New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacement design since 2012

https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown

by tailspin2019 • 5 years ago

718 600 5 years ago

webmobdev4• 5 years ago

Thank you, frame.work - https://frame.work/ - this is what happens when there is real competition and innovation in the market.

Jcowell• 5 years ago

I sincerely doubt framework was even a factor in the decision making of whether or not MacBook batteries should be follow iPhones already existing design.

brianwawok• 5 years ago

100%. It was probably due to some EU lawsuit or other, and rather than make 2 designs (US / EU), they just changed the design to make everyone happy.

It's weird that US companies basically need to be sued by the EU for stuff to be consumer friendly..

webmobdev4• 5 years ago

I sincerely doubt framework was even a factor in the decision making ...

Oh, you may be surprised at how closely Apple watches and reacts to PR and its competitors - it's one of the things they do right and are really good at. Some examples:

1. After Apple's very successful launch of the iPhone, they got a huge shock in Europe when Jolla, a small, new startup of ex-Nokia employees launched a phone with a new mobile OS that outsold the iPhone. When Apple realised that Jolla's marketing emphasised "user privacy", Apple strategically temporarily shelved its plan to collect user data (for which it was getting bad PR) and even pretended to abandon their advertising platform. And that worked out very well for them because luckily for them Jolla was mismanaged, and failed.

2. Frame.work has received highly positive reviews from both the media and users / patrons all of whom have acknowledged and appreciated the creativity and innovative use of existing technology to create a highly repairable laptop. While it may not have outsold any Mac device yet, the PR buzz it has generated has focused public spotlight back on right-to-repair and created new awareness and appreciation for repairable electronics. Invariably, comparison has been made with Apple's popular yet deliberately hard-to-repair devices and you can bet that it has made Apple quite uncomfortable. (With regulators breathing down their neck about right-to-repair, the last thing Apple needs is an innovative competitor that tauts repairability as a feature).

3. When Apple released a Mac Mini with soldered RAM and SSD, the criticism and poor sales forced them to backtrack and release the next Mac Mini with replaceable RAM. (Again, a temporary strategic withdrawal).

4. The current and new Apple iPhones size and design are inspired by Sony mobiles phones, one of the few companies in the world that still has their own design division and produces amazing phones with great hardware.

5. The whole "thin device" craze at Apple was inspired by a Motorola phone. (And ofcourse, it remains popular as it aids their "planned obsolescence" goal for their devices).

I am not completely disparaging Apple - reacting to PR and their competitors is something giants sometimes ignore at their peril. But Apple doesn't, and they cleverly calibrate their strategy to maintain their competitive lead.

(I'd even say the article linked to is just a fluff piece trying to convey the impression that the new Apple laptop is suddenly a more easy to repair device because the battery is no longer glued like before but uses stretchable adhesive :). I recently repaired an iPhone SE and the battery adhesive broke as I was pulling it carefully and after that it was a real pain to remove it without damaging anything - easy to repair, my ass.)

skinnymuch2• 5 years ago

I’ve never heard of this. Only one of my casual tech blog reading or coding friends have. I don’t think Apple would do something because of such a small competitor. The Wikipedia entry for it only has an introduction section.

benbristow3• 5 years ago

It's gotten a bit more media attention recently as Linus (of Tech Tips/YouTube fame, not Linux/Git fame) has made a rather large investment in them and has been talking about them a lot on his platforms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSxbc1IN9Gg

alphabettsy2• 5 years ago

They’re a competitor by definition, but not by any practical consideration.

Despite seeming like a great company and product they probably sell fewer machines and have less mindshare than the $19 Apple cleaning cloth.

Since all laptops previously had and some still have replaceable batteries, including Apple, I’m also curious how Framework gets credit for this innovation?

desiarnezjr4• 5 years ago

By bucking the trend and good PR really. Framework is interesting, but in reality reminds me of when Thinkpads were still tank-like workhorses that were quasi self-servicable over decade a ago. For the most part, you could swap components out, which is Framework's whole schtick.

The ship has sailed on replaceable RAM and storage IMO, because most of us want the performance increases that losing upgradability brings. It's a trade-off but one that's worth it in the long run.

benbristow3• 5 years ago

Hi, Linus! :P

pzo• 5 years ago

I wouldn't call it as easily repairable as frame.work - frame.work doesn't use those glue white strips instead they just have few screws and you can remove such battery without struggle.

I once changed battery in my old iphone SE and it's a real pain if such white strips break - and they are sooo thin that it's really easy to break. Once it breaks you have to use heat gun and fishing line as improvised saw to cut battery from the case.

BTW My old macbook 15'' pro 2012 unibody had only screws and easily removable battery

webmobdev4• 5 years ago

Same here - I had to use a hair dryer and dental floss to "saw" through the adhesive strip once it broke off ... damn near took me around 30 - 40 minutes! (And some HP laptops don't even need screws but provide sliding buttons to easily "unlock" and remove / change the battery).

supernes• 5 years ago

They should check if the camera stops working when you replace it.

zrm• 5 years ago

Credit where credit is due. Let this be a trend.

spicybright2• 5 years ago

Hear hear. It's frankly amazing how this model did a 180 in these aspects.

IshKebab• 5 years ago

Yeah it's like they took the list of everyone's complaints - touchbar, ports, magsafe, battery and fixed them all. Very un-Apple-like.

There's only really minor complaints left, like the unreplaceable RAM and disks, and lack of touchscreen.

scohesc• 5 years ago

So they say it can actually be replaced.

Nice!

Hopefully they don't pull an iPhone and individually serialize batteries that authenticate with other chips on the phone - if they don't match you get an annoying warning and supposedly underclocked CPU causing performance issues even if it's a brand new battery.

kfprt• 5 years ago

With the iPhoneification of their product line I'm sure that's exactly what's going to happen.

speedyapoc• 5 years ago

Very nice to see!

I use my machine in closed clamshell around 90% of the time which means the battery is usually in pretty terrible shape after a couple years of use. Will be happy to see battery replacement times hopefully go down on these new machines as waiting 5-7 days isn't fun to deal with.

asdff13• 5 years ago

I really don't understand why macbooks are set up to still draw off the battery when under AC power. You can only get a mac to run off ac power only if you start it up with the battery physically removed iirc. I had a macbook where I was spinning fans for most of the day and I got it down to 85% battery capacity within a year since it keeps straining the battery even when its just sitting on my desk running off a 90W power adapter at 100% charge. Its like, whats the point of paying for these workhorse laptops if you are going to be blowing through batteries once you actually start to utilize the power you are paying egregiously for? Might as well get a powerful mac mini and connect to it with ssh from a much cheaper laptop.

hbn2• 5 years ago

I had a macbook where I was spinning fans for most of the day and I got it down to 85% battery capacity within a year since it keeps straining the battery even when its just sitting on my desk running off a 90W power adapter at 100% charge

They released a feature in Big Sur where it learns if you always keep your laptop plugged in, and during those times (which may be all the time, like in my case) it'll hover the battery between 70-80% to preserve battery health, and won't charge up to 100% until you tell it to manually (click the battery icon -> "Charge to full now")

TMWNN3• 5 years ago

I use my machine in closed clamshell around 90% of the time which means the battery is usually in pretty terrible shape after a couple years of use.

For those of us who usually use our MacBooks attached to the wall, deep discharging (AKA "calibration"; <https://www.newertech.com/batteries/power-calibration-guide/>) on a regular basis is a substitute, but is annoying to do.

I similarly went through batteries every couple of years. I now use FruitJuice (on the App Store) as the menu bar battery indicator. If it finds that the computer hasn't been used on battery long enough, about once a month the app guides me through running a maintenance cycle to run it down to 20%. I presume that following FruitJuice's advice is why my latest third-party battery is still at 103% health after more than a year.

riffic5• 5 years ago

FruitJuice

Thanks for the tip, I'll have to give this a shot.

krrrh6• 5 years ago

Check out the app Al Dente. There’s a free version, but the pro also comes with some nice features.

https://apphousekitchen.com/

major505• 5 years ago

Well, this is great. Because, while I don`t like to admit they launch a lot of trends that other manufactures tend to follow. Hope they go the same way.

drclau• 5 years ago

AFAIK, replacing the battery on the previous generation meant replacing the top part of the body, to which the battery was glued. That included replacing the keyboard and the touchpad (not 100% sure if the old keyboard and touchpad could have been kept; maybe they were replaced just because of the damage done to them by the expanding batteries). At the same time, the previous generation had battery problems and keyboard problems (as pointed out in sub-comments), which meant many were replaced for free even out of warranty (as it happened to me due to faulty battery).

