And many of those designs were made at Ive's behest, against the wishes of entire teams of engineers. I feel like we have his "courage" to blame for the Butterfly keyboard, terrible Mac thermals and the lack of ports on "Pro" computers.

Don't forget the Apple Mouse with the lightning port under the mouse so you can't use it while it charges. It's still the only Apple product with a design that makes me physically cringe.

I also find it awkward and uncomfortable to use, but that might just be me.

I love the Apple mouse. Been using it for 10ish years. But yeh it’s an absolute ball ache when it loses battery and you reallly need a mouse

When I had that Apple mouse, I kept around a separate wired mouse to use when it inevitably ran out of charge while I was in the middle of work. I won't just stop what I am doing just because Apple wants me to not use a mouse with the cord plugged in.

I was just going to say…the mouse has to go on its back to be charged lmao.

So the power button on the bottom of Mac Mini is fine?

I'm not familiar with the Mac Mini. I didn't know about that.

Ive did good designs when Jobs kept him in check. Once Jobs was gone he messed up a whole generation of MacBooks. Things got much better after his departure.

I think after Jobs, Ive did all sorts of things just to justify his presence at Apple. Hence trying to make an already well-designed product even more "well-designed", but to his terms. And that's when it started turning to shit.

The almost two decades before he made great designs. I have always felt it went downhill after Jobs was not there anymore to provide a counter force to Ive's design tendencies. It's like taking one of John or Paul away.

I had the butterfly keyboard for 5 years yet I didn't have a single problem with it. And I'm a long time mechanical keyboards user. What is all the hate about?

Many people (more than the average rate for the prior generations) _did_ have problems. Perhaps more importantly, the only way to address those problems when they arose was to replace not only the keyboard itself but the entire top case of the machine due to the way the parts were integrated. This process costed many hundreds of dollars when the machines were out of warranty, and the company eventually acquiesced to social pressure and lawsuits by creating an extended warranty program.

That's not to say your situation is unique...there are probably many machines out there that have not had problems, including one owned by my wife. But there are also an unusually high number of machines that did.

> This process costed many hundreds of dollars

"Cost"

I'm a native English speaker and nobody told me this (and I didn't manage to pick it up) until I was nearly 40. "Cost"'s past tense is also "cost."

There's another, newer, largely fatuous, verbed "cost" that means "to calculate the cost of something." That's the one that gets used in the past tense ("the projects have all been costed.")

"I've costed a keyboard replacement for my computer, and the total is more than the computer cost in the first place."

That's luck on your side. I too own a butterfly keyboard, trouble free. But there were 50 other macs in the office I worked in that regularly had issues. They were unreliable as hell, and beyond the reliability issue, many people did not like the shorter travel distance (I didn't mind this at all myself).

I had the first generation on a MacBook 12" and had no issues at all. Then I got the second generation on a MacBook Pro (I think this was still without the dust seals) and it was one big misery. A small speck of dust would make a key feel bad or get stuck. I was so happy when I could finally get rid of the stupid device. Never had issues with Apple Scissor switches thereafter.

I was like you ... until one day.

I felt the same way when I used it. But recently I booted up an old laptop with the butterfly keys and I was like "ewwww" as soon as I started typing on them. They worked. But what we have now is more comfortable.

I didn’t like the feel and mine failed after a year.

I'd get a particularly large molecule lodged under a key and then I couldn't press that key consistently anymore until I managed to flush it out. It was OK when it worked, but it didn't work enough.

Just look it up. It was a thing for years, to the point that Apple was basically forced to revert it.

The thermals were all Intel’s fault. My 2019 MacBook from work is an oven. I can’t tell whether my smaller m4 max is turned on by touching it.

Blaming Intel is a poor excuse. Apple could have done some actual design and built a laptop around the hardware they had. But they didn't want to. Instead, they ignored the reality, stuck to the flawed design, and shipped mediocre laptops several years in a row.

I agree, but I think they didn't care. For some years, some Apple execs believed that the iPad was going to replace the Mac. After that they knew that the Apple Silicon Mac was nearby, so they probably didn't want to make an investment in a 'legacy' platform. Did suck for all the people who bought one.

