Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features | Hacker News Reader

Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

inputmag.com

358 pointsmetahost550 comments

The nice thing about my 2015 Macbook Pro is that it's useful without any accessories. I can just throw it in a bag and walk out the door.

It's got enough battery life that I usually don't need to bring a charger. It has all the ports that I ever need. I can hook it up to a projector with the built in HDMI port, I can put in the SD card from my camera, or I can quickly copy files from someones thumb drive. I don't need to think about bringing the right kind of cables for what I'm planning to do.

Sure, the new Macs are a lot faster, but every Mac released after 2015 would be a downgrade for me.

I have the 2015, 2017 and a 2020 and they are pretty much all the same that way. None need a power source for normal workdays, I don't have a camera that needs to have memory cards swapped out, and all presenter displays are either ClickShare or AppleTV and thus wireless. I don't accept random mass storage devices, and for those few times that I do want one I use a multiport adapter which works with both the 2015 and all the newer ones (USB-C and USB-A connectors), which I also use for when WiFi is down and you need Ethernet. It's not much bigger than any Ethernet adapter anyway.

It's great that the built in ports cover all your needs, but my experience with laptops has been more complicated.

You use a projector as an example of a use for your HDMI port. In my limited experience doing presentations, I've run across a mixture of HDMI, VGA, and even DisplayPort for some reason.

Once, even though I was using a Dell Precision with built in HDMI and VGA, I ended up using a usb-c dongle with combo HDMI+VGA+DP ports I keep in my bag. My coworker had to wait for someone to get a more specific passive converter for their laptop which didn't have usb-c.

Obviously YMMV, but I've found the combo of usb-c plus a compact multi port adapter to be indispensable, even on a laptop with a crap-ton of ports.

My take is Jony Ive went extreme on form factor and totally lost his grip on users. He wanted an objectively perfect, extremely thin portless wireless machine. Now that he’s gone the design team is descending from the Ivery tower and undoing his work, meeting users halfway again.

Yeah totally sounds like with Steve gone, there was nobody anchoring him to the ground.

I really hope that you're right, but to be honest I'm not holding my breath.

I also don't think the 2015 Macbooks were perfect, it's just that I don't care about any of the new things Apple has introduced. What I would really like would be a cellular modem so I don't have to bother with hotspots on the train and maybe a stylus for marking up screenshots.

For my use cases, Apple expects me to carry a Macbook, an iPad, a stylus, and a pouch filled with dongles. I'm envious of the Windows folks, they get to have a single device that does it all.

I just moved away from windows because while the devices do everything they don't work properly.

I've now switched to a Mac Mini for a desktop and I use an 11" iPad Pro and apple pencil for everything that isn't code on the road.

I've got to the age where I'm not sitting hunched over a laptop working for half a day and there's not much point in having a laptop if it's going to be docked all day.

Why are you envious of Windows folks? Windows hardware is generally cheaper, so if you're using Macintosh, you could ostensibly afford Windows.

if your workflow depends on macOS then it doesn't matter how cheap windows is

Given Apple have gone cellular with everything all the way down to the Watch, I’m always amazed they never included it in a Macbook.

They expect you to have an iPhone; using that for cellular data is literally one click away.

You could make the same argument for the iPad. But they do sell cellular iPads.

In my experience, personal hotspot on my Macbook takes about 30 seconds to connect, and it sometimes just fails to connect altogether. It disconnects when I close my Macbook, so next time I open it I need to connect again. Sometimes my phone doesn't show up in the Wifi menu and I need to manually start hotspot mode on my iPhone.

I'd much prefer a built-in cellular modem.

There’s a solid reason to have a cellular modem in a MacBook - data only plans. It’s cheaper in the US to buy a cellular plan addon for iPad than to pay for data as part of the main plan.

I remember that Qualcomm licences their modems for an outrageous price if they're for a computer, that might be a reason they were never included. But I believe Apple will now manufacture their own cellular chips.

> He wanted an objectively perfect, extremely thin portless wireless machine.

i mean that is the ipad pro with a keyboard. (not perfect comparison i guess but is closer to that ideal)

The mbp is supposed to be for professionals and that comes with a need for flexibility and functionality. the quest for thinness was misguided in my opinion.

The iPad Pro fails at many laptop-esque tasks. I tried during a vacation, and it was way more work and way slower than it needed to be, and it wasn't because it wasn't powerful enough, it was the OS. Dumping photos from an SD card with not apple photos ran into a lot of annoyances and was a lot slower than doing the same thing with a 5 year macbook pro at that point, something that is objectively slower in the CPU realm and were both using USB2 speed SD card readers of some sort. Not to mention iOS's hostility to backgroup apps, making my file syncing app need to be on the foreground all the time for it to sync my photos to my E2E encrypted cloud drive.

A convertible M1 MacBook Air would probably be a better iPad Pro than that iPad Pro would be, and I think that is where apple is going with the "touch-size-ification" of macOS. iPad Procreate running full screen on a macOS convertable would give you %95 of the iPad experience TBH. A laptop is better than an iPad for videos and web browsing TBH.

Yeah i would be totally sold to a M2 macbook pro 2 in 1 with decent GPU and Pen support. This enables to run things like blender with pen and other stuff.

Right now, there are only windows 2 in 1 laptop which i find subpar on build quality.

yeah the macbook air does fit the bill better than an ipad... you're right. i forgot that those still existed.

What I don't understand is how a not user-centered idealist designer can reach the top in Apple, my thought has been Apple is already big enough to care more about innovation and experiment instead of current user need, or it's just their motto to influence users instead of listen to them.

It wasn't wrong for the MacBook though. The use of OLED and other modern techniques could have made MacBook even thinner and lighter. And in that extreme, having only one port, butterfly keyboard, and enlarged TrackPad were Trade offs that was understandable.

The problem is they then bring that mentality over to MacBook Air and to the Pro.

TrackPad causes false positives [1], why were they using butterfly keyboard just to get 0.6mm thinner? It was basically all the wrong trade offs.

Oh and the cable were too cramped they failed after closing and opening every day for a year? [2] Which was clearly a design flaws. Not only did they not fix it for free and at try to use the opportunity as good gesture, they actively push their customer for a $700 fix in order to push for services revenue increase. And the problem has been known since 2017. Those report by mainstream media only came in 2019.

And many other things, Post 2016 MacBook Pro was so bad at one point in time 2015 MacBook Pro's 2nd hand price was higher than 2016-2018 MacBook Pro.

[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/06/10/upgrading-to-a-16-inch-ma...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/22/18193120/a...

Agreed. I wouldn’t touch any post-2015 MBP, but I wish I had bought one with dedicated graphics card. With each new version of macOS, things have gotten so much slower and laggy, even though I have disabled almost every unnecessary process and app in the OS.

The other day, I was working with a 2011 MBP with graphics crad and Chrome was much faster in that compared to my 2015 MBP. I think the graphics card does improve web surfing quite a bit.

The dedicated graphics cards have a terrible feisgn flaw that burns 10-20W at idle when an external monitor is plugged in. This is a problem daily, while a non-dGPU laptop handles external monitor just fine.

No it doesn't. My MBP can't handle a 27 inch external monitor without putting so much pressure on the CPU. If it had a dedicated GPU, that would take care of video output and not make the mac drain its battery by having the CPU fans at +6500 RPM all the time.

The 2015 MBP is also the last one that still has built-in optical audio output, via mini-TOSLINK.

An HDMI cable is an accessory.

CompactFlash card doesn't fit in an SD port.

Any projector setup worth having would have an HDMI cable ready for you.

A 5.25" floppy diskette won't fit an a CompactFlash slot.

What's your point? I can come up with silly excuses too.

Almost every place that has a projector also has an HDMI cable installed.

I haven't used a CF card in the last 10 years or so, but SD cards show up frequently. (Cameras, Rasberry Pi, Prusa 3D printers). For the Raspberry Pi I needed to use an adaptor because it uses smaller cards, but still better than no card reader at all.

But of course that's just my experience. If you use CF a lot, an SD slot won't help.

Oh absolutely. As a product designer, I was worried that it may be rendered obsolete, but the industry standard for design tools have moved into cloud-based browser solutions, so it will still be useful forever

I've said this in probably a dozen HN comments over the years, but my 2010 MBP is still my favorite computer of all time. It has a matte screen and 4TB of upgradable onboard storage. It was frustrating watching MBPs move progressively farther away from the features I really loved on that machine. Eventually, I jumped ship for the PC world again, where I found the hardware much more inspired.

The Airs are already quite powerful machines. Let them carry forward the legacy of the direction of the past several years, and make a truly differentiated offering for folks who do most of their work docked.

Also, a hill I will die on is that the Touchbar should have been a new UI paradigm at the bottom of a touchscreen. I'd also dig a Touchbar accessory for my keyboard tray. Just saying. But for the love of god, keep it off my F-key row.

Cosigned, and writing this comment on my own faithful 2010 MBP. Still works like a charm, even if some sites don't load due to legacy browsers.

Having the correct USB plug-ins for my old-but-durable wacom tablet and an internal CD drive is still critical for my usage and I can't believe some of those parts were the first to go in the madness. Currently tempted to switch to the M1, but still worried about loosing the parts mentioned.

Seconded. But why legacy browsers? My mid-2010 MBP, still going strong, runs High Sierra, which supports all current browsers.

I have a early 2011 MBP on High Sierra.

I recently reported a bug to Mozilla that I was experiencing in Firefox. They couldn't reproduce it, but it was essentially the integrated graphics are so old in this machine that their new render engine was causing major glitching issues. The solution was to hard code the use of the previous engine for older laptops.

This, among a number of other issues made me decide to recently upgrade... but hearing about these old-but-new features makes me want to cancel my order and wait it out a bit longer.

> my 2010 MBP is still my favorite computer of all time

Seconded. Mine has dents all over the body, battery has been replaced a few times, upped the memory and replaced the optical drive with 1TB storage.

It's performed surprisingly well for over 10 years. Once had to visit the "geniuses" to replace the logic board after a few years, but that's it really.

Its worked in pubs behind the bar, as a live mixer for audio gigs, as a development machine, as a university note making machine...

Although now I've got what seems to be a hardware fault with the display where black pixels turn bright green. That and the fact the speakers and microphone are shot to pieces means I'll have to move on soon.

End of an era for me. I will miss this machine dearly.

On jumping ship: if I can work out a way to get iTunes + Apple Music running reliably on Linux I'll be jumping over there asafp. Not liking the software direction (news/rumours?) Apple has taken recently.

god I miss matte screens, I really need to find a matte screen cover for my current MBP

The article's criticism of the 12-inch MacBook are preposterous. The 2 lb Macbook is the best laptop I've ever owned, by far. Maybe I'm too sensitive about weight, but I feel an incredible difference between 3 lb and 2 lb laptops, especially if its sitting on your lap for extended periods of time. The keyboard and charger have never once been a hindrance to my workflow, as the article makes it out be. I really wish Apple would come out with 2 lb laptops again. Latest line of Macbooks (the "Air") weigh in at 2.8 lb minimum.

I can't upvote this enough. Everytime I pull out the MacBook 12 I just feel joy using it

I agree I wish Apple would find a way to make a 16inch MBP weight 3lbs and an Air weigh 2lbs. It *seems* possible given an 12.9 inch iPad Pro only weighs 1.4lbs and other manufacturers have entries in that range.

For whatever reason this idea always gets downvoted but I believe it will happen someday and every who downvoted will suddenly "get it".

I assume they could do it, but by reducing battery life to what it was before.

However, if you can’t bare a laptop heavier than 2lbs may I suggest you’re in the wrong line of work.

> I wish Apple would find a way to make a 16inch MBP weight 3lbs

This could be reasonably possible with Apple silicon—well, maybe not 3lbs, but noticeably lighter than the current model.

Part of the reason the 16” is so heavy is the 100Whr battery (which still manages to be woefully inadequate due to how much power the CPU sucks, let alone the GPU).

The 13” ASi Pro has a 58Whr battery for “up to 17 hours” use, which seems to pan out to about 12-14 hours real-world usage. They could put that exact battery in an ASi 16” and it would still be leagues better than the “up to 11 hours” battery in the current model, which in my experience is actually 3-5 hours.

> It seems possible given an 12.9 inch iPad Pro only weighs 1.4lbs The iPad Pro's weight jumps up significantly if you have to add a keyboard and trackpad to the mix. Though personally I would welcome a tablet mac with no included keyboard since I use an ergonomic keyboard the vast majority of the time anyway.

> and other manufacturers have entries in that range.

The one that comes to mind is the LG Gram series, of which they make a lot of compromises in order to accomplish their weight goals. Opening up the chassis of the LG Gram 17 and 15 you'll see a lot of empty space and a battery that is much smaller than it could accommodate. I think it'd be doable if apple made a 16 inch variant with the m1 chip in it but I'm not sure that you could without making similar compromises that LG does.

Personally for a 16 inch laptop I'd rather have longer battery life and processing power which I think more closely aligns with people who prefer the larger form factor anyway. Still, it'd be nice to have options!

I wonder when will Apple stop using Unibody for MacBooks. I don't like the body overall because it's heavier, too cool on winter, and its style not attracting not much anymore.

While I find the performance just not up to par, I completely agree.

Like everyone else, I love the MacBook 12. Give me one with a M-series, at the same (or less) weight, with Touch ID and the new keyboard. Like others, I don’t need more than 1 port. Not discounting anyone else’s need for it, but after living with it for a few years I really don’t need additional ports.

The thing is that while you might be reasonable about this, there seems to be a completely baffling number of people whose argument seems to be "I don't need it, therefore they shouldn't include it". It's like.....no one is forcing you to use these extra ports? But it's very nice to have them and some people will need them. If it doesn't increase the weight or thickness of the device(and it definitely doesn't to add another USB-C to the 12" MacBook) then I don't understand why some people literally treat it like some betrayal of what the device is.

I agree. Reading all these comments made me realize how selfish some people could be.

I think that's a weird realization. Those other people don't use those port so they want everyone to have a MacBook without them. You want those port so you want everyone to have a MacBook without them.

Or wanting either of those tings is selfish, and you should've realized that what you want is selfish, or both aren't.

You're wrong. What they want literally makes the MBP not usable for many others, whereas what I (and many others) want doesn't affect the usability/performance of the MBP for anyone.

Exactly. If you have a MacBook with two ports and you use only one, the mere presence of the second port has no effect on your life. But if your MacBook only has one port and you need two then it's an actual inconvenience. It's not like we're paying per port of like they are adding weight. It's not cars where everyone's insistence to have cars that can do everything at once leads to some SUV monstrosities which are compromised in many ways, it's a laptop where having literally a modicum of extra functionality has no negative sides whatsoever, I guess apart from people on the internet saying they don't need them so they shouldn't be there.

We're not paying per port, but adding more ports surely adds to the BOM, which influences to total price.

And I agree that adding one port doesn't make the device noticeably heavier. But I thought we were talking about adding multiple I/O ports, since that's what the article says and other comment are talking about adding multiple USB A and C ports, MagSave, an SD slot and even an hdmi port. Adding all those ports will increase the size of the MacBooks.

I'm not saying it's wrong to want to have more ports (I wouldn't buy a notebook with one port). I'm saying that it's strange to call people egotistical for wanting fewer ports while failing to see that adding ports has consequences other people might care about.

My entire point was that people decry a lack of ports as a specific downside of the MacBook 12 and, in my opinion, that wasn’t an issue for me (or it seems several others).

Not all products have to appeal to all people, and products involve hundreds of trade offs. If more ports doesn’t mean increased weight or thickness, I’m not opposed!

I also love MB 12!

The 12" MacBook was a fantastic computer. I used one from 2016 until a few weeks ago. However many of the (perfectly reasonable) compromises that Apple made to build this tiny 12" ultraportable also ended up being applied to the rest of the product line, where they just don't make much sense. Specifically the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro were really affected by this.

Yeah, the only people that seem to criticise the 12" macbook are people who've never owned one. I still have my 2016 12" m5 and it is a fantastic little machine for people that need to be mobile.

In fact the other reason I got it was that the rest of the line (in Sept 2016) was not appealing at all. I had been set on a maxed out 13" pro, but hated the touchbar. I thought of the 12" as a stopgap until Apple realised the error of their ways.. turned out I would be waiting half a decade.

Its drawback is poor performance but it’s ok for basic use — surfing the web, typing docs and notes. I almost got one in 2015 if I could code in it but I tested it and it was way too sluggish.

However a 12 inch MacBook M1 would be incredible.

TBH I'm surprised apple didn't make the 12 macbook M1. The air is already fanless and the M1 chip is only 10W. I guess they really wanted to impress everyone with battery life numbers.

I use two MacBooks for programming for several hours each every single day, my personal machine has a touchbar, my work machine does not. I realize this is blasphemous to say and I did think I would hate the touchbar for all the reasons, but I actually ended up liking it.

I had imagined myself tapping virtual function buttons and the whole thing seemed silly and useless and worse than having physical keys, but VS Code and other dev tools actually have good integration, and when I open an app like Adobe Illustrator which I don't use frequently enough to memorize all the hotkeys it's quite handy to have the commands listed.

Yea, what I really want is physical keys that travel but also have OLED screens built in on the top. Expensive, but best of both worlds.

I hope this is Apple's eventual goal; "expensive and best of both worlds" sounds exactly like something Apple would do.

Me too, but I'm not holding my breath. The idea has been out there for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard

The Optimus Maximus keyboard showed why OLED was a bad choice for the keyboard. Chyrosran22 did a review of a used one that had severe burn in on all the keys.

It would be interesting if someone could make a screen key cap that was compatible with Cherry MX or Alps switches. The problem is with communication and power delivery, though. Could NFC power a tiny E-Ink display?

https://youtu.be/qj7GYU-wedo

I think mini/micro LED displays are the future of making something like that work without burn in issues. They are small and flat enough that you could fit in whatever key you want to. There will be a lot more wires involved although, as each key cap will have a mini display in them in front of the switch, and I'd worry about that wire eventually breaking from the constant moving of that wire inside the keyboard key.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen NFC powered eink displays before! Here’s a random one after a quick Google search, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/7-5-inch-e-ink-displ...

There was a rumour 3 weeks ago that Apple was "Researching Keyboards With Adaptive Displays on Each Key":

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/29/apple-researching-keybo...

I wonder if e-ink might be better -- less energy, could work with a general keyboard backlight?

I think e-ink requires a side-light rather than backlight, as the little spheres are opaque, with a dark side and a light side that physically reorient, meaning illumination from a backlight would have to somehow shine through the dark side, when the dark side faced the backlight, but be blocked by the dark side when it faced outward.

Maybe someone can up with a UV transparent dark side and a fluorescing light side or something.

nobody hates the touchbar, they hate that a row was sacrificed for it, instead of just adding it on top.

Please only speak on your behalf, not “everybody”.

Hospital PA: "Mr Art Lebedev to the design HQ please, Mr. Lebedev" https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/maximus/

I wouldn't mind having a touch bar if that didn't imply not-having the physical F-keys row. I actually want both. And an additional, programmable row of physical keys if only this was possible :-)

Interesting, I would think most programmers touch type which at least for me make the touch bar useless. Since it's always changing I have to look down to see what button I am about to press. For me, if it's something common enough that the touchbars ability to change makes that functionality useful I would have found or made a keyboard shortcut for it.

