Inside the lab: Why Apple still sweats the details on iMac | Hacker News Reader

Inside the lab: Why Apple still sweats the details on iMac

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51 pointssteven62 comments

>The input device, dubbed the Magic Mouse 2, would look to users exactly like the previous model....

>But one thing was totally unacceptable.

>The mouse didn’t sound right.

Yes, everyone loves the Magic Mouse so much, nothing else could be improved in version 2, except for the sound, that has to be perfect, in a mouse.

I mean, that's kind of the point. It's a tiny detail that nobody else would focus on, according to the narrative.

Not that I think it matters myself.

I'm not missing that point. What I find highly amusing is that no one I know, including myself, will be able to hold the mouse long enough to appreciate the new sound. I could be in an isolated world of DeathAdders and Zowie addicts, but this also includes my coworkers and parents.

I've worked with plenty of people who liked the Magic Mouse. I don't think it's a matter of missing the trees for the forest, I think you're just not who Apple worries about when they update the Magic Mouse. They typically make design decisions with an appreciation that not everyone will like it.

Yeah, I understand they choose symmetry and geometric simplicity over ergonomics, and the mouse isn't intended to fit into the hand and be comfortable to hold. It's still amusing that they tell everyone that the beautiful log is a perfect forest :)

Also it's hard to know if it is upside down until the cursor moves on the screen. This was so confusing to my youngest child we got an inexpensive wired mouse.

>Not that I think it matters myself.

And if it had come out tons would be screaming in forums about Apple's "noise making mouse" (if the click was that bad).

Like they did for the Laptops whose CPUs "whined" circa 2006 etc (which you would have to pay real attention to even hear).

> Like they did for the Laptops whose CPUs "whined" circa 2006 etc (which you would have to pay real attention to even hear).

My old Dell laptop's whine,[1] drove me insane in quiet rooms and was one reason I switched to Macs.

[1] I think it had something to do with the PSU when the CPU throttled down to a lower-power state.

I thought everyone loved the Apple BT keyboard universally and the Magic Mouse v1 was divisive?

I do love my Apple keyboards, trackpads, but I could never hold their mice.

Well, I do love the Magic Mouse so much. It's the best Mouse I've had -- from a history of crappy Apple (and earlier PC) mice, which includes SUN Spark's optical mice (which required a special mousepad) when nobody on their PC had optical mice yet...

Especially Apple's older mouse (with the too easy to jam with dirt wheel/ball) I really hated...

The Mighty Mouse is the old one, which they still sell for $49! I like the idea of the ball better than a scroll wheel, but they clog after a week and are never the same again.

Oh yeah. Completely agree there… the Mighty Mouse was horrible. After using mine for about a year, the trackball in it got so jammed with dirt that scrolling was a huge pain.

This is a good write up, but as I was reading it I started to realize the brilliant marketing behind it, and potentially why I buy some Apple products. I wouldn't buy the mouse because Apple made it sound perfect. I would buy the mouse because this article makes me see how much effort Apple puts into making their products the best they can be. Whether or not they are actually the best products is almost irrelevant after eliciting that emotion.

And once you've convinced yourself the mouse is better - how can it be worse ? i.e. placebo.

IME the (alkaline) apple bluetooth mouse really is awful, and I really wanted to like the apple mouse (I really want to like anything I over-pay that much for). I ended up buying a $20 logitech bluetooth mouse because the apple mouse disconnected sporadically from my macbook when the batteries got below ~20%, and also refused to play well with non-mac machines.

Yeah, half way reading it I started wondering if it is genuine article or really skilfully written ad. Either way it is not bad reading I just tend to be careful when emotions try to influence tech decisions -- in this case what would I buy next decision.

The entire article is a marketing piece. The mouse is just a diversion.

For what it's worth, on my old Apple mouse, the battery lid frequently falls off. It's so annoying that I don't use it any more. This is an issue that has apparently been fixed as well.

> This is an issue that has apparently been fixed as well.

Well, they fixed it by just not including a removable battery (and it's lid).

Exactly.

You also cannot use the new Magic Mouse v2 while charging. That's so stupid an oversight.

A charge for a single days use is around two minutes though. Takes longer to fetch spare batteries and change them.

Are you sure about that? I haven't seen anything anywhere that suggests that. :-/

Look at how/where the Lightning cable is inserted on the bottom.

Yup... Looks like you're right. I can't imagine why they wouldn't have it plug in at the top. That does seem like a silly oversight.

The article mentions a minute of charge will power it for 1/2 a day

Sure, but it doesn't say anything about it not working while being plugged in. That seems more of a "wired mouse when it's plugged in, wireless mouse when it's not" kinda thing.

Edit: Looking at the pics on the Apple site for it, it plugs in on the bottom. You wouldn't be able to use it even if you wanted to.

What do programmers think about 27inch iMac (2013)? I do not like it at all. The screen is too glossy (reflecting not just the overhead lights but more like a mirror). The screen is shaped like square rather than rectangle. This forces you to move your eyes/neck in all directions. And it has old noisy hard drives rather than SSDs.

I have removed the imac outer mirror screen to reduce glare [1] and am always resizing windows. Now I mostly use imac as external monitor for macbook, in target display mode. However, TDM is too fragile to use. For example, you need to login to your account in iMac before you can send the key signal via ssh from your laptop, otherwise the signal is ignored [2,3].

I can rant more about imac. For example, my imac speakers do not work. Apparently, some time when I removed my head phone, the imac sensors got stuck into believing that headphones are still plugged in [4].

With so many issues, I cannot believe that iMac is a labor of love, as the article suggests.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSF84EoQBvk

[2] https://superuser.com/questions/540799/sending-key-via-ssh-o...

