I'm astonished and pleased to see they walked back the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPs - the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.
The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute, but perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team's desires.
It turns out that people who buy laptops -- a mobile-ish form factor differentiated from a tablet by its keyboard -- might really really care about keyboards as the main interface between user and device.
I'd concluded that Apple didn't really think much of laptops anymore, and had simply moved on to caring more about other form factors: it seemed a logical conclusion if one assumed that people at Apple were in fact competent.
This shows some real care regarding laptops as a form factor and puts them back in the running for a lot of buyers, including me. But there's still one major issue that I don't see people talking much about -- the way that Apple's decisions regarding storage (namely soldering it to the board AND making it so that there's no way to access it in the event of a logic board failure) increases consumer risk as well as decreasing consumer choice:
It increases risk of data loss. That's a choice that impacts the day-to-day experience much less than the keyboard, which explains why the keyboard has gotten much more attention, and it really is nice that a company arguably built on attention to experience returned to that aspect of it. But this kind of choice makes a huge difference in a moment of failure, and it's at least equally user-hostile, especially in a product bearing the name "pro" where data recovery can be a matter of business continuity.
I suppose that one can argue a responsible professional will be using network and external backups (and of course all responsible professionals worth considering or selling anything to will do this, right?), and so this isn't necessary, and Apple's thing (wise or unwise) is that they frequently reconsider and eliminate things that aren't crucial. But redundancy in some areas is wise, and I can't see what they think eliminating both removability AND emergency direct access when it come to storage actually buys them. Even if one assumes it's a lock-in action for service, it makes the actual service more difficult and costly.
I'm liking the keyboard correction. I just bought a 2014 MBP to replace an older failing MBP, so I'm not in the market for something else for a year or two, but when that comes up, I'll be seriously looking at the 16" as an option. And this will be what I'm thinking about.
I realize that this is idealistic of me but data loss should never be an issue. This is 2019 and backups have been drilled into everyone's heads for years and years and years. You can still access the drives in these via Target Disk mode (and I've had to do a few recoveries through that so I know it works) and it's likely that the pros outweigh the cons.
- There's the adage in the enterprise space that, if you haven't tested your backups, then you don't really have backups. Most consumers, and even professional users, aren't likely going to be in a position to verify their backups before they actually need them.
- Not even being able to do simple repairs or upgrades massively reduces the ROI. This is especially for high-end, professional equipment.
When I first started my current job, everyone was given the option of a Thinkpad with linux or a Mac. Both units had 16GB of RAM. When it became apparent that 16GB was insufficient for my workloads, it was simple for IT to upgrade my Thinkpad to 32GB. My coworkers with Macs were not so fortunate.
> There's the adage in the enterprise space that, if you haven't tested your backups, then you don't really have backups. Most consumers, and even professional users, aren't likely going to be in a position to verify their backups before they actually need them.
This is why having more than just one computer is beneficial. Because I jump between multiple laptops, desktops, and other devices, and perform my work and other activities, I bring with me copies of my data between devices by necessity, whenever I need that data.
And I think that is actually the way to do it. Not to focus so much on trying to keep multiple copies of all of your data since forever, because then you get bogged down in details about keeping everything in sync and everything organized, but instead to just focus on the data that you actually need, and being conscious about making copies of data when you use it.
In the past, when I was using fewer computers, I had one computer that was sort of the canonical location of data. And I’d access it over the network and work on my data there. It had great uptime too. On the order of months. Then one day there was a power outage and that was when I realized that I had no idea what I had set as the password for the full disk encryption on said machine. Ooops :^)
I lost a fair bit of data that day. But I learned something too, and that learning has shaped my habits in how I deal with data and I can proudly say that in the years that have passed since then I have been able to hold on to all of the data that is most important to me.
I almost got blindsided by 2FA a couple of years ago, because I didn’t know that the keys for the second factor were intentionally kept device-local. But thankfully I was changing phones with the old one still functional and in my possession and was waiting with performing factory reset until after I’d set up the new phone and seen whether or not I had all that I needed. So because of that all I needed to do was to log in with the 2FA of the old phone on each service I had it on, temporarily disable 2FA and then reenable it with the new phone and when I did that I also saved all of the new 2FA keys so that in the event that I might actually end up having to switch phones because the new one broke in the future I would not end up locked out of my accounts.
Even if data loss is entirely mitigated by backups, storage failure can also be a thing, and mitigating that issue used to be a matter of making at least one of your backups bootable and on media you could swap in, so this didn't take down the whole device. Not sure what techs do now, but I'll bet it involves more downtime and less continuity.
But data loss is an issue. Network backups are great, and I use them, but they're bandwidth bound. Local external drive backups are great, and I do them, but less frequently. And I don't test my backups (yet)... do you? Having removable storage -- or even storage that's reliably accessible in the face of other component failure -- provides an extra margin against the risk of loss that can creep in even with a set of responsible backup habits.
What's the pro of soldering storage to the board that outweighs these cons?
Just get a time machine, put on your wifi and you don't have to think about it anymore, it will just backup every day in the background. You can easily restore into another macbook using the builtin restore functionality. Apples solution to this is really good (still struggling to do it with the same ease with Windows without 3rd party software and Linux).
Just preheat the board, get your hot air station, heat and remove those bad modules, clean the pads, add your solder and remount some new ones before cleaning up all that flux you were using. Then reinstall macOS and restore your backups.
It might take a few tries before the solder balls up correctly under each pad. Use plenty of flux. Maybe give it a ultrasonic bath.
Ah yes, Apple is known for making things obvious, intuitive, easy, and user-friendly! /s
Having an actual mini-sata or m.2 connector won't be too taxing. But it will increase tech support costs, and lower profits from sales of new replacement machines at least.
Sad. (That's why my choice is Thinkpad T series, which is built like a tank: heavy, bulky, easy to replace any part, and hard to actually break; also, enough room for a good keyboard.)
Even the XPS 13s are more serviceable than their rival MBP 13"s. The RAM may be soldered on both but the XPS uses a standard NVMe SSD. It's saved me a few times already.
If you have AppleCare you won’t have to pay for that replacement. After 3 years, you would, however buying a laptop with an inferior OS just in case one day a machine catastrophically fails is like riding a horse because you are afraid your car might fly off a bridge at some point in the future.
I know I am anecdote-land, but I have never in 20 years of using Macs, had one catastrophically fail. Or fail at all for that matter.
Apple discontinued Time Capsule and their entire Airport line. The Time Machine software is still in MacOS, but de-emphasized and who knows if they'll retain it going forward.
With how hard they're pushing their cloud and integrating it into pretty much everything I'm surprised there's still no official cloud backup solution for Mac.
The pros are only size related. Size at all costs is excusable as a consumer or prosumer product, but most of the users of the high end pro's want power, cooling, good ports, reliability, and certainly upgradability. The 2012's were so nice featuring 2 internal sata connections and removable ram. Those computers weren't too thick in my mind, so for a pro, I think they have their objectives mixed up.
I feel the upgradability issue is relatively minor. For some extra money, I can order one with 64 GB of DDR4 and 8 TB of flash. That's probably enough to carry me for five or so years. Quite frankly, my local storage needs topped out somewhere between 1 and 2 TB and have been there for the past five years. Whether 64 GB of RAM will be enough is the big question for me. Even if it weren't, there aren't many laptops available today that can go further than that.
Upgradability is good if you intend to make a lower initial investment and increase capacity at a later point. This laptop is not a toy and, if you are buying one, it's reasonable to expect a return on your investment.
Some extra money? You’re talking about a nearly $6k configuration.
It almost never makes sense to overbuy storage and memory, which tends to be a cyclical market that drops in cost over time. Doubly true with Apple that marks up both commodities dramatically.
64GB will cost you $800 now. When you need it, it may cost half that, or less. And Apple was notorious for underspec'ing the maximum amount of RAM a machine could take - it was common for a machine to take double the Apple official maximum because the DIMM densities increased with time. Since the integration of the memory controller into the CPU this is less of an issue, but the soldered RAM means you're limited to the amount that Apple is prepared to give you, which until this model has been far less than the CPU actually supports - the 15" i9 could be spec'd to 32GB, but the CPU could address 64GB.
Apple's attitude to upgrading is to replace the entire machine. It's both expensive and absurd. I bought a 2008 MBP back in uni in 2010. I later upgraded the RAM and disk when I could afford to, and when I had reached the limits of what it had. That machine served me well for 5 years. There's nothing else on the market today I'd trust to be a daily use machine for 5 years straight.
Even then, it's getting more and more difficult to justify the increasing gap between Apple pricing and say - Dell or Lenovo. Almost $1k in it now for equivalently spec'd non-base MBP vs XPS15/X1 Extreme, and the gap just gets higher as you need higher requirements.
Let's have a look at what Apple have done since 2012.
1) Inflate the base prices of the machines and attempt to justify it via non-optional "features" such as the touch bar, wide gamut displays, extra thunderbolt ports, obsessively thin designs, T2 chip.
2) Solder everything, requiring customers to buy the specs they think they'll need in ~3 years' time upfront, when prices are at their highest. Look how expensive 1TB of flash was 3 years ago vs today, for example. Heck, in 2008-2012, several Apple machines could be upgraded to beyond their original BTO capabilities thanks to technology advancements and firmware updates by Apple at the time.
3) Where they didn't solder storage in the 2012-2015 machines, they used several different proprietary form factors for blade card SSDs when standardised form factors have existed the whole time (mSATA, M.2 SATA/PCIe AHCI/NVMe).
4) Removed the ability for customers to restore machines to working state either in the field or in a timely manner, and pushing customers toward Apple service and AppleCare.
5) Literally glue in the one consumable item in the machine (battery) that is almost certainly going to fail before the usable lifespan of the machine, pushing the price of a battery service up dramatically, reducing the economical lifespan of the machines.
6) Reduce serviceability of other components likely to fail or get damaged over time such as the keyboard and trackpad by riveting, glueing, sandwiching etc to ensure older machines are uneconomical to repair as soon as they can be, pushing customers toward buying a new machine.
This is a company that is doing everything to take away your choice as a customer, trying to turn expensive computers into disposable appliances. Don't try to justify this crap - just say no.
All the above, combined with the design flaws almost every 2016+ MacBook has (butterfly keyboard, flexgate, staingate, display connector issues, T2 chip integration issues), the seriously declining quality of Apple's OSs, the removal of useful features (MagSafe!, sleep light, external battery status meter, IR remote, non-type C ports, SD reader), have me now in the position where I not only don't want to buy any of there new MacBooks, I'm actively encouraging others not to as well.
Me, a once huge Apple fan whose personal portable machines have been Apple almost exclusively since the 90s. Whose OS of choice has been OS X/macOS since Jaguar. Who used to go out of his way to explain why Apple machines were worth it.
I recently bought a Thinkpad P1 Gen 2 with i9 9880H, 64GB RAM, 2x 2TB NVME, 15” OLED, basically all the options ticked, including a 3 year warranty with equivalent properties to AppleCare+.
It ran about $4700 before tax but after one of those coupons which Lenovo is constantly running and which knocks 10-30% off the MSRP of the device. Given Apple is now pricing NVME at $300/TB for upgrade, this seems comparably priced for what is largely the same internals.
I’ve been a MacBook Pro aficionado for the last decade. I’ve tried other stuff like the Surface Pro, never kept it.
I guess my point is there’s a myth that Apple is significantly more expensive than others, which doesn’t feel like it’s borne out by the manufacturer configurators when you’re dealing with high-end configurations?
Obviously, and this is highly subjective, I personally ascribe significant value to what Apple does to enhance thermal management (vs. the P1, which has throttling issues), to enhancing security through stuff like T2, Touch ID, FileVault 2 being so seamless, etc.
I’ve got enough nagging concerns about the maxed-out P1 Gen 2 that I’ve just ordered the new 16” MBP to do another compare and contrast — we’ll see how it goes. Extra 4TB of NVME over the P1 certainly doesn’t hurt.
Where I agree is some of the integration/packaging compromises impacting repairability are a pain, AppleCare+ is a subpar experience to Lenovo who’ll have parts and a technician appear next business day to fix your laptop. Also the mistakes Apple made around keyboards were deeply unfortunate, I had to get mine repaired multiple times.
> Upgradability is good if you intend to make a lower initial investment and increase capacity at a later point. This laptop is not a toy and, if you are buying one, it's reasonable to expect a return on your investment.
Not clear on your meaning here. Are you saying that upgradability increases ROI, and that it is something one should expect in a professional laptop? If so, I agree.
You can buy an upgradable computer specced to your current needs today and adapt it to your future needs as needed. You will pay less now because it doesn't need to be able to run now the OS that'll be available in 5 years and you probably will pay less for the capacity by then. The cost is the time you'll need to invest to make those upgrades: sourcing the parts, assembly, etc.
Upgradability is, in general, a good thing. In the case of these laptops, you buy them to the specs you'll need at the end of the machine's useful life, at the full current price.
> In the case of these laptops, you buy them to the specs you'll need at the end of the machine's useful life, at the full current price.
OK, I see what you are saying. The nit I have to pick with that particular sort of reasoning is that now Apple has put their customers in a bit of a bind:
- either you buy the absolute max spec (and hope that it includes the specs you'll need for that time span), or
- you risk buyers remorse as you end up in a situation where the laptop that you already handed over a small fortune for isn't up to the task
This past year I recently considered buying one of Lenovo's premium Thinkpad T-series laptops, but the fact that they had one (of two) RAM slots soldered put me off. I was buying this laptop for personal use, and so I didn't want to spend top dollar on it right then, but I didn't want to end up in a situation where what I had settled for wasn't enough.
I ended up going for one of the "budget" E-series Thinkpads, because (paradoxically) those do have fully upgradable RAM.
It's not just buyers remorse. If you use the machine for work and buy something under-spec'd - especially in RAM, you lose money by being less efficient with a slower machine.
The Thinkpad T490 (not the T490s) does have upgradeable RAM -- we settled on it for all our new developer machines. It's got an amazing keyboard and is fairly lightweight, but has every port you'd need, even VGA (and costs ~$1,000 for 8GB/256GB SSD).
It has one stick of upgradable RAM - better than nothing, but I wanted both sticks. Honestly, for a work laptop where you are going to be trading it out again in 3 years, that's probably fine.
My E495 currently has 8GB (2x4GB for better iGPU performance) and that's all I need for personal uses for now. But I can upgrade to 32GB later if I need to (and for less overall cost).
By how much? I understand that if instead of buying a laptop with the intention of replacing it with the then top-of-the-line model five years down the road I get one that I plan to outgrow in 2 years, I'll spend less money, but is that a relevant amount compared to the money you expect to make by using the computer?
