30 ms·
A lot of comments seem focused on the incentives to apple and what's motivating the change. All fair questions. To me, though, it feels like just a radically di
by tobyjsullivan 5y ago
A lot of comments seem focused on the incentives to apple and what's motivating the change. All fair questions. To me, though, it feels like just a radically different approach this year.
2016 macbook felt like leadership got in a room and said "okay, let's make a list of all the sexy things we can think of that would make the macbook unique". This netted things like thin-beyond-practicality, touchbar, removing all the ports, etc.
2021 macbook feels like leadership got in a room and said "okay, let's make a list of all the top things everybody is complaining about most." And they just fixed everything (well, most things) on that list one-by-one.
- brightball 5y agoIs the hard disk / SSD / NVMe still soldered to the board?
- DrBenCarson 5y agoTo summarize: the MBP no longer has a “hard disk”. It has flash memory that is coupled with the SoC. This is to make the memory bottleneck tolerable (considering the cpu and ram move 400GB/s)
- colechristensen 5y agoI replaced one of the (honestly I don't know what to call them... gumstick sized ssd?) in a MacBook that had it as a separate component and it was a bad idea. It required an adapter board, some large proportion of available products on the market weren't compatible, and even with one that was there was still occasional strange behavior. Soldering in was the least of the problems.
- peterburkimsher 5y ago"blade style drive" -> M.2 I also replaced the SSD in my 15" MacBook Pro 2014, and currently use a 4 TB M.2 drive. When a replacement battery fried my logic board, I didn't lose my data. It didn't take multiple hours to re-clone from backup; I just used a screwdriver to move the SSD over to my spare laptop (13" Pro 2015). A computer for me is primarily a data storage and retrieval device. Data loss is an existential risk to it. Data security doesn't bother me as much as it does other people; once the hardware is accessible, all bets are off anyway. I do get some strange behaviour with the new SSD (periodic weekly crash/reboot) but still accept that in order to have the larger capacity (4 TB is much more than the 512 GB when the laptop was new).
- fouc 5y agoI did a similar replacement and it was a great idea! But you had to pick the right adapter, also the 2015 MBP had the least compatibility issues.
- rootusrootus 5y agoWasn't 2015 still in the days of SATA? I put an SSD in mine and it was trivial. It's not at all what the 2016+ models are like.
- mehrdada 5y ago- 2010 to ~2013: removable SATA SSD in a stick form-factor. - ~2013 to 2015: removable PCIe SSD (connector not compatible with off the shelf ones though) - 2016+: soldered
- gregoriol 5y agoThere are still a few things left for 2022 models
- Gigachad 5y agoI think it might be unlikely that we see replaceable flash chips come back as it sounds like the built in ones are insanely fast and likely cheaper as well.
- masklinn 5y agoMBPs haven't had a "hard drive" to solder on in a few years: the "T2" security chip is also the SSD controller, managing the "freestanding" flash chips (which are soldered onto the board). The SSD isn't a separate thing at all.
- mehrdada 5y agoThat, however, does not prevent the flash chips from being removable. Sure you would not be able to access the data, but could replace/upgrade the flash without throwing away the computer when they fail. In fact that exists in a real T2 product: Mac Pro. You won't be able to replace it with off the shelf NVMe though.
- rbanffy 5y agoIf you go to the other extreme of the spectrum, to the eMMC-based laptops, they are also soldered to the motherboard. Which is really a shame (I have one Acer Aspire laptop and I mount /var/log as tmpfs without swap so it doesn't devour the eMMC like the RPis do with SD cards)
- masklinn 5y agoI fear 2016 MBP was Jony Ive unimpeded by practical concerns.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoCourage!
- behnamoh 5y agoGood riddence of him.
- masklinn 5y agoHe still works with Apple as an independent stylist (Apple is LoveFrom's primary client), but likely not with the seniority and off-hands approach from others he had as chief design officers, which clearly was an issue with no Jobs to oversee.
- eddieroger 5y agoHe lived long enough to be the villain, huh. You don't have to love his style, and it got more extreme as time went on, but he did plenty of good along the way, and just struggled when not checked.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoThat would be nice, but would mean reversing all the decisions from 2016. Also, I'm happy about having more ports, but not all my devices are USB-C, especially pendrives. A noticeable part of my routine is dealing with various dongles just because someone thought they will decide what I need and in which direction I should be pushed. In the meantime, all other vendors continue to support USB-A.
- cletus 5y agoThe 2016 wasn't leadership, it was Johnny Ive without Steve Jobs bringing him back to reality. Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to raise the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macbooks, that had fallen precipitously low from a shareholder perspective because of the superb value-for-money proposition that was the 13" Macbook Air. The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability. USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical one that forced people everywhere to carry dongles. The USB-C cable situation was and continues to be a nightmare as different cables support different subsets of data, power and video and, worse yet, different versions of each of those. Worst of all, it was the loss of the much-beloved MagSafe. Also, the ports weren't all the same. You were better off charging from the right (IIRC) rather than the left. Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful. Personally I don't believe this was about forcing users to pay for upgrades primarily. It was about shaving off a small amount of volume. Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.
