Let's hope some of the mechanical issues cleared up.
Also, I really miss having real keys instead of a touchpad. I never knew how much I subconsciously relied upon a "thunk" from the ESC key. Remapping (my keys and muscle memory) is an arduous process.
Why do you say that? I've used emacs for years and use the escape key very infrequently. (Although I do swap control and caps lock, and have for years.)
At a guess, it's the layout of Ctrl and Alt on Mac keyboards. They're small and crammed right next to each other. It's physically painful to use Mac keyboards for Linux-y tasks and I don't understand people's love of them.
While I haven't remapped it for Esc (I have for Ctrl), you can reassign both keys. It took about a week to get used to it, but now my Control key acts as caps lock and honestly it works like it was designed to work that way. No more accidental hitting of caps lock with my pinky, and no weird gestures to hit a key I use all the time. Not saying your method is by any means worse or wrong, just thought it'd be worth pointing out!
This is interesting - what are the typical use cases where you need to write more than 2-4 letters (e.g. "FBI" or "NASA" or something like that) in all caps ? It seems like quite unusual domain of writing - is it legal documents or something like that?
The hardware registers in our designs are all defined and used in upper case.
The file names in our code base have a lot of upper case in them as well.
But the real reason is tbat I learned speed typing in high school on an IBM Selectrix typewriter. I use CAPS LOCK even for FBI and NASA. It comes totally natural to me.
Get Karabiner-Elements and you can map press-and-hold on caps lock to control and press-and-release on caps lock to esc. Massive win for emacs users and most vim users I have introduced it to seem to like it.
Ooo, interesting! I'll definitely look into that when I go into one of my next "optimize my workflow as a form of procrastination" mindsets I tend to end up in
ControllerMate is another really powerful tool, though not just for keyboards but for USB devices in general. Interface is a bit funky but it's really worth checking out, not just mapping but conditional reactions, timing, scripting, for any key or arbitrary combinations of keys or non-keyboard devices (I made a DS4 work with a Mac at launch except for the touchpad part of it for example).
You don't know many serious vim users. I remapped Caps Lock to control years ago (primarily for the tmux prefix ctrl+a), and escape is remapped to jj. So easy. Besides, my understanding was that Escape wasn't an option on Mac until a couple years ago.
Ctrl-C also exits insert mode (and replace mode) and some people find that easier to type than Ctrl-[ (especially if you have a keyboard where '[' is not handy)
The escape key is there in terminal in same position it would be if there was no touchbar. Its been a complete non issue that people who do not have the touchbar like to complain about.
Around when they introduced the first touchbar models, they finally made it so you can remap caps lock to escape which I'd been wanting for years. So at least there's that option.
This complaint always strikes me as trolling of the highest order. As though a 2018 laptop should definitely be designed to accommodate software structured for the limitations of 1970. In 2050, when the world has moved to direct neural interfaces, vi trolls on HN will still be saying "but my escape key!"
I've never failed to hit the software escape key on my 15. Not one time since the past rev was released. What is that, six months? Not once in six months. I just put my finger in exactly the same place as I would on any other keyboard and it always works.
I really think that dismissing this complaint as "trolling" is odd. The escape key is used in a lot of applications, not just vim. It's used to cancel out of actions, it's used to often dismiss modals, it's used across a lot of software for a lot of purposes. And I'm personally someone that misses the key often enough that I wish it was still there. And the escape button on the touchbar is actually not at the same place as it is on other keyboards, which makes me think you've maybe not used one of these new touchbars and are arguing just for the sake of it.
> And the escape button on the touchbar is actually not at the same place as it is on other keyboards, which makes me think you've maybe not used one of these new touchbars
Nonzero finger width easily makes up for the difference. You don't have to hit the center of it to register a touch. In fact you don't actually need to touch it at all.
Anyone who uses a keyboard to navigate their computer (most software professionals worth their salt) hit the escape key often enough to warrant it as a complaint. Try not using your mouse for your computer
Anyone who uses a keyboard to navigate their computer and has not already re-mapped their keyboard to put esc into a more RSI-friendly location is going to be paying for this choice in a decade or so...
I just switched to a new Touchbar machine, and am adapting to the fact that I had several of my most common shortcuts bound to F-keys. At this point, I'm seriously considering trying to add better touchbar support to Emacs to work around this.
You can set it up so that tapping caps lock is interpreted as escape, while holding it is interpreted as control. It's one of the first things I do whenever I get a new machine.
I highly encourage mapping the Escape key to the Caps Lock key for a couple days and seeing how it feels. I gave it a spin last year out of curiosity and have since fallen in love with it. My poor pinky no longer has to frequently stretch out to the farthest upper left reaches of the keyboard!
If you're on macOS, you can do this in System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... and selecting the "Escape" in the Caps Lock dropdown.
I've been using Caps Lock for CTRL for years now. Instead of Caps Lock for Escape, in Vim, I use jj and that has served me well. I mention this because there are others out there that have already remapped Caps Lock, and mapping to escape might not work well for them.
I tried all the above suggestions for extended periods of time. Ultimately the most productive thing for me was caps lock as control, and Ctrl-[ for escape since it works everywhere in the system.
Thanks... unfortunately I've already co-opted the caps lock key to be the control key... a common thing for emacs users to do. Now I need to find another home for esc. shakes fist at sky
Using karabiner-elements, https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/, you can map caps to behave a esc when pressed alone, and as ctrl when pressed with another key.
Apple will swap a device for the latest model if it fails and is repaired for the same reason 3 times . It’s called “crewing” (or maybe “cruing”?) I don’t know the spelling. You have to get it repaired by Apple 3 times though.
Apple can definitely do this over the phone. I believe they will require a deposit to be held on a credit card though to cover the cost of the machine in case you don't send back your old one.
If they ever do decide to kill the touch bar, I'd expect it to occur along with a more significant rev where the whole design gets updated. This is more of an interim spec update -- not even announced at a keynote!
> The new keyboard has the same dimensions and look as its two predecessors, but the keys feel just a little bit different. They're quieter, for one thing. They have a softer, less click-y feel that is a little closer to the pre-2016 models' chiclet keys. We found the new keyboard to be a little nicer to type on, but it's not a radical difference. It's unlikely to convert the detractors, but it's a welcome iteration for those who liked or didn't mind the previous butterfly keyboards.
I'm going to wait a year, maybe 18 months for feedback before I consider upgrading. Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts? No touchbar, smaller touchpad than the newer macbooks, but updated specs? Call it Macbook Developer... We build the software for the "Pros" after all.
The 15-inch 2015 Retina model is no longer being sold on their website, too. It was there as an option for some time, but it appears this new update called for getting rid of it. I was planning on saving up to finance that as my next laptop purchase, but seems as if I'll have to go through a third party seller.
Bought a 2016, then returned it and got a refurb 2015. My only regret was getting the 500g SSD vs waiting for a 1tb model (which my friend got). The refurb levels were changing daily, and I kept missing the 1tb models, so I pulled the trigger on a 500g.
Didn't care for the touch bar - yes, hey, apparently all the cool kids 'remap' their ESC key, and many did it I guess 20 years ago(!), but I've got decades of muscle memory to overcome. But beyond that, yeah sure it was thinner and sexier, but had a 20% smaller battery, and for the work I do, I guess I'm not 'pro' enough, but never managed more than about 4 hours max of real work.
The 2015 model was 'good enough' in most respects, and better in others (keyboard, battery), and... cheaper.
Always interested to see and try the newer models, but probably won't upgrade in 2018 or 2019 without some massive reason to do so.
EDIT - well, the 32g option might be a worthwhile reason to upgrade. And the battery looks slightly larger than the 2016 model.
had looked at that - seemed potentially more trouble than it's worth, but... it might be a cost-effective avenue (factoring in time/value) before another upgrade. thanks.
The battery increase for the high end i7/i9 models is to offset the increased power draw -- it supposedly won't give you much in terms of battery life in actual usage.
Or just... running stuff that kicks on the GPU? Running development tools (ios stuff, java stuff) would always kick things in to overdrive and send the fans whirring, and killing my battery. Yes, I'm often plugged in, but knowing that, if I need to be mobile, I'm going to get 2-3 hours... was a hard pill to swallow for $3700, when for 30%+ less I'd have a machine that lasted longer, had quieter keyboard, etc.
And worth noting the 2015 15-inch MBP they've discontinued had the old non-butterfly keyboards. The old style keyboards are gone, Apple is 100% in on the keyboards they currently have a defect service program on. [1]
(Edit: Though these new MBPs apparently have a new third generation keyboard, so not exactly identical.)
They didn't do that because it is not what most people want. Apple has to make changes that will sell more laptops to the masses to maximize shareholder value.
The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does. Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products and make up 10% of the complaints then to focus on the 10% of customers who make up 90% of the complaints.
It's not just developers and MacRumors posters. Joe Rogan - the comedian and MMA commentator - did a massive unprompted rant on how poor (and he didn't use the word 'poor') the Apple keyboard was on his recent podcast (3rd most popular podcast in the world http://www.itunescharts.net/us/charts/podcasts/).
The keyboard affects anyone who types. It's not a niche group of obsessives at all.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Rogan is a good proxy of Hollywood creatives, which in turn has an enormous impact on how often Macs show up as default movie props.
There's a big difference between the AfterEffects guys and the writers. Rogan's complaints were as someone whose career requires massive amounts of writing and understandably wants a keyboard to have feedback.
I'm in complete agreement with him. In their obsession to make the thing thinner and fancier they have rendered it less usable. They've locked themselves into a marketing pattern that precludes them from having a "if it ain't broke" mindset.
I would also add Rogan has a massive following and is a big influencer in many areas. His opinion could easily affect people thinking about or considering moving to a Mac product.
I know a lot of his followers on Twitter are super loyal to the brands he promotes.
Consumer electronics movie props are typically paid advertising placements now. I don't think there's really a default anymore, at least not for big-budget Hollywood productions.
> It's not just developers and MacRumors posters. Joe Rogan - the comedian and MMA commentator - did a massive unprompted rant on how poor (and he didn't use the word 'poor') the Apple keyboard was on his recent podcast.
The Macbook Pro has been the go-to software developer machine for years now, and that segment is seeing a massive exodus after the touch bar launch. I don't know how big a percentage that is of total sales, but it can't just be a trivial niche.
I'm holding on to my 2013 mbpro with a real keyboard, but if it dies... looks like they only have emoji keyboards now. I'll have to join the exodus then.
Same here, I'm typing this with my late 2013 mbp, this was my first Mac. And it's amazing how it keeps working perfectly just like the first day, I haven't noticed any slowdown, it doesn't have any noticeable hardware issue. I never experienced this with other computer.
I have a 2013 13" and a 2014 (I think) 15" for work and having had used a lenovo thinkpad for work briefly I can confidently say that there is no way I will be joining any sort of exodus when my work laptop or personal laptop come time for upgrade.
Same here. Well, that's my personal laptop which is perfectly fast and in great condition.
My work laptop was actually the same generation, until IT recently upgraded me to one of the new-keyboard models. I don't like how loud the keyboard is, and I don't like the touchbar. (sorry, I actually need to press "Esc" and also use non-beautifully-designed software that sometimes uses Fn keys.)
Needless to say, I have absolutely no desire to upgrade my personal laptop. When I do, I can only hope Apple has moved past this, or the F/OSS world has finally acknowledged that the touchbar actually needs to be supported.
Mine's a mid-2012 model. I've been quite happy with it. I've long been looking forward to Apple coming out with a model capable of 32GB, so I would have upgraded immediately, but my understanding is that the new machines haven't addressed the keyboard dust issue. So I'm probably going to hold on to my 2012 for at least another year.
Is there a real, large exodus though? I don’t notice that, anecdotally, but others seem to (seemingly anecdotally too). Are there data about it? For the segment that are “professionals” or for work use, for example? At least broadly, 3Q saw Mac sales decline 7.5 percent YOY. But, the whole PC industry declined. So, I’m not sure what conclusions to draw — and in the absence of that it seems a bit hard to swing either way in claims.
I have no data, and I personally use Linux and track point equipped machines, but my observation is Mac fans paying for their computers with their own money are not buying the new macs. I suspect that the sales number are reflecting corporate sales. I think Apple should remember that it is people from the former group who have managed to arm-twist corporations to look at non-Windows machines, that and the slow rise of Linux acceptance in more and more companies should make them listen to people who don't want Windows want.
The PC industry as a whole is declining from a sales perspective because refresh cycles moved from 30-40 months to 60-70 months. If you have 1000 computers, you needed to buy 200/year today, and would have needed 350 in 2005. Computers don't need to replaced as often, so slowdowns in momentum are very important because they indicate the institutions are slowing down purchases.
Microsoft is trying to push back on this by making it impossible to support Windows 10. We'll see how that goes.
When I was responsible for this at a large enterprise, I was buying 40k devices a year, every year. The Mac component was about 1,500/year. That dropped to 50 when the new keyboards came out and started failing. Losing a few hundred sales isn't a big deal, but some of that money that was going to MacBooks went elsewhere.
I had a touchbar 15" from work and once I left I bought the no touch bar 13" version. I was waiting for the 15" no touch bar version, but it looks like I'll stick with the 13" for now. Eventually they'll probably fix it somehow, but if not it sucks as I used to like both the machine and the OS.
You say that but it's the vocal but happy 10% that can sway the 90% to buy it. Mac wouldn't have been as big as it is today without its fans. The ones that complain are your best customers, because the ones that don't just walk away without giving you feedback as to why they walk away. The 90% is too indifferent to speak up.
I’d be willing to bet a big part of the base that buy the MacBook pros are the creatives. Most consumer consumers are happy with iPhones and iPads.
As someone who was a massive fan of Apple MacBooks and recommended them to other people, I don’t do that now. I highly unrecommend them nowadays. I’ve personally in fact bought older second MacBooks since they last longer and work better than the new ones.
So it slowly adds up. Microsoft surface is already making a good dent in what was a loyal Mac Pro market.
A lot of people ask techie friends for advice on what computer to buy.
As argued by Paul Graham:
"So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?
Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world."
PG’s argument is a meaningless non sequitur. The question isn’t about what new technologies people adopt; it’s about what product designs they go for. The former of course will start in CS departments and research labs, because that’s where they’re developed. That’s really not saying anything, and has no bearing on the latter.
Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers,
If that were the case, Apple wouldn't be selling tons of iPhone's in their "wall gardens" and DRM'd media content and the "Year of the Linux Desktop" would have come ages ago....
The most popular apps made be made by computer geeks but which apps are made are decided by large corporations. Corporate America (and corporate marketing) have a far bigger sway than computer nerds.
If that weren't the case Samsung wouldn't be the most profitable Android manufacturer with their crappy bespoked custom Android version.
Yeah, I don't think that's because you're a tech person. To most parents, their children may as well be tech experts because their bar for that is simply "they know more about computers than I do." I'm sure most people could probably convince their parents to buy a Macbook, or any other brand of computer, for even arbitrary reasons.
I may be wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that your parents had to be convinced to be a Macbook on the merits of it's technical prowess in relation to other competition. They probably just respect your opinion on technology regardless of what it is.
> The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does.
Haven't done a survey, but quite a few folks I know who work at Mac shops report that their employers have been steering clear of the new MacBooks and just trying to keep the older models they already have alive, while also looking seriously into the feasibility of switching to PCs running Linux if they don't get their act together.
Making the keyboard reliable would help, but that touchbar is also a legitimate ergonomic concern for anyone who uses software that requires you to be banging on F-keys all day.
>while also looking seriously into the feasibility of switching to PCs running Linux if they don't get their act together.
This is ultimately what I ended up having to do; not really by choice. My 2015 MBP was stolen, considered looking for a refurb model but found myself test driving an HP Spectre x360-a minute with the keyboard, another few minutes Googling linux driver support on my phone and some other specs. I was walking out the door with the new purchase 15 minutes later.
It's been a couple of days now, I still haven't gotten around to throwing *nix at it, but for a majority of purposes WSL is getting me by pretty nicely enough. A few days of getting a fresh Windows installation and ridding myself of all that retail bloatware, I'm actually not having a bad time with Windows 10 given it's the first time I've dailied a windows machine since XPSP1.
That's how far I'm going to avoid the new mbp because key input means that much to me-given how much time I spend in text fields, but this is a really enjoyable machine so far. After 3 years though my eyes definitely got used to the retina display, and this screen just can't match the color variation or the deep darks-then again it also may be the high gloss touch screen.
I'm being forced into an timed upgrade by corporate and I couldn't be unhappier. If some of the extraneous software needed to work in the environment wasn't Mac/Windows only, I'd request a hi-res Thinkpad and throw Linux on it. Even my ~2010 iMac at home runs Ubuntu.
You might consider running Windows virtualized. About 5 years ago it was still a little janky and slow. These days those problems are mostly non-existent. I run heavy Adobe applications through VirtualBox and can't tell any difference from native speeds, even on my older laptop.
Every time one of the big boys screws up, we all hope for this. Then the relevant players in the Linux community fail to get their shit together and the cycle repeats itself.
In your view, what would it take for the big players to "get their [act] together"? I'd like to hear a bit more of how you see it. What players would need to work together or coordinate? What are some more-or-less realistic paths forward?
First, they'd need to have a willingness to license "encumbered" codecs, drivers, etc, even if it meant charging for a version of their product.
Second, it would involve a ton of product testing, and tedious ironing out of rough edges. Every single time an installation or upgrade fails, or runs into a strange error needing obscure forum searches to fix it, that's a problem.
Third, they'd have to seriously cozy up to proprietary software vendors for application support. This one is unfortunately an endless time and money sink, and can't pay off until they have enough users that they don't need to do it anymore. Thankfully F/OSS options provide some limits on this, but not entirely. Many times there are F/OSS options that are usable, but the proprietary ones are better (and worth paying for).
This is just a few thoughts off the top of my head. Its not well researched or thought out, but a starting point for a conversation.
I think you are spot on. These are such a huge issues that keep most people away from Linux. The perpetual denial of these issues is a ridiculously huge blind spot in the Linux comunity.
First, someone (RedHat?) needs to establish a partnership with an OEM so they can deliver an end product. "Some assembly required" in the software environment is, almost by definition, a hobbyist project. End users shouldn't need to spend hours researching what hardware is compatible and hunting down drivers. And yes, that means that proprietary codecs and other essential packages will need to be included.
Second, Linux systems have a bit of a jerry-rigged feel to them that needs to be addressed. Things like fd.o and the FHS are intended to help this, but don't go far enough. Compare this to FreeBSD, where every decision about which packages are used in the base install, what the filesystem hierarchy is, etc. is well documented and cohesive. Linux can't go mainstream until, say, a runit-based distro has no references to systemd in its documentation.
> trying to keep the older models they already have alive
It's not a bad move - if you can maximize the return on DisplayPort monitors, USB keyboards, HDMI cables and MagSafe chargers, it makes sense. Keep in mind the company will eventually have to move to USB-C, as the MacBook Air is the only remaining MagSafe laptop and I won't bet on its longevity. OTOH, the old-style MBPs are enough for most uses, as are the Air for anyone who can live within 8GB.
> the company will eventually have to move to USB-C
Not necessarily. A minority of machines are Macs, and I wouldn't be surprised if not wanting to deal with the whole USB-C thing right now is yet another incentive for IT to be interested in ditching Apple.
> a few folks I know who work at Mac shops report that their employers have been steering clear of the new MacBooks
My office is a great example of this. Hundreds of developers here, and I've seen exactly one of the touchbar MBPs in the office. The CIO hates them with a passion, and nobody's demanding them, so it's 2014/2015 MBPs for everyone. There are a lot of Airs, too, but I've seen zero Macbooks.
I base it on the fact that among developers it is an extraordinarily popular laptop, and that there are a shitload more developers than most people seem to estimate. We are a pretty large "niche" nowadays. I have a Lenova Yoga 720 and I am almost always the single non Macbook user in any developer group.
"developers/enthusiasts have a really weird way of showing their discontent"
If you want to use xcode, you have no choice[1]. If you're in the ecosystem, you have no choice. So you complain about it and hope they change it the next time around.
My point is that there is a much larger audience outside of our own "niche". The fact that we see a lot of developers with Macs, does not mean that they are a large audience among all of the Mac users.
My brother works at an Apple shop, and the vast majority of people he has to attend come from all walks of life, they are not developers/enthusiasts.
We are talking specifically about Macbooks. Among buyers of the iPhone, iPad, and iMac is a broad, society-representing demographic. For Apple laptop it is overwhelmingly developers and aficionados (e.g. designers). I don't have any official stats, but I don't know a single person who owns a Mac laptop who isn't in those two categories.
There are around 20 million developers globally and Apple has been selling 4.5 million Macs per year on average since 2013 (most of them MacBooks).
If 27% of all developers are using Macs (as the stackoverflow survey indicates) and the machines are replaced after 4.5 years then developers would be buying ~1.2 million Macs per year, 27% of all Macs sold.
In terms of revenue developers are probably an even larger share, perhaps a third? That's still not the majority, but it's certainly very significant even assuming that Mac users are overrepresented in the stackoverflow survey.
It happens with every Apple product since as far back as at least the original iPod. There is always one thing (or a small number of things) that people just can't stop complaining about... Yet the product gets super high sales numbers a year or two later the people who complained the loudest return to buy the newest verison anyway.
I mean, the people who don't like it are in their right to have that opinion. It sucks when your use case gets fucked. But when the removal of the ESC key is your reason to bemoan the sure death of the MacBook, you gotta at least be aware that you are in a tiny, tiny minority.
I just don't understand the grief over that. Even if you do use a notebook for programming, would you actually use the laptop keyboard all the time?
I always have an external keyboard around for any serious dev work. That way you can pick any style you want, clicky mechanical or wireless or whatever.
In the article they cite the MBP as being the most popular notebook for developers so this niche must be important, otherwise why list it?:
> Already the most popular notebook for developers around the world, the new MacBook Pro can compile code faster and run multiple virtual machines and test environments easier than before.
What we want is a functional keyboard. They are losing this market-share quickly but you're right maybe they don't care about this market anymore. They must not since they aren't doing anything about it.
Then make it an option, or risk losing the segment. When my company gave me a 2015 MBP I was really impressed with it, it seemed like the perfect hardware. I knew when I upgraded my personal laptop it'd be a Macbook Pro.
Then they started handing out post-2015 MBP to others and so I've used them a bit. There is zero chance now that a MBP will be my next laptop.
People who want functional keyboards is the majority of MBP users. Even non-technical blogs like The Verge and The Outline are complaining about major failures with the keyboards. This problem isn't developer-specific in any way.
The niche is not developers themselves; the niche is a (vocal) sample of the developer community. I'm a developer and I like the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard with touchbar.
In particular:
What we want is a functional keyboard.
This is your opinion, but it's not necessarily the majority opinion. For example, I would rather Apple focus on other parts of the computer than the keyboard. The keyboard just isn't that meaningful to me, and I'm just as productive a developer without whatever platonic ideal of a keyboard Apple could put on the thing.
I think a lot of people vastly overestimate the number of Apple customers who have an opinion about this, because it's relatively easy to see complaints on HN, blogs or tech journalism.
Sure, that would be shitty. But do we have an authoritative and empirical source indicating a meaningful increase in keyboard hardware problems?
When I search for information about this, I come up with articles like [1]. But none of the data is provided and the analysis isn't exactly...rigorous, to put it charitably.
EDIT: Why in the world has this been downvoted to -3?! This is a reasonable comment to make complete with an example. If you disagree, blindly downvoting isn't informative of anything except that you don't like a comment.
The only people that could conclusively provide that information is Apple, and they have no desire to do so. So all we have to go on is anecdata. My personal experiences suggest that the keyboard is problem is widespread, though by no means common.
