That actually seems pretty useful. On that row I only use escape and f12 (quake-style terminal) without the fn-button (with which I control volume and brightness). The occasional keyboard macro recording and replaying in emacs I can just as well bind to something else.
The big problem I see is that my laptop is hooked up to a display half the time, lid closed. It wouldn’t be useful for showing anything that isn’t also on the main display. And it can’t have a set of bar-only controls (if Apple were serious about that use, they would have released an external keyboard with Touch Bar by now).
Which is why Apple tends to put non-required controls in the Touch Bar. It's a nice thing to have, but not every Mac has one, so they have to put shortcuts there rather than new features.
If you have an iPad, you can use duet to simulate the touchbar on the bottom of the display. This makes it all the more useful if you're using your iPad to see chat messages or monitor the status of a terminal since it also takes advantage of the touchscreen
Yes, surely; Apple already had superior touch devices supporting Handoff, etc. It would have made way more sense to extend Handoff and let the larger, more capable touch screens of iOS devices interact with Macs.
This, I'm currently in the market for a new macbook and considering the tb model. I tried it in the store, it doesn't bother me as much as it should considering i'm a vim user and it does offer some nice contextual features. But I use my laptop mostly docked. So in order to benefit from the touchbar and incorporate it into my workflow I really need a external keyboard with the same feature. Otherwise I'm just adjusting my workflow all the time in relation to where I sit and I'd then rather just ignore the touchbar and stick with shortcuts.
I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article:
> As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days.
At least Siri doesn’t get in the way of productivity.
> Once again. I hate sliders on Touch Bar. Changing them to buttons was the first thing I did. Now I can tap them blindly. Guess, even my stress level significantly dropped when I stopped trying to put the sliders in the desired position. It was same to adjusting hot water in a shower — you're never gonna get it without burning yourself.
Those sliders are the worst, now requiring TWO high precision taps, while looking at the keyboard, to tweak the volume. I find myself reaching for the physical volume controls on my headset more often.
> Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every ad that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient.
Unreliable play/pause button, very annoying.
> Imagine, you want to drag a picture to a browser to upload. You click the Finder, but instead opening a new window at the same screen, it carries you away somewhere. Just because there's another Finder window opened there. And it's fucking impossible to fix that with standard MacOS tools.
Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.
You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. I find it is much quicker and more accurate to use the sliders on the touch bar as a result of this. You don’t even need to pause after the tap with your finger down, just tap and slide your finger around and the slider is there.
> You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider.
Yes, this is actually one of the few things I actively like about the touch bar.
I love that Apple is trying something new with laptops, but sadly it's been mostly a dud for me too. I'd take Face ID + a T2 chip (like iMac Pro) any day. The fundamental problem is you don't tend to look at the keyboard when you're using a computer; there isn't enough incentive to do so, so it always feels a bit like a chore to use.
I think there's a kernel of a good idea here, but the current implementation isn't it.
Edit: Reading this article, I've realized all I really want from the touch bar is a permanent Dock. The Dock is important enough to always be on your screen, and it'd be really useful to have at a touch.
> You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider.
This is a nice shortcut for adjusting the volume. However compared with non-TouchBar keyboards, adjusting the volume now requires you to look at the keyboard and precisely slide your finger around on the TouchBar. Whereas on the non-TouchBar you could rely on finger memory to instantly and without disruption from looking at the keyboard adjust the volume.
> Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.
I'm thinking I might be misunderstanding this part, but here's a few tips for you:
* Open Mission Control however you invoke it, top right corner there's a + button for adding a new Desktop. You can drag any windows you like into the new desktop or even force an entire app or multiple apps into that particular desktop.
* Hold down the fullscreen button in the title bar of any window, you'll have the option of dragging it to the left or the right. All the windows in the current desktop will go into expose on the other side and you can select one of them to take up the other half of the display. I use this for Mail and Calendar, or two browser windows, or sometimes a text window to take notes and whatever I'm reading on the other side.
Maybe I misunderstood you after all, but if I didn't, then I hope this helped.
The fact that these features are so undiscoverable proves the point, I think. The split view management in particular is clunky as hell even when you do know how to use it, as you can't edit the view once it's been created... only tear it down. Whether it's hiding the other desktop thumbnails until you hover, or the fact that fullscreened apps always become the last space (instead of just the next one), there are loads of little things that would be trivial to fix or at least provide preferences for, hidden or not, like in the old OS X days. But new Apple seems to be infected with the same "we know better" and "everything has to work the same for everyone" authoritarian UI design that makes Android such a pain in the rear too.
I miss the Apple that did things like letting you right click a document's title bar to access its parent folders, or letting you drag that icon right off the window to manipulate it. They used to understand the principle of direct representation and manipulation. Not a single new OS X feature has made it worth upgrading in recent years.
> I miss the Apple that did things like letting you right click a document's title bar to access its parent folders, or letting you drag that icon right off the window to manipulate it. They used to understand the principle of direct representation and manipulation. Not a single new OS X feature has made it worth upgrading in recent years.
I actually stuck with Snow Leopard on my personal (not work) laptop for many years, and well, I did a fair amount of work on it too so obviously it was good enough, before I upgraded to Sierra when I bought a new laptop, so I completely get where you're coming from on this.
That said, when we stop nitpicking every detail to death there's still a fair amount of flexibility in the OS, the window management now is light years ahead of where it was on Snow Leopard and the improvements that have accumulated over time while individually not a big deal, make for a really nice package. It was worth upgrading from Snow Leopard even though I was overall pretty happy with it.
Here's another little improvement that Apple made over the years. I am also a long-time Firefox user and one of the more irritating missing features of Firefox has been the lack of Dictionary panel support. In pretty much any Cocoa app you could look up a word from Dictionary.app in any content view and it would show in a nice panel. Not so with Firefox, because while theoretically possible to support, their priorities have always been elsewhere. Mac OS X integration just isn't a high priority for them, and I can live with that. I had an add-on that filled the gap, it didn't support the panel either, but it would send the word over to Dictionary.app which was good enough.
Turns out that at some point after Apple introduced multitouch trackpads they also added the ability to three-finger tap any word in any app and look it up, and it turns out that in spite of Firefox not really supporting the Dictionary panel, this will work just fine in Firefox. You just don't have it in the context menu.
The Services menu will also work just fine in Firefox now, you just don't have access to it from the Context menu (which also would have replaced my add-on just fine had I noticed this sooner).
There is a lot of depth and history to Mac OS X. Apple really only shows off and advertises the newest features, and there is no real user manual for anything, not one that is particularly useful. Apple could write one themselves and provide it free of charge in iBooks pushing delta updates whenever they update the operating system, but the system as a whole is much more flexible than you give it credit for and still retains those little features like being able to right click a document title and get the directory list. You can actually use a dark-themed menu bar now and create Tags in the Finder, and they haven't taken anything out like the Graphite Aqua color scheme I've always preferred.
Yeah they kind of shot themselves in the foot ditching the Software Update utility in favor of App Store updates, and the Mac App Store is trash that I avoid, but on the whole I would say Mac OS X today is much more useful to me than Mac OS X 10 years ago, even as the number of unique apps I've used has dwindled down to about nine or so, three of which are cross platform and all of which are replaceable. I could honestly replace my whole operating system with any BSD, 9front or MINIX at this point without losing anything too substantial, but I would lose a lot of the small touches and refinements that have built up over the years that I'm used to and comfortable with and there's no sign of those going away.
>The fact that these features are so undiscoverable proves the point, I think.
Why? These aren't features that your average, every day pro users would ever need. You're complaining about discoverability for an advanced feature that maybe 10 or 20% of the user base will use.
> I'm thinking I might be misunderstanding this part, but here's a few tips for you (...)
Thanks, I'm aware of these features. I was typing on my iPad in this small (non-resizable) comment field so was a bit short in explanation here. What I meant is that whenever I'm working inside a space, I don't want any other Space to interfere. So when I cmd+tab to an application, or click it in the dock, I want that app to open in the current Space, possibly spawning a new window.
But the inverse as well, say I have two Spaces each with a Safari window. When I cmd+tab to Safari, I want to open the most-recent used window (possibly switching Spaces), instead of opening the window on the current Space.
> Hold down the fullscreen button in the title bar of any window, you'll have the option of dragging it to the left or the right.
