Honestly, the only thing I will miss is the escape button but that was misplaced on the keyboard anyways. 10.12.1 added support for making caps lock into an escape key and that's if anything an improvement over where escape was before.
I agree that caps lock is an improvement over escape's location. But, if you're like me, you also find it to be an improvement over control's location so you have caps lock mapped to that already so rebinding esc to caps lock is not an option.
in all seriousness, switching the ctrl - caps lock keys was probably the best layout improving decisions i've ever made. highly recommending it for ergonomic and health reasons.
For ages I've had ~ remapped to escape (if no modifiers pressed so tilde still works as expected, and caps to ctrl) so the missing ESC isn't a big deal, although I did have it remapped for `
Anyone looking for extremely fine grain keymap control (with a UI that far surpasses any kind of keyboard remapping I've tried doing in Linux) should look up karabiner.
Conformance with Apple's UI standards, or at least something resembling them.
Escape and f-keys are used to send commands to the computer, not to enter text. Apple feels that this is better achieved with touch, gestures, and the mouse, so they've removed the temptation for developers to fall into old bad habits. See also: the removal of arrow keys on the original Mac.
Sublime has an SFTP/FTP plugin that makes it trivial to edit files over SSH. Since you are running ST on your local machine and only using SSH to save/read the file it actually works better over a flaky connection (like on a plane) than SSH+vi.
Sometimes I've a feeling that some people really like it complicated. Today it is no mysterium to mount a remote machine via SSH and edit all the files using atom/sublime/vs code/... so mostly no need for a terminal editor on a remote server.
And have you ever tried to use a terminal (editor) on remote over a connection with high latency? Awful.
I should of course have elaborated on his ludicrous assertion that a tty over ssh has worse latency than an rdp gui or such but his sentence was so self evidently nonsensical and his tone so needlessly aggressive and self assured that I didn't.
It was not an attack and I resent the framing of it as such.
1. VS Code doesn't support SSH/SCP/SFTP natively, and Windows/Mac support for sshfs is non-existent/bad. Not to mention it breaks down in tons of cases, especially low latency or dropped connections. And even in Linux, depending on where you mount to, you can basically hork your system to the point where it requires a reboot.
2. Gotta agree with easytiger. I work all the time from 3G tether connection. Mosh makes it a breeze.
I've never understood this argument where you limit yourself to something that will work in the worst case scenario. For programming projects as well, the only time I'm using SSH directly is to troubleshoot rare server issues. Besides this, server admin should be automated/scripted so I'm not doing complicated edits over SSH.
You know, I agree with the idea this isn't a big deal, or at least, it might not be eventually.
The bar is programmable, so I would expect that applications like iTerm will write in support for it and they probably would include an ESC key on the bar. It would be nice if Apple had thought of this and Terminal.app already did that. Maybe they didn't think about that, but my guess is that they work mostly in Xcode.
Then there is the suggestion from someone else in the comments to remap the Caps Lock key to ESC which might be something I try even though I pretty much use full keyboards. The ESC key on home row might be a great idea.
I like terminal editors because they're easier to use in a distributed computing environment, furthermore, you're almost certainly going to able to run vim no matter what the hardware looks like and you /really/ can't say the same thing about some of these others (especially if they need some weird HID like the touch bar).
Applications that have terminal UIs tend to be significantly more well behaved than those that don't, this isn't always the case it's just a trend I've noticed.
Maybe you could enlighten me to some of the possibilities. Besides a slider, I'm not really seeing much productivity enhancements that functions keys cannot do.
Not sure if there will be TouchBar user interface toolkit for java applications, but I spend a lot of time in IntelliJ. It would be great if the TouchBar rather than having to remember mappings, could have sets of labels [Step In, Step over...] during an active debug session or a different set during editing or presentation modes. Currently, the solution is to have myriad toolbars and icons bespeckle the window frame, which can be distracting and confusing, and all together take up some valuable laptop screen real estate.
Why is everyone so upset about this? It is a dynamic part of the keyboard. I would be shocked if there was no option to set it "classic mode" for certain applications (or even universally if you wanted), which would have the ESC key and the function keys. Why the opposition? Having a dynamic part of a keyboard is pretty innovative, what are some of the possibilities, I am not 100% sure but I am sure that developers will find neat and useful (and probably unexpected by us and by apple) things to use it for.
I guess you can have virtual function keys as well as buttons for specific terminals. It depends how locked down the SDK is - knowing Apple it'll probably become more extensible as time goes on. I imagine that when IDEs can integrate with it, you'll be able to get some pretty nice features.
You can also show stuff like CI status, notifications for IMs, etc.
Yeah, I don't understand all the outrage over the touchbar. It changes depending on your application. So can't you setup VIM so the touchbar displays a "normal" or "classic layout", which would display all the keys that the previous model had? I am far more disappointed in the elimination of magsafe and only having USB C ports.
I'm not outraged, more like disappointed. After no significant update in a very long time we get a touch bar, but still cannot put 32GB of ram in the MB-PRO.
I am sure people could adjust to this. I am not certain how many people actually use those buttons without looking at the keyboard anyway. When I learned to type the function keys weren't included, I for one, always have to look when use a function key, and generally have to look when typing numbers too.
If you're constantly using one or two function keys, it's fairly common to do it by memory. For example I can hit the volume and brightness buttons and f5 without looking. But really, all the other functions that will become available with the touch bar will more than make up for the time lost looking down.
Nothing you can't already do. It's just buttons with pretty graphics on them. If you want buttons to do "great productivity enhancements" the tech has been available for that on Macs for over a decade. Possibly decades plural; the Mac has had an active extension community for a long time, let alone the official stuff from Apple like AppleTalk, however flawed it may have been.
And there isn't much you can do with the pretty graphics on the buttons that you couldn't already do with pretty graphics on the screen, especially in an era of touchscreens. The whole touchbar strikes me as a demo-feature; demos great, in practice, not especially useful.
They're not just buttons. They are also sliders, pickers and any other GUI elements that you can think of.
They are visual. So you don't have to memorise any key combinations. Also they are context aware. This means you don't have to memorise all those key-context-application combinations.
It is multitouch. You cannot click at two different points on the screen with the touchpad. So this is an improvement over the current input mechanism.
Is touchbar better than touchscreens? Maybe or maybe not. Who knows now. But note that it is not placed on the screen. It is placed near the keyboard, where the other input mechanisms and your fingers normally are.
You don't need to "look down at the keyboard". In a laptop you are already looking there. It's already in your peripheral vision. And if you use an external monitor (but not an external keyboard), you simply don't have to use the touch bar.
I don't understand this negativity on HN. There will be many creative applications for this new input/output method. I'd rather see people brainstorming on all those new possibilities.
Since the article doesn't even mention that the escape functionality is still there (although it's no longer a physical key but a touch button), I'm going to assume that its only source is jokes on twitter.
Honest question: what's the alternative? I've got a 2013 rMBP 15 inch. What's my next machine? I'm not willing to regress on display (220 ppi or better), screen size, or battery life (8-9 hours real use). I might regress on quad core to dual core if everything else is perfect.
EDIT: The XPS 15 gets more like 5-6 hours with the high res display by my understanding. The Surface Book has the right combination of resolution and battery life, but 15.4" to 13.5" is a big step down if you're used to working with side by side windows. Is there anything out there I've overlooked?
Surface boook is just as gimped - 16gb ram, about same cpus, same expensive storage, and other gimmicks (detacheable screen won't do you much good in helping to develop stuff)
16GB of RAM and a mobile i7 has been perfectly acceptable for my day-to-day development needs. As for expensive storage... that's unfortunately true of basically all laptops.
Doesn't help for development per se, but I do enjoy having the flexibility of the "gimmick" screen. I still prefer paper, but it's a viable alternative for note taking.
The one issue I have with the XPS is that the camera is in the bottom corner instead of at the top. Although the slick bezel looks great, I just don't think the trade off was worth it.
I think the trade off of small bezel for the camera being at the bottom really justifies it. I am commuting and bringing my laptop around more than I am on the camera.
If I am skyping and the person I am skyping with has upward view of me, I don't really see an issue with that.
I "defected" a few months back and I am now using a Dell XPS 15 Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz × 8 16GB Ram running Ubuntu 16.04. It is a beautiful machine, very sturdy, fast and an excellent keyboard. It is available with a 238ppi screen, but I chose 141ppi because I don't care about the extra pixels on a dev machine.
I own a ZBook 15 first generation, Ubuntu 16.04. The trackpad is large and works well. It has 3 physical buttons (actually two pairs of them, on the top for the mouse stick and on the bottom for the trackpad). I'm using it as a mouse (single finger) or to scroll (two fingers). It's probably multi touch up to 10 fingers but I can't remember.
I understand that OSX has gestures and maybe Windows too. Maybe there is some package that brings gestures to Ubuntu as well (apt-cache search gesture|grep gesture returns some) but the keyboard is good enough. Alt left to go back (it works in Nautilus too), etc. Sometimes I'd like pinch to zoom in Gimp like on the phone and tablet and some day I'll try those gesture packages, but I'm in no hurry.
On the other side, I find the push to click trackpads I see on Macs and some PCs very difficult to operate, especially when I don't want to move the mouse pointer when clicking (graphic programs) and especially the trackpads that actually move. That's why I bought a laptop with physical buttons and disabled push to click (it had that too).
TL;DR the Mac trackpad is almost a reason not to buy a Mac for me.
>On the other side, I find the push to click trackpads I see on Macs and some PCs very difficult to operate, especially when I don't want to move the mouse pointer when clicking (graphic programs) and especially the trackpads that actually move.
That was a concern I had when upgrading to a MacBook with no physical button, but it hasn't actually been an issue. You can treat the trackpad as though it has a separate physical button (leave your thumb at the bottom the whole time, and use it to click instead of the tracking finger), and it's smart to detect that and ignore the thumb except for clicking.
I don't understand why any dev would want to use a touchpad of any kind?
They're not nearly as precise as a mouse. They cause you to rotate your cuff even further than a mouse. Dragging and dropping things is more difficult with a touchpad.
Touchpads all stink, including Apple's.
Evoluent's vertical five button wireless mouse is where it's at. Everything else is second rate.
> Because sometimes you need to work on the move? I like to get things done on flights...
Uggh. That sounds like a terrible way to work. If open floor plans are bad, working on a flight has got to be even worse. I guess I'm lucky that I don't have to do any of that.
> I've actually ended up getting a Magic Trackpad for my desk...
I also use a Magic Trackpad instead of a mouse at work as a dev. I also do music production exclusively with my Macbook's trackpad. I'm definitely more comfortable with it than a mouse for my normal work habits.. and I was able to beat people online in Starcraft pretty handily with a trackpad. I don't doubt that I couldn't become more precise with a mouse over time, but I really prefer scrolling and gestures to what's available on a mouse.
No, no, no. Travel distance is supremely important, and if you're working on a MacBook the trackpad is right there! I loathe all trackpads except MacBook's. In fact, I have a Magic Mouse and Keyboard that I use when I place my MacBook on a stand, and it feels tiring to move my hand so far to move the mouse.
I use a Mac Pro primarily, but I actually have a mouse, trackpad, and Wacom tablet attached. Each get used for the things they work best at with the trackpad getting the most use.
Trackpad is excellent, not as large as the Macbook Pro but works very smoothly under Linux with excellent precision. Re battery I get a solid 8 hours of work from it.
Forgot to mention the other reason... The magsafe charger is ridiculously poor quality. I've had several of them fail. They all burn the casing off the wire just outside the plug, and then it stops working. The advantage of a magnetic connector isn't worth spending another ton of money to replace it every year.
I'm testing out a strange setup that is working surprisingly well: I have a beefy desktop: 64GB RAM and 32 cores. Then I carry an Intel Compute Stick, portable laptop and mouse with me. I just plug into any HDMI monitor to do basic work, or RDP/TeamViewer into my desktop for real work. Surprising how well this is working...
I guess you're lucky, or generally have a good connection. There's a dev in my office who's bluetooth keyboard has a latency of around 100ms. Two of us get instantly sick when trying to type on it, but no one else in the office can detect the latency.
$2000 - A loaded Dell Precision workstation. Wait for Kaby Lake quads though. If you like the Surface Books that's an option too.
$1500 - Dell XPS.
$1200 - ASUS UX501VW. (Only one RAM slot is upgradable, though)
If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards.
All of these machines run Linux well (with an occasional driver compile). The biggest tradeoff will be the touchpad. I find the trackpads on par with my 2009 unibody White Macbook. If you prefer a mouse like I do, it wouldn't be that much of an issue. On the plus side, you can get much better specs for the price of a Mac. Xeons, lots of ECC RAM, beter displays, better battery etc etc.
> This workstation can get some serious work done, but its battery life of 5 hours and 34 minutes means you likely won't be taking it far from your desk.
I don't feel like I'm being unreasonably picky here. I've been using a laptop with a great display and 8-9 hours of actual battery life for the last two years. Everything on the market right now (including probably the new MBP) is a downgrade from that.
> If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards
Meh. The one on my 2015 X1 Carbon is okay, but the keyboard and trackpoint are the worst parts of my X1 Yoga – the trackpoint only allows the "soft dome" caps (i.e. the convex ones, not the nice concave ones which save you a bunch of stress in the fingers) and the keyboard just feels very cheap and weird. The keypress is still well-defined, it’s just that the keys are incredibly shallow.
Especially for people who are tied to macOS for iOS development reasons. I guess it is time to look into Hackintoshes again.*
Apple really seems to loath their developers either through active malice or passive indifference. I've wasted too much time reverse engineering Xcode/LLDB/MobileDevice.framework to get automated iOS testing to work (no, XCTest is not adequate). Of course, once my company wanted to move from physical hardware to virtual, we were screwed again by the near total lack of virtualization products for macOS guests. VMWare ESXi seems to be the only player in town for server deployments and that still requires Apple hardware. Sure, go ahead and spend well over $3,000 on their laughable Pro/"server" products that cannot be reasonably placed in a server room. Apparently Apple hasn't heard of the whole "cloud" thing.
* But not really, I would never dream of violating the macOS EULA by running it on non-Apple hardware...
You can have i7 quad-core, dual 1 TB SSD, 32 GBytes RAM (maybe more), backlit keyboard, thin(ish) form factor, and a fantastic 3840 x 2160 screen. Graphics are NVidia M1000M which is desktop class and runs CineBench 11(?) OpenGL test at 93 fps (faster than my NVidia GTX 970).
This is by FAR the nicest and thinnest portable workstation-class laptop I've ever used. It's easily carryable-around, which is more than I can say for any previous laptop such as the larger Dell Precisions, HP Elitebooks I've previously used in this class.
In particular, fast Samsung NVM SSDs and fast laptops are a match made in heaven.
Why do you need a new Macbook when your machine probably does everything? The specs between a 2016 and 2013 are negligible for web browsing and programming. Unless you're doing heavy video editing or 3D rendering..
So many people upgrading notebooks when they don't need to.
I think that's the point of the article -- developers have little reason to upgrade -- if they want more memory, faster CPU's or more cores, then they need to go with a non-Apple laptop.
I would say for a machine that is only three years old, just wait? I mean, if it's working well for you now, why are you considering upgrading?
I'm sitting here on a 2008 Mac Pro, and was hoping to move to a mobile solution. But 16GB of RAM just isn't going to cut it for the VM's and what not a run. So I guess I'll just be running this into the ground.
Bah, these entitled kids. I guess being old enough to remember keyboards before they had escape keys helps, but ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket. Read your ASCII table! C-[ is even a quicker type avoiding RSIs from all those long pinky reaches.
(More seriously, as much as it bothers me to retrain my pinky, most uses of the escape key would be many times better if the lefthand side of the touch bar had a word for the function, like stop being full screen, cancel, leave menu, or whatever. The function would then be discoverable instead of secret lore.)
It's also a kinda crappy alternative, because it's not possible on a large number of non-English keyboard. Ctrl+c is also an option, although I think there's a slight difference.
ESC is 0x1B, traditionally the CTRL key reset the two highest bit of the ASCII code, [ is 0x5B, if you reset the two highest bits of 0x5B you get 0x1B which is why ESC and CTRL-[ are the same thing.
