It can be both, and often is. Honestly, I'd be surprised if Apple's continued push for thinness comes from just a single team. Design pushes for thinness, because hey, it looks pretty damned impressive. Engineering eventually figures out a way to make it work after (I presume) screaming a bit. Which is impressive.

Marketing and the business side love it because it's a concrete metric they can point to in order to justify it to consumers and it doesn't require any specialized knowledge for consumers to understand. Thickness is simple. Everyone can understand it, and some people can even use a ruler to measure it themselves.

And consumers continue to choose to reward them by buying thinner devices. After all, if we can't have flying cars, personal jetpacks, and live like The Jetsons right now, we damned sure can have thin devices as a consolation prize. Consumers would probably buy these devices even if they weren't thinner than the generation they replace, but it all gets tied together. Not to mention the pesky problem that the biggest problems (lack of repairability, keyboard switches that are deathly allergic to dust, etc.) aren't really noticeable until something goes wrong. And then, it's "my MacBook is broken" and not "my Macbook is broken and the ultimate cause is a zealous focus on thinner and thinner devices."

So here we are.

Cargo cult metrics.

Thinner for the sake of being thin has been an Apple problem for a while now.

Thinner for the sake of making other laptops look thick and crappy.

Maybe at some point that was true, it's not true anymore. Unless you're getting a gaming laptop, pretty much every ultrabook is only mildly thicker than the MacBook Air or Pro, some of them are thinner.

Just another way to impose impossible standards. =)

I have no idea about the inner workings of apple, but is it possible the design team is being driven by the marketing team's requirements?

Once again, I have 0 knowledge of the inner workings of apple, rather I am asking if this is a possibility.

Very unlikely. Ive is the successor to Jobs on the design front - what he and his team want to build chassis-wise, they're likely to build. He's got a great deal of political capital in the organization because he's been such a hit maker.

My semi-informed understanding of how things work at Apple wrt hardware is:

- Industrial design makes cool concepts, showing whats possible in hardware

- Eng & UX makes cool features, showing whats possible in software

- Product marketing determines mix of features that make for a compelling release

- Marcom figures out how to pitch it

Obviously lots of back and forth as a particular concept of what makes a compelling release is refined and roadmapped, and many other teams involved. That said, typically product marketing is driving what gets released.

As to the importance of product marketing itself, its one of Apple's greatest strengths because the vast majority of electronics/computer companies have a hard time figuring out a) what different segments of the market might want, and b) what is the intersection of possible AND useful with technology.

An easy way to determine if someone knows what they're talking about wrt Apple is if they complain about a monolithic 'marketing' bogeyman, because it shows they don't understand the nature of how products are built at Apple, nor how products succeed in the market.

That said, they occasionally miss. The keyboard has been generally well-received (tho a bit polarizing) EXCEPT for the obvious quality disaster. Not sure where the breakdown was there. And the touchbar has been very polarizing among the pro segment - the choice to bundle it with the high-end machines for the developer market segment was a miss likely entirely on product marketing.

Right, so you're saying it's not like the marketers walk in and say "we need it 0.2mm thinner because x product that released is thinner!!!"

Rather, the industrial design team tells them what they can do and product marketing informs the best mix?

Thanks for the response by the way, semi-informed is way better than my 0 informed.

I mean, I agree but that's a rude way to tell the above poster you disagree

Considering it reinforces a commonly held engineering ideology that only engineers understand or are capable of solving a problem or goal, and every other job function in a corporation is clueless deprivation of engineering, I’d say the response is fair. Apple is quite successful despite organizing in a way that baffles engineers, and will spend a bit recovering from this, then everyone will forget about it within a few Christmases. That’s not even advocacy, that’s just, like, exactly what will happen. It’s dust in the path of an asteroid at this point, with well-documented prior art. All of us with the keyboard get a bum deal, but events are probably proceeding exactly as engineered, if we are all honest with ourselves.

The correct following step is “what can I learn from that,” including, yes, many pitfalls and questionable decisions to learn, rather than “I know exactly what’s wrong with that success, and it’s business leaders.”

I realize the irony of saying this here, as many are at least amenable to said ideology. It also doesn’t strike me as an intentional color, just subtle thought basis underlying the sentiment.

I don't know. A lot of people are searching and holding out for non-Mac alternatives, because Apple ruined the calculus of "$200/yr premium in exchange for a device engineered to satisfy needs and comforts you didn't even realize you'd love", and replaced it with "No way I'm paying a fortune for a physically painful and unreliable keyboard that missing one of the critical keys just because some industrial designer was wants to feel special."