I just upgraded from a MacBook pro to a MacBook air for the main reason it not having a touchbar, and it's much better (for me)!

In many situations, you don't have to look at the touchbar to know what the keys are. For example, when using terminal, vim / ide emulation, I know left is Esc key. It does make spamming Esc feel less weird to me.

I find it harder to touch type on the non physical keys. BTW, you can remap ESC to caps lock. Look into hyperkey ;p

I'm accidentally hitting something on the touch bar all the time, which for me far outweighs anything useful it might do (which is never).

My controversial hot take--

I have never needed an SD card, and have gone all-in on USB-C. I will be very disappointed if they add back in USB-A/HDMI/SD ports, or remove USB-C charging in favor of proprietary charge port. Sounds like unnecessary feature bloat. Please just do MagSage + USB-C, so I can maintain my one-cable-for-everything, making traveling lighter and simpler. Here's my counter argument to all those that love MagSafe: makes traveling a huge hassle, forcing me to carry a special charge brick that only works for ONE device. In 2021 going forward, I will flat refuse to spend money on anything that doesn't use USB-C or Qi charging. I can now travel with a single 2xUSB-C power brick, and charge all devices from the same cable. This is a huge step forward, please don't reverse this.

I am all for removing the TouchBar. The new MacBook Air with TouchID + physical function keys is a perfect combination of features. There are a few things about the TouchBar I do like -- eg, having a custom one-touch screen lock button that's always present. However vast majority of the time I use external keyboard+trackpad+monitor, so the touchbar can't be part of my usual workflow anyway. Removing this reduces cost and complexity.

Please. Just keep it simple.

They could put the magnet as an end of a usb cable. You would still use the same brick, and just plug a different cable if you want to charge a different device.

Seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me.

That would just defeat the point of having USB-C charging. Only the one proprietary cable would stay in the port.

May I suggest a little different look at the use of SD Card slot on your MacBook (Pro). About 5 years back, I had one of those SD Drive stick-in for MacBook Pro that stays there. There were few (Nifty Drive, MiniDrive, etc).

The primary use I see are;

1. Have a clone backup of your primary drive. (Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, Time Machine).

2. Have an extra storage handy for a rather economical price without lugging around an extra drive.

I am always amazed at how people do not even think of this excellent use-case (let alone use it). This is something I have always loved in laptops and have used. Besides that card is barely even visible unlike a pen drive or a hard disk. It just stays there subtly.

I was also planning to have a bootable Linux on one of those, but I never got around to actually doing that. Now that my 2012 MBA's flash storage is dead (and here in India either I can't find replacement, or repair shops are asking for half a kidney) I will see if I can actually use a card instead.

Oh good idea! Bootable Linux would be so handy.

Probably because carrying your backup inside of your device is a horrible way to preserve your media in the event that the device is lost or stolen.

My suggestion was one of the convenient tips of the proverbial iceberg in the world of backups and redundancies. Today, I'd be astonished if one lost their devices and loses any data along with it.

Personally, all my devices are endpoints or tools. For instance, if I lost my phone, it will take me a few hours or a day/two at best to get back to where I was. The same goes for my other devices (desktops, laptops).

In the most critical situation, say, I lost my phone while traveling, but lucky my wife's phone is in-tact, I can pick up hers and go through my contacts (we sync our contacts two ways). I can then login to anything anywhere by getting to her Password Manager, which fortunately has a copy of mine. I might need to ask her to authenticate it for me.

I strongly feel that one should have a pattern and system of redundancies and be independent of the devices one uses. I'm still discovering and learning a lot; not yet the best, but I'm happy I started quite a while back.

No, I won't.

I will still have data on rsync.net, b2, Tarsnap, borgbase, some even in Dropbox. Also, the weekly backup to my external hard disk.

That card is more like regular/scheduled backup sink (encrypted data) like those cloud destinations I mentioned above to help with laptop malfunctioning or just dumping some data on it quickly when I want to take it with me (that's rare though).

I have a 512GB SD card plugged at all times in my iMac Pro and I use it as an entry point for various backups (which get distributed to cloud storage for redundancy after).

I too am a bit confused by the non-popularity of such a setup. SD cards are okay for rarely changing data (or data that changes little, exactly like the incremental backups) and are extremely compact.

I view SD cards as the diskettes I always wanted to have some 26 or so years ago.

I am partial to the samsung fit usb drives. You can boot off of them in a pinch. But current usb-c devices need a dongle.

Yup, it's a shame that there aren't any USB-C type fit drives. Obviously it's a question of space. But I love it how the USB-A connector is basically now able to house an entire flash drive.

I've got a USB drive that is USB-A on one side and USB-C on the other.

I'm guessing you will have probably have cheaper/larger options for usb-a flash drives.

This stuff is just like firewire. Maybe it will be different in 5 or 10 years.

I've been waiting for reasonably-priced and fast enough USB-C flash drives. Maybe 2021 is the year. I hope so.

Is any of this controversial?

Do you take photos or videos with a camera other than an iDevice? I do, and I have to use a dongle every time to transfer data. Those wifi SD cards are a joke.

I agree that they should not remove USB-C charging. People by now have powerbanks, or USB-C ports in their car that would stop working. However, my daily driver still is the 87W charger that came with the MBP, for the simple reason that it’s the fastest option to charge. I‘d be glad if they switched that to MagSafe - just yesterday, one of my kids almost pulled the MBP from a table while I was looking away.

My camera, like many modern ones, has USB-C and can transfer photos over Wi-Fi, so I find it pretty convenient to connect to a Mac.

Some, but not most. And cameras have a lot longer life than other tech, so my guess would be that 99% of cameras in use don’t have the ability to connect via USB-C.

Just permanently stick a tiny USB-A to USB-C adapter on the cable and they instantly do have the ability to connect via USB-C. It's that easy!

I haven't directly connected my camera to a computer in over a decade. Card comes out of the camera and goes in the SD card slot on the laptop. So much easier and less fiddly.

But why? Why does it make sense to someone to remove SD card slot?

Cameras have SD cards instead of internal storage for a reason - plugging in the whole camera is often cumbersome or in some scenarios not possible.

While Image Capture is fine the transfer speeds directly from camera are usually poor.

Cameras also have CF and now CFexpress. I’ve personally never used an SD card in any of my cameras so USB card readers have been part of my workflow for many many years.

It’s a difficult one to get right. Moving to all in on USB-C TB achieves pleasing nobody equally.

Maybe I’m being naive, but when a common IO interface has been pretty much standardized for several years, I’m confused by why people are asking the companies dedicated to the standard to make exceptions and not asking the companies stuck on exceptions to adopt the standards.

Because replacing a DSLR is really expensive, but an SD card port is cheap. And even if it worked with USB-C, I would still need a cable between them.

We have a dslr and just use a USB-C cable. It’s much more convenient for me than the SD card is. I can also use it with an iPad.

How do I plug in a storage device without it sticking out if it’s not an SD card in an SD port?

With a really small USB-C memory stick that fits completely in the hole.

Do those exist? If so, link please.

There are ones that fit almost completely in a USB-A port. https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-64GB-Cruzer-Flash-Drive/dp/B0...

Maybe we'll see one for USB-C some day.

No, I don't. So why should I sacrifice space for my battery to accommodate those who do?

The amount of extra battery space would be insignificant. Plus with the expected battery life on new MBPs with M1 chips, you'll have plenty of juice.

Amazon has a bunch of magnetic USB-C adapters that are designed for MBP’s, that add the MagSafe functionality into existing USB-C ports.

I haven’t tried one, but they look like an adequate middle ground.

Unless you have other things routed besides power through the bus.

Why wouldn’t it work for data as well?

Power delivery is amenable to magnetic plugs but they don’t meet the standards for data.

24-pin ones that accommodate even Thunderbolt are available

It is somewhat anecdotal, but I had one of those and it blew out 2 usb-c docks. The first one went kaput about a month after I started using the magnetic adapter and I chocked it up to bad luck. The replacement fried about a week later and I put 2+2 to together and removed the adapter and haven't had any trouble over the last ~1 year.

All I can say is that I am glad it was the dock that fried not any of the laptops that use it...

That all said, it was pretty glorious when it worked -- a single magnetic cable that did dual 4k monitors, charging, videoconf setup, network, license dongles, etc

I would be surprised if those magnetic adapters handle disconnects properly.

USB-C connectors have pins of different lengths so device can detect them being disconnected, and do things like turn the power off. They also make guarantees that the ground pins are first to connect, and last to disconnect.

My guess would be that you disconnected your laptop while it was pulling lots of power. The pins got disconnected in the wrong order, which resulted in the electronics in the dock getting fried or a high voltage line for power delivery got momentarily connected to a data line, and fried something.

> I haven’t tried one

Tried several and they're no good.

I tried almost every lightning & micro usb magnetic adaptors I could find, and they all were unreliable. Im waiting for anker to make one.

This. And I'm guessing there's a reason why Anker hasn't made such a move.

My shitty Surface happily charges by its USB-C or proprietary port. It also has a USB-A port, which is mighty handy for plugging in Plantronics dongles. I'll be glad to have the same possibilities on a MacBook.

>I have never needed an SD card, and have gone all-in on USB-C. I will be very disappointed if they add back in USB-A/HDMI/SD ports, or remove USB-C charging in favor of proprietary charge port. Sounds like unnecessary feature bloat.

I'm on the same side, though I wouldn't mind one-two USB-A ports added for when I'm on the go in a hurry without a USB-C/A cable. Or the addition of some smart "mag-safe but still usable USB-C port" combo.

But given the complaints from the "moar ports" side and the complaints from the "USB-C all the things" side, one thing is clear: There's no pleasing some people, there's doubly so not pleasing all the people, and Apple has to make its choices and be done with it.

That said, while I believed in the initial promise of the touchbar (especially for specialty apps like DAWs, NLEs, etc), I welcome its removal now, and I think most do.

The one improvement I could see to make it workable would be a full keyboard with separate, tactile keys (the same as we have now) but with changebale legends/colors. That would make learning shortcuts in new apps etc or customizing key behavior very nice. It will also enabled on the fly switch to different keyboard layouts (e.g. from foreign language like AZERTY to Dvorak) complete with key legends.

> one thing is clear: ... Apple has to make its choices and be done with it.

It is not clear to me why Apple cannot sell a small handful of models. Two otherwise identical machines, one all-in on usb-c, the other with a mix of ports.

Maybe MacBook Pro with all the ports, MacBook without.

>It is not clear to me why Apple cannot sell a small handful of models. Two otherwise identical machines, one all-in on usb-c, the other with a mix of ports.

No technical reason, that's just not how Apple rolls.

If they do that, they do it with 2 different models (where the lack/presense of some feature makes sense based on the target market, e.g. college students), not with two otherwise identical models.

> But given the complaints from the "moar ports" side and the complaints from the "USB-C all the things" side, one thing is clear: There's no pleasing some people, there's doubly so not pleasing all the people, and Apple has to make its choices and be done with it.

Knowing Apple and their quirky fanbase, I daresay that the "remove all the ports" people wouldn't exist, if Apple wasn't the manufacturer removing the ports. Nobody ever said, "hey this headphone jack here? I hate it. This HDMI jack? Hate it. SD card reader? It is killing me."

Same with "VGA port? I hate it. Give me a proprietary port and a dongle"

I should point out first that I don't believe these rumors are correct.

But I need an SD card reader all the time, my camera and my field recorder both use them and it makes it super simple to transfer data - without having to carry an extra cable. I don't see why a device that claims it is aimed at professionals (especially creative professionals) could justify omitting it.

My solution is a dongle, but as you say, then you have to travel with an extra cable.

> But I need an SD card reader all the time

Ok, but I never need one for my profession so I don't want the port. Which one of us gets it the way we want it? We both can't have it our way. They went for people who want to use it are the ones to use a dongle, which seems fair to me - the person who wants it pays for it.

It is Apple we are talking about, we are already overpaying for stuff, the port is thin enough and will cost epsilon at scale so you lose nothing and may even find it useful in the future.

Same here. I like the touch bar but unless they find a way to make it feasible on a Bluetooth magic keyboard, I’d rather have no touch bar for consistency. If they are going to kill it they should have killed it with the first M1 MacBooks.

I’m also all in on USB-c (even my shaver uses it for charging) and don’t miss MagSafe at all. Charging from either side is surprisingly handy. One charger for everything is a traveling game changer. $50 worth of charger and dongles has a permanent spot in my luggage.

Hopefully MagSafe in this case means wireless iPhone charging. I just don’t need MagSafe power in. I especially don’t need it now that the battery life is so long. I charge at my desk and if I use my MacBook somewhere else I don’t even take a charger with me.

That being said I wouldn’t mind one USB-a and one HDMI port. Since the rumour is for a less rounded design I guess the edge thickness may be enough to easily support those.

If you use an iPad as a sidecar, there's a touchbar there. However, that touchbar only works for apps you've moved onto the sidecar display for some reason.

> Hopefully MagSafe in this case means wireless iPhone charging

That would require a massive change, since you can't transmit power through metal. I can't really see the top surface being made out of glass, thus the only other place for charging would be the touchpad.

You can transmit power through non-ferrous metals.

Even a non-ferrous metal can interfere with electromagnetic fields (try dropping a cylindrical neodymium magnet down a copper tube if you don't believe me). There exist some wireless charging methods that aren't affected by metallic enclosures, but that's not true for all wireless charging in general.

> I’m also all in on USB-c (even my shaver uses it for charging)

It's funny how different people's experiences can be. Maybe it's because I'm not in the Apple ecosystem and tend to use my devices until they break, but I own a single device that uses usb-c: a raspberry pi 4b. There are two other usb-c ports in my house, one on my laptop and one on my desktop, but I've never used them. I don't even own a separate usb-c cable (the pi charger is integrated).

I kind of dread making the switch for peripherals because I'm going to have to replace everything.

> because I'm going to have to replace everything

You mean, you'll have to replace the cables. Not the devices themselves, unless you want to be able to use USB-C-to-C cables everywhere.

Actually, I mean that I'm dreading the choice between replacing everything and dealing with a hodgepodge of different cables.

Right now, all of the "source" devices (for lack of a better word) have USB-A "out" — laptop, desktop, charging bricks — and all the peripherals — phone, tablet, bluetooth speaker, xbox controller… — have USB-Micro "in". Thus, the only type of usb cable that I need is A->Micro.

If/when I replace my phone, I have my first USB-C peripheral, but the others haven't disappeared, so now I need both my old A->Micro cables and A->C for my phone. Same for my laptop, on the source end — now I need C->C and C->Micro, too. It gets worse: it's rare that I want to charge/connect all my peripherals at once, but it's common that I'll want to charge any two. Plus, you always want a spare.

So now instead of ~3 cables, I'm going to end up with probably 7 or 8, and when I go to grab one out of the drawer I'll need to check both ends of the cable to know I'm getting the right one… ugh. The only way to keep the combinations under control is to replace all source devices or all peripherals at once (or take the middle ground and buy a bunch of C->Micro dongles, pair one with each peripheral, and now they're faux-C peripherals). None of these options are particularly appealing to me.

I'm being a little melodramatic. It's not really that big of a deal. I'll live through it and eventually I'll make it out the other end and maybe I'll be in a C->C golden era. I'm just not looking forward to the transition when USB cable story right now is pretty simple (even if I dislike Micro; Mini was a far nicer connector).

You can get USB A to C and vice versa adaptors not cables. They are a bit weird in that you cant plug the cables in both ways up but they do work. More convenient and cheaper than lots more cables (and lots of items have captive cables).

Section 2.2 of the USB Type-C Specification[1] explicitly forbids this kind of adapter:

USB Type-C receptacle to USB legacy adapters are explicitly not defined or allowed. Such adapters would allow many invalid and potentially unsafe cable connections to be constructed by users.

[1]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...

OK yeah, you're right about that.

Some thing that _will_ be easier though, is your laptop. When you get a new one, get one that charges over USB-C. That option was obviously never available with micro-USB.

Yes, that's what I appreciate the most with the USB-C on my 2019 MBP. No matter where I am I can plug the charger in on either side nearest to the wall. Of course with the M1 or later ARM chips charging will be less of an issue.

>However vast majority of the time I use external keyboard+trackpad+monitor ... > one-cable-for-everything, making traveling lighter

How those two work together? Do you take external monitor , trackpad and keyboard with you ? It looks like most of the time you are not using your laptop as a laptop, when you need everything on the go and you wish to be prepared for diff scenarios. Then you wish laptop as much packed as possible and preferably nothing else, so you would avoid caring many dongles with you.

You can have your stuff in many places, and travel between them. I have monitors and keyboards in my home, my office and my parents home.

Sure, it’s just you do not use ‘laptop abilities’ too much in such scenario compared to fully mobile setup. That’s why you have no need for many mobile requirements that only laptop can deliver.

I love this and have considered doing it myself. However, what worries me is whether using a single power adapter will shorten the life of devices which require different levels of wattage. Sure you can use the same USB-C cable, but the benefit is largely diminished if you have to carry a bunch of different power adapters for each device's unique wattage.

Or am I worrying about this unnecessarily?

Just carry around a first-party Apple charger that matches the highest draw among your devices. Using a higher-rated charger won’t hurt anything.

I used to carry around a 60W adapter, even though I had a device that required an 80W adapter.

The reason was airplane seats. They have a breaker that flips at 75W.

I wouldn't get fast charging with the 60W adapter, but I wouldn't run out of juice on a 14-hour flight.

It’s not a concern, the more powerful the charger, the better.

The devices that are being powered are the ones controlling the charging, the charging brick will derate itself if devices demand more than it can handle. It might hurt the brick, it will get hot or perhaps noisy if it’s a cheaper one.

It’s like openning every single faucet at your house, as long as the pressure and flow at the source are ok, the faucets will output the same as in any other case, otherwise each faucet will “slow down”.

Thanks for this. Would that "slowing down" harm the device though? Obviously, I should err on the side of higher wattage, but if the power adapter provides lower wattage than is required, would that harm the device?

No. That really isn’t how electronics works.

Basic charging works on the principle of deciding a charging voltage (which is either 5v or negotiate to be higher via Power Delivery) plus as many amps as the charger can provided.

As a receiving device the only thing you really care about it voltage. If it’s to high, then stuff gets fried, two low and stuff just doesn’t turn on.

The amps are determined by how much the receiving device can consume. And of course decreases as the device charges (if you’ve got a full battery, then you don’t need more power). If the receiving device pulls to many amps, then the voltage will start to drop, this then causes the receiving device to reduce its power consumption.

Ultimately power electronics are extremely robust today, you would have to try very hard to fry modern electronics. This is a result of how modern electronics converts power, which naturally makes them very robust to fluctuating inputs. (I’m simplifying a lot, want to learn more then look up DC-DC converters, and see how they’re implemented in silicon)

In short, just don’t worry.

You are worrying unnecessarily. These devices use USB-PD to negotiate how much power it wants with the power adapter, and a well-behaving power adapter would refuse to output anything above the minimal current without the negotiation happening.

Worrying unnecessarily. The USB PD spec requires negotiation of delivered power - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver....

> Or am I worrying about this unnecessarily?

