On one hand, this seems like welcome news for many of us. Who doesn't miss MagSafe?
A lot of the previous years was like someone at Apple read Calvino's Six Memos and took the notes on "lightness" a little bit too far.
On the other hand, one wonders if we'll have to replace all the sleeves and bags that have been made with the previous dimensions in mind. Hopefully not. Even the new 16-inch MacBook Pro fits in sleeves and bags designed for the previous 15-inch.
I think the upcoming 16 inch MacBook will be a little thicker than before, and with one of the the older keyboards. They are maybe modifying their vision a tiny bit since their design lead left
Not only does the 16” fit the 15” sleeves, it’s nearly identical in dimensions and weight to the 15” models everyone praises before the bad keyboards. It’s basically a 2015 MBP with a slightly smaller bezel.
The old 15” was like the perfect dimensions. It practically had the footprint of the present 14”, maybe even smaller. Apple made a big deal about how their new chips run so cool, yet they made the pro laptops as fat as they were in 2012 again so clearly thermals were an issue.
Thin & light had nothing to do with Magsafe. That's all USB-C, which in its spec offers power delivery. Either they'd have two types of power delivery (USB-C and Magsafe), or one. Not hard to see why they went with one.
Both MBPs lost half a pound (16% on 13", 11% on 15"). That's not enough thermal room to both fit a faster intel processor and requisite battery increase, and same for AMD graphics on the 15". Granted, that IS enough to go from 16GB to 32GB max RAM, but Apple probably felt faster disk IO (3.1GB/s) would compensate for all but the most demanding workloads. Since a tiny % of users need 32GB, and LPDDR4 is probably going to deliver that when Intel gets around to adding it, they chose to slightly slim down the next chassis as they always have, and in a year or two it'll work itself out. Totally reasonable way to optimize a multi-year product launch.
Honestly I think people are blowing out of proportion what's possible here. Intel is slow to add important features (like LPDDR4), and USB-C is a temporarily annoying transition. Given the typical constraints Apple has always tried to follow (battery life, thermals, build quality, margins), this release says tons more about what Intel can ship than what Apple can.
I was at the Apple Store this weekend. Some guy brought in his older 15” to compare to the new 16”. It was not too much larger but it was slightly noticeable. It didn’t feel like I would break the top lid like I do on my 2017 15”.
I would not use clumsily large to describe it, my work laptop is a clumsily large hp zBook. Not one will ever mug me for it because I could throw it at them. They’d probably get a concussion.
Apple listened to customers and built the 16”. The CPUs are intel’s problem not apple. The 16” is Apple saying they were wrong and fixing issues.
I’ve got a 16 MacBook Pro and it’s great and all - but soooo thick. Like as thick as my old, old, MacBook Pro from 2012. I was expecting it to be more like a 2015 MacBook Pro when I bought it.
I’d much prefer some of that sweet apple silicon power, in a nice thin 15 inch size please.
Interestingly the latest MacBook Pro did get thicker than its predecessor. Not a lot but perhaps they have got to the point where they are thin enough.
We’re talking about a difference in thickness of millimeters though. Was my 2014 Macbook Pro really that bulky? The prevailing sentiment over the last several Apple announcements seems to have been “fewer gimmicks, more power”. Maybe software engineers aren’t the target market for these computers anymore though, or perhaps my bubble is too small.
> relentless pursuit of thinness and lightness has come at the expense of the premium, robust feel of their older MacBook models.
The 14/16" are significantly thicker and heavier than previous generations, both in actual measurements and in appearance (as they don't taper at the edge like they have since the 2012) I truly cannot imagine looking at that and thinking any part of the design was imagined with the words "thinness and lightness" in the mind.
The whole point of this article is that the original MacBook Air had a principle (thinness above all) that the current one has moved away from, and that it wouldn't be surprising if they moved back.
Well thankfully, Apple seems to have gone in that direction with the last MBP releases. And with them being the trendsetters they are, I wouldn't be surprised if other OEMs saw that as a green light to start putting out thicker laptops with decent ports again.
A lot of the previous years was like someone at Apple read Calvino's Six Memos and took the notes on "lightness" a little bit too far.
On the other hand, one wonders if we'll have to replace all the sleeves and bags that have been made with the previous dimensions in mind. Hopefully not. Even the new 16-inch MacBook Pro fits in sleeves and bags designed for the previous 15-inch.
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