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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

I think Ive's ego really got in the way of good products and you can see this with the MacBooks since he left.

From totally form over function and thinness above all, back to MacBooks that have actually working keyboards again (though still not as usable as a thinkpad's) and that you can actually use in an office without a bag full of overpriced dongles. The 12 inch MacBook with its single usb port and broken keyboard was the pinnacle of this focus and it was almost unusable.

Ive really forgot that people don't buy laptops as a piece of art but to work on. I think it's good that his yes-men are also leaving, it's an indication that the culture in Apple is changing.

Though I've left there ecosystem already, maybe it's not too late for some.

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Some risks need to be taken in order to move things forward. It’s easy to say, “this works,” and get lazy. Maybe we’ve reached peak laptop, but it’s hard to know unless things are tried, but the reaction from the market also needs to be taken into account.

I have an M1 MBP now, and while I have the ports, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used more than 1 at a time. I’m betting there are a lot of people (thought maybe not on this site) who had no issue with the single port. I assume most of these people would also be in the iPad market.

Due to internal management bottlenecks, Apple can only redesign a product every ~3 years so every time they take a risk like the butterfly keyboard or trashcan it gets locked in for years and they "can't" fix it. This is the worst of both worlds.

Using that as an excuse not to take any risks is arguably worse than the ~3 year wait for a correction. Most people can wait out 3 years, or the change isn’t so bad that they are lost customers. But if it looks like Apple has stopped trying to innovate, and is instead sitting back and milking their product line (like in the Apple ][ days), I think more people will leave to find a company trying and doing new things.

There is a balance to strike, but with the Mac being a smaller portion of their revenue, and people generally waiting longer between upgrades, they can afford to take some risks.

I was just in the Apple Store today to try out the Vision Pro, and I was struck by how much of the store was dedicated to iPhone and iPad. The Mac’s were maybe 10% of the floor space. I’m glad they have the M-series chips to show there is some life left in the Mac, as otherwise it would look like they don’t care at all.

> Due to internal management bottlenecks, Apple can only redesign a product every ~3 years

That's a choice, it's not a matter of being able to.

Apple has such an enormous pile of money tucked away they can do anything they would ever want to.

HDMI is nice given how many (even expensive) TB/USB hub/docks have spontaneously failed on me over the years. No dongles docks or other BS. Great.

I think also the Pro in MB Pro implies some sort of power user features, so ample ports kind of fits that bill.

They have the MB & MB Air lines for minimalism and form over function.

strangely, people's mac laptops with HDMI (at least the newer ones?) seem consistently unable to drive the HDMI cable in our conference room (which admittedly, is a bit long?). My thinkpad has no trouble, nor does the average USB-C to HDMI dongle. Wonder what's going on there...

I’m no expert, but I wonder if it has something to do with the various HDMI versions, all wrapped up in identical looking ports. I know the MBP didn’t release the the newest standard, which had a lot of people in the reviews dinging it. If the cable or TV is expecting a single the MBP doesn’t support, that could be a problem. If it’s the TV, I’d imagine changing some settings would resolve it.

It is a TV, though the cable goes into a wall jack first and then into a TV. But the TV is ~9 years old at this point, so I can't imagine it has some crazy standard.

As the sibling comment suggests, I would also recommended checking if it's really the cable and not the TV (or projector) that is the issue.

It's probably related to the cable, but it's still not clear why apple silicon macbooks consistently are the only computers that have problems with it (and not if using a USB-C dongle...).

Because Apple does not care about non-Apple hardware.

this much is clear. It's funny nowadays that me with the Linux Thinkpad is more likely to be able to connect to projectors than all the Mac users... certainly was not the case 15 years ago.

> The 12 inch MacBook with its single usb port and broken keyboard was the pinnacle of this focus and it was almost unusable.

It was also insanely light. I don't even get why they kept the air branding after they axed the 12 inch; it's always going to feel heavier and larger than it needs to be in comparison to the 12 inch. Best travel and writing device i've ever used and nothing else comes close.

Granted, I never tried to use the usb for anything but power.

The 13" M2 Air feels decently light compared to most things I've daily driven. In part helped by its charger being very light.

i had a 12in macbook and used it for the year i transitioned from design to dev. it ran our rails+pg+angular dev environment like a champ; the one adaptation i had to make was to cut out a bunch of atom plugins i didn't need. i never needed a second port because, well, it's a netbook. the butterfly issues did bite me, after two years of heavy use, and the replacement was free.

these days my work takes up too much memory for that, but my ideal is still a superlight laptop with just enough compute--i have a 14" now, but will probably go back to a base air if it's available with 32gb ram. i am happy to wait a little longer for compile, or drop from 120fps to 60, if it means i can fit my work in my purse again

For me it was really the keyboard. It was just literally unusable for me. The non-existent travel and awful feedback, it was just something I would not use. If my work would buy me one I'd literally refuse it :)

It wasn't the reliability issues even, just the horrible feel.

Thanks for this analysis. Curious what the HN commentariat is shopping for today.

Trading up to more power in a machine seems a fruitless endeavour: I'll never have as much memory or CPU as I could rent in AWS or Azure, and I'm sufficiently well-connected to both that running remote desktop or SSH is feasible virtually all the time. So is it worth paying top dollar for what is essentially a terminal onto a remote computer? Probably not, but the urge to have local compute capability is deeply ingrained.

> I'll never have as much memory or CPU as I could rent in AWS or Azure, and I'm sufficiently well-connected to both that running remote desktop or SSH is feasible virtually all the time.

But do you actually do that?

I don't use cloud computing for my desktop activities and I wouldn't, for privacy reasons (after all, the cloud is just somebody else's computer). I wonder who would. The experience is not really ideal if you're used to Mac either, as cloud Macs are incredibly expensive. So you'd end up with Windows or Linux.

We had one mini in AWS at work for testing purposes but it burned 800 euros a month, meaning we could actually buy one M1 mini a month! It made no sense.

This is my own n=1 sample, maybe not representative. Agree that the full remote desktop model is too costly right now.

I dont need a lot of juice to run an email client, a browser, IDE, and a terminal. Those could run locally on 16G of RAM. I do need a lot of juice to compile code, train models, etc.

So maybe I can get away with a $1000 laptop augmented with a few cloud VMs that get spun up for a few hours every month, instead of a laptop that costs three times that and weighs multiple kilos.

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