The question is less whether the cost is lower, but whether it's lower enough to justify the extra work of upgrading.
To paraphrase a recent HN comment about the touchbar...
"I'm so glad this model has soldered storage"
"I would buy a dell xps but only if it had soldered storage"
things no one ever said. [1]
Soldering ram and storage on a laptop this big is an anti-feature, just a remnant of what Marco calls the "spiteful design" [2] of the last three generations. When a DIY upgrade to 128gb/16tb is affordable not a single person will be thankful they can't upgrade.
The point is I don't care. I'd rather have the specs of what I'll need five years from now right now and have a very comfortable machine than having a reasonable machine now, spending a day upgrading it later, having a then reasonable machine until it's retired.
The difference in cost is not that huge. I'm not talking about getting an 8-way Xeon Platinum box with 16 TB of RAM to put under my desk.
>have the specs of what I'll need five years from now right now
lol... like you can know this. My 2010 MBPro definitely needed 16GB ram in 2016, and thankfully I was able to put it in there even though apple never supported that much ram in that model.
Your entire perspective on this is entirely warped.
> whether it's lower enough to justify the extra work of upgrading.
Extra work? I upgraded the SSD in my 2015 MBP in 2 hours. And almost all of that was waiting for time machine to restore to the new disk. Is that worth it against the £2k+ I'd have to spend on a whole new MacBook? Of course it is.
I couldn't have afforded the bigger disk when I first purchased the laptop (if you have the ability to always be able to afford to top-of-the-line model, then that's a luxury that not everyone has). And this is Apple, who claim to be environmentally friendly.
Not everyone makes Bay Area money as an engineer especially in the hard sciences. Even though I’m one of the lucky ones, it’s annoying being forced to pay Apple prices for storage which is about double the market price eg Apple 8TB $2400 vs decent brand decent speed 8TB ~$1200-$1500. It is very hard to justify. This also doesn’t account for inflation and the general decrease in storage prices over time. Yes, the price drops are no longer as fast but in a year or two, we’re still seeing %25 price decreases; it’s still worth waiting for a lot of people including me. I feel the same way about Apple RAM. Soldering it down does nothing for me. it just helps Apple’s profits, since it seems they’re no longer able to substantially grow their user base. It feels like extortion and this isn’t helping growth long term even if they only see iOS as the future
But isn’t this exactly the point of the thunderbolt ports? You can buy your external SSDs and get as fast (even faster if you RAID them) access to your data.
I use this setup. It is annoying as hell when you have to constantly unmount drives. Using this setup for Apple Photos is even worse. In Catalina I’m unable to safely unmount unless I reboot (shutting down photos and waiting 30 min isn’t enough) Also this setup is not portable
Apple no longer just works anymore for me. It hasn’t for the past 2-3 years now.
It's also hard to imagine needing 8TB on-the-go capacity. That's certainly a niche use. I can imagine more cases where being tethered to a desk in order to get to the data would be not a big deal.
It's also worth considering that it extends the usable life of the machines. In some companies, older high end machines that are still in good condition are recycled and passed down to less demanding users - e.g. developer machines may get passed down to tech support.
For personal users, it means that passing it down to a family member may no longer be an option.
In addition, the lack of upgradability has tanked the resale value of lower end Macs - so lease companies aren't recovering as much value, and consumers machines are depreciating faster than Macs of old.
During the upgradability era, it was still cheaper to up your ram and storage yourself on day one than through apples gouging. You could even put in more ram than apple even offered.
If the disk is encrypted (and it should be) and the encryption key is stored in a secure enclave (like the T2 chip) or uses a machine specific key (UID), then having removable or swappable storage isn't helpful either.
In either case, you're not accessing any stored data from a broken Macbook.
Yet Apple still has no option to Time Machine backup to iCloud. I believe there are some third party ways to Time Machine backup to some cloud provider, but I don't see why Apple doesn't provide this as a feature out the box.
Because Time Machine does versioned delta backups and, as far as I know, no cloud provider offers the ability to store that much data unless their business model revolves around backup solutions.
But it’s just for Apple users? A terrabyte per user is surely within Apples reach? I can backup my phone to iCloud, but not my MacBook. It’s a glaring hole in their end-to-end experience.
Macbook drives typically can go to 1TB or more. You'd need much more storage than that to properly do a versioned backup solution that was online and that doesn't include any of the other uses of that storage.
This is kind of a cloistered view. Many people work in environments where bandwidth is hard to come by. And, of course, on-site backups are always risky.
The data migration connector will not help much in cases where your laptop and your local backup disk are destroyed.
My setup backs up to both local and networked disks (both disks listed in Time Machine, so backups alternate between them). The networked disk is actually a folder in a Debian VM that, from time to time, sends the backup to AWS.
A bit paranoid, but little added effort (figuring out and setting everything up took about an afternoon).
The paradoxical thing with recent Apple laptop keyboards is that their Magic Keyboard 2 is pretty darn good. I haven't bought any Apple products for more than a decade, but I keep recommending and buying their Magic Keyboard 2 for Linux workstations.
It has a very good mechanical feel, and it reduces latency perhaps due to shallow action point and/or firmware tweaks [1]. Also, it's really easy to source ANSI layouts outside the US.
I do in fact prefer it to my blue ALPS keyboard for long typing sessions.
Interestingly, the way you pair it with the Mac is to plug it in. When you unplug it is magically paired. It was embarrassing how long it took me to figure this out the first time.
I ran into this issue with 2015 MBP. I incorrectly assumed SSD where still removable and connectable to a USB adapter. When my display started failing I took it to Apple. They advised that data loss is possible. I had an old backup and figured I could just use the SSD via USB for more recent stuff.
Sure enough all data is lost. I ask them why they removed such a feature. They said they replaced it will a special port on logic board for accessing the SSD the same way. They tried that though and it failed. LOL at the nonsensical design decisions.
If Apple does a removable SSD again, it would go a long way to restoring faith in them.
Yep. That’s correct. Unless you have a working T2, any SSD you have is basically decorative. Which is good for data security but terrible for its integrity.
What's more likely--logic board failure, or the loss or theft of your entire laptop? If you're not backing up your data, your risk of data loss is unacceptably high. Worrying about whether the SSD is soldered to the logic board is like walking outside in the cold without a coat and worrying about whether you're wearing a long sleeve or short sleeve t-shirt.
Personally? I've never lost a laptop or had it stolen. However, I've had several laptops stop accepting power, including one of the three Apple laptops I used in a business setting. Lack of simple removable storage on the apple laptop made handling the power issue a lot more exciting; because I noticed it when I had a full battery, I was able to do a full backup in time.
Maybe not logic board failure specifically, but I see the possibility of my laptop dying as much more likely than it getting lost or stolen. And it's usually possible to extract a working SSD out of a dead laptop.
I suppose you could also repair the computer if the full logic board hasn't died, but that may not be worth it if the laptop was purchased a while ago, especially given how unrepairable these devices are. And depending on how Apple decides to go about the repair, they may end up not retaining your anyway, even if they could have.
Theft is a worthwhile risk profile to consider. People should do backups. Perhaps they should use encrypted volumes for sensitive information, too.
This does not change the fact that removable storage (or even storage that's accessible post board-failure) provides an additional margin of risk mitigation against hardware failure. AND a convenient way of making bootable backups you can swap in the event of storage failure rather than taking the entire machine out. AND upgradability.
What's the advantage of soldering the SSD to the board?
(And personally, I've experienced boot failure hardware issues on two laptops, theft zero times.)
> This does not change the fact that removable storage (or even storage that's accessible post board-failure) provides an additional margin of risk mitigation against hardware failure.
How much additional margin? If you have backups, you're covered against both failure modes; the only marginal benefit would be to recover the x hours of data since your last backup.
> How much additional margin? If you have backups, you're covered against both failure modes; the only marginal benefit would be to recover the x hours of data since your last backup.
I would wager that for 90% of people, that would be all of the data since initial power on.
Have owned laptops for about 20 years. Their internals take a beating inside of bags and such. Most of them I have owned had the power connector fail. One had a GPU become de-soldered in 2006. Zero of them have been lost or stolen.
> soldering it to the board AND making it so that there's no way to access it in the event of a logic board failure
I prefer this, considering how encryption works with the T2 chip. I'm probably in a minority of general users, but probably in the majority of HN users when I say that nothing on my laptop is important. I don't even have backups per-se. Code is in git and mirrored to multiple remote backups. Documents and similar exist solely in the cloud. If for some reason my laptop was stolen I want there to be an as close to 0% chance of an enemy retrieving data from my laptop as possible.
(Yes, I know SSD encryption exists, I think the T2 thing takes things a step further)
Not just the risk of data loss, but the inconvenience of restoring the machine is much higher. This means the only solution to restoring a modern Mac notebook is to replace the entire logic board - everything else may be functional except the storage, which is a consumable by most considerations, but now the entire board must be swapped. And if it's out of warranty, which let's face it, it's extremely likely to be, then you are completely and utterly stuck. You either have an enormous bill from Apple or an authorised repair shop (and Apple is notoriously cagey about allowing third parties access to their replacement parts) or you have to hunt down a machine for spares to do the swap yourself, and now with Apple's invasive security measures requiring communication with Apple's diagnostic tools to perform certain swaps, storage failure can render the machine entirely useless for months, if not permanently. Whereas if the disk was replaceable, just order one from the most convenient store, swap it in, restore from Time Machine.
The Function Key MBPs have a problem with their flash storage where they may randomly and unpredictably die, taking all the data with them. The fix is a firmware update, which also takes all the data with it. Fantastic, Apple, we bought six of those machines, and because the users are actively, y'know, using the damned things, it's not really convenient to tell them they'll be without their machine for a week while the service centre gets around to it, and then multiple hours of restoring their Time Machine backups. On the plus side, the SSDs in those machines are not soldered. Yes, they're proprietary, but it's something - if those machines suffer failure, I could grab an SSD on eBay and get them running again. It's almost worth the risk.
If you're dealing with Apple/an Authorized Service Provider, there is a replacement method available to them to get data off of a failing system. (Uses the USB-C ports and DFU mode).
Anecdotally, it does work on some boards that are otherwise hosed, but may be less frequently successful than with the prior data connector, as there's more pieces that do have to be still functional for it to work.
Interesting to note that the T2 chip in the new MBP supposedly contains the HD/Flash controller that used to be a separate IC -- according to the specs page. As it's a pretty fully featured SOC in its own right, that might make it easier to get to the HD in case of main CPU/RAM failures.
I bought a 1 TB Samsung T5 SSD for Time machine backups on a 512GB 15” MacBook Pro that I bought recently. With that and a Yubikey (with an off-site backup Yubikey of course), I’ve got everything I need if I ever have my laptop stolen or rendered inoperable. I’ve also got another older spinning rust external hard disk for backups, but that’s more of a backup of a backup thing.
Companies do not act according to their morals: they act according to their incentives. And there is an incentive to sell more iCloud storage if SSDs are hard to swap.
Except that when you don't have the disk space on your SSD to download the stuff from iCloud, the whole thing doesn't work. I think you've a conspiracy theory here.
When you don't, the local files that haven't been accessed in some time are deleted and only a local alias is kept. Next time you need it, it'll be downloaded.
> I'd concluded that Apple didn't really think much of laptops anymore, and had simply moved on to caring more about other form factors: it seemed a logical conclusion if one assumed that people at Apple were in fact competent.
Counterpoint, I love the new keyboards and hate using anything else. Amazing how far people go in assuming their opinion is correct, and then just keep going from there.
Maybe somebody at Apple got the idea that telling more users "Sorry, your data is gone forever, no way to get it back." increases user perception of device security (that it's hard to get your data off your device; if Apple can't do it then criminals can't either.)
I'd rather have FDE on a removable drive, but perhaps the typical user doesn't really have a clear mental picture of what's going on.
> "the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPs - the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys."
The "butterfly mechanism" keyboards are awful, unreliable, and get worse with time, so I'm very glad to see them go. Likewise, the return of the physical Escape key is very welcome.
But honestly, the design of the arrow keys has never bothered me in the slightest. If anything, the present configuration is slightly better because it's aesthetically cleaner and gives you a larger surface to hit the left and right arrows.
The "butterfly mechanism" keyboards never bothered me. I actually like the feel of my MBP's keyboard. Likewise the software Escape key never bothered me.
But honestly, the design of the arrow keys is super important. With the full-height left/right keys it's hard to quickly find the arrow keys by feel. The new (old) arrow key design is honestly what I'm most interested in with this computer after the 16" screen.
I am with you as far as the butterfly mechanism (aside from robustness issues), but for me the arrow keys are fine.
The bigger issue for me is lack of physical volume controls. I think it's extremely important for any device which produces sound to have a physical mute button. This would be less of an issue if the touch-bar were more reliable, but it often doesn't respond immediately, or else gets frozen and unresponsive, for instance with the volume slider up.
I know the subject has been beaten to death but still, as someone who was pleasantly surprised by the butterfly keyboard, I am living a nightmare with my just 2 month old MacBook Pro with keys starting to lose travel and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before bein completely stuck. To the point I’m now afraid to use the keyboard, feeling like everytime I use it without the external keyboard keys become more stuck. I’m so disappointed and was misguided on how the new generation had less problems.
The lady and right keys are easy. But up and down are difficult. With the half height left and right keys it’s easier to find the up and down keys. The down key is between left and right and the up key is an island (or a peninsula at least). Does that make sense?
I bought the last half height model when I upgraded my MBP 13”.
I can find the up and down easily because they are shaped differently. They are the only keys split horizontally, and the connecting edges are curved inward unlike the other keys. I find them easy to feel fore. I am glad the new keyboard solves this problem for others though, I don't think the full-height left/right keys are particularly better.
But when not looking at the keyboard, having full height left and right arrow keys makes them feel just like the nearby Option and ? keys. Having a distinct arrow-key-group shape makes them easier to locate by touch.
It's not always easy. If I need to quickly move to the arrow keys (I touch type, so no looking!), I have about 80-85% success finding the right key on the first press... with the inverted-T layout, that's about 99%.
There's something weird about the way my brain handles the key being the same size as the option key next to it, and the fact that the tops of all those keys are exactly the same.
If you touch type then learn the OS X shortcuts of CTRL-B, CTRL-F, CTRL-P, CTRL-N, far more efficient than moving your hand over to the arrow keys and works in (virtually) all places you are editing text.
I don't think I have anything special configured for my Mojave setup and these seem to work for me. In particular, I use Ctrl + Shift + F2 (on my external keyboard) to focus the menubar and then I can use Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f to navigate back (left) and forward (right) between menus, Enter to select a menu, and then Ctrl-n or Ctrl-p to navigate next/previous entries in the menu, with Enter again to select.
