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Much has already been said about this, but this achievement of shipping a MBP that pro users seem to love is a triumph of user feedback over design purity. I su

Much has already been said about this, but this achievement of shipping a MBP that pro users seem to love is a triumph of user feedback over design purity. I suspect that Jony Ives’ departure may have facilitated this. I suspect it will be a breakout success and I aspire to contribute to their sales figures some day. Of all of Apple’s revenue streams I know their pro products are now merely an afterthought, but they remain an important part of the brand’s ethos and I’m delighted to see them shipping a truly superior product again.

wayneftw 5y ago
It's just a laptop in the same old rectangular shape, in the same old colors that is actually just catching up and there's nothing at all special about this one… Try to catch some breath. Nobody anywhere likes the notch either. Triumph? No.
bombcar 5y ago
What's amusing about the "design purity" is this is basically (from an externals point of view) an upgraded PowerBook G4. Good design isn't limited to "make it look as much like a thin sheet of metal as possible".
- seumars 5y ago
  Which again is weird for someone like Ive considering that "form follows function" is one of those mantras that people like Rams and the Bauhaus folk based their entire work on.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Even if that was the basis at some point I suspect much of it is now just an argument for particular parts the designer likes, as "function" isn't necessarily completely defined.
- beaner 5y ago
  Personally I dislike this bit. Thinness isn't everything, but it's something. I don't know that the new models really needed to look as brick-ish as they do, and the previous design was certainly sexier.
  - hardwaregeek 5y ago
    Yeah like I get that Apple went too far but thinness is a really important quality. People love thin, sleek objects. For the average consumer that may be a bigger factor than an SD card reader.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the new design. That being said, I really, really want one.
  - oleganza 5y ago
    Speaking of backpacks, I was expecting that M1 energy effeciency would allow for less weight to carry rather than +10 hours of standalone time. A few hours of life, but 0.5 kg less weight would be a better tradeoff for me. (I'm talking weight, not thinness. A thicker body with better heat dispersion is fine, as long as extra space is taken up by air.)
    - lowbloodsugar 5y ago
      21 hours when watching movies. When doing real work, I get a good five hours out of my MacBook Air, whereas I'd get maybe one hour out of my Dell. If you actually have work to do, and you're stuck in the arse end of a coffee shop or airport, then you can still do meaningful work for hours.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    I actually like the throwback, personally. I'm guessing they did that to differentiate it in the market. What I have trouble getting over is the flipping notch to the top. Just why. The bezel on my 2019 macbook looks the same, if not skinnier. Do people really not watch fullscreen videos anymore or something?
- tarsinge 5y ago
  That makes me wonder what a PowerBook G3 (my favorite one but it’s surely nostalgia) inspired design could be.
moritonal 5y ago
Whilst an afterthought, the kinds of people who buy Pros are the kind of people who decide on the tech for their wider families.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  You don't really even have to decide for the rest of the family. Basically all of my family migrated over to MacBooks after I bought my first MacBook Pro within like a two year span.
stuff4ben 5y ago
> I suspect that Jony Ives’ departure may have facilitated this. I'm sure that is a very accurate statement. I thoroughly enjoy the improvements to the keyboard and adding back in the new ports. But I wonder what the future of the MacBook will be without the visionary design from Ives? Are we going to see a melding of PC and Macs or will Apple keep design innovation at the forefront?
- decafninja 5y ago
  Haven't we already seen the post-Ives era products? I imagine Apple will continue to be design centric, just without a Jobs-esque demigod-like figure that could dictate his will above and beyond anyone else - i.e. form over function.
- rangoon626 5y ago
  I'm not trying to be mean spirited, but it was clear that his time was up. That's totally fine. He made some great contributions, but that doesn't mean that he can or will through his last waking moment.
- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  Yeah this feels like a pyrrhic victory. Yes, we've gotten our ports back, but is this indicative of a trend that Apple is moving away from design? It's too soon to say but I'd argue that it's likely Apple will experience some regression to the mean. Considering that Apple's design is several orders of magnitude away from the mean, that'd be a loss.
  - mrkstu 5y ago
    I’d say the new iMac’s argue against that. Very ‘designed,’ very thin, to the point of compromise in some ways. It seems they are letting the designers have their way in the non-pro arena.
