
End of the line for MacBook Pro - geophile
For nearly ten years, my entire computing environment has been a MBP with a Linux VM. OSX was an excellent end user (non dev) environment (music, photos, video), Linux is my preferred dev environment, and VMWare simplified wireless networking compared to some Linux&#x2F;raw metal systems.<p>Then, over ten years, OSX has steadily degraded. Some of the UI decisions were just terrible, e.g. the skeuomorphic Calendar app (RIP). iTunes has long been a mess. iPhoto and Photos have been completely inscrutable to me for a long time.<p>By adding the cloud to things, Apple tried to maintain the fiction that your content is seamlessly anywhere you need it, while safe in the cloud. But there are at least two ids to deal with (I think? Apple ID and something else?). Consuming content on my phone chews up the data permitted by my phone plan. What I would prefer is to manage file locations manually. But the design of the apps makes that difficult. I never know if it is safe to delete anything anywhere, because I don&#x27;t know the rules for propagating the deletion to other devices. It&#x27;s a mess.<p>And now, the absolutely terrible changes for the new MBP. Getting rid of the ESC and Fn keys, and what appears to be a crappy MB keyboard, instead of the old, far superior MBP keyboard. And the non-upgradability of components has really gone too far.<p>I have the last gen MBP before the current one, and hope it lasts a long time. But looking ahead: If I go to vanilla hardware running Linux, how can I sync photos, music and other data with my phone? I&#x27;d rather not go to Android, since it appears that Google&#x27;s incentive is to mine my data, and Apple does not appear to be in that business.
======
nicholas73
I curse every time I accidentally click iTunes or Photos, as it means I have
to wait minutes for my computer to stop lagging before I can close it. Worse,
if you exceed physical memory, it seems to have a permanent slowdown until you
restart. That's a feature back from the Win XP days.

The latest updates to iOS seem to make things laggier as well, to the point
where the keyboard might pause after I hit a key.

~~~
geophile
How old is your laptop? That sounds like the behavior of my previous MBP (the
one with an HD) toward the end of its life. I put it down to disk
fragmentation.

------
meric
The headphone jack to lightning connector doesn't work with Apple's iPhone
battery case, which means to use a battery case with iPhone 7, you have to get
a pair of wireless earbuds.

------
rohan_
People are being hyperbolic when they say Apple is "Getting rid of the ESC
key" right? You guys know it's still there on the touch bar right?
[https://www.wired.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/10/EscKey_TA-1...](https://www.wired.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/10/EscKey_TA-1024x768.jpg)

~~~
geophile
Yes, I know. Mechanical keyboard > old MBP keyboard > MB keyboard > virtual
keyboard. For the six rows of keys on an old MBP, Apple has taken one step
down on five rows, and two steps down on the sixth.

I concede that a mechanical keyboard is a bad choice for a laptop.

------
rm999
The MBP still has an escape key, unless you pay extra to "upgrade" to the
touch bar.

~~~
murukesh_s
And you can satisfy being treated as second class with low speed memory, Lowe
processor, leser ports etc.