While a nice new feature, when working on my 27" iMac this isn't very useful to me. I usually switch between ~5 apps and having two full-screen doesn't fit my mental model. Maybe I still need to get used to it.
Ah, that makes sense. Actually this is part of the reason I don't use more Spaces than I do now, I have two Desktops usually and the rest are all various fullscreen and split-screen spaces.
I think ideal for me would be:
1. If I am in a Desktop space (i.e. nothing is fullscreen), then ⌘⇥ ought to remain within the current space unless the app I am switching to is pinned to a particular space or the only instance of it is fullscreen. Switching to Firefox when the only extant window is on my other desktop should switch to the app without switching to my other Desktop space, that way I can open a fresh window. Clicking an http:// link should open a new window in the current space. Switching to NetNewsWire though should take me to the fullscreen app, for it is always fullscreen in its own space.
The reason for this is the whole point of Spaces for me is content separation. A web browser or file browser is a general purpose tool, I might have multiple windows of each open pointed to different resources related to different projects. I want to maintain that separation, and if I want to change what I'm working on, then I can do so through Mission Control without ⌘⇥ taking me out of Space I'm in. I want it to be an app switcher, not a Space switcher.
2. If I am in a fullscreen space, then ⌘⇥ should go to the most recent window of that app that I was looking at. If I was looking at a Firefox window in Desktop 2 and I have 3 fullscreen windows of Firefox and 5 more open windows in Desktop 1, then ⌘⇥ ⌘⇥ ⌘⇥ should toggle between that window, the fullscreen app, and then back to that window again.
#2 actually happens though, but #1 does not unless I keep a (often blank) Firefox window on all of my desktops, and then I have to do the same for each app that I would want that behavior. That is to say, Spaces needs some work, but for the most part apps that you click on in the Dock should launch in the Space you are in unless you have them pinned to a specific Space.
> While a nice new feature, when working on my 27" iMac this isn't very useful to me. I usually switch between ~5 apps and having two full-screen doesn't fit my mental model. Maybe I still need to get used to it.
It isn't for everyone, which is fine. Having my Mail and Calendar open side-by-side was something I picked up from a friend. He has the same setup except he has a multiple monitor setup with Mail and Calendar occupying the screen of his laptop. There's much to be said for not trying to incorporate each thing that exists on your system into your work if you simply have no place for it. It will be there if you need it.
I'm sure I don't matter to Apple anymore, but the touchbar is the reason I haven't upgraded my laptop yet.
I enjoy having an Apple laptop to complement my Windows and Linux desktops, but if the touchpad doesn't go away by the time I decide not to wait any longer, I'll probably grab something else. Maybe a Chromebook with a replacement OS, maybe an Ubuntu or Fedora laptop. Probably not Windows as it's mainly for games and hobby game development for me. But whatever it is, it won't have a touchbar.
Only in the smaller lower performance bracket models. They do not make a 15 inch macbook pro without a touchbar.
EDIT: In fact I didn't realize that it's significantly different spec wise to the 13 inch with touch bar. Only going to a 2.5Ghz base clock speed on the non-touch bar. And this is with only intel integrated graphics and a dual core cpu only, compared to the 15 inch models. This can be a big deal for anyone who wants to do even basic video editing or many other content creation type activities.
If only they would have kept the powe button, that could double a finger print reader, ant the esc button. I wouldn’t mind the oled screen I place of the f-keys.
Yes. Still, you can pry my mechanical keyboard from my cold, dead hands.
The home button on the new iphones feels _weird_, almost as if there's this strange, unnatural delay to the click actually occurring. For something that purports to be "just like real life" it does a poor job.
The click on the mbp trackpads is not too bad though.
Thanks, I have been dreading the upcoming time when my pre-touchbar macbook pro is too old and I will check out these tips when it does.
One bit of feedback:
> RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural.
A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine.
The issue is that your indicator needs to show you not just "how much is used vs free", which is indeed useless. It needs to show you the breakdown of wired, active, and inactive memory. This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.
> This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.
And how often does that actually happen anymore, really? Yes, Chrome and friends are memory hogs, but a constant RAM indicator? If a MacBook (or any other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.
> And how often does that actually happen anymore, really
Pretty often, especially if you open an app that decides to allocate a lot of memory very quickly (Xcode, VirtualBox) or when you switch to an app that causes a lot of memory to be swapped in.
But if I just started up one of those apps, I'm wanting (and expecting) it to allocate a lot of memory because that's what those apps do. So I don't really see what actionable information an always-visible meter does for me. But I don’t begrudge those who like them!
I use gkrellm, and set the three memory krells option. The "usage" is memory actually used for application memory. The other krells mark how much cache and buffers are allocated. htop does something similar, green is application usage, blue is buffer usage and yellow/orange is filesystem cache (at least, as far as I know, I might be wrong)
edit: on linux. I would assume Mac and even windows have enough granularity to distinguish.
I always find it amusing how developers flock to MacOS saying things like "you don't need to configure it like Linux; it just works", and then there are articles like this containing myriads of workarounds for its problems :b This is cool, though. I'm somewhat envious of the shiny thing. The conky screenshots are fun, since this is quite reminiscent of it, except done somewhat usefully. It's a shame that it's tied to a little laptop keyboard that you definitely shouldn't be using full time if you value your wrists and your spine, but, it's a start.
(Now, please please please don't do all of your programming on a MacBook).
The difference is that this is a highly subjective "problem".
I actually love the touch bar. I'm not in love with esc and f-keys not being physical but lots of the other stuff it does is pretty great. Like, the brightness and volume sliders he hates so much? I love them. Greatly prefer them over buttons. I've been developing on MacBooks for about 7 years now and I do almost no system configuration at all besides installing requisite apps. So yeah, I do love that developing on a Mac doesn't require me to configure it.
My takeaway is that most people probably DON'T do all that much configuring of their systems. But they aren't writing blog posts about how much they love their touch bars because there's no meat to that. It's not a useful article to write. But for people who do dislike the touch bar, this article is super useful to them.
Same. Ever since I’ve found the “hold slidebar<volume|brightness>”+slide shortcut this has gotten even better. You press <volume>, slide left or right in one go and You’ve adjusted it better than you could have previously.
Prior to the touchbar I simply wouldn’t use the Fn buttons ever. Now I actually use them.
Before the Touch Bar, you could always use modifier keys in combination with volume keys for continuous (rather than discrete) volume adjustments. Except it was on the screen, with a huge volume display, using volume keys you could feel with your fingers, taking up less keyboard space overall.
It seems that every system is going to have parts that don't "work" when spread to enough people with different ideas of what works for them. Whether or not the touch bar met its goals, it seems obvious it was never added to appeal to developers. I think a lot of devs think of macbooks as machines for developers because they see a lot of their peers using them, but I suspect "developers" as a group have historically been a tiny percentage of Apple's customer base.
First, you don't need to spend hours configuring the Touch Bar for it to be a functional machine, like you would trying to run Linux on a laptop... But some people do, because it's there. The Touch Bar works just fine without this article.
Second, having a myriad of workarounds for its problems is a positive not a negative. Everything has problems; I'll take the platform that has a myriad of workarounds over the one that has a handful.
Be my guest to use something else for all of your programming. I'll keep using my MacBook Pro.
Just like you don't need to spend hours trying to run Linux on a laptop. I'd say 20 minutes is enough in general, depending on how you install it. Quicker when using a fast network connection, slower when you first have to get a distribution.
But wait, this is not all you get, there is more. You can choose which desktop you want to run, you can install application software at the same moment, you can either start working or start tinkering, whatever fills your need or desire.
One thing you generally do not have to do: start tinkering around to get a working Escape key. OK, I said generally, those who bought a computer without one may have no other choice than to join the article writer in his quest for sanity.
In 20 minutes I've got all the hardware drivers installed? Do they even exist/work on my machine's specific hardware? Where do I even find them? I get to choose a desktop and a distro to run? I guess I also make those choices in 20 minutes?
Did I mention this all comes without official support for a lot of commonly used software (Adobe Suite, Office Suite, etc)?
Probably not a good idea to try to make the argument that it's somehow easier to run Linux on some generic laptop than it is to run MacOS on a Mac...
Also... Being able to install software while doing other things is not a unique thing in 2018...
Also... The escape key works just fine out of the box. I can open my MacBook's box for the first time and be working in less than 20 minutes (and that's being very generous). That's simply not something you're doing with Linux.
