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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor.

Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side, headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt).

Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to charge on either side.

But that's it. Great job, apple - you solved this form factor.

However, for reasons other than functionality or user-experience, Apple continues to fiddle and fuddle and muck around with laptops - making them weird and unwieldy in the best case, and totally unusable in the worst cases. In the case of USB ports exclusively on one side of the laptop, the only response can be merciless ridicule.

We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base*.

"Special Edition-ed"[1] comes to mind ...

[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Star_Wars_Trilogy_Speci...

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> We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base*.

Can't help coin a new word, but Ralph Caplan described this phenomenon really well. I'm a (software) designer, and I think about this all the time:

> When cuffs disappeared from men’s trousers, fashion designers gave interviews explaining that the cuff was archaic and ill-suited to contemporary living. It collected dust, contributed nothing. When the trouser cuff returned, did it collect less dust and begin at last to make a contribution? Probably no fashion designer would argue the point; but the question never came up. Designers got rid of the cuff because there aren’t many options for making trousers different. They restored it for the same reason.

Trouser cuffs do have a function. The extra weight helps the cloth drape better.

Could extra fabric be folded on the inside for the same effect without the dust collecting?

> Could extra fabric be folded on the inside for the same effect without the dust collecting?

Yes, but you introduce other even more annoying problems, like your foot catching on the cuff when you put the pants on, and weird-looking vertical 'breaks' at the cuff fold.

In fashion, "newness" is a function.

Often even the function.

And further, reverting is a form of newness in fashion.

IMHO the Ribbon UI in MS Office is the same. Also, most things Reddit has done in the past 5 years.

old reddit gang

To be fair reddit is less about new and more about making their ad platform more lucrative.

Software's not so different. Particularly, but not only, when it has a GUI.

newness % 7 years

It's indeed the differential nature of markets. People have a finite memory capacity.. once they forgot that trousers used to have cuffs.. you can reintroduce it as novelty.

-- Marcus Aurelius

What was old is new again. -- someone else

(rephrased Aurelius? Probably)

"There is nothing new under the sun." - Solomon

Another “function” of a trouser cuff is visual. It demarcates the end of the leg, creates a transitional element between the leg and the shoe. It is closely analogous to the capital on a classical column, eyeliner, the frame around a picture, the line at the bottom of this page, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

> Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side, headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt).

Welcome to ~2004 in IBM ThinkPad X-series land, IBM "solved the laptop form factor" ~4 years prior to Apple's Air.

And even before that Sony's PCG-Z505 delivered most of this in a robust and lightweight magnesium package.

you've reminded me of my lovely Panasonic Let's Note W series, thank you

I liked the ~2004 Thinkpad’s, but sadly they had crap battery life by today’s standards. You could install larger batteries and swap them out if they started to degrade, but most people just treated them as needing to be plugged in 24/7.

The Z was the ultimate - traveled everywhere with it. If it only could be updated a bit...

To some non-trivial amount, many laptops wind up being just a desktop with the lid closed 100% of the time in someone's office. It's the size of the commercial industry that makes manufacturers have little reason to actually make good laptops for laptop use.

Came here to say this. I've been working from home for ~6 years now. My work laptop sits vertical in a stand, and is wholly connected to external devices. I switched back to a desktop machine for my personal machine. It sits in a tray that's mounted on the underside of my desk.

"Welcome to ~2004 in IBM ThinkPad X-series land, IBM "solved the laptop form factor" ~4 years prior to Apple's Air."

No. What goes without saying in my original comment was the fact that the MBA has an aluminum unibody.

Aluminum (or other metal) unibody cases represented a major step forward in aesthetics, substance and durability.

I don't care how interesting the thinkpads are (and they are interesting) - I am not going backwards to plastic.

> I am not going backwards to plastic.

And yet the aviation industry, obsessed with lightness and durability, is eliminating aluminium in favour of plastics with each successive generation.

In case you're unaware, many ThinkPads use magnesium alloys quite extensively and just use plastic in areas like the keyboard keys and palmrest.

The X220 I'm typing this on is built like a tank, and I'm quite appreciative the palmrest and keyboard keys at least aren't a thermally conductive metal like the rest of the machine.

