Fight me but I miss the touchbar, it was customizable to be super useful with better touch tool

I suspect that the touch bar served its likely real purpose: to ship an ARM CPU with a secure enclave in the machines so that we could have Touch ID without needing to wait for Apple Silicon. Everything other than that was gravy, an interesting experiment.

I didn't mind the touchbar, and enjoyed some of the added functionality. Would have been so much better if it had been an addition instead of a replacement for the top row of keys.

loved the touchbar for things like timeline scrubbers and quick shortcuts in my pro software

Have to say I really prefer butterfly keyboard (as long as it works).

My finger tips literally becoming purple colored due to the insane heat of that aluminum's thing in the i9 era. still hurts.

I love that he instantly flopped repeatedly and showed it was actually Apple that was great all along.

They did not take the MacBook Air off the market when the retina Macbook 12" was released. The MacBookAir7,1 was released a month before the MacBook8,1. The 7,2 came out 2 years later as a spec bump not because Apple abandoned the product, but because this was the same time Intel's tick-tock schedule went completely off the rails.

I collect the 12" macbooks, even today. It really only needs one port; the vast majority of people never plug anything but power into their computer ever. I would pay huge sums for a modern Mx 11-12" ultralight macbook with a reliable keyboard.

Nobody said that.

MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.

Luckily there are two lines: the Air and the Pro.

The issue people had was from 2016-2019, the Macbook Pros sacrificed a lot of usability for thinness, when that should only happen for the Airs.

I think the preference is to have a battery that can run a CPU that's compiling, AI-ing, or rendering for an entire day (16+ hours) without having to worry about where an outlet is or being tethered to a wall or be thermal throttled. Right now that's a volume tradeoff. If there was something that ran as fast for as long and was MacBook Air (or the last Intel generation) thin, I don't think anyone would complain.

I'd be fine with a thinner and lighter laptop if it was without compromises.

But having a shitty keyboard, losing the HDMI port, wasn't worth it.

My old thinkpad was thicker but not heavier. Way more ports, didn't need dongles.

It's not exactly a decade-old issue when the problem started a decade ago and persisted for half a decade. The MacBook Pros from the tail end of that era are only just now starting to reach an age where they can reasonably be considered obsolete and due for replacement, because that kind of machine absolutely should be usable for 5+ years. From the perspective of Apple's current product offerings those laptops are many generations back, but from the perspective of the actual user base they're still recent history.

Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.

MacBooks can last almost that long. People still own and use them.

Apple is letting the market "commoditize its complements" without lifting a finger.

I just think the concept of an LLM is counter to how Apple treats content on their products. See [1] for more of my thoughts here. I think the only chance Apple embraces AI is if they manage to research a 1. local model that 2. is purely deterministic, whose output can be reliably constrained and controlled by Apple.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849737

I don't see selling local LLM servers/software, as such, being something that makes sense for Apple, but selling an "Apple Intelligence" appliance that works with your Apple devices and/or provides home automation might do.

That must be a very restrictive definition of “successful consumer hardware company”.

Apple _is_ a software company: everything it sells is based on a Mac OS X foundation.

I had no idea. Thanks for the tips!

classic engineering delusion -- often hold the line on technical items that are irrelevant or simply not important to the consumer.

I have worked at all top three firms, and never had engineers come close to being customer oriented.

The Apple Lisa was the first GUI computer Apple made. Starting price $9995 (or $35,000 in today’s dollars).

Yes, Apple has gone down market these days, but their history is really premium.

Or they start premium and then move down market like they did when they released the Macintosh ($2500 then or $8000 today).

And the Mac didn’t do much more than the Lisa and had no software. (The LaserWriter didn’t come for another year, and with it a use case of desktop publishing).

The iPhone came out around $800 (taking into account the contract with ATT) when most phones were sub 100.

If we had the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate while bring the price down or forcing competitors to compete on tech and bring their prices up.

Apple today is just too risk adverse.

If Apple had gotten to the point of making a real product with “Titan”, all the signs were they would be engaging with a manufacturing partner in the US. Hyundai, most likely.

As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it.

I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.

The way Apple funded hardware purchases for their "OEM" manufacturers makes it hard to really say they were "capital-light."

Quantum leap CarPlay/Siri could be a big win but, even as an Apple fan in general, have no particular interest in an Apple Car absent things like self-driving that blow everyone else out of the water--which seems a pretty big ask.