You are. Provide a lot of amps. Each device will take just as much as it needs. So err on the side of more watts - it will even help your batteries charge faster.

The only thing that can be diminished with fast charging is the number of battery cycles (the battery lifetime) so set a low charging engage (only charge if <= 50%) and a high ceiling (stop charge if >90%) in your bios: this will increase your battery life.

Source: all my devices use USB-C. They all share the same AC adapter with power delivery, and a Lenovo Dock also USB-C with PD.

No USB-C charging = I don't buy.

The rule to maximize life of Li-Ion batteries is to keep them between 20% and 80%. Total charge and discharge current cause wear, especially in extreme states of charge. The number of cycles only matters when you assume a given amount of charge in each cycle.

The batteries of my 7 years old previous laptop, which was used mostly stationarily and mostly kept at 75-80% state of charge, are still at above 90% capacity. I don't fully trust the >90% reported, but the batteries are quite obviously still good.

I got excited at the idea that I could set those thresholds on my MacBook (like on a Tesla) but then realized when you said BIOS that you’re talking about a PC.

USB-C is probably smarter and more unified in this regard, but back in USB 2.0 land the devices negotiated how much power they need/can accept, and compliant adapters wound themselves down as appropriate: https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/design/technical-document...

What is “unnecessary feature bloat”?

Do you think something like “gosh, I _hate_ all these additional ports” about MBP 2015? There’s a reason it is still holds (not much, but) some value on second-hand market.

> There’s a reason it is still holds (not much, but) some value on second-hand market.

Not much? A base model 15" 2015 RMBP is still easily $800+ on eBay. Unheard of for a 6 year old laptop.

Yeah that's the price of a mid level 2020 laptop methinks

They did hit a sweet spot with the MBP 2015. They did have to replace my screen under a special warranty program for manufacturing defects but it's still a perfectly fine laptop I use all the time. It's a bit on the heavier side for travel and I'm sure its battery life is not what it was--and was never super in the first place.

I'll almost certainly get an Apple Silicon laptop at some point but I'm not in any rush especially at a time when I'm not traveling.

I do hate the extra ports when at the beach.

It’s easy enough to find usb-c rubber gaskets to keep sea salt air out, but not for arbitrary ports or slots.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BPNBNJ5/

On the list of most marginally relevant edge cases, I think "beach proof design" ranks pretty high.

Wait, isn’t this the digital nomad site? Call it Thailand proof if you prefer. :-)

"Designed (and used primarily) in California"

If you really want or need MagSafe, as I do, you can have it with USB-C only Macs too.

There are many magnetic adapters you can buy, the good ones working better than the original MagSafe 2, which easily fell off when using MacBooks on your Lap, due to the connector being T shaped (instead of MagSafe 1 being L shaped, which worked great).

I also hope they don‘t bring back SD card readers and big clunky HDMI ports into the MacBook lineup, potentially reducing the amount of USB-C ports and making some models thicker.

I hope they don't bring back USB-A, but the SD card slot and hdmi have been sorely missed. If you do anything with photography, being able to just plug the card directly into your laptop makes a world of difference. Same thing with walking into any meeting and already knowing you'll be able to plug into a projector if needed, without having to run out and grab a dongle.

Others never use SD and have a USB-C to A dongle permanently plugged in (me). The ideal exact connectors probably differ a lot per person, and at least USB-C+Thunderbolt can support everything.

HDMI is probably the least controversial, although there will also be people who never connect external displays.

> The ideal exact connectors probably differ a lot per person

Agreed. All I really need is more USB-C ports. Both my current MacBook Air and my upcoming MacBook Pro have only two USB-C ports and I don’t understand why they didn’t make them with four USB-C ports.

Its limited by CPU PCI connectors, adding more ports needs a lot more bandwidth, uses more power and needs more pins. The low end models are not expected to have these, but the larger more power hungry ones will.

>The ideal exact connectors probably differ a lot per person

While I'd probably prefer more ports, there's certainly an argument to keep things simple with USB-C and let most people buy their adapter of choice.

With respect to HDMI, it's very common in offices and for people speaking at events, but most consumers wouldn't use it much.

> With respect to HDMI, it's very common in offices and for people speaking at events, but most consumers wouldn't use it much.

Completely false. Most cheaper CONSUMER monitors today come with only two inputs: HDMI and VGA. More expensive ones come with Displayport in addition. All TVs have HDMI ports. What else, aside from monitors and TVs, are consumers connecting their laptops to??

Agreed. It probably should have occurred to me before, but a lot of the Wacom and Huion drawing tablets with screens use HDMI for display and some kind of USB for input. Obviously that would be better if they were upgraded to thunderbolt models that could do both, but that would of course require another $1000+ upgrade for those users on top of the laptop.

Of course the real question is how much more quickly does thunderbolt get adopted when nobody's Macbooks have HDMI, which is probably one that Apple is asking themselves. They've never shied away from pushing industries forward to accommodate them.

I have noticed that it seems like more windows users at work are also using thunderbolt for displays on small and light laptops

If you do anything with photography, you are carrying around a camera, batteries, and lenses anyway. Just buy a 12$ card reader and put it into your camera bag with all your other expensive stuff.

It surprises me that people who buy high-dollar computers are so reluctant to buy an extra cable. TB3 natively supports DP at faster speeds than HDMI 2.0b can push. You can buy a TB3 to DP1.4 cable online for $15. Even the most expensive cable for this purpose sold on Apple's web store costs $50. I suppose you can ask your office manager to buy a couple for the meeting rooms, in order to accommodate Mac users.

Maybe consider that it’s more nuanced in real life.

That $12 card reader, even expensive USB-3 card readers, are often a lot slower than that builtin one. They get lost and broken, not even considering that when you’re on the go, many photographers will absolutely try to shed as much unnecessary weight as possible, as not many people are built like the hulk or have an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting.

I use my laptop a lot outside of an office, and having that multitude of builtin ports is an absolute must, as dongles are quite difficult to deal with in situations when I don’t have a flat surface to put the laptop on. That TB/Ethernet dongle I regularly do have to use has been a great source of frustration.

I bought a new MacBook Air last year, and a USB A/C adapter with it. I somehow lost the adapter. Bought another one. Then bought a dual A/C USB thumb drive. I'm getting along, but would appreciate at least one USB-A port.

I am also a photographer, and miss the SD port. But I realize that's kinda niche, and can understand it going away. I wouldn't be surprised to see cameras move away from SD cards eventually anyway.

The speed of the SD is far more limiting than the speed of the card reader itself, even for USB2.0.

As for whether I consider the nuances of "real life," I traveled by land across several countries with a DSLR, and took hundreds of photos a week. My DSLR has a CF slot and an SD slot; I used the SD slot for a wifi chip, and saved all photos to CF. My CF reader hasn't gotten lost or broken, and I didn't have "an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting" (whatever that means when talking about a card reader).

In real life, you can just use an external card reader. It's not a big limitation, just like it's not a big limitation that laptops these days don't have optical drives.

USB 2.0 tops out at a theoretical 60MB/s, and in reality it is much slower, far below the read speeds of fast SD cards.

I appreciate that it’s good enough under some circumstances, but not always. Certainly not when taking several cards worth of photos a day, with only very limited time to do transfer, selection, and editing.

It's not about the cost, it's about UX. If I just did a full day of shooting photos, and I am in the hotel room looking at the photos, I don't want to dig through my bag and pull out the card reader, or to have a dongle hanging off of my laptop when I'm doing it. If I can just get the card out of the camera and throw it in the laptop it's so much nicer

Every single peripheral I own is USB-A. I've never seen USB-C-only as the default option on any peripheral in a store or Amazon. Not having USB-A on a laptop is just absurd to me.

I agree that it is the standard, but I wish it wasn't. USB-C is preferable in every way.

When the iMac came out, everyone thought it was crazy not to have a serial port on the outside, since that was the standard for mouse and keyboard. But pretty soon, everything was available for USB. In fact, you might not have all those USB-A peripherals if Apple hadn't cut the cord, so to speak.

So I don't mind the loss of USB-A as much because USB-C is a strict upgrade. But for the SD card reader and the HDMI those are sort of separate and common use cases.

Of the MANY different ones I have tried (both 24-pin tb3 and 20-pin usb-c) NONE of the magnetic adapters work the same as a regular connection. When they are plugged in and you close the lid (macbook pro m1), they keep the display active. When using a "proper" cable, the display sleeps.

If anyone has found one that works properly, please let me know where I can get one!

Edit: Not sure why I am getting downvotes for this... Care to enlighten me?

It's important to note these adapters go against the USB C spec.

Most consumers miss being able to simply connect their laptop to their tv with an HDMI cable, but they know they have no voice in this modern day enlightened absolutism.

There's are plenty of USB-C to HDMI cables and TVs also come with USB-C I outs these days. We're in a weird transition phase, but going back to multiple different ports would be silly.

transition phase that has lasted around what, 4 years already?

You can forget about TVs coming out without HDMI ports. There is currently no plan to have TVs with USB-C inputs only. So it is up to laptops to adapt, or more likely, that people need to carry adapters.

Also maybe gamer TVs or more expensive models have USB-C inputs, I certainly have never seen one. Even in the monitor space, USB-C is seen as a premium feature. Even 5 years after the first laptops with USB-C.

If Apple can make a Magsafe cable for USB C that would be the best of both worlds. (I know third parties have made them but Apple would probably do a better implementation)

I also can't wait for the removal of the Touchbar. This prevented me from buying previous Macbooks because it was just one compromise too far for such an expensive machine.

Is this Apple's "Coke Classic" moment?

Doesn't Apple generally make worse cables than the competition?

It is very rare for a PC laptop power cable to break. There's a rubber grommet which protects the cable as it enters the plug from extreme and repeated bending.

For supposed aesthetics, Apple don't include this, and their cables fray easily.

(This is based on my experience managing hardware for a small organization, <50 staff. After about 5 years, Apple laptops come back with damage to the shiny screen from rubbing against the keyboard, and usually a wrecked power supply cable. Sometimes we have to replace the PSU within the 5 years. The rest of the laptop is usually in good condition, i.e. the case, keyboard, ports.

Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc business laptops come back with the cables in good condition, the matt screens suffer less even with similar keyboard marks, but the cases usually look a bit scruffy. Depending on usage, we might have replaced the battery after ~3 years, which is either easily done by the user, or takes 5 minutes with a normal screwdriver to remove the back case.)

Apple's cables are bad. Never been a problem for me because I take care of them, but people shouldn't have to be as careful as I am.

Very rare? Come on. I still have that Dell somewhere which had cable frayed right where its stress relief mold ended.

"rare" != "unique"

I have a stack of old laptops 2 feet high, and my old Dell that frayed at the strain relief is the only one whose cable crapped out.

I've never seen cables as bad as Apple's. I have multiple Apple cables that I've patched up with electrical tape, and I'm quite careful to avoid kinking them.

> It is very rare for a PC laptop power cable to break.

The failure was usually the plug breaking loose from the board. (Both on PC laptops and old Powerbooks with the barrel plug.)

The problem with the TouchBar is that it disrupt the flow of attention towards the keys. The cool thing about having just ONE screen is that you can forget about looking your fingers because the content is fixed (not dynamic) and therefore can be internalized. The TB doesn't solve any problem, and by the way, it created a UX's hiccup because:

Attention is limited. Focus is limited. Flow is limited.

Don't break that Apple.

Agreed but let's also give credit to Apple for trying to innovate. The TouchBar wasn't a bad idea just that it probably wasn't tested thoroughly with all types of users. It more seems like a "I think everyone's going to love it" kind of a designer's idea. Anyway, would happily buy a model without it.

Lenovo did the same thing years before apple with the X1 carbon gen II. It was a disaster and got removed from later models (thank God).

Yup, they tried. It's not something to blame them for but I don't think it was a good idea to have a dynamic touch screen at your fingers when you're supposed to be watching your screen to interface. The TouchBar breaks everything about Typing that has existed for decades now.

> so I can maintain my one-cable-for-everything, making traveling lighter and simpler.

you mean one-cable-plus-12-50€-adapters right ? ffs most projectors are still VGA

> There are a few things about the TouchBar I do like -- eg, having a custom one-touch screen lock button that's always present.

The trackpad preferences allows one or more corners to be assigned to locking the screen. One swipe away works well.

I agree and also don't see a need to go back. As what always happens with these rumors, people filter it through the lens they want.

Already mentioned elsewhere, MagSafe could just mean there will be a charger for the iPhone in handset portion of the new MBP. Ports can also mean a lot of things, even releasing an Apple branded dock of some sort. Imagine a branded dock that you just set the MBP on and it charges and has a bunch of ports that can be used? That is much more Applely than adding usb-a back.

The Touch Bar has been on life support for awhile. When Apple never released a version for the desktop, they relegated it to a niche feature regardless of how useful it could have been.

Anyone who shoots photos or videos on a real camera uses SD cards near-constantly.

It wouldn't affect your not using the port for them to include it. Adding magsafe doesn't mean not supporting usb-c charging, or removing any usb-c ports.

Your take obviously isn't that controversial: the maker of the best laptops in the world agrees with you, or at least they did at one time.

It's really annoying though that I still have to stick SD cards into readers; my Fuji X-T4 doesn't support acting as a proper SD card reader and CaptureOne 20 can't fetch images off camera devices ... meanwhile the camera is plugged in for USB-C charging anyway...

It sucks that camera manufacturers don't do basic shit half the time like act like an SD card reader when plugged in, or use USB 3 speeds vs save $3 by making their interface USB 2 speed vs USB 3.

> the maker of the best laptops in the world agrees with you

Who exactly would that be in your opinion?

I wish. Nikon uses XQD

An extra port is not inconvenient - you just won't use it. A missing port is SUPER inconvenient.

Can't tell you how annoying it is to require a USB-A dongle or adapter, same with HDMI.

The extra port competes with USB-C. If Apple wants to make USB-C more valuable to users, they must ensure companies make more products for it and, therefore, remove such redundant ports.

I have an HDMI monitor connected to my MacBook via a USB-C to HDMI/USB dongle, which also charges the computer, keyboard and trackpad, and another another via a UDB-C to DisplayPort cable.

I've been using my SDcard based camera less and less, both because my phones got much better and because they are much smaller. With an iPhone, which is a pretty decent camera, everything happens transparently and all my photos are automagically imported.

A reasonable docking station/port extender is small and has all those ports. I keep one in my backpack (even though I used it like once while traveling).

I really prefer it this way. I'd also love if Apple went back into making monitors that could charge my Mac and offer plenty of rarely used ports on its back.

There just are not enough ports on the pro laptops. 3 usable USB-c (monitor, monitor, keyboard/mouse/sdcard/network/legacy dock) and power. Docking stations only go so far as high resolution monitor/power passthrough and for those of use who end up using those features daily, our machines look like they were blessed by the flying spaghettis monster. 2-3 more USB-c ports would be a boon. Even freeing up one extra with a maglock power connector would be lovely.

I catch my Bride doing her photography workflow on her old, replaced macbook because it has the sdcard handy, she won't mess with the rat's nest in her office, and lord knows where the half a dozen dongles went.

>The extra port competes with USB-C. If Apple wants to make USB-C more valuable to users, they must ensure companies make more products for it and, therefore, remove such redundant ports.

The userbase of all tech products is too big for this to be reasonable now. This attitude was only successful during a time when fewer people overall each owned fewer devices individually. USB-A won and it will be around forever. HDMI won and it will be around forever.

HDMI will probably be around for TVs, but with USB 4 I imagine we're 5-10 years from most of the current ports going away completely, except for a collection of USB C ports of different levels (3, 3.x, 4).

Importantly, HDMI will be around for projectors. Almost every meeting room and every class room everywhere in the world has a beamer and an HDMI cable on the desk. I don't think this is going to change in the next 5 years. It took more than 10 years for most of the world to upgrade from VGA to HDMI cables, and HDMI works fine technically, so there's less pressure to upgrade to USB-C.

So for the foreseeable future, if you ever do a presentation, and you have a Mac, you are going to bring a dongle.

If you're a teacher and you don't want to deal with an unreliable dongle 5 times a day, the most convenient Mac for you is currently the 2015 Macbook Pro with its built-in HDMI port.

It was like that with VGA and now it's not. It may not change in 5 years - it took longer for VGA to finish dying.

Or just do what my company started doing: chain a dongle to the projector. If you have a Type-C port, use the dongle. If you have HDMI, use the direct HDMI cable.

This $30 dongle is cheaper than upgrading all the projectors to support Type-C, and still allows older PCs to use HDMI.

Not really sure what's unreliable about USB-C to HDMI dongles... sure if you buy a crappy one they have issues, but good ones aren't expensive these days (at least, for projector resolution. YMMV if you're trying to do 4k or something)

Other than storage, no peripherals care about USB 4. We can't get away from USB-A because all of the devices that MATTER use it and its variations. Even today no one that I've seen makes a USB-C to USB-Micro (or USB-Mini - yes, I still have multiple products that use that) cable. I have no interest in having to chain multiple adaptors off all my computers for everything I do. Keyboards, mice, printers, cameras, microphones, audio adapters, gaming controllers, smartwatches, sensors, Arduino boards -- none of these things need any more speed or any more power. They don't want a new connector and they don't want to pay royalty fees for use of a new connector. The only things that might benefit from USB 4 are monitors (and how often to people replace monitors anyway? I ran my U2410s for a decade and only replaced them because I wanted a higher refresh rate) and storage devices (and to be honest I don't use external storage that often since online storage is so simple these days).

> Even today no one that I've seen makes a USB-C to USB-Micro (or USB-Mini - yes, I still have multiple products that use that) cable

Here. You don't need a special cable - you need a small adapter: https://www.wish.com/product/5ae06f0a7ddb0672b9a704b9?share=...

Section 2.2 of the USB Type-C Specification[1] explicitly forbids this kind of adapter:

USB Type-C receptacle to USB legacy adapters are explicitly not defined or allowed. Such adapters would allow many invalid and potentially unsafe cable connections to be constructed by users.

[1]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...

> Other than storage, no peripherals care about USB 4.

Video??? The comparison was with HDMI.

Also thanks for missing my main point about USB C...

You mean like this? https://www.cablematters.com/pc-714-123-usb-20-type-c-usb-c-...

And this? https://www.cablematters.com/pc-655-123-usb-20-type-c-usb-c-...

You can even have USB-B: https://www.cablematters.com/pc-652-123-usb-20-type-c-usb-c-...

That's a long time for people to spend extra money on apple equipment and use shitty dongles.

(apologies to dongle teams who basically put custom computers inside cables)

I'm all in on USB-C as a personal user, including a docking station and a bunch of dongles.

But USB-C's port/cable standards are such a huge mess that there will probably never be a time when you can walk into a random conference room and find a USB-C video plug which 'just works'. The reality is Mac users come into meetings with a dongle hanging off their machine. And maybe Apple finally realized that's not a good look.

This is like a homeowner saying "cars should park in a garage".

But some people live in apartments and some people park their car most of the day at work.

This is a way of saying - not everyone parks their computer at home with a nice reliable setup completely under their control.

Some people - for many reasons - have to use setups that are out of their control. Those people will be second-class citizens, carrying an assortment of duct-tape with them (dongles).