I suspect someone at Apple realized how much would have been saved if only the battery was not glued to the case.

Edit: mentioned the keyboard problem, which would result in replacing the battery too it seems.

martinko• 5 years ago

I suspect that they see the right to repair movement and are trying to preempt it, at least to an extent.

gregoriol3• 5 years ago

It's probably just that replacing too many parts when one breaks was getting too costly for them

selykg• 5 years ago

This is also how I got two new batteries replacements when I had to send my MBP in for keyboard replacement due to the stupid thing breaking (repeatedly).

Each time the system showed 0 cycles on the battery and I basically got a nice reset. Loved that part of it at least.

egypturnash• 5 years ago

hahaha, my 2016 MBP chews through batteries - I'm on my fourth, I think - and every time I get a new battery it comes with a new keyboard, so I haven't had any of the keyboard problems some are plagued with.

fishtoaster• 5 years ago

It had the nice side effect that I got a brand new battery every time I had a single janky keyboard key. My battery is always nearly-new! :)

hedgehog• 5 years ago

Same, but then the last time the battery went bad (swelling) with only about 30 cycles on it.

sundvor• 5 years ago

That's definitely a "glass is half full" view of the MacBook keyboard quality situation. :)

bityard• 5 years ago

I wonder if all of the recent interest in right-to-repair laws by various states impacted the new design.

samwillis• 5 years ago

I wander if the new keyboard design with plastic rather than aluminium between the keys will also make it easer to replace it too, it almost looks like the module that could be swapped. I'm sure we will find out from iFixit soon!

I suppose it also means that the top case is no longer tied to different keyword layouts, fewer SKUs. That will have helped cut costs!

(written on a 2019MPB with duff ender key)

dsego2• 5 years ago

it's a black anodized aluminum inset from what I can find online

aha_throwaway• 5 years ago

Some YouTube video said you still have to replace the whole top

chrischen2• 5 years ago

Yep I had annual keyboard replacements on all the butterfly macs I owned. I considered it a nice feature that the keyboard had this defect because it also meant a free annual battery replacement.

michaelcampbell• 5 years ago

As I get older I start thinking more about our e-waste problem. This seems fairly egregious in that regard.

grishka5• 5 years ago

That's what "authorized service providers" do. Unauthorized ones do replace just the battery by ungluing the old one.

Gigachad6• 5 years ago

Which involved hours of using chemicals to dissolve the glue with a plastic card. It was ranked one of the hardest repairs on ifixit.

quitit• 5 years ago

Unfortunately there is a lot of really wild speculation going on that places a lot of the thinking into “upper management” and ignores the realities of engineering and production. IIRC - This is the first time the battery attachment method has been changed since they were made to be fully enclosed units. It could really be as simple as eng/Production standardising battery attachment tech for unibody enclosures and the switch to m1 was the first meaningful redesign where that could have happened.

This is underlined by Apple’s “repairability scores” being mostly random - it seems that apple just doesn’t spend a lot of R&D time obsessing about repairability tweaks in bump-releases, especially if they’re going to get in the way of their vision for the device.

nicbou• 5 years ago

At some point they ran out of that part, so they gave people refurbs. They didn't have the fr-CA keyboard in Germany, so I got upgraded from a 2012 mid-specced MacBook to a 2017 top-specced one for the price of a battery change.

Then I got two more battery swaps when my keyboard failed.

roflchoppa• 5 years ago

It’s the right thing to do from a service prospective, the last design had it built into the top case. I’m sure they hit supply issues with all the keyboard failures on the old model. Are the speakers in the old model removable? If not more topcase constraints ha.

gregoriol3• 5 years ago

At least you got a new/clean keyboard everytime your battery did need service

alphabettsy2• 5 years ago

I’m sure this is more to save $$ for Apple, but either way it’s a win. It’s nice to feel like someone is actually listening with this new redesign.

zerof1l• 5 years ago

I don't get what is the news here and why this is in top. You could always replace the battery. It's just that it is not easy. Now to replace it, you need to remove a trackpad. Ridiculous. You still can't purchase a replacement battery from Apple to replace it yourself. The only option is to purchase it from a place like iFixit once your warranty is out, or pay ridiculous price at Apple.

teilo• 5 years ago

This is incorrect. We are an Apple self-service shop (meaning we are authorized by Apple to do our own repairs, order OEM parts, etc.). In the 2019 models, battery replacement required a new top shell.

drcongo• 5 years ago

I'm impressed that you dignified that post with an answer.

Wingman4l7• 5 years ago

No it doesn't, you're (understandably) just not willing to do the large amount of labor required to rip out the battery:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Touch+Bar+2...

eli3• 5 years ago

FTA: "this new MacBook Pro has, at the very least, the first reasonably DIY-friendly battery replacement procedure since 2012."

MrBuddyCasino4• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what is supposed to be an improvement? I replaced a MBP 2015 battery myself, and this did not require removing the touchpad.

paxys• 5 years ago

Sucks that this is now the gold standard whereas for laptops sold a decade ago you didn't even need to open up the chassis or use a screwdriver to replace the battery.

ryanhuff4• 5 years ago

I have a 2012 MBP, and Apple won't replace the battery. The laptop works great, but Apple considers "obsolete". Sad.

m463• 5 years ago

I guess "pull tabs" makes it slightly different...

bigbaguette• 5 years ago

Well, the last battery I bought from iFixit was flawed and killed the logic board. Victim among a few others of a bad batch. They refunded the battery at least.

Now I can fry my logic board again without having to go through the major pain of removing the original battery.

givemeethekeys• 5 years ago

The 2013 and 2015 MacBook pros have a battery and charge controller that is so badly glued onto the body that you're bound to damage something else in the process of trying to replace it.

dont__panic• 5 years ago

In a world where Apple is pushing on-device CSAM scanning and serial number locking cameras to motherboards, it's nice to see that some of their products still respect users' rights.

Now if only we could get an iPhone Pro with this kind of respect for right to repair.

sneak• 5 years ago

You can't wipe the drives on these machines fully and make them functional again without an internet connection back to Apple.

Even the Monterey installer doesn't work offline at present, even the full 12GB one, or even a usb one made with createinstallmedia --downloadassets.

You must transmit your serial number to the mothership.

marcan_427• 5 years ago

On the flip side, these machines are unbrickable, which pretty much no PC is. If you wipe a PC "fully" (BIOS and all) it's dead. That's why you need to call the mothership to fully DFU reinstall one of these Macs - it literally goes and downloads things like factory calibration info from their database.

You can in principle do offline OS installs on these Macs in reduced security mode. I did it once with Big Sur. If that doesn't work with Monterey, that's a bug that should be reported and fixed. Full security mode requires phoning home, as part of their security model (this is so they can stop allowing installs of old, vulnerable OSes, which could be used as an attack vector on someone else's machine).

You need to make sure you install from 1TR if you want to do a reduced security install; again, this is part of their security model, to ensure you've asserted physical presence.

exoque• 5 years ago

That's not at all what I think of when I hear the words 'replaceable battery'. Too bad.

lamontcg3• 5 years ago

Yeah there's still a long way to go to get back to where we used to be.

sbuk4• 5 years ago

What is the use case? Modern batteries hold their charge for a long time. In a review I saw today, the reviewer - a professional photographer and filmmaker no less - said that he managed to shoot edit and export a video on a single charge[0]. The need to swap out batteries with these device has all but disappeared, save for permanent replacement.

[0]https://youtu.be/I10WMJV96ns?t=643

ct03• 5 years ago

About as replaceable as a tesla's battery. You simply cant do it yourself. Seems like a trend.

Ductapemaster• 5 years ago

This is dismissive and incorrect. iFixIt, the authors of this piece, provide everything someone needs to do such a replacement: tools, parts, and in-depth user guides. I've replaced an older-generation MacBook's battery using their stuff, and it worked fine. What more do you want?

Kluny• 5 years ago

I don't get it - the battery isn't glued in, and you can remove it without damaging other parts. Isn't that pretty good?

asdff13• 5 years ago

It's still an entire procedure. You have to remove the trackpad to access all the cells. Most users aren't going to be confident doing that to their $2000 laptop, they will continue doing what they do with glued in batteries today which is hand it off to a technician and playing the flat rate apple repair fee.

Pretty good was the first unibody macbook (open latch with one finger, remove door with two fingers, remove battery with two fingers, done):

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+Bat...

Rebelgecko• 5 years ago

When I hear "replaceable battery", it makes me think of the days when packing a spare battery was a viable alternative to bringing a laptop charger with you (I don't think any MBPs were like this, but Powerbooks were). It's funny how the Overton window has shifted.

