5 ms·
Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish, but recovered nicely afterw
by foobarian 6mo ago
Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish, but recovered nicely afterwards. My M4 is a glorious device built like a tank
- a012 6mo agoAnd dont forget the scissor keyboard and the fucking touchbar
- alex7o 6mo agoFight me but I miss the touchbar, it was customizable to be super useful with better touch tool
- vel0city 6mo agoI think the touch bar was a neat idea with a lot of potential but IMO they should have kept the row of physical function keys as well.
- alex7o 6mo agoThe thing is I have never used the function keys on my laptop so that was not a problem form me, but also some of the custom functions I hard can just be mapped to fn keys so it is bit like it it us a huge loss
- vel0city 6mo agoI don't necessarily use the numbered function keys all the time (as in F1-F12), but I use those physical buttons constantly. Brightness, volume, play/pause, mic mute, are all buttons I press a good bit. Many of those I'd rather just have be a single quick button, especially things like speaker or mic mute.
- pie_flavor 6mo agoVolume and brightness are exactly the place the touchbar shines: tap and start dragging and you're adjusting a slider, which is much better than mashing a button.
- vel0city 6mo agoSure, a slider can make sense there, I agree. But now I've got a part of the screen dedicated to be the spot to tap to start changing the volume and a part dedicated to it being the brightness taking away from the other useful parts of the screen, or its hidden under a sub menu making it more annoying to rapidly change. Imagine if on your phone to change the volume you had to swipe into a settings menu first and then change it on a slider versus just using the volume buttons on the side. Seems like a worse way for something you're potentially wanting to rapidly adjust, like when you accidentally start playing something way too loud.
- anonymars 6mo agoWhy not have the "buttons" change the touch bar itself into a slider when pressed? If you locate them in the middle it could be a seamless "press, drag, release" action
- pie_flavor 6mo agoThat is what the touchbar did. It doesn't take two steps. You motion like you're dragging the volume button and the slider appears under you, already being dragged.
- wwweston 6mo agoNo. So much no. It utterly destroys the “quick incremental adjustment” that taps are better for. It makes it more involved to even complete maximal adjustments, which are just press and hold. It makes all adjustments more involved, it’s not merely a matter of locating a physical key, it’s orchestrating movements your eyes and hands have to track together toward a location that can’t be known , through touch detection that can get fussy for any number of reasons. This is not theoretical. This was my experience with a touchbar MBP. The idea was just wrong for this kind of routine function. Meanwhile, I can adjust volume blind by feel on a MPB with function keys. I never for a moment when doing this for audio or brightness think “I wish I had a slider” and even if I did I know how to find one for use with the touch interface every MBP ever has had.
- dismalaf 6mo agoFn keys usually double as media keys so I use them a lot, as do most laptop users I know.
- Cockbrand 6mo agoAnother thing was that not all Mac notebooks had a touch bar, so developers couldn't put any vital features onto it.
- duskwuff 6mo agoAnd there was no Touch Bar-equipped external keyboard either, so users with a desktop system were shut out entirely.
- csunbird 6mo agoI think the problem with touch bar was that, it completely replaced the function keys, instead of complementing them. Other than that, I actually liked it.
- plomme 6mo agoHah, that reminds me! My first work issued Mac didn't have the ESC key, just the touch bar. IIRC a program hung in fullscreen, freezing both the app and the touch bar. So I had to reboot to get out of it because the esc key didn't work.
- vel0city 6mo agoIts interesting the touch bar was also hung up, as from what I recall the touchbar was actually driven by a separate processor (the T1/T2 chip) and had its own version of watchOS running. I would have thought it would have continued working, just unable to continue syncing with the rest of the Mac.
- Forgeties79 6mo agoIt’s rare but I’ve definitely seen my touchbar lock up or go dark and require a restart. It also could get mad hot on my 2016 MBpro when video editing. Still love(d) that computer though…
- Groxx 6mo agoYeah, it locked up on me every couple months or so. Very glad to see it gone (as the primary ESC + F-row input). I also would not mind it in addition to regular keys, there are some great interactions in there. But it's an extremely poor keyboard-emulator. Splitting off the escape key made a huge improvement, but it's nowhere near enough.
- Forgeties79 6mo agoYeah Apple has had a few missteps like this over the last 5 to 10 years. They assert themselves with that Steve Jobs mentality of “we know what’s best for you,” but he got it right more often than the current iteration. The touch bar was definitely not properly assessed by users before shipping.
- dkga 6mo agoSame. I still have my intel Mac as a secondary, backup device and I still love using it, in part because of the touchbar.
- garbageman 6mo agoInteresting to hear a different perspective on the touchbar. I have yet to meet someone who liked it. Removes touch typing, requires you to refocus attention, etc. Changing the volume is easy, button same place always - but with touch bar I have to look down and do the slidey thing. If they implemented real keys with that display built in...now we're talking!
