Also the parallel port. I remember the drama!
It goes the other way, too. When Apple put cameras in all of their laptops, the press relentlessly bashed them for wasting BOM on something so useless and expensive. Then the industry realized it was a good idea and followed suit. Similar for retina displays -- the term "High Definition" had become synonymous with "good enough" and ground PC monitor advancements to a halt for a decade. Phones were coming out with higher resolutions (not pixel densities, resolutions) than full-size monitors. Then Apple figured out how to market higher resolutions, the press mocked them for wasting money, but word got around that HD might not be the end-all of display technology and consumer panel resolutions started to climb again.
Here's a counterexample, a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet. 1GbE became synonymous with "good enough" and got so thoroughly stuck in a rut that now it's very typical to see 1GbE deployed alongside a handful of 10 gigabit USB ports and a NVMe drive that could saturate the sad, old 1GbE port many times over.
Sometimes taking risks results in a Touch Bar or Butterfly Keys. That's just the nature of risks. The only way to have a 100% feature win rate is to limit yourself to copying features that someone else has proven out, but if everyone does that then the industry gets stuck in a rut.
I'm glad Apple exists, even if I don't personally feel the need to fund their experiments.
This has a few reasons:
- 10 GbE was, until quite recently, pretty power intensive and it still is more expensive and hot than gigabit
- Devices in LAN, especially those with high bandwidth usage, have become far rarer. A lot has moved to the cloud and the bandwidth of most people can't saturate 100 Mbit, not to speak of Gigabit.
- LAN as a whole has become rarer. A lot of people now only use WiFi with their phones or laptops, up to the point that most people now have (theoretically) faster WiFi than LAN.
Combined, there are few reasons to take the expense of putting a high-speed ethernet port on a device. Luckily, the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the jump a bit and you see those ports on a few consumer devices now.
All this talk about how fast Wifi can be made people think it's all they need. But in reality, building a Wifi network with fast speeds across a whole house while avoiding too much interference from networks around you (esp in inner cities where you can easily have 40+ networks in reach) is more work and more expensive than pulling LAN cables to the right places.
But LAN isn't sexy and no one advertises how fast a copper cable can be, it just doesn't sell products as well as talking about Wifi 6.
/rant
I think the only thing driving 2.5/5/10GbE at all is that WiFi Access Points need it.
[0] https://www.amazon.de/XIAOLO-Netzwerkadapter-Unterstützung-L...
[1] https://www.amazon.de/XG-C100C-Netzwerkkarte-RJ45-Port-802-3...
PCIe 3.0 transceivers were 8Gb/s and supported preemphasis and equalization, closing the sophistication gap with their off-backplane counterparts. How many PCIe3+ transceivers has the average person been running (or leaving idle) for the last decade? These days a typical processor has 16Gb transceivers by the dozens and 10Gb hardened transceivers by the handful. I just counted my 10Gb+ transceivers -- I have 36 and am using... 10 (EDIT: 8/4 more, HDMI is 4x12Gb/s these days).
The reason why 10GbE is expensive has nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with marginal expense, nothing to do with power, and everything to do with market structure. Computer manufacturers don't want to move until modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers move and modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers don't want to move until computer manufacturers move.
These snags don't take much to develop, just "A needs B, B needs A," and bang, the horizontally segmented marketplace is completely immobilized. That's why the market needs vertical players like Apple who can push out A and B at the same time and cut through these snags, or high-margin players like Apple who can deploy A without B and wait for B to catch up. Otherwise these market snags can murder entire product segments, like we've seen happen to LAN.
No, it isn't because of reduced demand. People are recording and editing video more than ever, taking more pictures than ever, streaming more than ever, downloading hard-drive busting games more than ever, and so on. LAN appliances would have eaten a much healthier chunk of this pie if LAN didn't suck so hard, but it does, so here we are.
> Luckily, the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the jump a bit
Yaay, PCIe 2.0 speeds. 2003 called, it wants its transceivers back :P
> modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers don't want to move until computer manufacturers move
Modems and routers only make sense once they serve a link that is actually beyond 1Gbit - which is rare even today. Also, these devices are minimal and the hardware required to actually route 10Gbit is a lot more expensive. Even Mikrotiks cheaper offerings today can't do so with many routes or a lot of small packages (no offense to them, their stuff is great and I'm a happy customer - it's still true, though).