Perhaps, but pretty much every high performance Intel laptop between 2017 and 2023 is exactly the same unless it's in an heavy, enormous and unpleasantly loud gaming chassis. Supposedly the Core Ultra Series 2 are an improvement but I haven't tried one yet.

For a while, you could get the thermals a bit more tolerable by undervolting them, but then the plundervolt mitigations blocked that.

(Typing this comment from a Lenovo X1 Extreme sitting on a cooling pad, sat next to an X1 Carbon that we can't use because it throttles too much. :)

Apple is generally really good at trying to keep their machines silent. When they originally transitioned to Intel, their Core 2 Duo laptops were both cheaper and more silent than the competition. As a Linux user, that's one feature from Apple I'd like most manufacturers to copy.

Regarding your X1, tweaking Linux kernel parameters and downvolting a bit can work wonders in terms of reaching an pleasant heat : performance ratio. Obviously, Lenovo should have taken care of this. However, they release so many different machines that it's hard for them to pay attention to details.

It’s a company laptop that runs Windows, and the newer BIOSes now block undervolting because of the plundervolt mitigations.

I replaced the thermal paste with some of that PTM stuff which helped a bit, but not enough. I also found that for some reason it tends to BDPROCHOT-throttle when powered through the official Thunderbolt 4 Workstation Dock, even though it’s meant to be 230W and provides power separately to the USB port - but using the standalone AC adapter when docked fixes that.

Ultimately, until there are some decent X86-64 laptops released, the choice is between slow, thin and quiet vs less slow, but big, heavy and noisy. AMD is a bit better than Intel but still weak on mobile and nowhere near as good as the current Apple offerings.

On another note, why are PC manufacturers still putting fan intakes on the bottom. Maybe it’s theoretically more efficient, but tell that to my users who always do things like resting their laptop on a book then wondering why their Zoom screen sharing goes jittery.

Intel has never been good at thermals.

I've never had an Intel laptop work well in the efficiency and thermal department, Apple or not. I used to blame Apple too, but seeing the difference, it's hard to argue who the main culprit was. Can't design around a bad foundation.

Pentium M's were magical when they came out.

Apple had the design ready for an Intel chips that didn't arrive. Rather than revisiting their design they opted to just chuck the chip into a design that couldn't accommodate it's thermal characteristics.

I spent way too much time figuring out that around 53W is the maximum that the last Intel MBP can sustain over longer periods before the VRM (converts power for the CPU) poops out and throttles you.

Your 2019 Macbook also uses a different chassis, designed by Jony Ive. Apple knew it throttled the chips they used but shipped it anyways, presumably because Ive liked his thinness even when it results in a bendgate.

You'll note that Macbooks don't quite look the same after Ive left and his influence went away.

I don’t actually know. Last MBP I had was circa 2017 or so.

How are they different ?

Beefier. Bulkier. Quick google search says Intel 16" was 4.3 lbs whereas M4 16" is 4.7 lbs. Not a big difference you say but 1) it is going in the opposite direction where the newer product is bulkier and 2) imagine the years of thin-ness that would have been forced under a different regime.

I wonder how much of that is battery.

Other than reliability issues (which I never ran into), the butterfly keyboard is the best laptop keyboard I've ever used.

I absolutely despise comments like these, and you only see them on HN.

It's like saying great architects aren't great, it's the construction workers who should get the credit.

> It's like saying great architects aren't great

No, you made that up. It's like saying great architects are not the sole cause of the things they make.

> it's the construction workers who should get the credit

Don't you think the construction workers should get some of the credit?

You're most likely to get credit by being unique and irreplaceable. In other words, if the work would not have happened without you. If someone else could have been easily hired to do the work you contributed, and if in that case the work would have been largely indistinguishable from the work you did, then you're essentially fungible.

IMO you still deserve credit. And in fact you still get credit. But that credit comes in the form of monetary reward and (hopefully) recognition from your team and peers, rather than in the form of fame.

All of which… seems sensible to me? Hard to imagine it working otherwise. Interestingly, the movie industry has normalized "end credits" which play after a movie ends, and which lists literally everyone involved, which is quite cool. But the effect is still the same, the people up top get 99.99% of the credit.

(Ofc the "system" is imperfect, and fame/credit can be gamed by good marketers. But it's also not a "system" that any one party invented, it's just sort of an organic economy of attention at work.)

