New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacement design since 2012
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2016 macbook felt like leadership got in a room and said "okay, let's make a list of all the sexy things we can think of that would make the macbook unique". This netted things like thin-beyond-practicality, touchbar, removing all the ports, etc.
2021 macbook feels like leadership got in a room and said "okay, let's make a list of all the top things everybody is complaining about most." And they just fixed everything (well, most things) on that list one-by-one.
Which is really a shame (I have one Acer Aspire laptop and I mount /var/log as tmpfs without swap so it doesn't devour the eMMC like the RPis do with SD cards)
It has flash memory that is coupled with the SoC.
This is to make the memory bottleneck tolerable (considering the cpu and ram move 400GB/s)
I also replaced the SSD in my 15" MacBook Pro 2014, and currently use a 4 TB M.2 drive.
When a replacement battery fried my logic board, I didn't lose my data. It didn't take multiple hours to re-clone from backup; I just used a screwdriver to move the SSD over to my spare laptop (13" Pro 2015).
A computer for me is primarily a data storage and retrieval device. Data loss is an existential risk to it. Data security doesn't bother me as much as it does other people; once the hardware is accessible, all bets are off anyway. I do get some strange behaviour with the new SSD (periodic weekly crash/reboot) but still accept that in order to have the larger capacity (4 TB is much more than the 512 GB when the laptop was new).
- ~2013 to 2015: removable PCIe SSD (connector not compatible with off the shelf ones though)
- 2016+: soldered
Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to raise the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macbooks, that had fallen precipitously low from a shareholder perspective because of the superb value-for-money proposition that was the 13" Macbook Air.
The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.
USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical one that forced people everywhere to carry dongles. The USB-C cable situation was and continues to be a nightmare as different cables support different subsets of data, power and video and, worse yet, different versions of each of those. Worst of all, it was the loss of the much-beloved MagSafe. Also, the ports weren't all the same. You were better off charging from the right (IIRC) rather than the left.
Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful. Personally I don't believe this was about forcing users to pay for upgrades primarily. It was about shaving off a small amount of volume.
Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.
Pure speculation: the forcing function for the big changes in the latest models was the M1. That forced a redesign of probably the entire unit anyway (eg different thermals, chipsets, power requirements, etc). Prior to that the path of least resistance was incremental changes and fixes.
As far as I'm aware, the last Intel MBPs were released in 2020, and simply continued the 2019 design language.
Both laptops (Air and 13" Pro) that the M1 launched in kept their previous designs. So the switch from Intel to Apple Silicon itself wasn't the cause. The switch from M1 to M1 Pro and Max, maybe. But even the previous Intel machines had some serious TDP (and thermal issues), and even that wasn't enough to justify a redesign.
I wish all of my cables were magnetic, The amount of things I have broken in my life by tripping is downright embarrassing. I do like being able to charge my mac book from my external monitor, and keeping my apple power supply in my bag in-case I need to go somewhere. It would just be nice if I didn't have to label my cables.
For stuff like charging headphones, LED lights and other random gadgets with mixed plug types, I use charge-only cables for that stuff, and it's been super convenient.
There are also magnetic cables that support limited fast charging and data, but only at USB 2.0 speeds, so that could still be a deal breaker for some people.
You have any recommendations for high quality magnetic gear?
This is part of a larger problem with a lack of regulations on high-current accessories. In the US, the FTC should probably be doing stringent inspections of imported cables, chargers, etc similar to how the FCC currently inspects communication devices so the substandard/dangerous ones get turned away at the border.
Some kinds of cable really benefit from easily detaching, and some don't.
Not at my desk, but sometimes when I temporarily plug into another monitor or a television it can be a problem.
For my desk, I wish I just had a dock like my thinkpad from 10 years ago, or at least if the connectors were on the back so I didn't have wires sticking out on both sides.
Some kinds of cable really benefit from easily detaching, and some don't.
It's not like other connectors are difficult to disconnect. My previous macbook had an hdmi port that would disconnect if i breathed on the cable too hard. USB-C does seem a bit more snug so far, but who knows how well it will last. Magnets done well just have a better chance of surviving if you trip on something, or if you drop your laptop.
I’ve been way more impressed with the durability of lightning ports. They get dirty and need to be cleaned out but their mechanical strength is amazing (apple’s cables on the other hand…). I like that Apple is confident enough in the strength of the lightning port that in the Apple stores, the standard display is to have the phone being physically supported by the port alone, even in an environment where hundreds of careless people are going to be messing with it.
Usb a has nice big leads, that don't readily corrode away. Usb c on the other hand, my phone barely connects to power anymore
The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input + rich display device. If adequately supported by software it can be an amazing input, affording a range of useful functions not replicable with discrete buttons. In general, I really wish modern computers had more analog inputs available. Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs, etc. are tragically missing.
I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal.
The problem with the touch bar is that (a) it only shipped on a limited subset of devices so software authors could not depend on it, (b) after its initial functions, Apple made limited effort to adopt it in all of their own software, improve its integration into the system, or push boundaries of what it could do as an input device.
> The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.
No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype vs. full-scale factory production + poor estimation of reliability in a wide variety of contexts over a longer period of time. Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost.
There are many suboptimal features of the common rubber dome + scissor stabilizer laptop keyboards, and I wish more companies were brave enough to experiment with alternative designs in search of improvements. (Disclaimer: my favorite "laptop" keyboards are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_portable_computers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable)
It's not ungrounded from the anecdotal evidence that these changes are coming after Ive's departure.
> I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal.
Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it.
This is just shifting goalposts because you got called out.
You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something.
It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with proof.
And speaking of your first comment:
> Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.
... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in the last few decades?
So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land now regardless of who's in charge?
Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming back leaked at the start of the year.
So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had no input on the current machine.
This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge and it's a flagship product.
Agreed with this. When you're coming to the CDO position after 20 years of being a hands-on designer at that company, most recently as the head of both human interface and industrial design across the entire organization, and having been described as being the person with the most operational power at Apple, after Steve Jobs himself, even before being promoted, my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar. It is most likely that he set the goals that produced these designs, and that he was aware of and approved of them from the beginning. And I suspect that as a new C-level, he was probably even more hands on than that.
But since in this thread we are being asked to hold ourselves to a very high standard of rigor, I should note that I have not submitted this comment to peer review, or made my data available for replication at this time. I'm just basing this on, you know, how jobs work.
Ive is part of the Senior Leadership Team.
No major decision in the company sneaks under his radar.
But that doesn't mean he is responsible for every decision.
That's only because in your ignorant reality you have made it so.
The actual reality is that what constitutes a product is so much more than just the design. For example it includes what features should and shouldn't be there. And that is a decision largely coming from the Product team. Or how it works. Which comes from Hardware Engineering team.
Each with a little OLED display, please. (Why hasn't this happened yet??)
I highly recommend using BetterTouchTool to get the most out of it if you still have a device with the touch bar.
Also, you can actually add the analog inputs yourself. The DIY keyboard community -- which is flourishing with options and new vendors -- has lots of options available. I myself have two analog knobs and one trackpoint on my keyboard. It's absolutely amazing.
Sure it could; it just has to beat the cost of the lookup. If you could have done some complex operation trivially with it, that couldn’t really be done with some keyboard shortcut, being a dynamic visual field would be fine.
Of course, volume sliders don’t fit that bill, and I don’t think anyone really found something that did… but it’s not some fundamental guarantee that it would be useless.
So adding stuff yourself is nice (I do it myself!) but not a way to move the industry or even the Apple ecosystem forward.
Sadly, the only company I'm aware of producing that sort of hardware for use outside the music industry seems to be Loupedeck.
But they didn’t. And I was always confused that the Touch Bar never got more love from the hardware developers.
That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.
It also wasn’t easy to build software for the Touch Bar from what I could gather. I had lots of ideas for little tools (think iStat-like gauges, but perhaps for things like the mic input level), but it wasn’t very easy to build one when I tried.
RIP Touch Bar. You might not be missed too much, but I bet something like you will come up again in a decade or two.
I think it was more like they decided to add the equivalent of an Apple Watch to Macs to support TouchID and then asked "what else can we do with it?".
Yes. It wasn't Jony. It came from the software side. I won't name who to protect the guilty.
I was really hoping Apple had a big leap
forward in fingers-on-glass interaction
planned.
While many people happily type on their laptops all day long with no external monitor or keyboard, there are also many people (me included) who think that's an absolute ergonomic disaster and greatly value the extra screen real estate of an external monitor.
So, honestly, there's no way the Touch Bar could have been good enough for me to use it.
The whole idea was just misguided.
What Apple should have done IMO was allow an iPad or iPhone to fill that role. I still do not understand why my iPad can't be an amazing accessory to my Mac. With the right software magic and integration, it could be everything the Touch Bar was while simultaneously doing a lot more, and is of course extremely compatible with external keyboard use.
Well, I can guess why, actually -- it would require a lot of coordination between the Mac and iDevice teams and that is challenging.
(However I'm encouraged -- Sidecar is a good first step. Let's see more...)
Apart from developers many professionals do look down all the time because they typically have other devices connected e.g. synths, photo/video editing rigs.
And Touchbar was designed much more for that audience.
The looking was never the problem, IMHO, the problem was execution and utility. It was actually distracting when there was adaptive completion results continually flashing. And the rest of the buttons were never great.
If every single dialog box flashed the buttons, that would be a win as it is easier and faster to tap the touchbar than it is to navigate the cursor and then click. But this obvious use case never really materialized.
And if, like most "professional" users, the laptop is operated via an external keyboard, the muscle memory never develops.
I'm sure there's some setting somewhere that defaults to showing whatever the layout for the in-focus app is, but it's failed to make me care enough about it to try to figure it out.
Also the parallel port. I remember the drama!
It goes the other way, too. When Apple put cameras in all of their laptops, the press relentlessly bashed them for wasting BOM on something so useless and expensive. Then the industry realized it was a good idea and followed suit. Similar for retina displays -- the term "High Definition" had become synonymous with "good enough" and ground PC monitor advancements to a halt for a decade. Phones were coming out with higher resolutions (not pixel densities, resolutions) than full-size monitors. Then Apple figured out how to market higher resolutions, the press mocked them for wasting money, but word got around that HD might not be the end-all of display technology and consumer panel resolutions started to climb again.
Here's a counterexample, a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet. 1GbE became synonymous with "good enough" and got so thoroughly stuck in a rut that now it's very typical to see 1GbE deployed alongside a handful of 10 gigabit USB ports and a NVMe drive that could saturate the sad, old 1GbE port many times over.
Sometimes taking risks results in a Touch Bar or Butterfly Keys. That's just the nature of risks. The only way to have a 100% feature win rate is to limit yourself to copying features that someone else has proven out, but if everyone does that then the industry gets stuck in a rut.
