Biggest new feature they could add would be to not have an additional screen taking up battery life and shining in my face, unable to be dimmed with f.lux.
Maybe instead we could have a row of keys that provide some sort of function, and maybe a key that allows the user to escape. That would be a pretty useful feature that I can guarantee I would use dozens or hundreds of times a day.
I'm considering replacing my MacBook Pro soon, and I might have to drop macOS from my 3 OS lineup. I can't justify an expensive but locked down desktop machine, so if the laptops aren't meeting my needs either then goodbye Apple.
I had to replace my 2015 MBP last week, because the kb started failing (it wasn't one of the ones eligible for a free repair, sadly, and I can't live without a machine for however long it takes them to fix it anyway). I was really torn, because although I could reluctantly live without the function keys, the escape key is a complete dealbreaker.
After much debate I decided to take a chance on a surface book. I figured I'd try it, try and get my dev environment in a decent place, and see how I felt about windows after 30 days, with the idea that I might have to return it if things didn't work out. I'm 6 days in, and I can pretty safely say there's no way I'm going back to apple. Windows has managed not to suck at all, my dev environment is arguably better than what I had before, and I'm absolutely loving the machine itself. Most joyful new laptop experience in many years.
Not my experience. I have to use windows at work. Got ubuntu running in a vm. Buggy as shit.
- sharing screen in hangouts puts chrome on every virtual desktop so now you can't click on chrome to navigate to that desktop
- slack crashes silently every 24 hours
- virtual desktops is a mess, if one window overflows into another desktop, then when you click on that app ubuntu will take you to the desktop where you see the least amount of your application, usually just a few pixels on the top of the screen
- copy-paste sucks balls, in some applications it's ctrl-c in others its shift-ctrl-c and some applications will copy to clipboard if you select a string
- keyboard support is terrible, in intellij i can't type `or ´ or ~ but I can type all those in gedit and then i have to copy paste them over
- ctrl-a and ctrl-e don't work in most applications, even though these are old school shortcuts that work nearly everywhere on a mac
- installing applications is always terrible on ubuntu. You can install from their app-store, if that works (50/50 odds) but you can't get intellij there, or sublime. To install sublime I had to find a blog post with 4-5 steps I needed to do. For intellij I also found a blogpost, but when I need to upgrade intellij I couldn't find it anymore and had to delete everything inside my intellij folder and copy a new intellij in.
> installing applications is always terrible on ubuntu.
there are three main was of "installing applications on ubuntu":
1. main software repositories; this is essentially 1-click install (if you go through the software management application)
2. installing from a PPA (e.g. Sublime); this is 1-line copy/execute (add-apt-repository XYZ), then update (apt update) and 1-click install
3. rarely, you install binaries directly; this is a double click.
none of them is terrible. the vast majority of the Ubuntu/Debian linux software is provided and installed via 1. (update obsessed users use 2.), which is a much faster workflow than windows, and immensely safer.
If a software is fidgety in a version 3 installer, it has nothing to do with Linux, as it's almost exactly the counterpart of the typical windows installation, it's just badly packaged by the developer; binary installers are a small minority anyway.
> copy-paste sucks balls, in some applications it's ctrl-c in others its shift-ctrl-c and some applications will copy to clipboard if you select a string
this is not correct. Ctrl+C/V are the standard, the exception (not "some applications") being the terminal, because Ctrl+C has different semantics.
> keyboard support is terrible, in intellij i can't type `or ´ or ~ but I can type all those in gedit and then i have to copy paste them over
you may have a misconfigured keyboard. run the live version of ubuntu, test the keyboard with the installer, then configure the same on your installed system.
>> copy-paste sucks balls, in some applications it's ctrl-c in others its shift-ctrl-c and some applications will copy to clipboard if you select a string
> this is not correct. Ctrl+C/V are the standard, the exception (not "some applications") being the terminal, because Ctrl+C has different semantics.
I agree that it sucks (in a CMD shell). It's the reason I switched to a Mac when I became a developer. Maybe it's come a long way. I've heard good things about PowerShell, too, but honestly haven't played with it much.
As far as the Linux subsystem, I wouldn't use it for anything serious. It choked the first time I tried installing Elixir.
I'd probably rely on a Vagrant VM running in VirtualBox (or whatever VM host makes the most sense on Windows).
When using the "Ubuntu Software" application I am shown results for snaps, as well as results from the apt repos. Creates a bit of confusion as to which one should be installed, even more so when version numbers vary between the two.
I use snaps for isolated software that I want more or less continuous stable updates for, apt for system components that'll stay on the same major version until I upgrade the OS.
I managed to install docker according to docker's own tutorial. Then 4 months later I get an update from ubuntu to upgrade my docker. I thought, that sounds about right....why not??? So after the "upgrade" I now had two different versions of docker installed at the same time in two different locations and neither of them wanted to start. That was a great start to my day and cost me an hour or so to fix.
I was a windows guy for many years before switching to OSX in 2006 (I actually worked for microsoft in the early 90's, but we all hated windows as much as the rest of the world, maybe moreso, because we had to develop on weekly builds). Therefore I have seen windows suck in a wide variety of ways, hence my desire to try it for 30 days and return it if needs be. In all my years in the windows world. I've never seen an app use anything other than ctrl-c/ctrl-v for copy paste (ok, I think you used to be able to do ctrl-ins, shift-ins, but that was optional), but the rest of your experiences sound quite plausible. I haven't run into any of them.
Also, I don't have to restart my wifi 5 times a day anymore, which is kind of a nice win.
EDIT: Oops, I thought these were complaints about windows (highly plausible!). actually it's unix under windows. Apologies.
I know classic Linux defense bullshit but these all aren't typical 'Linux issues'.
I can only guess the desktop you used but I assume we talk about Unity/Wayland. Ubuntu removed Unity meanwhile for the Way cleaner Gnome Shell (however I don't know if they have some custom bullshit in there again)
Shortcuts are often miss configured on system level. I noticed nonsense issues therelike as well on Ubuntu.
There are highly different software repository concepts like pacman and the AUR on arch where you have a package selection right there you could never experience anywhere else.
What I am trying to say is that there is no one Linux, I don't like vanilla Ubuntu. However having used any OS in the recent years I love going back to MY Linux.
Edit:// oh the shortcuts are also likely due to the VM I just realized
He also complains about a Chrome bug, a Slack bug, and an IntilliJ bug. 3rd parties doing no QA and not respecting UX conventions on the most popular distro is a problem, but not really with Linux.
2 out of three are proprietary software that you pay for and all 3 have free alternatives that are better.
He's also running unknown version of Ubuntu, probably old, that he doesn't know how to use properly. Odds are really great he's one of those that pastes unknown terminal commands from blog posts to achieve goals he doesn't quite understand and his install is screwed up in some way that would require hours of troubleshooting or 30 minutes to install over top of.
Its like reading an analysis of Chinese quisine written by a guy who only buys past date 99c frozen dinners.
That CTRL+SHIFT+C thing in Gnome Terminal/Ubuntu (and some others) has driven me nuts for years!!! yes, I get that CTRL+c means something different in the context of shell execution. But it's still maddening.
Middle click to paste is an unrelated thing that drives me up the wall in Linux. Many of the programs I use on a daily basis have specific actions triggered by a middle click that I use often, but if I miss my target and hit a text area instead, it injects whatever I had in my clipboard into the text, often without me realizing it until later. (In one instance, my clipboard contents made it into an email I sent out. Thankfully, it was minor enough that it just looked like a typo, but it could have been much worse.)
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any way to turn off this behavior.
I have a similar setup at work, albeit Ubuntu VM in a Mac OS host (I don't like Mac OS). A lot of these sound like VM issues. For example - the copy to clipboard if you select a string. That's how your VM is "sharing" the clipboard between the VM and the host. Try highlighting a string in the VM and then hitting paste in a text editor in the host and you'll see what I mean.
> - ctrl-a and ctrl-e don't work in most applications, even though these are old school shortcuts that work nearly everywhere on a mac
The shortcuts for text fields on Windows are not consistent either, are they?
I am very used to the organization of shortcuts on macOS, especially those for text editing. Strangely, that's what I miss on Linux the most now. However, it's probably easier to provide them to users when there is only one mainstream GUI toolkit (and, for instance, in Office for mac some of those shortcuts don't work).
I have 3 different distros running on as many machines all work fine and one is based on ubuntu LTS. Probably what you should be running but whatever.
"- keyboard support is terrible, in intellij i can't type `or ´ or ~ but I can type all those in gedit and then i have to copy paste them over"
Do you really believe people have this issue? Do you think we all have emailed ourselves documents full of all the characters are OS are too broken to recognize? Something is screwed up about how your vm or your vm software is configured that you are blaming on the OS. I have used over a dozen distros in a multitude of versions and none had any problem with hitting a key and having a character appear on the screen.
"virtual desktops is a mess, if one window overflows into another desktop, then when you click on that app ubuntu will take you to the desktop where you see the least amount of your application, usually just a few pixels on the top of the screen"
This sounds sub-optimal but may I suggest you keep windows on one screen. Most environments provide a hotkey to move a window to a certain screen and many provide hotkeys to resize it to either fill the entire screen or some portion thereof like the left/right/top/bottom half or just drag the window all the way onto the screen you intend to use it on.
Personally I prefer the way i3wm handles virtual desktops. They are PER monitor. Optimally you just assign each workspace to a particular output. Example 1-5 on left monitor 6-0 on right and switch a given output and to a given workspace with one click of super or cmd + number.
Want to view your chat app on the right monitor while leaving your browser alone on the left cmd + 7. Its also substantially lightweight which means it would work better on a vm.
The great thing about it is that there isn't ONE way to handle virtual desktops there are a bunch of different environments available one of which probably works optimally for you.
"- ctrl-a and ctrl-e don't work in most applications, even though these are old school shortcuts that work nearly everywhere on a mac"
Many applications are configurable but honestly different environments different conventions this isn't a bug its just a difference.
"- installing applications is always terrible on ubuntu. You can install from their app-store, if that works (50/50 odds) but you can't get intellij there, or sublime. To install sublime I had to find a blog post with 4-5 steps I needed to do. For intellij I also found a blogpost, but when I need to upgrade intellij I couldn't find it anymore and had to delete everything inside my intellij folder and copy a new intellij in."
Installing applications is fantastically easy and works every single time. Most common stuff is available in the repo and you can apt install foo or use the gui if you like.
Most less common stuff is available in a 3rd party repo. If you need such the workflow is google ppa somesoftware note the ppa involved and run
if you get bored and want to automate that in fish
function ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:$argv
sudo apt-get update
if [ $argv[2..-1] ]
sudo apt install $argv[2..-1]
end
end
ppa someaddress somesoftware bam installed
example want newer gimp
ppa otto-kesselgulasch/gimp gimp
When you say it works 50/50 you don't mean that it fails half the time you mean that it installs almost all things just fine save for a few quite frankly mediocre poorly chosen apps that you simultaneously actually pay money for but don't get good support for your environment.
This is probably because your environment is some 7 year old version of ubuntu that is similar to what your servers are running. Seriously the last time I installed intelij I just had to unzip an archive, add to path, and tell it where to get java. This "Install" in /opt actually survived multiple distros and worked without complaint.
Shockingly the instructions you found on the internet probably didn't cover the case of running new sofware on an obsolete base.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is what I'm running. Set it up about 9 months ago. Nothing special, haven't configured much expect hosts and the number of virtual desktops (which requires googling and special terminal commands to do, why is there no setting for this in the UI when it's a UI feature???)
Then I guess it runs Unity and when it comes to Unity I'll personally agree with some of the criticism:
Ubuntu Unity was always too opinionated and lacked the necessary UX testing IMO. (Yep, they seemed to have tested it, but not on enough power users; some power users (a lot of them around here it seems) love Unity. Others like me find it a producrivity disaster, probably for some of the same reasons as you found.
That said, a lot of the rest seems like a mix of misunderstandings and broken config either in the host or in the VM.
the only viable linux platform remaining is the one loosely organised and licensed around the world called "Android". with recent advances in ARM64 chips and extremely fast processors some OEM's are releasing desktop modes for android. Its truly the final frontier of linux, hopefully this idea can aleviate those issues you've had with linux. Applications work consistently on Android although there is still the app gap of stuff not yet ported onto google play store.
I was extremely unsatisfied with the promise and then the delivery of my surface pro, ended up selling it to a friend with lighter computing needs. The touch bar macbook seems pretty useful itself considering how insanely good its IO is (4 thunderbolt ports!!!). I haven't been able to use it as much and im waiting for better eGPU options to come out.
in the mean time I'm stuck just like you in the world of linux. My primary desktop pc for the past 9 months was my galaxy note 8 with a usb c to hdmi adapter. it has an incredible chromebook like UI when docked and has all the linux tools i need! I've even been able to write an app and submit it to the app store all from there. You really cant go back after you've tried one device life and it makes filming and editing content for my youtube channel seamless since video never leaves the 256gb SD card inside my phone.
Huawei has a similar mode and i cant wait for google to support it. they do natively support windowed mode and moving apps freely but i mean just add a chromebook ui to the screen when u dock a pixel 3 and you will be golden :)
> The touch bar macbook seems pretty useful itself considering how insanely good its IO is (4 thunderbolt ports!!!)
Can a machine have "insanely good IO" if dongles are required for everything from iPhones to hard drives to memory cards? I could agree that a machine with 4 thunderbolt ports on top of the regular complement of power, USB-A, and SD slots would be insanely great. But I'm living the dongle life and not loving it.
A machine can have "insanely good IO" if you're not judging it in the context of older hardware, yes.
Four thunderbolt ports is great. One adapter to plug in all of the things you mentioned is also great. iPhones and hard drives don't need dongles, they just need cables. A USB-C to USB-B 3.1 cable is $1.33 from Monoprice; USB 2.0 version is just $1.12. Not too shabby.
For iPhones: the only times I've had to plug my iPhone into my laptop is doing development, but a cable for that only costs $20.
But let's compare it to the previous (2015) MacBook Pro: two USB ports and two Thunderbolt-and-Displayport ports, and HDMI. Five ports total, but no flexibility. Our office was full of DP-to-DVI dongles already, so swapping one dongle for another seems like a no-op. Difference now is that we can buy USB-C monitors which also serve as a power source and a USB hub, meaning one cable to plug in my entire desk. That's something you can't really get on the old MacBooks (at least, not without spending a lot more than it costs to do it on the new MacBooks.
So yeah, the machine has "insanely good IO", and once the rest of the world catches up it'll be even better.
I feel that these discussions are always going back and forth because TB3 is a fantastic docking station port, and a niche port for everything else, so both sides are right. Comparing the 2016+ port selection to the 2015 one is a false dichotomy created by Apple. The straightforward upgrade path would have been to replace TB2 by TB3, like they did on the iMacs.
Exactly. There's nothing wrong with TB3 as a connectivity option, but it shouldn't be the only option.
I understand the desire to make the machine thin, which means the old USB had to go. But taking out the SD card slot makes it seem like they don't want you to have an easy way to add more onboard (-ish) storage space.
>So yeah, the machine has "insanely good IO", and once the rest of the world catches up it'll be even better.
I mean, that's the thing. Apple jumped ahead, and USB-C just isn't common. (At least, for me. I can't name any device I've used or even heard of that uses USB-C.) So, it's a less than practical option if you're in the market for a laptop, not so much insanely good.
I wouldn't buy a computer with only serial and parallel ports because none of my devices use them, and I wouldn't buy a computer with only USB-C ports, because none of my devices use them.
> if dongles are required for everything from iPhones
I never understood this complaint. AFAIK, I've never seen a macbook with a lightning port or the older 13-pin iphone port. If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable. Then you can use the macbook to charge your phone, or the usb-c charger that charges your laptop to charge your phone. Or yes, you can get a usb-c to usb-a dongle - but you can just as easily get the appropriate cable. I'm also seeing that Apple is going to start producing usb-c chargers for iphones and ipads (with a usb-c to lightning cable) in the near future.
I'm a macbook + android user, so I've had USB-C phones for a while, so now I can use the same cable and charger for my laptop or my phone.
> If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable.
iPhones don't come with these, so it basically means you have to go out and buy another cable, which won't work with any of the wall charger power bricks that came with your previous iPhones. I understand a change needs to be made at some point, but it's strange for Apple to ship computers with no ports that are compatible with their iPhones.
iPhone syncs on WiFi to Mac. I do not charge my phone with my laptop. I have an inductive charger on my desk at home, desk at work, table next to bed. I just set the phone on it.
I guess that works great for people who spend hundreds of dollars on inductive chargers!
I work in many environments and just bring a charge cable with me.
Of course, the iphone was just one of many things that I was noting isn’t compatible. External hard drives? Thumb drives? SD cards? All easily plugged into my previous Apple laptop, but require a dongle here. I have a mini-hub, but even that isn’t great because it can’t charge anything.
Glad they're cheap now! I stand corrected on that point. Curious to know your thoughts on the question of hard drives etc. Seems to me like Apple jumped the gun here.
Eh, is what it is. I recently swapped my MacBook Pro with TB for a MacBook. The HD is plugged into the Apple (LG) 4K. It runs at USB2 in this setup. I duplicated the same keyboard, mouse, monitor, HD at work and at home. I like 1 cable and the smaller size of the monitor given the resolution works fine. For me, the size and weight of the laptop was key due to 150K miles a year on a plane. Does the rsync of the HD to the home NAS take longer, yup. Does it matter, no. It’s a script that runs when the device is plugged in, in the background. If I need to do heavy lifting, CPU, compile, etc, I ssh to a rack of build servers in a colo. 3 racks of 48 cores a blade with a huge SSD NAS and 10G or 25G NICs sort everything. It is really about YOUR workflow and what works for you. My laptop is pretty much a window to google docs and for everything technical it is pretty much the same as a dumb X terminal. It works for me as my goal workflow is always the same no matter where I am.
