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Comment by liuliu | Hacker News Reader

> Nearly every Apple product has become objectively better since his departure. The complaints actually got addressed. Customers are being treated as valid sources of input to the product. Hard to see an issue here.

This is a subjective matter actually. The MacBook Pros got thicker, and Apple have no desire to address this. The iPhone camera modules sticks out more each generation to the point that a case is a must.

I do wish there are some Ive left in Apple so there are at least some care for the form rather than just functionality.

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> This is a subjective matter actually

I feel like this is subjective only if you want to sit around a cafe showing off your laptop, or make "day-in-the-life" videos for TikTok where you just show yourself eating at one of the FAANG cafes.

If you actually want to get work done, I don't think it's subjective at all. The butterfly keyboard is probably the best example of this bizarre obsession with design anorexia. Look, your laptop is .1 mm thinner. Except now you have basically no feedback when you type. Oh, and certain keys will randomly break every couple months if you get a tiny speck of dust on them.

It hasn't gone unnoticed that one of the biggest collective "Yes!!"es I heard from developers was a few years ago when Apple simply undid Ive's most recent design follies.

Plus, you can always get a MacBook Air (which now have relatively great power and performance) if you're a fellow design anorexic.

> Plus, you can always get a MacBook Air (which now have relatively great power and performance) if you're a fellow design anorexic.

IMHO, that's a key point. If there aren't clear form factor differentiations between the Air and MBP, Apple is making the wrong tradeoffs with the MBP.

> The MacBook Pros got thicker, and Apple have no desire to address this.

I suppose this would be a concern for me if that was an attribute I actually think of when shopping for a laptop but it isn't. Getting back the good keyboard, MagSafe, HDMI and to a lesser extend an SD card slot was absolutely worth the trade of a thicker machine. These are tools, not art pieces. I wish Apple would take it even further and give us back the ability to replace memory and storage, but that will probably never happen.

> This is a subjective matter actually. The MacBook Pros got thicker, and Apple have no desire to address this.

That's not a bad thing. I used to mock Apple's design for monomanically prioritizing thinness over almost everything else (e.g. we dropped this useful port to make your computer 0.2mm thinner, enjoy your dongle). That sounds like the natural and healthy reaction to relaxation of monomania.

Love my fatter MBPs. The 2016-2019 models were abysmal.

I must say, going from a 2019 16" MBP to a 2022 14" MBP for work I'm enjoying the thicker chassis, it doesn't thermal throttle all the time (and that has just as much to do with the improved thermal design as it does the CPU being more efficient).

> The MacBook Pros got thicker

The obsession with thinness above all else is a great example of Apple's style-over-substance failures.

It's good for a laptop to be reasonably light and portable. Having one line that focuses on reducing size/weight and another that focuses on power, as Apple does, also makes sense. But if the power-focused branch is 15mm instead of 13, that is deeply not a problem.

> The MacBook Pros got thicker

Yes, because in the real world bigger batteries store more energy, keyboard with more depth and travel are easier to type into (up to a point), and thicker objects bend less. Computers that are too light are actually harder to use

> and Apple have no desire to address this

GOOD. Sounds like the professionals are actually having a say

>Sounds like the professionals are actually having a say You think they're trying to make "Pro" mean professional, instead of its current meaning, profit?

Yes it would definitely be more honest of Apple if the base Pro came out with 16GB of RAM

> a case is a must

I haven't used a case on my iPhone for years. No issue at all. (Except that one time when I accidentally flung my phone into a concrete floor.)

Jony’s design would have saved your incident with the concrete floor.

Undoubtedly.

>The iPhone camera modules sticks out more

I just upgraded from a 6S+ to a 15Pro, and the cameras are taking some getting used to. i am impressed by the battery life, so i've been thinking a new case instead of a battery pack would be some form of an external SSD to capture the ProRes in a nice tight form factor that still fits all of the gimbals and other attachments. but, yeah, the protruding camera mount is well past ridiculous

I went from a XS with a case to a 15 Pro. It’s like no one at Apple has ever played a game in landscape mode. The camera bump is awful and uncomfortable. I haven’t found a case that makes it usable.

I can understand being disappointed if you want a really really thin computer. Maybe they should make the air "air" again?

But the previous computers were such dogs (over-heating-prone, loud, unreliable keyboards) that I think 99.9% of people think the current gen was a huge improvement.

Those Airs are ridiculously thin though. The only thing thinner is a naked iPad Pro which feels almost like holding a website in your hand if you don't have a case for it.

And the Air's are so powerful, I use one for my entire daily life (incl. work).

    The iPhone camera modules sticks out more each generation to the point that a case is a must.

I think that's the point. You are free to choose the exterior aesthetic & feel for your phone, it's thin enough that adding a case isn't an issue. The phone is designed to have a case of _some kind_ around it.

The cameras have gotten so big that adding a case no longer flattens the back of the phone, and will continue to rock on a flat surface.

Moreover, this isn't just an aesthetics issue anymore. The camera modules interfere with wireless car charging mats in some car models, either by slowing charging to a crawl due to the distance it creates with the charging coil, or making it extremely finicky.

I have a 15 pro max, and still wish they did something to keep the camera bumps under control. I could always use more battery, and do not find the bulging camera modules aesthetically pleasing on top of the issues they create.

I still hate it, because it's essentially then lying about how thin the phone is.

Doesn't matter to me if the phone is 0.2mm thin if I must slap a case on it to bring it to the same thickness as its largest protrusion.

> The MacBook Pros got thicker,

Thank goodness.

Huh?

The iPhone 6 had a case with the consistency of warm butter, and the phone 4 and 7 had glass cases. The current Pros are pretty durable.

The Macbook Pro had a completely defective, unrepairable keyboard, full stop. My company retired 40% of them early as a result.

I don't know enough about the Apple process to truly judge. But it does seem to correlate that post-Jobs, the design aesthetic had a negative impact on the product with little benefit. Ive's departure correlated with more pragmatic products.

I thought the phone thing was dumb until I realized that everyone (who’s not made of money or trying to pretend they are) puts them in a case anyway, so designing it to fit in a case makes sense. Probably keeps the camera from being as shaded by the case itself, for thicker ones.

(“Well they should just build the case in then” eh, the customizability and the way the case can ablate damage and be replaced is pretty good UX)

That and, as someone who would have called myself a photographer at one point, mostly just shoots photos on my iPhone these days. So the quality of the camera actually matters a lot to me even if it compromises some other aspects of the design.

I am neither made of money nor pretending to be, but I've never used a case on my cellphones, and I have never had a phone break for the lack of a case.

If a phone requires a case in order to be functional, that's a badly designed phone that I won't purchase. I wouldn't purchase that particular phone anyway, though, since it sounds like a lot of emphasis was put on the camera, and a camera is something I don't value in a phone at all.

It sticks out even with the case. I use the MacSafe wallet thing which is enough with (and probably without) the case to have the cameras not touch the table.

>The iPhone camera modules sticks out more each generation to the point that a case is a must.

I don't like that the iPhone without a case is not stable on a table when you tap the touchscreen. Seems like the kind of huge oversight that Apple wouldn't make.

I got one of these magsafe rings - https://www.amazon.co.uk/SYNCWIRE-Magnetic-Double-sided-Comp...

It's both a helper for using the phone with one hand and a "stand" of sorts to keep the phone stable when it's face up on a desk.

I do agree the protrusion is pretty ridiculous. I don't mind as much that mu current 15 Pro has a thicker one than my previous X. They're both more or less equally bad IMO.

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