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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

> The market demands thinner laptops with amazing battery life. The market - in general - isn't demanding a more serviceable macbook.

It doesn't. This is false. Noone cares about thin laptops. People want light laptops but thin is completely artifical and doesn't improve your experience.

One might say it was Jobs' plan to destroy the laptop industry with it and it worked.

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> Noone cares about thin laptops

I suspect that when you say "noone," you mean "noone except for all those weird people who bought the first generation of Macbook Air, and then another, and are now ready to buy a third Macbook Air."

Like me. And judging by recent Apple history, I am not an outlier. They have sold a LOT of Macbook Airs, to people who could have bought a "more powerful" machine with a different form factor.

Yes, absolutely I love its light weight. But I also like its profile, and the entire "thin wedge" design principle is to increase the appearance that it is thin.

You're almost right in the way you describe the market, all you have to do is replace "weird people who bought ..." with "people who will buy the next generation of Apple hardware no matter what who bought ...". They might grumble about missing ports, bad keyboards, a buggy operating system and a multitude of dongles which they need to keep around but, and this is the essential part, they still buy the next iteration of the product line as long as it has that party-eaten apple on it. In this sense Apple has achieved something quite remarkable in that they seem to have been able to reverse the common diction of "it is hard to gain trust, easy to lose it" into "it is easy to gain trust, hard to lose it". For that, I applaud them but I also vote with my wallet by not buying their products.

I bought a Macbook Air because I needed a Mac and it was the cheapest one available. To anyone looking at the numbers, though, my purchase looks like another vote for thin laptops.

Thin is not “completely artificial.” I replaced my MBP with an X1 Carbon and am really enjoying how thin it is. I can stick it in the papers pocket in my briefcase, the map pocket in the seats in my car, easily carry it one handed.

I’d love for laptops to keep getting thinner. The X1C is almost thin enough to easily carry around with a stack of papers, but if it were thin as an iPad that’d be even better.

A MacBook Pro is slimmer than an X1 carbon in every dimension? Its slightly heavier, but that’s due to physics (carbon vs aluminium).

MacBook Pro 13” 2017 - height: 1,49cm, width: 30,41cm, depth: 21,24cm, weight: 1,37kg

X1 Carbon 2017 - height: 1,52cm, width: 32,26cm, depth: 21,59cm, weight: 1,13kg

Perhaps the X1 has some perceived slimness going on, like the MacBook Air..

Parent said they replaced their MBP. They didn't said their "2017 MBP".

Guess I interpreted the parent differently, as in “I updated from my MacBook Pro specifically to an X1 Carbon for its thinness”.

To be clear, I’m not against the X1 Carbon in any way and I’m glad the XPS 13 and MBP have competition.

I also love my X1C (6th gen) and how slim it is! I wish though that Lenovo had sort of copied Apple on the charger. I was too spoiled with Apple laptops' charger hooks that come out on which you can wrap the wire around. The rather large X1 charger, with that long velcro wrap, is a bit of an eyesore and not as pleasant to handle and keep in your bagpack or laptop bag.

One of Lenovo's more stupid innovations. IBM thinkpads had a dog bone charger where the cable hooks were made by the ends of the "bone", perfect for fast winding. The velcro went round nicely, once. This poor Ebay image shows what I mean[0]. Those were used upto the last IBM Thinkpads. Not sure when they started.

What did Lenovo do? Made them pointlessly the same shape without a hint of cable management[1]. Along with lots of simple rectangular bricks. Strangely they still seem to keep the fixed cable exiting sideways on nearly all of them - that was for easy cable winding that you can no longer do.

[0] https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/w2cAAOSw-0xYY4l3/s-l1600.jpg

[1] https://www.astringo.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/lenovo...

The great thing about USB-C is you can use many chargers. I’ve got a really compact Anker with USB C and USB A.

Is this the one you're using? https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Premium-Charger-PowerPort-Deliv...

Yup.

Don't buy chargers on Amazon

>It doesn't. This is false. Noone cares about thin laptops.

You'd be surprised: "I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light" (Linus Torvalds)

As someone how loves their old Air, the recent Dell XPS laptops are quite nice.

> Noone cares about thin laptops.

I had a 2012 Macbook Air. Used it until 2016 when I spilled coffee on it and frantically replaced it with a 2015 macbook pro within a few days.

A year later I still missed my Air, and figured I could just open it up and try to clean it out with alcohol. Figured although I could take it to someone for them to try to fix it, I could learn something new if I did it myself and if it didn’t work again nbd.

There was sticky coffee on the motherboard and on the case and at the power button, but I took my time to clean it all out, dried it out, and reconnected the battery and it came back to life!!! I was so happy. And when I started using the Air again I noticed how much I preferred the form factor. I immediately made my 2015 rmbp the backup and went back to using the 2012 Air as my main.

They both had similar GHz and the same storage. Ran the same OS. I could write production code just fine on either of them. They ran the same IDE’s and crunched the same numbers. However the Pro did have the better screen. Still I preferred the Air to the Pro because of the form factor.

Every time I let someone borrow my air for a second when we were together they’d complement on how thin and light it was and they liked that. I think Apple figured out a market segment and there’s more of us than you’d think. And unless you’re editing videos for a living the Air is a capable machine.

Your 2015 MBP had similar processor and ram as your 2012 Air, that seems a bit odd.

Yep. My 2012 Air was custom-configured with the i7 processor, 512GB SSD, and 8GB Ram. Odd indeed, but it was a killer combo of ultra-portability and performance. It’s still to this day a very capable machine. Although Apple capped off MacOS upgrades for it at High Sierra.

MacBook Pro had same Ram and storage but with the i5. Difference between the 2012 i7 and 2015 i5 in GHz was negligible as far as I was concerned.

Maybe not false, but hitting diminishing returns.

I used to carry a 7 lb laptop (3 kg). Now it’s 3 lbs, plus dongles.

Getting to 2 lbs is barely noticeable. Thinner by 3-5 mm is imperceptible. Longer battery life is very noticeable.

My 15” laptop is 4 pounds and the battery is long enough to where I never need to bring a charger. It can only go down from there.

It’s a common mental error to believe that everyone has your same preferences.

Why is this so common among people who probably consider themselves pretty intelligent?

Blew me away in that Facebook dating thread yesterday how many people were saying that nobody uses Facebook.

no matter how intelligent, our brains are not designed to handle numbers like 1 million (or even a thousand). our brains our designed for numbers like 7 and 15.

People value portability, and thin and light are both elements of that.

So Jobs’ plan was to...trick the market into thinking it wanted thin laptops?

Not true, I do. Lots of people do. I care very much about thin macbooks.

If the tech specs were the same, which form factor do you prefer:

https://i.imgur.com/dV7WHCD.jpg

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kfOpFgAZ4kfdK8vNUNMOlKjuYwc=...

I've owned both of these. They both have good specs for their time. The ThinkPad keyboard was wonderful. The trackpad of the MBP is wonderful but so is its size and shape. The ThinkPad was a brick.

You say no one cares about thin, but once you have seen the MBP, the ThinkPad is a hard sell. (Though you youngsters should try one of those keyboards to see what you missed).

I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 back in the day, a 1.5kg 14" laptop (including a DVD burner!) https://www.notebooks-center.com/img/laptop/regular/laptop_p... and due to that screen protection hump it was some 1.5" thick overall. No need to drag the nineties into this. That sort of laptop, lightweight because of quality materials but enough space for cooling is what laptops should be.

I don't think anybody truly believes "customers don't care at all" like your example illustrates.

But I think it's fair to say customers don't care about the last 2-3mm of thickness that Apple is sacrificing the ability to repair in order to squeeze out.

I've heard plenty of complaints from ultrabook owners that they find the "knife point edge" design that many of these have unconfortable to handle.

Generally speaking, maxizing a single aspect of a design is rarely a good choice. Making notebooks or smartphones as thin as possible (or pretending to do so, the strategies used here are borderline gaslighting) is not an intrinsic good.

The core of the nobody cares argument is that the utility of shrinking the device is incrementally less and the costs incurred are increasing incrementally more.

I think this is a bit of a disingenuous comparison. That ThinkPad looks to be around the mid 1990s (maybe early 2000s?). Meanwhile, if you looked at a modern ThinkPad (regardless of your opinion on Lenovo as a company), the keyboard is still category-leading, the weight is almost identical to a MacBook in the same class, and the thickness likewise. Look at, say, the X1 Extreme.

Replaceable RAM and SSD. 4.06 pounds. The MBP 15" is 4.03 pounds.

Now, the keyboard definitely isn't as good as it was (RIP old keyboard, may you rest in peace), but it's definitely still very competitive.

We agree. The fact that ThinkPads and MacBooks are both slim today suggests that people want slim laptops, contrary to the claim of the grandparent.

That TP 340 I bought in 1994. It was a marvel for its time and much more affordable than the contemporaneous Mac: a more stylish brick like so:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/540c_ope...

That's a Thinkpad 750 from 1993.

Either way, arguing against "consumers don't really care about having the thinnest brick on the market" by invoking early 90s hardware by comparison is of course a B/S way of arguing things.

I was arguing against "Noone cares about thin laptops." That's a direct quote and different from yours. Not 'thinnest', but 'thin'. Since almost the laptops went thin, someone cared about it.

Wow, the X1s have come a long way. Possibly the only non-Mac 15" with a tenkeyless right now.

X1 is 14". It's actually noticeably smaller than a MacBook Pro, other than thickness.

MacBook is actually really bad in the keyboard department when you consider that it's 15" - it has tiny up/down arrows, and no PgUp/PgDown/Home/End. Which is a shame, since these all would easily fit if speakers went elsewhere, and the touchpad was just a wee bit smaller (I mean, seriously, does it really need to be bigger than a 6" smartphone?). For a productivity laptop, these are very weird trade-offs.

Thinkpad X1 Extreme is 15.6"

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/Thi...

Ah, I see, I was thinking about the regular one. Yeah, this one looks like it could have a numpad without reducing the key size, although it would be a very tight fit at the edges.

The thing is that I don't want a tenkey keyboard.

Actually, the Dell XPS 15 has a 15" screen and a tenkeyless keyboard as well.

I agree. Laptops should be no thinner than 1.5". I would love a nerd machine that is 2" thick, has no less than ten various ports, has a fat battery that could last more than 24 hours at 'performance' energy settings, most things on replace-able/upgrade-able daughter boards (especially graphics), replace-able CPU on a socket, and four SSD + two optical drives. The replace-able parts following standards like desktop PCs do.

Laptops were the first to succumb to the thin/miniaturization cancer, and phones really took off with it. The best form factor smartphone IMO is still my first cellphone I had: Samsung SCH-i730. It had a screen which slid up revealing a physical keyboard, it had a camera, it had a large extended battery, it even had an extend-able antenna! It was not shy about being thick! I grew up loving tech, and now with faceb0rg + scr00gle spying, crapple + android thin-sh1t hardware, "smart tvs," more and more user-lockout in hardware (intel ME?), I'm finding myself hating it all more and more!

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