Have you noticed the correspondence between these alternate terminal incantations and the resultant codes they produce? If an ASCII table is laid out in columns of 32, they are on the same row, e.g.
(3) ETX <-- C (67)
(4) EOT <-- D (68)
(8) BS <-- H (72)
(27) ESC <-- [ (91)
I was happy to find some order in what previously seemed arcane stuff.
To be honest, that super-thin row of Esc/F-keys on the 11" Air has been totally useless anyway for real typing, so if I go from there to a new Pro, I wouldn't really miss that stuff.
I was just thinking that earlier today when I was enabling installing apps from "anywhere", which is now a hidden option that can only be enabled from the command line.
You can still install apps from anywhere. The hidden option allows you to bypass gatekeeper, which IMHO is a fantastic security feature that stops people from installing potential malware or unsigned binaries.
I think it's a good possibility that for operation systems, and even applications that don't take advantage of the bar that there's a default that behaves like the existing key row.
No function keys, so the "magic toolbar" will for 99% of the time just be a generic toolbar?
That smacks of the Android decision to do away with physical keys and instead just display them all the time. Wasting valuable screen real estate and power for a bad emulation of buttons.
I once owned a Dell laptop that used a strip of touch-sensitive regions for volume and media control. In practice they were completely useless, because without looking, it just felt like one continuous bar with nothing differentiating the buttons, so the lack of any tactile feedback made it impossible to use those "buttons" without looking at them. In my 4 years of owning that laptop, I was never able to build any muscle memory for hitting those buttons. I'm worried that the same will be true of this magic toolbar.
If the core issues are that there's no tactile feedback and that button locations can shift depending on context, then Apple made the same mistakes that Dell did. The problem is that no matter how well-designed it is, a keyboard used for touch-typing is the wrong place for a smooth, capacitive sensor.
Both haptic feedback and pressure sensitivity are within Apple's capabilities. This could actually be an improvement (imagine feeling a virtual volume slider scroll with dampened resistance).
I agree that an actual volume slider would be useful, but I still doubt that there's a good way to present a row of buttons on a smooth flat surface in such a way that they can be touch-typed. Haptic feedback doesn't let you manipulate a typical phone app UI without looking at it.
I'm not a fan of haptics when physical keys are an option. I believe that Apple can make a nice demo with vibrating indications of when the user's on a key, then detection of when they push down on it. What I don't believe is that it will be a better experience than feeling the edges of the keys and the actual descent and tap when depressing the key.
This seems like increased complication without any real gain. It's more sleek than usable, kind of like the touchpads with virtual buttons, rather than physical separate ones.
Just wanted to point out that that's exactly what people said about software keyboards on phones vs hardware keys (and some still do, but most phones are now all software). It turns out that a big innovation in the first iphone was dynamically adjusting the touch boundaries of the keys + smarter autocorrect.
I don't think anyone would argue that a touch screen is better to type on than a physical keyboard though. It's just a sensible compromise given the size and weight limitations of an iPhone. Harder to justify on a (relatively big and heavy) laptop, but we'll see.
A phone's soft keyboard is a compromise for size. Compared to a hardware keyboard, it sucks to type on. If you want to type anything but gibberish, you stare at the keyboard the whole time you're typing.
A laptop with a hardware keyboard is large enough not to benefit from that compromise. I mean, a little touchscreen's not without its uses, but don't get rid of the keys that I expect to be there.
In practice they were completely useless, because without looking, it just felt like one continuous bar with nothing differentiating the buttons
With Escape at the extreme left top, it should be possible to differentiate that stop by feel. I'll have to try it when it gets into the store. In the meantime, I'm still very happy with my 2012 MBP.
They probably mean the virtual one, which, if Apple is smart, will always be in the top left, so you'll know where it is in relation to tilde/backquote f.e.
I took the GP comment to mean "the physical Esc key will help you get your bearings without looking at the KB" but I might have mis-interpreted the comment.
I haven't seen anyone working on a screen+touch surface that can be be programmed to change physical texture per pixel such that you can for instance raise the pixels forming the border of an onscreen button allowing the user to feel it without having to look at the screen.
Another example of Apple trying to please the masses but pushing over developers. It's silly to think that the function keys and the ESC keys are used so little that they can be removed altogether. Agree with others in the discussion that such touch sensitive regions are largely useless besides the bling factor.
Also, what about the controls like screen and keyboard brightness or volume controls? Where do those go to?
I use a Macbook Pro 2015 and I don't think I'll be upgrading to the new one, especially if the specs are nearly similar.
Why Apple, Why do you insist on going against the standards on practically EVERYTHING? There has to be some method behind the madness.
Perhaps the `fn` key will remain, and switch the bar into a mode that has screen brightness, keyboard brightness, volume, etc. I think that would work ok, but yeah, it's a shame about Esc.
Looks like that's the case. 'fn' is the lower left key on the Apple keyboard. 4th to the left from the space bar. The images still show a key there (but not enough to see what text is on it), but that's almost certainly still the 'fn' key.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's also used to make fn+` = Esc, fn+1 = F1 etc
That's how my filco Minila & other 60% keyboards implement the F keys, and IMO it's an improvement. [though... I do flip the ` key to be ESC by default]
Some developers. Neither Emacs nor Vim use the function keys to any significant extent. Relatively rarely-used stuff like screen brightness and volume control seem like the obvious things to put on a multi-function OLED bar.
I hardly ever use an IDE but Apple Pages allows you to assign each function key to a distinct style. For example F1 is document heading, F2 section heading, F3 subsection heading, F4 body, F5 blockquote etc. I have a document template with this mapping set and it's my default template in Pages. After using this setup for a few months I found that I can indeed touch type the function keys and it's extremely convenient. I imagine many office workers in the Apple universe (i.e. not MS office or google docs) would feel the same.
>> I use a Macbook Pro 2015 and I don't think I'll be upgrading to the new one, especially if the specs are nearly similar.
Seriously? I'm on a 2013, and the specs of the latest machine are already "nearly similar". I have factory SSD flash storage and 16 GB of RAM. The CPU and GPU upgrades haven't been remotely worth upgrading to.