APs are a bit different, as WiFi recently "breached" the Gbit wall (under perfect conditions). But there are already quite a few with 2.5Gbit ports to actually use that.
NAS, on the other hand, are a bit held back by the market. Still, high-models have offered either 10Gbit directly or a PCIe-slot for a long time now.
> People are recording and editing video more than ever, taking more pictures than ever, streaming more than ever, downloading hard-drive busting games more than ever, and so on. LAN appliances would have eaten a much healthier chunk of this pie if LAN didn't suck so hard, but it does, so here we are.
The professional video editing studios with shared server are already on 10 Gbit LAN, the stuff has been available for years. Pretty cheap even, if you buy used SFP+ cards. Switching was expensive until recently, but I'd say that the number of people which need a 10G link to a lot of computers are even less.
And LAN competes with flaky, data-limited, expensive 100 MBit lines (if you're lucky). 1GbE is beyond awesome compared to that and yet it lost, anyway.
> Yaay, PCIe 2.0 speeds. 2003 called, it wants its transceivers back :P
I'm not happy, either, but its better to at least go beyond Gigabit speed rather than stay stagnant even longer.
10GbE was a bit of a mistake on several fronts.
We had become used to these 10x iterations with Ethernet from 10Mb to 100Mb to 1Gb such that 10Gb seems like a natural extension. But running that bandwidth over copper remains a significant technical challenge. For awhile I was using a Thunderbolt 10GbE controller and it was huge (basically the size of an old 3.5" external HD) and most of it was just a giant heatsink, basically.
In commercial situations, the issues with copper often result in using fiber instead. At that point there are less barriers to even higher speeds (eg 25Gb, 40Gb, 100Gb), which make a lot of sense in data centers.
Added to this, there's not a lot of reason to run 10GbE in a home setting or even in many small corporate settings. Even in larger corporate settings, you can go really far with 1GbE using switches, bridges and routers, possibly using higher speed backhaul connection technologies.
What should've happened is what has started to happen in the last few years: interim speeds (eg 2.5Gb and 5Gb). Hopefully these become more widespread and become relatively cheap such that someday they just displace 1GbE naturally.
On top of all of this, Ethernet is an old standard that uses 1500 byte frames. This actually starts to become an issue at 10+ GbE such that various extensions exist for very large frames (eg 9000 bytes) but this runs into issues with various hardware and software.
Probably largely because of the 1500 byte frames of Ethernet, the de facto standard for TCP/IP MTU is pretty much 1500/1536 bytes and this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as more and more infrastructure is deployed that makes this max MTU assumption.
Printers I can see. An entry-level HP LaserJet was $600 back in 2000, something not as easily replaced as a serial mouse or gamepad.
>> a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet.
They stuck it on the Mac Mini
(which granted, isn't too bad compared to the price of a new 10GbE card, but still...)
Also, you can actually add the analog inputs yourself. The DIY keyboard community -- which is flourishing with options and new vendors -- has lots of options available. I myself have two analog knobs and one trackpoint on my keyboard. It's absolutely amazing.
But they didn’t. And I was always confused that the Touch Bar never got more love from the hardware developers.
That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.
It also wasn’t easy to build software for the Touch Bar from what I could gather. I had lots of ideas for little tools (think iStat-like gauges, but perhaps for things like the mic input level), but it wasn’t very easy to build one when I tried.
RIP Touch Bar. You might not be missed too much, but I bet something like you will come up again in a decade or two.
Yes. It wasn't Jony. It came from the software side. I won't name who to protect the guilty.
I was really hoping Apple had a big leap
forward in fingers-on-glass interaction
planned.
While many people happily type on their laptops all day long with no external monitor or keyboard, there are also many people (me included) who think that's an absolute ergonomic disaster and greatly value the extra screen real estate of an external monitor.
So, honestly, there's no way the Touch Bar could have been good enough for me to use it.
The whole idea was just misguided.
What Apple should have done IMO was allow an iPad or iPhone to fill that role. I still do not understand why my iPad can't be an amazing accessory to my Mac. With the right software magic and integration, it could be everything the Touch Bar was while simultaneously doing a lot more, and is of course extremely compatible with external keyboard use.
