I think this discussion is interesting but misguided. For consumer laptops, light, very thin, and a single USB-C port makes sense to me. On the other hand, if you are building a larger form factor laptop for professional use, why not add additional ports, they are easy to fit into the design.
My Dad is 100 years old, and we were having a friendly disagreement over Apple gear: he is a fan of the desktop Mac Pros, just bought another new one in the last year. I was trying to point out that my wife’s new iPhone 13 Pro can probably process video competitively with Intel chips and conventional GPUs. I based this on the real time video effects, driven by deep learning models, that the new iPhone can do in real time. My Dad uses his desktop Mac Pro exclusively for video editing and 3D rendering. I was stating an opinion that I thought one of the new laptops with 64G ram in the SOC, with the extra GPUs and neural processing units would be better for video editing.
If you're 100 and still using the latest and greatest for video editing you're either making money off of it or enjoy it enough that the cost doesn't matter.
So much to be amazed about in this post. :) your 100 year old dad does video editing and 3d rendering to a degree that a Mac Pro is the computer he wants to use? I would love to see some of his work. (genuine interest)
> I think this discussion is interesting but misguided. For consumer laptops, light, very thin, and a single USB-C port makes sense to me. On the other hand, if you are building a larger form factor laptop for professional use, why not add additional ports, they are easy to fit into the design.
But this conversation is largely about the MacBook Pro, where it's a "larger form factor laptop for professional use", and yet they removed all but the USB-C ports, and then put them back. That seems rather on point in this discussion.
Was your disagreement about form factors or processing capabilities?
If it was about form factors - your father is in the right, the laptop form factor is terrible for your body in a number of different ways, so if you don't need to move around, you should just get a desktop. (unless you have the money to be able to afford both a laptop and a dock setup (although keeping your laptop docked usually kills the battery, so it's still kind of preferable to get a real desktop))
If it's about processing, you may very well be right - there was an article just yesterday about the M1 Max's rendering capabilities[1] and they're extremely competitive with current desktop workstations.
Why not get the best of both worlds, though, and wait for a desktop with an M1 Pro/Max chip?
Dude, holy cow, I would love to see an interview with your Dad about doing that kind of work at that age and I bet it would go over really well here. That is amazing. Being in my early 40s now I have been increasingly thinking about what the future holds for me. Reading things like this gives me a lot of hope that I could keep my skills sharp that long.
Bet Apple would love to see it, too. That's the kind of thing they'd put in a commercial or on stage at an event.
I don't understand the anger/disgust at the addition of new addressable pixels to the left and right of the camera. The remaining screen area has the same aspect ratio as before, the entire extra space is black during full screen video, etc.
Would you prefer a screen where the areas to the left and right of the camera were black plastic/glass instead of pixels?
It's pretty simple - we've been using rectangular screens since forever. With rectangular screens there are no compromises within our software and there are no compromises in our field of vision.
Obviously, the notch stands out. It juts into the rectangle, making it no longer a rectangle. The OS now must make all sorts of compromises and implement extra functionality and options (like compatibility mode). And they aren't working perfectly [0] (LOL - And for what? A thinner fucking bezel? There's plenty of bezel beneath the dock - they should have shifted everything down.) The users must make compromises as the size of usable screen area actually changes depending on what mode the application is in. With the notch, if you use any apps that have a long list of menus your eyeballs must now be trained to skip over the notch as you scan the list of top menu items. The whole thing is a byzantine nightmare.
Most people get this immediately and they don't like it. In all the comments on all the articles and forums that I've read - the vast majority of people don't like the notch on this Macbook and they don't like it on the iPhone either. However, they do put up with it and learn to ignore it given that they have no choice if they want to stay in the Apple ecosystem that they're probably locked into anyway.
Lucky for me - I'm somewhat of a minimalist on my smartphone. I can still buy a new iPhone without the notch (AND with a home button which is way better for quickly switching apps) because I don't need the greatest camera. For my computers, I'm not locked into any one platform but a Mac would certainly be my last choice because of this kind of garbage.
[0] "Apple’s new MacBook Pro notch is misbehaving. Early adopters have discovered inconsistencies in how Apple handles the notch across macOS and in individual apps, resulting in unexpected behavior where status bar items can get hidden under the notch." - https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/27/22748371/apple-macbook-p...
I can accept the notch if the OS is smart enough not to render stuff behind it. Don't look at the notch as missing screen estate, look at the strips of display next to it as extra screen you'd normally never have.
For now, the OS doesn't seem to be prepared not to render stuff behind the notch. That's a really obvious flaw that'll hopefully get patched out soon if Apple is worth their salt.
>the OS doesn't seem to be prepared not to render stuff behind the notch
Really? UIKit has been successfully dealing with the notch for a long time, I assumed they would have updated AppKit with the same logic ("safe areas") way ahead of introducing notches to macOS. Have you seen examples where it's not working?