Yes, as long as the laptop is one with good support - Thinkpads, HP's business machines, etc - you won't have to fiddle with device drivers. As to "where even to find them" the answer is you don't need to look as they'll be installed with your distribution unless you're using 'odd' hardware. In the latter case you will have to go looking so the choice is simple: either use known-supported hardware (a large and varied group) or accept the challenge. Given that you don't seem to like tinkering with device drivers and such you'd just use a Thinkpad and be done with it.
As to whether you'll find commercial software (which seems to be what you're after) to your liking depends on what business you're in. If you're doing video production, animation, software development or engineering the chances of finding something are higher than when you're in graphic design. Do mind though that the non-commercial alternatives (e.g. Inkscape, Krita, etc) are often on par with the commercial offerings.
And yes... I actually do make the argument that running Linux is easier than running MacOS on a Mac. I don't say running it 'on a generic laptop' is easier, as said the choice is yours. I can install it anytime, any place where I have access to the 'net or happen to carry a USB stick with a distribution, on any supported hardware. I can run it as a live distribution on other hardware. I can run it on a Raspberry Pi, on a laptop, a server, you get the picture.
Try it for yourself, it actually works on Apple hardware. Don't believe what you hear from those who feel they need to defend their decision to invest in other platforms.
I mean, the OP gave a real world example of the lack of drivers...
Doesn't having to write several paragraphs qualifying your previous statement make you question your position? Choosing the right hardware, being in the right industry, etc...
I'm also not just "[believing] what I hear". I've used Linux (and do pretty much everyday in some form) on multiple primary machines, and I also currently use my Mac.
> I get to choose a desktop and a distro to run? I guess I also make those choices in 20 minutes?
Most of the time you choose a distro and desktop that fits you and then install for rest of the time. And in 2018 driver support is generally quite solid.
Heh, I'm mostly bitter because most of the places I've interviewed at lately just give everyone a Macbook Pro and that's the end of it, and I'm sick of cursing at their window manager and then running Linux on the things. (Missing webcam driver makes me grumpy when the XPS 13 I normally use supports everything perfectly).
Anyway, I don't mean to rag on anyone's preferred OS. More just taking an opportunity to grumble pointlessly about a particular unconvincing argument people like to use for it. (Unfortunately, that argument is convincing for the people who buy the hardware I have to put up with at work).
Also to remind people about ergonomics, because we mustn't forget these things. Please don't be too drawn to the shiny touchbar, it is still attached to a keyboard which encourages squishy hand position and which is attached to a screen that is not at eye level.
I totally get that, but in a lot of cases it is easier to use MacOS than to run Linux (like not having to worry about hardware drivers pretty much at all).
Also, those are characteristics of laptops... Not specifically Macs... And I do need a mobile computer...
The Touchbar has been mostly a dud for me, and I don't miss it when using my older MBP. I have customized by touch bar to include my favorite actions such as locking the screen, but it is otherwise static.
My 2 biggest issues are:
- It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions away.
- No haptic feedback. Even having the trackpad click would be useful, since it can be felt throughout the Macbook.
Sounds like a great application for an e-ink display. No burn-in, low power, and can always emit as much light as the keys on the keyboard do (by front-illuminating the bar when the keyboard backlight is on).
The 2014 ThinkPad X1 Carbon had an e-ink touch strip instead of an F-row (exactly like the MBP does). It didn’t work very well: poor display contrast, hard to see in bright daylight, can’t feel for keys, slow response time, etc. They switched back to real keys for the 2015 model release.
...that’s why Apple’s adoption of it surprised me the most: I saw how it on the ThinkPad added no value, and while Apple has greater integration and will undoubtedly encourage third-party devs to use it - it will still be too fiddly and complicated.
I think Apple’s too proud to kill it off in just one project cycle - but I can’t see Apple’s management justifying continued investment of time into maintaining it. The fact they didn’t include it in their latest desktop keyboard (for a Pro users no-less!) says something.
It had a smooth plastic window over it without any matte-finish or anti-reflective coating. Couple that with how the keyboard area is often in the shade made it hard to see.
I owned one of those X1 Carbons and that was absolutely not e-ink. It was merely some LED lights over a touch surface. All the possible configurations were physically cut out; you couldn't display arbitrary stuff on it. Even for what it did do, it sucked, and made the entire layout more awkward.
Not entirely accurate, the Force Touch device uses a linear motor to accelerate a small mass to 'thump' into its housing. In principle it's similar to a speaker, but in implementation it's very different (a speaker voice cone never intentionally impacts its housing, for example).
I thought so too but the Pebble Time had snappy, colorful animations[1] that looked really good, and changed my perception completely on what is possible with e-ink.
With regards to touch feedback, MacBooks come with a pretty hefty “haptic engine” already so it should be possible.
>I thought so too but the Pebble Time had snappy, colorful animations[1] that looked really good, and changed my perception completely on what is possible with e-ink.
I see. The confusion on my part is that they used the term "e-paper" which I've now learned is an umbrella term including e-ink and any other technology that works to electronically replace paper.
Based on cursory research I believe the most important aspect of the LCD used on the Pebble time is that it's a "Memory in Pixel" or "Memory LCD"[1] – a technology specifically built for screens that may show the same thing for a sustained period of time.
Memory in Pixel seems to be a feasible alternative to e-ink if you want a low-power display that tends to show the same thing for extended periods of time. And it would probably work well for the use case of Apple's Touch Bar (assuming you can get a good pixel density with this technology).
"It turns off after 1 min of inactivity"
Oh wow I didn't know that, I've been kinda leaning on the "it might actually be pretty cool/useful" side of this touchbar thing, but now I'm squarely in the "it's totally useless" camp. What were they thinking?
You'd think it doesn't use that much, given it's a mostly black oled and the co-processor is from the apple watch. But, that one turns off after a little while too so nothing new there.
Whats great is when seemingly intelligent apps adopt the Touchbar koolaid, such as .. iTerm. So yeah, now I'm greated with the very nice side-effect of having a massive row of blinking crud all over my vision, just because iTerm wants to show me what command is running, what keys I could use to kill the process, blink back to the shell, oh .. another app is running in the shell, better update the touchbar ..
I'd been waiting for them to release this laptop, but ended up going with a lightly used Mid 2015 after Apple announced the specs and price. It was just a misfit for my needs especially after trying the keyboard. The powering-down of the TouchBar sounds like a horrible user experience.
I can live with all of the half-baked features of the latest MBPs (I have one for work, my home one is much older) but the false recognition of the overly large touchpad drives me crazy.
It's bad enough that I have to disable tap-to-click (which I greatly preferred - much more elegant) and it still mis-clicks if I rest my hands on it.
I used to think the MBP trackpads were a cut above everything else - now they're too big and the palm rejection is not good enough.
> It's bad enough that I have to disable tap-to-click
The crazy thing is that the "full" click is entirely simulated. I don't use MBPs anymore but the only place I had to turn off that feature was there as well.
I'm glad to hear other people have issues with the enormous trackpad. The number of times I incorrectly type my password in has increased like 10x on the new MBP. Unfortunately I can't use Touch ID to login due to an employer policy.
It really is a useless gimmick. Even when limiting it to the standard brightness, volume, etc. controls, I find myself accidentally touching it and triggering some unwanted function. I really hope Apple abandons it or at the very least, offers a MBP with top of the line specs and standard function keys.
Have you considered making your caps lock key an escape key? That’s been my game plan when I’m obligated to upgrade. Honestly, though I’ve held off for two years because I don’t know that I’ll be able to live with this.
No, because it’s already mapped to control. And that is Important, as its primary muscle memory. Escape shortcuts are less important. They still trip me up, but less often.
Ya the touchbar stupid, that track pad tho.. only laptop i've ever been totally fine using without a mouse. Hard to go back to other laptops after using that.
Plus the touchbar, though stupid and useless, does at least succeed in making all the other laptops look old and crappy now.
The developers who invented it thought that people would love it for swiping left and right on grindr all day long. They have no idea how real computer users need to use computers.
Counter point: I have a 2017 Pro with the Touch Bar, and it's pretty nice. I got used to the escape key in a couple of days, and I've found that it tends to keep me away from the trackpad more. Some of the UI on it is great – trimming clips in Quicktime feels lovely, and scoping searches in Dash. Some of it isn't as useful, like tab switching in Safari, but I never find that it gets in the way at all.
