I consider it a typical Tim Cook decision, in that the man led the company that made one of the fastest CPUs in the world, makes it draw as much as a Raspberry Pi. Absolutely crazy feats of engineering, design, manufacturing… and -
There is that ONE detail that would’ve made it perfected but it’s botched!
I don’t mind it too much, since it’s still 99% close to perfect.
But, but…
Tim Cook cares about money and efficiency of building and moving product. That’s it. I highly doubt there’s been any important design detail about any product that he made himself.
Nobody’s perfect.
He would've kept the power button on the bottom, though.
Thats the thing. You're right, he would've, but also he stopped a lot of good decisions from happening because it just wasn't to his taste.
So like, power button on the bottom isn't the end of the world.
And then when there's a fault requiring a hard reset to fix you have to insert a bent paperclip into a tiny unlabeled hole on the bottom, or spell out a message in morse code by unplugging and re-plugging the power cord with some special timing. (This is not sarcasm)
Instead, he would have put motion/light sensors on the screen, so it would automatically wake up when you are sitting in front of it. Macs don't shutdown, they just go to sleep and wake up when you need them.
Do people really use the physical button that often? 99% of the time I just let it go to sleep.
2. How often do people exactly have to turn off and on a mac that consumes less than a pi for them to constantly be reaching out to that power button?
3. Standby, hibernate exist.
This is also the same Apple that made the G4 Cube: that felt like this in reverse, with Jobs driving them to make a capacitive touch button because of an obsession with a seamless surface.
On the other hand, with Cook, it's always about cost cutting and corner cutting and the likes. It feels cheap (especially considering the pricing and brand aspirations) but also primitive and unrefined.
Which is why their price escalation was unjustified, if you want to charge a lot you need to figure out a no compromise product and, in my opinion, they have not been there a lot recently...
That's a funny comparison. They don't have power buttons at all. Without mounting, you need to pick it up to be able to remove the power supply.
And the power supply I bought with my Pi 4, at the Cambridge store, doesn't even work.