The fact that Apple has made a keyboard repair program available indicates just how bad this is directly. We don't have numbers, no, but it's pretty obvious it's not just a small number of users experiencing this given their response.
Okay, that's fair. It looks like it goes beyond the tech reporting bubble then. Thanks for being the only one to provide a cited source in response to my own.
I'll concede that the hardware flaws - independent of personal taste about the touchbar or function keys - is a major problem then.
You can walk into any Best Buy or other non-Apple retail location that sells Apple computers and find at least one machine with keyboard issues. The most common one I've found is a left shift key that doesn't work unless you press it exactly in the center or with excessive force.
I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?
Doesn't matter. The crappier keyboard is probably .014mm thinner, which supersedes all other considerations because producing thinner hardware is really really REALLY important to apple.
>> I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?
Your question has already been answered by Apple with the current generation of problematic keyboards.
They already had a mature, reliable keyboard that felt pretty good and was not noisy. It was not "broke" and did not need "fixing".
They presumably chose to "improve" it with the current one so that their computers could be a little bit thinner and that Jony Ive could brag about the new technology in a video during a keynote.
Apple doesn't care because people (including myself) will continue to throw money at them even if they make something that sucks. All of their competitors' laptops simply suck more. Freed from market pressures, Apple's hardware designers have free reign to pursue form over function, a dream situation for any designer to be in.
This is a great question, but many people seem to have already decided that Apple is personally out to sell worse computers because they can, or something.
It's worth noting that they did change the keyboard on these new models, and I would guess they did so to avoid extending their special keyboard replacement program they have fro the current one.
No company is perfectly rational. Apple have built their empire on doing things that run counter to the received wisdom of the industry, things that many analysts and competitors saw as deeply irrational.
Personally, I think that the loss of Jobs has created a serious leadership problem, because so much of the company's direction was led by the personal taste of one man. Apple has retained the institutional knowledge and habits accrued during that era, but it hasn't found a satisfactory replacement for the functions that Jobs performed. It has retained an obsessive focus, but it has lost the compass that guided that focus towards the user experience. They know how to do thinner, lighter, fewer ports and so they keep doing it, but there's no why. So many aspects of Apple's corporate culture are uniquely ritualistic, but the meaning of those rituals died with Jobs.
I didn't want to be this explicit with my point because I think it's patronizing. But your comment isn't responding to what I intended to say, so here it is. I'm not talking about ideological design mandates and I'm not talking about perfect rationality. I'm talking about charitable estimation of competency and an assumption of baseline rationality.
Apple is one of the most valuable and critically examined companies in the world, with 125,000 employees and end-to-end vertical integration across its hardware and software development process. In consideration of feedback from design decisions, like choosing to develop progressively thinner products, removing physical function keys and implementing touchbars, why would Apple make those decisions? More importantly, why would Apple double down on these decisions in a line refresh of the product 18 months after the initial launch? Presumably Apple is well aware of the number of developers who use their machines, and presumably Apple is aware of developer feedback (again: basic competency as an organization).
So let's reframe this question as follows: why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised? A very reasonable answer is that customers in the aggregate - developers included - don't care that much about the touchbar or the virtual function keys, and will continue to buy the products.
Regardless of my own opinion about the keyboard design, I try to approach this from the perspective that as a single individual with vastly fewer resources than Apple, I likely have a fundamentally less perfect understanding of Apple's product goals, customer demographic and design initiatives. So if I see an incongruence that seems to have a simple answer ("Why doesn't Apple just do the thing everyone clearly wants"), my instinct is that my priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.
Apple has built a substantial quality lead over competitors, over the years. That gives them a lot of room to make mistakes (like removing a useful key from the keyboard) while maintaining sales. That doesn't mean every decision they make is perfect.
Think of the thickness thing - Apple made billions of dollars before it wasn't even possible to make razor thin laptops. Is razor-thinness, to the point of losing port connectivity in a Pro device, really necessary or optimal?
Your charitable estimation of Apple's competency and baseline rationality is a reasonable one and absolutely could be correct, and I agree it would follow that your priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.
But I find jdietrich's argument totally plausible. They could have tons of negative user feedback that they ignored. "They" probably being a handful of designers (so the total number of talented people at Apple is basically irrelevant). Apple's always had a certain arrogance. They (believe they) know what customers want better than their customers do: in this case a thinner and thinner laptop. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they lose their way and I end up with a really expensive MacBook Pro that I hate typing on.
I've certainly seen a few cases inside Google where a small team ignored dogfood feedback from other Googlers ("you aren't the user", basically), then were shocked when they got the same feedback from real users. It's absolutely possible for a small number of people inside a giant organization to make decisions that later bite them. I don't have any particular reason to believe Apple's immune to this.
>why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised?
Because their approach to design is completely unique. Their industrial design studio is small, insular and incredibly secretive. That studio has almost complete independence; most Apple employees won't see a new product until the design is finalised and ready for launch. They have an overt belief in the wisdom of ignoring user feedback and media criticism, going back to the original Macintosh. They don't think that their role is to provide people with what they want, but what they should want.
That approach is one of Apple's greatest assets. They were right to ignore the people who said that a computer needed serial ports and a floppy disk drive. They were right to ignore the people who said that a phone needed buttons. They're willing to ignore conventional wisdom and the demands of the market in favour of a singular design vision for what technology should be. They're willing to tell their customers trust us, this is for the best. That approach is necessary if you're going to be a highly innovative company that creates entire new categories of product, but it's not right 100% of the time and it can be infuriatingly stubborn.
The strain relief on the MagSafe connector was too short. Any cable manufacturer would tell you that it was too short. Any electrical engineer would tell you that it was too short. The internet was full of pictures of frayed (and sometimes charred) MagSafe cables. The Apple store website was full of one-star reviews for MagSafe power adaptors that had frayed. Apple did nothing for over five years until a class action forced their hand; they offered replacements, but didn't fix the defect.
To answer your question, it is because Apple is an example of a company where the design people have run amok.
They don't want to improve the keyboard, because it would make the laptop slightly less thin, and the people with the power, (the design department) don't want that.
Just because Apple has lots of people working there, doesn't mean that the RIGHT people are in charge.
No company is perfect. And although apples religious focus on design has helped it in the past, this time it seems to have hurt thebl company.
And maybe they will learn from their mistakes or maybe they wont.
It could be that the keyboard is actually amazing, that the concerns are overblown, and that the engineers, developers, journalists, and consumers that have been complaining about it are either lying for some reason or lack the perspective to realize what is and isn't important to their workflow.
It could be that it would be a huge public image loss to admit that they were wrong about this. No matter how Apple phrases it, it's always look bad to say "we've spent the last 2-3 years telling you this was a technical achievement, turns out we were wrong." One of Apple's biggest marketing angles is "we put the work in and get it right the first time." That's going to be something that people mock them over, regardless of whether or not it's the right decision to make.
It also might open the floodgates on more expensive litigation and warranty requirements in the future. Apple's current warranty that they just rolled out is only valid up to 3 years after the initial purchase. Is a judge more likely to force them to extend it if a lawyer can argue in court "they lacked so much confidence that they reverted their own design?" Are their significant investments into blocking Right to Repair going to be hampered by that kind of public admission?
They've also invested large amounts of money into the current manufacturing process and design. Their recent decision to discontinue the 2015 model might point to this being about manufacturing costs - you could ask the same question of that decision: "why not allow the holdouts to keep purchasing the older model?"
Along with that, it could also be sunk-cost fallacy at play. One way to check if Apple has a problem with sunk-cost is to look back in the past to see if they've exhibited a pattern of doubling down on controversial decisions and rejecting criticism or blaming customers for issues.
It also could just be that the keyboard looks sexier in advertisements, and perhaps Apple optimizes for advertisements over extended customer experience because they have enough built up goodwill and reputation to do so. The devices might sell better right now when marketed as futuristic status symbols, rather than as practical machines.
Finally, don't dismiss the idea that it could just be the result of designers and engineers running wild without enough practical input to reign them in. I'm all for giving companies the benefit of the doubt, and I understand what you're getting at. But you should apply your philosophy in moderation or else someday you'll find yourself defending Microsoft Bob. Companies are made of people after all.
I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the size of the problem with the keyboard. Apple has had atleast three class action lawsuits regarding the defective keyboards. They have setup a warranty program to try and placate consumers and resolve the lawsuits. It's a real problem and just because it did not impact you does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted. So here we are, I'm a developer of 1 and have been impacted you're a developer of 1 and have not been impacted. It doesn't make yours or my experience any less real but I think the class action lawsuits speak for themselves. For me personally, it's hard to write a lot of code when keys don't hit or they endlessly repeat. So, I picked up a Lenovo and through Linux on it and ditched the MBP.
I honestly don't know how any of the other market shares can put up with this failing keyboard either. For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.
> It's a real problem and just because it did not impact you does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted.
This is a good point, which I acknowledge. Maybe I've been lucky with my keyboard. But while you point this out, I think most folks complaining about the keyboard are not acknowledging the other side - that it may not be as important as they think it is either. Hence my original comment indicating my own opinion.
> For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.
For what it's worth, I wrote a ~170 page paper (in LaTeX) on a 2016 MacBook Pro. I cared a lot more about screen real estate than the keyboard, so I added a few monitors. All anyone seems to be able to provide is an exchange of anecdotal evidence for or against the keyboard. If there's a real issue I'm not defending it. But I am saying it might not be worth it for Apple to fix it depending on incidence rate, and it might not be as prevalent as the tech blogging/journalism sphere would have us believe.
Actually it is more widespread than the blogging would have you believe as most people don't blog. They just take the computer in and pay for it to be fixed and go back to life.
If your keyboard ever breaks and you find yourself unable to type, then you will discover why people with defective keyboards think its super important. Until then you can minimize the impact it has on people all day long as they cannot type properly without an external keyboard. I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...
You're not discussing this in good faith, and I don't understand why you feel the need to be passive aggressive in response to my comments. You also seem to be almost willfully misreading what I'm saying.
To make this particular point painfully clear, I didn't postulate the problem is not widespread because literally only bloggers have the problem, and there are relatively few bloggers. My postulate was that the problem seems more widespread than it is due to the magnifying effect journalism and blogging has. If you disagree then critique the point I made, not the contrived false equivalence you seem to think I made.
Other than that yes, I've had a broken keyboard on a laptop, and no, I'm not minimizing anything. Devil's advocacy and a request for some quantitative evidence (which was elsewhere provided, and to which I conceded) does not constitute minimization or dismissal of a problem. This especially:
> I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...
is a false dichotomy, and one which I did not make.
> because literally only bloggers have the problem
It could be the ambiguous way you've phrased this, but if I'm reading this right, then that's what you're not getting: a lot of people actually do have this problem. Not just bloggers.
I don't think we have enough information to know whether or not "millions were affected." Neither class-action lawsuits nor a warranty program nor complaints on Hacker News prove this one way or the other.
Sorry, I was spouting hyperbole to counter-act hyperbole. You're right, that is not helpful, I agree. As someone says below: Only Apple can conclusively provide the numbers and they have no desire to do so. So, everyones opinion is just that. Anecdotal and an opinion because _no one_ can back up their claims. I'll take my statement back though, because it's not useful to fight hyperbole with hyperbole. What I can say is, I was impacted twice and I have since switched vendors.
I strongly disagree with you that I was being hyperbolic. In fact, my comment (the one you responded to) did not quantify anything, much less in a hyperbolic way. I expressed an opinion. As it stands, your comment is a pretty passive aggressive way to withdraw a statement.
> I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the size of the problem with the keyboard.
Actually the opposite is true.
Apple itself has said it is a tiny, tiny percentage of users. If they were to lie about this then it would be an SEC violation since they would be lying to markets about potential impact of replacements/lawsuits.
So I use a lot of different keyboards - my main ones are a whitefox with blue switches and a CODE with greens. I actually like the MBP keyboard - key stability and clickiness are the parameters I like, and the MBP has both.
My problem with the keyboard is just reliability - I now keep a can of compressed air at my desk just because a key is going to get screwed up at least once a month. And I have one key that is particularly bad, so I assume some piece of dust is just trapped under the key and the compressed air pushes it somewhere until it eventually falls back into place. I'm waiting a little longer to bring it in for repair in hopes that they start using this new v3 keyboard as a replacement - maybe it secretly fixes the dust issue (And they don't want to say it because that would be admitting that there was a problem.)
mainly interested in this news to learn if they'll start exchanging 2016/17 mbps for this new model.
Does the new keyboard require dozens of tiny screws to assemble/dissemble?
I may be wrong but I was under the impression the difficulty in replacing the keyboard is due to it being fused to the battery. You pretty much have to replace both when attempting to replace one or the other.
Yeah, that is the issue. A keyboard replacement means replacing both battery and keyboard because they are glued together.
But I have heard that they were replacing older keyboards (2016) with 2017 models (You could easily tell because they add new symbols above control/option.) I wonder if they'll be doing replacements with 2018 keys now. It would be really nice - the keyboard reliability is pretty much my only complaint, minus not having a physical escape key.
That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes. You're basically saying, "Whatever Apple sells I will buy, regardless of its qualities." That strikes me as a strange stance to take.
You act as though I said I wanted to use something outlandish as a keyboard, like a reprogrammed toaster. The MacBook Pro is a qwerty keyboard. It doesn't have the full function row or numpad, yes, but it's fundamentally a usable keyboard.
I'm not "basically saying whatever Apple sells I will buy", and to think that would indicate you have an unrealistically uncharitable interpretation of my comment. In fact, I explicitly stated elsewhere in this thread that screen real estate matters to me.
If you feel strongly about the keyboard, that's fine. But that's not intrinsic to your capacity as a developer, it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.
There's a fundamental difference between a keyboard whose feel I might not like (travel distance, click feel) and a keyboard which has been reported to fail catastrophically from the smallest bits of dust.
If Apple decided to go for a chiclet, or other variety of keyboard, I probably wouldn't care. I'd deal with that. In this case, though, I pretty much have to expect (based on news and class action lawsuits) that it will stop working correctly, in a matter of months, in a way which directly impacts my productivity. I'll use one at work if I have to, but there's no way I'd buy one for home while the keyboard is that unreliable.
To be clear, I'm talking about the design of the thing here. There are two different conversations being had - one is about a dislike of the design, the other is about the hardware reliability of the thing.
>> it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.
I find that people who take themselves very seriously tend to project their preferences on others.
As it relates to laptops for developers-- not agreeing on things like keyboards, matte screens, aspect ratios, touchscreens, etc. - that can elicit very strong absolutist responses from them.
I think what OP is saying is: I'm not picky about the keyboard. I can relate -- I actually prefer the new keyboard -- but also still like the old one (my work laptop), as well as two other external keyboards I switch between (a mechanical keyboard and another wireless keyboard). There's keyboards out there I don't like -- but there's plenty more that I do. So I think overall, Macbook could probably ship with any of these keyboards and it wouldn't be a factor affecting my purchasing decision. That's probably what OP means.
>> That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes.
This is true, but not everyone is picky about keyboards.
I started using mechanicals in the 80s, and I know a lot of people think it's the only way to type, but I actually don't like mechanicals any more.
Today, I use a dome keyboard (shudder!) as my daily driver and I can adapt to most keyboards, regardless of feel.
So while I get what you're saying, the OP is probably implying that he/she can adapt to different keyboard types -- as such keyboard type is not a meaningful selection criterion for him/her.
The only time I ever use a laptop keyboard directly is when I'm on a plane. I travel with an external keyboard and mouse. This is partially for ergonomic reasons, and partially preference. I like having a larger keyboard and full numberpad. So I agree with this comment completely. The keyboard would never be a factor in purchase for me.
Add me to the list of people who don't give a crap about the keyboard, so long as it's functional. The #1 thing I was looking for when I opened the page was...
"how many relevant ports does it have? will I have to carry around a dongle to do the same things I can do on my 2015 MBP without a dongle? oh wait.. nope still need dongles."
And then "Wait why is the 13 inch form factor not even getting discrete graphics processing, nor up to 32GB ram?"
A dysfunctional keyboard is a no-no, because I need a functional keyboard. But in general I'm not bothered at all about the other things that are important to other people, such as key travel, etc. So I haven't been vocal about it.
Wanting a functional keyboard on a laptop is a niche opinion? Wowwwwww. The reality distortion field is strong.
I've used every MacBook model and the new ones have unacceptably bad keyboards. I am in an office with dozens of broken ones and the things have become a joke amongst the developers. The IT department got so tired of Apple's time to repair them that they started just ordering extra keys from third party websites for $20/each.
I worked at Apple with Steve Jobs and I can assure you he would not say that the keyboard isn't meaningful and its fine if its broken. There is a reason all the major Apple bloggers have written piece after piece about their poor reliability and repairability. If your space bar breaks with one piece of dust you need to replace the entire top of the computer including the battery since its glued to it.
> Wanting a functional keyboard on a laptop is a niche opinion? Wowwwwww. The reality distortion field is strong.
This is a deliberate misreading of what I said. My point is that reasonable people can disagree about what a "functional keyboard" is for software development. You're free to disagree with me, but don't accuse me of being under a "reality distortion field." And for what it's worth, the comment of mine that you responded to is talking about design and aesthetic choices. You're primarily talking about hardware faults and reliability.
The source comment was not about design and aesthetic choices. Here is the first comment that you responded to: “What we want is a functional keyboard”
We want a functional keyboard. This is not about reasonable people disagreeing. If your space bar does not work, your keyboard is broken and typing sucks.
Developers are more likely to use software that's designed for multiple platforms, without priority given to the Mac. (I guess if you assume not all developers live their life in Xcode.)
This means that developers are more likely to be regularly using software that actually depends on the keys they stripped off to make the touchbar, and/or software with sub-par to nonexistent touchbar support.
Most developers I know use rarely touch the laptop keyboard. On my desk I have a bunch of monitors and an awesome mechanical keyboard. The only time I need the built-in keyboard is when I'm away from my desk.
i for one love the new keyboards, i don't give a damn about the touchbar and i dislike the battery usage, but the keyboard to me is near perfect. When i type on the old model now the keys feel overly mushy and inaccurate. Maybe people just give it a try for more than 20 minutes.
Take a look at the photos for a moment. Curious what the keyboard is like? Too bad - Every single photo shows the keyboard from the side.
Ah but you can still tell something. If there's anything to the idea that a picture sends a message or that there's such a thing as "visual language," this group of photos is loudly and stubbornly doubling down on "Thin is all that matters."
Customer: "Does the keyboard work this time?"
Apple: "IT'S THIN!"
Considering that the drive toward thinness is precisely what's ruining the keyboards, that tells you plenty, without even reading anything.
Every single photo shows the keyboard from the side.
This is standard operating practice for an international firm like Apple. The first set of images doesn't show certain details because you want it to have broad appeal. Since Apple keyboards come in a dozen or so different configurations for different markets, you show the more vague master images.
Once the global media outlets have had their splash, then the regionals will get images with more details. In this case, the regional keyboards.
Your detailed knowledge and mild tone-deafness places you inside Apple's marketing apparatus, particularly the part about a conspiracy. Who said anything about a conspiracy? A group of people conspiring to make crap keyboards, perhaps. What song can you play in the background to convince me otherwise?
Now way, this is ridiculous that not a single picture shows even a glance of keyboard. They just don't show you half of the laptop (and the other part is screen which you can't say much without seeing it in person).
Why’s that a relevant argument? The web site is localised, the physical objects are localised, surely it’s not beyond them to take localised photos of localised keyboards for their localised versions of their site?
(I’ve just looked at some of their locations, and German seems to use photos with German text on screen, while Greek seems to use photos with English on screen).
It reminds of the nForce chipset from 15 years ago. It was a godsend. The audio chip had an optical input, rivaled the best consumer-grade audio sound card, true dolby 5.1, etc. and... reviewers tanked it.
When the next generation of north/southbridge motherboard appeared and sound wasn't a priority for motherboard builders only then journalists noticed what they missed.
In the article they cite the MBP as being the most popular notebook for developers so this niche must be important, otherwise why list it?
That "most popular" is marketing - they have all of the developers running OSX and most of those are probably on MBP or Air, where developers using Windows or Linux are fragmented across multiple models from multiple manufacturers.
Here's the thing - I am big on ergonomics, keyboard and trackpads are always a super high priority for me.
At my desk I have a Topre Realforce 88UB 45g keyboard that cost me like £200, a Razer Blackwidow for gaming, and a Microsoft Sculpt to switch it up.
I'm fairly big on keyboards, but I do love the new MBP keyboard.
I can't remember the old one enough now (I had the 2014 model previously), but I know I spoke of it as the best laptop keyboard - so I agree I probably rate it more than this one, BUT I am so used to typing on this now that I really don't think about the keyboard as a con in the slightest - you have to sit with it for a few weeks and you'll be flying - I break 120wpm on this because there is practically no travel.
What I DO hate, is that effing touchbar. Worst design decision on this laptop. I am 'over' it in that I can work fine with it and don't feel like it hinders me anymore, but everytime I look at it I get annoyed they are still sticking with it.
The only two cons of this MBP now it has a spec refresh -> touchbar sucks and not having ONE USB-A slot really pisses me off everytime I reach for the adapter...
Agree about the keyboard speed. I can fly on the new keyboard (2017). My only complaint is the noise which they seemed to have attempted to address in the 2018.
Internet hearsay (Apple store/reseller staff quoted in podcasts etc.) often mentions that the MacBook Air is (was?) their best-selling laptop. It has no TouchBar, more keyboard travel, a smaller trackpad, arguably more useful ports, and longer battery life. If the trade-offs in the latest MacBook Pro were universally loved, why wouldn't they spread into Apple's other, more popular product lines?
I honestly don't see how their current laptop line-up makes any sense for consumers (and shareholders). If the TouchBar really makes it easier for non-nerds to find shortcuts, why only offer it in high-end laptops?
The Air is their best-selling laptop because: (1) it's by far the cheapest and (2) it's tiny. It's also extremely outdated -- people universally love the retina screen but the Air doesn't have that either. Also, rumor has it the Air is being replaced this fall, so we won't see what features make it downstream until then.
The above is to disagree with all of your specific arguments, but I do not disagree with your implied conclusion -- I don't think the touch bar is universally loved. I suspect most consumers do not care about it one way or the other, and I think it was a mistake that Apple should kill.
Fair enough. In any case, the MacBook Pro hasn't been Apple's laptop for the masses in a long time, unlike what r0fl implied. We can't infer from its design what 90% of customers want.
Longtime Mac user (I had an Apple II+). I've had a new MBP since Jan '17. Replaced a five year old MBA. The keyboard itself isn't terrible (although my left command key seems to be going, so yay) the Touch Bar is worthless. I simply cannot fathom who though putting something non-tactile on the keyboard was a good idea. I was so hoping they brought back regular fxn keys with the next iteration.
One of the key tenets of touch typing instruction is to NOT LOOK at the keyboard. And the lack of universal control over iTunes is admittedly a first world problem however they didn't replace it with anything meaningful. I've had this machine for 18 months and I have found zero utility in the touch bar.
I'm very curious to try the new BlackMagic eGPU though!
honestly, I don't think a touchbar is "bad" so much that the implementation may not've been the best. Maybe as an external piece of hardware like Microsoft's dial where I could use it for the cases it seems best suited for (sliders, picture thumbnails to render full screen on display, etc.), that would've been optimal. Although, I would've probably preferred a Magic Trackpad-sized device with a touch screen instead of a long bar. Would seem to allow for more use cases.
Though honestly, I was never much for the f keys beyond the browser and in Visual Studio. So the loss of those keys didn't hit me as much as it has others.
The MacBook Air competes with Chromebooks. It lost the low end to Chromebooks, and I see more and more high end MacBook Air users switching to Chromebooks as well. Neither the Air nor Chromebooks currently target developers.