Interesting! I always use Cmd-Shift-/, which focuses the search field in the help menu, and Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f do not escape from there.
But focusing the menu bar with Ctrl-F2 does indeed allow me to use Ctrl-f and Ctrl-b. And after hitting Return to open a menu, I can use Ctrl-n and Ctrl-p to navigate down and up.
Interesting.
I will have to try more, but I still think that there are places in macOS where Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f do not work, and I have to use the arrow keys, instead.
When you're searching for the arrow keys, the break is one thin line only in the middle of one key. When the keys are half height, there is are two large gaps to find. The difference is a few mm vs almost a cm and 3 targets to find vs one.
I hate the full-size left and right arrow keys because it means I can't easily use my sense of touch to find the arrow keys. I mistype them all the time now, even after months of use. That was never a problem with the previous inverted-T design.
Seconded. I frequently mistype L/R as up/down, and this is infuriating when striking 'command' + arrow to go to the beginning/end of the line (an extremely common op for me), and instead going to the top/bottom of the file, completely losing my place.
(Of course that particular problem would be less of an issue if the keyboard had home/end/pgUp/pgDn, which I'm still sore about, years after they got rid of them).
Arrow keys are so important I might almost want them all full size, in a "+" configuration.
I wonder -- is this for a 13" or 15" laptop? I'm curious because after this thread I was checking on how I tend to find the arrow keys. I have a 13" model and finding the edge of the computer itself seems to help me find the appropriate keys.
Many PC laptop keyboards have full-size keys for all four arrows. Tiny keys for a feature I use so frequently is user-hostile, whether it's 2 or 4 of them.
It’s not about the size for me. Sure the full height inverted T is easy to use. The half height inverted T also works. But the one that isn’t inverted T is difficult.
They also usually have an awful-looking extra row just for the arrow keys. And FWIW, I find that the inverted-T arrangement is even easier to quickly find by touch than full-height arrow keys.
are you a touch typist? because lifting your hand, and repositioning it onto a grid of undifferentiated keys is MUCH harder when you can't feel the shape of the inverted T and can't see it (because you're not looking at the keyboard or because you're visually impaired).
The escape key will be especially welcome by me, as I found the touchbar exceptionally hard to deal with, and I would often have to hit it three or four times to get vim to exit insert mode. I actually didn't have much trouble with the arrow keys, despite all the negative feedback I saw for them online.
Hopefully this trend continues and they can iterate on this model even further.
Right? The solution is 'make the fuckin keyboard work'. These are workarounds.
I have twenty... seven, Jesus. Twenty seven years of muscle memory with VI. The only keyboard I can't 'vote with my feet' on is the built-in one on my laptop. As a result I'm hardly ever using my laptop untethered now. I don't think I've ever owned a keyboard I've typed less on than the touchbar macbook. Which means I'm barely using them as laptops, which is a little depressing.
Yep - I have mine set to be control if pressed with other keys, and escape if pressed alone. Works for everything except if I'm playing a videogame that uses ctrl to crouch.
Other people argue that all real vimmers use ctrl-[ instead of escape.
Edit: This is on a 2015 macbook pro, that still has the physical function keys. I almost never use the physical escape key, just capslock instead.
Install Karabiner-Elements. Go to the "complex modifications" tab. Add "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone".
Personally I find a classic Unix layout to work best for me. I’ve mapped the caps lock key to CTRL. I use that far more than I ever use caps, it feels quite natural to me after about a week or two of adjustment.
In addition to this you can do something like mapping Shift+Caps Lock to be an actual Caps Lock toggle. Now you get 3 buttons for one and it works amazingly well.
>The oversized caps lock key on keyboards is an inexplicably bad UI choice anyway.
It's probably largely a relic from typewriters when it was originally something of a mechanical necessity and then made more sense than today in the context of filling out forms etc.
I used to have really strong opinions about keyboards. I even still have a Northgate keyboard which was an "improved" version of the original IBM keyboard. (Which largely mirrored the Selectric.)
But TBH, I use so many different systems these days that I pretty much just accept that keyboard layouts and keyboard feel are going to differ from machine to machine and there's no point fussing about it.
I haven't used a laptop, desktop, or other computer (windows/mac/Linux) in the last 15 years in which I didn't immediately configure Caps-Lock to be control within 5-minutes of setting up the system. So, to some degree - it's always been control for me.
FWIW, early PC keyboard layouts had the Control key next to the "A", where God intended it to be, too. (Don't have the link handy, but there was a story posted here on HN in the past week or so about the history of the PC keyboard that showed this...)
True, and as a longtime fan of the IBM Model 'M' that had that configuration and was mechanical and built to last with buckling springs, I'm glad I can get one of these:
That's a bit of a pain if you put that into muscle memory and use other Vi interface software that can't be remapped.
Personally I'm in the Caps to Ctrl and use Ctrl-[ for escape camp. Works in my shell, REPLs and in my database clients and anywhere else with a readline interface that isn't Vim.
Even with that I still want a physical escape key.
jk is a pretty rare combo to begin with, but when you do need it, just hitting j, and pausing for a second takes that input singularly, then you can type k safely. Slightly sub optimal, yes. But the benefits outweigh the negatives for me.
I was listening to the Upgrade podcast (from relayfm), the episode that was just released includes an interview with someone from Apple (I think she's the PM for the MBP?)
She specifically mentioned vim users as one of the reasons for bringing back the escape key
Not only is [ always in the same spot, but you don't have to move your fingers off the normal keys or stretch. I was fortunate that a friend told me about that early on, otherwise I couldn't have handled VI, the stretching is so inconvenient (especially so on those old IBM PS/2 keyboards with cubic keys).
Only if it's the same keyboard layout. For instance, on the US layout, [ is immediately to the right of P, while on the ABNT-2 layout, it's two keys to the right of P. Meanwhile, ESC is on the same place (top left of the keyboard) in both.
Personally an Emacs user---I use the esc key loads too. Best thing I ever did was install Karabiner to remap capslock to esc when tapped, and to ctrl when held down. (One meta key to rule them all!) Have you tried anything like that? Just curious.
I remapped `jj` to escape (shortly before the touchbar was announced), because I disliked either having to move my hand or use both hands to get out of insert mode.
For cruising around my code the advantage is that jk/kj doesn't do anything in normal mode (cruising mode, haha). So I can just start mashing jk in a terminal window that I don't know what mode I left vim in.
The biggest downside to jk/kj mapping is that words that end with k are somewhat common. So a few times a week I will type something like "splunk" and want to exit insert mode immediately so I mash jk/kj after the k. 50% of the time the j is first so I end up with "splun" (kj is <esc>) (k moves up since we're in normal mode now).
> The biggest downside to jk/kj mapping is that words that end with k are somewhat common. So a few times a week I will type something like "splunk" and want to exit insert mode immediately so I mash jk/kj after the k. 50% of the time the j is first so I end up with "splun" (kj is <esc>) (k moves up since we're in normal mode now).
This is why I use `jj` instead of `jk`/`kj` -- as a native English speaker in a job where everyone primarily speaks English, there are few cases where I'd be writing code with a `jj` naturally in a string.
Very rarely. The only place I notice a difference is if the last letter I type is a j, the cursor 'hesitates' for a moment because Vim is watching for a k.
The advantage I found of jk over jj is that, in normal mode, jk is a no-op, so if I hit jk as Escape when I was already in normal mode, it doesn't matter.
The only problem is that when I'm editing text out of Vim, I end up with the occasional jk at the end of my typing. That almost happened while writing this comment.
is it? I have ctrl mapped to caps-lock. so for me it's essentially home-row. left pinkie+right pinkie going almost nowhere. reaching for esc is decidedly not home-row.
The tough thing about the touch bar is how often it freezes. It's hard to get used to it when all that is noticeable is the few times a week it does it.
It's deeper than that. Control-[ is the same keycode as escape. [ is the next character after Z in ASCII, and Control-[ is the next character after Control-Z. It's not a mapping, they are one and the same.
I disagree. If you are a even modestly decent programmer you know to configure autoindentation so that you never need the tab key for anything. I cannot imagine a scenario where I would need the tab key in insert mode (except a very fringe case where I need to enter a tab character in a literal string and for some reason there are no escapes like \t. But then again you can still ^V^I)
can you point to a minimal example where vanilla vim autoindent cannot cope with python code editing? I never found any situation where I had to press the tab key
Have you ever refactored anything? Especially in Python, moving a line into a control block requires using the tab key. If you don't have to press the tab key either you're such a god programmer that you have never made a mistake or refactored anything you've ever written, or you're trolling.
When it comes to function keys, you either use them lots or rarely and for the former, yes - a physical key is prefered by far. However I see the advantages in other situations with the touchbar, however it would be great if the users had a choice. How hard would it be to have the touchbar in a modular design form that was user changeable and they could fit a row of keys instead?
However, there is always the option of an external keyboard. But then you end up carrying even more peripherals that you end up with a really thin light laptop and a second bag with all the adapters to enable to you to use the laptop in the way you want. For some it does feel like you got sold an electric sports car, yet end up having to tow a caravan about to carry all the spare batteries and other accessories you had in your previous car.
But certainly an opportunity to embrace modular design and allow the end user to customize in a way that has benefits and would win over pundits.
We have a modular laptop in our office-- it's a Dell Precision, and practically everything in the machine's serviceable and replaceable (complete with a detailed service manual, provided by Dell). Replaceable, externally accessible disk drives, replaceable RAM, replaceable modular keyboard, even (IIRC) a socketed processor.
The catch is that all that modularity makes the thing massive-- the thing's a good 2-3 inches thick (with lid closed) and weighs nearly 8 pounds. It looks like what you'd get if you took a '90s-era laptop chassis, stretched it to modern screen proportions, and stuck modern innards inside. It's just not practical unless it's going to spend all its time sitting on a desk, and that begs the question of why you wouldn't just buy a desktop in the first place.
On the other side, I have a Thinkpad T470s which has all the ports I could have asked for, a fantastic keyboard and replaceable SSD and expandable RAM but weighs less than a 13" Macbook Pro.
Thinkpads are nice, but that device has a much worse screen, worse processor (significantly older, but... Intel), lower max ram, lower max storage, and (for most people) worse trackpad.
if you comparing to this laptop, you should be comparing the x1 extreme gen 2... oled screen, equiv processor, same ram, lower storage (8tb == another laptop on apple upgrade pricing), trackpoint/nipple v trackpad. at that point your comparing effectively os (win/linux v OS X), on hardware pricing the Thinkpad is quite competitive and cheaper. bonus nvidia for folks that want to do ml, vs amd graphics, which afaics have pretty poor support in any major ml framework.. to which the answer is cloud.. at which point Chromebook ftw.
Except I have set up 100 of those X1 ThinkPads, and I can tell you that the display, in addition to being the stupid too-wide PC aspect ratio, isn't close in quality to what you get with a MB Pro. And as previously mentioned, the trackpad isn't close to Apple's all-glass trackpads, either. And the audio is laughable. And the case isn't as sturdy. And it doesn't have 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports, of course (although some prefer the selection of ports that Lenovo provides).
again its not a hw comparison per se, its a price (1-2k discount on hw) vs os sw. re sturdy its mil spec (810g), re ports its 2 usb-c/tbird plus no dongles (cause you have all the ports, hdmi, usb 3.1a x2, ethernet, sd). agreed re trackpad, but Thinkpad users I've noticed (linux mostly) tend towards the trackpoint/nipple to the point of disabling trackpad.
all that said I'm probably getting the MacBook due to apps, but the walled garden on graphics and ml as well as reasonable linux support gives me pause.
random aside, what did Nvidia do that apple won't talk to them..
> Just a little side note to correct your facts: no, the x2 extreme gen2 does not have ethernet.
Incorrect - it does not have a RJ45 connector, but it does have Ethernet, it just requires a dongle which may or may not come with the machine depending on the region its purchased in.
The benefit of the on board Ethernet is the fact you can PXE boot over it and other enterprise management benefits you don't get with a USB Ethernet adapter.
Heck, I wonder why they don't have BOTH function keys AND a touch bar. It looks like they could shrink the oversized touchpad slightly to recover enough space. Is it because the cost would be too high? Is it because it would ruin their design? Or is there some other reason?
I would love this. I have the touch bar set to show my dock at all times which just clicks for me. I'd love to still have function keys for IDE shortcuts in this configuration.
About the touchbar, I don't like it, for me it's not what the mediocre features it brought somewhat irrelevant most time, probably it can be a useful feature if it was designed better.
By nature, touchbar is a partial display and partial input device, blend it in with keyboard(a purely input) on the same flat surface angle, doesn't feel right. Currently, the only time I look at touchbar is when I need to click on touchbar, 50% of functionality just wasted in this sense.
If Apple kept the hinge design in pre butterfly keyboard macbook pro, that would be good place for touchbar. The location is more close to display, touchbar can act properly as a small assist display, also kept the keyboard part a pure mechanical input. The 45 degree elevation angle is also nicer.
If you still have pre butterfly retina macbook pro, just touch that hinge part, you may like what I said.
I like the Touch Bar a lot. Not having esc was the only gripe I had with it but I personally much prefer the multifunctional bar over some static f keys
I'm curious, do you usually blind type? If so, what advantage does it bring to you to look down on your keys? Also, in an optimal seating position (elbows at 90 degrees), do your fingers obscure the visibility of the touch bar?
I do blind type but I love the Touch Bar. There are many CAD programs that I use approximately monthly and I can never remember which F keys does what exactly. In my office I have cheat sheets on the wall but when out of office having icons makes using those applications much better.
I have my touchbar display the time, battery percentage and current song, so when I look down it's mostly to look at these. I also have a script that displays the last line of a particular file, so if I pipe a script's output in there I can look at its progress. I can swipe anywhere with two fingers to change the volume, three fingers is ctrl+tab (that one isn't useful, I need to figure out a better use), four fingers is brightness. I like it better than the F keys.
I did have to remap Caps Lock to ESC, because ESC on the touchbar was nigh unusable.
BetterTouchTool. It's not free, but it's cheap enough, and it lets you do a lot of cool things (including the multi finger swiping which you can assign to anything you want). You can write AppleScript routines and assign them to buttons, or have them run every n milliseconds to display something, which is what I did for the last line of the file thing.
Not parent, but I'm also a user that likes the Touch Bar (see comment history).
To answer,
> Do you usually blind type?
Yes.
> If so, what advantage does it bring to you to look down on your keys?
For simple actions (like opening a new tab) there is no need to look down on keys. IMO this is little Apple's fault, whenever I use a tabbable & Touch Bar-usable application I set the new tab button on the right. I usually place the trash button (on Finder, Mail and some other apps) on the middle of the Touch Bar.