I'm glad Apple exists, even if I don't personally feel the need to fund their experiments.
Printers I can see. An entry-level HP LaserJet was $600 back in 2000, something not as easily replaced as a serial mouse or gamepad.
>> a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet.
They stuck it on the Mac Mini
(which granted, isn't too bad compared to the price of a new 10GbE card, but still...)
This has a few reasons:
- 10 GbE was, until quite recently, pretty power intensive and it still is more expensive and hot than gigabit
- Devices in LAN, especially those with high bandwidth usage, have become far rarer. A lot has moved to the cloud and the bandwidth of most people can't saturate 100 Mbit, not to speak of Gigabit.
- LAN as a whole has become rarer. A lot of people now only use WiFi with their phones or laptops, up to the point that most people now have (theoretically) faster WiFi than LAN.
Combined, there are few reasons to take the expense of putting a high-speed ethernet port on a device. Luckily, the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the jump a bit and you see those ports on a few consumer devices now.
PCIe 3.0 transceivers were 8Gb/s and supported preemphasis and equalization, closing the sophistication gap with their off-backplane counterparts. How many PCIe3+ transceivers has the average person been running (or leaving idle) for the last decade? These days a typical processor has 16Gb transceivers by the dozens and 10Gb hardened transceivers by the handful. I just counted my 10Gb+ transceivers -- I have 36 and am using... 10 (EDIT: 8/4 more, HDMI is 4x12Gb/s these days).
The reason why 10GbE is expensive has nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with marginal expense, nothing to do with power, and everything to do with market structure. Computer manufacturers don't want to move until modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers move and modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers don't want to move until computer manufacturers move.
These snags don't take much to develop, just "A needs B, B needs A," and bang, the horizontally segmented marketplace is completely immobilized. That's why the market needs vertical players like Apple who can push out A and B at the same time and cut through these snags, or high-margin players like Apple who can deploy A without B and wait for B to catch up. Otherwise these market snags can murder entire product segments, like we've seen happen to LAN.
No, it isn't because of reduced demand. People are recording and editing video more than ever, taking more pictures than ever, streaming more than ever, downloading hard-drive busting games more than ever, and so on. LAN appliances would have eaten a much healthier chunk of this pie if LAN didn't suck so hard, but it does, so here we are.
> Luckily, the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the jump a bit
Yaay, PCIe 2.0 speeds. 2003 called, it wants its transceivers back :P
> modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers don't want to move until computer manufacturers move
Modems and routers only make sense once they serve a link that is actually beyond 1Gbit - which is rare even today. Also, these devices are minimal and the hardware required to actually route 10Gbit is a lot more expensive. Even Mikrotiks cheaper offerings today can't do so with many routes or a lot of small packages (no offense to them, their stuff is great and I'm a happy customer - it's still true, though).
APs are a bit different, as WiFi recently "breached" the Gbit wall (under perfect conditions). But there are already quite a few with 2.5Gbit ports to actually use that.
NAS, on the other hand, are a bit held back by the market. Still, high-models have offered either 10Gbit directly or a PCIe-slot for a long time now.
> People are recording and editing video more than ever, taking more pictures than ever, streaming more than ever, downloading hard-drive busting games more than ever, and so on. LAN appliances would have eaten a much healthier chunk of this pie if LAN didn't suck so hard, but it does, so here we are.
The professional video editing studios with shared server are already on 10 Gbit LAN, the stuff has been available for years. Pretty cheap even, if you buy used SFP+ cards. Switching was expensive until recently, but I'd say that the number of people which need a 10G link to a lot of computers are even less.
And LAN competes with flaky, data-limited, expensive 100 MBit lines (if you're lucky). 1GbE is beyond awesome compared to that and yet it lost, anyway.
> Yaay, PCIe 2.0 speeds. 2003 called, it wants its transceivers back :P
I'm not happy, either, but its better to at least go beyond Gigabit speed rather than stay stagnant even longer.
I think the only thing driving 2.5/5/10GbE at all is that WiFi Access Points need it.
[0] https://www.amazon.de/XIAOLO-Netzwerkadapter-Unterstützung-L...
[1] https://www.amazon.de/XG-C100C-Netzwerkkarte-RJ45-Port-802-3...
All this talk about how fast Wifi can be made people think it's all they need. But in reality, building a Wifi network with fast speeds across a whole house while avoiding too much interference from networks around you (esp in inner cities where you can easily have 40+ networks in reach) is more work and more expensive than pulling LAN cables to the right places.
But LAN isn't sexy and no one advertises how fast a copper cable can be, it just doesn't sell products as well as talking about Wifi 6.
/rant
10GbE was a bit of a mistake on several fronts.
We had become used to these 10x iterations with Ethernet from 10Mb to 100Mb to 1Gb such that 10Gb seems like a natural extension. But running that bandwidth over copper remains a significant technical challenge. For awhile I was using a Thunderbolt 10GbE controller and it was huge (basically the size of an old 3.5" external HD) and most of it was just a giant heatsink, basically.
In commercial situations, the issues with copper often result in using fiber instead. At that point there are less barriers to even higher speeds (eg 25Gb, 40Gb, 100Gb), which make a lot of sense in data centers.
Added to this, there's not a lot of reason to run 10GbE in a home setting or even in many small corporate settings. Even in larger corporate settings, you can go really far with 1GbE using switches, bridges and routers, possibly using higher speed backhaul connection technologies.
What should've happened is what has started to happen in the last few years: interim speeds (eg 2.5Gb and 5Gb). Hopefully these become more widespread and become relatively cheap such that someday they just displace 1GbE naturally.
On top of all of this, Ethernet is an old standard that uses 1500 byte frames. This actually starts to become an issue at 10+ GbE such that various extensions exist for very large frames (eg 9000 bytes) but this runs into issues with various hardware and software.
Probably largely because of the 1500 byte frames of Ethernet, the de facto standard for TCP/IP MTU is pretty much 1500/1536 bytes and this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as more and more infrastructure is deployed that makes this max MTU assumption.
Fwiw they are readily available by way of USB (e.g. MIDI) controllers. There are loads of dedicated knobs, faders, pads, etc. with a large amount of software to customize and translate those inputs (in addition to the array of software supporting them natively)
Obviously that would be external to the computer, but I think given the highly specific nature of analog controls it makes sense for these to be external. I'm having difficulty imaging a set of analog controls that would be at the same time universally useful and efficient in terms of weight and space utilization.
It just can't work with people like me that never look down at their keyboard. I'm not trying to be elitist, it's the honest truth. I wanted to love the Touch Bar, tried plugins like Pock, but in the end no matter how hard I tried I can't help and force myself and interrupt what I'm doing to look down, it just doesn't make sense.
It is product differentiation. The MacBook Pro 2016 redesign was delayed by a year due to Intel's CPU problems. The touchbar Macbook also had higher ASP from the start. It was the Post PC era. Everyone was suppose to leave the PC ( including Mac ) platform to Tablet. It doesn't get any clearer than that. Even making an iPad ads "What's a Computer". Making an ASP increase is a typical move of a market where you want to milk it. Did I mention they completely neglect Mac Pro for years?
>Jony Ive was its patron
Despite media wants to claim otherwise at the time and had shills cover it up. He spend most of his time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. But iPhone X and Macbook / MacBook Pro was his vision of how the ultimate MacBook Pro and iPhone would be as he said so himself. He was named CDO in 2015, along with some design team restructuring. The “Designed by Apple in California” chronicles 20 years of Apple design photo book came out in 2016. When he finally left in 2019, the media and shills were suggesting he hasn't actually been on product design for quite a few years. His earlier work on Apple in 2011+ was iOS 7 re-design. ( After Scott Forstall was out ) And we all know how that went as they spend the next 3 years to iterate out of it. To the point their old UX design head had to retire. And if you look at the changes to Apple Retail Store redesign, they were the same. Form over function. Partly Jony's fault, partly Angela.
>Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost.
Apple filled many patents where they were looking at keyboard on a flat piece of glass with Force Touch and 3D Touch. These patents were specific to computer. Higher BOM cost are often used as moat in any luxury items.
>to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could...
If it wasn't for the butterfly keyboard. The internet would not have a group of people and product reviewer now talking about key travel distance. The thin keyboard has a similar typing experience as typing on glass......
>There are many suboptimal features...
No one fault them for trying. But the first report of keyboard problem came out in 2016 from MacBook users. Less than one year after its launch even before the MacBook Pro TouchBar. Apple constantly delete report of the problem on its support forum. The whole thing only gotten attention when an online press themselves decide to blog about it and went viral. That was 2018. They stopped reporting Mac user satisfactory in 2018, both in keynote and in investor meeting. It took nearly 3 years of ranting before Tim Cook even made a Keyboard Service Program.
Basically without Steve Jobs, no one had the gut to say, fuck this. This isn't working. Close it down. Work on a alternative or go back to where it was and we make a Service Programme. Instead they drag on it for years. Without product sensibility and direction.
Okay, but...what caused them to try to make a keyboard that thin in the first place? GP is suggesting that it was driven by Ive, which you dispute, but you only give an alternative explanation for the "what", not the "why".
Also it's on the keyboard where you're not looking. If you want analog controls, either make them tactile - like a physical dial or slider - or just make the display a touch screen.
And this is why I believe more in the Ivy story than this one.
If you're a mechanical engineering group mismatch between prototype and production is MechEng 201 pretty much.
You wanna put out a new keyboard fine, but test the heck out of it. Let people have a go at it, put force onto it, spread some food on it, etc
Unless that mechanical group really think keyboards are a toy and don't need reliability, in this case they don't belong there
I could not keep my 13" MacBook plugged in while using it on my lap. The MagSafe cord repeatedly fell off when my leg, or a pillow bumped into it. My MacBook MagSafe port had black marks on it from arcing. At least three times I couldn't get it to charge because a metal fragment (once a folded paper staple) became magnetically stuck to the receiving side. On one of those occasions I couldn't fix it till I got home and grabbed some tweezers.
It was a smart solution, but IMO to a tripping problem that wasn't widespread.
Through all it's faults and problems, I can't shake how good my 2015 MacBook Pro has been: great keyboard, MagSafe, good enough everything, great keyboard. Did I mention how great the keyboard is? It's on my lap right now, purring and tethered to power as usual.
The new magsafe uses a normal usb-c power brick with a special charging cable. The cable has a usb-c plug at one end and a magsafe plug at the other end. So it should be intercompatible between chargers now, and there shouldn't be any more need to buy a new charger when the cable frays. (And apparently you can also charge with a normal usb-c cable in any of the regular usb-c ports).
I'm quietly hoping they might be able to run data through that magsafe port too. Being able to have a small usb dock which connects over magsafe would be sweet.
This sounds better than having your laptop's power connector internally damaged rendering your laptop unchargable just because your charging outlet was on the wrong side or your dog wanted to step on the cable.
