Hacker News Reader

Comment by lghh | Hacker News Reader

Funny that they used a very clunky looking Windows laptop and a pretty dated looking Android phone to show off Facetime.

View on HN

What do you think the average Windows laptop and Android phone look like?

Many popular Windows laptops e.g. Thinkpad look like that.

And since they are targeting younger people for Facetime maybe not surprising they didn't choose the most expensive, flagship phone.

And yet iPhones are flagship phones...

Taste is subjective. Anyone arguing that the MBP is objectively better than, say, https://icdn.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/dell-xps-...

is just expressing their preferences. And I say that as someone who is waiting on delivery of the 14" MBP.

M1 Pro/Max destroys the competition by every definition.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

So taste maybe subjective. But there is simply no argument that if you care about performance or battery life then the MacBook Pro is objectively better.

How does it fare in price/performance? I'd wager that's what will matter more than performance/watt to 90% of customers.

90% of customers only need MacBook airs, which have been at the top of price/performance for a decade.

Really? I'd love to see a source for how the $900 Intel MBAs stacked up against equivalently priced laptop hardware.

Right. I just ordered the M1 Max, for similar reasons. Even against my mid 2019 MBP.

The iPhone / Android objection still stands.

I get that you want to show your own products in their best light, but this is just petty and beneath them.

The macOS Finder still displays Windows machines on the network as CRT monitors showing the BSOD I believe. I’m not in front of my Mac now so can’t check.

This comes from the company that still shows non-Mac PCs in the network as CRT monitors, showing a blue screen of death.

Only if you have no sense of humor :).

Reminds me of how hugely offended some people were that the icon for a Windows PC in Mac OS X’s network browser was a blue screened monitor.

It's just annoying when they don't have a sense of humor about their products but have a negative sense of humor about other's.

I can be not offended and still feel it to be petty.

I found it absolutely hilarious when it was done about 15 years ago. That was when we Apple users were pretty much the underdogs and expected the platform to die any day.

But now that Windows users feel threatened by Apple and are sensitive about this, it should probably be changed. Although it's a fun relic of the olden times.

This is the same company that displays Windows machines it finds on the network with a Blue Screen of Death. You have to really zoom in on that icon to see it, but it's there. As a Certified Apple Fanboi(tm), such pettiness bothers me. I'd go as far as to call it unprofessional. But macOS rules and Windoze droolz, amirite?

I'd give them a pass for this as it's been in there since they really were the underdogs. At the time it was punching up. Not so much now.

That's my mental picture of Windows, and it's not because of the Mac icon. So in my opinion, it is a fair likeness.

About showing their products in the best light, it seems they also chose to limit the view of the notch of their brand new MBP to one (kind of small) picture... among pictures of 30 devices.

Looks about like the hardware you'd get for a N2040 laptop or a prepaid unlocked phone. Half of the stuff on the shelf at Walmart looks like this today. Just because Apple doesn't make entry-level hardware doesn't mean they're under any obligation to pretend that other companies don't. I think the image illustrates quite well what this update means -- FaceTime isn't just a rich-kid platform anymore.

So I just took a few minutes to lookup for the picture of an "N2040" (or various random low cost laptops, N4020 seems more likely if it's about a Celeron CPU, but I actually found one laptop model named "N2040") and they have bezels clearly thinner than what Apple shows for the laptop PC picture.

Ironically, during my research I also found this marvelous few years old MacBook Air https://fr.shopping.rakuten.com/offer/buy/2076960204/portabl... , which is not too far.

So I'm not really convinced that attempt of an excuse makes any sense...

If they used an XPS people might accidentally realize that you don't need a notch to put a camera at the top of your screen.

But then they'd have to show the corresponding person in the video call as being nothing but a floating nose.

The XPS line fixed that last year. It's at the top of the screen in a super thing bezel.

The new XPS has windows hello AND a super thin bezel. Imagine that.

Dell uses a low quality 720p camera on their XPS line.

And the notch gives them room for a future FaceID sensor stack.

And Apple only just with the new MBPs upgraded to 1080p.

And Dell supports Windows Hello 3D face recognition without a notch.

It's not quite as unbalanced as you imply.

And the notch was only just introduced. Not sure what your point is here.

The initial implication, "Dell's webcam implementation sucks. Apple's is better because of the resolution and position, which allows facial recognition".

Apple's resolution was equally as bad as Dell's until eight days ago.

Dell's position allows facial recognition without cutting into the screen.

So my point is that contrary to several comments implying how "obvious" it is that Apple's webcam implementation is superior, it's not necessarily obvious, nor superior.

> And the notch gives them room for a future FaceID sensor stack

If that's really the reason, why not just delay putting the notch on until they're actually doing that?

Why can't the most valuable company in the world just engineer a solution? Dell was able to fit infrared facial unlock inside that tiny bezel too, so I don't really buy the "it's for faceID" argument (especially since they didn't include the hardware this time). It's a ridiculous decision by a company that deserves to be ridiculed for cutting corners on a professional device.

Man. The screen was not cut by a notch, rather it grow to envelope the camera.

Compare the top bezel in a pre-notch mac book and you will see that the camera is basically on the same place as before, but the bezel is now smaller.

The function row wasn't replaced by the touch bar, the screen just grew to envelop the keyboard!

Finally, you can FaceTime with poor people!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com