> An extra port is not inconvenient

An extra port:

- is e-waste for everyone who never uses it

- reduces the rigidity of the case

- increases costs

- adds weight

- takes up space

- lets in dust and potentially liquid spills

You can see why people who never use them say ‘no thanks’. Isn’t it better that the people who do want them take on the costs of the port via a dongle?

- e-waste? Perhaps a microscopic amount of circuitry is added.

- case rigidity? The 2015 MBP case is fine.

- increases cost? No proof of this at all.

- adds weight? Again, a microscopic amount of weight to the laptop, far offset by the weight of dongles.

- takes up space? There's plenty of space to add this.

- lets in dust and liquid? The keyboard is a far more likely culprit.

I mean... no? If there’s a trade off involved then the “best” solution is the one that works for me at the cost of inconveniencing others :) I don’t think you’ll convince people to think otherwise.

> If there’s a trade off involved then the “best” solution is the one that works for me at the cost of inconveniencing others :)

But Apple aren't just trying to please you - they're trying to please most people. Most people don't use SD cards or USB-A devices anymore. The few who do can still do it using dongles, but the majority get a better laptop without them.

Doesn’t this article that shows Apple is backtracking on that by reintroducing ports completely contradict what you’re saying?

> Doesn’t this article that shows Apple is backtracking on that by reintroducing ports completely contradict what you’re saying?

Maybe Apple changed their mind, yes (it's just a rumour at the moment), but I'm explaining why Apple does it the way they do at the moment. That was their thinking.

And you can't 'contradict' people's opinion on the way things should be done!

Do you really believe most people don’t use USB-A devices anymore? Even the iPhone 11 is USB-A and that was the newest until like three months ago lol

> Even the iPhone 11 is USB-A

Not sure what you mean - the iPhone 11 is Lightning, which is usually plugged into a charger not a laptop. I doubt many people plug their phones into the laptops anymore - syncing has been done over wireless for many years now.

I doubt 95% of users even sync anymore. The only reason you used to do that was for podcasts, music, and backing up. Now, that’s mostly pointless thanks to streaming services and backups you can do in the cloud.

It has nothing to do with syncing. Many people charge their phone off their laptop using the cable.

> Many people charge their phone off their laptop using the (USB-A) cable.

Why would you do that? It's going to be super-slow - I don't believe it supports Fast Charging as the port can't handle the minimum 20 W.

Well plugging an iPhone 11 into the wall with the included cable would be 5W and the phone itself only supports up to 18W. So yeah plugging it into the wall will be super slow too.

So yes some people will buy a USB C to lightning cable for their older iPhone and a better wall adapter but most people will just use the included charger.

The lightning is the iPhone end, that hasn’t changed to USB C. The USB A that goes to either the wall block or your computer to charge only became USB C three months ago. People constantly plug their phones into their MacBooks or other computers in order to charge them. It’s often not convenient to plug the phone into the wall and use it since the outlet may be behind furniture. It’s much more convenient to use the phone while it’s plugged into the laptop you’re already using.

It’s not about syncing at all

If you don’t understand this use case, then I wouldn’t make bold claims that *most* users never use USB A as it’s certainly false

I'd like to see some kind of metric to quantify, but I'd wager most people outside of the Apple ecosystem don't use USB-C at all.

Even within the Apple ecosystem, so many devices exist that use USB-A that I don't think that most people could accept the assertion that "most people don't use USB-A devices" without some kind of proof (like the sort of usability studies Jony Ive must've used for toilet paper at Apple)

> I'd wager most people outside of the Apple ecosystem don't use USB-C at all

But almost all the Android phones are USB-C aren't they?

Other manufacturers' laptops are also often USB-C for charging. And other brands of things like wireless headphones. Apple uses it less than other brands, as they still have Lightning in many places.

Don't use USB-A devices?

I'm sorry for the crude language but that's absolute bullshit.

Since 2015 we have had all this clutter in the meeting rooms with different chargers, adaptors for monitors, projectors etc. In fact every mac user I know has a little hub to run everything! I'm currently using a Thinkpad and I have never felt that I had too many ports! I don't carry any adaptors.

Exactly. I have a Lenovo P51 and I’m in the same boat. I have usb-a, usb-c, mini display port, hdmi and Ethernet on my laptop and don’t need to carry any adaptors. It’s glorious. I use all of them regularly.

on site at a client fresh after they started upgrading people to USB-C/thunderbolt MBPs/Airs...

Very quickly meetings started with question of "who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort? We would like to start in 15s instead of 15 minutes of fighting with dongles..."

Anecdotes are not data. I can easily counter yours with mine:

I use such a dongle a lot whenever I am presenting on conferences etc, and have been doing so for many years (even before the all-out for USB-C/Thunderbolt on MacBooks, there were no VGA ports, while many projectors still were; now I see a lot of HDMI, but still need the adaptor).

And I habe yet to have a single issue caused by that! Sure, damaged VGA cables and other weirdness, but never ever anything tracing back to the dongle.

In the same time I helped lots of people who struggled with their laptops with builtin VGA/HDMI Granted, usually not the laptops fault but rather PEBKAC / or people not knowing how to control Windows / Linux. Doesn't really matter: my point is that I see zero correlation between dongle usage and projector troubles.

>> Anecdotes are not data.

Yes they are. The singular form of data is datum, not anecdote.

A personal experience is a data point. A 2nd hand story may well be an anecdote. "I have this and use it for that" is very much data in this case.

Is it enough to make product design decisions? No. Should Apple throw it out as an outlier? I would argue no - to think one person is a special snowflake with a unique problem is a mistake too.

HDMI to VGA conversion, even through displayport connector, is much simpler topic than properly handling USB-C feature negotiation, and as I mentioned in another comment, it was common for USB-C dongles to exhibit problems, especially on macOS (non-Apple branded dongles tended to have better success rate on non-mac systems, Apple-branded dongles were consistently problematic on everything).

Usual case was that with dongles, the display wasn't detected, at all, and having spent quite a bit of time fiddling with it, it didn't seem fixable.

My org has an entire batch of OEM USB-C to HDMI dongles which work great on Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft laptops but will reliably cause Macs to crash and reboot within 5 minutes.

    Very quickly meetings started with question of 
    "who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort? 
    We would like to start in 15s instead of 15 
    minutes of fighting with dongles..."

I don't understand this.

There are plenty of arguments against against going all-in on USB-C and forcing people to buy/carry multiple dongles. I don't like dongles myself! I still use a (pre-USB C) 2015 MacBook Pro, partially for that reason. I greatly prefer common ports such as HDMI to be built right into the laptop.

But "15 minutes of fighting with dongles?" Even if there's some comic exaggeration here, I don't understand.

Of all my gripes with Mac laptop dongles, "fighting" with them is not on the list. They are as plug and play as it gets. No drivers, etc... I hate carrying them but they're not exactly difficult to use.

The only way I can imagine people "fighting" with dongles is if they were nontechnical users who had difficulties simply plugging a cable in.

The reality was that quite often the dongles did not work properly. Using official Apple USB-C AV dongle (with USB-C, USB-A and HDMI) had people scrambling for "oh, maybe this one will work", screens randomly not displaying, etc.

I personally strongly suspect that they had a broken batch of dongles, seeing as how trying to use them on other systems often resulted in display detection issues too.

Then there was of course "oh, I forgot the HDMI dongle"/"Someone took the one that was in the meeting room" and so on.

The end result was that it soon become normal for people to push against updating the laptops.

Apple dongles normally work really well, which combines with the RDF to make people not believe stories like this until it happens to them.

Paraphrasing what I said in another comment, dongles are flaky. If yours aren't, congratulations, but that doesn't mean other people are lying or that they don't know how things work.

That's why I suspected they had a whole flaky batch - the dongles were too reliably not working for different case.

But your random non-technical person only faced the fact that the chances of quickly setting up a meeting went down if the presenter needed a dongle.

Unless you happen to have a cheap 3rd party dongle, use 2.4GHz wifi, and have to have internet access while doing your presentation or whatever. (3rd party dongles often have bad shielding and it interferes with 2.4GHz signal, it's a pretty widespread issue. You cannot really "fight it," though, you need to get another dongle.)

Oh, I forgot the interference issues - those are very "fun" even for deeply experienced technical people.

So it took you 4 hours to connect the projector to the hdmi port on your p51. My MacBook worked in seconds.

See what fun we have when we lie and exaggerate.

Only companies with disfunctional IT departments who didn't bother to install streaming devices to the big screens.

I worked in multiple companies that used streaming rather than physical connections for meeting presentations, and they were always so much worse and less reliable than just using a cable, dongle or not. Best case scenario it worked but there was a several second lag. There were a few meeting rooms that had the old fashioned physical hookups and those were always fought after because at least they worked reliably.

The last reliably streamable setup I've seen involved Plan B, a system built on top of Plan 9, and it was far on the weird side of the universe.

Many "streamable" options often end up actually using HDMI dongles, if working at all. Or work with very limited set of systems (the weird apparently undocumented reverse-RDP for projectors in Windows, intel-proprietary streaming, etc.)

Isn't this the reason to push for no more ports than the USB-C. After the Macbook become USB-C only, manufacturers started to move to USB-C instead of USB-A and some of them include an adapter.

The quicker we move, the better. It'll be a little painful at first, but then we'll have only USB-C for everything.

When I buy a computer, I want something that makes my life better. I do not want something that deliberately makes my life worse to achieve a strategic goal for Apple Computer.

We saw the same thing with Flash. Apple didn't like Flash and wanted it dead. They couldn't manage to kill it off through negotiation or outreach or by offering a better alternative, so they instead decided to weaponize the iPhone by refusing to support Flash at all. Their angry customers then killed Flash for them.

They did offer something better: HTML5.

Don’t blame Apple for Flash’s demise. Blame Adobe. They allowed it to become the inefficient, security rats nest that it was.

The web is amazingly better now that Flash has been relegated to its best use: historical animations and games.

And HTML5 did not kill off Flash. People kept right on using Flash until Apple sicced millions of angry iPhone users on them.

I thank Apple for Flash's demise. I had no love for Flash. What I blame Apple for is treating their customers as pawns in a game. They sold their customers a broken product so they could gain leverage.

> web is amazingly better now that Flash has been relegated to its best use: historical animations and games

Is it though? All I see is millions of bloated websites that all look the same thanks to lack of Flash, and not much success with html5 to really replace Flash.

My thoughts exactly. I don’t want to sacrifice my own convenience for the sake of a company, which by the way, doesn’t even bother including a freaking adapter in their other product, the iphone.

Which was a net positive for the Internet? But this is not a companies' war, but rather a specs war (USB vs A bunch). Apple is not pushing for its own interests only on this one, but for the interest of everyone.

That is entirely irrelevant to my point. Apple used its monopoly power to make its users buy an inferior product so that others would have no choice but to adapt. How many of those users, given the option, would choose to buy a machine with no Flash support or with only one type of port?

It is, by the way, absolutely not a clear advantage to get rid of old ports. USB C is about five years old. It is absolutely ludicrous to claim that any peripheral older than USB C is obsolete. That goes double for audio equipment. I have decades-old equipment that is still excellent by modern standards, but Apple has decided it's got to go because the 3.5mm headphone jack is unfashionable. If I were an Apple customer I would have no choice but to throw out all my electronics every few years or carry around a suitcase of adapters.

I’ve been hearing this argument for years now. Years of pain, and I still don’t feel like we’re any closer to this supposed future. Maybe it was a mistake?

I think we just started. I was shipping for an external hard-drive recently and USB-C seems to be the new standard.

I charge my phone on my laptop charger, and charge my laptop on my dock. When I want to undock my laptop, I disconnect a single cable. I have two monitors that can run off a phone or a laptop using just a USB cable (no power supply). I can even charge my MBP off a Lenovo charger without a second thought.

None of this was possible prior to those "years of pain." I personally welcome our USB-C overlords.

Charging standardization is only a small part of what was promised via USB-C though.

Why not both. Allow Magsafe charging and USB-C, have USB-A ports/HDMI as well as USB-C. There is no space constraint on the devices. Most of the edge is unpopulated.

I’m in the market for a reliable single 2xUSB-C power brick — could I ask which one you’re using?

I have a 65W Baseus 2x USB-C with 1x USB3 port charger that's pretty good. The only problem with it is that when a device is plugged in and it "splits" the wattage between the ports, it temporarily cuts off the power (I'm talking like 100-200ms or so) to the devices. I had some issues trying to power a Thunderbolt 3 dock with it. Anything with a battery is no issue, though (phone, laptop, etc). I also assume any multi port charger is going to have similar issues, all the ones I've seen do the "wattage splitting" thing when there's more than one device plugged in.

> eg, having a custom one-touch screen lock button that's always present

Do you know that clicking the TouchID button will lock your screen?

Indeed. So does ⌘⌃q (Command+Control+q).

If they remove USB-C charging they won't be compliant with the spec anymore which means they can't use the USB logo in their marketing materials

I hate to break it to you but Apple’s marketing materials don’t rely on the USB logo to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Not a fan of Apple's USB-C port implementation. Loosened ports that no longer "click" when a cable is plugged in is a common problem [1], and plagued my MacBook Pro straight out of the box. Even after getting it fixed under AppleCare, planting the laptop on a cradle at my standing desk, then leaving it there for months with no activity due to WFH for the pandemic, a dozen cable insertions of a USB-C drive last week and it started on one of the ports again.

If Louis Rossman had a more permanent fix with a third-party compatible port part that is far more durable, I'd send my now-un-AppleCare'd laptop to him in a heartbeat.

[1] https://appletoolbox.com/are-your-macbook-usb-c-ports-loose/

I love the idea of standard ports everywhere, I just wish it was apple or some other good multidisciplinary design team that had designed the standard. Lightning and MagSafe are the best out there. They feel satisfying to use; the lightning click is the phone equivalent of the German car door clunk, likewise with MagSafe, I also like that the connector tells me if its charging or not with the green/orange light on the connector. They are resistant to dust and electrically reliable. They fail safe; The lightning connector in the cable breaks, unlike mini/micro USB which knackers the port in your device if you bend it by accident. If you trip over the MagSafe cable it just pops off. The standardised ports seem to have mechanical and experiential design as an afterthought. In terms of the physical connector (not the capabilities of the port), USB-C feels like a step backwards from lightning.

I’m with you, for all the listed reasons. Travel is so much easier now that I’ve usb-c-ified all the things. The only thing I wasn’t able to find a usb-c option for (back in the dizzy) was a 4g modem, but that’s ok I just stopped using it altogether and started tethering my phone or iPad instead. I often use my iPad Pro as a second screen, so usb-c there also. I do carry a small dongle that I got just in case, but I think I’ve used it maybe five times in the past two years.

I really don’t miss MagSafe, and I find the MagSafe usb-c adaptor solutions one can easily get these days to be quite a good compromise for those that truly want it.

The only thing bothering me is that lightning connectors are still a thing on iPhones. The second they release a usb-c phone I’m getting it. Usb-c all the things!

Oh almost forgot, hard pass on replacing the Touch Bar though. I know people hate it, but for me it’s much more useful than Fn-keys. I don’t miss them, and once the Touch Bar with a physical escape key showed up that was it – perfection. I hope they keep Touch Bar as an option at least, brilliant piece of design in my opinion.

As always, mileage varies etc.

A "halo" market segment for mac books is video and photography professionals who make extremely heavy use of SD cards. Appealing to this group (who are also willing to pay a premium) has always been a feature of macs. Devs, not so much.

I have a MacBook Air 2012 with an SD card reader.

It has a 256GB SSD drive, and a 1 TB SD Card inside that I use for storing photos, video, music, etc. essentially everything that does not need fast storage.

This laptop was only meant to be a 1 year temporary solution, so I’ve been waiting 9 years to upgrade.

I’ve yet to find a new reasonably priced MacBook with 1,256Gb of built in storage.

Carrying an external drive sucks.

Unless Apple makes 1-2 Tb SSDs lower in price to the 100$ mark, the lack of an SD card is a killer for me.

Paying 500$ for an extra 256GB SSD when I can get 1 Tb SD card for 100$ is just ridiculous.

This is sort of unreasonable too hot too cold type thinking.

If you need a certain price point for a certain feature, why not expand to not limiting your search to only one manufacturer, which seems to be your binding constraint here since you’ve delayed updating 7 years, instead of expecting a manufacturer that has less than 10% of the total market share of an industry to meet you needs?

>why not expand to not limiting your search to only one manufacturer

Software. People become accustomed to the closed ecosystem of OSX, which you can't duplicate on others' hardware. This is a key facet of Apple's business model and as GP poster illustrates, it works. Apple can screw up the hardware for 7 years, and GP poster will simply wait for them to come back to doing it right.

More like a computer is a combination of hardware and software.

A different vendor product with cheaper storage can still be a much worse value proposition than my 2012 MacBook Air.

The problem here is that the Parent you are replying to assumes “storage” is the only issue why I haven’t upgraded. That’s an incorrect assumption.

I haven’t upgraded because paying >1000$ should add value over my MacBook Air 2012, yet for me all laptops in the market do not add enough value to justify the cost.

A new MacBook with 1 TB SSD storage sets you over 2000$, but the value just isn’t there.

Everybody’s mom is recommending an M1 these days, yet crappy webcam, support for 1 monitor only, expensive storage, low ram, being 1st gen of apples arm lineage with 1st gen flaws, no MagSafe, ... make it a bad value proposition right now for me compared with my 2012 air which doesn’t have most of these flaws.. sure it is better in many aspects, but it is also much worse in others (eg 1 external monitor support is a deal breaker for me)

True, well expressed. Which of the other macOS based laptop manufacturers would you recommend to them?

Apple could just make 2TB MacBook price cheaper instead of bringing back SD card reader into new models.

I didn't like having only 256GB SSD either in my Razer laptop and just bought a 2TB one, changed it in a few hours myself, and never thought about SSD space since.

Too true. Apples extra tax on storage is horrible. Baseline model with 256 GB drive of which half is required for the OS to function normally if you use is as something other than an iPad is crazy to release in 2020.

The price difference between 8GB/256GB and 16GB/1TB is insane.

I agree all the way up to the 16” pro. When you hit that form factor it now has plenty of room for more ports and I find them useful.

Apple is pretty smart when adding features most of the time. Maybe they just add strips of magnets to a usb-c so you can still use the port with a normal usb-c cable and still benefit of magsafe with the proprietary adapter. Anyway, I did enjoy MagSafe when it was there but I don't think Apple will go back. They'd rather focus on making sure you only have to charge your laptop at night.

I use SD cards daily to transfer data from cameras or different devices for further processing. It is handy to be able to just slide it in. I also have a dongle in an other laptop which works fine, but you need to be careful with these - I bought one cheaper dongle and it totally destroyed my SD card upon inserting. Unfortunately there was no backup as there was original material on it. So now I first do backup on a trusted SD card reader and then use it anywhere else.

The dramatic decline in camera sales has been discussed a few times on HN, here's a random google result: https://www.mirrorlessrumors.com/dont-look-at-this-graph-sho...

Cameras are rapidly turning into a niche product, it makes no sense for any laptop manufacturer to include an SD card reader at this point.