It's okay Ive. It's called "something useable" or even, if I might be so bold, "something the users want".
It's ironic the extremes Apple design has ended up at, because there was a point in time (when both Ive and Jobs were working together) when Dieter Rams claimed Apple was the only company that really followed his ethos, minimalism with a critical qualification of honesty, where form follows function... but for the last decade it's been more like the aesthetic of minimalism at all cost... it's funny because that sounds quite a lot like skeuomorphism, it's pretentious.
If customers don't like the Touch Bar, how does this make any sense? If pro users will pay (made-up number) $2000 for a MacBook Pro regardless of whether or not it has a Touch Bar because it comes with the CPU/GPU they want, adding a Touch Bar just decreases the margin.
If the MacBook Air is a better value-for-money proposition than the MacBook Pro to begin with, and customers do not actually like the Touch Bar, then why would they start switching to the MacBook Pro?
The psychological effects of the word "Pro".
Every time I 'see' a touchbar, I want one.
They look cool and useful.
The only reason I don't have one, is because everyone seems to indicate they are useless.
It's also possibly a platform issue - maybe they just didn't get enough participation etc..
Also - 'thinner' is a rational and generally positive thing, it's just that we've reached a threshold where the diminishing marginal returns are starting to weigh on other things.
Even ports - it's not an aesthetic issue only - they're trying to get everyone onto a standard. Frankly, I support the notion - I'd love it if everyone just used the same dam connector. The reason I don't like my 'USB C only Mac' is only because the ecosystem isn't there yet. If the ecosystem were there, I'd be fine with it.
I agree, I think they're really interesting. The way we interact with computers hasn't changed much, and having a set of buttons you can configure sounds amazing.
I wish they would have just put it above the physical function keys, and deployed it to all MacBooks and wireless keyboards. Being limited to just some MacBook Pros probably hurt the number of apps that adopted it.
As it is, when I use the keyboard on my work MBP, my fingers will brush the touchbar and do things. I have turned off the functionality in most apps so that I don't get that. (terminal especially)
For my actual usage, it's a step backwards from the pre-2016 function keys, an always available pause/play/stop, volume and brightness. I can't be doing something in emacs and then hit pause or louder, it's switch to music and then I can pause.
The lack of a physical escape key also dooms it in my usage. (no, escape is not going on caps-lock, that's where control goes)
So the work MBP is 99% used with an external keyboard/monitor. The personal 2015 MBP is generally used on the lap.
USB-c is ok, and the real magic is when you've got a Thunderbolt/USB-c power delivery monitor with a built in usb3 hub. One wire to the laptop and you're done. (and even better when the monitor has a built-in kvm so that the other computer is just a switch away, without mucking with cables).
I thought it was a great idea, and I still do, but am so glad they removed it. It sounds great on paper, but practically, I used it for nothing other than adjusting brightness and volume.
> The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.
Agreed. It really wasn't great. From a design perspective, it's quite clever, but from a usability perspective it was horrible.
> USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical one that forced people everywhere to carry dongles.
Apple has a long, long history of doing this. Headphone jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy disk drive? Gone.
I'm fine with it in moderation, frankly. USB-C is so clearly the future that where I take offense is that the rest of Apple's lineup doesn't work with it (iPhones, AirPods, some iPads, etc.).
> Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful.
Perhaps, but now that RAM is not only part of the SoC but a significant reason that the SoC is so good (high bandwidth shared memory between CPU and GPU), it's a change I'm more than fine with.
> Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.
Agreed. This finally, truly, feels like a Pro machine: "design first" is an approach for consumer products and, to Apple's credit, works very nicely on the iPad and iPhone and consumer MacBooks (generally). "Design first" for pro machines is great for the 3 minutes after opening the box, but when trying to do real work, you'd sacrifice all the bezels in the world to shave 30% off compile times.
The MBP designers still bravely include the 3.5mm headphone jack [0], though it is certainly true that the iPhone designers courageously jettisoned the jack.
And in Jony Ive designs they've had it on the wrong side for years. The 2021 model finally moves it back the left side.
There are a LOT of us that still believe this was a horrible choice.
Anyway, I'm happy they are including a genuine, pretend-spec'ed 3.5mm audio output jack in their newest laptops.
I love my AirPods. But the instant I have to start digging through screens to do a pairing dance with some third-party speakers, car stereo, etc, I pine for the simpler times when you could just plug in the AUX, and I mourn for what has been lost.
You can literally hear how much worse the bluetooth audio sounds in my wife's care compared to mine. She uses the aux port because it's so bad.
In particular there is a wide variety of required gain/impedance as well as multiple different proprietary options as people attempted to adopt it to add microphones, controls/signals, and/or video. This is why Android, Apple, Microsoft and Playstation all have incompatible accessories.
The number of contacts can vary between 2 and 5. The length of the primary contact is not consistent, thus the mechanism to retain the plug often does not engage. Likewise, there is no specification on overall plug size to guarantee a jack will fit into the device case.
Thats excluding other extensions such as toslink. It is also worth noting that making the wrong connection, e.g. attaching an AV output to an audio input, can physically damage equipment.
Generally what people see is that the headset they got for whatever device works and assume there is broad compatibility - but to work best the jack on the headset is being designed for and tested against a particular subset of supported phones/controllers/music players. And broader support is typically not possible without separate connectors (e.g. a headset cord sold for apple, for xbox, for playstation, for android).
There's an important distinction here you're glossing over: unreliable, wireless, software-controlled Rube Goldberg-esque connections (bluetooth, wifi) can't possibly supersede reliable wired ones. Wired connections "just work" 99.999999% of the time, and when they don't, you can actually see and inspect the thing that connects your devices to troubleshoot it. Wireless works only when it feels like it.
VGA, on the other hand, was fully superseded by various digital video interfaces, and floppies were fully superseded by optical media and then various forms of cheap flash memory.
And I mean it. People do still miss headphone jacks, and people do still buy ethernet dongles for their laptops. People don't really miss floppies and CDs.
This was the most shocking to me. I learned that the left and right side ports run through different buses, but each side does not have enough capacity to supply both ports at full speed. This mean I had to buy long USB cable to run to the other side of my Macbook in order to supply 3 monitors. I have a port just sitting unused.
Also, there seems to be a problem with left-side USB ports when charging. They cause the system to overheat (or at least think it's overheating).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/04/24/why-you...
This includes removing the things they've added...
Then again, the iPad Mini is more expensive than the larger iPad, so obviously there is something going on I don't understand. Perhaps the cost of engineering the motherboard and battery in an integrated package are so high that they can't afford to split the line any further.
The 2021 14" Pro is the first truly pro model in a while. I hope they keep it up. The keyboard is actually usable for extended periods, it has ports, the screen is great (to be fair, all Apple retina screens are great to varying degrees). Did I need it? No. But I wanted it. The last Mac laptop I bought for myself was the 2015 13" MacBook "Pro", so they're getting more money out of me this time around.
Sort of. The $329+ "iPad" has internals that are a few generations old, kind of like the iPhone SE. The iPad Air ($599+) and iPad Pro ($799+) are the "real" current larger iPads.
Louis Rossman gets a lot of things wrong because he does not have a computer engineering background. For example, he does not understand why Apple used SPI on the Macbook Air instead of USB despite it having USB capability. I had to correct him to explain that when your design goal is extreme power saving, you have to cut everything including running your data over SPI instead of a more power hungry USB bus.
Furthermore one reason they ship soldered on Ram is technical. It has been explained here from time to time that they are achieving much higher memory bandwidth with the memory modules they are using and it necessitates being soldered on. If the design goal is to build the most responsive laptop while maintaining excellent power savings, then this is the right approach to take.
Interfaces are designed for specific characteristics like maximum capacitance and signal loss, and going beyond the design parameters means you need to change something. In this case, it would involve significantly increasing the power consumption of the interface.
Using an external SSD format like M.2 means the added monetary and power costs of 1) an external flash controller, 2) the mechanical components to interface with it, and 3) multiple PCIe lanes which can never be fully powered off.
Okay, it was part of the T2 chip before. And they were able to put replaceable SSDs into the Mac Pro. Those only contained the NAND chips and were proprietary, but still.
The problem I have with soldered SSDs is that flash memory has a limited lifespan in terms of writes. Once you're out of writes, then what? This is aggravated by the fact that M1 can't boot even from external media if the internal SSD isn't working.
(This was briefly not the case with that Big Sur SSD thrashing bug, but that's been fixed now)
Apple could and have put their SSDs in modules - that's how the T2 Mac Pro does it. They're still proprietary though, of course, due to the split design.
so you do know the speed of signal in copper? ~20cm per 1ns. 5-7cm of extra track length to a slot would not hurt anything.
You cannot push a 512-bit wide memory bus like on the M1 Max through a connector and longer PCB traces without massively increasing the power consumption of the interface. Remember, those laptops have a memory bus equivalent to 8-channel traditional DDRx RAM. You'd need 8 SO-DIMM slots just to get the bandwidth, at a huge increase in power. LPDDR RAM isn't even available in modules for this reason; it's designed for low power, and using connectors goes against that design goal.
Unconventional ideas are inherently risky. They're just not worth pursuing if buy-in can't be secured and leadership is more focused on compromising to increase profit margins, etc. For that reason, it's great (in the short term!) that Apple is rehashing known-good designs from a decade ago. However, I don't see that strategy working in the long term.
I’m about to upgrade from a 2015 MBP and am wondering - is there a usb-c cable I can buy which works with everything guaranteed?
After all, Apple were also the first to sell Desktops without Floppy or Optical drive.
Again with this rubbish.
I have worked at Apple and Ive does not unilaterally make the product decisions in the company. It is a combination of Product Marketing, Hardware Engineering, Design, Procurement etc and they are all discussed and signed off by the Senior Leadership Team.
When you building products at the scale Apple does decisions are years in the making. And so they need to make them based on what they think the future will be. Mostly they are right and sometimes they are wrong e.g. USB-C being the standard connector for everything.
I dont know how Apple works but sometimes if there is guy at the top who has to be kept happy you sign off on only those things which you know will make the guy at the top happy.
I have been in design meetings with Jony, and Scott Forstall, and many others whose decisions were micromanaged by Steve at every step. You can argue that a lot of Steve's design decisions were questionable; rich Corinthian leather skeumorphism, lickable Aqua widgets, brushed aluminum window title bars, but he owned them.
Steve and Jony would sit for hours outside of Caffe Macs going over designs. Steve would spend even more time inside the industrial design area going over prototypes. He would spend a couple of hours every week meeting with every software team that had user facing features. He had input on almost every pixel on the screen and every button/port/display/etc on hardware.
