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Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

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Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#261

Post by pjettter »

kevindong wrote: post #254
vemv wrote: post #181

Honestly I've never understood why laptops are so strongly associated with developer culture. They are inefficient and conflated machines - two things that tend to be contradictory with software engineering. More practically, many people find themselves completely dependent on Apple's design whims. Mac Pros (or server racks in general) are closer to the kinds of machines that we deploy to (they use Xeons for one thin…

Meetings are generally held in meeting rooms (well, pre-Covid that is). In meetings, you typically have something to present or discuss over. It's generally better for employees to have a single machine (that they're very familiar with) to present on rather than having a machine per employee in addition to a machine per meeting room.

Perhaps some day we can just present from our phones and even use them as a pointer at the same time.

Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#262

Post by exhilaration »

varispeed wrote: post #252
BluSyn wrote: post #14

My controversial hot take-- I have never needed an SD card, and have gone all-in on USB-C. I will be very disappointed if they add back in USB-A/HDMI/SD ports, or remove USB-C charging in favor of proprietary charge port. Sounds like unnecessary feature bloat. Please just do MagSage + USB-C, so I can maintain my one-cable-for-everything, making traveling lighter and simpler. Here's my counter argument to all those th…

I use SD cards daily to transfer data from cameras or different devices for further processing. It is handy to be able to just slide it in. I also have a dongle in an other laptop which works fine, but you need to be careful with these - I bought one cheaper dongle and it totally destroyed my SD card upon inserting. Unfortunately there was no backup as there was original material on it. So now I first do backup on a…

The dramatic decline in camera sales has been discussed a few times on HN, here's a random google result: https://www.mirrorlessrumors.com/dont-look-at-this-graph-sho...

Cameras are rapidly turning into a niche product, it makes no sense for any laptop manufacturer to include an SD card reader at this point.

Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#263

Post by qppo »

kevindong wrote: post #254
vemv wrote: post #181

Honestly I've never understood why laptops are so strongly associated with developer culture. They are inefficient and conflated machines - two things that tend to be contradictory with software engineering. More practically, many people find themselves completely dependent on Apple's design whims. Mac Pros (or server racks in general) are closer to the kinds of machines that we deploy to (they use Xeons for one thin…

Meetings are generally held in meeting rooms (well, pre-Covid that is). In meetings, you typically have something to present or discuss over. It's generally better for employees to have a single machine (that they're very familiar with) to present on rather than having a machine per employee in addition to a machine per meeting room.

All my presentation materials are in the cloud somewhere, I don't need to bring a computer anywhere these days.

Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#265

Post by Xcelerate »

It's kind of funny, because the last laptop I purchased (and the one I am still using) was Apple's first retina MacBook Pro as soon as it was released in 2012. I've refused to upgrade since then because I felt that all of the newer MacBook's were inferior in some way. Now I'm finally thinking of upgrading again once the 16" is released, and it's sounding like the new laptop will look exactly like mine from 10 years ago.

I'm not a fan of MagSafe though. It's always falling out whenever I slightly move my laptop around. And my thought with the touchbar is that they should replace it with physical keys, however, the keys should have tiny OLED displays beneath them. That way, if you want the function keys back, it will look at exactly like the rest of the keys on the keyboard, but if you want some other type of button, that's possible too.

Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#266

Post by varispeed »

exhilaration wrote: post #262
varispeed wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use SD cards daily to transfer data from cameras or different devices for further processing. It is handy to be able to just slide it in. I also have a dongle in an other laptop which works fine, but you need to be careful with these - I bought one cheaper dongle and it totally destroyed my SD card upon inserting. Unfortunately there was no backup as there was original material on it. So now I first do backup on a…

The dramatic decline in camera sales has been discussed a few times on HN, here's a random google result: https://www.mirrorlessrumors.com/dont-look-at-this-graph-sho... Cameras are rapidly turning into a niche product, it makes no sense for any laptop manufacturer to include an SD card reader at this point.

That's interesting. I also use SD cards to transfer data from my phone (I make tons of photos). I used to do it by connecting via USB cable, but after a couple of months the USB-C port worn out and no longer works, so for me the only reasonable way to get the data out is through an SD card. I tried things like setting up network server and sending files wirelessly but that was flaky.

Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#267

Post by fulafel »

vemv wrote: post #181

Honestly I've never understood why laptops are so strongly associated with developer culture. They are inefficient and conflated machines - two things that tend to be contradictory with software engineering. More practically, many people find themselves completely dependent on Apple's design whims. Mac Pros (or server racks in general) are closer to the kinds of machines that we deploy to (they use Xeons for one thin…

It's because networking is so bad now that remote access to your workstation can't be relied upon.

Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#268

Post by kevindong »

qppo wrote: post #263
kevindong wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meetings are generally held in meeting rooms (well, pre-Covid that is). In meetings, you typically have something to present or discuss over. It's generally better for employees to have a single machine (that they're very familiar with) to present on rather than having a machine per employee in addition to a machine per meeting room.

All my presentation materials are in the cloud somewhere, I don't need to bring a computer anywhere these days.

In most cases, I fully agree.

But there's the hefty edge case (for developers at least) of showing off a piece of code that essentially requires a developer environment to be running. It's simply not possible to create a developer environment quickly enough in a meeting room for it to be practical.

Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#269

Post by jmcnulty »

BluSyn wrote: post #14

My controversial hot take-- I have never needed an SD card, and have gone all-in on USB-C. I will be very disappointed if they add back in USB-A/HDMI/SD ports, or remove USB-C charging in favor of proprietary charge port. Sounds like unnecessary feature bloat. Please just do MagSage + USB-C, so I can maintain my one-cable-for-everything, making traveling lighter and simpler. Here's my counter argument to all those th…

Ditto on the request to retain USB-C charging. The ability to charge phones + Chromebooks + a MacBook in my house with interchangeable power blocks and cables is a huge benefit. MagSafe just isn't worth it.

Re: Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

#270

Post by alsetmusic »

BluSyn wrote: post #14

My controversial hot take-- I have never needed an SD card, and have gone all-in on USB-C. I will be very disappointed if they add back in USB-A/HDMI/SD ports, or remove USB-C charging in favor of proprietary charge port. Sounds like unnecessary feature bloat. Please just do MagSage + USB-C, so I can maintain my one-cable-for-everything, making traveling lighter and simpler. Here's my counter argument to all those th…

Agreed on MagSafe + USB-C. What I find interesting is the interpretation of this bit:

- There will be additional I/O ports

I’m pretty sure that simply more USB-C ports also fits that description. I don’t know why someone would assume that means SD card slots are coming back. I don’t see a future where Apple has SD slots on notebooks.

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