I tend to defend Apple because I believe their commitment to "quality" as a being defined by every possible angle of hardware and software design as opposed to one, simple, established measurement, is something computer/device design needs (i.e., putting "unmeasurable" quality aspects like good UI design on the same level as measurable ones like processor speed). But they fuck up, sometimes. The one-button mouse made no sense, for example. But in terms of raw hardware, it's their over-commitment to thinness. Like, who cares?
I think there was a good movement to at least try and make laptops thinner, somewhere around the late 00s. There's a point between 4cm and 2.5cm that really made sense to me, in order to make laptops more portable (their main feature). But then, it got ridiculous. They shaved off a millimeter every year and at one point, it started to negatively affect the products. You could probably heighten the battery life quite a bit by adding 2 or 3 millimeters of thickness, you would prevent the keyboard rubbing onto the display (see "staingate"), and now this shit about cables being so goddamn thin they literally break.
This is their "Pro" line, as in "professional". I use my MacBook Pro professionally. I could not care less about whatever millimeter they shaved off the thing at the cost of making it more brittle. Sturdiness is a very "professional" quality and it looks like it's not in their list of priorities anymore. Meanwhile, MacBook Pro prices reach the $3000 mark.
It seems obvious enough to me for Apple to realize they've fucked up. Just like their last iOS update – oh wonder! – focused on speed rather than gimmicks, I hope their next MacBook hardware update will re-discover sturdiness as a selling point.
Even ignoring the "couple mm will add battery life", what about a couple of mm actually allowing the fucking machine to breathe and not thermal throttle?
My largest complaint with laptops is their performance just cannot match that of a low end desktop, and you're certainly not helping your customers by releasing a machine that (let's face it) is designed to not run at its fullest potential. It's the equivalent of buying a v8, but after you get past 35mph a couple of the cylinders shut off.
Making a portable device that never thermally throttles means a non-practical thermal system, likely consuming power and generating noise by running 100% all the time.
The reality is that the thermal output differs by well over an order of magnitude depending on what you are doing.
When a complicated task comes along, the system may:
1. spike to full CPU usage at max power usage (possibly higher than rated TDP)
2. if the work continues, get temporarily throttled while the cooling system catches up
3. settle on a "steady state" thermal performance
Since the design of the cooling system is different on a case-by-case basis, the thermal properties are now customizable by the laptop manufacturer to match their system.
This can cause issues with certain "stress test" benchmarks which do not take into account the more complex nature of both modern CPUs and cooling solutions. The performance curve from start to stop of a CPU load task no longer looks like a square wave.
I assume you were referring to the 2018 MBP with i9 chip (which I own). Initially there was an issue because the thermal and power profile that the machine shipped were not appropriate (and actually in some cases made the i9 machine perform inferior to an i7).
They fixed this with a later software update, which AFAIK resolved people's issues. I didn't purchase my machine until after the software update was released, so I never saw the original behavior.
I think there was a good movement to at least try and make laptops thinner, somewhere around the late 00s. There's a point between 4cm and 2.5cm that really made sense to me, in order to make laptops more portable (their main feature). But then, it got ridiculous. They shaved off a millimeter every year and at one point, it started to negatively affect the products. You could probably heighten the battery life quite a bit by adding 2 or 3 millimeters of thickness, you would prevent the keyboard rubbing onto the display (see "staingate"), and now this shit about cables being so goddamn thin they literally break.
This is their "Pro" line, as in "professional". I use my MacBook Pro professionally. I could not care less about whatever millimeter they shaved off the thing at the cost of making it more brittle. Sturdiness is a very "professional" quality and it looks like it's not in their list of priorities anymore. Meanwhile, MacBook Pro prices reach the $3000 mark.
It seems obvious enough to me for Apple to realize they've fucked up. Just like their last iOS update – oh wonder! – focused on speed rather than gimmicks, I hope their next MacBook hardware update will re-discover sturdiness as a selling point.