I'm honestly the biggest Apple fanboy — I have all the newest gadgets and I use literally every one of their products, and have been for the past several years. However, this is one thing that upsets me. The MacBook doesn't need less ports, it doesn't need to be thinner.
I understand the thinning of the MacBook Pro from the 2012 model to the 2015 model (which is what I currently own, and in my opinion is the best Mac). But I definitely don't think it needed to get any thinner or lighter than that, especially if it's sacrificing ports or a good keyboard.
IMO the 2015 MacBook Pro is the best Mac out there, mainly because of its beautiful retina display, perfect weight, and most importantly, a good keyboard.
While I understand the reticence towards thinness, I'm going to withhold judgment until I'm holding the new laptop. Thinness isn't just about aesthetic (although that is an aspect that HN commenters severely underestimate). It's also about the act of physically using the device.
I know that going from a 2015 Macbook Pro to a 2017 one made a gigantic difference in how I used the device. The 2015 one I had to decide if I wanted to put in my backpack. It added a non significant weight to my bag and therefore my back. I wouldn't open it while standing or outside, simply because it wasn't comfortable to hold in one hand, or to type in a password.
The 2017 Macbook Pro, while flawed in many ways, is very different. I carry it everywhere without a thought. I can easily carry it open in one hand or closed like a book. I can pop it open for a second, type some stuff in while holding it, then put it back (TouchID is great for this too).
This may sound like Ive-esque purple prose, but truly, a lighter laptop lowers the barriers between the physical object and what I want to accomplish. I don't have to think about the physical weight of the laptop. I can just bring it. I don't have to think about putting the laptop down and using it. I can just palm it.
You've made a great argument for a lighter laptop. Your 2017 laptop is a whopping 36% thinner than your 2015 laptop but only 11% lighter.
This modest difference in weight is mostly due to the reduced battery size that a more efficient chipset allows the newer laptop to have. The total weight of the 0.8mm thin ribbons of plastic and aluminium shaved off the plastic keys and edge of the aluminium case (the difference in key travel), is negligible compared to the weight of the laptop.
Apple could have made a laptop that was within 1% of the weight of your 2017 laptop, had a normal keyboard with good travel, and was just about 0.8mm thicker.
There’s the problem of feeling cheap however. If you make a laptop that’s thicker but lighter, you run the risk of having a laptop that feels weirdly light and cheap.
Also thickness does matter! If you’re gripping a laptop in one hand, a thinner body is easier to hold. And it’s just plain beautiful. It feels futuristic. Which, yes, is nonsense. But it’s also how you make a product that people want.
> If you’re gripping a laptop in one hand, a thinner body is easier to hold.
Is it though? If you're trying to hold six closed laptops in the same hand, thinner might be better, but when holding one laptop in one hand, it's weight not thickness that matters.
Has the product not been thin enough to easily hold one handed for years? We're talking about shaving millimeters off a 1.5 cm thick product. Not inches off something a foot thick
There's a difference between thin/light and holdability. My prior Asus[0] actually had a part sticking out the back (where the battery was attached) that provided an amazing grip. Flat macbooks, like my current Asus, I'm more afraid will slip out of my grip (or, held from the side, flex and damage something), especially pushing against it with the other hand while using the keyboard.
> a thinner body is easier to hold. And it’s just plain beautiful. It feels futuristic
IMO, a thinner body feels fragile. It feels like they've chosen aesthetics over durability to a detrimental extreme.
Thinner also means less room for cooling and a smaller battery. If I see a super-thin laptop, I'm going to assume it has low performance to compensate for inadequate cooling.
> But it’s also how you make a product that people want.
Is anybody asking for a thinner laptop? Or is Apple just creating a benchmark and advertising it?
This whole thing just re-affirms my belief that Apple isn't a tech company, they're a fashion company. They have absurdly inflated pricing and over-emphasis on aesthetics over performance.
> This whole thing just re-affirms my belief that Apple isn't a tech company, they're a fashion company. They have absurdly inflated pricing and over-emphasis on aesthetics over performance.
I don't disagree! If you don't understand fashion, you won't understand Apple. I'm always mystified at how people are seemingly disgusted at Apple's business model of selling products that look good. Well, yeah, people will want to buy products that look and feel good.
That's why people buy expensive clothes. They don't buy clothes for the features. They buy it because it looks and feels nice. You can certainly wear clothes that have more "features" like cargo shorts or pants that unzip to shorts. But don't be surprised when people eschew them for clothes that are objectively less practical but more beautiful.
It actually stuns me how other companies don't understand aesthetics at all. Windows laptops are shockingly ugly. Thinkpads are truly the cargo shorts of laptops. Sometimes they're slightly slimmer, slightly better cut cargo shorts, but they're still cargo shorts. Microsoft's laptops are probably the closest to beautiful, but they're still not that good. And when they're good, they're suspiciously close to Apple's products.
That being said, Apple's laptops aren't as bad for the money as you'd imagine. Try finding a cheaper laptop with a unibody construction that feels as durable, as well built as a Mac. Try finding a cheaper laptop where I can speak to an actual, physical person about getting it fixed. Try finding a cheaper laptop with as fast of an SSD^[1]. Try finding a cheaper laptop with as good of a touchpad. It's not as easy as you'd imagine.
yes, weight matters much more than thinness, when it comes to portability and usability. my 15” 2008 macbook pro weighed 5 1/2 lbs and hurt my back and shoulders carrying it all day. the 2012/2015 was 4 1/2 lbs; better but not great. somewhere between 3-4 lbs seems to be where the threshold is for portability/usability.
with that said, these discussions on mbp keyboards and thinness always miss the reason apple strives for thinness in the first place: to drive the market in a direction where apple is always perceived to have the lead/the best products. thinner products are harder to design, harder to manufacture, and really lean on the supply chain and operational focus/excellence of apple. that gives them their enviable market position, and most of the industry’s profits, so that’s why they do it. it’s really that simple.
As a counterpoint, I was issued the maxed out 2018 model for work, and I do not like the design. I only used it on a laptop stand, plugged into big external monitors, and with an external keyboard and mouse.
Not having a tactile escape key is a poor decision, as is the choice to ditch the inverted-T cursor keys, just to make the keyboard look more symmetrical. Both seem like steps backwards in usability — both being harder to navigate by feel.
The weird thing is that they could have added the touchbar and kept a full function key row and still have plenty of room for a good sized touchpad. The current Macbook's touchpad is arguably too large.
coming from the world of windows ultrabooks, it's sorta hard to imagine how a touchpad could be "too big". does the palm rejection suck, or is it just that you think the real estate could be used better for something else?
Coming from the world of tiling window managers on linux, I do not use a touchpad at all. On the Macbook I have to use it occasionally, but I still stay on the keyboard as much as possible.
So having to remap ESC to Capslock and often hitting the wrong arrow key is a much too big drawback to a bigger touchpad
As an example, both thumbs hovers the touchpad when my hands are on the keyboard. One of my thumb frequently taps and moves the cursor to another line all the while I am writing code. It's frustrating.
Imo, the touchpad on Macbook has always been its greatest strength and they managed to ruin it.
Totally agree. The loss of the arrow key space plus the no real escape key is the most pro-hostile (for coders at least) design decision. Although i guess could argue a keyboard that misses keys is worse but I haven’t had that problem.
I'm a hardcore vi user and even I miss-strike the arrow keys at times when I'm not using vi. Also, remapping caps lock to escape is great but for some reason I just can't get out of the habit of sending my pinkie or left ring finger up to the esc position. And for some reason, remapping caps-lock to esc has resulted in frequent esc-enter mis-type sequences, almost always when I've spent time writing long emails, thereby aborting the email with no draft to recover. Sheesh.
I carried it home with me every night, where I use my maxed out 2013 MacBook Pro without the displays or external keyboard.
While thinner, the maxed out 2018 15" model is 4.02 lbs, whereas the maxed out 2013 15" is 4.46 pounds. To me, there isn't much difference in 'heft' between the two.
It's the opposite for me. With my personal mid-2015 MacBook Pro I love to sit down and type on it for hours, creating great software and documentation. With the newer MacBooks I try to avoid long typing sessions or I have to mess with dongles and keyboards for a good typing experience. On a train an external keyboard is not an option so the newer MacBook stays in my bag.
For portable use I'd rather throw a 12" MacBook in my bag.
Everything you describe is good but the problem is if these things come at the expense of one of the fundamental functions of the device then really it's a tradeoff that should ever have been made.
(Had to edit repeated keypresses when typing this post due to the butterfly keyboard I wrote it on)
I have a 2018 MacBook air and have never had the repeated keypresses issue, so I imagine they've probably fixed that in the newer keyboard designs. That said, I don't like typing on the keyboard. It feels awkward.
Honestly, I've never liked typing on any generation of Apple keyboard and much prefer the Thinkpad keyboard. In fact, that's the main thing I look for in a laptop these days, since most keyboards seem to be getting worse and worse (even the Lenovo keyboards are getting worse).
I also hate that Lenovo are trying to join the "everything should be thin" crowd, especially seeing what it has done to Apple's keyboards. If you want thin, the MacBook Air or the Lenovo X1 models are there for you. If you want a more complete experience for working on for longer periods of time, the Thinkpad TXXX and MacBook (Pro) used to be what you go for, but those are condensing to look like the ultra thin models that it's becoming increasingly hard to justify the separation.
Please Apple/Lenovo, leave the thicker models thick and focus efforts on the thinner models if you want to make something thinner. I just want a good keyboard on my laptop...
I have the 2018 MacBook Pro and I occasionally have the double typed keys issue. Though it doesn't seem to happen as often as what I've read about previous versions of the keyboard.
Mmm... just 200gr of difference (over 2kg) doesn’t seem enough to me to go from “I can’t use it at all standing” to “I easily carry it open in one hand”.
What I’m missing?
You're just changing the goal posts of requirements. It is well known that ergonomic comfort is dependent on the actual person. Human strength in relation to weight is dependent on the square-cube law.
And in the opposite direction, our space-faring progeny of future physical and virtual galactic colonies squeal in delight by the notion of actually 'carrying' anything.
When I'm walking my fields repairing my fences I absolutely wish my fencing tools were lighter, even if I'm using my truck or other vehicle to carry my tools. I don't think they'd belly laugh at someone who preferred more efficient tools.
Not really. This is a common misconception. It is typical to go to the field with very little weight. Very light clothing, light (or often no) footwear. You typically will have a single tool for the job at hand (and whetstone where required). Maybe a woven basket with some lightweight sacks if you are collecting. Its hard enough work without carrying stuff.
Well of course they did; they were busting their butts all day. I doubt they would have been bothered much by a one pound difference in a laptop though.
I was a serious athlete for about fifteen years and still am casually. Of course it makes a difference; the question is how much. The answer is not much, especially when we're talking about relatively short distances (I don't think anyone commenting here is talking about carrying their laptop for a 30 mile hike), and I'd much prefer better battery life and the old keyboard.
Farmers don't move relatively short distances (I walk 5km just to cut half a hectare of grass) - and the movement is a lot more dynamic than simply moving from one place to another.
Im not saying a pound of weight is much, I'm saying that our "rugged farming ancestors" certainly wouldn't scoff at carrying a pound less weight.
I thin you missed the point... of course a farmer wouldn't want to carry additional weight. What they would scoff at is a software developer complaining about an extra pound when their most strenuous activity is walking from an Uber to the local cafe.
We're not farmers. If you are living under conditions like a farmer then yes, by all means, shed every pound you can. I don't imagine that the person who started this thread has to deal with those sort of conditions.
Actually, I am a farmer (and work with 'traditional' tools) - which is why i responded to the thread in the first place. Clearly we read differently into what was stated.
It seems I wasn't the only farmer to state this, as @lolsal said:
> When I'm walking my fields repairing my fences I absolutely wish my fencing tools were lighter, even if I'm using my truck or other vehicle to carry my tools. I don't think they'd belly laugh at someone who preferred more efficient tools.
Such small barriers to use suggest that the question of using your laptop or not was similar to an impulse control problem. Such as, whether or not to have another snack cracker. It's right there, so why not have another.