Holy shit! I wonder if this is something to do with some app devs not using the APIs as intended and it not mattering until now, but that seems so unlikely - surely the population of the menu bar is nigh-inescapably standardized (edit: double-unlikely, considering the battery icon example in that thread). It's always so disheartening to see screwups this obvious in the Apple ecosystem. The upside of their dictatorial style is supposed to be the absence of things like this.
The OS is smart enough to not render stuff behind it. You can test this by clicking a dragging a menu bar icon across the notch - it will immediately jump to the other side and not try to render a drag animation.
I took a look at a colleague’s M1 Macbook Air after using an iPad Pro exclusively for 3 years and I was shocked to see how outdated MacOS looks compared to iPadOS. Animations and the UI are nowhere near as polished.
Apple has clearly focused on iOS and iPadOS the last 10 years and they tried to slowly phase out the Mac but people kept buying Macs so they begrudgingly started focusing on it again around 2016-2018.
Laptops don't need animations because they have enough real estate that they don't need constantly reflowing UIs to fit the most important information in the tiny bit of screen space, while maintaining a sense of spatial organization. A laptop can just show you everything.
I think the animations being referred to are more usability/accessibility elements that acknowledge user interactions.
Often times users are confused by how the UI responds or doesn't and the last few years of iOS/Android releases have focused heavily on UI refinement to effectively communicate visually what's happening.
I'm not sure why everyone thinks Apple was caught off guard by this, it was a decade/generation in the making. Apple dumped dollars into iOS/iPadOS because that's what had inertia and they wanted to keep it rolling.
At the same time they required you to own or have access to a MacBook if you wanted to write Apps for those platforms, ensuring there would at least be some demand for the platform. They also transitioned from a proprietary and dated Power CPU to the commodity Intel x64 CPUs reducing their development costs.
MacBooks got adopted at places like MIT as cheap powerful Unix machines and as the LAMP stack took over the internet they became the preferred developer's box. These were the seeds planted.
Now days they're a lifestyle/prestige item for college kids, soccer moms, and corporate executives. They're focusing on it because the platform is approaching critical mass.
If you think it looks unpolished, then you're missing the point of having different UI kits. Mobile and desktop are not the same and does not have the same needs, eg. fancy animations when scrolling or tapping or moving between interfaces.
The world of iOS and iPadOS is meant for touch and caters to the consumer. Mac OS is meant for mouse and keyboard caters to consumers but it also serve as a development platform for its app ecosystem. As such it need to get out of way too.
Both platforms fulfill different needs. I'm personally glad Mac OS does not look nor behave like either iOS nor iPadOS, even though Apple is definitely trying to add a bit of the same UI with each Mac OS iteration.
For an inverse perspective (I'm a serious Mac user without an iPad), I'm regularly frustrated by how limited iPadOS is compared to the functionality of MacOS.
Apple wants to have its cake and eat it too. They've been trying to polish the iPad experience enough without encroaching on the Mac market to the point that they're painting themselves into a corner.
iPadOS looks fine for most mobile computing tasks, but it's still seriously lacking as a fully-fledged OS, which more and more people are asking for now that the iPad ships with the M1 chip and a decent amount of memory.
Aiming for USB-C sounded like a solid goal on paper, but it's become so fragmented with all the protocols, data rates, and variations in cable capabilities and it becomes obvious that compatibility is significantly worse than what we had before.
If you can't hit the lowest common denominator when it comes to USB-C you'll end up frustrated if you ever have a cable that doesn't meet your needs.
> it's become so fragmented with all the protocols, data rates, and variations in cable capabilities
I thought this was overblown until recently. I purchased a new car with Android Auto. I have a bunch of USB-A to USB-C cables at home and it took me 9 tries to find one that allowed my phone to connect. Seems the others were only good for charging. Was really surprised by that.
Oh my! That's also unlucky though. When I updated my 2015 Mazda to work with Android Auto, I ran to Best Buy and bought their store brand (Insignia) USB-C to USB-A cable, and it worked fine.
What were the sources of these cables that didn't include that capability? Included with other devices? It's a shame they went so cheap on those, though not surprising!
Some came with phones for charging. Some came from Monoprice. Some from Best Buy. Most of them were no name brands. You get what you pay for, I suppose. Learned my lesson, though.
Whatever his responsibility for some of the mistakes over the last few years, that doesn't wipe away his incredible contributions over several decades.
> I'm afraid it's not going to get any better from here on.
But like—it has been getting better. They fixed the keyboard, they added back some missing ports, they got rid of the touchbar. So it they are currently, actively in the process of getting better, and it is working.
I have a ton of mixed feelings on this one, but by no means do I think Apple was "Wrong".
If apple was wrong, so is/was Google and Microsoft.
Realistically there is no reason USB-C could not be what all 3 were pushing it to be, the standard port for most things. Especially with more and more being wireless.
I know people constantly complain about dongles, but when I plug in my laptop to work work area I have a single plug and it connects 2 monitors, my keyboard and mouse, webcam, ethernet, etc. That is... really nice. But is also something I don't need when I am traveling. The only dongle I carry with me is my ethernet adapter and even then, I am most likely using wifi.