This procedure looks doable and relatively low risk for technical people, but it's not something that my mom can do while sitting at a Starbucks

atoav• 5 years ago

I can flip my notebook over, pop the battery out and put a new one in within 5 seconds. That is replacable.

I also replaced a macbook battery once, with a hot air resoldering station (to soften the adhesive) and a metal bucket filled with sand nearby in case it catches fire (the battery was balooning and bending the aluminium frame out of shape). The whole thing took nearly an hour. Ultimately it was also replaceable, but this was needlessly painful.

tobyjsullivan2• 5 years ago

A lot of comments seem focused on the incentives to apple and what's motivating the change. All fair questions. To me, though, it feels like just a radically different approach this year.

2016 macbook felt like leadership got in a room and said "okay, let's make a list of all the sexy things we can think of that would make the macbook unique". This netted things like thin-beyond-practicality, touchbar, removing all the ports, etc.

2021 macbook feels like leadership got in a room and said "okay, let's make a list of all the top things everybody is complaining about most." And they just fixed everything (well, most things) on that list one-by-one.

brightball• 5 years ago

Is the hard disk / SSD / NVMe still soldered to the board?

gregoriol3• 5 years ago

There are still a few things left for 2022 models

masklinn10• 5 years ago

MBPs haven't had a "hard drive" to solder on in a few years: the "T2" security chip is also the SSD controller, managing the "freestanding" flash chips (which are soldered onto the board). The SSD isn't a separate thing at all.

rbanffy11• 5 years ago

If you go to the other extreme of the spectrum, to the eMMC-based laptops, they are also soldered to the motherboard.

Which is really a shame (I have one Acer Aspire laptop and I mount /var/log as tmpfs without swap so it doesn't devour the eMMC like the RPis do with SD cards)

DrBenCarson• 5 years ago

To summarize: the MBP no longer has a “hard disk”.

It has flash memory that is coupled with the SoC.

This is to make the memory bottleneck tolerable (considering the cpu and ram move 400GB/s)

colechristensen• 5 years ago

I replaced one of the (honestly I don't know what to call them... gumstick sized ssd?) in a MacBook that had it as a separate component and it was a bad idea. It required an adapter board, some large proportion of available products on the market weren't compatible, and even with one that was there was still occasional strange behavior. Soldering in was the least of the problems.

masklinn10• 5 years ago

I fear 2016 MBP was Jony Ive unimpeded by practical concerns.

Andrew_nenakhov• 5 years ago

Courage!

behnamoh• 5 years ago

Good riddence of him.

hdjjhhvvhga3• 5 years ago

That would be nice, but would mean reversing all the decisions from 2016. Also, I'm happy about having more ports, but not all my devices are USB-C, especially pendrives. A noticeable part of my routine is dealing with various dongles just because someone thought they will decide what I need and in which direction I should be pushed. In the meantime, all other vendors continue to support USB-A.

cletus5• 5 years ago

The 2016 wasn't leadership, it was Johnny Ive without Steve Jobs bringing him back to reality.

Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to raise the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macbooks, that had fallen precipitously low from a shareholder perspective because of the superb value-for-money proposition that was the 13" Macbook Air.

The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.

USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical one that forced people everywhere to carry dongles. The USB-C cable situation was and continues to be a nightmare as different cables support different subsets of data, power and video and, worse yet, different versions of each of those. Worst of all, it was the loss of the much-beloved MagSafe. Also, the ports weren't all the same. You were better off charging from the right (IIRC) rather than the left.

Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful. Personally I don't believe this was about forcing users to pay for upgrades primarily. It was about shaving off a small amount of volume.

Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.

shoto_io• 5 years ago

How do you know all this? We’re you at apple at the time?

tobyjsullivan2• 5 years ago

I don't think apple decided to "undo Ive" immediately, though. The 2019 models attempted an incremental fix approach - fix the keyboard layout, add a physical escape key - while trying to preserve the 2016 features (usb-c only, thinness, touchbar). It seems clear that it wasn't until 2021 that apple has decided to throw all the crap out entirely.

dec0dedab0de2• 5 years ago

Worst of all, it was the loss of the much-beloved MagSafe.

I wish all of my cables were magnetic, The amount of things I have broken in my life by tripping is downright embarrassing. I do like being able to charge my mac book from my external monitor, and keeping my apple power supply in my bag in-case I need to go somewhere. It would just be nice if I didn't have to label my cables.

jacobolus• 5 years ago

This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence.

The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input + rich display device. If adequately supported by software it can be an amazing input, affording a range of useful functions not replicable with discrete buttons. In general, I really wish modern computers had more analog inputs available. Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs, etc. are tragically missing.

I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal.

The problem with the touch bar is that (a) it only shipped on a limited subset of devices so software authors could not depend on it, (b) after its initial functions, Apple made limited effort to adopt it in all of their own software, improve its integration into the system, or push boundaries of what it could do as an input device.

The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.

No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype vs. full-scale factory production + poor estimation of reliability in a wide variety of contexts over a longer period of time. Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost.

There are many suboptimal features of the common rubber dome + scissor stabilizer laptop keyboards, and I wish more companies were brave enough to experiment with alternative designs in search of improvements. (Disclaimer: my favorite "laptop" keyboards are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_portable_computers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable)

thedougd4• 5 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if folks use rose colored glasses when thinking about MagSafe. I don't miss MagSafe and I enjoy the interchangeability of chargers.

I could not keep my 13" MacBook plugged in while using it on my lap. The MagSafe cord repeatedly fell off when my leg, or a pillow bumped into it. My MacBook MagSafe port had black marks on it from arcing. At least three times I couldn't get it to charge because a metal fragment (once a folded paper staple) became magnetically stuck to the receiving side. On one of those occasions I couldn't fix it till I got home and grabbed some tweezers.

It was a smart solution, but IMO to a tripping problem that wasn't widespread.

GoofballJones• 5 years ago

Ive was probably cursing at the announcement: "WTF are you doing! You're giving people what they want? That's not the Apple I left, mate. By this time, in 2021, there should be NO ports on the Macbooks, and it should be so thin you could shave with it. What the hell is all this?"

jdminhbg2• 5 years ago

Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to raise the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macbooks, that had fallen precipitously low from a shareholder perspective because of the superb value-for-money proposition that was the 13" Macbook Air.

If customers don't like the Touch Bar, how does this make any sense? If pro users will pay (made-up number) $2000 for a MacBook Pro regardless of whether or not it has a Touch Bar because it comes with the CPU/GPU they want, adding a Touch Bar just decreases the margin.

If the MacBook Air is a better value-for-money proposition than the MacBook Pro to begin with, and customers do not actually like the Touch Bar, then why would they start switching to the MacBook Pro?

jollybean• 5 years ago

Touch Bar I think was a legit attempt at modernization.

Every time I 'see' a touchbar, I want one.

They look cool and useful.

The only reason I don't have one, is because everyone seems to indicate they are useless.

It's also possibly a platform issue - maybe they just didn't get enough participation etc..

Also - 'thinner' is a rational and generally positive thing, it's just that we've reached a threshold where the diminishing marginal returns are starting to weigh on other things.

Even ports - it's not an aesthetic issue only - they're trying to get everyone onto a standard. Frankly, I support the notion - I'd love it if everyone just used the same dam connector. The reason I don't like my 'USB C only Mac' is only because the ecosystem isn't there yet. If the ecosystem were there, I'd be fine with it.

dlivingston2• 5 years ago

Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to raise the ASP

I thought it was a great idea, and I still do, but am so glad they removed it. It sounds great on paper, but practically, I used it for nothing other than adjusting brightness and volume.

The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.

Agreed. It really wasn't great. From a design perspective, it's quite clever, but from a usability perspective it was horrible.

USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical one that forced people everywhere to carry dongles.

Apple has a long, long history of doing this. Headphone jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy disk drive? Gone.

I'm fine with it in moderation, frankly. USB-C is so clearly the future that where I take offense is that the rest of Apple's lineup doesn't work with it (iPhones, AirPods, some iPads, etc.).

Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful.

Perhaps, but now that RAM is not only part of the SoC but a significant reason that the SoC is so good (high bandwidth shared memory between CPU and GPU), it's a change I'm more than fine with.

Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.

Agreed. This finally, truly, feels like a Pro machine: "design first" is an approach for consumer products and, to Apple's credit, works very nicely on the iPad and iPhone and consumer MacBooks (generally). "Design first" for pro machines is great for the 3 minutes after opening the box, but when trying to do real work, you'd sacrifice all the bezels in the world to shave 30% off compile times.