> IMO the 2015 MacBook Pro is the best Mac out there, mainly because of its beautiful retina display, perfect weight, and most importantly, a good keyboard.
Yep. 2015 Macbook Pro is the last best mac. Probably this is why refurbished 2015 MBP commands premium over other models.
That's funny, because I call the Late 2013 MBP the last best one :) Among other things, it was the last one to feature a physical trackpad click, as opposed to the fake "taptic engine" all-glass trackpad of the 2014 and newer which doesn't physically move when you click (similar to newer iPhones).
To be honest, I actually prefer the fake click of the new trackpads. It feels very real, it's not at all comparable to the taptic feedback on the buttonless iPhones.
The fake click feels so real that people don't even realise it's a fake click if you don't tell them.
The mechanical trackpads only allowed clicking in the bottom half (since it was a hinge), and in my experience it was unreliable. After a few years, clicks started registering twice, or not at all, etc.
The fake click track pad allows clicking everywhere, it lets you configure activation force, and for me it has been working flawlessly every day for years.
The haptic trackpad works beautifully imo, you can click anywhere, there is force click, the clicky sound can be turned on or off, the feedback can be adjusted. And to me it feels real.
Ah right, it turns out I misunderstood the EveryMac page about the Mid-2014 [0], with the wording 'a "no button" glass "inertial" multi-touch trackpad'. Thought that was their wording for the non-moving trackpad! haha :) It's the 2015 that had the taptic engine trackpad first, I think.
Oh, turns out I was one model off, the next model afterward ("Mid 2014"[0]) still had the physical trackpad click, while they introduced the taptic engine with the Early 2015 model[1]. I misunderstood the EveryMac description of the features!
My 2012 one jammed up one day and the glass actually shattered upon a click. Still works and somehow I'm not getting splinters, but that's definitely an inherent flaw in the physical keyboards as batteries expand over time.
Pardon the wild analogy but I think it says something about this era. Star Wars 7 and 8 were already sold cheaper than the original movies on Youtube movies.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of movies from 1977 were crap, but we only remember the ones that weren't, like the original Star Wars. Comparing all movies of today to the best movies of the past is unfair.
It's not really the same here. Both SW trilogies made rounds of moneys worldwide (ep 7 is in the top 10 I think). But the latest movies, which are brand new, and were somehow successful are already deprecated. It's like processed food, taste doesn't last.
I think they discount the newest movies so they can get as many people to watch them as they can in order to sell them related merchandise. It is Disney Star Wars after all.
Not many things quit at their peak. You tend to notice less things which were past their peak when you were growing up and remember things which peaked while you were around.
It might have something to do with why people get more conservative as they get older. There's a bias towards thinking things were better before than they are now when people just don't remember the crap from when they were younger and things actually are pretty much the same (or really are generally getting better by most metrics)
Nono it's not my tastes. I'm speaking about youtube pricing. Even they realize that new sequels don't hold much value, even though to most of their audience (new generations using youtube often) has no reference to favor the past movies from the new.
Oh I meant it in a different way, maybe I could rephrase:
You have a tendency to notice things getting worse that you personally experience. When you're younger you have had less time to experience something you care about declining than when you're older which leads to a cognitive bias where it seems that things were generally better when you were young.
However old you are, there were plenty of things in decline when you were young that you just didn't notice or care about because you never experienced them at their best and are much less likely to experience them. So many people have experienced Star Wars because it's super culturally relevant, but slide down that scale and there will be tons of things your parents saw the decline of that you might not even know existed.
> Why so much "new" is actually worse these days..
New stuff in general is not worse. New versions of old things quite often are! So upgrade your taste and try new things instead of newer versions of the old things you know you like, because with these you're very likely to be disappointed.
In this context maybe the answer would be to try something else than a macbook. Tbh, and iPad pro capable of running Xcode and docker would rock for me.
Indeed. I have an iPad Pro that admittedly doesn't see much use because I'm very much tied to my MacBook, but having played with iPadOS I'm blown away by it and I had a very sudden realisation of "So this is where Apple's development efforts have gone!".
I can't wait until the day where I can genuinely do some development on an iPad.
Regression to the mean may be part of it. Even for a master of their craft success and quality will depend on random factors beyond skill, so pieces of work following a great one are more likely to be worse than better, assuming skill remains constant.
I'm not at all an Apple fan but have certainly handled and used Apple hardware lots of times, and every time I need to pick up or otherwise handle a MacBook, it feels very weird and uncomfortable. They look nice, but the thinness and sharp edges combined with smooth metal both makes me scared that my hands will slip, yet the sharpness provokes a natural aversion to holding it firmly. I have a metal-bodied Thinkpad but it doesn't feel as uncomfortable to hold. I wonder if anyone else has this experience.
What's funny is that 10-15 years ago, apple was making the most approachable, softest computers in the game. My brother's old 2007 macbook is sitting nearby right now, and it's in all white with the rounded corners and it feels really nice to touch and use, and you don't feel like you need to take special care of it to protect the finish.
Apple takes the aesthetic far too seriously now, they're no longer concerned with approachability and usability. They're not really in the running for "what computer to give grandma" anymore.
Hopefully, they've turned a corner on that philosophy. The new iPhone 11 Pro is slightly thicker than last year's model, to make room for a bigger battery and other components. Perhaps they can apply this change of priorities to the MacBook Pro line. As well, Jony Ive is gone, off to start his own independent design consultancy — a fine time to break the focus on 'thinner at all costs'.
My wish would be to see a return to a nice keyboard that feels good to type on, an option to omit the Touch Bar from high end MacBook Pro models, and the option for an Nvidia GPU. Otherwise, my next MacBook Pro will be a decked out 2015 model.
John Gruber had thoughts on that in one of his two takes on the issue so far
> This angle that he’s still going to work with Apple as an independent design firm seems like pure spin. You’re either at Apple or you’re not. Ive is out.
But also,
> Apple’s hardware and industrial design teams work so far out that, even if I’m right and Ive is now effectively out of Apple, we’ll still be seeing Ive-designed hardware 5 years from now. It is going to take a long time to evaluate his absence.
I didn't watch the full September iPhone keynote, but from what I saw there was a noticeable lack of Jony Ive voiceover in the featured iPhone product videos. I may have just missed it, though?
In the Jobs era, Apple would sometimes make drastic hardware changes very close to the release of new hardware. It's possible that the criticism of the keyboards from so many corners (WSJ, famously [3]) may have shifted their plans.
True and false. Qualcomm could be seen as an example where money and monopoly helped clear up some bad blood. Nvidia doesn't have a strong enough monopoly, and the damage to Apple's reputation went beyond money.. so, sometimes no amount of money is going to resolve a conflict when your product has a mere 10-20% performance differential vs the nearest competitor. If Nvidia were to bring out some sort of super-chip that offered 10x performance per watt at half the price.. Apple might raise an eyebrow, but AMD has been keeping up and Apple has no reason to switch.
I've been wondering if Apple might get in to the dedicated GPU game. First replacing the integrated Intel gpu in the lower end machines with their mobile gpu chip designs, then maybe tackling a scaled up version?
They used to use PowerVR GPUs in the iPhone line, but I think (?) they're designed in-house now. They have their own Metal graphics API already. And they're on a 7nm process from TSMC.
Thin laptops are like big screens on phones and cheap airline seats. Lots of people say those aren't the most important criteria, but the tyranny of the majority says otherwise.
As far as this particular tech goes, the frailty of the butterfly keyboard is only half the problem for me. The other half is the lack of travel itself! I'm going to hang on to this 2015 model until it completely dies and then go find something else if what's on offer from Apple feels like typing on a sheet of tin foil on a kitchen counter.
I also use my 2015 and refuse to upgrade. And use it a lot; lot of the letters on my keyboard are long gone. But the keyboard keeps working, which is a major plus compared to the newer models. If only the MagSafe 2 wasn't such bad design...
It could be a little lighter, but I carry it around in a backpack so I don't mind, and it's still not too heavy to balance on my belly if needed to, so I don't mind either.
Thinner? I also had an Air, and while it was a pleasure to carry around, I never liked the feel. It was too thin for my taste already.
On the other hand, the later magsafe cable was finally the design that seemed to work the best in more chaotic environments like at a cafe where someone can kick the cable.
People complain about how it falls out "all the time", but to me that suggests that it's doing its job.
Meanwhile one of my two usb-c ports on my 2017 MBP is already damaged from normal wear (jiggling a cable will challenge the connection), probably from the times the port took the whole load of a pulled cable. Magsafe did the right thing of sparing the port.
Though as Apple macbooks become lighter and lighter, we increasingly deal with the ridiculous failcase where a pulled cable can launch the entire laptop off the table. I feel like magsafe is even more necessary now than ever before.
>People complain about how it falls out "all the time", but to me that suggests that it's doing its job.
I wasn't aware this was even a complaint. The magsafe always just seemed like it did exactly what it needed to; I think I can recall just a few occasions when I didn't realize I had set one of my MacBooks down at an angle on the bed or something and separated part of the power cord just enough to stop charging it.
I upgraded to a 2018 MacBook Air just earlier this year, and the lack of a native magsafe option is my only regret on the purchase. The plus side is that the battery really is pretty amazing, so most of the time I am just running without it plugged in at all, and at night the laptop peacefully charges.
There were two different designs for MagSafe 1... the design used on the 2008 Macbook and 2008 unibody Macbook Pro had a plastic rectangular end that jutted straight out. The design used on the early Macbook Air is like you describe, with a right angle and an aluminum body. Both designs work with the Magsafe 1 to Magsafe 2 adapter.
I preferred the L-form plug you're describing, but that's not my main issue.
I used an MagSafe 1 L-form one for a couple of years as well, and now the MagSafe 2 T-form one.
With the MagSafe 2 the cable sheath started to become kind of porous and would fray after a year at the connector, which I had to fix (used some excess sugru my sister had lying around). This worked, but made the connector end a little heavier meaning even more chance it will slip if the laptop is moved ever so slightly.
Another half year later or so the cable showed the same symptoms in the middle of it, where now a large area of the cable sheath would become rigid, porous and would eventually rip open. That part of the cable was usually in the air, did not touch anything and of course was not in front of a heat source or anything like that. Imagine my confusion. I patched it up again with some electric tape.
I never had these problems with the MagSafe 1 cable. When I googled a bit, this seems to be a common issue for Apple cables, and a lot, lot, lot more common for the MagSafe 2 (anecdotally from what I saw in the google results)[1]. That and a lot of people would have the entire cable fray and stop working (usually at the power block end), at which point you'd either have to open up the thing and solder it together or more likely buy a replacement for 80 bucks, but that didn't happen to me (yet) thankfully.
I've used a lot of laptops, and while the magnetic connector is certainly an improvement (so of course, Apple replaced it with USB-C), I never had a cable slowly shed the cable sheath before. That's what I meant by bad design.
As far as I can tell, things didn't improve. Instead Apple decided to not even ship a cord with new models, so you either have to buy one yourself (another 20 bucks) or plug the power block directly into the wall socket. I'm cynic enough by now to believe they didn't stop shipping one because they are cheap, but to make the packaging box "thinner".
Anecdotally, I'm on my third magsafe 1 charger. They are all shit. My GFs current magsafe 1 has like 3 patches of tape throughout the cable after the block, and a big beefy wad on the L connector. I've ran into a couple other people still rocking the 2012 mbp, and they are all on their second or third magsafe charger too.
They used to not have that grippy coating and I think those smooth cables worked great (until I ran over mine with a desk chair), even the original ipod cables were pretty solid in my experience, but every L shaped magsafe 1 is a time bomb just like any other apple cable these days.
My USB-C to Magsafe adapter is currently in the prototype phase. I'm really interested in what you didn't like in the design so I can fix it in the final product.
I'm in the same boat as you, but most of my devices including my work laptop uses USB-C for charging. I want to cut down on the number of chargers I have to bring with myself I going somewhere. Also, I really like that I can "dock" my work laptop with only one cable.
Apple used to be about a certain quality. Not just appealing to impatient masses. A good keyboard matters. Ports too. It seems they just lost some good sense.
Apple no longer competes on the same metrics as they used to. It used to be about functionality and quality, but they've become a status symbol (mostly in the ohines, but I think it carries over in the brand), and thus they don't have to face as much market pressure as other companies in the same space that other companies do to make sure they don't have problems.
