Apple is ready to admit it was wrong about the future of laptops
theverge.com
theverge.com
My Dad is 100 years old, and we were having a friendly disagreement over Apple gear: he is a fan of the desktop Mac Pros, just bought another new one in the last year. I was trying to point out that my wife’s new iPhone 13 Pro can probably process video competitively with Intel chips and conventional GPUs. I based this on the real time video effects, driven by deep learning models, that the new iPhone can do in real time. My Dad uses his desktop Mac Pro exclusively for video editing and 3D rendering. I was stating an opinion that I thought one of the new laptops with 64G ram in the SOC, with the extra GPUs and neural processing units would be better for video editing.
But this conversation is largely about the MacBook Pro, where it's a "larger form factor laptop for professional use", and yet they removed all but the USB-C ports, and then put them back. That seems rather on point in this discussion.
If it was about form factors - your father is in the right, the laptop form factor is terrible for your body in a number of different ways, so if you don't need to move around, you should just get a desktop. (unless you have the money to be able to afford both a laptop and a dock setup (although keeping your laptop docked usually kills the battery, so it's still kind of preferable to get a real desktop))
If it's about processing, you may very well be right - there was an article just yesterday about the M1 Max's rendering capabilities[1] and they're extremely competitive with current desktop workstations.
Why not get the best of both worlds, though, and wait for a desktop with an M1 Pro/Max chip?
Bet Apple would love to see it, too. That's the kind of thing they'd put in a commercial or on stage at an event.
With a little help you can add lots of nvme and hard disk storage.
If apple was wrong, so is/was Google and Microsoft.
Realistically there is no reason USB-C could not be what all 3 were pushing it to be, the standard port for most things. Especially with more and more being wireless.
I know people constantly complain about dongles, but when I plug in my laptop to work work area I have a single plug and it connects 2 monitors, my keyboard and mouse, webcam, ethernet, etc. That is... really nice. But is also something I don't need when I am traveling. The only dongle I carry with me is my ethernet adapter and even then, I am most likely using wifi.
That all being said, it think where this fell apart was a few things.
The first being the transition period, that was always going to be painful. As a large industry of cheap products was carried kicking and screaming into the future while also needing to maintain support for older products.
The second being... the USB-C "Standard" is a complete mess. Mixed with manufactures cutting corners all over the place on cables.
Maybe it was too soon? Idk, ultimately the conversation would have never happened had these companies tried to push it but even with all of their backing. The industry did not follow this time.
I wish it had, but I guess here we are... just as fragmented as we always were, if not more.
TLDR, Apple was not wrong. The industry just did not follow as Apple (and others) were pushing for.
The touch bar was stupid. Ridiculously dumb and completely useless. It got in the way, and removed functionality so I'd say they were wrong on that count too.
The keyboard is now bad, so they were wrong on that too.
I still have a mbp I bought in 2015 which is the 'old' design and it plugs into everything I need it to. I've been given a few of these new macbooks for work and frankly it was a horrible experience. They went from 'it just works' to 'it works if you have a dozen dongles'.
Which again that transition would have never even started had the companies not tried to push it.
There's just an inevitable economic trade-off with having a port that supports 40gb/s that many users also want to use for multiple cheap peripherals that only need a couple of kb/s like a mouse or keyboard, or perhaps a cheap usb 1.1 thumb drive that only needs ~10mb/s. That's 7 orders of magnitude overkill (or 3.5 orders of magnitude for the thumb drive).
I do think a potentially better trade-off for Apple would be to have like 8 usb-c ports instead of 4 where half of them are slower usb 3.0 (or even 2.1) usb-c ports, and come up with some easy to understand user convention of labeling high speed usb-c and low speed usb-c. For some reason where we've landed in the last few years (and not just from Apple but from other PC brands, from usb hubs, from multi-port power bricks, etc.) is that USB-C ports are almost always much faster than corresponding USB-A ports but there are always fewer ports available. AFAIK you still can't find a usb-c hub with more than like 3 ports on it. So it never became a drop-in replacement for USB-A for cheaper devices that don't need a lot of bandwidth, even though I believe the standard does allow for slower versions like usb 2.1 over usb-c.
I do agree that the USB combined with Thunderbolt and the cabling differences were a problem and really pissed me off. It also doesn't help that a hub to do what you are doing with a single cable really should be thunderbolt and minimum costs >$200 to do it right. People were used to USB hubs costing $20.
Horrible execution in every part of the transition.
My next computer build will almost certainly be a traditional tower-style PC running Linux. I can't keep up with the peripheral treadmill.
again, what you find odd is perfectly even for me. not one pair of wireless anything has ever sounded as good as my wired cans.
What I haven't been able to find out is whether the new 3.5mm audio port supports digital optical audio, i.e. Toslink. MacBooks prior to 2016 did. I suppose these don't. Again, you can buy a dongle (see the pattern here?) to handle that as well. Still, if you were using your Mac to drive a Toslink channel you still can. You just can't do it out of the box.