I am not sure what you're trying to say here. I agree that the existing situation is the most likely one. So what? I am simply saying that even though it is the "obvious thing", it is unfair and unkind. Those two things are compatible, in fact they are the usual arrangement of things!

> Hard to imagine it working otherwise.

No it isn't! It's very easy to imagine crediting people in a different ratio than we happen to do now. You are seeing what it looks like - people mythologise their heroes, and then other people come in and say "they didn't do it all, you know". People are literally doing it, in front of you, in this thread. How can it be hard to imagine?

When I say "I can't imagine" or "it's hard to image" I don't mean that literally. Obviously in reality I can imagine and it's easy to imagine, as evidenced by my example of movie credits.

What I'm saying is that it's not realistic. Humans are wired to remember and share highly specific things, especially names. It's been like this since the dawn of time -- the Illiad is about Achilles, not all the nameless soldiers. So this seems to be the natural order of things, rather than something designed, or something easy to change. And it makes sense, because it's practical -- our memories are limited. You can put everyone's names in the credits, but that doesn't mean they'll be remembered and shared.

Yeah, let's also give credit to the building materials and mother nature. Let's give credit to the pedestrians who walked by the construction site every day and decided not to commit arson.

Brilliant logic. And no, the original comment wasnt' saying "give the engineers some credit", it was saying the engineers deserve the credit instead of Ive.

Which is idiotic and common of smug, self-important programmers.

found the project manager

In between great architects and construction workers there are structural engineers who have to work out how to turn the pretty designs into actual, workable plans. Those are the guys who should get most of the credit.

Ive wasn't great. Apple has only improved since he left. There, does it help if I say it more directly?

It's great that you know better than Steve Jobs. You have impressive self-esteem.

Comments like yours that completely dismiss any questioning of established "legends" seems more despicable to me. Can't we have an open discussion and a range of opinions?

HN isn't special here. There's conflict between people whose job is to make something look pretty and people whose job is to make it work in every industry.

Repeat after me: design isn't about making things pretty.

For Ive, it often was. Ever thinner MBPs? Why, if not for appearance given the weight didn't change. No ports on PRO computers? Why, if they didn't bother his aesthetic sensibilities. Charging your mouse disables its use because the ports on the bottom? Why if not to hide the port for looks? He spent most of his time at Apple trying to make things pretty. Your comment may be true for "design" in the abstract, but as someone who spent plenty of time studying design and architecture, let me assure you, many of the people I studied with who are now industry veterans never cared about much more than aesthetics, even in architecture where engineering and building science are major factors. Again, sure, theoretically true for "design" but hardly true for Ive.

Just because you don't know the reasons doesn't mean there weren't any.

Certain people who call themselves designers could do with learning this. Bring back brutalism, I say!

Alternatively: Form follows function. Or: Good design takes into account the medium.

Many forms of saying it or a very similar statement. If only these words transformed into something beneficial in the minds of flying air castle designers.

I agree somewhat, you can feel the tension on HN with respect to labor vs capital. Which is funny because the entire premise of YC is to infuse capital and get a huge leverage over bootstrappers.

It's a pretty common turn of phrase on "lefty" (Western, English, very online, progressive) parts of the internet. I've always found it silly because it takes some pretty interesting nuanced problems (how do you give credit to folks who executed Ive's vision, many who probably boldly innovated to create what they did? How do you realistically situate Ive's flaws given his aura?) and wrings the nuance out of it by polarizing the readers (you're either with labor or you're with capital, pick your side of the picket line!)

But then these days lefty and righty parts of the Western English-language internet are all polarized and beating on common enemies is part of their conversational language. I think for a while HN was small enough that it resisted this polarization but at its current size there's no escaping it.

> I absolutely despise comments like these, and you only see them on HN.

Unfortunately the progressives have been pushing the downplaying of powerful people quite hard for a long time under the guise of equality, so it’s more widespread than just HN. Even more unfortunately, equality is also one of the main ideas of communism. It’s how the government can get rid of dissenters and thus move power to itself. That’s why Marc Andreessen in the Lex Fridman podcast talked about how the government told them that they could give up their startup because it was already decided which companies would be allowed to operate. That’s not capitalism. And Marc knows it that’s why he felt he had to speak up.