Once he was gone, the drift began. It was inevitable that focus would shift. Scott no longer had protection by Steve. Jony fixated on the new campus and things like watch bands. No one had Steve to rein in whatever impulse they had. Sure, people would ask "What would Steve do?" but we also had Tim Cook pushing to optimize production, lower cost of goods and increase margins.
Apple still has Steve DNA, but it continues to be diluted. You may disagree with Steve's vision and opinions, but it was strongly held and enforced. I feel almost everything about the last generation of MacBook Pros went against what Steve would have wanted and I am glad I wasn't there when those decisions were made.
Come-on, that guy has died for 10 years. His opinion on anything one cited for is *UNKNOWABLE*. Stop saying he will approve or disapprove some ideas... That's literally meaningless statement...
That being said, I just can't believe he would have been happy about the various issues with the old MacBooks. So many things feel so wrong.
That said, pure speculation on my part, but I think the notch would not have launched on the laptops without some other benefit - e.g. Face ID - or it would have been on pause until it was small enough to match the current menu bar’s height. There was sometimes more of a push to get things “just so,” I think. Either way, I miss the old showy product introductions. I like the polish of the videos under lockdown, but it feels like the format drains the enthusiasm a bit.
And it’s hard to point to anything recent, except maybe AirPods Pro and recent software releases, where Apple really knocked it out of the park. Most Apple hardware seems like incremental improvements rather than flashy impulse buys. Maybe I’m just more impatient than I used to be.
The Apple Watch has been much more profitable and will have a longer lifespan than the iPods.
I mean… the evolution of Apple’s in house chips are absolutely park-knocker-outters, and the thing that makes me bullish about the company’s future. It alone may be enough to secure a front runner position when it comes time to transition to AR.
They would benefit again from an iconoclastic head of product, but the new laptops and stability improvements introduced in Monterrey suggest that bench is stronger than a lot of people think.
Yeah, I’m not knocking Apple’s tech - but I was hoping for “the latest specs” and what I got was an HDMI 2.0 port, UHS II SD card slot, and so on. It reminds me of when they removed Thunderbolt Display input from the iMac, so you couldn’t use an old iMac as a secondary monitor. Or when they removed the optical sound out from the headphone jack. I won’t even ask why the new Macs don’t have cellular or why Apple hasn’t thrown money at game companies to make better Mac ports or otherwise entice PC gamers consider Mac hardware instead of Windows. Speaking of gaming, the lack of a “console-like” Apple TV is also a bit of a letdown. As is the lack of an Echo Show competitor.
I don’t doubt that this will be like the iPhone all over again - Apple’s late to the party but gets it right. But I also kind of worry it will be Siri all over again - fantastic at first, but ultimately a cancelled HomePod and still a work in progress…
Only partly. Apple under Jobs sold a completely unusable mouse (the infamous "hockey puck") for years simply because it looked cool. And it took them ages to move away from the butt-ugly skeuomorphic design in IOS. Only after first MS went with flat design and later Google got the design language of Android right, did Apple throw that out.
>And it’s hard to point to anything recent, except maybe AirPods Pro and recent software releases, where Apple really knocked it out of the park.
Uh, IDK. Considering how first the M1 and then the derivatives rocked the world of CPUs, I'd really disagree. The ripples of that really rocked intel and might cause quite drastic changes there.
Me, personally, I was looking at buying either a Dell XPS or a Framework laptop next to run Ubuntu, but considering the latest MBPs, I will buy one of those as I really love quiet machines with great displays.
I ask because it is almost as if you see the bricks change shape at Apple trying to fill the missing piece... they know they need that influence, it’s just not there, and honestly, I want to be a part of an organization that operates in the post-kicked out Steve aura.
Simple. Steve is undeniably one of the most influential people in the last 50 years. You don't have to agree with him to recognize this. To dismiss his impact because you don't like him personally is shallow and reductive. No one is saying he was a nice guy.
First, he and Woz brought us the Mac. Sure, Woz was the tech guy but Steve's product influence cannot be overstated. Macs really lost out to the IBM PC and then Steve was forced out of his own company by his own hire (John Sculley from Pepsi).
Apple languished for a decade while Steve started NeXT. On the brink of bankruptcy when Apple had to be rescued by a $150 million injection of funds from Microsoft.
In the next decade, Steve took the NeXT OS that because the foundation for OS X and iOS and released the iPod, iTunes and then the iPhone that ultimately turned Apple into what it is today: a trillion dollar company that literally prints money.
Steve was basically the ultimate product person and really a visionary. It was often stated that he generated a reality distortion field as he literally changed industries around him. The sea change that was the iPhone took control over code distribution on mobile phones from the wireless carriers. The price of this was several years of AT&T iPhone exclusivity in the US. The popularity of the iPhone bent carriers to his will. He unrelentingly refused to ship bloatware on the iPhone (unlike what you get on basically very Android phone other than the Pixel).
Apple developed a track record for taking terrible technologies and making them great. One of my personal favourite examples is connecting to Wifi. Many here probably aren't old enough to remember this but in the early 2000s that involved going to a settings window in Windows and entering the Wifi type (802.11b and then 11g), the encryption type (eg WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2 or WPA2-PSK) and an encryption key, which may or may not be a password.
On OSX you simply selected a network and entered a password. Why ask the user for a bunch of stuff they don't care about, probably don't know and you, the computer, can figure out?
To me this is classic Steve influence.
Fun fact: Steve is the reason we don't have DRM on downloaded music. iTunes initially used a DRMed format to launch and all songs were $0.99. DRM was demanded by the RIAA. The RIAA didn't like the pricing model. Steve ultimately made the bargain that gave them pricing tiers but his demand was no DRM. That's how iTunes ended up distributing DRM-less MP3s instead.
Steve was by far the most user-focused of any of the tech titans of the last half-century.
Some people don't like Apple's walled gardens and that's fine but again, to dismiss the impact of the iPhone (for example) because you personally prefer the "freedom" of Android is a shallow judgement.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. And Steve was a giant. That's why he was and continues to be respected.
Not sure about Windows 2000, but connecting to wifi on Windows XP took a single double-click... and I believe OSX Tiger was released years after XP.
</OS flamewar>
He was most definitely not empathetic to me. He could be very empathetic to an abstract construct of a person. He would act as an advocate of the "user" but I felt that the user was always him. How did this align with reality? I guess it did, to a certain cross-section of people who appreciated whatever guise of a user Steve represented. This user construct changed over time and I could see it in early Apple Steve, lost in the wilderness Steve, NeXT Steve and return to Apple Steve.
Steve had charisma. Younger Steve charisma was different to me and it left an imprint. I felt that he was attractive physically and mentally, could engage with you and make you feel like you and he were doing something that could really make a difference. We knew we weren't curing cancer, but that somehow the pursuit was noble in a similar way; enabling human potential that was being lost. I still want to feel this way about technology.
Once you got to know Steve (if one could) he was oddly two-dimensional. His lack of real personal connection or concern about you as an individual was troubling. In some ways, the more abusive he was to you, the more it showed his interest in you. It was dysfunctional. He was never mean to random people (in my observance) although you hear stories of him being abusive to people he didn't know, I never saw it. I saw him open doors for people, let people cut in line in front of him in the salad bar, normal sorts of politeness. The higher his expectation of you, the harsher the abuse you could expect to receive. You could never really become numb to it, but after awhile you just began to adjust your calibration.
As you point out, Steve did win quite a bit. Of course he lost and sometimes he lost big. I really didn't care about winning the way a lot of Silicon Valley people care and I saw some of this in how Steve lived his life. Yes, he drove a nice car and had some property. But he wore well-worn clothes, drove himself to work and generally seemed like one of us. Later in life, odd things like private jets, yachts and Central Park condos showed up.
Everyone that I worked with at Apple who is still there knows it is not the same company. It can't be. The scale, management structure, market, political climate and more is different. And there is no Steve. I left Apple when Steve finally left, but I knew that "my" Apple was gone around 2006.
Apple came back.
I can think of no other company in recent history that has come back from such a long run on death row to periodically become the company with the world's highest market valuation. And we tend to associate that (for many good reasons) with Steve Jobs. Steve's persona and the admiration that follows I think derives in large part because it has been the ultimate come back story.
This "come back story" is one of the most classic and inspiring stories that has resonated through myth and fable throughout history. It's what makes us stand up and cheer in a theater when Daniel Laruso delivers the take down kick. It is Miracle when the US beats USSR in hockey. It's why we like to interpret David and Goliath as a little guy takes down big guy story (vs the kid with the rock gun kills the big lout https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story...).
It's interesting to note that with Steve gone, Elon Musk has risen to the new Crazy Successful Celebrity Leader figure. Like Steve, you can see Elon from a variety of facets, some very flattering, and some very damning, what we would love about him is that he has had some success at defeating the status quo.
That being said, I just can't believe he would
have been happy about the various issues
with the old MacBooks. So many things feel so
wrong
During his life, he certainly did champion a lot of form-over-function decisions: the "cube" G4, the hockey puck mouse on the iMacs, etc.
And then he also championed some similar decisions that most people regard as roaring successes: the removal of legacy ports on the MacBooks felt an awful lot like the decision to ditch legacy ports on the original iMacs.
Sort of, but this disregards some important product context. Having a multi-port dongle or adapters on a desktop machine is a very different experience than a portable.
I'd also add that with Jony Ive on the way out for years, there are a lot of decisions attributed to him that he likely did no more than sign off on.
It is sad. No one knew what to do with Apple Retail. That was the most neglected part of business.
Ron Johnson left. Scott Forstall forced out. Katie Cotton retired. ( I felt both Scott and Katie had a bit of Steve Jobs in them ) Mansfield retired. It sometimes feel Apple is now largely run by Tim Cook and Eddy Cue.
Although the new MacBook Pro do seems to show there are people in Apple that still give a damn. That their voice may have been previously drown out. Quote from Steve.
>It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
>So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
Really wish Steve was still alive.
> And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
Developers are customers too.
In the past decade, Apple's focus is self-centered: optimising for profit. That has come at the cost of community. Will the new hardware solve that? It's a welcome improvement! I use a laptop for data storage, and am worried about being unable to quickly swap my SSD over to a spare laptop (restoring 8TB will take a long time). I'm very pleased about the return of MagSafe, though, and battery replacement. Will Apple's software improve? Will Apple listen to developers? Or will the Linux community act first to welcome more newcomers? We're going to find out this decade, and I'm excited to see what changes it brings.
Apple became the most valuable company in the US before Jobs passed.
After the App Store: Apple takes 30%
But let’s not pretend that most of the App Store revenue comes from poor indie developers. It comes from pay to win games, loot boxes, and other in app purchases with zero marginal costs.
But again, you’re not standing up for the poor starving Indy developer. You’re standing up for companies that are doing far more sinister things going after “whales” than anything Facebook has ever done.
There are several things wrong with that statement.