- shoto_io 5y agoHow do you know all this? We’re you at apple at the time?
- tobyjsullivan 5y agoI don't think apple decided to "undo Ive" immediately, though. The 2019 models attempted an incremental fix approach - fix the keyboard layout, add a physical escape key - while trying to preserve the 2016 features (usb-c only, thinness, touchbar). It seems clear that it wasn't until 2021 that apple has decided to throw all the crap out entirely.
- cletus 5y agoYeah I agree this wasn't a binary switch. Pure speculation: the forcing function for the big changes in the latest models was the M1. That forced a redesign of probably the entire unit anyway (eg different thermals, chipsets, power requirements, etc). Prior to that the path of least resistance was incremental changes and fixes.
- elicash 5y agoThis meeting, however, probably would have been in like 2017. We're just seeing the results now.
- rootusrootus 5y agoDoes it really take four years to update a laptop design? That's getting up there with automotive development time, and cars are significantly more complex.
- elicash 5y agoYou don't think Apple has had a meeting yet about 2025 laptops?
- rootusrootus 5y agoMaybe some brainstorming ideas. But I would be surprised if they've put effort into actually designing it yet.
- elicash 5y agoSo I think we agree! The initial meeting OP mentioned (where they were like "let's make a list!") probably took place around 2017. I'll certainly grant your point about when more detailed work began. I'll also grant that who knows, maybe they didn't sign off on the concept of listening to the feedback until a year later.
- EEMac 5y agoIf you create a problem, people will beg you to sell them the solution.
- dylan604 5y agoLike Coca Cola's New Coke solution.
- rootusrootus 5y agoI've always appreciated the fact that New Coke was more popular with Coke customers in a blind taste test. Pepsi usually wins, too, AFAIK. Probably why New Coke has a Pepsi ring to it.
- dylan604 5y agoThis is the first I'm ever hearing of someone saying that New Coke was preferred. They don't even make it any more. They switched from New Coke to Coke Classic. What taste tests showed New Coke as popular?
- rootusrootus 5y agoCoke did blind tests at the time that showed New Coke was more popular (it's been too long, but I feel like there were some independent tests during the scandal time as well). The outrage when they released New Coke was all about nostalgia, nothing to do with taste. People were simply offended that Coke would have the audacity to change the flavor they were accustomed to. I still remember the scandal. It was hilarious. There was a recent redux on a smaller scale when they modified the recipe for Coke Zero. IIRC, the big difference between diet coke and coke zero is that one is based loosely on the formula for coca cola classic, and the other new coke. That may be an urban legend, though.
- slt2021 5y agoit would be hilarious if Coca Cola decided to produce new recipe under Classic label and see if anyone would notice the difference. Or vise versa - old recipe under new brand)
- waynesonfire 5y ago> "okay, let's make a list of all the sexy things we can think of that would make the macbook unique" what are we talking about here? pussy right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuTvA1_NNSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuTvA1_NNSo
- bluescrn 5y agoIt was all going well until somebody said 'let's have a notch!' when they'd already decided not to add face ID...
- Gigachad 5y agoThere isn't the depth to add face ID. If the notch is a real concern, you can use a setting which adds black bars to the top so it looks like the older macbook
- poo-yie 5y agoWell said! Now they need to do the same with macOS.
- PostThisTooFast 5y agoAnd yet Apple's laptops STILL don't have a real Delete key. Just a Backspace key mislabeled "delete," while everyone else manages to fit a Delete key onto even small keyboards. There was never an excuse for it, but when the Eject key became pointless and Apple still didn't fix the problem... it became classic, infantile Apple pettiness.
- felixbraun 5y agoSo looking forward to the next version of iPhone 4 — hopes higher than ever
- jpswade 5y agoIt seems obvious to me that the decision to remove ports and buttons is not only for the design aesthetic, but less moving parts means less problems, less weight, less insulation, less cost and more elegant wireless peripherals to sell. If you look at it the same was as the iPhone it’s clearly the same strategy as why they removed the headphone jack and why they want to remove all the buttons, and are ultimately aiming for a clear piece of glass. It seems this 2021 Mac is a backwards step away from that strategy, perhaps recognising people aren’t ready yet, or perhaps competition and ecological concerns are becoming too big to ignore, either way, this will be a short lived regression, I’m sure.
- neop1x 5y agoOr perhaps people want want to connect three devices together without a bag full of dongles and let all batteries charge at the same time.
- raxxorrax 5y agoCustomer orientation was sadly extremely neglected by big tech, paternalism about what users want dominated design decisions. Most companies still do so, so kudos to Apple for once that they did really listen to customers.