I wonder how many vim users have tried using CTRL + [ for the first time today. Muscle memory being what it is I fully expect that nobody will swap over to this new and improved Apple way of pressing the Escape key.
And vi too - works just fine, but you have a valid point about muscle memory, which is pretty much the only kind of memory many of us have left when it comes to vi-like editors, since the key sequences disappeared from our brains decades ago!
What are the odds that someone at JetBrains didn't order one of these because they realize how cool it would be if the IDE displayed real terms like “Refactor”, “Step Into”, “Open method declaration”, “Deploy”, etc. for the very large number of context-dependent shortcuts a modern IDE has?
I use ␛ as the Meta key in Emacs. I just tried using C-[ instead. It works, but you have to press down both CTRL and [ at the same time; you can't flam CTRL and then [.
I am reminded also of one time trying to write C code on an IBM AS/400, only to find that the keyboard did not have square bracket keys at all...
What do you mean by that last line? Well for one thing the bar is customizable by each app, but still, from the examples, they show very clear icons of function.
This is already far superior than just F1, F2, etc, which are far far more cryptic than a descriptive icon.
That's the thing, most apps already do use F keys for custom bindings, but you have to manually memorize them for each different app. Here, you at least get to see the correct icon in each program you're using.
And as a bonus, you get variable size buttons, sliding input, colors, and much more that just isn't possible with simple buttons.
Ha, this is like "walked 5 miles in the snow uphill to school" territory.
I personally don't like the idea of losing some keys, keys are nice, my fingers can feel where they are at all times. But that said my fingers also know exactly where to go without the feedback of the keys. I do like the prospect of programming a custom touch bar for various programs, that seems kind of neat, but I would have also been fine with keeping my function keys (I mean custom bindings are what function keys are for in the first place, no?).
I wondered about that in the other thread. But it actually works with Ctrl+Ä or Ctrl-Ü (depending whether you are in OSX or Windows) in the console.
However this still does not help for a missing ESC in other applications (like IDEs where you sometimes want to close an annoying intellisense dialog).
> ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket
Technically — and here I go of on the stereotypical irrelevant nerd tangent (bind the adjectives as you will) — it's the other way around. ASCII was certainly designed with Shift and Control modifiers in mind, and arranged so that a device could have those keys merely flip a bit (see e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard>), but nothing actually mandates that those keys exist and that Control+h generate Backspace or Shift+h generate H.
I absolutely agree that Control+x ↦ x&0x3F is an established convention, and it continually annoys me that Windows and Windows-aping software violates it.
Agreed. Not only is there no option less than 2.9 GHz on the touch bar Macbook Pro, but I'm also not sure how a developer could equate a Core2 Duo with a Skylake core i5/i7.
While the RAM complaints are valid, I don't know anyone who actually uses their laptop keyboard for serious development. Almost all of these laptops spend 90% of their time docked somewhere with a real keyboard hooked up.
For me, the MBP was all about the nice screen, the touchpad, the keyboard, and the build quality. If you are only using it docked, none of these really matter.
I've had a good, satisfying run with MacBook Pros, but now I'm stepping off the Apple train. I understand that Apple is trying to go in a new direction with the new MacBook Pros, and I won't complain about it. I am now simply moving to an Arch Linux setup on an old Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 to continue living inside the Terminal.
nah it's not bad. Sometimes you just need to reinstall the same audio kernels, etc (depending on your hardware). There are many guides to find compatible hardware
I used a hackintosh for a year for development. It took a day to setup, which is of course a lot more work than for a typical osx experience. However, once setup it was better than the mac pro I was using. Might have even been more stable. Upgrades were a bit of a hassle, but not horrible.
I moved from Linux to OSX a few years ago. The smoothness of 3-finger swiping between full-screen windows and just the smooth UI / build quality of the Macbook is what I liked the most. Also the battery life!
I am now considering a Hackintosh. Don't want to put in too much time maintaining it though so still not sure about it.
I really feel most Linux distros were made for developers and development. Whenever I try to do things on Windows and OSX I get insanely frustrated with the amount of friction. It's nice to have an OS that trusts you and lets you make mistakes.
I had that problem with Linux where I wanted to be able to seamlessly use my Wacom pad with a decent graphics editing suite... oops no, it's terrible. Mainly because the environment for these tools is proprietary and there aren't enough graphics people in the Linux market to support it as a platform.
So... mac it still is. Windows is looking better these days.
When was this? Wacom drivers come built into Ubuntu now. I use my tablet with MyPaint. I agree that the graphics suites could be better, but it works for my not-so-artistic pursuits.
The last I tried it the baseline works. All of the buttons, wheels, pressure sensitivity, tip angles, etc... not good.
Just want to re-iterate it's not Linux's fault, it just doesn't work well as a proprietary platform. So if your program needs art assets you'll have to get them elsewhere. And if you want to deploy on Mac or Win you'll have to have one of those anyway... so shrug.
I like programming on Linux for sure it's just not there as a personal OS. And I used to run a very stripped down, customized Arch distro... on a desktop PC. It never worked well on any laptop I've owned and required too much hand-holding with rolling releases breaking things occasionally.
Windows is quite a nightmare for any time of compiled code in my opinion.
All of the Microsoft 'stuff' (anything in Visual Studio) works okay but once you start installing python or node modules, forget about it.
I remember the click finally happened when I spent an afternoon installing package after package to get a node module to compile on Windows. When I installed it on OS X, it just installed... I didn't have to do anything.
I installed Ubuntu that night and never went back (except to play games because WINE is just ehhh)
A couple years back, I was (increasingly un)happily using Mac OS X on a MBP. I made the switch back to a Free *nix and a tiling window manager.
While it's gotten some eye-rolls from tech friends, the UX of my current system is amazing. I have an almost vanilla Xmonad configuration, combined with dmenu, and passwordstore / dmenu integration. It simply rocks.
I anticipate soon starting a new job with a firm that has more or less standardized around Apple hardware. I find myself kind of dreading going back to a Mac. I may decide to be "that guy" and ask for something like the Thinkpad Carbon X1 in lieu of the standard issue equipment.
I was given a Macbook, and thought I'd get used to it, but I couldn't. Basic stuff is broken, like maximizing a window. Focus-follows-mouse doesn't work properly, and multiple windows from the same application are broken -- I'm not sure what the "correct" way to switch between multiple Firefox windows is, but it's clunky.
Linux on the Macbook can probably work if you're determined, but I'm (obviously) not a fan of Apple hardware. It was much easier to take a spare Dell desktop -- which has twice the RAM and a better CPU than the Macbook.
It does work great, meaning that it reliably executes the intended functionality correctly. My problem is that the intended functionality is not what I want. I have lots of terminals, Emacs windows, browser windows, etc. open at any given time, and I want my window manager to be agnostic to which is which. When I signal "focus next window", I want that to both jump between windows of an application AND jump to a window of another application, whichever is next in the focus ring. You can't (easily at least) do that on a Mac.
I installed https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch to get this behavior (it even has thumbnails of the window), but ideally you would have that option out of the box indeed.
I've spent so much time in my ion3 setup (now notion..) that changing things is just silly, and I'm so glad I don't have to. Open source code lets you continually port forward what you care about, because you have access to the source code.
I'm on something like 14 years using it? It's just awesome to me that everyone else is off inventing new ways of managing windows, and I'm here pressing F3 to run a program like I always have.
I'm feeling the same way. Clearly Apple doesn't care about the same things I do. The Pro is supposed to be for power users, and the touch bar to me feels like it's built for casual users(keyboard shortcuts for people who don't know keyboard shortcuts. I use almost no built in mac apps, so it's unlikely that I'll ever use it. It's just one more thing to raise the price and one more thing that can go wrong. Combined with the fact that I'd have to get a dock or a dock/monitor and things look super unappealing at this point. But they shaved off 1/2 a pound! that's better than having useful ports, right?
I have to say, this feels like a lazy hype-train post. Everyone is complaining about the lack of the esc key, but I'm sure it won't be so bad. It does depend somewhat on how integrations work with the bar. I could imagine hopping between files and functions in your IDE using the bar. And surely you would be able to map the section where esc was to esc?
> This isn’t to say that the touch bar is an inherently bad idea. You could locate it on top of the Esc and function keys instead of eliminating them entirely! Something like this: <image>
Not that there aren't worthy talking points in this article, but it's really annoying when a blogger has the arrogance to photoshop some keyboard image together and proclaim it's a better design than what a gigantic company carefully came up with.
Apple has its own reasons for doing things and they aren't going to please everybody, but does this Alexey Semeney fellow actually think Apple didn't consider all the possibilities before removing a whole bunch of keys from the keyboard? Apple might be a lot of things, but careless is not usually one of them.
Although people place a lot of trust in Apple, I think the proverb of "trust but verify" applies here. We shouldn't just take it on faith that Apple has made the correct choice.
What does "correct" mean? They are at least consistent. For decades they remove major hardware controls and ports that were initially thought to be critical for use. They were the first to get rid of CD drives, floppy drives, the list is quite long.
The best definition I can come up with is that Apple does not regret removing it in the future. I suspect they will be correct. I don't see people passing up on MBPs over this, and in 5-10 years people will stop missing the function keys.
The reality is that apple has been pretty much universally right whenever they ditch something "way too soon". There's never been a moment when a year down the line apple realized "wait, this USB thing is never going to catch on, go back to the old ports we were wrong!"
This doesn't even get into the dongle problem. The simplest example is that if you want to hook up Apple's flagship phone up to their flagship laptop for development, you need a dongle. And if you want to share one of their flagship wired headphones between the two devices, you need another dongle. Therefore if you want to connect three of Apple's flagship devices together on a daily basis, you can't go anywhere without bringing at least two dongles with you.
That might remove the dongle but is it any better? I now need either two cables, one to hook my phone up to my laptop and one to hook it up to my computer, or a new charger that accept USB-C but won't be compatible with most other devices out there.
> That might remove the dongle but is it any better?
Er… yes?
> I now need either two cables, one to hook my phone up to my laptop and one to hook it up to my computer
Except you carry one cable with you and the other one stays hooked to an eventual desktop computer, rather than having to carry around a cable and a dongle.
What kind of plug do you find in cars? What kind of plug do you find in hotel nightstands? What kind of plug do you find in airplanes? What kind of plug do you find in almost every outlet charger made by Apple or anyone else? The answer to all of those isn't USB-C. So if you want to connect your iPhone to both your laptop and almost all charging sources in the real world, you need either two cables or one cable and a dongle.
What prevents you from connecting them using Bluetooth? I forgot when it was a last time I had to connect my iphone via cable, MacBook just always knows that it's there via Bluetooth, and for the headphone, their flagship headphones are wireless now, and I've been very happy using bose Bluetooth headphones, losing a cord is a major benefit that far outweighs any drawbacks of dongles for me
How? I just tried it: Made my phone discoverable, paired to it using the Mac's bluetooth preference pane. Xcode (8.1) doesn't list the phone in the "Devices" pane nor does it offer it as a deployment target.
In Xcode 8 you can't. They briefly had it as a feature but it has never worked properly and is not supported.
EDIT: It was also using Wi-Fi, not Bluetooth.
Correct. I've hacked at it a bit in an attempt to re-enable the functionality but I haven't been successful yet. After reversing some old XCodes and iOS binaries I found a MobileDevice.framework call that is related to WiFi debugging but even after poking the iDevice with it, XCode doesn't show it in it's device list.
extern int AMDeviceSetWirelessBuddyFlags(struct am_device *device, uint8_t flags);
AMDeviceSetWirelessBuddyFlags(device, 1|2);
I see another reply saying you can but I've never done it
At one time, back in the Xcode 4.x days I believe, they did support development over WiFi. It didn't seem to be very well tested at the time and got pulled out soon after. They seem to have given up on the idea for some reason but it would be nice to go that route again.
All those arguments were once said when the first iMac came out and all it had were USB ports. All devices will have USB-C connectors soon, and instead of getting dongles, you'll be simply replacing your cables to be USB-C versions of them all.
All these arguments were also said when Apple replaced Firewire/mini-DVI/... by Thunderbolt, a fantastic new standard, and we all had to buy the adapters that we'll now throw away.
It seems that USB-C will be more successful than Thunderbolt 1/2 have been, but Apple really isn't helping it with the way they're doing the switch (some devices USB-C only, some devices USB-A only, Lightning headphones...).
or an USB-C to Lightning cable. Those exist. And so do any USB-C to any other USB-Plug cables.
Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now as two years from now, I'm quite sure no more peripheral will come out that has anything but USB-C.
So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C cables that will connect your devices directly to your MacBook Pro. No dongles what so ever.
USB-C is so much better than anything other USB that came before to the point where it can (and will) easily replace not only all other existing USB plugs out there, including on the device end (where there's a mess between USB-B, USB Mini and USB Micro right now) but also has the potential to replace the various ways how we currently connect screens (DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, or even VGA).
Going purely USB-C means that they could optimise as much as possible for this new connector without thinking of wasting space for a useless connector three years down the road, especially as you can convert USB-C to any other USB, but if they added an USB-A port, that would not be useful for anything but USB-A plugs.
Like I said in another post, is a new single purpose cable a solution for a missing dongle if I still have to carry the old cable with me too? Great, I don't need a USB-C to USB-A dongle, I just need both my USB-C to lightning and USB-A to lightning cables. It is the same problem, just shifting around the inconvenience.
And if USB-C is so great and the future of all tech, why isn't Apple moving to it on their mobile devices? In my mind the problem isn't the specific technology used on any of these devices. The problem is that the devices aren't using the same technology between them.
>And if USB-C is so great and the future of all tech, why isn't Apple moving to it on their mobile devices?
because the proprietary Lightning plug allows them to control who is connecting to their phones and it allows them to charge for the privilege of doing so.
What's happening on the other end of that USB-Cable that's the question. My guess: In the package of the next (or the one after) they will ship an USB-C to Lightning cable.
USB-C is the future. I'm really not sure why PC vendors having put a couple of all of their desktops and laptops. Many will probably offer both A and C, for at least a few years.
If you have buy a new computer with 0 USB-C ports, you're going to regret it in a few years.
They had actually moved even before that with 5X and 6P. They were some of the first phones to do it. I believe a few samsung and other phones have already switched too.
In my opinion, that's courage that actually matters. USB-C is a huge step forward which everyone will benefit from once we all move. Removing the audio jack? meh.
Most new-ish Android phones (as counted by number of models) are likely already coming with USB-C. Both the Pixels, the Nexus 5X and 6P before them, the LG v20, the Moto Z, all come with USB-C. As far as I'm aware, only Samsung hasn't made the jump yet.
> Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now
This would make a lot more sense if Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C as well. That way, you really could just use one cable for everything. Instead, you need three separate charger for your iPhone, Macbook Pro, and Apple Watch. Oh, and the iPhone comes with lightning-USB-A cables, which means you can't even connect a brand-new iPhone to a Macbook Pro out-of-the-box without getting a dongle.
High-end Android phones like the Nexus 5x, 6P, and Pixel already use USB-C, as do some non-flagship Android phones. It's brilliant - it means I only need to carry one charger for both my phone and my computer, and that charger also can be dismantled if I want to connect my phone to my computer.
>This would make a lot more sense if Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C as well
yes. it would have. And this is the actual problem there. Lightning is just another way of controlling their walled-garden around iOS and I really hate it for that reason.
But that's beside the point of the port choice of the new Macs: The phones always have a lightning port, so the cable connecting to them will always have a lighting plug on one end.
What they could have done is ship the iPhone with an USB-C to Lightning cable instead of a USB-A to Lightning cable, but then people would have been even more pissed as USB-C isn't that wide-spread yet and in-fact until yesterday was only supported by one single machine made by Apple.
> [USB-C] in-fact until yesterday was only supported by one single machine made by Apple
Really, have a look at this [1] half-year-old list of 10 non-Apple laptops that have USB-C ports... Of course pretty much all of these have USB-A ports too, because their manufacturers don't have a blind following and actually have to compete with each other.
I didn't want to say that USB-C was only supported by Apple.
What I meant was that of all the devices that Apple makes, until yesterday only one supported USB-C, so shipping the new iPhone not just without Headphone Jack but also with a cable that can only be used with the minority of all their computers would really have been a strange move (plus, there's no small USB-C power brick yet, so they would have had to produce one of those too - or give you their 29W one for free which would probably have been a bit too expensive)
> USB-C isn't that wide-spread yet and in-fact until yesterday was only supported by one single machine made by Apple.
