The 16-inch MacBook Pro is a repudiation of the ‘Ive Doctrine’ | Hacker News Reader

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is a repudiation of the ‘Ive Doctrine’

macworld.com

82 pointsmpweiher92 comments

I had a comment in 2016 that hints at this. Perhaps, it was true?

> There was an interesting idea floating around Designer News—Without Steve Jobs nobody can contain Johnny Ive.

> Jobs was a champion of the user. Tim Cook's specialty is in logistics, and probably defaults to Ive on many product decisions. In the mean time Ive continues designing beautiful products that focus on beauty and compromise on function.

> I doubt that's the case, but I like the theory.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010358

Certainly seems that way, but it's discouraging that Ive and Apple had to part ways just for Apple to get back on track. Very much a case of either dying a hero or living long enough to become the villian.

I use this as a reminder not to drink my own kool aid. Even if I'm being recognized at being good at something, it's not an excuse to double down on it and push it too hard. No one is applauded for being judiciously balanced.

> I use this as a reminder not to drink my own kool aid. Even if I'm being recognized at being good at something, it's not an excuse to double down on it and push it too hard. No one is applauded for being judiciously balanced.

But for a lot of things it can be positive if recognition motivates you to do more. Like can you ever be too good of an athlete? Too good of a programmer?

Not too good an athlete or too good a programmer, but an athlete complimented on his strength can focus on that to the detriment of his overall performance, and a programmer praised for her architecture can go on to . . . create Java framework-generating frameworks. Knowing your strengths is a good thing, but letting them dominate your identity is not.

I'm not sure if there even is any universal measure for how good of a programmer you are. There's probably someone who's really good at optimizing the hell out of a really hot loop that absolutely has to be faster, never mind if the code is comprehensible to mere mortals. And somebody who can design and architect a huge, complex enterprise program well enough that a newbie developer can quickly get an idea of what's going on and make contributions. And somebody who can inherit a huge ball of mud and gradually refactor it into something more reasonable while keeping it working the whole time. And somebody who can start a new project and build just the right amount of infrastructure into it at the right time - not so much that you've got some huge over-designed thing for a product with 2 users, and not so little that it becomes impossible to scale when you hit 10k users. And plenty more sub-field besides those.

It's easy to be really great at 1 or 2 of those, and not so good at the others.

Yeah, from the outside it seems like things had to be thinner and lighter to be Apple designed, in the same way that some programmers think they have to architect or optimise or <insert pet obsession> the heck out of everything. If you do it well once you’ll be a hero, but if you do it to everything while losing sight of your actual goals (customer satisfaction, business value, righteous cause) you’ll eventually be cast as a villain.

heck I am beginning to wonder if Ive is the reason the current iMac chassis has been around so long. as in all proposed designs were either too expensive or even more compromised in form.

the new Mac Pro, is whose fault? it seems more celebration of Apple than designing for the user base that made the most noise. it certainly is more for image than functionality, the costs could have been reigned in a bit

I think Ive needed Jobs to provide some user feedback he would listen to ahead of product release.

Without Jobs, it's taken Apple years to get keyboards back on track. Which is absurd given that their desktop keyboard is really good.

I haven't bought any Apple products for years, except for their peripherals. Their touchpad is excellent, and there's no other alternative in the market I know of that works decently in Linux. Their keyboard is a pleasure to use during long typing sessions and has really low latency.

What keyboard has high latency?

https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

Unfortunately that’s only half good. It’s more typical to measure peripheral latency by connecting an LED to the switch to see when it’s actuated. This person performed an Apple 2s to oranges measurement by not controlling his keypress speed and not testing the Apple 2. The conclusions are based on feelings. Keyboard electronics are simple so short of severe mistakes they add negligible latency. HIDs are connected to interrupts so the OS should get the input pronto. The insanely large software stack will slow things down, but it isn’t the keyboard’s fault.

Edit: to exemplify the issue with this test: a poorly implemented capacitive touch keyboard would add 10 ms of latency and feel sluggish yet would be at the top of this chart.

Maybe he means key travel time?

I am also baffled by that comment.

The latency on the magic keyboard is only 15ms, as opposed to the common 30-40ms on other keyboards.

