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Comment by highfrequency | Hacker News Reader

Why do you prefer the laptop to be thicker and heavier?

Nobody said that.

MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.

I don't want to think about how long I used that macbook where the keycaps would come off with my fingers as I typed, the switches were that broken.

It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.

That's a false dichotomy; there are plenty of keyboards that don't require recalls due to issues like the butterfly ones but also don't have the issues you're describing.

Luckily there are two lines: the Air and the Pro.

The issue people had was from 2016-2019, the Macbook Pros sacrificed a lot of usability for thinness, when that should only happen for the Airs.

I'd be fine with a thinner and lighter laptop if it was without compromises.

But having a shitty keyboard, losing the HDMI port, wasn't worth it.

Right? What was the point of a laptop with no "ugly ports" if everyone instead needed to carry around a stupid dongle to hang off it?

I think the preference is to have a battery that can run a CPU that's compiling, AI-ing, or rendering for an entire day (16+ hours) without having to worry about where an outlet is or being tethered to a wall or be thermal throttled. Right now that's a volume tradeoff. If there was something that ran as fast for as long and was MacBook Air (or the last Intel generation) thin, I don't think anyone would complain.

My old thinkpad was thicker but not heavier. Way more ports, didn't need dongles.

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