That's interesting. I also use SD cards to transfer data from my phone (I make tons of photos). I used to do it by connecting via USB cable, but after a couple of months the USB-C port worn out and no longer works, so for me the only reasonable way to get the data out is through an SD card. I tried things like setting up network server and sending files wirelessly but that was flaky.

You're an outlier. Most people don't take and process as many photos as you, and if they do, the processing is Instagram filters :-) Also the need to transfer photos around has decreased drastically with social media sharing and cloud storage.

You'll see in the next few years that smartphones, tablets, laptops will cater less and less to your needs. Sad... But probably inevitable.

Good observation. I use cloud sporadically - for example if I have just a couple of photos and feel lazy, I send them to Google Drive and then download on my PC, but I can imagine people use it all the time thus no need to have SD cards laying around.

Cameras are used for multiple professional purposes, including videography and commercial photography. SD cards are also used in devices such as Zoom audio recorders, which I often use for recording music. Especially right now, I'll loan a Zoom and a nice mic to a musician so that they can record tracks for me remotely.

They're also the standard boot device for computers like the Raspberry Pi. Basically, they're a professional tool which one might expect in a professional laptop.

Apple stopped catering to that kind of professional when Jobs died.

Apple is taking away ports so their devices will be more likely to survive falling into water. That is the kind of "professional" Apple is catering to.

Is a Macbook Pro from 2020 more likely to survive falling into water than one from 2015?

Even there, though, there are many competing standards. My MacBook has an SD card reader, but I need an adapter to plug the microSD cards from my Raspberry Pi into it. My camera's CompactFlash cards require a USB adapter. To use the high-speed SD cards, I need to bypass the built-in SD card port and use a USB adapter, anyway.

So it turns out it's easier to just buy a multi-card adapter. My computer's built-in SD port never gets any use anymore, not even for full-size, non-UHC SD cards.

Regarding videography: professional digital video isn’t usually recorded to SD cards (nor was it ever, ever since “professional digital video” became a thing.) 4K RAW was “too big” when that was what videographers worked with; and 8K RAW is “too big” now. It’s not just that you’ll fill up the card before you’re done a single recording session; often an SD card just won’t have the IO bandwidth to persist writes at the speed the camera wants to stream them in at. (How do smartphones do it? By having lots of RAM for buffering, and expecting that you won’t record for very long.) The SD Forum is always trying to bring new SD interfaces to market to up the total bandwidth; but the needs of professional videography always outpace the implementations of those standards arriving in the market.

What we do instead:

• DSLRs, when used as video cameras in professional workflows, are usually wired directly to a computer, streaming down the wire like a webcam.

• Purpose-built professional video cameras record directly to SSDs (either regular ones, like Samsung T7s; or proprietary ones, like RED’s “mini-mags”) that you’re expected to mount to your computer over USB — either by them being regular USB3 devices themselves; or, in the proprietary case, by the manufacturer selling a USB dock you’re supposed to buy for your editing workstations.

Regarding commercial photography: SD cards have gotten so large — and wi-fi sync so fast — that even the largest RAW photos sync instantly and hardly make a dent in your storage. There’s no real point in taking a 512GB SD card out of a camera.

Keep in mind, integrated ports are only really a demand of professionals when urgent, portable connectivity is a requirement; i.e. when even the time required to find and plug in a dongle would be SLAs broken and revenue lost. This was a true need for professional photography when SD cards were small, as you’d often fill up an SD card in the field and need to “dump it out” onto your laptop to continue shooting (or swap it for another while handing off the first to your editor to establish a pipeline.) Today, it’s not.

None of the other tasks you listed have ever been urgent, in-the-field tasks; they’re tasks where you do have time to go back home/to the office, and plug in an SD-card reader dongle to do the task.

Exactly, SD card support would be largely meaningless as far as professional work is concerned.

My Sigma fp has to record 12-bit CinemaDNG to an external SSD (SD cards larger than 64 GB can’t maintain the required throughput and 64 GB is enough for probably minutes). I might use the SD recording capability if I take the camera for a leisure photowalk (as far from professional work as it gets); I keep reminding myself to simply get a Wi-Fi enabled SD card so that I never have to take it out.

A memory card format that might be a bit more relevant here is CFexpress; but then again, it’s unlikely that as a professional you’d ever use your laptop’s built-in reader for this as opposed to sticking it into a box that automatically copies everything onto a 4TB HDD while you fill up another card.

By the way, tethered operation (wired or wireless) is used in professional photography as well, not just videography.

On the other hand Macs are heavily used by audio and video professionals, the Pro in the name doesn’t just refer to developers.

In fact doesn’t nearly every story on Mac dissatisfaction always have someone mentioning that high end A/V users are the real Mac target demo, not devs?

SD card support is largely meaningless to high-end professionals, few use memory cards and even fewer would bother with a built-in reader in professional work. There’s tethering (wired or wireless) for studio photography, cameras with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for when you’re on the go, high-speed SSDs or CFexpress cards for 8K 10-bit footage, etc.

Hobbyists, vloggers, even mid-range professionals (wedding photographers et al.) might use SD cards, but that’s pretty far from high end.

It's almost like something interesting was happening in early 2020...

The same graph for the rest of the year. http://www.cipa.jp/stats/documents/e/dw-202011_e.pdf

Camera sales are lower than previous years. AI pictures look unnerving; but it's definitely the way things will go.

I don't think it's fair to represent that graph as the death of the standalone camera, at least with regard to the 2020 data. The fact that nobody could go anywhere or be with anyone probably had a lot to do with it.

Camera sales on a whole peaked in the 2000’s and have been on a massive decline ever since. Smartphones are where photography is at for most consumers today.

Supporting an SD card is silly unless you plan to support many formats. At that point, you may as well just use an external card reader or just plug in the camera directly.

Ditto on the request to retain USB-C charging. The ability to charge phones + Chromebooks + a MacBook in my house with interchangeable power blocks and cables is a huge benefit. MagSafe just isn't worth it.

Agreed on MagSafe + USB-C. What I find interesting is the interpretation of this bit:

- There will be additional I/O ports

I’m pretty sure that simply more USB-C ports also fits that description. I don’t know why someone would assume that means SD card slots are coming back. I don’t see a future where Apple has SD slots on notebooks.

Then get a MacBook Air? The whole point of the MacBook Pro was that it was feature rich.

The amount of dongles and crap I have to carry around with me to make effective use of a “pro” laptop is ridiculous. Good on Apple for fixing it.

Agreed. I do hope they keep USB-C. The one cable that works for all was actually a convenience for me as I could charge a macbook, ipad, and even a samsung galaxy phone all with the same single cable.

FYI if you didn't know - even if it is widely known I have not known about super basic features hidden behind UI - you can use hot corners to lock screen very quickly. I use bottom right corner.

"Keeping it simple" is how we got here. People are unhappy because ports were removed. I want my microSD port back, and I don't think it will hurt you if you don't use it. Even if you pour coffee in it, it will just fuse itself off as long as there's a properly engineered rubber gasket in it.

You do bring good points about usb-c/magsafe. I hope they can make magsafe work with the usb-c port.

People were unhappy about the loss of the physical headphone port too .... for a short while. Then most of us went over to Bluetooth and stopped complaining.

Sometimes removing ports is dumb, sometimes it’s a smart reflection of what trends are clearly already happening.

Some of us in androidland continue to buy phones specifically because the headphone jack offers a quality of life improvement more than whatever other features are offered in place of the jack.

Some of you, yes. But most people just bought (or already had) bluetooth headphones and moved on.

I also have bluetooth headphones, but I prefer not having to worry about battery, prefer the sound quality, love the simplicity (pairing doesn't exist), and enjoy the utility (can plug into anything with an aux cord).

I can justify any inconvenience. I can justify additional expense. But in this case, I choose not to. If you choose to justify the inconvenience, that's on you—but acknowledge that it exists.

I still buy Android phones with headphone jacks, and am happy to have them. From what I've seen there is no advantage size, weight or waterproofing-wise for foregoing it.

The side effect is that I can't buy the flagship models anymore since they usually don't have headphone jacks. Oh well. Also, yes I have bluetooth headphones. One of which also supports 3.5mm input. I use both. With my phone I primarily use the bluetooth, with my laptop and tablet I use the 3.5mm jack and if I am in a car without bluetooth or a friend's house, I can hook up the 3.5mm cable to my phone.

I drank the USB-C kool-aid that Apple proposed but it just completely failed in practice. I now carry multiple different (and incompatible) USB-C cables which is in no way better than the magsafe + usb charger I had before.

Three years ago I had one USB-C charging brick with a lightning and USB-A cable and my macbook magsafe brick.

Now I carry a USB-C charging brick with a lightning cable for ipad and iphone, my USB-C charging brick for my macbook pro with a USB-C PD? cable, a USB-C -> USB-C cable for my external SSD (which I cannot use to charge my macbook and the charging cable of my macbook does not work with it). Additionally I have a USB-C to USB-A adapter with a USB mini cable for my headphones and mifi dongle and a separate adapter for HDMI and SD.

I ended up with more cables and I would be in that situation for at least two years more until the last mini USB devices are discarded. But even in that case I end up with multiple USB-C cables just because they are incompatible to each other.

You’re doing it wrong. You don’t need all of those cables. Get one that works with all of them.

You also only need one high watt brick not lots of different rated ones.

I agree with MagSafe basically being in the cord after the USB-C connector. That way we can use existing power cords or the new one with MagSafe if we want to.

Don't worry, once they do it, you will think how brilliant it is.

I have a dock that has all the connectivity options I need (an entirety of which can’t possibly fit in a portable device) while stationary, and it also charges my laptop. While on the go, I can pick dongles for what I need at the time. Most of the time it’s either nothing or a memory card reader.

The need for memory card reader becomes increasingly rare, as devices have AirDrop, cameras have Wi-Fi, and for larger files like CinemaDNG footage I’d have to use a portable SSD anyway which connects over USB-C.

Besides, memory card dongle dies and I buy a replacement for $20; built-in card reader dies and part of my laptop is dead weight until I send the whole thing in for service.

I can’t come up with anything I can imagine being useful as far as extra I/O is concerned, considering how blazing fast TB 2 and USB 4 already are; perhaps there are some novel connectivity options though.

> built-in card reader dies and part of my laptop is dead weight until I send the whole thing in for service.

Is this a frequent occurrence for you? I have a 6 year old MBP and all of the ports still work great. I would naively guess that P(port breaking) << P(dongle breaking).

Card reader in my old MBP died from what I presume is small debris stuck inside, and can’t be resurrected by manual cleaning anymore. For a time it was possible to use by inserting an SD card in a particular way, but that did not work reliably.

Ironically, that reader didn’t support microSD cards used by my audio recorder (Tascam DR-05), so once I lost the microSD to SD size adapter (which happened very quickly) I had to use a universal memory card reader dongle anyway.

I never sent it for repair: this was my daily driver so I had to have a backup machine in meantime, but when I got another laptop I simply switched to it.

My latest USB-C SD/microSD reader dongle feels surprisingly sturdy, though admittedly it is liable to getting lost (it’s been a year and it did not happen yet, but I’m sure it will at some point).

I’d say definitely P(port breaking) < P(dongle breaking or getting lost), but on the other hand port breaking has higher cost.

> I have never needed an SD card

I need to use SD cards for my camera and RPis. That's a significant amount of users that would buy Macs, even if you don't use them.

> and have gone all-in on USB-C

The move to Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C seemed to be hinged on the assumption that all new products would be USB-C. The prior removal of the headphone jack[1] and replacement of the lightning-adapter airbuds included with new iPhones set precedent to allow them to continue to simplify. But there's a big difference between (a) providing a replacement that effectively works the same way and (b) having a market based on being best and svelte, but expecting that the average customer can and will buy replacement lanky adapters and big ugly hubs that get in the way (especially when the cheaper ones can cause more interference[2]).

Apple once had a "Think Different" campaign, and perhaps that transmogrified to "Be the Change" in the 2010s. "Think Different" was about producing the best product, with a quality product that worked better, not about forcing customers to take on the burden of a mess, making their lives more difficult and looking out-of-control. "Be the Change" is activism which often causes problems for some, with a goal of things becoming better. "Think Different" works better in product design and development. "Be the Change" is for Human Resources and Marketing.

> Please just do MagSage + USB-C, so I can maintain my one-cable-for-everything, making traveling lighter and simpler. Here's my counter argument to all those that love MagSafe: makes traveling a huge hassle, forcing me to carry a special charge brick that only works for ONE device. In 2021 going forward, I will flat refuse to spend money on anything that doesn't use USB-C or Qi charging

It's expected to have Thunderbolt 3 (in form of USB-C) on it. I'd assume that they will allow charging the computer from it, as that's part of the spec of Thunderbolt 3; I'm not 100% on that, but as keeping that capability would be part of the Thunderbolt 3 spec which includes Thunderbolt, USB, DisplayPort, and 100W power input[3]. It just wouldn't charge as quickly.

This MagSafe will probably be the Qi-supporting MagSafe[3][4] which can be 15W for faster charging or 7.5W for Qi and will probably support the ring chargers, probably under the touchpad, given design choices from existing charging stands[5].

> I can now travel with a single 2xUSB-C power brick

And you would probably be able to do that, but it will charge faster with MagSafe.

> I am all for removing the TouchBar

Yep. I couldn't easily change brightness or volume when in context specific mode with the settings I had by default, and it was distracting.

It can be emulated[6].

[1]- 1/8" headphone that in some Macs had optical out: https://support.apple.com/en-za/guide/mac-help/cpmh0052/11.0...

[2]- https://www.zdnet.com/article/usb-3-and-usb-c-devices-can-ca...

[3]- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208368

[4]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagSafe

[5]- https://amazon.com/Kensington-SmartFit-Ergonomic-15-6-Inch-W...

[6]- https://github.com/sindresorhus/touch-bar-simulator

I’m with you. Maybe it’s something specific to being a techie and having a ton of peripherals, but being able to connect power, display, keyboard, mouse, webcam, backup drive, Ethernet, etc. with a single cable when I sit down at my desk was absolutely worth the somewhat pricey TB3 dock, especially when switching between work and personal devices.

I’m fine with them adding ports back as long as they still let you do PD into the TB3 ports. It’s still not super easy to determine exactly what features are supported by different devices/adapters/cables, especially when dealing with USB-C. However, it seems like a bit of a backslide on a bold move to push the state of the art forward that I believe was the right move.

Re: MagSafe, I honestly think they would be better off making a MagSafe adapter—a pair of small terminals which connect to the end of the power cable and the port that connect to each other magnetically. I imagine they could make this pretty low-profile and clean. But then it wouldn’t be exclusive to Apple’s own hardware, so I doubt they would ever go this route. A quick search turned up an existing adapter [1] that supports 100W PD and 40 GBPs data transfer so it’s definitely doable.

[1] https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/03/30/magrig-magnetic-usb-c...

My biggest wish would be for them to embrace standard display adapter technology and stick with usb c. I have a lot of thunderbolt docks that only work on Windows because of Apple’s outright refusal to support MST [1]. I recently switched to a Mac for work and this has been a major pain for my docking setup. Funny enough, it all works fine if you bootcamp your Mac since Windows supports MST. [1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251444928

Plenty of Windows laptops support TB3 docks, it is not something unique to Apple and definitely does not preclude having other ports on the machine for when you don't carry your TB3 dock.

Apple's approach to ports is bad design.

I think they were envisioning a USB-C revolution that hasn't come yet. You can buy new devices or buy adapters, but either way the computer is asking the user to adapt to it. I have a Razer laptop for playing games and they have some USB-C ports and some USB-A. One of the USB-C ports connects to the thunderbolt bus. On paper, the Razer has less connectivity bandwidth, but it's my macbook that I always fuss over.

I see the attraction in making all your ports USB-C, but that's just not where the computing world is yet. Give us 3 USB-C and 2 USB-A. Give us 2 of each and a specialized charging cable.

P.s. I would be more into the USB-C charger if I believed it was 100% safe to charge other devices with it, but I'm not sure that's true (even though I trust Apple - I'm not sure about the other devices)[1].

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/state-of-usb-c-870996/

But MagSafe solves a clear problem IMO, DC connectors are fragile and tripping on the cable will either harm the solder joints or make the whole machine fall.

Maybe a magsafe like adapter for usb-c then ?

Maybe a magsafe like adapter for usb-c then

That would be my preferred solution. USB-C port on the laptop, small MagSafe adapter, and then the charge cord with the other half of the MagSafe.

The value of a given port corresponds to the ubiquity and lifespan of the things that plug into it. HDMI is not going anywhere in the corporate world for the forseeable future. As for MagSafe, as long as they keep some USB-C ports you will presumably be able to charge that way too.

Yeah, people can be selfish when it comes to ports...

I bet during their market research, Apple had people like you in their focus groups.

This. Fully agree on usb-c (usb4). Magsafe in some shape or form and just MOAR usb4 ports would suffice.

I am all in with usb-c connector.

Industry is moving forward. Don’t rewind.

P.S. The article behind the link is based on rumors spread by “trusted” Apple “analyst”. Treat those accordingly.

All of these opinions (from this comment thread) perfectly sum up my view of the Touch Bar.

It's one of the reasons, aside from performance, that I believe that the M1 MacBook Air is currently the best laptop that Apple make.

> I am all for removing the TouchBar. The new MacBook Air with TouchID + physical function keys is a perfect combination of features. There are a few things about the TouchBar I do like -- eg, having a custom one-touch screen lock button that's always present. However vast majority of the time I use external keyboard+trackpad+monitor, so the touchbar can't be part of my usual workflow anyway. (BluSyn)

> while I believed in the initial promise of the touchbar (especially for specialty apps like DAWs, NLEs, etc), I welcome its removal now, and I think most do. (coldtea)

> I also can't wait for the removal of the Touchbar. This prevented me from buying previous Macbooks because it was just one compromise too far for such an expensive machine. (pharmakom)

> I like the touch bar but unless they find a way to make it feasible on a Bluetooth magic keyboard, I’d rather have no touch bar for consistency. If they are going to kill it they should have killed it with the first M1 MacBooks. (johnwalkr)

> The problem with the TouchBar is that it disrupt the flow of attention towards the keys. The cool thing about having just ONE screen is that you can forget about looking your fingers because the content is fixed (not dynamic) and therefore can be internalized. The TB doesn't solve any problem (ofou)

> the Touchbar should have been a new UI paradigm at the bottom of a touchscreen. I'd also dig a Touchbar accessory for my keyboard tray. Just saying. But for the love of god, keep it off my F-key row. (acjohnson55)

> No Touchbar. I love the idea, but it should be in addition to the Fn keys, on top of it, or in some other way. (maz1b)

> If they so wish their touchbars, why not to put them _above_ function keys ?! Make option to turn them off completely if required so they would not disturb at night or stand on the way. They never heard of people with muscle memory? (lovelyviking)

I bought a Microsoft Surface laptop 13” for work to test builds with. That laptop has a headphone port, USB-A, USB-C and a proprietary Microsoft port the power adapter plugs into. Don’t have that adapter handy while traveling? You can still charge it via the USB-C port with another charger. I can see Apple copying another facet of Microsoft’s Surface line. The other being the Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro.

That sounds like a terrible idea. Why have a proprietary charge port if it can also charge with USB-C?

Why would having multiple options be bad? It doesn't turn the usb c port into a useless port or anything?