SkyPuncher• 5 years ago

Also, the ports weren't all the same.

This was the most shocking to me. I learned that the left and right side ports run through different buses, but each side does not have enough capacity to supply both ports at full speed. This mean I had to buy long USB cable to run to the other side of my Macbook in order to supply 3 monitors. I have a port just sitting unused.

Also, there seems to be a problem with left-side USB ports when charging. They cause the system to overheat (or at least think it's overheating).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/04/24/why-you...

onion2k• 5 years ago

Apple products are excellent, well built, and they last. If they didn't add new things regularly far fewer people would buy. I think a lot of the new features on Apple products have simply been attempts to make things look different enough to be worth buying.

This includes removing the things they've added...

wnissen• 5 years ago

What I always wondered is why they didn't start with a $999 base model (like the original iBook) that was cheap, but big and slow. if you wanted premium performance/expandability/ports/screen, you could pay $2K for the Pro model in the same form factor. If you wanted portability, you could pay $2K for the Air in a smaller form factor with the same performance as the iBook. The cheapest model being the most portable is bizarre.

Then again, the iPad Mini is more expensive than the larger iPad, so obviously there is something going on I don't understand. Perhaps the cost of engineering the motherboard and battery in an integrated package are so high that they can't afford to split the line any further.

The 2021 14" Pro is the first truly pro model in a while. I hope they keep it up. The keyboard is actually usable for extended periods, it has ports, the screen is great (to be fair, all Apple retina screens are great to varying degrees). Did I need it? No. But I wanted it. The last Mac laptop I bought for myself was the 2015 13" MacBook "Pro", so they're getting more money out of me this time around.

nebula8804• 5 years ago

Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful. Personally I don't believe this was about forcing users to pay for upgrades primarily. It was about shaving off a small amount of volume.

Louis Rossman gets a lot of things wrong because he does not have a computer engineering background. For example, he does not understand why Apple used SPI on the Macbook Air instead of USB despite it having USB capability. I had to correct him to explain that when your design goal is extreme power saving, you have to cut everything including running your data over SPI instead of a more power hungry USB bus.

Furthermore one reason they ship soldered on Ram is technical. It has been explained here from time to time that they are achieving much higher memory bandwidth with the memory modules they are using and it necessitates being soldered on. If the design goal is to build the most responsive laptop while maintaining excellent power savings, then this is the right approach to take.

cmelbye• 5 years ago

Innovative design doesn't work without an internal champion who can rally the company around unconventional ideas. Jobs played that role, but now Apple is led by the operations team. The word "design" does not appear anywhere on their executive leadership page.

Unconventional ideas are inherently risky. They're just not worth pursuing if buy-in can't be secured and leadership is more focused on compromising to increase profit margins, etc. For that reason, it's great (in the short term!) that Apple is rehashing known-good designs from a decade ago. However, I don't see that strategy working in the long term.

andrei_says_• 5 years ago

The USB-C cable situation was and continues to be a nightmare as different cables support different subsets of data, power and video and, worse yet, different versions of each of those.

I’m about to upgrade from a 2015 MBP and am wondering - is there a usb-c cable I can buy which works with everything guaranteed?

blablabla123• 5 years ago

I'm quite happy about the move to USB-C and changed all my stuff to it as soon as possible. 5 years ago I had several micro usb and mini usb chargers, some of them broken. On a regular base I had to buy new chargers and cables. The MagSafe power supply cables broke easily (but yes, the port was nice). Now there's just one cable for everything, I still have 2 phone fast chargers but both actually work. Also I can just charge my phone without searching for the charger and the laptop can be connected to screen/keyboard with just 1 USB-C cable.

After all, Apple were also the first to sell Desktops without Floppy or Optical drive.

threeseed4• 5 years ago

it was Johnny

Again with this rubbish.

I have worked at Apple and Ive does not unilaterally make the product decisions in the company. It is a combination of Product Marketing, Hardware Engineering, Design, Procurement etc and they are all discussed and signed off by the Senior Leadership Team.

When you building products at the scale Apple does decisions are years in the making. And so they need to make them based on what they think the future will be. Mostly they are right and sometimes they are wrong e.g. USB-C being the standard connector for everything.

nothis2• 5 years ago

I want this to be true but to be honest, I care less about the Ive angle than them simply doing it! It seems like someone with power said, "hey, what are these letters P, R and O standing for, again?".

diskzero10• 5 years ago

People are commenting this post and saying it is speculation, and until someone who directly was involved in these discussions shows up to comment, I suppose it is.

I have been in design meetings with Jony, and Scott Forstall, and many others whose decisions were micromanaged by Steve at every step. You can argue that a lot of Steve's design decisions were questionable; rich Corinthian leather skeumorphism, lickable Aqua widgets, brushed aluminum window title bars, but he owned them.

Steve and Jony would sit for hours outside of Caffe Macs going over designs. Steve would spend even more time inside the industrial design area going over prototypes. He would spend a couple of hours every week meeting with every software team that had user facing features. He had input on almost every pixel on the screen and every button/port/display/etc on hardware.

Once he was gone, the drift began. It was inevitable that focus would shift. Scott no longer had protection by Steve. Jony fixated on the new campus and things like watch bands. No one had Steve to rein in whatever impulse they had. Sure, people would ask "What would Steve do?" but we also had Tim Cook pushing to optimize production, lower cost of goods and increase margins.

Apple still has Steve DNA, but it continues to be diluted. You may disagree with Steve's vision and opinions, but it was strongly held and enforced. I feel almost everything about the last generation of MacBook Pros went against what Steve would have wanted and I am glad I wasn't there when those decisions were made.

timeon2• 5 years ago

You are probably right but if we are talking about Touch Bar there are (at least few) people (like me) that prefer it to functional keys.

woah2• 5 years ago

All the new ports are pretty useless to me. I think that adding them back in shows a lack of vision and just caters to the lowest common denominator of complaints instead of making a better product from first principles.

HDMI: I guess it's good if you have an old monitor? My monitor from like 2015 has USB C and charges my computer while I use it.

MagSafe: I've never had a computer fall off a table. Seems like a weird overoptimization for an unlikely scenario. If you use it you've got to carry a different cable that you can't use for anything else, unlike the USB C power cable that i also use to connect peripherals if needed.

SD card: I've never used one of these. I guess it's good for professional photographers? Why don't expensive cameras just have 256gb of onboard storage and connect over thunderbolt?

amluto• 5 years ago

I suspect M1X’s excellent memory bandwidth is related to the lack of replaceable memory. x86 CPUs can, as far as I know, max out the bandwidth of their DIMMs, and they don’t get anywhere near the bandwidth of M1X. And integrated design can do better.

Complaining about the price of Apple’s RAM seems reasonable, but complaining that they didn’t choose DDR5 DIMMs when they appear to have chosen something better seems silly.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

Steve Jobs bringing him back to reality

I find it funny to appeal to Steve Jobs for a reality check :)

btw my pet theory about the touch bar is: let's use the apple tech skills synergy again, we made tactile swiped device since the ipod, we made that into phones, now let's blend it into our laptops.

kushan2020• 5 years ago

Each year apple has been shipping thicker and heavier products. I get that some people are happy but boy do I feel the heft when holding an iPhone 13 pro especially coming from a slim iPhone 6s Plus.

If Steve Jobs was alive he would never let such products ever released. You can feel he left his mark in MacBook 12 and iPhone 6 as those products were lightweight and thin - read pushing boundaries.

skohan2• 5 years ago

Yeah it was a bit of a head-scratch moment when those 2016 machines came out. Until then it seemed like you could just trust a macbook pro to be a great machine that could do everything you need, and that each edition would get better than the last.

Around that period it felt like Apple made a pivot away from trying to increase market share through having the best product, and toward maximizing their revenue by leveraging their amazing brand image.

One of the early things was the change from the L-shaped mag-safe back to the T-shaped one. The L-shaped one was such an improvement - those things would last forever. But the T ones would fray in a matter of months. It almost felt like someone at Apple looked at the money they were losing from selling less chargers and decided they had to go back.

And I liked mag-safe but honestly I don't miss it. USB-C charging is fine and having one standard charger you can get anywhere work for everything more than makes up for any relative drawbacks.

holoduke• 5 years ago

I don't agree with the USB c story. To me it's extremely handy to have just usb c. All (most) devices work, can use the same cable for charging my phone. super convenient for me.

skocznymroczny2• 5 years ago

I'm in the minority, but I really enjoy the butterfly keyboard on my Macbook. I'd love to have a fullsized butterfly style keyboard for my PC. Unfortunately the high-end market for keyboards is dominated by mechanical keyboards which aren't my kind of thing at all.

jpswade2• 5 years ago

Surely the change to USB-C was a compatibility thing, as the chipset is Intel based, it’s probably easier to supply.