For some more complex actions (like selecting an emoji/suggestion, or moving between photos, etc...) it's just as fast/faster to glance over and move your fingers instead of using shortcuts/trackpad.
> Also, in an optimal seating position (elbows at 90 degrees)
I'm not sure if I'm in optimal seating position, but...
(If you're meaning if my elbows are on the same height of the display yes)
> do your fingers obscure the visibility of the touch bar?
No, not at all. I can clearly see the Touch Bar whether my fingers are.
No, but I frequently find it easier to reach the Touch Bar (where only one finger needs to move) than to press Cmd-T (where two fingers need to move). I also use Cmd-T a lot too! :-)
What are you guys doing that you touch type using FN keys? Touchbar is far better — you can’t scrub audio or video. You can adjust things with more granularity with sliders. It’s contextual.
I don’t remember ever using a hardware F6 or F4 key in my life, but the touchbar I use all the time.
Lots of software uses Fn key bindings by default. IntelliJ & mc come to mind first, but there are many others. Sometimes they can be remapped, but given the number of key bindings required by pro software, replacing roughly 1/5 of the keys with a silly little nontactile screen is a nonstarter for me. I never look at the keyboard (that's what the real screen is for). Indeed this was the precipitating factor driving me away from the Apple 'ecosystem' in 2018.
You can easily reconfigure keyboard shortcuts in most IDEs. The function key row was never ergonomically placed to begin with. My current keyboard doesn't have one either (ErgoDox).
These actions are also not that important to be able to hit very quickly. Back when I did use function keys, I usually had to look anyway, because they're so far away from home row, and the time between using them is usually quite long. And even though I knew the function keys purpose in an IDE, I would never know them in any other apps, leaving that row useless when not programming. (Well, I use them for volume and brightness control, but again.. it's not a muscle memory action anyway)
I do think fundamentally speaking the Touchbar is the right idea. It's not better for everyone, obviously. But it's probably a bit better for most people. I'm just not convinced it's a big enough improvement to make the added cost worth it. It probably still ends up being mostly unused, which is worse when it's an expensive touch display instead of extra keys.
Personally I'd drop the whole row, maybe but the speakers up there instead, and make the keyboard wider.. put in keys between the two halfs of the keyboard like TypeMatrix or ErgoDox.. but that's never gonna happen
I feel the same. The stubbornness of Apple that was so frustrating is a bit more flexible now, paying attention to "subtle" feedback like the arrow key's sizes.
It may be "flexible" or their hand was forced. I know, personally, at least half a dozen people who have either delayed a Macbook purchased or outright moved to PC alternatives (e.g. XPS 13, Surface Laptop) because of the poor keyboard (both reliability and touchbar).
Now six people isn't statistically significant, but if that trend mirrors a wider one it could be costing Apple a measurable amount. The real question is will this be enough to satisfy e.g. programmers that actually want to bind the F keys to build/clean/run/step over/etc?
I've just ordered my first Windows laptop ever, literally. Dell XPS 13 (6 core model). I've been using Macbook Pros solely since the original Aluminium model when Apple moved to Intel processors. Apple's apparent hubris and inability to go back on their design decisions (Touch Bar...) has just pushed me over the edge.
I've been using my mid 2015 Macbook Pro and hopefully waiting for them to release a new MBP ideally without the touch or move the trackpad down/make it smaller, and have the Touchbar PLUS physical function keys (which I use for programming).
So yeah... "Pro" users at least in my case (and some friends) are moving away from Apple.
Go back to what? They already haven't purchased a new Macbook in five or more years, that money is already lost to Apple. All Apple can do is try to get them for their next upgrade.
It takes a long time to get a design through the point of manufacture... especially at that scale. And even before that happens, an organization needs to admit that it has to happen in the first place. For everybody saying the keyboard sucked and needed improvement, there were at least a few people within Apple that had staked something on the design as it was.
Not bad... as saagarjha says, you can slide on either that key or the brightness key. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for me because I've set the touchbar to default to F-keys for the sake of consistency with the other keyboards I use. For whatever reason, this means that the slide-on-button trick does not work.
For me the physical keys are better. With the touch bar, I have to look down to change the volume, and it occasionally hangs with the volume slider visible, but not actually responding to input. That's usually when I really want to turn down the volume quickly, and instead my laptop is blasting for another second while I have to adjust the volume with the mouse.
Also I really would like a physical mute button. It's often very valuable to be able to mute in a hurry.
The thing is, you can't use the touch bar without looking at it whereas I was constantly blind typing function keys. I think Apple have a different understand of "Pro" than I do.
Apple can innovate as much as they wish. For example put the touchbar above the keyboard or below the LCD. Nobody is complaining about the TouchID on the power button for example, since that maintains its core purpose.
People are complaining because 30+ year old keys they rely on to do their professional work were removed to add arguably a gimmick with a worse user experience/no touch feedback.
Just like people complained when they dropped floppy and and PS/2 for CDs and USB? Or when they introduced a smartphone with no physical keyboard?
Anecdotes don't make it fact.
You can see the difference in reactions to know that it wasn't wanted or desired by the target market. Its not anecdotes anymore, its data which we've had 3 years to accumulate.
Oh, don't underestimate the longevity of the no-floppy and especially the no-ethernet complainers. Just as one data point: there are non-ironic gripes about those decisions in this very thread.
I don't think there is a difference in reactions. A vocal minority complain every time Apple changes anything. Lots of people complained about the chiclet keyboard when the 2008 Macbook Pro came out. And shipping a computer without a floppy drive or a PS/2 port seemed crazy to many people at the time.
Change for the sake of change isn't innovation, it's a waste of time.
Spending hours fiddling with a dysfunctional keyboard that breaks after a week of normal use or has a gimmicky non-standard layout is not how I want to spend my finite time and mental energy.
Worst is certainly removal of 32-bit support. I'll personally never be using anything past Mojave. It would literally cost me from purchased software that is now incompatible and will not be updated.
To say Apple has lost its way would be an understatement. Apple is actively detrimenting those who have stayed in its ecosystem for decades. As a professional audio engineer, I refuse to lose several of my plugins to a quote-unquote 'upgrade.'
If I lose access to my software, you are not 'upgrading' my OS, you are removing access to what worked perfectly before.
I also refuse to lose Adobe CS6, by which I've paid a full license for. No, I have no interest in updates. I had no interest in updates post-CS3, to be honest.
There is no benefit to the lack of 32-bit support that could be worth losing it. If they did this because they're moving to ARM, fuck them. Don't let your behind the scenes process fuck with my day-to-day ability to work.
I'm literally going to have to leave behind my career as an iOS developer - I refuse by principle to purchase new Apple products ('vote with your money') - and I certainly refuse to accept an 'upgrade' that annihilates the usability of some of my most important software, in the name of...what? What possible benefit does removing 32-bit support lend to the customer? None. It's literally just a fuck you to me for supporting them for years. What a damn shame.
> To say Apple has lost its way would be an understatement. Apple is actively detrimenting those who have stayed in its ecosystem for decades.
Like they did with the transition from SCSI/ADB to USB, or the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, or the transition from PPC to Intel, or the transition from 30 pin to lightning, or...
Apple may or may not have lost its way, but dropping support for old software/hardware is something they've been doing consistently for a long time. There's nothing new about it.
I was there for most of that, but loosing 32-bit feels different to me. For the physical peripherals, I could still use them on old hardware. Forcing me to remain on an old OS is far more severe and I too (and everyone in my extended family) ran into this. In particular, my relatives depend on the old Microsoft office packages they bought eons ago. "Fixing" the problem Apple gifted us means buying and learning new software (and AFAICT, you can't even buy Office anymore, only rent it).
This is extremely disappointing and I'm not even sure what to do next time their hardware dies (which has happened multiple times).
It’s not so different from 10.7 dropping Rosetta, which led to a similar scenario where upgrading your OS meant a bunch of old PPC apps could no longer run.
Again I’m not defending Apple, just pointing out that all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again with Apple.
If you value compatibility with old binaries highly, Windows is a much better platform for that than macOS.
There was a reason for that - a benefit for users - there was a platform change, whose speed increases made an actual legit argument for the platform change.
There is no benefit to removal of 32-bit apps. There is no purpose, from the user's end, other than fucking them over, that I can see.
There's not even any reason given.
Rumours of an ARM platform change do not an ARM platform change make. Catalina is worthless and detrimental to me as an upgrade.
I'm not sure what this "new training" is, I've never had any training with Office and have been using it in most of its variations since it was first released.
Are you 75+? My parents are. Move an icon an they get confused (I say that without judgement - they have not like grown up with an intuitive for software)
The difference with 32 bit software is that there's nothing forcing them to do it. With something like a port, there are physical limitations to the device, so abandoning older technologies at least gets you something in terms of form factor.
With 32 bit support, these exact same CPUs could easily still run 32 bit software as they have for years. The tradeoff I guess is that it makes the OS a bit easier to support from Apple's point of view. The advantage to the user is not clear.
I develop iOS software as a hobby and a job. In order to support the newest iOS versions - Apple will support one major OS version behind, but what happens when 10.17 hits?
> ... the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.
Seems that if you scream hard enough AAPL listens:
> What Apple emphasized is simply that they listened to the complaints from professional MacBook users. They recognized how important the Escape key is to developers — they even mentioned Vim by name during a developer tool demo.
What I really don’t get is the Touch Bar could just sit in between the number keys and function keys. Even on 13” models there is space for both and a giant touch pad.
They have been forced to add it to just about every model to keep people from downgrading to avoid the thing. Which ok saved me money, but I would expect this to get the point across.
I'd want the touch bar to sit on top of the function keys, but I agree.
I also would be much happier if it was just easier to turn it off or if it at least made each touch action take 200ms or so so that I don't accidentally hit it all the time.
> perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base
What makes you think they stopped? You know it takes a couple years to design and ship hardware at this level (as well as to design the production lines to be able to build a few million more copies), yes?
It’s not like a web app where they can change, test, PR, and deploy in a few days or weeks or months. There is a lot of preproduction work that goes into building the kind of objects Apple is now famous for and are almost taken for granted.
If you look closely, not only is there a physical escape key, there's a physical fingerprint key, and the touch bar is also elevated. You still might not to be able to use the touch bar without looking at it, but at least you can find it without looking at it.
I was half expecting them to use haptics on the touch bar. Still no luck there.
When the touchbar first came out, I thought we'd see haptics in the second iteration. It seems so obvious that pressure-sensitivity and haptics could mitigate a lot of the weaknesses of the touchbar.
What I really miss is upgradeable RAM and SSD. Still using a 2010 MBP because I was able to upgrade it; that's no longer possible.
I’m sure someone has suggested this at some point but why not physical keys with an lcd underneath each key? This would allow those keys to be fully customizable and be worthy of the “Pro” designation.
Because it’s expensive, bulky, and unnecessary. Something like this already exists: the Optimus Maximus keyboard. And while it’s a cool concept, it’s not without its rough edges. [1]
Wasn't the Maximus made with tech that is now 10 years old? I can imagine that costs have decreased by at least an order of magnitude by now, now that oled is much more mainstream.
I wanted one of these when I first spotted it, but in hindsight it would be too dependent on software to work and I'd probably end up spending ages setting it up when the right thing to do would be to get blank key caps.
I'm sure there's a prototype of this sitting around somewhere in Apple headquarters, either waiting for some patent to expire, or some key component to become cheap/thin/reliable enough.
The touchbar has a lot of uses for many people. Developers may not see that much benefit from it (unless they use a native IDE or text editor), but for people who use native apps, the touchbar can be really useful.
Getting a physical escape key back and going with a more reliable keyboard design are big wins.
I don't get why they couldn't fit both a touch bar and the function keys on a 16 inch laptop. Other vendors manage to put a numpad on their notebooks of similar sizes.
Who cares about Watt-hours? What matters is how long it runs - I'd be perfectly happy with a laptop that runs a month on a 1.5 Watt-hour AAA battery. Kinda like Amps for vacuum cleaners, this can actually be a measure of INefficiency.
Escape key issue was so bad that a lot of my devs mapped caps lock to the escape key. Butterfly keyboard also has some weird workarounds with people carrying around mechanical keyboard.
To be fair, mapping caps to escape has been a thing for years and years. I started doing that once I learned vim about five years back, when I still had an older MacBook Air with a physical escape key.
Forget being forced to use it, I'd like to not be forced to pay for it. How much does the price of the MBP go up because of all of the parts required for the touch bar?
Sure, but besides a very low number of comments on HN I've never seen anyone who really appreciated the TouchBar (and the increased price it causes). Say Apple would offer a model with and without TouchBar and the TouchBar model would cost $400 more, how many people would be willing to pay that? I bet it would be less than 5%, maybe even less than 1%.
C-[ is the same thing in Unix. I haven't tried it on a Mac though. But if you're using vim (mostly where I hear this complaint) use C-[ (actually just use it in vim anyways because who wants to lift their hand up to do such a common movement?)
I prefer mapping caps to Ctrl over escape because it leaves me with loads of other useful shortcuts in both the terminal and Vim.
e.g. Ctrl-o to pop out of insert mode for 1 command only.
or
ctrl-w: delete the last word.
ctrl-u: delete to the beginning of the line.
ctrl-d or ctrl-t: change indent level.
ctrl-h: backspace without leaving the home row.
ctrl-m: without leaving the home row.
There's loads more that are useful in Vim. Of course you've still got the built in Ctrl keys but having ctrl in place of caps is really ergonomic for me.
I just tried that and that is super uncomfortable to me. Having all my fingers on the home row. My pinkies are much shorter than my index, middle, and ring, so it is pretty easy to hit ctrl with my pinky. I think your suggestion might be better if all your fingers are very similar in length, but I don't know a person like that.
I do use most of those ctrl commands btw. I didn't know about ctrl-o, so thanks for that!
Interesting. Because resting my left hand on the keyboard my pinky is on shift, ring on a, middle on e, index on f.
I also use tmux. I do a remapping to ctrl-s because I use ctrl-a (and ctrl-e) all the time to go to the beginning and end of lines. And let's be real, the normal behavior of ctrl-s (suspending) is not something I'm ever going to use on purpose.
But also I'm not using a mac.
> I hate having to press both keys with one hand for Ctrl key combos (ctrl-a being the only exception).
Do you not use panes? In vim? Because I use those quite a lot.
They even made it super simple to remap caps-lock to escape in OSX Sierra (the release of which, probably coincided with the release of the first Touch Bar MacBook Pro). You can do it from System Preferences, without any extra software like Karabiner. Although, I still use Karabiner Elements for some more complex keyboard remapping.
