Originally Posted by
kaiser_soze 
I rue the day that I decided to buy Apple stock.
The pros are faster graphics performance and the glass touchpad with integrated click. These are nice features, but they do not come close to compensating for the cons, which Ill get to.
From an investors standpoint, this is simply an unmitigated disaster. MacBooks are not competitive with PC notebooks for the simple reason that they are a lot more expensive. To improve market share, Apple needed to find ways to lower the cost of the MacBooks, not make them more expensive. I shudder to think of the number of CNC machines that will have to be devoted full-time to churning these things out, and the cost to purchase or lease those ultra-expensive machines. It boggles my mind. Instead of finding ways to reduce cost, they instead did something that inordinately increased the manufacturing cost! This does not make a whit of sense! I just cant believe that Jobs allowed this to happen. It is apparent to me that it is not his physical health that people ought to be worried about, but rather his mental health.
The touchpad is no doubt going to be nice, BUT WHAT SENSE DOES IT MAKE TO PUT SO MUCH EMPHASIS ON THE TOUCHPAD AND THEN USE A KEYBOARD AS LOUSY AS THIS? It does not make a whit of sense. Given a decent mouse, I can do without the touchpad altogether. I cannot do with the keyboard, and I need one that at the very least allows me to sense the individual keys with my fingertips. Every time that I have tried to use one of these keyboards that have flat, smooth upper surfaces on the keys, I have found them to be essentially dysfunctional. I cannot type on them, because I cannot sense the individual keys with my fingertips. In all likelihood, the tactile sensation will be reduced to the dull thud that occurs when the key hits bottom, the same as the keyboards that were introduced with the present iMac, which are the one of the worst keyboards ever.
And just as AppleInsider warned, the new 15 MacBook Pro is not available with an anti-glare screen, and this simply sucks. Previously, the significant advantages of the MacBook Pro over the MacBook included the fact that with the Pro, you could get an anti-glare screen and you got a much better keyboard. Those differences are now gone. The new MacBook Pro is now really just a souped up version of the MacBook, and that sucks. The 15 MacBook Pro is gone. It remains to be seen whether they are going to similarly screw up the 17 MacBook Pro, but Im not going to pay as much as they intend to charge for it anyway, so that is moot.
I can order a new Lenovo notebook running Microsofts crappy operating system for about half of what a comparable MacBook costs, with a truly professional keyboard and an anti-glare screen. Or, I can buy a new MacBook with an operating system that is better but still fundamentally flawed, but with a crappy keyboard and a screen that reflects background light. The Apple OS is flawed because the size of system fonts is fully determined by the screen resolution and the screen size. There is no way for the user to vary the scaling for system fonts except by setting the screen resolution to something other than the screens native resolution.
Instead of fixing things that needed fixing and finding ways to lower manufacturing costs, Apple did not fix anything that needed to be fixed and instead did the one thing that they could do to make certain that there would be no way, no how that there computers would be cost competitive with other notebook computers, and to add insult to injury, they diminished the quality of the screen and the quality of the keyboard. I am fuming. If a stockholder vote were taken today on whether Jobs should be fired, I would not hesitate for one second to vote to fire him.