USB-C isn't "widespread" yet in laptops, but it's hardly brand new. USB-C has been supported for a while by other laptops. In fact, Apple isn't even the first to release a laptop with Thunderbolt 3.
I know because Dell's XPS 13 has been shipping with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C for over a year now, and it's not the only one.
In order to add lightning support to a device of yours you need to be part of the MFI program which comes with NDAs, influence on functionality through Apple and, of course, a license fee per unit you ship.
If lightning was purely about the technical advantages it provides, they would have made it an open standard or at least documented it.
There were some technical reasons for not going with MicroUSB of course, but don't tell me that their MFI licensing model isn't a huge reason for a proprietary connector.
Or they could be like everyone else in the world, who have finally given up on proprietary ports and settled on micro-usb, to much rejoicing. But no, they are special.
Instead of two things, you just need one. They're saying that instead of a USB-A-to-Lightning cable and a USB-A-to-USB-C adapter, you can just use the one cable.
I think Apple could’ve avoided a lot of the hate if they’d bundled a few of the more common adapters as standard, to ease people through the transition to using USB-C for everything.
If I bought a new MBP today, I’d need:
* a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter at £49
* a USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter (giving HDMI and a USB
port) at £69
* a USB-C to USB Adapter at £19
That’s £137 just to connect the things I have currently connected to my 2015 MBP (external monitor, Thunderbolt HD, my phone and a USB->FTDI programmer).
With the abysmally low margins typically made off of keyboards and mice along with the fact that the highend of the market is driven by desktop gamers, I think you're going to see plain USB Keyboards and Mice sticking around for a long, long, long, long time. Hell, I can still buy some of my favorite keyboards with a PS/2 connection or with an included adapter.
I've been using external devices for these with my macbook for years.
Edit: In fact, I think this applies to almost any low-cost, low-margin pluggable. Laptop coolers/fans are another. Either USB-C is going to kill the market for these or you're wrong.
> I think you're going to see plain USB Keyboards and Mice sticking around for a long, long, long, long time
I'm not saying the old USB A peripherals will stop to exist. I'm saying that two years from now every conceivable peripheral will be available with a USB-C plug or at least a USB-C to whatever they need cable.
> So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C...
I agree with you that in the future USB-C is better and makes more sense. However, I don't think that the logical conclusion is that we should get rid of USB-A prematurely. I liken this the the decision to remove the CD from computer when CD were still used daily. I agreed that CDs wouldn't be used in the future, but, that doesn't do much for me if I still use CD daily. In hindsight it just caused an unnecessary annoyance while the CDs were naturally phased out.
That's the price of progress and this dropping support of older technology sooner than everyone else has been part of Apple's MO forever. The day 3rd parties will stop making older parts/accessories is the day they're no longer viable to make. If Apple were to keep a USB A jack for legacy compatibility reasons, 3rd parties will certainly delay moving forward to the new USB-C standard.
The nice thing about USB-C is that its a standard, so you don't have to buy it from Apple only anymore like before. For example I have https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K7C53K2 for $69, which is really useful: plug one cable in and everything is connected.
I don't know anyone who remaps capslock to esc. It just sounds like something that is fun to say on hackernews. You didn't even say you use it, you said a lot of vim devs do, to which i would counter--they dont.
I do. And judging from the list of articles that explain on how to do it for various platforms I suppose a lot of people do. The carabiner-elements is a whole (popular) program to do just that (by default, it has more options as well)
I do! I'm both a heavy vim user and have my ESC remapped to capslock. And otherwise ESC=>^] anyway so you can always do that (however it's a bit awkward so I'd rather use capslock).
Another thing I really do think deserves to be mentioned is which developer do really spend extended amount of time on the laptop keyboard when not traveling? Both at home and work I'm using the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard and keep the laptop docked with 3 external displays, with these new 5k-monitors two will probably be enough.
I'm not the GP, but for what it's worth I do remap capslock to esc. I mostly use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard where the escape key is one of the chiclet rubber keys, so using vim (at all) really begs for either a remapped esc or brain-retraining to use ctrl-[.
I'm not sure if it's a better or worse choice to remap capslock to ctrl - but it's certainly viable. The old Sun keyboards used to have that layout...
Yeah, I'm totally baffled as to who productively uses VIM and reaches waaaay up there with their pinky. In the first 10 minutes of learning I was googling "mac remap caps lock escape", and I haven't touched the actual escape key in years.
The frustrating thing is that machine only has 2 USB ports, rather than 4. So one port for power and another for a single wired accessory. I guess buying a dongle isn't a huge deal, but kind of frustrating that you'd have to spend more money for what I would expect to be included functionality for a "pro" machine.
I dislike this post intensely. The opinion comes across as uncharitable, as the author probably has not used this Macbook Pro yet. How can you (alexeysemeney) be so sure?
I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative developer tools, such as timeline interfaces for Replay Debugging. There are already a lot of applications in the content creation (Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya) space, which developers frequently use to create assets.
The escape key can be right there on the capslock (option to be enabled in System Preferences -> Keyboard). Using Esc key heavily with its default location is not practical at all. As for the F-keys I think this is more of a problem.
IIRC Support for Caps Lock -> ESC mapping in System Preferences is new as of 10.12 (or maybe 10.12.1?), so many people may not know that's an option. I didn't until I read your post and checked!
How do you achieve this with just System Preferences? On 10.11.6, I see the System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys allows re-mapping to Nothing, Control, Option, and Command, but not Escape. Is this a macOS Sierra thing? Tell me your secrets!
Check out Karabiner and Seil- you can even use these to map "tap capslock" to esc and "hold down capslock" to ctrl. (Seil has some issues in 10.12, but they're working on it.)
They have made karabiner-elements to do just some basic things and which works with sierra. I had a problem with it though as it remaps F-keys by default and it was clashing with Palua on 10.12
I've developed on a MacBook Pro for the last 5 years in vim and I have never touched the escape key or any of the F keys, ever.
If you're using vim and reaching for the escape key you are doing it wrong imho. Rebind esc to something else (like capslock) or learn another pattern that has more ergonomic value.
A lot of us live in a transient computing world, where we neither own nor have permissions to edit the bindings. Having one host with a binding and 6 other client's envs without, would a context switch failure invoke
You'd be surprised. Some corporate environments keep machines pretty locked down in terms of what you can change in the System Preferences, or install on your own.
Just fill in the ticket, call to follow it up, explain what you want again, re open the closed ticket, open the ticket again, do a few ritualistic incantations and you'll get there.
> So yes, rebinding Escape is the right answer if you heavily use it.
nobody does that because it was unnecessary. Of course, now developers need to ADAPT the Macbook instead of the Macbook ADAPTING developer's workflow. That's not the definition of a developer friendly machine. The touchbar is a gimmick and even then it doesn't justify the removal of an entire row of keys. It was purely an aesthetic decision. But I forgot, developers like to work with "beautiful" computers instead of functional ones /s
In my experience, quite a lot of people who take working on the keyboard seriously remap some keys.
I'm more of an Emacs guy, but still frequently hit Escape (I use it as the Meta key in Emacs). I've bound Escape to the Caps Lock key for as long as I can remember. Like I said, the normal location of Escape is way too far from the home row, and quite bad for touch typing.
In fact, the entire function row is too far for me to conveniently use while touch typing, and I have long fingers. I probably won't miss the function key row at all.
I haven't used or seen the actual touch bar, so cannot really make a strong statement whether it's a useless gimmick or actually useful. I have my doubts, but it could turn out to be useful in some applications.
Sorry, but removing this row of keys is entirely justified if you accept that the touchbar is a valuable addition. Having to reach over a row of useless keys (I suspect Apple's data would show ~90% of customers literally never use them, except for the system-control functions) to interact with the touchbar would seriously compromise it's utility.
> (I suspect Apple's data would show ~90% of customers literally never use them, except for the system-control functions)
Completely dishonest and backed by no fact at all, you can make up some data, I can too, I didn't. You call them "useless keys" but there are here for a reason. There are so useless than the touchbar can emulate this "useless" row, except that now users have to look at the keyboard to type since there is no physical feedback to guide them. this isn't innovation, this is a step back.
Calling it dishonest and backed by no fact at all and then go mentioning they are there for a reason. Can you elaborate?
Historically they are programmable keys, not very standard at all. Same goes for the reason keyboards are staggered, to mimic mechanical typewriters that couldn't have the keys orthogonally placed. No problem changing that.
And no I'm not a fan of the Touch Pad at all, using a 2013MBP as a daily driver. I don't understand all the fuss.
> The normal positioning for Escape is very inconvenient for touch typing.
But what if you're not a touch typist? I'm not, and I use the ESC key all the time when using vi/vim, So much so, that it is almost a mindless reflex. I have no choice but to adapt, I know, but my most likely response to this will be to use my Linux laptop more frequently. I still have to use the Mac for OS X and iPhone development, but for other server side stuff, I guess I have to switch to Linux.
Recent generations, yes. vi was designed for a keyboard where the Escape key was where the Caps Lock key is today. When Escape ended up in a hard-to-reach place on the 103-key layout, vi users sighed and rolled with it (and new users didn't know any better.)
I've been a vi user since 1996 and have always remapped the Esc key because it's too far from home. I had assumed others also did this because I've never seen a vi user who works without some customisation on commonly used boxes and it seems like one of the obvious first changes to make.
This is bullshit. You know what else is not on the home row? Most of the keys on the keyboard. The ESC key is very easy to hit without looking down, there is absolutely no need to remap it and I refuse to believe that people that grew up with keyboards with ESC keys ever feel the need to remap it.
> This is bullshit. You know what else is not on the home row? Most of the keys on the keyboard.
...So? You know where you spend most of your time in Vim? the home row. It's called that for a reason...
I grew up with `esc` way up in the corner, and as soon as I started learning Vim I googled for common workarounds to reaching so far. Refuse to believe it, but it's true.
I've never been able to touch-type a function key on any keyboard, ever. Replacing them with a dynamic interface like the TouchBar seems fine for a row I have to look down at every time, anyway. Even on my 2015 MBP I have to make sure I'm hitting a volume button and not the power button.
Programming is not regular touch typing. There are all kinds of punctuations and weird key combos you have to do frequently that are not on the home row. And yes, I hit function key combos without looking many times a day. I will not be buying this laptop.
Good on you. Neither am I, and I have no desire to convince you to. Point still stands that not everyone is as comfortable as you with reaching. I certainly spend most of my time outside of insert mode, firmly on the home row. When I'm done inserting, I want to be back on the home row as quickly and comfortably as possible. Reaching for the furthest row from it before returning home will always be the last thing I want to do.
Eh. I'm using Dvorak, so most of the keybindings in Vim are total madness anyways. For most regular typing, my fingers stay on home far more than you Qwerty typists.
This is the kind of advice that young programmers need to get earlier. I'm new to Vim and I'm slowly realizing that A) Vim is way more powerful than I originally gave it credit to be and B) I'm vastly underutilizing its power.
You don't even need to rebind the escape key. I've been using ^[ for years, and it works in basically all standard terminals and vims as the escape key.
Vim user as well, while I haven't used the new device. Judging from the distance and where I hit the ESC key on the current keyboard, it shouldn't pose any issues. Even if they did remove it, the power of vim is the ability to just remap keys.
C-] might be a better bet - it will cancel any active command, like C-g, and also back out of any recursive edits, while leaving your window layout intact.
If it's anything like their existing dynamic stuff, I worry it will be too slow. There are far too many cases where I search for something, see it pop up, go to hit enter, and as I'm hitting enter, Spotlight decides to shift focus to something else. So for their magic toolbar thing to work, they'd have to do something they haven't been able to do in my experience.
That's fair. My experience has been, at least with the iPhone, that they've made an effort to make it more and more responsive as time has gone on. Tangentially, this is why I don't understand people who install these third party keyboards that make background network requests. It's like, the keyboard is slow enough as it is without having to go to the public internet on a cell connection :/
Yeah, I haven't noticed that yet. Not to say it hasn't improved, but I just haven't noticed an improvement. My other concern is workflow. Right now, the magic toolbar is only on the laptop. This basically means the magic toolbar is only useful when using my laptop's keyboard. Otherwise, it's really an awkward tool to use.
I used to do it without looking at my phone, now with touchscreen I lost that ability, I have to check every word, some keyboards help with that correcting my words if I moved my fingers a little to the side, but it's not the same, with physical buttons I was sure I pressed the correct buttons. Physical buttons give touch feedback and that's important when you're focused on something important in your screen. I don't want to switch my focus from my screen to my keyboard every time I need to use a function key.
I almost always text on my phone without looking because the visual effect where the selected letter appears above your finger actually makes me slow down. I was never able to use physical phone keyboards as easily as the adaptive software ones on modern phones.
Also I use vi mostly so I only use function keys rarely, in which case I look up.
Which phones did you use? I used Palm Treos from 2004 to about 2009 or so, some of the keys even had a bump so you could locate the home row keys. You truly could type somewhat accurately without looking at the keyboard.
If you can't rebind keys, Ctrl [ is THE most ergonomic way to use VIM. I really don't understand why you would use the real Esc key. It's too far away to be useful.
I'll give you the same answer I'll give Apple: don't tell me how to be productive. I have already found vim key bindings to improve my development experience by almost an order of magnitude. You're not taking that away from me.
I'm 99% sure the escape key will be there when in Terminal.app, I also imagine terminals like iTerm2 will have some really sweet TouchBar options to make it even better with all your console apps.
The feel of a real button is great, but you can imagine the possibilities of what you can do with that space when you look at your MacBook keyboard right now and notice you likely never use a thing but the escape key, brightness and volume.
I haven't used it yet, so I can't judge it too much, but I imagine Escape actually works well since it's the top corner of the keyboard and easy to feel, if escape were anywhere else it would really suck.
The only F key I don't use regularly is f6. (Though f2 is mainly a Windows thing... I doubt I use it much in OS X.)
I've got a keyboard with clicky button-type Esc and F keys, which might be a fair approximation to the new F key strip. (Pressing them isn't a million miles away from clicking on the Force Touch trackpad.)
It's a terrible post, and a terrible site (did it break anyone else's back button?)
I gave up on Mac as a development platform back in 2012 when they removed expose and replaced it with that terrible Mission Control garbage. Then I went back to Linux and discovered tiling window managers and haven't looked back. (and yes, I realize there are some good ones for mac now).
But I will say on this post that the escape key is a good point. I use it all the time. Sure you can rebind it, but it's not a useless, SysReq/ScrollLock type key. Most developers will have to rebind it if it doesn't appear on that touch bar thingy.
I couldn't agree more, this kind of stance is embarrassing from a professional standpoint. It's ridiculous to act like this one special arrangement of plastic on a computer is so crucial to development.
All 'real' developers remap their own modifier keys.
All 'real' developers use full cherry-mx mechanical keyboards.
All 'real' developers write assembly with pen and paper and then print their stack of punchcards once.
etc, etc.
I don't think it would be very hard for terminal.app (or other apps targeted at developers) to show esc f1 etc along the top when it is open, and it can strictly have better function keys because instead of f4 etc they can be customised to say what they'd actually do.
I agree the fuss over the touch bar is overplayed.
I do some programming (Xcode and VS Code), I do some 3D art (blender, substance), and I do some photography (Lightroom). Not all of those programs will support it at launch, but I expect they will sooner or later. And the new screen sounds fabulous (I have a wide gamut external screen already, though it's AdobeRGB instead of P3, the MacBook will do better in reds and not quite as well in greens). I wish it were cheaper, sure, but this looks like a fantastic computer to me.
Yeah, you need some different cables. You might need to rebind some hotkeys. It might take a while for some pieces of software to support the touch bar properly.
If you don't want to be an early adopter or you can't get over your Vim muscle memory, pick up a refurbished 2015 model and the rest of us can buy a few new USB cables and move on with our lives.
If I were still a Mac user (back to Linux a year or so ago), I think I'd be annoyed by the new laptops. Not enraged...just annoyed a bit. It's not the end of the world, but like a lot of Apple's recent moves, I'm left with a feeling of "OK, but why?"