I don't understand this binding (it is a common one). I don't want a 50/50 shot of having caps lock on (or my light indicator). I'm also a fan of keeping things as vanilla as possible (I do use plenty of plugins and stuff, but almost every problem you have vim solves natively)
> I don't want a 50/50 shot of having caps lock on (or my light indicator).
What? Have you tried this feature at all? If you map Esc to Caps Lock in Mac OS, the light indicator never turns on, and you don't enable caps lock when you press that key.
Or do you mean that this is what'll happen if you use a different computer? In my experience that's not a problem at all. Muscle-memory can be made context sensitive. I use two different keyboard layouts (dvorak and qwerty), two different key arrangements (staggered on my laptop, grid on ErgoDox), Esc mapped to Caps-Lock on my home laptop, completely different key mappings on my ErgoDox at work, and still I have very little trouble using a Qwerty keyboard with standard mapping if a use a different laptop. I'm probably a bit slower, but that's not really a problem if it's a computer I don't use that often.
I mean I use ctrl-w all the time in vim (delete word back while in insert or moving panes. Basically I'm hitting ctrl ALL the time). I also frequently hit it when I'm writing a HN comment or something. Though this actually isn't a problem because sometimes I just shouldn't be replying.
Edit: I do notice that pretty much everyone that does the caps remap is using OSX. Is this because most people are using macs or just because macs have different behavior? Either way, I'd rather use a vanilla command than a remap if efforts are basically the same (my pinky rests on shift anyways and it is easy to contract my finger. I also use ctrl-backspace when typing in HN and other forms).
I do not understand this at all as the break in between the up/down arrow keys is far more apparent to touch than even the bump on the F key that's supposed to allow you to blindly return to the home keys. If that little bump works, how can a full break not be working for you?
That depends on which key you're referring to. On the Macbook, the left arrow key is right next to the up/down half-keys. If you touch to the right and you're hitting another full key, you're not at the arrow key.
Again, I don't understand how the bump on the F key works but somehow the giant dip in between the two up/down keys is the problem...?
The issue I have is that I will rest my index finger on the Option key instead of the left arrow key because they feel the same. The dip is fine for the up/down keys, but I can't "rest" my index and ring fingers on the arrow keys anymore.
They're hard to locate by touch. Seems counter-intuitive, maybe, but I'm sure I won't be alone in attesting from experience that it does make a difference.
I wonder if the screen reflective coating is better too. AFAIK, since introduction of retina screens of MacBooks (2012) it's a matter of time that the reflective coating will start to peel off and will leave ugly blotches.
I guess, though anyone I knew who used retina macbooks had issue with screen peeling off within 1-3 years of use.
There was a replacement program for a bit, so there was a possibility to change the screen, though after some time changed screens are peeling off too.
I know even an anecdote where almost brand new 2016 rmbp after working outside, had a spots of peeled off coating, because apparently light dust have scratched it. Thankfully Apple replaced the screen.
I wonder if it has any correlation with people who close the lid but continue running heavy workloads on their machine. The extra heat could possibly be a cause for delamination.
Nah, I see it on student laptops all the time (who aren't running anything with the lid off).
Also not correlated to putting pressure on the lid with it closed, I've lugged mine around in a backpack full of stuff for years and have no peeling issues.
Does anyone else remember when the macbooks came with two options for screen coating? The original anti-glare coating cost a few nits of brightness and some people had Feelings about this. I can't even recall now when they got rid of the option. Probably when the backlight got more powerful?
You're correct the 2012 model was when they stopped offering the Anti-glare screen - it was 1680x1050(if i recall?) compared to the default glossy screen's 1440x900, i recall there also being a 1680x1050 glossy display upgrade available too, at a glance the two could be distinguished by the aluminium bezel on the anti-glare display.
I picked up a grey market anti-glare display assembly (upper clamshell) for my 2011 model back in 2012 or so and it dutifully served another few years.
I predict that from now on the touch bar will slowly become smaller and smaller until it disappears completely. It would have been better if they'd gotten rid of it entirely in one iteration though.
Yeah me too, but I don't like accidentally touching something and then being out of context. Also happens with the gigantic track pad. It's really annoying.
>The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute
If the Touch Bar had been introduced above physical function keys, we'd consider it yet another Apple UI breakthrough, and other companies would imitate it the way every notebook today looks like the 2001 TiBook.
>perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team's desires
I don't think the fact that Jony Ive left the company a few months ago is a coincidence. Basically, Apple finally got notebook keyboards right ... after three years of worldwide embarrassment, and the departure of the company's chief designer!
I must be missing something out, but what's wrong with left and right arrow keys? I have 2018 15'' mbp and they are just fine. Or you mean up and down arrows?
coming from ubuntu before mbp(2013)
I anyways found the escape key to inconsistent to appreciate. depending on your state of full screen and what program you are in it will give you different response (exit full screen vs in program functionality) hence tried to disincorporate usage of escapekey from my muscle memory alltogether.
The touch pad is ridiculously huge now, going by my greasy finger smears I maybe use only 50% of the total area. They could easy sacrifice some of that real estate to put the touchbar as row above the function keys and feature a full size set of offset arrow keys.
Agree, I often end up brushing the touch pad accidentally with the heel of my hand while typing, and inadvertently moving the cursor somewhere up the page. Maybe someone else can weigh in on any advantages to having such a large touch pad.
You can drag further with it or use it at a higher sensitivity and drag as much as you used to. There are also more places you can start dragging so it’s more likely you will naturally touch your finger down and start dragging.
I almost never use the function keys and I am a programmer. They made the right call on that one. Just because you use an editor that makes use of rarely used keys doesn’t mean that they are a universal truth.
Do you debug and use the keys to control it? This is my biggest gripe, since most IDEs (and browsers if web dev) map debugging to the Fn keys, so I end up using them a LOT. I hate clicking the debugging icons, particularly since I tend to use a few different editors/browsers and they are all in different spots.
First thing that comes to mind when mentioning the Fn keys is debugging, however I always found that is feels unintuitive to use and would be eager to change my habits to learn more intuitive shortcuts.
those were not the worst things. a keyboard that breaks a week after you get it was the worst thing. the second worse thing is this redefinition of a computer into a big ipad. where does my sd card go? i cant plugin to the hdmi tv at a friends or a board room? why does it have a headphone jack? if we dont need it on our phone why do we need it on a laptop (lol)? oh yeah because inch by inch... apple is the epitome of capitalism, good and bad, and lately more bad than good.
I have to say that I agree with the parent post. I specifically haven't upgraded because:
1. no hdmi
2. no sd
3. escape key
4. keyboard
5. magsafe
6. usb a
I admit that maybe #6 is a little Luddite-like but there will be too many leads around which are usb-a which I'll need to use an adapter on. Right now, this is genuinely annoying that I need to carry around all these adapters which all cost quite a lot each.
Talking to one of my colleagues who has one of the 13" macbooks. He said that you just changed to be more careful about the lack of magsafe. Maybe I'll learn?
For HDMI. This is dumb for everyone who will ever have to do a presentation.
For SD. Tre-annoying, since my camera is usb-a. So I have to be $30 for an sd card reader. Yet another adapter.
Maybe someone should do some photos of a laptop with all the leads hanging off?! Then the designers might appreciate that it looks crap and do something about it....
Conclusion: you buy the MacBook Pro with max memory; upgrade the graphics card (why not... it isn't that much); up the disk size; buy a usb c adapter; buy a hdmi adapter; buy a sd card reader; buy a lightning cable converter too. That totals $5000. Ouch.
> He said that you just changed to be more careful about the lack of magsafe. Maybe I'll learn?
Having magsafe on my retina MacBook, with little kids in the house, may have been the best leisure hack I've ever enjoyed. The hack came from lack of anxiety about the kids tripping over the cord and bringing the laptop crashing to the floor, enabling me to simply set the machine down, walk away, and play with the kids instead. Now I would have to put the laptop somewhere out-of-sight in order for it to charge.
It's hilarious to me that their own marketing image has two dongles plugged into the laptop so that the user can still use USB.
Apple please for the love of usability: please give me back USB. I AM the pro that you want to feature in every one of your marketing videos. I have a music studio in my house, I build interactive lighting installations for the biggest music festivals in the world, I build custom hardware controllers for fire effects that travel all over the country, I travel around the world teaching people how to build hardware devices, and when home I spend the majority of my time teaching and building software that people love; I use my laptop for over 10 hours a day.
All of this stuff uses USB. ALL OF IT. Having to carry around stupid dongles all the time is the biggest pain in my ass when I'm trying to do all of this stuff. PLEASE give me back USB, you can even call it the "stupid loser old crappy loser lame macbook for loser non pros". I don't care. This nonsense minimalist sleek design stuff is actually harming my productivity.
No, USB-C is a step in the right direction. It's superior in every way imaginable to USB. It can handle almost every type of transfer (data/power), its orientation-agnostic, it's slim, etc. I could list the pros for days.
Having to deal with dongles for a couple years while the rest of the market catches up isn't a reason to push against the best port standard in decades.
USB-C is not superior in every imaginable way. And at least as embodied as a Thunderbolt 3 carrier, there are at least two.
There is no such thing as a USB-C hub. The protocol doesn't support it. That's one really concrete way that USB-C is inferior. I think I heard rumors that the proposed replacement fixes that, but Thunderbolt 3+USB-C is inferior that way.
It's also easier to snap off. That's two. Yes, it's better in a lot of objective ways, but there are also non-imaginary ways in which it's a pretty substantial compromise.
Maybe we should do a longbet on whether you're willing to talk smack about T3 once T4 hardware comes out. Because I bet you will.
Apparently all the hubs that have multiple USB-C ports are running USB 2 over them, or you can just use them for power delivery.
I am suddenly very happy that none of my other devices except for my USB-C hub, actually uses USB-C, I'd be limited to the ports that came on the computer!
Thunderbolt docks can do it, they just run multiple USB controllers on board, one for each port, but indeed, it USB-C 3.1 as it stands today doesn't support hubs.
My complaint about usb-c hubs, when I was looking for one a year ago is I couldn't find one that did 4k60, gigabit ethernet, and 2 or more usb 3.0 plugs. This has led me to plugging in two cables instead of one for years. If my monitor had a gigabit ethernet plug, I'd be set, because it outputs a bunch of usb (2) ports.
You have a dock, an adapter, a breakout box or whatever the cool kids are calling it.
A USB hub is just one USB port in and N out. There is no such thing for USB-c.
You can't even chain those adapters. The USB-c 'in' port that you plug power into? No data on that line. Just power.
And some of those adapters send the wrong voltage to USB-2 devices. Had a hell of a time with my keyboard and mouse until I started plugging the power directly into the computer.
I so wanted to be wrong it's not even funny. Like, how the fuck did you break this and why don't I remember screaming and bonfires in the streets over this? It's bullshit!
The weirdest one is that I at least expected those 'hubs' that have the port breakouts for everything to at least be able to take data in through both ports, but that doesn't work either. You can only plug a power brick into the USB-c female port.
USB A was very easy to ruin as well. It might look strong but usually its just held on with a couple of solder joints which I found very prone to bend enough to break the device if it ever got an up/down force on it.
> There is no such thing as a USB-C hub. The protocol doesn't support it.
Did you read the protocol specification? (It's freely available, with no paywall or even login wall.) The protocol does support a USB-C hub. Actually protocols, since there are three separate protocols involved, each on its own set of wires: USB 2.0, USB 3.x, and USB-PD. Each of them has its own support for USB hubs. The hub support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.x is the same as in the older USB hubs with the USB-A and USB-B plugs and sockets; only USB-PD is new (and has long chapters on how power delivery works through hubs in several different scenarios).
The only gotcha is that Thunderbolt 3 does not support a USB 3.x hub (but this is fixed by its successor USB4); this is worked around by including a full PCIe USB 3.x host on the Thunderbolt 3 device, since Thunderbolt 3 can pass through PCIe and Displayport at the same time (USB4 adds USB 3.x to the passthrough).
I mostly agree with you, especially on devices like phones where there's a single port, but here, there's 4 ports. Even if you use it for charging and two displays, you can still manage to put one USB-A in there. If you really like symmetry, maybe two of each. Unfortunately, Apple's obsession with uniformity and clean design would never let them do such a thing, even if the diversity would be objectively better here.
I can't sum it up in any other way than to say it's a user-hostile decision.
They should at a minumum have included a few choice dongles with the system. (usb-c to usb-a, and maybe usb-c to HDMI)
Additionally, they should have completed the ecosystem too. a mac-to-mac upgrade requires a dizzying variety of dongles, where one firewire cable was all that was required in previous systems.
Type-A has completely disappeared from my life and that of my family's.
Micro-USB is still clinging on but those will fade out within the next 2-3 years.
Additionally, four years is a laughably short period of time to measure Type-C's adoption, but even given that, I would love to see actual usage data for, say, American adults.
Maybe we just have to accept that people have different usage profiles. Personally I don’t have a single USB peripheral that is USB-C beyond simply charging. But I have many many devices that are USB-A, micro USB, HDMI, etc. A laptop that has USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI is significantly more useful to me than one which only has USB-C. I own all the adapters but I don’t always remember to bring everything with me, so even given my multi hundred dollar investment in adapters I often have trouble connecting with things. And as far as replacing all my peripherals with USB-C peripherals, those tend to be more expensive, and also my desktop computer does not support USB-C so I would basically need a separate set of everything. USB-C is undoubtably a better port in many technical ways, but for practical purposes it really doesn’t hold up against the ports it replaced in real life.
> Type-A has completely disappeared from my life and that of my family's.
I'm honestly surprised by this. I have eight different type A devices plugged into my PC right now[1] and I don't own a single type C device (and it's not that I've intentionally avoided it).
As for the rest of my family, I don't think any of them have computers that'd even have a Type C port. Mine has just one, and it's brand new.
Those mostly aren't "type-A devices". The connector is not the protocol. Except for those physically integrated into a type-A connector, those are mostly USB-2/3 devices that generally ship by default with a cable that includes a type-A connector at one end and a type-B or mini/micro-B at the other.
I too have an external audio interface, a printer, scanner, and external HDD, and they are all connected via USB cables that have a type-C connector at one end and the relevant B subtype at the other. These are now cheap and ubiquitous. My keyboard is lightning to USB-C, and my mouse is bluetooth. As for flash drives, I buy the double-ended ones these days.
The adapters I still use are for an older U2F dongle that is physically integrated into a type-A connector, which is due for retirement later this year, and a Thunderbolt display.
So the writing isn't just on the wall for USB Type-A connectors in my household, they're basically gone.
As for what happens to all the cables with type-A connectors that shipped by default, those are in my travel kit for device charging off wall-warts or vehicles that often still have type-A sockets.
