Mechanical keyboards are great, but you're not going to find one on a mainstream laptop. I think there's one $6000 20" gaming laptop that has an actual mechanical keyboard. And while some people don't like the short keystroke on the new Apple keyboards, personally I find it remarkably comfortable to use. Took about a week to get used to it and now I prefer it.
But I'm not sure I see the point to comparing mechanical keyboards to a laptop keyboard with the touch bar on it.
Hello xraydoc,
I don’t expect mechanical keyboards on laptops.
While I would be happy to have the $6000 laptop for gaming, they are noisy for work. Unfortunately, that’s true for most of the non-gaming laptops too, they are just less vacuum-cleanerish than the gamer counterparts. That’s one of the reasons why I’m "stuck" with Apple.
I love the keyboard on the 2012 MBP. The Apple Magic Keyboard is okay.
I wanted to show "professional" keyboards tend to have few to zero additional buttons and keys. The cheap keyboards have. Yes, there are exceptions, it’s just a trend.
The mechanical built often comes with pro standalone keyboards. It’s not what I wanted to point out.
There is a phenomenon I call Christmas tree effect. The name comes from the PC laptops. The manufacturer says: "Okay, it’s ugly, it’s huge, it’s heavy. What should we do? Let’s put leds on it! The more the better!"
You’ll see the same trend on audio hardware.
There is a market for that.
I don’t know how it is in the U.S., but in Europe, when you buy banana,
every single piece has a sticker on it.
Which means, if the bunch (cluster) of the banana you buy is really huge, you might get almost the same amount of stickers as you would get by purchasing a single PC laptop.
I tell you why. When there was no sticker there, people didn’t know it was Intel Inside. Every single customer thought there was a squirrel running in a small wheel inside the computer. Most of the time this wasn’t a problem. The Greenpeace was annoyed at every Christmas as people were calling them non-stop, asking them for help release the poor animals, but who cares.
Horrible things happened though when people tried to give water to the poor thirsty squirrels inside the machine before the Greenpeace stuff arrived.
That’s why it has to be put on almost every the PC laptops ever sold on Earth: "Intel Inside". It saves millions of lives each day.
I don’t know about the rest of the 6-8 stickers put on an average computer. All I know it takes a half day to remove them and to properly clean the laptop.
(Note: properly)
You can see the same phenomenon if you compare an iPad to another tablet. The latter will have more buttons. It will be slower, it will have worse display, and there will be more buttons.
Android, since version 1.0, is full of everything you won’t ever need. And they are everywhere just to make it sure there is not a single part of the whole interface that’s not chaotic.
I remember when Chrome was getting popular, Google thought the time of the Christmas tree macOS had been arrived so they put an icon to the status menu (top right) which even displayed alerts at times. There were many threads about how to remove it using the advanced config editor in Chrome, but the method changed from version to version. At the end, it was not possible to remove it. (I’m not kidding)
Google finally understood they were about 2-3 years too early. They finally didn’t force it to be there.
Still, my status menu on macOS is 70% wider than it used to be, and the only icon I "put" there is the Creative Cloud. I mean, I didn’t put it there but didn’t try to remove.
The CC icon almost never disturbs me (it almost never does anything) and it looks natural there. Still, the menu is definiately larger, and the color of the Siri icon doesn’t fit at all, it’s getting more chaotic somehow.
The Chrome icon was the summary of every kind of disaster a notification icon can cause, presented in a single element. I never though a single icon can show almost everything me and people who want to work hate about Android and Windows.
(I like Google. I do business with Google and I’m pleased with them in many regards. I’m only talking about the Christmas tree effect and the icon they finally removed, not the company itself. They make things are really cool.)
I don’t consider myself an Apple fan, haven’t read any book about Steve Jobs’ life, yet I know he was famous for *removing features* until the product had become perfect.
*Removing features to make it perfect.*
Led lights won’t make computers better, stickers won’t make laptops better, annoying icons in status menu won’t make software better, and additional keys and lights won’t make keyboards better.
With a few exceptations, they make them worse.
Every distraction costs time, effort, energy, and at the end, money. Such things are usually used to sell cheap or flawed products. Apple used to be on the opposite side.
By the way, I figured out I’m not an alien (in this regard). There are tickets in software trackers in which people telling they get crazy by (and they will stop using) software thanks to their focus stealing alert popups.
My impression is Apple is moving into the Chrismas tree direction. I’m confused because the Macbook Pro is still superior to the other laptops in most of the things that matter for me (and for many), but I’m not sure about my next desktop computer. Especially since macOS is showing the same signs.
I’m getting popups into my face telling me my AFP share disconnected when I’m trying to work. I can’t turn them off.
Well, I can. It will be drastic though.
I believe these all are the same thing.
A company can try to disturb me in my work, can try forcing me buy things that are invented for a different market, but sooner or later I will have enough.
If their products are still better than the competitors’, which is true in this case, I’ll complain for a while. But at the end I’ll get angry and I’ll switch.
It would be pathetic to provide link to show I’m not alone.
For me, the Surface is not an option. Getting a Macbook and high-end PC desktop with silent cooling for 2017 might be one.
Maybe the ol' Russian roulette version of rm -rf?
