You don't need to get fancy to make a laptop keyboard that tanks an errant glass of beer poured into it. Thinkpads have had this figured out for years. I accidentally put it to the test once and the result was a very sticky but perfectly functional laptop. Took about an hour with a screwdriver set and some rubbing alcohol on q-tips to make it good as new.
I shudder to think what a glass of beer would do to my MBA.
I could only find the first edition online sans $$$, but ISO 9241-4 Keyboard Requirements said “The key displacement shall be between 1.5 mm and 6.0 mm. The preferred key displacement should be between 2.0 mm and 6.0 mm.”
I don't understand Apple's obsession with thin devices. What's the point in making something so thin that it detracts from their primary function ? Ipad Pros that bend, Macs with problematic keyboards and overheating...
Please, stop. Make things functional first, thin if possible, not the other way around.
How thin does it have to get before everyone says "this feels shitty"? I have a few mechanical keyboards at home and at work and I can't imagine always having to use one of these new keyboards with zero throw. It makes me feel like I'm mimicking typing rather than actually doing it.
Maybe their goal is to eliminate mechanical keyboards, replaced with nothing more than textured glass. Have to train out an entire generation to get there.
I would not be surprised if Apple releases a solid state keyboard with chiseled glass keys, haptic feedback for key presses, and an oled screen underneath.
It seems like the conclusion to their “Taptic” engine, touchbar, and pressure sensitive touchscreens R&D.
I am a huge fan of thin and small laptops, even at the expense of things like connectivity. However, 90% of what I do with a laptop is type. If there's no key travel, I can't type.
I switched to a budget lenovo ideapad because i needed a windows machine. It turns out its way more comfortable to use than my mac and i keep coming back to it.
Just bear in mind the build quality of Ideapad and other budget Lenovo brands aren't great. The ThinkPad (X, T or P series) really is in a class of its own in terms of build quality, upgradability and repairability.
Do you know the common failure mode for ideapads? Two aspects of the design concerned me. The heat vents on the back are open when the lid is closed (presumably for ventilation while docked), and the power plug is barrel style, which i know handles stress poorly and can break the socket over time. It is cheap, probably for a reason. Performance in the short term is up to par.
I really wish they would move focus back to being more expandable. The way they weld stuff to the mainboard is hot trash. There is no upgrade path for these newer macs. My old 17"? That got a 16G RAM/SSD upgrade with the CD swapped out for a second drive. Added years to its life. I suspect the new 16" version will only have four USB-C port.
I got lucky and ended up with a 32G work laptop. I've got enough headroom to run a couple docker containers at the same time. My co-workers stuck with the 16G laptops are really in a tough place. As things stand, I end up stuffing a pile of dongles into my bag as I transition from work to home and back again.
It is unfortunate the person who keeps demanding 'thinner' over 'professional' keeps getting listened to. Wish I could find a 16:10 laptop that had expandability.
LG crammed a 17" 16:10 display and 2 NVMe slots + 1 SODIMM slot (with additional 8GB RAM soldered to the motherboard) into a sub-3 pound chassis in the Gram.
That video card is painful too. I'd be happy enough with 2560x1600@17" as it would be a Linux box... I think. I'll have to take a look at one and see how it feels.
Costco has'em on sale right now, too. Check out the in-store display. My boss loved the look and the weight, and bought a couple on the spot. They're really nice to use.
No need to beg Apple for expandability anymore on their laptops or desktops. Windows has gotten good enough especially with WSL2. Developers have more options now. I just got tired of waiting for Apple, and gave up when a Mac Pro starts at 6k. People want a headless, expandable iMac that’s affordable, kind of like the old cheese grater Mac Pros. Apple isn’t budging.
Windows isn’t garbage or anything. It’s a decent OS, but for me:
1. I absolutely hate the latest UI changes. Not only are things hard to find and not organized very well, especially in the system settings, but the UI feels jerky and rough compared to MacOS when moving windows around or when the “Are you sure you want to do this?” dialog pops up.