With both the headphone jack removal on the iPhone and the function keys here, Apple has used "but they're old" as part of the justification. Playing a slideshow showing me a keyboard from 1970 that had function keys is not itself any form of argument against function keys. Sure, the touch bar can serve the purpose of the escape key. Crucially however, so could the escape key. The demos look neat enough, but it's hard to envision a 0.5" strip of touch screen being all that broadly useful outside a few niche cases where a long linear control is just what you need (e.g., audio scrubbing).
It's not that I think these laptops are bad necessarily. It's more that I think they're gimmicky. Apple seems to do an awful lot of things these days that remind me of Samsung circa 2012 or so -- "press this button to send your heartbeat to your spouse" kind of stuff. Meanwhile, Microsoft looks to be absolutely on fire.
The justification isn't just "they're old" though. It's "they're old and almost completely unused."
I know in Windows there are actual actions on the f-keys (F1 for help, F2 for rename, F5 for reload, etc.), but the Mac has no such equivalents. They're used for hardware and music control, and have this whole secondary mode of fn+F_ chords that hardly anyone touches.
The touch bar will be useful in nearly every app. I wasn't about to set up and memorize custom F-key bindings in every piece of software I use, so it's going to be more useful. And it allows for types of input that buttons couldn't offer to begin with.
With the headphone jack, it was "it's old and we have something better," which I'm not thrilled by (but I wasn't planning on getting a new phone anyway). The USB-C and removal of F-keys I'm totally on board with.
You may never use the Fn and ESC keys (I hardly do either), but this does add to the list of events developers now need to handle in order to develop cross-platform compatible software.
Using function keys as shortcuts is already a terrible idea on macOS because these are used to control the screen brightness, volume, play/pause etc. The TouchBar might actually make it easier for new users to realise what the Fn key does.
either you don't use macbook or not interested enough to look for how to change that behavior. It is a single flag in preferences that allow you to use the keys as function keys and screen brightness etc. with 'fn' key.
I know, but that doesn't make the F keys a good choice for cross-platform app developers. Nobody would release a web browser on macOS where F5 is the only way to reload the page - not before and not after the TouchBar.
I was configuring a server while walking through the airport the other day (long story and I won't bore you with details) on my ipad. There is no control key on the ipad keyboard meaning that I could not save any files from the ssh terminal. It was not the greatest experience and I can definitely see these kinds of things happening on laptop now due to apples "courage". They seem to be gung-ho on breaking things that work perfectly in the name of "progress".
Unless Apple made an iPad SSH client I don't know about, this sounds like you were just using a bad app. The first two that popped up when I just googled for "ipad ssh client" clearly have control keys, as seen in their screenshots, and some other ones I've tried also have control keys.
When I concluded my Thinkpad Tablet 2 was a little bit too small to work as a primary machine (switched to a Helix 2 for that), I re-paired the bluetooth keyboard w/optical trackpoint with my tablet. The keyboard fits inside my jacket.
I can't express quite how wonderful it is on the occasions I don't have a bag with me to still be able to have a proper keyboard+mouse setup when something goes sideways.
> I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac.
ESC usage just off the top of my head: cancelling any dropdown (e.g. IDE autocomplete, browser autocomplete, Spotlight, quick file search in Atom/Sublime), cancelling any OK/cancel dialog (e.g. save as), the ESC + '.' sequence in Bash to get the last word of the last command.
If you go to the current Apple homepage, the first image they present you with shows the Esc key right there. So all of those things you currently do with it? You'll still be able to do with it.
I have a 2013 15" MacBook Pro, the diference with the top of the line that came out yesterday comes down a slight bump in the dedicated Graphics Card (which I don't appreciate since I use CUDA a lot and as such I actually prefer the GTX 750M to a only slightly better AMD card in the new model), and a 0.1 GHz bump in the processor (back from the 2.3 GHz i7 my MacBook Pro has).
I do understand that taking out the Esc and F* keys and replace it for a smart bar can be seen as a valid design option, but I can't see how shipping a Laptop 3 years later with, lets face it, basically the same specs and ask for the same price can be something positive.
I would say the author clearly knows very little computer specs:
"The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope."
Because a 2010 2.4ghz dual core is identical to a 2016 2.4 ghz dual core.... I thought we got over comparing processors purely by their clock speed a long time ago. (I will agree that theyve been going with lower and lower power to allow for better battery life, this is a terrible way to make the comparison. Id much rather see a processor comparison graph here).
Personally I think this is a terrible decision, but then again, I think using a laptop keyboard for programming is a terrible decision too. I need multiple monitors and an external keyboard to get anything done, so I typically use a desktop, and then use a lightweight laptop (basically a chromebook) to remote into the desktop if I absolutely need to be mobile.
Also, "What other people are saying" and then listing 4 anecdotal quotes seems pretty uncompelling.
I imagine this is not a great developer's laptop. But apple fanboys will keep buying it and either stop using vim just so they can keep using apple or buy an external keyboard. And Im really not sure what else you could really want out of a laptop then.
Then just map Esc to Caps Lock if you like. Unless you feel Caps Lock is still critical for commenting on YouTube videos, in that case I guess the new MBP is just a useless paperweight.
Nope - at the moment, my CAPS lock does nothing. But I'm not going to adjust my habit of where to find the ESC key just so I can have some pointless colourful lights.
Instead you could adjust your habit of where to find the ESC key for the sake of ergonomics (Caps Lock is much bigger and closer), like I did years ago, and take the colorful lights as a bonus.
What about the fact that I frequently jump between machines, many of which aren't mine? It's the same as people telling me to learn the Dvorak layout. Any possible productivity gains are lost in forever remembering what keyboard I'm on.
You're wrong. Muscle memory is very hard to retrain. To buy laptop with esc button is much more easy. It will be just not MacBook Pro, but it's their problems.
You're wrong? Muscle memory is not that hard to retrain. I had to do it when I first started using a Mac, on which most of the non-qwerty keys (and some of the qwerty ones too) are in a different location to the standard IBM layout.
But any laptop you buy is a product of some design chosen by other people and not something you can make work precisely as you want. You've adapted to the designs already available, not the other way around.
I realise that, but I'm mostly adapted either to common standards (like QWERTY) or something that provides a benefit to me. I would like a laptop that fits the habits I already have as much as possible, unless there is some good reason for it not to be that way. From the demos I've seen of the touch bar, it will be a gimmick that I very rarely use, so why should I invest in the change?
Also, I work about 50/50 from a USB keyboard. With this keyboard layout, I would need to remember which keyboard I'm using - awful for productivity.
Three points: The escape key is not where it is normally. The escape key is not present in all contextual operations (that is, you can open up a menu on the touchbar which causes the escape key to disappear in favor of a "close" button). There is no physical feedback that you've hit escape.
For me? Because I can't tell without looking at the keyboard whether it exists or not (and potentially whether it's been moved by some program's integration with the touchbar).
I've been touch typing for years now, and the idea that I have to look down at the keyboard to see if a key exists (a key that that has existed for the entirety of my computing history) is ludicrous.
But then how do you change the volume when using vim? Does vim need a special touchbar that basically completely emulates the old keys? That seems excessive.
It's a perfectly fair point. The function keys provide 2 operations each, depending on whether you use the [fn] modifier, so does the ribbon duplicate this functionality or are we effectively left with half the functionality of the old keys?
Personally, I don't see how you can quickly modify the volume from the ribbon if the application you are using has repurposed that space for some other functionality it thinks you are more likely to want
I really like laptops for research and prototype stages of programming: my Macbook works great at finding, curating, reading, and composing documents; handling email, IM, VOIP, VPNs, etc to actually communicate with services; dealing with internet search and websites for services (github, aws, etc); and I find that I even do better at writing "naive" implementations of things with just some paper and a laptop at a coffee shop, because it forces me to skip over most of the technical details (eg, efficient file IO) and just write the essence of the program (ie, the main algorithm or idea I'm trying to implement).
For actually writing a finished production-ready product, a desktop with several monitors and a real keyboard is preferred. But being able to switch between the two modes -- research and creative, focused and technical -- gets the best results.
So can repeated use of keyboard chords. Not to mention the absolute position and shape of the control key can change based on the type of keyboard you're using (such as wired apple keyboard vs. wireless vs. built-in).
What does an external keyboard give you that you can't get from a laptop keyboard? I like the macbook pro keyboard. I plug in two monitors and I'm good to go. Vim users should remap somewhere closer. I use cap locks. Will that not be possible anymore?
The big obvious difference is the numpad, or lack thereof. Plus, mechanical keyboards are a lot more comfortable I find. I know they're a bit of a meme right now, but I definitely prefer them over tiny short press chiclet keys.
For me personally, Home, End, PgUp and PgDown keys. Also, MX switches. I can work without them, but I really think my tools should adapt to me, rather than vice versa.
Have you never used a quality, full-sized mechanical keyboard? There's something kind of joyful about clickety-clacking away.
Maybe my hands are too big, but I am just not really comfortable typing on a laptop keyboard. It's not as bad as trying to do anything on a miniscule on-screen keyboard on a phone, but I still tend to hit at least two or three keys at once far too often.
As a fellow Vim user, I don't use the escape key anymore. It's awkward to hit and I rebind it to "jj" (or more recently "jk"). It's unergonomic to reach for the escape key where it customarily is. If it were where Caps Lock is, it would make much more sense.
That said, I don't like rotating my hand or remove my fingers from the home row.
It's really a non-issue because you can rebind keys so easily, it's not even funny. Everyone seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill.
This. I never "learned" how to type, and while I've tried, I simple can't get rid of almost 20 years of muscle memory typing like a buffoon. It's much easier for me to use ESC and the arrow keys than people who keep their hands on the home row.
No, not in Sierra, because Karabiner classic does not work in Sierra. Karabiner-Elements, which is Sierra-only, can only do basic key remapping. None of the fancy stuff.
> If it were where Caps Lock is, it would make much more sense.
macOS Sierra allows you to rebind Caps to the Esc key, which seems like a good compromise to me. As a non-vim user, I just wish I could bind Caps to other keys as well :(
Have a look at Karabiner-Elements. The author recently open sourced it and kept up his brisk development pace. Every year he updates I'm lockstep with macOS releases and every year, I donate. Amazing project.
That doesn't seem right- I use "jj" to escape insert mode and nothing unusual happens when I use hjkl to navigate in normal mode. The only "pause" is when I type the letter "j" in insert mode.
Similar here. When my coworkers have to detach from their 23" monitors they say they're no longer able to do anything but email and chat. I have a guy who won't WFH because work won't buy him a monitor for it.
I nearly exclusively use VIm and any other editor I use has a VIm mode plugin installed. I pretty much can't work productively in anything else.
I can tell you that I haven't used Esc in ages. I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl (as it is a vastly more useful a key than Esc and Caps Lock is a much better position for it and is just as an extraneous as Esc is). I use Ctrl-C or Ctrl-[ to exit insert mode and it works just fine. In fact I understand that most experienced VIm users do this.
Esc is, by and large a useless key. Even if it wasn't you can remap keys as you like so feel free to map Esc to Caps Lock if you want. Taken alone the lack of Esc and Fn keys is not an argument against the design of the new MBP for developers.
The other anecdote is I've been using vim for about 15 years, and use esc daily. I am constantly in multiple vim environments - different servers, different clients, different OS, etc. I don't have the luxury of saying "I'm going to install all my default vim keybindings and plugins on every vim installation I ever use". Walking someone else over the phone who has to do vim - I need to count on some standard defaults being there, and 'esc' is one.
So yeah - some of you "power users" - fine - you've never touched ESC in 20 years - good for you. You're in the minority.
I've been using vi for over 20 years, but not a power user or anything (emacs for code, vi for quick edits), and have no idea how to use it without esc. Did vim change something? How do you switch modes?
Ctrl-[ == Esc. I had to learn Ctrl-[ three years or so back due to bluetooth keyboard paired with tablet and insufficient time to troubleshoot why Esc wasn't working, and then discovered that it's actually easier on my wrists to use Ctrl-[ and never went back.
I'm not even a power user, & after 25 years, I just know the basic few commands that you need to do anything - insert, delete, search/replace, save, & quit.
ESC is the key that (roughly) takes you back to normal mode from insert mode, visual mode, etc. If you aren't using it, then you're either using one of the other ways to get back to normal mode (like CTRL-[), or you are using Vi in a very non-standard way.
I use vim, I just assumed that when you open Terminal, a virtual escape key would appear in the touch bar. It'd still be in the corner, so fitts law would still apply, and it'd be easy to find.
Yeah, I'm not sure I'd even call it a command - but it is pretty fundamental to vi usage, unless you're using some alternative like ^C or the "remap typing 'jk' to Esc" trick. When you're saying you've never used the Esc key, you mean you only use the Esc key to take you out of insert mode, I guess?
Which is fine if you do everything locally (because you control that configuration), but not having escape really sucks when you are on servers a lot and you can't necessarily go changing vim settings around.
I don't know why that would be anyone's preference given that if you used telnet to connect to a remote shell, ^] is the default escape character. So using ^[ to exit input mode is dangerously close to popping you out of your telnet session. Someone who claims to have used vi for 25+ years (get off my lawn, ssh didn't exist back then) would have likely used telnet and been bitten by that more than once.
I love jk, been using that one for at least 8 years. I even got in the habit of tapping it a few times while thinking, sort of like how you might sometimes shake your leg or whatever. I trained myself off of that though when I had to use Eclipse more and more -- edits or undoes to a file can bring Eclipse to its knees....
Are you talking about the same editor? From a 1996 vi man page [0]:
There are commands that switch you into input mode.
There is only one key that takes you out of input mode,
and that is the <escape> key. (Key names are written
using less-than and greater-than signs, e.g. <escape>
means the ``escape'' key, usually labeled ``esc'' on
your terminal's keyboard.) If you're ever confused
as to which mode you're in, keep entering the <escape>
key until vi beeps at you.
Also... the F1 keys are like super important for debugging. Sure, you can click with the damn mouse in the button for step in, over, run, etc, but the thing is faster with F keys.
Even if mac apps come mapped to other keys, many peaplo still runs windows with bootcamp, virtual box etc and wine programs in apple computers, making things even harder.
And about external keyboards? Apple keyboards comes with F keys... they are going to be uselles now?
This is really just a war of opinions now, but the F1 keys are indispensable to me. My fingers rest on the hotkeys for "step into", "step over", "run to breakpoint" and I can keep my eyes glued to the watch list, inspecting the variables at each step. Some times you want to quickly step into functions, other times step over, and it's just really handy to have it mapped to keys.
I'm not even a power emacs user or something (IntelliJ is my preferred IDE). YMMV of course, but I find the hotkeys super useful.
But what if your IDE simply adds the debugger buttons to the touch strip instead? They could even have the correct icons and update state as you debug. Seems even better to me.
It's really odd when people say "I need one function key for some application specific operation", when those kinds of things are pretty much exactly what an adaptable, customizable touch row is perfect for. If apple could have read the touch bar complaints before, they probably would have been convinced to put a touch bar in earlier.
Main point for touch strip is changing icons/state. But that's absurd because not even my mother blind types.
This is clearly another fancy thing that removes functionality.
I have a blank keyboard, I never look at it, when I use for debugging I'm extremely fast as I don't have to look back and forth on keyboard and screen or use mouse (who uses mouse that much anyway?), I'd miss F keys if I bought the new macbook pro.
There will be one, they've shown it in some of the promotional imagery. I think everybody is just up in arms about the physical key being gone.
I'm a heavy vim user and use the ESC key all the time. If I get the new MacBook Pro I'll probably see how the touch key works, and then rebind if it's necessary. It's not the end of the world.
I'm a vim user as well, and I'm actually shocked at how many users apparently still use the ESC key. I actually didn't know any regular vim users did that, because to me, it seems super inefficient. I don't say that as a put-down or anything like that. But if you use vim, I'd highly recommend remapping caps lock to Esc. I think you will get used to it within a day and will never go back.
I'm a long-time vim user, and I use the esc for two reasons. First, because it's critical muscle memory, and if I go to a machine that is not my own don't want to be crippled. I would still consider remapping caps lock (as opposed to .vimrc remapping) since that would work when ssh'ed into arbitrary machines, but the problem there is I'm already using it for control, and because the control key is resized on the laptop keyboard I can't develop normal muscle memory when moving between different apple keyboards.