1. If these companies engaged in truly destructive business practices (and it could be proven), then Apple has a duty to remove those apps. Every developer has to pay them $99/year to be registered, so that money should be funding the removal of these supposedly exploitative and 'sinister' apps.
2. You cannot prove that the majority of these businesses are all big.
2a. Even if you could prove that, it's common knowledge that Apple is the largest company in the world, which renders that entire argument moot.
3. How do you delineate between indie developers and 'whales'?
3a. When you do differentiate the two, how is it ethical for the largest company in the world to ask for more of their profits?
4. Apple isn't standing up for the poor indie developer either, which is why it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to do better. There is not a company on this planet with more liquid cash than Apple, so there's nothing wrong with asking them to just improve their treatment of developers when consensus is that they're one of the most exploitative and destructive companies in the field of consumer electronics.
2. I said that most app revenue comes from “whales”. Those are the players who spend the most money on play to win games. https://medium.com/shopify-gaming/mobile-gaming-is-a-50b-ind...
3. Indy developers are selling a product that has value. The “whales” are the 5% of consumers buying loot boxes and candy crush coins (?).
3a Most of their profits are not from the App Store. Most of their profits come from a simple ethical business model - I give them money they give me stuff. Unlike Google and Facebook or the aforementioned games.
4. Who are all of these poor developers Apple should be standing up for? In the link above (and the numbers were confirmed during the Epic trial), most money is coming from games with in app purchases. If you look at the top selling apps on the App Store now, the last one that I can remember that came from Indy developers is WidgetSmith. How many Indy developers would be successful if Apple took a 15% cut instead of a 30% cut?
Well, there's the FlickType guy[0] who got kicked off the app store only to have his product completely cloned by Apple. Then there's the Hey! email people who went to hell-and-back just to get an inoccuous update approved. Not even a year ago there was a class-action lawsuit against Apple by developers[2], and Apple's "compromise" was to charge less for a service that was provably garbage. They know their 30% cut is illigitimate, that's why they backed off so quickly. Even still though, they charge certain people 30%, others only 15%, and then the big companies like Netflix get away with 0%[3] because of insider deals that other apps cannot benefit from.
So fixing that would be a good start. Then they need to allow for alternative payment processors (as pressure mounts from countries like South Korea and France), and hopefully get rid of their asinine sideloading requirements that do nothing for the user except make it harder to get the functionality they want. These feel like non-negotiables to me, and as a developer I have no intention of supporting their software or using their hardware until it's fixed.
[0] https://www.inputmag.com/tech/apple-blocked-the-flicktype-wa...
[1] https://www.engadget.com/apple-basecamp-hey-email-app-store-...
[2] https://www.axios.com/apple-settles-developer-class-action-c...
[3] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1444367219509637123
Netflix hasn’t allowed in app subscriptions for years.
Every developer with in app subscriptions only pays 15% after the first year.
If Apple’s 30% is garbage, so is Google’s and every console makers.
Do you support Android? Have you bought any game consoles.
As far as not allowing side loading - that’s a feature not a bug. Are you really unaware of all of the malware that is on computers because of no sandboxing?
I’m referring to well known software companies.
- Zoom installed a web server surreptitiously on Macs so when you uninstalled the software, it reinstalled it (https://www.zdnet.com/article/researcher-says-zoom-web-serve...)
- DropBox does all sorts of evil on Macs.
- Fortnite side loading introduced a vulnerability on Android (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/fortnites-android-vu...)
- Google and Facebook convinced users to install VPN software using a corporate certificate that allowed them to track users in other apps.
- not on purpose. But if you had system integrity protection turned off on the Mac and installed Chrome, it made the system unbootable (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...)
I agree. We have to hold Apple accountable first though, because they're abusing it hardest.
> Do you support Android? Have you bought any game consoles.
I do support Android, through F-Droid, and while my app wouldn't benefit from existing on a console I've sideloaded several apps to my Xbox One without any problem. I played through Castlevania last week and it ran flawlessly, so it's mostly Sony and Nintendo who are holdouts at this point (and I say that as someone with a hacked Switch).
> Are you really unaware of all of the malware that is on computers because of no sandboxing?
I'm fully aware. I just don't think it matters when the iPhone has much more malicious attack vectors, like zero-click iMessage exploits that cut straight through BlastDoor like it didn't exist. Maybe once Apple fixes their more egregious security vulnerabilities and embraces transparency they'd have an argument: but right now it's a poorly-disguised and obvious excuse for lock-in.
But it wasn’t about court. It’s about you selectively choosing who to have moral outrage against. So Apple makes too much money as the most valuable company in the world. But Microsoft and Google are the good guys even though they are also making obscene profits and are worth a trillion+ dollars?
>"Maybe it'll be a billion-dollar marketplace at some point in time. This doesn't happen very often. A whole new billion-dollar market opens up: 360 million yearly run rate in the first 30 days, I've never seen anything like this in my career for software,"
>"Music is a two and a half billion-dollar business a year for us. I'm thrilled at $360 million a year run rate. We'll be dancing on the ceiling if we cross a half a billion. Maybe someday we'll get to a billion."
He also said he doesn't believe App Store will overtake iTunes in revenue. But that was at the launch of App Store in 2008.
Forward to 2010, App Store was nearly $2B. Still not as much as iTunes, but it was growing fast. And projected to overtake iTunes in 2011. He didn't understand the App Store market. So it was uneasy for him. He spoke about it in multiple interview since 2008. But he was sick, and well aware oh his health. On his last trip to Japan in 2010, we wrote "All Good Things", the last part "must come to an end" wasn't written out. But he must have known his days may be numbered.
Remember 2010 to 2015, Apple was about, or at least perceived to repeat the same mistake of Macintosh and Windows again. Current iPhone 13 in launch quarter would have sold more iPhone than all iPhone 2G to iPhone 4 combined. iPhone revolution has barely stated despite most of nerds realise how big of a change it will be.
In 2015 the war has pretty much settled. Android will never be able to destroy iPhone. And iPhone growth projection has zero momentum lost. I wrote on AI how Apple will reach 1B iPhone user in 2020 at those projected rate in 2014. At least Phil Schiller was aware of it in 2014 and floated the idea or lower commission rate from "Strength". I am sure if Steve was alive and Scott Forstall was still on the team you would at least have some support of that idea.
The problem is right now no one has the conviction to say no this isn't a business we should be in. Certainly not from the number guys like Tim Cook or CFO. iTunes was used to sell iPod. App Store should have been used to sell iPhone. Instead it is now used to extract value from iPhone users aka Services Revenue. Scott stood up for Developers, Steve did too. As shown in email released in court. And I am pretty sure Katie Cotton would have smelled the PR disaster before it even started. But all three are gone.
https://www.livescience.com/16551-steve-jobs-alternative-med...
Versus other sources that say Jobs did delay treatment.
His working style and some of his personal history seem like they would not have worked in 2020s.
I could see him as a board member, occasional informal consultant. But not as head of the company. And I don’t know if he would have liked that too much.
I think if he was CEO of Apple in the current environment, certainly there would be less hero worship outside of Apple, and a lot more people would be writing pieces critical of his leadership style and effect on the world, but there wouldn't be anything serious enough to force him from the company given how well things would be going. In other words, he'd be much closer to Musk than Kalanick both in terms of the severity of the criticism and his ability to weather it.
I think Walter Isaacson did a massive disservice by not focusing on things he was uniquely good at, but instead built a largely negative narrative around him; squandered an opportunity to show his work ethic, his approach and how he inspired people. I recommend reading "Becoming Steve Jobs" instead by Schendler and Tetzeli. One of the best moments in the book is when Steve wanted the I-beams to be absolutely perfect in the new office building.
It would be better if we pick out good things about any accomplished personalities and try to benefit from them, instead of dishing out vile hatred that is oh-so-common at discussion boards like this.
There’s also an old documentary about the founding of NeXT that does such a great job of showing what it was like to be in the room with him as a member of a small team, and this was before he fully “became” Steve Jobs. People underestimate how much meaning can be found in being pushed hard by someone with a clear and inspiring vision.
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
With this knowledge about Steve Jobs, it's fair to assume that he knew that too right ? he probably knew he was part of the glue that made Apple Apple, and took measures to avoid dilution happening too fast.
Also says a thing about leadership and human groups :)
In my opinion this design was a lot more usable than the current 10 year trend toward having no borders around anything anywhere.
HDMI: I guess it's good if you have an old monitor? My monitor from like 2015 has USB C and charges my computer while I use it.
MagSafe: I've never had a computer fall off a table. Seems like a weird overoptimization for an unlikely scenario. If you use it you've got to carry a different cable that you can't use for anything else, unlike the USB C power cable that i also use to connect peripherals if needed.
SD card: I've never used one of these. I guess it's good for professional photographers? Why don't expensive cameras just have 256gb of onboard storage and connect over thunderbolt?
But the key reason for it is that it's a dedicated power port. That means that port is designed for that. You don't waste money allowing your laptop to be charged from any of the four USB-C ports. Like, who needs that?
Worse, those ports weren't identical leading to the advice to always charge from one side to avoid overheating.
I do find HDMI to be a bit of a strange choice however. I don't mind USB-C to HDMI/DP cables for this. Like you say, more monitors support DP passthrough over USB-C if not full TB.
The HDMI port is also 2.0 not 2.1. The difference? 2.0 can run 4K @ 60Hz. 2.1 can run 4K @ 120Hz. 120Hz continues to have poor support under OSX but it's clearly the future.
As for the SD card, I don't really use this either but this is aimed at photo and video professionals. Why not just connect the camera? Easy. Because you need to keep using the camera so it's far quicker just to swap out the cards and start copying.
A modern digital photo or video setup will have a camera with 2 SD card slots. The camera will write the same to both cards. When swapped out, one will be kept separately as backup. The other will be copied onto another device, which then may also copy that offsite. This way you immediately get 3-4 backups in 2-3 locations, which is a lot of redundancy.
Granted, it just bounced and flipped and sustained no damage, but I wouldn't guarantee you'd have the same luck.
USB ports have to be connected to the power system anyway because they have to power peripherals. Maybe it's got to be a slightly heavier connection to charge the computer, but I'm guessing the extra cost is minimal compared to a whole different fancy port with magnets in it and a whole different cable. Who needs it? People who don't want to carry around an extra cable everywhere.
That said, I still like the additions. the sd card and hdmi are the only reason I even have a dongle most of the time.
People don't want to throw away their camera every time the storage runs out. They want mirroring between cards so the wedding shots don't disappear on a storage failure. So they can swap storage on the go.
Your strong assertions based on your limited understanding of other people's needs says more about you than Apple.
Complaining about the price of Apple’s RAM seems reasonable, but complaining that they didn’t choose DDR5 DIMMs when they appear to have chosen something better seems silly.
