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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

And many of those designs were made at Ive's behest, against the wishes of entire teams of engineers. I feel like we have his "courage" to blame for the Butterfly keyboard, terrible Mac thermals and the lack of ports on "Pro" computers.

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Don't forget the Apple Mouse with the lightning port under the mouse so you can't use it while it charges. It's still the only Apple product with a design that makes me physically cringe.

I also find it awkward and uncomfortable to use, but that might just be me.

I love the Apple mouse. Been using it for 10ish years. But yeh it’s an absolute ball ache when it loses battery and you reallly need a mouse

When I had that Apple mouse, I kept around a separate wired mouse to use when it inevitably ran out of charge while I was in the middle of work. I won't just stop what I am doing just because Apple wants me to not use a mouse with the cord plugged in.

I was just going to say…the mouse has to go on its back to be charged lmao.

So the power button on the bottom of Mac Mini is fine?

I'm not familiar with the Mac Mini. I didn't know about that.

Ive did good designs when Jobs kept him in check. Once Jobs was gone he messed up a whole generation of MacBooks. Things got much better after his departure.

I think after Jobs, Ive did all sorts of things just to justify his presence at Apple. Hence trying to make an already well-designed product even more "well-designed", but to his terms. And that's when it started turning to shit.

The almost two decades before he made great designs. I have always felt it went downhill after Jobs was not there anymore to provide a counter force to Ive's design tendencies. It's like taking one of John or Paul away.

The thermals were all Intel’s fault. My 2019 MacBook from work is an oven. I can’t tell whether my smaller m4 max is turned on by touching it.

Your 2019 Macbook also uses a different chassis, designed by Jony Ive. Apple knew it throttled the chips they used but shipped it anyways, presumably because Ive liked his thinness even when it results in a bendgate.

You'll note that Macbooks don't quite look the same after Ive left and his influence went away.

I don’t actually know. Last MBP I had was circa 2017 or so.

How are they different ?

Beefier. Bulkier. Quick google search says Intel 16" was 4.3 lbs whereas M4 16" is 4.7 lbs. Not a big difference you say but 1) it is going in the opposite direction where the newer product is bulkier and 2) imagine the years of thin-ness that would have been forced under a different regime.

I wonder how much of that is battery.

Blaming Intel is a poor excuse. Apple could have done some actual design and built a laptop around the hardware they had. But they didn't want to. Instead, they ignored the reality, stuck to the flawed design, and shipped mediocre laptops several years in a row.

Apple had the design ready for an Intel chips that didn't arrive. Rather than revisiting their design they opted to just chuck the chip into a design that couldn't accommodate it's thermal characteristics.

I spent way too much time figuring out that around 53W is the maximum that the last Intel MBP can sustain over longer periods before the VRM (converts power for the CPU) poops out and throttles you.

I agree, but I think they didn't care. For some years, some Apple execs believed that the iPad was going to replace the Mac. After that they knew that the Apple Silicon Mac was nearby, so they probably didn't want to make an investment in a 'legacy' platform. Did suck for all the people who bought one.

I've never had an Intel laptop work well in the efficiency and thermal department, Apple or not. I used to blame Apple too, but seeing the difference, it's hard to argue who the main culprit was. Can't design around a bad foundation.

Pentium M's were magical when they came out.

Perhaps, but pretty much every high performance Intel laptop between 2017 and 2023 is exactly the same unless it's in an heavy, enormous and unpleasantly loud gaming chassis. Supposedly the Core Ultra Series 2 are an improvement but I haven't tried one yet.

For a while, you could get the thermals a bit more tolerable by undervolting them, but then the plundervolt mitigations blocked that.

(Typing this comment from a Lenovo X1 Extreme sitting on a cooling pad, sat next to an X1 Carbon that we can't use because it throttles too much. :)

Apple is generally really good at trying to keep their machines silent. When they originally transitioned to Intel, their Core 2 Duo laptops were both cheaper and more silent than the competition. As a Linux user, that's one feature from Apple I'd like most manufacturers to copy.

Regarding your X1, tweaking Linux kernel parameters and downvolting a bit can work wonders in terms of reaching an pleasant heat : performance ratio. Obviously, Lenovo should have taken care of this. However, they release so many different machines that it's hard for them to pay attention to details.

It’s a company laptop that runs Windows, and the newer BIOSes now block undervolting because of the plundervolt mitigations.

I replaced the thermal paste with some of that PTM stuff which helped a bit, but not enough. I also found that for some reason it tends to BDPROCHOT-throttle when powered through the official Thunderbolt 4 Workstation Dock, even though it’s meant to be 230W and provides power separately to the USB port - but using the standalone AC adapter when docked fixes that.

Ultimately, until there are some decent X86-64 laptops released, the choice is between slow, thin and quiet vs less slow, but big, heavy and noisy. AMD is a bit better than Intel but still weak on mobile and nowhere near as good as the current Apple offerings.

On another note, why are PC manufacturers still putting fan intakes on the bottom. Maybe it’s theoretically more efficient, but tell that to my users who always do things like resting their laptop on a book then wondering why their Zoom screen sharing goes jittery.

Intel has never been good at thermals.

I had the butterfly keyboard for 5 years yet I didn't have a single problem with it. And I'm a long time mechanical keyboards user. What is all the hate about?

Just look it up. It was a thing for years, to the point that Apple was basically forced to revert it.

I was like you ... until one day.

That's luck on your side. I too own a butterfly keyboard, trouble free. But there were 50 other macs in the office I worked in that regularly had issues. They were unreliable as hell, and beyond the reliability issue, many people did not like the shorter travel distance (I didn't mind this at all myself).

I felt the same way when I used it. But recently I booted up an old laptop with the butterfly keys and I was like "ewwww" as soon as I started typing on them. They worked. But what we have now is more comfortable.

Many people (more than the average rate for the prior generations) _did_ have problems. Perhaps more importantly, the only way to address those problems when they arose was to replace not only the keyboard itself but the entire top case of the machine due to the way the parts were integrated. This process costed many hundreds of dollars when the machines were out of warranty, and the company eventually acquiesced to social pressure and lawsuits by creating an extended warranty program.

That's not to say your situation is unique...there are probably many machines out there that have not had problems, including one owned by my wife. But there are also an unusually high number of machines that did.

> This process costed many hundreds of dollars

"Cost"

I'm a native English speaker and nobody told me this (and I didn't manage to pick it up) until I was nearly 40. "Cost"'s past tense is also "cost."

There's another, newer, largely fatuous, verbed "cost" that means "to calculate the cost of something." That's the one that gets used in the past tense ("the projects have all been costed.")

"I've costed a keyboard replacement for my computer, and the total is more than the computer cost in the first place."

I didn’t like the feel and mine failed after a year.

I had the first generation on a MacBook 12" and had no issues at all. Then I got the second generation on a MacBook Pro (I think this was still without the dust seals) and it was one big misery. A small speck of dust would make a key feel bad or get stuck. I was so happy when I could finally get rid of the stupid device. Never had issues with Apple Scissor switches thereafter.

I'd get a particularly large molecule lodged under a key and then I couldn't press that key consistently anymore until I managed to flush it out. It was OK when it worked, but it didn't work enough.

Other than reliability issues (which I never ran into), the butterfly keyboard is the best laptop keyboard I've ever used.

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