Excellent rant.
Incidentally I have a Samsung Chromebook with a foldout Ethernet port. I really would never want to get stuck with a wifi only computer. I conclude the new Macbook is a companion device like an IPad. Perhaps large tablets really are on the way out and this is the replacement.
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Shaddackâs world: where both the designers and the customers of the worldâs largest company are wrong, and should be eliminated.
Of course, itâs not possible that light, small computers that are pleasurable to use are the substance being sold, is it?
There is no will, and no (unmet) demand.
Youâve just told us they should rethink having small bezels and edge to edge keyboards. Whip out your jewelry scale again and figure out how many grams that would add to widen everything.
[quote=âshaddack, post:101, topic:54066â]
Itâs not just about you. Your technology choices are impacting the others who have to keep the infrastructure to cater to your whims.
[/quote]Youâre right. I donât believe I set the market. Nor do I believe I should be able to tell the market what to make. On the other hand, you do. Iâll confess Iâve never been in a situation where âthe wifi goes down, or is jammed, or should not be available for security or EMI or other reasons in a given facilityâ and there was somebody running up to help me with an Ethernet cable. I bet not many Macbook Air or Retina Macbook Pro users have had this problem. Only one Mac portable since 2012 has had an ethernet port, yet people seem to be managing.
I really donât understand the point of your aggressively stupid posts about a computer not being marketed to you and for which there are many alternatives available. I mean, it doesnât have a floppy or optical drive either: maybe we should wish users were in situations where those would be helpful, too.
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They are wrong. The elimination is optional.
The tragedy is that it is possible to have both light and small computers and computers with full set of the needed ports. The solutions exist.
There is demand, Just not at the point of purchase because the imagination-free âwe-think-differentâ crowds are not anticipating things crapping out on them. Use cases are a great thing - as long as there arenât unexpected situations that the use cases did not count with.
We can take the new width divided by the old width, times the old mass. A humble rule of proportion, and an assumption of homogeneous isotropic density (aka a spherical cow), good enough to give you a ballpark figure. Plus there are other tricks that may not even require making the thing the five millimeters wider.
I believe I should be able to tell it. If only because there are ways to have both the size/weight and the necessary features.
I was there. I had my experiences with crappy wifi, with nonexistent wifi, with existing wifi but nobody knowing the password. That three-feet lightweight piece of Ethernet cable I carry on my travels paid for itself a number of times. And I usually, due to the virtue of having an idea about the tech, end up bailing out those who donât. So naturally I want them to be prepared too. Especially if it costs them nothing, except making the right choices in advance.
They just had to get used to be screwed when the notoriously unreliable wifi gets⌠ummm⌠unreliable.
A single bad microwave oven can kill wifi in a fairly large area. And try to track it down without a frequency analyzer; a common wifi scanner of the Kismet/Netstumbler class wonât help you here. (A $15 chinese downconverter for a RTL-SDR dongle should be on the way soon.)
Aggressive, yes. Stupid, personal experience proved me right multiple times, so apparently not.
I can, and do, choose machines that are not crap. I cannot choose what Iâll have to get to maintain and keep running.
These are by now replaced by fairly reliable solid-state USB disks with bigger size than DVDs. (For which, incidentally, you need, guess what - drumrolls, please - USB ports!)
So⌠? Iâm not sure what this has to do with anything.
Itâs on the weak end of the scale.
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The gist of things is that you believe you know better than Apple how to make a computer. Given that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, Iâm guessing thatâs a huge opportunity for you (or someone) to get rich by making things better than Apple.
Itâs not like people have never owned a computer before and have no idea of things theyâll run into. If people donât think they need a floppy drive or Ethernet port on todayâs computers, itâs probably because they know they havenât needed on in a long time. Just because a catastrophic event could happen and make an ethernet cord useful, at the point of purchase people are probably correctly discounting this as unlikely and not worth it.
[quote=âshaddack, post:106, topic:54066â]
We can take the new width divided by the old width, times the old mass.
[/quote]Jesus Christ. Itâs a new product, so what is the old width? And why would you want to use the âoldâ weight? This 12" computer is 15% lighter than the 11" Macbook Air (which, guess what, has USB A ports). So much for your ballpark figures.
After five years of ethernet-free Macbook Airs operating in the wild, I think this has already happened.
Personal experience has proved you right that Apple is wrong, and that Apple has been making products of limited appeal?
Kind of like how Ethernet has been replaced by wifi, I guess.
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I guess it might be, but I donât think counting clock cycles says much anymore, itâs too architecture-dependent. I very much doubt that a 2015 1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core M is going to work anything like one from seven years ago. Iâd need to see actual benchmarks. But with laptops, ruggedness, battery life, and connectivity are my main concerns, rather than raw number crunching power. Even there Iâd be looking at GPU and video RAM, where most companies skimp.