Is it really any wonder that as Apple products become more and more of a status symbol we see quality slip, not entirely, but just enough that they can keep their status but increase their margins? I would argue it's what we should expect given their situation (even if it sucks).
I'm a developer (I've worked on products many here use). I prefer thinner and lighter pro laptops. It has nothing to do with status.
People use these things around town in coffee shops, take them around campus, travel the world with them, etc.
Every pound in my backpack matters to me. Weight matters to me. Thinness matters to me. It's the difference between me deciding to bring my laptop and completely leaving it behind.
Same philosophy with my camera gear. I never got into the DSLR game because they were simply too heavy and bulky. I much prefer mirrorless cameras and I'm fine with the tradeoffs that come with them because I actually take my mirrorless camera around with me.
You don't have to agree with me, but I'm a huge fan of thin and light devices.
I was commenting more on the actual quality issues they've been having, and their replacing some components with ones of perceived lesser quality in the pursuit of size and weight reduction (e.g. the keyboard).
The quality argument isn't worth discussing much, as I assume you agree with the premise that quality should not drop, even if you may or may not agree it has or has not dropped (but Apple doesn't score nearly as well as it used to with review sites, and there are various things I could link to regarding quality problems, or you could just watch from stuff from Louis Rossmann).
The keyboard argument I think requires a bit more explanation, in that I think the keyboard is both of more relative importance than weight, and should be of importance for more time than the weight is as well (you should be using the keyboard longer than you are walking around with the laptop, if it's actually important for your job). As such, I see a change in the keyboard as a functionality loss for a marketing gain, since the actual weight reduction could be very minimal since it was mainly for thickness reduction (it appears the 2015 Macbook Pro might be lighter than the 2019 Macbook Pro?). To me that speaks to Apple trying to retain or cement the status symbol feature of their brand, where artistic design is, to some degree, outweighing functional design.
That sounds like an argument for the regular/Air lines which already exist. I want a Pro option that isn't just the Air+. Apple hasn't yet figured out how without catastrophic hardware failure.
But do you really notice that large of a weight difference between the 2015 and the 2017? Do you really use the few millimeters of space saved? I honestly can't tell much of a difference in terms of weight, though I acknowledge that there is some.
I actually do notice and appreciate it, personally.
I don't mean to excuse the keyboard problems - those should be addressed. But I just wanted to share my opinion because there are A LOT of others who feel the same way I do - they just have no incentive to participate in these discussions. I usually just ignore them - but in this case I was a bit bored.
There's definitely advantages, and I say that as someone with a sore back and a 2012 macbook, but there's no excuse for the modern macbook pros to not just have actually useful ports for a change. They used to give you a card reader too, and that slot is as thin as usb-c!
I've had professors delay class because they forgot the damn dongle, or the dongle mysteriously doesn't work in this particular lecture hall but "worked fine in my office!!" Occasionally you'd see someone in the wild with a tiny keychain usb drive or logitech wireless nub and a hulking 4 port dongle taking up nearly half the table space as the laptop.
I get keeping a wedged laptop like the air sparse, but Macbook pros have like 6 inches on either side where they could throw in a usb type a or hdmi cable (or the card reader, if you like photography!) if they reduced the taper by 1mm and kept the laptop at the same thickness. To not do that is aggressively stubborn, especially when usb-c isn't even the standard plug for their phones.
Maybe they shouldn't be making them out of aluminium then? My 14inch t480s has all the ports, a card reader, replaceable battery, ssd and memory. Well, maybe it's a bit chunkier, but it weighs a tiny bit less than the new 13inch macbook pro.
No it is a wonder how one of the most profitable companies in existence cannot manage to keep both mindsets alive. Milk the status money without deprecating the quality line.
> It used to be about functionality and quality, but they've become a status symbol
They've become a fashion company. They have an over-emphasis on aesthetics over performance and durability, matched with incredibly inflated prices. For the price of any Apple computer, I can get a PC with equivalent or better specs for at least 30% less cash.
There is high resale value in Apple products, you can quite literally always have the newest mbp 13” for around $150-250 a year depending on how often they release.
Don’t get me wrong, when I sold my mbp 2018 edition earlier this year it was replaced by a surface pro 6. But if you’re not fed up with the Apple eco-system as I am, then there can be a lot of value in resales and you won’t get those with any other brand. My surface pro by contrast lost 80% of its value to moment I bought it.
> However, this is one thing that upsets me. The MacBook doesn't need less ports, it doesn't need to be thinner.
The article is based on a patent filed half a year before the current butterfly keyboards were introduced. There's absolutely no reason to assume that this is exactly what the next iteration of the mac laptop keyboards will be like.
I disagree. The 15" MBP is still pretty heavy and big to carry around. At half the thickness, and say 2/3 the weight, it would be a much more reasonable daily driver.
And i disagree with you? What you consider big and heavy i consider basically feather weight. Its light, has a great keyboard, decent battery and all the ports. it's perfect. i don't want it any lighter tbh.
Maybe there should be a 15" MBP lite that is just that?
While thin and light is nice for carrying the laptop around, you still want a laptop which offers everything you need to do your work. And the late 2015 MB Pro seems to be the smallest, which hasn't made painful sacrifices. It offers a reliable keyboard and a wide selection of ports. Having at least one HDMI port is very convenient. It also has a large battery. The only thing missing, and I would sacrifice further thinness for it, would be easier exchangeable battery and ssd storage.
It seems strange no one in this thread has mentioned thermal limitations of such a thin and light design. True current CPUs are more energy efficient than those in the past but you are still going to get throttled when the machine is working hard from what I have read.
Also as you said, user replaceable battery, ssd and ram.
Thermals are indeed a good reason too. While it seems that the current MB Pro does a reasonable job with cooling the CPU, it is obvious that with better cooling you could drive the CPU harder. As the laptop is for me a mobile workstation, there is also the point that I would prefer a slightly bigger laptop that runs faster.
Which is why Apple should differentiate between the "air" and the "pro" line more. There would be a place for a 15" air, which is a slightly thinned version of the current 15" pro, and a true pro machine which sacrifices a bit of portability for features and performance.
My current dream machine would be roughly like the late 2015 MB Pro (that happens to be the machine I am typing this on), with at least a 16" screen (the bezels are plenty large on mine) and 1-2mm more thickness, allowing for good thermals and more serviceable parts. For a pro machine a battery, keyboard or ssd exchange needs to be doable by a skilled technician on-site.
I have one and it’s great for daily use. I’d really like an upgraded 12” MacBook for traveling though. I mostly use a very old ChromeBook but there’s no real replacement for that available.
To me it seems an oddly missing niche. A lot of people spend a lot of time on planes, don’t need much of a laptop, and often don’t much care for tablets as laptop replacements. Nothing really on the market for them.
Are you serious right now? Half an inch thick and 4 pounds has a negative impact on your daily well being? For what I assume is a work computer. You've never picked up a shovel or any other tool in your life, have you?
I'm up for thinning components if it doesn't make the experience worse, but I rather like my late 2013 MBP and I'd rather they fill the space with battery.
To be fair though, I'm not that bothered about macos and ran linux on it for several years. I bought it because of the screen, typing and the trackpad, and since the MBP is well into compromise land, I might buy a matebook x pro.
> IMO the 2015 MacBook Pro is the best Mac out there, mainly because of its beautiful retina display, perfect weight, and most importantly, a good keyboard.
Yep, I have a Late 2013 Retina still going strong, the only thing is I've had to replace the battery a couple of times which is a pain in the ass but it was used as my daily work machine for half of its life and still going strong.
My old work laptop was one of the more recent MacBook models and I never got used to the keyboard or having to use dongles for everything.
Can confirm. My late 2013 13” MBP is still kicking. The SD card slot failed but otherwise it’s fine. I got it refurbished originally and haven’t had to change a thing.
At work I have a 2015 15” and imagine that’s the route I’ll go to replace my personal machine soon enough...
Exactly why I bought a 2015 model when its successor was announced. I hope Apple will release a new decent model before mine become obsolete otherwise I’ll have to find a non-mac PC again. Also price increases make it harder and harder to justify buying a MBP.
I hold the opposite view - Thinner and lighter is good, not just for looks, it saves my bag space and weight on my shoulder. And ports that are not used, most of the time by most users are a waste. With Thunderbolt and usb-c the laptop doesn't need them any more, so long as there's enough bandwidth they can stay on the desk.
But I'm with you on it needing a functional, decent keyboard. That shouldn't be sacrificed.
I just want to connect to a projector without a damn dongle. I’m not asking for a parallel port, or even a serial port. I can even live without Ethernet. But - just about every office worker routinely has to connect to projectors and TVs.
There is a wireless standard for displays, but Macs and PCs seem to be incompatible.
But I would ask - what sort of projector? Because some of the meeting rooms here still have VGA connectors, we have others that use HDMI, screens in our collab area that have mini-displayport, I'm pretty sure there's a DVI-only projector hanging around somewhere too... Do you want all these ports on your laptop?
I'm loving the (seeming) convergence of display-port-over-thunderbolt using USB-C connectors. Though unfortunately it also seems that not every device and every display are happy talking over that so maybe it's no panacea either.
>The MacBook doesn't need less ports, it doesn't need to be thinner.
I think this needs further explanation, because I do think people want less port and thinner. Just not at the inconvenience of it.
Example, had there been a Wireless Standard that allow direct transfer of 5Gbps+ Real World speed, energy efficient, widely available etc. I dont need more ports. I need one for power / Display and that is it.
I would love the MacBook to be thinner, but not at the expense of having only 7W cTDP CPU and zero-travel keyboard. ( And I know we are approaching the limit of physics )
And I wanted to point out, when the current MacBook generation were designed, Apple were looking at Roadmaps of upcoming tech. That is 802.11ad 60Ghz and its successor 802.11ay with 80Gbps direct transfer, 802.11ax with 3.2Gbps and more. Intel 10nm that is suppose to be Super Power efficient, and its 7nm that superseded it.
All of these were suppose to come in 2016 / 2017. And if there were delays, may be 2018. But none of them did, we are closing in to 2020 and we are just starting to see WiFi 6 coming out. And judging from Intel's extremely conservative statement 10nm won't be in high volume any time soon either.
So Apple designed their product with future iteration in mind for the next 4 years and none of that went according to plan.
On one hand I blame them for not reacting, like their Keyboard they simply refuse to admit there is a problem until a Journalist herself had the same problem described and decide to write a piece on it that went viral. On the other hand I believe everyone were blindsided, the WiFi 6 tech has been on trade show since 2017, and it keep getting delayed, Intel kept thinking their 10nm will come. And most Keyboard problems dont actually went to Apple Store for repair because we cant afford to have 3 days without our laptop. And Apple thought the stats were fine.
> IMO the 2015 MacBook Pro is the best Mac out there, mainly because of its beautiful retina display, perfect weight, and most importantly, a good keyboard.
What about integrated USB and display ports that don't require external adapters? Isn't that the dream? o_o
I'm of the same view where I don't desire thinner also. I preferred the form of the pre-touchbar model MBP to my current 2017 MBP. But from a competitive perspective, thinness is a barrier to competition as it requires substantial engineering investment. Few can invest in the materials and process like Apple. In lieu of other differentiators, thinnest and lightest is at least something for marketing.
On the flip side, the maniacal focus on thinness led to the disastrous butterfly keyboard and associated replacement program.
I’ve really enjoyed my 2017 and 2019 MacBook Pros (and the MacBook I bought for traveling). I know some people have had issues with the keyboards, but I haven’t. I like the minimal amount of travel they have because typing on them is easier on my aging fingers. I don’t ever use the Esc key, since I use Karabiner to remap my Esc and CTRL keys to the Caps Lock key and my parenthesis to the Shift keys, so the Touch Bar doesn’t upset me at all. For me, the 2019 MacBook Pro is the best one.
My 2015 has taken some serious abuse such as falls on hard floors and impact with a wall. The MBP came off better every time. This will of course curse it, but everything still works perfectly (only the rubber feet have fallen off). It runs the latest OS fine.
