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from the renewed-interest-in-Compaq-Portable-computers dept.
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
The pursuit of thinner, lighter laptops, a trend driven by Apple, means we have screwed ourselves out of performance.
Over the last few days we’ve seen outcry about Apple’s new MacBook Pro, which offers an optional top-end i9 processor, and how its performance is throttled to the point of parody as the laptop heats up over time.
Sparked by a video from YouTuber Dave Lee, who demonstrates that the only way to get Apple’s quoted performance from the MacBook Pro is by keeping it in a refrigerator, the outcry has been brutal.
Thousands of comments on the video say things like “Wow if it cant even maintain stock speeds that's pretty sad” and “Apple should offer a fridge that goes with the Macbook i9,” but the sobering reality is that this practice is normal across laptops—we’re just starting to see it more often.
[...] If Pro users really were Apple’s target market, the company could redesign these laptops to use the older, thicker MacBook Pro form factor from 2015. With that available space, and improvements in processor design, it would be able to better cool the same hardware and squeeze out more performance—but it’ll never happen. Thicker laptops would mean admitting failure.
Thinner and lighter is great, and if we’re honest, we’re all sucked in by the allure. The unfortunate reality for those of us that need these machines for work is that it’s just not good enough, and we’d welcome thicker machines in exchange for hardware that isn’t constrained by heat. Apple insists these new MacBooks are for ‘pro users,’ and while it has some of the best-in-class hardware design out there today, it simply doesn’t hold up if you push them hard enough.
The MacBook Pro isn’t designed for pro users at all, it’s a slick marketing machine designed to sell to the wealthy ‘prosumer’ that wouldn’t notice anyway. That much has been clear since the introduction of the Touch Bar and death of the SD slot—and it’s making a ton of money anyway.
Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-and-lighter-laptops-have-screwed-us-all
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:35PM (1 child)
Testing on actual users.
When I worked there in the mid-nineties they had two usability labs. They were set up with several video cameras, the network came through a proxy that would log the URLs that the user would visit.
They'd hire some random guy off the street to do the actual testing.
"See that icon there on the Desktop."
"Yeah, what is it?"
"iTunes."
"What does it do?"
"You can find out by double-clicking it with your mouse. Knock yourself out!"
The Apple employee then leaves the room as the camera rolls.
Such testing quite clearly determined that FOR APPLE'S TARGET MARKET one-button mice clearly made far more sense than did two or three button mice.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:59PM
If that was the actual instruction, then it is no wonder that the one-button mouse “worked better”: For the two-button mouse there's important information missing, namely which button to double-click. It's like presenting a keyboard with no labels to someone who has no experience with typing (and thus wouldn't know the location of the keys), and then telling them “please enter that word written here by pressing the appropriate keys.”
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.