Doesn't your MBA use plastic keys as well?

The magnesium alloy ThinkPads and some Dells use is far more durable than aluminium because it's harder so doesn't bend on impact. It's also less likely to scratch. I've seen countless scratched Macbooks over the years.

Plus unibody designs mean the whole laptop body needs to be replaced if there is damage instead of just replacing a single panel. High end Dell laptops are almost modular in comparison.

> The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor.

That's weirdly-specific. Some people would prefer a larger screen size, for example.

> Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ?

I upgraded from a 2015 (I think) MBA to a 2018 model (both 13" ones), and two actual improvements that I like are: larger trackpad size, and smaller overall dimensions (so there's a smaller bezel around the screen, for example).

trackpad was nice until I realized the trade-off was worse than the gain, it took a few days to notice the undeniable excess of unintended clicks and moves

sure enough, it had been right the first time and now is a mistake imho

> That's weirdly-specific. Some people would prefer a larger screen size, for example.

And some people need a larger screen because we don't run the highest resolution possible. I run my 24" 4k monitors at high-density 1080p. My 16" laptop screen is at 1536x960 or 1344x840.

Anything smaller than a 16" MacBook Pro doesn't leave enough screen space to work with.

What is it you're doing that 13" can't cut it?

Small screens have small letters, small icons, etc. My eyesight is very good, but working on such a screen is uncomfortable after an extended amount of time (unless you lower the resolution significantly).

You can have a small screen with large letters and a big screen with small letters. You're conflating screen size and feature size. If you have a 4K screen and the features are too small, increase the UI size, don't decrease the resolution. If you're running a 4K screen at 1080p all you've done is waste a lot of money.

I’m running 24” monitors at double density 1080p. MacOS is rendering at 4K and the monitor is getting a 4K signal. The way macOS handles scaled resolutions make any scaled resolution look native, on top of making everything more clear.

Increasing UI size often breaks application across all operations systems.

Oh please, the experience in practice for this is terrible unless you're on Mac OS and even then it's not always good.

Is your eyesight really that good?

I've worked on a 13" screen all day long and have terrible eyesight and usually eye discomfort is that last thing I feel.

Not OP but I have great eyesight (I think...) and much rather use a big screen (my neck thanks me too).

Ok, but bigger screen being better isn't really a roadblock, it's just a QoL improvement. It's not actually a dealbreaker for your workflow, which is what was implied by the GC.

Yes, it's been measured.

> > The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor.

> That's weirdly-specific. Some people would prefer a larger screen size, for example.

> > Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ?

> I upgraded from a 2015 (I think) MBA to a 2018 model (both 13" ones), and two actual improvements that I like are: larger trackpad size, and smaller overall dimensions (so there's a smaller bezel around the screen, for example).

I'll agree that 13" rather than 11"seems to be a sweet spot for size, and the air deserves credit for popularizing that size. 13" is as small as you need to fit in a backpack, and still stupidly light. I suspect the air and it's competitors (surface book, xps, spectre) are what killed off the sub 10" netbook/palmtop form factor.

There is/was a trope that an average Apple user only uses Safari so there's no need for this or that feature (starting from when Jobs was against having an appstore for the first iPhone), that's the only way I can think of that this statement is correct.

My laptops serve 2 purposes - first, the actual laptop that I use for travel with no monitor, and can use for work, photo processing, movie watching, gaming or whatever with some compromises. For that, 11" is utterly useless; it might have been acceptable in 2005 for checking something online, reading or sending an email, but these days a phone can do that so there are literally 0 uses cases for an 11" laptop imo.

The other use case is a portable desktop that I always plug into a (27-38") monitor for serious work or gaming; for that MBA is woefully underpowered. I used to work for a company where you could choose if you get an MBA (mostly salespeople/PMs/etc.) or an MBP (mostly engineers); there were always jokes about how you could immediately tell who never actually does any work ;)

I think you're missing a very common power-user workflow which is: browser + terminal.

For many people, all serious work happens in a near-zero resource application (the terminal) and the MBA is, of course, just fine for that.

Fair enough, although I wonder how big this niche is compared to people using IDEs or various editing software from powerpoint to photoshop, or even just playing games (or using that browser for smth like metrics dashboards that require more space, for that matter).

