Same here, except I used it instead of my company issued Dell portable. Amazed colleagues when I could connect to client’s printers via Bonjour while their Dell’s couldn’t find the printers.
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Apple's MacBook Pro Turns 20 Years Old
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Same here, except I used it instead of my company issued Dell portable. Amazed colleagues when I could connect to client’s printers via Bonjour while their Dell’s couldn’t find the printers.
Bingo. If the Touch Bar was so good, why did it never come to a USB keyboard?
- Using an iMac/Mini/Mac Pro? - no Touch Bar
- Using your MBP in clamshell mode? - no Touch Bar
Time flies... and while today's polished video presentations look great, boy I do miss the old keynotes with Steve.
I didn't switch to the new Intel MacBook right away, I kept my PowerBook G4 for 5 more years until the i-series Intel CPU's were introduced.
I didn't switch to the new Intel MacBook right away, I kept my PowerBook G4 for 5 more years until the i-series Intel CPU's were introduced.
Mweeh... not hate, but personally I don't like the touchbar because it doesn't have haptic feedback. The idea of custom buttons for different applications was good but it (re)moved standard buttons like volume + / -. The annoying thing was, it's so sensitive that it "detects" a touch while my fingers are nowhere near the touchbar when I'm typing some text. So many moments where the music app suddenly started or exposé activated. This forced me to flip to the F-keys without any function assigned to them. When I want to change volume or something I have to use the fn-key.
It sounds pathetic to say I miss the old days, I don't - I live in thr present moment, everything else is madness.
But I do miss Steve Jobs, today Apple is not much a company for users anymore.
Now they just sell stuff to feed the stockholders 😝
Cook is the most boring dude ever at Apple to watch 😴
If there's is anything that I really like with today's Apple, it is Apple Silicon.
The guys that have evolved that deserves ♥️
But I do miss Steve Jobs, today Apple is not much a company for users anymore.
Now they just sell stuff to feed the stockholders 😝
Cook is the most boring dude ever at Apple to watch 😴
If there's is anything that I really like with today's Apple, it is Apple Silicon.
The guys that have evolved that deserves ♥️
I remember that I really wanted one of those Macbook Pros back then. However, somehow being obsessed with the smaller form factor, I started hunting for a refurbished 12" Powerbook G4 and ended up buying a used one. After a while, it was replaced by a polycarbonate Macbook, realizing the performance difference between PowerPC and the Intel chip.
Yesterday was history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift that why it called the present!
By the way, my first "MacBook" (Pro) was an Acer Intel Celeron laptop, which I transformed into a Hackintosh with Mac OS X Leopard. It was Mac OS X those days, not macOS. It triple-booted with Windows and Ubuntu. Since then, I mainly used Linux, exploring hundreds of distros, with Windows as the second OS, primarily for AutoCAD. Ultimately, I chose a (un)used 15" 2018 MacBook Pro over the M1 in 2020 for the Touch Bar and waited for the M4 Mac Mini, which was sent directly from China to me by Apple in November 2024. The M4 Mac Mini is a gem and will be used until 2030 or further (though tomorrow is a mystery).
MacBook Pros are fantastic laptops. A lot of improvement over the years. Waiting to see the next major refresh. Addition of cellular capability will be beneficial.
A largely unbroken sequence of excellent machines.
That said, as a long time Mac user, I remember being gutted that they retired the PowerBook name and replaced it with MacBook. I remember thinking that MacBook just didn’t have the same ring to it, and although I’ve got used to the name over the years, when I think about it I still feel that PowerBook was a badass name that they should have hung on to!
That said, as a long time Mac user, I remember being gutted that they retired the PowerBook name and replaced it with MacBook. I remember thinking that MacBook just didn’t have the same ring to it, and although I’ve got used to the name over the years, when I think about it I still feel that PowerBook was a badass name that they should have hung on to!
I’m guessing battery life becoming an issue in a small and thin keyboard enclosure.
I also loved it, and always wondered why don't apple have the best of both worlds with the Touch Bar and a row of F keys, there is plenty of space for it.
It’s crazy looking back, to think this was only a year before the first iPhone—when everything changed! And for me personally, also about a year before I switched to the Mac. A 17 inch MacBook Pro in fact. Everything changed for me from that point too ☺️
I had one of the 17” models, and then as now it was genuinely impressive that despite being the first generation of a completely different CPU architecture it was a solid, quality computer. In fact, having ended up bedridden at the time, that computer was my entire window to the world for several months.
