They did, but the old iBooks were much thicker than modern laptops. There simply isn’t space for that any more.
I can’t imagine how. There’s no way around the fact that with a tablet + keyboard, all the weight is in the screen part, which means that the center of gravity is not over the keyboard part when the screen is open more than 90 degrees. That’s why the Surface has the little kickstand, and the iPad keyboards extend further past the bottom of the screen.
I’ve typed on those keyboards. They’re pretty impressive for what they are, which is an accessory to make typing better on a primarily touch device. But they are nowhere near as good as an actual laptop keyboard if what you’re doing is primarily typing on it while it’s sitting on your lap.
There are real tradeoffs to these design decisions. That Apple is making different decisions than you’d prefer doesn’t mean they’re falling behind.
Honestly, I’d love it if they’d make me a Macbook Air-sized laptop with twice the battery life, because that’s the thing I care about. And they could do it. But instead the new Macbook is thinner and has a better screen and about the same battery life. Which is why I haven’t bought one. Oh well.
And if you had broken a port instead and killed it, would you say “at least you should be able to pop the port off and put in a new one?”
If you had broken the screen instead, would you say “at least you should be able to pop the screen off and put in a new one?”
None of which you could do with a Surface. Is the keyboard something special to you, or were you just looking for an excuse to post another passive aggressive “Apple is doomed” post (and don’t kid yourself, you post them frequently enough to know what you’re doing)? How many PC laptops are totally modular, which you apparently think equals ZOMG innovation?
. It sure is. I’m a writer/translator on my laptop all day long. The keyboard is a wear-and-tear item I’d like to be able to replace more conveniently.
That seems to me to be a straw man argument whereby you impute the absurd thesis “Apple is doomed” to the OP and reject it for its absurdity. I care about Apple, use the company’s products, and am nostalgic for the Apple of 2004-2010 when I felt a part of it all. Is that plausible to you?
Again, we mustn’t trade in absolutes, like the Sith. The Surface Pro is a more sophisticated and clever bit of hardware than anything Apple is producing right now. A world in which MS is beating Apple at its own game would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.
I would imagine a thin, Surface-style keyboard simply popping into he aluminum. It could actually be less weight, since currently there is aluminum between the individual keys, and the need for that would go.
It would just be a different accessory that the screen/guts unit pops onto, and it could look much like the bottom half of the laptop “clamshell” does now and could have an arbitrary amount of weight. You could literally fab it yourself from a block of wood, with a recess to hold the current Surface keyboard and some type of clip system to hold the screen/guts in place. Then the whole thing would feel like a standard laptop sitting on your lap.
Yeah, a lot of people don’t seem particularly jazzed with the current options.
I LOVE my Surface Pro 4. I got one for work after I left Microsoft. It’s the bee’s knees for me. I’m a road warrior and it is by far the best laptop I’ve ever had with two exceptions:
battery life pretty well sucks. 4~ hours max on normal brightness. Note: I am running the Windows 10 updated fast preview, so the O/S isn’t optimized yet, but still the battery life is pathetic.
typing on your lap is awkward.
But I love it. The weight, thickness, pen, inking solution, etc make this a great work machine.
Indeed. My main client requires the Mac “ecosystem,” so I can’t really switch. Also, I am a fan of the Mac OS, very used to it now. It would be cool to run that on the Surface 4… blasphemy?!
Yet apparently the power port and the screen aren’t important to you since you aren’t complaining that either of those aren’t modular, even though losing one of them could end your work day. Should I just assume that you have no need for screens and power ports because you can’t make your argument when it’s those parts in question?
“Apple is doomed” is short hand for all your constant chicken little-ing about Apple not innovating. Your thesis “Apple has fallen way behind in innovation because the MacBook keyboard is not modular” is the absurdity. It’s absurd because, despite your unsourced claims as to how easy and cheap it would be, pretty much no other company produces a modular keyboard for their laptops. It’s absurd because if you compare Microsoft tablets to Apple tablets, then, yes, they both offer modular keyboards. It’s absurd because you’ve arbitrarily decided keyboards should be modular, yet you refused to address the incongruity that other equally vital parts of a Surface are not modular.
I sincerely hope you don’t live your life by a code written by George Lucas. If you’re a writer, you should know that.
