If Microsoft can do it, Apple could do it too and even improve upon it.
Also I can't see why the original comment is about "hating on Apple". All I see is legitimate criticism about some issues with Apple products, that apparently many other people have too. Your comment on the other side is very emotional and full of snide remarks.
Yes, this is really my biggest issue with the new MacBooks or rather was my biggest issue, until I found out there are numerous magnetic connectors and complete cables for USB-C[1].
Now that I use such a cable (L shape, like MagSafe 1), I find it better than the T shaped MagSafe 2 cables, which would disconnect/fall off all the time from my 2015 MBP.
Yes, there are adaptors like that, and my dad uses them. Unfortunately he has to keep removing it to plug in other USB-C devices (e.g. USB-C to HDMI) in the port next to it, because it's so wide that it blocks the neighbouring port.
I am aware that there are alternatives. But none of them are as good as the original (Apple hold some key patents, evidently) and second, it is just another POS to carry around and eventually lose. Steve is rolling in his grave.
Why do folks that don‘t want to use them even care?
It’s not that when they are used, different code is produced. As with the editors color scheme, it’s just a personal choice everyone can live out within the privacy of his or her editor.
Personally I find it nice to represent single logical tokens like => or === with just a single character.
I’m on your side with ligatures. Pry them from my cold dead hands. But given that the author is a font designer he probably has had many heated discussions on the matter and that’s probably why he cares so much.
Inkjets still have a few advantages or are at least on par with Laser printers:
- Borderless printing (Photos, your invoices with a footer that has a blue background, …)
- Much cheaper to restock with 3rd party cartridges or even cheaper when you have one with refillable tanks
- You can print on photo paper and get out really nice looking photos. Generally the quality of images with a good Inkjet is better than laser imho
- You can print on a very broad array of different kinds of papers, formats and materials, many printers can even print on blu-ray discs and stuff like that
- Many modern Inkets use Ink that is water resistant, so you can use a marker pen on your printouts for example
- Time to first page is usually shorter (no warmup needed)
That would be Dan Riccio, wouldn‘t it? He is senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, directly answering to Tim Cook and leading the Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod engineering teams.
Some of the current/recent failures that come to mind:
- The MacBook keyboard issues discussed here
- The MacPro disaster (thermal design issues -> no real update since almost six years)
- The The MBP 2018 thermal design issues
- The MBP „Flexgate“ (display connector design flaw)
Dan might be the guy who falls on his sword if anyone does, but I suspect that he is struggling with design constraints imposed from someone higher up. Someone obsessed with making everything as thin as possible -- which is arguably the root of many of Apple's hardware woes, large and small. Someone with a British accent who is fond of white rooms.
(Having said that, I think some of those issues are somewhat overstated. The keyboard is a real issue; the Mac Pro's thermal corner is a real issue, but it's one we have solid evidence is being addressed by both the forthcoming Mac Pro and the already-existing iMac Pro; AirPower is a debacle, but I don't know if that's really his purview; the rest...eh. I'm not saying they're not real, but I don't know how widespread they are as real issues. But with the exception of AirPower and the Mac Pro, all the issues you listed would probably have literally been solved by making everything 1mm thicker.)
I think Ive is preparing us for laptops without keyboards. Two screens, one that you type on. It's a dumb idea but I think they will go through with it.
It's quite possible that's what Ive personally would be happy with, but I don't think Apple's going to do that any time soon. As "courageous" as they like to be with jettisoning old technology, they're aware of what a PR fiasco their current generation of laptops has become. If anything, swapping back to low-profile scissor switches and quietly jettisoning the Touch Bar is the most likely next-gen MBP shift.
If Touch Bar were in addition to the function keys + Escape key, everyone would praise it as yet another brilliant Apple innovation, and rivals would be copying it the way every notebook nowadays looks like the late-2008 unibody Macbook Pro (and really, all the way back to the 2001 titanium PowerBook). But it's not, so they don't and they aren't.
It's possible. It's not impossible that if they'd just kept the hardware escape key and replaced the function keys with the Touch Bar it would have gotten a warmer reception; I think Apple really underestimated (a) how much of the MBP's loudest and most influential audience is comprised of developers or developer-adjacent techies, and (b) how many of those folks are really attached to their escape key. Personally I would be a lot happier with that -- in practice, I don't really miss the function keys and media keys, and I've actually used some of the Touch Bar functionality once in a while, but not having the escape key makes me angry and I'm not even a dedicated Vim user.
I think techies overestimate their influence. The Mac’s revenue was the highest it’s ever been last quarter. The lack of an escape key didn’t hurt sells.
Techies are a pretty big subset of MacBook Pro buyers, specifically, and that's the only line that has models in it with no escape key. The last quarter was the first one that the new MacBook Air was on sale -- the Air being one of Apple's most popular laptops and the one that had gone years without an update. That drove a lot of the sales that quarter. Were a lot of techies buying the Air? I don't know. But you know what the new Air has? An escape key. :)
I'm not sure "debacle" is the right word for a product they announced, and then later decided they couldn't make, and so cancelled. There were no physical copies out there, no consumers wasted money on it, it was just... a cancelled product.
Apple operates on Form Over Function and has for years. The engineering team is subservient to the design team. You are seeing the consequences of it live. The engineering team knows the butterfly keyboard design is fundamentally flawed, but the design team has priority. There's only so much the engineers can do to make it Function while being constrained by Form.