> If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable.
The problem is that when they purchased the iPhone, it came with said cable.
I purchased an iPhoneX this year and it comes with, you guessed it, a USB-A cable. So in order to connect it to my new Apple laptop I need to buy either a $20 cable or a special dongle? If Apple wants to go all in on USB-C then they shouldn’t still be shipping their top of the line “futuristic” phone with USB-A cables.
But obviously they already know that they would have gotten many dissatisfied customers complaining about having to buy a cable just to ‘connect their phone to their iTunes’ if they did that.
Termux emulates Zsh for me and gives access to apt-get. so I installed nodejs through apt and made the project with react native and expo. compiling the binary for uploading to Google Play Store was a tricky step and I hope to improve the workflow in the future but for now had to cheat. Expo.io provides a build service for free where they will compile and sign your app for you.
ideally i need to get a copy of OpenJDK installed and build with gradle but this was much easier.
Expo also allows you to build an iOS blob from Android entirely assuming you have a way to get it onto an iphone through testflight.
My Windows machine at home is awful. Every time I go to boot it up, I have to wait another 5 minutes for it to… whatever it does, finish windows updates I assume.
I shut it down before a trip to Montreal; two weeks later I came back and it wouldn't boot. No idea why. Had to restore from a previous system snapshot and re-install a bunch of drivers and windows updates.
It's a lot better than it was, but there's still strange, ridiculous stuff that crops up seemingly out of nowhere.
My windows machine at home is always on, it's 6 years old and it's great. The only thing that has gone wrong is the motherboard failed, I replaced that and it's still chugging along quite nicely!
I cut my teeth on Windows with Microsoft Visual Studio Basic in the 2000s, then Windows/Dev-Cpp because of poor MSVC++ support for some C++ features I thought I needed at the time, switched to Mac/Vim, then had a 6ish year stent with Ubuntu and Vim as an IDE. But then a botched upgrade from 14.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS lead to a few frustrating hours of my time to get X to even load. I'll never see that time again. Now I'm back on Windows, and somehow have drudged along without installing Cygwin yet, although that's coming. Developing Java has been a pleasant experience with IntelliJ IDEA. The GUI use is taking getting used too-- but configuring IDE things like language servers is mostly automagic and have very reasonable defaults. The biggest issue I've had is Windows upgrades requiring random restarts completely interrupting my workflow. But, overall, rediscovering Windows has been a pleasant experience for me too.
Is there some missing repository you need to add to the Windows Ubuntu? Every time I've tried to install some one-off tool Stackoverflow has suggested (yesterday it was ncftp, the other day it was some ssh configuration, ifconfig isn't there) apt can't find it.
it's the same userland as "real" Ubuntu, so apt will give you the same results on both.
Perhaps do a "sudo apt-get update" (updates the local resources of apt, not the packages themselves) so that when you do a "apt search" or "show" in the future it has something to show?
Filesystem performance is a bit crap and you can't run Docker in Windows Home, but otherwise I found WSL pretty great. The Docker thing finally turned into a dealbreaker for me though, so after about two years of WSL I'm back to linux.
The lack of Docker support with WSL stopped me in my tracks too, or I'd have probably moved back to windows as my daily driver. I don't enjoy dual-boot for gaming as I only game occasionally and have to deal with a backlog of windows updates when I do.
> but configuring IDE things like language servers is mostly automagic and have very reasonable defaults.
What does configuring IDE things have to do with Windows? Wouldn't IntelliJ have the same reasonable defaults on Linux and macOS? Or is it a different product somehow (haven't used it myself.)
I just moved from an XPS to a surface book and I'd say if you can afford it go for the surface book, it's everything I liked about the XPS but with a detachable keyboard and a pen extra.
How does it compare to the XPS 2-in-1 models? The 3:2 aspect ratio seems tempting (even if slightly lower resolution) as does the battery life. Pen support should be quite comparable (wacom AES vs N-Trig), I guess?
Reviews said batterylife with the screen detached is very short?
The big drawback for me for the surface book would seem to be the subpar support for other OSs.
Pen support is better than the original surface pro's, which I believe were wacom. Hard to pin that on pen tech vs OS improvements, though. The pen needing a Quad-A battery is a bit annoying, but they're not too hard to find, and just one lasts a long time.
Battery life with a detached screen is short, but you'll only really need it detached if you're walking around with it. If you're sitting or lying down, you can just attach it backwards and fold it back onto the keyboard. Heavier, but not to the point of annoyance, and it gives it a nice tilt for reading things if it's on a desk.
Battery life with the keyboard attached is incredible, especially if you can dim the monitor a bit and run in battery saving mode. (The battery saver mode does have a pretty significant perf hit, though). Just don't try to use it at full speed, at least with an i7 and discrete GPU - I can kill my battery in under 2 hours if I try to run something like a graphics-intensive game. For dev stuff I've never had a problem.
Multi-OS support is probably an issue, though WSL does seem to do a pretty good job of most things.
Windows because I use it primarily for gaming/light browsing when away from my desktop, VM for other things. I bought it when I injured my leg and couldn't easily get up to my office.
Source? I can only find articles of people complaining that they can not get the switchable graphics to work or can get it to work and have horrible battery life. This guy (https://medium.com/@kemra102/linux-on-the-dell-xps-15-919e6d...) tried 11 linux distributions and describes his experience as "horrible".
I can't speak to the 15" versions, but my XPS13 (onboard graphics only) runs KDE Neon beautifully with no noise or build quality issues.
It's probably my favorite work laptop to date. The only minor gripe is that I haven't been able to find a good combination of settings to prevent accidental touchpad activation while typing.
People also often mention coil whine which I haven't noticed on this model, the 15" might be different.
What are you using for the terminal? I just started a new job with a Windows desktop provided and I can't get much done on it because every terminal emulator I can find sucks compared to iTerm 2 on my MBP, so much that I'm going in to IT to beg them to let me use it, or at least let me dual-boot Ubuntu. Bash on Windows has no way to add solarized light/dark or groovebox themes, much less switch between them daily like I like to do when I get stuck on something and need to see it differently. Also the Windows bash home is a no-mans-land once you want to open something up with Atom on Windows. Directories I make in Bash don't show up in File Explorer once I spend 5 minutes navigating to the right place. Font rasterizing and color-coding is awful too, on the native Bash, CMDR, and Hyper.JS. It's so frustrating.
Yet, the customizability rocks, and since xterm.js now renders using Canvas, performance is decent, and with my incoming MBP 32GB, I can afford the memory hit even more!
Although installing the plugins is asking for your fans to spin up.
You shouldn't use windows to access the WSL filesystem, there are several issues with that (which I believe are being worked on). If you want files accessible from both put them in the Windows filesystem.
Regarding themes I can't help that much, I have successfully solarized vim though. I needed:
let g:solarized_termcolors=256
set term=screen-256color
set t_ut=
If you're like me you're stuck in an older version of Windows 10 where WSL has serious bug the most recent version are very stable but if your work has you stuck on an old build it might not work well.
I opted for a Xiaomi laptop. Best purchase I ever made. Amazing build quality, out of the box compatibility with Linux, great hardware specs. I can't believe that near MBP clone only set me back 550€.
How does the trackpad on the Xiaomi compare with the MBP? I'm considering buying a cheaper MBP alternative and running Linux on it but I don't want to be carrying an external mouse around with me.
Hey, what was wrong with your keyboard? Was the trackpad also not working when you had keyboard problems?
You may have had a common issue with the 2015 Macbook Pros, literally tens of thousands of people have Googled that problem on Youtube. Apple won’t admit that it’s a problem with hose models but if you take it to an Apple Store they’ll conveniently take $500 to replace the keyboard.
Anyways it’s an introduced bug due to a design flaw in the models released in 2015. They placed the ribbon cable flat on top of the battery on those models, and when the battery heats up and expands, as it does, it damages the ribbon cable. Prior models had the ribbon cable avoiding the battery by going around it. You can fix it yourself by replacing the ribbon cable. The ribbon cable costs $10 online and it’s the first thing you see when you open up the macbook, you don’t have to dig to get to it. No special equipment needed besides the screws to get the Macbook open.
For awhile the 'e' key was only working about 90% of the time. Then it began working about 120% of the time, so I had to remap it to nothing, move the 'e' to the backslash, and plug in an external keyboard. The trackpad and all the rest of the keys were working just fine. I usually replace machines every three years or so anyway, so the key issue was just the trigger. Thank you for your advice. Do you think that might be the issue, given that the trackpad worked fine?
Intermittent keyboard problems are the early signs. But I haven’t heard of it affecting just a single key.
The trackpad and keyboard both use the ribbon cable, so when it fails completely, both the trackpad and keyboard will stop responding.. With the exception of the power button.
It’s a toss-up if it’s the same issue with only one key being unresponsive. Could just be a bad key. But I’d give it a shot since it’s only a $10 fix with a t6 screwdriver. Or if you want, mail it to me and I’ll fix it and use the laptop as a secondary computer to run my data visualization computations =D
Heh... the current plan is to hold onto it as a backup (in case windows decides to rise up and ruin me in a couple months) and just use it with an external kb.
Trading a touchbar escape key for Windows? As a Mac user that uses Vim, that touchbar escape seems easy to adapt to compared to adapting to an entirely different OS (and Windows at that!)
I recall when touchbar first launched, someone on HN pointed out that Esc is a poor way to use Vim anyway and there are far better mappings. I swapped to Ctrl-[ before I even had a new MBP and much prefer it. The “Esc problem” is a drastic reason to throw your whole hardware/OS stack our the window IMO.
As a long time emacs user, I've always had cap-locks mapped as my control key (plus the emacs key-bindings work in html forms and in anything using gnu deadline) which is a bonus. So on my MBP with touch-bar, I have had this mapping so I can have a physical ESC key:
CAPSLOCK -> CTRL
LEFT CTRL -> ESC
It's not great, but it works. The last time I had to deal with a company who put the ESC key in a weird place was back in college where we have several of these HP Apollo/720 keyboards:
My sense of the comment was not that he was trying to change your mind, but rather saying it seems unusual to be so fixated on the escape key that nothing else matters.
Having said that, yes, Apple should allow individuals to, for example, always require the touch bar to provide an escape key (or any other key) on the far left (or anywhere else on the touch bar). The user should get to control what the touch bar does through an easy and powerful interface and API (so third parties can extend the capabilities). Can we even make touch bar keys act as new meta keys? That would rule! The benefit of the Apple approach is that even if this has not been done yet, it's all software: it could be done.
As far as Windows, I guess it must come down to which features are important to you, and personal taste. I use Windows a lot, and have owned a Surface Pro, and boy I hated it. The very, very best thing about Windows is the Linux compatibility layer, and even that's not as good as if it were a real Unix-like platform all the way down.
I am indeed glad you're happy with your laptop (seriously; not sarcasm), but I've been there, done that, and hated it.
I wouldn't say I'm so fixated on the escape key that nothing else matters. The base OS matters a great deal! I pursued three lines at this particular fork in the road, I considered buying a 2016 MBP, a refurb or whatever, I considered switching to unix on whatever hardware (leant toward dell XPS), and I considered a windows box, with unix living underneath, somehow. The first option just seemed crazy to me, perhaps irrationally, but making my new machine a two year old machine just felt wrong, the second option could have mostly worked, except that I really need excel, and I really want ableton. I decided to give the third option a try, thanks to the money back guarantee, and I'm amazed at the improvement.
I suffered the temporary pain of switching to OSX in '06 because I'm not religious about these things, and at that time macbooks running OSX were providing an exceptional environment for devs like me. It was a hard transition, but after a couple of months I was (mostly) fine. A fair amount has changed in the world in 12 years, and I'm no longer convinced that OSX inherently provides the best environment for a dev. I figured give windows a shot and see how it goes. It took me 24 hours to get the machine in a state where I could work as before (this would have been impossible on a windows box in 2006), and the question now becomes, why would I go back? It's only been a week, so perhaps windows will show me why very soon, but my gut feeling is it won't.
Also worth considering, is that from about 2000 onwards, apple was catering to open source focussed devs, at the exact moment that microsoft was making their lives impossible. I think that trend may have been reversed. Every upgrade to OSX for the past six years or so has represented more pain than pleasure for me. YMMV, but microsoft's offerings, even when flawed seem to be headed in the right direction.
As far as the comment, yeah, I was a little snarky I suppose, but a common response to complaints about the lack of an escape key is "you don't actually need one". I'm sorry, but I do. Ok, I don't need one. but I really want one, and this is a laptop we're talking about, and I use it as a laptop most of the time. I also want ports, a headphone jack, etc. But the escape key is for me the last straw, and enough of an incentive to actually look on the other side of the fence, which I've avoided doing for 12 years. I like what I see there.
it goes beyond the displayed icon certainly, but definitely not to the physical extent of the whole bar, for at least mine and another that I've tried.
There's at least 2-3mm of dead space on the LHS of the bar.
Sadly I already remap caps-lock to ctrl. Don't worry though, this SB2 is so nice I'm no longer feeling any pain. Literally my only complaint about it so far is that the headphone jack is in the wrong place (it's on the edge of the screen in the upper right, which is sort of an odd place for a wire to be coming out. It should be on the lower edge either left or right.)
I left Mac for a Surface Book a couple of years ago. It was a challenge at first. Largely because of WSL speed, but that has been mostly fixed now (test suite may be a few seconds longer, but it isn't 10x longer)
I am browsing the thread out of FOMO and don't feel any urge to switch back.
I hear you. The little annoyances are far outweighed by the positives. Even the display seems crisper which I didn't expect over a retina display. WSL is not amazing performance, but it's probably about the same (the machine itself is faster, phoenix under WSL is not. Perhaps that's the perf issue at play)
So my main concern was being able to easily run elixir/erlang, with some flavor of unix as a production target. Therefore running natively on windows was, at best, a nice to have. On OSX I could just work in the native environment, since it's unix, albeit a bit of a peculiar unix with the occasion random odd thing installed to trick me. On windows I've found two possible solutions so far. The first is Ubuntu installed under WSL. I've heard people complain that WSL doesn't always work, but so far I've had no issues. easily installed elixir, erlang, npm and vim. Phoenix works no problem. I installed elixir natively on windows as well, just to see if I could, and again, no problems at all, and it works fine. I'm using cmder, which gives you a much more unix-like command environment. Chocolatey is the equivalent of homebrew, and actually seems to be superior, or at least more complete. ("choco install chrome", "choco install spotify", kinda handy). I'm mostly a vim guy, but I'm not religious about that. Neovim worked fine in WSL, so that's all good for now. Might give vscode a shot, as it has some nice elixir plugins.
Finally, I installed vagrant under windows, with virtualbox. I haven't used that before, but I think it could provide another alternative dev environment in case WSL turns out to be unreliable. My ultimate fallback plan was always to use vmware or similar and just run unix for dev, windows for things like excel, but my feeling is I'm not going to have to do that.
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I know it's trendy to hate on the touchbar... but for what it's worth, I personally find it more useful than the old function keys.
Most mac apps don't use function keys as shortcuts, so the old keyboard ended up being used for media keys (volume, brightness, play/pause, etc.).
The touch bar gives me a better version of that (I actually get a volume slider), plus more apps actually make use of that space to provide useful shortcuts now. And the scrub bar for media playback is really great when you have audio playing in the background.
Yes, you lose tactile feedback. But battery life doesn't seem to be a big problem. At least for me, it's been net positive.
The touchbar hate is not trendy. It's based in specific complaints.
If, on the balance of how you evaluate the problems and benefits of the touchbar, it's useful for you, great. That doesn't mean the primary reason people express a distaste for the touchbar is essentially a social fashion.
Or one model with and one model without. I don't like the touchbar (keys move around and change size depending on context, escape can be triggered by touching areas outside of the escape key, touch bar locks up / crashes) but I'm largely indifferent to it. My primary complaint is the awful butterfly keyboard itself. There's too little travel, the keyboard itself is far too delicate (only took a few weeks for the spacebar to start crapping out on my 2016), and the layout is subpar.
My mid-2012 MPB is in need of a replacement, but the butterfly keyboard is a dealbreaker. I'm not thrilled with the touch bar, generally supportive of USB-C (although I miss magsafe), will tolerate the glossy screen and oversized trackpad, and don't give two hoots about the fingerprint reader. If Apple could see fit to provide a current gen MBP with a proper keyboard I'd buy one in a heartbeat. As it is, when my MBP dies for good I'm almost certainly moving to a Linux laptop.
That's what I don't understand- there is plenty of room for both, especially on the 15". Just add the Touch Bar strip above the function keys and call it a day...
In my experience, most of the people (not all, but most) who complain about the TouchBar haven't actually even used one for any significant period of time.
I’ve got an issue with the Touch Bar that, as far as I can tell, only I am experiencing:
Take your MacBook Pro, put it in a room indoors, and flick the lights on and off in that room several times a second. You’ll notice high CPU usage on a process called “TouchBarServer”, as it tries to adjust itself to the changing light levels so it can display its screen. For some reason, as it does this, it lags the entire rest of the computer: scrolling will freeze every couple of seconds, clicks won’t register, the mouse will lag, and keystrokes will just be ignored.
Why would you do this, you might ask? I work on trains a lot, and I get this same flicker effect as the trees by the tracks go past. As they pass the windows of the train, it’s like a bright light source is being rapidly turned on and off.
