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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

The ironic thing is how much simpler it would have been for Apple to give people what they actually wanted.

All anyone wanted was a retina macbook air. That's it. Everyone was perfectly happy and just wanted a nicer screen.

All anyone wanted was a mac pro tower with updated SATA and USB speeds and new processors, etc. That's it.

Instead, in both cases, we got silly weird things that nobody wants. I'm never going to buy the non-tower mac pro. Similarly, when the new touchbar macbooks were announced, I ran to the apple store and bought a nice, new max spec 11" air to hold in reserve in my closet.

Now I'm covered on the laptop front for at least five more years and apple has cumulatively lost out on 3-4 laptop and mac pro purchases from me.

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Apple has never been about what "everyone" wanted though - their whole shtick has always been "the consumer doesn't know what they want until you show it to them." This attitude worked in the Jobs era because of his product vision but it's hard to sustain when you're continually regressing toward the mean in innovation after a string of outlier hits

But every time they took something away, it felt like they were giving you something in return. (Store your music library in our cloud, let your whole family access all music for $15)

But every time they took something away, it felt like they were giving you something in return for more money.

The MacBook is the "Retina MacBook Air"

All anyone wanted with the MacBook Pro was: better performance, 32GB RAM, better battery life.

It's a pro machine, it's meant to sacrifice some portability for pro features.

> The MacBook is the "Retina MacBook Air"

Unfortunately, no it is not. The processor in those things is pretty crippled, and the lack of ports is beyond ridiculous.

> lack of ports is beyond ridiculous

That's not gonna change with Apple hardware anytime soon :(

I was thinking about switching to the 12" MacBook instead of the 13" Pro for portability reasons alone, but every time I ran my test suites on it, I realized it would be slower than my 2013 Air with a 1.7 GHz i7 and I gave it up.

Current ads on TV in the UK suggest that the target market for the Macbook Pro is first-year undergrads.

Someone on here said that if you mentally replace "pro" in Applespeak with "deluxe" it starts to make a bit more sense.

> The ironic thing is how much simpler it would have been for Apple to give people what they actually wanted.

This is not how Apple works.

Apple decides what users want and builds that.

If they are right, it's a smashing success. If they are wrong, people still buy it and then convince themselves that this is what they actually wanted.

> convince themselves that this is what they actually wanted.

Well, they don't have a choice of hardware suppliers, unless they are willing to take the Hackintosh route...

> Apple decides what users want and builds that.

You have a point there, but that decision didn't use to be at random(s/random/internal politics/), the way it seems to be now.

"Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things" - Steve Jobs

I suspect that the touchbar and the applewatch would be 2 of the 1,000 things.

The Apple Watch was born out of Jobs' frustration with the state of data sharing in patient-doctor relationships.

If you think that these are now just ideas that they randomly decided to follow through on you have no idea how many things they throw out.

> The Apple Watch was born out of Jobs' frustration with the state of data sharing in patient-doctor relationships.

I didn't know that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the watch would be introduced in the state/form it has been, or even that it would see the daylight at all.

But why shouldn't it? It's a popular device, makes Apple users even more conspicuous, and does a few things really well. It's basically the only wrist thingy that measures heart rate accurately, for example. It also includes a pulse oximeter which isn't currently in use. I would say the full story of the Apple Watch is not known to consumers yet, it's still sort of like the iPhone pre-App Store or pre-3G, say. The core elements of its success are there but the transformative potential is not yet realized in its entirety.

I love my Mac Pros, but have gone back to PCs because I can get better hardware/performance/memory/video etc than Mac Pros x2 for the price of the new jet engine Mac Pro.

I miss the cheese grater towers on the Mac Pros that were really quite nice and the ability to get in there. Back to building PCs now though and still love it, then just have an iMac to compile iOS apps.

Also, Apple is trying to obsolete all these Mac Pro towers as well by not allowing the next os to run on it, not wise. I had to sweat on the last release and just made the list of 4 year old machines that a hardware company is trying to obsolete through os software that adds little value.