Honestly I'm not sure what problems people are generally having with it.
Seriously though, I don't look at my keyboard and therefore have no idea what is on touchbar at any moment. I am not offended as some by its existence, but I also don't find it useful except touchid bit.
> I decided to steal this feature and make the "coffee break" button. It locks the laptop and switches the screen off.
Ctrl+cmd+q = lock screen. Display will dim/sleep shortly after that. (Found this out myself not too long ago, I think because of HN).
Incidentally, I just switched the touch bar to the standard function key display with fn switching to the buttons just like the keyboards of old. I found I almost never look at the touch bar and there's absolutely nothing I found that it added that I couldn't already do with the old setup. I hate that the escape key is no longer where it used to be (fully left-aligned). I also hate on the new keyboards that the left and right arrow keys are so big. I use the space on the smaller keys of my old keyboard as a tactile indicator of where my hands are (perhaps it's finally time for vim?).
Ctrl-Cmd-Q does nothing for me on my tbMBP using the external Magic Keyboard (because I refuse to use the ESC-less, painful, loud internal keyboard) on macOS 10.12.
Even though the author doesn't like Hot Corners, I use Hot Corners willingly to enable screen saver & lock. It's built in to the OS and works fine as long as you don't habitually move your cursor to the corner(s).
> Buttons rock. It's always faster to tap, not slide.
If you press Fn, the slider will go away and the "normal" function buttons will appear.
> I want to have instant access to Finder, anywhere. Default Touch Bar can't do that. Weird.
Why is this weird? Finder is always in the Dock for every user.
> E.g., the eyedropper tool, to take the hex color code from the screen.
/Application/Utilities/Digital Color Meter.app
> Standard Touch Bar will never support the most useful feature — to display the name of track playing.
Slide out Notification Center.
> Would be cool to display the name of the YouTube video on the Touch Bar, right?
See above.
> You have a script running once in 20 seconds, and praying it won't overload the CPU.
Don't do this. Use AppleScript to watch for changes, instead of polling.
> I decided to steal this feature and make the "coffee break" button. It locks the laptop and switches the screen off.
Press the power button.
Not offense, and I'm sure you enjoy your setup, but I really think it would do you well to learn a bit more about why your computer was designed that way rather than writing a rant online and spending time making it "just right".
EDIT: it looks like this comment is pretty controversial, since it's flip-flopping between ±5 points rapidly. Let me give a more detailed response.
Personally, I don't have a computer with a Touch Bar. I have, however, used one a borrowed one for a couple days. Personally, I would be fine switching (there are other issues with the MacBook Pro that are preventing me, but that's a story for another day).
I don't use the function keys that often, so I don't feel as if I'm "losing out" on them. Many of the supposed grievances that I normally hear are easily solvable ("oh, I didn't know I could control the volume slider without lifting my finger", "I didn't know I could add sleep to the Touch Bar"). Really, I think the main issue with the Touch Bar is people view it as a second screen rather than an extra set of controls as it's supposed to be. The Touch Bar is meant as a place to have surface extra controls that would be nice to have at your fingertips; what it is not is a place to show you data or be a Dock or menu bar or Notification Center or Activity Monitor. Why? Because you're not always looking down at it. There's no point putting any significant information there.
That being said, Touch Bar is not perfect, of course. It's a nice idea, but it could be improved if it provided more tactile feedback (e.g. haptic feedback, some sort of dynamic change in texture). And given that it's new, Apple's guidelines, while good, may end up changing as real-world usage influences them. Overall, though, I feel that much of the Touch Bar criticism is based on knee-jerk reactions or issues that are not difficult to resolve. Yes, there are some deeper issues, as I've outlined above, but I think the concept as a whole is interesting.
Lol Apple made it impossible to understand how to turn on and off the laptop and removed the startup sound leaving you with zero feedback when you start the laptop for an eternity.
In older macbooks I've used, this also would put the system into suspend mode. That's fine, but it would also disconnect any terminals on remote systems because the system would no longer be on. Is this still the case or has that changed recently? For a coffee break button I wouldn't want to have to reconnect to everything I was working on before, or have to worry about any long running processes (say ML training, copying a file, etc.) that were going on when i'm just walking away for two minutes to fill my water up.
I'm on mobile, so I can't write code for you (plus, the code is going to be ugly since it relies on a C framework). However, I can give you some pointers; one, you'll need to create some sort of app, since it will need to continuously run with a run loop. You'll want to look into the Accessibility/OSA APIs and register an AXObserver.
> If you press Fn, the slider will go away and the "normal" function buttons will appear.
So, something that used to be a simple that could be done from muscle memory is now either (a) a slider that requires change of focus or (b) a multi-key combination which is totally the same thing as the thing you miss, and in summary, everything is fine.
> I really think it would do you well to learn a bit more about why your computer was designed that way
Maybe this highlights Apple's ostensible vs true value pitch these days:
Ostensible: "You aren't going to have to think about it too much because it just works."
Actual: "learn a bit more about why your computer was designed that way and we're sure you'll find that any complaints and frustrations are actually just wrong"
> So, something that used to be a simple that could be done from muscle memory is now either (a) a slider that requires change of focus or (b) a multi-key combination which is totally the same thing as the thing you miss, and in summary, everything is fine.
No. I only suggested the buttons because the author of this post thought that the slider was "bad". I don't buy their reasoning; you don't even have to look down to see the slider's progress because macOS will mirror it smack-dab in the middle of your display.
I really think that the author's complaints show that they really haven't been using macOS the way it's normally used. The Touch Bar is not your Notification Center. It's not your menu bar. It's not your Dock. It has a very clear purpose, and I feel that the author is just trying to give Touch Bar functionality that they wished it had because they just don't know about the other built-in features. My guess is that they haven't really used macOS (i.e. they're coming from another OS, and are used to what that provides), but take this with a grain of salt because I have no evidence to back it up.
> you don't even have to look down to see the slider's progress because macOS will mirror it smack-dab in the middle of your display.
Progress isn't the issue. Input is. To operate a slider, your pointer/finger needs to be where the handle is. The location of the handle is variable. The touchbar could potentially handle this smoothly by displaying sliders in such that they always appear with the handle underneath the finger, but this is not the behavior the touchbar was displaying when I tested it out -- sliders opened out to the side of the target you tap to open it, which means you then have to move your finger to the location of the handle, which requires a visual reorientation.
And none of this is an improvement on quick taps with well-defined change increments for stuff like adjusting brightness and volume. Not to mention the value of tactile feedback.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the issue I'm talking about: Apple has solved these problems; it just hasn't done a great job spreading it.
> To operate a slider, your pointer/finger needs to be where the handle is. The location of the handle is variable. The touchbar could potentially handle this smoothly by displaying sliders in such that they always appear with the handle underneath the finger, but this is not the behavior the touchbar was displaying when I tested it out -- sliders opened out to the side of the target you tap to open it, which means you then have to move your finger to the location of the handle, which requires a visual reorientation.
The location of the slider actually does not change, interestingly. What actually happens is the touch target for the slider changes to include your original tap point when you tap it, even if it shifts visually. This means all you have to do is slide, and this works even from the original location.
This is an improvement over the choice I thought they'd made, but it's an improvement in utility alone, and also even more of a headscratcher of a choice when it comes to the UI. It means they realized you want the handle right where the touchdown happens, so they can't plead ignorance, but they chose to have the in-touchbar visualization the user is interacting with appear elsewhere. It's not just non-obvious and therefore a failure of spreading the news, it's actually misdirection. Not having any visual feedback in the touchbar at all would have been better UX. As you pointed out earlier, the screen does fine for independent visualizations.
Interesting, it's got a lot in common with one of the complaints around the escape key -- the actual touchable area is different than the outlined area (which is positioned farther in from the keyboard than it's historically been).
Laptops have long had a display surface and a touch surface. If marrying them is worth experimenting with, getting the visual feedback connected with touches correctly is a crucial idea.
Anyone who doesn't like the Touch Bar is ipso facto deluded and/or irrational. Fantastic.
My main means of input to my computers is touch-typing on a keyboard. I never look at it (I already have a peripheral for looking at: a screen!). Replacing an entire row of keys with a miniature screen would represent a fairly profound change to how I operate a machine I use for 5-8 hours day, for no benefit.
