My take is Jony Ive went extreme on form factor and totally lost his grip on users. He wanted an objectively perfect, extremely thin portless wireless machine. Now that he’s gone the design team is descending from the Ivery tower and undoing his work, meeting users halfway again.

I really hope that you're right, but to be honest I'm not holding my breath.

I also don't think the 2015 Macbooks were perfect, it's just that I don't care about any of the new things Apple has introduced. What I would really like would be a cellular modem so I don't have to bother with hotspots on the train and maybe a stylus for marking up screenshots.

For my use cases, Apple expects me to carry a Macbook, an iPad, a stylus, and a pouch filled with dongles. I'm envious of the Windows folks, they get to have a single device that does it all.

Given Apple have gone cellular with everything all the way down to the Watch, I’m always amazed they never included it in a Macbook.

I remember that Qualcomm licences their modems for an outrageous price if they're for a computer, that might be a reason they were never included. But I believe Apple will now manufacture their own cellular chips.

There’s a solid reason to have a cellular modem in a MacBook - data only plans. It’s cheaper in the US to buy a cellular plan addon for iPad than to pay for data as part of the main plan.

They expect you to have an iPhone; using that for cellular data is literally one click away.

You could make the same argument for the iPad. But they do sell cellular iPads.

In my experience, personal hotspot on my Macbook takes about 30 seconds to connect, and it sometimes just fails to connect altogether. It disconnects when I close my Macbook, so next time I open it I need to connect again. Sometimes my phone doesn't show up in the Wifi menu and I need to manually start hotspot mode on my iPhone.

I'd much prefer a built-in cellular modem.

I just moved away from windows because while the devices do everything they don't work properly.

I've now switched to a Mac Mini for a desktop and I use an 11" iPad Pro and apple pencil for everything that isn't code on the road.

I've got to the age where I'm not sitting hunched over a laptop working for half a day and there's not much point in having a laptop if it's going to be docked all day.

Why are you envious of Windows folks? Windows hardware is generally cheaper, so if you're using Macintosh, you could ostensibly afford Windows.

if your workflow depends on macOS then it doesn't matter how cheap windows is

It wasn't wrong for the MacBook though. The use of OLED and other modern techniques could have made MacBook even thinner and lighter. And in that extreme, having only one port, butterfly keyboard, and enlarged TrackPad were Trade offs that was understandable.

The problem is they then bring that mentality over to MacBook Air and to the Pro.

TrackPad causes false positives [1], why were they using butterfly keyboard just to get 0.6mm thinner? It was basically all the wrong trade offs.

Oh and the cable were too cramped they failed after closing and opening every day for a year? [2] Which was clearly a design flaws. Not only did they not fix it for free and at try to use the opportunity as good gesture, they actively push their customer for a $700 fix in order to push for services revenue increase. And the problem has been known since 2017. Those report by mainstream media only came in 2019.

And many other things, Post 2016 MacBook Pro was so bad at one point in time 2015 MacBook Pro's 2nd hand price was higher than 2016-2018 MacBook Pro.

[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/06/10/upgrading-to-a-16-inch-ma...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/22/18193120/a...

> He wanted an objectively perfect, extremely thin portless wireless machine.

i mean that is the ipad pro with a keyboard. (not perfect comparison i guess but is closer to that ideal)

The mbp is supposed to be for professionals and that comes with a need for flexibility and functionality. the quest for thinness was misguided in my opinion.

The iPad Pro fails at many laptop-esque tasks. I tried during a vacation, and it was way more work and way slower than it needed to be, and it wasn't because it wasn't powerful enough, it was the OS. Dumping photos from an SD card with not apple photos ran into a lot of annoyances and was a lot slower than doing the same thing with a 5 year macbook pro at that point, something that is objectively slower in the CPU realm and were both using USB2 speed SD card readers of some sort. Not to mention iOS's hostility to backgroup apps, making my file syncing app need to be on the foreground all the time for it to sync my photos to my E2E encrypted cloud drive.

A convertible M1 MacBook Air would probably be a better iPad Pro than that iPad Pro would be, and I think that is where apple is going with the "touch-size-ification" of macOS. iPad Procreate running full screen on a macOS convertable would give you %95 of the iPad experience TBH. A laptop is better than an iPad for videos and web browsing TBH.

Yeah i would be totally sold to a M2 macbook pro 2 in 1 with decent GPU and Pen support. This enables to run things like blender with pen and other stuff.

Right now, there are only windows 2 in 1 laptop which i find subpar on build quality.

yeah the macbook air does fit the bill better than an ipad... you're right. i forgot that those still existed.

Yeah totally sounds like with Steve gone, there was nobody anchoring him to the ground.

What I don't understand is how a not user-centered idealist designer can reach the top in Apple, my thought has been Apple is already big enough to care more about innovation and experiment instead of current user need, or it's just their motto to influence users instead of listen to them.

It's great that the built in ports cover all your needs, but my experience with laptops has been more complicated.

You use a projector as an example of a use for your HDMI port. In my limited experience doing presentations, I've run across a mixture of HDMI, VGA, and even DisplayPort for some reason.

Once, even though I was using a Dell Precision with built in HDMI and VGA, I ended up using a usb-c dongle with combo HDMI+VGA+DP ports I keep in my bag. My coworker had to wait for someone to get a more specific passive converter for their laptop which didn't have usb-c.

Obviously YMMV, but I've found the combo of usb-c plus a compact multi port adapter to be indispensable, even on a laptop with a crap-ton of ports.

The 2015 MBP is also the last one that still has built-in optical audio output, via mini-TOSLINK.

I have the 2015, 2017 and a 2020 and they are pretty much all the same that way. None need a power source for normal workdays, I don't have a camera that needs to have memory cards swapped out, and all presenter displays are either ClickShare or AppleTV and thus wireless. I don't accept random mass storage devices, and for those few times that I do want one I use a multiport adapter which works with both the 2015 and all the newer ones (USB-C and USB-A connectors), which I also use for when WiFi is down and you need Ethernet. It's not much bigger than any Ethernet adapter anyway.

Agreed. I wouldn’t touch any post-2015 MBP, but I wish I had bought one with dedicated graphics card. With each new version of macOS, things have gotten so much slower and laggy, even though I have disabled almost every unnecessary process and app in the OS.

The other day, I was working with a 2011 MBP with graphics crad and Chrome was much faster in that compared to my 2015 MBP. I think the graphics card does improve web surfing quite a bit.

The dedicated graphics cards have a terrible feisgn flaw that burns 10-20W at idle when an external monitor is plugged in. This is a problem daily, while a non-dGPU laptop handles external monitor just fine.

No it doesn't. My MBP can't handle a 27 inch external monitor without putting so much pressure on the CPU. If it had a dedicated GPU, that would take care of video output and not make the mac drain its battery by having the CPU fans at +6500 RPM all the time.

Oh absolutely. As a product designer, I was worried that it may be rendered obsolete, but the industry standard for design tools have moved into cloud-based browser solutions, so it will still be useful forever

An HDMI cable is an accessory.

CompactFlash card doesn't fit in an SD port.

Almost every place that has a projector also has an HDMI cable installed.

I haven't used a CF card in the last 10 years or so, but SD cards show up frequently. (Cameras, Rasberry Pi, Prusa 3D printers). For the Raspberry Pi I needed to use an adaptor because it uses smaller cards, but still better than no card reader at all.

But of course that's just my experience. If you use CF a lot, an SD slot won't help.

Any projector setup worth having would have an HDMI cable ready for you.

A 5.25" floppy diskette won't fit an a CompactFlash slot.

What's your point? I can come up with silly excuses too.