An obnoxious maneuver, born of undiluted hubris and a mercenary neglect of the graphics and media professionals who no longer rank high enough on Apple's sales charts to influence the products. This has been brewing for years, with the most obvious affront being a Mac Pro that hasn't seen an update since its launch in 2013. Building a rich kids' toy like the MacBook Pro - decent power under the hood but clearly designed to give the middle finger to people in complex graphics environments - is offensive but hardly surprising.
Most professionals are at a difficult crossroads. Apple still has the superior OS to Windows 10 and unless Microsoft does something unheard of in its own history, this won't change. But limping along with jury rigged hardware that is clearly designed for web browsing, but that costs in most cases 2x what Windows laptops cost is not sustainable either.
There's a vacuum developing in the pro market and it will be interesting to see who fills in over the next couple years.
Great move, Apple. Now, let's do it also for RAM and SSD (not charging 2 to 3 times more than the very same make/model from manufacturer or retailers like Amazon).
Awesome move by Apple. This SHOULD shut up most of the complaints, but of course it won't.
It's not like Apple is selling $500 laptops. There's two ways to look at this:
The first is that if someone is buying a laptop that starts at $2400, they should't be complaining about having to buy some adapters, even if they're overpriced and that if you're a pro, technology advances and the investment is the price of doing business.
The other way to look at it is that if someone is spending between $2400 and $4300 (for the MBP with all options except for application software and AppleCare), Apple shouldn't have cheaped out and they should have provided 2 to 4 adapters in the box of the customer's choosing. The price of four adapters/cables is as much as a cheap PC.
And then my cost of ownership goes up because I can't replace the battery, expand memory or replace the SSD myself. Or, if I Iive with a 256GB SSD, I've got to get a ton of external storage for pro-level photos and video and live with the hassle of not having every file with me when I'm out of the home/office.
This is another example of Apple labeling something "pro" and then not understanding the workflow of their pro customers. They did that with FinalCutPro and they did it when they moved away from the tower configuration of the MacPro.
Every time Apple switches ports, they tell the market how their new choices are the greatest and how they want both manufacturers and consumers to commit to that port. Then after a few years, they change their minds and they move on to something else. Did they really need to drop Mag-safe? What about all the people who bought extra power supplies to keep at home/office, etc.? HDMI is ubiquitous on TVs and receivers and the cables have become inexpensive, but now I've got to buy an adapter that costs ten times what the cable cost?
What was Apple's rationale for going solely to USB-C? Was it because they truly think this port is the future and that the accessory market will fully move to that port and that it provides technological advantages? Or was it really because of Ive's anal-obsessiveness over thinness and not wanting to look at different sized/shaped ports on the side of the machine? What drives me crazy is that Apple wants the machine to have this superior industrial design so that it looks great in photos and in ads, but they have no problem with users having to stick a bunch of dongles and adapters on the thing. It's the same with the iPhone and the obsession with thinness, but then we have to put it in a case because it can't survive a fall. So few are really seeing and feeling the thinness anyway. Sometimes I think people at Apple don't actually use the products they produce in the real world.
So, IMO, criticism is warranted. If Apple wants my money, they're going to have to do a bit better. I hate using PCs at work, but I'm not spending $4K to $5K on my next computer and I don't want to feel like I have less than what I have today. So as much as I hate Windows, my next laptop might actually be a Windows machine. And I've been an Apple customer for 35 years.
I fully agree with this assessment. Ive needs some kind of therapy. This obsession with thinness and lightness has led to too many compromises. Prices went up with retina Macs and up again with these models. They are now literally out of the reach of many and severely compromised by being non-upgradeable and ultra expensive to repair. Currency fluctuations have just worsened an already bad situation. And let's not forget the foolish who never backup. If one of these models goes belly up it will be a lot of hassle getting the data out of the machine.
The iPhone 6 and 7 have got to be the most slippery phones I've ever held. That's bad design. it doesn't matter how good it looks on the ads. If you absolutely need a case just to be able to hold the phone safely, something is wrong. I've never understood the hideous white dongles either. Completely overstated and so tacky. Good for an iBook but nothing else.