Most of Apple's shareholder value these days comes from the fucking iPhone and iPad. They won't be terribly hurt by switching back. This is purely marketroid-driven product design, and if it keeps up it'll bust Apple back down to also-ran status.
(Not that Jobs wasn't a Dire Marketroid himself, but at least he knew that practical and functional sells better in the long run than snazzy but busted.)
I don’t necessarily agree that it’s what most people want. I think the reason that most people keep buying macs is because of MacOS. It is so nice to have a UNIX-based OS with great UI, so we keep buying the overpriced, out-of-date, defective laptops because we have no other choice. I’m convinced that a solid, secure, reliable and polished Unix-based OS for developers would quickly wipe out a large segment of Apple’s market share.
I think that's right. Our only two options are the Linux desktop with its high-maintenance potential of timesink, and Windows that, while it has improved, suffers from an authoritarian approach to things like reboots, updates, ability to customize and so forth. I use Windows 10 + MobaXTerm after moving off of the increasingly annoying MacBook design choices.
But there's something far worse: killer apps (for some professionals and hobbyists) only exist for Mac OSX and Windows. I'm looking at you, Adobe.
Linux has improved a lot in the last couple of years. Even on state-of-the-art hardware you can expect reasonable support if you choose a distro that uses a recent kernel (ie. Manjaro instead of stock debian).
I've been using a 8th gen computer for a year and I haven't had any problems. On the contrary the hevc hardware decoder/encoder works on linux, but I couldn't get it to work on Windows.
On the other hand Windows looks more polished than KDE and GNOME.
Having recently built an AMD gaming rig and bought a Aero 15 laptop with the latest 8th gen chip and installed the latest Ubuntu on both, not everything works out of the box (sensors and discrete graphics specifically), but both machines did everything I asked of them.
I've long felt that the greatest threat to Linux on the desktop (for the past ~15 years) has been OSX, not Windows.
We all want a solid and reliable UNIX-based OS, but we also want an OS that won't be treated as a bastard child by hardware and software vendors. As much as we all love the world of free software, sometimes we actually do want/need to use commercial software as well.
Apple has given us what we fundamentally want, so we just put up with all the baggage that comes along with it. After all, what else are we going to do? Use Windows?
I have been going back and forth for many years between Linux and MacOS. In 2013, I just got annoyed at how finicky it was to get something compiled. I ended up with a Mac at my current job at the beginning, but a year into it, I had enough.
Ubuntu has been a fine OS for me. It's not perfect, but it serves its purpose well enough.
Agreed... we need another apple that makes laptops and polishes the linux OS that it comes with (great software/hardware integration). I'll buy those over macs
Curious. Have you tried Gnome Shell or recent KDE or some modern Linux desktop like that for a while?
Because I always assumed MacOS as a Unix with shiny UI as well, however once I worked on one for a year or two I realized it long lost its uniqness. In many ways the UI is closer to Windows 7 than Windows 10 is. And things like Unity/Gnome Shell or even win 10 long went in a more productivity focused UI concept.
>> Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts? No touchbar, smaller touchpad than the newer macbooks, but updated specs? Call it Macbook Developer... We build the software for the "Pros" after all.
> They didn't do that because it is not what most people want.
What's your basis for saying that, besides the assumption that Apple can't be wrong, so whatever it's doing must be what people actually want?
Apple has a habit of designing from an ivory tower and not admitting to its mistakes. I would say it's arguable that their design priorities are currently out of whack: chasing thinness when you're going from 1.5in to 0.75in is one thing, it's quite another when you're going from 18mm to 15mm. It may not be a fatal mistake for them, but it's evidence that they may longer deserve the design deference they've traditionally gotten.
> Apple has to make changes that will sell more laptops to the masses to maximize shareholder value.
Many of those changes could be characterized as pointless sidegrades: merely change for change's sake.
> They didn't do that because it is not what most people want.
> Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products
So either you're wrong, or Apple's PR team is really bad positioning their product. From the Press Release itself in the first few paragraphs:
ideal for manipulating large data sets, performing complex simulations, creating multi-track audio projects or doing advanced image processing or film editing.
Already the most popular notebook for developers around the world, the new MacBook Pro can compile code faster and run multiple virtual machines and test environments easier than before.
MacBook Pro now delivers faster performance for complex simulations and data manipulation.
With the new MacBook Pro, developers can compile code faster and more easily run multiple virtual machines and test environments.
Aren't those all features described exactly for the "niche developer/macrumors posters"?!
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that those niche developer/macrumors posters are part of the described target audience, but no in the sense that they are a small fraction of the described target audience.
I believe this is a case of a disparity between who they say their products are for (power users), and who they are actually for (people who want to think of themselves as power users).
This would be similar to, for example, many sportswear brands who say they are for professional athletes, but whose primary consumer base is... not.
In both cases, they may still attract the audience they claim to target, but in practice, that niche market makes up only a small fraction of their total sales.
> I believe this is a case of a disparity between who they say their products are for (power users), and who they are actually for (people who want to think of themselves as power users).
That's true for most gaming rigs and high-end Windows laptops ;-)
computer advert in 2018, truth in advertising version:
"stalk your ex on Facebook, 37% faster"
"Cat videos on youtube look great in Retina full screen"
"Your stolen music files sound fab thanks to deeper bass response from the stereo speakers"
"chat with your dumb friends for hours, with a new longer-lasting battery"
"call in sick without removing your phone from its case, thanks to bluetooth."
Other than dying batteries, or physical damage (broken trackpad/keyboard) I seriously wonder why the average person needs anything but the most basic laptop when a $99 android phone is in all measures more powerful than a 10 year old laptop but we're doing basically the same activities: surf the web, chat, email. Very, very few people create content. Most consume.
YouTube videos don’t serve 4K on Safari. When they do, it’s over Chrome which is using 10W more powerr, which over entire world equals power use of a small country...
Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake have full hardware VP9 decoding, so all told you'll probably be using more energy playing H.264 in Chrome if you're on a Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake processor.
Yes, been using that. Problem is that YouTube quietly removed 1440p h264 videos too! Used to be my indicator that I can turn off h264ify for a minute to view 4k content...
Nicely put. People also like to buy over-featured products for “bragging rights” (huge pick up trucks used to go shopping, ultralight trekking gear for 5 km hikes, €300 knives to cut apples in slices etc.)
I'm reminded of the recent "news story" making the rounds, that some researchers found iPhone ownership to be the clearest signal of wealth.
"Signal"
There is a lot of signaling going on, using these product choices. And Apple's at the top of the heap.
It has transitioned from "tech" to "brand".
I've seen people write off William Gibson's more recent work, that takes this on as a central topic for examination and exposition. It may not be as... "awesome" as the universe of Molly and Wintermute. But it's a very good and engaging application of creating writing to this topic. Recommended.
I agree with you, but also think there might be more nuance going on here than all that.
I think this is actually sometimes about minimalism. I'd rather have one nice, good, high-quality thing than to accumulate junk over the years as I get deeper into a hobby. The longest hike I've done was a three-day section hike on the AT, but I have ultralight hiking and camping gear. I know, in the future, when I have more time, I'll do longer and more frequent hikes, and even now, lighter is more comfortable to carry.
There's also the Paradox of Choice. Upper middle class folks are strapped for time and flush with cash. Would I rather spend two hours reading reviews to find out whether the discount pocket knife is really as good for my purposes as a Benchmade, or just make the purchase secure in the knowledge that I bought a well-regarded brand with excellent customer service? Maybe I overpaid, but the speed and hassle-free nature of the transaction are worth it.
Well, in this case, the deluxe/upsell machine is just the wrong tool for the job. An overbuilt kitchen knife, a high-performance light truck, or ultralight hiking gear will generally accomplish those tasks as well or better than a mid-market alternative. A new MacBook Pro is worse for most developers than one from a couple years ago, and worse in all sorts of other ways (namely the slashing of battery capacity in exchange for an ultimately minor reduction in size and weight).
I have to admit I've gone through a few, but my daily driver can be found for ~ $30 online if you watch for it. I also spend good money on sharpeners, etc. Ironic? yes.
“complex simulations” strikes me as particularly wannabe-ish. I really do run pretty complex simulations that take hours, sometimes days, to run to completion (on a maxed-out 2012 Mac Mini with dual SSDs and the maximum amount of memory it will support). It would never occur to me to run such stuff on a laptop that might run out of power, throttle back the processor because of heating, or something else going wrong.
“Managing data and complex simulations” seems to allude to ‘em Excel jockeys who should be using a humble database and/or are running some kind of what-if calculations.
Agree with you. I have a ~4k touchbar Macbook Pro and do HPC type of stuff all day... and I rarely consider doing anything more than a toy simulation or computational experiment on my laptop. When I previously used a Macbook Air, my toy PoC stuff ran pretty must just as well.
Anything else either quickly gets offloaded to one of my group's servers with 64-80 threads and 100s of GB of RAM or, if it's even bigger, to the local HPC cluster with 1000s of CPUs.
Even without access to existing resources: I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where, if I have a fixed budget of ~3-5k to do computational work, it'd be better for me to spend that on a top-end MBP than a two-piece solution of laptop+linux server.
A couple months ago, building projections for a rabies elimination program while sitting in a hotel bar in Zambia, I was pretty pleased I wasn't relying on a server.
It's still a big deal, but getting better - my university's running a decently successful program in Kenya.
And yeah, people still use compartmental models pretty heavily. A lot of my stuff is stochastic (it's about the beginning or end of epidemics, or in small populations) so that's nicely parallel.
On the other hand, I do this all the time on my laptop, and have found having some more RAM or a couple more cores to be something that would make my life actively easier.
It’s funny because I “perform complex simulations and handle massive data sets” but no laptop (or even desktop) is capable of handling them. I normally need to SSH to some cluster with thousands of CPU cores and terabytes of RAM. I’m actually kind of curious who the target user is for a high performance laptop nowadays. Video editors? What kinds of tasks require more performance than a standard laptop but less than a desktop?
I currently have a 2012 MBP Retina, but am not sure if I want my next laptop to be another MBP or just the regular MacBook. I really like the 15” screen and would have a hard time giving that up. I wish they had a regular MacBook with a high quality screen, battery, and keyboard and not much else.
I suspect that a ryzen+ or even eypc+ when its out would be good or initial investigations on the desk top and as an interface to a bigger hpc cluster when needed.
I can get a much better idea how my ML models will behave at scale if I prototype on my 16GB MBP than if I only had whatever ram is leftover from 8GB after Chrome and everything use up most of it. It's no match for server GPUs but I can run multiple Jupyter notebooks with decent size datasets loaded and not have to think about it.
> What kinds of tasks require more performance than a standard laptop but less than a desktop?
I suppose it depends on the desktop! I just moved from a MacBook Pro to a Dell XPS 15. I thought I'd replace the MBP with the Dell, but I ended up replacing my desktop machine with the Dell, and still using the MacBook in my dining room.
The XPS 15 I bought has an i9, 32GB RAM, and 1TB SSD for $1100 less than the equivalent MacBook. My workload is primarily Adobe- and WordPress-centric, with some coding and article writing thrown in for good measure.
I do video editing, photo editing, and run code with zero issues. The i9 beats the pants off my Skylake i7 desktop. And it's portable! And the screen is amazing. I have it hooked up to my 5K monitor in my home office, and it's gorgeous.
Since my workload is 98% Chrome, Adobe products, Microsoft products, or text editors, everything was pretty much identical from one platform to another. I turned off automatic updates on Windows 10 (I do this on my Mac too) and had no issues at all migrating over.
I don't think I'll be buying a new Mac at this point.
I also "perform complex simulations and handle massive data sets" and often do mockup on my laptop (where power is nice) before shipping it off to the cluster, and often truck the results back to my laptop for analysis.
> Aren't those all features described exactly for the "niche developer/macrumors posters"?!
Yes, and, trust me, most developers I know who got newer MBPs are pretty happy with theirs. I know I am and I hope I get one of these newer ones next week. 6 cores and 32 gigs of DDR4 make a lot of a difference. The vi users make jokes about the Esc key, of course (but I'm into Emacs, so no problem for me). One company I know of offered the "classic" model for those who wanted to have it and nobody took the offer.
Among developers, the 10% troublesome to 90% happy rate seems to be present.
I, personally, have different priorities and have no problem with thicker laptops. My next personal one will probably be a maxed out Lenovo or Dell XPS, since they are cheaper than Macs at the cost of features I don't really need (high-fidelity screen, for instance).
> I know I am and I hope I get one of these newer ones next week. 6 cores and 32 gigs of DDR4 make a lot of a difference.
Even if they provide 64 GB, it will never be enough RAM. OSX is dogshit at memory management, with massive memory leaks. On my work laptop (-1 generation), I have 16 GB. Normal workloads (i.e. not even developer workloads/compilation tasks) consume memory to the point where I’m constantly swapping. Until they fix their shit, I’m not going to buy a new one, nor will I ask my company (I am good friends with IT) to refresh.
That’s not a remotely true for the vast majority of users. If you’re having this problem, you should push for a clean install because nobody on a dev team full of Macs at two different companies has had your complaint (although plenty have had a Slack or Chrome is leaky/bad memory management complaint)
Ok, then why I do only run into this issue on hardware running OS X? This is across machines (I worked at Apple btw, and had to dogfood Mavericks at the time) and across time. Same problem, it was never fixed.
I run Chrome and Slack on Windows and I never have had memory issues. Using Occam’s Razor, it has to be an issue with memory management at the OS level. I’ve also run Chrome and Slack on Linux - 1/10th of the memory footprint. I will write a blogpost in the future about it.
The developers where I work who have new MBPs complain a lot about the keyboard, the lack of ports, the lack of an escape key, and the lack of an SD card slot.
I had a new MBP for a few months and hated it.
As soon as an old MBP freed up, I traded in for it. SO much happier, and my friends are jealous.
And I pretty much live in emacs. Where I use the escape key regularly. C-x ESC ESC is one of my go-tos.
For me, the trackpad is the thing that got me to get rid of my MBP and replace it with a Pixelbook. I was getting false positive clicks all the time while typing, which would move the cursor and destroyed my productivity. And I was not hitting it accidentally - I contorted my hands into all sorts of strange positions and it still happened, I had people observe me while it occurred, etc. Happened on two different MBPs, but the tech support folks at my company couldn't make it happen. Must be something weird about my capacitive field. Much happier with the Pixelbook, especially since I can now run Android Studio on it along with other Linux apps.
Exactly. The escape key has never been an issue for me either (for what it's worth, I use Spacemacs as my primary editor).
I just open the macOS preferences, and remap Caps Lock to Control. Then escape becomes a Caps Lock + [ combination. Simple, and no fumbling around for an Escape key.
This also works well on both macOS and Linux, especially when moving about the command line (e.g. Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E to move to the beginning/end of the current line, respectively). See [1] for more shortcuts. Especially useful is Ctrl+K to cut text after the cursor, and then Ctrl+Y to paste it back.
Of course, the regular control key will do the same thing. But using Caps Lock as control reduces strain, at least for me. In fact, it's the first change I make on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
And on Ubuntu, gnome-tweak-tool makes it trivial to make Caps Lock and additional Control key (if you really need Caps Lock, you can also swap Caps Lock and Control).
I think this is like cars that market themselves as capable of racing and/or off roading, but people use them to commute in stop and go traffic. Majority of people don't select products for rational/practical reasons.
> The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does. Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products and make up 10% of the complaints then to focus on the 10% of customers who make up 90% of the complaints.
I was very happy with every single MacBook Air since I had one (which I think might have been 3rd generation?), and in fact purchased every single MacBook Air thereafter. People really liked the original Retina MacBook Pros.
This idea that these Pro customers who regularly spend $3,000 on their computers are a fickle whiny bunch who are never happy about anything and have always found something to be upset about is complete fantasy and ignores the reality of an actual degradation in quality.
We didn't just imagine the extension of the warranty on MacBook Pros with butterfly keyboards: Apple had to take action because the computers were ACTUALLY BREAKING. I own one of these, my t key ACTUALLY FELL OFF. I'm not just trying to come up with arbitrary reasons to hate on Apple, the "t" key is not some ivory tower feature only some 10% niche care about, this is a serious quality problem.
No one is saying they shouldn't innovate and come up with gimmicks to sell new computers. In fact, the T2 gimmick might be perfect: they get to tell "the common user" that the computer now runs Siri without compromising existing behavior -- brilliant! Compare this to the Touch Bar, which while flashy infuriates me every single day as I repeatedly mute and unmute my computer as my pinky brushes the touch bar so delicately I don't even register the feeling on my finger.
>The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does.
That's not entirely accurate. The original 15 inch Retina Macbook Pro is an ideal laptop as far as I'm concerned. I'm still holding on to mine for home use. It was extremely well received in development communities at the time of release. On the other hand I have 2017 Touchbar Pro from work and it's horrendous for undocked use, borderline unusable.
Apple has notoriously aggressively focused on a future-facing scalable way. I.e. where they see enough of the market in say 5 years (i.e. firewire, USB-C). However, they have been wrong before, AND I don't think anyone can argue that they aren't focusing on non-mobile hardware right now.
While it's easy to say "just trust apple, they're doing it for the shareholders," I think it's also fair to say that they're losing their touch in this venue.
It used to be the only reason you didn't buy a Mac for pro creative-type work was the price. Now there are many great reasons from ergonomics to computing power.
The 10% are the "word of mouthers" (evangelists) that influence the other 90%.
Apple isn't where it is today because of TV advertising. It's where it is because of brand advocates like the people who are now complaining about the new products.
That niche of developer/macrumors posters USED to be happy with everything Apple did. Under Steve Jobs, it seemed like Macbooks got cheaper every year, with more value. Now, every year the price goes up, but less value.
You can tell no one is clamoring for those features because they're not getting copy-catted.
No one wants that touchbar and Apple themselves just replaced the keyboard so to say its what consumers want is just pure fantasy. There's no data yet. Maybe they'll want this new keyboard but you're assuming anything Apple does is what the consumer wants.
Look at the iPhone SE. For customers who prefer a compact form-factor at a low price point, Apple still make a phone with the body of an iPhone 5 and the guts of an iPhone 6s. It's a niche product, but an important part of the line-up. "Old chassis, new internals" is a standard part of the Apple playbook. Mac sales represent an almost irrelevant part of Apple's revenues, but they're a vital part of the overall Apple ecosystem.
Apple still have the tooling for the 2015 Macbook Pro. The NRE costs to put a modern processor in that chassis would be relatively modes, because it's a much larger chassis with a more straightforward thermal design. The market for such a machine might not be large, but it's extremely important for the health of their ecosystem, because developers developers developers.
Personally, I think that the post-Jobs Apple has developed a nasty case of cargo cultism. Obsessive focus on the user experience has transmuted into obsessive focus on arbitrary design goals - thinner, lighter, fewer ports. They're making record profits thanks to the huge margins on iPhones and the strong vendor lock-in on iOS, but they're burning the goodwill that kept them alive during the lean years. If Apple can't find a way to delight customers rather than frustrate them, they're facing a serious long-term problem.
Then they'd be wrong. You focus on the 5% of people who tell the 95% others what to think.
And you don't ask people what they think, you observe their behavior and hope you can make sense of it. People have no fucking clue what they want. You would have to be insane to ask people for their _opinions_ and expect something you can work with.
If you're used to MacBooks, check out the Surface Laptop or Surface Book.
- The hardware (particularly the keyboard and massive trackpad) is great
- apt-get on WSL is better than homebrew will ever be (powershell too if you have the time to learn it)
- Windows 10 has a dedicated team working on it (Apple has merged iOS and macOS teams since a few years ago, which may be because iOS makes a lot more money).
Same here. My work provides us with Macs (I just got the touchbar one), and 90% of my time is spent in iTerm ssh'd into my linux work desktop with tmux. We had a choice of a ThinkPad, but it is just so goddamn hard to get used to a different trackpad after a mac.
Good to point out that iOS developers want a good solid laptop. It is definitely the case though that there are developers who don't/won't do iOS development but want a solid, well-built laptop with good components, good support, and good drivers. I have no idea if the Surface laptops fit that bill, but I assume they have lots of support from Microsoft.
I've been running a ZBook G3 with Debian 9 and have been having a pretty good experience so far. The laptop feels pretty good but I'm sure a MacBook Pro would be a step up in terms of hardware quality.
I'd be interested in knowing how many people switched from the MBP to the Surface(Book) due to delays and changes/issues in the MBP range.
I bought a first generation Surfacebook a few years ago because I couldn't wait any longer for Apple to release their new MBP range, and I'm glad I didn't wait. It's the best laptop I've ever owned.
Even though I've moved away from .NET dev and work mostly with Ruby and Node it's still my favourite machine to use. I run Debian with minimal problems, and I'm started to get more into WSL, which seems to work brilliantly for all the use cases I've thrown at it.
If the numbers are strong on people moving from MBP to the Surfacebook, then it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for it to become a real option for developers, regardless of whether they want to use Windows or not.
Count me in, for one. My main machine is still the 2013 MBP (2015 MBP at work). But every laptop / portable / desktop I've bought since then has been a Windows machine, because they offer either 1) similar value at a cheaper price, or 2) greater flexibility and usability at the same price. The Surfaces are the best laptops a non-Apple-dev "Pro" can get right now, in my experience. They've got ports, they've got portability, their hardware is now up to par with the best of the Macs.
I still love my 2013 Macbook Pro, but I'm probably not going to be buying a Mac again until they make something of similar usability and flexibility (mostly the keyboard and the ports).
Agreed. I also have the 2013 model and it's a great machine, but it's starting to show its age now, and the keyboard on the Surfacebook is now light years ahead of the MBP. Unless Apple can release a laptop on par with the flagship Windows laptops I cannot see myself buying one.
Coming from windows to mac I just love the simplicity. In windows you have so many options, so many updates, preinstalled apps which I never use. I open the mac, click the app in the dockbar, that's it. All apps scale nicely on the screen, unlike windows on a 4k display, terminal is great.
This. I love this about most modern PC laptops. Sometimes you get some driver issues like I did on this MSI where I had to go through a kernel mailing list and use some python scripts to extract the firmware from Windows to get Wi-Fi working:
But that was also a gaming laptop. Every Dell and HP I've purchased in the past few years works perfectly with the mainline kernel. I've never had an issue with missing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or video drivers for years in a PC laptop.
Trying to get Linux working on a MacBook is a fucking nightmare:
Sorry, but Windows 10 is godawful. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. If you want to sell the surface laptop to power users and developers, you're better off mentioning that you can install Ubuntu (as an actual host OS, not WSL bullshit with Microsoft's spyware still running in the background) just fine on certain models.
I've tried some simple ops stuff on my home computer (Windows), and it's horrible because the alt-tab behaviour is completely ridiculous / arbitrary. Old style was alt-tab goes to previous open window, new one goes ???
I disagree with this sentiment. What makes it "god awful" in your eyes? I've been using it at work for the past year or so, and I've had no real issues to speak of.
Do I like more than Ubuntu (which I use personally)? No, but I find it to be pretty easy to use.
Also, the Ubuntu subsystem has been fantastic for working on remote Linux servers. I was using git bash (or Ubuntu in Virtual Box) previously, but I don't need that anymore. It will freeze once in a while, but it's trivial to get going again.
I feel like the trajectory over the last few years has been to make things worse... I guess if you used Windows 8 a lot it's a bit of an improvement but I still don't feel like it's anywhere near as good as Windows 7 was... I'm not even talking about things like deciding it wants to update and spending half an hour doing that when I'm trying to get work done, it randomly installing Candy Crunch and some other crap automatically one update (again, work machine) or the fact that my start menu stops working surprisingly often (seriously, not sure if this is just my machine but it's damn annoying - it just doesn't do anything when I click on it sometimes)...