Key travel time contributes to this, so if you have longer travel you will also have longer latency (latency being the beginning of the keypress untill the character appears on your screen). I personally much prefer the feel of a mechanical keyboard, so I dislike both the magic keyboard and regular dome keyboards. The typing experience on a mechanical keyboard is better, even though it has more travel.

I think the synergy of the Ive-Jobs relationship was that Ive was the "how it looks" guy, and Jobs was the "how it works" guy, and the "how it works" guy always had final say on a product.

Looking at the past few years, it seems clear that the "how it looks" guy was the one with final say on a product.

Okay, friendly jab here: which one is responsible for putting USB ports in the back of iMacs, in such a position that I either strike luck and bent my wrist but get something plugged or I must stand up, move the keyboard and stuff on my desktop to grab the screen and move it around so I can plug something in and then turn the screen around again :-) ?

I suspect that would have been something they both agreed on. Ives being Ives and Jobs being the type of person who refused to sell a mouse with two buttons until the second "button" could be hidden away behind a touch interface.

Though to be fair any of the displays I've used with USB ports also have them situated around the back. I guess it's a bit different when you're talking about the only ports on the computer vs. ports added for convenience.

That's the reason why there was a USB port on each side of the original Apple keyboard (not the wireless one of course). These ports (on the back) are most likely located there with the idea of having a device pluggued in for good and not moved so often.

If memory serves me well those keyboard USB ports weren't amped enough to handle power hungry devices though.

They were primarily for connecting a wired Apple mouse on the appropriate side for a left or right-handed user.

An even better idea: listen to CUSTOMERS

Except most customers are stupid, so you have to be careful with that, too. If you accept customer input uncritically you get design by the biggest possible committee.

There is not nor will there every be a substitute for good judgment.

Still rocking a 2013 here. Just got handed a 2019 for work purposes. It makes me sad.

> it's taken Apple years to get keyboards back on track

This was a conscious decision, they could have reverted the mistake in 12 months if they had truly wanted. But it would require burning a production line and design roadmap that was supposed to last 3 years. Turned out having users buy an inherently faulty $2000+ product for 3 years and a repair program was the easier pill to swallow.

Tim Cook isn't a product person[0], he's never going to think of the actual product and its impact on the users in a way that could make that call.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM

The iOS devices haven't suffered similarly though. Those products have been developing fine.

Apple just hasn't cared enough about the Mac (the Mac Pro is proof of that). I've read reports (could be false) that all the A players go on the iOS teams, and the ones left on the Mac teams are the handful of truly passionate, and the B players. (well if you read other reports, the A players go to Google where they pay better...)

If google has so many A players then why are so many of the services in a poor state? You could point to any google service, outside of drive/docs etc., and have severe complaints about it.

> Their touchpad is excellent...

exception: the 2017 macbook pro trackpad. it's not great. i don't know how many times i had to plug a mouse in to get drag and drop to work...

The poster you were replying to makes it clear he means the stand-alone touchpad, not ones in laptops.

I always go into accessibility settings and enable three-finger click and drag. It seems by far the most easily usable way to do that on a trackpad.

"Which is absurd given that their desktop keyboard is really good."

I guess that is pretty subjective. I for one, hate Apple desktop keyboards. Not only the feel of it, but the layout (in my country) is different than the PC keyboards which drives me nuts.

Definitely subjective.

I find chiclet keyboards absolutely horrible, and Apple has been the pioneer of that horrible type of keyboard.

The keys are terrible mushy little islands.

Mechanical keyboards are just SO much better.

In recent versions of macOS the PC keyboard layout is builtin the OS, so no external tools are needed anymore.

I find discussions like this extremely disingenuous. It's much like discussing the lifestyles and personal choices of celebrities. You don't know what the lifestyles of celebrities are really like, just as you don't really know what it's like inside apple's design team. It's all speculation.

But we do know the output. And for those of us using the products for years at a time, at no small expense, the investment is significant

Yeah, we know the output, but we don't know what really happened or how things ended up this way. It still pairs up with the celebrity aspect. We know Kanye acts crazy, but is he really crazy, or is it for media? Impossible to tell.

I'm by no means defending Apple. The keyboards should have been gone after they discovered the defect, and they really should have gone further in compensating users. Still though, I find articles like this sensationalized at best.