That all being said, it think where this fell apart was a few things.
The first being the transition period, that was always going to be painful. As a large industry of cheap products was carried kicking and screaming into the future while also needing to maintain support for older products.
The second being... the USB-C "Standard" is a complete mess. Mixed with manufactures cutting corners all over the place on cables.
Maybe it was too soon? Idk, ultimately the conversation would have never happened had these companies tried to push it but even with all of their backing. The industry did not follow this time.
I wish it had, but I guess here we are... just as fragmented as we always were, if not more.
TLDR, Apple was not wrong. The industry just did not follow as Apple (and others) were pushing for.
+1. It might have been annoying at the start, but I haven't had a problem with just USB-C in years. If anything, the new MacBooks seem backwards with SD slot and HDMI. If I get one, I imagine I'll use USB-C exclusively - I'll only carry an USB-C charger, as it charges my phone, kids' Nintendo Switch and iPad.
From a professional perspective they were wrong. Say you want to go through some slides with a new client but their meeting room doesn't support new-fangled USB-C video input? You're out of luck if you didn't bring some weird dongle. So from the perspective of ease of use, they were very wrong.
The touch bar was stupid. Ridiculously dumb and completely useless. It got in the way, and removed functionality so I'd say they were wrong on that count too.
The keyboard is now bad, so they were wrong on that too.
I still have a mbp I bought in 2015 which is the 'old' design and it plugs into everything I need it to. I've been given a few of these new macbooks for work and frankly it was a horrible experience. They went from 'it just works' to 'it works if you have a dozen dongles'.
While I am not denying that first issue exists, that first issue is resolved by the transition finishing. It is painful now but it would have fixed itself.
Which again that transition would have never even started had the companies not tried to push it.
People talk about the messy USB-C standard, but I think there's another related problem that has nothing to do with any specific issue in the standard.
There's just an inevitable economic trade-off with having a port that supports 40gb/s that many users also want to use for multiple cheap peripherals that only need a couple of kb/s like a mouse or keyboard, or perhaps a cheap usb 1.1 thumb drive that only needs ~10mb/s. That's 7 orders of magnitude overkill (or 3.5 orders of magnitude for the thumb drive).
I do think a potentially better trade-off for Apple would be to have like 8 usb-c ports instead of 4 where half of them are slower usb 3.0 (or even 2.1) usb-c ports, and come up with some easy to understand user convention of labeling high speed usb-c and low speed usb-c. For some reason where we've landed in the last few years (and not just from Apple but from other PC brands, from usb hubs, from multi-port power bricks, etc.) is that USB-C ports are almost always much faster than corresponding USB-A ports but there are always fewer ports available. AFAIK you still can't find a usb-c hub with more than like 3 ports on it. So it never became a drop-in replacement for USB-A for cheaper devices that don't need a lot of bandwidth, even though I believe the standard does allow for slower versions like usb 2.1 over usb-c.
It worked for Apple with: ADB -> USB, SCSI -> Firewire -> USB, No Floppy, No CD, etc. However, the device manufactures had bought in and rolled new connectivity with them. Remember hard drives that had eSATA, USB, Firewire all on one chasis?
I do agree that the USB combined with Thunderbolt and the cabling differences were a problem and really pissed me off. It also doesn't help that a hub to do what you are doing with a single cable really should be thunderbolt and minimum costs >$200 to do it right. People were used to USB hubs costing $20.
Horrible execution in every part of the transition.
Don't forget removing the damn headphone jack. People are still ranting and raging about this and it was what, 5 years ago? I say, give it up: Apple's target market is the person who is constantly buying new stuff. If you have a lot of legacy peripherals (and yes, 3.5mm headphone jack is ancient--it was introduced around the same time as the old serial D-sub connector), you're bound to be frustrated with any new Apple product. I dumpster dive for most of my stuff, and I probably haven't bought a new computer or peripheral for close to a decade. If I were to suddenly get a brand new M1 Mac, I don't know if it would even work with half my stuff, my stuff's so old.
My next computer build will almost certainly be a traditional tower-style PC running Linux. I can't keep up with the peripheral treadmill.
I'm one of those "you can have my headphone jack when you pry it from my cold dead fingers" as I clutch my 6S+. However...I did just break down and bought the newly released airpods. I've been using my phone on my bike, and the cord is just ridiculous for that use case. But I still have the options of plugging in my overear cans that never run out of battery power.
The dongle you need to convert USB-C to 3.5mm audio is less than $10 on AWS. You could have used your cans without fear of running out of battery power.
He was talking about MBPs between 2016 and 2020 that didn't have the 3.5mm jack. TBH, I find using wired cans on a mobile device odd, and I mean as odd as putting a 3.5mm jack on an Apple Watch. That kind of odd. But on an MBP? Not so odd.
are you sure? I have a 2017 and a 2019 MBP right here (i'm typing on the 2019) and they both most certainly have a 3.5mm jack. you might want to double check your info.
again, what you find odd is perfectly even for me. not one pair of wireless anything has ever sounded as good as my wired cans.
