Apple Registers Several New Mac and iPad Models in Eurasia
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
And then Steve Jobs died and Apple abandoned that user segment in favour of the iPhone. I think Jobs saw Mac as his brainchild and refused to neglect it, whereas Tim Cook has no such emotional attachment to it.
Please Apple, bring out another model like the Macbook Pro I already have:
* No Touch-bar. It's pointless & irritating & I'd prefer my money to be spent elsewhere, where it matters.
* A decent keyboard that will last 6 years like this one
* Magsafe
I use this machine to make my living as a software engineer. These things matter a great deal to me.
And Apple, please please please don't make it thinner - I really don't care about thinness like you think I do!
Is that so much to ask for?
Another take on this, though, in terms of our value to Apple though is the concept of "developer mindshare" (as well as power users). A small percentage of customers can have a massive network effect in terms of sales. This whole cycle of history seems to be repeating itself all over again. Right now when I go to developer conferences, I still see MacBooks everywhere, but of course this was't always the case. It only takes a few years for things to flip.
This whole cycle of tech history seems to be repeating itself all over again. Which is a shame, because, on the whole I've benefited greatly from the combination of macos, the hardware and "it just works"; it's allowed me to simply get on with my work, unencumbered by faulty drivers, weird library interactions and whatnot, and to earn a living without unwelcome distractions.
I continue to monitor the Linux options and don't want to use Windows. I like Unix. I've been comfortable here with macos, but I feel Apple are "this close" to blowing it with the hardware.
I've been holding on as long as I can with my mid-2012 model and if it dies before the above is done I'll be switching.
Apple needs to get back to being a hardware company because being locked to mediocre hardware because of an OS isn't going to cut it.
Apple needs a consumer model and a developer / pro model that gives developers and creators what they need in a laptop.
Stop butchering the pro line!
1. The low-travel butterfly keys would be fine for most folks (even if the low-travel is less comfortable to some, thereby prioritizing form), if they didn't break.
2. The touch bar seems useless to basically everyone, not just the HN set. It's not driving sales the way other things to (such as the quest for thinness)
3. Only one port on the 12" Macbook is probably the right approach, but becomes silly on the "Pro" machines.
So gosshake, they didn't even put the stinking ESC in the same place, they had to indent it, ruining the billion times I've trained my hand to it.
You need benevolent dictators, basically, to have the trust and authority to innovate. Even Microsoft is catching up now with surface book 2 which has a lot of invocation in its hardware (but Windows still suck). Apple will not be number one innovator for long if they keep messing up.
Apple's size and the fact they are using the butterfly type keyboard throughout their laptop lines, means that inertia in deciding to make a change and then implementing it throughout their manufacturing chain is a fraught and time consuming process.
I also spend a lot of time working on my laptop outdoors though, and every time I get something under a key I hold my breath a little as I shake my laptop upside down, hoping that this isn't the time that it finally fails permanently and I have to send the whole machine back to Apple to replace a single key.
But in the end, I'll never switch, because they're good enough as they are, and the quality/form factor is unbeatable. And macOS is fine and stable for me, with all its warts.