But just things like the network settings - they have been making getting to Network and Sharing Centre harder each big update, and the replacement (the new metro-style settings app) is just rubbish in comparison. You can't change an IP address in it, can't easily get to the network status, etc... Network and Sharing Centre wasn't even that good but it would be a big improvement to just can the settings app and go back to the Windows 7 control panel...
I have little insight on spying issues (or how MS compares to what Apple, Google or everyone else is doing regarding that nowadays) but coming from Windows 7 I have zero practical complaints about using Windows 10 over it. I like the WSL bullshit a lot, too.
If you use Windows 10 Pro in an enterprise environment, AD policies can turn off most of the spying (although there have been various issues on that and plenty of other HN threads).
That being said, I don't mind Win 10 when I have to use it. I use it for games and Adobe products and I find it really nice and prefer it to macOS easily.
My main box at home and my laptop at work are both Linux though. Gentoo for life! When it comes to development nothing compares to a good tiling window manager and a solid Linux ecosystem.
If you're used to MacBooks, check out the Surface Laptop or Surface Book.
I’ve also switched from MBP to Surface, couldn’t be happier. Great keyboard, great 3:2 screen (since you can’t buy 4:3 anymore), nice trackpad, WSL is great too. Rather than complain, vote with your wallet.
Having managed a suite of them (SP4's) I disagree veheremently with your assesment. of the 30 I had, 26 had to be returned for repair; fan falures followed by battery issues were the main faults. To add, the dock is just a pile of junk. Utterly worthless, despite an endless series of updates. The Windows 10 team are responsible for Server and Embedded versions of Windows as well as the desktop version. Suggesting that the have a "dedicated" team is mileading.
My experience with WSL has unfortunately been different to yours.
I tried running Docker on it, which was a disaster. WSL doesn't seem to fully implement things that Docker or other Linux apps require. Various network things seem to be half working or absent.
I don't want to start an argument with you on this, I'm glad your experience has been different to mine. I've started using WSL as a simple shell to access a Fedora VM running under Hyper-V.
AFAIR there was a story stating that the windows team is now part of azure and some other project, no longer having its own team.
Apt is so different from homebrew that I don’t think they’re worth comparing directly. Fwiw people run homebrew on ubuntu, presumably because it is «better» (i.e has something to offer over) than apt.
And there’s a lot of applications that don’t work under WSL - a while back, not a single haskell app worked. (I haven’t bothered checking)
I keep wanting to buy a 17" and then walking back from it after seeing/handling 17" laptops in physical stores.
All the bezel-shrinking R&D being done for phones has to reach laptops at some point. I'm seriously losing half an inch of luggable-but-not-lookable space on each side of the screen, plus a good inch below. (I have like the most common 13" Dell in the world; just walking around in the study room of the library I see three more.)
The Apple 17" laptops were about the same size (maybe even smaller) as large 15" laptops though. Presumably, an Apple 17" laptop in this day and age would be pretty manageable size-wise.
I can definitely attest to this, having had one back in the day. Of course back then, everyone else made super-chunky laptops, at least with the cheaper models (so chunky that people bought netbooks because laptops were insufficiently portable.)
I frequently put Apple's 17" laptop in a backpack/case slot designed for 15" normal laptops, and it fit just fine.
I wouldn't mind that either, but OTOH, I don't work on a laptop screen all day as a rule. I'd rather have a compact machine that I can just plug into a screen. I wouldn't mind a Mac Mini style machine with magsafe power and/or an easily detachable docking station.
Without a battery, you'd have to shut down each time you moved from seat to seat. You might as well carry a fast, bootable drive around and treat the actual computer at each seat as the docking station.
My favorite was the first Aluminum Powerbook 12 and 17. I wamted both. I owned the 17 inch. I envied the 12 inch also. The 17 inch was almost the size of a Dell 15 inch at the time, so it wasn't as large it seemed. It was and is my favorite laptop I owned, ever. Well, that or my IBM Thinkpad 600e.
The 2006 17" MacBook Pro only had a resolution of only 1680x1050. A 15" Retina MacBook Pro has a "true" resolution of 2880x1800 but is normally used at an effective resolution of 1440x900. However, you can easily adjust it to be an effective resolution of 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 (the resolution of the last 17" MacBook Pro in 2011).
Of course the effective pixels per inch may make some features too small but the effective PPI of 1680x1050 on a current 15" MacBook Pro is lower than the actual PPI of the last 17" MacBook Pro's screen:
147 PPI 15.4" 1920x1200
133 PPI 17" 1920x1200
129 PPI 15.4" 1680x1050
116 PPI 17" 1680x1050
110 PPI 15.4" 144x900
That was back in the day when you had to buy Apple's 17" model just to get the same number of pixels on your screen as everyone else's 15" model. Apple had worse density than the competition back then.
Then a few years passed, and Apple went all-in on high-DPI "Retina" displays, while the whole PC laptop world had a great display regression.
I also think that part of there are economic and organizational commitment reasons the touchbar is still getting made. I do not think it is because people love the touchbar.
Color me optimisitic, but I'm hopeful a new arm-based mac will come earlier than 2020, though.
It seems to me the touchbar was just a clever way to get their own processor into their laptops for some large scale real-world testing before they ditch intel and build the entire thing themselves. 2020 is a good guess I'd say.
I'm surprised this is the first time I've seen the "touchbar as a way to get the A-series chips into macbooks" take. It's the most sensible explanation.
Even without the Touchbar, using the T1 for securing the TouchID sensor (amongst the other duties it fulfills) would've been justification enough. So no, that's no excuse for the Touchbar.
Maybe the Touchbar was just a "clever" way to prepare all of us for sole touch-based input, which is going to be included in the MBP in 2020. ;-)
P.S.: I don't even think touch-only input is neccessarily a bad idea. All Apple has to do to make it work is to implement some kind of really good haptic feedback which also allows to feel individual keys. I even expected that for this iteration of the MBP for the Touchbar.
Re: your P.S.: If a touch keyboard could give haptic feedback that let us distinguish between a "correct" keypress and a missed one, it might work. Perhaps a pleasant haptic vibration in proportion to how close to center your finger strikes would work.
Sure, there are downsides to the touchbar (I get it), but I'd suggest we ask this question: where does Apple want to go with the touchbar? Instead of focusing on where it is right now, think about what it could be.
With haptic feedback and perhaps different locations/placement, it has the potential to augment or even transform the ways we interact with the computer.
Put another way, the current problems are not insurmountable. Changing habits is not easy. What if there are better options than current keyboards? All I'm saying is consider what might be in the works.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we should blindly accept anything Apple does. But we should not blindly assume that their decisions are based on the worst intentions, either.
I kinda wish they were able to implement the touchbar in some sort of hybrid way, like those Art Lebedev keyboards we all saw hyped (but probably never in person) back in the day.
While I'll admit there are cool things you can do with embedded OLED displays, the keys they sacrificed for it are keys I actually need to press. Regularly.
That's the sunk cost fallacy. If the traditional function keys would sell better than the new touchbar, their best move would be to start selling the old ones right away, even if that meant "throwing money away" on r&d.
>They have to recover the money spent on TouchBar R&D. We won’t see a proper MacBook Pro until 2020.
The amount of money spent on the TouchBar has nothing to do with anything. Apple makes a new set of chips for each new iPhone, iPad and Mac; they have the in-house expertise and the budget to make whatever they want whenever they want.
It's not like the Mac division has it's own profit/lost statement it has to worry about.
The main reason why it's taken this long to get MacBook Pros to this level of performance is due to delays by Intel; simple as that.
Web developer here. The MacBook Air is fast enough for me, so I am very much interested in thinner, lighter, and non-performance related features (Touch Bar and Touch ID) in the Pro lineup.
Do you speak on behalf of all "developers?" The 2016 revision is Apple's fastest-selling iteration of the MBP.
I notice you don't quote two paragraphs right before that:
> The butterfly keyboard design Apple introduced in 2016 has been divisive. Some people really like it, claiming it has fast travel and a sturdy, responsive feel to it. Others feel it's uncomfortable to type on. We haven't seen a keyboard this polarizing in a long time; it's a point of passionate disagreement even among Ars Technica reviews staff.
The reaction is mixed, even among people who compare laptops to each other for a living. But you make it sound like anybody who knows what they're doing would prefer the old model.
> The 2016 revision is Apple's fastest-selling iteration of the MBP.
This is after an (at the time) abnormally long period of little to no substantial updates to the laptops. If you remember at the time, people were worrying about the lack of a new laptop the way they worry now about the Mac Pro. It's really not completely fair to state this metric without the realization that there was a lot of pent up demand for modern components, which would probably overrule any other issues. I was one of the people that bought the 2016 model -- and I'm not happy (not least of which because one of the keys literally fell off), so "fastest selling" != "well received". As it stands now, for me the defining quality of the hardware is that it is the easiest way to run macOS. The fact that the 2015 model and the Air keep selling so well is in my opinion a better demonstration of the "reception" of this new MacBook.
> The reaction is mixed, even among people who compare laptops to each other for a living. But you make it sound like anybody who knows what they're doing would prefer the old model.
This is also just not a fair representation of the actual state of affairs. Regardless of whether the keyboards are enjoyable when functional, the reality is that they have quality issues. Apple having to create a program for replacing the keyboards since they break so often is just a fact. Interestingly enough, I'm in this camp: I really have no issue with the new keyboard except for the fact that the keys break. Well, that and the Touch Bar which is a separate topic.
Independent of the like or dislike of the keyboard, it is interesting to highlight that Apple will employ the classic PID style of marketing speak.. (as in like PID controller).
what I mean is, if they are selling a ton and its sustained best case scenario), then they talk about that number (thats the proportional term) -- they say things like "we are shipping 1k units per day and projected to hit 50k per month soon".
If they are they aren't selling very many, then they find the derivative of the number sold and see when it is the highest.. "like in a weekend we sold 1 million units!!"
And then if its a slow burn after a period of time they eventually tell you a cumulative number that have sold (integral). "There have been 100 million macs sold to date.." that kind of thing..
So when somebody says "fastest selling", that gives me pause because it basically can mean whatever you want it to mean -- that somehow they have a metric of sales within a period of time of their choosing that was higher than other previous devices. That could literally be because of their ability to fulfill them compared to previously.
Anyway, I'm still holding onto my MBP 2012 and waiting for basically a lighter version of it that has the ability to replace internal M.2 cards (not proprietary), ability to max out my ram and also doesn't have a touchbar.. I mean that touchbar is so lame.. what a waste of effort/time on apples side.. also, talk about fixing something that wasn't broken -- the trackpad.. basically up until the force trackpad people thought it was better than anything else out there by a factor of 10, and apple then changes it and basically everybody says its substantially worse feeling except novice users who know no different..
You are wording my exact thoughts. mid-2015 13" MBP was good balance.
They've played this thinness and flashy lights game too much too long. My new Lenovo T480S (24GB DDR4, is coming next week :) Sweet Linux with i3 tiled window manager. All the ports & productivity I can ask for.
I'm voting with my wallet and my vote doesn't go to Apple.
I just looked up my laptop's info: 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 from 2012. So you are telling me 6 years later, I can get a 2.9GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 processor for ~$2800. So Moore's law was incorrect?
I believe Moore's law hasn't been true since before 2012
Anyway, yes, this is why a lot of people, myself included, think the new MBPs are not at all worth the price, especially if you have an older one. There is essentially no reason for me to ever upgrade from my late 2013 model unless it completely breaks. I love this computer, it was probably one of the best purchases I've ever made
Who are we to believe has a grasp of the reality of value-for-money? Hacker News commenters smugly declaring that Macbooks are junk? Or Apple's sales figures?
If we're going to be rational, we can't wave it all off as marketing or shiny toys, we have to accept that if they are consistently selling tons of products at high margins, they are delivering value, and the market is voting for that value with their pocketbooks.
If we say, "Well, their prices are out of whack with their value because we can get the exact same thing from Bob's Motherboards for half the price," then we are wilfully choosing to emphasize the part of their value that their customers don't care about, while ignoring the part of their value that customers care about.
Moore's Law is with respect to transistor counts and has nothing at all to do with performance.
Historically speaking transistors and performance were coincidentally related: More transistors helped do more things at once, and tinier transistors ran faster than bigger ones.
Now we're at a different inflection point where the transistors aren't shrinking as quickly, but the dies themselves are getting bigger and the chips are growing more complex in terms of 3D structure. There's more transistors in there, but the easy gains in terms of pitch reduction leading to higher clock-speeds are gone.
If we'd been on the same track as before you'd have a ~140GHz CPU. Instead you have a 2.9GHz one because physics is a buzzkill.
> Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts?
That would have been far more desirable.
I am repulsed by the Touch Bar, and the keyboard which is widely reported to be notoriously unreliable and requiring very expensive repairs does not inspire confidence.
I like the touchbar and the bigger touchpad, and even the new keyboard (at least, while it works). Granted there are a few bugs with the touchbar which are rather annoying, but nothing they can't fix with a software update (fingers crossed).
As a developer the new keyboards have ruined macbooks for me - I find my macbook pro quite comfortable to type on for longer periods when I am away from my desk. I feel like the new keyboards are not practical for real use and it doesn't sound like the new models will greatly improve that which is a shame because I would love an upgrade.
I think those keyboards are great on the smaller more portable macbooks but I don't understand why the 'pro' models are favouring a couple of mm in size over a more practical keyboard designed for 'pro' use.
(I assume that you meant uncomfortable instead of comfortable based on context.)
Counterpoint: I'm also a developer, and I love the 2017 MBP keyboard. I'm of course disappointed to hear that they fail so regularly and that the repair process is so absurdly sledgehammery, but I think they feel amazing to type on and the recall replacement program satisfies my failure concerns.
Chiming in with more annecdata - I love the feel of the new-style keyboards. Sure, it took a little bit to get used to, but now I can't stand the old keyboards - they feel so soft, mushy and inprecise.
The part where they're completely unreliable though, I hate.
Ditto, I work on one most of every day and the overall design is fine and works well for me. The occasional "double press" and having to blow out the keyboard with air, though, annoying. I hope the re-engineering on this new one resolves most of the issues.
"... so many reports that it can be rendered inoperable by a grain of sand and that is incredibly difficult and expensive to repair or replace. This new third-generation keyboard wasn’t designed to solve those issues, Apple says."
Comfortable was referring to my current (2015) macbook pro keyboard. I wouldn't say I find the newer keyboards 'uncomfortable' so much as just lacking travel which I generally prefer.
Based on yours and other comments, perhaps I need to find an opportunity to use the newer keyboard a little more than I have to see if I get used to it.
Same. I often take work from my work-provided 2015 MacBook Pro to my personal 2017 just for the keyboard. I didn't like the 2017 at first, but after a bit of using it, the 2015 feels sluggish, squishy, and effortful.
But did they fix the keyboard? I have a new MB Pro for work and two weeks of using the flat keys actually gave me horrible wrist pain. Now I use an external keyboard.
I use a 2015 MacBook Air at home that I can type on for hours without any wrist pain.
The keyboard still has the same design. It's just a third revision of the same basic flat design. They are not going to be making a completely different keyboard design unless they change the design of the computer itself.
After ongoing problems and repairs with my gen 2 butterfly, I switched to Linux (Ubuntu). After many months, I'm still a little shocked at how much worse the desktop experience is. 11 year old OS X Leopard is more consistent, intuitive and usable.
Hardware is slightly less polished, but no major complaints there (except for how poor the buying experience was).
Still, keyboard works. It would take something amazing to win me back (like a custom CPU that just completely redefines what we expect from battery life and performance)
The new XPS 13. It's fine. My disappointment is 98% software. The XPS has poor camera placement (but you know that going in), the buying experience is awful (here in Asia anyways). I see myself sticking with Linux, but no loyalty to hardware vendors. I'm hoping the MateBook or Chromebook become [relatively] cheap and powerful first class linux options.
Install Xubuntu on XPS, and set up i3 as your window manager - this is my current setup and I love it. Takes a bit to get used to a tiling window manager, but once you get it it's amazing - I never understood why people value overlapping windows anyway.
I like UIs that feel premium. Needless to say, Xubuntu and i3 do not make the cut. Left with Gnome 3 (ugh) or KDE (options galore). All other DEs feel clunky (graphical glitches, sub-par design) and are also usually buggy (which is normal for an open source project with such a big scope).
XFCE looks a lot better with a different window theme installed, the defaults are absolutely terrible. There's as many options for XFCE as KDE, but it definitely takes tweaking before it looks good.
i3 is generally used for its productivity benefits, not for appearance. You can still spruce it up with a new bar (see Lemonbar or Polybar), but overall people choose it because it feels nice to use. The people on /r/unixporn have done a pretty good job of making it look good though.
Well if you're comparing it to Leopard / Snow Leopard no wonder. That's probably the most neat and polished a desktop operating system has ever been.
edit: To clarify, I think current macOS is a better OS, its features are worth less neatness, but Snow Leopard did a smaller amount of things in a neater and more polished way.
It is well known that Ubuntu is going through a phase of rapid change at the moment. I understand how you feel but I'm pretty sure the quality and consistency will only increase from here on. Otherwise, try a Plasma desktop or Mate (if you feel like a minimalist).
> It is well known that Ubuntu is going through a phase of rapid change at the moment. I understand how you feel but I'm pretty sure the quality and consistency will only increase from here on.
People have been saying things like that about various Linuxes for over 20 years, and it still isn't close.
Well I think that from about April 2012 (first generally positive feel about Unity) until about April 2021 (yes I know, this is the end of 16.04 support) you could have had (and can have) a fairly consistent experience. Now, with the introduction of Gnome into Ubuntu there is some (avoidable) flux. If you don't like it, go for a more conservative distro like CentOS, or pick Ubuntu Mate.
Linux is always rapidly developing but there are always distros which suit the more conservative users who hate change. I agree that this is a difficult concept when first entering the Linux world but it is how it is.
I do wonder what makes you say it isn't close though... I feel it is more than that and would really love to replace my companies Windows 10 environment with Kubuntu 18.04. Still, I think even Ubuntu's standard desktop is pretty nice and very usable.
> I feel it is more than that and would really love to replace my companies Windows 10 environment with Kubuntu 18.04.
Get all their .net apps and office/excel stuff to work, and get whatever integrations with office365 are required to work actually working and get it all to sync with their mobile devices... I'm sure you can have them switched in no time...
> Linux is always rapidly developing but there are always distros which suit the more conservative users who hate change. I agree that this is a difficult concept when first entering the Linux world but it is how it is.
I first entered the 'Linux world' in 1994, when I downloaded SLS onto floppies and installed it on my 486/33. I consider myself less of a 'conservative user who hates change' and more of a person with better things to do with my time than fight with my computer to make it perform basic functionality.
I'm also a person with better things to do with my time than fight with my computer to make it perform basic functionality, this has made me pretty conservative in my Linux Distro picks ;)
> People have been saying things like that about various Linuxes for over 20 years, and it still isn't close.
That was part of my reason for going full mac 10 years ago. Had one in the house, but my main laptops were linux. And it was always such a pain, wireless networking in particular. And ever few months I'd hear/read "oh, but ubuntu's great - everything just works". And then I'd try it on a new laptop, and things wouldn't work, and there'd be no answers, or the answers would be things like "dude, you have to research all your parts before you 'just buy something' - linux isn't like that!" And then I'd read more about "hey, everything now 'just works'!" I came to realize it was mostly people who'd didn't have moderately complex needs (like wanting to use 2 monitors without rebooting an X session), or needing to vpn easily, or... whatever. None of this was simple then. I'm going to guess it probably still isn't now for many 'edge cases' (most of my tech life apparently was an 'edge case' when I was a linux/desktop users). It was tiresome. After 10 years of "year of linux on the desktop" I got too tired of wrestling with all that crap and switched to a macbook.
> I got too tired of wrestling with all that crap and switched to a macbook.
This is pretty much exactly my experience. There were usually ways to make things work on Linux, but it always required more effort than it was worth. Back in school, spending that effort made sense because it was a learning experience and at the time that was my primary goal. These days, there are enough competing priorities in my life that spending hours wrestling with my computer to make it perform basic functionality just isn't worth the opportunity cost. (I could be learning something people value or doing paid work or spending time with my family or exercising....)
One of the things I did love about Linux was the ability to switch to a tiling window manager. That said, as nice as it was, customizations required modifying C source code and writing scripts and never did work nearly as well as anything else. (In particular, I never figured out the right NetworkManager incantations to connect to a new WiFi network.)
To put this in perspective, my experience with Linux dates back to 1994, installing SLS from floppies on a 486/33. There has always been this belief that 'the community' will solve the problems and turn Linux into a fully competitive desktop platform. While there's definitely been progress, the reality is that the community has neither the time nor the attention to achieve near the level of polish that the vast majority of people expect these days. (Note that I don't view this as necessarily a problem, just an artifact of people making the same sorts of resource allocations choices for themselves that I described myself making back in the first paragraph.)
Similar view on 'young and learning' and 'older with other priorities'. Started using linux on servers in 99 (slackware, mostly), and desktop/laptop (mostly redhat, and some debian and gentoo for a while) in 2000.
I do miss the fish protocol in konqueror/kde. I will say that with... KDE4(?) I just gave up caring about moving back to desktop Linux. Never cared much for gnome experience - had really liked KDE3.
As recently as a month ago, a colleague was writing to our local Linux list about laptop sleeping vs suspending, and how to get those working, and there was some discussion about why you'd want to do that, hardware support, BIOS issues, etc. Life is just way too damn short for me to care about any of that stuff. Yeah, I may be giving up some 'freedom' in an abstract sense (or perhaps even, maybe, a real sense) but... really, I just want to close the lid and not think about it.
An all too familiar story. At some point you just need to get work done without worrying about every last detail of CUPS printing a document out using Liberation Serif, and whether it looks close enough to your colleagues' printouts, etc.
I wanted a Unix machine I could use to hack together bash scripts, play flash video without jitters, and use Photoshop and Word... without constant emotional labor coercing the system to do what I needed. Apple provided the best technical solution to my problem set.
(By the way, not really a tiling window manager, but have you checked out Magnet? It's one of my favorite Mac utilities.)
> I wanted a Unix machine I could use to hack together bash scripts, play flash video without jitters, and use Photoshop and Word... without constant emotional labor coercing the system to do what I needed. Apple provided the best technical solution to my problem set.
Pretty much my reasoning too. I was also surprised that, once I factored in build quality, etc., the Apple was price-competitive as well.
> (By the way, not really a tiling window manager, but have you checked out Magnet? It's one of my favorite Mac utilities.)
No, but I'll check it out. I like it by the sound of it's name already. Thanks!
So you are surprised that a randomly chosen hardware has problems with a GNU/Linux while the hardware specifically designed for MacOS works flawlessly with the latter?
Of course one has to choose the hardware to be sure the drivers are compatible... You are asking something impossible from GNU/Linux developers.
Second comment about buying experience. I got a Dell XPS which is great, though I would never buy anything again from Dell due to their horrible customer service. By which I mean pathetically rude and unprofessional (German store).
Desktop experience of clean uninterrupted GNOME is great for me. Move from Ubuntu to fedora. Ubuntu really messes up GNOME with their BS ideas of usability. I.e horrible terrible ugly Unity, RIP.
As far as I remember (before I switched) they’re messing up nautilus and keeping older versions. Also installation, software management and other little things. This mishmash of ideas and concepts of two separate projects is bad.
Ubuntu does not understand usability and they should really allow GNOME’s vision to come through. GNOME is probably not perfect, but it is consistent.
Yeah, the whole Unity look and feel was always terrible for me. My first experience with Linux was the last version of Ubuntu with Gnome2, then I did a system update and everything changed and back then I didn't know about changing DEs. Now I avoid Unity whenever possible, as even the Gnome lookalike Ubuntu has now seems so much slower than XFCE or i3.