I vividly remember being weirded out by the thought of owning a computer with Ann Intel CPU, after having literally grown up with Motorola chips and entered adulthood with IBM’s evolution thereof, but booting it up it just felt like a good Mac.
I vividly remember being weirded out by the thought of owning a computer with Ann Intel CPU, after having literally grown up with Motorola chips and entered adulthood with IBM’s evolution thereof, but booting it up it just felt like a good Mac.
Hear hear!
I absolutely hated the MacBook name when it was announced and couldn’t believe the rumored name turned out to be real. I’ve gotten used to it, but to this day I think PowerBook is a better name.
It probably would’ve been a superb feature if they actually made the effort to make it a consistent feature across the ecosystem.
As in at least having one built into the accessory keyboard that they sell for desktop use.
I can’t imagine who would bother developing for it or implement it as a part of their daily workflow when you lose access to it as soon as you sit down at your desk and plug in to your monitor and keyboard.
When you can’t use it when you want it the most then it basically just became a game of hide and seek for all your function keys when on the go. Who needs that?
I agree they should have made it part of more machines and keyboard if they were serious about driving its adoption; but I wonder what percentage of MacBook users bother with clamshell mode when at a desktop?
Anecdotally, having seen a lot of PC and Mac laptop users working at desks, almost all used the built-in keyboard even if they had an external monitor. The biggest exception to that were situations where the company bought only laptops, no desktops, and use a docking station to turn the laptop into a desktop; often the laptop never left the dock for long periods at a time.
Yeah, it looks impressive that the prices are still the same, or lower after 20 years, although they're holding the iMac's beer, because the entry level iMac has been $1299 since 1998. (32 MB RAM, 4GB HDD!) and if you want to stretch a bit the 1977 Apple II was $1298.
However, that's not Apple being generous - the entire IT - and much of the consumer electronics industry - has seen the same lack of inflation (and multi-order-of-magnitude increase in specs) since the 1980s. A half-decent personal computer setup has cost about the same number of dollars for the last 40 years, whatever the platform. It's a combination of Moore's Law and the way that the cost of mass-produced electronics is hugely dependent on sales volume.
It's just much, much easier to do the comparison with Apple, thanks to the almost-unique way that Apple structure and name their product range - plus handy sites like everymac.com with price data going back decades.
The (credible) accusations of "greed" come from comparisons of Apple's base RAM/SSD specs (e.g. sticking at 8GB/256GB for years while the industry moved on) and upgrade prices with comparable PC products. That may be changing at the moment - we've yet to see whether Apple are going to raise prices in response to the RAM/SSD bubble, but their prices started out so far above any credible component costs that they might be able to weather it.
Shame you cannot find positivity in your remarks. To be able to buy an entry level macbook pro, for the same price as 20 years ago, is something to be lauded, not weaponised.
When they were in vogue we always specified the machines without the Touch Bar. Cheaper and more usable for us.
Budget was not an issue. I imagine that was true for a fair number of people, so Apple will have lost quite a few top-end sales. This is for software development etc. We would also buy multiple machines per person/use docking stations, so the laptop keyboard would only get limited use. Switching between radically different keyboards is just a pain.
The things I do use from the top row of the keyboard are:
- escape
- volume controls
- play/pause etc for music
- brightness controls
It's easier to have these as physical keys so you can navigate by touch (and that's consistent with the rest of the keyboard). You can always map the function keys if you want them to have non-standard functions (with the modifiers
I rarely find it necessary). For applications I use a lot I wouldn't be looking at the keys anyway - just use muscle memory.
Sliding over multiple keys (another feature of the TouchBar IIRC for eg volume control) meant stretching the hand - better carried out on a trackpad to reduce strain.
There's certainly some market for reconfigurable keyboards. Maybe Apple could have made an external fully touch keyboard, or maybe it would have done better with both function keys and a Touch Bar? For a while Side Car, I think, mimicked the Touch Bar on an iPad, so an approach like that would probably be the way to go these days if you really wanted touch capabilities.
his whole 'greed argument' is overused. Does Apple make a healthy margin on upgrades? Certainly, but so fo most manufacturers. It's the nature of the business, and not just in computers.