I haven't had a chance to use the new keyboard but I think I won't like it. Was it necessary? Nope, but we got it because someone just had to shave off a couple of mm from somewhere.
The future? I already see it. One slab of glass sitting over the body of the laptop. No physical keys of any kind. Just a touchscreen with force touch and 'virtual' trackpad included.
It's not going to make a difference. At this point, Cook, you have exposed Apple to the worst type of criticism... high prices, noncompetitive value. High margins are only good for the stock holders. When Jobs was in charge he was price/value sensitive.
I'll give you serious responses when you have 100+ posts!
The good news is, this shows Apple is aware of the criticism. The question remains whether consumers will hold tough and avoid buying the new pro to send a clear message that this doesn't cut it. It isn't what pro users want or need.
Awesome move by Apple. This SHOULD shut up most of the complaints, but of course it won't.
It's not like Apple is selling $500 laptops. There's two ways to look at this:
Apple has lost it's way regarding usability - criticism is warranted.
Ive may or may not be a good industrial designer but he clearly doesn't know much about the main concepts of usability - the "look, feel & flow" of a hardware/software product. We get the "look": but the "feel & flow"? - any sense of how it actually feels to use the product effectively day by day is missing from the designs. As zoetmb notes, Apple doesn't appear to use the devices they produce any more. We certainly don't see any pix of MBPs with cascades of dongles cluttering the user's desk.
This whole thing is unbelievably pedantic on Apple's part. Virtually none of the press release is even true. "We realize.." No, you don't.
"legacy connectors" - No, professional, necessary connectors.
"a transition" - No, Apple, you will make the transition, not others.
It is astounding that a "computer" cannot interface with USB or with a disc anymore. I am getting old! These are not real computers. They should cost $300 maximum.
I have superior equipment that is older (much of it Apple). With things like replaceable hard drives, replaceable batteries and upgradeable RAM. I am amazed that new equipment you buy today is inferior to what I have. My MBP has Firewire, several USB ports, optical out (which I use)... etc. And 1TB storage. And it was cheap! Rawr I am old, time for my nap.
It's not going to make a difference. At this point, Cook, you have exposed Apple to the worst type of criticism... high prices, noncompetitive value. High margins are only good for the stock holders. When Jobs was in charge he was price/value sensitive.
High margins are not always good for stockholders. High profits are good. High margins only work if the additional profit makes up for the lost sales. Apple has always pushed the envelope on price. Jobs too. I still think the price of the MBP is too high. I think this move is nice. Won't affect my purchasing decision but it's not all about me.
I agree. It's not just the price for adding dongles but the excessive cost of the new MacBook Pros. The limited size of the internal flash drives makes no sense. The base MacBook Pro should come with at least a 500 gig flash drive and a more reasonable price for the 1 terabyte drive upgrade. I don't want to move my Documents folder and Desktop to the iCloud Drive to save a few gigs on the internal drive. I can't afford to risk my most important files to the cloud without a backup.
Maybe I don't fully grasp the backup options for the iDrive cloud. But I don't think backup programs like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner will back up cloud-based files. CrashPlan will not. Not sure about Time Machine.
Even if Time Machine does perform an iDrive Cloud backup, it's still too buggy to for business users in my opinion.
If the MacBook Pro came with an easily upgradable and non-propriety internal drive upgrade option, then I might not be so resistant to the high price.
I guess most complaints are from those who were not around during other "big" changes...
SCSI, ADB, Serial, etc, etc...
If you can't handle the continual changes that happen in the tech market change to gardening.
This just shows how Apple continues to suffer under Tim Cook! Steve would never have done this /s
Really? Why did Jobs abandon ADB ports in favor of USB, abandoned floppy disks and optical drives, and intergrated new technology like Thunderbolt and Firewire?
damn, didn't see that sarcasm.
Awesome move by Apple. This SHOULD shut up most of the complaints, but of course it won't.
It's not like Apple is selling $500 laptops. There's two ways to look at this:
The first is that if someone is buying a laptop that starts at $2400, they should't be complaining about having to buy some adapters, even if they're overpriced and that if you're a pro, technology advances and the investment is the price of doing business.
