
Apple Updates Air, Pro Laptops, Kills Off the MacBook - mrzool
https://tidbits.com/2019/07/09/apple-updates-air-pro-laptops-kills-off-the-macbook/
======
ValentineC
Discussion from a similar post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20393236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20393236)

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wwweston
Macbook Pro "improvements" over the last 3-7 years:

* No more matte display

* RAM soldered to the board

* SSD soldered in

* remove all ports except USB-C

* make keyboard worse

* remove function keys, replace with touch surface that's redundant at best

But it's very thin!

And even thinner was the recent Macbook, and if the law of "diminishing
returns" matters as little as the usual defenses of all the above tradeoffs in
pursuit of light/thin imply, you'd think that that'd be worth keeping.

Maybe there _is_ a limit, and Apple's actually reflected on that?

Or... maybe it's just a recognition that the Air and Macbook had come to a
place where there was little distinguishing them. And that really, the MBP is
less and less designed/deployed with actual professionals in mind and more and
more meant for a prosumer subsegment. In which case reducing focus to two
models (general purpose consumer laptop, light netbook) makes sense.

~~~
ppeetteerr
I really (really!) appreciate how thin they are. The new 15in is as heavy as
the old 13in. Really nice when you have to carry it around all the time. The
biggest pain point is the lack of ports (4 ports including power) is not
enough. The older models had around 5+ ports and still required dongles.
Everything else aside from the keyboard is a minor issue (e.g. getting more
ram today versus in the future is just a question of deferring costs).

~~~
jedberg
> getting more ram today versus in the future is just a question of deferring
> costs

Not really. I had a 2011 MacBook. In 2015 I was able to upgrade the RAM to
chips that didn't exist in 2011. Technically they weren't supported, but they
worked just fine. I couldn't have done that if the chips were soldered to the
board.

I also upgraded the drive from spinning disk to a much larger SSD. Again an
upgrade I couldn't have done otherwise.

It allowed me to keep using the machine until 2017.

~~~
ppeetteerr
I meant that were the chips upgradeable, you would still spend the money, only
you would do it later. With the components soldered on, you have to spend the
money today, not 4 years later.

I'm also of the opinion that hardware today is going to improve rather little
in the coming years. For instance, with the option of having 16/32gb of ram, I
don't see the need to upgrade the laptop on account of the memory for a good 5
years, at least. Even the new SSDs have 2gb throughput, _much_ higher than the
SSD you installed into your 2011 MacBook.

Finally, Macs have always had amazing resale value. You can always sell a 5
year model for a few hundred dollars and invest in something that will be much
better.

~~~
jedberg
> I meant that were the chips upgradeable, you would still spend the money,
> only you would do it later.

Yes, but my point was that I couldn't spend the money up front even if I
wanted to, because the thing I upgraded to didn't exist. It's not "deferred
cost" if you get something better later. It's only deferred cost if you get
the same thing but later.

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areoform
That's Courage. For real this time, one of the first things Steve Jobs did
when he came back to Apple was that he slashed the product line and killed off
a ton of things so that the company could focus on what truly mattered;
building great computing devices.

I am positively encouraged that Apple has grown to the point where they took
feedback critically and have returned to a more Jobs-ian way of operating. As
they should have been all this time. They've renewed their emphasis on general
computing, created new devices, and are iteratively getting out of the hole
they'd dug themselves into. This is a turnaround that's taking place before a
drastic turnaround needed to take place. And that takes Courage™

~~~
geerlingguy
Not sure if the whole post or only part is /s, but IMO they need to have the
courage to drop the Touch Bar. Everything else I can live with, but now
there’s literally no MacBook Pro I will buy. I have the 2016 Function Key
model, and maybe my next upgrade will be to a 2015 Pro... or to a non-Apple
laptop (sigh).

~~~
chrischen
I'm certain people who are OK with the touch bar don't care about it as much
as the people who hate it, but I for one prefer that they are iteratively
innovating on the keyboard for macs. I'd rather they do that than make a thick
brick of a laptop with a row of mostly useless function keys that a vocal
minority has been harping for.

~~~
cold_fact
my 2015 Pro is so much better than mycompany 2017 Pro w/ touchbar

like people are saying, most people just don't care about the touchbar. It
does get annoying at times (as a vim user). Why WHY do they hide the esc key
and have it take two inputs to increase the volume/brightness by more than 1
tick (sliding is terrible).

Other than that, I totally agree, the real focus should be the keyboard.
Because it's shit. Here aresome of the awesome problems I go through on a
daily basis at work.

\- space bar double spaces all the time. Turned off key repeat and also
whatever other suggestions I could find on Stack

\- backspace deletes too many characters

\- keys double type or are just not responsive (space, left shift, fucking /
for some reason)

yeah, real fun using it especially while I'm on call right now and working on
prod servers!! WORK ON THE KEYBOARD APPLE

~~~
Zarel
For your keyboard problems, just get it repaired. It's free under a four-year
warranty, and it usually only takes one day: Just drop it off at an Apple
store, and pick it back up the next day.