How can you be on a 2015 MacBook, talking about upgrading to a 2016? Nobody cares whether you own the latest gadget; upgrades should wait at least 2, usually 3-4 years. I'm not talking about the severe case of frugality (use the same laptop for at least 8 years until it dies!). Just basic common sense.
I have a macbook pro from .. 2013? The main reason for me would be too get a fanless laptop. That could be a reason to update even from last year's model.
But if it's as silly as the 'new macbook', then I'll probably pass.
I'm trying not to sound snarky, but: different strokes for different folks. Who are you to tell someone how to spend their money? Just basic common sense. Ok, that was a little snarky.
>How can you be on a 2015 MacBook, talking about upgrading to a 2016?
(Germany) Well, I personally can depreciate computers faster than the usual 3 years. Because I run a software business I was able to argue with the tax authorities that I always need the most recent model as the average life time of a computer in my field of business is 1 year.
But then again I don't make really use of this because as you said: There's not enough differentiation between consecutive Mac models so the trouble of writing off and switching machines isn't really worth it.
TBH, when I talk about this upgrade I'm talking my work laptop, which I have the option of upgrading (for free through the company) every year. Most of my configs and tooling is customized and backed up, so getting up and running on a new system is not too time intensive. And in the case of better specs or better tooling, then why not? It's not about owning the latest gadgets but the performance improvements that come along with them.
My home system is a 2012 rig running BunsenLabs Linux (https://www.bunsenlabs.org/) which I upgraded to from Crunchbang some time back.
"It's silly to think that the function keys and the ESC keys are used so little that they can be removed altogether."
Not on macOS, at least for the Fn keys. Having a context aware row of buttons that will actually give some cue as to what they do, rather than some random, generic name will probably see those buttons get much more use than they currently do.
I actually think this is excellent for developers as well – they are among the people who most strive to do everything by keyboard, but its really quite hard to remember all useful shortcuts of multiple editors/browsers etc.
I'd love the next generation to have tactile feedback, or maybe at some point to go full-on single-key OLED like that concept that went around a couple of years ago. But depending on the APIs, this may already be quite useful.
Apart from the lack of the Escape and function keys, I'm kinda bothered about the keyboard. It seems the MacBook Pro has the butterfly keys. I really hoped they won't use the butterfly keys on the MBP.
Well, it's just a leaked image, so can't draw too many conclusions out of it I guess.
I'm more bothered by the butterfly switches than the touchscreen strip. When the 12" MacBook was released, I stopped by a local Apple store to check it out, and left unimpressed. Better than typing on an iPad, but not by much. At the point where I'm carrying a laptop, the extra few mm for decent key travel is going to be unnoticeable.
Alright, I think the touch bar thing is stupid but really I use those keys for volume/brightness almost exclusively. So I can probably live with that.
edit: Aw crud, I do use escape when I'm editing in vim from time to time.
Not having HDMI on the 15" is annoying. Not having SD is annoying. I didn't use the HDMI port a ton, but it was nice to have. SD I really only use for photos.
Losing magsafe is probably the worst thing here.
Oh well, my 2013 is still going strong so it's not like I'm really in the market for a new macbook.
No magsafe and taking out all those other conveniences means I can consider other vendors for the first time in years—but only because the MacBook will have gotten worse, which is kind of a sad reason for it.
I have a venerable 2010 MBP that I'm considering replacing in the near future, but (as you mention) the new hardware is not compelling. The thing I can't figure out is whether or not my gripes are legitimate, or if I'm losing brain plasticity (i.e. getting old).
HN is the only place where I can read people's comments complaining about how the JavaScript ecosystem needs to move at even faster pace than it is now and just a few submissions away, watch people complain about hardware change.
For me anyway, I don't care as much about software changes because I have lots of choice, and can rewrite something or switct to another software package if I want to. There is literally nothing on the market that matches apple's battery life on their laptops so any changes they make that are deal breakers for me are a big deal.
If battery life is your main criteria, the thinkpad x260 gets 17+ hours of real world usage battery life, and the x250 gets over 22 (from what I remember) if you add the superbay battery.
Are they light and thin and durable and with high-quality chips and well-tested hardware and perfect integration between OS and hardware and calibrated displays and ... you get the idea. There's a reason pro users pay the Apple premium for laptops.
But I wonder if Apple is really making a smart choice. Alienating the tech / UNIX people, as few as we may be in the grand scheme of things, may hurt them in the long run.
That's why I said "If battery life is your main criteria" in hopes of avoiding this kind of predictable response.
People have different preferences/needs. Pro users get plenty of non-mac laptops with "high quality chips" (I didn't know Intel made them worse for everyone but Apple) and hardware.
Also the x2xx Thinkpads are probably far, far more durable than any macbook, but that's unrelated to battery life.
"High quality chips" wasn't about Intel, we all know they are reliable. I'm talking about dodgy wifi, audio, ethernet, etc. chips, that offload their work to the cpu to save on silicon, have crappy drivers, or are otherwise flaky. That's been my experience with non-Apple laptops.
So much complaining about something that we didn't even yet seen in action. Guys from Apple are not that stupid to remove f1-12 keys and put something completely useless and UX unfriendly, give them a chance of showing it first and then complain.
And all the other talk about ports, magsafe and other stuff that are just guesses, why do you complain about something that is not even confirmed?
New in Sierra, they allow for native remapping of caps lock to esc. I had been using a 3rd party solution to do this before the update. Won't make everyone happy but the number of Vim users using the Esc key as opposed to Ctrl+[ (or caps lock) has to be decreasing ..
You shouldn't be using the escape key because it takes your left hand off the home row. I prefer the Caps Lock mapping to the 'jj' variant which might make be more work for my pinky and be slightly slower but it works for me.
Having easy access to your mode switching character is important because training yourself to enter Normal after entering a piece of text is the first step to 'next level' Vim use.
For you GNOME users, making your Caps Lock an escape key is as easy as setting it in the Tweak Tool.
So, who's going to be first with an after-market "bumpy" "screensaver" appliqué for this, to simulate at least to some degree a "key texture"?
Alternatively, will/could it (at some point) have localized haptic feedback?