The other way to look at it is that if someone is spending between $2400 and $4300 (for the MBP with all options except for application software and AppleCare), Apple shouldn't have cheaped out and they should have provided 2 to 4 adapters in the box of the customer's choosing. The price of four adapters/cables is as much as a cheap PC.
And then my cost of ownership goes up because I can't replace the battery, expand memory or replace the SSD myself. Or, if I Iive with a 256GB SSD, I've got to get a ton of external storage for pro-level photos and video and live with the hassle of not having every file with me when I'm out of the home/office.
This is another example of Apple labeling something "pro" and then not understanding the workflow of their pro customers. They did that with FinalCutPro and they did it when they moved away from the tower configuration of the MacPro.
Every time Apple switches ports, they tell the market how their new choices are the greatest and how they want both manufacturers and consumers to commit to that port. Then after a few years, they change their minds and they move on to something else. Did they really need to drop Mag-safe? What about all the people who bought extra power supplies to keep at home/office, etc.? HDMI is ubiquitous on TVs and receivers and the cables have become inexpensive, but now I've got to buy an adapter that costs ten times what the cable cost?
What was Apple's rationale for going solely to USB-C? Was it because they truly think this port is the future and that the accessory market will fully move to that port and that it provides technological advantages? Or was it really because of Ive's anal-obsessiveness over thinness and not wanting to look at different sized/shaped ports on the side of the machine? What drives me crazy is that Apple wants the machine to have this superior industrial design so that it looks great in photos and in ads, but they have no problem with users having to stick a bunch of dongles and adapters on the thing. It's the same with the iPhone and the obsession with thinness, but then we have to put it in a case because it can't survive a fall. So few are really seeing and feeling the thinness anyway. Sometimes I think people at Apple don't actually use the products they produce in the real world.
So, IMO, criticism is warranted. If Apple wants my money, they're going to have to do a bit better. I hate using PCs at work, but I'm not spending $4K to $5K on my next computer and I don't want to feel like I have less than what I have today. So as much as I hate Windows, my next laptop might actually be a Windows machine. And I've been an Apple customer for 35 years.
Actually I think it's you and other dongle-phobes who are the anal-obsessives.
There is so much pure, sculpted techno eroticism in the new form factor that you'd have to be a puritanical ass-wipe to give a second's thought to how it looks with an adapter or two plugged into it.
I can't believe the pettiness of you people. The new MBP is the culmination of five years of foresighted development, if you include —as you must — the investments they were jumping on in IGZO development going that far back to Japan, no less, where the tech was developed.
Same with the keyboard. If Swiss watchmakers made keyboard switches, they would maybe be like this. Probably another five years in the making. And the aluminum machining — try to find a wonky tenth of a millimeter of misfit. How long have they been developing that? And the asymmetric fans, and so on.
Go get yourself a Windows machine. You may not deserve to handle one of these unless you come around. Meanwhile, millions are going to get limitless pleasure out of picking theirs up to pack it at the end of the day as they gladly take care to pack its adapters in the case with it.
Edit: you know why there's no USB A? It's too big, that's why. It's as obsolete as the headphone jack is on the iPhone. If you want them to make the base thicker just to accommodate that port, you're disqualified as an Apple observer.
Wow. Keep snorting that stuff Flaneur - and one day you might be calm enough to discuss things in a civilized manner.
It is valid for someone to propose the view that Apple is putting form before function and throwing away usable connections for the sake of "thinness".
It's just a discussion. Join in some time when you come down - you might learn something. ;-)
This whole thing is unbelievably pedantic on Apple's part. Virtually none of the press release is even true. "We realize.." No, you don't.
"legacy connectors" - No, professional, necessary connectors.
"a transition" - No, Apple, you will make the transition, not others.
It is astounding that a "computer" cannot interface with USB or with a disc anymore. I am getting old! These are not real computers. They should cost $300 maximum.