Furthermore the application I use for 50-70% of that time is IntelliJ Idea, with tweaked default keybindings. I probably hit F keys hundreds of times a day. I would need to either do some substantial keybinding remapping, or start using part of my keyboard as a mini-screen.
I don't either like or dislike the Touch Bar. I just have no interest in it, as it makes the new MB Pros quite irrelevant to my professional requirements.
> Anyone who doesn't like the Touch Bar is ipso facto deluded and/or irrational. Fantastic.
You're putting words in my mouth. The root issue is just a lack of information; there's nothing wrong with the people themselves as you're trying to claim.
> My main means of input to my computers is touch-typing on a keyboard. I never look at it (I already have a peripheral for looking at: a screen!).
I agree, partially. When you're using the keyboard you're not looking at it, and for the most part that's also true for the Touch Bar. When you're doing something with the function keys or escape, you don't have to look down, since those are always in the right place. Even some with dialogs fit into this category. You do, however, look down when you're trying to perform some annoying operation that the Touch Bar surfaces easily.
> Furthermore the application I use for 50-70% of that time is IntelliJ Idea, with tweaked default keybindings. I probably hit F keys hundreds of times a day. I would need to either do some substantial keybinding remapping, or start using part of my keyboard as a mini-screen.
I'd make the argument that using the function keys as shortcuts is not the idiomatic way to use macOS, which relies heavily on the modifiers at the bottom of the keyboard, but I get that this is a weak argument since it requires you to change your behavior. Ideally Idea would just ship with nice shortcuts…
> I don't either like or dislike the Touch Bar.
My comment may have come off as a resounding plaudit for the Touch Bar; it is nothing but. I'm also not completely sold on it; I really think it needs to be improved so that it's more useful. However, I do think it's an interesting direction to go in, and as it currently stands, I'm slightly in favor of having it instead of function keys.
I actually like using the sliders for changing brightness and volume. Although you nailed it, the new media play/pause functionality is absolute garbage.
I've been meaning to get the status line from Atom and have it displayed in the touchbar.
Easily. Even as a full time software developer (full stack, SQL Server, C#, Typescript) I barely use the function keys. Everything's bound to chords I can easily hit without moving my hands.
Of course, your set can be completely different, we all have our preferences and there's nothing wrong with that.
I do it every day. The function keys to me always hid functionality, and I never found it easy to discover what they did. Usually there was another, and better documented way to do whatever they did anyway.
Normally? The only program I use regularly which needs function keys is htop. The only other I can think of is gitk, and I try to avoid that thing.
MacOS/OSX doesn't really have a history of using function keys, so pretty much the only software which does is stuff which was "ported" from other unices where relying on function keys is more standard.
Xcode (a macOS exclusive) uses function keys by default (for debugging). Cross-platform apps (not just ports) very commonly use F keys (eg. JetBrains stuff).
It's a good question, you made me think about how rarely do I touch that upper row of buttons on my MBP. Mostly I'm in a web browser or in terminal & vim, so I never end up using the function keys at all. What a waste.
Slightly off topic. But I always hated AppleScript. I first started trying to play with it in 1992 with System 7 and it always fell in the uncanny valley of being almost a natural language but not really. What’s strange is that I did like HyperTalk with Hypercard
These days you can use JavaScript for anything that has an AppleScript interface, and you can use automation (either language) from a shell script. For applications that support it, automation is pretty nice.
I'd rather just buy decent hardware to begin with and not gimmicky crap like a 1280x80 pixel screen jammed onto an arm chip on a laptop. Nope. I heard its especially fun if you have to reinstall - you need both firmwares or the machine goes in frowny mac mode.
I'd much rather put time in a decent Linux desktop. You don't need neuromancer-syle cyberpunk interfaces to make a really nice Linux system. And you can pretty much do whatever you want, rather than have to break Apple's "standards" for something that doesn't resemble brushed aluminum dogshit.
(psst, look at username. I'm even somewhat OK with Windows, given some of my 3d design workflow is there. My last job was a linux shop with Macs.. Hated the macs every second.)
I started remapping the Caps Lock key to the Escape command when I got my tbMBP, and now it's the very first thing I do on every single computer I start using, touch bar or not. MacOS even now offers this as a 1st party option in system preferences, it works phenomenally. I even love, at a visceral level, the balanced symmetry of ESC and ENTER being opposite each other.
I'm hesitant to do this for portability reasons, but it really would be a great method.
Instead, I have some stuff in my .vimrc, which is a lot easier to port over than a key-remap.
I get bye with capslock remapped as control and using ctrl-[, which is the pinky of each hand and requires minimal movement. Control in general is useful for everything, escape not as often.
I both knew this and read the post I was responding to, which also brings this up as an option. I commented about Ctrl-[ because it was the last previously-unmentioned option.
Same, but I always remap Caps Lock to Control since I use the emacs keybindings. Using other people's laptops is really disorienting now, but worth it :)
You can make the Caps Lock key even more useful by turning it into a "Hyper" modifier (Command+Ctrl+Option+Shift) when it is held down (great for system-wide shortcuts in Hammerspoon[0], since application shortcuts that use all four modifiers are very rare) but acts like pressing "Escape" when it is tapped.
This is easily done with Karabiner Elements[1] and a simple rule[2] you import and enable.
I would have bought a Macbook Pro last winter, but given the abomination that is the Touchbar, I refused to buy one. If the next iteration of the Macbook Pro doesn't get rid of it, I'm going to just get a Windows laptop instead.
I definitely disagree. I think we're at a great balancing point with touchscreen laptops, the keyboards aren't perfect but they get the job done, and the touchscreen augments that wonderfully. Phones are inherently limited by size, and while I miss physical keyboards, the flexibility of on-screen keyboards more than makes up for it.
tbh I don't really understand why that's needed... I still think milestone2 was best phone ever made control-wise. Great construction, solid keyboard... shame things like that are not made anymore
I absolutely loved this. Might be the lateness of the hour here, but I actually giggled when I got to the "Fine, I'm gonna code my own BetterTouchTool. With blackjack!" bit.
475 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadit would be bigger so they could keep the 'real' Esc key etc and avoid most of the problems people encountered
> As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days.
At least Siri doesn’t get in the way of productivity.
> Once again. I hate sliders on Touch Bar. Changing them to buttons was the first thing I did. Now I can tap them blindly. Guess, even my stress level significantly dropped when I stopped trying to put the sliders in the desired position. It was same to adjusting hot water in a shower — you're never gonna get it without burning yourself.
Those sliders are the worst, now requiring TWO high precision taps, while looking at the keyboard, to tweak the volume. I find myself reaching for the physical volume controls on my headset more often.
> Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every ad that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient.
Unreliable play/pause button, very annoying.
> Imagine, you want to drag a picture to a browser to upload. You click the Finder, but instead opening a new window at the same screen, it carries you away somewhere. Just because there's another Finder window opened there. And it's fucking impossible to fix that with standard MacOS tools.
Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.
Yes, this is actually one of the few things I actively like about the touch bar.
I love that Apple is trying something new with laptops, but sadly it's been mostly a dud for me too. I'd take Face ID + a T2 chip (like iMac Pro) any day. The fundamental problem is you don't tend to look at the keyboard when you're using a computer; there isn't enough incentive to do so, so it always feels a bit like a chore to use.
I think there's a kernel of a good idea here, but the current implementation isn't it.
Edit: Reading this article, I've realized all I really want from the touch bar is a permanent Dock. The Dock is important enough to always be on your screen, and it'd be really useful to have at a touch.
This is a nice shortcut for adjusting the volume. However compared with non-TouchBar keyboards, adjusting the volume now requires you to look at the keyboard and precisely slide your finger around on the TouchBar. Whereas on the non-TouchBar you could rely on finger memory to instantly and without disruption from looking at the keyboard adjust the volume.
> Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.
Uhh, it doesn't? You can put multiple apps in a space.
I'm thinking I might be misunderstanding this part, but here's a few tips for you:
* Open Mission Control however you invoke it, top right corner there's a + button for adding a new Desktop. You can drag any windows you like into the new desktop or even force an entire app or multiple apps into that particular desktop.
* Hold down the fullscreen button in the title bar of any window, you'll have the option of dragging it to the left or the right. All the windows in the current desktop will go into expose on the other side and you can select one of them to take up the other half of the display. I use this for Mail and Calendar, or two browser windows, or sometimes a text window to take notes and whatever I'm reading on the other side.