Yeah. I hope me (and something like HN) still exists whenever someone in the know actually writes a memoir about this period of Apple's history.

We also know how obsessed Jobs was about product functionality. The original iPhone was going to ship with a plastic screen and was demoed with one when it was introduced. He saw our easily it was scratched an announced in a press release three months before it shipped that they were changing to a glass screen.

Contrast that to the then CEO OF Google who used a Blackberry years after Android shipped.

Even on the iOS side, iPhones have been getting thicker and heavier for every generation since the iPhone 6 (2014)

On the Mac, the issue has more been they prioritized design over functionality. On the iOS side, the only functionality we lost to the design obsession was a headphone jack, maybe some battery life, whereas on the Mac we lost far more (such as being able to type). If an iPhone redesign made the keyboard break, the device would be recalled and it would be fixed in weeks. On the Mac they let it go for years.

The 2017 roundtable change in attitude seems to have been Apple now allowing the Mac to "be a truck" as Jobs expressed it. Put functionality first, and let the design adapt to that.

I'm not convinced removing the headphone jack was purely a design decision, but rather strengthening apple's position in the accessories market, as it is able to control the software side of bluetooth headphones, making high margin airpods more attractive. With a headphone jack the playing field was flatter for other headphone manufacturers.

iPhones work with any BT headphones.

That is true. However, now apple controls the pairing process and is able to introduce features such as share audio that lets you use multiple airpods on the same device, and is probably working on a feature to make airpods work on all your apple products simultaneously.

So doesn’t that argue in favor of them dropping support of the headphone jack just for the versatility?

But I mentioned in another reply that BT multipoint is a thing. The good standard BT headphones can support multiple devices.

No, my point was that since apple controls the software side, it is able to limit the features of other headphones, especially when it comes to seamless pairing and integration into the apple ecosystem. When the competition was EarPods vs. thousands of different 3.5mm connected headphones, apple had less power to throttle competition when the experience was almost indistinguishable.

How is it limiting competition? Any BT headphone maker can create headphones that pair to multiple devices. What awesome features could competitors do with a headphone jack that they couldn’t do by creating headphones with a lightning end?

Try to connect your friend's generic bluetooth headphones to share audio from your iphone while connected to your airpods. Now do it with another pair of airpods. Check the list of headphones on this support page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210421. All apple-owned.

The argument was that Apple was denying the ability for third parties to create a feature by excluding the headphone jack. If Apple had a headphone jack you would get this:

https://www.amazon.com/Avantree-Headphone-Splitter-Earphone-...

Instead of this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PB93C96

But most BT headphones don’t work seemlessly between laptop and phone. You usually have to unpair from you phone to pair to you laptop.

With a headphone jack I can unplug from my phone and plug into my laptop.

But once those devices loose headphone jacks I can’t just switch to BT headphones. But I can switch to AirPods. Which seem quite expensive.

What other Bluetooth headphones can easily switch from my MacBook to my iPhone?

> But most BT headphones don’t work seamlessly between laptop and phone.

That's a firmware deficiency, not something mandated by bluetooth ICs. I, right now, use bluetooth headphones that connect to my phone and my laptop simultaneously.

There are plenty of Bluetooth headphones that support Multipoint

https://phiaton.com/blogs/audio/bluetooth-multipoint-pairing...

> I like to call this Jobs’s Law, though it could just as easily be called the Ive Doctrine: Always strive for the next version of your product to be thinner and lighter than the current one.

Then hopefully somebody will start making "reasonable-sized" phones again. Something like iPhone4/5 size with full-size displays.

Not happening. Big co. are all going after Asian markets, and aircraft carrier sized smartphones took off as a trend there.

Some people are even buy 2 devices these days. A giant 7 inch smartphone, and a dumphone or bluetooth handset with dial pad in addition to it.

> ...the Ive Doctrine: Always strive for the next version of your product to be thinner and lighter than the current one.

I guess this guy hasn't noticed the phones getting thicker and heavier over the last several years.

Seeing that Jason Snell worked fine MacWorld for over a decDe before he went independent, I think he knows some things about Apple’s products.

I guess you stopped reading there?