Meh. For less than $10 you can buy a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone adaptor on AWS. Yes, it's a dongle - which people have complained about, but it's not like you had to go out and buy brand-new headphones. In fact new peripherals weren't needed at all - you might have to buy a few dongles but that's a far sight cheaper than buying all new peripherals.
What I haven't been able to find out is whether the new 3.5mm audio port supports digital optical audio, i.e. Toslink. MacBooks prior to 2016 did. I suppose these don't. Again, you can buy a dongle (see the pattern here?) to handle that as well. Still, if you were using your Mac to drive a Toslink channel you still can. You just can't do it out of the box.
Hey don't worry, Apple has time to be wrong again and maybe this time around everyone will switch over to USB-C. EU is enforcing USB-C chargers for all phones so that should be taken care of. Next year could be the year of USB-C.
Regardless, I still welcome all the ports. The 14" would probably look better thinner but the 16" is fine.
Apple on the desktop is not in a good space. If you take performance out of the equation, the new Pro laptops just look and feel years behind what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11 and the Surface. MacOS was really fantastic a few years ago. It was lightweight and great for development and design. But, now it just feels old and bloated.
I agree, and it feels like a notch on such an expensive device is the perfect troll.
I am happy though that real keyboards are back.. I hope the notch doesn't make it to other devices...
It's my hopes that M1 and ARM in general can make massive inroads simply because of power efficiency, but I hope for it to be done outside a walled garden and I hope it can adapt to the X86 "builder" space... Otherwise its just a matter of time before Intel/AMD catch up (and bechmarks of new Intel leaks appear to be doing well - and i'll be honest, i have no complaints on my current gen intel or amd either)
Strongly disagree. I think there are certainly use cases around video and 3D design that performance is _the most important metric_. But, hardware performance has not been an issue for general computing or software development in a few years. The problem with MacOS is around usability. It is just not on par with Windows 11, ChromeOS, or even iOS. They haven't evolved the software to meet modern computing and it really shows.
I don't get why everyone is so hyped about this. The MBP still doesn't have VHS support so they're literally gate keeping an entire medium behind a dongle. They have some serious nerve >:(
My setup is USB-C -> USB-A -> VGA -> VCR. It’s an obsolete medium, so that seems reasonable to me.
Then again, I distinctly remember my amusement when I got my first MP3 player - a Diamond Rio PMP300 - to work with the stereo in my room when I was in high school. It was a console record player with an 8-track deck, and I used an 8-track to cassette adapter, a cassette to 1/8” stereo adapter, and plugged that into the headphone port of the Rio.
I very much doubt that'd be "better" in any meaningful way, at least for the use case that a card reader covers. You still want removable storage, it's useful to be able to read that storage without the camera, ...
Yes, if you believe everyone is a “pro”, then I agree most pros don’t need any ports. Hence why the IPad Pro and iPhone Pro exists. That should be enough computing power for most “pros”
All fringe hobbyist activities, not "pro" stuff (except perhaps photo drones).
I don't think that many people are photographers, overall. Most people who buy "Pros" probably work in an office and their company buys the computers for them.
Where to even start with this. What if I told you that just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean it doesn't exist?
There are tons of small businesses in the physical automation space that run on hooking SBCs up to various things. Many of their components are 3d-printed, by them, until they get everything laid out just right. Source: security evaluations for the software those people write is an extremely lucrative side-hustle, and it's all word of mouth.
The photography business you casually ignore is quite large (Google "wedding photographer" in your city and then realize that most photographers don't even shoot weddings). Or just realize that on the order of 200k DSLRs ship in a given month, almost all using SD as at least one of the onboard cards. Add to that the high-end mirrorless segment which is about the same size, plus all the GoPro addicts (and just to head off the inevitable "what pro uses GoPros" comment, go look at b-roll in any car review). Then round it out with the dashcam/security camera crowd that either doesn't trust wifi or is required to have on-device recording for regulatory reasons.
There are also lots of scientific instruments which use SD cards for data logging in remote locations, especially since they're cheap so you can buy 2-3 from different manufacturers and duplicate the writes without appreciably increasing cost. Ditto other kinds of data loggers like IoT stuff that actually uses an air gap.
Yes you can use your DSLR as a +500g (without the lens, or the mic, or the cage) dongle. There is a huge list of problems with this approach but it boils down to the simple truism that, for pros, ports are good and dongles are bad.
Agreed. I spend a lot of time writing SD cards for use in various projects I do using the Raspberry Pi. Unusual for a week to go by when I'm not doing it.
If you go down the "most people" path, all the ports go away.
I am certainly not most people but still use SD cards as a "thumb drive", to format for the Raspberry Pi, for my wife's dash cam, and I also have a few digital cameras I still use that are SD-card based.
I do however expect this will be the last MacBook with an SD card slot.
What Apple has done here is accept that MacBook Pros are indeed for Pros. Who uses SD cards? Pros!