Well, I can guess why, actually -- it would require a lot of coordination between the Mac and iDevice teams and that is challenging.
(However I'm encouraged -- Sidecar is a good first step. Let's see more...)
I think it was more like they decided to add the equivalent of an Apple Watch to Macs to support TouchID and then asked "what else can we do with it?".
So adding stuff yourself is nice (I do it myself!) but not a way to move the industry or even the Apple ecosystem forward.
Sadly, the only company I'm aware of producing that sort of hardware for use outside the music industry seems to be Loupedeck.
I'm sure there's some setting somewhere that defaults to showing whatever the layout for the in-focus app is, but it's failed to make me care enough about it to try to figure it out.
Sure it could; it just has to beat the cost of the lookup. If you could have done some complex operation trivially with it, that couldn’t really be done with some keyboard shortcut, being a dynamic visual field would be fine.
Of course, volume sliders don’t fit that bill, and I don’t think anyone really found something that did… but it’s not some fundamental guarantee that it would be useless.
Apart from developers many professionals do look down all the time because they typically have other devices connected e.g. synths, photo/video editing rigs.
And Touchbar was designed much more for that audience.
The looking was never the problem, IMHO, the problem was execution and utility. It was actually distracting when there was adaptive completion results continually flashing. And the rest of the buttons were never great.
If every single dialog box flashed the buttons, that would be a win as it is easier and faster to tap the touchbar than it is to navigate the cursor and then click. But this obvious use case never really materialized.
And if, like most "professional" users, the laptop is operated via an external keyboard, the muscle memory never develops.
It's not ungrounded from the anecdotal evidence that these changes are coming after Ive's departure.
> I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal.
Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it.
Agreed with this. When you're coming to the CDO position after 20 years of being a hands-on designer at that company, most recently as the head of both human interface and industrial design across the entire organization, and having been described as being the person with the most operational power at Apple, after Steve Jobs himself, even before being promoted, my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar. It is most likely that he set the goals that produced these designs, and that he was aware of and approved of them from the beginning. And I suspect that as a new C-level, he was probably even more hands on than that.
But since in this thread we are being asked to hold ourselves to a very high standard of rigor, I should note that I have not submitted this comment to peer review, or made my data available for replication at this time. I'm just basing this on, you know, how jobs work.
Ive is part of the Senior Leadership Team.
No major decision in the company sneaks under his radar.
But that doesn't mean he is responsible for every decision.
This is just shifting goalposts because you got called out.
You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something.
It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with proof.
And speaking of your first comment:
> Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.
... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in the last few decades?
So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land now regardless of who's in charge?
Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming back leaked at the start of the year.
So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had no input on the current machine.
This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge and it's a flagship product.
The person in charge of design, for a company that has a handful of physical products, is a completely different situation. It's reasonable to blame them for top level product design decisions. What happens in that specific realm is what they want. The top priority of their job is those few dozen decisions. The opposite of a CEO that's overseeing ten thousand different things.
Be a little less stuck on the word 'pushing'. The fact is, when it's one of the main things you're in charge of choosing, and you allow a decision and then stand by it for a long time, you are now pushing it.
Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with that wording, you're upset at a strawman.
The top priority of his job is those few dozen decisions.
Be a little less stuck on the word "Director". The fact is, when you're one of the main people in charge of allowing decisions, it's not the same as personally championing them.
-
> Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with that wording, you're upset at a strawman.
You know you can just read the comment I referred to right if you've already forgotten right?
The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.
Does that sound like personally assigning blame to Johnny Ive for something? It'd be one thing if it said Ive's team or something, but it's the common refrain parroted on this site
-
If John manages Joe and Joe deletes a database in prod, do you say "John's subordinate deleted a database in prod" or do you say "John deleted a database in prod".
You see how there's a difference there even though both acknowledge that John has a part in what happened?
It's not that complicated to see the difference if you've ever interacted with any sort of situation where the buck actually stopped with leadership, but I guess that's not universal.
Then it's probably fair to blame him for some high-level decisions. But technical decisions go well beyond design, and microsoft has so many products, so it's harder to say how much you can point at him.
> The top priority of his job is those few dozen decisions.