[3] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5211301

[4] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3694502

So, not only 4k pixels on the iMac 21", but also 25% improvement in colour gamut. This screen should look fantastic!

Just an honest question, but do you like the glossy screens? I personally get quite annoyed by them at times, and find matte screens to be a more relaxing (/dull) experience. The glossiness does however make the iMacs look good in stores. The colors a bit more vivid, and they also tend to show mostly whtie/bright footage on them which hides the mirroring effect.

I had a lot of issues with one in an office that had tons of windows, some times of the day it was super hard to see. But the colors did look pretty good.

I'm partial toward matte too, just got an Asus 4K display that's seriously impressive, never expected them to brand really nice displays.

If one has to use their laptop/desktop out in the sun (and in a fixed position), or under non controlled light, then a non-glossy is probably the better option.

Personally I love glossy screens. They get glare sometimes, under direct light, but nothing that an angle change can't fix. Besides I don't want to be using a laptop under direct light anyways -- and for a desktop which is used inside, that's a non issue.

Non glossy screens (which I started with), I now find smudgy and hazy, and with much worse (gray-ish) blacks.

Under controlled

I really like the fact that they used 4096x2304 instead of 3840x2160 as the screen resolution for the 21.5" retina iMac. Let's hope this new resolution catches on quickly.

Why do you really like that? 3840x2160 is exactly double 1920x1080, which is a useful property.

They've used the DCI 4K resolution standard as the basis for their 4k screen, which is defined as 4096 x 2160 at 16:9 aspect ratio. This screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio, thus 4096/16*9 = 2304, the vertical resolution on the 4K iMac.

I'm afraid I didn't quite follow you there. Is one of those things using non-square pixels?

4096:2304 is still 16:9.

I read it a couple of times, I think that's what he is saying why they chose that resolution.

I agree that it's useful for a TV but the 21.5" iMac is too small for that anyway - however if you want to edit 4k video, it's super useful to have extra pixels to be able to display a full UHD image with some GUI elements surrounding it.

I bought a Magic Mouse a few years ago. I couldn't use it because getting the cursor from one side to the other required me to move the mouse so far that it caused shoulder pain. I had to replace it with a 1000 dpi Logitec.

Do the new mice have higher dpi as well?

One side of the screen to the other? With tracking speed set all the way up?

Yep. I had to "shuffle" to get it to move all the way.

That's really weird. I didn't love (or even particularly like) the mouse when I used one, but it was at least functional. I wonder if the one you had was physically defective somehow?

I wonder if this will be the apple mouse I finally like. Probably not, though! As much as I like their keyboards, their mice are terrible. I do like the trackpad, though.

Edit: I just realized they now do not offer a keyboard with a numpad. Crap.

They still do actually (the wired one). They just don’t advertise it anymore:

http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MB110LL/B/apple-keyboard-w...

Previous keyboard did work well for a short travel keys. Nothing extraordinary but decent when I had to use it. Otoh new switches are too far away from decent. Ecosystem, I get it.

I use Logitech wireless mice with my Macs. When I was shopping for them I noticed that Bluetooth is not widely used. What's the reason for using a different wireless standard?

The single-purpose rf transceivers are more power-efficient.

I can think of a few reasons:

1) You can tailor the wireless protocol to exactly your needs, rather than using something general purpose. That can help things like battery life and latency.

2) You don't have to work with buggy Bluetooth hardware or drivers that you don't make, and your hardware works with any computer with USB. Bluetooth was not common on PCs for a long time, especially on the desktop.

3) You can ship your peripherals pre-paired with the receiver, which means users don't need to do any setup besides plugging the receiver in.

Can anyone explain why they don't put more RAM in modern Mac computers? I think I can remember debating 8 versus 16 almost ten years ago. Why are they still stuck on 8?

Because not everyone is a techie that reads HN. Most people I know, even many developers, could easily get by with 8g of RAM.

Its a struggle with 10.10 and 10.11. The RAM requirement went up and it is a lot more sluggish. I got a lot of complaints and we ended up putting 16g in every iMac. The airs just became painful.

The 27" iMacs aren't using soldered RAM and has 4 slots. So it would probably be cheaper to buy and install RAM separately. 32GB would be about $180 instead of the ridiculous $600 Apple wants.

Can you actually install additional RAM? I didn't know you could take apart an iMac; i thought that changed after their "unibody" one piece aluminum design.

Apple has a guide at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191

Yes, the 27" model has a panel and slots for upgrading RAM.

You can't take apart the iMac, but the 27" model does have user-accessible RAM.

Funnily enough, it's probably easier to replace the RAM in one of those Mac than any other consumer PC. https://youtu.be/1nQp_Yb8YW0?t=55

It is by far the easiest! It is a very thoughtful design, nothing like your average PC where upgrading the RAM is the same experience as it was 20 years ago.

I had 16GB in my Hackintosh 3 years ago. I noticed that 8GB seem to be enough for more of the things I do, even with some big apps such as XCode and Final Cut Pro X in simultaneous use. I think my next Macbook will only have 8GB. Apple tends to charge a huge premium on extra RAM and SSD space anyway.

I doubt it. In 2005 a 1GB Corsair stick was $189 [1]. Going to 16GB from 8Gb would have set you back an extra $1500, even assuming your motherboard could have taken it.

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/average-historic-price-of-ram/

No discreet graphics kind of kills the deal with the smaller model. 4k display powered by Intel graphics is a bitter pill.

I think if Apple put real graphics cards in the 21" models people would buy them instead of the 27" models, which is bad from Apple's perspective.

Having said that, Intel graphics should be able to adequately display 4K at this point. My MBP from 2013 can drive close to that (2560x1600 internal+1080p external) without a hitch.

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