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Comment by yowlingcat | Hacker News Reader

Very sad to agree with this entire post. I hate to essentialize it to an already checked and problematic mythology of Jobs-Ives, but it seems like all of the air left the sails after Jobs passed. The OS versions are getting unreservedly worse, likewise with the hardware -- it's active regression rather than stagnation.

When it comes to having a quality laptop and OS to get work done, I would at least be happy with stagnation if the stagnation point occurred around the era of the best MBPs -- late model MBPr 15s, ~2012 to 2015-2016. I'm typing this one one right now. It's a little long in the tooth, but I'm horrified to update to a newer one and have to get the whole bottom panel replaced, yet again.

I'm hoping to defer this decision by a year or two, but I'm sure I'll have to bite the bullet eventually, and every year, I hope that it's not going to be worse, so that it'll at least be good enough. Sadly, it looks like that hope may yet be naive.

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Why do you think the hardware and software versions are getting worse? My late 2017 15 inch rMBP is a lot better than my 2011 MBP. I also like the recent releases of MacOS. Dark mode, stacks on desktop, seeing Meta data in preview, and the new screenshot tool are a few Mojave features I like.

Memory compression in Mavericks was also something I feel is great. Although I never dealt with it directly as a programmer, only a user.

2017 may be significantly better that 2011, but it's NOT significantly better than the early 2015 Retina's.

The problem Apple has is that the early-2015 Macbook Pro Retina's really hit the balance point with the physical form factor. Enough heft to feel solid without too much weight. Enough battery life to do real work. A solid set of ports: HDMI. Magsafe. USB 3.0 ports. A keyboard that doesn't break due to random micron-sized dust particles.

So, a LOT of people want a 2015 Macbook Pro but with ONLY the tweaks to bring it forward to 2019 technically (memory, CPU, display, change to the two Thunderbolt 2 connectors to USB-C Thunderbolt 3) while leaving it in 2015 physically.

I think the stagnation you're describing is not unique to Apple.

The marketplace has become much more competitive as innovation has pretty much stalled.

I'm thinking of moving back to Mac OS after being on Windows for the last six years.

On the hardware side: keyboard, touchbar, touchpad to keyboard ratio.

On the software side: slowness but more importantly a general decrease of opinionated cohesion, and an increase in odd UX decisions. Facetime calls to my iPhone trigger alerts on all of my devices, even if I'd prefer it to just be my phone (I rarely use Facetime on my machine). Beyond that, there are too many useless popups that interrupt me in what I'm doing that I have to X out of that I end up with a screen that looks like the topic post -- hence the pejorative "10.15 Vista" which is how a lot of folks about Windows Vista when it was released after the relatively sleek and polished UX of Windows 2000 and XP.

1. Open the Facetime app.

2. Open the Preferences menu.

3. De-select the "Calls from iPhone" checkbox.

4. Done.

It's not a great default behavior in the first place, and indicative of other issues.

What really irks me is the touchbar. It's never going away, not because people like it, but because so many would lose face if they admitted it was a bad idea.

I don't understand why people feel this way. Apple's doing away with 3D Touch because of the data that says that people don't use it. What makes you think they wouldn't do the same with the Touch Bar?

Despite that, I love the Touch Bar. I do tons of video and audio editing and it's super-convenient for me. It seems like HN just has a higher noise ratio against the TB because it's mostly programmers and a high percentage of them are tied to a physical escape key. As a front-end dev myself who uses VS Code, I feel like that audience is just going to keep shrinking while the percent of people that will find benefits to the TB will probably grow.

What irks me is that it's an added cost for not much functionality for like 90% of people on top of an already expensive laptop with other compromises (namely base storage and memory). If it was just an option, you wouldn't hear all this bitching on the internet.

>for like 90% of people

Citation needed. I would venture to say that more people use it than you think.

MacRumors has been hinting that the touchbar is being phased out, but we’ll see. If you’re one of the people that actually gets value out of the touchbar, that’s great.

Forcing it on all 15 in. MBPs and maxed-out 13 in. models was the biggest FU to Mac users and an insanely user-hostile decision. But they’ve been really good at pulling those lately, so I’m not getting my hopes up.

one of the reasons i bought an air instead of another mbp was so i could get touch id and no touchbar!

I'm curious if the guy who came up with that even uses it. Honestly one of the worst "features" that Apple has ever green-lighted.

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