It was the first Apple product I bought but I can't see myself buying another MBP. They've signalled and demonstrated over and over I'm not in their target market.
I sold my MBPro 2016 and got back to the early 2015 version. Also, i own Lenovo X1 Yoga (with touch display). So i have two laptops that i really love to use. If apple keeps producing crap the Lenovo way will probably be my way also. For now the MBpro 2015 is my work horse though
I would consider a Thinkpad if Lenovo gave us the option of buying it without the nipple - which I feel is an awful pointing device (sorry, people who love it).
>The MacBook doesn't need less ports, it doesn't need to be thinner.
This is especially true now that they're trying to position the iPad as a serious "work" machine. If it hasn't crossed this threshold already it will soon where the only reason one would need a small MacBook is because the interoperability of ports and a solid keyboard/mouse navigation process is important to your workflow.
Let the iPad handle use cases where those aren't important and let the Mac be the heavy-duty machine.
Jobs had a good quote back in the day about how not everyone wants or needs a computer equivalent of a pick-up truck and most computer vendors tend to assume they do. Apple is leaning towards the opposite problem where they're assuming everyone wants the equivalent of a sports car, which is just as bad.
Let the iPad be the Miata and let the Mac Pro be an F-250. But some of us in the middle just want a nice Camry (or the BMW/Audi/Mercedes equivalent) and they're doing a poor job of understanding what that means.
I love my 2015 15” MBP, but I do have to say the smaller size and weight of my new 2019 that work provided is certainly easier to carry in my bag. I don’t think it’s a great trade off for not being able to upgrade the RAM or SSD plus the less than stellar keyboard, but I didn’t have to pay for it so meh.
We don't "need" to improve the form factor for anything, everything is fine as is.
That said, theres nothing wrong with trying to make progress. Sometimes there are hiccups (the 2016+ keyboards).
I certainly appreciate the thinner form factor of my 2018 model (I don't mind the keyboard). I do see room in improvement for making them thinner, as my absolutely favorite portable is the Pixelbook (sans giant bezel), which is quite a bit thinner (0.4" vs 0.61") and still has the 2015 style keyboard.
I think the first generation macbook pro was the best for the keyboard - it was a wonderful keyboard with scuplted keys that fit your fingers. Additionally your fingers could easily detect the edges of the keys and self center because of the concave keycap shape.
It also had a variety of ports. The only downside was the machined aluminum case of subsequent models was rock solid.
It's a measurable metric which they can through advanced engineering at. Even if they fail once in a while like they did with the last gen (I bought a 2013 mbp instead) I think it's a net positive that they try at all.
Pipe fucking dream now. There was a time when apple let you change a battery with zero tools and a hard drive with 4 screws through the same port of entry. RAM upgrade was another half dozen screws.
It's pretty telling that apple is only concerned about milking every dollar out of you when phones start at 64gb, laptops are sold with 8gb of RAM, and getting 1tb of storage on your laptop requires another thousand dollars. Apple either rips you off on the upgrade or forces you into their cloud service, where you are at the mercy of our good friendly and ever reliable ISP cartels to access your files.
This sounds a lot like "nobody will ever need more than 640k of ram" quote attributed to - but denied by - Billy Gates.
"The MacBook doesn't need to be thinner": The MacBook doesn't need to exist either, but I think as technology improves and things are lighter and more power efficient, the smaller the footprint will be (size and weight).
I can see the argument against a decision to shrink it down 0.001m - which is only a 6% reduction in thickness (0.001/0.0149), but if it was a 0.49m reduction, bringing it down to a thickness of 1cm, would you still hold that same opinion?
Taking this to levels of science fiction - I would love a laptop so thin you can fold it like a piece of paper and place it in your pocket. I don't need any ports if all my data is always available in some "cloud" that my laptop has free and instant access to. So thin and cheap, if I dirty it I can crumble it, toss it in recycle, and just rip open a brand new one.
I kinda get your argument, but I look at my 2015 MBP, and I don't really wish it was thinner. I wish it'd had upgradable RAM and better battery life, and right now I especially appreciate that it has a replaceable SSD because it just gave out.
These are all things I care about that are being sacrificed by Apple to improve one aspect I don't care about (thickness).
I'm definitely not the only one who's thinking that, as evidenced by the comment threads here.
I appreciate you not getting on me for being "stuck on words".
On your opinion on RAM - I disagree. I feel like the way memory modules are psychically, they would probably be detrimental enough (thickness, keyboard, battery, maybe eventual water resistance) that it would out weight the benefits. Besides, you can get enough RAM when you buy the notebook that the amount you get will be good enough far past the date of the CPU being good enough.
On SSD though, I agree. I think with M.2, now with Gen 4 M.2 (and SFF NVMe?), Apple could and should of went to the lengths of allowing that. Even at this thinness, there is not great excuse why not. Besides, its STORAGE. It goes bad, people want to back it up, extract it, recover it, etc. Apple should not have to replace the whole logic board for that.
If you, in your head, read "The MacBook doesn't need to be thinner" as "The MacBook doesn't need to be thinner for ME" you'll realize your entire comment makes no sense.
I really wish they would move focus back to being more expandable. The way they weld stuff to the mainboard is hot trash. There is no upgrade path for these newer macs. My old 17"? That got a 16G RAM/SSD upgrade with the CD swapped out for a second drive. Added years to its life. I suspect the new 16" version will only have four USB-C port.
I got lucky and ended up with a 32G work laptop. I've got enough headroom to run a couple docker containers at the same time. My co-workers stuck with the 16G laptops are really in a tough place. As things stand, I end up stuffing a pile of dongles into my bag as I transition from work to home and back again.
It is unfortunate the person who keeps demanding 'thinner' over 'professional' keeps getting listened to. Wish I could find a 16:10 laptop that had expandability.
No need to beg Apple for expandability anymore on their laptops or desktops. Windows has gotten good enough especially with WSL2. Developers have more options now. I just got tired of waiting for Apple, and gave up when a Mac Pro starts at 6k. People want a headless, expandable iMac that’s affordable, kind of like the old cheese grater Mac Pros. Apple isn’t budging.
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of praise for Win10 in the last few years, but in reality my colleagues are cursing it daily and bashing their heads against basic dev stuff that works nice and dandy with Macs or with Linux. Win10 may be ok for running Microsoft’s current flagship, Office and maybe games but otherwise I wouldn’t want to spend time with fighting against the OS.
And no, in my opinion WSL is not real solution if the OS still makes life harder and more weird. Just a new twist to the cygwin/mingw/virtualisation scheme when running the real thing would be a lot better option.
And no, Macs and Linux are not perfect either, but they both are more friendly and humane options for developers.
I believe you, but my own experience could not be more different.
I dual boot constantly and sometimes I forget what OS I am running. Until I see one clock instead of the other.
Of course there are some specific tasks that are more suited to one OS over the other (a reason for restarting), but things like using the browser, the text editor, VPNs, Kodi, epub readers, Anki, etc, they basically work the same.
So, for some games-> Windows, for CLI -> Linux, for anything else, any of them.
I dual-booted or had two machines for dev work for almost 20 years. The Windows machine was mostly for Office.
Since VMs and containers because standard for development, I honestly have no idea what problems your colleagues are having. I haven't had a "Windows problem" other than the clunky UI since Win7, and the UI is 100% customizable.
- a windows 2016 server for which we needed to dig deep in powershell so it wouldn't reset the clock every 6 hours
- a user whose local account services is totalled and he can't access his desktop any more
Personally I would like the start menu search to only look for applications but I gave up on that.
I suppose using windows only for office would help, of course.
I use Windows for servers too (not my choice), and both of those things sound like a sysadmin who is making strange choices and not actual Windows bugs. I could be wrong, of course.
To be fair, I don't have full control of the domain for the server and I suspect a catch-21 regarding the clock setting and the domain sync thingy. I fixed it by "resetting a lot of time thing" but I am a linux guy before a windows guy so I ended up in Powershell (which i like).
I attribute the other one to a brutal shutdown of the PC that somehow corrupted a running update, some random clicking from the user in a misguided attempt to fix things behind the back of IT et voilà.
What problems are you having? The common complaints against Windows now vs back then are really vague. “I hate Windows (for no apparent or specific reason)!”
Why doesn’t WSL work? It’s Linux. It’s closer to what you’re deploying on for production than a Mac
I left a job in less than a month after I started because of Windows. I haven't been to companies where there's no possibility to use a Mac for years and I didn't really think about asking during the interview. And it wasn't like the job requires using Windows. I tried for 2 weeks to set it up and get used to it but it was just not working. There was always "Oh it supports it but you need to that workaround". And WSL was crap (2 years ago, don't know about it's current state). So I gave up and resigned on the third week.
No worries, MS is actively trying to get rid of it (by hiding some folders, by mangling some shortcuts, by putting libraries and stupid things like that first so that you rarely actually have access to the tree).
True enough. What is your favorite image viewer? The built-in in Win10 is basically unusable because it keeps trying to open files it doesn't understand (raw photos) and tells me to install a plugin (which probably doesn't exist).
I mostly use Linux Mint Cinnamon and the window and workspace management just feels more consistent and snappy.
Also Windows apps have a very annoying habit of showing windows for background tasks (file sync? software updates?) which I don't want to care about -- all they really accomplish is that sometimes the service gets stopped altogether just to forget about it.
Everybody recommends IrfanView, but is really the "desktop linux" (in tnat old derogatory sense when it was for nerds) of image viewers: endless configurability (with important things like color management off by default), strange navigation (How again do I switch images when zoomed in?), etc...
It's like Total Commander: efficient and good in a way, but not in a way of modern streamlined UX that e.g. Apple software was once known for.
I'll admit, I have no idea how to do anything advanced with it, but I like it because I can double click almost anything that is an image, from old Deluxe Paint files, PICs, RAWs, TIFFs, whatever, and it'll try to open it and put something on the screen, usually successfully.
I'm not trying to start a flame war, here. I was seriously surprised. I get that some people love using Windows.
I had a similar transition. I used DOS through XP/2000 heavily growing up. I worked jobs that used Linux and had a Mac at home until I had a recent job as Win10 was being adopted. I tried to give it my best effort. I got a book on Powershell and read it and researched. I was aghast that the same frustrations I had with XP and earlier hadn't been touched. I wish I had kept a log as I re-discovered them.
* Nobody used PowerShell. I tried to push it, but then I realized I needed a BAT file wrapper to run PS1 files, anyway. I was hoping PowerShell would be a next-gen BASH, but having verbose flags is great in scripts, but horrible interactively. The system I was on was air-gapped and the documentation required an extra download on each system.
* Man, Windows still updates a lot. Often requiring reboots. MacOS asks to reboot like twice a year (and doesn't force it). With Linux it's very, very rarely necessary to reboot.
* I found window management awkward. I was coming from Linux where META+LMB moved Windows, META+MMB resized them. I tried the hot-corners shortcuts and other built-in things, I tried installing a few things.
* When the UI is busy I still can't resize or minimize it?
* Control Panel and other configurations were a huge mishmash of tacked on menus with a mix of old UIs and icons.
* I really missed ssh-ing in to query and poke at stuff. RDP felt so heavy for small stuff that should be quick or automated.
After a few months I toyed with WSL, but spent most of my time sshed into a Linux box using vim or bash when managing files or source code. Most of the small services I set up running in Linux. After a year and a half I left for a variety of reasons.
I haven't tried FancyZones. I left that job a couple years ago and haven't yet dug into tiling window managers.
> Nothing stops you from installing an SSH server also.
I didn't want to get too much into this in my previous comment because it has more to do with how the place was managed, then Windows itself. But it does speak to Windows out of the box. This was an air-gapped setup and they were fairly open to me making changes, but I was very careful about jumping in suggesting big changes since I had 0 practical experience managing Windows. They mostly started with Windows as it was installed when it was delivered. Windows 10 was fairly new and they were comfortable with 7. Things were managed with PDQ. Most things were done in an "artisanal" fashion (individually done in a simple or straightforward way). I was used to installing a bunch of software on a network drive and running it directly off NFS. I've been told at multiple places that's unfeasible with SMB because of performance. (I'm definitely not speaking to NFS or SMB as a whole here--just with this specific use-case)
This also meant our rack of headless machines, when the power went out, had to be brought up individually since the disk checker was waiting for input before booting. I had on my todo list to change this, but it's difficult to test and roll out and doesn't come up often.