In Apple’s view, the people who use only their phones for photos will be perfectly served with the M1 machines (Air, Pro 13, iPads). The ugly design is because they realize that it’s the lowest priority for Pros… performance and ports are far more important.
Both the SD card slot and HDMI port are on release outdated. SD card reader is limited to UHS-II when UHS-III is out and the HDMI connector is 2.0 instead of 2.1. I'm assuming they're using the pci-e lanes that would've been consumed by the thunderbolt 4 connector it replaces which would mean it'd require an additional controller to meet the bandwidth requirements for both UHS-III and HDMI 2.1 (which consumes 48gbps on its own), but I wouldn't exactly describe either of these connectors more "pro." I'd describe them as convenient.
GoPros and other action cams. Wild life cameras. Dashcams. RaspberryPi. These are things that just popped to the front of mind. I'm sure there's plenty of other things that we could find that you were also unable to think about.
I can think of things that use SD cards. Just not very relevant things. Like if you read the card from your wild life camera once per month, you can easily attach a card reader.
Apple doesn't care about the future of anything except their bottom line. They wanted sleek and different to sell a new generation of laptops, now they're adding features again to sell a new generation of laptops. Planned obsolescence and creating churn to sell more units, the Apple way.
The newest unsupported laptop is from 2015. I mean maybe there has been longer support for previous operating systems but I'm not sure anyone would be calling "six years old" "pretty recent". Six years, incidentally, matches the age of their oldest phone that is still supported by the latest iOS, the 6s.
And... different people buy devices at different times. What are they supposed to do to satisfy your standards, release one laptop every eight years?
> And... different people buy devices at different times. What are they supposed to do to satisfy your standards, release one laptop every eight years?
Not constantly break and re-implement standards. Just stick with a nice evolutionary product line. It's a known marketing tactic to constantly introduce useless features in order to push more units.
Also, the standard for PCs is that support basically never ends, you can always install the newest OS until the computer literally can't run it anymore.
Linux supports more hardware than either (including tons of legacy stuff) and moves quicker than either.
Their removal of the function row and removal of slots was supposed to be a feature, now they've gone back. In reality they're just changing shit for the sake of it, so the faithful feel compelled to always upgrade.
Has it really “moved faster” in a way that helps users?
The Touch Bar was supposed to be an enhancement and increase functionality (which it did) users didn’t like it. Should Apple not have tried or should it have stuck to its guns?
How is not having the Touch Bar on new Macs “obsoleting” old Macs?
As far as HDMI, having four USB C ports was more versatile than having three USB C/Thunderbolt ports.
However the reality is that while you could use a dongle, it was more convenient to have an HDMI port. But how did adding an HDMI 2 port “obsolete” having four USB C ports?
Not sure they were wrong about the future of laptops, rather wrong about the future of pro laptops that have specific needs that favor function over style. Most of us I think thought once they removed ports and MagSafe, and added Touch Bar, etc there was no going back and we had to get use to it. Haven't been this excited and love using in a long time. Always has been a great machine that rely on every day, but now it's a true joy. Sure would have loved FaceID and CFExpress and if MagSafe was also thunderbolt data cable (since many of us use docks), but otherwise it's incredible.
This is why I think a Framework Laptop is a better option as you can customize the kind of ports you want to have for your needs instead of being held hostage to design decisions that require USB docks/adapters.
I think nobody would have complained about the Macbook's lack of ports if Apple would have offered (and promoted!) a portable docking station and a Thunderbolt screen equivalent for USB-C. Unfortunately that never happened, and most users don't even seem to know that there are docking stations and USB-C screens with power delivery from third parties.
So lots of people used Apple's ridiculous adapters and plugged in 3 or more cables for power, external screens and USB-A devices like webcams.
Tiny nit, but it bugs me that the word "admit" has been bastardized and is now a standard tool in the clickbait-writer's toolbox. I know that language changes and I'm no prescriptivist, but to admit something means to acknowledge it. The most common use I see, in headlines at least, is along the lines of "Notable Person says something which, if you analyze it, suggests they are a hypocrite." Or worse, "Notable Person stumbles over words during an interview. Zing!"
This headline would imply that there's a high-level Apple exec on record saying the Touch Bar was a mistake. This is the opposite of that: Apple is pretending like it never happened.
hey this is kind of off topic but it’s about apple so here goes: Does anyone know what happened to the whole csam thing from a few months ago? I know they delayed the feature but iirc they didn’t cancel it completely. Does anyone have any updates?
It's not that Apple's admitting it's wrong about the future of laptops. It's probably still right about it.
The problem is this is Apple remembering what a Pro user is, and as a result, what a Pro laptop should be. Or to put it another way, this is Apple remembering that they can't just sell farmers a faster and more expensive car. It still needs to sell them trucks.
The Pro (or the Powerbook before that) line distinguished itself from the non Pro, Air and iBook lines not just through price and power, but also, very significantly, by providing everything it's fairly niche and specialized users needed. This used to include stuff like optical audio in/out, FW 400/800, SD Card readers, etc. Because that's what their Pro users needed, and Apple wanted to create a device that gave them everything they could without making them buy other stuff, making it a great user experience.