Also, what would the margin be?

They could probably do full development from scratch for under $10 bil if they were frugal and patient, or more if they want to go fast, and farm first product out to a manufacturing house like magna. This is their MO already (they don't want to own a plant).

In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters - which is also a negative ROI segment today for AI companies.

> as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.

Sure, but that's a choice by Apple to not even attempt to offer such features, or integration with AD, or a comparable feature stack. That all comes under my "proper management features" handwave.

Even managing a few Mac Minis for CI is a massive pain. There's popups that can only be resolved by logging in on the desktop directly, which is completely unsuitable for proper "server" use.

I setup an XServe for a mid-sized office, Open Directory was Apple's solution at the time. It worked but my recollection was that they did it by emulating a lot of Active Directory by layering code over OpenLDAP. When it worked it was nice, when it didn't work it was a headache to figure out where the problem might be. The management tools really couldn't compete with Active Directory, it was a mix of incomplete UI and command line tools.

Apple's Private Cloud Compute is hundreds (probably thousands) of M3+ Ultra rack mount servers; they highlighted them in the Texas manufacturing plant video.

Just wish they'd sell those to end users, like the Xserves (which had ILO/IMPI in the end).

The Apple silicon is really good! That would be the #1 reason to put it in a data centre, if it wasn't such a pain to manage a rack full of Minis.

Apple public transit?

I don't know, the majority of people I know (mostly upper-middle class white collar) have at least a HomePod/Alexa/Google smart speaker. And many have a smart thermostat and/or smart doorbell/camera. Part of the problem with IoT/home automation is a lack of consistency across devices - they all want their own apps. HomeKit is so close to making that easy - you shouldn't have to spin up HomeAssistant with a bunch of plug-ins to make this stuff easy for the end-user, but that's where we are (and that's decades after the first gen stuff rolled out). I'd think it was an easy sell to have lights, doorbell, security cameras, and smart speakers all connected easily.

Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.

> I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years.

I'm not an Apple fan beyond the Apple II era. But Apple has a way of taking early adopter markets and breaking into mainstream. x10 is from 1975, so there were probably people running home automation on Apple IIs, but...

The iPod was kind of early for portable mp3 players, but it wasn't the first. It made portable mp3 players mainstream.

The iPad wasn't the first tablet; Microsoft had been kicking around tablets that didn't sell for ages. But it's the only tablet with mainstream adoption.

Apple didn't invent HiDPI screens, but they brought them back to the mainstream.

Apple does have HomeKit to address home automation, but something more concrete could be nice.

> IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing.

Mostly because it's fragmented and Apple was nowhere to be found with their initially quite good and promising but then completely abandoned HomeKit.

In 2026 I still can't have my always-on supercomputer in the form of AppleTV to do anything with any of the devices at home. And Home app is extremely stupid, extremely limited, and requires a PhD in rocket science to figure out how to do anything with it (espceially since they just bolted on Shortcuts totally on the side).

I often think the problem is Apple thinks too big. They are so big that for a product to move the needle it needs to be huge. Even the "failed" VisionPro was probably $2B of revenue. The "Home, Wearables and accessories" line is $40B of revenue.

Is Apple willing to trade-off some of the steady reliability of their earnings stream for product lines that may be real contributors 5-10+ years out is the question? I think under Cook the answer to that was no.

I think staying on this path will eventually lead diminishing returns and endanger them long term.

Well Siri can't do all the cool home automation stuff if the "small beans" aren't already there.

Exactly - Apple needs to be making MORE bets, not LESS.

Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc.

Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc.

I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade.

The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore.

Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.

You can choose not to ship the 99.

I don't like the name. Makes it sound two faced.

Yes, I get it's a marrying of DeepMind and Google Brain teams or whatever. Still think it sounds duplicitous.

I have used Gemini, I have a personal subscription to ChatGPT and a corporate $5000/month allowance to Claude.

How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?

Eh, depends on what aspect of it. It's a very bad harness and is comically bad at tool calling, but as a Siri alternative and Youtube summarizer it's pretty good.

As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.

Why do you think you'd have to speak out loud?

Automagical AR glasses are also probably a couple decades out for various reasons. Maybe we'll see more weirdos wearing goggles around but I don't see useful mainstream fashionable classes around anytime soon. And, of course, lots of privacy implications, i.e. here's the profile of the person I'm looking aat.

They will be talking but not speaking