Yeah, why would you make a laptop thin and light? A mobile computer needs to be thick and heavy, right! 🤔
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Jony Ive’s vision was killed today
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Or, make a Prosumer laptop reasonably thin and light, but without compromising on functionality, and reliability, all while keeping prices competitive.
Basically, don’t do what Apple did with the 2016 MBP.
The thinness didn't compromise reliability, the butterfly mechanism did. And the 2016 MBP 13" started at $1,499 − while the 2021 MBP is $1,999. So who jinxed the prices? And is any of that even the responsibility of a designer. 🤷
There's "thin and light", and there's "too thin to function as intended". The butterfly keyboard era was a prime example of that. And IIRC, the justification for the butterfly keyboard was to shave less than 1/16 of an inch off the thickness of the laptop. You also create a false dichotomy in your post, but walking contradictions like that are a staple of your posting history.
Again, you're providing misleading (and irrelevant) information here. The 2016 13" MBP started at $1499, the current 13" Pro starts at $1299. So what prices were jinxed? The point was that the butterfly keyboard was adopted specifically to make the MBP just a little thinner, the effect was keyboardgate.
And why do you think 1.5 mm less thickness are insignificant for the overall weight of the machine? Or will you finally admit that making a mobile computer "thin and light" is a worthy design goal.
Nope, your just to stubborn to admit that thickness and weight are directly related. Arguing against thinness is arguing for heavier devices!
It needs to be functional above all else first.... Ives drive to thinness damaged functionality at a certain point. As tech improves things *can* get thinner (see: M2 MacBook Air is actually thinner than the Intel rMBA/M1 MBA for ex) without damaging functionality, but the functionality has to be there or the device is just a showpiece. Ives forgot about that last part.
For what it's worth the battery and the screen probably weigh more than the chassis itself, or at least it's close. Would love to see some statistics on this, but the aluminum frame doesn't necessarily = heavy. Take a completely emptied out aluminum frame from an old MBP and see how much it weighs.
Not to mention that we're talking about pro machines, a market that does not care about thin and light. If it's possible it's a good thing. but it should never come at the cost of existing functionality or performance.
Dust and debris created keyboardgate, because of improper sealing. The scissor switch keyboards can get stuck all the same, it just needs a little more dirt.
If you look for a design flaw, don’t look further than glued in batteries, which block access to the keyboard and trackpad and make repairs impossible without a complete top cover swap.
But you don’t blame neither this decision nor the butterfly mechanism, you blame the very idea of a thin and light laptop. As if thinness and reliability are directly contradictory. So who’s creating a false dichotomy here, you or me?
It does not negate the fact that the butterfly keyboard was only implemented for the purpose of thinness. They tried, they failed. Maybe they try again and succeed, but the point stands.
And what makes you think, Apple isn’t constantly working on smaller displays and smaller batteries as well? In a lighter laptop everything is tighter integrated. This was not the first time Apple switched to smaller keyboard design and it’s the job of engineers and quality control to ensure the reliability of a new design.
The unibody frame was famously developed to enable thinner and lighter yet sturdy builds. And Steve Jobs was endlessly proud of it.
LOL, of course it does. 😂
And if they had known in advance that reliability would suffer this much, they wouldn’t have built it that way. But being innovative means learning by mistakes. Only the follower, who merely copies proven designs of others, never makes mistakes. The Pros are on the Apple platform, because of its innovations.
Half of your post is in agreement with me, so I'll only address the stuff that isn't. Obviously tech is always being miniaturized, but my point is that they can focus on that instead of making the chassis needlessly thin. Focus on the internals instead. I never "think" that they can't make display panels and batteries smaller, only a fool would think these things are fixed. Who has ever said such nonsense?
Does the pro market care about thin and light? Yes, to an extent. Do they care about it more than performance, ports, thermal performance, battery life, speaker quality, and keyboard quality? No. I dare you to find me a true professional user who thinks otherwise. Pro is a case of "you keep using that word, I don't think you know what it means"
And thinness is a worthwhile design target, because it enables lightness. A lighter portable device is a better portable device.
I don’t know how else to put it for you to understand. For ugly heavy laptops go to Windows! Apple doesn’t want you as a customer. Since the Apple ][ design is in the DNA of Apple Computer Inc..
Sure... The company I've given $50,000+ to, and whom agrees with me now that they made mistakes with regards to form over function, does not want me as a customer. Believe it or not, you are the one arguing against Apple's moves of late. Simply laughable.
And you’re wrong for thinking, laptops and desktops don’t need to be much-much thinner and lighter, more energy efficient and tighter integrated still. Every time Apple presents a new design, somebody complains that it didn’t need to be thinner and that Apple sacrificed functionality for aesthetics. And yet people love their 11 mm thin iMacs much more than the old ones. I’d rather have this than a thicker one with USB-A ports.
I'm definitely a professional, I work on a macbook pro, my work issued M1P 16" MBP is a bit thicker and heavier than my older 2016 intel machine I had before. It also runs *vastly* cooler (something the Intel machine could have too with a more robust cooling system, and that was even more true of the space heater 2019s) and as a result doesnt sound like a jet engine taking off under load or scorch my lap when I do have to work on the go. It's blazingly fast while managing that. Oh, and the keyboard is about a million times more comfortable than the old machine and way more reliable too. And the battery life is better.
I'll take that over a bit thinner and lighter any day for work. It's not like the thing is an uber heavy brick, it's still thin and light, just not as much as before. It's a professional machine, it's designed to handle professional workloads without heat or battery issues. And Apple has an answer to people who want a bit less performance in exchange for thinner and lighter: the 15" MacBook Air (which I'll likely pick up for personal use next year).
also what @retta283 said
You’ve paid that money to a company which ALWAYS valued design and compromised functionality many times in the past. If you’re not aware of that, that’s your misconception. And yes, Apple reversed a lot of its design decision lately and reverted to the old design as quick fix.
