Prioritizing the MacBook Hierarchy of Needs

Jason Snell, writing for Six Colors: This week on the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP), John Siracusa floated the concept of a MacBook Hierarchy of Needs, a priority list of features for the next time Apple redesigns the MacBook line, as is rumored to happen later this year. It's a fun thought experiment, because it requires you to rank your wish list of laptop features. That's important, because if I've learned anything in this wacky world of ours, it's that you can never get everything you ask for, so you've got to prioritize.

The ATP hosts all made a 'good keyboard' their top priority, an idea that would've been surprising a few years ago but now is almost a given. Yes, of course, Apple laptops need to be fast and reliable and have great displays and good battery life, but the past few years' worth of MacBooks have made a lot of people realize the truth: a bad/unreliable laptop keyboard isn't something you can really work around if you're a laptop user. This is why a lot of nice-to-have-features, like SD card slots, have to fall way down the hierarchy of needs. Any feature that can be rectified with an add-on adapter falls immediately to the bottom of the list. You're stuck with a laptop keyboard forever, and if you're committed to the Mac and every single Mac laptop that's sold uses the exact same keyboard, there's nowhere to run.

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