Apple introduced its Retina MacBook 10 years ago today
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
- Ditching MagSafe
- Touch Bar (at first without a dedicated escape key)
- Butterfly Keyboard
- Uncomfortably hot to the touch
- Full-sized left and right arrow keys which made it harder to find without looking
- Only USB-C ports
Whoever had the reigns when Apple finally reversed these decisions and made the M1 MBP -- this is the best laptop I've ever owned.
… shivers
It's sad to see all that work going to bin.
Did you know that you can get touchbar on ipad that you connect as a second monitor? Excellent way to keep it alive, except, oh, it does not work, unless you drag the window to the ipad first... I mean... Somebody went and designed it to work like that, on purpose...
From the security perspective, having some UI that cannot be controlled by apps (a led, a touchbar, whatever) is very important for signalling app privilege levels. oh well
They didn't. The new keyboard is still not old scissors keyboard with 1.5mm Key travel. If I remember correctly it is 1mm or 1.2mm. And it is still a huge difference for me.
My 12” G4 PowerBook has the best keyboard of any laptop in my house.
The 2015 and 2014 models weren't that great either since they were using old 4th gen Haswell Intel CPUs which ran super hot.
I didn’t find it to run that hot and generally found it to be the best windows laptop (via vm) money could buy at the time.
The rest of the computer was great though (display, keyboard, trackpad, ssd).
My only complaint is that Apple’s keyboards have become significantly less resistant to finger oils and staying on top of cleaning them is much more demanding than it used to be.
...and I excitedly bought one. And then a year later the M1 came out, and I was kicking myself
The 2016-2019 Pros on the other hand replaced a machine that was universally loved. there were entire podcasts dedicated to complaining about them for four years.
I bought an M1 Air, base model, at launch, and was blown away. For once, a manufacturer wasn’t lying about battery life. What Apple has achieved with their SoC is nothing short of revolutionary. They make the best laptops by any conceivable metric, and it isn’t even close.
They shoulda kept the touchbar and restored the functions keys (including restoring volume controls etc to function keys). That would have been amazing. There was so much opportunity for cool custom functionality with touchbar, but it needs to be dedicated to that, not doing double-duty as physical keys.
Then I switched jobs, got a butterfly MBP and the laptop was honestly one of the worst I've had. After 2 years, I had lost a number of keys (i simply never used the built in keyboard when possible) and the battery started expanding. I couldn't even make it to the normal refresh cycle. Maybe bad luck, but such a POS. Apple phoned it in the generation prior to M1.
We have the technology today to make a true MacBook Air that is both much thinner and lighter with same battery life. But it would cost a lot more and today's Apple doesn't seems to be interested in these sort of products. I would imagine Steve Jobs would insist on making it at charge it for $1999.
He is still directing from the grave is he?
The 12 MB had 3 major flaws which were just too much to deal with on a daily basis:
- It was shockingly slow, even for its time. Apple Watch Series 0 slow.
- That keyboard — which I didn't mind the feel of — kept failing.
- 1 USB C port meant I always had to pick charging or plugging something in, and the problem became a lot worse as the battery health declined. The fancy terraced battery design meant it was also pricey to replace.
I do think a 12" MBA would be great, but Apple has forgotten how to design good software for small screens.
The other reason I went with (or eventually got to, anyway) a MBP was the nano-texture display. I had bought an available in-store model without it (at least where I am, the only things in stock that have it are iMacs), and after using it for a while, somewhat regretted not getting more RAM, as I had the base M4 Pro, with 24 GiB. My M1 was also base (8 GiB), and over time, I had wished for more. So, I figured if I was going to do that, I might as well bump everything up a little bit, so I got the next higher CPU/GPU spec (14 cores / 20 cores), and the next higher SSD (1 TB) spec. The nano-texture decision was a lot of waffling, because I had seen it on the in-store iMacs, and wasn't sure about it, but reading a lot of reviews, plus Apple's return policy led me to try it, and man I'm glad I did.
I've since come to realize that under the perfect lighting conditions of an Apple store, the relatively small differences in saturation, contrast, and clarity between the nano-texture and standard displays is heavily magnified, while eliminating the thing nano-textures are great at: glare. The fixed position and angle of an iMac probably doesn't hurt, either. But sit down with a laptop in real-world conditions, and the benefits are immediately obvious. If I did a lot of photo or video editing, or if I strictly used my laptop on a desk or docked, I probably wouldn't want the nano-texture, but since none of those are true, it's terrific.
MacBook8,1 and MacBook9,1 as they are known.
Great little passively cooled machines, only real issue is the underpowered CPU (a legitimate trade-off for size/weight/silent) and of course the butterfly keyboard that is prone to failure.
Fingers crossed they make an Apple Silicon mac in this size one day.
Drop me an email if you are also an aficionado. My email’s in my profile.
I wasn't there for the plastic Intel MacBooks, but the biggest complaint I remember hearing about was that the black one collected fingerprints like crazy and, later on, some overheating issues. They were also a pain to repair, though not as bad as the iBooks before them.
At least RAM and hard drive were very easy to replace, which I appreciated. I don't think I ever needed to actually open my MacBook back then. But I do remember repairing white iBooks, which was a pain indeed.
Despite all that, I loved these machines, but many people found them to be just a bit too Apple.
The size and weight of this form factor is imo ideal for a daily carry portable computer. It’s an iPad with a keyboard, that runs a real OS.
I still have a MacBook9,1 with kubuntu on it I use for certain things sometimes.
The small one really is so much more portable, even moreso than an iPad Pro with a keyboard cover (which is surprisingly dense).
If you could buy SBCs based on the m5, I'd eat them up.
The size was really so good—great on a plane, so light I never thought about it in my bag. I took it all over for years. Wrote a little iTunes library export tool in the back seat of a minivan on the drive from NYC to Maine right after I got it^. It's nice to have an actual laptop when traveling rather than just a phone or tablet, but even a little bit bigger and heavier can be annoying. My wife still uses it for web browsing and has only just recently started to mention it being unusably slow (it was never fast, but it was passable). I have an M1 Air now but would absolutely prefer something a bit smaller.
If they were to attempt a modern re-do, I think it’d be smart to go hard on the hyperportable angle and pare down the hardware a bit to accomodate that. With how powerful Apple Silicon is these days, you wouldn’t need a full fat M-series SoC for a good macOS experience… a passively cooled A-series like those used in iPhones could do the job about as well. Heck you could probably even downclock the SoC a bit for better thermals and still have about as much power as much of the thin and light competition yet have ridiculously better battery life.
happyjack@mailbox.org
Control sometimes acts like Control and other times acts like an alien interpreting what it thinks I want to do.
The touchpad has exactly one freaking #$#%@#%$ button!?!!?
The touchpad can do click, right click, middle click, a four fingered click, and more. I have 5 different tap\click actions mapped on mine with BetterTouchTool.
The base model m3 processor was grossly underpowered. They threw money at a retina screen but didn't drive it with any graphics support. And then they charged users a premium to be their guinea pigs with the experimental and deeply awful butterfly keyboard.
In the past ten years, Apple has done a lot of things that are indistinguishable from negligently or maliciously flooding the ultraportable market with pure shit. Honestly, someone should file a shareholder derivative lawsuit for how bad they repeatedly, intentionally fuck up small form factor devices.