“Technology has been on a diet for years now. Whether we’re talking about notebooks, tablets, or smartphones, manufacturers seem convinced that the thinner a thing is, the better,” Mark Coppock writes for Digital Trends. “The question is, what are we giving up when we give up girth?”
“In terms of notebook PCs, the MacBook Air was the first successful model to make thin and light the primary selling point. And that made sense — most notebooks at the time were indeed quite chunky,” Coppock writes. “Today, all but the least expensive notebooks, or most powerful gaming machines and workstations, are thinner and lighter than before the pursuit of thinness took hold. But being thin has taken a toll.”
“Now, we have notebooks that are so thin that they sacrifice functionality. They offer fewer ports, reduced-travel keyboards, and smaller batteries,” Coppock writes. “The best example is the 2016 MacBook Pro, where Apple shaved off a few millimeters from an already thin machine, and in the process shaved off much of its appeal, too.”
MacDailyNews Take: Specious. See:
Phil Schiller: Apple has more orders for MacBook Pro with Touch Bar than for any other professional Mac notebook ever.
“Apple has a reputation for maximizing battery life in its notebooks, but no matter how efficient Apple managed to make the new MacBook Pros, the fact remains – if it hadn’t focused so much on making the new machines thin, then it could have packed larger batteries inside, and perhaps increased battery life over previous models [as opposed to decreasing it],” Coppock writes. “HP wanted to find a way to meet all customer needs or, as [Mike Nash, HP’s Chief Technologist and VP, Customer Experience and Portfolio Strategy] put it, to focus on providing an optimized experience, instead of what the company perceives as the compromised experience. HP decided to increase the machine’s thickness a bit to ensure that the 4K machine would give customers roughly the same battery life as the old model with Full HD screen.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s a lot of rigmarole about legacy ports. That’s not an issue. USB-C is the future and, for the relatively few using dongles today, the dongle-life will quickly come to an end.
What HP, a company hardly worth mentioning anymore, says is pretty much meaningless. With their design chops or lack thereof (“copy the way Apple’s Macs look” is not an admirable design mantra) and lack of profits, HP likely couldn’t even make a decent laptop as thin as the MacBook Pro.
Now, that said, we’ve asked this type of question before — for example, Open thread: What’d be wrong with slightly thicker iPhone with more battery life and a flush camera assembly? — so we’ll ask you again here: Would you prefer a slightly thicker, slightly heavier MacBook Pro if that meant it could deliver longer battery life?