Maybe I misunderstood you after all, but if I didn't, then I hope this helped.
I miss the Apple that did things like letting you right click a document's title bar to access its parent folders, or letting you drag that icon right off the window to manipulate it. They used to understand the principle of direct representation and manipulation. Not a single new OS X feature has made it worth upgrading in recent years.
I actually stuck with Snow Leopard on my personal (not work) laptop for many years, and well, I did a fair amount of work on it too so obviously it was good enough, before I upgraded to Sierra when I bought a new laptop, so I completely get where you're coming from on this.
That said, when we stop nitpicking every detail to death there's still a fair amount of flexibility in the OS, the window management now is light years ahead of where it was on Snow Leopard and the improvements that have accumulated over time while individually not a big deal, make for a really nice package. It was worth upgrading from Snow Leopard even though I was overall pretty happy with it.
Here's another little improvement that Apple made over the years. I am also a long-time Firefox user and one of the more irritating missing features of Firefox has been the lack of Dictionary panel support. In pretty much any Cocoa app you could look up a word from Dictionary.app in any content view and it would show in a nice panel. Not so with Firefox, because while theoretically possible to support, their priorities have always been elsewhere. Mac OS X integration just isn't a high priority for them, and I can live with that. I had an add-on that filled the gap, it didn't support the panel either, but it would send the word over to Dictionary.app which was good enough.
Turns out that at some point after Apple introduced multitouch trackpads they also added the ability to three-finger tap any word in any app and look it up, and it turns out that in spite of Firefox not really supporting the Dictionary panel, this will work just fine in Firefox. You just don't have it in the context menu.
The Services menu will also work just fine in Firefox now, you just don't have access to it from the Context menu (which also would have replaced my add-on just fine had I noticed this sooner).
There is a lot of depth and history to Mac OS X. Apple really only shows off and advertises the newest features, and there is no real user manual for anything, not one that is particularly useful. Apple could write one themselves and provide it free of charge in iBooks pushing delta updates whenever they update the operating system, but the system as a whole is much more flexible than you give it credit for and still retains those little features like being able to right click a document title and get the directory list. You can actually use a dark-themed menu bar now and create Tags in the Finder, and they haven't taken anything out like the Graphite Aqua color scheme I've always preferred.
Yeah they kind of shot themselves in the foot ditching the Software Update utility in favor of App Store updates, and the Mac App Store is trash that I avoid, but on the whole I would say Mac OS X today is much more useful to me than Mac OS X 10 years ago, even as the number of unique apps I've used has dwindled down to about nine or so, three of which are cross platform and all of which are replaceable. I could honestly replace my whole operating system with any BSD, 9front or MINIX at this point without losing anything too substantial, but I would lose a lot of the small touches and refinements that have built up over the years that I'm used to and comfortable with and there's no sign of those going away.
Why? These aren't features that your average, every day pro users would ever need. You're complaining about discoverability for an advanced feature that maybe 10 or 20% of the user base will use.
Thanks, I'm aware of these features. I was typing on my iPad in this small (non-resizable) comment field so was a bit short in explanation here. What I meant is that whenever I'm working inside a space, I don't want any other Space to interfere. So when I cmd+tab to an application, or click it in the dock, I want that app to open in the current Space, possibly spawning a new window.
But the inverse as well, say I have two Spaces each with a Safari window. When I cmd+tab to Safari, I want to open the most-recent used window (possibly switching Spaces), instead of opening the window on the current Space.
> Hold down the fullscreen button in the title bar of any window, you'll have the option of dragging it to the left or the right.
While a nice new feature, when working on my 27" iMac this isn't very useful to me. I usually switch between ~5 apps and having two full-screen doesn't fit my mental model. Maybe I still need to get used to it.
I think ideal for me would be:
1. If I am in a Desktop space (i.e. nothing is fullscreen), then ⌘⇥ ought to remain within the current space unless the app I am switching to is pinned to a particular space or the only instance of it is fullscreen. Switching to Firefox when the only extant window is on my other desktop should switch to the app without switching to my other Desktop space, that way I can open a fresh window. Clicking an http:// link should open a new window in the current space. Switching to NetNewsWire though should take me to the fullscreen app, for it is always fullscreen in its own space.
The reason for this is the whole point of Spaces for me is content separation. A web browser or file browser is a general purpose tool, I might have multiple windows of each open pointed to different resources related to different projects. I want to maintain that separation, and if I want to change what I'm working on, then I can do so through Mission Control without ⌘⇥ taking me out of Space I'm in. I want it to be an app switcher, not a Space switcher.
2. If I am in a fullscreen space, then ⌘⇥ should go to the most recent window of that app that I was looking at. If I was looking at a Firefox window in Desktop 2 and I have 3 fullscreen windows of Firefox and 5 more open windows in Desktop 1, then ⌘⇥ ⌘⇥ ⌘⇥ should toggle between that window, the fullscreen app, and then back to that window again.
#2 actually happens though, but #1 does not unless I keep a (often blank) Firefox window on all of my desktops, and then I have to do the same for each app that I would want that behavior. That is to say, Spaces needs some work, but for the most part apps that you click on in the Dock should launch in the Space you are in unless you have them pinned to a specific Space.
> While a nice new feature, when working on my 27" iMac this isn't very useful to me. I usually switch between ~5 apps and having two full-screen doesn't fit my mental model. Maybe I still need to get used to it.
It isn't for everyone, which is fine. Having my Mail and Calendar open side-by-side was something I picked up from a friend. He has the same setup except he has a multiple monitor setup with Mail and Calendar occupying the screen of his laptop. There's much to be said for not trying to incorporate each thing that exists on your system into your work if you simply have no place for it. It will be there if you need it.
Apple should ditch it entirely, or at least make it optional on all MacBook Pro models.
I enjoy having an Apple laptop to complement my Windows and Linux desktops, but if the touchpad doesn't go away by the time I decide not to wait any longer, I'll probably grab something else. Maybe a Chromebook with a replacement OS, maybe an Ubuntu or Fedora laptop. Probably not Windows as it's mainly for games and hobby game development for me. But whatever it is, it won't have a touchbar.
EDIT: In fact I didn't realize that it's significantly different spec wise to the 13 inch with touch bar. Only going to a 2.5Ghz base clock speed on the non-touch bar. And this is with only intel integrated graphics and a dual core cpu only, compared to the 15 inch models. This can be a big deal for anyone who wants to do even basic video editing or many other content creation type activities.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/
I've seen some fan renders where the trackpad is being used with the apple pencil, definitely something I could see apple doing.
Many people would consider an iPhone keyboard to be this…
The home button on the new iphones feels _weird_, almost as if there's this strange, unnatural delay to the click actually occurring. For something that purports to be "just like real life" it does a poor job.
The click on the mbp trackpads is not too bad though.
One bit of feedback:
> RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural.
A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine.
The issue is that your indicator needs to show you not just "how much is used vs free", which is indeed useless. It needs to show you the breakdown of wired, active, and inactive memory. This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.
I use https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/
And how often does that actually happen anymore, really? Yes, Chrome and friends are memory hogs, but a constant RAM indicator? If a MacBook (or any other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.
Pretty often, especially if you open an app that decides to allocate a lot of memory very quickly (Xcode, VirtualBox) or when you switch to an app that causes a lot of memory to be swapped in.
I use iStat Menus for that stuff. Working without various monitors seems to me a lot like doing without speedometers and gas gauges.
Every few weeks to a few times a week depending what I'm working on/with.
> If a MacBook (or any other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.
1. not necessarily, SSDs make swapping way less problematic than it used to be
2. ideally you want to nip the problematic process before it locks up the entire machine
edit: on linux. I would assume Mac and even windows have enough granularity to distinguish.
(Now, please please please don't do all of your programming on a MacBook).
I actually love the touch bar. I'm not in love with esc and f-keys not being physical but lots of the other stuff it does is pretty great. Like, the brightness and volume sliders he hates so much? I love them. Greatly prefer them over buttons. I've been developing on MacBooks for about 7 years now and I do almost no system configuration at all besides installing requisite apps. So yeah, I do love that developing on a Mac doesn't require me to configure it.