I think the Unity dock concept is a lot more approachable for naive computer users: commonly used applications are always availabe, it’s clear which applications are open, and it’s clear which windows are open within those applications.
Older relatives of mine have taken to it immediately, Gnome’s equivalent has an appreciable learning curve. Also, I recently installed 18.04 on a relative’s three year old laptop, and it was really really fast, faster than my vanilla Gnome installation, although that could be because I’m using more applications at once.
Ubuntu’s ideas of usability are valid for some use cases, even if they’re not mine.
Never used a Macbook before; always been a Windows user until my switch a few years ago to Ubuntu Gnome. Gotta say Gnome was the most counter-intuitive DE coming from a Windows background, making the switch brutal.
Several years later, loving and still using the Gnome look. Wouldn't trade it for anything.
It is all what you're used to. I switched from a Linux KDE desktop to a Mac 11 years ago. I ended up switching back to Linux & KDE after about 6 months of use, and giving the Mac to my inlaws.
What it came down to for me is that I've been using the same window manager shortcuts since the late 80s, and I can't make them work with OSX. Eg, I use focus-follows mouse, and some strange mouse-button + ALT key combos to move/raise/iconify windows. The loss of focus follows mouse is what really drove me nuts. I was forever deleting emails because I'd move my mouse to a terminal or emacs window and start typing, like I'd done for the last 20+ years, but without a click "random stuff" was happening in Mail, which was still getting the keystrokes.
Yep, I'm a long term Windows user and developing on a mac for the last 6 months, and I find it pretty terrible, I'd rather be using Ubuntu. But I'm happy to admit it's because of what I'm used to.
Ubuntu is far less consistent with keyboard shortcuts and menu bars from app to app (OSX has this nailed). This is overwhelming my biggest problem. cmd+c, cmd+v for copy and paste across all apps. Not all apps minus terminal. Double click URL portion in firefox, entire url is highlighted, double click url part in other places, only that word/segment is highlight (I guess it's this 8 year old bug? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611162)
Sublime sometimes opens with the menu shown, sometimes with it hidden (I've tried to script this, doesn't always work). Sometimes the window shows up minimized (scripting this catch 90% of the cases)
On quit, Firefox always restores the DDG and Amazon search options, but not the other ones. Why can't it remember this? (there are other cases of partial configuration amnesia for various apps)
"Ubuntu Software" doesn't list available updates for installed "Add-ons", you have to remove and and re-add when you know one exists. It also doesn't let you "search" installed even if you're on the installed tab.
When my I wake my screen up, there's a brief flash of my unlocked screen (someone could theoretically take a picture) before the lock screen comes up.
In OSX and android I just enter my carriers free wifi settings and it works. In Ubuntu, I'm given a bunch of detailed options, and I've yet to find the magical combination that works.
While on battery, the time remaining can be comically off when waking from sleep (23 hours, really?!). I've also had it say 10 minutes left when it shut down.
There are plenty of apps on extensions.gnome.org (available in "Ubuntu Software") that constantly crash gnome. Go through systemd logs, find which ones are causing the problem, try to fix or uninstall.
The list goes on and on. Correct battery time, configurations that stick, consistency from app to app are polish, not preferences.
> This is overwhelming my biggest problem. cmd+c, cmd+v for copy and paste across all apps. Not all apps minus terminal.
I really wish one of the major *ix toolkits/desktops would make some effort to attract or accommodate Mac refugees or dual OS users. I just wanna type Ctrl-W to erase a word and GUI-W to close a window — consistently.
> Sublime sometimes opens with the menu shown, sometimes with it hidden
After a year of using Sublime on Ubuntu for work, I have yet to have this issue happen. Even if it does happen, it seems like an application issue not an OS issue.
> On quit, Firefox always restores the DDG and Amazon search options, but not the other ones.
Same case, Firefox on Ubuntu for years and never had any kind of application amnesia.
> When my I wake my screen up, there's a brief flash of my unlocked screen (someone could theoretically take a picture) before the lock screen comes up.
What DE were you using, and what screensaver application? The only time I've had that happen was on old hardware without much support, and I'm still not sure what the entire cause of the issue was.
> While on battery, the time remaining can be comically off when waking from sleep (23 hours, really?!). I've also had it say 10 minutes left when it shut down.
That seems like an issue with hardware as much as with the OS. The only time my battery has reported inaccurate information was when the BIOS was also having trouble detecting battery stats.
Everything you've mentioned has been pretty anecdotal, as has everything I've mentioned. The biggest advantage of OS X is that you have guaranteed hardware support so you don't have to worry about half of the issues you've mentioned. I admit that it does take some tweaking occasionally, but for the most part Linux just works now.
Yes the issue with Linux terminals using different shortcuts than the rest of the system drives me absolutely bonkers, probably more than any of the hundreds of small cuts found in the desktop Linux experience.
Note that you can change terminal to use ctrl-c and ctrl-v for copy/paste. Then if you want to interrupt a running program, use ctrl-shift-c (which as far as the shell is concerned is the same as ctrl-c).
"The loss of focus follows mouse is what really drove me nuts."
This is a killer for me and I am trying to solve it currently ...
I ran Snow Leopard from 2009-2018 and had FFM due to "mondomouse" but that is no longer published or supported.
Now that I have upgraded (my 2009 mac pro) to Yosemite, I sort of have a FFM solution with a tool called dwellclick and one modification[1] but it's not perfect.
HOWEVER, it appears that there is a new accessibility option in High Sierra that allows you to turn on FFM without third party software. Not helpful for me because I can't install High Sierra on a 2009 mac pro ...
Do you have more details about the new accessibility option in High Sierra that allows you to turn on FFM? I can't seem to find it, both by looking at the Accessibility menu on my laptop or by googling. Thanks!
I recently switched from macOS High Sierra to Fedora.
I felt that Fedora was smoother, way more responsive on the same hardware (and yes, comparing fresh macOS to fresh Linux install), more consistent and more intuitive, and more usable. The only thing I can think of that's better on macOS is the touchpad, which to the best of my knowledge is a gift given to us mortals by the gods.
> The only thing I can think of that's better on macOS is the touchpad, which to the best of my knowledge is a gift given to us mortals by the gods.
I'm absolutely unwilling to give up the Mac trackpad. When I see people who aren't artists using mice I have to question their value system, or assume they haven't discovered the absolute joy that is "tap to click".
On my Thinkpad the whole touchpad depresses like a giant keyboard button. Yes, there is slightly more force than on an apple Touchpad, but you don't accidentally click by tapping, which is nice.
I remember experiencing some issues around that, but it's been years and I was not used to the device it happened on. It might not have been a MacBook, but the alternative then would have been a dedicated area or physical button in the corner of the touchpad, so then it was preferable. I don't remember why, but I think the issue with palm rejection being necessary on some of the laptops I used (not owned) was the lack of sufficient space to rest the hands on that would neither result in them being on the edge of the case nor on the edge of the touchpad. This Thinkpad (T540p) does not have that issue, as the size seems to allow the keyboard to be far enough away from the front edge of the base.
To be fair, the noise of clicking the touchpad is annoying some times, but mostly due to the mushy bottoming of the keyboard, which results in low noise despite a clear actuation point.
My aversion to a MacBook is mostly coming from the repair-unfriendlyness, combined with the high prices on the secondary market compared to T/X series Thinkpads. As long as I can hold it for at least one hour on one hand, while walking, in a position that I can keep an eye on the screen and use the other hand for hitting keys if needed, I don't consider it to heavy. And screen size is only really restricted by needing to fit inside commonly available backpacks, and not hindering maneuverability which happens if it is too wide in the middle dimension (approximating as a cuboid) to fit within the width of the chest. Being able to fit with it on my lap in a row on e.g. public transit/long distance trains/ (airplanes) also sets a limit to the width in the maximum dimension of the cuboid approximation. As this limit is lower than that imposed by fitting within the flat space on my back, that restriction dosn't really apply for the laptop.
I was just looking into external trackpads yesterday because I'm about to switch to thinkpads. There's nothing! Even Logitech discontinued their version of Magic Trackpad. How is this possible?
when I see people who don't use a mouse with additional buttons for things like navigate forward and backward in terminal and IDES, I also question them.
An aspect that is often left out of the discussion: language support is way better on osx/windows. In particular japanese IME was still very primitive in comparison on linux (tried last year).
That's the same situation as for ios/android really, it's not a deal breaker, but the quality of life difference is clear.
i know. dammit. i think the part of the brain that allows one to use linux in the first place (ie bash) is at odds with the aesthetic and visual centers of the brain. seriously.
that said, with a non-trivial amount of time and work, you can get your desktop experience to be pretty slick. but it requires knowing your desktop environments, window managers, compositors, default apps, etc...
You can change desktops very easily on the popular linux distros. Try r/linux and ask about what you want specifically. It's very likely there is a desktop out there for you. If you just want a macOS copy, most of that can be done by configuration. The development environment is really good on arch linux bdw.
Unity is very commonly despised in the Linux community. Some do like it, but to form your opinion of Linux DE usability based on that one experience isn't fair. Try Linux Mint for all the ease of Ubuntu in terms of setup and bundled software, but for the best DE out there.
I was using a late 2011 that I had outfitted with 16GB of ram and a larger SSD, save for the screen, it performs comparatively to the latest models. Now, its graphics just went bad and Apple now considers it "vintage" and won't fix it. I assume the 2012 models will suffer form that fate soon as well.
It's not possible to buy it without the TouchBar any more :(
I really wanted to like it, and the concept could perhaps eventually be good, but the current implementation is infuriatingly bad:
• I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.
• The buttons are in different locations depending on context, so it's not possible to use it by muscle memory.
• TouchBar automatically goes to sleep, making the previous two points worse.
• It's not even that good for its intended purpose. Previews of things on it are too tiny. Most actions still require multiple taps, and it's in the uncanny valley between direct and indirect manipulation.
Fingerprint sensor is convenient, but the TouchBar ended up being a gimmick, not a pro feature.
> • I need more than one tap to change the brightness,
For what it's worth, if you tap and hold the brightness and volume buttons, it turns into a slider under your finger that you can immediately use. One tap + drag.
It's the one thing I miss about the Touch Bar after leaving it for the MacBook Escape.
depends what your definition of "pro" is, even if it's 50% of all users who do pro work that need a GPU (Video, photo, CAD) there's at least as many who need a lot of memory/CPU for various other things.
Programming/compiling not-withstanding there are many tasks today that are CPU intensive.
Plus, real professionals use slack, so that extra memory is needed.
> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.
I discovered recently that you could just do a "quick swipe" (very fast) on the button in the right direction on both the volume and brightness virtual button to apply the expected effect. Good enough for my usage.
OP is incorrect, just tap and hold and then slide left or right to change the volume or brightness. It’s quicker than physical buttons and more granular.
I’m fairly sure it was in the demo on stage, it is a publicised feature from day one (when I got mine) but people are so bothered about the escape key and other things that this feature gets lost in the noise.
Check our BetterTouchTool it has a 40 day free trial so you give it a proper work out and let's you customise the touch bar completely. It's brilliant and worth every cent.
I wouldn't care about the touch bar if the esc+(sleep key) were still regular hardware keys. Those are the only ones that I actually use.
But an even bigger problem for me is the price increase. The base TB version costs 200€ more (or 400€ if you'd buy the nTB 128gb version). With ne nTB version not getting the update, the updated MBP is too expensive compared to non Apple machienes.
I believe the price increase is purely based on the profit-maximizing strategy. If people will pay that much then Apple has no reason to ask for less. Unfortunately, I can not imagine myself switching to a Windows-based laptop. This is just another example of why monopoly is bad.
I agree that this is profit maximization, but the only monopoly Apple has is on sucking less than others at particular things that particular niches care about (privacy, UX, ecosystem integration come to mind).
A non-Apple device will do all the same stuff. It just might not do it the exact way you like out of the box.
I pay the Apple tax (albeit exceedingly infrequently) because I can afford it & it reduces friction in my life, not because I have no other options.
As an aside, I switched Caps Lock to ESC a few years ago and after the 6 weeks(?) or however long it took to fully adjust, it's fantastic. I wish I could bring Caps Lock -> ESC joy to everyone.
I've done the same but Caps + key to Hyper (cmd+ctrl+option+shift), just to pair with custom shortcuts.
But I really love using it for escape. I'm on a 2014 model but not going to the corner for escape is great. Plus I'm about to get one of these new ones, and I feel prepared since I have zero usage of the top row (other than the special functions).
If it's any help, I found this tool useful: https://www.haptictouchbar.com/ (I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't build this into the Touch Bar at some point.)
For those who are wondering, it's creating a haptic bump via the trackpad. You'll feel it right there if you put one finger on the trackpad and then touch the touch bar.
It's a good enough effect, though, I will probably keep it. Thanks for the suggestion.
You don't need to worry so much about most of these. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard. Change the Touch Bar shows to Expanded Control Strip. Then go to Customize Control Strip... and set the keys you want to always have displayed. I can guarantee you will be using the touch bar more often then you did the F* keys.
My favorite is when my hands naturally come to rest near the top of the keyboard at least once a day they land on the brightness control in the touchbar and dim my screen to black.
Or that I try to press delete, and if my fingers are a tiny bit off, the computer goes to sleep since the touch bar is really sensitive. Even the edge of my finger triggers it.
I learned that while reading email and using "e" to archive that my pinky rests on the escape key. Took me a bit to realize why weird things were going on.
Other than that, I like the 2017 keyboard (assuming mine doesn't break) and touch bar.
> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.
>
> The buttons are in different locations depending on context, so it's not possible to use it by muscle memory.
You can add Volume/Brighness Up/Down buttons to the "always-on" touchbar by going to View -> Customize Touch Bar on the finder.
You can also start sliding from the "open slider" button without releasing your finger, which is more granular and IMO much nicer than having to press many times to adjust volume. If they only removed that giant pop-up on the screen with the current brightness and volume it would be a big improvement.
The touchbar is awesome--you can immediately blow away all the worthless function keys and have a minimalist setup. I keep the escape key and the volume/brightness sliders, that's it. Keeps the entire setup feeling clean. People actually use the touchbar for context-dependent tasks?
I don't understand your argument from that point of view... with the same argument, I could tell you that adding 15 new keys to the middle of the keyboard would be good, because those keys may have esoteric function for a small number of users, and if you complain about their addition, I'd just remind you that this is a tool, not a piece of art.
Look at how many people here recommend rebinding caps lock to "esc" and control to caps lock and all other sorts of editing to the keys... should you remind them that rebinding keys is unnatural and the tool should be used the same way it's always been?
I guess it stems from the fact that I've never understood the argument that the touch bar took away the "esc" key... but on every touch bar MBP I see at the Apple Store, the esc key is still there, still right where it was, and still has the same functionality. The only difference is now if you don't use the esc key, you have the ability to remove it and put a more useful key there instead. But somehow this is a bad thing. I don't understand it.
If it's a tool, like you claim, it should be useful for getting work done. But instead you seem to actually want it to be made according to your exact design and visual preferences, which to me sounds more like you're actually looking for a piece of art.
Consider “remapping keys” as the digital equivalent of “customizing a tool’s grip to for your hand”. Or maybe “rearranging the workshop to put your most-used tools in easy reach”.
Replacing the top row with the touch bar, in this analogy, is like someone else coming into your workshop and replacing several tools’ grips with big padded things that completely ruins the physical feedback you expect to feel, and never realized you used for fine control until you didn’t have it.
Maybe I'm part of the minority (or since Apple's sales are still doing pretty good maybe the minority is just louder), but it's just weird that the line in the sand is being drawn at "the uncommonly-used keys are still there, but now they can be customized too, but only if you choose to use the default keyboard instead of an external keyboard".
For me when I switched to a Mac, the hardest thing to get used to was the lack of a forward delete key (the Windows-style use of the delete key) and having to use a key combination instead. Even today I still struggle with the lack of pgup and pgdn keys, and the lack of home and end.
In light of commonly-used keys that are actually missing, I just struggle to accept the idea that the Esc key being a touch button but still existing is a hill worth dying on. Especially when, since the touch bar is customizable, everyone can now swap their (relatively) useless F1-F12 keys for the (relatively) more useful Home, End, Forward Delete, Page Up, and Page Down keys. Or whatever else they want it to be.
To me, it's like the digital equivalent to swapping a workshop's dedicated phillips-head screwdriver with one that lets you switch ends to be phillips or flathead or torx or whatever. Some small number of people may complain "but it's not the same way it's always been!", but it sure does make life a lot easier for a lot more people.
"It's not the same way it's always been" has been Apple's driving mission since... well basically forever. Think Different, right?
Why didn’t they keep both the touchbar and the F keys. That would have been so awesome for developers, it would have enabled so many usecases without killing existing ones.
Hopefully see this article? [0] I don't have on-hands feedback on this but it sounded kind of promising (or at least a possible stairway to escape that special circle of hell)
> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.
Happily, you don't - tap and hold the button on the touchbar and drag your finger from there. You do not need to move your finger to the slider. Same works for volume. Tap, hold, drag. Not sure about skipping songs.
> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume
Not true; you can change them by beginning a slide over the brightness/volume (and maybe other buttons that expand into a slider) in a single gesture without lifting your finger.
The keyboard and the touch bar are deal breakers for me. For the first time in a while I've been considering buying a new laptop, but the touch bar is basically zero utility and the keyboard is negative utility. I can't spend $2400+ on a laptop and feel good about it.
Don't forget the trackpad so big that your palm interrupts your gestures.
And the touch bar actually has negative utility as you'll end up accidentally pressing some buttons.
I disagree on this point. I've been using the new form factor with the large trackpads since initial launch in 2016 and the large trackpads are amazing, and I don't seem to have any issues with palm interaction. Anything smaller just feels downright primitive and old to me now.
I can tell you from personal experience that the touch bar is more useful than the function keys it replaces. You will not miss them after a few weeks. They keyboard is solid too. I cringe if I have to type on the old pro keyboard with its soft keys.
I've had the Touch Bar model twice now (long story). Each time I switched back to a 2015 model after about two weeks.
The missing Escape key is annoying. The lack of tactile feedback makes it awkward for touch typists who expect some kind of feedback to sense that their press reached the right place. Remapping to Caps Lock requires a long muscle memory retraining period that is not helped by the fact that external keyboards still have an Esc key, moving your training progress backwards (unless you pry it off or something).
The new keyboard is not very nice to type on, but the worst aspect of it is that it is extremely loud. I didn't experience any key failures myself, but I have a colleague who did. (And of course he encountered the classic problem: What do you do when the laptop you absolutely rely on for work is in the shop for 7+ day's to fix a single key?)
Also, the new arrow key layout is very bad for touch typists like myself. I frequently had to look down at the keyboard and see that my fingers weren't finding the right arrow key. The old pyramid layout of the four arrow keys was much more friendly.
The Touch Bar is literally useless to me as a touch typist who is used to not looking at the keyboard. One of the first things that annoyed me was that the contents of the Touch Bar changes depending on the app, so in order to use it without glancing down you have to remember the exact widget placement for each app. So I pretty quickly switched to the "extended" control bar that always has the same layout. But that basically just gives you the functionality of a pre-Touch-Bar Mac.
I frequently found myself accidentally touching the Touch Bar, often because I rest my hands in a splayed position across the keyboard. My fingertips would end up resting on the Touch Bar and cause surprising things to happen.
Another annoyance is the fact that if you do want to invest in using the Touch Bar efficiently, you can't use the Mac with an external keyboard. In my home office I have an external screen and "dock" my MacBook there and run it with a closed lid and a wireless Apple keyboard. No Touch Bar there.
I don't mind all the other problems so much -- USB-C, no MagSafe, trackpad that is too big (yet another case of accidental touches), etc. -- but I'd pay a lot of money to get rid of the Touch Bar.
True story: The other day I was in the living room and I hear this crunch crunch crunch sound from the kitchen. I call over to my SO "what are you eating?" Her response was "I'm not eating, I'm typing." I use a 2013 MBP and she uses a 2017 MB.
I'd be very happy with the 32GB at this point, but sadly my company just got me the previous new model with 16GB and I doubt I can convince anyone to reduce my refresh cycle to mere months.
Haha, 32 gb is enough for me at the moment, but I am sure that the engineers at google are doing their best to make sure that chrome consumes record amounts of ram per tab, so soon 32 will no longer be enough.
I hear all the complaints about keyboard and touchbar, but we use these with external keyboards and never use the touchbar.
32GB DDR4 Ram and 6 Core processors honestly is making this a no-brainer here. We have been waiting on the ram for years. Price is the big question. At this time, the Select on the apple store is disabled so no idea what this will cost.
I believe my dad’s old Osborne luggable was heavier than a 27” iMac. Of course, it came in it’s own case and a whopping 4” monochrome text only monitor.
Personally I always use my MacBook Pro set up below my external monitor. I always use the built in keyboard and trackpad because I find a small, short travel keyboard with a centrally mounted trackpad more ergonomic. I'm pretty sure this setup might only relevant to me though, so horses for courses.
I haven't upgraded because the new macs don't seem to match my use-cases and I can get by with my old 2013 model for now.
I agree about price though. The new MacBook Pros seem poor value to me. You have to decide whether to max the RAM/SSD upfront, get the new dongles you need all while Apple are nickel and dimming over things like the PSU extension cable which is no longer included despite the price rises.
- MBP Audio: MADI and AES50 ports, 8 mini TRS inputs and outputs designed by Lynx or Apogee
Across board: fast SD card reader, HDMI even if mini.
Releasing even one of these sure would indicate that they're with the times. I'll admit to being an odd user though, my dream laptop would have a 16x PCIe slot exposed on one side.
aside: It's good to see Blackmagic Design get such a loud shout-out from Apple. Since dabbling in the live production world I've been consistently impressed by their FPGA and industrial design chops. possible acquisition? https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HM8Y2VC/A/blackmagic-egpu
An edition with an Nvidia GPU would certainly be appreciated, even after years of Apple exclusively pushing AMD GPUs there's still a non-trivial amount of software that doesn't work on them.
There's been a mass-defection from Mac to Windows in the motion graphics industry just because they want/need Nvidia GPUs to run their preferred renderers.
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Right at the very top of the article:
> Now Featuring Up to 6-Core Processors and 32GB of Memory, True Tone Display and the Apple T2 Chip
Let's hope some of the mechanical issues cleared up.
Also, I really miss having real keys instead of a touchpad. I never knew how much I subconsciously relied upon a "thunk" from the ESC key. Remapping (my keys and muscle memory) is an arduous process.
I used caps lock all the time for its intended function (shocking!), so remapping it is just not an option.
The file names in our code base have a lot of upper case in them as well.
But the real reason is tbat I learned speed typing in high school on an IBM Selectrix typewriter. I use CAPS LOCK even for FBI and NASA. It comes totally natural to me.
i could do the tap -> esc, hold -> control, but every solution i tried has some delay that makes it super uncomfortable.
Indeed, Mac keyboards didn't originally have Escape or Control keys; they weren't added until 1987.
I've never failed to hit the software escape key on my 15. Not one time since the past rev was released. What is that, six months? Not once in six months. I just put my finger in exactly the same place as I would on any other keyboard and it always works.
Nonzero finger width easily makes up for the difference. You don't have to hit the center of it to register a touch. In fact you don't actually need to touch it at all.
Edit: Video proof https://streamable.com/ao18b
> which makes me think you've maybe not used one of these new touchbars
You were saying?
Hardware should be designed to accommodate the software that is actually being run on it, regardless of when it was first written.
If you're on macOS, you can do this in System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... and selecting the "Escape" in the Caps Lock dropdown.
Not expecting anything great from the new models on this front.