I honestly have no idea which few dozen you mean. Across all of microsoft? I could list a bunch for "apple product design", like the way airpods fit, the decision to have no holes in airtags, the keyboard and touch bar choices in macbooks, etc.
Maybe the start menu location? You could probably blame him for the choice of xbox models too. I'm not singling out Apple in saying that executives should be considered responsible for certain high-level decisions.
> Be a little less stuck on the word "Director".
I'm stuck on the word "design". He's the design guy.
> The fact is, when you're one of the main people in charge of allowing decisions, it's not the same as personally championing them.
If it's one of the top few most important decisions under your job purview, the difference is so minor as to not matter outside the company.
> Does that sound like personally assigning blame to Johnny Ive for something? It'd be one thing if it said Ive's team or something, but it's the common refrain parroted on this site
Assigning him blame is not the same as saying he 'pushed' it. The buck stops here for design. He gets the blame because he strongly approved it and he could have easily spent entire days on the decision because that's the core of his job, and spending enough time on the decision is also his job.
> If John manages Joe and Joe deletes a database in prod, do you say "John's subordinate deleted a database in prod" or do you say "John deleted a database in prod".
John decided to delete a database in prod. Ive decided to go with this keyboard.
Assuming the delete wasn't accidental, because the keyboard definitely wasn't accidental! If it was an accident this analogy isn't relevant.
"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."
In other words, you have no excuse for failure. You are now responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn't matter what you say.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference...
This is a bit of a quirk of how Apple structures responsibility, and makes it a bit more fair to say that "Jony made a disliked change" in a way that doesn't quite apply at Google or Microsoft, where responsibility tends to be a bit more diffuse.
But I provided a simple analogy above.
Say John manages Joe and is the DRI for data storage. If Joe goes and deletes the production database, John has some blame even though he didn't personally delete the database.
Do you not see the difference between saying "John deleted production?" and "John's subordinate deleted production?"
Both are assigning some blame to John, but only one is factually true.
This entire conversations almost feels like the typical HN inability to realize the world is not black and white.
It's like people need Johnny Ives to personally have opened up a CAD drawing and shrunk the MBP because it's utterly impossible that a larger team decided on the vision for an entire flagship possible.
-
Lol the replies. What a weird way to dodge a simple question lol.
"John's subordinate deleted production" implies that John is partially responsible, but accurately reflects he did not personally delete it.
You're not even mentioning Joe, you're accurately reflecting John was in charge, but you're also not lying and saying John did it.
Not a single decision is made on things that I am DRI on without me being a part of that decision. I may not get my way if I'm over-ruled for corporate reasons, but I know about it, and being the DRI, I get a slightly-larger-than-average say in what happens. Generally it takes a director or VP to over-rule what I want, and then the radar is very clearly marked as such.
Apple takes the concept of the DRI very seriously. You don't give responsibility without also giving power.
My opinion: There is zero chance (not "a small chance", zero chance) that Jony Ive didn't sign off on, and explicitly endorse the Touch Bar. Something that obvious, in that commanding a position in the user interface would never have escaped his personal input and attention.
Jony was responsible for the Touch Bar.
Anyway, some evidence: "For years, Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive has expressed a desire for the iPhone to appear like a single sheet of glass", suggesting that this could have been part of a larger overall design direction. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-unlikely-to-make-big-chan...)
I'd be willing to bet that they mocked up MacBooks with full touchscreen keyboards.
Further, I don't think it's a coincidence that I don't mind typing an email (core C-level activity) on an iPad on-screen keyboard, but I'd find it infuriating to try to code on.
That's only because in your ignorant reality you have made it so.
The actual reality is that what constitutes a product is so much more than just the design. For example it includes what features should and shouldn't be there. And that is a decision largely coming from the Product team. Or how it works. Which comes from Hardware Engineering team.
Each with a little OLED display, please. (Why hasn't this happened yet??)
It just can't work with people like me that never look down at their keyboard. I'm not trying to be elitist, it's the honest truth. I wanted to love the Touch Bar, tried plugins like Pock, but in the end no matter how hard I tried I can't help and force myself and interrupt what I'm doing to look down, it just doesn't make sense.
