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Comment by caprad | Hacker News Reader

I don't think he was being sarcastic, and the key has to go somewhere on the keyboard. You can't just put it anywhere else. And it wasn't a problem before, when it popped up a menu you could dismiss easily.

And I never hit it on my macbook, so I guess it isn't a probably for everybody.

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> the key has to go somewhere on the keyboard

Or, you could have a separate power button somewhere else like every other laptop in existence. Or all the previous iterations of Apple laptops.

I've never used a Macbook Air before, but now that I look at its keyboard... wow. I think accidentally pressing the power button because it looks and feels just like the other keys on the keyboard is a bad design. The one on my laptop is isolated from all the other keys, looks and feels very differenet, and recessed to prevent accidental activation.

I want to agree with you, because what you say is eminently reasonable. But I've never, ever, ever accidentally hit the power button. And I don't consider myself a particularly good typist.

Sometimes I wonder if they moved the power key there just because they couldn't figure out anything else to do with the now-defunct eject button on optical-drive-less machines, as opposed to there being any problem with the old location just above and to the right of the keyboard.

I don't really like it either.

It's also cost reduction: why install an extra dedicated switch in the top case when you could reuse one of the keyboard's keys instead? I'm sure if they wanted to, they could come up with some other, less disruptive function to map to a key there.

The entire machine is milled out of an aluminium block. "Cost reduction" is utterly irrelevant when you're burning through cutting heads like that.

I think it's a terrible, terrible design. I was working on a new Retina Powerbook last week, and I pushed the power key within my first ten minutes. It should not be trivially easy to bring your productivity to a screeching halt.

The soldered RAM is annoying - I'm OK with my computer being a complex tool, not an appliance. The excuse of the soldered RAM to up-sell if you want 16 GB of memory is insulting. The power button is idiotic. Apple wants me to pay three grand for a laptop that can be turned off instantaneously by an overly curious pet?

Really?

Really?

  > It should not be trivially easy to bring your productivity
  > to a screeching halt.

Screeching halt? What heppended, your computer just shut down instantly?

RTFA, particularly the second paragraph.

Apple isn't "upselling" you. They're simply charging you for more RAM, and only more RAM, if you want to buy more RAM. They aren't forcing you to upgrade anything else (this actually would count as an upsell); the RAM can be upgraded independently at the time of purchase.

Furthermore, if you want a really thin laptop and you want them to cut weight from the design and you want the design to be extremely tough (and most of us do), one thing you run out of space for pretty quickly is multiple RAM sockets.

I'm frankly ok with paying for the 16 GB now or never.

> the RAM can be upgraded independently at the time of purchase.

FWIW, RAM cannot be upgraded on newer Macbook models, incl. the retina mentioned. The RAM is soldered on.

The CR-48 (Google's test chromebook) had the same problem. The last function key was the power button, and it was right above backspace. One accidental move and it fell asleep. It was really the only problem I had with that computer.

On my non retina macbook pro, it's the eject CD key instead; which isn't quite as annoying but still bewildering.

I'm on my fourth or fifth mac notebook and all the others had the power button well away from the keyboard.

I also remember my uncle's Apple II with the reset key in the upper right next to backspace that he eventually pried off and put a bottle cap over the switch to keep from pressing it accidentally.

In later revisions they added a stronger spring underneath the button to prevent unintended resets. I had a II+ with it back in high school (48k RAM, dual floppy drives, 80-column card -- I was the envy of all my friends!)

I'm wondering if a plastic fence around the button can be made to act as a guard. Or perhaps a modern equivalent of your uncle's bottle-cap, with a small hole where you could insert the tip of a house key or a pen to activate the button.

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