In any case, being about to use a browser and a terminal hardly qualifies as "solving" laptop form factor much more than just being able to use a browser IMHO.

In German you have verschlimmbessern - making something worse in an attempt to improve it

Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?

I can confirm that verschlimmbessern is a perfect fit to describe the situation.

Englisch took Angst and Zeitgeist. Take that one too?

Angst and zeitgeist don't decimate the American tongue. If you want us to adopt verschlimmbessern, drop one of the Ms and one of the Ses and get Muppets to sing a song about it.

You made me smile on a foggy cold and way to early morning before coffee. Take that upvote!

Happy to provide a vital service to society.

Yes they have noticed it! To the extent that I have seen articles in which people explain in detail concepts for which they hope a concise German word exists. For example: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/concepts-for-which-i-sus...

That's a very interesting observation. I wonder if there's a word for it...

Have you noticed how much entropy goes into a German word? They certainly do have a word for every concept.

I read somewhere (on HN?) that Italians speak faster than Germans because their words contain less information, so in the end they still communicate the same amount of information per minute. Italians and Germans were used in the example because they were the two extremes.

Is this RISC vs CISC human language philosophy?

Nice graph of syllables per second vs bits of information per second here:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/09/28/why-are-...

What's with the bimodal distributions for German there?

I was reading a conversation trying to work out the most information that you could fit into a one word command (the limit of the Dungeons and Dragons Command spell.) Italian was floated as the language that could be stretched the furthest, due to being able to compound verbs.

So it really depends on exactly what kind of information you are trying to package and how. Different languages compress differently.

It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word.

In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving".

When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bash them together to get the rest of the concepts.

German is the perfect language for engineers and KSP players.

And we anglophones can make descriptive-with-more-readability words by comparison through the use of hyphenated adjectives.

Off the cuff chain-associating / goal-seeking:

descriptive-with-more-readability ... Common Lisp ... Lisp ... parentheses ... angled brackets ... Angles ... Anglophones.

As a German I’ve always found “verschlimmbessern” very clunky and awkward, but it is pretty widespread, so you get used to it. That’s usually not the case in discussions like this, for example the famous “Wanderlust” isn’t really a thing in German, although it is a feasible, natural sounding compound.

An English neologism might be something like “imporse(n)” or maybe “imperiorate”. Personally that sounds more sophisticated to me. “Imporsement” or “imperioration” could be the nominalisations (what’s the noun for “worsen”?).

In English, is suggest unimproved or updegraded.

> It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word.

Like Sanskrit. Also, in Sanskrit, many words have multiple meanings, so when you string them together, there is often (somewhat of) a combinatorial explosion of overall meanings.

German has no word for "silly". "Funny", "stupid", et c, yes, but no "silly".

It has no 1:1 translation, but that's true the other way around too for a lot of nuanced words.

E.g.: silly, ridiculous, foolish In Germany you have: albern, lächerlich, töricht

They are quite close to the English ones, but not exact the same. It's the other way around too: English doesn't have words that match the German ones 1:1

Germans are cheating a bit, they just concatenate existing words and "hey, we have a word!"

That's not true. You can find "verschlimmbessern" in any dictionary [1][2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern

[2] https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern

Blend of verschlimmern (“to make worse”) +‎ verbessern (“to improve”)

From your link ...

The point is that's in a dictionary and thus is not a random combination of words.

These two things are not mutually exclusive.

The usage of these specific two words is just widespread enough to be entered into the dictionary.

They are not mutually exclusieve. I also never claimed that they are mutually exclusieve. I simply said it's wrong that claiming germany is cheating in this case. Because the word is in the dictionary and thus not an ad hoc combination.

That is really a bad example, but in general this is true for long German words. Often there's a similar combination of words in English, the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept.

> the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept

Sure, but that's a purely orthographical difference, not a difference in the grammar of the languages. It's like saying that German is fundamentally different from English because in German, all nouns are capitalized, whereas in English, some nouns aren't capitalized.

Yes, I tried to say that the difference is really minor.

