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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.
magsafe has saved my laptop from death countless dozens of times. unless they bring back magsafe i will only be buying used macbooks ... which also have good keyboards.
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.
Pretend everything since 2016 never happened.
The 2015 and prior design has everything going for it that people have been complaining about since the 2016 re-work.
- Plenty of ports
- MagSafe charging
- A reliable keyboard
Take the same 2015 design /rant over
- Update the ports, maybe even add a few
- Keep MagSafe
- Don't fuck with the keyboard, it was fine,did not have to be re-imagined and made worse
- Update the chassis for a thinner bezel design
- And of course update the guts
- Oh, and ditch that dumbass touchbar
But seriously Apple do that and I'll buy a Mac again.
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.
Some people accept whatever crappy tool they can find, even if that causes them tons of aggravation down the line. Others realize it's worth investing in top-quality tools. Apple's products used to be top-quality tools, and can be again if the company quit fucking around.
The effort required to turn Apple laptops into top-quality tools is far lower than that required to turn a Windows laptop into a top-quality tool. That's why we don't switch.
I don't care about the touch bar. I need my function keys to work. Period.
I’m shopping for a Unix laptop that runs MS Office. Got a buying guide I can work from?
You're glossing over a very key point: macOS. As hard as it may be for you to understand, your average computer user, even intelligent people who do real work, usually can't easily up and switch to a new OS and stay productive. Yes Apple makes switching away harder with their ecosystem lock-in, but still, changing primary OSs is a large task for most people.
When there are so many issues that you have to prioritize them, maybe it's time to start looking at other brands that fit your needs.
Why don't you just do what normal people do? If the product is crap, buy a different one rather than writing love letters about it.
Multiple reasons:
a) Vendor lockin. Switching from a Lenovo machine to a Dell machine both running Windows 10 with a slightly different clicky feel on they keyboard and a slightly different graphics card is orders of magnitude different than moving from an Apple *ecosystem* to a Windows / Linux one. Note that word ecosystem. You're not just changing laptops. You're affecting your other fixed devices, your portable devices, you're affecting your software, your existing files, you're changing the way of working, potentially the services you (or worse, your customers) use.
b) Because the product isn't crap, it just has a list of minor annoyances that prevent it from being perfect. So what device do you switch to? I'm no Apple fan but I can give a non-Apple example: I don't like that the Surface Pro only has 1 USB port. What should I do? Switch to a Lenovo Miix with it's horrible keyboard, inaccurate pen and poor quality kickstand? Get the HP Spectre X2, a device which my father has returned under warranty twice?
Apple fanbois really are a different sort of person.
Actually they are taking a completely thought out human approach to their predicament. Try to be less judgy.
I've have been looking at other laptops. All laptops have compromises. It used to be Apple compromise was the price, max heat/thinness, and the shiny screen. I've found plenty of laptops that have terrible keyboards, limited Linux support, no SSD, no PCI SSD, terrible trackpads, terrible screens, limited RAM, poorly thought out high DPI screens, even worse thermal management, touchbar-like gimmicks, etc. I won't buy a current MacBook Pro, and probably never again, but I haven't seen anything else I liked unreservedly, either.
I also reserve the right to complain about how the last decade of Linux Desktop development has gone to produce something that looks like but isn't as good as Windows 95, and how of my 4 most used Windows app, 3 of them quit differently and all have different chrome. Also how Haiku apps stutter, even though the multithreaded UI was supposed to prevent that.
Great, now I have to change my password.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
If only there was a way to connect a keyboard to your laptop using a cable or even using fancy wireless technology.
At home, my laptop is docked and I use a real mechanical keyboard. It's wider, thicker and heavier than the laptop itself. So obviously I'm not going to lug the keyboard around when I'm on the road. If I was going to do that, I wouldn't need a laptop to begin with. A laptop needs to be usable without any external dongles, that's kind of the point of having one.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I'm someone locked into Apple. Why ? My children pounded on them for years--no issues with data loss or OS. My wife is an appliance user...no issues with her stuff either. Every time someone gives me a Windows machine I spend hours on updates (that often don't load) and getting nonsense out of the start up folder. Based simply on time "running the box", and not even doing work, the money spent on Apple has paid back in time returned to my life. YMMV and I don't code, but the only Windows machine we have is my son's gaming rig...and even he wishes he wasn't forcibly "upgraded" to 10. So, just no.
Even when people can switch, they still might simply prefer OSX. In my lab we have windows, OSX, and linux machines, and many of us use all 3 for various tasks. But when it comes to laptops pretty much everyone uses macbooks to do their real work.. and this is a software development shop and thus not exactly 'average users'.
So you're saying it's easy to use, doesn't require daily maintenance, and isn't expensive to update?
Sounds like a good product.