Back to that question; it would have meant finding a third-party ssh and rolling it out just to appease me. I likely would have done it if I stuck around, though. Maybe in tandem with a full update to Win10.
On that topic, though. Currently, I support Windows users who work from home. It's a bit odd you need admin privileges to create a symlink (I admit, that need mostly comes from trying to get feature parity with Linux/macOS), but detecting and running Admin rights is incredibly awkward [1]. We also need these non-technical people do to some port forwarding or to ssh into our Linux servers. PuTTy's configuration interface is horrid to describe to random people. Since you can't import/export configs we've looked at creating a Registry file with the right configuration, but it's not a trivial thing. For a few people we've had them install WSL, but it's a bit overkill to install however many Gigs along with Linux just to get an ssh client (and it's not an option for non Windows 10 users).
I actually bounce between linux and windows very frequently so I may have just grown accustomed to how each OS wants to do things. For backend work, I definitely prefer linux, but working frontend (I'm a graphics engineer), linux still poses a lot of problems. For example, as much as I hate windows apis, the linux X11 system is insane (and no, wayland isn't ready yet). Also, the state of device and driver support is still much more streamlined on windows. If someone complains that something isn't working to me on linux, it can be much more difficult to understand why as a result.
With WSL, it’s usable for me now since Linux is baked in. Are the apps as good on a Mac? Usually not, but a lot apps on Mac aren’t even native anymore.
I assume you mean WSL2, because I'm using LTSB and stuck on WSL and it's unusable garbage. Not that I've used WSL2 just heard that it is better.
On WSL (one? whatever) there is no raw socket access, zero. Cannot run something as simple as tcpdump. Plus the copy and pasting (CTRL-SHIFT-c/v) is incredibly annoying and inconsistent. Also the redraw in the terminal is really screwed up, half the time I try to go back to WSL and my terminal prompt is drawn in 3 different places on the screen.
It sure does. Luckily it’s good enough for my tot desktop at home, although my laptops are still macs. My work laptop cost a shit load of money, but so do the dells the rest of my team has.
Windows isn’t garbage or anything. It’s a decent OS, but for me:
1. I absolutely hate the latest UI changes. Not only are things hard to find and not organized very well, especially in the system settings, but the UI feels jerky and rough compared to MacOS when moving windows around or when the “Are you sure you want to do this?” dialog pops up.
2. I cannot stand working with Windows Explorer, drive letters, and the overly complex tree view.
3. Things that are easy on MacOS (i.e. rotating and cropping pictures, editing and signing PDFs, etc.) are either hard or not supported on Windows.
4. Device driver issues are more frequent on Windows and suck to fix.
5. Windows has a LOT of shitty software for it and it seems that everyone who asks me for help is running that shitty software.
6. I don’t like the cluttered UIs that most Windows applications have; like the Ribbon thing that Office introduced.
7. I don’t like .NET and Visual Studio much, and I don’t like programming for Windows. I prefer Swift and Xcode. Having said that, I do like F# quite a bit.
One area where I think Windows really shines is gaming.
To expand on your software point, I genuinely would say that the quality of software on Windows is all-round lower. I don't know what the reason for this is - whether it's because developers prefer the tools available on macOS or if it's simply because Mac users are more inclined to pay for their software, but the quality is clearly higher.
Try games that also exist on Mac, on the same hardware. They perform visibly better on windows, just because of DirectX. Maybe it's because game devs know DirectX better, but still it's a superior experience even on the same hardware. (eg Civ 5 / 6, most Blizzard games)
Why is a tiling window manager so important for dev work (but not for anything else)? I am a dev and I can never wrap my head around why anyone would want to spend time on tiling windows, it looks so tedious.
I don't know how generally true this is of people who like tiling WMs, but for me: a lot of it is about (easily) maximising the use of the screen, and (quickly and easily) moving windows to where I want them to be via the keyboard. I always found managing windows with the mouse to be (comparatively) tedious and slow, which led me fairly naturally to tiling WMs.
These days I'm on macOS not linux but my desire for that kind of control and speed remains; fortunately tools like BetterTouchTool enable this really nicely, and I get the best of both worlds: nice mouse-driven control when I want it, and a quick/easy way to throw a window where I want it the rest of the time (i.e. most of the time).
(I'd also say, addressing the parenthesised part of your first question, that for me, this isn't just about dev - this is a general preference; for some tools, e.g. the GIMP, tiling's a bad fit and the mouse is where it's at, but in general, if I can keyboard it, I will.)
Well, yeah, sort of, depending on what you mean by "tiling like stuff", I suppose. For me, tiling was all about maximising my use of the screen and minimising labour, which meant being able to easily place windows where I wanted, without space between them, and without using the mouse or otherwise laboriously moving/resizing by hand. That was the "why" of tiling for me, and while BTT doesn't do the "how" of tiling (i.e. it has no capability to force tiling as you move windows around, and doesn't maintain a tree of windows liking a tiling WM does), it does have a pretty powerful "move/resize window" action. Using that action I can scratch my itch and do everything I ever used a tiling WM for.
So I've got a whole bunch of hotkeys doing things like "maximise window", "put window in top-right quadrant", "put window on display 3, taking up 1/3 of the width of the screen at the right and at full height". That kinda thing. This allows me to quickly/easily set things up as I want (not _automatically_ but that's fine for me in practice since the world and my needs are always in flux.) If you dig into it you can do some fairly powerful things... E.g. you can set up named triggers (i.e. actions not bound to hotkeys) which you can then call from AppleScript triggered by hotkeys (or, if you want, triggered externally by, e.g. Alfred, though I don't do that); the AppleScripts can maintain state between calls, so I have some hotkeys that move windows in cycles, e.g. "maximise the window's height and push it all the way to the left, and on each call cycle its width between 1/6, 1/3, 1/4, 1/2, 2/3" - stuff like that.
It's true you don't get "real" tiling with this - but as I say, for me, it satisfies the "why" of tiling WMs, without doing the "how". Hope that makes sense.
But I don't spend time positioning them. I switch to a window that needs my attention, or sometimes snap them to get a split view, but that's not common. Maybe it makes more sense on a bigger screen, I'm always on my laptop, so there is not really enough real estate to have many windows shown at the same time.
I use a tiling window manager and I dont really spend time positioning windows either. 99% of the time my programs are in one of two states. Either full screen or split down the middle.
In a tiling WM full screen is the default. I never have to manually full screen something, it’s automatically taking up the whole screen. I usually have it in tabbed mode, so all new programs are just full screen in tabs. (And split view is just a hot key or two away)
Really though my favorite thing is the easy multiple desktops. Win+4 is always my chat program. Win+2 is always my ide, win+1 is always my web browser. I never have to mash alt+tab a varying number of times. and more importantly if the second desktop is actually two programs in split screen, it’s still easy to switch to and from. Otherwise I frequently find myself looking at one thing in full screen, then having to alt+tab multiple times to bring two half-screen programs back to the front.
I’ve tried to install various windows tools to either provide hot keys to virtual desktops, or otherwise replicate my tiling WM setup but nothing seems to be quite as convenient to me. I feel like I waste so much time alt+tabbing and getting things where I want them whenever I’m in a normal WM. In i3 it’s all either already the way I like or it’s 1-2 hotkeys to fix it.
How is that different on a tiling window manager? I would assume a smaller screen would be more apt to using a tiling window manager.
It automatically makes the window you're using take up 100% of the screen. You can also switch between tiling and a maximized view in pretty much every tiling wm. Also, there are usually multiple desktops (or even better, "tags" like in dwm) which allow you to easily switch between applications in any of the different tiling modes.
LG crammed a 17" 16:10 display and 2 NVMe slots + 1 SODIMM slot (with additional 8GB RAM soldered to the motherboard) into a sub-3 pound chassis in the Gram.
Costco has'em on sale right now, too. Check out the in-store display. My boss loved the look and the weight, and bought a couple on the spot. They're really nice to use.
That video card is painful too. I'd be happy enough with 2560x1600@17" as it would be a Linux box... I think. I'll have to take a look at one and see how it feels.
Professional bloat-maker here. I doubt it. I want my software to be reasonably lightweight but I've literally never thought about what the user's computer upgrade path might be.
As long as it runs well on anything newer than 5 years old, I'm happy. This captures enough users without requiring me to go to great pains to get the remaining, much harder hardware/software setups.
People may read that and hate it, but the reality is I have deadlines to meet, demanding bosses, and a never ending queue of features and bugfixes. I suspect a lot of folks are in the same boat.
Expanding on what the GP said, I hate Docker with a passion.
I mean, I know it's useful, but at my previous job I was able to use my vintage 2GB Macbook Air after installing things with brew + rbenv, while everyone else needed 16GB. All it took was a couple hours to setup the local environment.
Never had a problem because the environment was different and my app startup times were much smaller.
Are people really demanding thinner laptops? Who is demanding that a laptop or phone be thinner?
MAKE THEM THICKER, I want more battery life and better performance! I am a fat out of shape need and I can carry 40lbs on my back, no sweat. MAKE THEM THICKER.
Are people really demanding thinner laptops? Who is demanding that a laptop or phone be thinner?
Yes. Anyone who carries them around demands thinner, where possible. I could have bought a MBP and am typing this on a MBA. The latter has various advantages but the latter is fast enough and also lighter. PG uses (used?) 11" MBAs. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/740739637572997120?lang=en
I carry my laptop everywhere, and whenever there is a trade-off I demand performance and quality over thin/light.
I use my machine to do work. Better performance makes we work better and faster. It's my bread and butter. Less weight... is a slight convenience while commuting, I guess?
When you travel, especially internationally where you're probably carrying the laptop in a hand bag then the extra weight starts to be an annoyance. A lot of walking around and 0.5kg savings makes a difference.
Well aluminum also has the nice property that it's a good thermal conductor, it definitely has functional advantages over plastic. It also has a good specific heat capacity, so as well as conducting away heat via the chassis, it can allow longer bursts of high power usage before temperature limits are reached.
I carry two. And power leads. And clothes for upto 2 weeks (three at a push). And a 10 port mikrotik, a few cat 6 cables of various lengths, a supple of lc-xx sm fibres and an sfp. Sometimes a pi or two as well.
0.5kg makes a significant difference when you're rock climbing because you have to pull that weight up vertically with you. If 0.5kb makes a significant difference while walking around, I suggest that you join a gym instead of buying thinner MacBook.
Marginal gains. A lighter bag, a lighter laptop, less clutter in such bag, can add up. If you're carrying things in a backpack, you can carry heavy loads without an issue, except then in hot buildings you end up with a sweaty back.
If you put it in a single strap bag like a satchel then it can dig into your shoulder after a few hours. If you use a briefcase then you have to mount it somewhere or continually have one hand occupied.
I was so disappointed when they cancelled the little Macbook this year - just a tiny bump in specs, and upgrade the USB-C to TB3 and I would have jumped. That was a nicely sized machine.
1) desktop (Ubuntu), main daily use at home
2) laptop (t410s/Ubuntu). For work in apps rooms. Really falling to bits now, but still using it due to things like Ethernet port. The keyboard is now worse than the air so looking how beast to replace it
3) MacBook Air, for portable use
Right tool for the right job. If I want a portable I’ll go for a small air. If I want a useful machine I’ll go for something larger and heavier, but with the ports I need
the most environmentally friendly thing you could do with that t410s is to replace the keyboard with a new one instead of replacing the laptop with a new one. This of course assumes that everything else is fine and only the keyboard is falling to bits.
Totally gone - the long thin bits are normally connected by two robots, it’s just one. This means the plastic case is separated. While I can just about close the lid by pushing from tr base of the screen, it’s really flakey.
I'm "Anyone who carries them around" and I don't demand thinner. I don't mind the weight or size as long as it has the power and usability I need. I still use a "fatty" 13" MBP from 2012 for travel for this reason - great keyboard, lots of ports (no dongles needed), and durable.
