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Brushing against the touchpad during video playback should do nothing, rather than its current behavior of seeking within the video.

Picking up the remote in any orientation and brushing against any part of it during handling, without physically pushing a button, should never result in accidental input. Picking it up should feel safe.

Touchpad seeking during video playback is already available when the video is paused by the Play/Pause button or, intuitively, clicking the trackpad — there’s no need to make it active all the time, when it frequently results in accidentally seeking videos, a highly disruptive usability failure.

This isn’t the Siri Remote’s only problem, but I think it’s the biggest. This rearrangement would solve some other problems.

The MD101LL/A, pixelated to simulate the quality of its screen.

The 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro, model MD101LL/A, was launched in 2012 for $1199. Almost four years later, it’s still for sale, completely unchanged except for a price drop to $1099 in 2013.

Despite the low-resolution screen, slow hard drives, very little RAM, and CPUs that were middling even in 2012, it’s an open secret among Apple employees that the “101” still sells surprisingly well — to a nearly tragic degree, given its age and mediocrity.

Geeks like me often wonder why anyone would still buy such an outdated machine. I’ve heard from many people who buy it (or who’ve been unsuccessful in talking others out of it), and it’s surprisingly compelling, especially for volume-buying, price-conscious customers such as schools and big businesses:

• It’s the only Mac with a DVD drive. Many people still want one, either “just in case” or for actually watching movies from discs on a regular basis. Geeks think such use is “dead” and long gone, but it’s far from it. (It’s also the only Mac still sold with FireWire and the only laptop with Ethernet built in, both of which still matter a lot to some buyers.)
• It’s the only Mac laptop that uses standard hard disks, meaning storage space is very cheap: 1 TB from Apple is only $50. And the disk can be easily and cheaply replaced if it fails, which is a huge win for IT departments and budget-conscious owners.
• It’s the only Mac laptop with upgradeable RAM. Many buyers can’t afford top specs up front, but would gladly upgrade down the road to extend the machine’s lifespan. Third-party RAM options are not only cheaper, but sometimes have higher limits: Apple won’t sell more than 8 GB in the 101, but OWC sells 16 GB for just $108.

• It’s very inexpensive, even when specced up. $1400 buys the fastest CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB disk from Apple.

  If you’re willing to use third-party RAM and disks, you can put 16 GB RAM and a 2 TB disk into Apple’s fast-CPU model for a total of only $1457. Or with a 1 TB SSD (!) for $1613.¹

  A modern 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro with a similar CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD is $2700. While it’s thinner and lighter and has better battery life, and the SSD is way faster than hard drives, it lacks the DVD drive, FireWire, Ethernet, and repairability. For many buyers, they’d rather save the $1100 and get the bulkier, slower, more expandable machine.

• It’s not that outdated. It has Thunderbolt, USB 3, and a multitouch trackpad (not Force Touch, although I consider that a plus). The low-resolution screen is the most obviously outdated part, but a lot of people simply don’t care enough.

  If you install an SSD, it’s even competitive on performance. In the Geekbench 64-bit benchmark, the 101’s base CPU is only 16% slower in single-threaded tasks and 25% slower in multi-threaded tasks than the 2015 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro’s base CPU. If you compare the best CPUs on each, the difference is only 7% and 9% for single- and multi-threaded, respectively.

I’m right there with everyone else who’d strongly advise against buying this machine for most people who’d ask me. But if someone has a tight budget, needs a lot of disk space, and doesn’t care about the screen, it’s hard to argue against the 101.²

As we’ve progressed toward thinner, lighter, more integrated Macs, we’ve paid dearly in upgradeability, versatility, and value. There are many Macs to choose from today, but in some ways, we have less choice than ever. The 101 represents the world we’re leaving behind, and our progress hasn’t all been positive.

The better question isn’t why anyone still buys the 101, but why the rest of the MacBook lineup is still less compelling for the 101’s buyers after almost four years, and whether Apple will sell and support the 101 for long enough for newer MacBook models to become compelling, economical replacements.

From Stephen Hackett’s The Supposed Problem of Choice, about Apple’s ever-broadening product line:

All of this adds up to the reality that the Apple that had a simple product line, and made things that all Apple nerds would enjoy, is no longer in business. […]

Ultimately, we have to be okay with that. I don’t think Apple’s widening product portfolio is a problem like it was in the 90s. […]

Not all of Apple’s products are for me anymore, and probably aren’t all for you, either. That’s totally fine, as weird as it may feel sometimes.

For the most part, I agree. It’s not a problem when Apple releases a product, in isolation, that’s not for me — nobody’s forcing me to buy everything they make.

The problem is when the products that aren’t for me negatively affect the ones that are. Apple has limited resources, so boring, older products often get neglected or made worse by decisions made for the younger or more mass-market ones.

And as much as it seems like the product line is more cluttered and expansive than ever, there still isn’t a lot of overlap. For instance, when Apple made the new cylinder Mac Pro even more specialized, limited, and expensive than the previous, more general-purpose tower, nothing replaced the lost roles previously filled by the tower — they either go unserved, or get wedged into nearby products like the cylinder Mac Pro or 5K iMac even if they don’t serve those roles as well (or at all).

Overall, the product line is better than ever, and covers a more broad range of needs than ever, but there have been quite a few casualties along the way. The breadth of the product lineup has been achieved in part by making some of the products serve much narrower roles, sometimes unnecessarily. It’s hard to celebrate every change when your needs fall on the wrong side of one.

Every so often, this comes up, and is met with two responses:

1. There’s no point! People can’t hear anything above 16/44!
2. Finally! I can hear the difference, and I won’t buy anything below 24/192 or DSD or lossless or whatever!

Technically, both are correct.

Benefits of higher-than-16/44 audio sampling are indeed both inaudible in theory and undetectable in controlled testing. Lossless encoding being indistinguishable from well-encoded lossy compression isn’t quite as clear-cut, but it’s close — it’s at least safe to say that most people can’t tell the difference.

But audiophiles buy and swear by tons of products that only offer placebo benefits. Selling snake oil to audiophiles is not only a very profitable business, but one could argue that it isn’t even usually a scam — in most cases, both the sellers and the buyers believe in the benefits being sold. Placebo benefits are real to their observers, and placebo-based demand is still demand.

While audiophiles who demand high-resolution formats are a tiny fraction of all Apple customers, they’re probably a much bigger portion of those who buy a lot of music.

Apple may offer higher-than-16/44 and/or lossless music downloads at some point, but it would be neither a scam nor an indicator that they believe in audiophile pseudoscience — it would simply be a response to strong demand from a very profitable market. And as long as Apple’s not serving their demands, they risk losing them to competing ecosystems.