Tim Cook really missed the boat with that whole "post-PC" stance for pro users. Apple is post PC apparently but the pro users just went where it wasn't post PC.

Nobody wanted iPhones, they only wanted a tougher Nokia and more Java games...

I love the touch bar and I was really impressed with a form factor and design of the new Mac Pro. I don't find touch bar silly, Apple would not be Apple if they did not try new things and experiment.

I agree, nobody wanted to ditch Flash either in 2010 (1), the reactions then were the same as all the crap you read about Macbooks now. 6 years later, and everyone realises they need to get rid of Flash. I think it's the price you pay for innovation, many people can't handle (the) change.

(1) http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Did you read the part of his article where he's constantly fat fingering the wrong keys on the TouchBar? And never finding the ESC key?

The issue of the TouchBar is not that it exists. It's that it replaces a good, well functioning component by something much worse.

Well, I for one disagree. I thought I wouldn't really care about the touchbar, but I love the freaking thing. Then again, I use emacs and not vi most of the time. But even given my rare use of vi (about once a day, perhaps), I've had no problem with hitting escape reliably, and only when I want to.

I think diversity of hardware is good. Not everybody needs the same stuff. When I'm back in the GUI world, the touchbar is fantastically more productive. I can dismiss dialog boxes without moving the cursor. I can navigate to functionality in programs more easily than with pull-down menus.

If somebody has a problem with the new escape key, and still really wants caps-lock or really wants control as their caps-lock, fine.

I'm glad he found something that works better for him. But the current 13" MacBook Pro with touchbar works wonderfully for me, and I'd be so happy to never have to deal with worthless (to me) F keys again. The touchbar restores functionality to keys that in the past had been relegated to volume control only, for me.

So to all the people that dislike the touchbar, that's fine! Buy something else. But please don't begrudge me my increased productivity or enjoyment of it. I remember tons of people being similarly infuriated at the lack of physical keys on the iPhone. In the end, it's a compromise that the world felt was worth it; less tactile feedback for increased screen space and dynamic functionality. For me, and I believe for 99% of programmers, and 99.9% of the population, the touchbar is a better compromise than touchscreen smart phones were.

>nobody wanted to ditch Flash either in 2010

I always hated Flash. Does that mean Apple shouldn't have ditched it because that's what some users were asking for?

I think you can overstate the "faster horses" principle. Apple doesn't have to give users what they specifically ask for, but they do have to solve users' problems. That's what Ford did.

Maybe he's saying people should ditch Apple?

I know a lot of people that hated Flash with a passion since 2006+, and couldn't wait to have a viable alternative. I, like many people I know, consistently ran a Flash blocker.

I ran with one from 2009 until 2014, when I got a Mac and realised that, thankfully, Flash was dead on most sites, and I didn't even need to have it enabled it in my main browser 99% of the time.

> All anyone wanted was a retina macbook air. That's it. Everyone was perfectly happy and just wanted a nicer screen.

The non-touch bar 13" model is exactly that. It weighs the same as an Air and has a smaller footprint, with the same 15W processor for good battery life. Problem is they jacked up the price because Apple.

If Apple were smart about it, they'd make a 17" pro developer edition as their blessed dev machine. Make it thicker, larger trackpad (with support for wacom-style pens), better battery life, lots of RAM, second/third SSD, and a couple other ports in addition to USB-C.

I owned the last 17" MacBook, and I loved it. I was sad when they discontinued it.

However, time away has made me realize that I never want a laptop that large ever again. It's overkill, inconvenient, and sells poorly.

I had (still have) the maxed out 17" MacBook "lapzilla" but loved it for the power and really need a big screen to get real work done (coding/gamedev/data etc). I am now usually surrounded by 3 27" screens, if the laptop is just for demos and meetings probably could be smaller but if I have to work on it for any amount of time it needs to be a big screen.

I would still dig a pro 17" thicker and more powerful MacBook.

If they did edge-to-edge, then you could fit the 17" laptop in a body only a little wider than the current 15" model (most gains would be in thickness).

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