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> I really don't understand Apple's obsessions with thinness. Steve Jobs once prioritized a thing and found success. Now that Jobs is dead Apple is cargo-cult

by tivert 8y ago

> I really don't understand Apple's obsessions with thinness. Steve Jobs once prioritized a thing and found success. Now that Jobs is dead Apple is cargo-culting his past decisions. See also: hyper-aggressive removal of ports. It made sense in 1998 when we were talking about clearly obsolete things like Apple's nonstandard DIN-8 serial ports and SCSI-1, less so in 2018 when we're talking about performant and ubiquitous standards like USB-A and the headphone jack.

lallysingh 8y ago
I think that's exactly it. They don't know what to do without Steve. So the company runs off of memories of him, which aren't enough.
slimsag 8y ago
What I don't get is why not just replace the headphone jack with a smaller one? e.g. a 1.5mm one?
- cptskippy 8y ago
  Where are those sweet sweet licensing fees they enjoyed from the proprietary connectors?
  - chris_wot 8y ago
    Kind of misses the point. I'd rather like to charge and use my earphones at the same time. It's not an unobvious use case!
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      Just wait, the next iPhone will be symmetrical with a notch and a lightning connector on each side.
    - dubya 8y ago
      There are a few adapters that do audio out and lightning in for charging. Apple makes (made?) a dock that was similar. They all have pretty bad reviews unfortunately. USB-C and Android seem to have the same lack of solutions. I was looking for one because one of our cars has no bluetooth, and the other has bluetooth that won't talk to any recent iPhone, and my iphone 5S is getting flaky. Wish I hadn't missed the SE over the weekend.
    - dangus 8y ago
      And the solution already exists within the product: wireless charging.
- komali2 8y ago
  That would almost certainly require a dongle in all use cases anyway...
- tivert 8y ago
  > What I don't get is why not just replace the headphone jack with a smaller one? e.g. a 1.5mm one? Before the iPhone, traditional cell phones already had smaller headphone jacks: a 2.5mm one was pretty standard. One of the innovative things the iPhone did was replace the smaller port with a standard 3.5mm jack, which allowed people to use regular (potentially high-quality) 3.5mm headphones with it, rather than a crappy 2.5mm headset. The decision eliminated pointless proprietary-ness to integrate with a more vibrant ecosystem. Job's decision on the iMac to embrace USB and drop the Mac's proprietary ports could be seen in a similar light. I wish those kinds of decisions were the ones present-day Apple decided to cargo-cult.
  - da_chicken 8y ago
    Yeah, but the EU has been trying to drag the same Apple kicking and screaming into using a common connector for phone chargers since at least 2011. The iPhone XS and XR still use the Lightning connector.
    - detaro 8y ago
      AFAIK the wording of the EU targets in the end was mostly about the charger, and shipping a USB charger and a USB-to-iDevice cable was tolerated as a solution.
    - badwolf 8y ago
      With the latest iPad Pro using USB-C (as well as macbooks) makes me think this will be happening soon (fingers crossed)
      - penagwin 8y ago
        I work in phone repair, and I have to say the lightning connector is superior to usb c in durability. 9/10 times a phone comes in "because it's not charging" there's dirt in the port, some tweezers and they're on their way. Whenever a USB port is involved, it's usually smashed and requires soldering to fix. Given that most modern phones have AMOLED screens, and those cost 200$+ just for our store to buy the part, and that many phones require you to remove the screen to get to the charging port.... Well you see where this is going.
- shadowoflight 8y ago
  1.5mm is way too thin for a consumer-aimed cord standard. I can imagine the headlines for "SnapGate" already...
- ascagnel_ 8y ago
  I'd love to see a headphone jack standard (maybe based on on USB-C?) that's digital or analog and doesn't short whenever you plug/unplug stuff.
  - least 8y ago
    At some point through the chain, you have to have a change from a digital source (the music file on your computer) to an analog signal (that is pushing audio out of your headphones). If you are changing the headphone jack standard on the headphone end (changing it to a usb-c jack, for example) would simply be pushing the DAC into the headphone. Not only would this needlessly increase costs, it'd also remove the flexibility. I personally think that more headphones should have the threaded 3.5mm jack on which you can adapt either the 1/4" jack or say, a usb-c or lightning adapter. This would effectively make it a permanent addition to your headphones without having to keep track of a separate dongle.
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    The lightning port would be ideal for that, except it’s proprietary.
- jasode 8y ago