Fwiw they are readily available by way of USB (e.g. MIDI) controllers. There are loads of dedicated knobs, faders, pads, etc. with a large amount of software to customize and translate those inputs (in addition to the array of software supporting them natively)
Obviously that would be external to the computer, but I think given the highly specific nature of analog controls it makes sense for these to be external. I'm having difficulty imaging a set of analog controls that would be at the same time universally useful and efficient in terms of weight and space utilization.
I highly recommend using BetterTouchTool to get the most out of it if you still have a device with the touch bar.
Also it's on the keyboard where you're not looking. If you want analog controls, either make them tactile - like a physical dial or slider - or just make the display a touch screen.
And this is why I believe more in the Ivy story than this one.
If you're a mechanical engineering group mismatch between prototype and production is MechEng 201 pretty much.
You wanna put out a new keyboard fine, but test the heck out of it. Let people have a go at it, put force onto it, spread some food on it, etc
Unless that mechanical group really think keyboards are a toy and don't need reliability, in this case they don't belong there
Okay, but...what caused them to try to make a keyboard that thin in the first place? GP is suggesting that it was driven by Ive, which you dispute, but you only give an alternative explanation for the "what", not the "why".
It is product differentiation. The MacBook Pro 2016 redesign was delayed by a year due to Intel's CPU problems. The touchbar Macbook also had higher ASP from the start. It was the Post PC era. Everyone was suppose to leave the PC ( including Mac ) platform to Tablet. It doesn't get any clearer than that. Even making an iPad ads "What's a Computer". Making an ASP increase is a typical move of a market where you want to milk it. Did I mention they completely neglect Mac Pro for years?
>Jony Ive was its patron
Despite media wants to claim otherwise at the time and had shills cover it up. He spend most of his time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. But iPhone X and Macbook / MacBook Pro was his vision of how the ultimate MacBook Pro and iPhone would be as he said so himself. He was named CDO in 2015, along with some design team restructuring. The “Designed by Apple in California” chronicles 20 years of Apple design photo book came out in 2016. When he finally left in 2019, the media and shills were suggesting he hasn't actually been on product design for quite a few years. His earlier work on Apple in 2011+ was iOS 7 re-design. ( After Scott Forstall was out ) And we all know how that went as they spend the next 3 years to iterate out of it. To the point their old UX design head had to retire. And if you look at the changes to Apple Retail Store redesign, they were the same. Form over function. Partly Jony's fault, partly Angela.
>Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost.
Apple filled many patents where they were looking at keyboard on a flat piece of glass with Force Touch and 3D Touch. These patents were specific to computer. Higher BOM cost are often used as moat in any luxury items.
>to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could...
If it wasn't for the butterfly keyboard. The internet would not have a group of people and product reviewer now talking about key travel distance. The thin keyboard has a similar typing experience as typing on glass......
>There are many suboptimal features...
No one fault them for trying. But the first report of keyboard problem came out in 2016 from MacBook users. Less than one year after its launch even before the MacBook Pro TouchBar. Apple constantly delete report of the problem on its support forum. The whole thing only gotten attention when an online press themselves decide to blog about it and went viral. That was 2018. They stopped reporting Mac user satisfactory in 2018, both in keynote and in investor meeting. It took nearly 3 years of ranting before Tim Cook even made a Keyboard Service Program.
Basically without Steve Jobs, no one had the gut to say, fuck this. This isn't working. Close it down. Work on a alternative or go back to where it was and we make a Service Programme. Instead they drag on it for years. Without product sensibility and direction.
The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input + rich display device. If adequately supported by software it can be an amazing input, affording a range of useful functions not replicable with discrete buttons. In general, I really wish modern computers had more analog inputs available. Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs, etc. are tragically missing.
I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal.
The problem with the touch bar is that (a) it only shipped on a limited subset of devices so software authors could not depend on it, (b) after its initial functions, Apple made limited effort to adopt it in all of their own software, improve its integration into the system, or push boundaries of what it could do as an input device.
> The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.
No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype vs. full-scale factory production + poor estimation of reliability in a wide variety of contexts over a longer period of time. Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost.
There are many suboptimal features of the common rubber dome + scissor stabilizer laptop keyboards, and I wish more companies were brave enough to experiment with alternative designs in search of improvements. (Disclaimer: my favorite "laptop" keyboards are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_portable_computers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable)