Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

One criticism of Apple back in the Ive days was the lack of practicality. I like the fact that Apple relented on the MacBook Pros and they have an HDMI port.

I don’t want to have to use dongles unnecessarily.

> Apple fanboys/fangirls/fanothers: even the Mac Pro includes two legacy USB-A ports (admittedly it also has four Thunderbolt ports). Why is this relic of old tech cluttering the clean design of an Apple product in 2021?

This is naive. The chip hardware support to have 2 extra USB A ports is nothing compared to having two extra USB C/Thunderbolt ports and USB C/Thunderbolt is overkill for many situations.

View on HN

> This is naive. The chip hardware support to have 2 extra USB A ports is nothing compared to having two extra USB C/Thunderbolt ports and USB C/Thunderbolt is overkill for many situations.

Type C doesn't require anything more than USB 2.0 with the same signals routed out. There's no difference whatsoever. Type C is just a connector. Yes there will be more chip support if you decide to make the connector more fully-functional but that design choice is on the device manufacturer. They do not need to do that to have a Type C port.

Yeah, but having Type-C ports with different capabilities is wildly confusing to users. Imagine that Apple had mixed Type-C ports. Imagine the number of support calls from people that says 'doesn't work' when they try to plug their Studio Display in an USB 2.0 Type-C port. Or when the Studio Display works because they plugged it into a port with USB3 and DP-Alt, because the downstream hub doesn't work, because you need to hook it up with Thunderbolt.

In the end the only thing that is understandable to most users is when all the ports on a system provide the same capabilities (and probably Thunderbolt 4).

> Imagine that Apple had mixed Type-C ports.

They actually do :) they don't all have the same capabilities. Some are Thunderbolt, some aren't.

USB4 goes some way to addressing this concern though, since anything marked USB4 has to be fully-functional.

Not on the same Mac, as least for MacBooks (I haven't paid much attention to desktop Macs).

I regularly wish my work MacBook Pro had a single A port. I understand my personal Air not having one—it’s lacking all ports but C—but it’s the one thing preventing my MBP from being as always-useful-entirely-on-its-own as the 2014 Pro I used to have.

I carry a usb a to c cable in my “go bag” to work. It’s a 3” cable with some flex to it. Weighs nothing.

They are in the range of $10 Put in an expense report if IT doesn’t have one for you?

Sure, but it still makes the pro slightly worse than it could be. One of the things that quickly convinced me I’d been computing wrong, the first time I was issued a MBP, was that I could just pick it up and walk off and be able to work for hours. No need to grab the power brick or an extra battery (did I remember to charge it?) in case I was away more than two hours, no need to take a mouse, since the trackpad was actually a viable input device beyond a few painful minutes. Enough ports I’d almost certainly not need anything else (I wasn’t doing network tech stuff anymore, so absent Ethernet didn’t hurt me)

The windows machines at work have A ports (and C). They have a single notable leg up in the MBPs, now, as far as pick-up-and-go capability. Of course they still lag in other areas, but it’s gone from pure win to “most of it’s better… except that one thing”.

I found the return of the HDMI and SD card reader so refreshing but also so puzzling.

On one hand that's what we asked for. On the other hand it was in the same wave as giving up on the touch bar, slowing (stopping ?) the evolution of the iPad, no touch support on the laptops when the design changes were hinting at it.

Basically it felt like they froze the hardware form factors in time to solly focus on the ARM transition and the Vision Pro. That's a good decision on many front, and also a sign that the mac is now in its "conservative" phase where change isn't to be expected for a very long time if ever.

Now that Panos is also gone from Microsoft, I wonder where innovation will happen on the laptop/desktop side. Asus and Lenovo ? If it doesn't, desktops will slowly fit into the mainframes' position, and laptops will be legacy/ultra niche tools.

Perhaps then it will truely be the year of the desktop for linux ?

> On one hand that's what we asked for. On the other hand it was in the same wave as giving up on the touch bar, slowing (stopping ?) the evolution of the iPad, no touch support on the laptops when the design changes were hinting at it.

Apple typically tries for a fixed design cycle - the 2016 MacBook Pro design changed in 2021, so you can hypothesize when the next significant revision.

Loud voices stated that pros hated the keyboard, hated the Touch Bar, hated having to use dongles to do certain tasks like give a presentation or pull in photos from their camera. People also waxed poetic about MagSafe.

Lo and behold, the next version changed the keyboard, dropped the Touch Bar, and added HDMI and SD card slots, and added back MagSafe as a charging option.

The iPad has had hardware revisions since then (it has gone from A15X to M2) but there has been some hold-up on rolling out new models. The oddity is that nobody reporting based on supply chain leaks has knowledge here.

My suspicion is that there was originally a launch planned for March 2023 of new Air, Pro, Mini, and two new Apple Pencil models. For some reason - all we got was a new base Pencil model this year, and that was only released last month.

I know of no design changes to laptop hardware that hinted there would be touch support. The software design changes in MacOS 11 and beyond have been around UX alignment with iOS, and more specifically iPadOS. Apple wants the 'mobile' team that works on iOS apps to see that there is a supported and intuitive way to adopt their codebase to iPad and Mac releases, rather than having the 'web' team wrap the code in Electron for Mac and letting iPad run in iPhone compatibility mode.

This is why iPadOS has been gaining Mac-like features (mouse/trackpad support, keyboard shortcuts, multitasking/multi-monitor enhancements to name a few larger ones)

> Basically it felt like they froze the hardware form factors in time to solly focus on the ARM transition and the Vision Pro.

The Pro models have a design expected to accommodate the M1 through M5. Several iPad models are all due for a design change, but for whatever reason thats gummed up.

I would expect if design resources are taken up by Vision Pro, they don't break or pause their iterative process - they just have less manpower to propose and implement changes in an iteration.

> Loud voices stated that pros hated the keyboard, hated the Touch Bar, hated having to use dongles to do certain tasks like give a presentation or pull in photos from their camera. People also waxed poetic about MagSafe.

Yes, if we compared the current laptop lineup to 2015's, the only real significant changes are USB C and the 14" notched screens. Internals radically changed as well as performance, battery life, and that's where Apple is keeping the focus (rightly so given the reaction to the current models, where the consensus seems to be to not touch anything anymore outside of the battery and the chips).

> The iPad has had hardware revisions since then (it has gone from A15X to M2)

Yes, same path as the mac where internal changes seem to be the priority. The biggest change for me was the introduction of the cantilever keyboard as an option, which as you point out went along with Mac-like features coming in the OS.

In contrast, in the same time span Microsoft introduced the Surface Studio line (the elusive 2+ desktop and the widely loved but crazy expensive laptop) and the Surface Pro line that directly answered the "What's a computer ?" question Apple was asking. Looking at the numbers [0] it seems they found a decent niche where the iPad has stagnated for so long.

I think Apple could have interesting ideas for the next iPads, but as you say, no leaks whatsoever at this point probably means it's at least a year down the line, and if it's a real big change the iteration process will need that much time (and they should take their time. A half baked prototype would be killed on the spot after such a long wait)

[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/microsoft-su...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com