> Why would having multiple options be bad?

Because this is how you end up with a Homer Car of a device.

That's a bit myopic. You can strike a balance.

You're argument is the same thing that led to "we should get rid of headphone jacks because we have Bluetooth."

Bluetooth is an option, its not the best option, but I wouldn't suggest removing Bluetooth because we have a headphone jack.

> You're argument is the same thing that led to "we should get rid of headphone jacks because we have Bluetooth."

I mean... yeah it's the same argument and I agree with both. When we got Bluetooth and decent ear pods... time to get rid of the headphone jack we don't want both, one is redundant. Simpler, cleaner, more uniform is better for these devices in my opinion.

I'm just one data point but thanks to "courage" I hardly ever use headphones on my iPhone anymore. I never have the lightning earpods with me, and it can't use any of the random headphones I had stashed in various useful locations. Bluetooth headphones don't really fit into my life either. Thanks, Jony.

Wireless headphones are an e-waste nightmare (in particular Airpods, designed to never be disassembled). When used with a mobile phone, their convenience is incredibly minor, and for me is more than offset by the need to keep them charged.

I agree with getting rid of dying interfaces, but this is a case where it makes way more sense to keep options available. Almost everyone uses audio, and different people have different priorities. Waterproofing the jack is easy, and phones still have enough space for them. The only way I can interpret their decision to remove that jack was to incentivize wireless headphone sales, and perhaps appeal to the small ultra minimalist crowd.

Does the fact that there's a tiny and cheap dongle not make it all ok? You can keep using whatever devices you want if you've got some special use-case. Just pop the dongle in. For everyone else... we don't have to add it to the devices and we get a better device.

Apple's 3.5mm audio dongles are honestly very well engineered and they're selling them at an uncharacteristically reasonable markup. Great DAC implementation. I use mine all the time.

I just don't believe most people think the device is better without the headphone jack. It's not a "special use-case". Deleting the jack has definitely driven some sales for wireless headphones to people who don't want to use the dongle, rather than a desire to get rid of the wire.

For some reason it's very hard to find a cheap and solid way to charge via Lightning and use wired audio at the same time. My workaround is to charge after I'm done listening. Probably good for reducing phone use, but it can be annoying on occasion.

Can't really connect my phone to venue sound systems by Bluetooth when teaching dance classes. And wouldn't want to have to be forced to choose between a 3.5mm adaptor and a charger...

This is the main reason I'm still on Android, since the last iPhone I would even consider buying was the original SE.

Do you realise that for your (extremely specialised) use-case you can get a dongle that gives you both 3.5mm and power at the same time? They're about $10.

Everyone else who doesn't need this doesn't have to pay for it by excluding it.

> This is the main reason I'm still on Android

For a $10 dongle? That's the critical decision in your mind?

Because it's a magnetic port similar to magsafe.

I had an XPS that had both and indeed it was useless to have a port for just charging. But if the charging port is also used for magsafe that makes it worth it.

The XPS 15 has a dedicated charging port that can draw much more power for the discrete GPU - up to 130W, but lets you charge it on the go with the USB-C port. You get full graphics performance with one but have the choice not to lug around a larger power brick on the go.

Why would I want only one option when I can have both?

Maybe because of the power requirements?

All kinds of reasons - my biggest one being why MagSafe was invented in the first place; I know my power cord is run across the living room due to a lack of power outlets in my 70-year-old apartment, and gets tripped over regularly. Not to mention a proprietary charger can free up a USB port for additional peripherals.

For those that don't get it, CPUs can only have so many USB-c ports wired up, it's all trade offs.

Wiring a charger through different circuitry gives you an extra port.

It's also easier to pump more wattage through and tends to be a bit more durable because thicker connectors can be used.

> For those that don't get it, CPUs can only have so many USB-c ports wired up

I don't get it. Why? And how many is "so many"?

Tripping over a power cable was a problem created by a battery life that was shorter than a work day, IMO. I have been charging my M1 Mac at night, like my phone.

Wait a couple years and you can say goodbye to your MBA superb battery capacity. Mine is now at 70% after only 3 years and less than 400 cycles. For all the buzz it receives, Apple does not really provide the highest quality. I’ve concluded that:

“Apple gives you awesome first impression and terrible relationship in the long term.”

This is a problem with all laptop batteries, not just Apple batteries.

I'm saying that the OP's reasoning for lack of magsafe is not relevant.

>Mine is now at 70% after only 3 year

70% of an M1 Macbook's battery capacity would still be enough to get you through a typical work day!

> “Apple gives you awesome first impression and terrible relationship in the long term.”

I’ve always heard the opposite. And in fact, my M1 Mac replaces an almost decade old MacBook.

A power strip might help.

It’s a bit redundant, but pretty far from being terrible. I have it on my laptop. Offhand it’s nice to leave the port free if you have a lot of usb needs. If anything it provides some flexibility. Can’t say it’s necessary but I certainly don’t mind it.

Yes, a terrible idea, like putting a motor on a sailboat! I mean, why would you ever need 2 methods of propulsion?! (Some boaters even bring oars and towline! Insane!)

That analogy is silly. Two methods of propulsion is a good idea - when the wind is not blowing then use the engine. If the engine runs out of petroleum use the engine.

Having a proprietary power interface and a USB C interface that does the same thing is ridiculous.

USB-C can’t charge nearly as quickly as a high power proprietary charger. In use USB-C needs to supply power for both charging and operating the laptop, so what might take 3 hours to charge with USB-C might take 20 minutes to charge with a dedicated connector.

That’s not to say every laptop’s proprietary charger will supply noticeably more than 100W, but many examples exist.

I'd be surprised if a 13" Surface doesn't charge well enough at 100W, though.

13” Surface laptops had up to 90Wh of battery. Batteries get hot when charging due to inefficiency, meaning it takes more than 90Wh to charge a 90Wh battery. Subtract the power demand while in use and your well over an hour to fully charge.

By comparison a quick charge to 80% in under 20 minutes while under full load should be possible assuming sufficient cooling and power. That’s not a huge deal most of the time, but it’s still plenty useful if your sharing a single outlet etc.

I’m sorry, what laptop charger has a brick that’s over 100W?

There are some. Thinkpads can go to 135 and if I recall correctly, maybe even 170W.

The bricks weigh as much as an ultrabook, though :-D

Here’s a 230W example: https://www.amazon.com/Charger-Adapter-GTX1070-RTX2070-RTX20...

Their still common with gaming laptops like Razor 15’s. It’s ancient at this point, but a friend used to have a dual GPU laptop that used 2 different AC adapters at the same time.

A bad attitude and a bad analogy. A second charging port is redundancy, a second motor is auxiliary.

Don't start about multiple usb ports because those are also auxiliary in purpose

Edit: Not making a judgement as to if a second charging point is a good idea or not. I don't care, why not.

You obviously don't sail. You need a motor on a sailboat to either fight a strong tide to dock, to escape an incoming storm if the wind is pushing you towards a storm. Many other uses such as regenerating the batteries so you have your food not spoil. Sails/masts/rigging also fail so you need a backup to get you to port in an emergency.

The true statement is that either I don't sail OR sarcasm is sometimes hard to pick up on the internet. I grew up cruising on my dad's sailboats, raced dinghies in college, and have owned a variety of sailboats myself, the last being a humble 35' Erikson. So, I would say it's the later.

Awesome a fellow salt. Sarcasm was definitely hard to pickup but glad you had so much fun on the boats. I picked it up later in life and would have been so nice to have done that as a kid.

The MS proprietary cable doesn't follow the USB-c spec and can therefore do a lot more (and I think it's still expandable). I think usbc is limited to 20V @ 5a?. And using USBC for charging takes up a data port. And many docks and stands make use of the MS port. And the MS cable is magnetic.

Obviously you’d never just remove the power port and not replace it with anything, you’d replace the power port with another USB-C port.

I have a Surface Go with a similar setup.

The proprietary one is a magnet-style and rests flush against the device.

USB-C is convenient to have, but the proprietary charger is much better if I'm going to be using the device while charging.

Except in practice, you get the worst of both worlds: a proprietary charger that looks like a USB-C. And even if it is proprietary, the Magsafe and similar ports are miles ahead of any USB-C charger in preventing tripping and IO port damage from dogs, children, and clumsy adults walking over the charger (granted, USB-C is a huge improvement over traditional round DC ports)

We went to Surfaces in my house for a while. They're by and large fine, but Windows 10 is sufficiently painful and hard to use that I'm bringing the family back to macs just to stop having to do so much tech support.

I'm excited about everything mentioned in the rumors, except for the "flat edge design similar to the iPhone 12". One of my favorite parts of the MacBook design is how easy it is to pick up off of a flat surface with one hand. The tapers help me slide my fingers underneath the computer to hold on. I feel like if there is a flat edge, it'll be hard to grip on the side unless you're using 2 hands.

What is like is one robust enough to pick up by the top of the screen like the thinkpads.

Also my Dell XPS is so bad if you pick it up by the corner of the unit it flexes enough for the touchpad to trigger clicks. Ugh.

Fair point.

I do think that they have a team in place to make these decisions and the experience you’re describing was thoroughly tested and designed already.

One thing they’re frequently berated for is an emphasis on visual aesthetics. But I think that’s a misunderstanding - they design for function, and the aesthetic pleasure comes from that function.

I suspect they will find a way to make these match the visual look that these leaks suggest, without abandoning what you’re talking about. Probably with some tapered edge shape or something like that.

Was this team on holiday when they designed the mouse to have it's charging port on the bottom?

I have to wonder if that design came about because Apple didn’t want people to leave the mouse plugged in all the time. It’s the kind of reasoned institutional blunder that I feel like I encounter in my work life fairly often out of momentum and groupthink.

I suspect the conversation was closer to “make it rechargeable, but don’t change anything else.”

You obviously can make an Apple style mouse that plugged in sensibly, but that would require changing the case and internal layout. The way they did it the new battery and charge port fit in the space left by the old AA’s.

They definitely have not been designing for function over form, at least while Jony Ive was there without Jobs to curtail his worst impulses.

I think everybody is forgetting that apple repurposed the name “MagSafe”.

I think “MagSafe and new ports” translate to having a magnetic area where you can place a iPhone 12 MagSafe charger or charge your iPhone 12.

What new keyboard translate to, I have no good guesses, but I do have a feeling that if you think it’ll be 2015 keyboard you’re in for a disappointment.

>I think everybody is forgetting that apple repurposed the name “MagSafe”.

Well, they could trivially just multi-use it for all kinds of magnetic+safe ports, whether they are the round iPhone ones or the more traditional ones.

>What new keyboard translate to, I have no good guesses, but I do have a feeling that if you think it’ll be 2015 keyboard you’re in for a disappointment.

They have already fixed the 2016-2019 keyboard issue in 2019 models, so why would people be "in for a dissapointment"? It's not like they'll go back to the 2016-2019 era keyboard mechanisms...

It's kind of funny, because the last laptop I purchased (and the one I am still using) was Apple's first retina MacBook Pro as soon as it was released in 2012. I've refused to upgrade since then because I felt that all of the newer MacBook's were inferior in some way. Now I'm finally thinking of upgrading again once the 16" is released, and it's sounding like the new laptop will look exactly like mine from 10 years ago.

I'm not a fan of MagSafe though. It's always falling out whenever I slightly move my laptop around. And my thought with the touchbar is that they should replace it with physical keys, however, the keys should have tiny OLED displays beneath them. That way, if you want the function keys back, it will look at exactly like the rest of the keys on the keyboard, but if you want some other type of button, that's possible too.

IMO the last model of a generation is usually the best wrt Apple laptops. They usually have more efficient processors that run cooler, at the least.

That 2012 laptop is amazing! I put an ssd in it and moved the original HDD into the CD slot for extra storage. Total powerhouse.

I have even installed Big Sur on mine and it runs fine. (Needs a patch though)

Author seems to hang a lot of faith on rumor. Maybe some of those rumored things will happen, but it's pretty unlikely that all of them will happen. (I'd be OK if the touchbar vanished though!)

Apple just announced a magnetic feature for their phones called "MagSafe". What's the chance that the revived MacBook feature called "MagSafe" won't be something phone related? A charging region on the notebook seems hard to believe but stranger things have shipped.

The author is also quite dismissive of the 12" MacBook which for me was a breakthrough product. I traveled around the world with one in my bag, wrote a ton of code, and often had to check to see if it was in my bag, it was so light. I'd still be using it except it turned out one day not to be rainstorm-proof :-(.

As for the SD slot: I asked Jobs about this in the early 2000s (this was around when PCMCIA was phasing out) and he was dismissive for the same reason: "Oh, you have an SD card? Do you also use CF? And Memory Stick?" This was painful because indeed, I used all three.

The fact is the TB3 (USB4) ports are powerful enough that they can connect to almost anything a user has. I know everybody's milage varies, but for me that's more powerful than a dedicated port I only use occasionally (as FW400 was for me) or never (FW800 in my experience).

On one hand, this seems like welcome news for many of us. Who doesn't miss MagSafe?

A lot of the previous years was like someone at Apple read Calvino's Six Memos and took the notes on "lightness" a little bit too far.

On the other hand, one wonders if we'll have to replace all the sleeves and bags that have been made with the previous dimensions in mind. Hopefully not. Even the new 16-inch MacBook Pro fits in sleeves and bags designed for the previous 15-inch.

Not only does the 16” fit the 15” sleeves, it’s nearly identical in dimensions and weight to the 15” models everyone praises before the bad keyboards. It’s basically a 2015 MBP with a slightly smaller bezel.

Apparently someone disagrees with this statement of facts about the measurable dimensions that are trivially verifiable.

> On one hand, this seems like welcome news for many of us. Who doesn't miss MagSafe?

I don't miss MagSafe 2. The laptops had gotten light enough that the selling point (would come detached if someone snagged the cord) meant that the magnet had to be weakened. The cord constantly came undone.

Bits attracted by the magnet would be lodged in the port sometimes, interfering with the charging in odd ways as well.

I had a lot of Magsafe 1 chargers, which compounded the frustration. I had to use a little magnetic dongle.

The cord was attached to the brick directly, so when it frayed (not if, when) you were out $100. Your brick was now a brick.

It was a big charger I couldn't use to charge anything else I travelled with (phone, ipad, headphones, etc), _and_ there were zero third party accessories (battery packs, etc) that worked with it because it was proprietary/patent protected.

If laptops have enough power to go 12+ hours on a single charge, the value of magsafe goes way down. I'm not operating the thing on a kitchen table with a cord draped down and across the room to the wall. I am charging it overnight.

Not to mention, there's a huge benefit of sitting down at a desk and having a single USB-C/TB cable to plug in to get connected to everything, including power.

If the choice was magsafe or USB-C charging, I'd pay extra for USB-C.

I'm typing this on a MagSafe laptop. I don't like MagSafe.

The cables fray and the MagSafe tips wear out, that means buying an entire new charger (or soldering on a donor cable), I'm on my 5th or 6th. The surfaces get dirty, and because they just butt up (rather than sliding) they become high resistance and heat up.

If MagSafe 2021 doesn't fuse the cable to the charger brick, then I might consider it. The fickle electrical connection is inherent to the design though.

All Apple cables fray because of design decisions around the stress relief area

I'm also typing this on a Magsafe laptop going since 2011 but I'd doubt if it would still be good if it was a plugged in connector, as my previous laptops died around that area.

My 16” still fits in the sleeve I’ve bought for my first Macbook Pro. The 15” 2006 model.

I don't miss MagSafe.

I enjoy being able to sit on my kitchen table and plug USB-C cable on the right. And if my favorite chair is used by my cat, I can sit on the other side and plug the cable on the left. On the other side of the cable is a third-party charger that I'm using to charge my iPhone (with damn Lightning-USBC cable, when will Apple drop Lightning?), iPad and Nintendo Switch. And when I sit on my desktop, I connect my laptop to the monitor with just one (USB-C) cable.

Previously, I had to have two separate proprietary chargers and hope that the cable don't break; now I can just buy another USB-C cable anywhere.

Weird. My 2016 12” MacBook is still almost my favourite machine. I say almost because the M1’s speed is _incredible_, but I do miss the smaller size and flatter keyboard.

Honestly I've never understood why laptops are so strongly associated with developer culture.

They are inefficient and conflated machines - two things that tend to be contradictory with software engineering.

More practically, many people find themselves completely dependent on Apple's design whims.

Mac Pros (or server racks in general) are closer to the kinds of machines that we deploy to (they use Xeons for one thing). They don't overheat so easily.

Their 'sea of cores' approach enables more productive workflows and tooling.

And one gets to use his favorite peripherals, in an ergonomic position (instead of slouching around a laptop).

After having built a Ryzen Mini ITX setup about a month ago, I have to totally agree. Soooo smooth.

I feel like the migration to open floor plans and offices where you need to take your knowledge base everywhere (e.g., conference rooms) has lead to laptops being the default loadout for many companies.

One of the best things about being a software developer in 2021 is that I can do it from almost anywhere.

I'm not lugging my Mac Pro to a cafe. I'm certainly not taking it on a trip.

For my development needs and work style I much prefer a laptop that I can dock at any workstation or just work off the laptop.

I recently worked off my laptop while in a car on a road trip. I just wouldn’t have that capability otherwise.

I just recently ditched my workstation for a dock and like it a lot better. I kind of miss having the dedicated computer in the home-office, rather than always having to transport my laptop from wherever it is. But I definitely like having a single machine to configure and everything being consistent.

Meetings are generally held in meeting rooms (well, pre-Covid that is). In meetings, you typically have something to present or discuss over.

It's generally better for employees to have a single machine (that they're very familiar with) to present on rather than having a machine per employee in addition to a machine per meeting room.

Perhaps some day we can just present from our phones and even use them as a pointer at the same time.

All my presentation materials are in the cloud somewhere, I don't need to bring a computer anywhere these days.

In most cases, I fully agree.

But there's the hefty edge case (for developers at least) of showing off a piece of code that essentially requires a developer environment to be running. It's simply not possible to create a developer environment quickly enough in a meeting room for it to be practical.

You an remote into your machine.

I'd question why you're running code in a meeting. That's some morning standup stuff for your team which can be done at your desk or placed in a gif in an email, not hauled off to a separate room.

Meetings are for collaboration, not demos...

> Meetings are for collaboration, not demos...

Meetings can absolutely be used for demos. Maybe you're demoing for an audience that's large enough to not fit next to your desk. Maybe you're demoing something that you don't want other people to overhear. Maybe multiple people are all demoing projects to each other.

The parent provided a personal example of why they think laptops are useful for developers, and you attacked the example.

It's because networking is so bad now that remote access to your workstation can't be relied upon.

I think laptops are more convenient as primary developer machine with the CPU heavy tasks being delegated to cloud. Most tasks take less than or much more time than around 30 seconds. This is the division I roughly take for running locally or in cloud. At least that's the workflow for me and most developers I know of. Having a desktop forces you to work in just one position and this could could cause a lot of obvious inconveniences like not being able to work in cafe or in both home and office.

> They are inefficient and conflated machines - two things that tend to be contradictory with software engineering.

Perhaps by your set of metrics.

For me, it's the best option because I always have exactly what I need with me - locally. I can work from home, a coffee shop, an airplane, conference room, a different couch/chair/table, etc without a second thought.