ookblah 5y ago
while i think ive should get a lot of criticism for "form over function", he helped push the barriers of what is possible and in a way pushed the industry forward as well. i think without steve to temper that it ran over a bit. you want someone to push the boundaries then someone to rein it in a bit vs the other way around. IMO, this is probably going to be a very special time for the macs as we see the pendulum swinging back and getting all the "function" we missed. i fear tho in a generation or two it will be too "function over form" and we get an apple basically producing bricks again lol. u can already see it with the iphones. sure... increase the thickness this year, but what prevents you from taking that thought further. compromise a little here or there, whatever. this is where someone with an obsession to say, thinness/lightness, helps. this is to say nothing about the hardware. they are far ahead there.
nojito 5y ago
>I suspect that Jony Ives’ departure may have facilitated this. This is a popular statement but Jony didn't have any design oversight for years before he formally left.
- jagger27 5y ago
  Products also take "years" to design and develop, so I'd say the statement may still hold true.
mrtksn 5y ago
My guess is that Apple bet on something that did not materialise, it wasn't about Jony Ive not caring about user feedback. What was the bet you say? I think they bet that the shift to USB-C/Thunderbolt/Wireless will happen quickly and they can help with the push and increase their margins. IMHO It wasn't a design decision but a business one and I think the removal of mag-safe is a giveaway. Every little thing that they add makes the thing more complicated to manufacture, thus more expensive. Every non-off-the-shelf piece puts multiple teams in to work on multiple continents and this costs money. I think they aimed for the simplicity at management level and not at design level. They did some calculation based on how well people are locked in and how many will buy a new mac and went with the most profitable option up until the time for the great transition comes. Until very recently the PC industry was racing to the bottom and Apple did not have a reason to compete on features. Nice Windows laptops are a very new phenomenon, up until very recently the best trackpad on a PC laptop wasn't even on the same league with Apple's.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- piva00 5y ago
  > IMHO It wasn't a design decision but a business one and I think the removal of mag-safe is a giveaway. Every little thing that they add makes the thing more complicated to manufacture, thus more expensive. Every non-off-the-shelf piece puts multiple teams in to work in multiple continents and this costs money. I think they aimed for the simplicity at management level and not at design level. They did some calculation based on how well people are locked in and how many will buy a new mac and went with the most profitable option up until the time for the great transition comes. The touch bar invalidates a lot of these assumptions. My personal opinion is that Ive's vision for Apple's design future was of ever slimmer and slicker pieces of hardware, USB-C helped a lot this vision to simplify design lines, streamline the ports layout and so on. The simplicity take goes away when you consider that supporting 4 USB-C ports that behave differently due to limitations on power envelope and Thunderbolt chipset doesn't really simplify the design for cost-cutting.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  USB-C adoption mostly went fine, though. Or as fine as could be expected. I think the past five years can be more easily explained with — ironically — a Steve Jobs quote: > When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular … PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around, they're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be used by one out of X people. And that's what the Mac team lost sight of; they tried to make Pro Macs that were sports cars. Maybe the Macbook Air is an affordable sports car of sorts (do they still make Mazda Miatas?), but the Macbook Pro is and should be a truck.
quitit 5y ago
I’m not sure if their pro-lines were an afterthought, rather they weren’t in a good position to strongly differentiate their pro devices. “Disruption” in the pro space is going to be about performance, Apple did leverage their technologies for better performance and made some choice software acquisitions - but this involved pros switching tools and workflows to realise a moderate speed jump. A more powerful disruption is simply having much faster hardware, which at the time was unavailable - but clearly in development for quite some time. I think moving forward we should expect the pro lines to have benchmarks that are not just impressive, but custom silicon that makes changing software/workflows a huge advantage. I will definitely be moving over my video workflows for example - the performance gains make the time savings worth it. I also feel that Adobe has to really pull their finger out now, as software that has been built on Apple’s tech is seeing insane performance jumps.