I don’t ever use the Touch Bar — nor did I want one — but merely having one renders my laptop unusably slow for two hours every day. I hate this computer.
That's my main issue with the touchbar as well, not this specific light issue, but the fact that it drags the rest of the computer down with it.
I would have preferred buttons, but I'm pretty adaptable and can deal with the touchbar if I have too. But what really gets me is that mine frequently crashes and when it crashes it's impossible to control system volume. And since trying to mute or lower the volume is one of the specific situations that causes it to crash, it results in one of the worst user experiences you could have.
I have filed a bug report. But yeah, it’s crazy that one part of the machine makes all the rest of it slow down! There was a time before I figured out it was the Touch Bar when I thought it was _moving fast_ that was making it lag (because it didn’t happen when the train stopped at stations). I was paranoid that it was trying to keep tabs on my location... so it could be worse, I guess.
I’m not sure, but for what it’s worth, I’ve got “Automatically adjust brightness” unchecked in System Preferences. So either it’s just ignoring that option, or it’s using some secondary light sensor.
God, I hate the touchbar. I constantly brush it, which is particularly frustrating when I'm typing something in Chrome and it accidentally focuses the address bar or creates a new tab. Drives me up a wall! The lack of real function keys is another huge annoyance. Also had a couple keys on the keyboard get stuck. I've had it for a year now and I'd throw it out the window in a second if I thought there was a decent shot I could get a 2015 replacement.
I've got a 2015 for personal use and a 2016 for work and I can honestly say that at the end of the day I'm thrilled to work on a machine that doesn't get in my way. They had it so right and really, really dropped the ball for me.
I'd absolutely buy a new $3000 MBP if it was the new specs inside the 2015 body. As-is, I think my next machine will be Windows.
There's quite a bit of selection bias because people who don't want a touchbar generally have a strong enough opinion on it that they aren't buying computers with touchbars.
I'm at the 6 month mark on a 2017 15in and I still dislike it. It's not that its terrible...it's just worse than the function / media keys. Its a step backwards. Perhaps if the touchbar was in addition to the old function row I wouldnt mind it as much.
in system settings under keyboard you can set it to only show the function keys and act only as a row of keys (similar to how it runs while bootcamped into windows)
That's how I've set mine up, but even that mode is significantly worse than having physical keys, due to the lack of tactile feedback. I still accidentally touch the software keys without intending to several times per day, and I can't press them without looking at them to confirm that I'm touching the correct one.
You can set that up only per application, and you can't do anything fast like dragging all your apps into the window. You have to click the + button once for every app on your machine and manually select it from an Open dialog. And the dialog doesn't remember the last directory used. It's utterly hostile.
It's a mostly-black screen with fairly low brightness. I'm not in the habit of sitting in a pitch-black room on my laptop, so I can't tell you how it looks there, but in my everyday use it hasn't been even the remotest problem.
>I'm not in the habit of sitting in a pitch-black room on my laptop, so I can't tell you how it looks there...
The one situation I can imagine the Touchbar brightness concerning me is when I'm on a plane. They always turn the cabin lights out, and I'm aware that I need to turn the brightness right down on my laptop when I'm in economy class, so I don't bother those around me. A quiet keyboard is also important on a plane.
I've not used newer Macs except in the store, so I don't know if the touchbar brightness is actually an issue or not. I definitely like my physical volume buttons for making sure my laptop is muted while flying though.
I can’t say I have ever noticed the light from the Touch Bar at night, and I’ve had this laptop since they first came out. It’s so much dimmer than the screen it’s a complete non-issue.
I am convinced that the only people complaining about this have either never used this laptop or have such sensitive eyes that daytime light would render them permanently blind. And I say this as someone who was excited by the possibilities of the Touch Bar but have so far been underwhelmed and wants to go back to the physical keys.
Not once in this conversation have I insulted you or anyone else. Not once in this conversation have I dismissed your needs and wants. I acknowledge that there are benefits to it that for some outweigh the loss of tactile feedback or addition of a second screen.
Does it really help the conversation to say things like this?
> I am convinced that the only people complaining about this have either never used this laptop or have such sensitive eyes that daytime light would render them permanently blind
I thought the tone of the second part of my comment was very obviously tongue-in-cheek, simply serving to underscore how dim the Touch Bar actually is. The main point still remains: I have yet to find a person who's complained about the Touch Bar brightness who's actually owned one of these devices.
It's really not bright. I'd guess it's probably less bright than the keyboard backlight, which also isn't bright (but is at least dimmable). It's so not bright that I've literally never noticed the thing at night in well over a year of regular use. Whatever number of lumens it outputs is so far below the brightness of the main display that it's all but unnoticeable in use.
I'm not willing to spend the money to own one, specifically because of the touchbar brightness.
I cover my monitor's power LED as well as the status screen on the receiver for my wireless headset. I run F.lux on the reddest settings when I'm within 1-2 hours of bedtime. (and after that I don't run any screens)
I have no issues with daylight brightness, but must carefully control lighting at night due to a broken circadian rhythm. Trust me, I don't need to own it to know that it's too bright. Especially if F.lux is not supported, which it is not last time I checked.
You've expressed a concern about having a second screen, but the concern seems to be unfounded. The parent is dismissing you because it appears that you're manufacturing a reason to hate on the touchbar and have already stated that you believe you don't even need to try it out to determine whether your concern is valid.
If you're not willing to consider that your concern is unfounded, then you shouldn't be offended when other people dismiss your concern.
I tape over the LED power indicator on my monitor, I have the screen disabled when not in use on my microwave oven, I disable the charging light on android devices, and I even cover the indicator on my refrigerator that tells you whether it's going to dispense ice or water.
Everything you’ve described are lights that can shine in the dark. But that’s not what the TouchBar is. The TouchBar can only be seen when the laptop screen can be seen, and is really dim (certainly dimmer than the laptop screen). The TouchBar can’t ever be a light shining in the darkness because it would always be drowned out by the laptop screen.
The LED power indicator on my monitor is absolutely equivalent. When the monitor is off it doesn't produce light because I press the button. It only shines when the monitor is on, and I still find the need to cover it.
Is six months long enough for my hate to be valid? I actually had my place of employment take it back and started working out of my retina MBP again. I'm considering buying a Windows laptop for the first time.
I was given an MBP with a touchbar when I contracted with Comcast for 10 months. Hated it.
My personal laptop is MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014).
I will NEVER EVER pay with my own money for a touchbar mac book.
My number one rule when getting a laptop is a good keyboard. Period.
Plus the USB-C drivers for external displays in the new mac books is complete trash. Misaligned windows, constantly forgetting window positions, occasionally completely not working.
The MBP line of computers keeps on getting worse and worse.
IMHO the touchbar requires more effort and distraction to control the brightness and volume. What previously was one key-press to dim/brighten or mute/volume - all without me having to take my focus from the screen now requires a multi-stages process with no tactile feedback.
No thanks. Plus the keyboard will likely have the same issues my 2016 version has. I’ve had keys replaced 4 times already.
Just to note because it is non-obvious and not documented - both volume and brightness buttons are one touch. You can just tap and drag up/down to immediately adjust, and you don't have to tap, move over to the slider, tap again, then drag.
Your tip only works for _decreasing_ the volume. If it’s turned all the way down, and you want to turn it up, you can’t tap-and-drag it because the fingerprint sensor gets in the way.
You’re right. It’s just two quick drags to maximize the volume. Or one drag to get about 80% there, which covers most situations. The slider stays open when you lift your finger.
The touchbar was what I thought was most idiotic before I got my macbook with it, and is the least idiotic thing after I've had my macbook. It is ok, sometimes kinda nice. If they put a physical Esc key on the far left, and a physical Mute key on the far right, and stuck the touchbar between the two, it would be actually very nice, because I agree the function keys are useless on a mac. But the touchbar utility doesn't make up for not having a physical Escape key.
My pie-in-the-sky idealized computer experience is a color e-ink display with a decent framerate.
Replacing tactile buttons with a second blinding photon emitter is not progress as far as I'm concerned.
I understand all the benefits you quote, and I'm not just complaining because it's "trendy". If it was eink, I wouldn't care at all. But it's another backlit screen shining in my face. No thanks.
As a heavy IntelliJ user - I use the function keys all the time. Some examples: F1: show file in project view, F2/Shift F2: next/previous error, Ctrl+F2: stop process, F3/Shift F3: find next/previous, F6: move/rename, different F7 variations: find usages, F9/F10: run/debug options, also F8-F10 - step over/into/out/continue, F12 - toggle maximize editor, etc.
I don't understand what I'm supposed to do with a touchbar, or how to otherwise remap all of these shortcuts... Sticking to my 2015 MBP for now, but I really hope Apple get their act together and release a developer-friendly model (because otherwise I'm a huge fan).
Intellij could support the touchbar - I was going to say it's a great way to do debugging until I found that using arrow keys + modifier is a fantastic way to control the debugger. (up=continue, left=step out, right=step in, down=step)
I use Control+S,Z,X,C for debugging, mapping Caps Lock to Control. (S=continue, Z=Step Over, X=Step In, C=Step Out). It keeps my right hand free for mousing around, drinking coffee, etc.
What modifier are you using for the arrow keys? Aren't they all taken already?
They already do, in the 2018.2 EAP there is support for touchbar. Since it's already in RC state I think the stable version will be out in a couple of weeks.
I am using it right now. It works very well, also context aware so that it shows different stuff depending on what you are doing like in the debugger you will continue, next etc.
Nobody needs to re-map anything, if IntelliJ would just support the touch bar, then they could keep the same shortcuts and rename the keys from "F8" to "Step Over"
I'm not looking at the keyboard when hitting those keys (I've been using this exact keymap for over 8 years), touchbar support isn't helping, I need tactile keys.
Adding media keys did not require the loss of Function keys (“fn” toggle) so low use in apps was not a reason to remove keys entirely.
How is a touch volume slider better? Using modifier keys you can achieve any level of precision from keyboard volume keys, without looking down to find and watch what you tap. There are also slider controls already, using the mouse (both in the menu bar and System Preferences).
I noticed a big regression in battery life (25-35%) between my 2013 and 2017 MacBook Pro. I don't know how much the Touch Bar had to do with it, but the 2017 was definitely worse.
From 2015 to 2016 models the battery capacity dropped from 74 watt hours to 49 watt hours in the new 13" design. The gap was made up for by efficiency gains of the CPU and possibly the display. But the display can also be cranked way brighter now, running it at the full 500 nits will hurt your battery performance for sure. Also if you are running demanding loads it will be worse off as well.
The Touch Bar likely sips power, but the real issue with it is the lost battery capacity beneath it (The non-touchbar models have larger batteries at 54 watt hours)
Maybe I'm a backwards person but I barely use escape at all. I do however use the function keys, all day, every day. I have them mapped to various apps for screengrabbing, batch copy and paste of files, rename etc. Apps like keymaestro let me add extra functionality to these "spare" keys and I don't want then replaced by any damn touchbar
In my experience, adding those functions to the Touch Bar via Better Touch Tool was just as easy as making f-key bindings, plus I get easy and visibly-distinguishable per-app bindings.
The Touch Bar is great, Apple just isn't going far enough.
The majority of my use of my MBPr is in clamshell mode, with a large external monitor, and a mechanical keyboard. Even for people who use theirs open, beside a large monitor, it's usually on a stand. So a Touch Bar is either pointless, or so unwieldy as to be useless, in these situations, respectively.
True. I can’t think of many situations where a laptop can be used, but capacitive touch cant, and the laptop can’t be switched off or the lid closed, and the noise will would cause a problem. I guess I thought that would happen, I’d keep a headphone jack handy as a silencer. I don’t think the utility in an unlikely situation outweighs the balance of use.
closing the lid doesn't mute the sound as a hardware switch. Lots of sounds will continue to play through the closing of the lid, including sounds for video.
For an example of when capacitive touch wonts work but the laptop would, simply get your finger a little bit wet.
The scenario I'm imagining is opening your computer only to discover that had closed it in the middle of a youtube video or something the night before, and it just continues playing where it left off. A crime of the highest order in OS design, to be sure, but hardly a rare occurrence.
Cmd+Q would be my first action in that situation (which I’ve been in!) But I agree not everyone knows that.
I was imagining someone wearing a glove, but you are right that a certain amount of water will start causing issues. I think it would be difficult to pool enough water on both the touch bar and the trackpad outside of a catastrophe.
I can’t get sound to continue emitting after closing the lid. I’m sure an app can be developed to make that happen, but it wouldn’t be something commonly used. The most likely candidate seems to me to be something like audio performance software, but a person in that situation wouldn’t be using the speakers as an out and would be used to quickly dealing with software/hardware quirks.
Question for someone who has a touchbar: is it possible to add app shortcuts to it (like an extension of the dock)? And what about a dedicated escape button?
I use F12 throughout the day to open iTerm and Cmd+F2 to open Spotlight, and the escape key is obviously generally useful. Losing equivalent dedicated buttons/shortcuts would be a dealbreaker, but otherwise I could take or leave the function keys.
Edit: If yes to the above, are there any situations in which my configured dedicated buttons might conditionally disappear?
The escape button shows up in practically all apps, and extends beyond the area indicated by the OLED screen to the edge of the glass. Basically, the entire left 1" of the touchbar is a large dedicated escape key.
I'm a developer and BetterTouchTool is great. I have terminal shortcuts and others bound to touch bar buttons. BTT even lets you run bash scripts from the touch bar.
Interesting, thanks! Sad that it requires third-party software to add the iTerm shortcut (which was my biggest concern since I use it so often), but sounds like the touchbar will probably be a net positive, or at least not a dealbreaker when I do eventually upgrade.
I wonder why they don't just through haptics into the touchbar to diminish the tactile complaint? My Galaxy S9 has touch haptics that feel rather nice.
Smartphones have less mass to move. The touchpad is haptic but the Taptic chip is fairly large and the whole pad is kind of suspended so that you can feel the vibrations. I bet they will do this but it might be tricky since it has a display in it.
My biggest problem with the touchbar is that I would only be able to use it half of the time.
Because when I dock my laptop it is either closed and tucked in the corner of my desk, or perched on a laptop stand. Either way the touchbar is to far away to be of any benefit. So unless Apple comes with a (bluetooth) keyboard with touchbar, I cannot integrate it into my daily workflow.
When I'm wearing my cynic hat, the touch bar is the beginning of a plot to replace our physical keys with another screen with an image of keys. The 2030 MacBook will basically be two iPads taped together
I think so too, especially with further improvements to the Taptic Engine. This might also lead to a more “solid state” device with less mechanical parts to worry about. I wonder if there will be a backlash or if we will all get used to it.
It's okay, if you don't like it you can just plug an external keyboard into the dongle you have plugged into the dongle you have plugged into the only USB-C port they plan on offering!
Not sure I agree with the lenovo equals RIM comparison. By the way, lenovos had an oled bar on top of their keyboards but removed theirs when people said they didn't like it.
I think Taptic engine + force touch is the key (ahem) to such a scenario working.
If there were little localized bumps every time my fingers moved outside the area of a given letter, and if the keys could tell the difference between resting, setting, and actually typing, then I'm not sure there would be any problem.
The new Macbook keyboards have such low travel that they feel like a step in that direction. I like the laptop overall but I make a lot more typos than I did on my old one.
My biggest problem with the touchbar is the escape key. I hate not having tactile feeling for a key I use on a regular basis. I'm constantly missing it or hitting something on accident.
I've had Caps Lock mapped to escape for years. You used to need some tool to do this, but now you can do it right inside Keyboard settings "Modifier Keys".
Make sure you choose the real keyboard if you also have a Yubikey plugged in :)
I map caplocks to control, I find the default control button in a weird spot to always be moving my pinky to (and I hardly have a use for caplocks, like yourself). However, after you said this, it reminded me of the comment I caught once where someone had their caplocks setup to be esc on click, or control on hold... no idea how he had it setup, though I'm curious once again.
This is the only problem I have with it too. I MUCH prefer having the Touch Bar. Even though I don't use it frequently, it comes in very handy for certain things, and I use it far more often than the function keys. Having a virtual escape key is just strange though. I wouldn't want to go back to a MacBook without a Touch Bar, but if they just cut out another button on the left like they have on the right for the power button and made it an escape key it would be perfect. As it is, the virtual escape key is actually pretty padded to the right. You could replace it with a hard key and not actually lose any space. You might actually gain a few usable pixels.
I turned away from the mac, first because the HW, second because prop. software is creaping me out more and more. I bought a lenovo T480 (big battery, higres screen, good keyboard, only the trackpad is shitty) and I installed the shiny ubuntu 18.04 and I have to say, it's the best setup I ever used. It's super stable, with some tweeking(https://github.com/erpalma/lenovo-throttling-fix) it's crazy fast, 7h+ battery life when doing web development. Even the LG UltraFine works great under linux. I never regretted it.
> I bought a lenovo T480 (big battery, higres screen, good keyboard, only the trackpad is shitty) and I installed the shiny ubuntu 18.04 and I have to say, it's the best setup I ever used.
If by hires screen you mean WQHD, I am wondering what you do with absence of proper fractional scaling support by desktop environments (and how workarounds interact with external monitors).
Former macbook pro user here. I currently use a T480 with the 72wHr battery. Web Development and programming I pull about 20+ hours of battery life. Using i3wm under Fedora.