Also, your 2 links that you think back up your play? The macobserver link- “Apple hasn’t updated their Cinema Displays, Apple nickels and dimes you on hard drives, Apple’s pro line up has stagnated” …yawn. If you’ve been following Apple as long as you say you have then you know all that shit is film at 11. Are you really trying to use Cinema Displays and hard drives as an accurate diving rod for Apple’s innovative heath?
As to the forbes “article” by Priestley you quoted? He isn’t grousing. He’s fooled you. He’s not a journalist working for forbes. Pretty much anybody can post, unedited, whatever nonsense they want to under the “contributors” banner at forbes.com. He previously worked for a company that counts Microsoft as a partner. He is currently a “Mentor at Microsoft Ventures Accelerator.” Your thesis is absurd enough without having to appeal to such a biased source.
You seem irate, and you are not actually countering what I am saying except to say that I am wrong. You are not saying how Apple is actually doing a good job at this point. Do you think so?
Did you read the OP? I had an issue with the keyboard, thus I am talking about the keyboard. The keyboard has a ton of moving parts that get hammered regularly. It can also have liquid or another substance spilled on it very easily. It’s a part that can easily get damaged and cripple the machine.
Bullshit. If I am going to talk about Apple failing as a business, I’ll do so. I’ve never said anything close to that.
Bullshit. That was one example. I linked to knowledgeable people, especially the first one, who talks about how Apple is losing power users because their hardware has gotten behind the times.
Is it possible that Apple solved the removable keyboard benefits by manufacturing a better keyboard from the start, and part of this design is non-removability? From your account, your old way of thinking after spilling liquids on the keyboard is to wholesale replace it. In reality all you had to do was wait for the liquid to evaporate and things are back to normal. Seems to me that Apple did ya a solid.
Based on 10 years of working with Apple laptops in a public school district, no. The non replaceable keyboards are just as vulnerable as the replaceable ones. The only difference is a $20.00 five minute in-house repair turned into a $250+ mail-in repair, because you can’t just replace the keyboard, you have to replace the whole top case. And that’s after letting the keyboard dry out for a week to see if it starts working again, which only works occasionally. How much thickness did this save? Not much. Even with the thinner screen the difference between an iBook and a 2011 MacBook is only about 9 mm.
And replacing the MagSafe DC in board isn’t trivial, but you can get the part for under $20.00 and it takes under an hour.
IBM (and probably the successor Lenovo) Thinkpads have a well-deserved reputation as durable enterprise workhorses. Broke the keyboard? Just go down to your office’s tech support guy and in five minutes they can pop off a trim strip, remove three screws and a plug, swap keyboards and put it back together. Drives are similarly easy to swap out. Fabulous serviceability, but the thing is ugly, or at least really uninspiring, not the fastest laptop on the block, and not exactly lightweight.
There’s no way to make an easily detachable thing weigh less or be as small as a similar thing that’s not easily detachable without sacrificing something. Because the easily detachable thing has to have connectors and a rigid body of it’s own. You can’t easily replace the keyboard on a modern Mac laptop because the keys are individual pieces, and have to be replaced individually. If it were one big piece, then all the material that holds it together would be added weight and volume.
The aluminum between keys isn’t wasted weight on laptops. It’s a single piece of aluminum with holes in it, which gives the whole laptop greatly increased structural rigidity. If it weren’t there, you’d have to have more weight somewhere else or risk the whole laptop bending more easily and breaking internal components.
Reduced weight is a hugely important premium feature for laptops. Is this a serious suggestion? It suggests a disconnect from the past several decades of progress in portable computers. No one’s going to carry around a big heavy thing so their laptop balances properly.
Industrial design is hard. I’m not saying that there aren’t improvements to be made, but saying that Apple should have thought of a big heavy tray to clip a flimsy keyboard into doesn’t make me think that you know what you’re talking about.
They seem pretty comparable in most ways. Looks like you get better performance from the Surface Pro and better battery life from the iPad. The other differences seem pretty minor. I’d choose more battery over most anything, but other people reasonably value other things.
It’s really misleading to compare the hardware specs and designs and note that they are similar. There’s a HUGE difference between iOS and Windows-10. iOS is simpler and more streamlined, and works very well for tablets (as does Android). iOS has a huge array of available apps optimized for tablets. Android is almost as good.
