One of the character in Neal Stephenson ’s novelSnow Crashuses kniveswith edges a single corpuscle thickset , so keen they can cut through anything . I remember about those knives every prison term Apple announced a newer , fragile MacBook or iPad or iPhone .
Each unexampled contemporaries of Apple production strives to be thinner and light than the product that it ’s replacing . It is n’t always possible , but it ’s clearly a destination that drives Apple ’s product design decision .
And count where it ’s claim us . bring in in 1991 , the PowerBook 170 weighed 6.8 pounds and was 2.25 inches compact . Ten years later on the Titanium PowerBook G4 was a staggering “ one inch lean ” and count 5.3 pounds . Nine eld later the MacBook Air was .68 inch at its thickest point and weighed 2.4 pounds . And the new MacBook is .52 in at its deep point and weighs 2.03 pounds .
Even the MacBook Air looks beefy compare to the young MacBook .
likewise , the full - sized iPad has deoxidise from 1.5 pounds to .96 pound , and an iPad mini weighs just .69 pounds . Smaller and modest . Meanwhile , the iPhone keeps shrinking in one attribute while growing in the other two – all to create a bigger projection screen for us to view ( and make finger gestures on ) .
This approach has served Apple well , and customer seem to like thin , lighter thing , too . And yet I keep wondering where this trend end . Let ’s assume that a future MacBook wo n’t be a single atom dense , capable of slice up your enemies in two like those knives inSnow Crash . How tenuous is too thin ?
There’s always a trade-off
I love my MacBook Air . It attract to me in part because it ’s so thin and light . But Apple ’s pursuance of spareness and lightness has aftermath . Thinner and lighter devices have smaller barrage , low - power processors , and reduced space for interface and hack . The new MacBook features a keyboard withdramatically reduced cardinal locomotion , apparently due to size constraint .
This is n’t yet another article about the MacBook , though . It ’s about the ordered continuation of Apple ’s drive to get thinner and lighter . This has got to block up at some point — assuming that Apple ’s not go to make a monomolecular laptop computer that you could throw likeOddjob ’s hat . The question is , when ?
For a while now , Apple’sshot for a baseline of battery lifewhile making its machine thinner and lighter . Once the company decides that there are no thinner domain to conquer , would shelling life begin to increase ? Or will Apple continue to strive toward thinner , lighter equipment , even as the returns lessen rapidly as both free weight and thickness approach zero ?
If Apple ’s notebooks get any thin , they might ball up away .
orchard apple tree ’s content for alteration is one of the things I admire most about its corporate culture . I do marvel , sometimes , about how Apple will conform when it discovers that it ’s becoming increasingly difficult to make products thin and lightheaded . Will Apple note when the sacrifices necessary to make those product begin to outbalance the benefits ? What will be the moment of realization that the pursuit for slenderness and lightness has reached a fillet full stop ?
Then again : last yearApple filed a patentfor anext - generation periodic lecturer with a flexible display . So maybe we ’ll be seeing Apple devices so thin they could give you a paper track .
Perhaps the most enchanting part of this issue is how Apple ’s drive for technological advancement inevitably clashes with our own biology . Human body have n’t changed much in 200,000 year . Our heart are imperfect and get worse with geezerhood . Our hands come in a limited ambit of sizes , our fingertip are small , and we only have so many finger’s breadth .
In the goal , maybe the Apple Watch ( which has quite a piece of room to get thinner itself ! ) indicate a dissimilar way forward , with small technical school ware break up everywhere . Once there ’s a touchscreen display and microphone on your wrist joint , and a flyspeck wireless talker in your ear , and a fragile - but - not - too - fragile iPhone in your pocket , measuring and weighing every disjoined component of that constellation of machine might seem completely unimportant .
