The question is actually "at what cost?" Sure, all things being equal thinner/lighter is great. BUT, what trade off's are being made in the name of thinness? If you need to sacrifice 50% expected lifetime to make something 0.5mm thinner, is that a good trade off?

All my Apple laptops have lasted many years longer than laptops from other brands, and also have higher resale value at the end.

I'm not a hardware expert who's qualified to judge the actual tradeoffs Apple's making and the actual failure rates, but the big picture seems to be clearly that they're managing both thinness and longevity quite well, despite whatever isolated cases of failures there may be.

Apple certainly isn't perfect, but I've had more hardware problems with "non-thin" laptops by other brands than I have with thin laptops by Apple.

The target market being people who don't want their screens to work lol? Sure, thinness and lightness are beneficial to an extent, but surely you see there's a point of diminishing returns? What's the optimal thinness? Do you want a laptop that's a millimeter thick and crumples like a squashed tin can in your bag? Nobody is saying we should go back to textbook-thick laptops, that's a total strawman.

We've reached incredibly thin and light tech, but there's a point where making it thinner vastly reduces usability and reliability without really producing any worthwhile benefits. And I hate the "not the target market" excuse. I hear that all the time, and it always seems like such a cop-out. Is there a demographic for broken displays and keyboards which apple desperately needs to pander to? What about professionals and power users? It's a Macbook Pro, after all. This should be exactly the target market. I think most pro users would rather have that millimeter back to make the keyboard and display work, it didn't make it bulky by any means. It was still incredibly svelte and light and thin.

The X1 carbon is slightly thicker (.03 inches more) than the air but weights .5 pounds less.

It also has 2 full size USB ports + 2 USB C + headphone + a card reader.

The laptop is more expensive than a mac book air but it's more an example that you don't have to sacrifice ports for weight.

As well as full-sized HDMI.

I'm wedded to MacOS, but am in the process of hackintoshing a refurbished X1 Carbon. There are still a few issues but it feels so much more user friendly than the current model MacBooks.

HN participants are absolutely part of the target market, but they're innovators/early adopters on the technology adoption curve (which are a small part of the whole market): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

devices are generally thin enough, so the tradeoff in my mind is between weight and battery life. i'd love true all-day battery life--not the 10-minutes-for-email-20-minutes-of-web-surfing type of "all-day" battery life--where i could have the device on for 8-12 hours doing real work. at the same time i'd love a laptop that weighs a pound and a phone that weighs 2 ounces, with lightning fast processors, huge, bright, high resolution screens, and honkin' graphics power. most folks would easily accept 30%, or even 50%, thicker devices for that.

obviously, that would require like 5X the battery and 3X the weight (made-up numbers). apple knows this already, but the technology just isn't there, so we're where we are with their best compromise. and they're trying to make this better for idevices by switching to wireless power, with the idea being that any time you put down your idevice, you'll be charging it.

I'm actually in the process of refurbishing and (potentially) upgrading a TRS-80 Model 100 for everyday usage. Sure, it won't have any of the modern stuff available, but it will run for hours off of 4 AA batteries that I can purchase anywhere.

Oh cool! I have a TRS 80 Color Computer w/ tape drive and thermal printer that needs some love. I got started amassing docs, software and parts but didn’t finish. Thanks for the reminder!

Are you going to be writing about the refurb anywhere?

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