I find it funny to appeal to Steve Jobs for a reality check :)
btw my pet theory about the touch bar is: let's use the apple tech skills synergy again, we made tactile swiped device since the ipod, we made that into phones, now let's blend it into our laptops.
If Steve Jobs was alive he would never let such products ever released. You can feel he left his mark in MacBook 12 and iPhone 6 as those products were lightweight and thin - read pushing boundaries.
Around that period it felt like Apple made a pivot away from trying to increase market share through having the best product, and toward maximizing their revenue by leveraging their amazing brand image.
One of the early things was the change from the L-shaped mag-safe back to the T-shaped one. The L-shaped one was such an improvement - those things would last forever. But the T ones would fray in a matter of months. It almost felt like someone at Apple looked at the money they were losing from selling less chargers and decided they had to go back.
And I liked mag-safe but honestly I don't miss it. USB-C charging is fine and having one standard charger you can get anywhere work for everything more than makes up for any relative drawbacks.
Personally, the only mechanical switch I could stand was Kailh Choc Blue - low profile blue switch.
Now it’s their own chip, it makes sense that they have now switched to their own proprietary solutions.
I still remember the scandal. It was hilarious. There was a recent redux on a smaller scale when they modified the recipe for Coke Zero.
IIRC, the big difference between diet coke and coke zero is that one is based loosely on the formula for coca cola classic, and the other new coke. That may be an urban legend, though.
Or vise versa - old recipe under new brand)
If you look at it the same was as the iPhone it’s clearly the same strategy as why they removed the headphone jack and why they want to remove all the buttons, and are ultimately aiming for a clear piece of glass.
It seems this 2021 Mac is a backwards step away from that strategy, perhaps recognising people aren’t ready yet, or perhaps competition and ecological concerns are becoming too big to ignore, either way, this will be a short lived regression, I’m sure.
I suspect someone at Apple realized how much would have been saved if only the battery was not glued to the case.
Edit: mentioned the keyboard problem, which would result in replacing the battery too it seems.
/1 without giving up your business books for 5 years selling your customers privacy, and giving up ability to do component level repair.
Each time the system showed 0 cycles on the battery and I basically got a nice reset. Loved that part of it at least.
I suppose it also means that the top case is no longer tied to different keyword layouts, fewer SKUs. That will have helped cut costs!
(written on a 2019MPB with duff ender key)
I’m quite positive the actual reason for its high difficulty score is that actually reaching the battery basically requires completely dismantling the whole laptop — the battery is under the motherboard, and every little module has to be removed and taken out fully before the motherboard can go. And putting them back in, the connectors are ridiculously small and fiddly.
The battery being glued was completely a non-concern IME.
Probably spent about 20 to 30 minutes using some old sacrificial credit cards to break the glue & pry the cells out.
Still, replacing just the battery ends up being a lot cheaper.
This is underlined by Apple’s “repairability scores” being mostly random - it seems that apple just doesn’t spend a lot of R&D time obsessing about repairability tweaks in bump-releases, especially if they’re going to get in the way of their vision for the device.
Then I got two more battery swaps when my keyboard failed.
Remember the glowing light near the laptop latch that would slowly swell to tell you that your laptop was asleep?
The Unibody had this lovely latch mechanism that also allowed you to easily replace your hard drive and/or RAM.
God, I miss those days. :(
Old batteries wouldn't be useable at half the age most modern batteries to start swelling
Then again, I was probably harder on the battery in those days than I am now, with my laptop often plugged in. I supposed my 2011 Air lated until at least 2018 on the original battery though.
There's only really minor complaints left, like the unreplaceable RAM and disks, and lack of touchscreen.
Please god no.
Being able to draw on screenshots with my finger (I that a lot for work) is really nice.
At least it has the killer feature of having the ability to be completely ignored, unlike other "trendy" features on new laptops :)
Also, I can never find a good use case for the folding tablet modes.
Maybe it's because I'm not an artist, and don't my computer much for pure media consumption, but almost everything on the computer is designed around having a keyboard.
I find it silly to type on a software keyboard 5x slower than the keyboard already attached to the device.
Once Apple invests in 3D chiplets, it is very likely that RAM, CPU, and GPU will be all be the same component. This is also likely necessary to eventually get memristors into commercial SOCs. I think maybe even the SSD might get pushed into the chiplet if they can manage the 3D real-estate. Ideally, even colocate the UWB and cellular modem[1] onto the single 3D chiplet or maybe have two SOCs one for compute+storage and one for wireless.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/apple-sta...
At the end of the day they are all MCMs(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-chip_module).
Previously, RAM, CPU, and GPU were all connected by the motherboard with copper(or similar) based wires. Because the wires can't overlap on the motherboard, there could only be X wires connecting the CPU/GPU to the RAM. To replace the RAM, either disconnect it from the slot or de-solder all X wires if needed, then replace the RAM chips.
Based on what I've read the M1 is a single MCM using a silicon-interconnect fabric, where the RAM and CPU/GPU are to each other's left and right[1]. This reduces the length of the wires a lot, which is a lot more efficient and improves performance. However, it still means you can only have X "wires" going from the CPU to the memory because the "wires" can't overlap. In theory (with very expensive equipment), you could "disconnect" all X "wires" and "pick up" the RAM chips and swap them for new ones.
A 3D chiplet[2] has the components stacked on top of each other i.e. the CPU/GPU is on top of the RAM, i.e. the RAM is below the CPU/GPU. Technically you could keep the legacy number of "wires", i.e. X "wires" between the CPU and memory, however, because the "wires" now go up and down (rather than left and right) they can never overlap and you can now increase the bandwidth by having X100 or X1000 more "wires" between the CPU/GPU and RAM. While, theoretically you could still "disconnect" the up and down "wires", because there are sooo many more "wires" between the stacked chips everything gets more difficult, and replacing them gets even even more expensive. At which point, from my perspective, basically puts them in the category of "single integrated circuit" or "monolithic integrated circuit" (which is probably a better description than my previous use of "single component").
[1] Pic from Apple: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standard/A...
[2] https://wccftech.com/amd-discloses-multi-layer-chip-design-e...
You can stop grinding that axe bud, it’s never gonna swing again.
This is what we used to have with laptops 10+ years ago.
Swapping batteries due to charge issues was never particularly important to the majority of consumers and is a red herring.
> Swapping batteries due to charge issues was never particularly important to the majority of consumers and is a red herring.
Why?
And 90% of laptop users. Utility of computer upgrades for most people’s needs stagnated 5 to even 10 years ago. I think the last big material improvement before M1 for regular consumers was SSD replacing HDD.
Editing images and video comes to mind. Average users are doing that a lot more, since they have access to high resolution RAW output via mobile devices that struggle less than their desktop to cope with the throughput.
You're the guy who decided to drag this argument off onto the soapbox that you wanted to talk about that I never cared about. I wrote you off from the tone of your first response... because this is the internet...
It's not unreasonable for people to ask for that level of simplicity.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+Bat...
That's why Apple offers to do it for them.
Sure, completely user-replacable would be ideal but such a battery design surely comes with other trade-offs and compromises.
Pretty good was the first unibody macbook (open latch with one finger, remove door with two fingers, remove battery with two fingers, done):
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+Bat...
This procedure looks doable and relatively low risk for technical people, but it's not something that my mom can do while sitting at a Starbucks
Sure, a bit less power efficient, but surely cheaper than an Apple product, and you can choose your features e.g. AC inverter!
You also have the option of battery banks. As long as you can replace the battery when it wears out, thats all that matters to the average user.
I also replaced a macbook battery once, with a hot air resoldering station (to soften the adhesive) and a metal bucket filled with sand nearby in case it catches fire (the battery was balooning and bending the aluminium frame out of shape). The whole thing took nearly an hour. Ultimately it was also replaceable, but this was needlessly painful.
Glad the battery is easier to replace, though (speaking from experience!)
$20 is a ton for a cleaning cloth, but a small price to pay for consumers of apple products.
Here is the alternative (personal experience) 1. You search on amazon 2. Get presented with 1000 products 3. Read some reviews, wonder if this is the best product for your iPhone, will it work on the laptop 4. decide you don't really need a cleaning cloth
The apple solution, solves your problem for a price.
I haven't bought the apple cloth, but have and am considering it.
Unless of course all the while one was disturbed at the very thought of not having this revolutionary invention of Apple A Cloth That Just Cleans™ at home.
Honestly, I clean my iPad Pro so often with lackluster results I might just buy Apple's cleaning cloth if it's actually better than other microfiber cloths.
Now if only we could get an iPhone Pro with this kind of respect for right to repair.
Even the Monterey installer doesn't work offline at present, even the full 12GB one, or even a usb one made with createinstallmedia --downloadassets.
You must transmit your serial number to the mothership.
You can in principle do offline OS installs on these Macs in reduced security mode. I did it once with Big Sur. If that doesn't work with Monterey, that's a bug that should be reported and fixed. Full security mode requires phoning home, as part of their security model (this is so they can stop allowing installs of old, vulnerable OSes, which could be used as an attack vector on someone else's machine).
You need to make sure you install from 1TR if you want to do a reduced security install; again, this is part of their security model, to ensure you've asserted physical presence.
And again, it's totally optional, because "reduced" and "permissive" security mode exist.
(Yes, you said that, but I feel it should be re-iterated because it's important! The user is in control here!)
The user is in control, they just need to prove they're physically at the machine.
Like a lot of apps, you don’t need to use Photos.app. They didn’t sneak it in without explaining how it worked.
CSAM is an abbreviation for "child sexual abuse material", so no, that won't (hopefully) get added without your consent.
Everyone cheering apple on for making the laptop they should have made in 2016. Wow! No Touch Bar it’s so much better.
Semi replaceable batteries! How great. The funny thing is, if they had dropped the ports on this generation instead of the last, less people would have cared.
Sly but I wouldn't be surprised if they held it back for M1 to make the appeal of the devices bigger.
I use my machine in closed clamshell around 90% of the time which means the battery is usually in pretty terrible shape after a couple years of use. Will be happy to see battery replacement times hopefully go down on these new machines as waiting 5-7 days isn't fun to deal with.
They released a feature in Big Sur where it learns if you always keep your laptop plugged in, and during those times (which may be all the time, like in my case) it'll hover the battery between 70-80% to preserve battery health, and won't charge up to 100% until you tell it to manually (click the battery icon -> "Charge to full now")
For those of us who usually use our MacBooks attached to the wall, deep discharging (AKA "calibration"; <https://www.newertech.com/batteries/power-calibration-guide/>) on a regular basis is a substitute, but is annoying to do.
I similarly went through batteries every couple of years. I now use FruitJuice (on the App Store) as the menu bar battery indicator. If it finds that the computer hasn't been used on battery long enough, about once a month the app guides me through running a maintenance cycle to run it down to 20%. I presume that following FruitJuice's advice is why my latest third-party battery is still at 103% health after more than a year.
