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Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

Topping my wishlist would be for Apple to not have to put every product in the same "fashion bauble" category and consider pro, workhorse computers to be a different type of thing with different criteria. Both the Mac Pro and the MacBOOK Pro should be treated as workhorses, not show horses, and optimized for practical usefulness. Less emphasis on looking thinner and more fashionable and more on keyboards that feel great and go on working just fine when splashed with bacon & eggs, thrown in a backpack, dragged around on a desert adventure, lots of convenient connectors, maxed out on battery power, useful buttons instead of gimmicky touchbar, and so on.

My wish would be that actual computer users could look forward with excitement, the way we used to, at what new improvements were about to become available rather than dreading what they'll "courageously" take away next.

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The Touch Bar actually gets somewhat useful if you install BetterTouchTool, at which point you can override it with custom everything (including scripted buttons, changing contents of things with Applescript, etc).

The sad part is that there's still no good way to use it as a Dock replacement, which seems to me like the really obvious thing that would actually make it a productivity boost rather than merely "nifty".

• Thinner means lighter—i.e. more luggable, which you'd think would be an important consideration for a workhorse.

• Apple's ecosystem (at least for business leasing) is sort of like the luxury car ecosystem: there are rather few models, and they're not very customized, but there's a dealership close enough to you that if there's any problem—any problem at all—with your [under-warranty] device, the idiomatic "solution" is to give you a loaner (the exact same model, with your data copied over) while they attempt to repair yours; and then either you get it back fixed, or you keep the loaner. Like luxury cars, this enables them to use nice-but-brittle components, under the expectation that nobody will actually have to put up with the component being broken, instead just being fed a steady supply of working devices. (Anecdata: my MacBook's keyboard has failed five times. Do you know what that means? It means that I've received a same-day replacement MacBook five times!)

• I think you're confusing "professional" with "ruggedized." Apple has never made, or claimed to make, ruggedized hardware. (The iPhone is waterproof, I guess?) Apple has no product category aimed at e.g. the ThinkPad's "techs performing maintenance on cell towers in deserts/jungles/swamps" use-case. Apple makes its desktop products like most companies make servers, or scientific equipment: intended for climate-controlled, central-air-purified conditions, to be operated by techno-priests who take the proper ritual-purity precautions before touching them. The Macs really are workstations, in the sense that they are intended to do their work from a designated station. ;)

Everything you said is right, but you are missing the point.

Thinner means more luggable, but if it restricts a workhorse machine from having more than the 16gb of ram the base model can also have because they can't fit enough battery to power it, then why not go all the way and shrink it to the size of the 12" MacBook? Well, because of the other components you might say! But, if the CPU throttles, the GPU throttles, the keyboard stops working and the anti-reflective coating peels off, all because of the thermal stress the machine is under when used as a workhorse, then is not much of a workhorse is it? Besides, no one is asking for an aircraft carrier, the thickness of the 2015 version was good enough for nearly everybody, specially when you do have laptops like the MacBook that do make those compromises.

Apple is sort of a luxury brand but the problem is they want it both ways. They want to be seen as an aspirational brand and as a workhorse brand. That is why they keep releasing FinalCut, Logic, and XCode. At some point those two ambitions are going to collide; most people think they already did.

No one is asking for a tank, you are presenting a false dichotomy as no one is confusing professional with ruggedized. Every serious complain about the MacBook Pro is about specs, ports and reliability, not unbreakability. In fact, based on your previous point about luxury machines I say you are the one that is confused. Are MacBook Pros professional machines or not? If they are luxury items as you claim then by all means don't make them waterproof but if they want to aim it at people editing 8K video on-site in Africa, which happens by the way, then ffs make the screen less reflective.

> why not go all the way and shrink it to the size of the 12" MacBook?

Personally, I see the MBP as a hybrid use-case device, much like the Nintendo Switch: it throttles when freestanding (because it has nowhere to dissipate its heat to), but it runs more quickly when "docked." So you can use it for light things portably, and for heavy things at a desk.

Unlike the Switch, there's no first-party dock for the MBP, but search "mbp cooling dock" and you'll see many accessories designed specifically for the MBP to enable this workflow.

> FinalCut, Logic, and XCode

Two of those persist for the sake of enterprise media-production companies that fund the engineering resources for them all on their own. If Apple were trying to push these for new customers, they'd still be making Xserves, as the hardware to go with this software. New companies need render-nodes, right? But they aren't, because these apps are only for these "legacy" media companies that already have render-farms and don't need Apple selling them render-nodes.

Xcode exists because Apple uses it to make macOS and iOS. (And because the period where MPW sucked and CodeWarrior was third-party and so hard to get new features supported in was a bad time to be an Apple system-software developer.)

> No one is asking for a tank

No, but a keyboard that'll keep working when you spill bacon grease on it, or a computer that won't choke in a sandstorm, is pretty damn ruggedized. Most computers, regardless of manufacturer, are not capable of surviving those onslaughts.

> editing 8K video on-site in Africa

See, this is what I was getting at with the difference in perspectives here. A ruggedized workstation would work just sitting around outside in the heat and dust and light of the savannah. Whereas a professional workstation is—like a server, or (in previous decades) a news crew's satellite uplink—something that exists in a designated editing-room in a designated trailer you're hauling around with the crew.

> I see the MBP as a hybrid use-case device, much like the Nintendo Switch: it throttles when freestanding (because it has nowhere to dissipate its heat to), but it runs more quickly when "docked." So you can use it for light things portably, and for heavy things at a desk.

MacBook Pros throttle even on "docks". They can't magically dissipate more heat when stationary on a desk.

> New companies need render-nodes, right? But they aren't, because these apps are only for these "legacy" media companies that already have render-farms and don't need Apple selling them render-nodes.

Companies need lots of things. One of them is a Pro Apple laptop. Apple has no problems charging Pro prices, they should in return give a Pro machine.

> No, but a keyboard that'll keep working when you spill bacon grease on it, or a computer that won't choke in a sandstorm, is pretty damn ruggedized.

You are being unreasonably extreme. No one is asking for anything more than what we already had. A keyboard that is defeated by dust particles, dust!, is a failed product at any price and in any category, let alone in the luxury non-pro market where you want Apple to focus on. You should be even more outraged than the rest of us! Which Rolex dies when you eat a sandwich wearing it?

> See, this is what I was getting at with the difference in perspectives here. A ruggedized workstation would work just sitting around outside in the heat and dust and light of the savannah. Whereas a professional workstation is—like a server, or (in previous decades) a news crew's satellite uplink—something that exists in a designated editing-room in a designated trailer you're hauling around with the crew.

You should tell all the pros carrying their laptops into war zones that they've been doing it wrong all these years. No, wait, they have been working fine even in the dust and in sunlight, despite not having armor.

> MacBook Pros throttle even on "docks". They can't magically dissipate more heat when stationary on a desk.

Cooling docks. The kind of docks that have case-fans in them, and often are made of porous metal than makes direct contact with a large portion of the surface-area of the bottom of the device, making them gigantic heat-sinks.

> You should tell all the pros carrying their laptops into war zones that they've been doing it wrong all these years. No, wait, they have been working fine even in the dust and in sunlight, despite not having armor.

Err... those are ruggedized devices, whatever you want to call them. By "ruggedized" I'm not referring to laptops with extra armour tacked onto them (e.g. "mil-spec ruggedization"); but rather to laptops built to certain specs regarding tolerances of heat/cold/light/dust/radiation/vibration/etc. You know, like how a satellite is ruggedized.

A lot of laptops are ruggedized, by this standard. Everything produced under the ThinkPad brand, the HPe brand, etc. is ruggedized. But, outside of these, most laptops aren't. Your average HP Pavillion, or Asus Chromebook, won't survive a war zone. In general, consumer electronics won't survive a war zone. (Some lower-quality consumer electronics won't even survive the cargo hold of a plane.)

And everything Apple makes, even for "professionals", is consumer electronics.

You wouldn't expect the iPad Pro to survive in a war zone without absolutely "babying" it, right? It's a piece of delicate, finicky consumer electronics that happens to be targeted at one particular type of professional—artists—whose needs don't include ruggedness. Well, Macs are pieces of delicate, finicky consumer electronics that happens to be targeted at college students, businesspeople and engineers, none of whose needs usually include ruggedness either. No real difference.

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> You are being unreasonably extreme. No one is asking for anything more than what we already had.

To be clear, I was replying explicitly to this line from the root of this comment thread:

> keyboards that ... go on working just fine when splashed with bacon & eggs

That's not your average laptop keyboard; that is, in fact, only the keyboards in ruggedized laptops that can do that.

> MacBook Pros throttle even on "docks". They can't magically dissipate more heat when stationary on a desk.

Given how frequently I catch my Macbook Pro leaving the fan at 0rpm even when the CPU is 180F, I suspect they're capable of getting rid of a lot more heat than they're permitted to at the moment.

Even forcing the fan to stay on with 3rd party tools just makes it bounce back and forth, once the CPU is no longer hot enough to burn your lap the fan completely turns off again and the cycle repeats.

I'd love to know why Apple thought it was a good idea to throttle and retain a ton of heat instead of turning the fan on, the end result is that the laptop is both hot and slow at the worst possible times.

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