There's no hard and fast 'three repairs' rule, but that's generally the rule of thumb that employees stick by.
Nearest Apple Store is 4 hours away...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/apples-new-2018-macb...
Oddly they still advertise 30 days standby.
The new 13" models still have LPDDR3, and thus are limited to 16GB
I'm going to wait a year, maybe 18 months for feedback before I consider upgrading. Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts? No touchbar, smaller touchpad than the newer macbooks, but updated specs? Call it Macbook Developer... We build the software for the "Pros" after all.
I just don't get it.
There are still some available in the Apple Store under the clearance section (https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/clearanc...). Definitely your last chance to get this model new from Apple.
Didn't care for the touch bar - yes, hey, apparently all the cool kids 'remap' their ESC key, and many did it I guess 20 years ago(!), but I've got decades of muscle memory to overcome. But beyond that, yeah sure it was thinner and sexier, but had a 20% smaller battery, and for the work I do, I guess I'm not 'pro' enough, but never managed more than about 4 hours max of real work.
The 2015 model was 'good enough' in most respects, and better in others (keyboard, battery), and... cheaper.
Always interested to see and try the newer models, but probably won't upgrade in 2018 or 2019 without some massive reason to do so.
EDIT - well, the 32g option might be a worthwhile reason to upgrade. And the battery looks slightly larger than the 2016 model.
However, Apple has previously led the market in power optimizations. I'm not confident they'll do that this time.
(Edit: Though these new MBPs apparently have a new third generation keyboard, so not exactly identical.)
[1] https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...
Check Apple's refurb store: https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macb...
Also, Woot: https://computers.woot.com/plus/refurbished-macbooks-macbook...
The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does. Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products and make up 10% of the complaints then to focus on the 10% of customers who make up 90% of the complaints.
It's not just developers and MacRumors posters. Joe Rogan - the comedian and MMA commentator - did a massive unprompted rant on how poor (and he didn't use the word 'poor') the Apple keyboard was on his recent podcast (3rd most popular podcast in the world http://www.itunescharts.net/us/charts/podcasts/).
The keyboard affects anyone who types. It's not a niche group of obsessives at all.
I'm in complete agreement with him. In their obsession to make the thing thinner and fancier they have rendered it less usable. They've locked themselves into a marketing pattern that precludes them from having a "if it ain't broke" mindset.
I know a lot of his followers on Twitter are super loyal to the brands he promotes.
I honestly can't tell if this is satire or not.
I think this is the longest i've held onto a computer.
My work laptop was actually the same generation, until IT recently upgraded me to one of the new-keyboard models. I don't like how loud the keyboard is, and I don't like the touchbar. (sorry, I actually need to press "Esc" and also use non-beautifully-designed software that sometimes uses Fn keys.)
Needless to say, I have absolutely no desire to upgrade my personal laptop. When I do, I can only hope Apple has moved past this, or the F/OSS world has finally acknowledged that the touchbar actually needs to be supported.
That being said, for a personal development machine, I would much rather have a 27 inch 5K iMac with the same specs. Work provides me a decent laptop.
Me and some other pro users were insta-buys for the new machines. But then they had few ports and no function keys. We're still on 2015 machines.
I'm holding out for the mac pro, but I would have bought 1-2 macbook pros if they had been suitable.
Know any other data?
Microsoft is trying to push back on this by making it impossible to support Windows 10. We'll see how that goes.
When I was responsible for this at a large enterprise, I was buying 40k devices a year, every year. The Mac component was about 1,500/year. That dropped to 50 when the new keyboards came out and started failing. Losing a few hundred sales isn't a big deal, but some of that money that was going to MacBooks went elsewhere.
It really isn't. In some localized niches, perhaps. Overall, no.
As someone who was a massive fan of Apple MacBooks and recommended them to other people, I don’t do that now. I highly unrecommend them nowadays. I’ve personally in fact bought older second MacBooks since they last longer and work better than the new ones.
So it slowly adds up. Microsoft surface is already making a good dent in what was a loyal Mac Pro market.
As argued by Paul Graham:
"So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?
Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world."
http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html
The number of people with HN-grade "techie" friends is a rounding error.
If that were the case, Apple wouldn't be selling tons of iPhone's in their "wall gardens" and DRM'd media content and the "Year of the Linux Desktop" would have come ages ago....
“There’s a App for That” <—- who makes the apps?
If that weren't the case Samsung wouldn't be the most profitable Android manufacturer with their crappy bespoked custom Android version.
If I was on android/PC they would have bought those, for tech support reasons.
I've influenced some friends, too. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing, and professional users talk about their machines a lot.
(Devs, video editors, writers, designers, photographers, etc)
I may be wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that your parents had to be convinced to be a Macbook on the merits of it's technical prowess in relation to other competition. They probably just respect your opinion on technology regardless of what it is.
Haven't done a survey, but quite a few folks I know who work at Mac shops report that their employers have been steering clear of the new MacBooks and just trying to keep the older models they already have alive, while also looking seriously into the feasibility of switching to PCs running Linux if they don't get their act together.
Making the keyboard reliable would help, but that touchbar is also a legitimate ergonomic concern for anyone who uses software that requires you to be banging on F-keys all day.
This is ultimately what I ended up having to do; not really by choice. My 2015 MBP was stolen, considered looking for a refurb model but found myself test driving an HP Spectre x360-a minute with the keyboard, another few minutes Googling linux driver support on my phone and some other specs. I was walking out the door with the new purchase 15 minutes later.
It's been a couple of days now, I still haven't gotten around to throwing *nix at it, but for a majority of purposes WSL is getting me by pretty nicely enough. A few days of getting a fresh Windows installation and ridding myself of all that retail bloatware, I'm actually not having a bad time with Windows 10 given it's the first time I've dailied a windows machine since XPSP1.
That's how far I'm going to avoid the new mbp because key input means that much to me-given how much time I spend in text fields, but this is a really enjoyable machine so far. After 3 years though my eyes definitely got used to the retina display, and this screen just can't match the color variation or the deep darks-then again it also may be the high gloss touch screen.
Second, it would involve a ton of product testing, and tedious ironing out of rough edges. Every single time an installation or upgrade fails, or runs into a strange error needing obscure forum searches to fix it, that's a problem.
Third, they'd have to seriously cozy up to proprietary software vendors for application support. This one is unfortunately an endless time and money sink, and can't pay off until they have enough users that they don't need to do it anymore. Thankfully F/OSS options provide some limits on this, but not entirely. Many times there are F/OSS options that are usable, but the proprietary ones are better (and worth paying for).
This is just a few thoughts off the top of my head. Its not well researched or thought out, but a starting point for a conversation.
Second, Linux systems have a bit of a jerry-rigged feel to them that needs to be addressed. Things like fd.o and the FHS are intended to help this, but don't go far enough. Compare this to FreeBSD, where every decision about which packages are used in the base install, what the filesystem hierarchy is, etc. is well documented and cohesive. Linux can't go mainstream until, say, a runit-based distro has no references to systemd in its documentation.
It's not a bad move - if you can maximize the return on DisplayPort monitors, USB keyboards, HDMI cables and MagSafe chargers, it makes sense. Keep in mind the company will eventually have to move to USB-C, as the MacBook Air is the only remaining MagSafe laptop and I won't bet on its longevity. OTOH, the old-style MBPs are enough for most uses, as are the Air for anyone who can live within 8GB.
Not necessarily. A minority of machines are Macs, and I wouldn't be surprised if not wanting to deal with the whole USB-C thing right now is yet another incentive for IT to be interested in ditching Apple.
My office is a great example of this. Hundreds of developers here, and I've seen exactly one of the touchbar MBPs in the office. The CIO hates them with a passion, and nobody's demanding them, so it's 2014/2015 MBPs for everyone. There are a lot of Airs, too, but I've seen zero Macbooks.
We have about 20% of people with 2017 MacBook Pros, including, myself.
The "niche developer/macrumors posters" were extremely happy with it before, and were hearty advocates of it.
Further, I would say that developers/enthusiasts comprise a very high percentage of macbook purchasers.
And you base this assumption on?
Every action from Apple in these last few years have gone towards the wishes of the average developer/enthusiast.
Worse keyboards, useless gimmicks, gimped CPUs, fewer ports, less repairability/configurability.
If they consider developers/enthusiasts as their main audience, they have a really weird way of catering to them.
And since Mac sales have been at least steady over the last years, developers/enthusiasts have a really weird way of showing their discontent.
https://bgr.com/2018/01/14/mac-sales-2017-marketshare-pc-dec...
"developers/enthusiasts have a really weird way of showing their discontent"
If you want to use xcode, you have no choice[1]. If you're in the ecosystem, you have no choice. So you complain about it and hope they change it the next time around.
[1]-I remote desktop to my desktop, but eh.
My brother works at an Apple shop, and the vast majority of people he has to attend come from all walks of life, they are not developers/enthusiasts.
If 27% of all developers are using Macs (as the stackoverflow survey indicates) and the machines are replaced after 4.5 years then developers would be buying ~1.2 million Macs per year, 27% of all Macs sold.
In terms of revenue developers are probably an even larger share, perhaps a third? That's still not the majority, but it's certainly very significant even assuming that Mac users are overrepresented in the stackoverflow survey.
This is a long trend that goes back to the old PowerBook days.
Yet the same group that was so vocal in denouncing the new model is suddenly a huge fan of it when a new-new model comes in.
And so the cycle repeats.
I mean, the people who don't like it are in their right to have that opinion. It sucks when your use case gets fucked. But when the removal of the ESC key is your reason to bemoan the sure death of the MacBook, you gotta at least be aware that you are in a tiny, tiny minority.
I always have an external keyboard around for any serious dev work. That way you can pick any style you want, clicky mechanical or wireless or whatever.
> Already the most popular notebook for developers around the world, the new MacBook Pro can compile code faster and run multiple virtual machines and test environments easier than before.
What we want is a functional keyboard. They are losing this market-share quickly but you're right maybe they don't care about this market anymore. They must not since they aren't doing anything about it.
Then they started handing out post-2015 MBP to others and so I've used them a bit. There is zero chance now that a MBP will be my next laptop.
In particular:
What we want is a functional keyboard.
This is your opinion, but it's not necessarily the majority opinion. For example, I would rather Apple focus on other parts of the computer than the keyboard. The keyboard just isn't that meaningful to me, and I'm just as productive a developer without whatever platonic ideal of a keyboard Apple could put on the thing.
I think a lot of people vastly overestimate the number of Apple customers who have an opinion about this, because it's relatively easy to see complaints on HN, blogs or tech journalism.
When I search for information about this, I come up with articles like [1]. But none of the data is provided and the analysis isn't exactly...rigorous, to put it charitably.
EDIT: Why in the world has this been downvoted to -3?! This is a reasonable comment to make complete with an example. If you disagree, blindly downvoting isn't informative of anything except that you don't like a comment.
_________________
1. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/30/2016-macbook-pro-...
Apple has that information, and they've decided it's a big enough problem to issue a repair program and adjust the keyboard in the new version:
https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...
So, in answer to your question, yes we do have an authoritative source - Apple.
I'll concede that the hardware flaws - independent of personal taste about the touchbar or function keys - is a major problem then.
Your question has already been answered by Apple with the current generation of problematic keyboards.
They already had a mature, reliable keyboard that felt pretty good and was not noisy. It was not "broke" and did not need "fixing".
They presumably chose to "improve" it with the current one so that their computers could be a little bit thinner and that Jony Ive could brag about the new technology in a video during a keynote.
It's worth noting that they did change the keyboard on these new models, and I would guess they did so to avoid extending their special keyboard replacement program they have fro the current one.
Personally, I think that the loss of Jobs has created a serious leadership problem, because so much of the company's direction was led by the personal taste of one man. Apple has retained the institutional knowledge and habits accrued during that era, but it hasn't found a satisfactory replacement for the functions that Jobs performed. It has retained an obsessive focus, but it has lost the compass that guided that focus towards the user experience. They know how to do thinner, lighter, fewer ports and so they keep doing it, but there's no why. So many aspects of Apple's corporate culture are uniquely ritualistic, but the meaning of those rituals died with Jobs.
Apple is one of the most valuable and critically examined companies in the world, with 125,000 employees and end-to-end vertical integration across its hardware and software development process. In consideration of feedback from design decisions, like choosing to develop progressively thinner products, removing physical function keys and implementing touchbars, why would Apple make those decisions? More importantly, why would Apple double down on these decisions in a line refresh of the product 18 months after the initial launch? Presumably Apple is well aware of the number of developers who use their machines, and presumably Apple is aware of developer feedback (again: basic competency as an organization).
So let's reframe this question as follows: why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised? A very reasonable answer is that customers in the aggregate - developers included - don't care that much about the touchbar or the virtual function keys, and will continue to buy the products.
Regardless of my own opinion about the keyboard design, I try to approach this from the perspective that as a single individual with vastly fewer resources than Apple, I likely have a fundamentally less perfect understanding of Apple's product goals, customer demographic and design initiatives. So if I see an incongruence that seems to have a simple answer ("Why doesn't Apple just do the thing everyone clearly wants"), my instinct is that my priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.
Think of the thickness thing - Apple made billions of dollars before it wasn't even possible to make razor thin laptops. Is razor-thinness, to the point of losing port connectivity in a Pro device, really necessary or optimal?
But I find jdietrich's argument totally plausible. They could have tons of negative user feedback that they ignored. "They" probably being a handful of designers (so the total number of talented people at Apple is basically irrelevant). Apple's always had a certain arrogance. They (believe they) know what customers want better than their customers do: in this case a thinner and thinner laptop. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they lose their way and I end up with a really expensive MacBook Pro that I hate typing on.
I've certainly seen a few cases inside Google where a small team ignored dogfood feedback from other Googlers ("you aren't the user", basically), then were shocked when they got the same feedback from real users. It's absolutely possible for a small number of people inside a giant organization to make decisions that later bite them. I don't have any particular reason to believe Apple's immune to this.
Because their approach to design is completely unique. Their industrial design studio is small, insular and incredibly secretive. That studio has almost complete independence; most Apple employees won't see a new product until the design is finalised and ready for launch. They have an overt belief in the wisdom of ignoring user feedback and media criticism, going back to the original Macintosh. They don't think that their role is to provide people with what they want, but what they should want.
https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Apple-Americas-Admired-Secreti...
That approach is one of Apple's greatest assets. They were right to ignore the people who said that a computer needed serial ports and a floppy disk drive. They were right to ignore the people who said that a phone needed buttons. They're willing to ignore conventional wisdom and the demands of the market in favour of a singular design vision for what technology should be. They're willing to tell their customers trust us, this is for the best. That approach is necessary if you're going to be a highly innovative company that creates entire new categories of product, but it's not right 100% of the time and it can be infuriatingly stubborn.
The strain relief on the MagSafe connector was too short. Any cable manufacturer would tell you that it was too short. Any electrical engineer would tell you that it was too short. The internet was full of pictures of frayed (and sometimes charred) MagSafe cables. The Apple store website was full of one-star reviews for MagSafe power adaptors that had frayed. Apple did nothing for over five years until a class action forced their hand; they offered replacements, but didn't fix the defect.
They don't want to improve the keyboard, because it would make the laptop slightly less thin, and the people with the power, (the design department) don't want that.
Just because Apple has lots of people working there, doesn't mean that the RIGHT people are in charge.
No company is perfect. And although apples religious focus on design has helped it in the past, this time it seems to have hurt thebl company.
And maybe they will learn from their mistakes or maybe they wont.
It could be that it would be a huge public image loss to admit that they were wrong about this. No matter how Apple phrases it, it's always look bad to say "we've spent the last 2-3 years telling you this was a technical achievement, turns out we were wrong." One of Apple's biggest marketing angles is "we put the work in and get it right the first time." That's going to be something that people mock them over, regardless of whether or not it's the right decision to make.
It also might open the floodgates on more expensive litigation and warranty requirements in the future. Apple's current warranty that they just rolled out is only valid up to 3 years after the initial purchase. Is a judge more likely to force them to extend it if a lawyer can argue in court "they lacked so much confidence that they reverted their own design?" Are their significant investments into blocking Right to Repair going to be hampered by that kind of public admission?
They've also invested large amounts of money into the current manufacturing process and design. Their recent decision to discontinue the 2015 model might point to this being about manufacturing costs - you could ask the same question of that decision: "why not allow the holdouts to keep purchasing the older model?"
Along with that, it could also be sunk-cost fallacy at play. One way to check if Apple has a problem with sunk-cost is to look back in the past to see if they've exhibited a pattern of doubling down on controversial decisions and rejecting criticism or blaming customers for issues.
It also could just be that the keyboard looks sexier in advertisements, and perhaps Apple optimizes for advertisements over extended customer experience because they have enough built up goodwill and reputation to do so. The devices might sell better right now when marketed as futuristic status symbols, rather than as practical machines.
Finally, don't dismiss the idea that it could just be the result of designers and engineers running wild without enough practical input to reign them in. I'm all for giving companies the benefit of the doubt, and I understand what you're getting at. But you should apply your philosophy in moderation or else someday you'll find yourself defending Microsoft Bob. Companies are made of people after all.
I honestly don't know how any of the other market shares can put up with this failing keyboard either. For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.
This is a good point, which I acknowledge. Maybe I've been lucky with my keyboard. But while you point this out, I think most folks complaining about the keyboard are not acknowledging the other side - that it may not be as important as they think it is either. Hence my original comment indicating my own opinion.
> For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.
For what it's worth, I wrote a ~170 page paper (in LaTeX) on a 2016 MacBook Pro. I cared a lot more about screen real estate than the keyboard, so I added a few monitors. All anyone seems to be able to provide is an exchange of anecdotal evidence for or against the keyboard. If there's a real issue I'm not defending it. But I am saying it might not be worth it for Apple to fix it depending on incidence rate, and it might not be as prevalent as the tech blogging/journalism sphere would have us believe.
If your keyboard ever breaks and you find yourself unable to type, then you will discover why people with defective keyboards think its super important. Until then you can minimize the impact it has on people all day long as they cannot type properly without an external keyboard. I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...
To make this particular point painfully clear, I didn't postulate the problem is not widespread because literally only bloggers have the problem, and there are relatively few bloggers. My postulate was that the problem seems more widespread than it is due to the magnifying effect journalism and blogging has. If you disagree then critique the point I made, not the contrived false equivalence you seem to think I made.
Other than that yes, I've had a broken keyboard on a laptop, and no, I'm not minimizing anything. Devil's advocacy and a request for some quantitative evidence (which was elsewhere provided, and to which I conceded) does not constitute minimization or dismissal of a problem. This especially:
> I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...
is a false dichotomy, and one which I did not make.
It could be the ambiguous way you've phrased this, but if I'm reading this right, then that's what you're not getting: a lot of people actually do have this problem. Not just bloggers.
"millions"? Let's not spout hyperbole here. You can't say that without some backup.
Actually the opposite is true.
Apple itself has said it is a tiny, tiny percentage of users. If they were to lie about this then it would be an SEC violation since they would be lying to markets about potential impact of replacements/lawsuits.
My problem with the keyboard is just reliability - I now keep a can of compressed air at my desk just because a key is going to get screwed up at least once a month. And I have one key that is particularly bad, so I assume some piece of dust is just trapped under the key and the compressed air pushes it somewhere until it eventually falls back into place. I'm waiting a little longer to bring it in for repair in hopes that they start using this new v3 keyboard as a replacement - maybe it secretly fixes the dust issue (And they don't want to say it because that would be admitting that there was a problem.)
But I have heard that they were replacing older keyboards (2016) with 2017 models (You could easily tell because they add new symbols above control/option.) I wonder if they'll be doing replacements with 2018 keys now. It would be really nice - the keyboard reliability is pretty much my only complaint, minus not having a physical escape key.
That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes. You're basically saying, "Whatever Apple sells I will buy, regardless of its qualities." That strikes me as a strange stance to take.
I'm not "basically saying whatever Apple sells I will buy", and to think that would indicate you have an unrealistically uncharitable interpretation of my comment. In fact, I explicitly stated elsewhere in this thread that screen real estate matters to me.
If you feel strongly about the keyboard, that's fine. But that's not intrinsic to your capacity as a developer, it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.
If Apple decided to go for a chiclet, or other variety of keyboard, I probably wouldn't care. I'd deal with that. In this case, though, I pretty much have to expect (based on news and class action lawsuits) that it will stop working correctly, in a matter of months, in a way which directly impacts my productivity. I'll use one at work if I have to, but there's no way I'd buy one for home while the keyboard is that unreliable.
I find that people who take themselves very seriously tend to project their preferences on others.
As it relates to laptops for developers-- not agreeing on things like keyboards, matte screens, aspect ratios, touchscreens, etc. - that can elicit very strong absolutist responses from them.
No it isn’t. Plenty of people use external keyboards. I do, for one.
This is true, but not everyone is picky about keyboards.
I started using mechanicals in the 80s, and I know a lot of people think it's the only way to type, but I actually don't like mechanicals any more.
Today, I use a dome keyboard (shudder!) as my daily driver and I can adapt to most keyboards, regardless of feel.
So while I get what you're saying, the OP is probably implying that he/she can adapt to different keyboard types -- as such keyboard type is not a meaningful selection criterion for him/her.
"how many relevant ports does it have? will I have to carry around a dongle to do the same things I can do on my 2015 MBP without a dongle? oh wait.. nope still need dongles."
And then "Wait why is the 13 inch form factor not even getting discrete graphics processing, nor up to 32GB ram?"
A dysfunctional keyboard is a no-no, because I need a functional keyboard. But in general I'm not bothered at all about the other things that are important to other people, such as key travel, etc. So I haven't been vocal about it.
I've used every MacBook model and the new ones have unacceptably bad keyboards. I am in an office with dozens of broken ones and the things have become a joke amongst the developers. The IT department got so tired of Apple's time to repair them that they started just ordering extra keys from third party websites for $20/each.
I worked at Apple with Steve Jobs and I can assure you he would not say that the keyboard isn't meaningful and its fine if its broken. There is a reason all the major Apple bloggers have written piece after piece about their poor reliability and repairability. If your space bar breaks with one piece of dust you need to replace the entire top of the computer including the battery since its glued to it.
This is a deliberate misreading of what I said. My point is that reasonable people can disagree about what a "functional keyboard" is for software development. You're free to disagree with me, but don't accuse me of being under a "reality distortion field." And for what it's worth, the comment of mine that you responded to is talking about design and aesthetic choices. You're primarily talking about hardware faults and reliability.
We want a functional keyboard. This is not about reasonable people disagreeing. If your space bar does not work, your keyboard is broken and typing sucks.
Marketing 101. The majority of smokers weren't cowboys.
This means that developers are more likely to be regularly using software that actually depends on the keys they stripped off to make the touchbar, and/or software with sub-par to nonexistent touchbar support.
Ah but you can still tell something. If there's anything to the idea that a picture sends a message or that there's such a thing as "visual language," this group of photos is loudly and stubbornly doubling down on "Thin is all that matters."
Customer: "Does the keyboard work this time?"
Apple: "IT'S THIN!"
Considering that the drive toward thinness is precisely what's ruining the keyboards, that tells you plenty, without even reading anything.
This is standard operating practice for an international firm like Apple. The first set of images doesn't show certain details because you want it to have broad appeal. Since Apple keyboards come in a dozen or so different configurations for different markets, you show the more vague master images.
Once the global media outlets have had their splash, then the regionals will get images with more details. In this case, the regional keyboards.
Sorry. No conspiracy here. Just good marketing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(I’ve just looked at some of their locations, and German seems to use photos with German text on screen, while Greek seems to use photos with English on screen).
When the next generation of north/southbridge motherboard appeared and sound wasn't a priority for motherboard builders only then journalists noticed what they missed.