P.S. I'd like to see some "edge-on" photographs that show whether and to what extent the relative exposure/relief of the top row of keys and the bar cause the bar to "hide behind" the higher relief of the keys, making it more difficult to touch without triggering one of those keys, particularly for a touch-typist or someone hitting the bar frequently.
so if there is an API for applications to modify this magic toolbar, does it mean that while the application with the custom toolbar is running I can't change screen brightness or mute the sound etc? hopefully there is some shortcut that forces the magic toolbar to 'alt-tab' to the 'system defaults' view...
I'd expect the brightness is tied to keyboard brightness. Not that that answers the question about blue light. To that end, I'd wager first version won't be sporting anything like Night Shift / flux.
This is correct. The imgur description incorrectly dates the renderings from 2015. They actually came out a little over a week after the leaked body photos.
I've had Macbooks for about a decade, and I'm excited about these changes. The OLED bar is kind of gimmicky, but OS X apps (unlike Windows ones), don't really use the function keys much. The MB keyboard is good--what it lacks in key travel it more than makes up for in key stability. Also, good riddance to Magsafe. The worst part of the Macbook experience is Apple's incredibly fragile and shitty chargers/cables. Being able to use off-the-shelf braided USB-C cables is going to be awesome.
Every Macbook that's entered my house over the last ~6 years (4 work, 2 personal) has had its adapter abused horribly, and none of them have frayed. Meanwhile they've saved all of them from multiple rapidly-getting-friendly-with-the-floor events (kids).
One thing I don't do is wrap the Magsafe end around those little prongs when I pack it. I just bunch it up roughly and toss it in the bag. Maybe that's what frays it?
Yeah wrapping around those prongs seems like the worst thing you can do to that tiny cable. And I don't blame the users for this. I just don't understand why they would put those prongs there.
Apple has a guide to show you how to best wrap the cable without straining it...
i.e. Don't pull it tight. I still have power charges from my 2007 MacBook Pro that have not frayed and still look like new and with the adapter from MagSafe 1 to 2 still get used regularly.
Same. I travel extensively with my laptop which means it and the charging cable are in and out of the bag a lot. The adapter is unplugged and plugged in multiple times per day. I go through about two charging cables a year right now. If they don't physically start fraying, the pins in the magsafe start sticking and it no longer makes good contact.
Really odd. I had one of mine for four years through college, which meant constant plugging in/unplugging in classes, at the library, at the dorm/my apartment.
Other than being off-white from dirt/dust and whatever, that charger lasted all that time.
I've been an Apple-laptop user for 10 years, and a month or two ago my charging cable started fraying. It's less than two years old, and hasn't been used anymore than I have previous ones (if anything it's probably been abused less).
I'd assume it's just Apple reducing quality and raising prices (€85 for a replacement?!?) - Lightning cables are notorious for the same issue.
I have to keep fiddling and moving it around in its socket, or else it either stops charging, or even worse gets into a "false charging" state, where the OS says it's charging, right up until it dies because the battery's drained. The only indication I get that this is happening is that the percentage stops changing.
Besides cables fraying, adapters dying (two of Apple original adapters died on me in last two years. As opposed to my Dell XPS M1330 7 year old adapter who's still not showing any damage to the cable even though I used it the same way) and it keeps falling out of the laptop as soon as you're on uneven surface.
Agreed. I have a late-2008 aluminum Macbook (non-pro, "collector's edition"). The Magsafe adapter was one of my favorite things about it. There were countless times when it saved that laptop from falling off of a table, or saved me from tripping. I've had the same charger since I bought the thing back in January of 2009, and it still works fine, no fraying or other injuries whatsoever.
> Being able to use off-the-shelf braided USB-C cables is going to be awesome
Sadly there are a shocking number of USB chargers/cables which will physically fit into a USB-C port but are not to spec, therefore prone to damage or destroy the device. A Google engineer has been testing these and listing "approved" ones here http://www.bensonapproved.com/
Why does Apple still insist on such large bezels when the industry is shifting away from those for displays?
Rather than potentially usable display area we have more large bezels, yet again.
Take the 12" Mac for instance - Apple had no problem shrinking the bottom half of the computer yet retained the large bezels, whereas they could've utilized the area to place a larger display panel in while retaining the same footprint. The resulting incongruence looks odd IMO.
You may like that scheme from a functional standpoint, but Apple would never produce something like that. From a design standpoint, it looks bad when you place a sharp corner so close to the screen fillet. The extra breathing room feels much better.
They may reduce the bezel in the future, but IMO that would be done in the midst of a MB redesign.
Famous last words. The titanium powerbook had very small bezels for its time (2001), and I remember Steve Jobs when introducing it claiming that at the edge the cursor was almost gonna fall off. Of course this doesn't mean they'll do it again, but they certainly experimented with the idea before.
I’ve been wondering about this for a long time, too. They could cram a 14" screen into a 13" casing. So much wasted screen space.
The only theory I could come up with: They do not want reduce bezel size because this potentially closes the door for making the laptop lid thinner. As we all know by now, thinness has top priority at Apple. A super thin lid means there cannot be support structure and connectors behind the screen, they must be placed around it. But you cannot place it around it if there is no bezel to hide it beneath.
If the Apple MacBook hardware guys read this: I’d rather have the current laptop lid thickness and no bezels than a paper thin lid with the current large ugly bezels.
I tried mapping jj to esc, but even after a few days I couldn't really get used to it. Always drove me crazy when it would switch modes when I just intended to type 'jj' as a variable name in loops. At least it got me to use more meaningful names!
Your latter suggestions are brilliant, I'm going to steal them right away.
If you like the space bar leader you might want to try spacevim or something like that. (I switched to spacemacs and I love it... Vim is a great style of editing but the plugins are bad and feel broken and half assed. Spacemacs fixes that by combing the best of vim with the best of Emacs. That feels dirty to type but it's true.)
You can have the best of both worlds with Karabiner. After remapping caps lock to Control, you can add a Karabiner setting to send Escape when you tap Left Control. Holding caps lock in combination with another key will still act as ctrl-<key>
The fact that you haven't had it enabled for years is probably why you can't understand its usefulness. It's just not part of your workflow because its not available. It does in fact provide a lot of value. As an example, entering uppercase alphanumeric codes is annoying without capslock (switching from holding shift for uppercase letters to remembering to let go of shift to enter a number really slows down entry).
That's not really an example of why something in all caps is useful, though.
The only time I've seen anyone using caps lock is in a call center where people think it's the proper way of entering data into a form (my opinion is it's totally not).