Once their Pro users' needs changed, so for example, once FW became far less popular even among pro users than it used to be, it was then that they changed their device.
With the USB-C transition Apple had to have known that it would take years, if not decades for their Pro users to completely change their workflow. So eliminating ports that they used daily was extremely user hostile.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadMy Dad is 100 years old, and we were having a friendly disagreement over Apple gear: he is a fan of the desktop Mac Pros, just bought another new one in the last year. I was trying to point out that my wife’s new iPhone 13 Pro can probably process video competitively with Intel chips and conventional GPUs. I based this on the real time video effects, driven by deep learning models, that the new iPhone can do in real time. My Dad uses his desktop Mac Pro exclusively for video editing and 3D rendering. I was stating an opinion that I thought one of the new laptops with 64G ram in the SOC, with the extra GPUs and neural processing units would be better for video editing.
But this conversation is largely about the MacBook Pro, where it's a "larger form factor laptop for professional use", and yet they removed all but the USB-C ports, and then put them back. That seems rather on point in this discussion.
If it was about form factors - your father is in the right, the laptop form factor is terrible for your body in a number of different ways, so if you don't need to move around, you should just get a desktop. (unless you have the money to be able to afford both a laptop and a dock setup (although keeping your laptop docked usually kills the battery, so it's still kind of preferable to get a real desktop))
If it's about processing, you may very well be right - there was an article just yesterday about the M1 Max's rendering capabilities[1] and they're extremely competitive with current desktop workstations.
Why not get the best of both worlds, though, and wait for a desktop with an M1 Pro/Max chip?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28994800
Bet Apple would love to see it, too. That's the kind of thing they'd put in a commercial or on stage at an event.
With a little help you can add lots of nvme and hard disk storage.
Would you prefer a screen where the areas to the left and right of the camera were black plastic/glass instead of pixels?
Obviously, the notch stands out. It juts into the rectangle, making it no longer a rectangle. The OS now must make all sorts of compromises and implement extra functionality and options (like compatibility mode). And they aren't working perfectly [0] (LOL - And for what? A thinner fucking bezel? There's plenty of bezel beneath the dock - they should have shifted everything down.) The users must make compromises as the size of usable screen area actually changes depending on what mode the application is in. With the notch, if you use any apps that have a long list of menus your eyeballs must now be trained to skip over the notch as you scan the list of top menu items. The whole thing is a byzantine nightmare.
Most people get this immediately and they don't like it. In all the comments on all the articles and forums that I've read - the vast majority of people don't like the notch on this Macbook and they don't like it on the iPhone either. However, they do put up with it and learn to ignore it given that they have no choice if they want to stay in the Apple ecosystem that they're probably locked into anyway.
Lucky for me - I'm somewhat of a minimalist on my smartphone. I can still buy a new iPhone without the notch (AND with a home button which is way better for quickly switching apps) because I don't need the greatest camera. For my computers, I'm not locked into any one platform but a Mac would certainly be my last choice because of this kind of garbage.
[0] "Apple’s new MacBook Pro notch is misbehaving. Early adopters have discovered inconsistencies in how Apple handles the notch across macOS and in individual apps, resulting in unexpected behavior where status bar items can get hidden under the notch." - https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/27/22748371/apple-macbook-p...
For now, the OS doesn't seem to be prepared not to render stuff behind the notch. That's a really obvious flaw that'll hopefully get patched out soon if Apple is worth their salt.
Really? UIKit has been successfully dealing with the notch for a long time, I assumed they would have updated AppKit with the same logic ("safe areas") way ahead of introducing notches to macOS. Have you seen examples where it's not working?
[1] https://twitter.com/SnazzyQ/status/1453143510111059968
Hundreds of millions of iPhone owners seem OK with it.
Which means you're stuck with the notch, and you need to learn to accept it.
Or you just... don't care about it, because it doesn't matter.
Apple has clearly focused on iOS and iPadOS the last 10 years and they tried to slowly phase out the Mac but people kept buying Macs so they begrudgingly started focusing on it again around 2016-2018.
Often times users are confused by how the UI responds or doesn't and the last few years of iOS/Android releases have focused heavily on UI refinement to effectively communicate visually what's happening.
At the same time they required you to own or have access to a MacBook if you wanted to write Apps for those platforms, ensuring there would at least be some demand for the platform. They also transitioned from a proprietary and dated Power CPU to the commodity Intel x64 CPUs reducing their development costs.
MacBooks got adopted at places like MIT as cheap powerful Unix machines and as the LAMP stack took over the internet they became the preferred developer's box. These were the seeds planted.
Now days they're a lifestyle/prestige item for college kids, soccer moms, and corporate executives. They're focusing on it because the platform is approaching critical mass.
???
The world of iOS and iPadOS is meant for touch and caters to the consumer. Mac OS is meant for mouse and keyboard caters to consumers but it also serve as a development platform for its app ecosystem. As such it need to get out of way too.