2. I cannot stand working with Windows Explorer, drive letters, and the overly complex tree view.
3. Things that are easy on MacOS (i.e. rotating and cropping pictures, editing and signing PDFs, etc.) are either hard or not supported on Windows.
4. Device driver issues are more frequent on Windows and suck to fix.
5. Windows has a LOT of shitty software for it and it seems that everyone who asks me for help is running that shitty software.
6. I don’t like the cluttered UIs that most Windows applications have; like the Ribbon thing that Office introduced.
7. I don’t like .NET and Visual Studio much, and I don’t like programming for Windows. I prefer Swift and Xcode. Having said that, I do like F# quite a bit.
One area where I think Windows really shines is gaming.
Try games that also exist on Mac, on the same hardware. They perform visibly better on windows, just because of DirectX. Maybe it's because game devs know DirectX better, but still it's a superior experience even on the same hardware. (eg Civ 5 / 6, most Blizzard games)
To expand on your software point, I genuinely would say that the quality of software on Windows is all-round lower. I don't know what the reason for this is - whether it's because developers prefer the tools available on macOS or if it's simply because Mac users are more inclined to pay for their software, but the quality is clearly higher.
It sure does. Luckily it’s good enough for my tot desktop at home, although my laptops are still macs. My work laptop cost a shit load of money, but so do the dells the rest of my team has.
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of praise for Win10 in the last few years, but in reality my colleagues are cursing it daily and bashing their heads against basic dev stuff that works nice and dandy with Macs or with Linux. Win10 may be ok for running Microsoft’s current flagship, Office and maybe games but otherwise I wouldn’t want to spend time with fighting against the OS.
And no, in my opinion WSL is not real solution if the OS still makes life harder and more weird. Just a new twist to the cygwin/mingw/virtualisation scheme when running the real thing would be a lot better option.
And no, Macs and Linux are not perfect either, but they both are more friendly and humane options for developers.
I dual-booted or had two machines for dev work for almost 20 years. The Windows machine was mostly for Office.
Since VMs and containers because standard for development, I honestly have no idea what problems your colleagues are having. I haven't had a "Windows problem" other than the clunky UI since Win7, and the UI is 100% customizable.
- a windows 2016 server for which we needed to dig deep in powershell so it wouldn't reset the clock every 6 hours
- a user whose local account services is totalled and he can't access his desktop any more
Personally I would like the start menu search to only look for applications but I gave up on that.
I suppose using windows only for office would help, of course.
I use Windows for servers too (not my choice), and both of those things sound like a sysadmin who is making strange choices and not actual Windows bugs. I could be wrong, of course.
To be fair, I don't have full control of the domain for the server and I suspect a catch-21 regarding the clock setting and the domain sync thingy. I fixed it by "resetting a lot of time thing" but I am a linux guy before a windows guy so I ended up in Powershell (which i like).
I attribute the other one to a brutal shutdown of the PC that somehow corrupted a running update, some random clicking from the user in a misguided attempt to fix things behind the back of IT et voilà.
What problems are you having? The common complaints against Windows now vs back then are really vague. “I hate Windows (for no apparent or specific reason)!”
Why doesn’t WSL work? It’s Linux. It’s closer to what you’re deploying on for production than a Mac
I believe you, but my own experience could not be more different.
I dual boot constantly and sometimes I forget what OS I am running. Until I see one clock instead of the other.
Of course there are some specific tasks that are more suited to one OS over the other (a reason for restarting), but things like using the browser, the text editor, VPNs, Kodi, epub readers, Anki, etc, they basically work the same.
So, for some games-> Windows, for CLI -> Linux, for anything else, any of them.
No worries, MS is actively trying to get rid of it (by hiding some folders, by mangling some shortcuts, by putting libraries and stupid things like that first so that you rarely actually have access to the tree).
True enough. What is your favorite image viewer? The built-in in Win10 is basically unusable because it keeps trying to open files it doesn't understand (raw photos) and tells me to install a plugin (which probably doesn't exist).
I mostly use Linux Mint Cinnamon and the window and workspace management just feels more consistent and snappy.
