Probably curved corners and a notch, too.
/s
Joking aside: Yeah, the price increases are getting to be a bit much.
I was about to jump your ship and shout you down that Apple would NEVER do something so stupid, then I remembered the last several years in Apple product announcements.
Yeah... they would, actually. They did it to their stupid phones, they’d put a notch on a Mac screen or a notebook or whatever.
What would be really nice though, is if they blessed the computer with the power to sip juice when not fully engaged in things, and made the back of the display a PV cell that could either recharge the battery or reduce drain on the battery. It’s not like THAT part of the machine is doing anything ANYWAY besides looking like a big chunk of matte-finished aluminum. SURELY if Citizen can find a way to power a wrist watch (see Eco-Drive,) and have it be basically invisible to anyone looking at the watch, Apple could figure out how to do the same with the BACK of a notebook. Honestly, especially with larger ones, every surface that COULD gather light, (like the side where the keyboard is,) should have that. They could, instead of making everything aluminum, have them be basically gunmetal grey to black, and have those surfaces absorb energy when struck by light. Hell, light OR heat. IMAGINE having a MacBook you could take literally ANYWHERE and even if you didn’t bring the charger, you just set it in the sun, and let THAT charge it up?
Yes, I know there aren’t THAT many watts per square foot, which is about what the surface area is, even somewhere with lots of sun, but it would still be better than NOTHING which is what you have now. ACTUALLY, you could also have a flap that just folds out, and can pivot so you can point it to maximize harvesting of incoming light. Though there’s no reason they couldn’t use the same tech that takes the edge-lighting on LCD TVs and monitors and distributes and diffuses the light evenly across the screen.
I’ve taken a few old LCD panels apart, and if you’ve never done so, there are some really slim layers of plastic with some pretty freaky, crazy optical properties. They bend light and distort images as an accidental result of having been designed to take light from the edge and make a panel that is smoothly and evenly illuminated. There’s probably a way to do that in reverse, so that you cover the surface with that (presumably) relatively cheap substance, and then let it guide the light to some PV cells that can handle a lot of power hitting a small space, reducing their cost, and letting the computer be solar powered... even if you have to leave it be for a while to build up some charge, it’s better than having nothing.
That’s part of the issue I take with people who insist that you can’t have a solar powered car. I don’t get that at all. Even if the car might take a long-ass while to charge, if you park it in broad sunlight, it’s still better than it doing NOTHING, right? If it’s an electric car in the first place, I mean. I’m aware that in order to have a car that can go at even modest highway speeds powered by the sun, it has to be incredibly efficient on weight and aerodynamics, and it’s still pretty anemic, and probably not road-worthy for normal use, (i.e., capable of taking a collision with a 2000-13,000 pound vehicle without killing its driver and any passengers unfortunate enough to be aboard,) but if you drive it to work, and just leave it sitting in the sun all day, quietly charging, shoot... at the very least it should produce enough power so that the thing is nice and either warm or cool inside without regard to the temperature OUTSIDE, i.e., enough power to run an AC or heater, especially if it’s properly insulated.
A laptop with a PV system built into it probably wouldn’t be THAT much heavier than one without, and the battery could be lighter to compensate.
I guess it’s unlikely Apple would even consider doing something like that, what with their pathological focus on thinness and lightness, which is dangerously close to going TOO far... though I do wonder... WHY do they even still have physical keyboards built in? Seriously... why not just have a textured panel with taptic or haptic or schmaptic feedback that can detect button-presses without any physical buttons?
I mean... one, Apple has obviously no problem trying to force users to just buy whatever Apple wants them to, so... as part of a move towards forcing everyone to use soft keyboards, WHY not make the entire keyboard virtual? There are advantages... for example, imagine for a moment...
