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Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

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Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#351

Post by pantalaimon »

dredmorbius wrote: post #313
papaf wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Windows to Linux on my work Dell and battery life is the same. I go to standby on lid closed and shutdown at the end of the day. Bootup to login takes 20 seconds so I don't bother with hibernate.

The issue for me is that hibernate saves user state (desktop, apps, edit state), reboot doesn't. I expect a desktop session to live months. IOW: Your solution may not suite all.

Linux has no trouble with hibernate/suspend, at least on my machine. It's just that I prefer to start from a clean state each day and don't want to be bothered with yesterday's clutter.

I also save downloads and small 'run once' experiments to /tmp, so booting the notebook is a good way to clean everything up.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#352

Post by varjag »

djsumdog wrote: post #181
stcredzero wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the issue is, and continues to be, growing pains. They're certainly losing the lead in software engineer talent (giving it away to whom, I'm not sure). I keep on interviewing recent Comp Sci graduates who have a 3.75 or a 4.0 and who can't tell me how to implement cycle detection -- to the extent that they could write a pseudocode function signature or some kind of concretely implementable design. Many of the…

I knew CS graduates who loved parsing theory and could implement some basic C compilers, and I knew some who didn't know what a SCSI controller was. You get out of your education what you put into it. I had someone in an interview in Berlin ask me to write a garbage collector. In CSC 202, our professor talked about using reference counts. Reference counts can get leaks if you have two objects referencing each other w…

When people say they expect someone to implement cycle detection, they usually mean Floyd's algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Floyd%27s_Tort...

If you come up with something else (like tagging nodes), you get a strike for inefficiency.

It looks simple enough to feel smug about once you know it, at the same time there's near zero chance the interviewers could come up with this algorithm independently without prior knowledge.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#353

Post by Apocryphon »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #54
cududa wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Absolutely wrong assessment. This is a design team running amok after their own goals

It can be both, and often is. Honestly, I'd be surprised if Apple's continued push for thinness comes from just a single team. Design pushes for thinness, because hey, it looks pretty damned impressive. Engineering eventually figures out a way to make it work after (I presume) screaming a bit. Which is impressive. Marketing and the business side love it because it's a concrete metric they can point to in order to jus…

Cargo cult metrics.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#354

Post by fooker »

88 wrote: post #309
toomanybeersies wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A MicroSD reader would be fairly useless. Outside of phones, MicroSD isn't really used, and nobody uses MicroSD for transferring files. SD cards are still the standard format for cameras, which are the main use case for SD card slots.

Every SD card I’ve bought in the last few years has just been a microSD card with full size adapter.

Cameras need fast full size SD cards.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#355

Post by yedpodtrzitko »

derefr wrote: post #13
phnofive wrote: post #4

Who is Apple engaging in design anorexia for? Does it drive sales? Couldn’t some other stat be used to pad their presentations? Any thickness less than an inch is fine with me. I’m not concerned with whether my laptop fits in an envelope.

I don't know why so many people are under the impression that they do thinness for thinness sake. They do thinness for lightness sake. The lighter your laptop (or tablet, or phone), the more you'll choose to not leave it behind but rather to just lug it around with you, and so the more places you'll have it and the more it'll be there to aid your productivity in random situations. [Also, for phones and tablets specif…

> They do thinness for lightness sake.

That's what Air is (was) for. Converging both Pro and Air into a single machine seems like a solution no Pro user is really happy with.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#356

Post by neuronic »

tracer4201 wrote: post #342

I honestly don't understand all these quality sacrifices just to make things thinner. It makes the product actually feel somewhat cheap and brittle. The same thing confuses me with smartphones. Everyone keeps making these bacteria and finger print magnets thinner... the minute you drop it, it's shattered or unuseable... and so then you're buying a case to protect it from scratches and shatter... so what's the point o…

Not sure how this can fly over peoples heads, but the point is marketing.

There is virtually zero disadvantage in making the phones 2mm thicker and add to their robustness and battery life this way.

Virtually zero... except _marketing_ and hence sales.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#357

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Symbiote wrote: post #315
dleslie wrote: post #252

I like machines that are built to take a beating. My penultimate laptop was an HP Mini 101; I only replaced it on a whim, and still use it from time to time. The keys have been worn to be smooth, concave and most are missing the printed text. When I last opened it up to add an SSD a suprising amount of sand came pouring out; having been taken to many beaches, tossed in bags, and generally used outdoors it had accumul…

> Running Linux, of course. I wish more people would. That's the best way to get any issues fixed, whether by filing bug reports, writing up a workaround on a wiki or Stackoverflow to help others, or fixing the bug. It's important for us to own our own tools, and keep the right to do with them as we wish. We expect this for our servers, but ignore it for laptops and desktops. If developers continue like this, then us…

And why do you think that a lot of people who are painfully aware of all the issues you mention still refuse to use Linux on a laptop while happily using it on servers?

There is a riduculous repetitiveness about this debate. For me and many others, Linux on a laptop has always been unstable, insecure, hot and noisy. Many specific issues can be fixed if you put in the effort, but on almost every dist-upgrade something essential breaks and you're back to square one.

And the response to these issues has always been a mixture of disbelief, denial, accusations of incompetence and pointers to ridiculously convoluted and brittle workarounds. There are bound to be people on every message board claiming to have run Linux for years if not decades without any of the issues I'm seeing on a daily basis and have been seeing for decades on scores of different laptops.

So where do we stand on this? Will we ever get out of this unproductive loop of claims and counter claims while an oligopoly of corporations builds ever higher walls around more and more restrictive gardens?

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#358

Post by Ntrails »

Symbiote wrote: post #315
dleslie wrote: post #252

I like machines that are built to take a beating. My penultimate laptop was an HP Mini 101; I only replaced it on a whim, and still use it from time to time. The keys have been worn to be smooth, concave and most are missing the printed text. When I last opened it up to add an SSD a suprising amount of sand came pouring out; having been taken to many beaches, tossed in bags, and generally used outdoors it had accumul…

> Running Linux, of course. I wish more people would. That's the best way to get any issues fixed, whether by filing bug reports, writing up a workaround on a wiki or Stackoverflow to help others, or fixing the bug. It's important for us to own our own tools, and keep the right to do with them as we wish. We expect this for our servers, but ignore it for laptops and desktops. If developers continue like this, then us…

> It's important for us to own our own tools, and keep the right to do with them as we wish

At no point in my life have I had any investment in linux, it's not mine. I use windows at work, I develop using .Net-y languages in visual studio.

And I get you're speaking for a different subset of developers on hn. The real ones, who believe fervently in open source etc etc. But you say "us" and I don't think you should be comfortable representing an entire cross section of the internet so blithely.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#359

Post by pritambaral »

eecc wrote: post #307
strls wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is truly a pain like never before. Going Linux can be very easy these days, depending what you do on the machine.

Hopefully Systemd won’t mount your firmware on a rw partition and brick the laptop in an unfortunate update? (Sarcasm aside... I’d flip in a heartbeat but despite macOS’s lapses, every single time I had to deal with a Linux desktop I regretted it.)

> Hopefully Systemd won’t mount your firmware on a rw partition and brick the laptop in an unfortunate update?

That's the hardware's fault.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#360

Post by AstralStorm »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #106
cma wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maglev keyboard: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/9/16826146/ne...

Oh, that sounds very nice. Has anyone tried this yet?

Yes, lack of tactile feedback sucks (you get it after key is depressed) and the keys themselves are not exactly mechanically stable.

And when you solve these two, the result is almost identical to a scissor switch.

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