Thanks for the tip, I'll have to give this a shot.
AirPods Max are also great: - User-replaceable earcups with no tools needed; - User-replaceable headband, just needs a paperclip; - Somewhat user-replaceable battery - you can have them do it for $79 out of warranty, but a repair shop can definitely do it as well because it's just screws.
I always got the orange version of this: https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/productimages/a_121995.jpg
In any case where I care enough to listen wired, I also care enough to get a separate DAC. The cheap Bluetooth is competitive with the cheap wired these days and last longer.
Example: https://www.amazon.com/TOZO-T6-Bluetooth-Headphones-Waterpro...
Id rather use that space for extra battery capacity.
I do, at least. The main reason is that they just work. I never have to worry about pairing with different devices, walking too far away and disconnecting, keeping them charged... I have a pair of bluetooth headphones but I'm pretty sure they're not charged.
MMCX connectors mean you can replace the cable, not that I've ever broken a Shure one (they use Kevlar)
IMO $20 is only barely enough to get something WIRED that won't turn your music into a mushy mess.
Nice!
Hopefully they don't pull an iPhone and individually serialize batteries that authenticate with other chips on the phone - if they don't match you get an annoying warning and supposedly underclocked CPU causing performance issues even if it's a brand new battery.
What I need is the ability to swap out my SSD in the laptop, either for data retrieval, backing up, or upgrades. Unfortunately good removeable storage seems to be a thing of the past. I say "good" because I don't want to boot the newest MBP off a slow SD card.
I could depend on Migration Assistant or Time Machine, but I don't trust anything other than a good raw "cat" or "dd" of a drive
That's not exactly what I was expecting based on the headline. Still seems pretty complicated.
I'm trialing switching away from an XPS13DE (Develoepr Edition) to some "cheap"-ish 600 dollar laptop from HP just because I literally cannot stand the fact that the XPS doesn't have USB-A ports. I notice the difference (my cheap laptop is so much nicer) since it's so much more convenient since a lot of things are still USB-A these days (eg. my Arduino uses a printer cable which is USB-A, my flash drives are USB-A, my HDMI capture dongle is USB-A, my cheap webcam is USB-A, et cetera). Even if I have myriad dongles, if I'm travelling away from home, I don't have to remember to bring those dongles with me anymore.
Will we see hobbysts with a heat gun adding ram to these things? BGA soldering with tweezers and a heat gun doesn't look too tricky on those because the pad spacing is easily within what you could manage with tweezers.
The actual pin layout isn't a standard I recognize - so I assume apple has ordered custom made ram chips ..
I say it deserves at least a 5 out of 10 since you can wash it in the washing machine on cold and it air dries quickly
Is the picture supposed to show these new tabs? I don't see anything. Can I get a red arrow?
newer iPhones notoriously don't like DIY battery / screen replacements, and they disable features such as battery health with a DIY replacement.
What happened to outer compartments you could pop open without having to tear apart your $1500 laptop with a pair of tweezers?
It's weird that US companies basically need to be sued by the EU for stuff to be consumer friendly..
Oh, you may be surprised at how closely Apple watches and reacts to PR and its competitors - it's one of the things they do right and are really good at. Some examples:
1. After Apple's very successful launch of the iPhone, they got a huge shock in Europe when Jolla, a small, new startup of ex-Nokia employees launched a phone with a new mobile OS that outsold the iPhone. When Apple realised that Jolla's marketing emphasised "user privacy", Apple strategically temporarily shelved its plan to collect user data (for which it was getting bad PR) and even pretended to abandon their advertising platform. And that worked out very well for them because luckily for them Jolla was mismanaged, and failed.
2. Frame.work has received highly positive reviews from both the media and users / patrons all of whom have acknowledged and appreciated the creativity and innovative use of existing technology to create a highly repairable laptop. While it may not have outsold any Mac device yet, the PR buzz it has generated has focused public spotlight back on right-to-repair and created new awareness and appreciation for repairable electronics. Invariably, comparison has been made with Apple's popular yet deliberately hard-to-repair devices and you can bet that it has made Apple quite uncomfortable. (With regulators breathing down their neck about right-to-repair, the last thing Apple needs is an innovative competitor that tauts repairability as a feature).
3. When Apple released a Mac Mini with soldered RAM and SSD, the criticism and poor sales forced them to backtrack and release the next Mac Mini with replaceable RAM. (Again, a temporary strategic withdrawal).
4. The current and new Apple iPhones size and design are inspired by Sony mobiles phones, one of the few companies in the world that still has their own design division and produces amazing phones with great hardware.
5. The whole "thin device" craze at Apple was inspired by a Motorola phone. (And ofcourse, it remains popular as it aids their "planned obsolescence" goal for their devices).
I am not completely disparaging Apple - reacting to PR and their competitors is something giants sometimes ignore at their peril. But Apple doesn't, and they cleverly calibrate their strategy to maintain their competitive lead.
(I'd even say the article linked to is just a fluff piece trying to convey the impression that the new Apple laptop is suddenly a more easy to repair device because the battery is no longer glued like before but uses stretchable adhesive :). I recently repaired an iPhone SE and the battery adhesive broke as I was pulling it carefully and after that it was a real pain to remove it without damaging anything - easy to repair, my ass.)
Right...
Snark aside, the 2021 Pros seem well balanced between moving things forward hardware wise, and still offering enough I/O. They're likely not perfect at all, and for me the M1 Air is more than enough.
But all those things - planning, engineering, design and supply chain and last mile distribution take years to execute on, not weeks or months.
But my earlier comment itself was partially snarky to what is essentially a puff piece trying to convey that the new Apple laptops is now more "repairable" - "Oh my god! Apple has replaced the glue they use on their battery with stretchable adhesive that is now easier to remove!"
Just that the timelines on products are very long especially with hardware. There are no fast or simple pivots, and not usually in months - more like years on many things.
Despite seeming like a great company and product they probably sell fewer machines and have less mindshare than the $19 Apple cleaning cloth.
Since all laptops previously had and some still have replaceable batteries, including Apple, I’m also curious how Framework gets credit for this innovation?
The ship has sailed on replaceable RAM and storage IMO, because most of us want the performance increases that losing upgradability brings. It's a trade-off but one that's worth it in the long run.
That's what Apple marketing and clueless fanboys want you to believe.
M1 is fast because it is fast. Not because it has RAM in package or soldered SSD.
Socketed RAM and SSDs would be just as fast.
I once changed battery in my old iphone SE and it's a real pain if such white strips break - and they are sooo thin that it's really easy to break. Once it breaks you have to use heat gun and fishing line as improvised saw to cut battery from the case.
BTW My old macbook 15'' pro 2012 unibody had only screws and easily removable battery
Well, maybe I'll consider one of these over a Framework. I'll lean strongly towards the Framework machine but at least Apple is reconsidering some of their design choices over the last decade.
But the Linux desktop experience has been ... frustrating to say the least. And I say this as someone who has used linux in the terminal at my job every day for 5+ years now. It's ridiculous that the software experience still cannot match my 9 year old laptop running macOS Sierra on a 2.5GHz Core i5 and 8GB of DDR3 RAM!
I am running PopOS 21.04. There's inconsistent keyboard shortcuts, lack of touchpad precision, glitchy touchpad gestures, inconsistent fingerprint auth and more. Just on Day 2, I somehow ended up with a machine that somehow took 30+ seconds to go from login to desktop and 3-4 second lag when typing with 100% CPU usage when running any GUI app. The only way to fix it was to completely reinstall the OS -- I have no idea what caused this. I have now found some usable options for implementing my preferred touchpad gestures ("fusuma") and system-wide keyboard shortcuts ("kinto.sh") though there are still many quirks that are irritating.
I like Framework's approach, so I supported them by buying the device. I promised myself I will keep daily driving it for at least a month to give it a chance. If it keeps getting on my nerves, I will sell it and buy one the of the new 14" MBPs. Life's too short to spend hours upon hours fiddling with configuration files and reinstalling operating systems to get basic functionality working.
Thanks!
FYI I only am trying out Manjaro just because I wanted an Arch experience and for my gaming build I thought it might fair a bit better since the Steam Deck is built against it. I think Ubuntu is still a perfectly great solution.
Do it your way vs Gnome "here's what we think matters".
It appears to be non-rectangular silicon... Or perhaps some power MOSFETs under a cover?
Would much rather buy a new battery and put it in myself and be done with t
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85
It's past my personal definition, but just barely, since it involves dealing with a ribbon cable and an apparently fragile connection for the battery itself. It's not too bad, but not something I want to try and walk someone through if they're not used to this sort of thing.
(I'm still thrilled to see this improvement to serviceability on the new MBP, even if previous generations set a low bar.)
Did you actually have one? Or are you remembering a picture you saw online once?
And you can still use the scrolling top and click while its charging if you really need to continue browsing.
The Touchbar was my daughter's favorite - an Emoji keyboard. It also did a lot more - bringing up manpages in the terminal, having app-specific buttons (no need to hunt down the Zoom window to mute). People wanted an ESC key and they got it eventually. I couldn't care less about function keys. I get it was very expensive for the little if offered, but, still, it's still useful. More useful than F1 to F12 ever were.
Magsafe is nice from a safety standpoint (I have a kid and work from the couch sometimes), but with all-day battery life, what is the use of it? On my desk, the Mac is plugged into power, two external monitors, ethernet, keyboard and trackpad with a single cable, as God intended it to be. That's 3 free USB-C connectors for anything else (such as the external storage) and there is one power brick that lives in my backpack along a pair of US/EU adapters for when I need to travel. With USB-C power, it was nice to have the Dell and the Mac sharing power bricks when needed (if I said that 10 years ago, I would laugh myself out of the room)
I like the replaceable battery, but I miss the touchbar and actively dislike the reintroduction of Magsafe.
All of this is to point out, has anyone confirmed 4k/120 on the thunderbolt port? Given the 2x6k monitor output 4k @ 120hz sounds like it should be possible, unless Apple have nerfed the output.
It’s 2 for the Pro but 4 for the Max (technically 3 plus I think 4K@60, because that’s the limit of the hdmi port).
That ease-of-use—just pick it up and walk away, you don't even need to think about it—is significantly weakened if you need a few special cables and dongles to be similarly-well-prepared.
Your device's ports are a casualty of the lack of standard data port. The HDMI on displays makes you feel like you need an HDMI on your laptop, I disagree if my USB-C port can do that AND a whole bunch of other things.
It also requires carrying an adapter at all times just in case.
> Your device's ports are a casualty of the lack of standard data port
To my great dismay HDMI is the standard video port, that’s why it got added back.
> The HDMI on displays makes you feel like you need an HDMI on your laptop
No, what makes them feel that is that every video input aside from specifically desk-top computer displays is HDMI.