I have superior equipment that is older (much of it Apple). With things like replaceable hard drives, replaceable batteries and upgradeable RAM. I am amazed that new equipment you buy today is inferior to what I have. My MBP has Firewire, several USB ports, optical out (which I use)... etc. And 1TB storage. And it was cheap! Rawr I am old, time for my nap.
nonsense. apple skates to where the puck is going, and all the other fatasses go to where it was and complain about having to skate at all.
i guarantee this new MBP will smoke your old crap in every meaningful performance test any day of the week. your big ass removable batteries, hard drives and ram do me absolutely NO good for completing my work. i max my machines out from Day 1 and start generating value. when they get too slow i replace them. (usually by reselling!). that's it. i've never upgraded a notebook hard drive, that's absurd. if the battery fails i drop it off with service.
these are tools, not hobby machines for tinkerers. get a raspberry pi for that.
You seem to have more money than sense. If you max out one of these machines the vast majority of pro users would have to re-mortgage their house. How many pro users do you think can apply your tactics? And what's the point of maxing out SSD - at Apple's prices- at time of purchase if you're not going to fill it immediately? I say immediately because Apple is shipping MacBook Pros with 128GB of non upgradeable SSD. They seem to think you can get by on that just fine. Why not wait a couple of years and upgrade to better, bigger, cheaper SSD? Whoops! You can't.
Why should you have to send in your mac just to change a battery? All MBPs spend 100% of their time sat on their backsides. Nobody ever looks there. Use some small screws and let me take the bottom plate off. Make the battery user replaceable! get rid of the glue! Apple has gone too far on thinness.
"your big ass removable batteries, hard drives and ram do me absolutely NO good for completing my work"
That sentence means nothing. Are you saying that having everything sealed in DOES do you good for completing your work? Surely both scenarios are exactly the same. They would have the same benefit on your work. That said, having user upgradeable RAM, SSD and batteries does offer some advantages.
nonsense. apple skates to where the puck is going, and all the other fatasses go to where it was and complain about having to skate at all.
i guarantee this new MBP will smoke your old crap in every meaningful performance test any day of the week. your big ass removable batteries, hard drives and ram do me absolutely NO good for completing my work. i max my machines out from Day 1 and start generating value. when they get too slow i replace them. (usually by reselling!). that's it. i've never upgraded a notebook hard drive, that's absurd. if the battery fails i drop it off with service.
these are tools, not hobby machines for tinkerers. get a raspberry pi for that.
It's not much, but here is my point for you. A 2GB RAM / 250GB machine would suck even more. And with today's Apple, an under-specced brick is what you will soon have., unless you want to get raped by buying a heavily-specced machine from Apple. I understand they want $3k per computer but for me, that is excessive. With non replaceable battery no less. Hahahaha.
My work machines are extremely unglamorous too, because I use them for work, not to glorify my boyhood.
if you truly used them for work and generating value (as i do every day) then i find it odd that you give so much concern to removable batteries -- because they get years of use before requiring a service.
and claiming these machines are under-spec'd? yeah, right. sorry but only trolls play the apple-spec game. you've revealed yourself.
I guess most complaints are from those who were not around during other "big" changes...
SCSI, ADB, Serial, etc, etc...
If you can't handle the continual changes that happen in the tech market change to gardening.
This whole thing is unbelievably pedantic on Apple's part. Virtually none of the press release is even true. "We realize.." No, you don't.
"legacy connectors" - No, professional, necessary connectors.
"a transition" - No, Apple, you will make the transition, not others.
It is astounding that a "computer" cannot interface with USB or with a disc anymore. I am getting old! These are not real computers. They should cost $300 maximum.
I have superior equipment that is older (much of it Apple). With things like replaceable hard drives, replaceable batteries and upgradeable RAM. I am amazed that new equipment you buy today is inferior to what I have. My MBP has Firewire, several USB ports, optical out (which I use)... etc. And 1TB storage. And it was cheap! Rawr I am old, time for my nap.
nonsense. apple skates to where the puck is going, and all the other fatasses go to where it was and complain about having to skate at all.
i guarantee this new MBP will smoke your old crap in every meaningful performance test any day of the week. your big ass removable batteries, hard drives and ram do me absolutely NO good for completing my work. i max my machines out from Day 1 and start generating value. when they get too slow i replace them. (usually by reselling!). that's it. i've never upgraded a notebook hard drive, that's absurd. if the battery fails i drop it off with service.
these are tools, not hobby machines for tinkerers. get a raspberry pi for that.