Personally I think people make way too big a deal about the escape key being difficult to hit. It's right there in the corner, never been a problem for me.
I've tried ctrl-c, ctrl-[, and ESC. The one that stuck for me was ESC. The others usually don't work in other programs that use vim keybindings.
Many people already map capslock to ctrl. You could map ctrl to ESC, but then it gets uncomfortable when switching computers, and it goes against 10+ years of muscle memory.
I tried remapping capslock once, but it got too confusing when switching computers.
I am a developer who writes code while in tmux and vim. I have remapped my Caps Lock key so it's Ctrl when presses with another key and Escape when pressed on it's own.
> I use Ctrl-C or Ctrl-[ to exit insert mode and it works just fine. In fact I understand that most experienced VIm users do this.
That's pretty uncommon to imply it's generalizable. Most vim users, I feel comfortable in saying, actually use 'Esc', or a key mapped to the same. Speaking for myself, I can't see why I'd want to use two keys when one would do.
Well having to stretch your little finger all the way to the corner of the keyboard gets pretty annoying when you have to do it all the time, as you do with Vim. Much easier to remap another key close to the home row, and since caps-lock is so redundant, it is the obvious candidate.
So whether you map it directly to Esc or to a modifier, the parent's point stands: Vim users don't need the Esc key and are probably better off without it.
classic apple fanboy huh? I've a shortcut for my F1 key which toggles terminal on full screen. What there? You don't expect me to map one key for that as well, do you? I'd still prefer a physical button.
- can you give me some details on your remap setup on macOS? if you have dotfiles somewhere that'd be great.
- as a vim user who only uses vim as an editor, I challenge the assumption that touch Esc is a horrible thing. Esc is a very special key and it may turn out to be ok for it to _be_ different, and _feel_ different.
I wonder if any of the people watched the demo. They showcased Terminal, and there was an escape key on the touch bar. They also specifically said pressing the "fn"'key would show function keys on the touch bar, which is exactly what you have to do on current Apple keyboards to use the function keys.
It seems like a non-issue to me unless people simply don't like the touch bar not being physical keys, which is fine, because they can just get the other Pro without it.
I haven't. I based my prediction on the assumption Apple engineers are not stupid. For what I observe, it's quite the opposite.
The bar's function varies according to the application being used. It should be trivial to make, say, iTerm, which is immensely popular (I use it myself) have Esc and function keys available by default.
If you're a Vim user and have escape as one of the keys farthest away from you, they did you a favour. I don't mean that as a defence of the MacBook Pro. At the very least, switch caps lock and escape if you're not using caps lock for something else.
It's extremely patronizing and dismissive to insinuate that only "apple fanboys" buy macbook pros. There are plenty of reasons to buy an apple laptop without being a "fanboy". Searching for the best laptop leads many to apple simply because of logistics/price/ease-of-use.
That said, most of the other stuff you say is true.
My point was more that there are people who buy Apple regardless of quality or features. If you buy Apple because it's the best for you, go for it. I agree that they are quality built laptops.
You don't find people who are dedicated to buy only Dell laptops even if something negative happens. There are no Dell fanboys (that I've ever encountered). If Dell does something stupid, people will buy ASUS, HP, Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc and get basically the same experience.
The point was less that ONLY fanboys buy macbook pros, but moreso that Apple has a large enough loyal fanbase that they can basically do whatever, and people will defend the decision.
You will hear people say that 16gb of RAM is a non-issue and if you need more than that you are doing it wrong. That is a fanboy response. A logical response is "I don't need 16gb of RAM, but I'm not everyone, so I'm not going to start a debate over this"
The processor speed is less important to me. But the lack of more than 16 GB of RAM is a serious problem. As a developer, I frequently run a large number of VMs at once. My current laptop has 16 GB of RAM, and I frequently need more to run all of the VMs that I need, so I wind up having to use my workstation with has 32 GB of RAM, and just connect to that remotely when I'm on my laptop. That's cumbersome and doesn't work well when I'm on the road in places with flaky connectivity (I travel a lot, as I work remotely and come into the office, so being able to do all of my work on my laptop would be a big win).
The escape key issue doesn't bother me as much, but I'm not a Vim user and I already have Caps Lock mapped to escape or control depending on whether it's a modifier or not. I do use the function keys occasionally in cross-platform development tools like gitk, but I'm sure that other keybindings can be substituted and I'd be able to deal with that.
But the lack of RAM beyond 16 GB pretty much means there's no reason for me to upgrade from my 3 year old laptop. I would have considered upgrading this cycle if they offered more RAM, but as it is I'll probably hold off. Maybe if they release another in a year or so with more RAM I'll upgrade; if not, I may just switch to a Lenovo or other laptop that has more expansion room.
3 years without a bump in RAM capacity seems like an awful lot. I realize that Moore's Law is flattening out, but stagnating for 3 years like this seems like a long time.
The interesting thing is that Apple just released the ability to remap Caps-Lock to Esc. natively in macOS 10.12.1, which doesn't seem to be incidental.
I find it interesting and perhaps a bit telling that the most common response to the Esc key portion of this post is remap/use a different key binding.
How is that a reasonable response? To me, the reasonable response would be, "I remap/whatever, but maybe it's best if you look at a different platform where this isn't a concern." Or, "I can see how that's a problem, here's what I do."
We do have some responses in the 'reasonable' category, by we also have replies like "Esc is, by and large a useless key." and "It's really a non-issue because you can rebind keys so easily, it's not even funny" and "the ESC key in vim can lead to RSI" and "Only if you're too lazy to rebind it to any of the many more finger friendly options". All of them saying, "You're doing it wrong" - even if not in so many words.
Telling someone they're wrong to dislike a specific change because a workaround happens to exist says to me that you're making a whole lot of assumptions about other people based on what works for you at best, and being patronizing at worst.
I realize I don't know the first thing about MacBook keyboards. Are you saying they don't have Page up, Page down, Home and End?
Maybe a Windows thing but I use Function keys everyday, F3 for incremental search, F5, F9, F10, F11 for debugging. Not having these keys would be handicapping.
Home/end are not really necessary on a Mac, where you can use cmd+arrow keys instead (left=start of line, right=end of line, up=start of document, down=end of document).
The function keys are also not commonly used by apps because the system maps them to brightness control, volume, play/pause etc. by default and you need to use the Fn key to produce the actual function key keystrokes.
The convention for incremental search is: cmd+F to open the find dialog, cmd+G for "Find Next" (which is great because it's right next to cmd+F), and cmd+E cmd+G for "search for selection". Every macOS app works that way and the F3 key will not be missed.
It's really not that bad. The only key I miss on Mac keyboards is forward delete (Del).
You can change Fn keys behaviour from prefs and I believed all developers would have defaulted to Function keys but seems not so.
Chrome, IntelliJ, VSC all use Fn keys for debugging, and also at least I have mapped most of function keys to some tasks, like F5 for open symbol etc.
Touchbar is only good for some slider like things where continuous strip will help. It is also good for novice users like MSOffice ribbon, they can see a lot of things on screen now and they don't have to hunt in menu or remember shortcuts.
But for a real pro user spending whole day in few softwares, it makes no sense. I have seen pro photoshop users using 3-4 keys long shortcut like second nature, they need access to tonnes of features and variants so more keys the merrier.
Honestly, I haven't seen any real use cases of the touchbar, smileys and photo slider is cute but not something on top of my list to optimise.
You're describing the 'Fn' mod-key. Everyone else here is describing the F-keys. The 'Fn' key is still there and does what it always did. In fact, it calls up the traditional 'Fn' keys on the touchbar, functionally just the same as the old MBPs, making all this whining look particularly stupid.
I find really amusing that after the Macbook reveal last year half of the response comments (in sites like ArsTechnica) were of the gist "just give me an updated Macbook Air, with the same form factor and a better screen".
Well, the base Macbook Pro model does exactly that. There is also an option (cheaper!) to keep the function keys.
I might be getting old and grumpy, but more than anything else
it boggles my mind when apparently everyone believes they should be the target user Apple (or Microsoft, or Google,or...) design their product for, and they consider a personal insult when that is not the case.
I don't think there was ever a time where the laptop market had so many options, at all price levels, many of those of such a high quality.
You don't like that a particular manufacturer is offering ? Vote with your wallet and choose another option, don't whine.
I think there are lot of us who may never have really like Mac hardware, but find the OS is the best option out there to get our work done. Its just a little sad it locks us to specific hardware platform as well.
Here we go again... why are you people so blind in following a brand. Apple, Google, Tesla, etc. It's ridiculous. Whatever those companies do, it's always good. I use a mbp everyday, but I have no problems with saying how stupid this is and I don't even use vim.
Are you seriously saying, that removing the ESC and Functions keys is not issue and does not affect you, as developer?! If you use your mbp for Facebook or if you program in Visual Basic, then I might understand.
I've used the Lenovo's "adaptive keyboard". It's crap to use, especially for development. FN keys are especially easy to remap for macros or lesser used functions, and having no haptic feedback essentially kills their function for a touch typist.
It's also no wonder that newer carbon models came back to regular fn keys.
I actually bought/buy macbooks for their build quality, and generally only install linux on them. Looks like this particular model marks the end of this path.
Devs are a huge market for Apple, but Apple is ignoring them.
This isn't about ESC, it's about whether Apple has any interest in acknowledging the dev market and keeping devs on board.
The answer is "no."
Apple is making no concessions to developers or professional power users who need performance. Instead, Apple is producing vanilla-grade laptops with a touch of gimmicky brand frosting to justify the high price.
The real heuristic is skimping on performance and connectivity to maintain margins. The cost to users is significant lost productivity.
This is the MacBook Pro Intern Edition. It could have been more, but that's where Apple is now.
They're ignoring the giant behemoth that is ....Vim users..? What?
Wait till the EMACS crowd gets a whiff of how Apple refuses to sell pedals for their keybindings, then Apple is truly in trouble.
Look, I know VIM is popular, but so is XCode, so is Sublime, so is Atom, so is TextMate, so is a multitude of other text editors for God's sake, that to claim that Apple is somehow "abandoning the entire software development community", as if VIM users somehow speak for all of them, is pretty whiny and unrealistic.
Do you think Apple really worries that a bunch of what, Open Source "hackers" producing yet another Ruby testing framework are now going to abandon their platform? Seriously? Get off your high horse, man.
There's thousands of Visual Studio developers in the Windows world and thousands of XCode developers in the OS X world who don't give two shits about your 1970's vintage terminal mode text editor. Apple will be fine. Software developers (again, a much larger group than you obviously think) are also going to be fine.
And aren't you guys always bragging what power users you are? So now that one (remappable!!!!) key is gone your entire world is crashing around you?
If you're such a fossil that you can't adapt to the absence of this one key, that already is of extremely limited use for 99.9% of people, how did you cope with the disappearance of the floppy disk, the caps lock key, the parallel port, VGA, optical disc drives? How did you ever adjust from storing backups of your code on floppy disks once that went away?
What happens when Windows laptops one day follow suit and remove the Escape key and the (just as useless) Caps Lock key? If VIM users can't adapt to a simple change such as this, maybe you deserve to fade to irrelevancy? Just keep buying 2008-era laptops off Ebay well into the 2030's, I guess?
Were you clicking around the menus all the time or using a heavily modded keymap? Building, running, almost all of the debugger commands, viewing property pages, switching between code and designers, all make heavy use of the function keys out of the box. Those are pretty common tasks.
So basically what you are saying is that Devs need to adapt to apple products not the other way around, because apple knows best.
IMO what is really pathetic is people tying the hardware to the software, I don't buy "Windows Laptop", I buy a Laptop with the hardware that suits my needs and install Linux on it if it's not already installed, but I guess my opinion is irrelevant as I'm an emacs core user and use VIM as a text editor.
Let me give you a tip here, If you buy a Laptop and chose to have it without Windows pre installed you will get a discount ( The windows License fees)
And guess What I will never pay a license fee for an IDE (from M$ or Apple) that do not match half what I get from my open source "vintage editor", but that just only me!!!
Visual Studio is the only place I've really used the function keys (F5, F10, F11), and I rarely use VS anymore. Outside of that I use F2 when in any kind of GUI that permits renaming of a file or folder.
It has always been possible to set those keys to default to F-key functions instead of media functions. The difference here is that the position may not be constant, and you can't feel with your fingers what you're over before you commit to activating the function, so you must look. In some contexts you can "get used to it", but this is a steeper uphill battle.
Developer here. Dealbreaker for me. All my tools heavily use function keys and escape. If I had no other options I'd just deal with it, but Apple is competing with themselves: since they didn't bother to upgrade the actual performance, I have no incentive to move from my current macbook. And when I do, I'll probably just buy a different brand if they don't release a laptop that's actually useful for me.
Non-developer here. The new MacBook has both an escape key and function keys, as could clearly be seen in the demos and screenshots on Apple.com. So all your tools will still work.
Saying the new MacBook doesn't have an escape key is like saying the iPhone doesn't have an "L" key. It does when you need it to.
I use the F keys a lot in Matlab, but I'd guess that Matlab users are just as much a minority of developers that developers are of Mac users, so I can see why it's not a big deal to Apple. Maybe Mathworks will add some of the functionality to the touch bar anyway.
Surely the weird thing about removing the escape key is that it is used to bring up the force quit menu (cmd-option-esc). Pretty ingrained in my mind at least, but to be fair not needed that often.
The ESC key should hardly be a deal breaker for Vim devs - most remap it to caps lock on a Mac because it's easier to reach.
The 13" model has a version that keeps that row anyway. And the Touch Bar does still have a function key row/view? with ESC. MacVim and iTerm could probably add the functionality that the whole row is an ESC key when they are the active apps.
For me though, Apple got it wrong by releasing a gimmick (touch bar) which may be useful for some groups of Pro users (designers/film editors?) but I can't see adding much value to what I think is their largest group - software developers.
For me my ideal developer laptop is small, light and powerful. So while it's great the Pro is now the same size and weight as the air (13" model), I think they could have gone even smaller - see the Dell XPS 13. A 13" full powered (i7, 16GB ram) in a 12" body (by having an edge to edge 'infinity' screen). Basically they should have released a MacBook that can run an i7 and 16GB ram.
Then I'll wager your knowledge of the capabilities of the apps you use is limited and if you are developing UIs I'll bet that while you consider them slick and sophisticated, they are in reality limited and inefficient.
I was waiting for the new Macbook Pros as I need to buy a new laptop, and was going to give my old Macbook Pro (2014 model) to my wife. But given that they have nothing of value (I don't care about gimmicks like the new touch bar), I've decided to abandon Mac and go back to Linux.
I'm just a typical web developer, running a bunch of virtual machines, and an IDE. Any recommendations? I saw the Dell XPS 15 for around £1,300:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B018FSX9GA/
Any others? I'm not a Linux diehard, so I'd probably go with Ubuntu.
It's available in the UK. We've moved the XPS 13 Developer Edition to be in the same place as the Windows version. One side affect is that this (well, the internal details of how that's done in our catalog) makes it easier for us to change up the Dev Ed configs. If you go to http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd and scroll to the right ("Next" button) you'll see them.
I would also recommend Lenovo Thinkpads, which are quite popular with Linux folks. The X and T in particular give a lot of bang for your buck. I am also eying Thinkpad 13 as a great beater machine replacement for my aging x230.
Are Lenovos still a good go-to? I've just seen them fall apart pretty quickly amongst my friends. Just wondering if the build quality has gotten better...
I got the 1st gen Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and it didn't hold up great. The balance of weight, power, battery life, and Linux support were huge for a traveling programmer. By the end of year 2, though, I had replaced a broken screen, and the battery life was down to 30-60 minutes (from about 6 hours).
I decided to give them another chance on the 4th gen X1 Carbon, and I've been very happy so far. The build quality seems much better, and they've nixed some of the annoying "innovations" from the 1st gen one (ironically including a touch bar at the top; they reverted to normal keys). That said, I've only had this one for about 5 months, so I might change my mind by the time another year or 2 passes.
Good luck with HiDPI. It is very application dependent, so I would check what you typically use. From what I have tried and read, macOS handles HiDPI and multi-monitors much better than any other OS out there right now.
I'm so used to HiDPI just working on my MBP that I never even realized it was an issue on the other OSes until I started thinking about switching.