wayneftw 5y ago

It's just a laptop in the same old rectangular shape, in the same old colors that is actually just catching up and there's nothing at all special about this one… Try to catch some breath. Nobody anywhere likes the notch either. Triumph? No.

bombcar 5y ago

What's amusing about the "design purity" is this is basically (from an externals point of view) an upgraded PowerBook G4. Good design isn't limited to "make it look as much like a thin sheet of metal as possible".

seumars 5y ago
Which again is weird for someone like Ive considering that "form follows function" is one of those mantras that people like Rams and the Bauhaus folk based their entire work on.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Even if that was the basis at some point I suspect much of it is now just an argument for particular parts the designer likes, as "function" isn't necessarily completely defined.
beaner 5y ago
Personally I dislike this bit. Thinness isn't everything, but it's something. I don't know that the new models really needed to look as brick-ish as they do, and the previous design was certainly sexier.
- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  Yeah like I get that Apple went too far but thinness is a really important quality. People love thin, sleek objects. For the average consumer that may be a bigger factor than an SD card reader.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the new design. That being said, I really, really want one.
- oleganza 5y ago
  Speaking of backpacks, I was expecting that M1 energy effeciency would allow for less weight to carry rather than +10 hours of standalone time. A few hours of life, but 0.5 kg less weight would be a better tradeoff for me. (I'm talking weight, not thinness. A thicker body with better heat dispersion is fine, as long as extra space is taken up by air.)
  - lowbloodsugar 5y ago
    21 hours when watching movies. When doing real work, I get a good five hours out of my MacBook Air, whereas I'd get maybe one hour out of my Dell. If you actually have work to do, and you're stuck in the arse end of a coffee shop or airport, then you can still do meaningful work for hours.
- spicybright 5y ago
  I actually like the throwback, personally. I'm guessing they did that to differentiate it in the market. What I have trouble getting over is the flipping notch to the top. Just why. The bezel on my 2019 macbook looks the same, if not skinnier. Do people really not watch fullscreen videos anymore or something?
tarsinge 5y ago
That makes me wonder what a PowerBook G3 (my favorite one but it’s surely nostalgia) inspired design could be.

moritonal 5y ago

Whilst an afterthought, the kinds of people who buy Pros are the kind of people who decide on the tech for their wider families.

Hamuko 5y ago
You don't really even have to decide for the rest of the family. Basically all of my family migrated over to MacBooks after I bought my first MacBook Pro within like a two year span.

stuff4ben 5y ago

> I suspect that Jony Ives’ departure may have facilitated this. I'm sure that is a very accurate statement. I thoroughly enjoy the improvements to the keyboard and adding back in the new ports. But I wonder what the future of the MacBook will be without the visionary design from Ives? Are we going to see a melding of PC and Macs or will Apple keep design innovation at the forefront?

decafninja 5y ago
Haven't we already seen the post-Ives era products? I imagine Apple will continue to be design centric, just without a Jobs-esque demigod-like figure that could dictate his will above and beyond anyone else - i.e. form over function.
rangoon626 5y ago
I'm not trying to be mean spirited, but it was clear that his time was up. That's totally fine. He made some great contributions, but that doesn't mean that he can or will through his last waking moment.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
Yeah this feels like a pyrrhic victory. Yes, we've gotten our ports back, but is this indicative of a trend that Apple is moving away from design? It's too soon to say but I'd argue that it's likely Apple will experience some regression to the mean. Considering that Apple's design is several orders of magnitude away from the mean, that'd be a loss.
- mrkstu 5y ago
  I’d say the new iMac’s argue against that. Very ‘designed,’ very thin, to the point of compromise in some ways. It seems they are letting the designers have their way in the non-pro arena.