Surface Pro is a full Windows-10 system. It can run any Windows software - Photoshop, 3D modeling software, etc. But the availability and quality of tablet-optimized apps is abysmal. For example, there is an Amazon Kindle app, but it’s very slow and does not support some book formats (notably the “Print Replica” books which a lot of textbooks on Kindle use). The Texture (formerly Next Issue) magazine reader just doesn’t work on Win-10. This is not a hardware limitation - there are some really good apps, e.g. the PDF reader app which runs faster and smoother than any Android PDF reader. It’s just that few developers have made the effort to build a top quality Windows tablet app.
The comment I replied to specifically mentioned the hardware.
I realize that the OSes are vastly different, but it’s not clear to me that one is better than the other. They’re better at different things. The presence of the Surface Pro 4 doesn’t support the claim that Apple has fallen behind in innovation on the Mac.
I never made the claim that Apple is doing a good job because I am not making that claim. The claim I am making is that your example of Apple’s lack of innovation is absurd and I listed 3 reasons why I think it is absurd.
The difference that you don’t seem to understand is that you aren’t just complaining about the keyboard, you are using the keyboard as an example of lack of innovation. If a modular keyboard equals innovation to you because it can fail or be damaged, then it stands to reason so do other points of failure or damage. Therefore, they are exactly like your keyboard in that regard. Yet you refuse to admit the Surface’s lack of a modular power port or screen as a lack of innovation, even though by your logic, it is.
You have taken a very small, insignificant, illogical example and extrapolated it to mean Apple has “fallen way behind in innovation.” That is about as close to the definition of chicken little as it comes. Otherwise, your post would have just been “I fucked up and spilled a drink on my laptop and it sucks that it will be in the shop a few days.” Not to mention that this is far from your first post expressing emotional concern for the future of Apple.
So now this is about power users? Are power users abandoning Apple in droves because MacBooks don’t have modular keyboards? Mac sales have mostly been on the rise for quite a long time, which is all the more amazing as the PC market as a whole has been contracting. That macboserver article makes no mention of sales so how did you reach the conclusion that Apple is, in fact, losing power users? You have a problem where you think opinion pieces are factual.
So you linked to one guy who is making the same complaints about Apple that everyone and their dog has made for the past 15 years, and another guy who literally works for the competition. Are you next going to complain about Coke’s lack of innovation and cite a Pepsi PR drone to back you up? You have picked underwhelming, even biased, cites.
Well how about stating your own impression of how things are going, provide the big picture? Just sniping at my post really isn’t all that interesting.
Well, you’re not using logic at all. I am saying that the Surface is more innovative as hardware than the MacBook, not that it is infinitely innovative. The fact that not all parts are modular doesn’t negate the fact that a very important part of the Surface is modular.
Nope. I was using that example as a jumping-off point to discuss the macro issue. You don’t seem to dispute the fact that Apple has done nothing new with the Mac since 2013. Is that acceptable?
And “doomed” and “chicken little” are your words. Feel free to quote any post in which I’ve said that Apple is some sort of financial trouble. If anything, I’ve prefaced my posts with “they have a billion in cash!” to preempt dumb shit like you’re saying.
2013.10.19 Apple Inc. has hit the top of the arc–it’s all downhill from here (Note I say in the OP: “Apple is a strong company. It’s got the iTunes and App Store cash cows, and it has a ton of cash. It’s not going to go out of business or anything like that.”)
You tell me if that is a crazy posting pace for this topic.
Did you read the OP? You could also read the first article I quoted. He gets into details about what former/current Mac users are saying.
**Now, more than two-thirds of Apple’s revenue is made up of iPhone sales. So where the iPhone goes, so goes Apple – and last quarter was a miserable one for Apple’s signature gadget. IPhone sales fell for the first time in history.
But ever-sinking iPad sales and flat-lining Mac demand didn’t help Apple’s case either.**
“Flat-lining.” Thanks for pushing me to make a better case for myself. Can’t fault you for that!
So, can I buy an iPad for $1,000 to replace my MacBook pro… one that would run OSX and take care of all my computing needs?
Because that is what we are talking about. That is what the Surface Pro can do for you if you are a Windows user. There is not an equivalent product in the Mac ecosystem.
Your reasoning applies in most cases, but a thought experiment easily shows that this is probably an exception. I know how much a Surface keyboard weighs: not much. I imagine ripping the keyboard part along with the aluminum between the keys out of the MacBook Pro and laying the Surface keyboard on there. The difference in weight would not be much. Further, the Surface-style keyboard could be even thinner, since there would be parts below to support it (i.e., it would not have to maintain its own rigidity to such an extent).