It's a political thing: if they replaced Caps Lock by Escape by default then emacs users would scream murder. If they replaced it with Control then vim users would probably start looting nearby stores.
And thus, the status quo is maintained.
But seriously, like with almost everything keyboard layout-related it's just there because people are used to it.
One of my favorite things: map caps to escape on tap, and control when used as a modifier. I've got it set up that way on my linux machine and it's amazing. I'm sure you can do it on OS X with Karabiner or something.
I'm still surprised when I see people using caps lock instead of shift for typing a single uppercase character (This being the keyboard peckers who still use one finger for everything).
I see this sentiment all over the internet but I don't really understand it. Not trying to be snarky but can you explain why you want the caps lock key gone?
I know personally I don't use it too often, but it's nice to have if I want to type in all caps which happens occasionally. Holding down shift with a pinky for a anything more than a few key presses can be a little uncomfortable so I appreciate the caps lock key.
One of the screenshots shows function-like buttons. I'm assuming you'll be able to map spaces of the OLED strip's screen to arbitrary keys. Also I'm sure that, given some time, you'll be able to have ESC show up only when macvim/term is in the foreground :)
… Apple may be replacing the top row of the MBP keyboards with a a context-aware touchscreen, and y'all assume somehow that this means they're getting rid of ALL of the fn keys?
No, you're still gonna be able to dim your screen and mute your speakers and yes cancel modal dialogs.
I've heard of this before. Do you have to hit some sort of modifier to get them? Does that not make indexing arrays extremely annoying, or is it really not that big a deal?
To be fair, () are more common than [] in most programming languages, and you need modifier keys to get () for most keyboard locales. Yet not many people complain about ().
In the German Mac keyboard layout, brackets [ ] and curly braces { } need the ALT modifier. “[” is ALT + 5, “]” is ALT + 6. You get used to it. With smart editors, writing “[” automatically creates its counterpart “]”, same for curly braces, so the typing effort is kept within limits.
(I have never used a US keyboard layout. Maybe typing programming symbols could be so much easier and I have never experienced it.)
I don't think it's a huge difference. Both () and {} require shift modifiers on US layouts, and they are both used extensively in most programming languages, far more than [] and nobody seems to complain.
Actually, there is, because indexing elements in arrays is a fairly common operation and when I use a US layout, it's so much easier. In fact, a lot of the contortions we have on EU keyboards are a pain to go back to once you've gotten used to a US layout, because there are decades of lore and history around US-layout TTYs that influenced programming language designs.
I've been touch typing on Programmer Dvorak for more than a decade. If you type programming symbols all day long it's unbeatable: http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/
It's annoying as hell. {} is even worse though, shift-alt-8/9 iirc (I've moved to a US layout years ago precisely because of this, and haven't looked back)
Or you know, they won't not buy one. I really don't get the appeal of Macbooks for developers, the price tag is quite heavy compared to the specs one gets.
I can't find a great windowing environment still, mind sharing your setup? For me, quartz is still light years ahead in the quality department over things like gnome and kde, though some of the new work on wayland wms looks promising
My experience the last few years has been that Linux works good enough on most laptops but that there are some rough edges. Everything works, but the laptop will only go to sleep 50% of the times you close the lid or the display brightness will automatically drop to 10% when you leave the laptop for 2 minutes and not go back when you start using it again or the wifi will drop for half a minute every 30 minutes.
Nothing dealbreaking really, just annoying. But I don't experience these kind of things when using the OS the laptops was shipped with (OSX/Windows) and would love to see more Linux certified hardware like Dell's XPS.
Running Debian Unstable on a 2008 Macbook 4,1 and it's working quite well. The GPT partition was a bit tricky, but after that all has gone well but the camera, which doesn't work without proprietary firmware from yonder the repos. It's pretty cool to see an 8-9 year-old laptop with good battery life and reasonable performance. First time I ever fussed with a Mac and I'm glad I did. Also, I totally nixed the Mac OS partitions, for single boot.
Decent tradeoff of ease-of-use and "just works" factor with unixy tools. Not as good as Linux for the latter (which in turn may not be as good as BSD, depending on who you ask) but way better for the former.
One gets a hardware-compatibility-guaranteed unix workstation. There really aren't many cheap options for that. If you want to suggest an unsupported linux laptop, I can suggest a hackintosh.
Because macs offer UNIX environment which is great for Devs, but also a full-featured UI with lots of high-end commercial apps (and good audio engineering) which is not as easy to get in a Linux laptop. And, the support and ease of using the system is appealing compared to the more hands-on approach of maintaining a Linux distribution.
Plus they are quite dependable hardware overall, and lots of easy OS updates.
Nowhere near the same. Last I checked, Microsoft kinda put it over in the corner, where it can be it's own little thing, but not a first class citizen of the system like UNIX is on macOS.
That isn't what the parent's claim was about though -- the claim was "first-class" citizen.
I'm well aware of homebrew and the like having used it myself; I still think the current situation is now better on Windows than macOS, which is bizarre.
Except that so many platforms just don't work well under Windows, and if you use languages like OCaml with OPAM, or other incredible tools like Elixir or Erlang, you can expect hiccups. You can get them working, but you have to do more heavy lifting [0]. In some cases it took the maintainers of major packages years to get them working properly on Windows because of its strange environment compared to most of the rest of the industry, and these tools are often still unstable. Which is why so many developers who choose to use Windows usually have a duel boot or VM into Linux, which is an extra layer of inconvenience a lot of the time.
I used to work on Windows only and had a VM, for 2 years this was my daily workflow. When I finally just switched to Mac, it was amazing how much more time I felt like I had during the day to spend on my real work, how fewer VM issues I had to deal with, and just enjoy working on the native OS.
> Except that so many platforms just don't work well under Windows, and if you use languages like OCaml with OPAM, or other incredible tools like Elixir or Erlang, you can expect hiccups.
I disagree. I listed several issues with XNU's implementation of POSIX above.
A large portion of the WSL complaints are around the lack of inotify. You know what other system doesn't have inotify either?
Another example is ptrace(): on XNU, it doesn't work; you have to use Mach instead. On the other hand, Microsoft went to the effort of actually making ptrace() work properly. This has actual user-visible ramifications: gdb works great in WSL, while it works not-so-great in current versions of macOS. strace works fine in WSL, while on Darwin you have to use the heavily underdocumented dtruss.