I also rarely need the full compute power of a desktop. Sure, it'd help with cold builds - but incremental builds are so fast that it's just not worth being tethered to a desktop.

> They are inefficient and conflated machines - two things that tend to be contradictory with software engineering.

They are a monitor with some processing ability, and we ask Apple to push ergonomics to the max.

> I've never understood

This is the reason :)

It’s so that engineering orgs can get you to work from home in addition to the workplace. They force you to take the laptop with you and then will try to make you work from home.

That is the only reason. Everything else is just seasoning.

The most common response is often working from a coffee shop or plane. I dont understand those either, how can you concentrate in a coffee shop? How many flights do you really take? - get a book.

Apple should bring back the 2015 MBP but with Apple Silicon and a USB-C port and call it the MBP Classic!

MBP SE

For $399 I would buy it!

MBP SE/30

For what it's worth, I have a fully specced out out 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro with 64gb of RAM and the 5600m upgrade, and I can frankly say that these rumored MacBooks are actually exciting compared to what I have.

What I feel strongly that Apple should do:

- Allow for USB-C AND MagSafe charging (MagSafe 2 would be ideal but I won't be upset if it's something else)

- Ensure that the 4 USB-C ports are all equally capable of bandwidth and don't suffer from any drawbacks in that regard.

- Great thermals / fan noise and still handle demanding workflows

- No Touchbar. I love the idea, but it should be in addition to the Fn keys, on top of it, or in some other way.

So cool. I probably am going to buy a MacBook if they bring everything back. Definitely buying something else if they don't. MacBooks look interesting but I'd rather buy something with an SD slot, physical F-keys, analog audio jack and at least 1 classic USB port to accompany Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports.

I dont think there's a particular reason to have USB-A when you can just use a usb-c-to-a adapter. Sure, you have to carry a dongle around but USB-C is just so much better in all aspects ( reliability, usage, speed, unidirectional). Plus it would keep the machine smaller (the physical height is an issue with the cases).

I know USB-C is better, but I also know the overwhelming majority of thumb drives (as well as other peripherals) around are USB-A. Doesn't being free from having to carry an extra dongle around feel good?

I don't insist it (a USB-A port) should be there but I would be pleased to have one. Its lack would mean I would have to always carry a dongle with me. Why not build it in if you always carry it with you anyway?

> Plus it would keep the machine smaller (the physical height is an issue with the cases).

Some extra millimetres are exactly the thing I absolutely couldn't care less about. Completely irrelevant. Definitely not willing to sacrifice, let alone pay anything for this.

I honestly view smaller as lighter, and that I do -really- care about. I travel a lot, so having something ultra portable was my favorite part of the MBP 13". I even had a smaller and lighter 45W usbC charger I could use for it. I really really really enjoyed that.

and I just kept a dongle in my travel kit with my charger and other cables, nbd :) (but yeah everyone is different, I'd probably just invest in USB-c thumb drives, or the ones that have ports on both end for C and A).

I used MacBook Air 2013 (which was not mine) a lot and appreciate how portable (and durable) it is very much. This is exactly why I feel like buying a MacBook perhaps. But it already is perfect and I certainly don't want it to be even more thin. I actually just want a MacBook Air 2013 with better CPU/RAM/SSD/GPU specs and a Thunderbolt 4 port added to the those already there.

As I have emphasized the difference between USB-C and USB-A is just some millimetres and this doesn't make a valuable difference. Of course I would appreciate the difference if it was a centimetre or more.

Anyone still remember Apple Remote?

It used to come free with your MacBook and is to this day one of my favorite features of my mid 2012 MBP that I will miss terribly once I have to upgrade (no Big Sur support...).

Yeah had one with my first gen intel iMac. Great idea that was. The whole machine got used as an audio source regularly.

I built the Turn Touch remote[1] to basically bring back the old Apple Remote features. Music and video control for your laptop.

[1]: turntouch.com

I almost never ended up using that remote, quite honestly. I got a lot more use out of the remote/stylus that my smartphone came with which I could use to play/pause media, take pictures from a distance, and obviously write or draw.

Yep, it was great. I used it regularly to give presentations, and many people were curious about the remote (where it came from, was it included, etc...).

I’m happy to give up thinness for SD card and HDMI. I use my MBP with a bunch of hardware samplers old and new which use SD for sample import and storage. I never use the Touch Bar and miss F keys dearly(development duties). The next MacBook that reverts back to the above is an instabuy.

Apple's previous MacBook plan was stupid stupid. I just can't bring myself to view 'several different ports' as a stroke of genius.

To save someone the time: 'it can't be stupid if it sold <x million> units'

It can still stupid be if a different obvious one could have sold more or made more profit.

For example, almost everyone thought the butterfly keys were a terrible idea. They sold a ton of devices with that, but then they switched back anyway.

I agree. Besides, there are many stupid decisions that sell better than smart ones, short term.

It sold well because the competition is still worse. It doesn't mean you should intentionally make it worse just because you can get away with it (there's an argument that making it worse to lower cost thus earning more profit, but I doubt the added complexity of USB-C made the new design any cheaper).

I think Apple needs to rethink and design products that are built for serviceability. That means the end user should be able to service most parts of the laptop themselves. No plastic prying tools should ever be needed to service a laptop.

Battery -> User replaceable under a hatch. SSD -> User replaceable RAM -> User replaceable Screen -> User replaceable Motherboard -> User replaceable Keyboard -> User replaceable. Wifi Network card -> User replaceable.

And with that I mean you design to make the product easy to repair. Using standard Philips or torx screws whenever possible.

Current Apple products means using a lots of dongles for what should be built in.

Make repair videos on how to mend broken parts, put those on video sharing platforms like Youtube.

We are having global warming, that needs that all products needs to be easy to repair so that we have less waste on the planet.

Isn’t the RAM basically integrated onto the SoC now?

With the M1 as-is, yes. However, it's entirely possible that future M1X or the like will keep RAM separate.

> Current Apple products means using a lots of dongles for what should be built in.

Who decides what should be built in? Some people might need SD card reader, others will need HDMI out, lan port is requested by others, I on the other hand don’t use any of that and would rather have my laptop to be lighter and thinner.

I don’t think most if these are possible with the recent form factors. I mean battery hatch / battery case itself would be a huge volume loss in the chasis.

People talk about repairability etc but at the end, most will demand the sexy and thin laptops.

Very excited. I got an Intel MBP in 2020, but these models have enough that I am willing to switch. The question is who will buy my maxed out Intel laptop when the M1 is faster and costs less? XD

Also wondering if this new version will have M1X or M2, just a M1 that supports more RAM or an M2 with updated architecture?

This is a really exciting development! Everything I miss from the 2013 MacBook Pro - no final word on what ports are being added or if they are bringing back the SD slot, but MagSafe, a working keyboard, and an escape key are themselves welcome.

The touch bar ended up being completely useless except for muting/unmuting zoom calls and smashing the left hand side seventeen times in a row until it finally registers as an escape key - I guess Apple devs don’t use vi. I was thrilled to have Touch ID at first but ultimately it only gets used in the control panel because apparently Apple doesn’t let anything else use it. I largely stopped using u2f keys because it was too much of a pain to dig up a usb-a dongle and I didn’t want to spend $50 on a usb-c form key that still doesn’t work on iOS.

If you are a vi user, you could consider using CTRL-[ instead of escape. I find this to be more comfortable and quicker to use anyways and you wouldn't need to use the touch bar anymore

I like mapping jk (and kj) to escape. For lefties I imagine df (and fd) would be more convenient. Both sequences are unlikely to appear in any words. They're on the home keys, so least effort to move your hands. https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

>Schiller had squashed all hope of the SD card returning ...

>Schiller said “probably not” but added that “nothing about the future is in stone and things can always change.”

what?

The last paragraph mentioning touchscreens is weird. Please don't add a touchscreen to a device running a desktop OS. 99% of people won't be using it anyway, but it would lead to those atrocious spacious phone-style UIs I despise so much.

Give a MacBook to a child and she will likely try to touch the screen. Because at this point a touch interface is expected by people.

Even me who is used to non touch screens user interfaces, I tend to touch the screen on a non touchscreen laptop once in a while. It's frustrating that it doesn't work, because it does work on my ThinkPad and I enjoy it.

Apple not having a touchscreen option on their high end laptops is weird, since they did so well with the iPhone and the iPad.

At least that would help developers to implement touch interfaces for iOs. Or not feel dated for the younger generations.

IMO it's important to maintain a clear separation and not blur the line between desktops and tablets. Desktop UIs are dense, they're your tools to get your job done as efficiently as possible. You can position the mouse pointer quickly and with great precision, so there is no need for ample spacing between the controls.

It's okay when a professional tool has some learning curve to it, but after you're past that, it's a joy to use.

And no, desktop UI design shouldn't be informed by phones and tablets. When designing a desktop UI, you should pretend touchscreens were never invented.

That being said, I do know one person who has a Windows laptop with a touchscreen and does occasionally tap or scroll something on it. Myself, as someone who has never owned one of these, I maintain this clear separation between mobile and desktop in my head and have never had the thought of touching my laptop screen except to clean it.

The current trend in user interfaces is not to design for desktop but for mobile first, because that's where the large majority of users are.

Of course you have exceptions, when a company develops an application only for desktop for example or when a company can afford developing and maintaining many versions of one user interface.

Already today it's very fine to use a laptop with a touchscreen on most websites. And actually most of desktop apps are also possible to use while not always super nice. The screens are quite large so it's not that bad to hit a specific area.

I agree the mouse is a lot more precise when you are good with a mouse, but a mouse also needs more training than a touch screen to be used fast and accurately.

It will always be a market for old fashioned desktop apps, maybe Apple is going for it, perhaps some GNU/Linux folks too, but I think the industry is not targeting devices without touch interfaces.

You aren't making much sense.

If someone is making a desktop app, how could it possibly be mobile first? Even if you're using the cancer that is Electron, that design with a lot of whitespace is always deliberate.

I'm not saying that it's not fine to use a touchscreen laptop for something. I'm saying that no one uses them like that with any kind of seriousness because it's awkward and physically inconvenient to poke your fingers into a vertical surface in front of you for any extended period of time. There are laptops capable of folding such that the screen faces outward, but these are as rare as they were 8 years ago, so this has never caught on either.

> I'm saying that no one uses them like that with any kind of seriousness because it's awkward and physically inconvenient to poke your fingers into a vertical surface in front of you for any extended period of time.

I think users of Windows laptops have embraced touchscreens in spite of these downsides, because a touchscreen is still less bad than the touchpads on those laptops. But Apple doesn't have the problem of bad touchpads, so they have no reason to compensate with touchscreens.

I feel the same about Apple laptops not having a TrackPoint which is why they need to compensate with a good trackpad. ;)

But seriously, I think the larger advantage I see of touchscreens on Windows devices and potentially future MacBooks is pen support (with pressure-sensitivity) and a 360° foldable display so you can write on it for taking notes or annotating documents. Apple has already started down this road with the iPad and Pencil, so I think it's conceivable to see a full convergence at some point.

I have no problem with the touchpad on my XPS, but I find the touchscreen quite useful.

* Have to log kid into Teams classroom in the morning: pick up laptop, tap calendar, tap meeting, tap join, done. Much quicker than dragging a pointer around everywhere.

* Cooking dinner, greasy fingertips, want to skip songs: tap Skip with my knuckle.

* Looking at pictures, maps, reading a website, etc with family or looking through numbers with coworker: quicker and more engaging to zoom in on something with a touchscreen than a touchpad.

* Perusing Netflix at night, I find it nicer to keep my laptop in my lap and swipe though things.

There's no awkward "gorilla arm" thing involved: you pull the laptop in closer for a bit and your elbows stay on the table. When you're done you move back.

I mean, it's not a game changer, not something I use more than a couple times a day, short durations each, but there's lots of times when it's super convenient to have a laptop with a touchscreen. I think Apple really missed the ball on this one, and continues to do so.

None of your points seem at all convincing to me. It's like you haven't used a good touchpad. If you say things like "Much quicker than dragging a pointer around everywhere", then your current touchpad sucks. If it ever feels like you're dragging the cursor around, then you're dealing with a touchpad that has inadequate sensitivity and precision that forces the cursor speed to be set unreasonably slow. Likewise for your complaint about zooming. A good touchpad is every bit as responsive as a touchscreen, and you're not blocking half the screen with your opaque hand.

And on top of the touchscreen offering almost no advantages over a truly good touchpad, Apple's touchpads have haptic feedback that isn't really possible with a laptop-sized touchscreen. They also support a wider array of multi-touch gestures than most touchscreen software can recognize, and that's before getting into third-party software that adds more gestures, such that touchpad gestures can replace about half of the keyboard shortcuts I use.

I use an MBP for work. If I had a macbook for my personal laptop, I'd still prefer touchscreen for all the use cases above. I wouldn't think I'm the only one either, but maybe I'm wrong.

I don't see what Apple gains by not at least offering it as an option. That way people who didn't want one wouldn't have to get it. I'd pay maybe $150 extra for it. I'd also bet it would outsell the non-touchscreens ten to one.

The Apple touchpads are good, probably the best, but they are not good enough to replace a touch screen.

Similarly, the old iPod click wheels were good, probably the best at their time, but they have been replaced by a touch screen for the better.

About the touchpad gestures, I prefer gestures on my touch screen personally.

Most apps nowadays are mobile apps or web apps. A few are put in Electron for desktop, very few are made for desktop first.

Yes a touchscreen can be inconvenient in some positions. That's why you have devices such as the Surface pro or the foldable laptops you mention.

In general, where there is a touchscreen, there is a dumbed-down UI with significantly reduced functionality.

Touchscreen devices are great for content consumption and communication. But not so much for creating anything.

General purpose computers, with precision input devices, are still required by many for getting serious work (and play) done.

I disagree there. It's very much easier to create content on a mobile device like a smartphone or an iPad. Professionals will prefer a desktop I guess but there are so many great user friendly apps for video editing, music, art, photography, with interfaces designed for touchscreens.

Think of the new M1 macs and how they can run iPad apps and how lots of developers opted out of their apps being offered for those new Macs because their apps are meant to be used on a touchscreen, not via trackpad and keyboard.

That opting-out is a good sign. Apple and their customers shouldn't want the Mac platform to become polluted with half-assed ports that retain a touch-oriented UI rather than designing a UI that's actually appropriate for desktops and laptops.

Agree 100%, this is a hill I will die on. The usual counter point is “well you don’t have to use it”, but once it’s there developers will inevitably start to change their software to account for it.

Not to mention that reaching out to touch a vertical surface is clumsy and unergonomic, even if the UI is designed for touch, like an iPad in a keyboard case (which I expect is why they added pointer support).

The only ports I want to see on a modern laptop is just a bunch of fully capable USB C ports. An SD card slot would be fine, and if there's something like MagSafe, I'd want USB C charging to still be possible so I can just travel with a single kind of charger and cable.

Lots of random USB-charging gadgets have switched to USB C. I like the idea of making USB A, one of the worst port designs of all time, die a slow painful death. I am very happy with my thumb drive-shaped portable card read that has USB C on one side and A on the other.

Let me introduce you to the db25 parallel port. How about the PS/2, which took about thirty seconds to align correctly.

An SD card is useful things other than just cameras it also is a great thing for 3d printers. Yes some printers have usb and maybe I should spend a day or figuring out ocotoprint but I usually just use my SD card and get on with printing. My lap has a MacBook Pro 2015. It’s both sturdy and has all the nice features plenty of usb-b ports and sd card slot... newer PCBs are finally shipping with usb c support but I don’t see things like the teensy having usb c anytime soon...

I still use my 2015 MacBook Pro. Built in hdmi port, card reader, USB ports, MagSafe charging.

After years of fighting with the broken butterfly keyboard, the missing ESC key (Vim!) and Apple’s recent ambitions in censorship, I finally made the move, after 15 years with Macbooks, to switch to a free and more transparent platform, as in “a system that respects the user’s freedom”. Yes, moving to System76 and their Pop! OS will come with efforts of re-abituation but I appreciate the freedom that comes with it.

I agree about the return of function keys and preservation of Touch ID, but that's hardly a prediction; it's what they're already doing as they roll out new machines.

If you think Apple is returning the SD slot or adding a dongle to the power cord, you don't know Apple. But maybe they've found a way to magnetically connect USB-C while still maintaining compatibility and avoiding dongles.

Magsafe, was great unless you had a 5 year old laptop. After the 50th time you had a small magnetic rock get lodged into the plug and scrape the laptop's magsafe port enough, it stops being magnetic.

I can't agree more on replacing the touch bar.

All the recent buzz about Apple’s supposed MBP updates traces back to a single source, which also has promised Apple AR glasses in 2020 (I bet this is why Bloomberg didn’t feel comfortable putting the name on the rumour).

The idea of additional I/O ports seems questionable, given performance of Thunderbolt 2 and USB 4.0 in latest devices. (Support for SD cards, which has the author so excited, seems especially dubious to me. Sure, there are professionals using SD cards, but just as well there are professionals using CF cards or microSD cards; it’d seem quite un-Apple to try to satisfy everyone.)

Then there’s the obvious stuff (microLED).

I'm sure someone smart will design a way for USB-C to plug into your MacBook without the risk of ripping out your I/O board if you trip over the cable.

We don't need magsafe, we just need some sort of clever springy socket.

The USB standard is pretty specific about connectors; I doubt the resulting connector would be licensed to be called USB.

I never needed an SD card until suddenly I needed one. And then there I was with one permanantly lodged in my old Air's SD port, with my music collection on it, because I needed more room on the HD.

I have been enjoying being able to dock my current Pro to the desk setup with one cable that carries power/video/audio/USB but I keep on eyeing my slowly-filling hard drive and worrying about what I'll do when I need more space. I hate carrying external drives around.

A "magsafe USBc" connector would be super awesome, IMHO.

There are a bunch of magnetic usb c adapters on Amazon for not very much money, I can’t speak to quality

Bring back matte screens too.

Glossy screens have been a disaster, not only ergonomically but also in terms of the never-ending "staingate" scandal of antireflective coating peeling off the screen.

Miss the matte screen on my 2008 MPB

Apple hardware is really top notch. I am a Linux person but if I squint hard enough I can use the Mac OS (with some swearing weaved in). But I cannot use that terrible keyboard. Why do I need key combos for page up/down? Why are they useless buttons like that top squiggle on the top left but no page up/down buttons (there is space for them). Why some things are Cmd+ and some are Ctrl+? Why no key travel?

I enjoy typing on the macbook more than my Lenovo now. I've just gotten used to it, I suppose.

The key combos take some learning - protip: Few things are "ctrl+" unless it is Firefox or terminal, in my experience.

I do agree in missing the nav buttons.

I have the newest XPS. It's a 15" laptop, it's huge. And yet, they've gone and put Home and End under F11 and F12. Meanwhile, Printscreen is under F10, which no one needs, and NOTHING is under F9. Also, F5 is covered with the brightness key! I can either refresh or have brightness, while F9, which is used nowhere, is blank.

There used to be such a nice last column along the rightmost edge of the keyboard with Home, Page Up, Page Down and End. Bring them back! It's stupid design to have.