Iâm just annoyed that Apple have not continued the obvious theme naming of their connecters.
Weâve had Thunderbolt, then we had Lightning.
The next step is obviously a âVery Very Frighteningâ connector.
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OK. Maybe I was being a tad harsh.
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Apple makes products of very extensive appeal⌠that they lard with dickish âimprovementsâ because they know they have a captive consumer audience. They are that much better than their competition. Like most run-of-the-mill users with a young kid, I went with Apple for our first tablet, c. 4 years ago. Which led to iPhones, and more iPads. And now, a MacBook. Because they make it so damned easy. And they have superlative, responsive tech support at an always-busy shop in a nearby upscale mall. I put up with their blatantly high-handed, supercilious push-sales of cloud services, iTunes and portlessness because their entire ecosystem of products had a learning curve a 10 year old could handle.
But, she isnât ten anymore, is starting a tech program next year⌠and once sheâs trained up on Linux we may well kiss their lovely but pretentious universe goodbye. Because of the dickishness.
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I appreciate your arguments, and agree that some of the market decisions Apple makes seem odd to me in the sense that as much as I might like whatever it is, thereâs some major reason I would never buy it myself (though I donât see myself ever buying anything other than a macbook pro anytime soon, I also donât see myself buying anything but a Nexus android phone anytime soon).
The thing is that there are quite a lot of people who only really need a tablet and a smartphone - many people get by with just a smartphone (or, you know, without a computing device at all). Many people think their ipad is just great⌠I guess, itâs not something Iâd really use myself, but I see the appeal of a small thin nicely designed device that is a pleasure to handle.
If you think this new macbook is meant to be anything more than a slightly more capable ipad with a built in keyboard youâre not thinking about this right. Others have already pointed this out, so I donât know.
Granted, some people will buy it who really needed something else, no doubt company executives and the like who buy the latest shiny thing without really understanding it who are going to demand that it works with the company network (or whatever your examples are referring to). I guess thatâs what youâre really against here, people buying the wrong tool for the job.
But then to say that since that will happen, the thing shouldnât exist at all? Excluding everyone for whom this thing is the right tool for the job?
If itâs a problem and youâre there, explain that this device is basically an ipad with a built-in keyboard. People seem to understand that an ipad is not going to work in extreme cases where internet access is imperative and a rogue microwave cut out the wi-fi. Which I will point out do not come up often, if ever, for people who only use an ipad. People are even more forgiving of smartphones, which can lose signal on a whim.
For the people who want this thing, the very rare case where itâs not going to work is not worth having to deal with something that is not as pleasurable to use the rest of the time.
For those for whom those are not rare cases, they can and should buy something else.
This is, of course, all ignoring the fact that USB to ethernet cable adapters exist, and if you expect to find yourself in places with unreliable wi-fi you can just bring one of those and have the benefits of the more pleasurable device the rest of the time.
The differences in the pleasure of daily use between Apple laptops and everyone else are enormous, by the way. For me it largely comes down to the track pad (though I appreciate everything else too) - I canât even imagine having to use what passes for a track pad from anyone else every day. I would probably even buy the external track pad apple sells to use with some other computer than use an external mouse, itâs that good.
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I donât know, display size (the only 12" macbook ever)? âRetinaâ?
Color (the only other metal macbook was offered for about 8 months in
2008-09, and it didnât come in grey or gold)? Year?
MacBook Air 2.0 would be much better IMHO.
Look at the iPads. Apple does absolutely nothing to distinguish between various versions. You canât find anything on the case or in the software that would distinguish iPad 2 from iPad 3.
Is this any less kludgy than other computer makers, who use long and unwieldy model numbers?
Yes. MUCH less kludgy. Especially when said ugly model number can be found on the case and in software in the âabout deviceâ description.
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Wonât work. I donât have the marketing machine nor the army of fawning fanboys that will buy whatever crap if it has the fruit logo and then defend the companyâs bad decisions on the internet for free.
Itâs like a toothache. All is okay. Then the tooth starts hurting and you want the pain to go away. Then it stops, and you are back in the same old itâs-all-good. People donât think ahead, donât predict failure modes, donât have contingency plans, are overly optimistic. And then we get markets that focus on appearance and thinness instead on reliability and durability and fallbacks.
In my experience, this is true with floppies and FALSE FALSE FALSE with Ethernet ports and with spare USB ports. (And with integrated SD card readers. They are useful. Apple, why are you âforgettingâ them?)
Correctly, NO WAY. Catastrophic, not so when you have the cable and port; then it is a minor annoyance. Otherwise I agree.