Syscalls are underdocumented in macOS, so Valgrind doesn't work well; it constantly breaks on OS updates. On the other hand, Valgrind works great on WSL as long as you compile from source. A lot of this is because Linux has a stable and documented syscall interface, unlike Darwin.
Well, I don't use Windows any more so I cannot speak from personal experience on the matter. But in my free time I experiment heavily with new platforms and languages, and as I'm working through support forums, freenode, blogs, there is a tremendous amount of noise from fellow experimenters trying to get something going on Windows [0]. Perhaps the really smart folks out there don't have this problem, but for the average joe blow developer who just wants to have some fun exploring technology, it is very obvious that things just go a lot more smoothly when installing and compiling and running various platforms on OSX compared to Windows. There is rarely any difference between the OSX and Linux steps to get all setup, while the Windows steps are often a non-trivial obstacle for the average developer. And many environments carry disclaimers about known issues on Windows that can affect operation. Even WSL often needs to be patched just to support a platform that works fine on OSX. Or we hear, "you can do this better in the next version of WSL..." sigh, that's not what most people want to deal with.
You are perhaps well above average and so these issues don't affect you. But that doesn't help everyone else who struggles in the Windows environment for things that prioritise Linux/OSX.
[0] Heck, even one of the principal Clojurescript developers doesn't even support Windows, he just asks for patches from Windows users who managed to figure out how to get something working. That is not an isolated attitude.
Except we weren't talking about Windows -- we were talking about *NIX stuff, which implies the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
I won't claim it's fully there yet, but given how macOS is these days, it will be more stable very soon.
Ask the Go language team how they feel about all of the little breakages in various syscalls/apis that Apple introduced.
Ask graphics programmers how they feel about the lack of modern OpenGL.
Pretty soon Windows will be a far more compelling development platform than macOS (unless you have to do Apple development of course, but then there's always Visual Studio for remote development for some Mac/iOS things :-P).
I cannot disagree with you enough. Last I saw, you cannot interact with the rest of the system from Windows bash. I can install Sublime Text on my Mac, and launch it from the terminal, for example. I can't do that with the Windows system.
It's actually entirely similar to the way BSD is grafted onto Mach in Darwin.
lxss.sys is a much better implementation of POSIX, honestly. In WSL I've never had to deal with incredibly broken stuff like ptrace(PT_CONTINUE) panicking the kernel from untrusted userspace with "TODO" messages (I wish I were making this up) or having the kernel close file descriptors sent via sendmsg() in flight if the sending end of the Unix socket is closed in blatant violation of POSIX.
I spend 90% of my work hours developing on a Mac. I have reverse engineered dozens of Cocoa libraries to get my apps working, because of insufficient documentation. I have dug into the XNU source code to find out why things are happening.
Say what you will about Windows, but I don't have to spend hours debugging random out of memory reads causing kernel panics in the OpenGL drivers on that OS. (For example, calling texture2DMS in a vertex shader on anything other than the first row of a texture reads from random memory; still not fixed as far as I am aware.)
I do live in the terminal, and I couldn't be happier with Bash on Windows. I use the XFCE terminal connected to a local X server and it's the same experience I get on Linux.
I have several Thinkpads running *BSD and they are great and all, but at the end of the day I gotta use Skype and the Office suite for communicating with clients so I default to working with macOS most of the time.
UNIX + great desktop support and apps + pkgsrc offers an unmatched experience depending on what you work on.
Not actually much more expensive than other comparably-high-quality laptops.
That glowing Apple on the back means you won't be personally blamed if something on it fails to work—say, if your wifi decides to cut out every five minutes due to a quirk in a particular hardware pairing, or it doesn't like a certain projector and refuses to work with it, and the meeting at your client's site ends up being more about your broken shit than the client's needs. If your $500 Dell running Arch and covered in penguin stickers does that, you might be personally blamed for it, and/or the quality of your judgment and competence might suddenly be on everyone's mind.
- nice extra features if you have an iphone like iMessage
- can develop apps for android and iOS without janketyness
- can develop for Linux/Windows/Mac
- some don't play many games anyway on a dev laptop
I think it's nice to have the development flexibility. i like being able to start coding anything possible because you never know when an idea may need a quick prototype.
If I do need macOS, don't want to jerk around with hackintosh in a VM.
- many ports so you can utilize the pro-ness of it w/o a dock or another extension (my micro-sd card is about as large as my ssd)
So half of the reasons I bought are no longer present or not really applicable because equal or better apps are now on Windows.
I get it, they want to add all these cool features, but based on the rumors I have heard (and their 'updates' since 2011) the 'Pro' Macook is getting less Pro with each release. Thankfully, my laptop has held up quite well and I primarily use it for dev, so I'm hoping it will hold up for sometime so I can continue working on it...but I don't see the advantage of paying $1000s for what amounts to a more powerful 12-in Macbook. Better to buy a mini (specifically for iOS dev) and a laptop that isn't a beefed up consumption device.
Actually, the Apple hardware and specs are usually better than you can get in a comparable Windows laptop for the same price.
The Windows machines are cheaper right now only because Apple has gone two and a half years without updating the Macbooks Pro without lowering the prices. Apple does awful things like that sometimes so you have to be careful about what you buy, but you have to be careful with Dell and HP and Lenovo also, so that's not really different.
But try finding an equivalent 3lb, silent, big glass reliable touchpad, extra long battery life, solid reliable build, color corrected retina screen laptop with similar specs to the new Macs next week and you'll find Apple has the best prices in the market as usual.
---
Plus, as others have mentioned, UNIX is like a smooth creamy dream compared to the droning misery and shocking horrors of Windows.
You might want to tell Apple, they think they released it in April 2015.
Meanwhile as best I can tell, the Dell was out in August of 2016.
I have no horse in the race. I'll be upgrading my Mac with another Mac. But it's not Dell's fault Apple has been neglecting its entire computer range: over a year since the last iMac bump, 18 months for the MBA, 2 years for the Mini and nearly 3 years for the Mac Pro (I love how they're still charging full retail for the Pro components, or worse, $280 for 64GB ECC, but $1200 from Apple).