You seem to have more money than sense. If you max out one of these machines the vast majority of pro users would have to re-mortgage their house. How many pro users do you think can apply your tactics? And what's the point of maxing out SSD - at Apple's prices- at time of purchase if you're not going to fill it immediately? I say immediately because Apple is shipping MacBook Pros with 128GB of non upgradeable SSD. They seem to think you can get by on that just fine. Why not wait a couple of years and upgrade to better, bigger, cheaper SSD? Whoops! You can't.
Why should you have to send in your mac just to change a battery? All MBPs spend 100% of their time sat on their backsides. Nobody ever looks there. Use some small screws and let me take the bottom plate off. Make the battery user replaceable! get rid of the glue! Apple has gone too far on thinness.
"your big ass removable batteries, hard drives and ram do me absolutely NO good for completing my work"
That sentence means nothing. Are you saying that having everything sealed in DOES do you good for completing your work? Surely both scenarios are exactly the same. They would have the same benefit on your work. That said, having user upgradeable RAM, SSD and batteries does offer some advantages.
i always max out RAM and dont give a second thought about it, yes. my macs earn me my living -- I'm not in the business of cracking them open to futz and tinker with upgrades. the closer it is to an appliance computer the better it is. when your battery is getting low you'll be aware of it -- you can either drop it off for a few days (making due w/ the desktop) or consider an upgrade.
this is what pros do. and what every pro shop I've worked in or for do as well -- they dont personally upgrade their gear; they have fixed lifespans and upgrade cycles. these are tools, no tinker toys.
Good move but the fact Apple felt the need to do it suggests there's some pretty fierce backlash with these new Macs. Perhaps more backlash than Apple was expecting,
I think that's right -- in fact I don't see how there could be any other interpretation.
I'd go even a bit further (though this isn't as obviously right, I think it's still probably right) and guess that while online orders might have "broken records", they may have fallen short of Apple's internal projections. Given the pent up demand for an update, breaking the record in and of itself isn't that big of a deal. What matter is the margin of the record breaking. Apple might have looked at that and thought "oops."
Right, there can be no other interpretation because the iPhone wasn't selling in 2007 when Jobs did essentially the same thing by offering $100 credit to previous buyers after reducing the iPhone by $200.
I'm not sure what your point is.
The point is that Apple does this because it responds to customer concerns. Not because sales "have fallen short of Apple's internal projections".
Seriously dude? Do you not think there is a breaking point at which a market segment says enough? I don't know a single pro in the world that cares about 'thin'. They want more battery life and better gpu/cpu's, functionality and convenience. FFS man, you can line the entire inside of the new spaceship campus with Apple dongles and cables.
It's like Cook is Christopher Walken in the cowbell sketch... "I have a fever - and the only cure is more dongles..."
The iMac is a desktop machine. People look at it from the front - not from the side - but Ive couldn't resist compromising the entire system to make it 'the thinnest iMac ever. No room for conventional large capacity cheap disks, only room for lame graphics cards etc
But it looks beautiful! Yes Jony but what's on the inside is more important and every time I look I get depressed.
I'm sorry but I don't think it looks good that Apple is having to drop prices only a week or so after their event. I have no doubt that these MacBook Pros are the best ever but they blew it on messaging and pricing. I doubt Apple will reduce pricing on the new laptops but I'll bet they let 3rd parties discount heavily this holiday season.
EDIT: Gruber chimes in saying he thinks Apple dropped the prices on adapters to counter the narrative that they went all USB-C as a money grab. But then why didn't they announce price cuts the day of the event, if not on stage at least online and in stores.
Awesome move by Apple. This SHOULD shut up most of the complaints, but of course it won't.
It's not like Apple is selling $500 laptops. There's two ways to look at this:
The first is that if someone is buying a laptop that starts at $2400, they should't be complaining about having to buy some adapters, even if they're overpriced and that if you're a pro, technology advances and the investment is the price of doing business.