5. My BT Dongle (which my BT headset won't actually pair with, thus #4)
6. Wi-Fi adapter
7. Xbox 360 controller
Now that is my desktop, my laptop is USB-C, with a dock plugged into the port. Said dock only has 2 USB devices plugged in, wireless adapter for my Mouse/Keyboard, and my headset.
None of this counts the many USB-A charging cables. I have USB-A to Lightning, USB-A to Micro, and USB-A to USB-C, all currently in use. I also have a single USB-C to USB-C adapter.
I see it as a wealth level thing. People will still be buying $30 Canon printers at Walmart with USB-B ports and USB-A flash drives in 20 years. Not everyone buys their entire family the newest, most expensive hardware every 2 years. It'll be ages before USB-C and USB 3 hardware becomes as cheap as the massively produced USB-A/B and USB 2 hardware.
A printer with a USB-B port can be plugged into a USB-C port. Only the cable needs to change, not the printer. After buying my Macbook with 4 USB-C ports I simply replaced the cables for the various devices, and I almost never need to use any adapter/dongle at all.
Do you and your family exclusively use laptops and phones manufactured after 2017 without any external peripherals? Because it's still hard to find USB-C on anything else. Even some of Apple's own devices still cling to lightning.
Sure, some motherboards, peripherals, and displays have type-C ports, but they're still very much the exception.
> Type-A has completely disappeared from my life and that of my family's
This might be true for end users, but in my electronics work, I don't see even a single USB-C device around me, and I'm looking at about ~50 devices right now around my desk (dev boards/kits, logic analyzers, interfaces, accessories, microscopes, oscilloscopes, and other equipment).
USB-C only is perhaps fine on consumer laptops, but these are supposedly the more capable "Pro" machines, for, well, pros.
It's decidedly inferior in its lack of hubs. If you don't have enough USB-C ports, you're SOL (and given I have a 2-port macbook pro, I feel this acutely).
I have a usb-c monitor connection, and of course the usb-c charger - so any third device requires unplugging one of those. In my case that's a usb-c yubikey. That dongle gives me an hdmi port I can't use (HDMI on the 13" pro can't drive a 34" monitor) and a usb-a port I can't use (I was good and got usb-c perpherals!).
As Steve Jobs says, you should start from the user experience and work backwards. Dongle hell is not a good user experience, especially when Apple's obsession with slimness is in part due to portability.
> Having to deal with dongles for a couple years while the rest of the market catches up isn't a reason to push against the best port standard in decades.
But why do I have to be the hostage here? I don't want to wait for "the rest of the market catches up", I want to get my work done, and my work requires plugging in lots of USB-A peripherals. The move to USB-C only was premature and trying to force the market using users as hostages shows incredible hubris.
Things change, deal with it. I've swapped USB cables to USB-C cables. Only USB drives, which i rarely use anymore require an adapter. Meanwhile, I can use all 4 ports to:
- Run a display
- Charge my laptop
- Charge a phone
- Connect a drive
I can even use a single port to both charge the laptop and run a screen with multiple USB devices attached to it.
I now need to daisy chain converters to use my PS/2 mouse on my MacBook Pro though, so that's a bit of a hassle.
Also, I can use the same charger and dongles for my work notebook, which is Windows based. I wish every new thing was USB-C, because I love it.
(This is a copy of a previous comment, because I feel it is relevant again.)
Having 4 USB-C's is a bit like having 4 Ferraris. Sometimes you need something a bit more practical. People will still be using USB-A for the next 10 years. Having to use a dongle for USB-A on a 16" macbook is pretty ridiculous. There's still a billion USB-A accessories out there and will be for a long time. Apple jumped the gun in a major way. This wasn't like dropping the floppy disc or CD-rom drive considering how small the USB-A port is.
The floppy drive died because a better option came out. If USB-C is truly better, than all new accessories would use it.
There needs to be a transition period where everyone has USB-C and USB-A so that the peripherals can naturally move to the better technology.
Right now I've never seed a good USB-C to USB-A converter. I work at a lot of conferences, and any time a speaker comes with a new MacBook and a USB adaptor, it's a disaster. They all suck.
They removed USB-A about a year before they should have, but now the industry has moved on. We can talk about it as a mistake in the past, but it would be wack to put USB-A back onto these devices.
How can we say "the industry has moved on" when the second piece of media on the linked announcement page has someone doing music production with a visible USB-C -> USB-A dongle connecting some rack-eared music gear. There's even a second dongle on their left that I don't recognize. I long for the C-only future, but we're not there yet. Apple's decision to go C-only always seemed to be an aesthetic one to me.
That's been my experience: at every conference I've talked at this year (three so far: ESUG, Macoun and SPLASH, heise MacDev still coming up in December), I plug in my USB-C equipped MacBook Pro and It Just Works™.
Only one of those was an Apple-specific conference.
Sorry your experience is still different. Mine was, too, a year ago.
If people actually started using electronics for 100 years instead of throwing them out every few years, that would be fantastic. It would also be a very radical departure from the status quo and I don't think it a likely scenario, so rest easy I guess..
While it may be fun to try to design something that lasts s hundred years and that people will want to use in a hundred years, who would want to sell it?
As the guy who gave up my laptop( MacBook pro 2015) in a meeting to project because the 2 other MacBooks in the meeting only had usb c and the presentation was on a usb a stick.
At least they got the projector using usb c with a dongle now..
Nothing like having choices. Why my new personal machine was a linux based laptop.
There are still devices currently that use floppy disks.
The only accessory I have that uses hardwired USB-A is my Logitech C920 webcam. All other stuff has a detachable cable. I will just change the USB-A to (Micro)USB-B cable to USB-C to (Micro)USB-B
While sacrificing something else. Battery, speakers, thermal management, or aesthetics would have to traded off for USB A to be included. Not worth it for an outdated port whose function can be duplicated by an inexpensive adapter.
If you were Apple's only user, you might have a point. But you're not.
Music professionals, video professionals, photographic professionals, and plenty of other professionals all have collections of USB peripherals which aren't going to be updated any time soon - either because there are no USB-C replacements, or because a complete replacement program might easily run to four figures, edging up to five for some users, and in extreme cases will be as high as six.
Some of these people tour or travel a lot. Having to rely on dongles - which can be lost, or stolen, or which may stop working for random reasons - is very much not a good idea.
Telling these professionals to "deal with it" is unhelpfully obtuse.
Speaking as one of those people, dongles don't bother me in the least. You're absolutely right that many peripherals are prohibitively expensive to update just for a connector, but they're also bulky and usually already involve lots of other cabling, so adding a dongle really doesn't make a big difference. Plus we're all used to having dongles just to hold license data anyway (thanks, Pro Tools), not to mention the menagerie of adapters that have been a way of life for decades in the audio world.
Yup. I DJ and use cameras all the time, so I'm not just a guy checking his Facebook. I swapped cables and have zero issues now. For every cable type there's now a USB-C equivalent for cheap on Amazon or Aliexpress. People just want to find something to complain about.
Edit: Before anyone mentions that ‘now you need to bring cables’...When I DJ I always bring a bunch of spare cables anyway, because I don't what to rely on the location for providing me what I need. So I did this with my old mac too. Nothing changed except the type of cable.
maybe they should be complaining to the peripheral manufacturers rather than Apple. USB C is better and a major player going all in is the only way to get the industry to switch.
Things do change, but change for the sake of change isn't a good thing.
Meanwhile, I can use all 4 ports to:
- Run a display
With a dongle
- Charge my laptop
Did you need 4 ports to do this? How is this better than a magsafe connector?
- Charge a phone
Existing USB ports do this fine, and most charger cables have USB-A on one end. USB-C-USB-C cables are extremely limited in their use and are more expensive.
- Connect a drive
Again, no advantage over USB-A
Apple has "solved" non-existent problems and in exchange they've created a whole new slew of problems. Why should I have to replace all my existing cables to work with a computer? It's because Apple is designing for slim cases above all else. (So slim and delicate that resting my hand on the case while typing causes random keypresses).
I broke an early macbook screen by tripping over the charging cable. When they made the switch to magsafe cables it was to explicitly prevent this very common occurrence. They traded trip-proof laptops for the ability to plug your charger into 4 different ports. What possible advantage could that offer?
> Charge my laptop Did you need 4 ports to do this? How is this better than a magsafe connector?
Being able to charge on either side is really, really nice. I miss MagSafe, sure, but this mostly makes up for it. I can also run my laptop off the ubiquitous USB-C battery packs now, which is glorious.
USB-C-USB-C are going to be much more ubiquitous too, especially when the iPhone switches next cycle.
it’s $23, available online with free next day in most cases. further the massive downside to the old magsafe adapters is how proprietary they were and that they were soldered to the brick. if one frayed on you, as they did all the time, all you could do is go to the apple store. if you travel for work this becomes a massive liability. if this cable cost $100, was useless on other devices and you didn’t have to carry a usb-c cable in the first place then i can see your point. but when you buy a $3000+ laptop then complain about a $30 cable then it becomes hard to take you seriously.
Other companies have dealt with change better than Apple. For example, I can buy a professional tier laptop from Microsoft or Lenovo with plenty of USB ports, while Apple's reaction to change has been to ignore their professional users' use-cases.
And you can’t compare an Apple to anything non-Apple. So as far as Apple laptops go, USB-C, adaptor or forget it. You can get adaptors so small you barely notice them. I’d rather have 4 USB-C ports than 3 because they scrapped the bandwidth of one to put in a old port. Most people keep apple laptops for years, and I doubt we’ll be using standard USB much longer
> And you can’t compare an Apple to anything non-Apple.
There are plenty of professional users doing just that.
For example, I can get my job done on a Lenovo just as well as on a Macbook, until I need to plug in a USB peripheral. Then, I can do my job better on the Lenovo than the Macbook.
and for the rest of the world where windows is a hinderance you can’t compare them. As a pro user i barely plug anything into my laptop now, just one usb-c cable connects my monitor, charger, keyboard / mouse (usb, not bluetooth) and gives me a few more usb ports. in fact this is better because i can shove my laptop in a pocket behind the monitor and not take up room.
every time apple changes someone people who don’t even use apples come out of the woodwork to complain.
Then go and buy one of those laptops. Use what works for you.
Just because you’re not a fan of it doesn’t mean it isn’t a solid solution for the rest of us. And the rest of us mostly like having change forced on us — it means we’re progressing forward instead of shouting at clouds for being in the way of the sun.
You're repeating the OP's "deal with it" sentiment. I'm sharing how other companies have dealt with it, and offer similar professional tier laptops with more USB ports.
I'm not having a go at you directly, I'm having a go at the idea that it's constructive to even point out how a piece of hardware doesn't solve a problem for you and that there are others options. We know.
> I'm having a go at the idea that it's constructive to even point out how a piece of hardware doesn't solve a problem for you
I'm going to have to disagree, the lack of USB ports doesn't solve a problem. It's just a limitation that doesn't affect you, but certainly affects other professionals and their ability to do their jobs efficiently.
You can't just change the goal posts to cause your argument to have more weight. This entire post has nothing to do with where you work or work at all: it's to do with a consumer laptop being released and you know right well we're talking about buying this for personal use.
The GP of the OP I responded to was talking about his profession and every post I have made in this thread was about professional users and their ability to do their jobs. How you can walk away from this conversation thinking that I was talking about personal use is beyond me.
>Just because you’re not a fan of it doesn’t mean it isn’t a solid solution for the rest of us.
Leaving out USB-A ports isn't a solution for you though, it's just a limitation that affects some people but not you.
>And the rest of us mostly like having change forced on us — it means we’re progressing forward instead of shouting at clouds for being in the way of the sun.
This just stinks of fanboyism, any time Apple makes a big hardware change like removing the headphone jack from iPhones, it's mostly negative voices disliking the change. The heat eventually dies down and people adapt, but it's revisionist history to imply people like having the change forced on them at the time.
> Leaving out USB-A ports isn't a solution for you
USB-C is faster than USB-A. Eventually all technology becomes obsolete and it's time to move on. Removing USB-A and forcing me to switch to USB-C is helping me adopt a technology that is popping up everywhere.
I believe modern smart phones now charge via USB-C? A colleague in work also has a power brick that can charge his laptop via USB-C.
USB-C is here and we'll only move over to it if we start implementing it. Use an adapter if you're not in a position to swap out A->C for a while.
> This just stinks of fanboyism ...
And this is just a shallow insult, hence why you've been down voted.
> ... like removing the headphone jack from iPhones ...
Which other manufacturers immediately did too.
> ... but it's revisionist history to imply people like having the change forced on them at the time.
The iceberg is melting. The cheese is being moved. It's time to change and for the better. It's easier to be comfortable and complacent, but that's not how reality works.
I don't want to research and keep up with the latest in IO technologies. I trust Apple to make good choices for me so I can get on with solving problems. That works out for me in a positive way far more than it impacts me negatively.
I'll continue with a (roughly) five year cycle for upgrading my MBP and a two year cycle for my iPhone. And I'll continue to trust that Apple's engineers are smarter than me and are making intelligent choices for me.
You're free to not trust them and do as you wish.
EDIT: In fact I'm actually finding it annoying how most new devices are USB-C and I don't have USB-C on my 2014 MBP. I want USB-C as power bricks, HDDs, pen drives, and more, are switching over (because it's the right then to do). Very soon I will be obsolete and you'll be telling me I need to move on...
You can also use one USB-C to both charge your Macbook and drive a powerful 4k monitor plus a few extra USB-A ports on the back of the monitor.
Being able to come to work and plug in a single cord and have it drive my mechanical keyboard, headphone amp, monitor, and power is pretty amazing IMO.
I have this exact setup on the Thinkpad in front of me. It is great, and it's hilarious to see my phone's lockscreen pop up on the screen when I end up charging it with that cable.
You know what else this laptop has? Two ports I don't recognize (thunderbolt and dock?) on the left, and on the right, two USB-A, ethernet, SD card reader, HDMI, and headphone jack. It's a false dichotomy to say that you can only get the one-port connection by throwing away all the other ports you might need.
No one made that dichotomy, idk who you guys are arguing against.
If you don’t want Apple products cool. I personally have no need for Ethernet, sd card readers, and USB A 24/7. Like I said elsewhere this is a non problem for me.
Obviously if it is for you you can buy a giant dell laptop with 20 ports.
>>Being able to come to work and plug in a single cord and have it drive my mechanical keyboard, headphone amp, monitor, and power is pretty amazing IMO.
Just imagine having a dock, and not needing to plug any cords :-)
Also, like most things Apple removed (I'm looking at you, 3.5mm), how has the removal enabled your use case?