That "most popular" is marketing - they have all of the developers running OSX and most of those are probably on MBP or Air, where developers using Windows or Linux are fragmented across multiple models from multiple manufacturers.
At my desk I have a Topre Realforce 88UB 45g keyboard that cost me like £200, a Razer Blackwidow for gaming, and a Microsoft Sculpt to switch it up.
I'm fairly big on keyboards, but I do love the new MBP keyboard.
I can't remember the old one enough now (I had the 2014 model previously), but I know I spoke of it as the best laptop keyboard - so I agree I probably rate it more than this one, BUT I am so used to typing on this now that I really don't think about the keyboard as a con in the slightest - you have to sit with it for a few weeks and you'll be flying - I break 120wpm on this because there is practically no travel.
What I DO hate, is that effing touchbar. Worst design decision on this laptop. I am 'over' it in that I can work fine with it and don't feel like it hinders me anymore, but everytime I look at it I get annoyed they are still sticking with it.
The only two cons of this MBP now it has a spec refresh -> touchbar sucks and not having ONE USB-A slot really pisses me off everytime I reach for the adapter...
are they really though? or are people complaining but still buying it?
I honestly don't see how their current laptop line-up makes any sense for consumers (and shareholders). If the TouchBar really makes it easier for non-nerds to find shortcuts, why only offer it in high-end laptops?
The above is to disagree with all of your specific arguments, but I do not disagree with your implied conclusion -- I don't think the touch bar is universally loved. I suspect most consumers do not care about it one way or the other, and I think it was a mistake that Apple should kill.
Maybe it helps the laptop feel more highend/luxury?
One of the key tenets of touch typing instruction is to NOT LOOK at the keyboard. And the lack of universal control over iTunes is admittedly a first world problem however they didn't replace it with anything meaningful. I've had this machine for 18 months and I have found zero utility in the touch bar.
I'm very curious to try the new BlackMagic eGPU though!
Though honestly, I was never much for the f keys beyond the browser and in Visual Studio. So the loss of those keys didn't hit me as much as it has others.
(Not that Jobs wasn't a Dire Marketroid himself, but at least he knew that practical and functional sells better in the long run than snazzy but busted.)
But there's something far worse: killer apps (for some professionals and hobbyists) only exist for Mac OSX and Windows. I'm looking at you, Adobe.
I've been using a 8th gen computer for a year and I haven't had any problems. On the contrary the hevc hardware decoder/encoder works on linux, but I couldn't get it to work on Windows.
On the other hand Windows looks more polished than KDE and GNOME.
We all want a solid and reliable UNIX-based OS, but we also want an OS that won't be treated as a bastard child by hardware and software vendors. As much as we all love the world of free software, sometimes we actually do want/need to use commercial software as well.
Apple has given us what we fundamentally want, so we just put up with all the baggage that comes along with it. After all, what else are we going to do? Use Windows?
Ubuntu has been a fine OS for me. It's not perfect, but it serves its purpose well enough.
Curious. Have you tried Gnome Shell or recent KDE or some modern Linux desktop like that for a while?
Because I always assumed MacOS as a Unix with shiny UI as well, however once I worked on one for a year or two I realized it long lost its uniqness. In many ways the UI is closer to Windows 7 than Windows 10 is. And things like Unity/Gnome Shell or even win 10 long went in a more productivity focused UI concept.
> They didn't do that because it is not what most people want.
What's your basis for saying that, besides the assumption that Apple can't be wrong, so whatever it's doing must be what people actually want?
Apple has a habit of designing from an ivory tower and not admitting to its mistakes. I would say it's arguable that their design priorities are currently out of whack: chasing thinness when you're going from 1.5in to 0.75in is one thing, it's quite another when you're going from 18mm to 15mm. It may not be a fatal mistake for them, but it's evidence that they may longer deserve the design deference they've traditionally gotten.
> Apple has to make changes that will sell more laptops to the masses to maximize shareholder value.
Many of those changes could be characterized as pointless sidegrades: merely change for change's sake.
> Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products
So either you're wrong, or Apple's PR team is really bad positioning their product. From the Press Release itself in the first few paragraphs:
ideal for manipulating large data sets, performing complex simulations, creating multi-track audio projects or doing advanced image processing or film editing.
Already the most popular notebook for developers around the world, the new MacBook Pro can compile code faster and run multiple virtual machines and test environments easier than before.
MacBook Pro now delivers faster performance for complex simulations and data manipulation.
With the new MacBook Pro, developers can compile code faster and more easily run multiple virtual machines and test environments.
Aren't those all features described exactly for the "niche developer/macrumors posters"?!
Given a choice between a sexy MacBook Pro design and a pro-developer feature, Apple will choose the sexy design everytime.
This would be similar to, for example, many sportswear brands who say they are for professional athletes, but whose primary consumer base is... not.
In both cases, they may still attract the audience they claim to target, but in practice, that niche market makes up only a small fraction of their total sales.
That's true for most gaming rigs and high-end Windows laptops ;-)
"stalk your ex on Facebook, 37% faster"
"Cat videos on youtube look great in Retina full screen"
"Your stolen music files sound fab thanks to deeper bass response from the stereo speakers"
"chat with your dumb friends for hours, with a new longer-lasting battery"
"call in sick without removing your phone from its case, thanks to bluetooth."
Other than dying batteries, or physical damage (broken trackpad/keyboard) I seriously wonder why the average person needs anything but the most basic laptop when a $99 android phone is in all measures more powerful than a 10 year old laptop but we're doing basically the same activities: surf the web, chat, email. Very, very few people create content. Most consume.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd...
"Signal"
There is a lot of signaling going on, using these product choices. And Apple's at the top of the heap.
It has transitioned from "tech" to "brand".
I've seen people write off William Gibson's more recent work, that takes this on as a central topic for examination and exposition. It may not be as... "awesome" as the universe of Molly and Wintermute. But it's a very good and engaging application of creating writing to this topic. Recommended.
I think this is actually sometimes about minimalism. I'd rather have one nice, good, high-quality thing than to accumulate junk over the years as I get deeper into a hobby. The longest hike I've done was a three-day section hike on the AT, but I have ultralight hiking and camping gear. I know, in the future, when I have more time, I'll do longer and more frequent hikes, and even now, lighter is more comfortable to carry.
There's also the Paradox of Choice. Upper middle class folks are strapped for time and flush with cash. Would I rather spend two hours reading reviews to find out whether the discount pocket knife is really as good for my purposes as a Benchmade, or just make the purchase secure in the knowledge that I bought a well-regarded brand with excellent customer service? Maybe I overpaid, but the speed and hassle-free nature of the transaction are worth it.
Oh, I really enjoy prep-work. I have to admit, I like using a nice, sharp knife (plus, it's much safer).
I hate doing prep-work at other peoples houses. The knives are just so dull.
So, I spend more money on knives than I should because I enjoy good knives and get lots of good use out of them.
https://www.amazon.com/Victorinox-Fibrox-Chefs-Knife-8-Inch/...
“Managing data and complex simulations” seems to allude to ‘em Excel jockeys who should be using a humble database and/or are running some kind of what-if calculations.
Anything else either quickly gets offloaded to one of my group's servers with 64-80 threads and 100s of GB of RAM or, if it's even bigger, to the local HPC cluster with 1000s of CPUs.
Even without access to existing resources: I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where, if I have a fixed budget of ~3-5k to do computational work, it'd be better for me to spend that on a top-end MBP than a two-piece solution of laptop+linux server.
Edge case, sure, but shrug
How's the rabies situation there? Are people still doing multicompartment SIR models? That kind of stuff is hard to parralelize.
And yeah, people still use compartmental models pretty heavily. A lot of my stuff is stochastic (it's about the beginning or end of epidemics, or in small populations) so that's nicely parallel.
I currently have a 2012 MBP Retina, but am not sure if I want my next laptop to be another MBP or just the regular MacBook. I really like the 15” screen and would have a hard time giving that up. I wish they had a regular MacBook with a high quality screen, battery, and keyboard and not much else.
I suppose it depends on the desktop! I just moved from a MacBook Pro to a Dell XPS 15. I thought I'd replace the MBP with the Dell, but I ended up replacing my desktop machine with the Dell, and still using the MacBook in my dining room.
The XPS 15 I bought has an i9, 32GB RAM, and 1TB SSD for $1100 less than the equivalent MacBook. My workload is primarily Adobe- and WordPress-centric, with some coding and article writing thrown in for good measure.
I do video editing, photo editing, and run code with zero issues. The i9 beats the pants off my Skylake i7 desktop. And it's portable! And the screen is amazing. I have it hooked up to my 5K monitor in my home office, and it's gorgeous.
Since my workload is 98% Chrome, Adobe products, Microsoft products, or text editors, everything was pretty much identical from one platform to another. I turned off automatic updates on Windows 10 (I do this on my Mac too) and had no issues at all migrating over.
I don't think I'll be buying a new Mac at this point.
Yes, and, trust me, most developers I know who got newer MBPs are pretty happy with theirs. I know I am and I hope I get one of these newer ones next week. 6 cores and 32 gigs of DDR4 make a lot of a difference. The vi users make jokes about the Esc key, of course (but I'm into Emacs, so no problem for me). One company I know of offered the "classic" model for those who wanted to have it and nobody took the offer.
Among developers, the 10% troublesome to 90% happy rate seems to be present.
I, personally, have different priorities and have no problem with thicker laptops. My next personal one will probably be a maxed out Lenovo or Dell XPS, since they are cheaper than Macs at the cost of features I don't really need (high-fidelity screen, for instance).
Even if they provide 64 GB, it will never be enough RAM. OSX is dogshit at memory management, with massive memory leaks. On my work laptop (-1 generation), I have 16 GB. Normal workloads (i.e. not even developer workloads/compilation tasks) consume memory to the point where I’m constantly swapping. Until they fix their shit, I’m not going to buy a new one, nor will I ask my company (I am good friends with IT) to refresh.
I run Chrome and Slack on Windows and I never have had memory issues. Using Occam’s Razor, it has to be an issue with memory management at the OS level. I’ve also run Chrome and Slack on Linux - 1/10th of the memory footprint. I will write a blogpost in the future about it.
I had a new MBP for a few months and hated it.
As soon as an old MBP freed up, I traded in for it. SO much happier, and my friends are jealous.
And I pretty much live in emacs. Where I use the escape key regularly. C-x ESC ESC is one of my go-tos.
YMMV.
My esc key has been caps-lock for the past like 6 years, so that isn't an issue. (HIGHLY recommend this either way)
I don't use the touchbar too much (just like I didn't use the f bar too much), but the sliding action for volume control and a few others is nice.
I just open the macOS preferences, and remap Caps Lock to Control. Then escape becomes a Caps Lock + [ combination. Simple, and no fumbling around for an Escape key.
This also works well on both macOS and Linux, especially when moving about the command line (e.g. Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E to move to the beginning/end of the current line, respectively). See [1] for more shortcuts. Especially useful is Ctrl+K to cut text after the cursor, and then Ctrl+Y to paste it back.
Of course, the regular control key will do the same thing. But using Caps Lock as control reduces strain, at least for me. In fact, it's the first change I make on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
And on Ubuntu, gnome-tweak-tool makes it trivial to make Caps Lock and additional Control key (if you really need Caps Lock, you can also swap Caps Lock and Control).
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/keyboard-shortcuts-fo...
(a habit I picked up on DEC and Wyse and etc... terminals where the key labeled ESC was in different locations)
When I am forced to move to a new machine I am strongly considering grabbing a Dell or Lenovo and throwing Ubuntu on it. Experience has been that bad.
I was very happy with every single MacBook Air since I had one (which I think might have been 3rd generation?), and in fact purchased every single MacBook Air thereafter. People really liked the original Retina MacBook Pros.
This idea that these Pro customers who regularly spend $3,000 on their computers are a fickle whiny bunch who are never happy about anything and have always found something to be upset about is complete fantasy and ignores the reality of an actual degradation in quality.
We didn't just imagine the extension of the warranty on MacBook Pros with butterfly keyboards: Apple had to take action because the computers were ACTUALLY BREAKING. I own one of these, my t key ACTUALLY FELL OFF. I'm not just trying to come up with arbitrary reasons to hate on Apple, the "t" key is not some ivory tower feature only some 10% niche care about, this is a serious quality problem.
No one is saying they shouldn't innovate and come up with gimmicks to sell new computers. In fact, the T2 gimmick might be perfect: they get to tell "the common user" that the computer now runs Siri without compromising existing behavior -- brilliant! Compare this to the Touch Bar, which while flashy infuriates me every single day as I repeatedly mute and unmute my computer as my pinky brushes the touch bar so delicately I don't even register the feeling on my finger.
/S
That's not entirely accurate. The original 15 inch Retina Macbook Pro is an ideal laptop as far as I'm concerned. I'm still holding on to mine for home use. It was extremely well received in development communities at the time of release. On the other hand I have 2017 Touchbar Pro from work and it's horrendous for undocked use, borderline unusable.
While it's easy to say "just trust apple, they're doing it for the shareholders," I think it's also fair to say that they're losing their touch in this venue.
It used to be the only reason you didn't buy a Mac for pro creative-type work was the price. Now there are many great reasons from ergonomics to computing power.
I use it as my home-notebook and iOS development.
Apple isn't where it is today because of TV advertising. It's where it is because of brand advocates like the people who are now complaining about the new products.
No one wants that touchbar and Apple themselves just replaced the keyboard so to say its what consumers want is just pure fantasy. There's no data yet. Maybe they'll want this new keyboard but you're assuming anything Apple does is what the consumer wants.
Bingo. Most people on this site don't realize they are in the minority.
Apple still have the tooling for the 2015 Macbook Pro. The NRE costs to put a modern processor in that chassis would be relatively modes, because it's a much larger chassis with a more straightforward thermal design. The market for such a machine might not be large, but it's extremely important for the health of their ecosystem, because developers developers developers.
Personally, I think that the post-Jobs Apple has developed a nasty case of cargo cultism. Obsessive focus on the user experience has transmuted into obsessive focus on arbitrary design goals - thinner, lighter, fewer ports. They're making record profits thanks to the huge margins on iPhones and the strong vendor lock-in on iOS, but they're burning the goodwill that kept them alive during the lean years. If Apple can't find a way to delight customers rather than frustrate them, they're facing a serious long-term problem.
For normal humans, having a card slot and being able to use old chargers and accessories is a real consideration.
If you can’t reuse that stuff anyway, then fenestrating may become less distasteful.
And you don't ask people what they think, you observe their behavior and hope you can make sense of it. People have no fucking clue what they want. You would have to be insane to ask people for their _opinions_ and expect something you can work with.
- The hardware (particularly the keyboard and massive trackpad) is great
- apt-get on WSL is better than homebrew will ever be (powershell too if you have the time to learn it)
- Windows 10 has a dedicated team working on it (Apple has merged iOS and macOS teams since a few years ago, which may be because iOS makes a lot more money).
Edit: changed emulator to simulator (which is true, it's x64 iOS).
I've been running a ZBook G3 with Debian 9 and have been having a pretty good experience so far. The laptop feels pretty good but I'm sure a MacBook Pro would be a step up in terms of hardware quality.
XCode even connects over WiFi to my iPhone when both are on the same network, but I did have to jump through a few hoops to get it all working
I bought a first generation Surfacebook a few years ago because I couldn't wait any longer for Apple to release their new MBP range, and I'm glad I didn't wait. It's the best laptop I've ever owned.
Even though I've moved away from .NET dev and work mostly with Ruby and Node it's still my favourite machine to use. I run Debian with minimal problems, and I'm started to get more into WSL, which seems to work brilliantly for all the use cases I've thrown at it.
If the numbers are strong on people moving from MBP to the Surfacebook, then it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for it to become a real option for developers, regardless of whether they want to use Windows or not.
I still love my 2013 Macbook Pro, but I'm probably not going to be buying a Mac again until they make something of similar usability and flexibility (mostly the keyboard and the ports).
I run Mavericks in a VM to do Mac builds for Electron, and it works fine if you've got plenty of RAM and a fast SSD.
This. I love this about most modern PC laptops. Sometimes you get some driver issues like I did on this MSI where I had to go through a kernel mailing list and use some python scripts to extract the firmware from Windows to get Wi-Fi working:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/
But that was also a gaming laptop. Every Dell and HP I've purchased in the past few years works perfectly with the mainline kernel. I've never had an issue with missing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or video drivers for years in a PC laptop.
Trying to get Linux working on a MacBook is a fucking nightmare:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/linux-on-a-macbook-pro-14-3/
I prefer i3/tiling window managers and package management to Win/Mac and I'd hate to work at a job where I'm forced to use either.
Do I like more than Ubuntu (which I use personally)? No, but I find it to be pretty easy to use.
Also, the Ubuntu subsystem has been fantastic for working on remote Linux servers. I was using git bash (or Ubuntu in Virtual Box) previously, but I don't need that anymore. It will freeze once in a while, but it's trivial to get going again.
But just things like the network settings - they have been making getting to Network and Sharing Centre harder each big update, and the replacement (the new metro-style settings app) is just rubbish in comparison. You can't change an IP address in it, can't easily get to the network status, etc... Network and Sharing Centre wasn't even that good but it would be a big improvement to just can the settings app and go back to the Windows 7 control panel...
That being said, I don't mind Win 10 when I have to use it. I use it for games and Adobe products and I find it really nice and prefer it to macOS easily.
My main box at home and my laptop at work are both Linux though. Gentoo for life! When it comes to development nothing compares to a good tiling window manager and a solid Linux ecosystem.
However, the base model has weak specs and the upgrades get pretty pricey. So it's similar to MBP in that way, at least
I’ve also switched from MBP to Surface, couldn’t be happier. Great keyboard, great 3:2 screen (since you can’t buy 4:3 anymore), nice trackpad, WSL is great too. Rather than complain, vote with your wallet.
I tried running Docker on it, which was a disaster. WSL doesn't seem to fully implement things that Docker or other Linux apps require. Various network things seem to be half working or absent.
I don't want to start an argument with you on this, I'm glad your experience has been different to mine. I've started using WSL as a simple shell to access a Fedora VM running under Hyper-V.
Apt is so different from homebrew that I don’t think they’re worth comparing directly. Fwiw people run homebrew on ubuntu, presumably because it is «better» (i.e has something to offer over) than apt.
And there’s a lot of applications that don’t work under WSL - a while back, not a single haskell app worked. (I haven’t bothered checking)
That was the best developer laptop I had. The missing 2" on the 15" just makes the IDE too narrow.
All the bezel-shrinking R&D being done for phones has to reach laptops at some point. I'm seriously losing half an inch of luggable-but-not-lookable space on each side of the screen, plus a good inch below. (I have like the most common 13" Dell in the world; just walking around in the study room of the library I see three more.)
I have no idea why this style isn't more popular. Maybe it seems too fragile to consumers?
I frequently put Apple's 17" laptop in a backpack/case slot designed for 15" normal laptops, and it fit just fine.
Of course the effective pixels per inch may make some features too small but the effective PPI of 1680x1050 on a current 15" MacBook Pro is lower than the actual PPI of the last 17" MacBook Pro's screen:
147 PPI 15.4" 1920x1200 133 PPI 17" 1920x1200 129 PPI 15.4" 1680x1050 116 PPI 17" 1680x1050 110 PPI 15.4" 144x900
Then a few years passed, and Apple went all-in on high-DPI "Retina" displays, while the whole PC laptop world had a great display regression.
Color me optimisitic, but I'm hopeful a new arm-based mac will come earlier than 2020, though.
P.S.: I don't even think touch-only input is neccessarily a bad idea. All Apple has to do to make it work is to implement some kind of really good haptic feedback which also allows to feel individual keys. I even expected that for this iteration of the MBP for the Touchbar.
> What is that? A non-moving keyboard where a feedback is faked convinvingly enough via localized haptic feedback.
> See iPhone home button and MBP trackpad.
https://mobile.twitter.com/keff85/status/1011350819210498050
With haptic feedback and perhaps different locations/placement, it has the potential to augment or even transform the ways we interact with the computer.
Put another way, the current problems are not insurmountable. Changing habits is not easy. What if there are better options than current keyboards? All I'm saying is consider what might be in the works.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we should blindly accept anything Apple does. But we should not blindly assume that their decisions are based on the worst intentions, either.
While I'll admit there are cool things you can do with embedded OLED displays, the keys they sacrificed for it are keys I actually need to press. Regularly.
The amount of money spent on the TouchBar has nothing to do with anything. Apple makes a new set of chips for each new iPhone, iPad and Mac; they have the in-house expertise and the budget to make whatever they want whenever they want.
It's not like the Mac division has it's own profit/lost statement it has to worry about.
The main reason why it's taken this long to get MacBook Pros to this level of performance is due to delays by Intel; simple as that.
The linked Apple release just says:
> an improved third-generation keyboard for quieter typing
I notice you don't quote two paragraphs right before that:
> The butterfly keyboard design Apple introduced in 2016 has been divisive. Some people really like it, claiming it has fast travel and a sturdy, responsive feel to it. Others feel it's uncomfortable to type on. We haven't seen a keyboard this polarizing in a long time; it's a point of passionate disagreement even among Ars Technica reviews staff.
The reaction is mixed, even among people who compare laptops to each other for a living. But you make it sound like anybody who knows what they're doing would prefer the old model.
Isn't that mostly because they let the Macbook Air languish, rather than either upgrading it or letting it drop to netbook-level pricing.
So lots of people (myself included) who wanted a Mac laptop bought the Pro one instead.
This is after an (at the time) abnormally long period of little to no substantial updates to the laptops. If you remember at the time, people were worrying about the lack of a new laptop the way they worry now about the Mac Pro. It's really not completely fair to state this metric without the realization that there was a lot of pent up demand for modern components, which would probably overrule any other issues. I was one of the people that bought the 2016 model -- and I'm not happy (not least of which because one of the keys literally fell off), so "fastest selling" != "well received". As it stands now, for me the defining quality of the hardware is that it is the easiest way to run macOS. The fact that the 2015 model and the Air keep selling so well is in my opinion a better demonstration of the "reception" of this new MacBook.
> The reaction is mixed, even among people who compare laptops to each other for a living. But you make it sound like anybody who knows what they're doing would prefer the old model.
This is also just not a fair representation of the actual state of affairs. Regardless of whether the keyboards are enjoyable when functional, the reality is that they have quality issues. Apple having to create a program for replacing the keyboards since they break so often is just a fact. Interestingly enough, I'm in this camp: I really have no issue with the new keyboard except for the fact that the keys break. Well, that and the Touch Bar which is a separate topic.
what I mean is, if they are selling a ton and its sustained best case scenario), then they talk about that number (thats the proportional term) -- they say things like "we are shipping 1k units per day and projected to hit 50k per month soon".
If they are they aren't selling very many, then they find the derivative of the number sold and see when it is the highest.. "like in a weekend we sold 1 million units!!"
And then if its a slow burn after a period of time they eventually tell you a cumulative number that have sold (integral). "There have been 100 million macs sold to date.." that kind of thing..
So when somebody says "fastest selling", that gives me pause because it basically can mean whatever you want it to mean -- that somehow they have a metric of sales within a period of time of their choosing that was higher than other previous devices. That could literally be because of their ability to fulfill them compared to previously.
Anyway, I'm still holding onto my MBP 2012 and waiting for basically a lighter version of it that has the ability to replace internal M.2 cards (not proprietary), ability to max out my ram and also doesn't have a touchbar.. I mean that touchbar is so lame.. what a waste of effort/time on apples side.. also, talk about fixing something that wasn't broken -- the trackpad.. basically up until the force trackpad people thought it was better than anything else out there by a factor of 10, and apple then changes it and basically everybody says its substantially worse feeling except novice users who know no different..