Now it’s their own chip, it makes sense that they have now switched to their own proprietary solutions.

elicash3• 5 years ago

This meeting, however, probably would have been in like 2017. We're just seeing the results now.

rootusrootus6• 5 years ago

Does it really take four years to update a laptop design? That's getting up there with automotive development time, and cars are significantly more complex.

EEMac• 5 years ago

If you create a problem, people will beg you to sell them the solution.

dylan6044• 5 years ago

Like Coca Cola's New Coke solution.

bluescrn• 5 years ago

It was all going well until somebody said 'let's have a notch!' when they'd already decided not to add face ID...

Gigachad6• 5 years ago

There isn't the depth to add face ID. If the notch is a real concern, you can use a setting which adds black bars to the top so it looks like the older macbook

poo-yie• 5 years ago

Well said! Now they need to do the same with macOS.

felixbraun• 5 years ago

So looking forward to the next version of iPhone 4 — hopes higher than ever

jpswade2• 5 years ago

It seems obvious to me that the decision to remove ports and buttons is not only for the design aesthetic, but less moving parts means less problems, less weight, less insulation, less cost and more elegant wireless peripherals to sell.

If you look at it the same was as the iPhone it’s clearly the same strategy as why they removed the headphone jack and why they want to remove all the buttons, and are ultimately aiming for a clear piece of glass.

It seems this 2021 Mac is a backwards step away from that strategy, perhaps recognising people aren’t ready yet, or perhaps competition and ecological concerns are becoming too big to ignore, either way, this will be a short lived regression, I’m sure.

neop1x2• 5 years ago

Or perhaps people want want to connect three devices together without a bag full of dongles and let all batteries charge at the same time.

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

Customer orientation was sadly extremely neglected by big tech, paternalism about what users want dominated design decisions. Most companies still do so, so kudos to Apple for once that they did really listen to customers.

throwaway744678• 5 years ago

That comment about the new "Apple Polishing Cloth" is hilarious. 20$ for a piece of cloth...

Glad the battery is easier to replace, though (speaking from experience!)

olliej• 5 years ago

But it's an artisanal cloth made of unicorn fur!

jjoonathan3• 5 years ago

The lint must be picked one-by-one off the unicorns with extra small tweezers that can only be held by child laborers!

mpalczewski• 5 years ago

The cleaning cloth was sold out immediately.

$20 is a ton for a cleaning cloth, but a small price to pay for consumers of apple products.

Here is the alternative (personal experience) 1. You search on amazon 2. Get presented with 1000 products 3. Read some reviews, wonder if this is the best product for your iPhone, will it work on the laptop 4. decide you don't really need a cleaning cloth

The apple solution, solves your problem for a price.

I haven't bought the apple cloth, but have and am considering it.

crossroadsguy• 5 years ago

It’s not really that much effort, is it? You just buy a cleaning cloth? No?

Unless of course all the while one was disturbed at the very thought of not having this revolutionary invention of Apple A Cloth That Just Cleans™ at home.

thirdsun2• 5 years ago

Also: It's apparently not just an overpriced accessory, but a necessary cleaning tool for the Pro XDR display with nano surface: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-pro/clean-pro-display-xd...

Honestly, I clean my iPad Pro so often with lackluster results I might just buy Apple's cleaning cloth if it's actually better than other microfiber cloths.

hdjjhhvvhga3• 5 years ago

Whoah! That's fantastic news for the customers and the environment! I was thinking of skipping this model, but now I'm sure I'll buy it.

fsflover• 5 years ago

It's still not repairable...

hdjjhhvvhga3• 5 years ago

Well, I'm realistic, I don't believe Apple stops being greedy anytime soon. But the battery issue is a huge step forward. I mean, of all components, that's the one I know will break first because of the laws of physics (and chemistry). So having it irreplaceable is particularly cruel. It's like saying "buy this expensive machine and watch it die." I really hate throwing hardware away, I try to make use of everything I own and repurpose it if necessary, but the battery literally destroys everything, I have this bulge that damages the touchpad and keyboard and Apple says they will fix it for a ton of money. I could have done it a long time ago if I could, thanks.

rbanffy11• 5 years ago

I feel that, on the ports and touchbar side, this was a step backwards. The SD slot is a good thing, but the replacement of one USB-C with a (vintage) HDMI port and the addition of a proprietary power connector is a leap backwards in time.

The Touchbar was my daughter's favorite - an Emoji keyboard. It also did a lot more - bringing up manpages in the terminal, having app-specific buttons (no need to hunt down the Zoom window to mute). People wanted an ESC key and they got it eventually. I couldn't care less about function keys. I get it was very expensive for the little if offered, but, still, it's still useful. More useful than F1 to F12 ever were.

Magsafe is nice from a safety standpoint (I have a kid and work from the couch sometimes), but with all-day battery life, what is the use of it? On my desk, the Mac is plugged into power, two external monitors, ethernet, keyboard and trackpad with a single cable, as God intended it to be. That's 3 free USB-C connectors for anything else (such as the external storage) and there is one power brick that lives in my backpack along a pair of US/EU adapters for when I need to travel. With USB-C power, it was nice to have the Dell and the Mac sharing power bricks when needed (if I said that 10 years ago, I would laugh myself out of the room)

I like the replaceable battery, but I miss the touchbar and actively dislike the reintroduction of Magsafe.

JoshGlazebrook• 5 years ago

Vintage in what sense? HDMI is literally one of, if not the most common types of display ports on TVs, Monitors, game consoles, etc. I think most people would choose a straight HDMI to HDMI connection over trying to find the right USB-C/lighting/whatever cable to fit their needs (which is very hard to actually do). The HDMI port has stayed the same for a long time, yet new HDMI specs come out every few years expanding the capabilities.

rbanffy11• 5 years ago

I was being a bit cruel. It's an HDMI 2.0 port, which is useful for presentations (a USB-C to HDMI dongle lives in my backpack for that reason). 2.0 will drive a 4K monitor at 60 fps. Never tried that, but, IIRC, the original USB-C port (and HDMI 2.1) could do it at 120 fps (which, for my terminals, would be... totally overkill, just like 60 fps already is).

notyourwork6• 5 years ago

What's wrong with a USB-C to HDMI cable if you need that connectivity?

bitwize2• 5 years ago

Ports tend to be common until Apple deprecates them.

hn_throwaway_99• 5 years ago

The Touchbar was my daughter's favorite - an Emoji keyboard

This is the Macbook Pro, they shouldn't be optimizing for children's love of emojis. I get what you're saying about your other usages of it, but I hate the Touchbar with the heat of a thousand suns, and given that Apple did decide to remove it on the Pro I'm guessing my sentiment was in the majority.

rbanffy11• 5 years ago

I may or may not have (ab)used mine as an emoji keyboard after realizing Github Enterprise could deal with emojis just fine.

Spivak2• 5 years ago

I don't get this charicterization where professionals don't have fun or use those childish whimsical things like emojis. By a huge huge margin I use more emojis at work than anywhere else and having a keyboard for them is quite nice.

The Touch Bar is infinitely more useful than the function key row -- volume and brightness sliders are way better than "louder" and "brighter" buttons. Answering calls with the bar is easier than mousing over to the Teams notification.

rymate1234• 5 years ago

To be fair you can still charge the new macbooks via USB C if you want, and magsafe in this iteration is just a USB C to magsafe cable now

boardwaalk• 5 years ago

The MagSafe connector is just USB-C on the other side, so it's almost just a form factor thing (though obviously it doesn't support data).

And you can still power the thing over USB-C (alongside data), just not at the same wattage/no quick charge. It's perfectly serviceable unless you're doing something really punishing.

The only problem I've had so far is getting a two monitors working with my particular USB-C dock (it works with an Intel MacBook). Hopefully it's a software/firmware thing, because I enjoy the single cable life as well.

ArchOversight• 5 years ago

It was a known limitation of the M1 that it only supported one external display even if your Thunderbolt dock supported two displays.

The M1 simply couldn't push more pixels.

rbanffy11• 5 years ago

If it completely replaced the USB-C port and made the power brick also an Ethernet interface, I’d love it. USB-C minus data isn’t what I’d expect from USB-C.

masklinn10• 5 years ago

I feel that, on the ports and touchbar side, this was a step backwards. The SD slot is a good thing, but the replacement of one USB-C with a (vintage) HDMI port and the addition of a proprietary power connector is a leap backwards in time.