You cannot compare different models this way. The frame itself will have much different mass, depending on what it is made of. That one model is smaller and heavier and has a certain connector does not have any relevance to the extra weight being linked to that connector.
What I meant is this. Take a look at the existing design. Take its weight/volume=density. Make it 5 millimeters wider (not thicker!) recalculate the dimensions, recalculate the weight.
Example: Macbook Pro. Width is 35.9 millimeters. New width is proposed as 36.4 mm, no other dimensions are influenced. Weight is 2.02 kg. New weight would be estimated as 36.4/35.9*2.02=2.05 kg. Not so much of difference, is it? (Disclaimer: assumes homogeneous density of the machine and rectangular cross-section, which is not so true. But wonât be off by a major factor.)
So here are the ballpark figures, listed, with the underlying equations.
If you donât understand my claim now, you are deliberately obtuse.
Yes. What puzzles me is why something so inferior design-wise has so wide popular appeal. Further reinforces my rather low opinion about the plebes.
Augmented. Not replaced in any way! At this moment I am on a wifi connection, but have no fewer than two live gigabit ethernet cables within reach, right on the floor. The fixed devices on the local infrastructure, from TVs to desktops, are wired. The other two tables I frequently have the laptop on also have a cable ready, or at least a socket on a switch, within reach.
I should remind you that wifi is a shared band. The amount of megabits per second you can get through it varies greatly and with dependence on a plethora of factors, from distance to antennas to noise and interference to a particular spot where you are at the moment, because of fading aka constructive/destructive addition of reflected waves. The multiple-antenna hacks on the laptops and accesspoints help to a degree but donât alleviate it completely.
And especially in dense urban infrastructure there is dearth of free frequencies where somebody else is not already squatting and glutting the connectivity wide and far with packets of streaming soccer matches or other crap. (And then wondering why things drop out or keep buffering because the neighbors do the same.)
And thatâs not all! The quoted bandwidth is there for all the devices! Take two laptops, connect each with a gigabit etherent cable to a switch. Both machines can talk at full gigabit (minus various overheads) at the same time, without one influencing the other. Take 56Mbit wifi, and if one of the laptops eats 40 Mbps, the other one got 16 left. (In practice they will talk over each other and reduce the speed for each other further.) The MIMO architecture with beam-shaping alleviates this somewhat but not perfectly.
Wifi is good for non-mission-critical low-speed applications. Using it for anything more important than downloading Angry Birds, ESPECIALLY without a fallback on hand, is asking for problems where they donât have to be.
That âfeatureâ was apparently part of the agreement to getting the big four record labels onboard with allowing their music to be sold via iTunes. Because apparently pirating music was really difficult in 2003, and they were certain making your iPod less useful would stamp out piracy completely.
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Yeah, but when I use wifi, I donât have to drill holes in floors, walls, or ceilings and run cable in/under/over such objects just to get on the Internet.
There is a reason people, largely, stopped using ethernet unless they have a specific need or in an environment where it still gets run to every office or desk. My work has ethernet at every desk but, except for server boxes people are running as one offs, no one bothers. Everyone just uses one of the wifi networks we have.
Yes, and Apple has had this forever, right? I mean, they were going gangbusters before the iMac. And the iPod. And the iPhone. Right? Iâm sure all these products took off because of Gil Amelio fanboys and the irrational love of third-party Macs.
But youâre right, itâs simply impossible to take market share off of Apple. Which is why Android and Windows have bigger market share.
Good olâ shaddack. The only rational person alive, completely invulnerable to the cognitive biases that afflict everyone else.
Given your mindset on how people are unable to correctly determine risk, I wonder how you explain the prevalence of insurance, which is predicated on people at least somewhat correctly determining future
risk.
Why 5mm? Thereâs no USB connector that is only 5mm deep. And double it if youâre going to be symmetrical. Now youâve substantially added to the dimensions, which is the opposite of what the design is trying to do.
[quote=âshaddack, post:116, topic:54066â]
Example: Macbook Pro. Width is 35.9 millimeters. New width is proposed as 36.4 mm, no other dimensions are influenced. Weight is 2.02 kg. New weight would be estimated as 36.4/35.9*2.02=2.05 kg
[/quote]35.9 mm?
Your claim is basically that we should redesign the Macbook to be the same as a Macbook Air. Why? Because you want legacy USB ports and donât mind increasing size and weight. Of course the Macbook is for those who do care about size and weight.
Get over yourself. You use the word âdesignâ but I donât think you understand what it means. And itâs surely not possible that millions of people might be right, and that you could be wrong or misguided?
At this moment I have hundreds of optical discs in this room, so I guess USB has only augmented optical media, and not replaced it.