Regardless, I still welcome all the ports. The 14" would probably look better thinner but the 16" is fine.
This headline would imply that there's a high-level Apple exec on record saying the Touch Bar was a mistake. This is the opposite of that: Apple is pretending like it never happened.
And... different people buy devices at different times. What are they supposed to do to satisfy your standards, release one laptop every eight years?
Not constantly break and re-implement standards. Just stick with a nice evolutionary product line. It's a known marketing tactic to constantly introduce useless features in order to push more units.
Also, the standard for PCs is that support basically never ends, you can always install the newest OS until the computer literally can't run it anymore.
And supporting features forever and backwards compatibility explains why there are a million hacks in Windows and why MS moves so slowly.
Their removal of the function row and removal of slots was supposed to be a feature, now they've gone back. In reality they're just changing shit for the sake of it, so the faithful feel compelled to always upgrade.
The Touch Bar was supposed to be an enhancement and increase functionality (which it did) users didn’t like it. Should Apple not have tried or should it have stuck to its guns?
How is not having the Touch Bar on new Macs “obsoleting” old Macs?
As far as HDMI, having four USB C ports was more versatile than having three USB C/Thunderbolt ports.
However the reality is that while you could use a dongle, it was more convenient to have an HDMI port. But how did adding an HDMI 2 port “obsolete” having four USB C ports?
What hardware company does that?
Aiming for USB-C sounded like a solid goal on paper, but it's become so fragmented with all the protocols, data rates, and variations in cable capabilities and it becomes obvious that compatibility is significantly worse than what we had before.
If you can't hit the lowest common denominator when it comes to USB-C you'll end up frustrated if you ever have a cable that doesn't meet your needs.
I thought this was overblown until recently. I purchased a new car with Android Auto. I have a bunch of USB-A to USB-C cables at home and it took me 9 tries to find one that allowed my phone to connect. Seems the others were only good for charging. Was really surprised by that.
What were the sources of these cables that didn't include that capability? Included with other devices? It's a shame they went so cheap on those, though not surprising!
A pox upon them and their manufacturers.
The problem is this is Apple remembering what a Pro user is, and as a result, what a Pro laptop should be. Or to put it another way, this is Apple remembering that they can't just sell farmers a faster and more expensive car. It still needs to sell them trucks.
The Pro (or the Powerbook before that) line distinguished itself from the non Pro, Air and iBook lines not just through price and power, but also, very significantly, by providing everything it's fairly niche and specialized users needed. This used to include stuff like optical audio in/out, FW 400/800, SD Card readers, etc. Because that's what their Pro users needed, and Apple wanted to create a device that gave them everything they could without making them buy other stuff, making it a great user experience.
Once their Pro users' needs changed, so for example, once FW became far less popular even among pro users than it used to be, it was then that they changed their device.
With the USB-C transition Apple had to have known that it would take years, if not decades for their Pro users to completely change their workflow. So eliminating ports that they used daily was extremely user hostile.
When Jobs died, they lost the vision. When Ive left, they lost taste.
I'm afraid it's not going to get any better from here on.
But like—it has been getting better. They fixed the keyboard, they added back some missing ports, they got rid of the touchbar. So it they are currently, actively in the process of getting better, and it is working.
The new Macbook Pro looks and feels like a brick compared to my old 2018 Macbook Pro.
Would you prefer a screen where the areas to the left and right of the camera were black plastic/glass instead of pixels?
Obviously, the notch stands out. It juts into the rectangle, making it no longer a rectangle. The OS now must make all sorts of compromises and implement extra functionality and options (like compatibility mode). And they aren't working perfectly [0] (LOL - And for what? A thinner fucking bezel? There's plenty of bezel beneath the dock - they should have shifted everything down.) The users must make compromises as the size of usable screen area actually changes depending on what mode the application is in. With the notch, if you use any apps that have a long list of menus your eyeballs must now be trained to skip over the notch as you scan the list of top menu items. The whole thing is a byzantine nightmare.
Most people get this immediately and they don't like it. In all the comments on all the articles and forums that I've read - the vast majority of people don't like the notch on this Macbook and they don't like it on the iPhone either. However, they do put up with it and learn to ignore it given that they have no choice if they want to stay in the Apple ecosystem that they're probably locked into anyway.
Lucky for me - I'm somewhat of a minimalist on my smartphone. I can still buy a new iPhone without the notch (AND with a home button which is way better for quickly switching apps) because I don't need the greatest camera. For my computers, I'm not locked into any one platform but a Mac would certainly be my last choice because of this kind of garbage.
[0] "Apple’s new MacBook Pro notch is misbehaving. Early adopters have discovered inconsistencies in how Apple handles the notch across macOS and in individual apps, resulting in unexpected behavior where status bar items can get hidden under the notch." - https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/27/22748371/apple-macbook-p...