But where they do offer bold new designs (like with the iMacs), they present classic Apple design philosophy. Cut all old legacy port, shut down upgradeability and repairability, offer beautiful colors, reduce energy consumption, value thin, light and silent above all else etc.
Once Apple stops playing it save with MacBooks and designs a truly new form factor, you will see a much thinner and lighter laptop with fewer ports and a smaller battery.
Well said. Those later Intel MBPs really did run hot and loud, I had a 16" MBP that I simply couldn't stand for that reason. The noise wasn't even the biggest problem, but my hands and lap suffered big time. After a while I'd set it on a large book or anything I could find just for a buffer. Compared to the M-series chips that run cool enough.
I'm not sure what you mean. The new MacBooks are some of the most beautiful laptops Apple has ever created. Jony Ive was stuck in his ways and although he came up with some "golden era" designs, I felt that toward the end, he was holding Apple back. The only thing I can't stand is the screen notch. The only way I'll be able to tolerate the notch is if it ends up being a placeholder for Face ID. Whoever they have in charge of designs right now is doing a [mostly] fantastic job.
They didnt revert to an old design, my dude, they went with a slightly thicker new design for MBPs. There is a difference.
And as I recall most of the times they went with form *over* function they usually got spanked by their market. The G4 cube and 2013 Mac Pro come to mind as gorgeous, fun to use, machines that were a mistake functionally that got rejected by the target markets (note, I have one of both, they're cool, but when new were terrible value and terrible futures in thermal design among other problems. They were compromised by their designs and ended up as commercial failures).
OK, but an iMac runs the same chip as a laptop but with a much larger surface area to dissipate heat, no need for a battery, no need to integrate keyboard and mouse, and a much bigger overall power budget for cooling. So sure, you can make it that thin without compromising function. I'm not sure why you dont understand that no one on this thread hates thin, light machines, just when that goal compromises the ability to *use* the machine.
They literally just introduced a new form factor for the airs with the M2... And it is thinner and lighter. Are you living in 2020 still or something?
And the efficient M-series chips were developed with the intend to make thin and light designs work. Steve Jobs stated his strong belief, that the designer should envision a tool/workflow and the engineers were responsible to develop the technology to make it happen. He was death against adapting the design to the technology. Start with the user experience and work your way back to the design.
And to experience a laptop that is thin and light, cool and quite, and just works, was always more important than raw performance, winning benchmark, backwards compatibility, ergonomics and affordable prices.
If you think otherwise, you don’t think different enough.
MagSafe instead of USB-C power delivery, scissor switches instead butterfly keys, inverted T arrow keys instead of same height, a row of function keys instead of TouchBar.
You can’t deny that the "new" MacBook design is a giant rollback. The only new "innovation" is the useless notch, which they will scrap with the next revision.
The M* series chips were designed to vertically integrate Apple's chips, stop reliance on third party vendor schedules, and get better performance/watt. You can do two things with better performance/watt at the extremes: same performance or lower with lower TDP or much higher performance at the same TDP. Apple for the most part has split the difference.
You *can* make things thinner and lighter with lower TDPs, but that doesnt necessarily follow that was the primary goal, or even a goal at all, in the development of AS for Macs in general. And given the first couple sets now of MBPs they released *didnt* do that tells me it wasnt the driving force. They've gone for a bit bigger and heavier, but much better performance and cooling over thinner and lighter for the MBPs.
If anything what you really can say is that AS enabled them to target their chips to both types of use cases without relying on an external vendor. The Airs, Minis, and iMacs for tiny and decently powerful, the MBPs, Studios, and MP for heavier workloads (literally). Have you looked at how much of the studio is cooling? It's basically a giant heatsink.
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Those are components, not design.
MagSafe was going to come back anyway at some point in some form, they'd been putting magnetic charging on nearly everything else in one way or another (you can even think about how the iPad docks to the magic keyboard and logitech cases as magsafe, it even uses pogo pins like macbook magsafe connectors). And it's not *instead* of anything, it's an *addition*.
Charging via USBC works just fine. I hardly ever use magsafe, I don't even know where the cable that came with my MBP is. when it's docked at my desk it gets power from the thunderbolt dock, via the USBC ports, when mobile it uses the same USBC cables I carry for my ipad, kindle, etc.
The function row back is a backlash to the reaction to the touchbar, which most people (myself included) found more gimicky and annoying then useful, and given a function row is basically a hallmark of basically any keyboard for the past 40 years or more I don't really see that as reusing a design. It's not the same keyboard that was on the pre-2016 machines you know, it's a new design, it just also happens to have a function row. Same with the inverted T.
As far as the notch goes, have you actually used an M*machine with one or are you just bloviating based on not liking pictures of it? It takes up what was dead space in the UI anyway and allows the menubar to move up, giving you more space than a same size screen that had that bezel all the way across. It's great.
The space is needed for the camera to, ironically given your posts, keep the screen thin (think about how much thicker an iphone's camera module is than the screen of a macbook pro). It's a good compromise that gives more space while keeping things svelte.
So what's funny about you mentioning the notch is that it's *exactly* the kind of making things thin without reducing function that Apple is usually good at.
If you don't care how thick and heavy, hot and loud your laptop is, then you don't care about performance per watt. You only care about raw performance! Per watt enables all the convenience factors, thin and light, cool and quiet, all-day battery life™. You want it, so that you can shrink the battery, omit the fan, build a thinner and lighter laptop, which makes no noise whatsoever. And of course it's not the fastest laptop ever built, only the fastest in its size and weight class. It's always about thin and light.