Over time I imagine we will evolve to a more standard "data transfer" cable that is what USB-C is trying to do. The transition isn't always easy and will introduce friction to various use cases.
Remember firewire? Today when I'm mobile I have a bookbag, a laptop and a small accessory bag. The accessory bag has various cables, dongles and adapters to ensure I have plug-ability.
Going back to your desk is a work problem, the office should just have those dongles in all the conference rooms and the problem you describe is entirely moot.
You run into this a lot places where only some developers and maybe the artists use MacBooks. Everyone else has fat Windows machines that have every port known to man and don't need dongles. Past the initial (annoying and unnecessary, but oh well) adjustment period, it wasn't that bad for all-Mac shops, but it's a real pain in mixed shops because it's basically just a MacBook problem.
Road warrior? It also meant you could grab it and go to the conference room and not have to take anything else with you, or go back to your desk for something. Packing for a business trip? Maybe you need to throw the power brick in the bag. That's all. Every single type? It had, what, five, including the rather niche Thunderbolt ports? Those are what should have become USB-C ports, as that change would have been 100% an improvement. Keep the rest, including USB-A, which might finally not be the most useful USB port to have in, oh, 2030 or so, if trends continue. Should be right about the time USB-C is being replaced ("Can you believe anyone ever thought that cable situation was OK? LOL.")
> Having a single port type on your device simplifies one half of the equation.
I don't think it's been most people's experience that having only USB-C makes their device simpler to use with a broad range of peripherals, even ~5 years after Apple went all-in on it.
At home I have a CalDigit docking station. One cable to my laptop, and I get power, video to a second monitor, digital audio connection to a DAC for audiophile quality headphones, SD card reader if I really need it and wired ethernet. The laptop still has 3 open USB-C ports. How is it not beautiful that a single cable takes care of all of that. Sure, we've had docking stations forever but they weren't single cable, they looked like cash registers you have to literally sit your laptop in to get the same level of connectivity.
When I'm traveling I have a few cables for various scenarios and adapters. USB-C to HDMI for video, also works for my iPad so it serves two purposes. I don't use SD-cards on the road so this isn't a problem for me but a USB or USB-C or whatever to SD-card reader isn't bulky enough to gripe about for traveling.
At work conference rooms can simply provide the needed connectors so when I disconnect from my desk and end up in a conference room I still have the connectivity I need.
> USB-C to HDMI for video, also works for my iPad so it serves two purposes.
I get why they didn't do it at first (lower-end models exist in part to use up parts from previous higher-end models, so you can't just change them all on day one) but it's crazy to me that they're still shipping iOS devices of any kind with Lightning ports. The dongle thing would have been less annoying if I could at least use the same dongles on all my (new) Apple devices, iOS and MacOS alike. As it is, only my 4th-gen iPad Pro has it. [edit] And man, is it so frustrating that they've almost achieved a situation where you can travel with one brick and one cable to provide power for your laptop and phone and a tablet... but no, they kept putting out new Lightning devices for years.
This doesn't seem like a big deal, but the first time I went on vacation with my family after getting the 2019 MBP, I forgot that I needed to pack the adapter, and we couldn't watch whatever series we were currently binging on Netflix or HBO, which was pretty annoying. I'm happy to see HDMI ports showing up on more laptops these days!
HDMI is going to be especially sticky, and great to have built-in, for years to come, most likely. AFAIK USB-C cannot replace it, because, like most data cables that aren't HDMI or Ethernet, it has really, really short max-length limitations. Meanwhile, HDMI can have runs of 20+ meters and work totally fine, no repeaters or anything. If you're building in a ceiling projector, or have a TV at one end of a room but the connection in a conference table, you will use HDMI. Something might replace it, but it'll be a cable we've not heard of yet, not USB-C.
Example 50m cable: https://www.rockshop.de/corning-thunderbolt-3-optical-cable-...
Way too expensive for that, but if the price drops a bunch on that tech, that'd become an option.
You can get those cables for ~500$. It's not super practical yet, but if you can afford a 1500$ GPU, you can also add that :) Plus, you'll need to worry about cooling, noise and optics a lot less, which, on a high end build, might already be enough saving to make it worthwhile.
Still baffles me why there was no hash key though.
HDMI is great because whatever random TV you want to connect to probably already has some other device plugged in with a 6' HDMI cable that you can steal.
I really don't see the big deal with a one-off use case like that being the reason my machine NEEDS a specific port that doesn't have a compatible adapter.
Likewise, when Apple champions a non-proprietary port on their PCs, other manufacturers tend to follow suit.
Apple is more than just another large OEM. They are the standard bearer for the personal computing industry. They have tremendous influence over what a computing device looks like and how it connects to peripherals and other machines. (WiFi was largely a lab experiment before Apple's AirPort.)
That they are indeed. HP has a whole line of laptops named "Envy" for a reason.
This is the Macbook Pro, they shouldn't be optimizing for children's love of emojis. I get what you're saying about your other usages of it, but I hate the Touchbar with the heat of a thousand suns, and given that Apple did decide to remove it on the Pro I'm guessing my sentiment was in the majority.
You can then search for whatever emoji you want and hit enter without taking your eyes off the screen or your fingers off the keyboard. Typing emojis was never a problem in macOS that the touchbar needed to solve
The Touch Bar is infinitely more useful than the function key row -- volume and brightness sliders are way better than "louder" and "brighter" buttons. Answering calls with the bar is easier than mousing over to the Teams notification.
And you can still power the thing over USB-C (alongside data), just not at the same wattage/no quick charge. It's perfectly serviceable unless you're doing something really punishing.
The only problem I've had so far is getting a two monitors working with my particular USB-C dock (it works with an Intel MacBook). Hopefully it's a software/firmware thing, because I enjoy the single cable life as well.
The M1 simply couldn't push more pixels.
And while I understand the chipset availability limitations, 2x2 802.11ax will at best nearly equal the performance of my 2017 MBP in my current 3x3ac deployment. Guess I'll have to hurry up transitioning to ax.
Just because it's a leap backwards doesn't mean it's bad. Sometimes changes are not good and backtracking is.
* HDMI inputs are in super common world in the professional world, it's become the standard for all video projection or conference room TVs (unless you still have an even more ancient VGA) and having to carry adapters to meetings or to give talks is a pain in the ass. It's also pretty much the standard for digital audio (since Apple also removed SPDIF).
* The touchbar was shit, it could have been OK as an addition to function keys, but it precluded any and all muscle memory and quick access to featues. "More useful than F1 to F12 ever were." isn't even remotely true.
* And not all users are at your desk, that the laptop has "all day battery life" (as long as you only watch youtube videos, you're not going to get 11h battery life if you're actively working with demanding software) doesn't mean people won't need to charge them at places which are not your desk. Plenty of people work on kitchen tables and whatnot, with the power cable in the way and yankable by a pet, a child, or just somebody going through.
> On my desk, the Mac is plugged into power, two external monitors, ethernet, keyboard and trackpad with a single cable, as God intended it to be. That's 3 free USB-C connectors for anything else (such as the external storage) and there is one power brick that lives in my backpack along a pair of US/EU adapters for when I need to travel. With USB-C power, it was nice to have the Dell and the Mac sharing power bricks when needed (if I said that 10 years ago, I would laugh myself out of the room)
Certainly I can't see how you could ever survive with only 2 free USB-C connectors left. Poor you.
I mean, the F1-F12 keys are so mostly useless that the majority of laptops require you to press a modifier to use them as such. They replaced them with functions that are more broadly useful to most people: media keys, brightness control, keyboard back lighting, etc. I mostly agree that those keys are easier to use than the touchbar, though.
Gaming and hotkey macros notwithstanding, I think this is what people are mostly lamenting when they complain about the TouchBar replacing F-keys.
Ha, that was one of my use cases as well. Not an extremely compelling one, though, to be fair. (^⌘? does the trick with a keyboard shortcut).
I was having a similar discussion the other day. MagSafe was amazing when my Intel MBP had to basically be tethered to power all the time. My M1 MBA only ever gets charged at my desk plugged into a dock/monitor. MagSafe was great when it was needed, but its time is passing.
I don't see the dislike for it.
Looking down at the touchbar each time to assess what the current interface is adds a tiny amount of additional overhead to my interactions that I dislike. It's not _terrible_, but it's not my preference.
I also really dislike the lack of tactile feedback.
1) You can't really make it part of your muscle-memory workflow if you use an external keyboard more than a very small percentage of the time, rendering it nearly useless for lots of people, right out of the gate.
2) Some of us discovered we barely brush the Touch Bar (F-key) area while typing certain keys (numbers, for me, which means also all the symbols that are on the number keys). This meant we had to all-but disable the damn thing to keep it from opening iTunes and doing other crap, apparently "at random" but actually because our fingers were straying 0.01mm onto the Touch Bar without our realizing it. Result, a fair percentage of users had to force like 3/4 of the bar to be empty all the time, or else face constant irritation when using the built-in keyboard.
2) I get it but comparing to desktop keyboard F-keys are dead without Fn-key so unlike Touch Bar mbp f-keys are not on par with desktop keyboard.
Didn’t want to editorialise the iFixit link with 9to5mac’s title but we ended up there anyway :)
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Touch+Bar+2...
"Even better, it appears the battery isn’t trapped under the logic board. That could mean battery swaps without removing all the brains first—a procedure we’ve been dreaming about for a while."
That...seems like a pretty big improvement?
As to expertise: you just need to remove a few screws and then the power connector, its not difficult just tedious.
You don't have to follow each step, but if you don't know any better you should.
taking shortcuts just leads to sloppy outcomes, like any repair method.
This is why I still feel the fishing line method, combined with low quantities of solvent is the least risky option overall.
But I went to check the battery replacement guide for the 2015 and…: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Disp...
> Steps 74
> Time Required 2 - 3 hours
However according to the comments the ifixit people were playing it very safe, most of the steps in the first half are not entirely necessary and the procedure can be completed in about an hour.
Pre-unibody I can believe. I had a whitebook and the battery popped off and revealed the disk bay and RAM.
The removable battery in your device wasn’t supporting the device. It’s a design trade off that most OEMs have made.
It’s an argument akin to complaining about unibody cars. For the vast majority of people, like 95%, nobody was replacing laptop batteries on a regular basis.
We historically bought <1000 batteries a year, mostly due to environmental issues like cold and good lifecycle management.
having > 3% of your batteries go puffy though is still significant when you can redesign your machines to be easier to repair.
I’m not running that business anymore, but I’d be interested in changes between 2019 and 2022, as people are running on battery more and using residential electric service.
According to coconut I replaced my battery back in 2017~2018 or so (battery was manufactured in October 2017) and it was a breeze. "New" battery is at 6934/7000mAh (99% capacitity).
Now I can fry my logic board again without having to go through the major pain of removing the original battery.