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Prioritizing the MacBook Hierarchy of Needs (sixcolors.com)
Jason Snell, writing for Six Colors: This week on the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP), John Siracusa floated the concept of a MacBook Hierarchy of Needs, a priority list of features for the next time Apple redesigns the MacBook line, as is rumored to happen later this year. It's a fun thought experiment, because it requires you to rank your wish list of laptop features. That's important, because if I've learned anything in this wacky world of ours, it's that you can never get everything you ask for, so you've got to prioritize.
The ATP hosts all made a "good keyboard" their top priority, an idea that would've been surprising a few years ago but now is almost a given. Yes, of course, Apple laptops need to be fast and reliable and have great displays and good battery life, but the past few years' worth of MacBooks have made a lot of people realize the truth: a bad/unreliable laptop keyboard isn't something you can really work around if you're a laptop user. This is why a lot of nice-to-have-features, like SD card slots, have to fall way down the hierarchy of needs. Any feature that can be rectified with an add-on adapter falls immediately to the bottom of the list. You're stuck with a laptop keyboard forever, and if you're committed to the Mac and every single Mac laptop that's sold uses the exact same keyboard, there's nowhere to run.
The ATP hosts all made a "good keyboard" their top priority, an idea that would've been surprising a few years ago but now is almost a given. Yes, of course, Apple laptops need to be fast and reliable and have great displays and good battery life, but the past few years' worth of MacBooks have made a lot of people realize the truth: a bad/unreliable laptop keyboard isn't something you can really work around if you're a laptop user. This is why a lot of nice-to-have-features, like SD card slots, have to fall way down the hierarchy of needs. Any feature that can be rectified with an add-on adapter falls immediately to the bottom of the list. You're stuck with a laptop keyboard forever, and if you're committed to the Mac and every single Mac laptop that's sold uses the exact same keyboard, there's nowhere to run.
If Windows laptops can manage to include both USB type C and USB 3.x ports, a MacBook Pro should be able to do the same. My MacBook Pro looks ridiculous with 4 dongles hanging off it.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I bought a late 2016 MBP - the one post-magsafe, all USB C and with the new butterfly keyboard. Love quickly turned to loathing. Although it wasnâ(TM)t the first MacBook I bought (4 over the years for my immediate family) it was the first I bought for myself after years of Wintel laptops, all ThinkPads (both Lenovo and IBM). Iâ(TM)ve experienced keyboard issues, most notably double-spacing. Keyboard already replaced once. Wake on sleep problems. Failed speaker. My gripes are as follows: - no magsafe. This is an issue for non-obvious reasons: the USB C port simply does not hold onto the charger cable as well which can often easily slip out causing the laptop to fall back to battery - the cost of repairability. The top case is a fusion of the keyboard, battery, speakers and some other bits so if any one part fails you have to replace them all at once at rediculous cost. Easily $400 if you need to buy a new keyboard - 16GB ram. Granted this may change - non-expandability. Cannot change ram or internal storage. - as above, the keyboard. Too sensitive, low travel, goddamn noisy (try typing in a meeting and everyone will be looking at you), susceptible to dust, expensive to repair - switching between apps on OSX for some bloody reason always brings up the wrong document, and not the last one I was working on when I have multiple docs open. Cannot stress how much this pisses me off! - hundreds of $$$ spent on dongles to replace missing ports: ethernet, HDMI, SVGA and USB - VMWare Fusion so I can use Visio and MS Project to get my job done Although Iâ(TM)m no fan of Windows my next laptop will again be a Wintel. I will miss the iMessage OSX app but this is about it. Lenovo (X1E) and Dell (XPS 15) have shown that you can do powerful, thin and light with expandibility and with ports people actually use.