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"I don't want thinner" is really what apple needs to hear. Thinner means you take away my ports so I have to carry dongles. Yes, I'd actually love to have at

"I don't want thinner" is really what apple needs to hear. Thinner means you take away my ports so I have to carry dongles. Yes, I'd actually love to have at least one old-fashioned USB2 port. I know, I'm insane, but USB2 devices didn't exactly disappear just because USB-C is great. I still have a lot of them. Thinner means you take away magsafe, which is one of those great "gosh, apple is so clever" features that's very, very useful. Thinner means you give me a keyboard which, at best, completely sucks (layout, feel) and at worst, can't actually do its job because of reliability problems. Thinner means I could have more battery life. I'm literally carrying around TWO 2015 MBPs on a daily basis right now and it's TOTALLY FINE, APPLE. I'm not dying over the weight or amount of space they take up. I hardly even notice. For what developers do with laptops, thinner is way down on the priority list. I wish you'd listen to us. Also: I literally have no use for the touchbar that isn't perfectly handled by function keys, and I hit ESC 1000 times a day because I'm a vim user. Why do you hate me? Please just release a mac that looks exactly like a 2015 MBP with an i9 and some USB-C ports, and I will be lining up to throw $3k at you. As is, I'm getting as much life out of my 2015's as I possibly can (they're running great, btw, but I doubt they'll make it to your next refresh if it's 3 years away). When they finally die, if the only MBPs available have garbage keyboards and touchbars, I will grudgingly stop being a Mac user.

Mindwipe 7y ago
> Thinner means you take away my ports so I have to carry dongles. I'm not sure it does really. The modern MacBook Air chassis is the same size as the old one. But it's lost Magsafe, a useful keyboard, USB-A, it's lost a port on the 13 inch, and no SD card slot. Apple hasn't got rid of these things for thinness. It's gotten rid of them because of a misguided belief that the replacements are better than the loss of flexibility, or just plain working. Apple are wrong about these things. But the problem is much more fundamentally that Apple seems to have lost it's ability to engineer well and it's judgement about how to please it's Mac customers. Thinness is just a symptom.
- tekknik 7y ago
  People have complained about Apple removing things since they first removed floppy drives. They remove them not because of some misguided belief, but because it’s old tech. I have a MBP from 2012 still going strong. When laptops last that long a bit of future proofing is a bonus. If you swap laptops every other year then you obviously miss out on this benefit. PC manufacturers will start removing USB ports and if history is any judge we’ll see zero complaints about them doing it, just like with the floppy
  - hamburglar 7y ago
    There are two reasons the floppy drive isn't a very good comparison, in my opinion. The first is that floppy drive usage had already dropped dramatically because software was distributed on CDs and macs had been networked for years. So the use cases for floppies were a lot fewer and farther between, meaning it was less upsetting to people that Apple made the bold move of just dropping them. Also keep in mind that by this point, the Zip drive had absolutely taken over as the sneakernet of this era, and those were 100% aftermarket add-ons. The second reason the floppy is very different is that if you consider the tree of all the devices that are plugged into your mac, floppy drives are leaf nodes. Nothing else plugs into them, so removing them impacts nothing but floppy usage. Every day I plug in a DisplayPort monitor, an HDMI monitor, USB 2.0 yubikey, and USB 2.0 keyboard+mouse via a USB 2.0 hub. That's a lot of perfectly functional stuff to replace just because Apple jumped the gun on deciding USB-C had taken over. Evidence that it hasn't: the hundreds of people walking around my workplace with gigantic USB 2.0 + HDMI + displayport dongles dangling from their laptops all the time, or starting meetings by saying "oh shit, i left my dongle in the other building. Can I borrow someone's so I can use the projector?"
  - LASR 7y ago
    Floppy is a terrible example to support your point. When floppies were removed, almost nobody had to purchase external floppy drives to use their existing library of floppies. 1.44mb is pretty useless when you already have a flood of cheap USB flash drives 64+mb at the time. Heck, even during the windows 95 days, I only touched floppies to be able to boot into ms-dos to reinstall windows. When you buy a brand spanking new $1500 iPhone Xs and a brand spanking new $4000 MBP and walk out of the Apple Store with no way to connect the two without a dongle, you know you’re eating whatever shit Apple is feeding you.
oftenwrong 7y ago
>and I hit ESC 1000 times a day because I'm a vim user Do yourself a favour: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_macOS https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_macOS
- hamburglar 7y ago
  1) I have an escape key because I'm clinging to my 2015 MBP 2) I already have capslock remapped to "hyper" aka ctrl+alt+shift+command and use it heavily.

Mindwipe 7y ago

> Thinner means you take away my ports so I have to carry dongles. I'm not sure it does really. The modern MacBook Air chassis is the same size as the old one. But it's lost Magsafe, a useful keyboard, USB-A, it's lost a port on the 13 inch, and no SD card slot. Apple hasn't got rid of these things for thinness. It's gotten rid of them because of a misguided belief that the replacements are better than the loss of flexibility, or just plain working. Apple are wrong about these things. But the problem is much more fundamentally that Apple seems to have lost it's ability to engineer well and it's judgement about how to please it's Mac customers. Thinness is just a symptom.

tekknik 7y ago
People have complained about Apple removing things since they first removed floppy drives. They remove them not because of some misguided belief, but because it’s old tech. I have a MBP from 2012 still going strong. When laptops last that long a bit of future proofing is a bonus. If you swap laptops every other year then you obviously miss out on this benefit. PC manufacturers will start removing USB ports and if history is any judge we’ll see zero complaints about them doing it, just like with the floppy
- hamburglar 7y ago
  There are two reasons the floppy drive isn't a very good comparison, in my opinion. The first is that floppy drive usage had already dropped dramatically because software was distributed on CDs and macs had been networked for years. So the use cases for floppies were a lot fewer and farther between, meaning it was less upsetting to people that Apple made the bold move of just dropping them. Also keep in mind that by this point, the Zip drive had absolutely taken over as the sneakernet of this era, and those were 100% aftermarket add-ons. The second reason the floppy is very different is that if you consider the tree of all the devices that are plugged into your mac, floppy drives are leaf nodes. Nothing else plugs into them, so removing them impacts nothing but floppy usage. Every day I plug in a DisplayPort monitor, an HDMI monitor, USB 2.0 yubikey, and USB 2.0 keyboard+mouse via a USB 2.0 hub. That's a lot of perfectly functional stuff to replace just because Apple jumped the gun on deciding USB-C had taken over. Evidence that it hasn't: the hundreds of people walking around my workplace with gigantic USB 2.0 + HDMI + displayport dongles dangling from their laptops all the time, or starting meetings by saying "oh shit, i left my dongle in the other building. Can I borrow someone's so I can use the projector?"
- LASR 7y ago
  Floppy is a terrible example to support your point. When floppies were removed, almost nobody had to purchase external floppy drives to use their existing library of floppies. 1.44mb is pretty useless when you already have a flood of cheap USB flash drives 64+mb at the time. Heck, even during the windows 95 days, I only touched floppies to be able to boot into ms-dos to reinstall windows. When you buy a brand spanking new $1500 iPhone Xs and a brand spanking new $4000 MBP and walk out of the Apple Store with no way to connect the two without a dongle, you know you’re eating whatever shit Apple is feeding you.

oftenwrong 7y ago

>and I hit ESC 1000 times a day because I'm a vim user Do yourself a favour: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_macOS https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_macOS

hamburglar 7y ago
1) I have an escape key because I'm clinging to my 2015 MBP 2) I already have capslock remapped to "hyper" aka ctrl+alt+shift+command and use it heavily.