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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

This review is hilariously bad and biased ("no touchscreen or 5G!"), but the app compatibility is an expected chicken-or-egg issue with early adopters. The point I would make is you have to weigh the app experience in Nov 2020 against your expected experience for the rest of the life of the machine. I know people who've kept Macs running for nearly a decade (e.g. 2011 Macbook Air) and I'd strongly suspect 5 years from now a 2020 M1 Mac will be a lot more futureproof and app-compatible than a 2020 Intel Mac.

If your main concern is running Zoom and OneNote for the next 6 months, maybe sit out M1 for now.

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I actually found review to be a nice counterpoint to mostly glowing reviews by reviewers like Dave2D and Marques Brownlee .

> If your main concern is running Zoom and OneNote for the next 6 months, maybe sit out M1 for now.

There is very little information out there about how M1 fits into developer workflow. It is not just Zoom and OneNote but app compatibility is very important for developers and I think most developers(except iOS devs) would perhaps want to sit out the release. There is no docker. VirtualBox will probably never work on Apple M1, so an escape to Linux VM is not available if you need. Parallels and Vmware Fusion may work someday but you will end up paying for those and someone should do performance/battery comparison if I am going to run a VM all day. Things like Emacs don't work yet and only information available about this is from obscure twitter threads.

Apple shows no signs towards being interested in selling a touch screen laptop. They steer people to their iPads for that and have indicated otherwise for their laptops. Rightly or wrongly.

Jobs famously said quite strongly that they'd never do one. There is a video around of him justifying it due to the user's hands getting too tired https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=S9ZJHy8QOso .

After 12 years on Macs I picked up a touchscreen PC and would simply never go back to a non-touch machine, it is not essential, but it is incredibly convenient. Why shouldn't it be possible to touch rather than tap when appropriate? After a few months selecting an appropriate option for any particular input is totally natural and subconscious. I have no idea why noting the lack of touch on a Mac should be considered "biased".

I picked up a Dell touchscreen laptop and literally have never used the touchscreen. I even forgot it has it. I just can’t see any reason to use it and how it’s better.

I probably use it for around 10-15% of navigation and scrolling on web sites. It's not a case of "I'm on a web site designed for a touch device, I will therefore now start poking the screen", but more along the lines of noticing it'd be much quicker to work a sequence of buttons by touch than by tap.

Touch is definitely much faster to get through certain styles of forms. The first that came to mind where I'd often tend to touch is the TFL (Transport for London) journey planner.

Does {tab}/{space} not work in some forms?

As it happens, tabbing around a badly designed form often doesn't work correctly. Then there are UI with hundreds of focusable inputs where while tabbing might work correctly, is extremely cumbersome and slow to use.

This is not to suggest replacing a keyboard with a touchscreen, any more than suggest a keyboard is no longer required since a mouse or trackpad is available. It's just an additional form of input, and one I'd personally definitely miss.

I agree with you. The keyboard/mouse has been a standard input combination for PCs since the 80s. Maybe it's time we added touch to the standard. Seems some additional input methods are likely well past due.

My work provided laptop has a touch screen. I only ever use it when I'm trying to point out something on the screen and touch the screen by accident. It's always jarring.

He also said “they’ve lost their way if they ever give you a stylus” and then Apple Pencil. But I do agree and even like the Apple Pencil. I wish they saw themselves a little more like a “batteries included” company trying to deck out their stuff with features people may never use than now. But I also think that’s always been a criticism of Apple.

I will add this though. You can side car a tablet to your Big Sur Mac. Pretty sure it stays touchable through to the Mac client.

The stylus comment was more of a quib on clunky resistive touchscreen which forced phones to come with a stylus rather than the idea of drawing with a stylus being bad.

Why would a review be biased if they want 5G or a touchscreen in their laptop?

Those are features of other laptops. And Apple already ships the technogy to support both.

This is sort of like complaining about the passenger capacity of a 911 or the cornering on a minivan. You expect a review to describe how good something is at being what it intends to be, not how the reviewer prefers an entirely different style.

People can wish for things within creations that the creators never imagined or considered inappropriate. Which is why mod-ability is a nice escape hatch. Sadly Apple has rarely supported or encouraged that in their hardware.

>("no touchscreen or 5G!")

This is a huge plus in my opinion.

> I know people who've kept Macs running for nearly a decade (e.g. 2011 Macbook Air)

It’s no longer my primary machine but my 2009 MBP is still running just fine (new memory and disk 5 years back, battery is a bit shagged at this stage) and I use it all the time for storing and casting media, light dev work, office apps etc.

> new memory and disk

Something you'll not be able to do with Apple Silicon hardware. I am interested in the longevity of the new devices, but they'll definitely age faster since the configuration you get today is it.

That's been the case since 2016, after that everything is soldered in, so you can't change anything. And even before that in the 2012 iteration you could only change the SSD with the RAM still being soldered in.

So all in all - it's been almost 10 years since they've been aging faster.

Pointing out that the laptop is missing features many peot want, is not "bad biased". It's especially silly to make this accusation moments before you yourself say "maybe sit this one out".

Macs cost a lot and promise long life. That's a long time to not have a feature with increasing desirability. M1 enables merging MacOS with iOS. A touchscreen is an important aspect of that merge.

>but the app compatibility is an expected chicken-or-egg issue with early adopters.

>The point I would make is you have to weigh the app experience in Nov 2020 against your expected experience for the rest of the life of the machine.

So much for the "It just works" marketing that Apple used to push a couple of years ago.

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