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Hacker News Comments on
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

The Onion · Youtube · 15 HN points · 33 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention The Onion's video "Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard".
Youtube Summary
The MacBook Wheel lets consumers accomplish everyday tasks like typing with just a few dozen spins and clicks of a wheel.

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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
I'm still waiting for the revolutionary laptop Macbook Wheel, hopefully it will run the latest IpadOS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA - 2009 video
You mentioned a wheel in the context of Apple and I thought you were talking about the Apple MacBook Wheel.

https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA

I never thought I'd see some argue for the MacBook Wheel.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

adhesive_wombat
The click wheel is a very good interface, especially when you are very often setting a scalar value (volume, temperature, fan speed, etc) or navigating a linear list (songs, contact names, call history, etc) and using one hand without looking at that hand. So it's a good fit for both MP3 players and cars.

Not so good for typing, but can be quite good when there's a good UI that narrows down options for you at each entered letter.

>Human Machine Interface hall of fame along with the old click wheel iPod Classic

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

"just few hundred clicks away"

Mar 07, 2022 · dcj on Show HN: iPod Clickwheel.js
It would be funny if the Next button took you to clickwheeljt.com and the Previous button took you to clickwheeljr.com.

"Everything is just a few hundred clicks away." -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA immediately comes to mind.
tverbeure
The agile aardvark arrived by airmail.
bonestamp2
I forgot about that video. It's funny that one thing in that video did come true... from google, and it's great (predictive sentence completion).
jarrenae
this may or may not have been my inspiration haha
samwillis
I once worked with someone who genuinely fell for that video, he also had his bank account cleared out from a phishing email too though...

I knew exactly what the video was going to be before I clicked.

You might enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
roryokane
This is a link to the video “Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard”, which was already linked in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421855
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

xeeeeeeeeeeenu
The on-screen keyboard from that video is pretty much how text input works in Apple TV: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
zdragnar
Interestingly, they actually are:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-developing-fol...

I know it is the frequency illusion, but 2022 seems to ve the year that satire keeps coming true.

throitallaway
This has already existed for a few years in the PC world. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkpad-x1-fold
Cthulhu_
It's a weird and interesting thing to see; if others do it, it's a weird nice product for a handful of people, but once Apple does it it becomes mainstream and widely adopted.

Counterpoint though, it didn't work out for Apple's touch bar.

jptech
How about Mactini?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BGGOn-H7s3Q

mushyhammer
Realistic except for the manual. You're just supposed to find them on your own nowadays.
542458
I mean… they did, and called it an iPad. And they’ve sold 350 million of them so far, so it seems like it was a decent idea.
folmar
But that was not "revolutionary new", there were tablets previously.
dymk
How popular were tablets before the iPad?
folmar
It depends on how long before you look. In 1990s they were fairly popular as the smaller devices were expensive and small screens were hard on the users and custom development was not as easy, so field data entry was often with some b&w tablet, often connected to a portable printer and other accessories.
ricardobeat
Technically yes, but in practice no. The previous products were extremely expensive, keyboard-wielding niche products which were extremely hard to come by. The iPad was the first viable commercial product, with multitouch, Wi-Fi, and a friendly OS. I bought one right after release in 2010, at the time Android was in its infancy, most people had a flip phone and I’d never actually seen a tablet in any form before (other than the iPod touch a few months earlier). It was mind blowing.

Also, revolutionary != new. Apple rarely is the first to enter a new market.

Phrodo_00
While not multitouch, the Nokia N770/N900 was a thing.
mynameisvlad
I mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900#/media/File:Nokia_N... is absolutely nothing like https://i.ytimg.com/vi/w72kt0kbgmY/maxresdefault.jpg other than the fact that they both have screens.

If you wanted to compare the N900 to an iPhone, that might be a slightly more apt comparison, but at the end of the day, the iPhone and iPad completely changed what "phones" and "tablets" look like. Their predecessors and successors are extremely different devices and perform different functions.

folmar
They do have different form factors, but do similar functions.

To qoute Wikipedia: "The N900 functions as a mobile Internet device, and includes email, web browsing and access to online services, a 5-megapixel digital camera for still or video photography, a portable media player for music and video, calculator, games console and word processor, SMS, as well as mobile telephony using either a mobile network or VoIP via Internet (mobile or Wi-Fi)."

mynameisvlad
I mean, yeah that's what the first iPhone might be described as. Before the release of the App Store. Unfortunately for the N900, it was released by the time the 3GS was out.

It has a resistive touch screen, which massively hampers what you can do on the device. This precludes it from any real gaming, or interactivity. By the time the N900 came out, the Apple App Store had 100k apps and 2 billion downloads. That's two magnitudes larger than the number of apps Maemo had in total.

It's not a matter of "a different form factor" it's more that the N900 is a completely different class of device, it fundamentally can't compete with the iPhone and its massive (even at the time) ecosystem.

If you were to squint with glasses of a completely different prescription to yours, sure, you can say they "do similar functions", but let's be honest with ourselves. The N900 was too little too late. It was released at a point in time when capacitive, glass touchscreens with high interactivity games and apps are what was the new norm.

tombert
I was one of the people who made fun of the iPad when it was announced, and I am grown-up enough to admit that I was 100% wrong. I made fun of it for being a "wannabe laptop", and at some level I still kind of think that, but I didn't consider that people might not want/need all the features of a laptop all the time. I didn't see the appeal of "an iPod touch with a bigger screen" because I couldn't see through the eyes of a non-geek.

I don't have an iPad, but I do have a Kindle Fire HD10, and I have to begrudgingly admit that I like it a lot more than I thought I would.