For now, the OS doesn't seem to be prepared not to render stuff behind the notch. That's a really obvious flaw that'll hopefully get patched out soon if Apple is worth their salt.
Really? UIKit has been successfully dealing with the notch for a long time, I assumed they would have updated AppKit with the same logic ("safe areas") way ahead of introducing notches to macOS. Have you seen examples where it's not working?
Hundreds of millions of iPhone owners seem OK with it.
Which means you're stuck with the notch, and you need to learn to accept it.
Or you just... don't care about it, because it doesn't matter.
I'm not astute enough to tell if this is /s, but the idea of a USB-C to VHS dongle is highly amusing to me.
Then again, I distinctly remember my amusement when I got my first MP3 player - a Diamond Rio PMP300 - to work with the stereo in my room when I was in high school. It was a console record player with an 8-track deck, and I used an 8-track to cassette adapter, a cassette to 1/8” stereo adapter, and plugged that into the headphone port of the Rio.
Apple has clearly focused on iOS and iPadOS the last 10 years and they tried to slowly phase out the Mac but people kept buying Macs so they begrudgingly started focusing on it again around 2016-2018.
Often times users are confused by how the UI responds or doesn't and the last few years of iOS/Android releases have focused heavily on UI refinement to effectively communicate visually what's happening.
At the same time they required you to own or have access to a MacBook if you wanted to write Apps for those platforms, ensuring there would at least be some demand for the platform. They also transitioned from a proprietary and dated Power CPU to the commodity Intel x64 CPUs reducing their development costs.
MacBooks got adopted at places like MIT as cheap powerful Unix machines and as the LAMP stack took over the internet they became the preferred developer's box. These were the seeds planted.
Now days they're a lifestyle/prestige item for college kids, soccer moms, and corporate executives. They're focusing on it because the platform is approaching critical mass.
???
The world of iOS and iPadOS is meant for touch and caters to the consumer. Mac OS is meant for mouse and keyboard caters to consumers but it also serve as a development platform for its app ecosystem. As such it need to get out of way too.
Both platforms fulfill different needs. I'm personally glad Mac OS does not look nor behave like either iOS nor iPadOS, even though Apple is definitely trying to add a bit of the same UI with each Mac OS iteration.
Apple wants to have its cake and eat it too. They've been trying to polish the iPad experience enough without encroaching on the Mac market to the point that they're painting themselves into a corner.
iPadOS looks fine for most mobile computing tasks, but it's still seriously lacking as a fully-fledged OS, which more and more people are asking for now that the iPad ships with the M1 chip and a decent amount of memory.
As for ports, who still uses SD cards? Most people only take photographs with their phones and sync to the cloud directly.
I don't think that many people are photographers, overall. Most people who buy "Pros" probably work in an office and their company buys the computers for them.
There are tons of small businesses in the physical automation space that run on hooking SBCs up to various things. Many of their components are 3d-printed, by them, until they get everything laid out just right. Source: security evaluations for the software those people write is an extremely lucrative side-hustle, and it's all word of mouth.
The photography business you casually ignore is quite large (Google "wedding photographer" in your city and then realize that most photographers don't even shoot weddings). Or just realize that on the order of 200k DSLRs ship in a given month, almost all using SD as at least one of the onboard cards. Add to that the high-end mirrorless segment which is about the same size, plus all the GoPro addicts (and just to head off the inevitable "what pro uses GoPros" comment, go look at b-roll in any car review). Then round it out with the dashcam/security camera crowd that either doesn't trust wifi or is required to have on-device recording for regulatory reasons.
There are also lots of scientific instruments which use SD cards for data logging in remote locations, especially since they're cheap so you can buy 2-3 from different manufacturers and duplicate the writes without appreciably increasing cost. Ditto other kinds of data loggers like IoT stuff that actually uses an air gap.
SD cards are used for a lot more than just cameras, especially among pros of many different stripes.
I am certainly not most people but still use SD cards as a "thumb drive", to format for the Raspberry Pi, for my wife's dash cam, and I also have a few digital cameras I still use that are SD-card based.
I do however expect this will be the last MacBook with an SD card slot.
Exactly.
In Apple’s view, the people who use only their phones for photos will be perfectly served with the M1 machines (Air, Pro 13, iPads). The ugly design is because they realize that it’s the lowest priority for Pros… performance and ports are far more important.
to you. FTFY. Luckily, you're not in charge of what other people think are relevant and find useful.
I am happy though that real keyboards are back.. I hope the notch doesn't make it to other devices...
It's my hopes that M1 and ARM in general can make massive inroads simply because of power efficiency, but I hope for it to be done outside a walled garden and I hope it can adapt to the X86 "builder" space... Otherwise its just a matter of time before Intel/AMD catch up (and bechmarks of new Intel leaks appear to be doing well - and i'll be honest, i have no complaints on my current gen intel or amd either)
But why would you take _the most important metric_ out of the equation...?