How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?

I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.

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majormajor 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?

>I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.

Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?

Their actions seem to indicate that they heard this desire loud and clear, and that this caused a single-minded focus that lost the plot on the overall functionality part of the role of design. And then they heard lound and clear from users that "thinner than what came before" was not the end-all-and-be-all. They also rolled back other victims of the "as thin and liught as possible" chase, such as SD cards and HDMI ports.

The claim here is that they could have anticipated that if they weren't driven overly by the aesthetic bragging-rights side of the design team vs the functional side. It's not hard to anticipate everyday reliability causing more blowback than relatively-rare battery-replacement capabilities. They probably had a very good idea of how many replacement batteries were sold, after all. (And for the record: headphone jacks are still there.)

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Swizec 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?

Could it be that miniaturization has reached a local maximum of what current technology can support and we simply can't make devices that are thinner and lighter while preserving battery life and computing power?

Or maybe they got thin enough so other factors now outweigh thinness. Notice how laptop batteries used to last 2 hours and now they go 8h and more.

If you can make a device 1cm thinner and keep the same 2 hours of battery life, worth it. But if a 10mm device lasts 2 hours and a 12mm lasts 6 hours, obviously 12mm is the better choice.

Notice that phones continue to get thinner. Except around the camera because better photos outweigh smaller camera.

	▲	hdgvhicv 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But phones still get bigger. Current phones are far larger than the phones from 2020 and those were larger than those from 2010.
	▲	inertiqa 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		i remember something similar with the ipod shuffle, that they cannot keep make it smaller only because the power button would be too small to operate, innfact the one that is like a piece of metal, the only way to easily slide the power button is with your nail

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samplatt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?

Not really. Jony Ive, chief designer at Apple for most of the iphone era, left in 2019. He and Jobs were the primary pushers behind the "thinner, lighter" drive. Once the chief pushers for "form > function" left, it predictably stagnated, and begun to fall in line with industry standards from other companies.

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rramon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Jony Ives goal or obsession is invisible computing that gets out of the way, so thinner is just on a trajectory towards that. No surprise he ended up at an AI company and works on voice interfaces etc.