There's a tendency to combine words out of existing fragments in German. Verschlimmbessern might be an example for this. In English I see this less often and there are many more words that come from Latin or Greek.

Finnish also has lots of compound words. German might be different, but in Finnish words might sometimes have a slightly different meaning if the words are written separately (with a space) or as a compound. (Often that other meaning is rarely used, and there would almost never be any actual potential for confusion, but technically there may still be a difference.)

Some of the compounds may be written as compounds because that's just how you're supposed to write them, but sometimes there might be some kind of actual semantics behind it.

Could there be something similar going on in German, or is it really that German-speakers just concatenate things that English-speakers would write separately?

Yes, this is also the case for German. If you use the individual components separately, that will often mean sometimes slightly differen, but most of the times using separate words won't make any sense at all.

Is that so different from "downsizing", "television", "textbook", "wallpaper", "motorbike", "grapefruit", "agoraphobia", "airport", "manslaughter", "candlestick", et al?

The noun formation that people purport to mock in German is the same that English uses, as in your examples of "textbook", "motorbike", "grapefruit", "airport", "manslaughter", and "candlestick". It's unsurprising that German and English grammar would be identical in this respect, since the languages are extremely closely related. It's a little more surprising that so many English speakers seem to think the German words are hilarious; I assume they think so only because they were told to and never bothered to think about it.

"Television" and "agoraphobia" are different; "downsizing" is less clear than the other examples.

Yup, Lebensabschnittpartner looks quite different from wallpaper.

My neighbor has used TurboTax for 20 years or so. This year, they came out with an "upgrade" that revamped the user interface. She no longer has any idea how to make it work. She's switching to using a CPA.

That word is: lack of market research.

I recently finished up shopping for a Windows laptop. It took awhile, as I balanced price with features. You'd be shock how many otherwise decently config'ed offerings lacked a key and basic feature (e.g., backlit KB), or was deficient in some key way (e.g., mid-priced models with only 8 GB RAM soldered, no ability to upgrade).

I agree. Some might not need backlit or more than 8 GB but if they do that machine - to them - becomes useless. Lack of sufficient RAM will cuts years off the usefulness of a laptop.

I'm not sure how such small thinking helps the brand, loyality, etc. Do these companies not understand?

I don't think it's that so much as the need to convince consumers to upgrade as often as possible even when what they have already works perfectly.

I think they actually do a lot of market research. They know that people like you and I might buy a good product that meets our needs and keep it for 5 years or more. But the bulk of their profits are coming from people who have to buy the newest whizbang model - and it has to look different - or else how will everyone know that you have the newest whizbang model?

If they want to impress me, a better display would do it. I have an endless desire for more pixels and more resolution.

I'd argue too much, not too little market research is the problem. They just have wrong (ok, misaligned) objectives.

Soldered RAM is invisible on the table at Best Buy, but the price savings to the manufacturer are very visible on their balance sheet. In fact, a laptop that becomes useless and you need to upgrade from 8 GB soldered RAM to one with 16 GB soldered RAM after 2 years is more than twice as profitable as one that a consumer stuck a new SODIMM stick in and used for 4+ years. Companies understand that very well, and the average consumer hasn't been able to prove that they are even aware of these problems.

Perhaps. But more landfill trash? That sounds like a 20th Century business model.

But to your point, let's take it a step further. Most people aren't going to bother to upgrade their RAM. It's likely they won't even know. Even so after three years they'll want some new feature. But who do you give that to? At least if the RAM could be upgraded, it could have some added use. I'm not so sure that bonus round is being filled with new hardware.

Put another way, a used Brand X is good shape would be a gateway to a new customer and a new purchase next time. Why not lease laptops to the consumer market? Or offer trade-up deals like phones?

There's got to be a way that's better for consumers, the environment, and manufacturers.

Economy and ethics is not a partnership made in heaven.

Economy in the purest sense is, but financial profit is not. People seem to confuse economy with financial functions. Companies seem to do most things for financial reasons, particularly profit to owners, not economic reasons. I think this distinction is important as "economics" hides the egregious use of business for financial gain at the cost of much else in society.

You're overthinking it, it's some PM justifying his or her own job in a company flush with so much cash it doesn't know what to do with it.