- tpmoney 6mo agoThe touchbar was great when apps used it for useful things. It’s main sin was replacing the physical escape key and I suspect if even just that key had remained physical most people would have been fine with the touchbar because most people don’t really use the f-keys by touch. Most of the time when I’m using the f-keys, it’s to use the debugger for an IDE. And that’s where the touchbar really shined because instead of remembering whether f6 or f5 was step over, the touchbar could just display the expected symbol. Personally I’d love to see the touchbar make a comeback either as an addition to the fkeys row, or as a set of e-ink/oled physical buttons where the fkeys are. Allow the displayed legends to update while still keeping the physicality.
- dhosek 6mo agoEven without BTT, I liked the touchbar (especially on the Macbook “Esc” which restored the escape key). It was nice having keys that actually said what they did. Maybe someday, keycaps with an LCD-generated display will be feasible (or maybe e-paper for power consumption needs)
- sersi 6mo agoYeah, I hated the keyboard but really did like the touchbar. Apple really dropped the ball there though. We shouldn't have needed Better Touch Tool to make it useful.
- nekooooo 6mo agoloved the touchbar for things like timeline scrubbers and quick shortcuts in my pro software
- RulerOf 6mo agoI thought it really excelled at displaying the timeline—it was quite novel to see a timeline for a video I was watching that didn't occlude any part of the screen—but quite annoyingly it would go black due to inactivity. And of course the virtual function keys were awful.
- thih9 6mo agoVirtual function keys and virtual escape key in earlier models.
- varjag 6mo agoHave to say I really prefer butterfly keyboard (as long as it works).
- thih9 6mo agoSamsung Galaxy Note 7 was a great phone as long as it didn’t spontaneously combust.
- epolanski 6mo agoMy finger tips literally becoming purple colored due to the insane heat of that aluminum's thing in the i9 era. still hurts.
- pohl 6mo agoI suspect that the touch bar served its likely real purpose: to ship an ARM CPU with a secure enclave in the machines so that we could have Touch ID without needing to wait for Apple Silicon. Everything other than that was gravy, an interesting experiment.
- SSLy 6mo agoT2 or a successor could theoretically do all of that too.
- bdcravens 6mo agoI didn't mind the touchbar, and enjoyed some of the added functionality. Would have been so much better if it had been an addition instead of a replacement for the top row of keys.
- s_dev 6mo agoScissor keys are the good ones, you're thinking of Butterfly keys.
- jnwatson 6mo agoThat's a really good point to remember and counters the article's claim that there were no major recalls. Still, the M series laptops are so much better than offerings from competitors I am hesitant to even put them in the same product category.
- Nesco 6mo agoI had this opinion until I actually had a new model and felt the weight difference. The duality of Man
- highfrequency 6mo agoWhy do you prefer the laptop to be thicker and heavier?
- jonhohle 6mo agoI think the preference is to have a battery that can run a CPU that's compiling, AI-ing, or rendering for an entire day (16+ hours) without having to worry about where an outlet is or being tethered to a wall or be thermal throttled. Right now that's a volume tradeoff. If there was something that ran as fast for as long and was MacBook Air (or the last Intel generation) thin, I don't think anyone would complain.
- petu 6mo agoNobody said that. MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.
- hombre_fatal 6mo agoI don't want to think about how long I used that macbook where the keycaps would come off with my fingers as I typed, the switches were that broken. It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.
- saghm 6mo agoThat's a false dichotomy; there are plenty of keyboards that don't require recalls due to issues like the butterfly ones but also don't have the issues you're describing.
- eloisant 6mo agoI'd be fine with a thinner and lighter laptop if it was without compromises. But having a shitty keyboard, losing the HDMI port, wasn't worth it.
- jmyeet 6mo agoThis was the last gasp of Johnny Ive. And yes, it was terrible. It got us ending the incredibly successful Macbook Air for the too-compromised 12" Macbook (1 port, remember?), the pointless Touch Bar and the terrible butterly keyboard (remember how dust could kill it and I'm sure Apple spent a fortune on replacements?). Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low. Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.
- sneak 6mo agoI collect the 12" macbooks, even today. It really only needs one port; the vast majority of people never plug anything but power into their computer ever. I would pay huge sums for a modern Mx 11-12" ultralight macbook with a reliable keyboard.
- varjag 6mo agoSame. Using my MacBook 12" of Theseus still at home. It's a fantastic machine for travel or field work if configured to 16GB. That 1" down from Air makes a huge difference on a seat tray.