This is the same type of corporate structural flaw as Boeing has, just without the loss of life for Apple. They needed to sell the plane without re-certifying, so the management demands some poor engineers work around it while having their hands tied behind their back.
Without constraints and product goals, engineering is just wanking around with math. Every great product you've ever used started with a vision and then engineering was brought to bear to make the vision a reality.
There is a role for engineering to adjust the vision when necessary to comport with reality. It's not clear that was an issue with these keyboards as it's not clear that anyone knew up front that the butterfly mechanism would have these problems.
It's worth remembering that when Apple launched this keyboard, they didn't just say it's thin, they touted the engineering that went into it. I really, really doubt that this was a situation where the engineering team was banging the problem gong and was overruled. I know that's a popular way of thinking here on HN but I need at least some evidence to believe it.
This looks more like well-intentioned innovation that has just not worked out as well as they hoped, which happens sometimes, even with competent engineers. It's why Apple keeps such cash reserves on hand, so they can try new things and survive the ones that don't work out. Thankfully in this case, laptop keyboards are not life and death products.
Apple is notoriously secretive, and has unusually restrictive policies about discussing work outside the company. At best we can have ex-Apple engineers chiming in.
Do you really think if the head of engineering went to Tim Cook and said that Ive’s design wasn’t technically feasible he would have been told to ship it anyway?
Maybe if the head of engineering had had another 6 months to test the keyboard design properly he could have concluded that it wasn't technically feasible. But at the time there was a lot of pressure to release a redesign of the MBP and probably the design of the case was already decided. In the end Apple wasn't able to make a proper keyboard to accommodate the specs but maybe it was too late to go back to the drawing board.
I'm speculating of course, but I very much doubt Apple are complete idiots. It's more probable that some circumstances forced them to release the redesign. It was a mistake of course, they should have only updated the specs of the 2015 model, maybe adding a TB3 port. But you know, hindsight is 20/20.
I imagine Apple has been working on a redesign with a new keyboard, but these things take a couple of years. Specially when the Mac is only 10% of Apple's revenue.
The thing with keyboards is that... well, for one, scissor switches are perfectly acceptable (the ones in the 2015 MBP and older, and pretty much all laptops today). Further, the thickness of the scissor mechanism can be made to be REALLY small. See: Acer Swift 7 (9.95mm thick, total), the XPS 13 (11.6mm thick, total) the X1 Carbon 6 (15.95mm thick, total), and pretty much any other Ultrabook. This is compared to the MacBook Pro, which is 14.9mm thick. Note that the X1 Carbon has TDP-up configured to 25W vs 28W on the MacBook Pro and the XPS 13 has TDP-up configured to 26W. Point being, thermal constraints did not force a keyboard redesign to fit the new form factor.
This feels like something Google would do: Take something that's perfectly functional, change it entirely, remove features, make it less functional, have it be buggy as hell, then release it while deprecating the old one. Now, sell it as an innovative new feature.
In short: the keyboard redesign does not appear to have any real reason behind it, and it's essentially change for the sake of change.
Maybe you are right. That would be consistent with the trashcan Mac Pro redesign.
Everyone was happy with the Mac Pro towers, a lot of people still use them today. The trashcan design IMO was more of an engineering/design statement at solving a self imposed problem rather than an existing one.
So, if rumors are to be believed, Apple is making a 180 on the new Mac Pro. Let's hope in a year or two we will have a new MBP with a good keyboard.
Tim: Hey X, I appreciate the hard work you're doing. But I've been busy with other meetings and slagging off Zuckerberg again. LOL. Why don't you touch base with Jony Ive and see if you two can't come up with something?
The MBP 2018 design issue was fixed by a firmware update a week later.
The AirPower debacle was anything but. They noticed they had an unfixable design problem and cancelled the project. The alternative would have been something similar to the Samsung/Galaxy Fold issue. Shipping a bad product.
Even the Mac Pro not being updated was halfway because they thought the IMac Pro bad external GPUs was the answer. Honestly, for most people it could be and has gotten great review. They had a change of heart.
The alternative would have been something similar to the Samsung/Galaxy Fold issue.
Nope, there's another alternative: announce it when it's sitting in the backroom of every Apple store, like back in the old days. I'm sure Apple has their reasons for not doing that much anymore, but it would have avoided this very issue.
Even in the Jobs era they pre announced the “3Ghz G5” that never happened and the AppleTV that did. Of course they preannounced the iPhone by 6 months.
Can anyone with a bit more information explain why the EU might have any saying as to what a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library can and can not host?
Quote: A referral activity (meaning the reporting of terrorist and extremist online content to the concerned OSP) does not constitute an enforceable act. Thus, the decision and removal of the referred terrorist and extremist online content is taken by the concerned service provider under their own responsibility and accountability (in reference to their Terms and Conditions).
Not for anyone outside of the EU, and not in short-term. However, I believe that it is an alarming tendency that can cause a lot of damage over a sufficiently long time period.
It's still a problem for us in the U.S, because there are always politicians in the U.S. that look at dumb things being done in Europe and say, "We should be doing that, too.", and voters who will vote for them.
In the long term, though, it could cause noticible implosion of related industries. I'm kinda imagining that this kind of regulation is going to be so clearly harmful that its removed.
If Microsoft can do it, Apple could do it too and even improve upon it.
Also I can't see why the original comment is about "hating on Apple". All I see is legitimate criticism about some issues with Apple products, that apparently many other people have too. Your comment on the other side is very emotional and full of snide remarks.