You open the screen of the new MacBook... let’s call it “MacBook Touch,” or something. Where you’d expect a keyboard, there’s instead just a solid slab of aluminum. When you hit the power button, a bunch of points of light flash where the keys belong. There’s just two little bumps. They’re about where the F and J keys normally would be. The lights show through microscopic holes in the aluminum, kind of like what the old AA-battery powered Apple Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad had. But these are in an array of colors, and they swirl and coalesce in the center to form an Apple Logo, while the computer is booting and displaying a ghostly Apple logo made of what looks like smoke in the center of the screen, (instead of a static white Apple logo on a black background that they’ve been using for years). Then the light points on the... where the keyboard would be... show an array of letters. The keys. There are A NUMBER of ways to accomplish this that I can think of.
One, the keyboard has multitouch sensors, and is basically just a giant f’ing trackpad, and detects the velocity and force with which you touch the keys. This would be adjustable through settings, allowing you to rest your fingers without actuating a virtual keypress event. You could even have it LEARN the user’s finger-presses, since probably when typing, there’s probably differing amounts of force typically applied by different fingers. OR it could detect in 3 dimensions where the fingers are and what their velocity is in 3 dimensions when hitting the keyboard, thus making it so that when a strike would fall on the boarder between two keys, it could figure out which one you were going for without even needing to know what word you were trying to type. Not based on any dictionary, but on the movement of the tip of your finger as it approached a given space.
DOING THIS would allow some possibilities not current with the current physical keyboard. FOR EXAMPLE... you remember that thing with the Touch-Bar? You could do that but with a whole keyboard, allowing you to switch the keys around as you’d like them. You could CHANGE how big the keys are, so if you HAPPEN to need a 10-key keypad, you could just hit Cmd-Opt-Space and switch to a slightly smaller keyboard with a 10-key pad. OR if you need to type in Cyrillic or Portuguese, or any other language where you have extra keys devoted to things like cedillas, enyas, umlauts, or other special symbols, you could just change the keyboard to that. Or if you want to play around with a Dvorak keyboard... you could do that in software.
I’m not suggesting making a giant Touch-Bar that would be a whole keyboard at all, and you might have to (or want to) coat the keyboard area with something more enjoyable tactilely than raw, bare aluminum, (esp. if you’re using it outside where the sun is beating on it,) and have that thing be user replaceable if/when it wears out. I’m suggesting replacing the (almost) last mechanical part on a MacBook... (the hinge would be the last, I guess). It’s not like they couldn’t.
Also, another idea. Find a way to allow an option to use e-Ink. SURELY if Apple wanted to, they could figure out full-color, low-power, front-lit displays for people who want to be able to use the things outdoors, and not have all that glare.
I think of MacBooks as a bit like vampires. What I’m imagining would be a MacBook capable of walking around in the daylight. Invincible. Fully and truly wireless, with no holes anywhere in the chassis. No ports, all wireless, replacing USB-C with NFC or BT or WiFi... charged by daylight itself. With a keyboard that couldn’t be defeated by dust. With a screen that could be used in full daylight and far from being unreadable, was instead even easier to read up to the limit of what the human eye can withstand in terms of brightness. Even the hinge would be replaced by a flexible joint that was completely impervious. Waterproof, dust-proof, and of course, outrageously expensive. Because Apple. But you could literally just toss it in your backpack and go. No cords, no cables, you don’t have to worry about power... if you had to power it up you could make it so it charges inductively from a pad. OR you can just take it and stick it right under your desk lamp with a nice, bright bulb and charge it that way.
That’s the sort of laptop I’d make if I made laptops. I’d call it the GoAnywhere, or the Infinitum, or something. It’d be a computer you could use literally anywhere and under any conditions. Without internal voids, (full of resin as part of the design) you could literally toss it in the ocean, put on scuba gear, and go play solitaire on the ocean floor. Okay... on the ocean floor I guess it would eventually run out of power, if you’re more than a few feet down, but... yeah. Front-lit, full color e-ink display, no holes anywhere, chargeable optically or inductively or both simultaneously, all solid-state, etc.
Sorry... what were we talking about again?