- wpm 6mo agoAny advice for finding them other than partaking in whatever premimum drugs eBay sellers smoke to make the prices they are charging for essentially e-waste make sense? God I want to pick up one so bad but $150, $200, $300, hell there's one out there asking $1200! For a computer that was pretty crap when it was new? I absolutely loved the one I used from 2017-2021. It was a maxed out 2017 model in gold. Some bozo director bought it for himself with his budget then quit a month later, so this thing no one really wanted ended up on the spares pile. I grabbed it to replace my 2012 13" MacBook Pro as my "going to town" computer, i.e. the one I'd take when I needed to step away from my desk and my desktop workstation. And whaddya know, the 7Y75 i7 benchmarked about the same as the Ivy Bridge i5 it was replacing. The wedge shape is so undeniably more humanistic and comfortable than the current MacBook Air/Neo slab. 0.14" at its thinnest, rounded at the bottom to make it easier to pick up. An excellent screen. Great trackpad. Full size keyboard, and yes, I liked the butterfly keys! Key travel is dumb! I never had issues with it and I took it into network closets and steam tunnels and ate greasy lunches next to it and all kinds of dusty, dirty places, and never had a key failure. God, what a wonderful portable computer! It was like carrying an empty clipboard around, you'd barely notice it in a stack of papers or notebooks, but open the screen and bam, full-fat macOS! Honestly it was the last Mac I think I've used that physically delighted me. I usually cringe when I hear executives talking about wanting to "delight" customers, but that shitty little slow, overpriced Macbook with one USB-C port, absolutely delightful. Like sure, Apple Silicon was amazing but in a different sort of way, in a "wow that V12 engine sure is powerful" and not "this entire car is amazing" way. The Retina MacBook was delightful even though my nerd brain knew that as a computer, looking at raw specs, was a complete dud (though mine had 16GB of RAM, nyah nyah, take that Macbook Neo!) And now that the vision Apple had for that device actually came true?? That we live in a mostly mobile, USB-C world where my company's conference rooms all have AirPlay and most monitors have built-in USB-C input/hubs? That they could put an ultra cut down iPhone chip in it and even if it was only as fast as a 5 year old Macbook that would still make it as fast as an M1? Oh well, now we don't get one! You will have a brutalist cold slab of a Macbook Air or a pathetically locked down iPad appliance and be happy! Perhaps it was a great product because of those flaws, those horrible compromises they had to make to get it that small. All I can hope is that there is some skunkworks project somewhere in Cupertino, maybe even unsanctioned, of hardware designers asking themselves "what would we have to figure out if we made it 0.25 inches thick?" or "Could we get a Macbook down to 1 pound?". I want a product whose development team were told "Make a Macbook. Priority 1. light, priority 2. thin, priority 3. there is no priority 3" Joz, Ternus, if you're reading this, I would also pay huge sums of money for a modern 11-12" ultralight Macbook. I would write Apple a blank check for one, name your price.
- reaperducer 6mo agoSpeaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish It wouldn't be HN if someone didn't dredge up a decade-old axe to grind.
- wtallis 6mo agoIt's not exactly a decade-old issue when the problem started a decade ago and persisted for half a decade. The MacBook Pros from the tail end of that era are only just now starting to reach an age where they can reasonably be considered obsolete and due for replacement, because that kind of machine absolutely should be usable for 5+ years. From the perspective of Apple's current product offerings those laptops are many generations back, but from the perspective of the actual user base they're still recent history. Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.
- triceratops 6mo agoMacBooks can last almost that long. People still own and use them.
- ComputerGuru 6mo ago> but recovered nicely afterwards After Ives was fired/forced out/decided to leave to pursue his creative vision.
- iwontberude 6mo agoI love that he instantly flopped repeatedly and showed it was actually Apple that was great all along.
- 33MHz-i486 6mo agoOpenAI acquired his company for Billions. maybe the products flopped but he did fine for himself personally
- iwontberude 6mo agoSure he made it into the Epstein class, whoopty fucking do
- tsunamifury 6mo agoThis is, by far, the most insane take i've ever heard. The guy litterally built modern apple from the ground up in equal with Jobs.
- vishnugupta 6mo agoApparently it required someone with the personality and product taste of Jobs to rein in Ivy. Cook on the other hand being a logistics/operations guy didn’t have the similar skills and we ended up getting absolute shitshow of hardware products from apple in late 2010s. Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.
- dkga 6mo ago
- chongli 6mo agoYeah my only complaint with Apple hardware these days is all the sharp edges. I miss the soft, rounded sides of touchID based iPhones.
- bmitc 6mo agoApple has had sharp edges for like 15 years now on their MacBooks.
- WalterBright 6mo agoI dug out my old iPod from a drawer. Put the charger in - it took a couple days for it to charge. And then it was working just fine, except that the servers no longer supported the apps on it. But the iPod is still so nice. I wish I could have a phone with that form factor. Even if it just had VOIP. The big phones are often just too much.
- throwaway894345 6mo agoI generally agree, but I had the misfortune of having a tiny grain of something (it was truly microscopic) wedged between my screen and the tiny rubber gasket around the edge and that completely disabled my screen and cost $800 to repair. I'm glad they moved away from the thin obsession, and I generally agree that the new design gives the impression of robustness even if that wasn't my experience. :)
- YmiYugy 6mo agoThe missteps of those intel MacBooks are undeniable, but I also feel like the new design feels very safe and unambitious. There is the huge notch. The 16" model is (given screen and battery size) 35% heavier than competitors and not exactly a joy to lug around. The keycaps continue to be made of subpar ABS getting a oily look within mere month of usage. The use of space inside is not very efficient compared to previous models.
- fooker 6mo agoThat's exactly why I love it. Happy to have an unambitious reliable workhorse where the battery lasts two days. I'd actually be happier if it was even less ambitious, and made the graphics bits less powerful. But that would likely be a bad business move.