(Also, if you're a vim user, you should really remap Caps Lock to Esc. There's
a pane in System Preferences for it, and it should be done whether or not you
have a touch bar.)

~~~
AlexandrB
Caps Lock is better remapped to CTRL in my opinion. However, with Vim I always
use CTRL+] instead of ESC because I think it’s easier to reach.

------
exabrial
That's because the new Macbook Pros are actually MacBooks. No I/O, no
upgradability, gimmicky and useless touchbars, etc

~~~
asdff
But finally quad core with a screen that actually fits on a lecture desk.

------
opportune
Why the fuck is Apple getting rid of the option to not have a touch bar on
Macbook Pros? They already made it so high-performance macbooks require them
but at least you had the option to pick a worse performing model with the
actual keys.

Does the touchbar really do that well in focus groups? It is pretty
universally reviled among all the techie people I know. It breaks one of the
most basic principals of a keyboard interface which is that you don't need to
look at it to know which button you're pressing. That would be fine if it was
just settings like brightness/volume you don't change very often but putting
the escape key there was just such an idiotic move

I used to consider myself a big macbook pro fan. I would probably continue
buying reskins of the 2013 model forever as long as they kept updating the
hardware. I would rather the product stagnate than have apple repeatedly make
it _worse_

~~~
HyperTalk2
I'm starting to think Apple is being subverted by high level employees who are
carrying out directives from someone else, possibly a competing company.

~~~
asdff
They sure do have a knack to keep tumbling down the stairs every single
product release since Jobs passed on.

------
georgebarnett
RIP Macbook. You have been my favourite machine for a long time.

~~~
bluedino
The 11” Air was one of my all time favorite laptops and the 12” rMB was such a
great replacement.

~~~
bredren
The 2015 11" Air was the best performance / value macbook Apple has ever made.

~~~
bluedino
Mine was a 2010 base model, but by 2015 I had grown weary of it's limitations.

The form factor was just amazing, and even though the Core2Duo CPU wasn't
anything special, with the SSD (at the time, they weren't very common) it was
still a very usable machine. The battery life was my biggest complaint, only
about 4 hours, and they didn't fix that until 2014.

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sakisv
In a twisted way I welcome these news.

If they had released a model without touchbar and with improved keyboard I
would be really tempted to buy it to replace my XPS.

Given their insistence on the touchbar is good way for me to accept that: a)
the last good MacBook for me will remain the 2015 model and b) I will have to
make do with Linux and XPS.

------
jasonhansel
For all the devs wondering how to replace their MacBook Pros: I highly
recommend running Linux on a Lenovo X1 Carbon. I've also heard good things
about System76.

~~~
rayiner
Contrary view: [https://medium.com/@hkdb/ubuntu-18-04-on-
lenovo-x1-carbon-6g...](https://medium.com/@hkdb/ubuntu-18-04-on-
lenovo-x1-carbon-6g-d99d5667d4d5)

~~~
adrianratnapala
How is that a contrary view. That guy seems very happy with the Ubuntu and X1
combo. Though he does spend a _long_ time obsessing about the battery, after
his initial take was "yup, it's good enough for me".

~~~
rayiner
The guy initially declares “everything works out of box.” But then he spends a
long time “obsessing about the battery” because without good battery life, a
laptop is useless as a laptop. As Apple understands, alleviating battery
anxiety is key to selling laptops.

------
IgorPartola
Why does choosing an Apple product always require a degree in Apple marketing
and design? I generally like their products but you need to do so much
research about everything from the weird ass product names (does Air even mean
anything anymore?), to where exactly in the product cycle each product is. Am
I about to buy something that will be upgraded in a week?

~~~
reaperducer
_the weird ass product names_

IME, Apple's product names make more sense than virtually any other computer
maker, or auto maker.

Currently computers from Lenovo are:

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 6

Yoga C930

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 5

ThinkPad X1 Extreme

Legion Y740

MacBook (RIP), MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro make complete sense comparatively.

~~~
bubblethink
Why do names of tools need to make sense? I don't go around calling my
screwdriver with cute names. It has a job to do. It needs a unique identifier
to distinguish from other screw drivers.

~~~
JadeNB
> I don't go around calling my screwdriver with cute names. It has a job to
> do. It needs a unique identifier to distinguish from other screw drivers.

Screw drivers also aren't regularly re-designed to hop on current design
trends and bump specs (or, rather, if manufacturers try it then people ignore
it). Car models are probably a more apt comparison.

------
adarioble
After having the Touch Bar model I almost wish they kept the “Touchbar Escape”
model. At least the choice is easier now - Apple NoChoice.

------
cutler
Considering a 128Gb SSD costs $47 and a 500Gb SSD costs $78 Apples's $400
"upgrade" to 500Gb over the base model's 128Gb disk represents a 6-fold price
hike on its market value. Why do we put up with this? Now it's soldered on so
we don't even have the freedom to upgrade our own machines.