Just because it's a leap backwards doesn't mean it's bad. Sometimes changes are not good and backtracking is.

* HDMI inputs are in super common world in the professional world, it's become the standard for all video projection or conference room TVs (unless you still have an even more ancient VGA) and having to carry adapters to meetings or to give talks is a pain in the ass. It's also pretty much the standard for digital audio (since Apple also removed SPDIF).

* The touchbar was shit, it could have been OK as an addition to function keys, but it precluded any and all muscle memory and quick access to featues. "More useful than F1 to F12 ever were." isn't even remotely true.

* And not all users are at your desk, that the laptop has "all day battery life" (as long as you only watch youtube videos, you're not going to get 11h battery life if you're actively working with demanding software) doesn't mean people won't need to charge them at places which are not your desk. Plenty of people work on kitchen tables and whatnot, with the power cable in the way and yankable by a pet, a child, or just somebody going through.

On my desk, the Mac is plugged into power, two external monitors, ethernet, keyboard and trackpad with a single cable, as God intended it to be. That's 3 free USB-C connectors for anything else (such as the external storage) and there is one power brick that lives in my backpack along a pair of US/EU adapters for when I need to travel. With USB-C power, it was nice to have the Dell and the Mac sharing power bricks when needed (if I said that 10 years ago, I would laugh myself out of the room)

Certainly I can't see how you could ever survive with only 2 free USB-C connectors left. Poor you.

least• 5 years ago

* The touchbar was shit, it could have been OK as an addition to function keys, but it precluded any and all muscle memory and quick access to featues. "More useful than F1 to F12 ever were." isn't even remotely true.

I mean, the F1-F12 keys are so mostly useless that the majority of laptops require you to press a modifier to use them as such. They replaced them with functions that are more broadly useful to most people: media keys, brightness control, keyboard back lighting, etc. I mostly agree that those keys are easier to use than the touchbar, though.

FabHK• 5 years ago

bringing up manpages in the terminal

Ha, that was one of my use cases as well. Not an extremely compelling one, though, to be fair. (^⌘? does the trick with a keyboard shortcut).

matwood2• 5 years ago

Magsafe is nice from a safety standpoint (I have a kid and work from the couch sometimes), but with all-day battery life, what is the use of it?

I was having a similar discussion the other day. MagSafe was amazing when my Intel MBP had to basically be tethered to power all the time. My M1 MBA only ever gets charged at my desk plugged into a dock/monitor. MagSafe was great when it was needed, but its time is passing.

zzyzxd• 5 years ago

The proprietary power connector is not a leap backwards in time. The current generation of USB-C spec just can't provide more than 100W PD charging, which the 16 inch model needs.

dang4• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29015869 (there's nothing wrong with it, I'm just pruning the thread, which got too top-heavy on the page.)

human• 5 years ago

I have been due to replace my battery on my 2019 MBP (I know, yeah…). The problem is not the price (which is steep) but the fact that I have to leave « my girlfriend » at the shop for 3-4 days. This new design is a game-changer.

asdff13• 5 years ago

Any apple repair they are going to make you wait. They don't do much of anything in the store anymore these days, they just scan with their software and send away. No clue why they don't image a loaner laptop for you in the meantime. They much such a big hubbo about pros using their hardware then they don't offer services that pros require for their hardware, like no downtime since they can't just tell the client that their rig is out of commission for four days.

r00fus3• 5 years ago

This would be great - they could image your machine & imprint onto the replacement with activation/etc even having you authenticate AppleID as needed. Is disk-imaging like CarbonCopyCloner possible on newer machines?

aaaaaaaaaaab• 5 years ago

2022 iphone will have a 3.5mm jack. Mark my words ;)

acomjean• 5 years ago

I'm not positive, but by removing the headphone jack, they sell more AirPods and force bluetooth on which enables the airtag and find my network to be more way more functional.

n8cpdx• 5 years ago

Do people still use wired headphones on the go? It’s been a while since I’ve seen any. You can get decent Bluetooth wireless headphones for ~$20 now. I remember spending $10 every few months when I was using wired headphones back in the day. Every few months because the wired inevitably broke or frayed (don’t forget you have to put them somewhere when you’re not using them). It was hell with jackets and layers in the winter.

I always got the orange version of this: https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/productimages/a_121995.jpg

In any case where I care enough to listen wired, I also care enough to get a separate DAC. The cheap Bluetooth is competitive with the cheap wired these days and last longer.

Example: https://www.amazon.com/TOZO-T6-Bluetooth-Headphones-Waterpro...

Id rather use that space for extra battery capacity.

humanistbot• 5 years ago

I hate having to remember to recharge yet another device. My wired earbuds never run out of battery.

asdff13• 5 years ago

I do, I use some sony MDRV6 cans when travelling or doing work. They are 10 years old and will last another 40 at least producing this reference tier sound. I think I payed $70 for these. I have no interest in airpods or crap like that, I already have their wired ones which I use exclusively for video conferencing and I know what sort of sound comes out of those.

paconbork• 5 years ago

Do people still use wired headphones on the go?

I do, at least. The main reason is that they just work. I never have to worry about pairing with different devices, walking too far away and disconnecting, keeping them charged... I have a pair of bluetooth headphones but I'm pretty sure they're not charged.

potta_coffee2• 5 years ago

I use wired headphones. I don't like charging my headphones. I'm not big into mobile phones or other devices though, so IDK, I'm probably an atypical user. I'm actually annoyed that phones no longer have headphone ports on them.

arprocter• 5 years ago

Yes - no need to charge them, less likely to get lost, no figuring out if my device speaks random codec v1 or 2

MMCX connectors mean you can replace the cable, not that I've ever broken a Shure one (they use Kevlar)

throwaway81523• 5 years ago

I only use wired headphones. Bluetooth = PITA. Wired earbuds are like $1 for crappy ones, which are good enough for my purposes. I also have a bigger set of over-the-ear headphones from back before wireless was a thing, and those work fine in all my stuff too. Bluetooth is sort of like USB, a basically sane and simple idea that got committee-enhanced to the point of permanent brokenness.

smoldesu12• 5 years ago

I only use wired headphones when the wireless alternative uses AAC.

gsich• 5 years ago

Yes they do.

lowbloodsugar• 5 years ago

Both my teenagers do. And yeah, I have a monthly subscription for headphone cables.

dalyons4• 5 years ago

no. apart from loud voices on HN, basically everyone is living in a wireless world because its better in almost every way. i was personally a long holdout on wired, but modern wireless (bose qc30s and now airpods) are so much more useable in almost every situation except maybe for never leaving your desk.

Toutouxc4• 5 years ago

You can get decent Bluetooth wireless headphones for ~$20 now

IMO $20 is only barely enough to get something WIRED that won't turn your music into a mushy mess.

tryauuum• 5 years ago

words marked

notyourwork6• 5 years ago

It seems I fall in the minority but I've become quite fond of the touchbar. Its a dynamic user input, if my phone rings I can touch answer on my touchbar to pick it up, if I want to seek or scroll on a spotify song I can do that with a touch and slide.

I don't see the dislike for it.

sgt• 5 years ago

That's the only thing I use the touch bar for (I have a 2018 MBP); to hit the red button after a FaceTime call.

elboru• 5 years ago

Touch feedback is important for a lot of us. Specially when I’m concentrated while debugging something, I don’t want to have to look at my keyboard. But I see value for other use cases, maybe having both the touchbar plus the F keys would have worked fine?

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

IIRC the dislike was mostly driven by the touchbar substituting for physical F keys. If they somehow managed to have both, I suspect people would be happy.

Gigachad6• 5 years ago

They would have been happy and probably continued to never use the touch bar. I find it pretty cool and interesting to look at but I have basically never used it because everything it does can be done via the mouse which I am already using for other task so I never felt it was useful to switch to pressing the touch bar.

mostlysimilar• 5 years ago

I already have a dynamic interface to control: the one on the display. Having the "keyboard" change throws off my intuition on where to place my fingers and how to interact.

Looking down at the touchbar each time to assess what the current interface is adds a tiny amount of additional overhead to my interactions that I dislike. It's not _terrible_, but it's not my preference.

I also really dislike the lack of tactile feedback.

papito• 5 years ago

Once you start using it for autocomplete in a text field, the touch bar is pretty cool. You also can glance at it during a zoom meeting to see if you are muted. RIP.

handrous8• 5 years ago

I don't see the dislike for it.