According to Everymac, the following changes were made:
- CPU went from a i7-4578U to a i7-5557U (Haswell to Broadwell)
- memory was upgraded from 1600 DDR3L to 1866LPDDR3
- SSD was given extra lanes of PCIe
- Iris 5100 went to Iris 6100
- Force Touch - "more advanced", not cheaper
- Battery life improvements
In fact the summary is that "internally, the 13-Inch "Mid-2014" and "Early 2015" MacBook Pro models have little in common except that both have soldered memory, "blade" SSDs, and batteries that are glued in place."
I have a setup on my work computer (windows) where capslock is control when pushed in combo with another key, and is escape when pressed and released on it's own.
People replied with some ways to do it on mac, but I haven't tried yet.
I use function keys a lot for programming, but there's plenty of apps I don't need them for. Having context aware buttons sounds like a nice step, especially if it has the ability to securely store and use my credit card for purchases.
How about going boldly into the future rather than being tied down to something which doesn't get a ton of use in most situations!
*Edit: of course my reply doesn't have anything to do with the headphone jack. For simplicity and space removing the jack made sense, but for ease of use and standards there's good arguments for keeping the it around. I argue this case is different because it's not widely used and it's prior use (fn keys) can be duped by the magic bar.
Apart from using them to change volume I have never used them for their intended purpose. Having a per application, contextual bar with actual labels e.g. Launchpead instead of F4 makes a whole lot more sense.
> Having a per application, contextual bar with actual labels
I would agree if they somehow have some way to physically distinguish the keys by touch. It's pretty much useless to me if I have to look away from the screen to find the key I want.
602 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadTo be honest, that super-thin row of Esc/F-keys on the 11" Air has been totally useless anyway for real typing, so if I go from there to a new Pro, I wouldn't really miss that stuff.
Linux and the like will be interesting, though.
That smacks of the Android decision to do away with physical keys and instead just display them all the time. Wasting valuable screen real estate and power for a bad emulation of buttons.
This seems like increased complication without any real gain. It's more sleek than usable, kind of like the touchpads with virtual buttons, rather than physical separate ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-9UggQV9BM
Or as Steve put it once "Your thumbs will learn"
A laptop with a hardware keyboard is large enough not to benefit from that compromise. I mean, a little touchscreen's not without its uses, but don't get rid of the keys that I expect to be there.
Everybody complained about the lack of haptic feel on the original iPhone keyboard, and look at what kind of interface we are all typing on today.
With Escape at the extreme left top, it should be possible to differentiate that stop by feel. I'll have to try it when it gets into the store. In the meantime, I'm still very happy with my 2012 MBP.
Not mentioned in the article: the power button is gone, too.
"It appears Touch ID is built into a nearly-invisible power button located next to the display."
Also, what about the controls like screen and keyboard brightness or volume controls? Where do those go to?
I use a Macbook Pro 2015 and I don't think I'll be upgrading to the new one, especially if the specs are nearly similar.
Why Apple, Why do you insist on going against the standards on practically EVERYTHING? There has to be some method behind the madness.
That's how my filco Minila & other 60% keyboards implement the F keys, and IMO it's an improvement. [though... I do flip the ` key to be ESC by default]
I'll wait until Thursday to check they still ship with the Terminal app...
Seriously? I'm on a 2013, and the specs of the latest machine are already "nearly similar". I have factory SSD flash storage and 16 GB of RAM. The CPU and GPU upgrades haven't been remotely worth upgrading to.
How can you be on a 2015 MacBook, talking about upgrading to a 2016? Nobody cares whether you own the latest gadget; upgrades should wait at least 2, usually 3-4 years. I'm not talking about the severe case of frugality (use the same laptop for at least 8 years until it dies!). Just basic common sense.
But if it's as silly as the 'new macbook', then I'll probably pass.
(Germany) Well, I personally can depreciate computers faster than the usual 3 years. Because I run a software business I was able to argue with the tax authorities that I always need the most recent model as the average life time of a computer in my field of business is 1 year.
But then again I don't make really use of this because as you said: There's not enough differentiation between consecutive Mac models so the trouble of writing off and switching machines isn't really worth it.
My home system is a 2012 rig running BunsenLabs Linux (https://www.bunsenlabs.org/) which I upgraded to from Crunchbang some time back.
Not on macOS, at least for the Fn keys. Having a context aware row of buttons that will actually give some cue as to what they do, rather than some random, generic name will probably see those buttons get much more use than they currently do.
I'd love the next generation to have tactile feedback, or maybe at some point to go full-on single-key OLED like that concept that went around a couple of years ago. But depending on the APIs, this may already be quite useful.
Well, it's just a leaked image, so can't draw too many conclusions out of it I guess.
edit: Aw crud, I do use escape when I'm editing in vim from time to time.
Not having HDMI on the 15" is annoying. Not having SD is annoying. I didn't use the HDMI port a ton, but it was nice to have. SD I really only use for photos.
Losing magsafe is probably the worst thing here.
Oh well, my 2013 is still going strong so it's not like I'm really in the market for a new macbook.
But I wonder if Apple is really making a smart choice. Alienating the tech / UNIX people, as few as we may be in the grand scheme of things, may hurt them in the long run.
People have different preferences/needs. Pro users get plenty of non-mac laptops with "high quality chips" (I didn't know Intel made them worse for everyone but Apple) and hardware.
Also the x2xx Thinkpads are probably far, far more durable than any macbook, but that's unrelated to battery life.
No way they screw this up.
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
You shouldn't be using the escape key because it takes your left hand off the home row. I prefer the Caps Lock mapping to the 'jj' variant which might make be more work for my pinky and be slightly slower but it works for me.
Having easy access to your mode switching character is important because training yourself to enter Normal after entering a piece of text is the first step to 'next level' Vim use.
For you GNOME users, making your Caps Lock an escape key is as easy as setting it in the Tweak Tool.
The biggest downside is that if I'm using someone else's computer, I keep yelling for no good reason.
That said, what's to say you can't use the strip to provide an Esc when running MacVim or iTerm etc?
Alternatively, will/could it (at some point) have localized haptic feedback?