DocTomoe
And then they sold the keyboard separately for people who used the ipad as more than a YouTube machine.
I think that many people only decided that they didn't need these features because Apple removed them.

It reminds me of this video from awhile ago by The Onion:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard[1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

hbn
Oh man, that's one of my favorite Onion videos. So many clever subtleties that make it a UX nightmare. Like how the first suggestion when you select T is the unicode TM symbol, the absurd sentence predictions that come up first when you type "the a", scrolling through an alphabetical list of every file on your hard drive.

I also imagine they were making a joke with the $2600 starting price, which is funny cause that's what I paid (albeit in Canadian dollars) for my base-model 14" MBP yesterday

Agreed! And given the source code is available maybe someone could hack together a prototype of this Onion classic: https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA
Biggsie
OMG. Thanks for bringing back that Onion classic. The sentence suggestions are legendary Onion.
> and choosing letters from a menu seems like more exertion.

How about from a wheel?

https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA

I see you're familiar with the Apple design paradigm. Remove functionality and call it a feature.

Have you reserved your MacBook Wheel yet?

https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA

I'm always reminded of The Onion's prophetic sketches:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Why predict the next letter when you can just predict the whole sentence? https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA?t=62
This used to be hilarious, but living it is about as much fun as predicted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Two of my favourites:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Anonymous Hero Donates Hospital 200 Human Kidneys - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_5nLxZVoPo

I think they'll address it by eliminating the keyboard entirely à la the MacBook Wheel[0], albeit perhaps with a touch screen. From an absolute, ergonomic standpoint, it will suck. But soft keys won't fail or get crud in them like hard keys do, and Gruber will soon be writing thinkpieces about how the keyboard is the most failure-prone part of a computer, and the complaints about recent MBP keyboards are inherent failings of hardware keyboards themselves rather than Apple skimping on quality, and Apple is taking the lead in something the industry should have done a long time ago by eliminating the hardware keyboard.

[0] https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA

Do you even vi? Remove everything! Here's a link to the pic of the keyboard for which vi was originally designed on:

http://vintagecomputer.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/LSI-ADM...

I completely agree with your post. Removing the home/end & function keys is such a waste given the amount of free space for keys on every single notebook ever made.

edit: I realized I hadn't taken my initial argument to complete absurdity, "Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

nayuki
I am aware of vim, but don't find its working style comfortable. It's true that vim can work well on a plain keyboard without needing arrow keys, Ctrl key, home/end/pgup/pgdn, shift-selecting, mouse, etc.

I like being able to type and select at any time, without having to remember which mode is active. Also, using Dvorak destroys the intuitive hjkl keys for positioning.

MacBook Wheel was great satire from The Onion ;-D. It vaguely reminds me of how annoying it was to type passwords and search terms on the Apple TV remote's D pad. For home theatre PC use, it seems most my friends choose a Logitech Wireless Touch Keyboard K400.

orbitingpluto
I set up a Roku for someone and the d-pad on the remote jumped twice instead of once for every click. Putting in a password required mod 2 arithmetic and switching between rows/columns with even/odd lengths. Things can always become more absurd.
unwiredben
Wow.. was it a RF remote or IR? I don't think I've seen that one in our bug database.
orbitingpluto
It was the standard IR Roku 2 remote. Behavior stopped eventually for whatever reason.
That reminds me of this fake ultimate apple ad. It's not exactly the following video, but maybe it helps remembering it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
ReverseCold
Is this what you were thinking of?

https://youtu.be/BGGOn-H7s3Q

erikb
Nope, but I also like it!
I'm, for one, am still waiting for MacBook Wheel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Watching the apple event and the various demos of the touch bar reminded me of this onion video from 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

I really needed a macbook upgrade (I've been using the same machine since 2008), but I have a feeling that the touch bar will fail and be removed in the next generation of macbooks. But buying the macbook without the touch bar means settling for lesser specs (and given that I'm thinking about buying a machine that would last me another 8 years it feels like a bad choice).

rietta
Buy a Apple Refurbished MacBook Pro from last generation. Get the discount and the warranty that way. And don't worry about it for 4 years.
landhar
Thanks, this actually sounds like the best compromise.
slantyyz
If you don't need retina and you want a 15" screen, I'd hunt down a 2012 15" MBP with a 1680x1050 screen. It's the last generation where you could make upgrades with commodity parts. You can even pull out the optical and stick in a second sata drive (but it will kill your battery). The i7 quad cores on those models still hold their own today.
iamatworknow
I wholeheartedly agree with this.

After a lot of debate and research, I bought the Fall 2013 MBP from Apple refurbished in the middle of 2014. They do an incredible job refurbishing, to the point where there was no way you could tell it was a used device other than it arriving in a nondescript box. Plus, I saved something like $400 off the price of what was still the latest model at the time.

In the past two and a half years the only "problem" I've had is that one of the rubber feet came off. It's still got more than enough power for the foreseeable future as well. Definitely recommended.

Oct 27, 2016 · 12 points, 0 comments · submitted by AlexeyBrin
This stuff always brings me back to "there's nothing more simple than one giant button" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA&t=2m24s is why

Seriously though, the Economist speculated it's because XP is being phased out.

"use j and k to select between objects in a scene" reminds me of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Apr 01, 2012 · Xlythe on Introducing Gmail Tap
I'm surprised. I thought Apple would have been the first to bring something like this to mobile since they already have a similar concept for laptops.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Perhaps G+ should substitute all comment boxes with dropdown menus

It would help with data hygiene. It would also integrate nicely with a no-keyboard computer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA "The aardvark admitted its fault."

Jan 22, 2011 · 3 points, 0 comments · submitted by yters
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