First off, component costs are only part of the final cost to manufacture. Smaller production runs and BYO options drive up costs, and need to be recouped. Multiple SKUs mean extra costs for stocking as well. Could Apple charge less, certainly, but greed s not the catchall reason why they don't.
Another way to look at is suppose Apple looked at the marginal revenue from upgrades and decided to creat one massive configuration and divide the revenue previously from upgrades and add the result plus the new component coststo the MBP and make one configuration. I suspect people would complain they can't buy a lower spec, cheaper model because the one available is what to much machine for them.
In the end, Apple is a for profit company and has a duty to the shareholders to make money for them; and does it by offering various combinations of machines that people find offer value at the price point.
In your original post, you could have just said "Hey, isn't it cool that the MBP price hasn't really changed in 20 years" (not something I'd dispute) and left it at that. You chose to "weaponise" that as an argument against Apple's "greed".
So, sure, it's great that the MBP price hasn't changed since 2006 - but that's typical of the entire personal computer industry so it doesn't support arguments for or against Apple being "greedy". That's the relevance to this thread, so I'm not going to go any further down the RAM/SSD price debate rabbit hole here.
The Touch Bar added little value. Arguably, it subtracted value. It introduced a new, non-standard input device that wasn’t deployed across the Mac product line, but limited to a subset of machines. Because of that, no app could rely on it, so every Touch Bar function had to be duplicated elsewhere in the UI. That meant the Touch Bar never enabled new workflows, only alternate ways to invoke existing ones. Adding context-dependent duplicates of existing controls isn't value. It only increases inconsistency and cognitive load. And for developers all this did was increase UI code (adding extra design, implementation, testing, and maintenance costs) with no corresponding user benefit or ROI. In sum, it was a bad idea from the start.
This was the first Mac I bought new from Apple, replacing a 666Mhz TiBook that it could outpace even when running code through Rosetta. Just a ridiculous leap forward from the stagnant PowerPC G4s.
I also agree with many of the comments above about Steve's presentations — he seemed genuinely interested in the products and willing to show some personality in explaining them. Today's bland media-trained dad jokes, rehearsed to death and pre-taped, are a huge turnoff.
I also agree with many of the comments above about Steve's presentations — he seemed genuinely interested in the products and willing to show some personality in explaining them. Today's bland media-trained dad jokes, rehearsed to death and pre-taped, are a huge turnoff.
I still remember around winter or spring 2006 when I was randomly surfing the Apple website because of my interests in video production, and I recall thinking "Why is the PowerBook now called the MacBook Pro?" With that said, the original 15" MacBook Pros did have several similarities but also more noticeable changes than the PowerBook G4 it replaced aside from the Intel Core Duo system...
The built-in dial-up modem was removed, an iSight webcam was placed above the display (becoming the first Apple laptop to use a built-in camera), the Type I/II PC card expansion slot was replaced with a more modern ExpressCard/34 slot, the S-Video output port was removed, as was the FireWire 800 port (but it was added back later that year when the MacBook Pro was upgraded with a Core 2 Duo chip), and - most importantly - the older circular AC adapter jack was replaced with Apple's new and innovative MagSafe power adapter jack, designed to magnetically pop in and out in an easy manner, especially if someone were to trip over the power cord. So the MacBook Pro did have considerably more changes than the early Intel iMacs.
Years from now when I am ready to replace my M1 MacBook Air, I am now considering going with a MacBook Pro, maybe the base-line 16-inch model of the time but with a little more RAM.
The built-in dial-up modem was removed, an iSight webcam was placed above the display (becoming the first Apple laptop to use a built-in camera), the Type I/II PC card expansion slot was replaced with a more modern ExpressCard/34 slot, the S-Video output port was removed, as was the FireWire 800 port (but it was added back later that year when the MacBook Pro was upgraded with a Core 2 Duo chip), and - most importantly - the older circular AC adapter jack was replaced with Apple's new and innovative MagSafe power adapter jack, designed to magnetically pop in and out in an easy manner, especially if someone were to trip over the power cord. So the MacBook Pro did have considerably more changes than the early Intel iMacs.
Years from now when I am ready to replace my M1 MacBook Air, I am now considering going with a MacBook Pro, maybe the base-line 16-inch model of the time but with a little more RAM.