The other way to look at it is that if someone is spending between $2400 and $4300 (for the MBP with all options except for application software and AppleCare), Apple shouldn't have cheaped out and they should have provided 2 to 4 adapters in the box of the customer's choosing. The price of four adapters/cables is as much as a cheap PC.
And then my cost of ownership goes up because I can't replace the battery, expand memory or replace the SSD myself. Or, if I Iive with a 256GB SSD, I've got to get a ton of external storage for pro-level photos and video and live with the hassle of not having every file with me when I'm out of the home/office.
This is another example of Apple labeling something "pro" and then not understanding the workflow of their pro customers. They did that with FinalCutPro and they did it when they moved away from the tower configuration of the MacPro.
Every time Apple switches ports, they tell the market how their new choices are the greatest and how they want both manufacturers and consumers to commit to that port. Then after a few years, they change their minds and they move on to something else. Did they really need to drop Mag-safe? What about all the people who bought extra power supplies to keep at home/office, etc.? HDMI is ubiquitous on TVs and receivers and the cables have become inexpensive, but now I've got to buy an adapter that costs ten times what the cable cost?
What was Apple's rationale for going solely to USB-C? Was it because they truly think this port is the future and that the accessory market will fully move to that port and that it provides technological advantages? Or was it really because of Ive's anal-obsessiveness over thinness and not wanting to look at different sized/shaped ports on the side of the machine? What drives me crazy is that Apple wants the machine to have this superior industrial design so that it looks great in photos and in ads, but they have no problem with users having to stick a bunch of dongles and adapters on the thing. It's the same with the iPhone and the obsession with thinness, but then we have to put it in a case because it can't survive a fall. So few are really seeing and feeling the thinness anyway. Sometimes I think people at Apple don't actually use the products they produce in the real world.
So, IMO, criticism is warranted. If Apple wants my money, they're going to have to do a bit better. I hate using PCs at work, but I'm not spending $4K to $5K on my next computer and I don't want to feel like I have less than what I have today. So as much as I hate Windows, my next laptop might actually be a Windows machine. And I've been an Apple customer for 35 years.
Actually I think it's you and other dongle-phobes who are the anal-obsessives.
There is so much pure, sculpted techno eroticism in the new form factor that you'd have to be a puritanical ass-wipe to give a second's thought to how it looks with an adapter or two plugged into it.
I can't believe the pettiness of you people. The new MBP is the culmination of five years of foresighted development, if you include —as you must — the investments they were jumping on in IGZO development going that far back to Japan, no less, where the tech was developed.
Same with the keyboard. If Swiss watchmakers made keyboard switches, they would maybe be like this. Probably another five years in the making. And the aluminum machining — try to find a wonky tenth of a millimeter of misfit. How long have they been developing that? And the asymmetric fans, and so on.
Go get yourself a Windows machine. You may not deserve to handle one of these unless you come around. Meanwhile, millions are going to get limitless pleasure out of picking theirs up to pack it at the end of the day as they gladly take care to pack its adapters in the case with it.
Edit: you know why there's no USB A? It's too big, that's why. It's as obsolete as the headphone jack is on the iPhone. If you want them to make the base thicker just to accommodate that port, you're disqualified as an Apple observer.
LOL. You’re not so hot as an observer, either. Why? Because you wouldn’t need to make the MBP base thicker to accommodate a USB A port. You just have to stop drinking the Kool-Aid long enough to see past Ive’s designed illusion of thinness. You clearly think that the thickness of the base is only that narrow flat band where the USB C ports are; and if that were true you’d be correct and an A port would not fit. But it’s not true. That is only about half of the base’s thickness, the other half is the rounded/tapered edge that Apple uses on many of it’s products, part for structural reasons but probably mostly for aesthetic reasons (aka, it makes it look thinner than it really is).