The other thing, which I take is the same for the macbook, is that the trackpad is so huge that the edge of the keyboard digs into the forearms, causing pain for any reasonable length of use.

I've been using Thinkpads for a long time, currently on my second X1. That keyboard is bliss compared to the mac. And I have page up, down, home, end... I feel spoiled for navigation (not to mention actual Function keys).

Btw that squiggle button — I assume you mean ~ — is completely instrumental to programming and using a shell. It’s also the switcher key between windows of the same app (cmd-~ as opposed to cmd-tab).

No I don't mean the Tilda. That is my home man... I'm talking about the symbol I cannot name. Something like § and ±.

Of course Ive pushed the design this way. He also designed the Apple Watch to be a design centric device and didn’t want it to be about health.

I wonder if any of these design choices are what led to him leaving. I’m almost confident a consensus was around one of these major changes he bet on and leadership heard all the nasty feedback across the web. Maybe Ive took it personally and just decided his time was over.

Ive was terrible for Apple as soon as Jobs was no longer there to curb his worst impulses. He's a great designer, but he's the kinda guy you want designing your concept cars, not your production vehicles.

> …universally hated butterfly keyboards.

Not true. I would choose butterfly over a wobbly one (e.g. 2019 Macbook Pro).

> Nobody wants a dongle.

Not true. I do agree that an SD card slot is convenient to have. But I have no significant problems using an adaptor. USB-A feels like a thing from the past to me. So I am not sure I would want it on the laptop.

The HDMI is the only thing I would not mind to retain (because of overscan issues, etc.)

Cool! On top of this if they would reintroduce the headphone jack on the iPhone, they would completely redeem themselves in my books.

Now that’s just crazy talk. Apple? Never. That is one mistake they will ever walk back on. It took a LOT of courage[0] to remove it.

[0]. https://splinternews.com/profiles-in-courage-the-product-man...

I don’t care that they removed the analog in favor of digital, I'm annoyed that it’s just. One. Port. Give me two lightning ports so I can use headphones and charge without resorting to a dongle and I’ll go along with it. As it is I haven’t bought a new iPhone since my 6S plus.

I think it's a lot difficult for people NOT to change than to change. I do understand the reason: New employees seeking for ownership, teams need to grab for budget, etc. And I'd argue that keep changing is always better than NOT changing at all. The only thing is how to make more changes positive?

My guess is that the leads in the new MagSafe correspond to USB-C power rails, and if you plugged in a charger into the machine's USB-C port, it would charge just the same.

I mean, if I were Apple, I wouldn't settle for anything less.

Dongles are expensive and cumbersome. If Apple is adding back legacy ports, good on them.

I would like to pay more for a usb-c magsafe connector. Even 5x the cost of the current cheap cables would be worth it if it 1) actually worked 2) was standards compliant in all the ways that mattered. USB-C is a dice roll right now and the magnetic ones even moreso.

Lenovo tried the touch bar approach with the X1 Carbon. But it didn't work out, users complained, and the next generation of the X1 removed it again. I wonder how many laptop manufacturers will try this again, only to need to revert it...

Touch Bar is interesting - it's really nifty, but I feel like touch typists hate it, and non touch typists love it.

My personal totally long shot wish is that Apple would switch to an ortholinear keyboard (because everyone else will do it too then).

They should really just sell both version, I bought the new mac air precisely because it doesn't have a touch bar.

If you never have to look at the keyboard for anything ever, the touchbar takes away an useful row of keys and forces you to start looking down at the keyboard. I can't overstate how annoying someone who never has to look at the keyboard might find this.

https://robservatory.com/the-fundamental-problem-with-the-to...

"The Touch Bar, despite its name, is actually an Eye Bar: It forces your eyes off the screen, down to the Touch Bar, back up to the screen, repeat ad infinitum. There's nothing physical about interacting with the Touch Bar, aside from using your finger: There are no defined button areas, and there's no haptic feedback when you tap something. So you absolutely must look at the Touch Bar to interact with it.

When the new MacBooks were released, I spent about 30 minutes testing a Touch Bar-equipped version in an Apple Store, and this constant moving of my eyes' focus from keyboard to screen to keyboard to screen to…well, you get the idea…was incredibly disruptive. To use the Touch Bar, I'd have to change my focus to the keyboard, then refocus on the screen, taking time to find my active window and locate the mouse cursor. This did not make for a pleasant user experience."

I'm excited about this! Lotta different ways that could go but I'm hoping it's Magsafe-over-usbc so their whole lineup can be protected! (Well they need to ditch lightning on iPhones, but yeah).

Unrealistic though it may be, I'd rather they just stuffed a half dozen USB-C connectors on either side instead, and the world could stop making custom connectors for every different device.

Sounds too good to be true.

Related from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788129

Typing on our 2013 Mac Pro is downright luxurious and I wouldn’t trade it for any super thin anything. Would also pay thousands for an M2 motherboard upgrade. :D

Was thinking the same thing, given thermal envelope improvements made possible by M1/M1X/M2 would be so cool to be able to upgrade my perfectly viable MacBook Pro 2015 with a new logic board. Upgrade cycles are so wasteful.

Can't wait to see all the articles praising Apple for innovation next... We might even see a skeuomorphic UI again!

I want my glowing Apple logo back. The only thing good about the Touch Bar is fingerprint ID, but I can do without it

MacBook Pro wish 2021: rounded-edges end-to-end screen, that's the future, like the iPhone and iPad have.

I can't help but think this leak is bad for Apple's Mac business. It will be a while before these potentially superior Macs will be available, cannibalizing the sales of the existing line. I'm looking to replace my laptop soon and these potential features make me comfortable waiting and seeing.

I hope that they would make it chargeable from either the Magsafe or the USB-C, like the Surface.

I feel like Kuo has been subject to a honeypot.

I don't think there's any reason to bring back old ports or magSafe. I can totally understand getting rid of the touch bar though - but I don't even expect that to actually happen.

Given how long the god awful butterfly keyboard persisted, I don't expect these less awful feature (and some, like USB-C, is positive) to go.

Yes, that’s generally why companies don’t like leaks around new product announcements..

For all we know, this sort of thing might get leaked intentionally as a middle ground between between annoucing it and keeping it a secret.

The most interested and active users will know about leaked information, and they can put off buying decisions and have greater long term satisfaction. If you bought a machine and 2 months later, exactly what you wanted two months ago comes out, you probably won't enjoy that experience very much.

However, less discriminating users probably both won't know about the leak, and won't find certain things coming out quite as disappointing.

I think it probably works out decently for Apple even if they really don't want the leaks, much the way piracy probably helped Microsoft Windows by helping make it a complete de-factor standard (though Microsoft seemed aware of that and seemed not to crack down as hard as they might for that reason.)

Honestly, the thing that I like the most about this is the wonderful IBM 3278 terminal in the background. Those things were the best terminals I ever used (even though they couldn't scroll) and had the very best (although the loudest) keyboards ever built.

Which reminded me I released a new version of my 3270 font yesterday, so it's doubly fortunate.

Touch bar is great, but should be an ADD-ON above the function keys, not replacing them.

I am really happy that my macbook uses usb c. I'm sad to hear that it is going away.

Today, my Mac interoperates with all my other devices, I can keep one charger running to the edge of the couch.

It's not the end of the world to flip back to the magsafe, but it's definitely not ideal for me (and I suspect others.)

Who’s to say you couldn’t have both? HN cynics aside, given that Apple is invested in USB-C/Thunderbolt, I would imagine that you could charge with either MagSafe or USB-C

This would be great.

There's some rumors that it'll have Magsafe and USB-C.

I like the premise of a single universal port but over the years it turned out to be kind of bullshit because there is no single "USB Type C" - there's 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, USB4, Thunderbolt and god knows what else. There are all sorts of weird incompatible peripherals and even cables that at best will not work and at worst will fry your device. I like USB-C (whatever variety it is that allows for docks with display connectivity) as a docking port, but it failed to solve the connectivity problem otherwise - it's the same mess of weird ports underneath, but now without the ability to quickly guess with a good degree of confidence if a device will work with your computer or not based on the port shape.

I think I'd much rather have both USB-C and standard USB-A/HDMI/SD card ports.

It’s working for me. I like being able to plug my laptop, tablet, and switch into the same charger.

which charger does USB-C smart charging on 3 or more ports and can provide however many wats the new MBP needs while also charging the other devices?

There are no chargers on the market that have multiple ports and over 100W output across those ports, so you are pretty close just plugging the MBP in and the other devices into the MBP ports.

With PD 3.0, I believe manufacturers now have the _capability_ to do what you are talking about, but I don't know of any products yet.

FWIW, the closest I've seen so far is Hyppr's 100W 2-port charger. I use this in my bedroom to have a phone/watch charging stand and a free USB-C cable for the iPad. However, it does a straight 45W split with two devices attached - neither the charging stand nor iPad need 45W though.

Funny that you brought up the Switch, because its USB-C port is a huge mess: https://switchchargers.com/faq/ - you won't, for example, be able to use the same cable to connect both your laptop and your Switch to a monitor. You're also advised against using some laptop chargers. And so on.

I had to do a bit a of research, but I found an hdmi dongle and charger that work with both my switch and my MacBook and it’s been really nice for travelling.

There are several USB-C cables with magnetically-connected tips on AliExpress, it wouldn't seem too difficult to make a breakaway junction in a cable using that principle:

https://m.aliexpress.com/item/4000374403062.html

Yes to the physical keys instead of touch bar!

RAM is the feature I care about and Apple has always been stingy with RAM.

oh man... if they remove the touch bar I will be so happy. I have a macbook pro 2015 and I was planning to replace it next year with the M1 16 inches. That would be the perfect timing. Generation 2015 powa!

Since 2015 I cannot even choose Mac Book Pro that would just fit for work with all that idiocy with touch bars, malfunctioning keyboards, lack of SD card slot and idiotic dongles, instead of working horse that has everything you need and makes things simpler, not harder.

But even MBP 2015 had gracefully died just recently having the best user care from me you can possibly imagine. This really encourages to move away from Macs. I do not wish to pay premium money for shitty equipment.

This 2015 model have just fallen apart, starting with screws that by some unknown to me reason where unscrewing themselves and you cannot not tight them back because some idiot made them non standard to make sure you really cannot do it, not even with the knife.

Then I discovered that screen has traces of buttons after closing the lid. Then I discovered those small traces are unremovable. Nice design.

Then battery even with a proper care died anyway after third of a cycles it suppose to have.

Then SD Card slot was reading only some of the cards, while cheap neighbour’s laptop had no problem reading all of them.

Then I discovered that connecting MBP to external monitor gets it heated too much to the level that loud funs make it unusable.

Then internal screen stopped working completely.

Then after some time this shit failed to boot at all ( even with external display).

I should also mention power cord ( with cheap plastic) that became yellow and was not always connecting , while it was carefully kept from banding too much.

HDMI that in critical situation did not work, with the best cable you can get.

Mac OS that was constantly confusing where the main screen is, forgetting the ‘mirror’ option at will and so on....

Overall the experience is horrible.

I have other models from previous years and nothing like that had happened.

And I am told MBP 15inch mid2015 is considered to be one of the best models from recent years, as after mid 2015 models are even worse, not mentioning lack connectivity that renders them useless for mobility I need.

So looking at the way Mac is made these days finally I hear something sane as I am not at all convinced they would continue to sell ‘tons of Macs’ in the following years otherwise.

I think only inertia saves them in such situation but for how long? In my case I cannot move from the platform now because naively I’ve decided to write a ‘proper File Manager’ for Mac. I am using what I wrote and I simply cannot live without it. I also cannot leave it unfinished as this would be a huge waste of effort. So I’ll have to finish it, and only then think of porting it to other platforms.

Right now I do not know even what do. Buy another 2015 one ?which could fall apart just as this one did? Buy new model? But which new model? They do not even have a model I need and looking at the quality of the shit I was counting on ... well, I see really no good options. Those with Touch-bars are unacceptable, smaller screens then 15 inch too. I would actually wish 17 inch for work in case some one sane from apple is reading. I wish model that have _all_ possible connections including USB3 which are still around a lot so I would not have to think about those stupid issues and concentrate on my work. And I have a lot of work. This is the way and how it _should be_ with a ‘proper laptop’.

Concentrate all _necessary_ ports_ on one left side at least pwr and video ports so I would not have dongkes or “Y” shape wires when you hold machine whike connected to external screen. Put only redundancy ports on the other side, and yes we need redundancy ports.

Bring magsafe back, this was good as long as the cable is not cheap-made so it can band nicely if required.

Having IRreceiver never hurts anyone especially those who have bought apple IR remote. I was using it when teaching tango for controlling music remotely so I do not have to run to the machine each time I wish to say something. It was so convenient, now for the same thing I had to make custom dongle with arduino.

There is no need for huge trackpad, the previous size was good enough and calming because you do not worry about palm faulty touches.

Half sized left/right keys where better then full sized, so you would not confuse them with alt-key. Why there is no ctrl on the right side? It inconsistent with left side and inconsistent with full-sized keyboards for muscle memory. And do not dare to remove it from big ones, please.

Oh yes, and bring me back my line-in as separated socket! Big thanks to one ’smart genius’ who removed it in 2015 model, combining it with phones port. Also this ‘genius’ made sure to activate it _only_ automatically with Apple headphones to create as much troubles as possible to connect my guitar on the go.

More then that, when you connect phones to listen what you are recording, and already agree to stupidity of recording sketch through the mic instead of a proper line-in you cannot choose what mic to use. Thus you cannot choose one built-in , so you end up recording with mic on the phones wire near your neck hitting your shirt or guitar as you play. ‘thank you very very very much’ for that. It has spoiled many good moods.

I wander about those who design those Mac Book Pro’s ... did they ever tried their creations or thought forward about real life situations and applications ? Or after Jobs there is no one who can do it and see how laptop should function?

If they so wish their touchbars, why not to put them _above_ function keys ?! Make option to turn them off completely if required so they would not disturb at night or stand on the way. They never heard of people with muscle memory? It is that hard? Goodness, it’s so obvious. I can go on and on ...

I feel I was robbed really with this 2015 model, I wish I could use those money for something more useful ...

Sort of the same here. I've used a mac for 7 years and when it dies I'll get a Windows machine and dual boot it. There's nothing keeping me on a mac and justifying the price. So long Apple

No mention of user swappable batteries or repairability. :(

I want the features of the 2012 MacBook Pro in the body of the latest model. Bring it all back and keep the slimmed down less useful model for ppl who don’t need functionality.

The keyboard! I have an M1 mac, I typing this from a 2012 macbook air. The new keyboards are utter crap! They are still crap. If I could have the M1 in an x220 shell, with the mac trackpad, I would be good.

Have you tried the 2019 16” MacBook Pro keyboard?

Ok, I just switched back to the M1 from the 2012 MBA. Keyboard is just too shallow and key travel is just too short. It is improved over the butterfly but it still isn't as good as the 2012.

The machine you mention is my work machine, but it has been docked and I haven't really broken in the keyboard.

The previous work machine which I typed in probably 20k words a day was a butterfly keyboard mac. I hate that machine with a passion, I want to buy it back from my employer and bisect it with a plasma torch.

I actually like the feel of my M1 pro keyboard better than my 1015 15" macbook pro's keyboard. But... That weird lcd strip constantly flickering in the periphery of my vision makes me want to throw the laptop out of the window. Good thing it isn't my main working machine, just a device to make fat binaries of Krita on.

I'm typing this from a 2019 16" MBP keyboard. And I can say without a doubt that it is my favourite keyboard of probably 10 macs I've ever owned. There is a Macbook Air sitting nearby which I just tried for comparison. It's pretty good too. But the MBP 16" is just lovely. Quiet. Enough feedback.

The only gripe is, and this might be true of all Mac backlit keyboards. Is that I can see light coming from under the keys when viewing it at a low angle such as when I've got my feet up and it's on my lap. Not just through the letters, but little slivers of light under each one.

> Not just through the letters, but little slivers of light under each one.

My pet peeve too. I hate that, as it doesn't happen on Microsoft Surfaces.

If it can't be fixed due to the different travel distance, give me instead a RGB led per key and I will be coding funny patterns to work around the issue (ex: red keyboard backlight at night, with a green for the important keys like enter, and blinking F keys if I got activity on a terminal)

The new keyboards are utter crap!

You can imagine the Apple of old hiring a team of researchers to determine the absolute optimal key travel and springiness. The Apple of today wants to make things that look nice on display and are never actually used.

>The new keyboards are utter crap! They are still crap

Hold on, are you claiming that the new scissor switch keyboards have similar reliability issues to the older butterfly keyboards?

If not, then this is really just a matter of taste. You can't please everyone with keyboards. People do genuinely have different preferences regarding feel and key travel. It honestly seems hyperbolic to describe a keyboard that most people find completely functional as "utter crap".

I personally love the feel of the older butterfly keyboards. I also think that Apple fixed the reliability issues with them in their last generation. At least, I've not had a single keyboard issue with my 2019 MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.

I am not saying they have similar reliability issues, not enough time has passed for that to be determined. Utter is too strong of a word, the keyboard has the same qualities for me that made the butterfly keyboards suck.

They may have fixed the reliability issues, but they have not fixed key travel issues. The person that designed this keyboard is a very particular person, and this person probably does not like the keyboard in the 2012 MBA.

It isn't just preference, the new keyboard is slightly uncomfortable to use, the key pressure is too high and the travel too low, so the impulse on the tendons is too sharp.

The gist is that Apple has over designed its product and made design the number one metric. Design only works when it is subservient to function.

>It isn't just preference, the new keyboard is slightly uncomfortable to use, the key pressure is too high and the travel too low, so the impulse on the tendons is too sharp.

Sure, but some people (like me) find keyboards with shorter travel more comfortable to use. So as far as I can see it is just a preference – and a question of what your fingers are accustomed to.

I'm old enough to remember when the chicklet macbook keyboards that everyone now idolises were the Worst Keyboards Ever because they didn't have enough travel.

>The gist is that Apple has over designed its product and made design the number one metric.

Apple is now using an ordinary chicklet keyboard that's very similar to the ones used by most other modern laptops. It's a very conservative and unremarkable design as far as I can see.

I’m really hoping this rumor is false. I want the 13” M1 MBP scaled up to 16”. I don’t want an SD card, F keys, MagSafe, or any of the rest of that.

I want the M1 MBA scaled to 16", I do want SD card, F keys, and MagSafe.

I'd love if it had an excellent webcam. I imagined the M1 would have a better webcam than the 2015 Retina MBP but instead the newest built-in webcams are significantly worse in quality.

I'd imagine including a camera system from an iPhone would make a huge difference for Apple's users given the popularity of remote meetings these days.

Unfortunately the back lid is not thick enough for that - even the iPhone isn't thick enough for the iPhone camera system, hence the "bump".

I actually wouldn't mind something closer to the iPad + magic keyboard design in a pro macbook, which would have the thickness needed for a significantly better camera.

Why not have a bump in the MacBook screen with a small penalty in trackpad size?

Because it's ugly. It's just not an elegant Apple-ish solution.

I'd imagine because for the vast majority of people they'd appreciate the trackpad size more and the webcams are already serviceable.

iPhone and iPad front facing cameras do not need a bump and they run circles around the crap in MacBooks though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com