Also Windows apps have a very annoying habit of showing windows for background tasks (file sync? software updates?) which I don't want to care about -- all they really accomplish is that sometimes the service gets stopped altogether just to forget about it.
Everybody recommends IrfanView, but is really the "desktop linux" (in tnat old derogatory sense when it was for nerds) of image viewers: endless configurability (with important things like color management off by default), strange navigation (How again do I switch images when zoomed in?), etc...
It's like Total Commander: efficient and good in a way, but not in a way of modern streamlined UX that e.g. Apple software was once known for.
I'll admit, I have no idea how to do anything advanced with it, but I like it because I can double click almost anything that is an image, from old Deluxe Paint files, PICs, RAWs, TIFFs, whatever, and it'll try to open it and put something on the screen, usually successfully.
With WSL, it’s usable for me now since Linux is baked in. Are the apps as good on a Mac? Usually not, but a lot apps on Mac aren’t even native anymore.
I assume you mean WSL2, because I'm using LTSB and stuck on WSL and it's unusable garbage. Not that I've used WSL2 just heard that it is better.
On WSL (one? whatever) there is no raw socket access, zero. Cannot run something as simple as tcpdump. Plus the copy and pasting (CTRL-SHIFT-c/v) is incredibly annoying and inconsistent. Also the redraw in the terminal is really screwed up, half the time I try to go back to WSL and my terminal prompt is drawn in 3 different places on the screen.
I'm not trying to start a flame war, here. I was seriously surprised. I get that some people love using Windows.
I had a similar transition. I used DOS through XP/2000 heavily growing up. I worked jobs that used Linux and had a Mac at home until I had a recent job as Win10 was being adopted. I tried to give it my best effort. I got a book on Powershell and read it and researched. I was aghast that the same frustrations I had with XP and earlier hadn't been touched. I wish I had kept a log as I re-discovered them.
* Nobody used PowerShell. I tried to push it, but then I realized I needed a BAT file wrapper to run PS1 files, anyway. I was hoping PowerShell would be a next-gen BASH, but having verbose flags is great in scripts, but horrible interactively. The system I was on was air-gapped and the documentation required an extra download on each system.
* Man, Windows still updates a lot. Often requiring reboots. MacOS asks to reboot like twice a year (and doesn't force it). With Linux it's very, very rarely necessary to reboot.
* I found window management awkward. I was coming from Linux where META+LMB moved Windows, META+MMB resized them. I tried the hot-corners shortcuts and other built-in things, I tried installing a few things.
* When the UI is busy I still can't resize or minimize it?
* Control Panel and other configurations were a huge mishmash of tacked on menus with a mix of old UIs and icons.
* I really missed ssh-ing in to query and poke at stuff. RDP felt so heavy for small stuff that should be quick or automated.
After a few months I toyed with WSL, but spent most of my time sshed into a Linux box using vim or bash when managing files or source code. Most of the small services I set up running in Linux. After a year and a half I left for a variety of reasons.
I haven't tried FancyZones. I left that job a couple years ago and haven't yet dug into tiling window managers.
> Nothing stops you from installing an SSH server also.
I didn't want to get too much into this in my previous comment because it has more to do with how the place was managed, then Windows itself. But it does speak to Windows out of the box. This was an air-gapped setup and they were fairly open to me making changes, but I was very careful about jumping in suggesting big changes since I had 0 practical experience managing Windows. They mostly started with Windows as it was installed when it was delivered. Windows 10 was fairly new and they were comfortable with 7. Things were managed with PDQ. Most things were done in an "artisanal" fashion (individually done in a simple or straightforward way). I was used to installing a bunch of software on a network drive and running it directly off NFS. I've been told at multiple places that's unfeasible with SMB because of performance. (I'm definitely not speaking to NFS or SMB as a whole here--just with this specific use-case)
This also meant our rack of headless machines, when the power went out, had to be brought up individually since the disk checker was waiting for input before booting. I had on my todo list to change this, but it's difficult to test and roll out and doesn't come up often.
