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> As far as I'm concerned, they could have made an iPad/MacBook hybrid for a long time now, where the display part could snap on a keyboard base and change prim

> As far as I'm concerned, they could have made an iPad/MacBook hybrid for a long time now, where the display part could snap on a keyboard base and change primary interaction method accordingly. They won't because it means a single device could fulfill all the needs for most people who don't need heavy computing power. I've been an early adopter of this kind of thing (remember Asus Transformer?) and used it a lot. In my experience, the catch is that to make the screen detachable and usable on its own, it needs to contain most of the electronics and at least part of the battery, with the keyboard then becoming a dock with perhaps a battery extension. And the problem with that is that it makes the screen heavier and the keyboard lighter to the point where you can't have the screen at a comfortable angle when the whole device is on your lap (or if you can, it requires constant effort to maintain balance). It's perfectly fine if you have a desk or other such surface, but, well, it's a laptop, right? Apple did an interesting thing with their iPad keyboard dock where instead of arranging it like a clamshell laptop, they suspend the screen above the keyboard, which allows them to move it closer to the user. I have one of those for a 14" iPad Pro. It balances better on the lap, but now you can't use it well while reclining... That said I still think the concept could work, but it would require consciously designing around this problem. Personally I would be perfectly fine with stuffing the keyboard with more batteries as a counterweight, but I think that designers are reluctant to do this because it increases the overall weight of the device. Anyway, on a device like that, yes, touch makes a lot of sense. On a regular laptop, IMO no (but with some exceptions; e.g. Lenovo's Yoga, and to some extent even Thinkpads because you can open them all the way to 180 degrees).