My takeaway is that most people probably DON'T do all that much configuring of their systems. But they aren't writing blog posts about how much they love their touch bars because there's no meat to that. It's not a useful article to write. But for people who do dislike the touch bar, this article is super useful to them.
Prior to the touchbar I simply wouldn’t use the Fn buttons ever. Now I actually use them.
First, you don't need to spend hours configuring the Touch Bar for it to be a functional machine, like you would trying to run Linux on a laptop... But some people do, because it's there. The Touch Bar works just fine without this article.
Second, having a myriad of workarounds for its problems is a positive not a negative. Everything has problems; I'll take the platform that has a myriad of workarounds over the one that has a handful.
Be my guest to use something else for all of your programming. I'll keep using my MacBook Pro.
But wait, this is not all you get, there is more. You can choose which desktop you want to run, you can install application software at the same moment, you can either start working or start tinkering, whatever fills your need or desire.
One thing you generally do not have to do: start tinkering around to get a working Escape key. OK, I said generally, those who bought a computer without one may have no other choice than to join the article writer in his quest for sanity.
Did I mention all this comes for free?
Did I mention this all comes without official support for a lot of commonly used software (Adobe Suite, Office Suite, etc)?
Probably not a good idea to try to make the argument that it's somehow easier to run Linux on some generic laptop than it is to run MacOS on a Mac...
Also... Being able to install software while doing other things is not a unique thing in 2018...
Also... The escape key works just fine out of the box. I can open my MacBook's box for the first time and be working in less than 20 minutes (and that's being very generous). That's simply not something you're doing with Linux.
As to whether you'll find commercial software (which seems to be what you're after) to your liking depends on what business you're in. If you're doing video production, animation, software development or engineering the chances of finding something are higher than when you're in graphic design. Do mind though that the non-commercial alternatives (e.g. Inkscape, Krita, etc) are often on par with the commercial offerings.
And yes... I actually do make the argument that running Linux is easier than running MacOS on a Mac. I don't say running it 'on a generic laptop' is easier, as said the choice is yours. I can install it anytime, any place where I have access to the 'net or happen to carry a USB stick with a distribution, on any supported hardware. I can run it as a live distribution on other hardware. I can run it on a Raspberry Pi, on a laptop, a server, you get the picture.
Try it for yourself, it actually works on Apple hardware. Don't believe what you hear from those who feel they need to defend their decision to invest in other platforms.
Doesn't having to write several paragraphs qualifying your previous statement make you question your position? Choosing the right hardware, being in the right industry, etc...
I'm also not just "[believing] what I hear". I've used Linux (and do pretty much everyday in some form) on multiple primary machines, and I also currently use my Mac.
Most of the time you choose a distro and desktop that fits you and then install for rest of the time. And in 2018 driver support is generally quite solid.
Anyway, I don't mean to rag on anyone's preferred OS. More just taking an opportunity to grumble pointlessly about a particular unconvincing argument people like to use for it. (Unfortunately, that argument is convincing for the people who buy the hardware I have to put up with at work).
Also to remind people about ergonomics, because we mustn't forget these things. Please don't be too drawn to the shiny touchbar, it is still attached to a keyboard which encourages squishy hand position and which is attached to a screen that is not at eye level.
Also, those are characteristics of laptops... Not specifically Macs... And I do need a mobile computer...
My 2 biggest issues are:
- It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions away.
- No haptic feedback. Even having the trackpad click would be useful, since it can be felt throughout the Macbook.
Most e-readers were only 167ppi in 2012, with 212ppi just starting to hit the market in premium models.
...that’s why Apple’s adoption of it surprised me the most: I saw how it on the ThinkPad added no value, and while Apple has greater integration and will undoubtedly encourage third-party devs to use it - it will still be too fiddly and complicated.
I think Apple’s too proud to kill it off in just one project cycle - but I can’t see Apple’s management justifying continued investment of time into maintaining it. The fact they didn’t include it in their latest desktop keyboard (for a Pro users no-less!) says something.
Huh? One of the defining features of e-ink is that it's easier to read in bright light, compared to a regular screen...
With regards to touch feedback, MacBooks come with a pretty hefty “haptic engine” already so it should be possible.
[1] https://youtu.be/v-vP9D062aM
Except they didn't use e-ink. Pebble used transreflective LCD's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...
Based on cursory research I believe the most important aspect of the LCD used on the Pebble time is that it's a "Memory in Pixel" or "Memory LCD"[1] – a technology specifically built for screens that may show the same thing for a sustained period of time.
Memory in Pixel seems to be a feasible alternative to e-ink if you want a low-power display that tends to show the same thing for extended periods of time. And it would probably work well for the use case of Apple's Touch Bar (assuming you can get a good pixel density with this technology).
[1] https://www.sharpsma.com/sharp-memory-lcd-technology and https://www.sharpsma.com/products?sharpCategory=Memory%20LCD
https://electricsheep.org/
HapticKey fixed this for me: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey
It'd have to time out because otherwise it would eat even more of your battery than it already does.
Man, its just .. like .. such an 80's feeling.
None of it can fix the horrible keyboard though.
If those overlays would jump off the keyboard if you didn't stroke them every 59 seconds.
I'd been waiting for them to release this laptop, but ended up going with a lightly used Mid 2015 after Apple announced the specs and price. It was just a misfit for my needs especially after trying the keyboard. The powering-down of the TouchBar sounds like a horrible user experience.
Escape, slow as hell. Brushing the touchbar and bringing up the man app on some random argument, useless and annoying.
It’s gotten a lot better now that I’ve switched it from context to function keys, and am using an external keyboard 95% of the time.
It’s really my third favorite laptop to use in the house, behind a 2012 MBA and a Thinkpad t410.
It's bad enough that I have to disable tap-to-click (which I greatly preferred - much more elegant) and it still mis-clicks if I rest my hands on it.
I used to think the MBP trackpads were a cut above everything else - now they're too big and the palm rejection is not good enough.
The crazy thing is that the "full" click is entirely simulated. I don't use MBPs anymore but the only place I had to turn off that feature was there as well.
Plus the touchbar, though stupid and useless, does at least succeed in making all the other laptops look old and crappy now.
Honestly I'm not sure what problems people are generally having with it.
Seriously though, I don't look at my keyboard and therefore have no idea what is on touchbar at any moment. I am not offended as some by its existence, but I also don't find it useful except touchid bit.
Ctrl+cmd+q = lock screen. Display will dim/sleep shortly after that. (Found this out myself not too long ago, I think because of HN).
Incidentally, I just switched the touch bar to the standard function key display with fn switching to the buttons just like the keyboards of old. I found I almost never look at the touch bar and there's absolutely nothing I found that it added that I couldn't already do with the old setup. I hate that the escape key is no longer where it used to be (fully left-aligned). I also hate on the new keyboards that the left and right arrow keys are so big. I use the space on the smaller keys of my old keyboard as a tactile indicator of where my hands are (perhaps it's finally time for vim?).
Actually, this was introduced midway through macOS Sierra; https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mediaplayer is available in macOS 10.12.1+.
> Buttons rock. It's always faster to tap, not slide.
If you press Fn, the slider will go away and the "normal" function buttons will appear.
> I want to have instant access to Finder, anywhere. Default Touch Bar can't do that. Weird.
Why is this weird? Finder is always in the Dock for every user.
> E.g., the eyedropper tool, to take the hex color code from the screen.
/Application/Utilities/Digital Color Meter.app
> Standard Touch Bar will never support the most useful feature — to display the name of track playing.
Slide out Notification Center.
> Would be cool to display the name of the YouTube video on the Touch Bar, right?
See above.
> You have a script running once in 20 seconds, and praying it won't overload the CPU.
Don't do this. Use AppleScript to watch for changes, instead of polling.
> I decided to steal this feature and make the "coffee break" button. It locks the laptop and switches the screen off.
Press the power button.
Not offense, and I'm sure you enjoy your setup, but I really think it would do you well to learn a bit more about why your computer was designed that way rather than writing a rant online and spending time making it "just right".
EDIT: it looks like this comment is pretty controversial, since it's flip-flopping between ±5 points rapidly. Let me give a more detailed response.
Personally, I don't have a computer with a Touch Bar. I have, however, used one a borrowed one for a couple days. Personally, I would be fine switching (there are other issues with the MacBook Pro that are preventing me, but that's a story for another day).
