<story><title>New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacement design since 2012</title><url>https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stack_framer</author><text>&amp;gt; This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not ungrounded from the &lt;i&gt;anecdotal&lt;/i&gt; evidence that these changes are coming after Ive&amp;#x27;s departure.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is &amp;quot;Chief Design Officer&amp;quot;, the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your &amp;quot;say&amp;quot; was just that you were aware of it, and didn&amp;#x27;t veto it.</text></item><item><author>jacobolus</author><text>This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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 &amp;quot;laptop&amp;quot; keyboards are &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;IBM_PS&amp;#x2F;2_portable_computers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;IBM_PS&amp;#x2F;2_portable_computers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Macintosh_Portable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Macintosh_Portable&lt;/a&gt;)</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>The 2016 wasn&amp;#x27;t leadership, it was Johnny Ive without Steve Jobs bringing him back to reality.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;quot; Macbook Air.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t all the same. You were better off charging from the right (IIRC) rather than the left.&lt;p&gt;Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful. Personally I don&amp;#x27;t believe this was about forcing users to pay for upgrades primarily. It was about shaving off a small amount of volume.&lt;p&gt;Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.</text></item><item><author>tobyjsullivan</author><text>A lot of comments seem focused on the incentives to apple and what&amp;#x27;s motivating the change. All fair questions. To me, though, it feels like just a radically different approach this year.&lt;p&gt;2016 macbook felt like leadership got in a room and said &amp;quot;okay, let&amp;#x27;s make a list of all the sexy things we can think of that would make the macbook unique&amp;quot;. This netted things like thin-beyond-practicality, touchbar, removing all the ports, etc.&lt;p&gt;2021 macbook feels like leadership got in a room and said &amp;quot;okay, let&amp;#x27;s make a list of all the top things everybody is complaining about most.&amp;quot; And they just fixed everything (well, most things) on that list one-by-one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>karaterobot</author><text>&amp;gt; When your title is &amp;quot;Chief Design Officer&amp;quot;, the design buck stops with you.&lt;p&gt;Agreed with this. When you&amp;#x27;re coming to the CDO position after 20 years of being a hands-on designer at that company, most recently as the head of both human interface and industrial design across the entire organization, and having been described as being the person with the most operational power at Apple, after Steve Jobs himself, &lt;i&gt;even before being promoted&lt;/i&gt;, my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar. It is most likely that he set the goals that produced these designs, and that he was aware of and approved of them from the beginning. And I suspect that as a new C-level, he was probably even more hands on than that.&lt;p&gt;But since in this thread we are being asked to hold ourselves to a very high standard of rigor, I should note that I have not submitted this comment to peer review, or made my data available for replication at this time. I&amp;#x27;m just basing this on, you know, how jobs work.</text></comment>
<story><title>New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacement design since 2012</title><url>https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stack_framer</author><text>&amp;gt; This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not ungrounded from the &lt;i&gt;anecdotal&lt;/i&gt; evidence that these changes are coming after Ive&amp;#x27;s departure.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is &amp;quot;Chief Design Officer&amp;quot;, the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your &amp;quot;say&amp;quot; was just that you were aware of it, and didn&amp;#x27;t veto it.</text></item><item><author>jacobolus</author><text>This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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 &amp;quot;laptop&amp;quot; keyboards are &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;IBM_PS&amp;#x2F;2_portable_computers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;IBM_PS&amp;#x2F;2_portable_computers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Macintosh_Portable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Macintosh_Portable&lt;/a&gt;)</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>The 2016 wasn&amp;#x27;t leadership, it was Johnny Ive without Steve Jobs bringing him back to reality.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;quot; Macbook Air.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t all the same. You were better off charging from the right (IIRC) rather than the left.&lt;p&gt;Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful. Personally I don&amp;#x27;t believe this was about forcing users to pay for upgrades primarily. It was about shaving off a small amount of volume.&lt;p&gt;Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.</text></item><item><author>tobyjsullivan</author><text>A lot of comments seem focused on the incentives to apple and what&amp;#x27;s motivating the change. All fair questions. To me, though, it feels like just a radically different approach this year.&lt;p&gt;2016 macbook felt like leadership got in a room and said &amp;quot;okay, let&amp;#x27;s make a list of all the sexy things we can think of that would make the macbook unique&amp;quot;. This netted things like thin-beyond-practicality, touchbar, removing all the ports, etc.&lt;p&gt;2021 macbook feels like leadership got in a room and said &amp;quot;okay, let&amp;#x27;s make a list of all the top things everybody is complaining about most.&amp;quot; And they just fixed everything (well, most things) on that list one-by-one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danaris</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a big difference between &amp;quot;Jony Ive, as CDO, must have signed off on this, and thus bears responsibility for it&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Jony Ive was pushing for this, for these specific reasons&amp;quot;.</text></comment>