Back to that question; it would have meant finding a third-party ssh and rolling it out just to appease me. I likely would have done it if I stuck around, though. Maybe in tandem with a full update to Win10.
On that topic, though. Currently, I support Windows users who work from home. It's a bit odd you need admin privileges to create a symlink (I admit, that need mostly comes from trying to get feature parity with Linux/macOS), but detecting and running Admin rights is incredibly awkward [1]. We also need these non-technical people do to some port forwarding or to ssh into our Linux servers. PuTTy's configuration interface is horrid to describe to random people. Since you can't import/export configs we've looked at creating a Registry file with the right configuration, but it's not a trivial thing. For a few people we've had them install WSL, but it's a bit overkill to install however many Gigs along with Linux just to get an ssh client (and it's not an option for non Windows 10 users).
I actually bounce between linux and windows very frequently so I may have just grown accustomed to how each OS wants to do things. For backend work, I definitely prefer linux, but working frontend (I'm a graphics engineer), linux still poses a lot of problems. For example, as much as I hate windows apis, the linux X11 system is insane (and no, wayland isn't ready yet). Also, the state of device and driver support is still much more streamlined on windows. If someone complains that something isn't working to me on linux, it can be much more difficult to understand why as a result.
I left a job in less than a month after I started because of Windows. I haven't been to companies where there's no possibility to use a Mac for years and I didn't really think about asking during the interview. And it wasn't like the job requires using Windows. I tried for 2 weeks to set it up and get used to it but it was just not working. There was always "Oh it supports it but you need to that workaround". And WSL was crap (2 years ago, don't know about it's current state). So I gave up and resigned on the third week.
Why is a tiling window manager so important for dev work (but not for anything else)? I am a dev and I can never wrap my head around why anyone would want to spend time on tiling windows, it looks so tedious.
I don't know how generally true this is of people who like tiling WMs, but for me: a lot of it is about (easily) maximising the use of the screen, and (quickly and easily) moving windows to where I want them to be via the keyboard. I always found managing windows with the mouse to be (comparatively) tedious and slow, which led me fairly naturally to tiling WMs.
These days I'm on macOS not linux but my desire for that kind of control and speed remains; fortunately tools like BetterTouchTool enable this really nicely, and I get the best of both worlds: nice mouse-driven control when I want it, and a quick/easy way to throw a window where I want it the rest of the time (i.e. most of the time).
(I'd also say, addressing the parenthesised part of your first question, that for me, this isn't just about dev - this is a general preference; for some tools, e.g. the GIMP, tiling's a bad fit and the mouse is where it's at, but in general, if I can keyboard it, I will.)
Well, yeah, sort of, depending on what you mean by "tiling like stuff", I suppose. For me, tiling was all about maximising my use of the screen and minimising labour, which meant being able to easily place windows where I wanted, without space between them, and without using the mouse or otherwise laboriously moving/resizing by hand. That was the "why" of tiling for me, and while BTT doesn't do the "how" of tiling (i.e. it has no capability to force tiling as you move windows around, and doesn't maintain a tree of windows liking a tiling WM does), it does have a pretty powerful "move/resize window" action. Using that action I can scratch my itch and do everything I ever used a tiling WM for.
So I've got a whole bunch of hotkeys doing things like "maximise window", "put window in top-right quadrant", "put window on display 3, taking up 1/3 of the width of the screen at the right and at full height". That kinda thing. This allows me to quickly/easily set things up as I want (not _automatically_ but that's fine for me in practice since the world and my needs are always in flux.) If you dig into it you can do some fairly powerful things... E.g. you can set up named triggers (i.e. actions not bound to hotkeys) which you can then call from AppleScript triggered by hotkeys (or, if you want, triggered externally by, e.g. Alfred, though I don't do that); the AppleScripts can maintain state between calls, so I have some hotkeys that move windows in cycles, e.g. "maximise the window's height and push it all the way to the left, and on each call cycle its width between 1/6, 1/3, 1/4, 1/2, 2/3" - stuff like that.