> (e.g., mid-priced models with only 8 GB RAM soldered, no ability to upgrade).

Aw, man, that's been a sticking point for years, that magic 8G. I don't know how they do it, but 8G of RAM has been the ever-soldered / or mid-range / you-need-to-pay-more-for-the-next-model-up thing for at least 5-6 years now. Even a web browser can eat up that 8G if it's hungry enough.

For some CPUs 8G is the maximum amount, makes sense soldering it. J4105 for example on my SBC.

That CPU is like embedded or Netbook/rock bottomn class computer, thats bot the limitatin most computers are saddled with

Until ~2015 4GB were the only reasonably priced option for crazy long as well. I've been waiting ~3 years looking for a new laptop, as replacing an old 3GB one with new 4GB one was hardly an upgrade.

> That word is: lack of market research.

Market research said the iPhone would be a flop.

Most of the time, it's right, but every once in a while, you'll miss an opportunity if you follow market research too closely.

Is there actually market research that said the iPhone would be a flop? Becuase I remember the launch, and people went wild.

This just sounds to me like one of those stories people tell but isn't true. People didn't want a bad iPhone, sure, but that's not the same thing.

I think 16 is getting to the end of its usefulness in a laptop these days, but finding ultrabooks with 32 is still rather difficult (surface, XPS, ...?).

Truth is the OEMs are just trying to move product, their mission isn’t to be the rising tide that improves compute capability for society. High competition, low margin business in the PC world and most consumers don’t know enough about computers to understand what they’re buying - just look at how many people buy “gaming” computers at Walmart or Costco.

Really? I got a 16gb laptop in Feb 2015 and I' doubt I'd get more than that if I bought a new one today. I've never seen it get even close to max memory.

Work-wise, at least. If it was a gaming machine I'd probably buy 32gb.

AFAIK only few months ago Intel released CPU with LPDDR5 support. And LPDDR4 does not support more than 16 GB. Not sure about AMD.

This baby is doing just fine with 8GB.

  >I think 16 is getting to the end of its usefulness in a laptop these days..

Seriously?

What are you people doing on your laptops to need so much RAM? I'm producing graphics and doing image manipulation on a 7 1/2 year old MacBook Air with 8GB RAM [I've even done the occasional bit of video editing] and I've never felt that it was struggling.

The author is also a journalist, which means he probably works primarily with words. For video editing and even some image editing, modern machines do make a difference.

> We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base.

Apple can only serve so many people well.

Apparently, you are not the "average" customer.

I'm in this exact situation every time I go shopping for shoes and find out I'm not within 1-sigma from the mean.

It sucks, but it's how mass production and mass integration works. Choice becomes very limited, and no company will rise to address a specific shortcoming for a specific group.

>Apparently, you are not the "average" customer.

So supposedly the average customer needs USB ports, but only on one side of the computer?

I would guess the average customer rarely needs USB ports. Most people use Bluetooth and WiFi. Needing to plug in a physical device seems pretty niche to me these days? The only exception is the charger and monitors. I guess it helps them reduce costs, which customers appreciate, to only have the bus going to one side of the laptop.

I'm by no means the average customer, which is why I have a Pro model, but every time I setup at the desk I use three ports: one for a dongle to my keyboard and trackball, one for the monitor, and one to charge.

I could in fact run the charging through the dongle as well, but then I'd be SOL when I plugged in a hard drive, which I do at least weekly.

I think the two ports but on one side is an aesthetic disaster, but it does have one upside: there are 'mega-dongles' which plug into one half of a MacBook, and those work with both the 2 port and the 4 port models.

The average person is agnostic to which side they’re on. The desire for any given feature is balanced by other features and overall design/usability.

I’m not crying a river about my new M1 MacBook having ports only on one side. Very much offset by amazing battery life.

It's important to note that your "average" customer is self—selected; the "average" Apple customer probably doesn't play AAA games (because anybody who does would have needed to buy a Windows machine with higher-end graphics). That is not the same as the "average" laptop buyer would not want to play them, though.

That doesn't mean Apple necessarily needs to go after those people, though, if they believe their current balance can get them customers they want.

