The last time they "innovated" on macbooks we got a touch bar (ignoring M chips). I'm good with incremental improvements if we can avoid those gigantic blunders.
Don't forget this also came with the awful butterfly keyboard, allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness. It had terrible reliability, Apple was forced to do replacements and IIRC required a motherboard replacement to actually replace.
And why did Apple do all this? To increase the Average Selling Price ("ASP") of Macs. That's literally it.
the new M4 Macbook Air for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price. For example, the 12" Macbook made too compromises to be just a little bit thinner.
Right and I'm not sure consumers are willing to tolerate innovation.
I recall the amount of hate touch bar got on HN and everyone asking Apple to revert back to building normal machines (which they did with Macbook Pro).
The issue with the touch bar is that it replaced the F keys which are (at least for me) my most used short cuts. I don't use the track pad gestures, never really got the hang of them. So the F keys were used a lot.
They should have added the touch bar, not replacement the F keys with it.
They should do their "touch bar, delete ports, flat keyboard" innovations on a new Macbook Max or Ultra product line and see how it goes. The Air and Pro can stay traditional and keep the HDMI and headphone jacks etc.
I actually enjoy the Touch Bar on my 2018 MacBook Pro. The screen brightness slider offers more granular control. On my M1 air there is often a brightness gap where the screen is either too bright or too dark when using the keyboard to adjust brightness. Then I have to go to the menu bar to get the brightness level I actually want.
It's even better on the 2019+ models when they brought back the escape key.
I would agree that the added expense of that oled touchscreen isn't worth it tho. The M series Macs often go on sale at pretty large discounts (seemingly even more than the Intel Macs), and removing the oled touchscreen and the T2 chip that controlled it probably contributes to that.
I've got the same problem with a hyphenated name, and it was always the way they phrased the error messages that annoyed me. Porter Airline's error message for the longest time was "Your Name is Invalid". No, my name is valid, your system doesn't support it.
I ended up having to contact their support quite a few times for them to fix the error message. Still doesn't work, but at least the error message is reasonable now.
I love seeing the codegen output, makes it easy to understand the issue, but claiming that it's faster or slower without actual benchmarks is a bit disappointing.
why waste brain cells on theory when you should simply bench both versions and validate without buying into any kind of micro-optimization advice at face value.
Someone will have to take over Linus' role. There's no way that kernel development can work without a person in charge, at least not in anyway that is remotely similar to today.
FreeBSD? But there is nothing fundamentally different in open-source project management between a kernel and any other large open-source project. The linux code base is the largest, but not by a large margin. Chrome, GCC, OpenOffice, Android (excluding the linux part obvs.), and the various BSDs are all comparable in scope, complexity, lines of code, and number of contributors. Only linux is (in)famous for having a toxic and unproductive culture.
I assume we're only comparing to operating systems, as I would say that e.g. Chrome as an open-source project is just as impactful if not more so. But generally speaking the Linux support experience is decidedly worse than *BSD or any proprietary OS. It is much harder to get patches upstreamed, and many hardware have errata that never get fixed. (If you haven't experienced this, it might be because companies like canonical and red hat maintain their own patches to support their customers.)
Worse they require frequent logins on device to keep the with client working. Just making the account on device isn't enough. You have to maintain it as well.