It's true you don't get "real" tiling with this - but as I say, for me, it satisfies the "why" of tiling WMs, without doing the "how". Hope that makes sense.
But I don't spend time positioning them. I switch to a window that needs my attention, or sometimes snap them to get a split view, but that's not common. Maybe it makes more sense on a bigger screen, I'm always on my laptop, so there is not really enough real estate to have many windows shown at the same time.
I use a tiling window manager and I dont really spend time positioning windows either. 99% of the time my programs are in one of two states. Either full screen or split down the middle.
In a tiling WM full screen is the default. I never have to manually full screen something, it’s automatically taking up the whole screen. I usually have it in tabbed mode, so all new programs are just full screen in tabs. (And split view is just a hot key or two away)
Really though my favorite thing is the easy multiple desktops. Win+4 is always my chat program. Win+2 is always my ide, win+1 is always my web browser. I never have to mash alt+tab a varying number of times. and more importantly if the second desktop is actually two programs in split screen, it’s still easy to switch to and from. Otherwise I frequently find myself looking at one thing in full screen, then having to alt+tab multiple times to bring two half-screen programs back to the front.
I’ve tried to install various windows tools to either provide hot keys to virtual desktops, or otherwise replicate my tiling WM setup but nothing seems to be quite as convenient to me. I feel like I waste so much time alt+tabbing and getting things where I want them whenever I’m in a normal WM. In i3 it’s all either already the way I like or it’s 1-2 hotkeys to fix it.
How is that different on a tiling window manager? I would assume a smaller screen would be more apt to using a tiling window manager.
It automatically makes the window you're using take up 100% of the screen. You can also switch between tiling and a maximized view in pretty much every tiling wm. Also, there are usually multiple desktops (or even better, "tags" like in dwm) which allow you to easily switch between applications in any of the different tiling modes.
Professional bloat-maker here. I doubt it. I want my software to be reasonably lightweight but I've literally never thought about what the user's computer upgrade path might be.
As long as it runs well on anything newer than 5 years old, I'm happy. This captures enough users without requiring me to go to great pains to get the remaining, much harder hardware/software setups.
People may read that and hate it, but the reality is I have deadlines to meet, demanding bosses, and a never ending queue of features and bugfixes. I suspect a lot of folks are in the same boat.
Expanding on what the GP said, I hate Docker with a passion.
I mean, I know it's useful, but at my previous job I was able to use my vintage 2GB Macbook Air after installing things with brew + rbenv, while everyone else needed 16GB. All it took was a couple hours to setup the local environment.
Never had a problem because the environment was different and my app startup times were much smaller.
The XPS 13 is the worst keyboard I've ever used. It brings me great physical pain to type on it. I had to quit using it as a laptop and exclusively use it with an external keyboard because the finger pain was so great. I know many people (like yourself) don't feel that way, but it was absolutely not acceptable for me.
Thanks to the XPS when I picked out my new laptop keyboard quality/travel was my #1 requirement by a tremendous margin.
Does anyone want a thinner computer? The I9s have thermal issues, the butterfly keyboard break in 12 months. Why don’t they focus on real innovation like adding faceId or Oled HDR screens. Apple is going to spite us all and replace the keyboard with an oled magic bar.
I mean, if I could have a magical fairy computer that was as thin as a piece of paper but had the keyboard of a 2015 MBP, and decent performance and battery life, yeah, I'd think that was pretty great.
What I'm not willing to do is make any drastic usability sacrifices in exchange for more thinness.
That fairy would need to use some seriously arcane magic to make such a device not bend and tear like paper too. Although I don't think that would bother Apple much at this point.
Habituating your user base on the way there is just something MS could never pull off, too, the flip is the start menu never going away until all the baby boomers are gone
Are people really demanding thinner laptops? Who is demanding that a laptop or phone be thinner?
MAKE THEM THICKER, I want more battery life and better performance! I am a fat out of shape need and I can carry 40lbs on my back, no sweat. MAKE THEM THICKER.