Funny you mention that machine... I just finished a development contract that I did on an early 2013 MBA 11 inch. That little machine made me about $50K. I'm disappointed it cannot run Big Sur but keeping it anyway.

I gave mine a second life as an Ubuntu machine.

2GB is... tight, for almost anything, and I'm a bit concerned about the wear all that swap puts on the SSD.

Loved the form factor though, and yeah, that machine was my bread and butter for a solid year.

The irony that when I bought Slackware 2.0, my machine had 32MB.

I don't remember how many megabytes I had when I first installed Yggdrasil from a CD, but it was either 32MB or half that...

> However, for reasons other than functionality or user-experience, Apple continues to fiddle and fuddle and muck around with laptops - making them weird and unwieldy in the best case, and totally unusable in the worst cases. In the case of USB ports exclusively on one side of the laptop, the only response can be merciless ridicule.

Those reasons are marketing and profit-seeking. Modern society has this false assumption that new = "improved." So even if Apple perfected the laptop form factor, the next model will be regression that's marketed as an improvement and believed to be one by undiscerning users. If they didn't do that, customers wouldn't buy it because it would be an old = "unimproved" design.

Though, a confounding factor here is there's a lot of personal preference with something like a laptop, so there's probably no one "objectively best" design. So some fraction of regressions are just catering to a different preference set.

Loved my 11" MBA. I needed more RAM and I could switch to any laptop I wanted for free, so I got a used MB 12" because it's the only Apple laptop with a similar form factor.

More like ruined. Manufacturers chasing that form factor, even for mobile workstations, has allowed them to justify a pivot away from user serviceability, and has also introduced major thermal/battery issues which have hobbled machines used for anything more serious than checking email (and, if you're using Chrome browser, maybe even that).

I don't want a phone with a large keyboard and screen. I want a mobile desktop. If it's a little heavier, thicker, and louder, that's fine.

Dell's XPS 13 fills a similar role for me as a Linux user (also have a MacBook Pro but I'm using it less and less).

The XPS13 is the same size as the MBA11; I'm using an 11" MBA case for mine. It has a larger, 4K screen though and faster 4 core/8 thread CPU and better GPU.

USB-C on both sides and a MicroSD card.

The trackpad isn't as good as a Mac yet but it is acceptable to me and is improving all the time.

“Gilding the lily.”

An idiom rather than a word, but that’s exactly it. “Lilly-gilding”, then, might be the “word” that meets the requirements.

Nah, that means adding unnecessary adornment. "Gilding" is explicitly about form. It would be a stretch to use that for a change that worsens something's substance.

>(in this case, lightning)

I suppose you mean Thunderbolt

Fixed. Thanks.

It doesn't help the situation that a Thunderbolt port's icon is a bolt of lightning.

It's so much easier to draw than a bolt of thunder.

What about the performance though? I believe these older models can be unbearably slow, just to browse the web with. For some of my friends this is a problem just because of the limited RAM, but you won't be able to upgrade it because it's soldered on.

Things are slow because of garbage bloated software. If devs stopped piling on ever more crap on existing systems and switched to optimizing their code, things would at least stay at the same performance or even gasp run faster.

Totally agree. Especially with al the Electron crap and such. But, I'm afraid you won't be able to change that, and that it'll only be getting worse.

Actually the Asus 1215B solved it for me, not Air.

The problem with this line of reasoning is you are using a specific outcome to criticize an entire process:

Apple failed to produce an iteratively superior product, therefore their process is "fiddle and fuddle."

Their process of innovation and iterative improvement brought us the Macbook Air and so many other great products. It seems very short-sighted to claim a particular model is the pinnacle of design and user-experience and they should quit now.

Will they always succeed? Certainly not. Should they keep trying? Definitely.

>fuddle and muck

swap(f, m)

But like most people I don't want or need legacy USB or headphone ports any more - so makes sense to refine the model and remove them to simplify?

If we took your advice they'd still have the old serial and parallel ports on them!

The best hardware targets are "what your users are using" + "extrapolated upgrades over the lifecycle of your product."

E.g. why Steam regularly does this https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I think it's fair to say that dropping the 3.5mm was way in advance of the user population.

As was dropping function and special keys.

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