Wow, this website eats CPU processing power like candy. It distracts from reading if your fan screams at you.

I'm amazed just how many websites my '19 MacBook Air struggles with.

That's not an indictment of the Air, which I bought fully cognizant of the battery / heat / power tradeoffs. The Air is happy to run native design, etc. software. The only time I feel its performance limitations is when I'm browsing the goddamned web.

Running a Pro most of the time it's easy to overlook just what utter pigs many websites are today. But seriously, how the fuck is it ok for websites to grind popular consumer-grade computers to a halt?

Don't these engineers have any pride / skill / will to create good products? Performance is a feature kids.

Based on the many discussions about web app performance on HN, it seems most web developers have neither pride in their work nor the will to create performant products.

Most of them must also lack the skill, given how difficult it is to squeeze performance out of a web app...

I'll put money on that not being the engineers; I'm guessing that a dev merely added Google Tag Manager and someone in sales/digital marketing went to town on it.

Still, yep, I disabled uBlock Origin and that site is bad (on my work's 2015 Macbook Pro). I like disabling it on news sites every now and then to remind me just how utterly fucking unusable much of the Web is without it.

Ghostery extension tells me that there are 105 (ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE) trackers loaded by the article page.

Wow. I'm not even mad, I'm impressed.

It works fine with scripts disabled.

I also used no ad blocker since it was a test browser (vanilla Chrome). Grave mistake.

> ...the Ive Doctrine: Always strive for the next version of your product to be thinner and lighter than the current one.

I'd say it follows a rule of "every sequel to a hit movie is worse than original" more.

I worked in OEM electronics since 2007, and I saw this happening all and every time with big public companies. In the industry, we have a term for that. We call it "Brand Fade"

It is near impossible for a big company to resist the urge to "optimise" the product to improve profits after hit sales with hopes of consumers not noticing it.

This is what is happening with Dell now with each newer XPS generation coming out more penny pinched that the previous one.

Exceptions to that rule are as follows:

- Terminator 2: Judgement Day

- Aliens

- Back to the Future Part 2

Or Empire Strikes Back, Godfather Part II, and plenty of other movies.

Quite possibly the three best movies of my childhood.

I disagree aboUt USB-C on a Mac, Apple has always pushed new interfaces forward. The iPhone is where the problem is, they keep refusing to retire lightning. This is one area where it just doesn't work.

They definitely didn't account for different populations' ears when they designed the EarPods - I've never been able to wear them, and I've heard many similar anecdotes from non-Westerners, and from some Westerners as well. The first thing I noticed about the AirPod Pros is that they'd probably fit in my ears, and I wondered what possessed Apple to change the design after years of insisting that EarPods fit the vast majority of people's ears.

The design change isn't an indication that they changed their belief regarding that aspect of earpods.

The design needed to change to better incorporate the active noise cancelling feature. Even if earpods fit most ears, to truly be able to implement in ear ANC, a seal between the buds and the ear need to occur so they decided to overhaul the design.

Weirdly it doesn’t. Regular Airpods keep falling off my ear. Got the Pro ones following similar reasonings as yours but they keep falling as well. The silicon tip just push itself out.

> from non-Westerners, and from some Westerners as well.

What do you mean by "Westerners?" People in "the West" have many different body types.

I'm dense. How does "Always strive for the next version of your product to be thinner and lighter than the current one." become "Ive Doctrine"?

He famously pushed it at the expense of good engineering, reliability, build quality, battery life, performance, and all the other things people want in a device. Apple over-indulged him.

Oh, is Ive a person? Okay, I just googled it. Thanks. I didn't know about Jony Ive. (if it isn't already obvious, I'm not an apple follower)

This is the common narrative, but is there any source confirming this?

Jason mentioned it on his podcast, but I didn’t see it in the article. The iPhone 11 Pros are also moving into the right direction. They are heavier, slightly thicker and have better battery life.

The Apple battery cases have always been a case of function over form. They have always been butt ugly, but more functional than third party cases.

>> also moving into the right direction. They are heavier, slightly thicker and have better battery life.

The worst thing about the latest iphones(10, pro) is that they got heavier. I find it so bad that I skipped the upgrade(s) because of that.

How much heavier than your current phone were they?

