I’m not a crazy spec guy any longer. But Apple’s continued obsession with making everything thinner and lighter kind of bothers me. The thing that really pushed my BS-O-Meter was something posted by John Gruber.
“Any laptop thick enough for an Ethernet port is too thick.”
When I read that I thought “Too thick for who?” Don’t get me wrong, I love John’s work. I’m a fan of Darning Fireball and The Talk Show. He’s one of the top Apple technology writers in the world, if not the best. But that quote feels empty, like a cheap line on a marketing brochure. Apple’s obsession with thinness smacks of razor manufacturers that hail the creation of a razor with five, count ’em, five blades! Not one, not two, not three, not four, but five, five blades!
I’m composing this on MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014.) It’s a great computer, it’s very thin, I don’t need a thinner computer. I develop iOS Apps for a living and this machine is plenty fast enough for my use. It’s not like 20 plus years back when I was writing Windows Code on a 486 with 4MB or RAM. In those days it took so long to compile we’d get “build wander”, you know, you wander around long enough for your build to complete. Thinner doesn’t matter to me. I’d prefer something else.
ULTIMATE POWER
What I do want is not something Apple typically gives us. A powerful computer I can easily upgrade. It would be nice to get a new MacBook Pro in the Fall with the best CPU, GPU, memory, and SSD money can buy. A year after getting that lovely new beast it will be old and crusty (at least for a lot of people.) Wouldn’t it be nice if you could crack the case open and add RAM and possibly a new CPU? For me, the answer is yes, that would be really nice.
Do I expect to get it? No, I don’t. My only hope is they don’t give it the horrible tapered look of the MacBook Air.
When you hear “Thinner and lighter” think “Five blades instead of four.”