They've played this thinness and flashy lights game too much too long. My new Lenovo T480S (24GB DDR4, is coming next week :) Sweet Linux with i3 tiled window manager. All the ports & productivity I can ask for.
I'm voting with my wallet and my vote doesn't go to Apple.
I just looked up my laptop's info: 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 from 2012. So you are telling me 6 years later, I can get a 2.9GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 processor for ~$2800. So Moore's law was incorrect?
Anyway, yes, this is why a lot of people, myself included, think the new MBPs are not at all worth the price, especially if you have an older one. There is essentially no reason for me to ever upgrade from my late 2013 model unless it completely breaks. I love this computer, it was probably one of the best purchases I've ever made
If we're going to be rational, we can't wave it all off as marketing or shiny toys, we have to accept that if they are consistently selling tons of products at high margins, they are delivering value, and the market is voting for that value with their pocketbooks.
If we say, "Well, their prices are out of whack with their value because we can get the exact same thing from Bob's Motherboards for half the price," then we are wilfully choosing to emphasize the part of their value that their customers don't care about, while ignoring the part of their value that customers care about.
Historically speaking transistors and performance were coincidentally related: More transistors helped do more things at once, and tinier transistors ran faster than bigger ones.
Now we're at a different inflection point where the transistors aren't shrinking as quickly, but the dies themselves are getting bigger and the chips are growing more complex in terms of 3D structure. There's more transistors in there, but the easy gains in terms of pitch reduction leading to higher clock-speeds are gone.
If we'd been on the same track as before you'd have a ~140GHz CPU. Instead you have a 2.9GHz one because physics is a buzzkill.
Here's an older article discussing the problem from 2012 but the same trend has held: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/116561-the-death-of-cp...
Transistor counts continue to climb but power consumption, clock speeds and performance per clock have all hit a wall.
That would have been far more desirable.
I am repulsed by the Touch Bar, and the keyboard which is widely reported to be notoriously unreliable and requiring very expensive repairs does not inspire confidence.
Sigh.
I think those keyboards are great on the smaller more portable macbooks but I don't understand why the 'pro' models are favouring a couple of mm in size over a more practical keyboard designed for 'pro' use.
Counterpoint: I'm also a developer, and I love the 2017 MBP keyboard. I'm of course disappointed to hear that they fail so regularly and that the repair process is so absurdly sledgehammery, but I think they feel amazing to type on and the recall replacement program satisfies my failure concerns.
The part where they're completely unreliable though, I hate.
Based on yours and other comments, perhaps I need to find an opportunity to use the newer keyboard a little more than I have to see if I get used to it.
I use a 2015 MacBook Air at home that I can type on for hours without any wrist pain.
“an improved third-generation keyboard for quieter typing.”
Looking forward to reading the first reviews.
15-Inch MacBook Pro Highlights
6-core Intel Core i7 and Core i9 processors up to 2.9 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 4.8 GHz
Up to 32GB of DDR4 memory
Powerful Radeon Pro discrete graphics with 4GB of video memory in every configuration
Up to 4TB of SSD storage2
True Tone display technology
Apple T2 Chip
Touch Bar and Touch ID
Personally holding out for a 32GB 13", if my 2012 makes it that long.
Hardware is slightly less polished, but no major complaints there (except for how poor the buying experience was).
Still, keyboard works. It would take something amazing to win me back (like a custom CPU that just completely redefines what we expect from battery life and performance)
i3 is generally used for its productivity benefits, not for appearance. You can still spruce it up with a new bar (see Lemonbar or Polybar), but overall people choose it because it feels nice to use. The people on /r/unixporn have done a pretty good job of making it look good though.
edit: To clarify, I think current macOS is a better OS, its features are worth less neatness, but Snow Leopard did a smaller amount of things in a neater and more polished way.
People have been saying things like that about various Linuxes for over 20 years, and it still isn't close.
Linux is always rapidly developing but there are always distros which suit the more conservative users who hate change. I agree that this is a difficult concept when first entering the Linux world but it is how it is.
I do wonder what makes you say it isn't close though... I feel it is more than that and would really love to replace my companies Windows 10 environment with Kubuntu 18.04. Still, I think even Ubuntu's standard desktop is pretty nice and very usable.
Get all their .net apps and office/excel stuff to work, and get whatever integrations with office365 are required to work actually working and get it all to sync with their mobile devices... I'm sure you can have them switched in no time...
I first entered the 'Linux world' in 1994, when I downloaded SLS onto floppies and installed it on my 486/33. I consider myself less of a 'conservative user who hates change' and more of a person with better things to do with my time than fight with my computer to make it perform basic functionality.
That was part of my reason for going full mac 10 years ago. Had one in the house, but my main laptops were linux. And it was always such a pain, wireless networking in particular. And ever few months I'd hear/read "oh, but ubuntu's great - everything just works". And then I'd try it on a new laptop, and things wouldn't work, and there'd be no answers, or the answers would be things like "dude, you have to research all your parts before you 'just buy something' - linux isn't like that!" And then I'd read more about "hey, everything now 'just works'!" I came to realize it was mostly people who'd didn't have moderately complex needs (like wanting to use 2 monitors without rebooting an X session), or needing to vpn easily, or... whatever. None of this was simple then. I'm going to guess it probably still isn't now for many 'edge cases' (most of my tech life apparently was an 'edge case' when I was a linux/desktop users). It was tiresome. After 10 years of "year of linux on the desktop" I got too tired of wrestling with all that crap and switched to a macbook.
This is pretty much exactly my experience. There were usually ways to make things work on Linux, but it always required more effort than it was worth. Back in school, spending that effort made sense because it was a learning experience and at the time that was my primary goal. These days, there are enough competing priorities in my life that spending hours wrestling with my computer to make it perform basic functionality just isn't worth the opportunity cost. (I could be learning something people value or doing paid work or spending time with my family or exercising....)
One of the things I did love about Linux was the ability to switch to a tiling window manager. That said, as nice as it was, customizations required modifying C source code and writing scripts and never did work nearly as well as anything else. (In particular, I never figured out the right NetworkManager incantations to connect to a new WiFi network.)
https://github.com/mschaef/dwm-tools
To put this in perspective, my experience with Linux dates back to 1994, installing SLS from floppies on a 486/33. There has always been this belief that 'the community' will solve the problems and turn Linux into a fully competitive desktop platform. While there's definitely been progress, the reality is that the community has neither the time nor the attention to achieve near the level of polish that the vast majority of people expect these days. (Note that I don't view this as necessarily a problem, just an artifact of people making the same sorts of resource allocations choices for themselves that I described myself making back in the first paragraph.)
I do miss the fish protocol in konqueror/kde. I will say that with... KDE4(?) I just gave up caring about moving back to desktop Linux. Never cared much for gnome experience - had really liked KDE3.
As recently as a month ago, a colleague was writing to our local Linux list about laptop sleeping vs suspending, and how to get those working, and there was some discussion about why you'd want to do that, hardware support, BIOS issues, etc. Life is just way too damn short for me to care about any of that stuff. Yeah, I may be giving up some 'freedom' in an abstract sense (or perhaps even, maybe, a real sense) but... really, I just want to close the lid and not think about it.
I wanted a Unix machine I could use to hack together bash scripts, play flash video without jitters, and use Photoshop and Word... without constant emotional labor coercing the system to do what I needed. Apple provided the best technical solution to my problem set.
(By the way, not really a tiling window manager, but have you checked out Magnet? It's one of my favorite Mac utilities.)
Pretty much my reasoning too. I was also surprised that, once I factored in build quality, etc., the Apple was price-competitive as well.
> (By the way, not really a tiling window manager, but have you checked out Magnet? It's one of my favorite Mac utilities.)
No, but I'll check it out. I like it by the sound of it's name already. Thanks!
Of course one has to choose the hardware to be sure the drivers are compatible... You are asking something impossible from GNU/Linux developers.
Desktop experience of clean uninterrupted GNOME is great for me. Move from Ubuntu to fedora. Ubuntu really messes up GNOME with their BS ideas of usability. I.e horrible terrible ugly Unity, RIP.
Ubuntu does not understand usability and they should really allow GNOME’s vision to come through. GNOME is probably not perfect, but it is consistent.
Older relatives of mine have taken to it immediately, Gnome’s equivalent has an appreciable learning curve. Also, I recently installed 18.04 on a relative’s three year old laptop, and it was really really fast, faster than my vanilla Gnome installation, although that could be because I’m using more applications at once.
Ubuntu’s ideas of usability are valid for some use cases, even if they’re not mine.
Several years later, loving and still using the Gnome look. Wouldn't trade it for anything.
What it came down to for me is that I've been using the same window manager shortcuts since the late 80s, and I can't make them work with OSX. Eg, I use focus-follows mouse, and some strange mouse-button + ALT key combos to move/raise/iconify windows. The loss of focus follows mouse is what really drove me nuts. I was forever deleting emails because I'd move my mouse to a terminal or emacs window and start typing, like I'd done for the last 20+ years, but without a click "random stuff" was happening in Mail, which was still getting the keystrokes.
I don't think this is true.
Ubuntu is far less consistent with keyboard shortcuts and menu bars from app to app (OSX has this nailed). This is overwhelming my biggest problem. cmd+c, cmd+v for copy and paste across all apps. Not all apps minus terminal. Double click URL portion in firefox, entire url is highlighted, double click url part in other places, only that word/segment is highlight (I guess it's this 8 year old bug? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611162)
Sublime sometimes opens with the menu shown, sometimes with it hidden (I've tried to script this, doesn't always work). Sometimes the window shows up minimized (scripting this catch 90% of the cases)
On quit, Firefox always restores the DDG and Amazon search options, but not the other ones. Why can't it remember this? (there are other cases of partial configuration amnesia for various apps)
"Ubuntu Software" doesn't list available updates for installed "Add-ons", you have to remove and and re-add when you know one exists. It also doesn't let you "search" installed even if you're on the installed tab.
When my I wake my screen up, there's a brief flash of my unlocked screen (someone could theoretically take a picture) before the lock screen comes up.
In OSX and android I just enter my carriers free wifi settings and it works. In Ubuntu, I'm given a bunch of detailed options, and I've yet to find the magical combination that works.
While on battery, the time remaining can be comically off when waking from sleep (23 hours, really?!). I've also had it say 10 minutes left when it shut down.
There are plenty of apps on extensions.gnome.org (available in "Ubuntu Software") that constantly crash gnome. Go through systemd logs, find which ones are causing the problem, try to fix or uninstall.
The list goes on and on. Correct battery time, configurations that stick, consistency from app to app are polish, not preferences.
I really wish one of the major *ix toolkits/desktops would make some effort to attract or accommodate Mac refugees or dual OS users. I just wanna type Ctrl-W to erase a word and GUI-W to close a window — consistently.
After a year of using Sublime on Ubuntu for work, I have yet to have this issue happen. Even if it does happen, it seems like an application issue not an OS issue.
> On quit, Firefox always restores the DDG and Amazon search options, but not the other ones.
Same case, Firefox on Ubuntu for years and never had any kind of application amnesia.
> When my I wake my screen up, there's a brief flash of my unlocked screen (someone could theoretically take a picture) before the lock screen comes up.
What DE were you using, and what screensaver application? The only time I've had that happen was on old hardware without much support, and I'm still not sure what the entire cause of the issue was.
> While on battery, the time remaining can be comically off when waking from sleep (23 hours, really?!). I've also had it say 10 minutes left when it shut down.
That seems like an issue with hardware as much as with the OS. The only time my battery has reported inaccurate information was when the BIOS was also having trouble detecting battery stats.
Everything you've mentioned has been pretty anecdotal, as has everything I've mentioned. The biggest advantage of OS X is that you have guaranteed hardware support so you don't have to worry about half of the issues you've mentioned. I admit that it does take some tweaking occasionally, but for the most part Linux just works now.
Note that you can change terminal to use ctrl-c and ctrl-v for copy/paste. Then if you want to interrupt a running program, use ctrl-shift-c (which as far as the shell is concerned is the same as ctrl-c).
This is a killer for me and I am trying to solve it currently ...
I ran Snow Leopard from 2009-2018 and had FFM due to "mondomouse" but that is no longer published or supported.
Now that I have upgraded (my 2009 mac pro) to Yosemite, I sort of have a FFM solution with a tool called dwellclick and one modification[1] but it's not perfect.
HOWEVER, it appears that there is a new accessibility option in High Sierra that allows you to turn on FFM without third party software. Not helpful for me because I can't install High Sierra on a 2009 mac pro ...
[1] defaults write com.pilotmoon.DwellClick MoveDistancePixels -float 600
(Free, OSS)
I felt that Fedora was smoother, way more responsive on the same hardware (and yes, comparing fresh macOS to fresh Linux install), more consistent and more intuitive, and more usable. The only thing I can think of that's better on macOS is the touchpad, which to the best of my knowledge is a gift given to us mortals by the gods.
Oh, and the macOS default wallpaper is better.
I'm absolutely unwilling to give up the Mac trackpad. When I see people who aren't artists using mice I have to question their value system, or assume they haven't discovered the absolute joy that is "tap to click".
Obviously the configuration matters a great deal.
The extra effort required/friction added to click really annoys me now.
To be fair, the noise of clicking the touchpad is annoying some times, but mostly due to the mushy bottoming of the keyboard, which results in low noise despite a clear actuation point.
My aversion to a MacBook is mostly coming from the repair-unfriendlyness, combined with the high prices on the secondary market compared to T/X series Thinkpads. As long as I can hold it for at least one hour on one hand, while walking, in a position that I can keep an eye on the screen and use the other hand for hitting keys if needed, I don't consider it to heavy. And screen size is only really restricted by needing to fit inside commonly available backpacks, and not hindering maneuverability which happens if it is too wide in the middle dimension (approximating as a cuboid) to fit within the width of the chest. Being able to fit with it on my lap in a row on e.g. public transit/long distance trains/ (airplanes) also sets a limit to the width in the maximum dimension of the cuboid approximation. As this limit is lower than that imposed by fitting within the flat space on my back, that restriction dosn't really apply for the laptop.
Too bad they already ruined it when they switched from the 2014 to 2015 models.
That's the same situation as for ios/android really, it's not a deal breaker, but the quality of life difference is clear.
A cool but probably useless feature in the Chinese IME for Mac is the ability to draw Hanzi on the trackpad as a giant digitizer.
Internationalization wise, I could never dream of using a computer in any language other than English, despite it not being my mother tongue.
that said, with a non-trivial amount of time and work, you can get your desktop experience to be pretty slick. but it requires knowing your desktop environments, window managers, compositors, default apps, etc...
https://www.rossmanngroup.com/
One of the things I think and hope is going to start happening is an aftermarket parts economy springing up around these particular Macs.
I really wanted to like it, and the concept could perhaps eventually be good, but the current implementation is infuriatingly bad:
• I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.
• The buttons are in different locations depending on context, so it's not possible to use it by muscle memory.
• TouchBar automatically goes to sleep, making the previous two points worse.
• It's not even that good for its intended purpose. Previews of things on it are too tiny. Most actions still require multiple taps, and it's in the uncanny valley between direct and indirect manipulation.
Fingerprint sensor is convenient, but the TouchBar ended up being a gimmick, not a pro feature.
For what it's worth, if you tap and hold the brightness and volume buttons, it turns into a slider under your finger that you can immediately use. One tap + drag.
It's the one thing I miss about the Touch Bar after leaving it for the MacBook Escape.
But discrete graphics aren't needed for lots and lots of other software either.
Programming/compiling not-withstanding there are many tasks today that are CPU intensive.
Plus, real professionals use slack, so that extra memory is needed.
I discovered recently that you could just do a "quick swipe" (very fast) on the button in the right direction on both the volume and brightness virtual button to apply the expected effect. Good enough for my usage.
this is the dealbreaker for me. :( i hope they release a model without the touch bar in the future
But an even bigger problem for me is the price increase. The base TB version costs 200€ more (or 400€ if you'd buy the nTB 128gb version). With ne nTB version not getting the update, the updated MBP is too expensive compared to non Apple machienes.
A non-Apple device will do all the same stuff. It just might not do it the exact way you like out of the box.
I pay the Apple tax (albeit exceedingly infrequently) because I can afford it & it reduces friction in my life, not because I have no other options.
There are tons of settings posted on Github, and I just modified someone else's to get:
[1] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-ElementsBut I really love using it for escape. I'm on a 2014 model but not going to the corner for escape is great. Plus I'm about to get one of these new ones, and I feel prepared since I have zero usage of the top row (other than the special functions).
It's a good enough effect, though, I will probably keep it. Thanks for the suggestion.
It is, but they didn't update the model at all.
That way you can just drag the mouse to the lower-right corner and black the screen anytime you like ...
Other than that, I like the 2017 keyboard (assuming mine doesn't break) and touch bar.
You can add Volume/Brighness Up/Down buttons to the "always-on" touchbar by going to View -> Customize Touch Bar on the finder.
You can also start sliding from the "open slider" button without releasing your finger, which is more granular and IMO much nicer than having to press many times to adjust volume. If they only removed that giant pop-up on the screen with the current brightness and volume it would be a big improvement.
The lack of direct volume control really annoyed me. I probably should have poked around the config instead of just being annoyed about it.
You left out how easy it is to accidentally brush with a finger and trigger various actions that you didn't want to do.
Especially infuriating when using Calculator and clear a result or turn a multiplication in to an addition.
My only complaint with the touchbar is its too easy to accidentally engage Siri.
Other than that it’s a good idea IMO.
System Preferences > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip
You can remove the Siri shortcut in the system preferences.
The touchpad is fine for that. No need for duplicating functionality.
Clean != good. These are tools, not pieces of art.
Look at how many people here recommend rebinding caps lock to "esc" and control to caps lock and all other sorts of editing to the keys... should you remind them that rebinding keys is unnatural and the tool should be used the same way it's always been?
I guess it stems from the fact that I've never understood the argument that the touch bar took away the "esc" key... but on every touch bar MBP I see at the Apple Store, the esc key is still there, still right where it was, and still has the same functionality. The only difference is now if you don't use the esc key, you have the ability to remove it and put a more useful key there instead. But somehow this is a bad thing. I don't understand it.
If it's a tool, like you claim, it should be useful for getting work done. But instead you seem to actually want it to be made according to your exact design and visual preferences, which to me sounds more like you're actually looking for a piece of art.
Replacing the top row with the touch bar, in this analogy, is like someone else coming into your workshop and replacing several tools’ grips with big padded things that completely ruins the physical feedback you expect to feel, and never realized you used for fine control until you didn’t have it.
For me when I switched to a Mac, the hardest thing to get used to was the lack of a forward delete key (the Windows-style use of the delete key) and having to use a key combination instead. Even today I still struggle with the lack of pgup and pgdn keys, and the lack of home and end.
In light of commonly-used keys that are actually missing, I just struggle to accept the idea that the Esc key being a touch button but still existing is a hill worth dying on. Especially when, since the touch bar is customizable, everyone can now swap their (relatively) useless F1-F12 keys for the (relatively) more useful Home, End, Forward Delete, Page Up, and Page Down keys. Or whatever else they want it to be.
To me, it's like the digital equivalent to swapping a workshop's dedicated phillips-head screwdriver with one that lets you switch ends to be phillips or flathead or torx or whatever. Some small number of people may complain "but it's not the same way it's always been!", but it sure does make life a lot easier for a lot more people.
"It's not the same way it's always been" has been Apple's driving mission since... well basically forever. Think Different, right?
[0]: http://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/
Happily, you don't - tap and hold the button on the touchbar and drag your finger from there. You do not need to move your finger to the slider. Same works for volume. Tap, hold, drag. Not sure about skipping songs.
Not true; you can change them by beginning a slide over the brightness/volume (and maybe other buttons that expand into a slider) in a single gesture without lifting your finger.
The missing Escape key is annoying. The lack of tactile feedback makes it awkward for touch typists who expect some kind of feedback to sense that their press reached the right place. Remapping to Caps Lock requires a long muscle memory retraining period that is not helped by the fact that external keyboards still have an Esc key, moving your training progress backwards (unless you pry it off or something).
The new keyboard is not very nice to type on, but the worst aspect of it is that it is extremely loud. I didn't experience any key failures myself, but I have a colleague who did. (And of course he encountered the classic problem: What do you do when the laptop you absolutely rely on for work is in the shop for 7+ day's to fix a single key?)
Also, the new arrow key layout is very bad for touch typists like myself. I frequently had to look down at the keyboard and see that my fingers weren't finding the right arrow key. The old pyramid layout of the four arrow keys was much more friendly.
The Touch Bar is literally useless to me as a touch typist who is used to not looking at the keyboard. One of the first things that annoyed me was that the contents of the Touch Bar changes depending on the app, so in order to use it without glancing down you have to remember the exact widget placement for each app. So I pretty quickly switched to the "extended" control bar that always has the same layout. But that basically just gives you the functionality of a pre-Touch-Bar Mac.
I frequently found myself accidentally touching the Touch Bar, often because I rest my hands in a splayed position across the keyboard. My fingertips would end up resting on the Touch Bar and cause surprising things to happen.
Another annoyance is the fact that if you do want to invest in using the Touch Bar efficiently, you can't use the Mac with an external keyboard. In my home office I have an external screen and "dock" my MacBook there and run it with a closed lid and a wireless Apple keyboard. No Touch Bar there.
I don't mind all the other problems so much -- USB-C, no MagSafe, trackpad that is too big (yet another case of accidental touches), etc. -- but I'd pay a lot of money to get rid of the Touch Bar.
The soft keys are quiet while the new keyboard is noticeably louder.
edit: clarify I was talking about the 15' model.
Honestly, this looks like a good revision. I've been wanting a quad core 13 inch for a while.
Hopefully the keyboard revision helps with all of the issues people have had.
cough kubernetes cough
32GB DDR4 Ram and 6 Core processors honestly is making this a no-brainer here. We have been waiting on the ram for years. Price is the big question. At this time, the Select on the apple store is disabled so no idea what this will cost.
https://www.amazon.com/Lavolta-Carrying-Case-Apple-27-inch/d...
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MR942...
Fully specced out = $6,699.00
Personally I always use my MacBook Pro set up below my external monitor. I always use the built in keyboard and trackpad because I find a small, short travel keyboard with a centrally mounted trackpad more ergonomic. I'm pretty sure this setup might only relevant to me though, so horses for courses.
I haven't upgraded because the new macs don't seem to match my use-cases and I can get by with my old 2013 model for now.
I agree about price though. The new MacBook Pros seem poor value to me. You have to decide whether to max the RAM/SSD upfront, get the new dongles you need all while Apple are nickel and dimming over things like the PSU extension cable which is no longer included despite the price rises.
Apple is oblivious that Pros want _more_ functionality, not less. Editions that would frustrate their supply line but be incredible:
- MBP Engineer: 32GB+ RAM, 2+ NVMe SSD, 10gbe, dedicated real A12 ARM chip for simulating iOS
- MBP Scientist: 32GB+ RAM, an FPGA with fun Apple SDK, dedicated GPU
- MBP Video: 4 SDI ports (integrated BMD DeckLink Duo 2), timecode BNC, dedicated GPU, 10gbe
- MBP Audio: MADI and AES50 ports, 8 mini TRS inputs and outputs designed by Lynx or Apogee
Across board: fast SD card reader, HDMI even if mini.
Releasing even one of these sure would indicate that they're with the times. I'll admit to being an odd user though, my dream laptop would have a 16x PCIe slot exposed on one side.
aside: It's good to see Blackmagic Design get such a loud shout-out from Apple. Since dabbling in the live production world I've been consistently impressed by their FPGA and industrial design chops. possible acquisition? https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HM8Y2VC/A/blackmagic-egpu
There's been a mass-defection from Mac to Windows in the motion graphics industry just because they want/need Nvidia GPUs to run their preferred renderers.