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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I'm pretty sure this Macbook Pro I have from 2014 will be my first and last. I've loved it, I'd buy it again, if it was the same design with new specs. I'm not going to downgrade for the same or an increased price tag. And for what? Shaving 0.3lbs off? Worse battery life? Someone get those noodley Apple designers some weights to lift. And some brains.

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Carrying around the two laptops, the newer one’s slightly smaller bezel, significantly thinner case, and weight reduction (overall, it fills 22% less volume and weighs 13% less) make a pretty big difference in portability, without the sacrifices that go into the Air laptops.

If you leave it on a desk all day, then it doesn’t really matter, but if you’re constantly taking it on the go you’ll likely appreciate the change (even if you don’t think it’s worth the trade-off in keyboard button travel distance, elimination of some ports, opportunity missed for a larger battery, etc.).

Personally I wish they had allocated an extra millimeter of depth for the keyboard.

Isn’t the Air designed for that purpose?

The new laptops have many spec advantages over the Airs. Most notably for me, they have displays with double the pixel density.

Are you carrying two laptops at the same time? I found I've not had too much trouble carrying my laptop in a backpack since 2008 (when I replaced a beastly ~5kg 15" Acer with a thin 2.5kg 14" Dell Latitude).

That really made a huge difference (the Acer used to give me backaches, as it also had a much larger power brick) but all the laptops since didn't really bother me in terms of weight.

No, one at a time. I’m just saying that there is a noticeable difference between carrying the new one all the time vs. carrying the old one all the time. And that one was noticeably more portable than the previous model with the spinning disk and CD drive.

That really made a huge difference (the Acer used to give me backaches, as it also had a much larger power brick) but all the laptops since didn't really bother me in terms of weight.

I cycle to work every day. I found switching from a MacBook 12" (2015) to a MacBook Pro (2016) a huge downgrade in this respect (the 12" is 0.45 kg lighter).

If Apple releases a MacBook 12" with at least two USB-C ports and good 4k@60Hz support, I will probably switch back to the MacBook 12" on the next upgrade.

Edit: The below is incorrect.

The weight reduction surprisingly doesn’t have a lot to do with battery capacity.

https://www.cnet.com/news/macbook-pro-october-2016-battery-l...

Ok, so they couldn't increase the battery capacity. But why did they reduce it from 99.5 watt-hours to 76.0 watt-hours rather than just keeping it?

Half in what terms?

I looked at the wrong rows in the table of capacities. So it's not a reduction by half. I corrected my message.

But it's still a reduction in capacity (from 99.5 watt-hours to 76).

You know what, I was under the impression the 15" had a 99.5wh battery. My mistake.

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