(I'm not suggesting anyone updates, just curious how much weight caused this to be the primary decision point.)

Heavier to the point that I experience pain handling it for long periods of times especially if I have to use one hand only. Shortly said the weight makes it uncomfortable to use. A clear example where "syle"/fashion is valued more than usuability.

How is it fashionable for the phone to be heavier?

Apparently the weight makes it "feel" more premium/solid. The shiny steel and back glass give it a more premium feel as well(on top of the extra weight). I guess this follows the Watch Edition/gold strategy.

> Jason mentioned it on his podcast, but I didn’t see it in the article. The iPhone 11 Pros are also moving into the right direction. They are heavier, slightly thicker and have better battery life.

Yet, they completely squander the opportunity to go with square PCB design and single cell battery. They would've done so if they were really concerned about that.

Split cell design doesn't give net boost to battery capacity with such small cells and only 2 of them. It's more of a compromise to packaging and cost, than about battery capacity. Foxconn bills them per-part and per operation for assembly, so they put as much as they can on single PCB, and order as much of pre-assembled modules as possible. This may well cost them more than a two-pieces PCB, but tell that to MBA types.

The thinnest iPhone was the 6 and 6s. Every phone since then has been thicker to accommodate new technologies and bigger batteries. Recent Apple Watches are also bigger than the earliest models.

I understand why Snell wrote this article now--to tap some pageviews off the public interest in the 16" Macbook Pro announcement--but his fundamental thesis is wrong.

Apple has always balanced size vs functionality; it has not been a continuous track toward thinner and thinner under Jobs or Ive. Where they have made major missteps, it is because they guessed wrong about technology, not some Ive-driven quest for thinness at all costs.

As an example of the repercussions of such a decline, after years of being an Apple user (I switched from Windows to OS-X when they started making top of the line hardware and using x86 processors) I switched back to Windows because their hardware become subpar and far too expensive for it, the lack of an escape key was a big red flag to me. This also coincided with Microsoft's current embracing of developers (not just MS stack ones), a better OS with Windows 10 and WSL. It's been a little rocky, but I cannot see myself going back to OS-X unless MS messes things up big time.

Want to love your current "bad keyboard" MBP again?

Grab a wireless Apple Magic Keyboard and stick it directly on top of the current IVE keyboard and use Karabiner elements to disable the MBP's internal keyboard.

I actually genuinely enjoy this computer now. A few days ago I was trying to figure out how to sell it and get a new 16" one, but honestly Apple doesn't deserve my money or attention anymore.

Can you imagine what people would say about PCs if one had to do this with a PC laptop?

It's insane. I hate this keyboard with a passion, but at least I have a "quick fix" that isn't going to make me give Apple much much more money.

The should recall these laptops.

> its commitment to an entirely USB-C lifestyle was premature

For me, going all-in on USB C is one of the best features of the 2016 model in terms of flexibility: any port can be a power, video, network, or USB port. Bad keyboard (butterfly) and trackpad (broken palm rejection) and virtual ESC key, not so much.

And a bargain at only $200/port. (MacBook Pro 13" price with 2 vs 4 ports).

It was inevitable that someone would write an article arguing the return of the escape key was an act of genius.

The iPhone 11 Pro was the first indication. Physically bigger, heavier, and with a larger battery than the outgoing model. I am very pleased to see them finally making a commitment to their "Pro" lines. A lot more could be done, and based on what we have seen, hopefully it will be.

I feel like press talk they had in 2017 when they announced they were working on a Mac Pro was an early indication that things would change, and now in 2019 is when we are actually seeing the fruits of that change.

On the Mac side we've gotten the Mac Pro, Mac mini, and the new thicker 16-inch MacBook Pro (although it still is stuck on just 4 USB-C!!).

On the iOS side we've gotten the iPhone XR first, then the 11, and 11 Pro all being thicker than the phones they replaced.

I cannot wait to pick one of these up. In despair I caved last year and got a 2018mbp for work, so we either have to sell it or how somebody and pass it down.

Next they need to phase out lightning now that usb-c is here.

Repudiation? Same number of ports as the 15 in…

At least they fixed the esc key and added space between the Touch Bar and the TouchID key, which I argue looks better than the previous asymmetric design.

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