> multi-monitors much better than any other OS out there right now.
No it doesn't. OSX in fact has a completely innane behaviour when a MBPr is connected to an external monitor. Meaning you have to mirror or put it in clamshell mode. You can't extend the monitor ontot he laptop screen. Works perfectly well in Linux for me.
Huh? I have 2 external monitors (connected using DP) and my laptop running as 1 large desktop right now. Both externals are 1920x1200 running off a rMBP. Dragging windows around scales properly and mostly works.
Last time I tried this on Linux it was a mess, particularly when moving windows from the HiDPI to the normal and back.
How do you mean? I'm connected from my Macbook Pro to two (non-Apple) external monitors (one on thunderbolt, other on HDMI) and they extend just fine - no mirroring or clamshell mode.
If anything, clamshell mode is the buggy one - it has a tendency to go into or come out of sleep mode when I don't want it to.
This is false. My Ubuntu desktop handles 4K DPI scaling perfectly, while attached to a 1440p with normal scaling as well. On the other hand my 2012 MacBook scales extremely weird when connected to a 4K display through HDMI.
I'm wondering this too. I'm using a 2010 version with a new battery and SSD installed, and besides that everything is working fine. I would like a Retina on that but I don't see the huge problem
I looked at this option, but started to think it was good money after bad. The repair shop I got a quote from said around £400 for the upgrade, and it just doesn't seem worth it.
I don't need a new one, but my wife does as her one is the Macbook Pro from 2009 and is now extremely slow, and the battery lasts about 20 minutes. So I was going to buy a new one for me, and give her my current one.
As you say, the 2014 is a great model - I'm using it right now, and it's plenty sufficient for everything I do.
Ah the hand-me-down train, I know it well. Brothers and nieces supply the demand for a generation or two old iDevices and gives me a bit of a way to cut into the purchase price of the new shiny.
I really like the XPS 15 and use it as my dev machine. I would consider the 141ppi screen. It is excellent value and works well with all existing apps.
well, if you you want a touchbarless macbook pro then get a 13' touchbarless macbook pro.
Just came to mind this thought "Maybe they're selling that one as part of a sales control group". But then: it's Apple, they just do whatever they think is innovative.
Do you think system76.com is a good alternative from the developers point of view?
All Lenovo would need to do is start supporting Unbuntu on their ThinkPad line and Apple would be in big trouble overnight. With then Thinkpads they are doing the opposite, locking Linux users out instead!
Totally agree with you. Ubuntu needs to have a mainstream manufacturer to go big. MBP is perfect so far because of the combo of UNIX and Office products and support for various softwares.
I'd like to see stats on how my VIM users actually still use the ESC key. Most (including me) have mapped this to Caps-lock a long time ago because the Esc key for a long time has not been in the same place on any keyboard as it was when VIM was originally created.
There sure are some to be found - I personally find it too hard to override my habit of reaching for the upper left corner for esc. And believe me, I tried the caps-lock as esc key, but I kept hitting either shift or tab as well... Might just be a matter of practice though. Currently my caps-lock key is still remapped to esc since accidentially hitting caps lock is the worst.
If you don't have the data, you have no position saying most vim users do anything. There is no reasonable way to assume that most users of any software make the same configuration changes away from default.
807 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 518 ms ] threadThere is also a solution for Hammerspoon users here: https://gist.github.com/arbelt/b91e1f38a0880afb316dd5b573275...
https://files.grid.in.th/11RiNt.png
in all seriousness, switching the ctrl - caps lock keys was probably the best layout improving decisions i've ever made. highly recommending it for ergonomic and health reasons.
Anyone looking for extremely fine grain keymap control (with a UI that far surpasses any kind of keyboard remapping I've tried doing in Linux) should look up karabiner.
https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner
Escape and f-keys are used to send commands to the computer, not to enter text. Apple feels that this is better achieved with touch, gestures, and the mouse, so they've removed the temptation for developers to fall into old bad habits. See also: the removal of arrow keys on the original Mac.
And have you ever tried to use a terminal (editor) on remote over a connection with high latency? Awful.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Hilariously so.
It was not an attack and I resent the framing of it as such.
2. Gotta agree with easytiger. I work all the time from 3G tether connection. Mosh makes it a breeze.
That's why ed doesn't prompt. (ed is the standard text editor.)
Or you could use nano.
The bar is programmable, so I would expect that applications like iTerm will write in support for it and they probably would include an ESC key on the bar. It would be nice if Apple had thought of this and Terminal.app already did that. Maybe they didn't think about that, but my guess is that they work mostly in Xcode.
Then there is the suggestion from someone else in the comments to remap the Caps Lock key to ESC which might be something I try even though I pretty much use full keyboards. The ESC key on home row might be a great idea.
Applications that have terminal UIs tend to be significantly more well behaved than those that don't, this isn't always the case it's just a trend I've noticed.
Also you don't need to remember which key does which
You can also show stuff like CI status, notifications for IMs, etc.
How is that any better or different than notifications that already exist on your system?
GitLab has web browser notifications that trigger on CI builds.
Literally every instant messaging service has notification systems that work on the OS.
What is the added benefit of putting it off of the main screen and on a small 1" tall screen where you have your hands?
And there isn't much you can do with the pretty graphics on the buttons that you couldn't already do with pretty graphics on the screen, especially in an era of touchscreens. The whole touchbar strikes me as a demo-feature; demos great, in practice, not especially useful.
They are visual. So you don't have to memorise any key combinations. Also they are context aware. This means you don't have to memorise all those key-context-application combinations.
It is multitouch. You cannot click at two different points on the screen with the touchpad. So this is an improvement over the current input mechanism.
Is touchbar better than touchscreens? Maybe or maybe not. Who knows now. But note that it is not placed on the screen. It is placed near the keyboard, where the other input mechanisms and your fingers normally are.
You don't need to "look down at the keyboard". In a laptop you are already looking there. It's already in your peripheral vision. And if you use an external monitor (but not an external keyboard), you simply don't have to use the touch bar.
I don't understand this negativity on HN. There will be many creative applications for this new input/output method. I'd rather see people brainstorming on all those new possibilities.
Personally I think the touch bar could be great for programmers so I'm gonna take that.
EDIT: The XPS 15 gets more like 5-6 hours with the high res display by my understanding. The Surface Book has the right combination of resolution and battery life, but 15.4" to 13.5" is a big step down if you're used to working with side by side windows. Is there anything out there I've overlooked?
That's charitable. It has a dual-core 15W TDP CPUs, the 13" touchbar uses a dual-core 25W CPU and the 15" uses a quad-core 45W CPU.
Incidentally, all Kaby Lake laptops use either 4.5W duals or 15W duals, there's nothing else out yet.
Doesn't help for development per se, but I do enjoy having the flexibility of the "gimmick" screen. I still prefer paper, but it's a viable alternative for note taking.
I tried it and for those who prefer Linux it's pretty great!
If I am skyping and the person I am skyping with has upward view of me, I don't really see an issue with that.
I understand that OSX has gestures and maybe Windows too. Maybe there is some package that brings gestures to Ubuntu as well (apt-cache search gesture|grep gesture returns some) but the keyboard is good enough. Alt left to go back (it works in Nautilus too), etc. Sometimes I'd like pinch to zoom in Gimp like on the phone and tablet and some day I'll try those gesture packages, but I'm in no hurry.
On the other side, I find the push to click trackpads I see on Macs and some PCs very difficult to operate, especially when I don't want to move the mouse pointer when clicking (graphic programs) and especially the trackpads that actually move. That's why I bought a laptop with physical buttons and disabled push to click (it had that too).
TL;DR the Mac trackpad is almost a reason not to buy a Mac for me.
That was a concern I had when upgrading to a MacBook with no physical button, but it hasn't actually been an issue. You can treat the trackpad as though it has a separate physical button (leave your thumb at the bottom the whole time, and use it to click instead of the tracking finger), and it's smart to detect that and ignore the thumb except for clicking.
They're not nearly as precise as a mouse. They cause you to rotate your cuff even further than a mouse. Dragging and dropping things is more difficult with a touchpad.
Touchpads all stink, including Apple's.
Evoluent's vertical five button wireless mouse is where it's at. Everything else is second rate.
> Touchpads all stink, including Apple's.
Couldn't disagree more. I've actually ended up getting a Magic Trackpad for my desk - the gestures etc are genuinely useful.
Uggh. That sounds like a terrible way to work. If open floor plans are bad, working on a flight has got to be even worse. I guess I'm lucky that I don't have to do any of that.
> I've actually ended up getting a Magic Trackpad for my desk...
Well, you're a rare bird then.
Welcome to the real world- sometimes we have to do things in environments that are less than ideal!
Given that Apple have iterated and released multiple versions of the Magic Trackpad, I doubt I'm that rare of a bird.
Now, I have a Dell XPS running Ubuntu. It is considerably faster. Far better battery life. Far high spec. Extremely slick display.
$2000 - A loaded Dell Precision workstation. Wait for Kaby Lake quads though. If you like the Surface Books that's an option too.
$1500 - Dell XPS.
$1200 - ASUS UX501VW. (Only one RAM slot is upgradable, though)
If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards.
All of these machines run Linux well (with an occasional driver compile). The biggest tradeoff will be the touchpad. I find the trackpads on par with my 2009 unibody White Macbook. If you prefer a mouse like I do, it wouldn't be that much of an issue. On the plus side, you can get much better specs for the price of a Mac. Xeons, lots of ECC RAM, beter displays, better battery etc etc.
> This workstation can get some serious work done, but its battery life of 5 hours and 34 minutes means you likely won't be taking it far from your desk.
The 13" rMBP gets 12 hours on the same test: http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/all-day-strong-longest-las....
I don't feel like I'm being unreasonably picky here. I've been using a laptop with a great display and 8-9 hours of actual battery life for the last two years. Everything on the market right now (including probably the new MBP) is a downgrade from that.
OS X vs. Windows?
There is a lot of trackpad jitter as well - which is easy to disable when a mouse is plugged in, but still.
edit: the camera is also in a stupid place.
Meh. The one on my 2015 X1 Carbon is okay, but the keyboard and trackpoint are the worst parts of my X1 Yoga – the trackpoint only allows the "soft dome" caps (i.e. the convex ones, not the nice concave ones which save you a bunch of stress in the fingers) and the keyboard just feels very cheap and weird. The keypress is still well-defined, it’s just that the keys are incredibly shallow.
Apple really seems to loath their developers either through active malice or passive indifference. I've wasted too much time reverse engineering Xcode/LLDB/MobileDevice.framework to get automated iOS testing to work (no, XCTest is not adequate). Of course, once my company wanted to move from physical hardware to virtual, we were screwed again by the near total lack of virtualization products for macOS guests. VMWare ESXi seems to be the only player in town for server deployments and that still requires Apple hardware. Sure, go ahead and spend well over $3,000 on their laughable Pro/"server" products that cannot be reasonably placed in a server room. Apparently Apple hasn't heard of the whole "cloud" thing.
* But not really, I would never dream of violating the macOS EULA by running it on non-Apple hardware...
You can have i7 quad-core, dual 1 TB SSD, 32 GBytes RAM (maybe more), backlit keyboard, thin(ish) form factor, and a fantastic 3840 x 2160 screen. Graphics are NVidia M1000M which is desktop class and runs CineBench 11(?) OpenGL test at 93 fps (faster than my NVidia GTX 970).
This is by FAR the nicest and thinnest portable workstation-class laptop I've ever used. It's easily carryable-around, which is more than I can say for any previous laptop such as the larger Dell Precisions, HP Elitebooks I've previously used in this class.
In particular, fast Samsung NVM SSDs and fast laptops are a match made in heaven.
So many people upgrading notebooks when they don't need to.
I'm sitting here on a 2008 Mac Pro, and was hoping to move to a mobile solution. But 16GB of RAM just isn't going to cut it for the VM's and what not a run. So I guess I'll just be running this into the ground.
(More seriously, as much as it bothers me to retrain my pinky, most uses of the escape key would be many times better if the lefthand side of the touch bar had a word for the function, like stop being full screen, cancel, leave menu, or whatever. The function would then be discoverable instead of secret lore.)
CTRL-C is completely different.
Had it only been a week or two I suspect my muscle memory wouldn't've shifted though.
I am reminded also of one time trying to write C code on an IBM AS/400, only to find that the keyboard did not have square bracket keys at all...
Yeah these entitled kids paying > $3000 for a product, they should just shut up and give money to Apple /s
This is already far superior than just F1, F2, etc, which are far far more cryptic than a descriptive icon.
That's the thing, most apps already do use F keys for custom bindings, but you have to manually memorize them for each different app. Here, you at least get to see the correct icon in each program you're using.
And as a bonus, you get variable size buttons, sliding input, colors, and much more that just isn't possible with simple buttons.
I personally don't like the idea of losing some keys, keys are nice, my fingers can feel where they are at all times. But that said my fingers also know exactly where to go without the feedback of the keys. I do like the prospect of programming a custom touch bar for various programs, that seems kind of neat, but I would have also been fine with keeping my function keys (I mean custom bindings are what function keys are for in the first place, no?).
However this still does not help for a missing ESC in other applications (like IDEs where you sometimes want to close an annoying intellisense dialog).
I absolutely agree that Control+x ↦ x&0x3F is an established convention, and it continually annoys me that Windows and Windows-aping software violates it.
I find it very hard to believe that these processors perform on the same level as the ones in 2010. Equal cores / GHz does not mean equal performance.
An anecdote is a single data point. So numerous anecdotes would, in fact, be data.
> The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope.
Aren't we done the whole gigahertz race?
I am now considering a Hackintosh. Don't want to put in too much time maintaining it though so still not sure about it.
So... mac it still is. Windows is looking better these days.
Just want to re-iterate it's not Linux's fault, it just doesn't work well as a proprietary platform. So if your program needs art assets you'll have to get them elsewhere. And if you want to deploy on Mac or Win you'll have to have one of those anyway... so shrug.
I like programming on Linux for sure it's just not there as a personal OS. And I used to run a very stripped down, customized Arch distro... on a desktop PC. It never worked well on any laptop I've owned and required too much hand-holding with rolling releases breaking things occasionally.
All of the Microsoft 'stuff' (anything in Visual Studio) works okay but once you start installing python or node modules, forget about it.
I remember the click finally happened when I spent an afternoon installing package after package to get a node module to compile on Windows. When I installed it on OS X, it just installed... I didn't have to do anything.
I installed Ubuntu that night and never went back (except to play games because WINE is just ehhh)
After 3 hours on Windows, I just brew-installed the damn thing from github on Mac and it just pulled all the dependencies.
While it's gotten some eye-rolls from tech friends, the UX of my current system is amazing. I have an almost vanilla Xmonad configuration, combined with dmenu, and passwordstore / dmenu integration. It simply rocks.
I anticipate soon starting a new job with a firm that has more or less standardized around Apple hardware. I find myself kind of dreading going back to a Mac. I may decide to be "that guy" and ask for something like the Thinkpad Carbon X1 in lieu of the standard issue equipment.
I was given a Macbook, and thought I'd get used to it, but I couldn't. Basic stuff is broken, like maximizing a window. Focus-follows-mouse doesn't work properly, and multiple windows from the same application are broken -- I'm not sure what the "correct" way to switch between multiple Firefox windows is, but it's clunky.
Linux on the Macbook can probably work if you're determined, but I'm (obviously) not a fan of Apple hardware. It was much easier to take a spare Dell desktop -- which has twice the RAM and a better CPU than the Macbook.
I've spent so much time in my ion3 setup (now notion..) that changing things is just silly, and I'm so glad I don't have to. Open source code lets you continually port forward what you care about, because you have access to the source code.
I'm on something like 14 years using it? It's just awesome to me that everyone else is off inventing new ways of managing windows, and I'm here pressing F3 to run a program like I always have.
Not that there aren't worthy talking points in this article, but it's really annoying when a blogger has the arrogance to photoshop some keyboard image together and proclaim it's a better design than what a gigantic company carefully came up with.
Apple has its own reasons for doing things and they aren't going to please everybody, but does this Alexey Semeney fellow actually think Apple didn't consider all the possibilities before removing a whole bunch of keys from the keyboard? Apple might be a lot of things, but careless is not usually one of them.
