Worst / funniest case of this (if you have a grim sense of humor) is when early unibody macbook pros would get 70C or so to the touch and physically burn the users to the point of minor scarring. People who’d complain about this would be berated by apple defenders stating that “its not a laptop and apple never called it a laptop. yet at the time a simple search for “laptop site:apple.com” sure seemed to indicate that they are referred to as laptops by apple.

I save a lot of energy in the winter because I can turn down our home heater and the hot laptop keeps my fingers warmed up and typing fast!

I largely agree with the parent comment. As of the series 7, charging became a non-issue since it’s so fast. It was painful before that.

And don’t _dare_ compare the charging situation to the touch bar. Let’s just all agree that was an abomination.

The entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for lighter and thinner devices.

Exactly--GP's preference for a watch with a longer battery life and user-replaceable battery is at direct odds with the desire for a thinner watch. Presumably Apple has just done the math and decided the market is better for the latter? It's always been a bit chunky for a watch--maybe now it can finally approach "normal" watch size.

This is a bit hyperbolic. They take occasional risks like the touchbar and then they addressed it after bad feedback. I personally like their aggressive sense of design mission and not always playing it safe merely because it will cause flame wars on technology forums. Yet generally they keep the UX extremely clean and consistent through major versions.

Their mission with watch clearly isn't a multiday battery thing, it's a compromise for high quality displays and performance. The market exists for alternatives. The lack of good ones would be on them not just Apple.

In my decade plus experience those bad examples like touchbar are few and far in between.

Every tool has a correct way to be used. You can’t tell me I shouldn’t slide my electric toothbrush from side to side “because of market forces”.

Battery technology just isn’t there. Bigger battery means heavier device. Duracell made a smartphone with a huge-ass multiday battery… that the market did not ask for. It has to be a compromise unfortunately.

As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it. The execution was subpar but I miss its ability to autofill forms just like on the iPhone and generally using the autocomplete UI the same way. There’s no replacement now.

As for the batteries, I hope they’re eventually forced to fold on that issue, but it will come at the expense of design, size and weight. Again a compromise.

The reception one you’re right.

No I still don’t understand the Apple Watch battery issue.

I have a xaiomi mi band 9. The body to screen ratio is roughly the same as the Apple Watch. It does HR tracking, workouts, has excellent 1000 night brightness, weather, notifications etc. I get about 15 days from a charge. They say I can get 21. But either way. I understand the Apple Watch is running better hardware and more things in the background, but there’s also significantly more space in the watch for battery. It might be doing more but a factor of 15x is a crazy differential.

Comparing Apple Watch to Mi Band makes no sense. Apple Watch is more of a microcomputer than a cheap smart band. It would be better to compare it to something like Garmin Fenix 7X that lasts you almost 40 days with 120 hours in GPS mode and does much more than a Mi Band.

Calling it a "microcomputer" is meaningless.

What is it doing? Monitoring some sensors, communicating with a phone via bluetooth, running a screen.

It's miniaturized iPhone as it can be used without phone to make calls, receive messages, stream music etc. as it has e-SIM capabilities. It runs Game Boy Color games which is pretty cool even if not very useful.

Mi bands are low powered, low-feature and fairly miserable experiences if you interact much with the screen. They are great at no-effort tracking of fitness metrics and providing basic information.

Apple Watches are designed for much more interaction and variety of capability.

It can be hard to understand this if you haven’t used an Apple Watch.

You’re misinformed about the space for substantial additional battery. Look at any teardown to see the compact component fitting.

Your mi band is a great device; just be realistic about the tradeoffs. Other devices don’t have to suck for yours to be good.

(I’ve owned multiple Xiaomi and Apple devices.)

> As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it

You don't understand why people wouldn't like something that takes away what they used regularly (function keys) and gave them something that necessitated looking away from their screen in order to even use and provided extremely limited use cases?

Seems pretty easy to understand

throw in the mac magic keyboard (no backlight - not even on the 2021 revision) and the magic mouse 1.

> let's forget that the entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for long-life batteries

apple sells 34% of smartwatches: https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/22/apple-watch-domin...

and most of the rest are deeply crap Android things that don't have week-long battery life.

I think it's more interesting that Apple creates this reaction where people will endlessly harp on about things that happened over a decade ago under different leadership (holding it wrong) any time they update their products.

It’s even worse than that. Those words were never uttered. People have interpreted their own sentiment from what was actually said and now that phrase is repeated as it if it was.