  >What I don't get is why not just replace the headphone jack with a smaller one? The explanation that made sense to me mentioned 2 design constraints: 1) the jack surface-mounted to the PCB took up space that conflicted with an edge-to-edge LCD/OLED display. If you've ever disassembled an iPhone, you'll see that removing the home button and extending the backlight assembly to the bottom edge means the headphone jack has to go away. 2) waterproof phone. The traditional jack was always an entry point for water damage. Apparently, Apple studied millions of phone users and determined that more people wanted waterproof phones with bigger edge-to-edge screens than the headphone jack.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > waterproof phone. Samsung has no problem making waterproof phones with headphone jacks. I'm not sure why, if you can put a USB/Thunderbolt/whatever jack on a phone and still be waterproof a headphone jack is some an intractable problem.
    - jasode 8y ago
      >waterproof a headphone jack is some an intractable problem. The explanation (possibly inaccurate) I read was that the waterproof jacks were more expensive. I noticed the new Samsung A8s has copied Apple's decision to remove headphone jack. Sony also removed the headphone jack. There seems to be an unavoidable engineering+cost motivation that causes multiple companies to remove that jack. Is it the edge-to-hedge screen? extra space for the haptic feedback? Better battery life because it doesn't feed the analog circuitry for that 3.5mm jack? I don't know.
      - FireBeyond 8y ago
        Apple certainly isn't hurting for profits, in general or on a per-unit basis. Fobbing it off as "Your iPhone would cost $1.08 more, so we're looking out for you!" is just Apple spinning it the way they want.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > I noticed the new Samsung A8s has copied Apple's decision to remove headphone jack. Sure, and there are perennial rumors that real soon now that will be reflected on flagships (first the S10, but then that faded, now the rumor is either the Note 10 or S11.) > There seems to be an unavoidable engineering+cost motivation that multiple companies (including Sony) to remove that jack. Well, yeah, of course, if nothing else, it takes space that could be used for something else. The Samsung Note 10 rumor centers around trading it for a bigger battery, for instance. Obviously, it's not a trade-off free choice, and what it's traded for may not be the same between different manufacturers that decide to axe it. (The same with SD card slots, which lots of manufacturers have done—even Samsung several flagship generations back, though they reversed.)
frereubu 8y ago
I hadn't thought of it like this before, but the cargo cult metaphor is spot on. It reminds me of when I was studying sculpture and one of the tutors said that there were plenty of people "making things that look like art," but those things weren't true artworks, as if they lacked a soul of some kind. It now feels like Apple are "making things that look like Apple products," but aren't delivering the deep quality which that used to entail.
- lostgame 8y ago
  >> It now feels like Apple are "making things that look like Apple products," but aren't delivering the deep quality which that used to entail. Oh, wow, you really nailed it right on the head, here. I still use a 'Pixar lamp/sunflower' iMac G4 for writing, design, and I have a massive collection of cartoon seasons that are nicely formatted for it that I watch on the side. To look at the iMac G4, with it's stunningly beautiful design, and the insanely stable OS X 10.5.8, and compare it to the God-awful 2017 Touch Bar MacBook Pro that my work gave me, is to truly see a company, that in 15 years, has managed to go from creating one of the most inspiring (and still functional!) machines in computing history, to something that, in 2019, I can't even put a USB key in without a $50+ dongle, and can barely type on. The 2017 MacBook Pro looks sorta like the 2015 MacBook Pro I have in my home music studio...but, with virtually the same i5 processor, the same 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, and 1.5GB of VRAM, the more-expensive 2017 model lacks: • standard USB ports that don't require adapters • a standard HDMI port • standard thunderbolt ports (of which I have purchased many existing dongles for) • MagSafe (has saved my butt more times than I could describe) • An SSD not soldered to the board (yes, the 2013-2015 models are still removable) • standard SD card port (I do video and photo editing. having one of these on the side is priceless) To purchase a 2017/18 MacBook Pro to replace my studio laptop would be a significant downgrade in terms of functionality for my workflow. I mean, significant. These devices look almost identical - yet one of them is virtually useless for my needs by design compared to one from years before. I loathe using my work laptop. I'm using it right now. I complained to my partner about the butterfly keyboard and yesterday I finally made her use it. She uses the 2015 all the time and made about seven mistakes in the first sentence. The lack of haptic feedback on the touch bar is baffling. These are the kinds of things Apple used to have the foresight to address ahead of time. Now we pay more, and get less. How the mighty fall.
chris_wot 8y ago
Minimalism gone made. They'll soon be so minimal that they won't have a working device and we'll need to shift to a non-Apple device. They have decided that form over function is the way to go. I was considering purchasing a Macbook - not any more!
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I'm not sure it's that simple. The Mac line is still doing very well, especially compared to other PC manufacturers. It appears that Apple mostly views the critique of people like us as outliers or else they would have changed this focus on thinness if they saw it was affecting sales. I think it really comes down to software -- MacOS -- which is still significantly better for certain kind of work than Windows or even Linux. Until that changes, people are going to continue to tolerate these hardware problems with Apple computers. I'm definitely one of them. Just for the record, I have two Touchbar laptops. One from 2016 and one from 2017. The 2016 one, when I first bought it, had the busted keyboard on day one, right from the Apple Store. I went back and swapped it for another one and that had the same issue but with different keys. The third one worked but it started having issues about a year into use. I had that one repaired and now it's having issues again, not even a year after (the symptoms show once the laptop has heated up a bit). It's comical how atrociously bad these laptops are in the reliability department. My 2017 one was slightly better, in that it worked when I bought it, but it also started having keyboard issues about a year after. Several of my friends who bought the same laptop around the same time also had to take theirs in for service for keyboard issues.
- nraynaud 8y ago
  Could you get a cargo cult on the consumer side too? Like the brand keeps its aura of quality longer than the quality as been maintained? That would just be a phase shift between the reality and perception.
  - tivert 8y ago
    > Like the brand keeps its aura of quality longer than the quality as been maintained? That would just be a phase shift between the reality and perception. That's a phenomenon that actually exists, and is deliberately exploited by private equity. A stark example is newspapers: there's a company that's aggressively buying them up, and once they acquire one they slash the newsroom staff to drastically cut costs. That results in a much inferior product, but it takes time for their customers to realize and even longer for them to cancel their subscriptions en masse. In the meantime they collect greater profits as they kill the business. The fact that lots of customers buy a thing does not necessarily mean that thing is presently a good product that serves their needs.
nraynaud 8y ago
I think it's a fragile position, it's like the critic of the rock band always producing the same music album after album, and then they evolve their stye and now they are not the same and it was better before. You can take both position depending on the weather, and there is no absolute truth. What I feel is a stronger and more measurable critique is that the quality of Apple has gone down (i.e. I might be wrong, but there are numbers to decide).
- addicted 8y ago
  Apple has the luxury of product lines which allows them to cater to different markets. They have the MacBook, Pro, and Air. It would be strange to see U2, U2 Country, U2 Jazz. Apple in this example is probably better compared to a music label than a single rock band.
  - dylan604 8y ago
    > It would be strange to see U2, U2 Country, U2 Jazz. Oh good gawd, please, please, please, don't let Bono see that as a suggestion
  - rleigh 8y ago
    Unfortunately, they don't really have a non-luxury product line. The Mini is still poor value for money, and this means they have nothing to offer at the lower end for entry-level or business use.
snowwrestler 8y ago
The constant attribution of all things Apple during Steve Jobs’ tenure to Jobs personally is itself a form of cargo cult. Apple prioritized thinness while Jobs was CEO, and Apple continues to prioritize thinness. Jobs is gone but many of the same product executives remain—Cook, Ive, Schiller, etc and many of their deputies. Is it really that surprising that the product goals are also unchanged? Complaints about thinness are not a new phenomenon—look back at how the first MacBook Air was greeted for an example. (intro’d by Jobs)
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  The original Air is a little different, because it was a separate product line marketed to people who valued portability above performance, with the MacBook Pro catering to the reverse. Recent iPhones are like if they'd announced the Air and then canceled all their other laptops.
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    All the current iPhone models are thicker than the 6s.
  - cotelletta 8y ago
    The new MBP is like the Air: a whole bunch of unproven assumptions in a new product category. They should've called it the Macbook Touch and let people decide for themselves if they wanted to give up on ports, keys and magsafe. The 2015 MBP remains an amazing machine.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  While I think you're right that Apple's devotion to thinness even when it becomes problematic isn't a "cargo cult" kind of problem, I think you're underestimating the pull specific executives can have. My own suspicion -- buttressed with some off-the-record comments with Apple folks -- is that it's actually Jony Ive who prioritizes thinness over all else. Steve Jobs may not have been an engineer or a designer, but he was often an excellent "editor," of the sort who'd look at a design and say "Why do you need this" or "If you add this it'll be a thousand times more useful" or even "You're focusing on the wrong thing, start over." Post-Jobs, the executive who could do that with Ive was Scott Forstall. Post-Forstall, there doesn't seem to be anyone who does that with Ive anymore. I'm hopeful that the string of highly visible problems with this most recent iteration of MacBooks will, if nothing else, give someone else in the company power to start pushing back. I don't hate my 2017-era MacBook Pro and I haven't had any real problems with it, but the fact that I'm worried about having problems with it in a way that I've rarely been with other Apple hardware is a problem in and of itself.
baybal2 8y ago
frail cabling is part of the very deliberate engineered obsolescence. I worked in electronics OEMs since 2007, and I tell you that such things are way more widespread than you think. When Amazon was making its first forays into electronics in 2007 with Kindle, the agent who was working for them was squeezing my first employer very, very hard. We were one of companies in the chain for sourcing accessories. They were literally asking us to shave single microns from plastic parts, and deliberately guiding us into using underrated components. The phrase "planned obsolescence" was never said out loud, but it was 100% clear that they wanted it. ----- As somebody in engineering, I can add that even cheapest Chinese mechanical sliprings have no problems at all transporting the EDP signal.
- baybal2 8y ago
  To add to that, even some of the cheapest clam shell phones were using slip rings or capacitive couplings instead of putting wires through the hinge even 15 years ago.
bluedino 8y ago
re: thinness - Jobs pushed for machines like the Air (and later the original Retina MacBook pro) because at the time, laptops were still thick and heavy. We're good enough. We don't need to go thinner. Similar to battery life. After 10-12 hours, there's no point in it, except for a small few.
- dylan604 8y ago
  Agreed on the thinness part. I'm halfway expecting a bendgate scandal for their laptop lines. However, the 10-12 hours of battery life is kind of misleading. To get that, you have to be doing the absolute minimum on the laptop. Doing anything graphics related requiring the GPU to kick in means your not going to get anywhere near that time.
- megy 8y ago
  > We're good enough This isn't a decision you get to make. I want thinner, lighter. Always. Most people do.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    I'll take thinner and lighter, but not at the expense of quality, usability, or other ergonomics.
crooked-v 8y ago
I agree about the thinness, but I'm very much looking forward to a future with USB-C for everything. The failure there isn't in the new standard, but that the new standard doesn't enforce only one or two cable types and clearly labeled power ratings.
shpx 8y ago
How do you get people to adopt USB-C if all laptops still have USB-A and manufacturing USB-C devices just means that you can't sell to all the old laptops without it?
philjohn 8y ago
The corollary to that is that you're just repeating the mistake of the naysayers last time. One of the most "egregious" omissions was either a floppy or an Iomega Zip drive. But a few short years later USB thumb drives became ubiquitous. USB-C is the future, we're already seeing a plethora of displays launching with them, and they obviate the need for another power supply. Yes, right at this moment it's a bit of a pain (not massively though, I have a dock at work and plug a single cable in and my dual monitors, keyboard and mouse just start working - with my 2015 MBP I had lots of ports, but had to plug and unplug 3 cables each time I wanted to move my laptop). I'd argue that maybe they went a couple of years too early, but they saw what the next big thing would be and jumped.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  Why not have both USB-A and C? Plenty of non-Apple laptops do it that way. A USB port is far smaller that a whole floppy drive.
  - npunt 8y ago
    The rip off the band-aid shift isn't just about making the leap to a better universal connector, it's also about kickstarting the peripheral market. Manufacturers of peripherals heavily optimize on the short term, so if USB-A is still around, they'll keep their R&D low and just pump out more of that. Moving to USB-C in one fell swoop creates instant demand and forces them to move. Apple is one of the few companies that can act as a market maker, bringing tons of consumers with money over to a new technology. The strategy was sound, and worked in the past (see iMac's USB in 1997, iPod connector, and lightning connector), though I think USB-C proved a bit too complex for many peripheral manufacturers to put out good products right away. These days though there's a ton of great USB-C peripherals out there.
dzhiurgis 8y ago
USB-A is not exactly performance when it takes entire day to back up your phone. Still I'd love that port to be there, event if I used if only couple of times a year. It's almost as if they should've kept USB-A connector but improved the interface for future...
caycep 8y ago
I suspect a lot of these things happened when Bob Mansfield retired the first time...

by tivert 8y ago

lallysingh 8y ago

I think that's exactly it. They don't know what to do without Steve. So the company runs off of memories of him, which aren't enough.

slimsag 8y ago

What I don't get is why not just replace the headphone jack with a smaller one? e.g. a 1.5mm one?

cptskippy 8y ago
Where are those sweet sweet licensing fees they enjoyed from the proprietary connectors?
- chris_wot 8y ago
  Kind of misses the point. I'd rather like to charge and use my earphones at the same time. It's not an unobvious use case!
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    Just wait, the next iPhone will be symmetrical with a notch and a lightning connector on each side.
  - dubya 8y ago
    There are a few adapters that do audio out and lightning in for charging. Apple makes (made?) a dock that was similar. They all have pretty bad reviews unfortunately. USB-C and Android seem to have the same lack of solutions. I was looking for one because one of our cars has no bluetooth, and the other has bluetooth that won't talk to any recent iPhone, and my iphone 5S is getting flaky. Wish I hadn't missed the SE over the weekend.
  - dangus 8y ago
    And the solution already exists within the product: wireless charging.
komali2 8y ago
That would almost certainly require a dongle in all use cases anyway...
tivert 8y ago
> What I don't get is why not just replace the headphone jack with a smaller one? e.g. a 1.5mm one? Before the iPhone, traditional cell phones already had smaller headphone jacks: a 2.5mm one was pretty standard. One of the innovative things the iPhone did was replace the smaller port with a standard 3.5mm jack, which allowed people to use regular (potentially high-quality) 3.5mm headphones with it, rather than a crappy 2.5mm headset. The decision eliminated pointless proprietary-ness to integrate with a more vibrant ecosystem. Job's decision on the iMac to embrace USB and drop the Mac's proprietary ports could be seen in a similar light. I wish those kinds of decisions were the ones present-day Apple decided to cargo-cult.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  Yeah, but the EU has been trying to drag the same Apple kicking and screaming into using a common connector for phone chargers since at least 2011. The iPhone XS and XR still use the Lightning connector.
  - detaro 8y ago
    AFAIK the wording of the EU targets in the end was mostly about the charger, and shipping a USB charger and a USB-to-iDevice cable was tolerated as a solution.
  - badwolf 8y ago
    With the latest iPad Pro using USB-C (as well as macbooks) makes me think this will be happening soon (fingers crossed)
    - penagwin 8y ago
      I work in phone repair, and I have to say the lightning connector is superior to usb c in durability. 9/10 times a phone comes in "because it's not charging" there's dirt in the port, some tweezers and they're on their way. Whenever a USB port is involved, it's usually smashed and requires soldering to fix. Given that most modern phones have AMOLED screens, and those cost 200$+ just for our store to buy the part, and that many phones require you to remove the screen to get to the charging port.... Well you see where this is going.
shadowoflight 8y ago
1.5mm is way too thin for a consumer-aimed cord standard. I can imagine the headlines for "SnapGate" already...
ascagnel_ 8y ago
I'd love to see a headphone jack standard (maybe based on on USB-C?) that's digital or analog and doesn't short whenever you plug/unplug stuff.
- least 8y ago
  At some point through the chain, you have to have a change from a digital source (the music file on your computer) to an analog signal (that is pushing audio out of your headphones). If you are changing the headphone jack standard on the headphone end (changing it to a usb-c jack, for example) would simply be pushing the DAC into the headphone. Not only would this needlessly increase costs, it'd also remove the flexibility. I personally think that more headphones should have the threaded 3.5mm jack on which you can adapt either the 1/4" jack or say, a usb-c or lightning adapter. This would effectively make it a permanent addition to your headphones without having to keep track of a separate dongle.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  The lightning port would be ideal for that, except it’s proprietary.
jasode 8y ago
>What I don't get is why not just replace the headphone jack with a smaller one? The explanation that made sense to me mentioned 2 design constraints: 1) the jack surface-mounted to the PCB took up space that conflicted with an edge-to-edge LCD/OLED display. If you've ever disassembled an iPhone, you'll see that removing the home button and extending the backlight assembly to the bottom edge means the headphone jack has to go away. 2) waterproof phone. The traditional jack was always an entry point for water damage. Apparently, Apple studied millions of phone users and determined that more people wanted waterproof phones with bigger edge-to-edge screens than the headphone jack.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > waterproof phone. Samsung has no problem making waterproof phones with headphone jacks. I'm not sure why, if you can put a USB/Thunderbolt/whatever jack on a phone and still be waterproof a headphone jack is some an intractable problem.
  - jasode 8y ago
    >waterproof a headphone jack is some an intractable problem. The explanation (possibly inaccurate) I read was that the waterproof jacks were more expensive. I noticed the new Samsung A8s has copied Apple's decision to remove headphone jack. Sony also removed the headphone jack. There seems to be an unavoidable engineering+cost motivation that causes multiple companies to remove that jack. Is it the edge-to-hedge screen? extra space for the haptic feedback? Better battery life because it doesn't feed the analog circuitry for that 3.5mm jack? I don't know.
    - FireBeyond 8y ago
      Apple certainly isn't hurting for profits, in general or on a per-unit basis. Fobbing it off as "Your iPhone would cost $1.08 more, so we're looking out for you!" is just Apple spinning it the way they want.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > I noticed the new Samsung A8s has copied Apple's decision to remove headphone jack. Sure, and there are perennial rumors that real soon now that will be reflected on flagships (first the S10, but then that faded, now the rumor is either the Note 10 or S11.) > There seems to be an unavoidable engineering+cost motivation that multiple companies (including Sony) to remove that jack. Well, yeah, of course, if nothing else, it takes space that could be used for something else. The Samsung Note 10 rumor centers around trading it for a bigger battery, for instance. Obviously, it's not a trade-off free choice, and what it's traded for may not be the same between different manufacturers that decide to axe it. (The same with SD card slots, which lots of manufacturers have done—even Samsung several flagship generations back, though they reversed.)

frereubu 8y ago

I hadn't thought of it like this before, but the cargo cult metaphor is spot on. It reminds me of when I was studying sculpture and one of the tutors said that there were plenty of people "making things that look like art," but those things weren't true artworks, as if they lacked a soul of some kind. It now feels like Apple are "making things that look like Apple products," but aren't delivering the deep quality which that used to entail.

lostgame 8y ago
>> It now feels like Apple are "making things that look like Apple products," but aren't delivering the deep quality which that used to entail. Oh, wow, you really nailed it right on the head, here. I still use a 'Pixar lamp/sunflower' iMac G4 for writing, design, and I have a massive collection of cartoon seasons that are nicely formatted for it that I watch on the side. To look at the iMac G4, with it's stunningly beautiful design, and the insanely stable OS X 10.5.8, and compare it to the God-awful 2017 Touch Bar MacBook Pro that my work gave me, is to truly see a company, that in 15 years, has managed to go from creating one of the most inspiring (and still functional!) machines in computing history, to something that, in 2019, I can't even put a USB key in without a $50+ dongle, and can barely type on. The 2017 MacBook Pro looks sorta like the 2015 MacBook Pro I have in my home music studio...but, with virtually the same i5 processor, the same 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, and 1.5GB of VRAM, the more-expensive 2017 model lacks: • standard USB ports that don't require adapters • a standard HDMI port • standard thunderbolt ports (of which I have purchased many existing dongles for) • MagSafe (has saved my butt more times than I could describe) • An SSD not soldered to the board (yes, the 2013-2015 models are still removable) • standard SD card port (I do video and photo editing. having one of these on the side is priceless) To purchase a 2017/18 MacBook Pro to replace my studio laptop would be a significant downgrade in terms of functionality for my workflow. I mean, significant. These devices look almost identical - yet one of them is virtually useless for my needs by design compared to one from years before. I loathe using my work laptop. I'm using it right now. I complained to my partner about the butterfly keyboard and yesterday I finally made her use it. She uses the 2015 all the time and made about seven mistakes in the first sentence. The lack of haptic feedback on the touch bar is baffling. These are the kinds of things Apple used to have the foresight to address ahead of time. Now we pay more, and get less. How the mighty fall.

chris_wot 8y ago

Minimalism gone made. They'll soon be so minimal that they won't have a working device and we'll need to shift to a non-Apple device. They have decided that form over function is the way to go. I was considering purchasing a Macbook - not any more!

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I'm not sure it's that simple. The Mac line is still doing very well, especially compared to other PC manufacturers. It appears that Apple mostly views the critique of people like us as outliers or else they would have changed this focus on thinness if they saw it was affecting sales. I think it really comes down to software -- MacOS -- which is still significantly better for certain kind of work than Windows or even Linux. Until that changes, people are going to continue to tolerate these hardware problems with Apple computers. I'm definitely one of them. Just for the record, I have two Touchbar laptops. One from 2016 and one from 2017. The 2016 one, when I first bought it, had the busted keyboard on day one, right from the Apple Store. I went back and swapped it for another one and that had the same issue but with different keys. The third one worked but it started having issues about a year into use. I had that one repaired and now it's having issues again, not even a year after (the symptoms show once the laptop has heated up a bit). It's comical how atrociously bad these laptops are in the reliability department. My 2017 one was slightly better, in that it worked when I bought it, but it also started having keyboard issues about a year after. Several of my friends who bought the same laptop around the same time also had to take theirs in for service for keyboard issues.

nraynaud 8y ago
Could you get a cargo cult on the consumer side too? Like the brand keeps its aura of quality longer than the quality as been maintained? That would just be a phase shift between the reality and perception.
- tivert 8y ago
  > Like the brand keeps its aura of quality longer than the quality as been maintained? That would just be a phase shift between the reality and perception. That's a phenomenon that actually exists, and is deliberately exploited by private equity. A stark example is newspapers: there's a company that's aggressively buying them up, and once they acquire one they slash the newsroom staff to drastically cut costs. That results in a much inferior product, but it takes time for their customers to realize and even longer for them to cancel their subscriptions en masse. In the meantime they collect greater profits as they kill the business. The fact that lots of customers buy a thing does not necessarily mean that thing is presently a good product that serves their needs.

nraynaud 8y ago

I think it's a fragile position, it's like the critic of the rock band always producing the same music album after album, and then they evolve their stye and now they are not the same and it was better before. You can take both position depending on the weather, and there is no absolute truth. What I feel is a stronger and more measurable critique is that the quality of Apple has gone down (i.e. I might be wrong, but there are numbers to decide).

addicted 8y ago
Apple has the luxury of product lines which allows them to cater to different markets. They have the MacBook, Pro, and Air. It would be strange to see U2, U2 Country, U2 Jazz. Apple in this example is probably better compared to a music label than a single rock band.
- dylan604 8y ago
  > It would be strange to see U2, U2 Country, U2 Jazz. Oh good gawd, please, please, please, don't let Bono see that as a suggestion
- rleigh 8y ago
  Unfortunately, they don't really have a non-luxury product line. The Mini is still poor value for money, and this means they have nothing to offer at the lower end for entry-level or business use.

snowwrestler 8y ago

The constant attribution of all things Apple during Steve Jobs’ tenure to Jobs personally is itself a form of cargo cult. Apple prioritized thinness while Jobs was CEO, and Apple continues to prioritize thinness. Jobs is gone but many of the same product executives remain—Cook, Ive, Schiller, etc and many of their deputies. Is it really that surprising that the product goals are also unchanged? Complaints about thinness are not a new phenomenon—look back at how the first MacBook Air was greeted for an example. (intro’d by Jobs)

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
The original Air is a little different, because it was a separate product line marketed to people who valued portability above performance, with the MacBook Pro catering to the reverse. Recent iPhones are like if they'd announced the Air and then canceled all their other laptops.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  All the current iPhone models are thicker than the 6s.
- cotelletta 8y ago
  The new MBP is like the Air: a whole bunch of unproven assumptions in a new product category. They should've called it the Macbook Touch and let people decide for themselves if they wanted to give up on ports, keys and magsafe. The 2015 MBP remains an amazing machine.
chipotle_coyote 8y ago
While I think you're right that Apple's devotion to thinness even when it becomes problematic isn't a "cargo cult" kind of problem, I think you're underestimating the pull specific executives can have. My own suspicion -- buttressed with some off-the-record comments with Apple folks -- is that it's actually Jony Ive who prioritizes thinness over all else. Steve Jobs may not have been an engineer or a designer, but he was often an excellent "editor," of the sort who'd look at a design and say "Why do you need this" or "If you add this it'll be a thousand times more useful" or even "You're focusing on the wrong thing, start over." Post-Jobs, the executive who could do that with Ive was Scott Forstall. Post-Forstall, there doesn't seem to be anyone who does that with Ive anymore. I'm hopeful that the string of highly visible problems with this most recent iteration of MacBooks will, if nothing else, give someone else in the company power to start pushing back. I don't hate my 2017-era MacBook Pro and I haven't had any real problems with it, but the fact that I'm worried about having problems with it in a way that I've rarely been with other Apple hardware is a problem in and of itself.