dpark 1y ago
> I think that designers are reluctant to do this because it increases the overall weight of the device. This is the SurfaceBook. The base has extra battery, extra GPU, and the hinge “unwinds” to extend the base a bit to help with balance. Nice concept but it definitely makes it heavier. I’m not really sure the market for this kind of device is very large. But then I feel the same way about 13” tablets and Apple sells enough of those to justify keeping them in the lineup so what do I know.
- seec 1y ago
  Yep. My brother actually has a Surface Book. It's a pretty cool device but severely let down by the hardware. The separation of the GPU is actually a problem and not something I find worthwhile but they didn't have a choice to enable good performance. But it's actually not relevant today, at least for Apple. They have a perfectly fine chip that they put in their Pro iPad that is good enough for most tasks with quite good performance. No separation needed. The Surface Book is a 9 years old device at this point. I think it's the Microsoft curse, they have a good idea but launch it half-baked and lose interest. They didn't control the most important piece of the stack anyway: the silicon. Nowadays with the Snapdragon chips they would have a chance at making something much better, but they failed too early, made a weird compromise with the Surface Laptop Studio (wasn't too bad but too expensive for the compromises) and then gave up. They focus on the Surface Pro which isn't too bad because unlike Apple they actually allow a full fat OS to run and it's not a very good tablet (at least in the media consumption sense) but it makes for a pretty decent laptop. Of course, you have to deal with Windows and it's not as efficient as an iPad would be. For the 13" tablet market the appeal is really easy: it can be a notepad that you draw on, you can annote document directly, write equation/diagrams/whatever with the stylus and at the same time it can be a laptop by just snapping a keyboard base to it. The major problem is the software: ideally you want to be able to use "full-fat computer OS" software when bolted on to the keyboard but at the same time enable touch centric usage when used as a notepad/tablet. Apple could very much do it: they already enable running iPad apps on macOS, they would just need to figure out a layer on top of macOS that would enable usage of touch for the relevant apps without needing to convert the full OS to be touch ready. Just like they did back in the days with Front Row, to enable media center usage out of a regular Mac. I'm pretty sure they already know how to solve most of the problems (maybe they even have prototypes) but I believe they won't because it is not in their interest profit wise.
seec 1y ago
Yes I agree about the engineering tradeoffs that require but the point is, as you hint, that they are actually already there and it's mostly a business decision. I have tried the iPad Pro dock solution and it's exactly what motivates my argument. The floating aspect is largely pointless and mostly serve as a look thing (if anything it makes it more tiring to raise your hand to use touch) while having stability compromises, and not providing enough advantages (they just added a port, the trackpad is small but at least the keyboard is better now). I don't think the weight argument is very relevant since the combo already weighs more than a MacBook Air. The point is to make it a more complete professional device, something has to give, MacBook Pros are heavier and people deal with it. To keep weight down they have the Air line, this is what it should be for, not selling re-heated designs at a discount (but of course the bean counter will disagree with that). They could make a much beefier base, with more ports and actually invest some engineering into figuring out a great hinge mechanism that the iPad part could lock into. They wouldn't need to rework a lot of the iPad parts and with their current chips you could get double battery life for what would be a very modular powerful device. Apple used to be able to do that, I don't know if you have ever dismantled a "Sunflower" iMac but I can tell you it was great engineering. I wish they would work their ass off to deliver something "magical" like that. But they won't because they know very well that many pros already get by just fine with a MacBook Air but they need to buy an iPad on top of that if they want stylus/touch functionality. You can infer that because the iPad Pro uses the same exact chip as the MacBook Air and the device drivers must be extremely similar outside of touch/stylus and camera. If they wanted, they could at least allow dual boot macOS/iPadOS with not much work at all. The touch target is a poor argument since it would work just fine with the stylus and using Wacom displays with a Mac has been a thing since quite a while now. It's purely commercial greed that motivates their behavior and it's the real reason they don't even try to make a device like that. One could argue that it's too niche, but that would be quite an argument, considering Apple just dumped billions of dollars in a Vision Pro, that ironically lacked vision and is the exact definition of niche. The problem with VR headset was never a technology quality problem in the first place but the fact that it doesn't really enable any kind of usage that goes past the cool demo to make up for the massive tradeoffs in useability/convenience. So, you have Apple dumping billions into a stupid "me too" product while purposefully ignoring a potentially innovative device because they are afraid that they would lose money. I doubt we would get the iPhone today if Apple got as successful as it is with just Macs/iPods. I haven't used an Asus Transformer but I have used a Surface Pro and my brother has a Surface Book. The potential is there but they are clearly let down by the comparatively much worse hardware. And that's the point, for anyone else than Apple this type of device is very hard (especially since their volumes are much worse) but if there is one company that has every building block that could make this go from very cool concept to absolutely amazing it's them. And yes, I agree that on a regular laptop having touch is not that important, you need to enable the tablet/flat notepad use cases to make it worthwhile which is exactly why 180/360 laptops with special hinges are still a decent target. But Apple could do it all.

dpark 1y ago

> I think that designers are reluctant to do this because it increases the overall weight of the device. This is the SurfaceBook. The base has extra battery, extra GPU, and the hinge “unwinds” to extend the base a bit to help with balance. Nice concept but it definitely makes it heavier. I’m not really sure the market for this kind of device is very large. But then I feel the same way about 13” tablets and Apple sells enough of those to justify keeping them in the lineup so what do I know.

