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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Apple has consistently shown that it cares more about form over function. No one needs their laptops to be any thinner than they already are

Well, this depends.

Here's how a user put it: "I 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. (...) A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit)." - Linus Torvalds

(Later he stopped using Apple laptops for the even lighter/thinner chromebooks).

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For a 13 inch or smaller laptop it is understandable to strike a balance between size, battery and specifications.

A 15 inch laptop is never going to be portable or easy to carry. We don't care about thickness. Just make it a bit thicker to add a full-travel keyboard.

>A 15 inch laptop is never going to be portable or easy to carry. We don't care about thickness. Just make it a bit thicker to add a full-travel keyboard.

Well, I don't like the new keyboard, but I sure like my laptop thin and lightweight, and I use a 15.

Thin laptops do suck. Give us ports and keyboards! Is there a single instance of high-quality laptop on the market with a generous key travel these days? Thinkpads don't quite reach the feel of MBP 2015 keyboard for me.

(Typing this on a 101-key NMB I restored which, I think, is close to typing nirvana.)

> "Thinkpads don't quite reach the feel of MBP 2015 keyboard for me."

They don't? I was under the impression that Thinkpads generally had the best keyboards. They get praised for it all the time. Are current Thinkpad keyboards actually worse than 2015 Macbook ones?

Are keyboards a piece of technology that's getting worse instead of better as time goes on?

It's super subjective.

I have two Thinkpads that I use frequently. One is a T520 with the traditional Thinkpad keyboard and the other is a Yoga S1 with the island keys. I prefer the newer keyboard (island or chiclet keys) by a mile.

I ended up looking for a similar desktop keyboard and ended up with the Logitech K750.

ThinkPads have better keyboards than most, but Lenovo decided to join the chiclet camp a few years back and the recent keyboards haven't been as good as ThinkPads from eight or ten years ago.

Is it just the chiclet form? I thought it was mostly the technology underneath the key: the travel, resistance, etc, that matters. Those can still be good or bad regardless of the shape of the keys themselves.

There are two types of laptop users - those wanting a portable machine, light, good enough for a short amount of ssh or vim and maybe a webpage or two

The other type are those looking for a luggable desktop, those who hotdesk but don’t really work on the go.

There’s then who want both, but that has proven to be a mugs game. No matter how much money you throw at it you end up with compromises on portability it power.

I for one stick with a 2015 era desktop and a 2013 11” MacBook air and don’t have problems.

Nah, I don't fit into either of your categories. I'm perfectly happy with my 2015 13" MBP; I use it as my main machine, every day, doing my job as a dev: most of the time, at home, it's driving two monitors (and acting as a third screen itself), though right now I'm working in a cafe for a change. In both circumstances it's a great, sufficiently powerful, nice-to-use machine which I'm productive on. Getting this right _is_ possible. I do fear the day I have to "upgrade" though...

It really depends on the user. I carried a zbook15 with charger which was around 6-7kg then. The laptop itself was crap, but I didn't care about the weight/thickness at all. And it could actually pull a number of heavy virtual machines without issues, which Chromebook just wouldn't be able to.

But people will have different expectations / idea of comfort.

There are different use cases for different laptops. I can certainly see the advantage of a laptop that's as light as possible, but that's never going to be a 15" laptop. On the other hand, some people want lots of power or a massive screen, and then making it as thin as possible just makes no sense.

The real problem IMO was a change in Apple’s segmentation.

It used to be the Pro (PowerBook) was targeted towards Pro users, and the regular MacBook (iBook) was targeted towards consumers. This also nicely aligned with price segmentation, but that was secondary. The focus was on pro vs consumer. Then Apple added the Air, where the focus, as the name implies, was on thinness.

At some point, however, these categories became less of a distinction between the targeted consumer which happened to align with price segmentation, but instead became all about price segmentation itself. I think that’s where the devices went off the rails. The Pro in MacBook now basically just means this is the most expensive machine in the Apple lineup...

All the lines basically have the same priorities now, with the only difference being the manufacturing budget, which determines what features are available.

Why is a very lightweight 15" laptop out of the realm of possibility? It's not like displays today are inherently heavy. If OLED panels become viable for notebooks, they weigh nearly nothing, but even with existing LCDs with LED backlighting, those don't weigh much either. They do need to pay attention to making the case rigid across a larger area, but that ought to be possible without adding too much weight given modern materials. The LG Gram 15 only weighs 1.1kg, for instance.

It's possible of course, but it's a compromise between weight and screen size. Even a 17" laptop can be light, as the LG Gram 17 proves. Though it's not very rigid, from what I understand.

But if weight is your primary concern, it makes more sense to go for a small screen. If you go for a larger screen, you're already accepting a bit more weight. How much depends, but personally I'd expect a laptop that sacrifices weight for a larger screen to also sacrifice some weight to have a slightly better keyboard.

I wonder what Linus would have made of the Compaq Portable or an Osbourn 1 back in the day.

He would have made do, for lack of alternatives (and a lack of technology to make things lighter then).

But that's hardly a justification when alternatives exist and the technology allows it.

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