Just looking at and touching my MacBook Pro right now, that doesn’t really seem to be true. It’s a fairly small bit of surface area in the center of the plane; it’s the highly rigid edges that really keep the thing from bending.
It’s an accessory! That’s like saying no one would use a selfie stick because it weighs 3x the phone itself. The cradle is something that you could leave at home or in the car to use when you wanted more of that traditional laptop feel.
Except that they did it before with the iBook, which another poster pointed out!
It is hard, but a lot of people are saying that Apple has made the wrong kind of tradeoffs recently, reducing all Mac ports to 1 or 2 USBs and soldering parts so that they can’t be upgraded, etc. To my eye the amazing (or even commensurate) reduction in weight hasn’t seemed to be there.
What isn’t interesting is your incessant sophomoric take on what you think equals innovation. What is interesting is how you steadfastly refuse to abandon it.
You’re problem is that you have chosen the keyboard as a standout in innovation arbitrarily, while conveniently ignoring the rest. Other parts are just as necessary as the keyboard to its function, yet you don’t care that they aren’t modular. That’s one of the things that makes it arbitrary. You are claiming that lack of a modular keyboard is in fact evidence that Apple has fallen way behind in innovation. It therefore stands to reason that the lack of a modular screen in the Surface is similar evidence Microsoft has fallen way behind in innovation. Has Microsoft fallen way behind in innovation, or are you just giving them a pass because it doesn’t fit your narrative?
Yeah, just like Chicken Little used the acorn falling from the sky as the jumping off point to tell everyone the sky is falling. You have inflated something very small and insignificant into a concern so grave you felt the need to post about it and tell everyone.
Now I see one of your biggest problems. You project stuff that isn’t there to validate your nonsense conclusions. I haven’t said a thing about where I think the Mac is, yet that leads you to believe I don’t dispute Apple has done nothing new with the Mac since 2013? The macboserver piece you quoted never provided any evidence that Apple was losing market share from power users, yet you claimed it as evidence it was. Then there is all your “pipeline” nonsense in your previous posts, where you declare, factually, that Apple has nothing in its pipelines, yet you never provided evidence to back it up. You just like projecting your preconceived notions into holes that do not fit.
They are my words and your feelings. Don’t hate me for placing accurate labels on the shit you’re shoveling.
Jesus fucking Christ. Here is how you characterize the company that last year had literally the 2nd most profitable year of any company in the history of mankind and arguably has more mindshare than all of its competitors combined… “it’s all downhill from here,” “Apple is in trouble,” “worry for Apple,” “Apple has no pipeline,” “they don’t seem to have the will.” Yeah, calling you Chicken Little is sooo totally off base. What the fuck was I thinking? Where ever did I get the idea?
Basically, you want it both ways. You want to be able to spew your inane interpretation of innovation and the corresponding doom it will cause Apple, but you don’t want to be called on such drivel because you prefaced it with “but Apple has billions in cash!” Weak.
I did. It was absurd nonsense. I gave some reasons why, too. You pretty much chose not to address them.
Yay for anecdotal evidence! Yay for confirmation bias! Yay for presenting opinion pieces as factual evidence!
It took you too long to finally admit this. I hope you use this as a lesson to not make such disingenuous claims again.
If you don’t think Apple is in any financial trouble, then what is the point of bringing this up? Did you think Apple was the Energizer Bunny and could just keep going up forever? Are you trying to make the claim that it is due to unsubstantiated empty pipelines and non-modular keyboards? If so, please provide some factual evidence.
Have you ever heard of context? Apple was down -2.1% last quarter while the entire global PC market was down -11.5%. If everybody is getting fucked, at least be one of the guys to get fucked the least.
Have you ever heard of cherry picking data? It’s a good thing you didn’t spill your drink during the preceding quarter, when again the entire global market was down -8.3% but Apple was up at 2.8%.
So here are some numbers you might like to see that are have more context and have been less cherry picked. The entire global PC market growth over the last 4 quarters? Down -44.7%. Apple? Up 13.4%. The rest of the industry would kill to flat-line like Apple.
You have yet to a make a better case for yourself, but I am glad that, at long last, you recognize you suck at it and will actually try harder.
The Surface Pro is a more sophisticated and clever bit of hardware than anything Apple is producing right now. A world in which MS is beating Apple at its own game would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.