Ignoring that none of the changes was presented as "revolutionary" (the touchbar wasn't mentioned, magsafe was referred to as "Brought back", and the ports were simply noted for convenience), for some small but very loud subset of HN users, an Apple event is all a giant lie if it apparently isn't hosted by some sneering Apple detractor.

It's an Apple product launch. Like every product launch ever in the history of ever, they point out the features of the thing they launch.

They said "function keys, replacing the touchbar." So they did mention it.

But yes, I don't care how they market it. They'd be dumb to pause and say "oh yeah we were stupid, here's your old toys back."

> They'd be dumb to pause and say "oh yeah we were stupid, here's your old toys back."

Maybe I'm weird, but my respect for a company that did that would go way up, not down.

Obviously they wouldn't say "we were stupid", but I'd absolutely appreciate an admission along the lines of, "during our design journey over the past X years, we've realized our customers prefer having a full function key row on their keyboard / more ports / MagSafe / etc., so we've listened and are bringing them back!" To me, that signals a group of folks who know they are fallible, listen to customers, and do their best to meet customer needs.

But of course admitting those sorts of things wouldn't be consistent with Apple's brand. Apple is all about "we know better than you know what you want and can do no wrong". Which is fine, and seems to have created a lot of success for them, but it's always turned me off.

> Maybe I'm weird, but my respect for a company that did that would go way up, not down.

I think technically-minded people would take that well, but the business/management types don't like doing stuff like this, likely because it has a chance of making the stock fall (or even just not rise as much as they wanted it to).

I wonder how much of the mechanical keyboard community increased sheerly because of the fact that many MacBook owners hated their laptop keeps.

> "oh yeah we were stupid, here's your old toys back."

"We heard your feedback and we listened."

> I was laughing when every single one of these changes was presented as "revolutionary" in the keynote.

Exactly none of these changes were presented as "revolutionary", that's just in your head.

I had the feeling they owned it. Like, the woman said something about "no need for adapters" and you could have maybe seen a little smirk on her face while saying that - but I don't know...

they listened to customers and reverted a lot of bad decisions from the past. What else do you want? That they admit they made bad decisions in what is essentially a sales event/pitch? This is more than anyone could have hoped for imo.

The more hilarious thing was the hate for it.

I would much rather have more usb-c ports that can do anything and add dongles, than have ports that are functionally limited.

>> because your previous revolution was universally hated by users.

Nah. It was hated by a small but vocal minority of users, of which HN has a lot of.

You're provably wrong : if it was a minority, they wouldn't have reversed. See headphone jack on iPhone.

"Provably wrong"? On the contrary, if it wasn't a small minority, Apple wouldn't have continued to break sales records with each iteration they release.

I posit that "hate" is too strong a word. I would describe the changes as merely unpopular.

Power users forget that function keys and even command shortcuts are pretty much useless for normal users.

>About 90 per cent of computer users don't use CTRL-F to search for a word - as they don't know such a keyboard shortcut exists, a Google survey found.

The results stunned Google's Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness, Dan Russell.

I think we just all assume that we all know it, but no one actually does."

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/only-one-in-10-know-what-c...

To be fair, the Macbook Pro is aimed squarely at power users. The majority of normal users are better off with the Air.

>Nah. It was hated by a small but vocal minority of users, of which HN has a lot of.

I have not met a pro user that wasn't annoyed by not being able to plug in HDMI at some point without a dongle...

It was even worse. Those macbook owners would cause the others in the meeting to be annoyed when they couldn’t plug in and had to send their slides to someone else with a hdmi port and keep repeating the words “next slide”. It was viral annoyance.

My employer issues a dongle with a type A, type C, and HDMI port on it with every MacBook. That only helps if you actually have the dongle with you. One popular option was to just keep the dongle attached at all times. Personally, I found an adhesive pouch and attached that to the back of the monitor, and carried the dongle around that way.

I wonder when I'll be able to get one of these new Macs at work ...

At my office they just gave up and replaced the HDMI connectors with USB-C connectors in every meeting room. Now it's the people with the older windows laptops who need a dongle.

Nice to meet you. I could not care less. If I need to plug something with a cable, it may have a dongle as well.

I personally think if it was just a vocal minority, Apple would not have relented. They play the long game, so they probably saw a decrease in their user base somewhere, or at least a trend there.

>small

Do you have a source for that? Because if that was the case, it would seem silly for them to undo.

I think he meant "hate" is too strong of a word. My impression is it just didn't serve much of a purpose for most people. I almost never use the function keys for anything but volume control anyway, and probably wouldn't have used the touch bar for anything but that either. It was just a waste. I probably wouldn't have hated it if I got one, maybe even found some nice uses for it, but I still think it was the right choice to get rid of it.