There used to be a time when what people considered “professional hardware” was versatility and durability over pure aesthetics. I’m not saying we can’t have both form and function with professional grade hardware but with the later iterations of the MBP Apple have put form ahead of function and then trained an entire generation of developers to look at hardware superficially. I honestly weep for the industry if this is the path we are destined to continue down.
But I will say, the aluminium body is genius in terms of form and function. That's not an aesthetic compromise, it's the right thing.
Computers are our workplace, we spend most of our lives in them.
Would you be just as productive if we put your desk in a reeking pig sty?
I have no issue with people wanting their work environment to be pretty but aesthetics shouldn’t hamper the person’s ability to get their work done. (at least not unless you work in an industry where aesthetics is your job).
Function over form.
All the time. The Macbook pro is meant to be for pros, pros care about other things like having physical function keys over it having a "light blue color that matches my shirt :)".
I haven't bought a Macbook since 2016 bc of all the trash they've been doing. A laptop without magsafe would last ~2 weeks in my household, so just that thing makes it for me.
Also, best battery, best screen, best trackpad, ports. Assuming nothing weird comes out later (screen or thermal issues) this will be the best laptop on the market for the next 10 years.
Great decision to have fired Jony Ive back then.
I like that they are going back to basics with the new models. Not crazy about the notch but otherwise it is all good. Decent screen, memory and ssd are super expensive but at least there's plenty of it now.
I'll wait a few months to see if their quality levels are back where they should be. Because I'm beyond taking their word for it after my last experience. I'm particularly curious to see if it delivers on the performance hype and thermal behavior when actually using it for doing work. If that's even close to what they are promising, it's going to be a bad year for Intel.
Does anyone know if those neural processors do anything useful or is that only for people that use specialist stuff like video editing tools? I run docker, intellij, vs code, etc.
But I still use a 2012 MBP. Doesn't look sharp anymore, and its always been pretty heavy, but they keys work sooooo well, the touchpad is a miracle of engineering, 9 years of daily use and everything still works beautifully. And frankly, I mostly don't notice any lag still (though I might if I was doing video editing). And the port selection meant that I could hook up to just about anything with no hassle ... including ethernet. Wifi is still inferior to an ethernet port.
I know it's a very minor and a picky thing, but Apple takes such a great pride in the uniformity and design, it's strange they resort to this.
The 2003 12-inch Macbook with the aluminum keys was like a textbook made out of solid metal. That keyboard felt great.
This looks like a great machine to me and I am a little sad I bought in Feb!
The 2020 13" Macbook Pro was 1.5 cm thick. The new 2021 14" Macbook pro is 1.55 cm thick. So that is only 0.5 mm difference.