To put it other way:
you could have everything you outlined even if they had magsafe + USB-A
but with removal of those things, we can't have things we want/need/desire, for no appreciable gain to you.
Like the original iMac eliminating SCSI, DIN-8 serial and ADB for USB-A, the point of removing old ports is to ensure support for the new ones. Local pain, long term gain. (Uh, once they sort out the many flavors using the USB-C form factor.)
All of those ports were already on the decline because their replacements already existed and were better. Every one of those ports existed on a machine with its replacement at some point.
Apple never made a machine with both USB-C and USB-A. They never allowed for a transition.
Because of that, people aren’t moving forward because they are holding back upgrades.
At home I bought a 2 pack of USB-C to USB-A the size of a quarter and never had a problem... only because I don't want to buy a new SD-card reader. But now even my external harddrive is USB-C (and incredibly fast/tiny at that) I almost never use them.
The new AirPods Pro come with lightning to USB-C. If the new phones aren't USB-C, they'll definitely have USB-C to lightning at least. Although realistically it'll be USB-C to USB-C (see iPad Pro)
I’m not sure you understand. Shouldn’t the people who want to plug their new iPhone into their new laptop be less inconvenienced when those products are all from Apple, not more inconvenienced? People with modern Thinkpads could use their iPhone out of the box while those with MBPs could not.
If Apple can’t be bothered, what a strange thing to blame me for.
I agree with the ridiculousness of it all, but to be fair, there is no such thing as a 2019 iPhone XS. It's a 2018 iPhone XS regardless of when it was purchased or manufactured, although that honestly just makes your situation even more ridiculous.
I liked charging and connecting displays from both sides.
What I didn’t like was that over three or four of the Apple USB-C to hdmi/usb-a/whatever the last one was (thunderbolt?) and one third party adapter I never found one that wasn’t super choppy with my input.
So my Webcam would stutter, and my keyboard would suddenly repeating the same key 12 times (admittedly making for a pretty exciting experience with ViM).
Very frustrating. It may have been my computer. Don’t think I’d heard of others with the same issues in my workplace. But really made working a PITA sometimes for me.
Meanwhile my 2015 MBP did just fine with the same hub through switch setup, so it was most likely the USB C hardware driver in the Apple Laptop.
I think it's key you have 4 ports. I think the very small number of ports and requirement of dongles in order to get enough ports (and lack of USB-C hub) perpetuates USB.
If you have 1 or 2 USB-C ports odds are you'll need a dongle. Since the only USB-C dongles don't multiply ports, it'll have multiple USB ports. If you had a lot of USB-C ports, you'd likely get adapters and switch to USB-C as you upgraded things. Now, unless you can switch to wireless, you basically have to replace it with a USB device.
That argument can be used to explain away any problem.
4 usb ports are massively redundant. Even if someone loves usb-C having a usb-A port will add a lot of usability without compromising on anything else.
I'm the opposite so I guess our desires cancel each other out. I will never buy a laptop or any device that has USB-A on it. None of my devices use USB-A and it's a legacy port that is ugly and wastes space. Same with micro-usb, mini-usb, lightning, etc. I'm living a 1 port lifestyle and it's phenomenal for traveling, minimalism, and just not having to worry about having the right cable in the right place.
Except for devices which have a hardwired cable, you can get USB-C to USB-whatever and nearly all, if not all, professional equipment I know of does not have hardwired cables. So in the worst case, you need to replace your cables and in the best case, you now have four direct ports, more than any portable Mac has had since the transition to USB-C. And for the cases where the connection must be USB-A adapters are small and reliable.
If you haven't used a USB-C/Thunderbolt-3 notebook, being able to go from portable to charging, full size monitor, peripherals, external storage, etc. with one cable is a welcome change.
Apple's commitment to supporting legacy ports (albeit through adapters) is pretty good, in my experience. As an anecdote, I needed to get some data off of an old Firewire 400 hard drive and linked Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire 800, Firewire 800 to 400 cable into the drive and it mounts like it would on a direct connection.
USB-C is great. Carrying around a dongle is not that hard IMO, but if you can't, just buy a bunch of these[1] and keep them attached to your USB cables all the time.
I can easily plug any USB device into my MacBook with a cable. I cannot however plug a firewire, thunderbolt or HDMI cable into a USB-A port. Yes I need to purchase different cables, but they are relatively cheap compared to something like a laptop docking station that I might need otherwise.
I take it you mean specifically USB-A? I can understand that, but I think I'd be satisfied if they would just put more than four USB-C ports on the thing. That should be the upside of a smaller USB connector, give me a dozen ports since dang near everything uses USB these days.
I think they are limited to 4 by available PCIe lanes since they are thunderbolt ports. It would a a confusing mess if they added more ports but only gave them USB 3.1 capability
They could switch them. It's unlikely that you need thunderbolt at 4 ports at the same time. On the other hand, 4 universally usable ports are already a lot. They might not cater for the long tail. Less than 4, and it's not only the tail you are cutting off.
I think it is to be expected by Apple to remove 2 of those 4 in the next generation, or one afterwards. It's a logical (to them) step towards cable-free computing, which is great and all, but is the only way towards it forcing it through the customers?
iPhones 8, X, XR, XS, 11 and 11 Pro have all supported wireless charging but retain the wired charging capability. I don’t think they are incredibly eager to eliminate ports if they don’t gain something from it (thinness, battery life, space for something else, or water resistance for example).
Interfaces change, but making the switch too early makes it needlessly painful. I mean, how does it make sense that Apple's own iPhone and iPad don't plug directly into Macbooks without a dongle?
I mean, why stop there? Apple could just go to zero ports and force everyone to use Wi-Fi peripherals. They could sell a wi-fi peripheral hub for backwards compatibility. Then they could get rid of the power port and use inductive charging. That would make for an insanely sleek machine, even if it were insanely painful to use.
Dongle? Just use a USB-C/Lighting cable. Having the right cable has never been considered odd.
And even that's optional. I never plug my iPhone into my MacBook, because everything syncs seamlessly via "the cloud"; only use Lightning cable for charging, and I'm looking forward to dumping even that when I upgrade to a Qi-enabled iPhone in a couple months. Yes, I look forward to "zero ports".
The only need for cables at this point is high-power/high-bandwidth/high-security applications. Qi doesn't deliver 60 watts, and my employer overloaded the security so I have to use a Lightning/USB-C cable for debugging ... so I'm happy to have 4 tiny identical ports that do the job.
> Apple's own iPhone and iPad don't plug directly into Macbooks without a dongle?
The newest gen of iPhones come with C to Lightning rather than A to Lightning now. Because that's also the requirement for USB-PD fast charging for the iPhone and Macbook. They've also sold the cables separately for the last two years for the USB-PD fast charging.
$10/mo (for 2TB) and the photos are promptly backed up, and transferred to your Mac. Full-res, backed up remotely, stored locally. Deliberate transfer becomes "already there".
I don't want my data in the hands of any cloud service. I'm sure theirs works well between all their products for you and many others, but it's just not for me. :)
What type of ports are you using that require USB-A on the laptop end? Pretty much every port I know of has a USB-C cable for it, no dongle necessary. Since 2016 I've slowly gotten USB-C-to-Lightning, USB-C-to-micro USB, USB-C-to-HDMI cables, etc. I gave away most of my USB-A to friends.
If you need a hardwired mouse, keyboard, and power cable, presumably monitor as well - why aren't you just leaving those hard wired to a dock with a single usb-c connection to the laptop?
If you're talking about using a keyboard and mouse while mobile, I have no idea why you'd be using wired instead of bluetooth...
I can't stand lag, inconsistent connections, or changing batteries, and with the exception of Airpods, every interaction I've had with Bluetooth devices leads me to believe the whole category of hardware is generally one big dumpster fire. So instead I toss a basic $20 wired logitech mouse into my bag, and it performs flawlessly every time I pull it out.
Yeah, I'm generally fine with that for that one example.
But the bigger problem is that I like being able to use friends' mice if I find myself without one, jack HDMI into my laptop for random conference room projectors (my MBP has HDMI out, it is frequently used), etc. I can carry around adapters/dongles, but I have multiple bags, and adapters don't always come with when I'm throwing my laptop into the bag I'm using that day. So the chances that I'll have something I want to use and can't because I just don't have the adapter on me are pretty high. This is a problem I never have on my 2013 13" MBP because of the port selection, but that I will if I don't change behavior if I get this 16" MBP (which I'm seriously considering).
I think the long game here is that USB will shift towards USB-C. Plenty of new Windows devices have USB-C ports, and it's only a matter of time until peripheral manufacturers transition over and the old USB ports become useless.
The long game may trend towards USB-C, but in the meantime Apple made the Macbook Pro less usable for people who want to do actual work. How is it better to have to manage a bag full of dongles when Apple easily could've included the ports that people frequently use like SD and USB-A?
It was a bad decision 2 years ago when they introduced this generation of Macbook Pros, and it's still a bad decision.
>Apple made the Macbook Pro less usable for people who want to do actual work
That's straight up nonsense. You can still do everything you could do with a USB-A port. I'm also in the full USB-C camp and any of my old USB-A devices just use a USB-C to USB-A cable. I am in no way hindered from doing actual work.
I just carry a small Anker USB-C hub in my laptop case -- has two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and an SD card reader. I must say, though, I've used it less than I expected to when I got it.
The point is not that you can't do those things, the point is that it's been made more difficult for little to no discernible benefit.
Apple has been going down this path of making thinness such a high priority that utility has become a second class citizen. So yeah I can carry around dongles for everything, but why? So the side of my MacBook Pro can have pleasing congruity in it's ports?
It is good that Apple has moved towards a standard port rather than just slapping 4 Thunderbolts on there. But the loss of HDMI, USB a, and sd card slots makes for more hassle with little upside, not to mention they did away with magsafe.
At least they fixed the keyboard and upgraded memory in a bug way, so maybe things are headed in the right direction now.
>the point is that it's been made more difficult for little to no discernible benefit
That is not true either. Although it cost me some money, I much prefer having 1 type of port to worry about instead of a million types and it has tremendously improved some of my workflows by being able to daisy-chain devices together. I can sit down at my desk, plug in 1 cable and have access to everything I need. Although I had a similar setup with a dock, I was limited to the number of ports. With the current system, I can keep extending and daisy-chaining to my heart's desire.
Just because it doesn't work for you doesn't mean it doesn't work for anyone just like my use case doesn't work for everyone either. To say that there's no discernible benefit is just silly. There are pros and cons just like with anything.
>carry around dongles for everything
That's a straw man. I don't carry any dongles with me whatsoever except for a multi-purpose video adapter because I still, unfortunately, have to present in a few rooms that have VGA outputs.
How would it make your life worse if in addition to the usb-c ports there was a sd card port and usb-a? Does switching away from magsafe make it more likely or less likely for the MacBook to get accidentally pulled to the floor?
I'm not saying that no one will find usb-c useful or that it works for no one's workflow.
I'm saying that going all usb-c doesn't provide much, if any benefit. They could've given you your usb-c ports and included the other ports.
If it works for you, great. The problem is that they could've made it work for a lot more people, but they chose not to in their Don Quixote-like chase for thinness and aesthetics.
The standard was adopted by IEC in 2016. How many years more do you reckon we should live "in the future" and use dongles because "one day we won't have to"?
I'm already living this future. I've replaced my usb-a, micro-usb, mini-usb, and lightning products. It's wonderful for travel, decluttering, and not having to worry about dongles.
That's pretty nice - but people who need to interface with a wide variety of devices in their line of work, or don't know upfront what the situation in the field will require don't have that luxury. So instead using a laptop with minimal 3 standard ports (USB-A, USB-C, HDMI), they have to carry dongles that get lost, bent, stop working etc...MBP is simply not a "pro" machine - it's a mainstream consumer machine that looks fancy on the desk instead of being functional. And that would be totally great if it was called "Macbook" and there was a "Macbook Pro", with ports, battery life, cooling, keyboard etc...
That's what they said about ADB to USB, USB to Micro-USB, Micro-USB to USB-C. Once everyone settles on USB-C, some new thing will come out that necessitates yet another port change. So much for "Universal".
If Apple cared about what its users thought about cables, they never would have replaced MagSafe with the wretched USB-C. Interestingly, if you want a MagSafe-like charger now, you have to buy a Surface...
Apple decided that their laptops are not power supplies. Is that so wrong? I need a single portable computer because it's expensive and has my data. I don't need a single dedicated portable supply.
One nice thing about not having a billion ports that can all fail is that now most long term interface failures will happen on easily replaceable dongles. I guess the downside is that the port that connects all the dongles failing is probably really really bad. So you would have to hope that is at least beefed up.
Find people doing cool stuff and keep showing up and offering to help until they let you.
Basically my background is software (like everybody else here), but around 2009 or so that started bleeding into hardware via arduino/hackerspaces.
And then that bled into doing some consulting work on large advertising installations (building motor control software for robots, building interfaces etc. Some of the stuff I've worked on has been for SXSW,comic con, and the super bowl).
I got lucky in meeting some really cool people doing really cool stuff at burning man, and they eventually let me help on some lighting and fire effects control stuff. That group then eventually morphed into a group that is also building things for music festivals, and when custom stuff needed to get built for it, I was somebody who could help, and so I got to.
As far as the travelling stuff: that was something a friend of mine was doing, but when she wasn't able to go on a trip, she connected me with her employer, which then led to more jobs etc.
But yeah, basically show up and be nice to people. Offer to help a lot.
I would say you are not their target market - you have specific hardware needs a tiny fraction of the overall population have. It's been ages since I last used a parallel port to control external devices from a computer. When I do so, I use an $10 RPi-like board and its GPIO pins. I don't do hardware for a living, but I write software and this machine seems perfectly good for that. In fact, it's a bit of an overkill.
I'm the opposite. All of my stuff uses USB-C except my MBP. It seems finally I can upgrade that as well. I hate bringing my MBP charge whenever I travel.
Yeah it sucks, BUT if they are not going to add it how about throwing a nice hub dongle in the box for free? Something that gives me card reader, a couple USB ports, ethernet, hdmi. that would take some of the sting out of it. Since you can buy a good one for $50 this is not a huge deal considering the premium price you pay already.
Also while you are at it include the Apple Power Cable extension cable too. Crazy that is not included.
If you listen closely, you'll probably hear my eyes rolling all the way from Seattle.
I too connect a bunch of devices via USB to my laptop (minus the brag). The problem was that there were so many devices, I never had enough ports so I had to use a hub anyway. Then graduated to a docking station and carried my hub around with me in my electronics bag.
