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.
But is it just programmers that don't care about the thinness of their keyboards and want something functional and high performing?
It perplexes me why non-programmer consumers wouldn't want the same. Who is Apple aiming at?