I got the one with the MX150 dGPU, because there was no other option from the students program I bought it from. But I personally would go for the one without a dGPU. Even-tough the dGPU version uses 2 heatpipes, there are thermal issues. As soon as the GPU hits 70°C, the cpu-package gets power throtteled to 5W... so it's not usable for graphic intense workloads. I would choose the one without the dGPU, manually buy and install the 2heatpipe cooler for better CPU temperatures and use a eGPU if I really needed the power. For the time being I just disabled the dGPU under linux with bbswitch. I'm still able to watch 4K movies with 60fps, no problem.
Wow, what a shame. How is this even possible? A Macbook Pro 15" has a 45 Watt TDP CPU and is half as thick but throttles less? The new Macbook Pro has two extra cores and I could use the graphic cards as well. Switching graphic also works where in Linux it does not. Taking into account that resale value of Macbook Pros the price difference is not so big.
To me, this is the best of both worlds. Just put the default keys to start and then let your users pick if they want to.
I prefer individual keys to tapping a screen, which is why I use a laptop and not an iPad.
yes - this is a damn fine idea. i'm always accidentally resting my finger on the down brightness key and only notice when the screen suddenly goes dark. keys that press = good idea.
Job gave me a MBP with a touch bar. In the past I've been able to grab an older MBP 15" but they were out of them. So... a small slice of electrical tape solved the issue. Ugh, it's ghetto.
It's the worst invention. Anyone who worked on it should feel bad about their existence -- like drawing mustaches on the Mona Lisa. The 2013 MBP was a perfect laptop (for the time). It's nice they finally got around to adding more RAM... that's about all I would have wanted to change on the 2013 MBP.
I used f.lux for 2-3 years. Then I stopped, and I haven't used f.lux for 2 years now.
The problem with f.lux is that it makes reading on the computer at night TOO comfortable. I was consistently staying up way past my bed time, and suffering for it.
Removing f.lux made it easier to go to sleep earlier. Sometimes comfort isn't worth it. I prefer getting my sleep.
I’m tempted to start a movement called Tape the Touchbar™. Just put a stylish piece of black electrical tape over it and pretend it’s not there.
Seriously though, I share your frustration in regards to both f.lux and external monitor/stand use. It would be nice to be able to dynamically disable the Touchbar in a user configurable way.
I've had a touchbar-mBP since release day, and I've only just recently found a use for the touchbar: in Zoom, to start recording the session, and in iTerm to change the colours.
Just this week I noticed with surprise that I'm actually using the touchbar 'productively' in this fashion - but its been a long time coming.
However I'd throw away this newfound appreciation of the touchBar in an instant, if both of these apps just .. you know .. had icons for the task. Maybe some sort of strip of icons, even ...
for those in this thread excusing the touch bar how would you feel if apple replaced the entire keyboard with a large touch surface like typing on an iPad. Great idea? Can't wait? Or Ugh?
Keep seeing people on Twitter suggesting this as a fix to the unreliable keyboard, completely ignoring that the keyboards were never unreliable until the Butterfly Switches existed.
As for the idea, well if touch keyboards are so great why have they invested so much effort in adding a physical keyboard to their Pro touch devices.
Can’t you use Night Shift or the built in dimming? Not sure I understand what you are saying. (Not arguing, just genuinely interested in the complaint.)
The Touch Bar can't be dimmed below a certain threshold (either manually or programmatically). Normally we use f.lux or Brightness Slider to dim the main display, but touch bar brightness can't be controlled. Makes it hard to work late at night without putting electrical tape over it.
I never had this problem. But if it's really an issue you can use betterTouchTool or similarly to simply remove all buttons so it doesn't render anything.
> The new keyboard has the same dimensions and look as its two predecessors, but the keys feel just a little bit different. They're quieter, for one thing. They have a softer, less click-y feel that is a little closer to the pre-2016 models' chiclet keys. We found the new keyboard to be a little nicer to type on, but it's not a radical difference. It's unlikely to convert the detractors, but it's a welcome iteration for those who liked or didn't mind the previous butterfly keyboards.
I'm going to wait a year, maybe 18 months for feedback before I consider upgrading. Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts? No touchbar, smaller touchpad than the newer macbooks, but updated specs? Call it Macbook Developer... We build the software for the "Pros" after all.
They didn't do that because it is not what most people want. Apple has to make changes that will sell more laptops to the masses to maximize shareholder value.
The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does. Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products and make up 10% of the complaints then to focus on the 10% of customers who make up 90% of the complaints.
> They didn't do that because it is not what most people want.
> Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products
So either you're wrong, or Apple's PR team is really bad positioning their product. From the Press Release itself in the first few paragraphs:
ideal for manipulating large data sets, performing complex simulations, creating multi-track audio projects or doing advanced image processing or film editing.
Already the most popular notebook for developers around the world, the new MacBook Pro can compile code faster and run multiple virtual machines and test environments easier than before.
MacBook Pro now delivers faster performance for complex simulations and data manipulation.
With the new MacBook Pro, developers can compile code faster and more easily run multiple virtual machines and test environments.
Aren't those all features described exactly for the "niche developer/macrumors posters"?!
I believe this is a case of a disparity between who they say their products are for (power users), and who they are actually for (people who want to think of themselves as power users).
This would be similar to, for example, many sportswear brands who say they are for professional athletes, but whose primary consumer base is... not.
In both cases, they may still attract the audience they claim to target, but in practice, that niche market makes up only a small fraction of their total sales.
Nicely put. People also like to buy over-featured products for “bragging rights” (huge pick up trucks used to go shopping, ultralight trekking gear for 5 km hikes, €300 knives to cut apples in slices etc.)
I agree with you, but also think there might be more nuance going on here than all that.
I think this is actually sometimes about minimalism. I'd rather have one nice, good, high-quality thing than to accumulate junk over the years as I get deeper into a hobby. The longest hike I've done was a three-day section hike on the AT, but I have ultralight hiking and camping gear. I know, in the future, when I have more time, I'll do longer and more frequent hikes, and even now, lighter is more comfortable to carry.
There's also the Paradox of Choice. Upper middle class folks are strapped for time and flush with cash. Would I rather spend two hours reading reviews to find out whether the discount pocket knife is really as good for my purposes as a Benchmade, or just make the purchase secure in the knowledge that I bought a well-regarded brand with excellent customer service? Maybe I overpaid, but the speed and hassle-free nature of the transaction are worth it.
I'm reminded of the recent "news story" making the rounds, that some researchers found iPhone ownership to be the clearest signal of wealth.
"Signal"
There is a lot of signaling going on, using these product choices. And Apple's at the top of the heap.
It has transitioned from "tech" to "brand".
I've seen people write off William Gibson's more recent work, that takes this on as a central topic for examination and exposition. It may not be as... "awesome" as the universe of Molly and Wintermute. But it's a very good and engaging application of creating writing to this topic. Recommended.
Well, in this case, the deluxe/upsell machine is just the wrong tool for the job. An overbuilt kitchen knife, a high-performance light truck, or ultralight hiking gear will generally accomplish those tasks as well or better than a mid-market alternative. A new MacBook Pro is worse for most developers than one from a couple years ago, and worse in all sorts of other ways (namely the slashing of battery capacity in exchange for an ultimately minor reduction in size and weight).
I have to admit I've gone through a few, but my daily driver can be found for ~ $30 online if you watch for it. I also spend good money on sharpeners, etc. Ironic? yes.
It’s funny because I “perform complex simulations and handle massive data sets” but no laptop (or even desktop) is capable of handling them. I normally need to SSH to some cluster with thousands of CPU cores and terabytes of RAM. I’m actually kind of curious who the target user is for a high performance laptop nowadays. Video editors? What kinds of tasks require more performance than a standard laptop but less than a desktop?
I currently have a 2012 MBP Retina, but am not sure if I want my next laptop to be another MBP or just the regular MacBook. I really like the 15” screen and would have a hard time giving that up. I wish they had a regular MacBook with a high quality screen, battery, and keyboard and not much else.
> What kinds of tasks require more performance than a standard laptop but less than a desktop?
I suppose it depends on the desktop! I just moved from a MacBook Pro to a Dell XPS 15. I thought I'd replace the MBP with the Dell, but I ended up replacing my desktop machine with the Dell, and still using the MacBook in my dining room.
The XPS 15 I bought has an i9, 32GB RAM, and 1TB SSD for $1100 less than the equivalent MacBook. My workload is primarily Adobe- and WordPress-centric, with some coding and article writing thrown in for good measure.
I do video editing, photo editing, and run code with zero issues. The i9 beats the pants off my Skylake i7 desktop. And it's portable! And the screen is amazing. I have it hooked up to my 5K monitor in my home office, and it's gorgeous.
Since my workload is 98% Chrome, Adobe products, Microsoft products, or text editors, everything was pretty much identical from one platform to another. I turned off automatic updates on Windows 10 (I do this on my Mac too) and had no issues at all migrating over.
I don't think I'll be buying a new Mac at this point.
I also "perform complex simulations and handle massive data sets" and often do mockup on my laptop (where power is nice) before shipping it off to the cluster, and often truck the results back to my laptop for analysis.
I can get a much better idea how my ML models will behave at scale if I prototype on my 16GB MBP than if I only had whatever ram is leftover from 8GB after Chrome and everything use up most of it. It's no match for server GPUs but I can run multiple Jupyter notebooks with decent size datasets loaded and not have to think about it.
I suspect that a ryzen+ or even eypc+ when its out would be good or initial investigations on the desk top and as an interface to a bigger hpc cluster when needed.
> I believe this is a case of a disparity between who they say their products are for (power users), and who they are actually for (people who want to think of themselves as power users).
That's true for most gaming rigs and high-end Windows laptops ;-)
computer advert in 2018, truth in advertising version:
"stalk your ex on Facebook, 37% faster"
"Cat videos on youtube look great in Retina full screen"
"Your stolen music files sound fab thanks to deeper bass response from the stereo speakers"
"chat with your dumb friends for hours, with a new longer-lasting battery"
"call in sick without removing your phone from its case, thanks to bluetooth."
Other than dying batteries, or physical damage (broken trackpad/keyboard) I seriously wonder why the average person needs anything but the most basic laptop when a $99 android phone is in all measures more powerful than a 10 year old laptop but we're doing basically the same activities: surf the web, chat, email. Very, very few people create content. Most consume.
YouTube videos don’t serve 4K on Safari. When they do, it’s over Chrome which is using 10W more powerr, which over entire world equals power use of a small country...
Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake have full hardware VP9 decoding, so all told you'll probably be using more energy playing H.264 in Chrome if you're on a Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake processor.
Yes, been using that. Problem is that YouTube quietly removed 1440p h264 videos too! Used to be my indicator that I can turn off h264ify for a minute to view 4k content...
“complex simulations” strikes me as particularly wannabe-ish. I really do run pretty complex simulations that take hours, sometimes days, to run to completion (on a maxed-out 2012 Mac Mini with dual SSDs and the maximum amount of memory it will support). It would never occur to me to run such stuff on a laptop that might run out of power, throttle back the processor because of heating, or something else going wrong.
“Managing data and complex simulations” seems to allude to ‘em Excel jockeys who should be using a humble database and/or are running some kind of what-if calculations.
Agree with you. I have a ~4k touchbar Macbook Pro and do HPC type of stuff all day... and I rarely consider doing anything more than a toy simulation or computational experiment on my laptop. When I previously used a Macbook Air, my toy PoC stuff ran pretty must just as well.
Anything else either quickly gets offloaded to one of my group's servers with 64-80 threads and 100s of GB of RAM or, if it's even bigger, to the local HPC cluster with 1000s of CPUs.
Even without access to existing resources: I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where, if I have a fixed budget of ~3-5k to do computational work, it'd be better for me to spend that on a top-end MBP than a two-piece solution of laptop+linux server.
A couple months ago, building projections for a rabies elimination program while sitting in a hotel bar in Zambia, I was pretty pleased I wasn't relying on a server.
It's still a big deal, but getting better - my university's running a decently successful program in Kenya.
And yeah, people still use compartmental models pretty heavily. A lot of my stuff is stochastic (it's about the beginning or end of epidemics, or in small populations) so that's nicely parallel.
On the other hand, I do this all the time on my laptop, and have found having some more RAM or a couple more cores to be something that would make my life actively easier.
> Aren't those all features described exactly for the "niche developer/macrumors posters"?!
Yes, and, trust me, most developers I know who got newer MBPs are pretty happy with theirs. I know I am and I hope I get one of these newer ones next week. 6 cores and 32 gigs of DDR4 make a lot of a difference. The vi users make jokes about the Esc key, of course (but I'm into Emacs, so no problem for me). One company I know of offered the "classic" model for those who wanted to have it and nobody took the offer.
Among developers, the 10% troublesome to 90% happy rate seems to be present.
I, personally, have different priorities and have no problem with thicker laptops. My next personal one will probably be a maxed out Lenovo or Dell XPS, since they are cheaper than Macs at the cost of features I don't really need (high-fidelity screen, for instance).
The developers where I work who have new MBPs complain a lot about the keyboard, the lack of ports, the lack of an escape key, and the lack of an SD card slot.
I had a new MBP for a few months and hated it.
As soon as an old MBP freed up, I traded in for it. SO much happier, and my friends are jealous.
And I pretty much live in emacs. Where I use the escape key regularly. C-x ESC ESC is one of my go-tos.
Exactly. The escape key has never been an issue for me either (for what it's worth, I use Spacemacs as my primary editor).
I just open the macOS preferences, and remap Caps Lock to Control. Then escape becomes a Caps Lock + [ combination. Simple, and no fumbling around for an Escape key.
This also works well on both macOS and Linux, especially when moving about the command line (e.g. Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E to move to the beginning/end of the current line, respectively). See [1] for more shortcuts. Especially useful is Ctrl+K to cut text after the cursor, and then Ctrl+Y to paste it back.
Of course, the regular control key will do the same thing. But using Caps Lock as control reduces strain, at least for me. In fact, it's the first change I make on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
And on Ubuntu, gnome-tweak-tool makes it trivial to make Caps Lock and additional Control key (if you really need Caps Lock, you can also swap Caps Lock and Control).
For me, the trackpad is the thing that got me to get rid of my MBP and replace it with a Pixelbook. I was getting false positive clicks all the time while typing, which would move the cursor and destroyed my productivity. And I was not hitting it accidentally - I contorted my hands into all sorts of strange positions and it still happened, I had people observe me while it occurred, etc. Happened on two different MBPs, but the tech support folks at my company couldn't make it happen. Must be something weird about my capacitive field. Much happier with the Pixelbook, especially since I can now run Android Studio on it along with other Linux apps.
> I know I am and I hope I get one of these newer ones next week. 6 cores and 32 gigs of DDR4 make a lot of a difference.
Even if they provide 64 GB, it will never be enough RAM. OSX is dogshit at memory management, with massive memory leaks. On my work laptop (-1 generation), I have 16 GB. Normal workloads (i.e. not even developer workloads/compilation tasks) consume memory to the point where I’m constantly swapping. Until they fix their shit, I’m not going to buy a new one, nor will I ask my company (I am good friends with IT) to refresh.
That’s not a remotely true for the vast majority of users. If you’re having this problem, you should push for a clean install because nobody on a dev team full of Macs at two different companies has had your complaint (although plenty have had a Slack or Chrome is leaky/bad memory management complaint)
Ok, then why I do only run into this issue on hardware running OS X? This is across machines (I worked at Apple btw, and had to dogfood Mavericks at the time) and across time. Same problem, it was never fixed.
I run Chrome and Slack on Windows and I never have had memory issues. Using Occam’s Razor, it has to be an issue with memory management at the OS level. I’ve also run Chrome and Slack on Linux - 1/10th of the memory footprint. I will write a blogpost in the future about it.
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that those niche developer/macrumors posters are part of the described target audience, but no in the sense that they are a small fraction of the described target audience.
I think this is like cars that market themselves as capable of racing and/or off roading, but people use them to commute in stop and go traffic. Majority of people don't select products for rational/practical reasons.
In the article they cite the MBP as being the most popular notebook for developers so this niche must be important, otherwise why list it?:
> Already the most popular notebook for developers around the world, the new MacBook Pro can compile code faster and run multiple virtual machines and test environments easier than before.
What we want is a functional keyboard. They are losing this market-share quickly but you're right maybe they don't care about this market anymore. They must not since they aren't doing anything about it.
Take a look at the photos for a moment. Curious what the keyboard is like? Too bad - Every single photo shows the keyboard from the side.
Ah but you can still tell something. If there's anything to the idea that a picture sends a message or that there's such a thing as "visual language," this group of photos is loudly and stubbornly doubling down on "Thin is all that matters."
Customer: "Does the keyboard work this time?"
Apple: "IT'S THIN!"
Considering that the drive toward thinness is precisely what's ruining the keyboards, that tells you plenty, without even reading anything.
It reminds of the nForce chipset from 15 years ago. It was a godsend. The audio chip had an optical input, rivaled the best consumer-grade audio sound card, true dolby 5.1, etc. and... reviewers tanked it.
When the next generation of north/southbridge motherboard appeared and sound wasn't a priority for motherboard builders only then journalists noticed what they missed.
Every single photo shows the keyboard from the side.
This is standard operating practice for an international firm like Apple. The first set of images doesn't show certain details because you want it to have broad appeal. Since Apple keyboards come in a dozen or so different configurations for different markets, you show the more vague master images.
Once the global media outlets have had their splash, then the regionals will get images with more details. In this case, the regional keyboards.
Why’s that a relevant argument? The web site is localised, the physical objects are localised, surely it’s not beyond them to take localised photos of localised keyboards for their localised versions of their site?
(I’ve just looked at some of their locations, and German seems to use photos with German text on screen, while Greek seems to use photos with English on screen).
Now way, this is ridiculous that not a single picture shows even a glance of keyboard. They just don't show you half of the laptop (and the other part is screen which you can't say much without seeing it in person).
