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Comment by dreamer7 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really like the chassis design. It looks dated. But the rest of the Macbook Pro sounds really exciting!

For those who missed the keynote, here are some laugh-inducing moments - "Our Pro users love to use physical function keys. So we have added them"

"Our Pro users like to connect a lot of devices without using a lot of dongles"

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I had the same thought. It looks like the 2011-2012 era chasis. Kind of funny but I imagine it’s necessary for the added ports. Probably couldn’t work with the slimmer form factor because of those, and scaling it would make it too big. Guess we can’t have our cake and eat it too.

It looks like a PowerBook to me, and yeah, it looks a little dated, and the curves look strange. But Apple being willing to release a laptop that "looks strange" is to me a signal that they want to value function over form on Pro laptops, and that they care more about cooling and power than they do about thinness and "elegance". It's a great step in the right direction. They can make the MacBook Air as pretty and "elegant" as they want but anyone with a boiling-hot 16" MBP will sure tell you how elegant it is to have a laptop burn their lap and throttle all the time.

It was time Apple valued pro users more than they valued their laptops looking good in hero pictures.

I suggest thinking about design as not belonging to a 'date' or an era, but whether it solves a given problem.

We've grown up in the era of designers that make us think that design is aesthetic and like fashion, it evolves. I think of it like an engineer - its job is to solve a problem.

I'd guess that's about thermals. Thin looks good but runs hot.

Apple have de-Ived and gone for practicality over fashion-accessory style. I'm not convinced that's a bad move.

I have nothing against being thick. The 2012 model was thicker but I like its design

It's not really thick though. In fact, the 14" is 1mm thinner than the M1 13" Pro.

I think the move back to an older design language is purposeful, to remind people of the "good old days" before the 2016 design.

Yeah it’s surprisingly ugly. Maybe it’ll grow on me but I can’t help but think this is the first post-Ive laptop

How often are you looking at the bottom of you laptop?

Not often but an aspect I respect about Apple is how they get the details right even when you don't see them. A profile of Ive mentions how they've thought about stuff like the color of the internal chips:

> One afternoon, Ive and Bart André removed the bottom panel of a MacBook laptop, revealing black and silver components arranged, with unnecessary orderliness, on a matte black circuit board. Ive looked down happily. “This is such an extraordinarily beautiful thing,” he said. André noted that, in a competitor’s computer, the board would be green. He sounded embarrassed on behalf of that other machine. On the same table was a plastic model of an existing Apple headphone—an EarPod—the size of a golf driver.

Having ugly feet on a laptop does betray a slight change in values. And yes, it's minor but it's like the extraneous requests on a rock star's rider. If they're not getting this right, what else are they missing?

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