I agree. Can't they let the Air and Pro diverge? I like them both. A Pro should live up to its name and be expandable and have a useful set of ports. As someone else noted, give extra internal space to the battery. Give it a world class keyboard. Figure out a way to keep the Touch Bar but bring back physical function keys. Let it be a great design given the tech constraints. Let the Air weigh a couple of ounces, be a centimeter thick, and be great specs given the design constraints.
There are like a dozen similar comments I could reply to, but I'll just pick yours to pipe up: hi, I'm a person who wants thinner and lighter laptops.
Why? Because I want the least possible weight, and a screen size I can use. The only way to hold screen size constant and drop weight is to get thinner.
I just got a 13" MBP, which is about the same weight and size as my 2012 Air, but gives me better battery life, better performance, and a way better screen. It's great. I even like the new keyboard better.
I'm like you in that I only ever buy 13" ultralight laptops. But there are diminishing returns after about 3lbs.
Like yeah, going from 2.8 to 2lbs is great and all but it's not as notable as the jump 10 years ago from the 5lbs bricks to the original MacBook Air. The computer still takes up about the same space in my bag and I wouldn't really notice ~1 lbs difference, especially if I still have to carry around a 1lbs power adapter because the thin battery lasts less than 8-10 hours of moderate use.
In the meantime, the design compromises to get to 2lbs are becoming increasingly aggravating: thinner keyboards that jam, screens bonded to glass so that repair is impossible, RAM and SSD soldered onto the board, batteries broken up into pieces so that replacement is annoying or impossible, passively cooled Intel chips that throttle, weak integrated GPUs. And probably a bunch of other stuff.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that the kind of lightweight laptop you like is inherently bad.
I see the appeal of light and minimal, but I also see the idea of heavy and feature packed.
Plus pursuing thinness as end in and of itself (edit: to the point that reliability is impacted) is preposterous. Is a few millimeters thinner really going to change the way you feel about your laptop? Probably it would not impact any functional aspect of your relationship with the laptop.
After all, thicker doesn’t necessarily mean heavier. I’m fact thicker things are more resistant to bending, so perhaps it could mean lighter. If you want to understand the mechanics, check this out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_modulus
> The only way to hold screen size constant and drop weight is to get thinner.
Or get rid of bezels. Or have a better aspect ratio.
> gives me better battery life, better performance, and a way better screen
That is be expected after so many years. Also, before apple started its "retina" branding it just had worse screens than comparable competition, e.g. sony vaio or hp and lenovo with nice high-res IPS screens while the air had a rather low res TN screen.
Some of us are skinny. Or we hate lugging around weight. With something like a laptop, which you're carrying around everyday, half a pound saved makes a big difference.
I won't say I'm for thinner laptops, per se, because I'd rather that every laptop came with the maximum permissible 99 WHr battery, but I want everything as light as possible hell yes.
Lol, I totally agree, why not offer the thick super-long-lasting battery version?!?!?
Let the skinny-jeans kids get their skinny phones and have to charge everywhere, but I'm fine with a brick in my pocket if the battery can go for a couple days.
I have an old HP business laptop I got refurbished for dirt cheap. It has every port you could want from the past two decades, a replacable battery, easy access bays for the multiple drives and RAM. It's probably two inches thick and eight pounds.
It's fantastic and I love it. I just wish it were bigger - 17 inch laptops were a nice, but sadly almost extinct, form-factor. Particularly the 2010ish 17" MacBook Pros were rock-solid, indestructible machines.
Yes. I want my (non-proprietary) ports, and I want my disk media drive, I want a long-lasting battery, and I want key travel on the keyboard, and I want a power+KVM+USB3 dock with magnetic connector.
I will be working and playing on this thing, not waving it around in the air with just two fingers.
I want something I don't even notice in my shoulder bag when I commute. Battery life is good enough, performance is good enough (and can boost a bit when the machine is plugged in).
You sound like you might be in the market for a workstation-replacement thinkpad.
It's true that they seem to be more differentiated on price than on target market, with the MB and the Air being "entry level". Not that there is an MB any more.
Particularly the Air is weird, it's not a lot slimmer or lighter than the 13" pro now, but it is a lot less powerful. It's a weird market segmentation (to my eyes).
Me. Macbook 12 is one of my favourite machines ever. Every Thinkpad feels super heavy and bulky in comparison and I don't want to use those. I value mobility above all else. If I want performance, I have my desktop machine or cloud for that.
I'm the opposite, I value typing economics above all else, and I'd much rather have more battery life than save a little on weight. For me, 14" is the perfect screen size because it gives me a decent sized keyboard, enough screen to see what I'm doing, it's small enough to fit in my backpack, and large enough to fit a large enough battery to last all day. But for some reason the most recent Thinkpads don't offer a second battery and are trying to go thinner, which is precisely what I don't want.
I have my desktop for serious typing and my laptop for a mobile workstation. Sometimes I need to work while visiting family or when going to conferences, and I need a decent keyboard, battery, and performance to do so.
If I want thin, I'll get something like a MBA, a tablet, or my little Lenovo Yoga (11"). But that's not enough for me to get work done on the go, it's mostly just barely good enough to take notes and watch videos. I need something capable of compiling decently large codebases and 3D rendering, and no MBA is good enough for that.
You live in a weird reality. An USB barely fits the carbon, and yet you don't think it's thin. For you a regular laptop is what everybody else calls an Ultrabook.
Yes, I want thinner even at a cost. The 2015 is heavy. The 2017/2018 model is way better because carrying it is less of a hassle. If it was 1/2 thickness and 1/2 weight that would be ideal.
Why not both?
There are 3 models, MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, why can't they diverge in focus? Sure, lighter is better, but that is if there are no trade offs. Some people accept the trade offs, other don't, but you have 3 product lines, why not letting them diverge on this question?
Also, you give people reason to have more than 1 Apple laptop, one with ports and great keyboard when ultra portability is not necessary, and the other for portability above all.
I am. As it stands, the latest MacBook Pro is too heavy and bulky for me to comfortably carry. Make it more powerful and lighter and I will have a reason to upgrade.
Dear Sweet Baby Jesus I want a thicker MacBook Pro that WORKS. I literally do not care about millimeter or two. I care very seriously about a quality keyboard I can type on.
My 2016 MBP is the worst Mac I’ve owned, and my first Mac was bought in 1989. And I don’t feel like I can upgrade because I’m unwilling to pay for more of the same crappy design. It’s embarrassing.
Linux has gotten to the point that it is no longer necessary to look at MacOS for a stable Unix environment. I don't need much from a laptop just decent keyboard, performance, battery life and for it to not thermal throttle, but unfortunately this seems to be incompatible with Apple's vision of the perfect MacBook. If this is the direction Apple is taking I cannot see myself buying a MacBook in the foreseeable future.
Sorry, but Linux hasn't gotten anywhere in a long while. They were trying something that may have worked (Ubuntu + Unity), but this just looks and feels like a toy still. When it comes to GUI and user experience, let's face it, there is a very very TINY market left for Linux. I am a software developer for a very long time and had been running QubesOS as well as most popular distros. Of those QubesOS is the clear winner, since it looks pretty much as sad as any other Linux but at least it gives you something you can't get anywhere else: Security.
As much as I hate Windows and MacOS, they just both run circles around Linux when it comes to graphics, GUI design and user experience and that is why they have such a big market share. It's this old delusion of some Linux fanboys that Linux would spread around the globe if the evil Apple and Microsoft would just allow them. There are few people who CAN use it and much fewer still that are willing to use it as a desktop system.
Agreed. I recently gave every Linux DE an honest test drive and... it's clear that nobody really has the resources to perfect them. They all get annoying after a while. I'd be happy with something as polished as Windows 95, but even XFCE has the exact same bugs as when I used it 15 years ago.
> I recently gave every Linux DE an honest test drive and... it's clear that nobody really has the resources to perfect them.
That's not strictly true. The resources were (and are) there, but they have been pointlessly squandered.
KDE3 and GNOME2 were great desktop environments. I would argue that KDE3 was the pinnacle of all desktop environments to date. Polished and usable, it was absolutely fantastic to use. Great UI, great design, and having KParts embedded in Konqueror made it really flexible and extensible. I used it for many years, and took advantage of its functionality unlike any other DE. I also used GNOME since the 0.9x days, and it also became very polished, if not less sophisticated overall. GNOME2 was definitely its peak.
What happened though was CADT. All the effort expended to build up these DEs was carelessly torn down to be rebuilt in an inferior form. Today, both of the major DEs seem to be busy aping mobile UIs instead of creating desktop UIs. GNOME/GTK have scrollbars with zero buttons and sized about 4px wide; totally unusable on a 4K display. They even broke the old paging and panning behaviours, which were excellent. They have almost completely lost their focus on the desktop, and with it, the developer base which formed the long tail of contributors.
Part of the problem is that the upcoming generation of developers have predominantly known mobile UIs; they haven't fully experienced or understood the sheer breadth and depth of rich desktop UIs. The other is that with the switch to mobile devices, there simply isn't the money in desktop UIs nowadays. While this isn't strictly a bad thing, in practice it's the loss of diverse commercial inputs which has driven GNOME off the rails and made it an insular echo chamber of bad ideas.
Not to be that guy, but what bugs have you experienced in XFCE? I've been using XFCE since Fedora 14. With the recent upgrade to Fedora 30 (from 28), I noticed they addressed my only beef with the environment by adding a greatly-improved GUI for managing multiple displays. It can save profiles for work vs home displays and (almost always) toggles between them correctly.
That was the only Linux pain point for me, having to manually toggle out of multi-screen mode after unplugging an HDMI cable. Obviously, that was some kind of kernel thing and not an XFCE-specific bug (I think?), but even the native XFCE tooling has improved in the last few years, despite the lack of a newsworthy major version release.
Fedora has been my daily driver for 8 years now. It keeps getting better. The last flaky distribution, for me, was Fedora 19, released in the summer of 2013! (Here, flaky is described as "difficult to get working the way I wanted" and "occasionally would do something weird and force me to reboot it to fix the problem")
I don't even think it's bugs that Linux desktops have a problem with. The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability.
> The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability.
That's funny because it's exactly the way I feel about macOS where they obviously design things based on the way things look and sell over how usable they are. This is actually part of Apple's DNA as we've read in the past: The only reason they stuck with the Dock was because of how well it marketed. You can read about it from the guy who developed Apple's first HIG - https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Meanwhile my preferred Linux DE (XFCE) gives me perfectly tasteful design and coherent usability. Instead of having things look or work the way Apple wants, I am able to do things the way I want to, which means that things fit into my opinion of what is tasteful or usable. It's a ton of little things you know? Like being able to quit an app with a single gesture (a middle click on its pane icon, similar to how you close a tab in your browser) - built into XFCE and not even available in macOS unless you're Apple and you have some access to their private API.
That's because most Linux desktop environments take after Windows, which has by far a better system of usability than macOS. To point out just one small thing: In macOS the keyboard shortcuts are an insane jumble of incoherence with no pattern which is why you simply cannot navigate the entirety of macOS with just the keyboard, something that I can do all day long on Windows and Linux.
If you think you can, I'll challenge you: Open the About this mac dialog, then switch to another program. Now try to switch back to that window with just your keyboard, without using one of your special usability-fixing programs that you have to install to fix such things on your Mac, like Witch.
I've been using XFCE for about 8 years and one problem I had since beginning is how sessions (don't) work (restoring open windows after reboot). I have experienced it not saving session at all, not saving Thunar at all and saving Thunar only if it was started from Applications Menu, seemingly completely independently on settings. I have never managed to debug what was causing it. Currently it works correctly on my work computer and is buggy on my home PC, even though they are both same distro and version and I'm not aware of changing any setting that could affect that.
That said, I consider XFCE great and all bugs I encountered while using it were minor.
I was trying out xfce recently. When you orient the taskbar vertically and the clock stays vertical instead of changing to horizontal. This sort of stuff pisses me off so much. But I'm OCD like that.
Many years ago people would complain about even getting things installed, have stories about driver problems, missing software, incompatibilities.
If today's strongest criticism is "the clock widget sometimes does not rotate automatically", I think that is a great endorsement.