P.S. I'd like to see some "edge-on" photographs that show whether and to what extent the relative exposure/relief of the top row of keys and the bar cause the bar to "hide behind" the higher relief of the keys, making it more difficult to touch without triggering one of those keys, particularly for a touch-typist or someone hitting the bar frequently.
comparison: http://imgur.com/a/KDOGq
[0] http://www.cultofmac.com/430982/spy-photos-all-but-confirm-2...
Then the spy shots leaked on 2016-05-31.
After that, the artist released his corrected renderings[1] on 2016-06-09, and backdated it to 2015 for some reason.
[0] http://www.martinhajek.com/new-macbook-pro-concept/
[1] http://www.martinhajek.com/macbook-meets-oled/
What's wrong with magsafe? Owner of a mid 2012 MBPr here and I loved it.
It'll be great to not have to use Apple's chargers/cables anymore.
Anyway, the register [0] mentions that a magsafe type C adaptor may be introduced either by Apple or 3rd Party.
Personally, I like the magsafe design. It has been useful the past 4 years.
[0] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2475007/macbook-pro...
One thing I don't do is wrap the Magsafe end around those little prongs when I pack it. I just bunch it up roughly and toss it in the bag. Maybe that's what frays it?
i.e. Don't pull it tight. I still have power charges from my 2007 MacBook Pro that have not frayed and still look like new and with the adapter from MagSafe 1 to 2 still get used regularly.
Other than being off-white from dirt/dust and whatever, that charger lasted all that time.
I can only assume some of got lucky with indestructible chargers.
I'd assume it's just Apple reducing quality and raising prices (€85 for a replacement?!?) - Lightning cables are notorious for the same issue.
With specs and quality going downhill and prices going up it just doesn't make sense for me any more.
Good riddance.
What?
Sadly there are a shocking number of USB chargers/cables which will physically fit into a USB-C port but are not to spec, therefore prone to damage or destroy the device. A Google engineer has been testing these and listing "approved" ones here http://www.bensonapproved.com/
Rather than potentially usable display area we have more large bezels, yet again.
Take the 12" Mac for instance - Apple had no problem shrinking the bottom half of the computer yet retained the large bezels, whereas they could've utilized the area to place a larger display panel in while retaining the same footprint. The resulting incongruence looks odd IMO.
Mockup of what I think the display should look like: https://i.imgur.com/BypLsSl.jpg
They may reduce the bezel in the future, but IMO that would be done in the midst of a MB redesign.
Famous last words. The titanium powerbook had very small bezels for its time (2001), and I remember Steve Jobs when introducing it claiming that at the edge the cursor was almost gonna fall off. Of course this doesn't mean they'll do it again, but they certainly experimented with the idea before.
The only theory I could come up with: They do not want reduce bezel size because this potentially closes the door for making the laptop lid thinner. As we all know by now, thinness has top priority at Apple. A super thin lid means there cannot be support structure and connectors behind the screen, they must be placed around it. But you cannot place it around it if there is no bezel to hide it beneath.
If the Apple MacBook hardware guys read this: I’d rather have the current laptop lid thickness and no bezels than a paper thin lid with the current large ugly bezels.
inoremap jj <Esc>
also, mapping the leader to spacebar is great
mapleader=" "
and finally
nnoremap Q @@
map the Q key to replay the last macro you used... much nicer than using @r or @g or whatever every time you want to replay the macro.
Your latter suggestions are brilliant, I'm going to steal them right away.
You need two apps: Seil and Karabiner, both made by the same person. Check out this guide: http://brettterpstra.com/2012/12/08/a-useful-caps-lock-key/
Can someone fill me in on actual use cases of having this key still?
I have been binding caps lock to escape for many many years.
The only time I've seen anyone using caps lock is in a call center where people think it's the proper way of entering data into a form (my opinion is it's totally not).
And thus, the status quo is maintained.
But seriously, like with almost everything keyboard layout-related it's just there because people are used to it.
When I mention doing so to non-programmers, people look at my like I'm from another planet.
I'm still surprised when I see people using caps lock instead of shift for typing a single uppercase character (This being the keyboard peckers who still use one finger for everything).
I know personally I don't use it too often, but it's nice to have if I want to type in all caps which happens occasionally. Holding down shift with a pinky for a anything more than a few key presses can be a little uncomfortable so I appreciate the caps lock key.
And remapping it to backspace still isn't possible without additional software (Karabiner Elements) :/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12791672
No, you're still gonna be able to dim your screen and mute your speakers and yes cancel modal dialogs.
Personally, I expect I'll remap caps lock to escape, or an unused meta, and get used to that (it's presently ctrl).
(I have never used a US keyboard layout. Maybe typing programming symbols could be so much easier and I have never experienced it.)
At least on german keyboards which should be the same as on the portuguese ones
Nothing dealbreaking really, just annoying. But I don't experience these kind of things when using the OS the laptops was shipped with (OSX/Windows) and would love to see more Linux certified hardware like Dell's XPS.
Plus they are quite dependable hardware overall, and lots of easy OS updates.
I'm sure it because of licensing, but then it's up to them to either improve them or provide modern replacements.
I'm well aware of homebrew and the like having used it myself; I still think the current situation is now better on Windows than macOS, which is bizarre.
I used to work on Windows only and had a VM, for 2 years this was my daily workflow. When I finally just switched to Mac, it was amazing how much more time I felt like I had during the day to spend on my real work, how fewer VM issues I had to deal with, and just enjoy working on the native OS.
[0] https://elixirforum.com/t/current-state-of-elixir-on-windows...
Which is why we have WSL/Bash on Windows!
A large portion of the WSL complaints are around the lack of inotify. You know what other system doesn't have inotify either?
Another example is ptrace(): on XNU, it doesn't work; you have to use Mach instead. On the other hand, Microsoft went to the effort of actually making ptrace() work properly. This has actual user-visible ramifications: gdb works great in WSL, while it works not-so-great in current versions of macOS. strace works fine in WSL, while on Darwin you have to use the heavily underdocumented dtruss.
Syscalls are underdocumented in macOS, so Valgrind doesn't work well; it constantly breaks on OS updates. On the other hand, Valgrind works great on WSL as long as you compile from source. A lot of this is because Linux has a stable and documented syscall interface, unlike Darwin.
You are perhaps well above average and so these issues don't affect you. But that doesn't help everyone else who struggles in the Windows environment for things that prioritise Linux/OSX.