I don't use the function keys that often, so I don't feel as if I'm "losing out" on them. Many of the supposed grievances that I normally hear are easily solvable ("oh, I didn't know I could control the volume slider without lifting my finger", "I didn't know I could add sleep to the Touch Bar"). Really, I think the main issue with the Touch Bar is people view it as a second screen rather than an extra set of controls as it's supposed to be. The Touch Bar is meant as a place to have surface extra controls that would be nice to have at your fingertips; what it is not is a place to show you data or be a Dock or menu bar or Notification Center or Activity Monitor. Why? Because you're not always looking down at it. There's no point putting any significant information there.
That being said, Touch Bar is not perfect, of course. It's a nice idea, but it could be improved if it provided more tactile feedback (e.g. haptic feedback, some sort of dynamic change in texture). And given that it's new, Apple's guidelines, while good, may end up changing as real-world usage influences them. Overall, though, I feel that much of the Touch Bar criticism is based on knee-jerk reactions or issues that are not difficult to resolve. Yes, there are some deeper issues, as I've outlined above, but I think the concept as a whole is interesting.
Where is this power button? I've been searching for it since I got this laptop.
Edit: Wow thanks, don't know how I missed that.
Awesome work.
Open the lid.
> leaving you with zero feedback when you start the laptop for an eternity
1. Startup doesn't take long.
2. There's a progress bar when booting.
In older macbooks I've used, this also would put the system into suspend mode. That's fine, but it would also disconnect any terminals on remote systems because the system would no longer be on. Is this still the case or has that changed recently? For a coffee break button I wouldn't want to have to reconnect to everything I was working on before, or have to worry about any long running processes (say ML training, copying a file, etc.) that were going on when i'm just walking away for two minutes to fill my water up.
Could you provide more info about this, or even better, an actionable code example?
So, something that used to be a simple that could be done from muscle memory is now either (a) a slider that requires change of focus or (b) a multi-key combination which is totally the same thing as the thing you miss, and in summary, everything is fine.
> I really think it would do you well to learn a bit more about why your computer was designed that way
Maybe this highlights Apple's ostensible vs true value pitch these days:
Ostensible: "You aren't going to have to think about it too much because it just works."
Actual: "learn a bit more about why your computer was designed that way and we're sure you'll find that any complaints and frustrations are actually just wrong"
No. I only suggested the buttons because the author of this post thought that the slider was "bad". I don't buy their reasoning; you don't even have to look down to see the slider's progress because macOS will mirror it smack-dab in the middle of your display.
I really think that the author's complaints show that they really haven't been using macOS the way it's normally used. The Touch Bar is not your Notification Center. It's not your menu bar. It's not your Dock. It has a very clear purpose, and I feel that the author is just trying to give Touch Bar functionality that they wished it had because they just don't know about the other built-in features. My guess is that they haven't really used macOS (i.e. they're coming from another OS, and are used to what that provides), but take this with a grain of salt because I have no evidence to back it up.
Progress isn't the issue. Input is. To operate a slider, your pointer/finger needs to be where the handle is. The location of the handle is variable. The touchbar could potentially handle this smoothly by displaying sliders in such that they always appear with the handle underneath the finger, but this is not the behavior the touchbar was displaying when I tested it out -- sliders opened out to the side of the target you tap to open it, which means you then have to move your finger to the location of the handle, which requires a visual reorientation.
And none of this is an improvement on quick taps with well-defined change increments for stuff like adjusting brightness and volume. Not to mention the value of tactile feedback.
> To operate a slider, your pointer/finger needs to be where the handle is. The location of the handle is variable. The touchbar could potentially handle this smoothly by displaying sliders in such that they always appear with the handle underneath the finger, but this is not the behavior the touchbar was displaying when I tested it out -- sliders opened out to the side of the target you tap to open it, which means you then have to move your finger to the location of the handle, which requires a visual reorientation.
The location of the slider actually does not change, interestingly. What actually happens is the touch target for the slider changes to include your original tap point when you tap it, even if it shifts visually. This means all you have to do is slide, and this works even from the original location.
This is an improvement over the choice I thought they'd made, but it's an improvement in utility alone, and also even more of a headscratcher of a choice when it comes to the UI. It means they realized you want the handle right where the touchdown happens, so they can't plead ignorance, but they chose to have the in-touchbar visualization the user is interacting with appear elsewhere. It's not just non-obvious and therefore a failure of spreading the news, it's actually misdirection. Not having any visual feedback in the touchbar at all would have been better UX. As you pointed out earlier, the screen does fine for independent visualizations.
Interesting, it's got a lot in common with one of the complaints around the escape key -- the actual touchable area is different than the outlined area (which is positioned farther in from the keyboard than it's historically been).
Laptops have long had a display surface and a touch surface. If marrying them is worth experimenting with, getting the visual feedback connected with touches correctly is a crucial idea.
> knee-jerk reactions
Anyone who doesn't like the Touch Bar is ipso facto deluded and/or irrational. Fantastic.
My main means of input to my computers is touch-typing on a keyboard. I never look at it (I already have a peripheral for looking at: a screen!). Replacing an entire row of keys with a miniature screen would represent a fairly profound change to how I operate a machine I use for 5-8 hours day, for no benefit.
Furthermore the application I use for 50-70% of that time is IntelliJ Idea, with tweaked default keybindings. I probably hit F keys hundreds of times a day. I would need to either do some substantial keybinding remapping, or start using part of my keyboard as a mini-screen.
I don't either like or dislike the Touch Bar. I just have no interest in it, as it makes the new MB Pros quite irrelevant to my professional requirements.
You're putting words in my mouth. The root issue is just a lack of information; there's nothing wrong with the people themselves as you're trying to claim.
> My main means of input to my computers is touch-typing on a keyboard. I never look at it (I already have a peripheral for looking at: a screen!).
I agree, partially. When you're using the keyboard you're not looking at it, and for the most part that's also true for the Touch Bar. When you're doing something with the function keys or escape, you don't have to look down, since those are always in the right place. Even some with dialogs fit into this category. You do, however, look down when you're trying to perform some annoying operation that the Touch Bar surfaces easily.
> Furthermore the application I use for 50-70% of that time is IntelliJ Idea, with tweaked default keybindings. I probably hit F keys hundreds of times a day. I would need to either do some substantial keybinding remapping, or start using part of my keyboard as a mini-screen.
I'd make the argument that using the function keys as shortcuts is not the idiomatic way to use macOS, which relies heavily on the modifiers at the bottom of the keyboard, but I get that this is a weak argument since it requires you to change your behavior. Ideally Idea would just ship with nice shortcuts…
> I don't either like or dislike the Touch Bar.
My comment may have come off as a resounding plaudit for the Touch Bar; it is nothing but. I'm also not completely sold on it; I really think it needs to be improved so that it's more useful. However, I do think it's an interesting direction to go in, and as it currently stands, I'm slightly in favor of having it instead of function keys.
I've been meaning to get the status line from Atom and have it displayed in the touchbar.
The best experience I've had is Fedora with Gnome. Red Hat employs many developers working on desktop Linux, and most of them are working on Fedora.
That being said, you'll have a better time with macOS if Photoshop is one of your requirements.
Of course, your set can be completely different, we all have our preferences and there's nothing wrong with that.
MacOS/OSX doesn't really have a history of using function keys, so pretty much the only software which does is stuff which was "ported" from other unices where relying on function keys is more standard.
I'd much rather put time in a decent Linux desktop. You don't need neuromancer-syle cyberpunk interfaces to make a really nice Linux system. And you can pretty much do whatever you want, rather than have to break Apple's "standards" for something that doesn't resemble brushed aluminum dogshit.
(psst, look at username. I'm even somewhat OK with Windows, given some of my 3d design workflow is there. My last job was a linux shop with Macs.. Hated the macs every second.)
But - you can always map <C-c> to <ESC>, so that it'll work exactly the same.
I could't care less about this, but...
> even love, at a visceral level, the balanced symmetry of ESC and ENTER being opposite each other.
now that you mentioned it, I absolutely HAVE to do it!
This is easily done with Karabiner Elements[1] and a simple rule[2] you import and enable.
[0] http://www.hammerspoon.org
[1] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements
[2] https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/#caps_l...
handles part of it and
xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape'
does the rest. xcape is in the ubuntu repos, for fedora there's a copr (dawid/xcape).
I think it's super useful to do this with any keyboard if you use vim.