That's true, but it's like a lot of little things add up. Windows 10 for example lost some of my files I was copying over from a linux drive, because ntfs is not case sensitive (by default?) and it didn't see there were two directories. So now the fear of losing more files is keeping me away from Windows.
Linux rewards customization, if you don't have the time for that Gnome is a good starting point assuming you can adjust yourself to its workflow. XFCE is amazing (and was my primary before I switched to wayland/swaywm) and I have deep respect for its developers for what they have managed to produce with thunar being one of the most if not the most customizable lightweight file managers. It can have its issues at times but nothing that I have not been able to work around.
I feel like the local maximum of Gnome was in the 2.x days. Gnome has really become a truly awful environment. All of the UI is needlessly dumbed down, and the window chrome is ridiculously wasteful of space.
I'm curious what languages you develop in? I primarily work in Java. On a Windows machine I generally install some way of using BASH (git-Bash suffices), but otherwise I can hardly tell the difference between MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I would imagine the experience is similar for languages like python, web development, etc.
Java is quite crossplatform. Python, by default, wraps system libraries, so the dev experience on Windows is very different, and special care must be taken.
But, it's the overall experience that sucks in Windows (and most linuxes imho).
I genuinely don't understand what you're referring to when you say overall experience. When I am coding I have one monitor full of IDE, one full of browser, and a console that is brought to and from focus from time to time. The experience on the 3 major platforms is extremely similar. What are you doing differently?
I've tried to switch from Ubuntu+Unity to OSX, and OSX feels so clunky in comparison. A year later, the mac still feels unpolished. Tiny but significant things:
- Unity puts multiple dots next to an app on the dock when you have multiple windows open. On the mac you have one dot even if you have 10 windows.
- Clicking a dock icon on unity when you have multiple windows and the app is already on top, does an expose' style selection; On a mac, you need to use expose (among all apps), right click the dock icon, or find the "Window" menu on top -- and that's assuming you know that there are multiple windows ... see first point.
- I have unity set up to make the active window 5% brighter than any other window (or dim the others to 95%, don't remember). Hardly visible, except you instantly and intuitively know which window is active, even if it's on another screen.
This is a kind of polish that OSX is missing, and that once tasted, it is painful to go without. On the other hand, when I occasionally have a chance to use Unity, there is nothing from OSX that I miss.
Exactly this! As a full stack web dev, Manjaro has given me exactly everything that I need with way, way, way less work and less hassle than any Mac or Windows machine I’ve ever used in over 20 years of my programming career.
Almost every piece of software that I really need to use was in the package manager for one thing. It’s also made being a developer fun again because I feel like I’m actually in control of my desktop OS! I can make it do whatever I want and have been doing just that for over a year now on 3 different machines. I have it on one work desktop, one home desktop and on a laptop, a beautiful and cheap 15” Acer/i5 unit with 16gb, expandable up to 32gb of RAM if I want... and the desktops are 5 year old HPs both with 32 GB of RAM and i7s that run circles around macOS on the newest MBPs due to things like it being a sane nix environment and not having to jump through hoops to be productive…
I also set it up for a couple of my coworkers and they love it too. Furthermore we occasionally do some ASP.net and SQL Server work and have had no problem doing so right on these same machines was nothing more than Docker and Azure data studio.
Honestly the only thing I’ve ever needed a Mac for is to compile stuff for iOS and I’ve been doing that for years already. Mostly because I just can’t stand the UX on macOS...like at all. So before Manjaro, I’d mostly stuck to Windows and virtual machines or Docker. But I had been trying desktop Linux on and off since the late 90s and this is the first time it ever stuck. I think it’s also because it’s not that hard to make cross platform apps anymore as it used to be when all you had was C++.
WSL is not good enough. I tried it, I really gave it a chance.
Breakages across Windows updates, atrocious filesystem performance, broken file permissions, so many rough edges buried deep in the issue tracker. I strongly recommend trying it but, but I can't possibly recommend it for professional use.
It's impressive, and from what I recall a small team working on it, who deserve tremendous kudos, but it's no replacement for real Linux.
I used Linux (Gentoo/KDE) quite a bit about 10 years ago, this year I ran Manjaro as one of my clients used that for their developer workstations.
I was severely disappointed. UI scaling for high resolution displays was terrible. Configuration still spread in a billion places, badly documented, and with the polish of a gravel road. Still no smooth scrolling, and no good remote access solution, unless you think VNC is still considered good. It's not.
Apart for some pretty logos, it felt almost exactly like the system I left 10 years ago. I actually felt rather sad that day.
It's rather shameful, but not unexpected how all those massive companies that built their businesses on Linux can't be bothered support what is - in a sense - the "origin" of that success: That people wanted a decent OS with a nice GUI where we also wouldn't have to be prisoners of Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else.
If you're going to scale the UI, why even bother with a high resolution display? Honest question: What do you do that requires more than 1080p?
> Configuration still spread in a billion places, badly documented...
Not quite a billion, but hey at least you can configure things the way you want very much unlike macOS where you have absolutely no choice whatsoever.
I can't remember the last time I even used official documentation for macOS or Windows. Don't you just google everything? Aside from that, what resources do you have for mac/win that are better (more detailed?) than the Arch Linux website (which applies to Manjaro)?
When I first setup Manjaro, I looked at all the remote access solutions as well and I found that X2Go was the best performing solution. Did you give that a try?
What has changed with Linux in the past 5 or so years? That makes it true now but not then? Or any other recent further back date like 2012, the first year they did a back to back yearly release (10.8, Mountain Lion)?
Does anyone want a thinner computer? The I9s have thermal issues, the butterfly keyboard break in 12 months. Why don’t they focus on real innovation like adding faceId or Oled HDR screens. Apple is going to spite us all and replace the keyboard with an oled magic bar.
I mean, if I could have a magical fairy computer that was as thin as a piece of paper but had the keyboard of a 2015 MBP, and decent performance and battery life, yeah, I'd think that was pretty great.
What I'm not willing to do is make any drastic usability sacrifices in exchange for more thinness.
That fairy would need to use some seriously arcane magic to make such a device not bend and tear like paper too. Although I don't think that would bother Apple much at this point.
This fetish for thinness is how we end up with 2100 dollar laptops whose keyboards start acting up in 2 months of purchase, and simply can't be cleaned or easily replaced because the whole thing is frigging glued shut with barely any clearance.
There is a lot of mythos about Steve Jobs but I feel confident in saying that the hot garbage that is post-2015 Macbook 'Pros' would not have shipped (or at least been promptly brought back to the drawing board) in his realm.
Note that the patent's Publication Date is listed as November 17, 2016. So we shouldn't read into this that Apple still thinks that they should keep going thinner and thinner. Hopefully they have heard loud and clear that people want a keyboard that has adequate travel, and this tech will therefore never see the light of day.
For the record, I have a 2017 MBP and agree with all the anti-butterfly sentiment voiced here.
Steve was mocking xerox for being run by people who have no idea how to develop a product. Jobs would mention that those people can only do marketing and sales and would drive the design to the point of uselessness.
Wish he would be still alive, none of this self destructive bullshit would have continued. The touchbar would have been binned and the butterfly keyboard slapped on the wall of shame with the title
I really wish I could switch back to Linux but not being able to use Adobe tools is what's stopping me. I am now considering dual boot of Linux + Windows for only when Adobe is needed (which is not an ideal Solution).
Just want to see how bad they screw up with the next MacBook before I make the switch. Currently running a 2015 MBP.
I haven't had a good reason to use it lately but modern wine (not the one in the debian repos) is pretty good once you have the 32 bit GNU userspace installed for it.
Is it? Honestly, I've played around with wine a long time back and realized I can't use it for serious stuff and still sorta carried that thinking. Might have to give it a try again.
I don't understand Apple's obsession with thin devices. What's the point in making something so thin that it detracts from their primary function ? Ipad Pros that bend, Macs with problematic keyboards and overheating...
Please, stop. Make things functional first, thin if possible, not the other way around.
So far only one other comment seems to have pointed out that this is a patent filing -- from 2016, no less -- not a commitment. Apple has filed many, many patents over the years that haven't gone anywhere. Meanwhile, there's been several rumors from the supply chain that the next keyboard design from Apple that's actually going into production goes back to scissor switches.
I think it might be worth waiting to see what the next new keyboard design -- which may not be the next laptop that they ship, depending on how far their infamously long pipeline stretches -- actually is before bringing out the tar and feathers.
I am a huge fan of thin and small laptops, even at the expense of things like connectivity. However, 90% of what I do with a laptop is type. If there's no key travel, I can't type.
I switched to a budget lenovo ideapad because i needed a windows machine. It turns out its way more comfortable to use than my mac and i keep coming back to it.
Just bear in mind the build quality of Ideapad and other budget Lenovo brands aren't great. The ThinkPad (X, T or P series) really is in a class of its own in terms of build quality, upgradability and repairability.
Do you know the common failure mode for ideapads? Two aspects of the design concerned me. The heat vents on the back are open when the lid is closed (presumably for ventilation while docked), and the power plug is barrel style, which i know handles stress poorly and can break the socket over time. It is cheap, probably for a reason. Performance in the short term is up to par.
How thin does it have to get before everyone says "this feels shitty"? I have a few mechanical keyboards at home and at work and I can't imagine always having to use one of these new keyboards with zero throw. It makes me feel like I'm mimicking typing rather than actually doing it.
I would not be surprised if Apple releases a solid state keyboard with chiseled glass keys, haptic feedback for key presses, and an oled screen underneath.
It seems like the conclusion to their “Taptic” engine, touchbar, and pressure sensitive touchscreens R&D.
Maybe their goal is to eliminate mechanical keyboards, replaced with nothing more than textured glass. Have to train out an entire generation to get there.
MacBook Pro 2025: The entire keyboard/touchpad area is now a screen with configurable controls. The touchbar was a tease of what's to come. People rejoice over the ability to swipe rather than type out a word.
If Apple truly wanted to kill the Macbook line, they wouldn't do it by spending millions of dollars over several years purposefully producing crappy products they don't believe in. They'd just announce they were killing the Macbook line.
That hasn't happened, so presumably, Apples believe that laptops fill a niche which tablets don't.
Well, what is that niche? The primary difference between a tablet and laptop is that the latter has a keyboard. If you're buying a laptop instead of a tablet, you probably want a good keyboard!
Apple making thin laptops was great, it moved us away from these giant thick things we had for so long. But this obsession with thinness is crazy now. They are chasing tooo thin.
I used to love my old Macbook Pro Retina, great keyboard, great laptop.
I'm on Lenovo's team now, it's keyboard is superior in everyway. I do miss the trackpad but I use the keyboard 99% of the time, and I like the nipple.
Not sure I'm the only one, but I'm at a conference with my 2019 MBP and when I see someone with an old MBP I think "that must be a new model.... I definitely could use all those ports and that nice keyboard". Then I remember it was tthe one I replaced with this definitely inferior machine (repeated letters left unedited)
I'm dying to switch to a good Linux laptop. Any suggestions for one that could replace my MacBook pro?
Every previous time I've done this, I've been disappointed with something basic: wifi, battery management, video card support, using external projectors. Have these issues been worked out?
I bought a Macbook Pro in 2009 and used it until 2017 when I switched to a T470. Haven't regretted it one second. Debian works flawlessly, as does OpenBSD.
I was considering getting a Thinkpad and running Debian or Manjaro to replace my MBP. I know historically thinkpads have been good machines, but do the new X or T series laptops still live up to the reputation?
I have a T470 and I love it. Some say the keyboards aren't what they used to be, but overall, I absolutely love the machine. While I think it looks good, I consider it a tool, not a fashion statement. I just need it to work, all the time, and have a great keyboard. It has everything I personally need.
The XPS 13 is the worst keyboard I've ever used. It brings me great physical pain to type on it. I had to quit using it as a laptop and exclusively use it with an external keyboard because the finger pain was so great. I know many people (like yourself) don't feel that way, but it was absolutely not acceptable for me.
Thanks to the XPS when I picked out my new laptop keyboard quality/travel was my #1 requirement by a tremendous margin.
"...the keys are positioned much closer to the circuit board, reducing the amount of travel and materials required to register a key press and to actuate."