Both platforms fulfill different needs. I'm personally glad Mac OS does not look nor behave like either iOS nor iPadOS, even though Apple is definitely trying to add a bit of the same UI with each Mac OS iteration.
Apple wants to have its cake and eat it too. They've been trying to polish the iPad experience enough without encroaching on the Mac market to the point that they're painting themselves into a corner.
iPadOS looks fine for most mobile computing tasks, but it's still seriously lacking as a fully-fledged OS, which more and more people are asking for now that the iPad ships with the M1 chip and a decent amount of memory.
Aiming for USB-C sounded like a solid goal on paper, but it's become so fragmented with all the protocols, data rates, and variations in cable capabilities and it becomes obvious that compatibility is significantly worse than what we had before.
If you can't hit the lowest common denominator when it comes to USB-C you'll end up frustrated if you ever have a cable that doesn't meet your needs.
I thought this was overblown until recently. I purchased a new car with Android Auto. I have a bunch of USB-A to USB-C cables at home and it took me 9 tries to find one that allowed my phone to connect. Seems the others were only good for charging. Was really surprised by that.
What were the sources of these cables that didn't include that capability? Included with other devices? It's a shame they went so cheap on those, though not surprising!
A pox upon them and their manufacturers.
When Jobs died, they lost the vision. When Ive left, they lost taste.
I'm afraid it's not going to get any better from here on.
But like—it has been getting better. They fixed the keyboard, they added back some missing ports, they got rid of the touchbar. So it they are currently, actively in the process of getting better, and it is working.
If apple was wrong, so is/was Google and Microsoft.
Realistically there is no reason USB-C could not be what all 3 were pushing it to be, the standard port for most things. Especially with more and more being wireless.
I know people constantly complain about dongles, but when I plug in my laptop to work work area I have a single plug and it connects 2 monitors, my keyboard and mouse, webcam, ethernet, etc. That is... really nice. But is also something I don't need when I am traveling. The only dongle I carry with me is my ethernet adapter and even then, I am most likely using wifi.
That all being said, it think where this fell apart was a few things.
The first being the transition period, that was always going to be painful. As a large industry of cheap products was carried kicking and screaming into the future while also needing to maintain support for older products.
The second being... the USB-C "Standard" is a complete mess. Mixed with manufactures cutting corners all over the place on cables.
Maybe it was too soon? Idk, ultimately the conversation would have never happened had these companies tried to push it but even with all of their backing. The industry did not follow this time.
I wish it had, but I guess here we are... just as fragmented as we always were, if not more.
TLDR, Apple was not wrong. The industry just did not follow as Apple (and others) were pushing for.
The touch bar was stupid. Ridiculously dumb and completely useless. It got in the way, and removed functionality so I'd say they were wrong on that count too.
The keyboard is now bad, so they were wrong on that too.
I still have a mbp I bought in 2015 which is the 'old' design and it plugs into everything I need it to. I've been given a few of these new macbooks for work and frankly it was a horrible experience. They went from 'it just works' to 'it works if you have a dozen dongles'.
Which again that transition would have never even started had the companies not tried to push it.
There's just an inevitable economic trade-off with having a port that supports 40gb/s that many users also want to use for multiple cheap peripherals that only need a couple of kb/s like a mouse or keyboard, or perhaps a cheap usb 1.1 thumb drive that only needs ~10mb/s. That's 7 orders of magnitude overkill (or 3.5 orders of magnitude for the thumb drive).
I do think a potentially better trade-off for Apple would be to have like 8 usb-c ports instead of 4 where half of them are slower usb 3.0 (or even 2.1) usb-c ports, and come up with some easy to understand user convention of labeling high speed usb-c and low speed usb-c. For some reason where we've landed in the last few years (and not just from Apple but from other PC brands, from usb hubs, from multi-port power bricks, etc.) is that USB-C ports are almost always much faster than corresponding USB-A ports but there are always fewer ports available. AFAIK you still can't find a usb-c hub with more than like 3 ports on it. So it never became a drop-in replacement for USB-A for cheaper devices that don't need a lot of bandwidth, even though I believe the standard does allow for slower versions like usb 2.1 over usb-c.
I do agree that the USB combined with Thunderbolt and the cabling differences were a problem and really pissed me off. It also doesn't help that a hub to do what you are doing with a single cable really should be thunderbolt and minimum costs >$200 to do it right. People were used to USB hubs costing $20.
Horrible execution in every part of the transition.
My next computer build will almost certainly be a traditional tower-style PC running Linux. I can't keep up with the peripheral treadmill.
again, what you find odd is perfectly even for me. not one pair of wireless anything has ever sounded as good as my wired cans.
What I haven't been able to find out is whether the new 3.5mm audio port supports digital optical audio, i.e. Toslink. MacBooks prior to 2016 did. I suppose these don't. Again, you can buy a dongle (see the pattern here?) to handle that as well. Still, if you were using your Mac to drive a Toslink channel you still can. You just can't do it out of the box.
Regardless, I still welcome all the ports. The 14" would probably look better thinner but the 16" is fine.