Given that Apple machines the MBP case, having one small section of that flat part, say about one inch, be about 2 mm thicker would be a trivial manufacturing change. And it would likely have zero impact structurally. So really, there is no technical, structural, or manufacturing related issue that would prevent them from easily doing that. (Alternatively, they could have made that band wider all the way around and reduced the thickness of the tapered curve to keep the same overall thickness. This would have the added benefit of actually creating more internal space for batteries, etc. But then that would not have given them the excuse that anything bigger than USB C was too thick.)
The only issue remaining is that there would be an ever so slight disruption to the aesthetics. And you would no longer have your perfectly sculpted erotic hardware to grasp in your hand.
Comments
Most professionals are at a difficult crossroads. Apple still has the superior OS to Windows 10 and unless Microsoft does something unheard of in its own history, this won't change. But limping along with jury rigged hardware that is clearly designed for web browsing, but that costs in most cases 2x what Windows laptops cost is not sustainable either.
There's a vacuum developing in the pro market and it will be interesting to see who fills in over the next couple years.
I fully agree with this assessment. Ive needs some kind of therapy. This obsession with thinness and lightness has led to too many compromises. Prices went up with retina Macs and up again with these models. They are now literally out of the reach of many and severely compromised by being non-upgradeable and ultra expensive to repair. Currency fluctuations have just worsened an already bad situation. And let's not forget the foolish who never backup. If one of these models goes belly up it will be a lot of hassle getting the data out of the machine.
The iPhone 6 and 7 have got to be the most slippery phones I've ever held. That's bad design. it doesn't matter how good it looks on the ads. If you absolutely need a case just to be able to hold the phone safely, something is wrong. I've never understood the hideous white dongles either. Completely overstated and so tacky. Good for an iBook but nothing else.
I haven't had a chance to use the new keyboard but I think I won't like it. Was it necessary? Nope, but we got it because someone just had to shave off a couple of mm from somewhere.
The future? I already see it. One slab of glass sitting over the body of the laptop. No physical keys of any kind. Just a touchscreen with force touch and 'virtual' trackpad included.
Apple has lost it's way regarding usability - criticism is warranted.
Ive may or may not be a good industrial designer but he clearly doesn't know much about the main concepts of usability - the "look, feel & flow" of a hardware/software product. We get the "look": but the "feel & flow"? - any sense of how it actually feels to use the product effectively day by day is missing from the designs. As zoetmb notes, Apple doesn't appear to use the devices they produce any more. We certainly don't see any pix of MBPs with cascades of dongles cluttering the user's desk.
It's not just my view - here are comments from a couple of the world's top UI/UX/Interaction designers who worked with Apple to create it's original world-class usability experience.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name
It is valid for someone to propose the view that Apple is putting form before function and throwing away usable connections for the sake of "thinness".
It's just a discussion. Join in some time when you come down - you might learn something. ;-)
Why should you have to send in your mac just to change a battery? All MBPs spend 100% of their time sat on their backsides. Nobody ever looks there. Use some small screws and let me take the bottom plate off. Make the battery user replaceable! get rid of the glue! Apple has gone too far on thinness.
"your big ass removable batteries, hard drives and ram do me absolutely NO good for completing my work"
That sentence means nothing. Are you saying that having everything sealed in DOES do you good for completing your work? Surely both scenarios are exactly the same. They would have the same benefit on your work. That said, having user upgradeable RAM, SSD and batteries does offer some advantages.
and claiming these machines are under-spec'd? yeah, right. sorry but only trolls play the apple-spec game. you've revealed yourself.
this is what pros do. and what every pro shop I've worked in or for do as well -- they dont personally upgrade their gear; they have fixed lifespans and upgrade cycles. these are tools, no tinker toys.
The iMac is a desktop machine. People look at it from the front - not from the side - but Ive couldn't resist compromising the entire system to make it 'the thinnest iMac ever. No room for conventional large capacity cheap disks, only room for lame graphics cards etc
But it looks beautiful! Yes Jony but what's on the inside is more important and every time I look I get depressed.
EDIT: Gruber chimes in saying he thinks Apple dropped the prices on adapters to counter the narrative that they went all USB-C as a money grab. But then why didn't they announce price cuts the day of the event, if not on stage at least online and in stores.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/11/04/apple-usbc-price-cuts