~~~
outworlder
The SSDs used in Macs outclass most other offerings. It's not fair to compare
them with random SSDs on price alone, you need to compare with the best the
market has to offer. The gap used to be an order of magnitude even against the
'best' SSDs commercially available. This is why they initially used their
proprietary interface, then NVMe. The gap is getting smaller but it is still
significant. And that's against SSDs you can buy - not the SSDs other
companies will stuff on their laptops.

What rubs me the wrong way is that Apple outfits all their cheapest devices
with unpractical storage sizes, so you are essentially forced to upgrade.

------
galo_sengen
I hope they release a fanless version of the Air to make up for the lack of
the Macbook. Are there any other fanless laptops on the market?

~~~
gambiting
The current Air might as well be fanless. The fan is nowhere near the heatsink
on the CPU, once it finally kicks in it only pushes the air through the case,
its impact on the CPU temperatures is minimal.

~~~
saurik
"It has a fan, but the fan is useless" is worse than merely having a useful
fan :/.

~~~
Marsymars
Also worse than no fan, since you could fill that space with battery if there
wasn't a fan there.

------
multibit
On the bright side, as Apple continues to pervert the formerly most used *nix
laptop, we may see a surge of interest in Linux.

Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu and has an OSX-like aesthetic and simplicity
that might appeal to newcomers wanting to switch.

------
babyslothzoo
Still has the unreliable keyboard

Still has the annoying Touch Bar

Still doesn't have a physical ESC key

Still has an annoying port situation requiring a half dozen dongles

Still is no user serviceable RAM / SSD / battery

= Still not a "Pro" laptop

------
iscrewyou
I feel like they are making way for the 16” MacBook(Pro).

~~~
SkyMarshal
Is there some credible info about this somewhere, or is this just speculation?

------
ChuckNorris89
Was expecting this. I imagine the Air will also be the first to make the
switch to their in-house ARM processors.

~~~
b212
Once they move all products to the ARM (is it even possible? I mean Apple is
Apple but they can’t put as much effort into CPUs as Intel or AMD - take a
look at the latest Ryzens for example :o) will it kill Hackintoshes?

------
mnm1
This is the final "fuck you and fuck off" to professional developers from
Apple. I expect the next generation of MBPros (and MBAirs) that are rumored
for later this year to continue in this direction giving us developers the
middle finger and likely it will continue into next year and beyond. Apple
doesn't care. The laptops look great from the outside and most people don't
know any better. Everything that makes this machine a laptop is indeed garbage
(keyboard, touchpad, screen, cooling) as far as computing is concerned, but
when you're a fashion company, computing is almost an afterthought. On the
bright side, I'm looking forward to "smart" socks and underwear coming out in
a few years from Apple. /s

~~~
pier25
If Apple was working on a complete redesign of the MBP with a new keyboard,
how long do you think it would take them to release it?

And if Apple were indeed working on that wouldn't it make sense to ditch the
12'' MB since it could not accommodate a thicker keyboard?

I'm bitter too about what has been happening on the Mac front for the last 5
or so years, but I think Apple is correcting course albeit slowly.

~~~
asdff
Prev gen mbp was 2013-2015. The one before that was 2009-2012. This one is
2016-2019. I'd say we are due for a redesign any day now. Hopefully we drop
this butterfly experiment and return to good old fashioned scissor keys and
ports for pros.

~~~
pier25
Nitpick: the first 15'' retina was introduced in 2012 on which the 2015 model
is based on.

Anyway I agree, a new MBP _has_ to be in the works. Hopefully it will be
released this year without the butterfly keyboard and the touch bar.

------
chunsj
Now, there’s no macbook without screaming fan noise.

~~~
kruuuder
I started using "Turbo Boost Switcher" recently. You can enable/disable turbo
boost from the system bar which keeps the MacBook quiet. Love it.

------
persistent
The price is not even that outrageous. When specified similar to the top-of-
the-line ThinkPad X1 Carbon it's only $200 more, and you're getting a better
display.

~~~
rayiner
The X1C6 is pretty expensive unless you’re doing some Lenovo EPP swindle.

~~~
tbrock
The X1C7 just came out so the price will be dropping like a stone on the 6th
gen pretty soon.

------
code_duck
Ha, I was waiting for them to update it so I could buy a new one. It has been
over 500 days since an update, which was unusual.

------
TYPE_FASTER
Anybody run XCode on the Air? How is it? It’s pretty tempting as a MBP no TB
replacement.

------
rolltiide
I’m almost ready to stop hating on the donglebook now that all my devices use
wireless connectivity

Even my hardware wallet is bluetooth and I’ll tolerate that

Inconclusive on my DSLR-form factor cameras, but I plan to axe them for the
iphone’s camera in a year or two as well, for how I use them

~~~
__d
So when Apple releases their new Apple Display Air with 60GHz wireless
Thunderbolt4, and the new MacBooks finally get wireless charging, we’ll reach
the nirvana of a totally port-less device.

With some more work on the keyboard, it could even end up being totally
coffee-proof!