If the goal is to minimize travel, why have any travel at all? Why not just glue on the keys? Why not just paint on the keys?
It feels like they are getting people used to the thinner keys to make it more like touching surface. Once people adapt to this, they will most likely swap out the entire physical keyboard with a touch keyboard (the touch bar seems like an incremental step).
At this point their products are thin enough. There really isn't a need to go any further.
The quest for thinness at the expense of more important features is supremely annoying, and I say that as someone that uses a number of Apple products daily.
I mean ... When was the last time thickness was a limiting factor to you in any way?
Why not focus on weight or size, which really do make a difference in everyday activities?
Edit: Most replies here in favor of thinness write something akin to "I want a thinner MacBook because the current one is to heavy." But you're confusing two aspects of the product, right? I agree that they probably go hand in hand most of the time, but there might be occasions where thinner does not equal lighter or thicker does not equal heavier and I guess most of us would be happier if Apple focused on the weight aspect, not the thickness aspect ...
I'm in the process of switching to a 2015 MacBook Air at work because the keyboard on my 2019 MacBook Pro is just unusable. I love the Mac external keyboards. I don't understand why they can't put them in their laptops.
... I have a 2016 MBP and I'm on my third keyboard/topcase (all repairs covered by Apple, so thumbsup). But both times they also decided to replace the logic board even though the computer was working fine and passed their initial diagnostics.
I'm wondering if this isn't just a "dust and junk gets into the butterfly mechanisms" and maybe these machines have thermal issues which is causing mechanisms to get soft or melt.
Steve Jobs said PCs were "trucks", but current MBP seems way more of an Italian sportacar which always has to be in the shop than a true truck.
They need to fix the thermal mess of the current MBPs. The fans spin up all the time LOUD and it sounds horrible. My 2009 MBP was silent unless it was at 100% CPU for minutes with the vents blocked (on the bed).
Not when idle but a minimal amount of usage spikes, like 10-20% CPU for a minute or so. IMO the fan really shouldn't be spinning up unless the CPU is really under stress for several minutes.
It's interesting how posts about polarising "hardware choices" collect so many comments. This really brings out the passion in people :)
I am not a mac user but I appreciate the thin design as it's something that can go in my bag without thinking about it (as someone mentioned here). My problem with Macs is that terrible keyboard. I can tell how many people are using a new Mac in a noisy train carriage just by that furious clicking sound of the keys (followed sometimes by moans and curses due to mistypes).
As someone who gave up on Apple in the late 1990s, I experience schadenfreude when they are having these totally unnecessary issues... Year after year after year after year.
Dell has created a maglev keyboard it uses in some of the XPS line. They've kept these thin, but apparently the feel is quite good.
I've been wondering, couldn't a keyboard use magnetic levitation to increase the key travel when the laptop is in use, but then turn off the magnets when folded so they sit flat?
> I would think the battery drain would be negligible compared to your screen.
I don't know how much battery it would require, but you'd want to provide enough resistance to make a keypress feel substantive and satisfying.
That said, with a careful and fast feedback system, the keys could start out with just enough force to hold up the keycap, detect a finger starting to press them, and ramp up the force to that key to provide enough resistance, then stop again when the key has traveled back up. That could reduce the energy usage compared to always providing force comparable to a spring or scissor switch.
That same feedback system could theoretically mimic the resistance curve of various other keyboard technologies.
That's a really good point Josh, I was reading something about a month ago about one of the gaming keyboard companies which has an adjustable magnetic switch which lets the user change the key travel, which I believe was also done via electromagnets.
Hopefully none of this is too far off. I'm not sure how the industry got itself into its current condition of poor experiences due to a desire for the great thinness.
I really hoped their focus would be on making an even better keyboard than the one in MBP 2015, and of course the return of at least the physical escape key.. But to be honest, I gave up all hope on that. They destroyed the MBP, making it a more classy thing for the upper class maybe? At least, the latter seems to become more and more their market.
For now I stick to my 2015 MBP, keeping it alive as long as possible. I refuse to go to Windows. Although it's a solid OS, it feels like it's infected by multiple viruses to me. They can go F* their selves with all their add-ware rubbish, forced auto updates(silently adding even more sophisticated viruses), sending home heaps of private data(including my keystrokes), etc, etc.. And although I love Linux, as on OS it's just not good enough yet compared to OSX IMHO.
I want a mobile workstation, not this weird obsession with making it thinner, lighter, etc. It's cool that it's thin and light, but function needs to come over form. The keyboard is trash (literally causes me knuckle pain compared to the old chiclet keyboards), the loss of magsafe has caused some pretty severe damage to my last macbook (somebody wasn't looking where they were going in a coffee shop and tripped over the cable -- took the entire laptop with it, dented the case where it hit the ground, and screwed up the USB C port), and the touchbar gets _hot_.
Give me a 2016 Macbook Pro with a retina display with an upgraded proc + ram + user servicable parts. Or even better, open up macOS to other hardware so that I can choose the system that works the best for me.
I don't need an appliance, but damn, I miss macOS.
I don't need a thinner MBP; I need ports, a reliable keyboard and a large battery. I'm still using my old early '11 because I don't want to buy a new laptop only to have to send it off for repairs or have to buy a bunch of dongles to get the usability I need out of it.
Fun fact:
I have the MacBook Air 11" Core i7 from 2013 and Apple does not produce that small, light and powerful laptops anymore.
If I want an i7 15 Watt CPU in a 2019 refreshment (it was nearly as fast as MacBook Pro 13" in 2013) it has to be larger and heavier nowadays, haha
Something tells me that they pretty much believe that PRO users should use external keyboard. Which sounds really wrong to me. I don't care if macbookPRO gets thinner. I like it to be lighter for sure but the thickness is not a priority for me over keyboard.
I guess I won't getting this mac either. Anyone at apple who values a thinner laptop over a ergonomic keyboard and longer battery life should be tared and feathered. It's embarrassing that I have to say this out loud.
I just want an ultra-low-profile mechanical switch. Something like a kailh low-profile, but with apple genius applied. I'm sure it's possible, and I would go buy a new mac right now if they did that.
I love my 2015 mbp like the next guy but if this can make the design more reliable and less prone to wear or failures due to liquid spills (if it’s sealed off) then I’d say this is a good thing
At this point, I don't want a thinner MacBook. One with a usable keyboard that doesn't force dongle hell upon me would already be fantastic progress from the status quo.
Lots of free money to be made by a company that can ship a reasonably priced (eg 500-1000 cheaper) mbp clone running Linux. Sounds like something YC should fund.
OK folks, I'm with you that I prefer phat juicy travel on my keyboards and don't mind a thick laptop.
But guess what, that's not the only target audience for laptops. The Macbook Air and recently-deceased Macbook are awesome because they're stylish and fit in a purse. Let that sink in. There are many use-cases for extremely thin devices that still have dedicated keyboards.
“You are not the target audience” is not an universal escape hatch in every Apple discussion. It’s perfectly okay if Apple is targeting users that care more about aesthetics. What’s not okay is that basic functionality is being lost — namely typing reliably and predictably on your keyboard.
They went too far and the rumours that the upcoming 16” MacBook will not have the type of keyboard that has been around ever since 2016 support the theory that they realised that their idea sucked and it’s time for putting more reliable keyboards in their laptops.
I see they've given up on any semblance of ergonomics. Each idea listed in this article seems less ergonomic than the previous. Glass panel. It even sounds painful. Clearly these patents and their resulting products are aimed at laypersons who do casual computing rather than power users. Seems on par with every product they've released in the last four years or so.
I could only find the first edition online sans $$$, but ISO 9241-4 Keyboard Requirements said “The key displacement shall be between 1.5 mm and 6.0 mm. The preferred key displacement should be between 2.0 mm and 6.0 mm.”
The last paragraph in this article is the most concerning. Surely, this would never happen?
"There has also been the suggestion of using glass panel keyboards with force detection for each key, the addition of touch-sensitive keys, and replacing the keyboard section of a MacBook entirely with a touchscreen."
Isn't thinness in a laptop the epitome of diminishing returns at this point? The high end ones are already at a pretty ideal level of thin, anything thinner is overkill and barely adds anything to the product.
If anything, they should be focusing on battery life, 4k webcam, OLED/HDR displays, etc.
It seems that everybody in this thread is equating thin and light, but I don't see why they should be so closely coupled.
After using a Chromebook for a while, my 2013 rMBP feels really heavy. Seems like they could get some of the weight out but keep enough thickness for a decent keyboard and airflow.
Hold on. This patent was filed in May 2016, so presumably this concept was being worked on around the same that the oft-unloved keyboards were being developed/released. I may be missing something, but this sounds like old news and not a signal of current thinking within Apple.
> The most recent attempt in August suggested the use of light in an "Optical Keyboard" to replace switches entirely, with key presses obscuring a light source and triggering a press.
Please no. I like key travel. This would virtually have none. Ok, a fraction.
Here we go again. I thought they were going to bring back scissor switch? I guess this is going to be an endless cycle of Apple fucking up new laptops, deciding to switch back to a sane keyboard, and then suddenly forgetting about the whole deal.
Does anyone have thoughts on the 15-inch versus the 13-inch MacBook Pro these days?
Particularly anybody who has used both for an extended period of time. Is the 13 screen size impractical small? Is it worth the tradeoff in weight for being easier to carry around?
I downsized from a 2016 15” to a 2017 13” a year and regret it. The screen and dual core processor are really insufficient if you’re doing dev work. I recently hopped on a 15” again and was blown away by how much more real estate I had to work with. I don’t think the 1lb difference in weight is worth it at all.
They’re not going to stop, until we are all typing on a flat glass panel with our fingers, just like I’m doing with my thumbs on this iPhone. They already did it with my beloved ESC key...
They should just remove the keyboard entirely. At this point its a public health risk, endangering millions of people's hands and wrists in the name of chic
I'm not a fan of their thin-first addiction, but when in the history of Apple have they asked customers what they want? Steve Jobs:
"Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do."
It doesn't seem like that is the problem with Apple's keyboards. It's Tim Cook not knowing the difference between aesthetics and the qualities that give a product an overall "high end design" feel. You know, like, how it is to actually use it.
The bean counter issue is causing them to leave out the extender part of the power cord and the basically required USB hub with all the ports that "Pros" need.
"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." - Conway's law
I mean that a perfectionist dictator must be in charge of design if a company is to make truly differentiated and tasteful hardware, instead of trending towards the mediocrity pumped out by typical corporations. It's riskier, of course, but that's how you make a $1T company, and it's the only way to overrule the bean counters. It's like making art as an individual instead of handing everyone a paintbrush.
Apple's design is (or was) completely under the control of Jony Ive, due to the leadership of Steve Jobs. He is an opinionated, controlling industrial designer and, although you may not like his designs, he sticks to his principles. It is much easier to lead the way - and screw up - as an individual. You can't please everybody, but you can at least have a cohesive whole. Same kind of thing with Tesla vs every other major car company.
You don't need to get fancy to make a laptop keyboard that tanks an errant glass of beer poured into it. Thinkpads have had this figured out for years. I accidentally put it to the test once and the result was a very sticky but perfectly functional laptop. Took about an hour with a screwdriver set and some rubbing alcohol on q-tips to make it good as new.
I shudder to think what a glass of beer would do to my MBA.
Habituating your user base on the way there is just something MS could never pull off, too, the flip is the start menu never going away until all the baby boomers are gone
I want the left and right arrow keys to be small again, it drives me crazy that I can’t get used to it and always misclick. The empty space above the left and right keys was a great referral point
When is enough just enough? Do the costumers really care about reducing a further 1mm from the thickness of a laptop sacrificing: keyboard usability, battery life and number of ports?
What if they flattened the keyboard completely? Replaced it with smooth glass? It could also be the display. It would be a computer, but the size of a pad of paper.
I understand the thinning of the MacBook Pro from the 2012 model to the 2015 model (which is what I currently own, and in my opinion is the best Mac). But I definitely don't think it needed to get any thinner or lighter than that, especially if it's sacrificing ports or a good keyboard.
IMO the 2015 MacBook Pro is the best Mac out there, mainly because of its beautiful retina display, perfect weight, and most importantly, a good keyboard.