Iâm guessing that 99% of those reading BB are just asking for trouble, then. Heck, for most people, Iâm guessing that a portable generator for use during power outages would be more useful than a Ethernet cord.
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I donât know if the âimprovementsâ are really anything they add over time. Moving iTunes songs has always been hard, I think. idevices have always had one proprietary port. iOS has been locked down from the beginning. Apple has always pushed their online services, and until iCloud theyâve all done poorly. Like you say, their walled garden is a feature to many, and a bug to many, but on the Mac side (I donât own any idevices) I think they do pretty well. I would probably rather run Linux on a Mac than on any other platform.
Before computers designers spent serious money on a portfolio so they could present their work as professionally as possible. What does that look like? Design in that context, designing to be in the background, is not so simple as you would like to believe. You donât go into a client meeting with the top advertising firms in the world wearing tennis shoes and a tee shirt unless you are already some kind of phenomenon. You wouldnât carry your hard work in a paper bag either. Nor would you want a red plastic file box, no matter how sturdy. You want your portfolio, and I mean the thing carrying the work, not the work itself, to communicate your professionalism and the care you take with all of your work. You want it to do this on an almost unconscious level. Be there for anyone who notices, but not to take center stage. Apple is the only computer manufacturer who gets this. It says; yes, this is the tool of my trade and I use the best because it is the only way to get what I want. Next time you go to an art gallery notice the frames. Usually they are minimal, plain lacquered wood or possibly metal. The build quality is very important though. If it isnât there the frame will draw attention to itself and interfere with the experience of the work.
This is not a minor point. If you donât know this you are just not a designer. In the museum world a great deal of attention is given to the detailing of an exhibition. Not to show off, but to disappear. You donât achieve that by just ignoring the issue.
If someone showed up to an interview with me for a design job carrying a Dell or HP laptop they have already communicated to me that they do not understand the job. Look at that Lenovo/Apple comparison photo up above. It shows that the difference in thickness is slight, but it also shows that the Lenovo is an ugly dog of an object. The detail of the hinge shown there is truly bad, like a childâs running shoe or the wrapper of a candy bar. Wrong place wrong time. Sure, there are exceptions in all the lines, but they are based on Appleâs design principles every fucking time. Simple, elegant and getting out of the way.
From my point of view all the linux installs in the world donât mean a thing. It isnât about the tool it is about what you do with it. When the tool is such a huge part of the presentation it had better be up to that job too. Donât show me your work in a frame made of colorful plastic with huge open miters at the corner or I am going to wonder just how wonderful those scribbles inside the frame are.
Funny thing; I have never considered the needs of the IT guy when it comes to choosing a tool. It is for him to meet my needs. Even if he doesnât understand the subtleties of my work. If we left it to him we would still be staring at the little blinking amber rectangle imploring us to know more about the insides of the machine. Yawn.
Yes, snobbery is a big part of it. That is the reality.
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I did not say it is impossible. I said I donât have the needed resources on hand.
Good olâ ad hominem⌠I am at least trying.
And the level of opposition to across-the-board health insurance you got over there, and the disparity between fear of terrorists and actual casualties, and lack of fear of cars or pools or stairs and actual casualties.
The USB Type C connector is 8.3 millimeters wide. I did not manage to find (in a reasonable timeframe) a drawing with depth dimensioned, but they look roughly square-ish on photographs, so it will be the 8mm give or take. Take 3mm on the thickness of the side of the chassis, and we have the connector flush with the outer wall and still fit to the 5 mm I guessed.
Ummmm⌠first, the symmetry goes via another axis, adding to width we have plenty of, not depth. Second, only the D+/D- and power lines are symmetrical and doubled; the rest for e.g. the USB3 additional lanes is swappable in the driver chip. You may like to consult the actual pinout.
My 5mm stays. You can avoid even those if you carve out a piece of e.g. Capslock key. Or the backspace. Or the football field like area in front of the keyboard; there are many centimeters of choice space there. All you need is to want, then you will see it.
35.9 cm, sorry. Long day. You got a small, meaningless plus mark, as my math teacher liked to say.
No. My claim is that we not only should but can redesign the Macbook to have the same or grossly similar dimensions while also having the ports.
And the USB CD/DVD drive that is smiling at me here is agreeing. (We could argue about semantics here.)
Yes, they do. And many of them are familiar with poor wifi in certain places, and my guess is that a significant subset knows what a network cable is for and can use it.
Now you are moving the goalposts from wifi trouble to power outages, in order to be right.
This just in, company that likes to lock customers into infrastructure continues to do so, film at 11.
Have none of you been paying attention? First you were excited about no floppies, then you celebrated the lack of optical drives and now youâre getting upset you canât plug more than one thing into a single USB port?
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