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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2021-04-29, 11:21

That's why I've been saying that for years. Thin is thin, and, for most of us, they've sold nothing "bulky" or "ungainly" for well over a decade. But it was never enough, was it? For many years, that seemed to be the biggest thing they'd crow about - "It's 7% thinner than the previous model...", etc. - upon the introduction of a new notebook (or phone, iPad, etc.). There is a point where it can work against you. I think they bumped up against that some time ago, on a few products.

And, no...I don't want silly, 1990's-era 1.78" thick notebooks. Nobody does. But when the pursuit of Almighty Thin has impacts on performance, cooling, components, etc., that's when you might want to pull it back a little.

The nice thing about this M1 (and beyond) is that they might have their cake and eat it too...thin as they'd like, but the performance and thermal/battery concerns are all addressed and maybe there's no big trade-off as before.

I'm not anti-thin at all. But there's a point where it makes no sense to go beyond if if means the overall machine is a less-than experience. Nobody's going to marvel at fractions of a millimeter lost if their machine is always throttling down and their scrotum is stir-frying.

I always got a perverse kick during the keynotes or an event when some Apple exec breathlessly touted the even-thinner, smaller body that was already plenty thin/small enough, and it was met with dead silence. That's a polite crowd's way of saying "we don't really give a shit, quit obsessing on that metric; it's not cute anymore. The MacBook Air has been around for quite some time, and it was already plenty thin the day Steve pulled it out of that envelope. Relax."
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