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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

And so ends the last of the Dark Days of Johnny Ive. Don't get me wrong: he innovated a lot. My theory is when Jobs died, he lost his counterbalance and his designs suddenly became without compromise (no that isn't a good thing).

It's when we saw the 12" Macbook as the crusade for thinness at all costs (terrible performance, only one port, a terrible version of the macbook Air), the end of the Macbook Air (before getting resurrected a few years later), the butterfly keyboard (allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness), the Touch Bar (primarily there to boost Average Selling Price) and the loss of MagSafe.

I was surprised last year how good the M1 was. The second generation looks even better. This thing has function keys back, no Touch Bar, MagSafe!!!, some non-TB ports and up to 64GB of RAM.

Shut up and take my money!

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The 12” MacBook was beloved by my elderly parents, who liked the low weight design and didn’t need to do anything other than check email and the web. Horses for courses. It was a great machine for the right audience.

My girlfriend also loved her 11" Macbook Air and was disappointed that the smallest option is now a 13" Air.

The 13 inch m1 air is barely bigger than the 11 inch thanks to smaller bezels. I have both, they don’t feel much different in practice.

Genuinely curious: what could you do on this that you couldn't do on iPad?

I am perhaps biased on this issue because I'm still mad about what happened with the Macbook Air (13" in particular). I bought one in 2011 and it was an amazing laptop. It was a sweet spot of compromise on power and portability.

But the best feature was the price: there is a world of difference between a $1300 laptop and a $3500 laptop. Both are reasonable sums of money but the first is infinitely more "replaceable". You don't feel as bad about losing it or having it break.

What came after were much more expensive for features literally nobody wanted (eg loss of ports, loss of MagSafe, a significantly worse keyboard, more expensive repairs, Touch Bar) at a higher price. The 13" MBA languished for years just needing a display upgrade and that's it.

I knew it was the nail in the coffin when the 12" Macbook came out because Apple wouldn't have 11", 12" and 13" SKUs (they also had the 13" MBP by this point) and I was right.

So for me the 12" MBP was everything bad about the new Macbooks with worse performance and a higher price. I didn't (and still don't) really understand who the 12" Macbook solves a problem for.

And the thing is, I don’t mind they put a weird, shallow keyboard and one USB C port on that 12” MacBook. They were trying to make the lightest laptop they could. Those compromises made sense.

The same compromises made no sense on high-end pro machines.

The 12" wasn't for everyone, but I know 2 people who had one and they both thought they were just fantastic.

I have the first (2015) version of the 12”, it’s still my main laptop. It’s powerful enough for light coding and music production which is all I need. I love the form factor and if they brought a new one out with an M1 chip I’d buy it in a flash.

The 12” was a truly awesome machine, and it would’ve been even more great with the M1.

I've been extending the life of my MacBook Pro 2012 (13") all throughout those Dark Days (with 8GB RAM from the start an SSD added later). As a software dev using it day in day out. It's really at its end now, runs only on AC and the only reason I can still run (yet not debug) the apps I build is with a bit of a hack.

I skipped the crappy keyboard, and loud, hot running versions. The M1 was a bit new and low on mem for me (wrt the future), but I just ordered the M1 Pro 32GB.

Only hesitation I had concerns ARM support. It sure is getting better and better, but if they would have added one more superb Intel model right before introducing the M1's I'd have gone for that. But that might have hampered M1 adoption so I can see why they didn't.

I have a MacBook Pro M1 since last year. With Rosetta and the added performance you will not notice any issues running any normal Intel app. Most apps have now even a universal version. Only a very few edge case apps are unavailable. So I am happy and really love the power and longevity that M1 brings.

You can always check if apps work normally through: https://isapplesiliconready.com/

I think the 12" MacBook was a great design. The ultimate compact laptop - I even would have bought one if that day the Apple Store had one in stock. But it didn't work out technically. Maybe it had, if the Intel 10nm process had been right on schedule. With the 14 nm parts, it was just too much of a compromise. With the M2, Apple might consider bringing back that form factor, that should work nicely. And move the Air to 14", tiny bezels. That would be the outer form factor of todays 13".

Who do you think is responsible for the new iMacs?

They took a very versatile all-in-one, removed almost all of the ports and added an external power brick -- just to make it a bit thinner. Which is even more ridiculous considering it's a desktop.

Ok, these I find a little weird, honestly.

I guess they fill a niche for some? My best guess is that these were a compromise with what the M1 could then do. It's kind of the same reason we didn't have M1 MBPs last year. That's just a guess though.

I hope to see less-compromised M1 iMacs in the future though.

The iMacs have almost always been just laptop components in a display case (I'm obviously excluding the iMac Pro). I think getting rid of the USB-A ports is fine, and the SD card slot was always in a weird, hard to reach spot.

I love my 12" MacBook and will be sad when I have to replace it. Its single port is not a big problem for me, and I really appreciate how light it is. If I replaced it with an M1 MacBook Air I'd be bothered by how much heavier it is.

If they had made an M1 version of the Retina MacBook, there would've been no complaints about the performance.

> It's when we saw the 12" Macbook as the crusade for thinness at all costs (terrible performance, only one port, a terrible version of the macbook Air)

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised they haven't brought this back with an M1 in it. It was mostly terrible due to compromises forced by the terrible chip it used; an M1 would be within its power envelope.

I liked the 12". It was an iPad that runs macOS. Rob Pike (golang) once said: "my two-year-old 11" MacBook Air is the only piece of computing hardware to make me happy since I can't remember when." (https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/)

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