I suppose also there's a terminal mode with ESC and the other keys (or iTerm might do that)
But yeah, the RAM issue is not good
Why would you bother with a dongle when you can get a Type C — Lightning cable for the same price?
http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK0X2AM/A/usb-c-to-lightni...
a.k.a the "lightning to thunderbolt" cable.
Er… yes?
> I now need either two cables, one to hook my phone up to my laptop and one to hook it up to my computer
Except you carry one cable with you and the other one stays hooked to an eventual desktop computer, rather than having to carry around a cable and a dongle.
I don't think you can connect via BT and then use that connection from Xcode for deployment and debugging. That still requires a cable.
At one time, back in the Xcode 4.x days I believe, they did support development over WiFi. It didn't seem to be very well tested at the time and got pulled out soon after. They seem to have given up on the idea for some reason but it would be nice to go that route again.
I've never found Bluetooth to work without having to fiddle for ten or fifteen minutes to get the cussed things to pair up.
It seems that USB-C will be more successful than Thunderbolt 1/2 have been, but Apple really isn't helping it with the way they're doing the switch (some devices USB-C only, some devices USB-A only, Lightning headphones...).
So does that mean that it also supports the USB protocol?
or an USB-C to Lightning cable. Those exist. And so do any USB-C to any other USB-Plug cables.
Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now as two years from now, I'm quite sure no more peripheral will come out that has anything but USB-C.
So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C cables that will connect your devices directly to your MacBook Pro. No dongles what so ever.
USB-C is so much better than anything other USB that came before to the point where it can (and will) easily replace not only all other existing USB plugs out there, including on the device end (where there's a mess between USB-B, USB Mini and USB Micro right now) but also has the potential to replace the various ways how we currently connect screens (DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, or even VGA).
Going purely USB-C means that they could optimise as much as possible for this new connector without thinking of wasting space for a useless connector three years down the road, especially as you can convert USB-C to any other USB, but if they added an USB-A port, that would not be useful for anything but USB-A plugs.
And if USB-C is so great and the future of all tech, why isn't Apple moving to it on their mobile devices? In my mind the problem isn't the specific technology used on any of these devices. The problem is that the devices aren't using the same technology between them.
because the proprietary Lightning plug allows them to control who is connecting to their phones and it allows them to charge for the privilege of doing so.
What's happening on the other end of that USB-Cable that's the question. My guess: In the package of the next (or the one after) they will ship an USB-C to Lightning cable.
https://madeby.google.com/phone/
Within 24 months, most Android phones will ship with USB-C.
That's over a billion devices a year.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11836816/iphone-vs-android-...
Chromebook are starting to ship with USB-C.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/03/hp-chromebook-13-review-th...
USB-C is the future. I'm really not sure why PC vendors having put a couple of all of their desktops and laptops. Many will probably offer both A and C, for at least a few years.
If you have buy a new computer with 0 USB-C ports, you're going to regret it in a few years.
In my opinion, that's courage that actually matters. USB-C is a huge step forward which everyone will benefit from once we all move. Removing the audio jack? meh.
This would make a lot more sense if Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C as well. That way, you really could just use one cable for everything. Instead, you need three separate charger for your iPhone, Macbook Pro, and Apple Watch. Oh, and the iPhone comes with lightning-USB-A cables, which means you can't even connect a brand-new iPhone to a Macbook Pro out-of-the-box without getting a dongle.
High-end Android phones like the Nexus 5x, 6P, and Pixel already use USB-C, as do some non-flagship Android phones. It's brilliant - it means I only need to carry one charger for both my phone and my computer, and that charger also can be dismantled if I want to connect my phone to my computer.
yes. it would have. And this is the actual problem there. Lightning is just another way of controlling their walled-garden around iOS and I really hate it for that reason.
But that's beside the point of the port choice of the new Macs: The phones always have a lightning port, so the cable connecting to them will always have a lighting plug on one end.
What they could have done is ship the iPhone with an USB-C to Lightning cable instead of a USB-A to Lightning cable, but then people would have been even more pissed as USB-C isn't that wide-spread yet and in-fact until yesterday was only supported by one single machine made by Apple.
Really, have a look at this [1] half-year-old list of 10 non-Apple laptops that have USB-C ports... Of course pretty much all of these have USB-A ports too, because their manufacturers don't have a blind following and actually have to compete with each other.
[1] http://windowsreport.com/usb-c-laptops/
I didn't want to say that USB-C was only supported by Apple.
What I meant was that of all the devices that Apple makes, until yesterday only one supported USB-C, so shipping the new iPhone not just without Headphone Jack but also with a cable that can only be used with the minority of all their computers would really have been a strange move (plus, there's no small USB-C power brick yet, so they would have had to produce one of those too - or give you their 29W one for free which would probably have been a bit too expensive)
USB-C isn't "widespread" yet in laptops, but it's hardly brand new. USB-C has been supported for a while by other laptops. In fact, Apple isn't even the first to release a laptop with Thunderbolt 3.
I know because Dell's XPS 13 has been shipping with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C for over a year now, and it's not the only one.
They designed Lightning because it best solved their needs.
Why the specious and unprovable claim it's to lock people out? Can you read their minds?
(Sure, down-vote away, HN groupthink always wins...)
If lightning was purely about the technical advantages it provides, they would have made it an open standard or at least documented it.
There were some technical reasons for not going with MicroUSB of course, but don't tell me that their MFI licensing model isn't a huge reason for a proprietary connector.
How is that different in any way?
GP: you have to carry a cable (type A - lightning) and a dongle (type A - type C) rage rage eleventyone
If you have a brain: you carry a cable (type C - lightning)
If I bought a new MBP today, I’d need:
* a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter at £49
* a USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter (giving HDMI and a USB port) at £69
* a USB-C to USB Adapter at £19
That’s £137 just to connect the things I have currently connected to my 2015 MBP (external monitor, Thunderbolt HD, my phone and a USB->FTDI programmer).
I've been using external devices for these with my macbook for years.
Edit: In fact, I think this applies to almost any low-cost, low-margin pluggable. Laptop coolers/fans are another. Either USB-C is going to kill the market for these or you're wrong.
I'm not saying the old USB A peripherals will stop to exist. I'm saying that two years from now every conceivable peripheral will be available with a USB-C plug or at least a USB-C to whatever they need cable.
No thanks.
I agree with you that in the future USB-C is better and makes more sense. However, I don't think that the logical conclusion is that we should get rid of USB-A prematurely. I liken this the the decision to remove the CD from computer when CD were still used daily. I agreed that CDs wouldn't be used in the future, but, that doesn't do much for me if I still use CD daily. In hindsight it just caused an unnecessary annoyance while the CDs were naturally phased out.
- USB-C to Thunderbolt 2: $49
- SanDisk SD Card USB-C Reader: $49.95
- USB-C AV Multiport Adaptor (HDMI): $69
Spend another $168 and you access to add the same ports you have now!
Gotta love apple. ^^
I cherish the memory of paying 60 Euros for my Apple HDMI adapter, another 40 for the VGA one, 80 Euros for a freaking charger,...
I almost never use the F keys, so if they kept the Esc key but removed the rest it would be perfect :)
The better choice is remapping capslock to ctrl.
Another thing I really do think deserves to be mentioned is which developer do really spend extended amount of time on the laptop keyboard when not traveling? Both at home and work I'm using the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard and keep the laptop docked with 3 external displays, with these new 5k-monitors two will probably be enough.
I'm not sure if it's a better or worse choice to remap capslock to ctrl - but it's certainly viable. The old Sun keyboards used to have that layout...
I suspect that any devs picky enough about their typing that this would prevent them from buying this laptop are using alternate keyboards anyhow.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-...
So I suppose in theory if you wanted something new but without breaking your workflow, you could just go for that one.
I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative developer tools, such as timeline interfaces for Replay Debugging. There are already a lot of applications in the content creation (Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya) space, which developers frequently use to create assets.
As for some recommendations others have had... I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl and Ctrl-[ remapped for tmux so those are out.
This is the same across several machines (MBP and multiples ThinkPads) so the more feasible solution for me is to simply stop using the Mac.
If you're using vim and reaching for the escape key you are doing it wrong imho. Rebind esc to something else (like capslock) or learn another pattern that has more ergonomic value.
If for some reason you "can't" add a .vimrc file to a user account then you probably shouldn't be manually logging into that user account.
So generations of Vim users are doing it wrong but you have the right answer?
So yes, rebinding Escape is the right answer if you heavily use it. The normal positioning for Escape is very inconvenient for touch typing.
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
nobody does that because it was unnecessary. Of course, now developers need to ADAPT the Macbook instead of the Macbook ADAPTING developer's workflow. That's not the definition of a developer friendly machine. The touchbar is a gimmick and even then it doesn't justify the removal of an entire row of keys. It was purely an aesthetic decision. But I forgot, developers like to work with "beautiful" computers instead of functional ones /s
I'm more of an Emacs guy, but still frequently hit Escape (I use it as the Meta key in Emacs). I've bound Escape to the Caps Lock key for as long as I can remember. Like I said, the normal location of Escape is way too far from the home row, and quite bad for touch typing.
In fact, the entire function row is too far for me to conveniently use while touch typing, and I have long fingers. I probably won't miss the function key row at all.
I haven't used or seen the actual touch bar, so cannot really make a strong statement whether it's a useless gimmick or actually useful. I have my doubts, but it could turn out to be useful in some applications.
Completely dishonest and backed by no fact at all, you can make up some data, I can too, I didn't. You call them "useless keys" but there are here for a reason. There are so useless than the touchbar can emulate this "useless" row, except that now users have to look at the keyboard to type since there is no physical feedback to guide them. this isn't innovation, this is a step back.
And no I'm not a fan of the Touch Pad at all, using a 2013MBP as a daily driver. I don't understand all the fuss.
But what if you're not a touch typist? I'm not, and I use the ESC key all the time when using vi/vim, So much so, that it is almost a mindless reflex. I have no choice but to adapt, I know, but my most likely response to this will be to use my Linux laptop more frequently. I still have to use the Mac for OS X and iPhone development, but for other server side stuff, I guess I have to switch to Linux.
Apparently it was where the Tab key was[1] as metafunctor pointed out.
[1] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
...So? You know where you spend most of your time in Vim? the home row. It's called that for a reason...
I grew up with `esc` way up in the corner, and as soon as I started learning Vim I googled for common workarounds to reaching so far. Refuse to believe it, but it's true.
I've never been able to touch-type a function key on any keyboard, ever. Replacing them with a dynamic interface like the TouchBar seems fine for a row I have to look down at every time, anyway. Even on my 2015 MBP I have to make sure I'm hitting a volume button and not the power button.
I've had Caps Lock remapped to Esc for years now.
But it's on a proper mechanical keyboard because prolonged use of builtin keyboards hurts my hands.
And no, I don't think remapping it is a great idea.
If I had to use this for work I would protest.
Because programmers are at least as fond of hyperbole as the reality television programming they all claim to hate.
I used to do it without looking at my phone, now with touchscreen I lost that ability, I have to check every word, some keyboards help with that correcting my words if I moved my fingers a little to the side, but it's not the same, with physical buttons I was sure I pressed the correct buttons. Physical buttons give touch feedback and that's important when you're focused on something important in your screen. I don't want to switch my focus from my screen to my keyboard every time I need to use a function key.
I almost always text on my phone without looking because the visual effect where the selected letter appears above your finger actually makes me slow down. I was never able to use physical phone keyboards as easily as the adaptive software ones on modern phones.
Also I use vi mostly so I only use function keys rarely, in which case I look up.
edit: wrong year
And you can use ctrl [ instead which is closer to the home row anyway.
I haven't used it yet, so I can't judge it too much, but I imagine Escape actually works well since it's the top corner of the keyboard and easy to feel, if escape were anywhere else it would really suck.
I've got a keyboard with clicky button-type Esc and F keys, which might be a fair approximation to the new F key strip. (Pressing them isn't a million miles away from clicking on the Force Touch trackpad.)
It's bearable, but not really very nice.
Confirmed correct:
http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...
The nice thing is with this touch bar thingy that's possible.
As long as it's supported by the program, of course.
What if you wanted to use mc (The Midnight Commander), which relies heavily on F keys? wait for the update?
I gave up on Mac as a development platform back in 2012 when they removed expose and replaced it with that terrible Mission Control garbage. Then I went back to Linux and discovered tiling window managers and haven't looked back. (and yes, I realize there are some good ones for mac now).
But I will say on this post that the escape key is a good point. I use it all the time. Sure you can rebind it, but it's not a useless, SysReq/ScrollLock type key. Most developers will have to rebind it if it doesn't appear on that touch bar thingy.
http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
I don't think it would be very hard for terminal.app (or other apps targeted at developers) to show esc f1 etc along the top when it is open, and it can strictly have better function keys because instead of f4 etc they can be customised to say what they'd actually do.
I agree the fuss over the touch bar is overplayed.
Yeah, you need some different cables. You might need to rebind some hotkeys. It might take a while for some pieces of software to support the touch bar properly.
If you don't want to be an early adopter or you can't get over your Vim muscle memory, pick up a refurbished 2015 model and the rest of us can buy a few new USB cables and move on with our lives.
With both the headphone jack removal on the iPhone and the function keys here, Apple has used "but they're old" as part of the justification. Playing a slideshow showing me a keyboard from 1970 that had function keys is not itself any form of argument against function keys. Sure, the touch bar can serve the purpose of the escape key. Crucially however, so could the escape key. The demos look neat enough, but it's hard to envision a 0.5" strip of touch screen being all that broadly useful outside a few niche cases where a long linear control is just what you need (e.g., audio scrubbing).
It's not that I think these laptops are bad necessarily. It's more that I think they're gimmicky. Apple seems to do an awful lot of things these days that remind me of Samsung circa 2012 or so -- "press this button to send your heartbeat to your spouse" kind of stuff. Meanwhile, Microsoft looks to be absolutely on fire.
I know in Windows there are actual actions on the f-keys (F1 for help, F2 for rename, F5 for reload, etc.), but the Mac has no such equivalents. They're used for hardware and music control, and have this whole secondary mode of fn+F_ chords that hardly anyone touches.
The touch bar will be useful in nearly every app. I wasn't about to set up and memorize custom F-key bindings in every piece of software I use, so it's going to be more useful. And it allows for types of input that buttons couldn't offer to begin with.
With the headphone jack, it was "it's old and we have something better," which I'm not thrilled by (but I wasn't planning on getting a new phone anyway). The USB-C and removal of F-keys I'm totally on board with.
I can't express quite how wonderful it is on the occasions I don't have a bag with me to still be able to have a proper keyboard+mouse setup when something goes sideways.
ESC usage just off the top of my head: cancelling any dropdown (e.g. IDE autocomplete, browser autocomplete, Spotlight, quick file search in Atom/Sublime), cancelling any OK/cancel dialog (e.g. save as), the ESC + '.' sequence in Bash to get the last word of the last command.
I could map ESC to the caps lock key I suppose.
I have a 2013 15" MacBook Pro, the diference with the top of the line that came out yesterday comes down a slight bump in the dedicated Graphics Card (which I don't appreciate since I use CUDA a lot and as such I actually prefer the GTX 750M to a only slightly better AMD card in the new model), and a 0.1 GHz bump in the processor (back from the 2.3 GHz i7 my MacBook Pro has).
I do understand that taking out the Esc and F* keys and replace it for a smart bar can be seen as a valid design option, but I can't see how shipping a Laptop 3 years later with, lets face it, basically the same specs and ask for the same price can be something positive.
Didn't they bump up the base price?
I would say the author clearly knows very little computer specs:
"The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope."
Because a 2010 2.4ghz dual core is identical to a 2016 2.4 ghz dual core.... I thought we got over comparing processors purely by their clock speed a long time ago. (I will agree that theyve been going with lower and lower power to allow for better battery life, this is a terrible way to make the comparison. Id much rather see a processor comparison graph here).
Personally I think this is a terrible decision, but then again, I think using a laptop keyboard for programming is a terrible decision too. I need multiple monitors and an external keyboard to get anything done, so I typically use a desktop, and then use a lightweight laptop (basically a chromebook) to remote into the desktop if I absolutely need to be mobile.
Also, "What other people are saying" and then listing 4 anecdotal quotes seems pretty uncompelling.