Lol, I totally agree, why not offer the thick super-long-lasting battery version?!?!?
Let the skinny-jeans kids get their skinny phones and have to charge everywhere, but I'm fine with a brick in my pocket if the battery can go for a couple days.
Are people really demanding thinner laptops? Who is demanding that a laptop or phone be thinner?
Yes. Anyone who carries them around demands thinner, where possible. I could have bought a MBP and am typing this on a MBA. The latter has various advantages but the latter is fast enough and also lighter. PG uses (used?) 11" MBAs. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/740739637572997120?lang=en
I carry my laptop everywhere, and whenever there is a trade-off I demand performance and quality over thin/light.
I use my machine to do work. Better performance makes we work better and faster. It's my bread and butter. Less weight... is a slight convenience while commuting, I guess?
When you travel, especially internationally where you're probably carrying the laptop in a hand bag then the extra weight starts to be an annoyance. A lot of walking around and 0.5kg savings makes a difference.
Well aluminum also has the nice property that it's a good thermal conductor, it definitely has functional advantages over plastic. It also has a good specific heat capacity, so as well as conducting away heat via the chassis, it can allow longer bursts of high power usage before temperature limits are reached.
I carry two. And power leads. And clothes for upto 2 weeks (three at a push). And a 10 port mikrotik, a few cat 6 cables of various lengths, a supple of lc-xx sm fibres and an sfp. Sometimes a pi or two as well.
0.5kg makes a significant difference when you're rock climbing because you have to pull that weight up vertically with you. If 0.5kb makes a significant difference while walking around, I suggest that you join a gym instead of buying thinner MacBook.
Marginal gains. A lighter bag, a lighter laptop, less clutter in such bag, can add up. If you're carrying things in a backpack, you can carry heavy loads without an issue, except then in hot buildings you end up with a sweaty back.
If you put it in a single strap bag like a satchel then it can dig into your shoulder after a few hours. If you use a briefcase then you have to mount it somewhere or continually have one hand occupied.
I was so disappointed when they cancelled the little Macbook this year - just a tiny bump in specs, and upgrade the USB-C to TB3 and I would have jumped. That was a nicely sized machine.
1) desktop (Ubuntu), main daily use at home
2) laptop (t410s/Ubuntu). For work in apps rooms. Really falling to bits now, but still using it due to things like Ethernet port. The keyboard is now worse than the air so looking how beast to replace it
3) MacBook Air, for portable use
Right tool for the right job. If I want a portable I’ll go for a small air. If I want a useful machine I’ll go for something larger and heavier, but with the ports I need
the most environmentally friendly thing you could do with that t410s is to replace the keyboard with a new one instead of replacing the laptop with a new one. This of course assumes that everything else is fine and only the keyboard is falling to bits.
Totally gone - the long thin bits are normally connected by two robots, it’s just one. This means the plastic case is separated. While I can just about close the lid by pushing from tr base of the screen, it’s really flakey.
I'm "Anyone who carries them around" and I don't demand thinner. I don't mind the weight or size as long as it has the power and usability I need. I still use a "fatty" 13" MBP from 2012 for travel for this reason - great keyboard, lots of ports (no dongles needed), and durable.
There are like a dozen similar comments I could reply to, but I'll just pick yours to pipe up: hi, I'm a person who wants thinner and lighter laptops.
Why? Because I want the least possible weight, and a screen size I can use. The only way to hold screen size constant and drop weight is to get thinner.
I just got a 13" MBP, which is about the same weight and size as my 2012 Air, but gives me better battery life, better performance, and a way better screen. It's great. I even like the new keyboard better.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that the kind of lightweight laptop you like is inherently bad.
I see the appeal of light and minimal, but I also see the idea of heavy and feature packed.
Plus pursuing thinness as end in and of itself (edit: to the point that reliability is impacted) is preposterous. Is a few millimeters thinner really going to change the way you feel about your laptop? Probably it would not impact any functional aspect of your relationship with the laptop.