seec 1y ago
Yep. My brother actually has a Surface Book. It's a pretty cool device but severely let down by the hardware. The separation of the GPU is actually a problem and not something I find worthwhile but they didn't have a choice to enable good performance. But it's actually not relevant today, at least for Apple. They have a perfectly fine chip that they put in their Pro iPad that is good enough for most tasks with quite good performance. No separation needed. The Surface Book is a 9 years old device at this point. I think it's the Microsoft curse, they have a good idea but launch it half-baked and lose interest. They didn't control the most important piece of the stack anyway: the silicon. Nowadays with the Snapdragon chips they would have a chance at making something much better, but they failed too early, made a weird compromise with the Surface Laptop Studio (wasn't too bad but too expensive for the compromises) and then gave up. They focus on the Surface Pro which isn't too bad because unlike Apple they actually allow a full fat OS to run and it's not a very good tablet (at least in the media consumption sense) but it makes for a pretty decent laptop. Of course, you have to deal with Windows and it's not as efficient as an iPad would be. For the 13" tablet market the appeal is really easy: it can be a notepad that you draw on, you can annote document directly, write equation/diagrams/whatever with the stylus and at the same time it can be a laptop by just snapping a keyboard base to it. The major problem is the software: ideally you want to be able to use "full-fat computer OS" software when bolted on to the keyboard but at the same time enable touch centric usage when used as a notepad/tablet. Apple could very much do it: they already enable running iPad apps on macOS, they would just need to figure out a layer on top of macOS that would enable usage of touch for the relevant apps without needing to convert the full OS to be touch ready. Just like they did back in the days with Front Row, to enable media center usage out of a regular Mac. I'm pretty sure they already know how to solve most of the problems (maybe they even have prototypes) but I believe they won't because it is not in their interest profit wise.

seec 1y ago

Yes I agree about the engineering tradeoffs that require but the point is, as you hint, that they are actually already there and it's mostly a business decision. I have tried the iPad Pro dock solution and it's exactly what motivates my argument. The floating aspect is largely pointless and mostly serve as a look thing (if anything it makes it more tiring to raise your hand to use touch) while having stability compromises, and not providing enough advantages (they just added a port, the trackpad is small but at least the keyboard is better now). I don't think the weight argument is very relevant since the combo already weighs more than a MacBook Air. The point is to make it a more complete professional device, something has to give, MacBook Pros are heavier and people deal with it. To keep weight down they have the Air line, this is what it should be for, not selling re-heated designs at a discount (but of course the bean counter will disagree with that). They could make a much beefier base, with more ports and actually invest some engineering into figuring out a great hinge mechanism that the iPad part could lock into. They wouldn't need to rework a lot of the iPad parts and with their current chips you could get double battery life for what would be a very modular powerful device. Apple used to be able to do that, I don't know if you have ever dismantled a "Sunflower" iMac but I can tell you it was great engineering. I wish they would work their ass off to deliver something "magical" like that. But they won't because they know very well that many pros already get by just fine with a MacBook Air but they need to buy an iPad on top of that if they want stylus/touch functionality. You can infer that because the iPad Pro uses the same exact chip as the MacBook Air and the device drivers must be extremely similar outside of touch/stylus and camera. If they wanted, they could at least allow dual boot macOS/iPadOS with not much work at all. The touch target is a poor argument since it would work just fine with the stylus and using Wacom displays with a Mac has been a thing since quite a while now. It's purely commercial greed that motivates their behavior and it's the real reason they don't even try to make a device like that. One could argue that it's too niche, but that would be quite an argument, considering Apple just dumped billions of dollars in a Vision Pro, that ironically lacked vision and is the exact definition of niche. The problem with VR headset was never a technology quality problem in the first place but the fact that it doesn't really enable any kind of usage that goes past the cool demo to make up for the massive tradeoffs in useability/convenience. So, you have Apple dumping billions into a stupid "me too" product while purposefully ignoring a potentially innovative device because they are afraid that they would lose money. I doubt we would get the iPhone today if Apple got as successful as it is with just Macs/iPods. I haven't used an Asus Transformer but I have used a Surface Pro and my brother has a Surface Book. The potential is there but they are clearly let down by the comparatively much worse hardware. And that's the point, for anyone else than Apple this type of device is very hard (especially since their volumes are much worse) but if there is one company that has every building block that could make this go from very cool concept to absolutely amazing it's them. And yes, I agree that on a regular laptop having touch is not that important, you need to enable the tablet/flat notepad use cases to make it worthwhile which is exactly why 180/360 laptops with special hinges are still a decent target. But Apple could do it all.