baybal2 8y ago

frail cabling is part of the very deliberate engineered obsolescence. I worked in electronics OEMs since 2007, and I tell you that such things are way more widespread than you think. When Amazon was making its first forays into electronics in 2007 with Kindle, the agent who was working for them was squeezing my first employer very, very hard. We were one of companies in the chain for sourcing accessories. They were literally asking us to shave single microns from plastic parts, and deliberately guiding us into using underrated components. The phrase "planned obsolescence" was never said out loud, but it was 100% clear that they wanted it. ----- As somebody in engineering, I can add that even cheapest Chinese mechanical sliprings have no problems at all transporting the EDP signal.

baybal2 8y ago
To add to that, even some of the cheapest clam shell phones were using slip rings or capacitive couplings instead of putting wires through the hinge even 15 years ago.

bluedino 8y ago

re: thinness - Jobs pushed for machines like the Air (and later the original Retina MacBook pro) because at the time, laptops were still thick and heavy. We're good enough. We don't need to go thinner. Similar to battery life. After 10-12 hours, there's no point in it, except for a small few.

dylan604 8y ago
Agreed on the thinness part. I'm halfway expecting a bendgate scandal for their laptop lines. However, the 10-12 hours of battery life is kind of misleading. To get that, you have to be doing the absolute minimum on the laptop. Doing anything graphics related requiring the GPU to kick in means your not going to get anywhere near that time.
megy 8y ago
> We're good enough This isn't a decision you get to make. I want thinner, lighter. Always. Most people do.
- int_19h 8y ago
  I'll take thinner and lighter, but not at the expense of quality, usability, or other ergonomics.

crooked-v 8y ago

I agree about the thinness, but I'm very much looking forward to a future with USB-C for everything. The failure there isn't in the new standard, but that the new standard doesn't enforce only one or two cable types and clearly labeled power ratings.

shpx 8y ago

How do you get people to adopt USB-C if all laptops still have USB-A and manufacturing USB-C devices just means that you can't sell to all the old laptops without it?

philjohn 8y ago

The corollary to that is that you're just repeating the mistake of the naysayers last time. One of the most "egregious" omissions was either a floppy or an Iomega Zip drive. But a few short years later USB thumb drives became ubiquitous. USB-C is the future, we're already seeing a plethora of displays launching with them, and they obviate the need for another power supply. Yes, right at this moment it's a bit of a pain (not massively though, I have a dock at work and plug a single cable in and my dual monitors, keyboard and mouse just start working - with my 2015 MBP I had lots of ports, but had to plug and unplug 3 cables each time I wanted to move my laptop). I'd argue that maybe they went a couple of years too early, but they saw what the next big thing would be and jumped.

jonny_eh 8y ago
Why not have both USB-A and C? Plenty of non-Apple laptops do it that way. A USB port is far smaller that a whole floppy drive.
- npunt 8y ago
  The rip off the band-aid shift isn't just about making the leap to a better universal connector, it's also about kickstarting the peripheral market. Manufacturers of peripherals heavily optimize on the short term, so if USB-A is still around, they'll keep their R&D low and just pump out more of that. Moving to USB-C in one fell swoop creates instant demand and forces them to move. Apple is one of the few companies that can act as a market maker, bringing tons of consumers with money over to a new technology. The strategy was sound, and worked in the past (see iMac's USB in 1997, iPod connector, and lightning connector), though I think USB-C proved a bit too complex for many peripheral manufacturers to put out good products right away. These days though there's a ton of great USB-C peripherals out there.

dzhiurgis 8y ago

USB-A is not exactly performance when it takes entire day to back up your phone. Still I'd love that port to be there, event if I used if only couple of times a year. It's almost as if they should've kept USB-A connector but improved the interface for future...

caycep 8y ago

I suspect a lot of these things happened when Bob Mansfield retired the first time...