[0] Heck, even one of the principal Clojurescript developers doesn't even support Windows, he just asks for patches from Windows users who managed to figure out how to get something working. That is not an isolated attitude.
I won't claim it's fully there yet, but given how macOS is these days, it will be more stable very soon.
Ask the Go language team how they feel about all of the little breakages in various syscalls/apis that Apple introduced.
Ask graphics programmers how they feel about the lack of modern OpenGL.
Pretty soon Windows will be a far more compelling development platform than macOS (unless you have to do Apple development of course, but then there's always Visual Studio for remote development for some Mac/iOS things :-P).
That's coming in the next version of Bash on Windows.
lxss.sys is a much better implementation of POSIX, honestly. In WSL I've never had to deal with incredibly broken stuff like ptrace(PT_CONTINUE) panicking the kernel from untrusted userspace with "TODO" messages (I wish I were making this up) or having the kernel close file descriptors sent via sendmsg() in flight if the sending end of the Unix socket is closed in blatant violation of POSIX.
Say what you will about Windows, but I don't have to spend hours debugging random out of memory reads causing kernel panics in the OpenGL drivers on that OS. (For example, calling texture2DMS in a vertex shader on anything other than the first row of a texture reads from random memory; still not fixed as far as I am aware.)
Can you elaborate?
I have several Thinkpads running *BSD and they are great and all, but at the end of the day I gotta use Skype and the Office suite for communicating with clients so I default to working with macOS most of the time.
UNIX + great desktop support and apps + pkgsrc offers an unmatched experience depending on what you work on.
Not actually much more expensive than other comparably-high-quality laptops.
That glowing Apple on the back means you won't be personally blamed if something on it fails to work—say, if your wifi decides to cut out every five minutes due to a quirk in a particular hardware pairing, or it doesn't like a certain projector and refuses to work with it, and the meeting at your client's site ends up being more about your broken shit than the client's needs. If your $500 Dell running Arch and covered in penguin stickers does that, you might be personally blamed for it, and/or the quality of your judgment and competence might suddenly be on everyone's mind.
- nice extra features if you have an iphone like iMessage
- can develop apps for android and iOS without janketyness
- can develop for Linux/Windows/Mac
- some don't play many games anyway on a dev laptop
I think it's nice to have the development flexibility. i like being able to start coding anything possible because you never know when an idea may need a quick prototype.
If I do need macOS, don't want to jerk around with hackintosh in a VM.
- clean UI w/ UNIX cli (it just works)
- it allows you to run anything (osx, Windows, nix in VM)
- iOS development
- support for non-Windows apps (Garage Band, Logic [which I never ended up trying], etc)
- easily up-gradable hardware (hard drive(s), ram)
- many ports so you can utilize the pro-ness of it w/o a dock or another extension (my micro-sd card is about as large as my ssd)
So half of the reasons I bought are no longer present or not really applicable because equal or better apps are now on Windows.
I get it, they want to add all these cool features, but based on the rumors I have heard (and their 'updates' since 2011) the 'Pro' Macook is getting less Pro with each release. Thankfully, my laptop has held up quite well and I primarily use it for dev, so I'm hoping it will hold up for sometime so I can continue working on it...but I don't see the advantage of paying $1000s for what amounts to a more powerful 12-in Macbook. Better to buy a mini (specifically for iOS dev) and a laptop that isn't a beefed up consumption device.
The Windows machines are cheaper right now only because Apple has gone two and a half years without updating the Macbooks Pro without lowering the prices. Apple does awful things like that sometimes so you have to be careful about what you buy, but you have to be careful with Dell and HP and Lenovo also, so that's not really different.
But try finding an equivalent 3lb, silent, big glass reliable touchpad, extra long battery life, solid reliable build, color corrected retina screen laptop with similar specs to the new Macs next week and you'll find Apple has the best prices in the market as usual.
---
Plus, as others have mentioned, UNIX is like a smooth creamy dream compared to the droning misery and shocking horrors of Windows.
Dell 13" XPS, i7-7500U, 16GB, 512GB SSD, 3200x1800 display, Thunderbolt 3, glass trackpad, 2.9lb, $1799.
MBP 13", i7-5557, 16GB, 512GB SSD, 2560x1600 display, Thunderbolt 2, glass trackpad 3.5lb, $2199.
Nearly half the power consumption on the CPU, lighter, $400 cheaper does not make for "Apple has the best prices in the market as usual".
Meanwhile as best I can tell, the Dell was out in August of 2016.
I have no horse in the race. I'll be upgrading my Mac with another Mac. But it's not Dell's fault Apple has been neglecting its entire computer range: over a year since the last iMac bump, 18 months for the MBA, 2 years for the Mini and nearly 3 years for the Mac Pro (I love how they're still charging full retail for the Pro components, or worse, $280 for 64GB ECC, but $1200 from Apple).
According to Everymac, the following changes were made:
- CPU went from a i7-4578U to a i7-5557U (Haswell to Broadwell)
- memory was upgraded from 1600 DDR3L to 1866LPDDR3
- SSD was given extra lanes of PCIe
- Iris 5100 went to Iris 6100
- Force Touch - "more advanced", not cheaper
- Battery life improvements
In fact the summary is that "internally, the 13-Inch "Mid-2014" and "Early 2015" MacBook Pro models have little in common except that both have soldered memory, "blade" SSDs, and batteries that are glued in place."
Sources:
- http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/macbook-pr...
- http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macb...
- http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macb...
People replied with some ways to do it on mac, but I haven't tried yet.
The Terminal/iTerm apps can just show an escape button in the top left corner.
How about going boldly into the future rather than being tied down to something which doesn't get a ton of use in most situations!
*Edit: of course my reply doesn't have anything to do with the headphone jack. For simplicity and space removing the jack made sense, but for ease of use and standards there's good arguments for keeping the it around. I argue this case is different because it's not widely used and it's prior use (fn keys) can be duped by the magic bar.
Tell that to Amazon.
Apart from using them to change volume I have never used them for their intended purpose. Having a per application, contextual bar with actual labels e.g. Launchpead instead of F4 makes a whole lot more sense.
I would agree if they somehow have some way to physically distinguish the keys by touch. It's pretty much useless to me if I have to look away from the screen to find the key I want.