1) You can't really make it part of your muscle-memory workflow if you use an external keyboard more than a very small percentage of the time, rendering it nearly useless for lots of people, right out of the gate.

2) Some of us discovered we barely brush the Touch Bar (F-key) area while typing certain keys (numbers, for me, which means also all the symbols that are on the number keys). This meant we had to all-but disable the damn thing to keep it from opening iTunes and doing other crap, apparently "at random" but actually because our fingers were straying 0.01mm onto the Touch Bar without our realizing it. Result, a fair percentage of users had to force like 3/4 of the bar to be empty all the time, or else face constant irritation when using the built-in keyboard.

ziml77• 5 years ago

I'm able to tolerate #1, but #2 definitely makes it suck for me. Haptics and requiring some pressure would have made the touchbar much easier to not hate.

christkv• 5 years ago

This of this. Made me strip the touchbar of all the icons I could on the left side.

timeon2• 5 years ago

1) we are talking about MBP - it is just under the screen you will always see them.

2) I get it but comparing to desktop keyboard F-keys are dead without Fn-key so unlike Touch Bar mbp f-keys are not on par with desktop keyboard.

wintermutestwin• 5 years ago

I love my touchbar. Until it freezes. Then I am whining that I want F keys back.

matwood2• 5 years ago

I was indifferent to the Touch Bar, but Apple needed to release an external keyboard with it if they really wanted it to catch on. I just never took the time to figure out good use cases since I could only use them when using the laptop keyboard.

fouc2• 5 years ago

That makes total sense actually, I'm surprised they never released an external keyboard with a Touch Bar

rootusrootus6• 5 years ago

I can dream. Mechanical keyboard with carefully implemented Touch Bar and Touch ID. Sign me up and take my money. But Apple seems to only want to make external keyboards that use laptop keys.

dang4• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29015869 (there's nothing wrong with it, I'm just pruning the thread, which got too top-heavy on the page.)

asdff13• 5 years ago

Replaceable battery, after removing the trackpad to access the final set of cells. Not the easiest projecdure and still is going to result in users doing what they do today, handing the machine off to a technician rather than be able to change the batteries on their device themselves. What a fall from grace from the first unibody macbook, where you could remove the battery with no tools and five seconds of your time since they engineered a door with a latch. I guess we celebrate what small affordances we can get these days.

krrrh6• 5 years ago

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

You can stop grinding that axe bud, it’s never gonna swing again.

asdff13• 5 years ago

If it wasn't for people with axes to grind this new macbook would have a touchbar, butterfly keyboard, and only thunderbolt ports.

rwaksmunski• 5 years ago

For me the 2021 MacBook Pro is a single USB-A port away from perfect. I want to use my old but good printer/scanner/mouse/thumb drive/external hard drive/yubikey without dongles.

nazgulnarsil• 5 years ago

A lot of dongle talk seems weird to me. A to C adapters are cheap. Buy a bunch and leave them on the things you regularly use. No dongle to track.

kaladin-jasnah• 5 years ago

It's still way more convenient to have the USB-A port built-in, even if you have myriad USB-C dongles.

I'm trialing switching away from an XPS13DE (Develoepr Edition) to some "cheap"-ish 600 dollar laptop from HP just because I literally cannot stand the fact that the XPS doesn't have USB-A ports. I notice the difference (my cheap laptop is so much nicer) since it's so much more convenient since a lot of things are still USB-A these days (eg. my Arduino uses a printer cable which is USB-A, my flash drives are USB-A, my HDMI capture dongle is USB-A, my cheap webcam is USB-A, et cetera). Even if I have myriad dongles, if I'm travelling away from home, I don't have to remember to bring those dongles with me anymore.

dalyons4• 5 years ago

totally agree. A sucks, C is a way better port. leave the $2 adapters on your old a cables if you have to. total non issue.

tantalor• 5 years ago

we notice ... battery pull tabs

Is the picture supposed to show these new tabs? I don't see anything. Can I get a red arrow?

fakename• 5 years ago

It's the thing being stretched between the fingers. Like a command strip.

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

Really sucks to see how awesome the new MBP is. It's too bad the CSAM scandal had to happen; never buying another Apple product again because of that shit.

ajvs• 5 years ago

And heaer I thought I was the only person who just can't get enthused about their new MacBooks, knowing that CSAM could just get added at any point in the future without my consent.

krrrh6• 5 years ago

The scanning wasn’t to be done by the OS, but by the Photos app uploader, and only if you had iCloud Photo Library turned on. Lots of apps already do telemetry and photo scanning that goes beyond this, as well as nearly every major cloud provider (though Apple seemingly doesn’t scan iCloud photo libraries without a warrant unlike Google and Facebook).

Like a lot of apps, you don’t need to use Photos.app. They didn’t sneak it in without explaining how it worked.

Toutouxc4• 5 years ago

knowing that CSAM could just get added at any point

CSAM is an abbreviation for "child sexual abuse material", so no, that won't (hopefully) get added without your consent.

busymom0• 5 years ago

We removed the trackpad and, lo and behold, there are cut-outs to access the pull tabs that hold the middle battery cells in place.

That's not exactly what I was expecting based on the headline. Still seems pretty complicated.

riffic5• 5 years ago

Is this Apple?

Well, maybe I'll consider one of these over a Framework. I'll lean strongly towards the Framework machine but at least Apple is reconsidering some of their design choices over the last decade.

tantony3• 5 years ago

I recently bought a Framework as a replacement for my 2012 MBP. I ordered it a few weeks before the new M1 announcements because I liked their philosophy. And the hardware is, in fact, great!

But the Linux desktop experience has been ... frustrating to say the least. And I say this as someone who has used linux in the terminal at my job every day for 5+ years now. It's ridiculous that the software experience still cannot match my 9 year old laptop running macOS Sierra on a 2.5GHz Core i5 and 8GB of DDR3 RAM!

I am running PopOS 21.04. There's inconsistent keyboard shortcuts, lack of touchpad precision, glitchy touchpad gestures, inconsistent fingerprint auth and more. Just on Day 2, I somehow ended up with a machine that somehow took 30+ seconds to go from login to desktop and 3-4 second lag when typing with 100% CPU usage when running any GUI app. The only way to fix it was to completely reinstall the OS -- I have no idea what caused this. I have now found some usable options for implementing my preferred touchpad gestures ("fusuma") and system-wide keyboard shortcuts ("kinto.sh") though there are still many quirks that are irritating.

I like Framework's approach, so I supported them by buying the device. I promised myself I will keep daily driving it for at least a month to give it a chance. If it keeps getting on my nerves, I will sell it and buy one the of the new 14" MBPs. Life's too short to spend hours upon hours fiddling with configuration files and reinstalling operating systems to get basic functionality working.

yepthatsreality4• 5 years ago

Personally I find Gnome environments pretty ugly. I switched to KDE on my Framework and it’s almost night and day that I’m leaving my desktop Gnome install behind for KDE as well.

jonnycomputer• 5 years ago

It seems to me, making batteries difficult to service and replace is very consumer-unfriendly--not to mention shitty to the environment. So this is definitely step in right direction. Not exactly so easy as pulling it out from the bottom like back in the day of bricks, but hey.

1970-01-01• 5 years ago

Important question: Are the batteries serialized or will any 3rd party battery just work?

martini333• 5 years ago

The actual content: https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown

sulam• 5 years ago

Thanks for the direct link, it'd be good if the post linked here vs a reheated version of the same content.

gilgoomesh• 5 years ago

It's been updated to this link, now.

jangid• 5 years ago

They are late though. Last year I have switched to Debian because of very few DIY repair options in MacBooks. And I discovered OS superiority as well. Everything in Debian (Gnome) is so fast - opening PDF files, Files (finder), Terminal, EMacs. Debian running on i5 is much faster then macOS running on i7.

dsauerbrun• 5 years ago

is it faster than osx running on m1 though?

smoldesu12• 5 years ago

I don't imagine it would make much of a difference, unless there's some kind of M1 upgrade kit for older Macbooks I never heard of.

chrischen2• 5 years ago

The SSD also has to be replaceable (without a full logic board swap) or the machine also has a constrained usable lifetime.

destitude• 5 years ago

I still remember when you didn't even have to open up the "MBP" and could replace the battery directly from the bottom. Even had green led indicator to show how much charge it had directly on the battery case.

hwbehrens• 5 years ago

Wow, I totally forgot about that period. I recall that I used to plug in my laptop when I arrived at my desk, then remove the battery to ensure that it was running exclusively on wall power in an effort to improve battery health. I never did have to replace that battery...

latortuga• 5 years ago

Was this MBP era or iBook/PowerBook era? I seem to recall this being the case on the old Titanium Powerbooks in the early 00s.