The niche is not developers themselves; the niche is a (vocal) sample of the developer community. I'm a developer and I like the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard with touchbar.
In particular:
What we want is a functional keyboard.
This is your opinion, but it's not necessarily the majority opinion. For example, I would rather Apple focus on other parts of the computer than the keyboard. The keyboard just isn't that meaningful to me, and I'm just as productive a developer without whatever platonic ideal of a keyboard Apple could put on the thing.
I think a lot of people vastly overestimate the number of Apple customers who have an opinion about this, because it's relatively easy to see complaints on HN, blogs or tech journalism.
I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the size of the problem with the keyboard. Apple has had atleast three class action lawsuits regarding the defective keyboards. They have setup a warranty program to try and placate consumers and resolve the lawsuits. It's a real problem and just because it did not impact you does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted. So here we are, I'm a developer of 1 and have been impacted you're a developer of 1 and have not been impacted. It doesn't make yours or my experience any less real but I think the class action lawsuits speak for themselves. For me personally, it's hard to write a lot of code when keys don't hit or they endlessly repeat. So, I picked up a Lenovo and through Linux on it and ditched the MBP.
I honestly don't know how any of the other market shares can put up with this failing keyboard either. For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.
> It's a real problem and just because it did not impact you does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted.
This is a good point, which I acknowledge. Maybe I've been lucky with my keyboard. But while you point this out, I think most folks complaining about the keyboard are not acknowledging the other side - that it may not be as important as they think it is either. Hence my original comment indicating my own opinion.
> For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.
For what it's worth, I wrote a ~170 page paper (in LaTeX) on a 2016 MacBook Pro. I cared a lot more about screen real estate than the keyboard, so I added a few monitors. All anyone seems to be able to provide is an exchange of anecdotal evidence for or against the keyboard. If there's a real issue I'm not defending it. But I am saying it might not be worth it for Apple to fix it depending on incidence rate, and it might not be as prevalent as the tech blogging/journalism sphere would have us believe.
Actually it is more widespread than the blogging would have you believe as most people don't blog. They just take the computer in and pay for it to be fixed and go back to life.
If your keyboard ever breaks and you find yourself unable to type, then you will discover why people with defective keyboards think its super important. Until then you can minimize the impact it has on people all day long as they cannot type properly without an external keyboard. I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...
You're not discussing this in good faith, and I don't understand why you feel the need to be passive aggressive in response to my comments. You also seem to be almost willfully misreading what I'm saying.
To make this particular point painfully clear, I didn't postulate the problem is not widespread because literally only bloggers have the problem, and there are relatively few bloggers. My postulate was that the problem seems more widespread than it is due to the magnifying effect journalism and blogging has. If you disagree then critique the point I made, not the contrived false equivalence you seem to think I made.
Other than that yes, I've had a broken keyboard on a laptop, and no, I'm not minimizing anything. Devil's advocacy and a request for some quantitative evidence (which was elsewhere provided, and to which I conceded) does not constitute minimization or dismissal of a problem. This especially:
> I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...
is a false dichotomy, and one which I did not make.
> because literally only bloggers have the problem
It could be the ambiguous way you've phrased this, but if I'm reading this right, then that's what you're not getting: a lot of people actually do have this problem. Not just bloggers.
I don't think we have enough information to know whether or not "millions were affected." Neither class-action lawsuits nor a warranty program nor complaints on Hacker News prove this one way or the other.
Sorry, I was spouting hyperbole to counter-act hyperbole. You're right, that is not helpful, I agree. As someone says below: Only Apple can conclusively provide the numbers and they have no desire to do so. So, everyones opinion is just that. Anecdotal and an opinion because _no one_ can back up their claims. I'll take my statement back though, because it's not useful to fight hyperbole with hyperbole. What I can say is, I was impacted twice and I have since switched vendors.
I strongly disagree with you that I was being hyperbolic. In fact, my comment (the one you responded to) did not quantify anything, much less in a hyperbolic way. I expressed an opinion. As it stands, your comment is a pretty passive aggressive way to withdraw a statement.
> I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the size of the problem with the keyboard.
Actually the opposite is true.
Apple itself has said it is a tiny, tiny percentage of users. If they were to lie about this then it would be an SEC violation since they would be lying to markets about potential impact of replacements/lawsuits.
Wanting a functional keyboard on a laptop is a niche opinion? Wowwwwww. The reality distortion field is strong.
I've used every MacBook model and the new ones have unacceptably bad keyboards. I am in an office with dozens of broken ones and the things have become a joke amongst the developers. The IT department got so tired of Apple's time to repair them that they started just ordering extra keys from third party websites for $20/each.
I worked at Apple with Steve Jobs and I can assure you he would not say that the keyboard isn't meaningful and its fine if its broken. There is a reason all the major Apple bloggers have written piece after piece about their poor reliability and repairability. If your space bar breaks with one piece of dust you need to replace the entire top of the computer including the battery since its glued to it.
> Wanting a functional keyboard on a laptop is a niche opinion? Wowwwwww. The reality distortion field is strong.
This is a deliberate misreading of what I said. My point is that reasonable people can disagree about what a "functional keyboard" is for software development. You're free to disagree with me, but don't accuse me of being under a "reality distortion field." And for what it's worth, the comment of mine that you responded to is talking about design and aesthetic choices. You're primarily talking about hardware faults and reliability.
The source comment was not about design and aesthetic choices. Here is the first comment that you responded to: “What we want is a functional keyboard”
We want a functional keyboard. This is not about reasonable people disagreeing. If your space bar does not work, your keyboard is broken and typing sucks.
So I use a lot of different keyboards - my main ones are a whitefox with blue switches and a CODE with greens. I actually like the MBP keyboard - key stability and clickiness are the parameters I like, and the MBP has both.
My problem with the keyboard is just reliability - I now keep a can of compressed air at my desk just because a key is going to get screwed up at least once a month. And I have one key that is particularly bad, so I assume some piece of dust is just trapped under the key and the compressed air pushes it somewhere until it eventually falls back into place. I'm waiting a little longer to bring it in for repair in hopes that they start using this new v3 keyboard as a replacement - maybe it secretly fixes the dust issue (And they don't want to say it because that would be admitting that there was a problem.)
mainly interested in this news to learn if they'll start exchanging 2016/17 mbps for this new model.
Does the new keyboard require dozens of tiny screws to assemble/dissemble?
I may be wrong but I was under the impression the difficulty in replacing the keyboard is due to it being fused to the battery. You pretty much have to replace both when attempting to replace one or the other.
Yeah, that is the issue. A keyboard replacement means replacing both battery and keyboard because they are glued together.
But I have heard that they were replacing older keyboards (2016) with 2017 models (You could easily tell because they add new symbols above control/option.) I wonder if they'll be doing replacements with 2018 keys now. It would be really nice - the keyboard reliability is pretty much my only complaint, minus not having a physical escape key.
I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?
No company is perfectly rational. Apple have built their empire on doing things that run counter to the received wisdom of the industry, things that many analysts and competitors saw as deeply irrational.
Personally, I think that the loss of Jobs has created a serious leadership problem, because so much of the company's direction was led by the personal taste of one man. Apple has retained the institutional knowledge and habits accrued during that era, but it hasn't found a satisfactory replacement for the functions that Jobs performed. It has retained an obsessive focus, but it has lost the compass that guided that focus towards the user experience. They know how to do thinner, lighter, fewer ports and so they keep doing it, but there's no why. So many aspects of Apple's corporate culture are uniquely ritualistic, but the meaning of those rituals died with Jobs.
I didn't want to be this explicit with my point because I think it's patronizing. But your comment isn't responding to what I intended to say, so here it is. I'm not talking about ideological design mandates and I'm not talking about perfect rationality. I'm talking about charitable estimation of competency and an assumption of baseline rationality.
Apple is one of the most valuable and critically examined companies in the world, with 125,000 employees and end-to-end vertical integration across its hardware and software development process. In consideration of feedback from design decisions, like choosing to develop progressively thinner products, removing physical function keys and implementing touchbars, why would Apple make those decisions? More importantly, why would Apple double down on these decisions in a line refresh of the product 18 months after the initial launch? Presumably Apple is well aware of the number of developers who use their machines, and presumably Apple is aware of developer feedback (again: basic competency as an organization).
So let's reframe this question as follows: why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised? A very reasonable answer is that customers in the aggregate - developers included - don't care that much about the touchbar or the virtual function keys, and will continue to buy the products.
Regardless of my own opinion about the keyboard design, I try to approach this from the perspective that as a single individual with vastly fewer resources than Apple, I likely have a fundamentally less perfect understanding of Apple's product goals, customer demographic and design initiatives. So if I see an incongruence that seems to have a simple answer ("Why doesn't Apple just do the thing everyone clearly wants"), my instinct is that my priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.
>why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised?
Because their approach to design is completely unique. Their industrial design studio is small, insular and incredibly secretive. That studio has almost complete independence; most Apple employees won't see a new product until the design is finalised and ready for launch. They have an overt belief in the wisdom of ignoring user feedback and media criticism, going back to the original Macintosh. They don't think that their role is to provide people with what they want, but what they should want.
That approach is one of Apple's greatest assets. They were right to ignore the people who said that a computer needed serial ports and a floppy disk drive. They were right to ignore the people who said that a phone needed buttons. They're willing to ignore conventional wisdom and the demands of the market in favour of a singular design vision for what technology should be. They're willing to tell their customers trust us, this is for the best. That approach is necessary if you're going to be a highly innovative company that creates entire new categories of product, but it's not right 100% of the time and it can be infuriatingly stubborn.
The strain relief on the MagSafe connector was too short. Any cable manufacturer would tell you that it was too short. Any electrical engineer would tell you that it was too short. The internet was full of pictures of frayed (and sometimes charred) MagSafe cables. The Apple store website was full of one-star reviews for MagSafe power adaptors that had frayed. Apple did nothing for over five years until a class action forced their hand; they offered replacements, but didn't fix the defect.
Your charitable estimation of Apple's competency and baseline rationality is a reasonable one and absolutely could be correct, and I agree it would follow that your priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.
But I find jdietrich's argument totally plausible. They could have tons of negative user feedback that they ignored. "They" probably being a handful of designers (so the total number of talented people at Apple is basically irrelevant). Apple's always had a certain arrogance. They (believe they) know what customers want better than their customers do: in this case a thinner and thinner laptop. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they lose their way and I end up with a really expensive MacBook Pro that I hate typing on.
I've certainly seen a few cases inside Google where a small team ignored dogfood feedback from other Googlers ("you aren't the user", basically), then were shocked when they got the same feedback from real users. It's absolutely possible for a small number of people inside a giant organization to make decisions that later bite them. I don't have any particular reason to believe Apple's immune to this.
Apple has built a substantial quality lead over competitors, over the years. That gives them a lot of room to make mistakes (like removing a useful key from the keyboard) while maintaining sales. That doesn't mean every decision they make is perfect.
Think of the thickness thing - Apple made billions of dollars before it wasn't even possible to make razor thin laptops. Is razor-thinness, to the point of losing port connectivity in a Pro device, really necessary or optimal?
This is a great question, but many people seem to have already decided that Apple is personally out to sell worse computers because they can, or something.
It's worth noting that they did change the keyboard on these new models, and I would guess they did so to avoid extending their special keyboard replacement program they have fro the current one.
Apple doesn't care because people (including myself) will continue to throw money at them even if they make something that sucks. All of their competitors' laptops simply suck more. Freed from market pressures, Apple's hardware designers have free reign to pursue form over function, a dream situation for any designer to be in.
To answer your question, it is because Apple is an example of a company where the design people have run amok.
They don't want to improve the keyboard, because it would make the laptop slightly less thin, and the people with the power, (the design department) don't want that.
Just because Apple has lots of people working there, doesn't mean that the RIGHT people are in charge.
No company is perfect. And although apples religious focus on design has helped it in the past, this time it seems to have hurt thebl company.
And maybe they will learn from their mistakes or maybe they wont.
>> I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?
Your question has already been answered by Apple with the current generation of problematic keyboards.
They already had a mature, reliable keyboard that felt pretty good and was not noisy. It was not "broke" and did not need "fixing".
They presumably chose to "improve" it with the current one so that their computers could be a little bit thinner and that Jony Ive could brag about the new technology in a video during a keynote.
It could be that the keyboard is actually amazing, that the concerns are overblown, and that the engineers, developers, journalists, and consumers that have been complaining about it are either lying for some reason or lack the perspective to realize what is and isn't important to their workflow.
It could be that it would be a huge public image loss to admit that they were wrong about this. No matter how Apple phrases it, it's always look bad to say "we've spent the last 2-3 years telling you this was a technical achievement, turns out we were wrong." One of Apple's biggest marketing angles is "we put the work in and get it right the first time." That's going to be something that people mock them over, regardless of whether or not it's the right decision to make.
It also might open the floodgates on more expensive litigation and warranty requirements in the future. Apple's current warranty that they just rolled out is only valid up to 3 years after the initial purchase. Is a judge more likely to force them to extend it if a lawyer can argue in court "they lacked so much confidence that they reverted their own design?" Are their significant investments into blocking Right to Repair going to be hampered by that kind of public admission?
They've also invested large amounts of money into the current manufacturing process and design. Their recent decision to discontinue the 2015 model might point to this being about manufacturing costs - you could ask the same question of that decision: "why not allow the holdouts to keep purchasing the older model?"
Along with that, it could also be sunk-cost fallacy at play. One way to check if Apple has a problem with sunk-cost is to look back in the past to see if they've exhibited a pattern of doubling down on controversial decisions and rejecting criticism or blaming customers for issues.
It also could just be that the keyboard looks sexier in advertisements, and perhaps Apple optimizes for advertisements over extended customer experience because they have enough built up goodwill and reputation to do so. The devices might sell better right now when marketed as futuristic status symbols, rather than as practical machines.
Finally, don't dismiss the idea that it could just be the result of designers and engineers running wild without enough practical input to reign them in. I'm all for giving companies the benefit of the doubt, and I understand what you're getting at. But you should apply your philosophy in moderation or else someday you'll find yourself defending Microsoft Bob. Companies are made of people after all.
Doesn't matter. The crappier keyboard is probably .014mm thinner, which supersedes all other considerations because producing thinner hardware is really really REALLY important to apple.
That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes. You're basically saying, "Whatever Apple sells I will buy, regardless of its qualities." That strikes me as a strange stance to take.
I think what OP is saying is: I'm not picky about the keyboard. I can relate -- I actually prefer the new keyboard -- but also still like the old one (my work laptop), as well as two other external keyboards I switch between (a mechanical keyboard and another wireless keyboard). There's keyboards out there I don't like -- but there's plenty more that I do. So I think overall, Macbook could probably ship with any of these keyboards and it wouldn't be a factor affecting my purchasing decision. That's probably what OP means.
You act as though I said I wanted to use something outlandish as a keyboard, like a reprogrammed toaster. The MacBook Pro is a qwerty keyboard. It doesn't have the full function row or numpad, yes, but it's fundamentally a usable keyboard.
I'm not "basically saying whatever Apple sells I will buy", and to think that would indicate you have an unrealistically uncharitable interpretation of my comment. In fact, I explicitly stated elsewhere in this thread that screen real estate matters to me.
If you feel strongly about the keyboard, that's fine. But that's not intrinsic to your capacity as a developer, it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.
There's a fundamental difference between a keyboard whose feel I might not like (travel distance, click feel) and a keyboard which has been reported to fail catastrophically from the smallest bits of dust.
If Apple decided to go for a chiclet, or other variety of keyboard, I probably wouldn't care. I'd deal with that. In this case, though, I pretty much have to expect (based on news and class action lawsuits) that it will stop working correctly, in a matter of months, in a way which directly impacts my productivity. I'll use one at work if I have to, but there's no way I'd buy one for home while the keyboard is that unreliable.
To be clear, I'm talking about the design of the thing here. There are two different conversations being had - one is about a dislike of the design, the other is about the hardware reliability of the thing.
>> it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.
I find that people who take themselves very seriously tend to project their preferences on others.
As it relates to laptops for developers-- not agreeing on things like keyboards, matte screens, aspect ratios, touchscreens, etc. - that can elicit very strong absolutist responses from them.
>> That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes.
This is true, but not everyone is picky about keyboards.
I started using mechanicals in the 80s, and I know a lot of people think it's the only way to type, but I actually don't like mechanicals any more.
Today, I use a dome keyboard (shudder!) as my daily driver and I can adapt to most keyboards, regardless of feel.
So while I get what you're saying, the OP is probably implying that he/she can adapt to different keyboard types -- as such keyboard type is not a meaningful selection criterion for him/her.
The only time I ever use a laptop keyboard directly is when I'm on a plane. I travel with an external keyboard and mouse. This is partially for ergonomic reasons, and partially preference. I like having a larger keyboard and full numberpad. So I agree with this comment completely. The keyboard would never be a factor in purchase for me.
Sure, that would be shitty. But do we have an authoritative and empirical source indicating a meaningful increase in keyboard hardware problems?
When I search for information about this, I come up with articles like [1]. But none of the data is provided and the analysis isn't exactly...rigorous, to put it charitably.
EDIT: Why in the world has this been downvoted to -3?! This is a reasonable comment to make complete with an example. If you disagree, blindly downvoting isn't informative of anything except that you don't like a comment.
Okay, that's fair. It looks like it goes beyond the tech reporting bubble then. Thanks for being the only one to provide a cited source in response to my own.
I'll concede that the hardware flaws - independent of personal taste about the touchbar or function keys - is a major problem then.
