Dan_Dilger
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Apple's new 16-inch MacBook Pro reveals its future direction
The less cynical way of saying the same thing is that "Apple's products are simply better."prof said:
There pretty much is consensus about that, especially with the Pro models. It's great for you that you have another Mac, for me this would be totally impracticable. There're a lot of different needs amongst pros and Apple has pretty much failed all of them and only catered to the needs of a few photgraphers and musicians. There's a reason why there was a lot of speculation about a completely new design with true Pro genes in a larger form factor.thanx_al said:"It was Apple who complicated things by pursuing its silly ‘thin at all costs’ mantra which undermined a generation of Macbooks. Now, with the new MacBook Pro, they are back on track"
There is far from universal consensus on this. I personally liked thin-and-light at all costs. It pushed technologies farther than they would have been if thick-and-fat were the go to standard. Did Apple go too far, maybe? But I remember the old days of thick, fat, and heavy laptops. No thanks. I can fit my 13" MBP into a folio designed for a notepad. That's what I want.
Making the pros as thin as possible is truly self-inflicted damage and people half rightfully scalded Apple for that; the lack of expendability, the abysmal keyboard, the thermal problems, the lack of escape key, the hard requirement to have a boatload of dongles on you, the unergonomic mirror screen.
Apple is truly lucky that other companies are sucking so much in usability department, that switching is often not a real option: a lot of people are sticking with Apple despite their crappy hardware, not because of it. It makes me sad, that my most usable laptop here is still my 2011 MBP 17"; luckily I still have it here because otherwise the 9d it took to repair the shitty keyboard on my 2017 MBP 15" would have been an even harder hit.
You can imagine ways you believe everything could be better--with the advantage of not having to prove your beliefs in the market. But that fact that its even easier to find fault with Apple's competitors really just means Apple is currently outperforming them. Note that everyone in the market has the same profit motive, and some are simply performing better. When you look at it that way, things are so much simpler.
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Apple's new 16-inch MacBook Pro reveals its future direction
wizard69 said:The Mac line suffered from poor management. We should be seeing new iMacs and Minis sometime early in the new year. Ideally a fat Mini with a discreet GPU! If the hardware languishes we will know that Apple has yet to recover from the neglect seen in the Mac lineup.
No doubt you won't be happy until this "fat mini" has an Nvidia GPU and USB A ports.Better just unplug from the web and enjoy your HP laptop running Linux that you narrowly selected over a completely different product with nothing in common.
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Apple's new 16-inch MacBook Pro reveals its future direction
There are plenty of people for whom AirPods don't fit well. If you interviewed a few of them it would be effortless to generate a Joanna Stern-type video about how Apple is building AirPods that are wrong and hates consumers and must be shoveled in a bit and burned with fire. Straight up antivax style propaganda is so easy! That's why morons are so good at it.kamilton said:It’s just beyond stupid not to have the most satisfying keyboard experience possible. That is the effing interface on a laptop. Look at the engineering involved in making AirPods hang just right in the human ear. At a few effing millimeters and make the touch irresistible. Nope. They shuck and jive and defend the errors of keyboardgate. Jony just had to have it thinner. Dumb. Shot sighted and dumb. Look at the 180 done on the Mac Pro. I expected the same initiative on the MBP. Screw it, I’m not dropping 3K on the 16”. I’ll buy a 2015 15 or 13” retina and keep on trucking. Total disappointment. Stop defending -
Apple's new 16-inch MacBook Pro reveals its future direction
To suggest that "customers despise" Apple's MacBooks is just nutter-level absurdity. Apple sells $25 Billion of Macs every year, and most of these are notebooks.Metriacanthosaurus said:
What point are you making?Mike Wuerthele said:
The new MBP is one piece of paper thicker than the 2016-2018. At the same time, it is thinner, smaller, and lighter than the 2012-2015 RMBP.henrybay said:Quote: ‘To blogger critics who have never done anything apart from writing their opinions on a subject, the solutions are simplistic: stop making light and thin machines, go back to using a keyboard from 2015, and add more RAM! Also, be faster with less heat and don't spin those fans up!’
It turns out that the solutions WERE quite simplistic - stop making such a thin and light machine, go back to using a scissor keyboard with a decent amount of travel, and add more power while addressing the heat issues.’
It was Apple who complicated things by pursuing its silly ‘thin at all costs’ mantra which undermined a generation of Macbooks. Now, with the new MacBook Pro, they are back on track
It took them 4 years to follow the 2015 MacBook Pro with a version customers don't despise. Until yesterday, there hasn't been a MacBook Pro that anyone was really happy about for years.
There is no spinning this.
So the spin is coming from the mob. You might as well be frothing about how toxic vaccines are. It's really that unhinged. Absolute blind rage in the face of facts and logic. -
Apple's new 16-inch MacBook Pro reveals its future direction
Well Dann, I can match your anecdote with my own. I've been using butterfly keyboards exclusively for the last three years, and I am notorious for banging out massive walls of text on a nearly daily basis. I make typos and mistakes, but I have yet to have a single issue with a MBP keyboard.BigDann said:Let's correct a bit of the Keyboard problem. The 2016 & 2017 had the most issues. The 2018 & 2919 are better for sure! They are still failing just the same. A lot of it has to do with different keys wearing out.
Depending on what your game is you can kill the Shift key, Space or a collection of letters or numbers. As an example A, E, S & R are the ones I tend to use more. I wore out two 2016 and one 2017 at which point I gave up on the newer systems, bought a second 2015 and have not worn out keys just the keycaps!
The biggest issue is the inability to service discreet key you need to replace the full keyboard. But even that is not possible! The full uppercase needs to be swapped out. So while we have four years of free coverage what happens then? A very expensive repair! Apple and all of the others need to alter their throw-away mentality! Most laptops today have no reason not to last six to eight years.Of course, my experiences aren't really applicable across Apple's 100M installed base. So to really understand what's happening, we looked beyond our own personal experiences and dug through mountains of data that focused on repairs. If the butterfly keyboard were significantly more troubled than previous models, we should have seen data supporting that. It really comes down to: do you care about reality, or do you have a preconceived notion that a personal experience means that Apple is actually building defective products that generate massive repair bills, but is somehow magically unaffected by this in its financial reporting.
Sometimes data is bad, as we've seen from all the supposed estimates that imagined Apple was getting pushed out of the tablet market by cheap Androids. We could show what was wrong with that data, and predicted an outcome that turned out to be correct.
If Apple were repairing keyboards anything close to the experience of few people who experienced real problems, or who simply didn't like the feel, that wouldn't be invisible outside of blogger rage bits and video podcasts of a Wall Street Journal blogger dressing up to create infotainment bits about how butterfly is a code-word for evil.If in the future we see some long term data that shows that mobile machines lifespans are radically shortened by their keyboard failures, that would be news. We have yet to see any evidence of that. However, Apple pretty clearly doesn't have a "throw away mentality," because the company is working to establish an installed base it can sell services/ software to. That's a far stronger interest in long term viability than the makers of Windows notebooks and Chromebooks and other devices that only make money when they are replaced on a regular cycle. Microsoft really isn't making any money from a Windows App Store servicing the installed base, and Google's service contracts are no dependent upon Chromebooks lasting for any length of time. These are cheaply designed products that don't last by design. Apple's MacBooks are not.
Now, will ultra mobile devices likely wear out faster than a tank built to deliver a 1990s experience? Perhaps, but buyers are not flocking to heavy built laptops advertising indestructibility. They want light and thin machines. This is driven by demand, not merely by Apple's design.