I imagine this is not a great developer's laptop. But apple fanboys will keep buying it and either stop using vim just so they can keep using apple or buy an external keyboard. And Im really not sure what else you could really want out of a laptop then.
Also, I work about 50/50 from a USB keyboard. With this keyboard layout, I would need to remember which keyboard I'm using - awful for productivity.
Would it not be possible to map the dynamic touchbar keys to Esc when one is using vim?
As long as the Escape keys exist when required, why worry about when they don't?
I've been touch typing for years now, and the idea that I have to look down at the keyboard to see if a key exists (a key that that has existed for the entirety of my computing history) is ludicrous.
I fail to see the issue here.
Personally, I don't see how you can quickly modify the volume from the ribbon if the application you are using has repurposed that space for some other functionality it thinks you are more likely to want
For actually writing a finished production-ready product, a desktop with several monitors and a real keyboard is preferred. But being able to switch between the two modes -- research and creative, focused and technical -- gets the best results.
The ESC key in vim can lead to RSI:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11443012/how-to-remap-key...
Maybe by the time I'm 70 I'll be talking to my computers, but still: why wreck my wrists?
However, that is a preference; when traveling I have no issues doing work while using a laptop keyboard.
Maybe my hands are too big, but I am just not really comfortable typing on a laptop keyboard. It's not as bad as trying to do anything on a miniscule on-screen keyboard on a phone, but I still tend to hit at least two or three keys at once far too often.
That said, I don't like rotating my hand or remove my fingers from the home row.
It's really a non-issue because you can rebind keys so easily, it's not even funny. Everyone seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill.
It gives an opportunity to relax the hand. For the same reason I'm not a fan of hjkl and often use the arrow keys.
You can remap your key bindings to exactly this layout using Karabiner-Elements.
https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/pull/247
You could build from the latest update and get that functionality.
macOS Sierra allows you to rebind Caps to the Esc key, which seems like a good compromise to me. As a non-vim user, I just wish I could bind Caps to other keys as well :(
Which, interestingly, is where ESC was on the computer that vim was first written for.
Bill Joy's keyboard had escape where caps lock is today.
This has made my life so much better.
Only if you're too lazy to rebind it to any of the many more finger friendly options.
So then wouldn't the esc be present on Touch Bar? It's not like it's the "useless stuff" bar.
I can tell you that I haven't used Esc in ages. I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl (as it is a vastly more useful a key than Esc and Caps Lock is a much better position for it and is just as an extraneous as Esc is). I use Ctrl-C or Ctrl-[ to exit insert mode and it works just fine. In fact I understand that most experienced VIm users do this.
Esc is, by and large a useless key. Even if it wasn't you can remap keys as you like so feel free to map Esc to Caps Lock if you want. Taken alone the lack of Esc and Fn keys is not an argument against the design of the new MBP for developers.
I don't even know what commands would use the ESC key?
The other anecdote is I've been using vim for about 15 years, and use esc daily. I am constantly in multiple vim environments - different servers, different clients, different OS, etc. I don't have the luxury of saying "I'm going to install all my default vim keybindings and plugins on every vim installation I ever use". Walking someone else over the phone who has to do vim - I need to count on some standard defaults being there, and 'esc' is one.
So yeah - some of you "power users" - fine - you've never touched ESC in 20 years - good for you. You're in the minority.
Vim users that use escape to leave insert mode are not exactly a majority of Mac users. Also, many people have been complaining about the location of Escape for such an important command. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4416512/why-use-esc-in-vi...
Having said that, I use Escape myself in Vim - you know what? I'll adapt.
This has nothing to do with the new MBP being unsuitable for developers. This is about power users being forced to abandon ingrained habits.
I'm not even a power user, & after 25 years, I just know the basic few commands that you need to do anything - insert, delete, search/replace, save, & quit.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
See, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi#Interface
End insert or Replace mode, go back to Normal mode. Finish abbreviation.
Note: If your <Esc> key is hard to hit on your keyboard, train yourself to use CTRL-[.
EDIT: Thanks for the replies, other people. I personally use ^C, I was curious what 'mozumder specifically used. :)
I was expecting more commands to use the ESC key?
I was expecting commands to be anything you did after the typing in colon.
I will, however, never forgive Excel for Esc being "abandon edit".
I'm a happy user of http://ex-vi.sf.net/ and can confirm that, since it's the exact same key code, it works -fine-.
I'm not a Mac User, but I use THE ESC key extensively to cancel out of dialogs.
Even if mac apps come mapped to other keys, many peaplo still runs windows with bootcamp, virtual box etc and wine programs in apple computers, making things even harder.
And about external keyboards? Apple keyboards comes with F keys... they are going to be uselles now?
I'm not even a power emacs user or something (IntelliJ is my preferred IDE). YMMV of course, but I find the hotkeys super useful.
I don't know why everyone is unnecessarily freaking out over this non-issue that has so many alternative solutions, some of which will be superior.
I'm a heavy vim user and use the ESC key all the time. If I get the new MacBook Pro I'll probably see how the touch key works, and then rebind if it's necessary. It's not the end of the world.
But seriously I use esc all the time to come in and out of modes in VIM.
I also use it in VIM mode in RStudio, VS Code and many other text editors.
FUNCTION KEYS - I use them all day with my IDEs. F2 is my go to help files.
When did you switch to the Caps Lock mapping? How long did it take you to get use to it?
Personally I think people make way too big a deal about the escape key being difficult to hit. It's right there in the corner, never been a problem for me.
Many people already map capslock to ctrl. You could map ctrl to ESC, but then it gets uncomfortable when switching computers, and it goes against 10+ years of muscle memory.
I tried remapping capslock once, but it got too confusing when switching computers.
I used this software to do this https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/
That's pretty uncommon to imply it's generalizable. Most vim users, I feel comfortable in saying, actually use 'Esc', or a key mapped to the same. Speaking for myself, I can't see why I'd want to use two keys when one would do.
So whether you map it directly to Esc or to a modifier, the parent's point stands: Vim users don't need the Esc key and are probably better off without it.
- can you give me some details on your remap setup on macOS? if you have dotfiles somewhere that'd be great.
- as a vim user who only uses vim as an editor, I challenge the assumption that touch Esc is a horrible thing. Esc is a very special key and it may turn out to be ok for it to _be_ different, and _feel_ different.
I am pretty sure that when you open a terminal, esc and function keys will be up there. It'll not be a mechanical key, but I'm sure it'll still work.
So no, by default, you will not get the F keys when you open Terminal.
It seems like a non-issue to me unless people simply don't like the touch bar not being physical keys, which is fine, because they can just get the other Pro without it.
The bar's function varies according to the application being used. It should be trivial to make, say, iTerm, which is immensely popular (I use it myself) have Esc and function keys available by default.
I imagine Cathode (http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/), another favorite of mine, will have beautiful function keys.
> because they can just get the other Pro without it.
Plus, it's cheaper.
If you're a Vim user and have escape as one of the keys farthest away from you, they did you a favour. I don't mean that as a defence of the MacBook Pro. At the very least, switch caps lock and escape if you're not using caps lock for something else.
That said, most of the other stuff you say is true.
You don't find people who are dedicated to buy only Dell laptops even if something negative happens. There are no Dell fanboys (that I've ever encountered). If Dell does something stupid, people will buy ASUS, HP, Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc and get basically the same experience.
The point was less that ONLY fanboys buy macbook pros, but moreso that Apple has a large enough loyal fanbase that they can basically do whatever, and people will defend the decision.
You will hear people say that 16gb of RAM is a non-issue and if you need more than that you are doing it wrong. That is a fanboy response. A logical response is "I don't need 16gb of RAM, but I'm not everyone, so I'm not going to start a debate over this"
The escape key issue doesn't bother me as much, but I'm not a Vim user and I already have Caps Lock mapped to escape or control depending on whether it's a modifier or not. I do use the function keys occasionally in cross-platform development tools like gitk, but I'm sure that other keybindings can be substituted and I'd be able to deal with that.
But the lack of RAM beyond 16 GB pretty much means there's no reason for me to upgrade from my 3 year old laptop. I would have considered upgrading this cycle if they offered more RAM, but as it is I'll probably hold off. Maybe if they release another in a year or so with more RAM I'll upgrade; if not, I may just switch to a Lenovo or other laptop that has more expansion room.
3 years without a bump in RAM capacity seems like an awful lot. I realize that Moore's Law is flattening out, but stagnating for 3 years like this seems like a long time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818839
How is that a reasonable response? To me, the reasonable response would be, "I remap/whatever, but maybe it's best if you look at a different platform where this isn't a concern." Or, "I can see how that's a problem, here's what I do."
We do have some responses in the 'reasonable' category, by we also have replies like "Esc is, by and large a useless key." and "It's really a non-issue because you can rebind keys so easily, it's not even funny" and "the ESC key in vim can lead to RSI" and "Only if you're too lazy to rebind it to any of the many more finger friendly options". All of them saying, "You're doing it wrong" - even if not in so many words.
Telling someone they're wrong to dislike a specific change because a workaround happens to exist says to me that you're making a whole lot of assumptions about other people based on what works for you at best, and being patronizing at worst.
Maybe a Windows thing but I use Function keys everyday, F3 for incremental search, F5, F9, F10, F11 for debugging. Not having these keys would be handicapping.
The function keys are also not commonly used by apps because the system maps them to brightness control, volume, play/pause etc. by default and you need to use the Fn key to produce the actual function key keystrokes.
The convention for incremental search is: cmd+F to open the find dialog, cmd+G for "Find Next" (which is great because it's right next to cmd+F), and cmd+E cmd+G for "search for selection". Every macOS app works that way and the F3 key will not be missed.
It's really not that bad. The only key I miss on Mac keyboards is forward delete (Del).
Chrome, IntelliJ, VSC all use Fn keys for debugging, and also at least I have mapped most of function keys to some tasks, like F5 for open symbol etc.
Touchbar is only good for some slider like things where continuous strip will help. It is also good for novice users like MSOffice ribbon, they can see a lot of things on screen now and they don't have to hunt in menu or remember shortcuts.
But for a real pro user spending whole day in few softwares, it makes no sense. I have seen pro photoshop users using 3-4 keys long shortcut like second nature, they need access to tonnes of features and variants so more keys the merrier.
Honestly, I haven't seen any real use cases of the touchbar, smileys and photo slider is cute but not something on top of my list to optimise.
Well, the base Macbook Pro model does exactly that. There is also an option (cheaper!) to keep the function keys.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-...
I might be getting old and grumpy, but more than anything else it boggles my mind when apparently everyone believes they should be the target user Apple (or Microsoft, or Google,or...) design their product for, and they consider a personal insult when that is not the case.
I don't think there was ever a time where the laptop market had so many options, at all price levels, many of those of such a high quality.
You don't like that a particular manufacturer is offering ? Vote with your wallet and choose another option, don't whine.
Are you seriously saying, that removing the ESC and Functions keys is not issue and does not affect you, as developer?! If you use your mbp for Facebook or if you program in Visual Basic, then I might understand.
It's also no wonder that newer carbon models came back to regular fn keys.
I actually bought/buy macbooks for their build quality, and generally only install linux on them. Looks like this particular model marks the end of this path.
Devs are a huge market for Apple, but Apple is ignoring them.
This isn't about ESC, it's about whether Apple has any interest in acknowledging the dev market and keeping devs on board.
The answer is "no."
Apple is making no concessions to developers or professional power users who need performance. Instead, Apple is producing vanilla-grade laptops with a touch of gimmicky brand frosting to justify the high price.
The real heuristic is skimping on performance and connectivity to maintain margins. The cost to users is significant lost productivity.
This is the MacBook Pro Intern Edition. It could have been more, but that's where Apple is now.
Wait till the EMACS crowd gets a whiff of how Apple refuses to sell pedals for their keybindings, then Apple is truly in trouble.
Look, I know VIM is popular, but so is XCode, so is Sublime, so is Atom, so is TextMate, so is a multitude of other text editors for God's sake, that to claim that Apple is somehow "abandoning the entire software development community", as if VIM users somehow speak for all of them, is pretty whiny and unrealistic.
Do you think Apple really worries that a bunch of what, Open Source "hackers" producing yet another Ruby testing framework are now going to abandon their platform? Seriously? Get off your high horse, man.
There's thousands of Visual Studio developers in the Windows world and thousands of XCode developers in the OS X world who don't give two shits about your 1970's vintage terminal mode text editor. Apple will be fine. Software developers (again, a much larger group than you obviously think) are also going to be fine.
And aren't you guys always bragging what power users you are? So now that one (remappable!!!!) key is gone your entire world is crashing around you?
If you're such a fossil that you can't adapt to the absence of this one key, that already is of extremely limited use for 99.9% of people, how did you cope with the disappearance of the floppy disk, the caps lock key, the parallel port, VGA, optical disc drives? How did you ever adjust from storing backups of your code on floppy disks once that went away?
What happens when Windows laptops one day follow suit and remove the Escape key and the (just as useless) Caps Lock key? If VIM users can't adapt to a simple change such as this, maybe you deserve to fade to irrelevancy? Just keep buying 2008-era laptops off Ebay well into the 2030's, I guess?
Truly pathetic rants, truly.
IMO what is really pathetic is people tying the hardware to the software, I don't buy "Windows Laptop", I buy a Laptop with the hardware that suits my needs and install Linux on it if it's not already installed, but I guess my opinion is irrelevant as I'm an emacs core user and use VIM as a text editor. Let me give you a tip here, If you buy a Laptop and chose to have it without Windows pre installed you will get a discount ( The windows License fees)
And guess What I will never pay a license fee for an IDE (from M$ or Apple) that do not match half what I get from my open source "vintage editor", but that just only me!!!
All of which can be rebound.
To use the functions keys in the touch bar in the new MacBook Pro, you have to chord with the "fn" key as well.
So where is the difference...
And then the lackluster specs. That alone leaves me no real reason to upgrade.
Saying the new MacBook doesn't have an escape key is like saying the iPhone doesn't have an "L" key. It does when you need it to.
While my primary isn't a Mac, my default left hand resting position on my keyboard is index finger on ESC and thumb on ALT.
The 13" model has a version that keeps that row anyway. And the Touch Bar does still have a function key row/view? with ESC. MacVim and iTerm could probably add the functionality that the whole row is an ESC key when they are the active apps.
For me though, Apple got it wrong by releasing a gimmick (touch bar) which may be useful for some groups of Pro users (designers/film editors?) but I can't see adding much value to what I think is their largest group - software developers.
For me my ideal developer laptop is small, light and powerful. So while it's great the Pro is now the same size and weight as the air (13" model), I think they could have gone even smaller - see the Dell XPS 13. A 13" full powered (i7, 16GB ram) in a 12" body (by having an edge to edge 'infinity' screen). Basically they should have released a MacBook that can run an i7 and 16GB ram.
Then I'll wager your knowledge of the capabilities of the apps you use is limited and if you are developing UIs I'll bet that while you consider them slick and sophisticated, they are in reality limited and inefficient.
I'm just a typical web developer, running a bunch of virtual machines, and an IDE. Any recommendations? I saw the Dell XPS 15 for around £1,300: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B018FSX9GA/
Any others? I'm not a Linux diehard, so I'd probably go with Ubuntu.
Do you know how well they work with Linux?
I decided to give them another chance on the 4th gen X1 Carbon, and I've been very happy so far. The build quality seems much better, and they've nixed some of the annoying "innovations" from the 1st gen one (ironically including a touch bar at the top; they reverted to normal keys). That said, I've only had this one for about 5 months, so I might change my mind by the time another year or 2 passes.
I'm so used to HiDPI just working on my MBP that I never even realized it was an issue on the other OSes until I started thinking about switching.
No it doesn't. OSX in fact has a completely innane behaviour when a MBPr is connected to an external monitor. Meaning you have to mirror or put it in clamshell mode. You can't extend the monitor ontot he laptop screen. Works perfectly well in Linux for me.
Last time I tried this on Linux it was a mess, particularly when moving windows from the HiDPI to the normal and back.
If anything, clamshell mode is the buggy one - it has a tendency to go into or come out of sleep mode when I don't want it to.
As you say, the 2014 is a great model - I'm using it right now, and it's plenty sufficient for everything I do.
Do you think system76.com is a good alternative from the developers point of view?