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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

Nah, this absolutely looks like the result of Jony Ive leaving. Head of design quits and suddenly a long term trend under his leadership suddenly reverses? Makes more sense than any sinister explanation.

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Both are not mutually exclusive. His leaving may be why they changed track. However that is not why they are harping these reverts as new features/innovation.

No one is talking about "innovation" with a straight face in regard to these features returning. It's just snark from detractors.

The pitch in the event was basically "we're giving pros what they want".

Marketing releases talking about “innovation” are equivalent to protestations of innocence before a criminal court; you should ignore it because everyone is motivated to claim the same thing regardless of whether it’s true or not. Doesn’t mean it’s always true or always false, sometimes real innovation occurs, but taken alone it provides no useful information.

Yeah, I think Jony Ive jumped the shark with the touchbar and eliminating ports. I dunno why they ditched MagSafe. The Worse parody of latter day Ive [1] was pretty spot on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBDdDdSqNE

I really like this MacBook Pro but at $2000 I may wait for the next Air. I really don't need the Pro features, HDMI, SD card, that many GPUs, ..., and my 2017 Air is just fine for now.

I can only speculate, but my guess is they reasoned that all-day battery life would make MagSafe obsolete.

The intel series MBPs do not have all day battery life, though, they last 3-5 hours when being used for software development.

Yup. Ironically they're bringing back mag safe at the same time as moving to processors that might make the battery life dream real.

I think the reason is dumber than that; removing MagSafe allowed the laptop to be more symmetrical and sleek. Ditto with SD readers and HDMI ports.

Let’s put tabs on the new names of the design:

> Evans Hankey, vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, vice president of Human Interface Design, will report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer

(From Apple’s website about Jony Ive).

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