The only people that could conclusively provide that information is Apple, and they have no desire to do so. So all we have to go on is anecdata. My personal experiences suggest that the keyboard is problem is widespread, though by no means common.
The fact that Apple has made a keyboard repair program available indicates just how bad this is directly. We don't have numbers, no, but it's pretty obvious it's not just a small number of users experiencing this given their response.
You can walk into any Best Buy or other non-Apple retail location that sells Apple computers and find at least one machine with keyboard issues. The most common one I've found is a left shift key that doesn't work unless you press it exactly in the center or with excessive force.
Add me to the list of people who don't give a crap about the keyboard, so long as it's functional. The #1 thing I was looking for when I opened the page was...
"how many relevant ports does it have? will I have to carry around a dongle to do the same things I can do on my 2015 MBP without a dongle? oh wait.. nope still need dongles."
And then "Wait why is the 13 inch form factor not even getting discrete graphics processing, nor up to 32GB ram?"
A dysfunctional keyboard is a no-no, because I need a functional keyboard. But in general I'm not bothered at all about the other things that are important to other people, such as key travel, etc. So I haven't been vocal about it.
In the article they cite the MBP as being the most popular notebook for developers so this niche must be important, otherwise why list it?
That "most popular" is marketing - they have all of the developers running OSX and most of those are probably on MBP or Air, where developers using Windows or Linux are fragmented across multiple models from multiple manufacturers.
Developers are more likely to use software that's designed for multiple platforms, without priority given to the Mac. (I guess if you assume not all developers live their life in Xcode.)
This means that developers are more likely to be regularly using software that actually depends on the keys they stripped off to make the touchbar, and/or software with sub-par to nonexistent touchbar support.
Most developers I know use rarely touch the laptop keyboard. On my desk I have a bunch of monitors and an awesome mechanical keyboard. The only time I need the built-in keyboard is when I'm away from my desk.
Here's the thing - I am big on ergonomics, keyboard and trackpads are always a super high priority for me.
At my desk I have a Topre Realforce 88UB 45g keyboard that cost me like £200, a Razer Blackwidow for gaming, and a Microsoft Sculpt to switch it up.
I'm fairly big on keyboards, but I do love the new MBP keyboard.
I can't remember the old one enough now (I had the 2014 model previously), but I know I spoke of it as the best laptop keyboard - so I agree I probably rate it more than this one, BUT I am so used to typing on this now that I really don't think about the keyboard as a con in the slightest - you have to sit with it for a few weeks and you'll be flying - I break 120wpm on this because there is practically no travel.
What I DO hate, is that effing touchbar. Worst design decision on this laptop. I am 'over' it in that I can work fine with it and don't feel like it hinders me anymore, but everytime I look at it I get annoyed they are still sticking with it.
The only two cons of this MBP now it has a spec refresh -> touchbar sucks and not having ONE USB-A slot really pisses me off everytime I reach for the adapter...
Agree about the keyboard speed. I can fly on the new keyboard (2017). My only complaint is the noise which they seemed to have attempted to address in the 2018.
People who want functional keyboards is the majority of MBP users. Even non-technical blogs like The Verge and The Outline are complaining about major failures with the keyboards. This problem isn't developer-specific in any way.
Then make it an option, or risk losing the segment. When my company gave me a 2015 MBP I was really impressed with it, it seemed like the perfect hardware. I knew when I upgraded my personal laptop it'd be a Macbook Pro.
Then they started handing out post-2015 MBP to others and so I've used them a bit. There is zero chance now that a MBP will be my next laptop.
i for one love the new keyboards, i don't give a damn about the touchbar and i dislike the battery usage, but the keyboard to me is near perfect. When i type on the old model now the keys feel overly mushy and inaccurate. Maybe people just give it a try for more than 20 minutes.
> The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does.
Haven't done a survey, but quite a few folks I know who work at Mac shops report that their employers have been steering clear of the new MacBooks and just trying to keep the older models they already have alive, while also looking seriously into the feasibility of switching to PCs running Linux if they don't get their act together.
Making the keyboard reliable would help, but that touchbar is also a legitimate ergonomic concern for anyone who uses software that requires you to be banging on F-keys all day.
>while also looking seriously into the feasibility of switching to PCs running Linux if they don't get their act together.
This is ultimately what I ended up having to do; not really by choice. My 2015 MBP was stolen, considered looking for a refurb model but found myself test driving an HP Spectre x360-a minute with the keyboard, another few minutes Googling linux driver support on my phone and some other specs. I was walking out the door with the new purchase 15 minutes later.
It's been a couple of days now, I still haven't gotten around to throwing *nix at it, but for a majority of purposes WSL is getting me by pretty nicely enough. A few days of getting a fresh Windows installation and ridding myself of all that retail bloatware, I'm actually not having a bad time with Windows 10 given it's the first time I've dailied a windows machine since XPSP1.
That's how far I'm going to avoid the new mbp because key input means that much to me-given how much time I spend in text fields, but this is a really enjoyable machine so far. After 3 years though my eyes definitely got used to the retina display, and this screen just can't match the color variation or the deep darks-then again it also may be the high gloss touch screen.
Every time one of the big boys screws up, we all hope for this. Then the relevant players in the Linux community fail to get their shit together and the cycle repeats itself.
In your view, what would it take for the big players to "get their [act] together"? I'd like to hear a bit more of how you see it. What players would need to work together or coordinate? What are some more-or-less realistic paths forward?
First, they'd need to have a willingness to license "encumbered" codecs, drivers, etc, even if it meant charging for a version of their product.
Second, it would involve a ton of product testing, and tedious ironing out of rough edges. Every single time an installation or upgrade fails, or runs into a strange error needing obscure forum searches to fix it, that's a problem.
Third, they'd have to seriously cozy up to proprietary software vendors for application support. This one is unfortunately an endless time and money sink, and can't pay off until they have enough users that they don't need to do it anymore. Thankfully F/OSS options provide some limits on this, but not entirely. Many times there are F/OSS options that are usable, but the proprietary ones are better (and worth paying for).
This is just a few thoughts off the top of my head. Its not well researched or thought out, but a starting point for a conversation.
I think you are spot on. These are such a huge issues that keep most people away from Linux. The perpetual denial of these issues is a ridiculously huge blind spot in the Linux comunity.
First, someone (RedHat?) needs to establish a partnership with an OEM so they can deliver an end product. "Some assembly required" in the software environment is, almost by definition, a hobbyist project. End users shouldn't need to spend hours researching what hardware is compatible and hunting down drivers. And yes, that means that proprietary codecs and other essential packages will need to be included.
Second, Linux systems have a bit of a jerry-rigged feel to them that needs to be addressed. Things like fd.o and the FHS are intended to help this, but don't go far enough. Compare this to FreeBSD, where every decision about which packages are used in the base install, what the filesystem hierarchy is, etc. is well documented and cohesive. Linux can't go mainstream until, say, a runit-based distro has no references to systemd in its documentation.
I'm being forced into an timed upgrade by corporate and I couldn't be unhappier. If some of the extraneous software needed to work in the environment wasn't Mac/Windows only, I'd request a hi-res Thinkpad and throw Linux on it. Even my ~2010 iMac at home runs Ubuntu.
You might consider running Windows virtualized. About 5 years ago it was still a little janky and slow. These days those problems are mostly non-existent. I run heavy Adobe applications through VirtualBox and can't tell any difference from native speeds, even on my older laptop.
> trying to keep the older models they already have alive
It's not a bad move - if you can maximize the return on DisplayPort monitors, USB keyboards, HDMI cables and MagSafe chargers, it makes sense. Keep in mind the company will eventually have to move to USB-C, as the MacBook Air is the only remaining MagSafe laptop and I won't bet on its longevity. OTOH, the old-style MBPs are enough for most uses, as are the Air for anyone who can live within 8GB.
> the company will eventually have to move to USB-C
Not necessarily. A minority of machines are Macs, and I wouldn't be surprised if not wanting to deal with the whole USB-C thing right now is yet another incentive for IT to be interested in ditching Apple.
> a few folks I know who work at Mac shops report that their employers have been steering clear of the new MacBooks
My office is a great example of this. Hundreds of developers here, and I've seen exactly one of the touchbar MBPs in the office. The CIO hates them with a passion, and nobody's demanding them, so it's 2014/2015 MBPs for everyone. There are a lot of Airs, too, but I've seen zero Macbooks.
> The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does. Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products and make up 10% of the complaints then to focus on the 10% of customers who make up 90% of the complaints.
I was very happy with every single MacBook Air since I had one (which I think might have been 3rd generation?), and in fact purchased every single MacBook Air thereafter. People really liked the original Retina MacBook Pros.
This idea that these Pro customers who regularly spend $3,000 on their computers are a fickle whiny bunch who are never happy about anything and have always found something to be upset about is complete fantasy and ignores the reality of an actual degradation in quality.
We didn't just imagine the extension of the warranty on MacBook Pros with butterfly keyboards: Apple had to take action because the computers were ACTUALLY BREAKING. I own one of these, my t key ACTUALLY FELL OFF. I'm not just trying to come up with arbitrary reasons to hate on Apple, the "t" key is not some ivory tower feature only some 10% niche care about, this is a serious quality problem.
No one is saying they shouldn't innovate and come up with gimmicks to sell new computers. In fact, the T2 gimmick might be perfect: they get to tell "the common user" that the computer now runs Siri without compromising existing behavior -- brilliant! Compare this to the Touch Bar, which while flashy infuriates me every single day as I repeatedly mute and unmute my computer as my pinky brushes the touch bar so delicately I don't even register the feeling on my finger.
I don’t necessarily agree that it’s what most people want. I think the reason that most people keep buying macs is because of MacOS. It is so nice to have a UNIX-based OS with great UI, so we keep buying the overpriced, out-of-date, defective laptops because we have no other choice. I’m convinced that a solid, secure, reliable and polished Unix-based OS for developers would quickly wipe out a large segment of Apple’s market share.
I've long felt that the greatest threat to Linux on the desktop (for the past ~15 years) has been OSX, not Windows.
We all want a solid and reliable UNIX-based OS, but we also want an OS that won't be treated as a bastard child by hardware and software vendors. As much as we all love the world of free software, sometimes we actually do want/need to use commercial software as well.
Apple has given us what we fundamentally want, so we just put up with all the baggage that comes along with it. After all, what else are we going to do? Use Windows?
I have been going back and forth for many years between Linux and MacOS. In 2013, I just got annoyed at how finicky it was to get something compiled. I ended up with a Mac at my current job at the beginning, but a year into it, I had enough.
Ubuntu has been a fine OS for me. It's not perfect, but it serves its purpose well enough.
I think that's right. Our only two options are the Linux desktop with its high-maintenance potential of timesink, and Windows that, while it has improved, suffers from an authoritarian approach to things like reboots, updates, ability to customize and so forth. I use Windows 10 + MobaXTerm after moving off of the increasingly annoying MacBook design choices.
But there's something far worse: killer apps (for some professionals and hobbyists) only exist for Mac OSX and Windows. I'm looking at you, Adobe.
Linux has improved a lot in the last couple of years. Even on state-of-the-art hardware you can expect reasonable support if you choose a distro that uses a recent kernel (ie. Manjaro instead of stock debian).
I've been using a 8th gen computer for a year and I haven't had any problems. On the contrary the hevc hardware decoder/encoder works on linux, but I couldn't get it to work on Windows.
On the other hand Windows looks more polished than KDE and GNOME.
Having recently built an AMD gaming rig and bought a Aero 15 laptop with the latest 8th gen chip and installed the latest Ubuntu on both, not everything works out of the box (sensors and discrete graphics specifically), but both machines did everything I asked of them.
Curious. Have you tried Gnome Shell or recent KDE or some modern Linux desktop like that for a while?
Because I always assumed MacOS as a Unix with shiny UI as well, however once I worked on one for a year or two I realized it long lost its uniqness. In many ways the UI is closer to Windows 7 than Windows 10 is. And things like Unity/Gnome Shell or even win 10 long went in a more productivity focused UI concept.
Agreed... we need another apple that makes laptops and polishes the linux OS that it comes with (great software/hardware integration). I'll buy those over macs
Look at the iPhone SE. For customers who prefer a compact form-factor at a low price point, Apple still make a phone with the body of an iPhone 5 and the guts of an iPhone 6s. It's a niche product, but an important part of the line-up. "Old chassis, new internals" is a standard part of the Apple playbook. Mac sales represent an almost irrelevant part of Apple's revenues, but they're a vital part of the overall Apple ecosystem.
Apple still have the tooling for the 2015 Macbook Pro. The NRE costs to put a modern processor in that chassis would be relatively modes, because it's a much larger chassis with a more straightforward thermal design. The market for such a machine might not be large, but it's extremely important for the health of their ecosystem, because developers developers developers.
Personally, I think that the post-Jobs Apple has developed a nasty case of cargo cultism. Obsessive focus on the user experience has transmuted into obsessive focus on arbitrary design goals - thinner, lighter, fewer ports. They're making record profits thanks to the huge margins on iPhones and the strong vendor lock-in on iOS, but they're burning the goodwill that kept them alive during the lean years. If Apple can't find a way to delight customers rather than frustrate them, they're facing a serious long-term problem.
Internet hearsay (Apple store/reseller staff quoted in podcasts etc.) often mentions that the MacBook Air is (was?) their best-selling laptop. It has no TouchBar, more keyboard travel, a smaller trackpad, arguably more useful ports, and longer battery life. If the trade-offs in the latest MacBook Pro were universally loved, why wouldn't they spread into Apple's other, more popular product lines?
I honestly don't see how their current laptop line-up makes any sense for consumers (and shareholders). If the TouchBar really makes it easier for non-nerds to find shortcuts, why only offer it in high-end laptops?
The Air is their best-selling laptop because: (1) it's by far the cheapest and (2) it's tiny. It's also extremely outdated -- people universally love the retina screen but the Air doesn't have that either. Also, rumor has it the Air is being replaced this fall, so we won't see what features make it downstream until then.
The above is to disagree with all of your specific arguments, but I do not disagree with your implied conclusion -- I don't think the touch bar is universally loved. I suspect most consumers do not care about it one way or the other, and I think it was a mistake that Apple should kill.
Fair enough. In any case, the MacBook Pro hasn't been Apple's laptop for the masses in a long time, unlike what r0fl implied. We can't infer from its design what 90% of customers want.
Longtime Mac user (I had an Apple II+). I've had a new MBP since Jan '17. Replaced a five year old MBA. The keyboard itself isn't terrible (although my left command key seems to be going, so yay) the Touch Bar is worthless. I simply cannot fathom who though putting something non-tactile on the keyboard was a good idea. I was so hoping they brought back regular fxn keys with the next iteration.
One of the key tenets of touch typing instruction is to NOT LOOK at the keyboard. And the lack of universal control over iTunes is admittedly a first world problem however they didn't replace it with anything meaningful. I've had this machine for 18 months and I have found zero utility in the touch bar.
I'm very curious to try the new BlackMagic eGPU though!
honestly, I don't think a touchbar is "bad" so much that the implementation may not've been the best. Maybe as an external piece of hardware like Microsoft's dial where I could use it for the cases it seems best suited for (sliders, picture thumbnails to render full screen on display, etc.), that would've been optimal. Although, I would've probably preferred a Magic Trackpad-sized device with a touch screen instead of a long bar. Would seem to allow for more use cases.
Though honestly, I was never much for the f keys beyond the browser and in Visual Studio. So the loss of those keys didn't hit me as much as it has others.
The MacBook Air competes with Chromebooks. It lost the low end to Chromebooks, and I see more and more high end MacBook Air users switching to Chromebooks as well. Neither the Air nor Chromebooks currently target developers.
It happens with every Apple product since as far back as at least the original iPod. There is always one thing (or a small number of things) that people just can't stop complaining about... Yet the product gets super high sales numbers a year or two later the people who complained the loudest return to buy the newest verison anyway.
I mean, the people who don't like it are in their right to have that opinion. It sucks when your use case gets fucked. But when the removal of the ESC key is your reason to bemoan the sure death of the MacBook, you gotta at least be aware that you are in a tiny, tiny minority.
I just don't understand the grief over that. Even if you do use a notebook for programming, would you actually use the laptop keyboard all the time?
I always have an external keyboard around for any serious dev work. That way you can pick any style you want, clicky mechanical or wireless or whatever.
I base it on the fact that among developers it is an extraordinarily popular laptop, and that there are a shitload more developers than most people seem to estimate. We are a pretty large "niche" nowadays. I have a Lenova Yoga 720 and I am almost always the single non Macbook user in any developer group.
"developers/enthusiasts have a really weird way of showing their discontent"
If you want to use xcode, you have no choice[1]. If you're in the ecosystem, you have no choice. So you complain about it and hope they change it the next time around.
My point is that there is a much larger audience outside of our own "niche". The fact that we see a lot of developers with Macs, does not mean that they are a large audience among all of the Mac users.
My brother works at an Apple shop, and the vast majority of people he has to attend come from all walks of life, they are not developers/enthusiasts.
There are around 20 million developers globally and Apple has been selling 4.5 million Macs per year on average since 2013 (most of them MacBooks).
If 27% of all developers are using Macs (as the stackoverflow survey indicates) and the machines are replaced after 4.5 years then developers would be buying ~1.2 million Macs per year, 27% of all Macs sold.
In terms of revenue developers are probably an even larger share, perhaps a third? That's still not the majority, but it's certainly very significant even assuming that Mac users are overrepresented in the stackoverflow survey.