I am happy though that real keyboards are back.. I hope the notch doesn't make it to other devices...
It's my hopes that M1 and ARM in general can make massive inroads simply because of power efficiency, but I hope for it to be done outside a walled garden and I hope it can adapt to the X86 "builder" space... Otherwise its just a matter of time before Intel/AMD catch up (and bechmarks of new Intel leaks appear to be doing well - and i'll be honest, i have no complaints on my current gen intel or amd either)
But why would you take _the most important metric_ out of the equation...?
I'm not astute enough to tell if this is /s, but the idea of a USB-C to VHS dongle is highly amusing to me.
Then again, I distinctly remember my amusement when I got my first MP3 player - a Diamond Rio PMP300 - to work with the stereo in my room when I was in high school. It was a console record player with an 8-track deck, and I used an 8-track to cassette adapter, a cassette to 1/8” stereo adapter, and plugged that into the headphone port of the Rio.
As for ports, who still uses SD cards? Most people only take photographs with their phones and sync to the cloud directly.
I don't think that many people are photographers, overall. Most people who buy "Pros" probably work in an office and their company buys the computers for them.
There are tons of small businesses in the physical automation space that run on hooking SBCs up to various things. Many of their components are 3d-printed, by them, until they get everything laid out just right. Source: security evaluations for the software those people write is an extremely lucrative side-hustle, and it's all word of mouth.
The photography business you casually ignore is quite large (Google "wedding photographer" in your city and then realize that most photographers don't even shoot weddings). Or just realize that on the order of 200k DSLRs ship in a given month, almost all using SD as at least one of the onboard cards. Add to that the high-end mirrorless segment which is about the same size, plus all the GoPro addicts (and just to head off the inevitable "what pro uses GoPros" comment, go look at b-roll in any car review). Then round it out with the dashcam/security camera crowd that either doesn't trust wifi or is required to have on-device recording for regulatory reasons.
There are also lots of scientific instruments which use SD cards for data logging in remote locations, especially since they're cheap so you can buy 2-3 from different manufacturers and duplicate the writes without appreciably increasing cost. Ditto other kinds of data loggers like IoT stuff that actually uses an air gap.
SD cards are used for a lot more than just cameras, especially among pros of many different stripes.
I am certainly not most people but still use SD cards as a "thumb drive", to format for the Raspberry Pi, for my wife's dash cam, and I also have a few digital cameras I still use that are SD-card based.
I do however expect this will be the last MacBook with an SD card slot.
Exactly.
In Apple’s view, the people who use only their phones for photos will be perfectly served with the M1 machines (Air, Pro 13, iPads). The ugly design is because they realize that it’s the lowest priority for Pros… performance and ports are far more important.
to you. FTFY. Luckily, you're not in charge of what other people think are relevant and find useful.
And... different people buy devices at different times. What are they supposed to do to satisfy your standards, release one laptop every eight years?
Not constantly break and re-implement standards. Just stick with a nice evolutionary product line. It's a known marketing tactic to constantly introduce useless features in order to push more units.
Also, the standard for PCs is that support basically never ends, you can always install the newest OS until the computer literally can't run it anymore.
And supporting features forever and backwards compatibility explains why there are a million hacks in Windows and why MS moves so slowly.
Their removal of the function row and removal of slots was supposed to be a feature, now they've gone back. In reality they're just changing shit for the sake of it, so the faithful feel compelled to always upgrade.
The Touch Bar was supposed to be an enhancement and increase functionality (which it did) users didn’t like it. Should Apple not have tried or should it have stuck to its guns?
How is not having the Touch Bar on new Macs “obsoleting” old Macs?
As far as HDMI, having four USB C ports was more versatile than having three USB C/Thunderbolt ports.
However the reality is that while you could use a dongle, it was more convenient to have an HDMI port. But how did adding an HDMI 2 port “obsolete” having four USB C ports?
What hardware company does that?
The new Macbook Pro looks and feels like a brick compared to my old 2018 Macbook Pro.
This headline would imply that there's a high-level Apple exec on record saying the Touch Bar was a mistake. This is the opposite of that: Apple is pretending like it never happened.
The problem is this is Apple remembering what a Pro user is, and as a result, what a Pro laptop should be. Or to put it another way, this is Apple remembering that they can't just sell farmers a faster and more expensive car. It still needs to sell them trucks.
The Pro (or the Powerbook before that) line distinguished itself from the non Pro, Air and iBook lines not just through price and power, but also, very significantly, by providing everything it's fairly niche and specialized users needed. This used to include stuff like optical audio in/out, FW 400/800, SD Card readers, etc. Because that's what their Pro users needed, and Apple wanted to create a device that gave them everything they could without making them buy other stuff, making it a great user experience.
Once their Pro users' needs changed, so for example, once FW became far less popular even among pro users than it used to be, it was then that they changed their device.
With the USB-C transition Apple had to have known that it would take years, if not decades for their Pro users to completely change their workflow. So eliminating ports that they used daily was extremely user hostile.