So I just bought an USB-C hub (as the docking station already had USB-C). I stopped using flash drives years ago, I have USB-C YubiKeys now so as a proficient user of multiple devices, I really don't feel any pain because of this..
for peasants still using USB-A flash drives, yes (not if you buy USB-C flash drives). You will pay the peasant fee. My mac is sitting in a docking station with USB-peasant ports 70% of the time so that's that.. I also don't really do flash drives anymore because of this whole internet thing. Also, the laptop costs more than 2 grand. Is $100 too much for you?
Can someone explain to me how Apple can justify only including a 720p FaceTime HD camera into the "the world’s best pro notebook"?
The last iPhone that had this FaceTime camera was the 6S, released in 2015. Since the iPhone 7 (2016) the phones have had at least a 1080p FaceTime camera. Given that FaceTime / Skype calls are such a common use case and rarely anyones uses external webcams anymore, why doesn't Apple use the existing camera system of the iPhone 11 for the MacBook?
Seriously, if I pay north of $4000 dollars for a laptop, why do I get an obsolete camera?
A phone camera is used to capture moments you want to preserve for posterity. A laptop camera is used for conference calls and no one needs to see all my facial flaws in 4K detail.
So, no, I don’t consider this in any way to be a dealbreaker.
I think if you're the type of person that records youtube videos regularly, chances are you probably already own an external camera with specialized functionality.
How does that address the original point in anyway? This laptop's base price is almost $4000 USD. That's a lot of money to spend on a laptop and one would hope that it'd at least come with a decent webcam.
You can't unilaterally claim what people do or do not care about, though. That's reverse rationalization. A 720p webcam is however, objectively, third class in 2019.
Even then you likely want something better than a webcam, those cams are of such poor quality. Even if you get a Logitech C930 you're paying a lot for relatively little. They're not really meant (they certainly can be used for it though) recording as much as they are for streaming/conference purposes. Image quality there isn't nearly as important as it is for recordings. A cheap camcorder will likely give you a much better image quality. Or hell, get one of those LED rings that you can mount your phone in and you're better off.
When doing user research (and I for one reason or another don't have other/better equipment around), I've used the MacBook as camera, mic, and screen recorder, when applicable (attaching a non-Apple mouse, of course, because those things are bonkers).
In these situations, a higher resolution camera wouldn't hurt. A better mic is higher priority though, so I'm happy to see that in the specs.
Reality comes at you fast! Their marketing for the feature was a bit dodgy, but overall it’s pretty smart. People will choose the conferencing software which presents them in the best light, and if you don’t think it matters, even subconsciously, to the people watching then you’re missing out on a potential advantage.
Such a wonderful slippery slope, but technology is disruptive that way.
In that case why don’t they have a back facing camera with three lenses and a flash just in case someone wants to take a picture on vacation with their MacBooks? I guess they should also have an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a gps chip just in case I need to use it for directions....
I guess this is more a rhetorical question as taking pictures with a back facing camera is an extreme^10 edge case while doing video calls with the FaceTime camera for most users is a daily or at least weekly occurrence.
Why not? Apple sells ~200M iPhones a year, so they already are ordering millions of FaceTime cameras for the iPhones. Why not buy 10M more of the same model and put them in the MacBooks?
Just to be clear, I don't think Apple should put a back facing camera into their laptops. However, they should consider updating the FaceTime camera as it is regularly used by most people.
For the pro line I would expect something I could just use to record video of me doing training or youtube reviews(at least in a crunch). I don't think it's too much to ask for at this price point. If I want to do the video editing it would be simple at times to use it for voice and video recording as well.
At a $2400 price point. You should get a 1080p camera included regardless of your use. If you don't want that much detail on a webcam, you should have a setting to turn it down to 480p or something. But higher quality should the ceiling. Besides some people vlog and want that type of quality on facetime
At a $2,400 price point I expect a usable computer. I sincerely don't care about the camera - there's a 4K one in my pocket that interfaces instantly with my computer.
At a $2400, other users want high quality video. The computer should have the option for both audiences. Don't want high quality, fine just turn the setting down.
> I don’t consider this in any way to be a dealbreaker.
Fair enough. But for some people it might be.
It is much more comfortable to perform video calls via laptop than via phone because a phone typically needs to be held in position manually. Therefore, I believe that most people would, if given a choice, prefer to use a laptop for video calls.
Also, people might actually want their video to have high resolution. For whatever reason. Even to show their facial flaws. Not providing them an option to do that, despite the fact that the required hardware is cheap and available, is an unnecessary restriction.
Finally, if a high resolution camera was included and someone would not want to use that high resolution, they can simply switch the camera to a lower resolution mode.
> So, no, I don’t consider this in any way to be a dealbreaker.
There are plenty of premium and luxury laptops at that price point that have HD cameras, and they don't prevent you from running unauthorized software[1].
'Posterity' is a stretch? Snapchat would dispute that.
In fact, if a phone really wanted to take good pictures (and not just market 'megapixels') they'd have focus, light balance, shutter speed controls. About all they can do is take still portraits.
> if a phone really wanted to take good pictures (and not just market 'megapixels') they'd have focus, light balance, shutter speed controls
Any high-end smartphone can manually control the focus, white balance, shutter speed and shoot RAW. On the iPhone you need a third-party app to access it, but plenty of Android devices include that in their default camera.
There's a lot of Good-Enoughism and Apple apologism in the responses to your question, even though you never said this was a deal-breaker. You are fairly asking why this particular corner was cut for costs, and it does seem a weird place to save a few bucks when, as you say, the price is ~$4,000.
For what it's worth, the front and rear cameras on Microsoft's Surface products are both high-quality and it's generally a pleasure to do video conferences with Surface users. As some others here have pointed out, it's not necessary to have a high-quality video stream—it's not necessary to have video at all—but it's a better user experience to have a more life-like image of the people you're speaking with. In a group conference in particular, the oddball with the low-resolution 720 web-cam does stick out, looking like a relic from 10 years ago. Especially with a high-fashion status symbol such as an Apple laptop, that's an awkward position to be in.
To be honest, I am also really surprised by the apologism and the creative possible reasons that people come up with (e.g. "Apple couldn't handle the traffic the increased resolution would cause"). But you're right, I didn't say it is a dealbreaker for me and it actually isn't. It is still very likely that I buy this machine - yet stuff like this bothers me, especially at the price point that Apple is commanding.
Imagine buying the top of the class Mercedes S-Class only to find out that the steering wheel is far worse than the ones that Mercedes uses in other models - you'd somehow feel cheated.
The number of Apple apologists on Hacker News is really jarring indeed. I don't think it's too much to expect a decent 1080p webcam on a ~$4000 USD laptop touted to be "the best notebook" and for professional use.
The number of Apple haters on Hacker News is also really jarring indeed.
One might accuse me of being the “apologist” you speak of (IDGAF), but if you’re correct we live in bubbles even here on HN, it’s much better and more honest if we don’t pretend the other doesn’t exist.
Sure, there are probably Apple haters here too. Never said there aren't. But given that this is supposed to be a community of technically inclined people it's really bizarre to see people make incredibly silly excuses for a ~$4000 machine.
Steering wheel analogy seems a little too much, but how about an S-Class with a tiny rear-view mirror? You use it occasionally, and it is useable, but at that price you'd expect something a little better.
>You are fairly asking why this particular corner was cut for costs, and it does seem a weird place to save a few bucks when, as you say, the price is ~$4,000.
Because the marginal cost of a better camera doesn't yield a sufficient increase in marginal revenue.
I wonder what their models predicted as marginal revenue of the touchbar and butterfly keyboard mechanisms, and how that compared to their marginal cost.
Maybe, but if I were designing this thing, both as an engineer or executive, it’d be a point of pride to me that the thing we advertise as the best laptop is actually the best laptop.
Especially if I know people are going to ask ‘wtf, why 720p’?
We turn all that off because inevitably someone starts saying: I can't hear you guys, it's coming in robot voice, can you turn off the screen/video share?
>the low resolution, low contrast, washed out, low fps video that makes it hard to read emotion or even detect where his/her attention is?
This is totally disingenuous. We're not comparing a 120p camera to a 1080p camera. We're comparing a sharp camera with great color rendition to a slightly higher resolution of the same camera.
You can use a Black Magic Design Web Presenter which allows connecting 2 pro camera/lens setups via HDMI/SDI, and XLR mic inputs. It shows up as a USB webcam like normal.
Not any good one that does it in hardware out of the box that I know of. There are mod kits for CS lenses for c920/930/brio, if you can live with a tighter shot. If you've an compatible RX100/A6000 or similar laying around, then an Elgato Cam Link like hanselman's setup above might be the easiest option.
Fair question, and I think yes! If you mainly do your meetings remotely (which I do), you want your interactions to be as high-bandwidth as possible.
There is value, and data, in real world interactions that is lost quickly in video calls. The lower latency, the higher the resolution and quality of the audio, the more you approximate a 'real' meeting.
This is way beyond baseline requirements for e.g. remote work, but it's _nice_, just as a slightly bigger screen is _nice_.
This is for audio, not video, as it's my "thing", but for the past year I've been doing all my video interviews with a Shure SM57 mic plugged into a nice preamp, into a good interface, and they've all gone much better than phone interviews. No one's ever said "wait, could you repeat that?" or "You're breaking up a bit". There's something to be said for smoothing out conferencing so it makes it more lifelike, and I'd assume that's even more true for video.
Or put another way, can you find any high-profile Twitch streamers using their integrated webcam/mic?
Could it be a limitation in thickness? Laptop display assemblies are thin, which means you need a very small lens and as a result probably can only fit a very small sensor. There's a lot more room for camera modules in phones.
That’s my guess as well. If you look at ifixit’s iPhone 11 tear down, the selfie camera takes up almost the full thickness of the phone[1]. The lid of the MacBook is much thinner. People are mentioning the front facing cameras of the surface are better, but they have much more depth to work with. I’m still disappointed the camera res hasn’t improved for almost a decade now, but I suspect you’re right in that the thinness of the lid is the limiting factor.
When talking about a camera for video conferencing, having especial high resolutions does not matter. Having good quality 720p (sharp, little noise) is way better than having bad full HD. Even TV in 720p holds up pretty well on large screens as long as the source is good quality.
Unfortunately the cameras in Macbooks are not of the "good quality 720p" kind. They make blurry images with lots of noise, have poor low light performance, and the colors don't look right.
Facetime on iPhones is a lot better than Facetime on Macbooks
Same issue with the super weak bluetooth antennae in macbooks.
My iphone6's bluetooth antennae lets me walk all over the house while listening to something with my headphones (an essential modern experience!) while my $2000+ macbook pro will barely let me leave the room without losing connection.
Wifi antennae too. On bad internet, my laptop cannot even connect to a wap that my phone can, so I'll tether my phone to get internet.
I want my laptop to be a portable powerhouse of connectivity too!
I would AT LEAST expect 1080p. That's a huge bummer in the year 2020, when even my phone can do 4K.
Conferences and Facebook livestreams just don't work with 720p :(
It's a fair point. If the camera were better, no one would be saying, "It's a great laptop, but the front facing camera, at 1080p, is excessive. I can't believe they did that." So I'm not sure why there are all these people trying to justify a low-res camera in these comments. :)
I wish they would take advantage of the thickness of the panel to make a bigger camera with a bigger lens. I don’t care about resolution at all, but I suspect conference call image quality might increase dramatically if it the lens could gather double the light.
They are probably not willing to sacrifice low-light performance and dynamic range for resolution. When you only have a few millimeters to work with, you can't make the sensor larger without making the lens wider, and no one wants a fish-eye for a web cam.
For a given sensor size, increased pixel density has to decrease low light performance, because each pixel will get less light. Since this camera will be almost exclusively used for online video confrerencing, frequently in low light, I bet it will lead to an overall better user experience.
I suspect it is related to them pushing a much thinner bezel to squeeze in a 16" screen in a 15" chassis. If true, I'd happily accept that tradeoff since screen realestate is far more important to me than a jump from 720p to 1080p for my webcam.
I envy your internet connection where the limiting factor is the quality of the camera and not the speed of your internet, which ends up compressing the video massively anyway.
Going to join others by saying I wouldn't want a higher resolution, and would actually prefer no camera. I got a new Dell Latitude last year, that when speced out, is probably in line with the Macbook Pro lineup, and it has similar camera specs.
Could be that they are not ready to support that amount of spike in traffic in their FaceTime services, so it's a way to limit it by not beefing up the cameras.
Would it materially harm a company with a trillion dollar market cap to offer a version of this without the touchbar (thus yielding a lower price), so people can afford to upgrade the soldered memory and NVMe drive?
Would it also harm them to make a version that didn't have soldered memory/NVMe drive?
Ultimately, this is why I switched to a Dell Latitude. Being user hostile to basic memory/disk replacement doesn't fly with me when spending $1500+ on a machine.
And if replacing either breaks the crypto chain - I don't need a black box T2 chip, I'll do my own disk encryption.
One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus. Options mean inventory, development and test costs etc... and can be sources of quality problems triggering warranty repairs or replacements. Doing few things allows one to streamline both product development and manufacturing.
Apple's product line is "simple" for marketing reasons. It's easier for customers to understand what product is right for them, then funnel them into configuration option trees. While limiting SKUs is still good retail practice (especially if you primarily sell through indirect channels), the ability for customers to easily understand your product portfolio is what's really important.
I do agree that they have slipped in this area, though I think it's an inevitable consequence of being a trillion dollar company. Apple was only able to become a trillion dollar company because their marketing and operations were easier to manage, and companies in a market-leading position typically grow until the point their size overwhelms their ability to steer the ship.
Except they still offered options, but without modularity, so you had more SKUs to track in your logistics - you still need to track the parts you solder down, except now instead of shipping a base system and being able to make a "CTO" version, or just let authorised resellers with authorised service points apply the right parts, you need to wait till a whole extra SKU gets moved through thousands of kilometers of logistic chain for your one tiny order.
Maybe the experience in USA with Apple Stores is different, but when forced to buy a Mac by work recently I had to deal with some ridiculous wait times just for asking for 32G ram.
It's so much better in the USA that I wait until I visit home to do anything Apple related, whether it's to order a new custom laptop or to send my laptop in for service.
For example, I needed my logic board + keyboard replaced and it landed on my doorstep 24 hours later.
Definitely a different experience everywhere else I've been when dealing with Apple whether it's Mexico City or Lisbon. Most places are even lucky to have an actual Apple Store rather than some sort of certified 3rd party with questionable liability.
When I ordered a max spec MBP there was a 2 week lead time before it was shipped overnight directly from Shenzhen to our office in California.
My interpretation was that Apple does not build and hold inventory of every SKU, certain configurations are built at the time of purchase and it took 2 weeks for the factory to process our order.
The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute, but perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team's desires.