It’s Wafer Thin
Sunday 24 May 2015 • 6:10 PM
Marco Arment on the new Retina MacBook:
Instead, we have major compromises on previous invariants. Until now, since I started buying Macs 11 years ago, Apple had never shipped a laptop with a keyboard or trackpad that was less than great. They recognized that a laptop without a good keyboard wasn’t a good laptop, even if a lot of people would be OK with it and buy it anyway.
Now, Apple’s priorities have changed. Rather than make really great products that are mostly thin, they now make really thin products that are mostly great.
This concerns me more than you probably think it should. Not only does it represent compromised standards in areas I believe are important, but it suggests that they don’t have many better ideas to advance the products beyond making them thinner, and they’re willing to sacrifice anything to keep that going.
I couldn’t agree more. Now that Apple is such a dominant player, they have the power to say “stop with this thinness nonsense.” I’m all for making things thinner, but not at the costs and compromises Apple is currently making.
This thinking has also infected Apple’s software development. OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the best, most stable operating system I’ve ever used. (Admittedly, I joined the Mac club late, with OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2006. So I only have experience with 7 major OS X updates). Even though new features have been introduced ((and some have been really great– making phone calls from my Mac, in particular)) each new update has been riddled with additional bugs and instability: the most glaring and inexcusable has been the “discoveryd clusterfuck”.
I don’t think I’m alone when I say: Apple, I’m okay waiting another six months for an OS X update. Just ship it when it’s ready.
I hate eating underbaked bread and I hate using undercooked software.