We are talking specifically about Macbooks. Among buyers of the iPhone, iPad, and iMac is a broad, society-representing demographic. For Apple laptop it is overwhelmingly developers and aficionados (e.g. designers). I don't have any official stats, but I don't know a single person who owns a Mac laptop who isn't in those two categories.
The Macbook Pro has been the go-to software developer machine for years now, and that segment is seeing a massive exodus after the touch bar launch. I don't know how big a percentage that is of total sales, but it can't just be a trivial niche.
Is there a real, large exodus though? I don’t notice that, anecdotally, but others seem to (seemingly anecdotally too). Are there data about it? For the segment that are “professionals” or for work use, for example? At least broadly, 3Q saw Mac sales decline 7.5 percent YOY. But, the whole PC industry declined. So, I’m not sure what conclusions to draw — and in the absence of that it seems a bit hard to swing either way in claims.
The PC industry as a whole is declining from a sales perspective because refresh cycles moved from 30-40 months to 60-70 months. If you have 1000 computers, you needed to buy 200/year today, and would have needed 350 in 2005. Computers don't need to replaced as often, so slowdowns in momentum are very important because they indicate the institutions are slowing down purchases.
Microsoft is trying to push back on this by making it impossible to support Windows 10. We'll see how that goes.
When I was responsible for this at a large enterprise, I was buying 40k devices a year, every year. The Mac component was about 1,500/year. That dropped to 50 when the new keyboards came out and started failing. Losing a few hundred sales isn't a big deal, but some of that money that was going to MacBooks went elsewhere.
I have no data, and I personally use Linux and track point equipped machines, but my observation is Mac fans paying for their computers with their own money are not buying the new macs. I suspect that the sales number are reflecting corporate sales. I think Apple should remember that it is people from the former group who have managed to arm-twist corporations to look at non-Windows machines, that and the slow rise of Linux acceptance in more and more companies should make them listen to people who don't want Windows want.
I had a touchbar 15" from work and once I left I bought the no touch bar 13" version. I was waiting for the 15" no touch bar version, but it looks like I'll stick with the 13" for now. Eventually they'll probably fix it somehow, but if not it sucks as I used to like both the machine and the OS.
I'm holding on to my 2013 mbpro with a real keyboard, but if it dies... looks like they only have emoji keyboards now. I'll have to join the exodus then.
Same here, I'm typing this with my late 2013 mbp, this was my first Mac. And it's amazing how it keeps working perfectly just like the first day, I haven't noticed any slowdown, it doesn't have any noticeable hardware issue. I never experienced this with other computer.
Same here. Well, that's my personal laptop which is perfectly fast and in great condition.
My work laptop was actually the same generation, until IT recently upgraded me to one of the new-keyboard models. I don't like how loud the keyboard is, and I don't like the touchbar. (sorry, I actually need to press "Esc" and also use non-beautifully-designed software that sometimes uses Fn keys.)
Needless to say, I have absolutely no desire to upgrade my personal laptop. When I do, I can only hope Apple has moved past this, or the F/OSS world has finally acknowledged that the touchbar actually needs to be supported.
Mine's a mid-2012 model. I've been quite happy with it. I've long been looking forward to Apple coming out with a model capable of 32GB, so I would have upgraded immediately, but my understanding is that the new machines haven't addressed the keyboard dust issue. So I'm probably going to hold on to my 2012 for at least another year.
I have a 2013 13" and a 2014 (I think) 15" for work and having had used a lenovo thinkpad for work briefly I can confidently say that there is no way I will be joining any sort of exodus when my work laptop or personal laptop come time for upgrade.
You say that but it's the vocal but happy 10% that can sway the 90% to buy it. Mac wouldn't have been as big as it is today without its fans. The ones that complain are your best customers, because the ones that don't just walk away without giving you feedback as to why they walk away. The 90% is too indifferent to speak up.
A lot of people ask techie friends for advice on what computer to buy.
As argued by Paul Graham:
"So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?
Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world."
Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers,
If that were the case, Apple wouldn't be selling tons of iPhone's in their "wall gardens" and DRM'd media content and the "Year of the Linux Desktop" would have come ages ago....
PG’s argument is a meaningless non sequitur. The question isn’t about what new technologies people adopt; it’s about what product designs they go for. The former of course will start in CS departments and research labs, because that’s where they’re developed. That’s really not saying anything, and has no bearing on the latter.
Yeah, I don't think that's because you're a tech person. To most parents, their children may as well be tech experts because their bar for that is simply "they know more about computers than I do." I'm sure most people could probably convince their parents to buy a Macbook, or any other brand of computer, for even arbitrary reasons.
I may be wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that your parents had to be convinced to be a Macbook on the merits of it's technical prowess in relation to other competition. They probably just respect your opinion on technology regardless of what it is.
The most popular apps made be made by computer geeks but which apps are made are decided by large corporations. Corporate America (and corporate marketing) have a far bigger sway than computer nerds.
If that weren't the case Samsung wouldn't be the most profitable Android manufacturer with their crappy bespoked custom Android version.
I’d be willing to bet a big part of the base that buy the MacBook pros are the creatives. Most consumer consumers are happy with iPhones and iPads.
As someone who was a massive fan of Apple MacBooks and recommended them to other people, I don’t do that now. I highly unrecommend them nowadays. I’ve personally in fact bought older second MacBooks since they last longer and work better than the new ones.
So it slowly adds up. Microsoft surface is already making a good dent in what was a loyal Mac Pro market.
It's not just developers and MacRumors posters. Joe Rogan - the comedian and MMA commentator - did a massive unprompted rant on how poor (and he didn't use the word 'poor') the Apple keyboard was on his recent podcast (3rd most popular podcast in the world http://www.itunescharts.net/us/charts/podcasts/).
The keyboard affects anyone who types. It's not a niche group of obsessives at all.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Rogan is a good proxy of Hollywood creatives, which in turn has an enormous impact on how often Macs show up as default movie props.
I would also add Rogan has a massive following and is a big influencer in many areas. His opinion could easily affect people thinking about or considering moving to a Mac product.
I know a lot of his followers on Twitter are super loyal to the brands he promotes.
Consumer electronics movie props are typically paid advertising placements now. I don't think there's really a default anymore, at least not for big-budget Hollywood productions.
There's a big difference between the AfterEffects guys and the writers. Rogan's complaints were as someone whose career requires massive amounts of writing and understandably wants a keyboard to have feedback.
I'm in complete agreement with him. In their obsession to make the thing thinner and fancier they have rendered it less usable. They've locked themselves into a marketing pattern that precludes them from having a "if it ain't broke" mindset.
That niche of developer/macrumors posters USED to be happy with everything Apple did. Under Steve Jobs, it seemed like Macbooks got cheaper every year, with more value. Now, every year the price goes up, but less value.
>> Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts? No touchbar, smaller touchpad than the newer macbooks, but updated specs? Call it Macbook Developer... We build the software for the "Pros" after all.
> They didn't do that because it is not what most people want.
What's your basis for saying that, besides the assumption that Apple can't be wrong, so whatever it's doing must be what people actually want?
Apple has a habit of designing from an ivory tower and not admitting to its mistakes. I would say it's arguable that their design priorities are currently out of whack: chasing thinness when you're going from 1.5in to 0.75in is one thing, it's quite another when you're going from 18mm to 15mm. It may not be a fatal mistake for them, but it's evidence that they may longer deserve the design deference they've traditionally gotten.
> Apple has to make changes that will sell more laptops to the masses to maximize shareholder value.
Many of those changes could be characterized as pointless sidegrades: merely change for change's sake.
You can tell no one is clamoring for those features because they're not getting copy-catted.
No one wants that touchbar and Apple themselves just replaced the keyboard so to say its what consumers want is just pure fantasy. There's no data yet. Maybe they'll want this new keyboard but you're assuming anything Apple does is what the consumer wants.
Apple has notoriously aggressively focused on a future-facing scalable way. I.e. where they see enough of the market in say 5 years (i.e. firewire, USB-C). However, they have been wrong before, AND I don't think anyone can argue that they aren't focusing on non-mobile hardware right now.
While it's easy to say "just trust apple, they're doing it for the shareholders," I think it's also fair to say that they're losing their touch in this venue.
It used to be the only reason you didn't buy a Mac for pro creative-type work was the price. Now there are many great reasons from ergonomics to computing power.
>The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does.
That's not entirely accurate. The original 15 inch Retina Macbook Pro is an ideal laptop as far as I'm concerned. I'm still holding on to mine for home use. It was extremely well received in development communities at the time of release. On the other hand I have 2017 Touchbar Pro from work and it's horrendous for undocked use, borderline unusable.
The 10% are the "word of mouthers" (evangelists) that influence the other 90%.
Apple isn't where it is today because of TV advertising. It's where it is because of brand advocates like the people who are now complaining about the new products.
Then they'd be wrong. You focus on the 5% of people who tell the 95% others what to think.
And you don't ask people what they think, you observe their behavior and hope you can make sense of it. People have no fucking clue what they want. You would have to be insane to ask people for their _opinions_ and expect something you can work with.
Most of Apple's shareholder value these days comes from the fucking iPhone and iPad. They won't be terribly hurt by switching back. This is purely marketroid-driven product design, and if it keeps up it'll bust Apple back down to also-ran status.
(Not that Jobs wasn't a Dire Marketroid himself, but at least he knew that practical and functional sells better in the long run than snazzy but busted.)
The 15-inch 2015 Retina model is no longer being sold on their website, too. It was there as an option for some time, but it appears this new update called for getting rid of it. I was planning on saving up to finance that as my next laptop purchase, but seems as if I'll have to go through a third party seller.
Bought a 2016, then returned it and got a refurb 2015. My only regret was getting the 500g SSD vs waiting for a 1tb model (which my friend got). The refurb levels were changing daily, and I kept missing the 1tb models, so I pulled the trigger on a 500g.
Didn't care for the touch bar - yes, hey, apparently all the cool kids 'remap' their ESC key, and many did it I guess 20 years ago(!), but I've got decades of muscle memory to overcome. But beyond that, yeah sure it was thinner and sexier, but had a 20% smaller battery, and for the work I do, I guess I'm not 'pro' enough, but never managed more than about 4 hours max of real work.
The 2015 model was 'good enough' in most respects, and better in others (keyboard, battery), and... cheaper.
Always interested to see and try the newer models, but probably won't upgrade in 2018 or 2019 without some massive reason to do so.
EDIT - well, the 32g option might be a worthwhile reason to upgrade. And the battery looks slightly larger than the 2016 model.
The battery increase for the high end i7/i9 models is to offset the increased power draw -- it supposedly won't give you much in terms of battery life in actual usage.
Or just... running stuff that kicks on the GPU? Running development tools (ios stuff, java stuff) would always kick things in to overdrive and send the fans whirring, and killing my battery. Yes, I'm often plugged in, but knowing that, if I need to be mobile, I'm going to get 2-3 hours... was a hard pill to swallow for $3700, when for 30%+ less I'd have a machine that lasted longer, had quieter keyboard, etc.
had looked at that - seemed potentially more trouble than it's worth, but... it might be a cost-effective avenue (factoring in time/value) before another upgrade. thanks.
And worth noting the 2015 15-inch MBP they've discontinued had the old non-butterfly keyboards. The old style keyboards are gone, Apple is 100% in on the keyboards they currently have a defect service program on. [1]
(Edit: Though these new MBPs apparently have a new third generation keyboard, so not exactly identical.)
You are wording my exact thoughts. mid-2015 13" MBP was good balance.
They've played this thinness and flashy lights game too much too long. My new Lenovo T480S (24GB DDR4, is coming next week :) Sweet Linux with i3 tiled window manager. All the ports & productivity I can ask for.
I'm voting with my wallet and my vote doesn't go to Apple.
I keep wanting to buy a 17" and then walking back from it after seeing/handling 17" laptops in physical stores.
All the bezel-shrinking R&D being done for phones has to reach laptops at some point. I'm seriously losing half an inch of luggable-but-not-lookable space on each side of the screen, plus a good inch below. (I have like the most common 13" Dell in the world; just walking around in the study room of the library I see three more.)
The Apple 17" laptops were about the same size (maybe even smaller) as large 15" laptops though. Presumably, an Apple 17" laptop in this day and age would be pretty manageable size-wise.
I can definitely attest to this, having had one back in the day. Of course back then, everyone else made super-chunky laptops, at least with the cheaper models (so chunky that people bought netbooks because laptops were insufficiently portable.)
I frequently put Apple's 17" laptop in a backpack/case slot designed for 15" normal laptops, and it fit just fine.
The 2006 17" MacBook Pro only had a resolution of only 1680x1050. A 15" Retina MacBook Pro has a "true" resolution of 2880x1800 but is normally used at an effective resolution of 1440x900. However, you can easily adjust it to be an effective resolution of 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 (the resolution of the last 17" MacBook Pro in 2011).
Of course the effective pixels per inch may make some features too small but the effective PPI of 1680x1050 on a current 15" MacBook Pro is lower than the actual PPI of the last 17" MacBook Pro's screen:
147 PPI 15.4" 1920x1200
133 PPI 17" 1920x1200
129 PPI 15.4" 1680x1050
116 PPI 17" 1680x1050
110 PPI 15.4" 144x900
My favorite was the first Aluminum Powerbook 12 and 17. I wamted both. I owned the 17 inch. I envied the 12 inch also. The 17 inch was almost the size of a Dell 15 inch at the time, so it wasn't as large it seemed. It was and is my favorite laptop I owned, ever. Well, that or my IBM Thinkpad 600e.
I wouldn't mind that either, but OTOH, I don't work on a laptop screen all day as a rule. I'd rather have a compact machine that I can just plug into a screen. I wouldn't mind a Mac Mini style machine with magsafe power and/or an easily detachable docking station.
Without a battery, you'd have to shut down each time you moved from seat to seat. You might as well carry a fast, bootable drive around and treat the actual computer at each seat as the docking station.
That was back in the day when you had to buy Apple's 17" model just to get the same number of pixels on your screen as everyone else's 15" model. Apple had worse density than the competition back then.
Then a few years passed, and Apple went all-in on high-DPI "Retina" displays, while the whole PC laptop world had a great display regression.
> Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts?
That would have been far more desirable.
I am repulsed by the Touch Bar, and the keyboard which is widely reported to be notoriously unreliable and requiring very expensive repairs does not inspire confidence.
Do you speak on behalf of all "developers?" The 2016 revision is Apple's fastest-selling iteration of the MBP.
I notice you don't quote two paragraphs right before that:
> The butterfly keyboard design Apple introduced in 2016 has been divisive. Some people really like it, claiming it has fast travel and a sturdy, responsive feel to it. Others feel it's uncomfortable to type on. We haven't seen a keyboard this polarizing in a long time; it's a point of passionate disagreement even among Ars Technica reviews staff.
The reaction is mixed, even among people who compare laptops to each other for a living. But you make it sound like anybody who knows what they're doing would prefer the old model.
> The 2016 revision is Apple's fastest-selling iteration of the MBP.
This is after an (at the time) abnormally long period of little to no substantial updates to the laptops. If you remember at the time, people were worrying about the lack of a new laptop the way they worry now about the Mac Pro. It's really not completely fair to state this metric without the realization that there was a lot of pent up demand for modern components, which would probably overrule any other issues. I was one of the people that bought the 2016 model -- and I'm not happy (not least of which because one of the keys literally fell off), so "fastest selling" != "well received". As it stands now, for me the defining quality of the hardware is that it is the easiest way to run macOS. The fact that the 2015 model and the Air keep selling so well is in my opinion a better demonstration of the "reception" of this new MacBook.
> The reaction is mixed, even among people who compare laptops to each other for a living. But you make it sound like anybody who knows what they're doing would prefer the old model.
This is also just not a fair representation of the actual state of affairs. Regardless of whether the keyboards are enjoyable when functional, the reality is that they have quality issues. Apple having to create a program for replacing the keyboards since they break so often is just a fact. Interestingly enough, I'm in this camp: I really have no issue with the new keyboard except for the fact that the keys break. Well, that and the Touch Bar which is a separate topic.
Independent of the like or dislike of the keyboard, it is interesting to highlight that Apple will employ the classic PID style of marketing speak.. (as in like PID controller).
what I mean is, if they are selling a ton and its sustained best case scenario), then they talk about that number (thats the proportional term) -- they say things like "we are shipping 1k units per day and projected to hit 50k per month soon".
If they are they aren't selling very many, then they find the derivative of the number sold and see when it is the highest.. "like in a weekend we sold 1 million units!!"
And then if its a slow burn after a period of time they eventually tell you a cumulative number that have sold (integral). "There have been 100 million macs sold to date.." that kind of thing..
So when somebody says "fastest selling", that gives me pause because it basically can mean whatever you want it to mean -- that somehow they have a metric of sales within a period of time of their choosing that was higher than other previous devices. That could literally be because of their ability to fulfill them compared to previously.
Anyway, I'm still holding onto my MBP 2012 and waiting for basically a lighter version of it that has the ability to replace internal M.2 cards (not proprietary), ability to max out my ram and also doesn't have a touchbar.. I mean that touchbar is so lame.. what a waste of effort/time on apples side.. also, talk about fixing something that wasn't broken -- the trackpad.. basically up until the force trackpad people thought it was better than anything else out there by a factor of 10, and apple then changes it and basically everybody says its substantially worse feeling except novice users who know no different..
It seems to me the touchbar was just a clever way to get their own processor into their laptops for some large scale real-world testing before they ditch intel and build the entire thing themselves. 2020 is a good guess I'd say.