Remember the glowing light near the laptop latch that would slowly swell to tell you that your laptop was asleep?

lostgame2• 5 years ago

There was a MacBook Pro era - even a couple Unibody revisions - that kept the easy user replaceable battery intact.

The Unibody had this lovely latch mechanism that also allowed you to easily replace your hard drive and/or RAM.

God, I miss those days. :(

NoPicklez2• 5 years ago

MBP era, I owned the first of the Aluminium unibody Macbook's which were released around 2008 which had a removable body with a tab.

r-w• 5 years ago

I have never seen "swell" used that way. I thought you were saying your battery was making the entire casing swell.

lostgame2• 5 years ago

Those were the days. I remember replacing the battery on my iBook G4 when it died. :)

r00fus3• 5 years ago

Man, I wish they would go back to having battery indicator on the case again. Truly miss that as I don't want to wake it just to find out if I need to seek a plug.

NoPicklez2• 5 years ago

I remember thinking it was absolutely genius when they first released it on the 2008 Alu Unibody Macbooks. I found that in practice I never ever used it.

irae• 5 years ago

Maybe you also remember batteries wore terrible, especially durability. It was quite common to see people replacing batteries on less than 1 year old laptops. Nowadays batteries easily endure 2 to 5 years without becoming useless. Sure, there are still memory issues and reducing total time over the years. But replacement is required way less often.

pengaru• 5 years ago

lipo pouch batteries are not durable, they swell up and deform housings quite often... all it takes is heat.

rconti3• 5 years ago

Fair point. I bought at least 2 or 3 replacement batteries for the G3 iBook I had in college.

Then again, I was probably harder on the battery in those days than I am now, with my laptop often plugged in. I supposed my 2011 Air lated until at least 2018 on the original battery though.

dang4• 5 years ago

Url changed from https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/27/new-macbook-pro-battery-repla..., which points to this.

tailspin2019• 5 years ago

Thanks, I considered posting the iFixit link but the title of that article being “Teardown Teaser: Is the 2021 MacBook Pro Repairable?” didn’t really convey what I thought would be specifically of interest to HN (ie the battery angle which the original article chose to focus on).

Didn’t want to editorialise the iFixit link with 9to5mac’s title but we ended up there anyway :)

dang4• 5 years ago

Yes, it's a mixed bag no matter how one slices it. (mixed metaphor too, apparently)

znpy• 5 years ago

I wonder if this is the effect of Jony Ive being gone.

mrfusion• 5 years ago

Does framebook have an easily replaceable battery?

banana_giraffe• 5 years ago

Depends on your definition of "easy"

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85

It's past my personal definition, but just barely, since it involves dealing with a ribbon cable and an apparently fragile connection for the battery itself. It's not too bad, but not something I want to try and walk someone through if they're not used to this sort of thing.

mshroyer• 5 years ago

Yes, the Framework laptop's battery is more easily replaceable than the new MBP's, from what I can tell without yet having seen iFixit's full teardown of the latter—there's no need to remove the trackpad or deal with adhesives on the Framework, in contrast to the new MBP.

(I'm still thrilled to see this improvement to serviceability on the new MBP, even if previous generations set a low bar.)

tobias2014• 5 years ago

The article says "reasonably DIY-friendly". I think this is an important distinction. Just because the battery has pull tabs doesn't mean that it's easy to get to that point.

usui• 5 years ago

Ease of being able to replace the battery has never been the reason stopping me from upgrading from a 2015 MacBook Pro. Anyone with the the intent of replacing a battery today will be able to make it after buying some readily available tools.

What I need is the ability to swap out my SSD in the laptop, either for data retrieval, backing up, or upgrades. Unfortunately good removeable storage seems to be a thing of the past. I say "good" because I don't want to boot the newest MBP off a slow SD card.

I could depend on Migration Assistant or Time Machine, but I don't trust anything other than a good raw "cat" or "dd" of a drive

londons_explore2• 5 years ago

What is the component between the CPU and the fan on each side?

It appears to be non-rectangular silicon... Or perhaps some power MOSFETs under a cover?

londons_explore2• 5 years ago

Are they pads for extra DRAM on the bottom left of the PCB?

Will we see hobbysts with a heat gun adding ram to these things? BGA soldering with tweezers and a heat gun doesn't look too tricky on those because the pad spacing is easily within what you could manage with tweezers.

The actual pin layout isn't a standard I recognize - so I assume apple has ordered custom made ram chips ..

rswail2• 5 years ago

The RAM is "unified" and on the same chip as the CPU and GPU.

garaetjjte• 5 years ago

That's probably far too distant for LPDDR. I guess these pads are for NAND flash, and RAM is right next to processor under the heatsink.

aunty_helen• 5 years ago

Stockholm syndrome doesn’t look like Stockholm syndrome.

Everyone cheering apple on for making the laptop they should have made in 2016. Wow! No Touch Bar it’s so much better.

Semi replaceable batteries! How great. The funny thing is, if they had dropped the ports on this generation instead of the last, less people would have cared.

breakfastduck• 5 years ago

Yeah but they also chose to bring all those much loved things back to coincide with their mac apple silicon.

Sly but I wouldn't be surprised if they held it back for M1 to make the appeal of the devices bigger.

jrochkind1• 5 years ago

Damn it really is the return of the Titanium Powerbook G4, what?

diebeforei485• 5 years ago

Apple seems to be taking a more repair-friendly approach for high-end products recently (except the iPhone and iPad).

AirPods Max are also great: - User-replaceable earcups with no tools needed; - User-replaceable headband, just needs a paperclip; - Somewhat user-replaceable battery - you can have them do it for $79 out of warranty, but a repair shop can definitely do it as well because it's just screws.

mataug• 5 years ago

This is wonderful news, I do wonder whether the 2021 MBP would work properly with DIY battery replacement ?!

newer iPhones notoriously don't like DIY battery / screen replacements, and they disable features such as battery health with a DIY replacement.

thedailypickup2• 5 years ago

Now if only the rest of the Macbook was DIY friendly; where I could upgrade my RAM to 64GB and NVME ~1TB without giving up my left kidney.

anaganisk• 5 years ago

Isn’t ram now part of soc?

thedailypickup2• 5 years ago

It is, that's why I'm saying it would be nicer if I could upgrade RAM myself without giving up my $$$ kidney $$$

darwingr• 5 years ago

IMO apple’s peak ridiculousness had to be the Magic Mouse that required you turn it on its back and unusable in order to charge it.

MengerSponge• 5 years ago

Is a charging dock for a mouse ridiculous? You can't use the mouse while it charges! How absurd! How silly!

Did you actually have one? Or are you remembering a picture you saw online once?

rswail2• 5 years ago

I agree it's silly, but it means that once a month, I need to plug it in when I go for lunch, or before I go to bed.

And you can still use the scrolling top and click while its charging if you really need to continue browsing.

seventytwo• 5 years ago

The commentary about the cloth is fantastic

ineedasername• 5 years ago

I love that they literally did a teardown of the polishing cloth as well. Which received a 0 out of 10 on the repairability scale.

BoorishBears3• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's the same cloth that came with my XDR

I say it deserves at least a 5 out of 10 since you can wash it in the washing machine on cold and it air dries quickly

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

Well, that's a huge plus for me. It seems that this kind of laptop will have much better lifespan. It seems that some engineer in Apple now is able to make decisions. I thought that all the decisions were driven by designers.

tlhighbaugh• 5 years ago

Too bad you can't change out the soldered on RAM. Thus still not buying even if adobe keeps up the "no photoshop on Linux" bs forever

rconti3• 5 years ago

Huge props to the hilarious polishing cloth teardown, complete with American Psycho quote, shade thrown at what else you could get for $19, and how it's actually two polishing cloths if you cut it in half.

nikprasad• 5 years ago

As a mac user, I welcome the improvement in battery replacement design. The cost of replacing the battery (and the keyboard) has been one of the worst design decisions by apple.

toolslive• 5 years ago

Is it just me or does the 'since 2012' reads as if it can also mean "and it has been that way since 2012".

mr2loco• 5 years ago

about time. My battery needs service now and I'm dreading to go to the store.

Would much rather buy a new battery and put it in myself and be done with t

pipeline_peak• 5 years ago

I’d call that technician friendly, certainly not Do it (Yourself).

What happened to outer compartments you could pop open without having to tear apart your $1500 laptop with a pair of tweezers?

New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacement design since 2012

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