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chia said:

Clamourers for USB-A ports on the new MacBook Pros have appeared with depressing predictability. It seems contradictory to want old tech on new products: the official USB organisation has dropped the USB-A connector from the current standard: USB 4 is achieved only via USB-C connectors.

All this clamour for USB-A ports is ironic seeing how 20 years ago Apple introduced the iMac with just USB[-A] ports, and there was lots of whining back then as to why Apple couldn’t also add the SCSI and Serial ports of the day. 

The USB-C connector is superior both in ease of use and the features it can offer; if Apple kept on catering to the technology luddites we’d all still be using ”laptops” the size and weight of the Macintosh Portable with ADB and SCSI ports.

It’s difficult to believe that those incapable of adapting to a $20-50 USB-C/Bluetooth mouse, or a $20 dollar USB-C to HDMI cable/adaptor, are serious, or should be taken seriously, in their consideration of several thousand dollar MacBook Pros for professional revenue earning work.

For me this is about design balance, Apple has been good at this in the past. The 'best' connected notebook is the one that can connect to everything (likely to be) required without extra devices (eg dongles); that's not the 'optimum' notebook because it's obviously going to be bigger/heavier than desired - it lacks design balance.

The trend in connectors is towards smaller and more versatile, USB-A was a good example when it was introduced. The trick now is to identify the future (I doubt anyone would argue about that being USB-C) and balance it with some subset of current (not legacy) connectors that are commonly encountered and may be inconvenient to adapt (ie a dongle might not be available at the point of need for whatever reason) or cannot be met by USB-C (don't forget that the USB-C MBP came with an analogue audio connector too - how ancient is a 3.5mm jack!).

Those decisions are trade-offs and they're not easy. Just deciding to do nothing (as Apple did in 2016) is an extreme design and, IMHO, history shows that it was a bad one. In 2021 there are still many situations where USB-C connectors on other equipment are entirely absent. For me, the pace of USB-C adoption, which Apple thought would quickly make the 2016 MBP able to ditch its dongles, is still sufficiently slow to justify some other connectivity.

Good arguments can be made for an SD Card reader, HDMI (or mini-HDMI), Ethernet and (yes) USB-A, all based upon their ubiquity in the real world. All would make the notebook fit better into many real users' real use cases. As I said, these decisions are difficult.

I bought the first MBP with a Touch Bar shortly after it was released. I assumed that Apple had a cunning plan for the Touch Bar that would more than compensate for its disadvantages - turned out that they didn't. Touch ID, on the other hand, is really valuable.

I could write a book on why the Touch Bar is a bad idea but some of the obvious ones are:

• You have to look at it to use its keys 'cos you can't feel them
• This is made worse by the fact they move around so the same key can be in different places
• It often needs an extra press just to use it since it times-out and goes blank (even on mains power)
• The bar has limited capacity so lists (eg of E-Mail addresses) are often incomplete compared to the version on the display
• And why wouldn't you use the display version anyway 'cos that's where you are looking?
• It adds cost to the computer
  
• It adds hardware complexity so, in principle, reduces reliability
• Heck, it probably even reduces battery life

In its favour, the utility for configuring it is really cool.

So I hope the new MBP loses the Touch Bar. I really hope it does include the extra port types though, to save carrying dongles or being embarrassed when you've forgotten them. My MBP before the Touch Bar was a real road warrior: you could connect it to almost everything in the real world without a dongle. Making things smaller and lighter by moving required functionality into separate units is not clever design (hey, look at the size of the new notebook - you'll need to remember to take along a battery though, and a display and keyboard and the really neat SSD... but look how small and light the notebook is!).

As to a notch, I'm not really sure I care. On the iPhone, Apple rearranged icons so the middle of the top of the display wasn't needed. As I write this on my current MBP, I see a big empty space in the middle of the Menu Bar and I happen to know that macOS already knows how to dump Menu Bar items should it be full so I doubt it would be a big issue. If it does come to pass, I also very much doubt it will be as big as the schematic seems to suggest.
</rant>

So that's things that PCs do and Macs don't. I wasn't as excited as the "users" in the ad, the only one that attracts me is the wider choice of games.

The hardware items only make sense until you think about actually using them. Why would I want a touchscreen on a laptop? It's too far from the keyboard and trackpad where my hands spend their time - much quicker to move the pointer and click or to type a shortcut than to break rhythm to move to tap the screen. And a foldy laptop that claims also to be a tablet just ends up with tablet compromises on a machine with laptop weight and size.

The upgradable RAM is a more complex issue: it would be great to be able to upgrade RAM when it got cheaper. However, there are trade-offs and these are not so attractive: an access panel is a complexity (and design constraint) while conventional sockets are bulkier and less reliable that soldered-in devices and that's before considering the way AS packages the RAMs for speed. Putting off a decision always sounds attractive but I doubt if many typical users would actually upgrade RAM, they'd just suffer those disadvantages.

Skeptical said:

hexclock said:

I have noticed that with iOS 15 on my XR that apps crash occasionally. So far Safari, Podcasts, and a couple other non Apple apps have randomly quit. 

You do know that an iPhone XR isn’t an iPhone 13 right?

I think this was a contribution to the "it's an iOS problem" school of thought.

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

A reaction to NVIDIA buying ARM?

At least a defensive move while it is unclear who will own ARM. While the ARM architecture remains available to all, there are benefits to using it but a 'hostile' (or just misguided) new owner could try to increase licensing costs.