Maybe the Touchbar was just a "clever" way to prepare all of us for sole touch-based input, which is going to be included in the MBP in 2020. ;-)
P.S.: I don't even think touch-only input is neccessarily a bad idea. All Apple has to do to make it work is to implement some kind of really good haptic feedback which also allows to feel individual keys. I even expected that for this iteration of the MBP for the Touchbar.
Re: your P.S.: If a touch keyboard could give haptic feedback that let us distinguish between a "correct" keypress and a missed one, it might work. Perhaps a pleasant haptic vibration in proportion to how close to center your finger strikes would work.
I'm surprised this is the first time I've seen the "touchbar as a way to get the A-series chips into macbooks" take. It's the most sensible explanation.
Sure, there are downsides to the touchbar (I get it), but I'd suggest we ask this question: where does Apple want to go with the touchbar? Instead of focusing on where it is right now, think about what it could be.
With haptic feedback and perhaps different locations/placement, it has the potential to augment or even transform the ways we interact with the computer.
Put another way, the current problems are not insurmountable. Changing habits is not easy. What if there are better options than current keyboards? All I'm saying is consider what might be in the works.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we should blindly accept anything Apple does. But we should not blindly assume that their decisions are based on the worst intentions, either.
Even without the Touchbar, using the T1 for securing the TouchID sensor (amongst the other duties it fulfills) would've been justification enough. So no, that's no excuse for the Touchbar.
I kinda wish they were able to implement the touchbar in some sort of hybrid way, like those Art Lebedev keyboards we all saw hyped (but probably never in person) back in the day.
While I'll admit there are cool things you can do with embedded OLED displays, the keys they sacrificed for it are keys I actually need to press. Regularly.
I also think that part of there are economic and organizational commitment reasons the touchbar is still getting made. I do not think it is because people love the touchbar.
Color me optimisitic, but I'm hopeful a new arm-based mac will come earlier than 2020, though.
>They have to recover the money spent on TouchBar R&D. We won’t see a proper MacBook Pro until 2020.
The amount of money spent on the TouchBar has nothing to do with anything. Apple makes a new set of chips for each new iPhone, iPad and Mac; they have the in-house expertise and the budget to make whatever they want whenever they want.
It's not like the Mac division has it's own profit/lost statement it has to worry about.
The main reason why it's taken this long to get MacBook Pros to this level of performance is due to delays by Intel; simple as that.
That's the sunk cost fallacy. If the traditional function keys would sell better than the new touchbar, their best move would be to start selling the old ones right away, even if that meant "throwing money away" on r&d.
I just looked up my laptop's info: 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 from 2012. So you are telling me 6 years later, I can get a 2.9GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 processor for ~$2800. So Moore's law was incorrect?
Moore's Law is with respect to transistor counts and has nothing at all to do with performance.
Historically speaking transistors and performance were coincidentally related: More transistors helped do more things at once, and tinier transistors ran faster than bigger ones.
Now we're at a different inflection point where the transistors aren't shrinking as quickly, but the dies themselves are getting bigger and the chips are growing more complex in terms of 3D structure. There's more transistors in there, but the easy gains in terms of pitch reduction leading to higher clock-speeds are gone.
If we'd been on the same track as before you'd have a ~140GHz CPU. Instead you have a 2.9GHz one because physics is a buzzkill.
I believe Moore's law hasn't been true since before 2012
Anyway, yes, this is why a lot of people, myself included, think the new MBPs are not at all worth the price, especially if you have an older one. There is essentially no reason for me to ever upgrade from my late 2013 model unless it completely breaks. I love this computer, it was probably one of the best purchases I've ever made
Who are we to believe has a grasp of the reality of value-for-money? Hacker News commenters smugly declaring that Macbooks are junk? Or Apple's sales figures?
If we're going to be rational, we can't wave it all off as marketing or shiny toys, we have to accept that if they are consistently selling tons of products at high margins, they are delivering value, and the market is voting for that value with their pocketbooks.
If we say, "Well, their prices are out of whack with their value because we can get the exact same thing from Bob's Motherboards for half the price," then we are wilfully choosing to emphasize the part of their value that their customers don't care about, while ignoring the part of their value that customers care about.
Web developer here. The MacBook Air is fast enough for me, so I am very much interested in thinner, lighter, and non-performance related features (Touch Bar and Touch ID) in the Pro lineup.
If you're used to MacBooks, check out the Surface Laptop or Surface Book.
- The hardware (particularly the keyboard and massive trackpad) is great
- apt-get on WSL is better than homebrew will ever be (powershell too if you have the time to learn it)
- Windows 10 has a dedicated team working on it (Apple has merged iOS and macOS teams since a few years ago, which may be because iOS makes a lot more money).
I'd be interested in knowing how many people switched from the MBP to the Surface(Book) due to delays and changes/issues in the MBP range.
I bought a first generation Surfacebook a few years ago because I couldn't wait any longer for Apple to release their new MBP range, and I'm glad I didn't wait. It's the best laptop I've ever owned.
Even though I've moved away from .NET dev and work mostly with Ruby and Node it's still my favourite machine to use. I run Debian with minimal problems, and I'm started to get more into WSL, which seems to work brilliantly for all the use cases I've thrown at it.
If the numbers are strong on people moving from MBP to the Surfacebook, then it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for it to become a real option for developers, regardless of whether they want to use Windows or not.
Count me in, for one. My main machine is still the 2013 MBP (2015 MBP at work). But every laptop / portable / desktop I've bought since then has been a Windows machine, because they offer either 1) similar value at a cheaper price, or 2) greater flexibility and usability at the same price. The Surfaces are the best laptops a non-Apple-dev "Pro" can get right now, in my experience. They've got ports, they've got portability, their hardware is now up to par with the best of the Macs.
I still love my 2013 Macbook Pro, but I'm probably not going to be buying a Mac again until they make something of similar usability and flexibility (mostly the keyboard and the ports).
Agreed. I also have the 2013 model and it's a great machine, but it's starting to show its age now, and the keyboard on the Surfacebook is now light years ahead of the MBP. Unless Apple can release a laptop on par with the flagship Windows laptops I cannot see myself buying one.
Coming from windows to mac I just love the simplicity. In windows you have so many options, so many updates, preinstalled apps which I never use. I open the mac, click the app in the dockbar, that's it. All apps scale nicely on the screen, unlike windows on a 4k display, terminal is great.
This. I love this about most modern PC laptops. Sometimes you get some driver issues like I did on this MSI where I had to go through a kernel mailing list and use some python scripts to extract the firmware from Windows to get Wi-Fi working:
But that was also a gaming laptop. Every Dell and HP I've purchased in the past few years works perfectly with the mainline kernel. I've never had an issue with missing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or video drivers for years in a PC laptop.
Trying to get Linux working on a MacBook is a fucking nightmare:
Having managed a suite of them (SP4's) I disagree veheremently with your assesment. of the 30 I had, 26 had to be returned for repair; fan falures followed by battery issues were the main faults. To add, the dock is just a pile of junk. Utterly worthless, despite an endless series of updates. The Windows 10 team are responsible for Server and Embedded versions of Windows as well as the desktop version. Suggesting that the have a "dedicated" team is mileading.
My experience with WSL has unfortunately been different to yours.
I tried running Docker on it, which was a disaster. WSL doesn't seem to fully implement things that Docker or other Linux apps require. Various network things seem to be half working or absent.
I don't want to start an argument with you on this, I'm glad your experience has been different to mine. I've started using WSL as a simple shell to access a Fedora VM running under Hyper-V.
If you're used to MacBooks, check out the Surface Laptop or Surface Book.
I’ve also switched from MBP to Surface, couldn’t be happier. Great keyboard, great 3:2 screen (since you can’t buy 4:3 anymore), nice trackpad, WSL is great too. Rather than complain, vote with your wallet.
Good to point out that iOS developers want a good solid laptop. It is definitely the case though that there are developers who don't/won't do iOS development but want a solid, well-built laptop with good components, good support, and good drivers. I have no idea if the Surface laptops fit that bill, but I assume they have lots of support from Microsoft.
I've been running a ZBook G3 with Debian 9 and have been having a pretty good experience so far. The laptop feels pretty good but I'm sure a MacBook Pro would be a step up in terms of hardware quality.
Same here. My work provides us with Macs (I just got the touchbar one), and 90% of my time is spent in iTerm ssh'd into my linux work desktop with tmux. We had a choice of a ThinkPad, but it is just so goddamn hard to get used to a different trackpad after a mac.
AFAIR there was a story stating that the windows team is now part of azure and some other project, no longer having its own team.
Apt is so different from homebrew that I don’t think they’re worth comparing directly. Fwiw people run homebrew on ubuntu, presumably because it is «better» (i.e has something to offer over) than apt.
And there’s a lot of applications that don’t work under WSL - a while back, not a single haskell app worked. (I haven’t bothered checking)
Sorry, but Windows 10 is godawful. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. If you want to sell the surface laptop to power users and developers, you're better off mentioning that you can install Ubuntu (as an actual host OS, not WSL bullshit with Microsoft's spyware still running in the background) just fine on certain models.
I have little insight on spying issues (or how MS compares to what Apple, Google or everyone else is doing regarding that nowadays) but coming from Windows 7 I have zero practical complaints about using Windows 10 over it. I like the WSL bullshit a lot, too.
I disagree with this sentiment. What makes it "god awful" in your eyes? I've been using it at work for the past year or so, and I've had no real issues to speak of.
Do I like more than Ubuntu (which I use personally)? No, but I find it to be pretty easy to use.
Also, the Ubuntu subsystem has been fantastic for working on remote Linux servers. I was using git bash (or Ubuntu in Virtual Box) previously, but I don't need that anymore. It will freeze once in a while, but it's trivial to get going again.
I feel like the trajectory over the last few years has been to make things worse... I guess if you used Windows 8 a lot it's a bit of an improvement but I still don't feel like it's anywhere near as good as Windows 7 was... I'm not even talking about things like deciding it wants to update and spending half an hour doing that when I'm trying to get work done, it randomly installing Candy Crunch and some other crap automatically one update (again, work machine) or the fact that my start menu stops working surprisingly often (seriously, not sure if this is just my machine but it's damn annoying - it just doesn't do anything when I click on it sometimes)...
But just things like the network settings - they have been making getting to Network and Sharing Centre harder each big update, and the replacement (the new metro-style settings app) is just rubbish in comparison. You can't change an IP address in it, can't easily get to the network status, etc... Network and Sharing Centre wasn't even that good but it would be a big improvement to just can the settings app and go back to the Windows 7 control panel...
If you use Windows 10 Pro in an enterprise environment, AD policies can turn off most of the spying (although there have been various issues on that and plenty of other HN threads).
That being said, I don't mind Win 10 when I have to use it. I use it for games and Adobe products and I find it really nice and prefer it to macOS easily.
My main box at home and my laptop at work are both Linux though. Gentoo for life! When it comes to development nothing compares to a good tiling window manager and a solid Linux ecosystem.
I've tried some simple ops stuff on my home computer (Windows), and it's horrible because the alt-tab behaviour is completely ridiculous / arbitrary. Old style was alt-tab goes to previous open window, new one goes ???
I like the touchbar and the bigger touchpad, and even the new keyboard (at least, while it works). Granted there are a few bugs with the touchbar which are rather annoying, but nothing they can't fix with a software update (fingers crossed).
It's not possible to buy it without the TouchBar any more :(
I really wanted to like it, and the concept could perhaps eventually be good, but the current implementation is infuriatingly bad:
• I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.
• The buttons are in different locations depending on context, so it's not possible to use it by muscle memory.
• TouchBar automatically goes to sleep, making the previous two points worse.
• It's not even that good for its intended purpose. Previews of things on it are too tiny. Most actions still require multiple taps, and it's in the uncanny valley between direct and indirect manipulation.
Fingerprint sensor is convenient, but the TouchBar ended up being a gimmick, not a pro feature.
> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.
>
> The buttons are in different locations depending on context, so it's not possible to use it by muscle memory.
You can add Volume/Brighness Up/Down buttons to the "always-on" touchbar by going to View -> Customize Touch Bar on the finder.
You can also start sliding from the "open slider" button without releasing your finger, which is more granular and IMO much nicer than having to press many times to adjust volume. If they only removed that giant pop-up on the screen with the current brightness and volume it would be a big improvement.
I wouldn't care about the touch bar if the esc+(sleep key) were still regular hardware keys. Those are the only ones that I actually use.
But an even bigger problem for me is the price increase. The base TB version costs 200€ more (or 400€ if you'd buy the nTB 128gb version). With ne nTB version not getting the update, the updated MBP is too expensive compared to non Apple machienes.
As an aside, I switched Caps Lock to ESC a few years ago and after the 6 weeks(?) or however long it took to fully adjust, it's fantastic. I wish I could bring Caps Lock -> ESC joy to everyone.
I've done the same but Caps + key to Hyper (cmd+ctrl+option+shift), just to pair with custom shortcuts.
But I really love using it for escape. I'm on a 2014 model but not going to the corner for escape is great. Plus I'm about to get one of these new ones, and I feel prepared since I have zero usage of the top row (other than the special functions).
I believe the price increase is purely based on the profit-maximizing strategy. If people will pay that much then Apple has no reason to ask for less. Unfortunately, I can not imagine myself switching to a Windows-based laptop. This is just another example of why monopoly is bad.
I agree that this is profit maximization, but the only monopoly Apple has is on sucking less than others at particular things that particular niches care about (privacy, UX, ecosystem integration come to mind).
A non-Apple device will do all the same stuff. It just might not do it the exact way you like out of the box.
I pay the Apple tax (albeit exceedingly infrequently) because I can afford it & it reduces friction in my life, not because I have no other options.
If it's any help, I found this tool useful: https://www.haptictouchbar.com/ (I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't build this into the Touch Bar at some point.)
For those who are wondering, it's creating a haptic bump via the trackpad. You'll feel it right there if you put one finger on the trackpad and then touch the touch bar.
It's a good enough effect, though, I will probably keep it. Thanks for the suggestion.
> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.
I discovered recently that you could just do a "quick swipe" (very fast) on the button in the right direction on both the volume and brightness virtual button to apply the expected effect. Good enough for my usage.
My favorite is when my hands naturally come to rest near the top of the keyboard at least once a day they land on the brightness control in the touchbar and dim my screen to black.
Or that I try to press delete, and if my fingers are a tiny bit off, the computer goes to sleep since the touch bar is really sensitive. Even the edge of my finger triggers it.
I learned that while reading email and using "e" to archive that my pinky rests on the escape key. Took me a bit to realize why weird things were going on.
Other than that, I like the 2017 keyboard (assuming mine doesn't break) and touch bar.
The touchbar is awesome--you can immediately blow away all the worthless function keys and have a minimalist setup. I keep the escape key and the volume/brightness sliders, that's it. Keeps the entire setup feeling clean. People actually use the touchbar for context-dependent tasks?
I don't understand your argument from that point of view... with the same argument, I could tell you that adding 15 new keys to the middle of the keyboard would be good, because those keys may have esoteric function for a small number of users, and if you complain about their addition, I'd just remind you that this is a tool, not a piece of art.
Look at how many people here recommend rebinding caps lock to "esc" and control to caps lock and all other sorts of editing to the keys... should you remind them that rebinding keys is unnatural and the tool should be used the same way it's always been?
I guess it stems from the fact that I've never understood the argument that the touch bar took away the "esc" key... but on every touch bar MBP I see at the Apple Store, the esc key is still there, still right where it was, and still has the same functionality. The only difference is now if you don't use the esc key, you have the ability to remove it and put a more useful key there instead. But somehow this is a bad thing. I don't understand it.
If it's a tool, like you claim, it should be useful for getting work done. But instead you seem to actually want it to be made according to your exact design and visual preferences, which to me sounds more like you're actually looking for a piece of art.
Consider “remapping keys” as the digital equivalent of “customizing a tool’s grip to for your hand”. Or maybe “rearranging the workshop to put your most-used tools in easy reach”.
Replacing the top row with the touch bar, in this analogy, is like someone else coming into your workshop and replacing several tools’ grips with big padded things that completely ruins the physical feedback you expect to feel, and never realized you used for fine control until you didn’t have it.
Maybe I'm part of the minority (or since Apple's sales are still doing pretty good maybe the minority is just louder), but it's just weird that the line in the sand is being drawn at "the uncommonly-used keys are still there, but now they can be customized too, but only if you choose to use the default keyboard instead of an external keyboard".
For me when I switched to a Mac, the hardest thing to get used to was the lack of a forward delete key (the Windows-style use of the delete key) and having to use a key combination instead. Even today I still struggle with the lack of pgup and pgdn keys, and the lack of home and end.
In light of commonly-used keys that are actually missing, I just struggle to accept the idea that the Esc key being a touch button but still existing is a hill worth dying on. Especially when, since the touch bar is customizable, everyone can now swap their (relatively) useless F1-F12 keys for the (relatively) more useful Home, End, Forward Delete, Page Up, and Page Down keys. Or whatever else they want it to be.
To me, it's like the digital equivalent to swapping a workshop's dedicated phillips-head screwdriver with one that lets you switch ends to be phillips or flathead or torx or whatever. Some small number of people may complain "but it's not the same way it's always been!", but it sure does make life a lot easier for a lot more people.
"It's not the same way it's always been" has been Apple's driving mission since... well basically forever. Think Different, right?
Maybe instead we could have a row of keys that provide some sort of function, and maybe a key that allows the user to escape. That would be a pretty useful feature that I can guarantee I would use dozens or hundreds of times a day.
I'm considering replacing my MacBook Pro soon, and I might have to drop macOS from my 3 OS lineup. I can't justify an expensive but locked down desktop machine, so if the laptops aren't meeting my needs either then goodbye Apple.