ookblah 5y ago

while i think ive should get a lot of criticism for "form over function", he helped push the barriers of what is possible and in a way pushed the industry forward as well. i think without steve to temper that it ran over a bit. you want someone to push the boundaries then someone to rein it in a bit vs the other way around. IMO, this is probably going to be a very special time for the macs as we see the pendulum swinging back and getting all the "function" we missed. i fear tho in a generation or two it will be too "function over form" and we get an apple basically producing bricks again lol. u can already see it with the iphones. sure... increase the thickness this year, but what prevents you from taking that thought further. compromise a little here or there, whatever. this is where someone with an obsession to say, thinness/lightness, helps. this is to say nothing about the hardware. they are far ahead there.

nojito 5y ago

>I suspect that Jony Ives’ departure may have facilitated this. This is a popular statement but Jony didn't have any design oversight for years before he formally left.

jagger27 5y ago
Products also take "years" to design and develop, so I'd say the statement may still hold true.

mrtksn 5y ago

My guess is that Apple bet on something that did not materialise, it wasn't about Jony Ive not caring about user feedback. What was the bet you say? I think they bet that the shift to USB-C/Thunderbolt/Wireless will happen quickly and they can help with the push and increase their margins. IMHO It wasn't a design decision but a business one and I think the removal of mag-safe is a giveaway. Every little thing that they add makes the thing more complicated to manufacture, thus more expensive. Every non-off-the-shelf piece puts multiple teams in to work on multiple continents and this costs money. I think they aimed for the simplicity at management level and not at design level. They did some calculation based on how well people are locked in and how many will buy a new mac and went with the most profitable option up until the time for the great transition comes. Until very recently the PC industry was racing to the bottom and Apple did not have a reason to compete on features. Nice Windows laptops are a very new phenomenon, up until very recently the best trackpad on a PC laptop wasn't even on the same league with Apple's.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
piva00 5y ago
> IMHO It wasn't a design decision but a business one and I think the removal of mag-safe is a giveaway. Every little thing that they add makes the thing more complicated to manufacture, thus more expensive. Every non-off-the-shelf piece puts multiple teams in to work in multiple continents and this costs money. I think they aimed for the simplicity at management level and not at design level. They did some calculation based on how well people are locked in and how many will buy a new mac and went with the most profitable option up until the time for the great transition comes. The touch bar invalidates a lot of these assumptions. My personal opinion is that Ive's vision for Apple's design future was of ever slimmer and slicker pieces of hardware, USB-C helped a lot this vision to simplify design lines, streamline the ports layout and so on. The simplicity take goes away when you consider that supporting 4 USB-C ports that behave differently due to limitations on power envelope and Thunderbolt chipset doesn't really simplify the design for cost-cutting.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
USB-C adoption mostly went fine, though. Or as fine as could be expected. I think the past five years can be more easily explained with — ironically — a Steve Jobs quote: > When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular … PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around, they're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be used by one out of X people. And that's what the Mac team lost sight of; they tried to make Pro Macs that were sports cars. Maybe the Macbook Air is an affordable sports car of sorts (do they still make Mazda Miatas?), but the Macbook Pro is and should be a truck.

quitit 5y ago

I’m not sure if their pro-lines were an afterthought, rather they weren’t in a good position to strongly differentiate their pro devices. “Disruption” in the pro space is going to be about performance, Apple did leverage their technologies for better performance and made some choice software acquisitions - but this involved pros switching tools and workflows to realise a moderate speed jump. A more powerful disruption is simply having much faster hardware, which at the time was unavailable - but clearly in development for quite some time. I think moving forward we should expect the pro lines to have benchmarks that are not just impressive, but custom silicon that makes changing software/workflows a huge advantage. I will definitely be moving over my video workflows for example - the performance gains make the time savings worth it. I also feel that Adobe has to really pull their finger out now, as software that has been built on Apple’s tech is seeing insane performance jumps.