After all, thicker doesn’t necessarily mean heavier. I’m fact thicker things are more resistant to bending, so perhaps it could mean lighter. If you want to understand the mechanics, check this out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_modulus
I'm like you in that I only ever buy 13" ultralight laptops. But there are diminishing returns after about 3lbs.
Like yeah, going from 2.8 to 2lbs is great and all but it's not as notable as the jump 10 years ago from the 5lbs bricks to the original MacBook Air. The computer still takes up about the same space in my bag and I wouldn't really notice ~1 lbs difference, especially if I still have to carry around a 1lbs power adapter because the thin battery lasts less than 8-10 hours of moderate use.
In the meantime, the design compromises to get to 2lbs are becoming increasingly aggravating: thinner keyboards that jam, screens bonded to glass so that repair is impossible, RAM and SSD soldered onto the board, batteries broken up into pieces so that replacement is annoying or impossible, passively cooled Intel chips that throttle, weak integrated GPUs. And probably a bunch of other stuff.
Some of us are skinny. Or we hate lugging around weight. With something like a laptop, which you're carrying around everyday, half a pound saved makes a big difference.
I won't say I'm for thinner laptops, per se, because I'd rather that every laptop came with the maximum permissible 99 WHr battery, but I want everything as light as possible hell yes.
> The only way to hold screen size constant and drop weight is to get thinner.
Or get rid of bezels. Or have a better aspect ratio.
> gives me better battery life, better performance, and a way better screen
That is be expected after so many years. Also, before apple started its "retina" branding it just had worse screens than comparable competition, e.g. sony vaio or hp and lenovo with nice high-res IPS screens while the air had a rather low res TN screen.
I agree. Can't they let the Air and Pro diverge? I like them both. A Pro should live up to its name and be expandable and have a useful set of ports. As someone else noted, give extra internal space to the battery. Give it a world class keyboard. Figure out a way to keep the Touch Bar but bring back physical function keys. Let it be a great design given the tech constraints. Let the Air weigh a couple of ounces, be a centimeter thick, and be great specs given the design constraints.
I am. As it stands, the latest MacBook Pro is too heavy and bulky for me to comfortably carry. Make it more powerful and lighter and I will have a reason to upgrade.
I want something I don't even notice in my shoulder bag when I commute. Battery life is good enough, performance is good enough (and can boost a bit when the machine is plugged in).
You sound like you might be in the market for a workstation-replacement thinkpad.
It's true that they seem to be more differentiated on price than on target market, with the MB and the Air being "entry level". Not that there is an MB any more.
Particularly the Air is weird, it's not a lot slimmer or lighter than the 13" pro now, but it is a lot less powerful. It's a weird market segmentation (to my eyes).
I have an old HP business laptop I got refurbished for dirt cheap. It has every port you could want from the past two decades, a replacable battery, easy access bays for the multiple drives and RAM. It's probably two inches thick and eight pounds.
It's fantastic and I love it. I just wish it were bigger - 17 inch laptops were a nice, but sadly almost extinct, form-factor. Particularly the 2010ish 17" MacBook Pros were rock-solid, indestructible machines.
Yes, I want thinner even at a cost. The 2015 is heavy. The 2017/2018 model is way better because carrying it is less of a hassle. If it was 1/2 thickness and 1/2 weight that would be ideal.
Why not both?
There are 3 models, MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, why can't they diverge in focus? Sure, lighter is better, but that is if there are no trade offs. Some people accept the trade offs, other don't, but you have 3 product lines, why not letting them diverge on this question?
Also, you give people reason to have more than 1 Apple laptop, one with ports and great keyboard when ultra portability is not necessary, and the other for portability above all.
Me. Macbook 12 is one of my favourite machines ever. Every Thinkpad feels super heavy and bulky in comparison and I don't want to use those. I value mobility above all else. If I want performance, I have my desktop machine or cloud for that.
You live in a weird reality. An USB barely fits the carbon, and yet you don't think it's thin. For you a regular laptop is what everybody else calls an Ultrabook.
I'm the opposite, I value typing economics above all else, and I'd much rather have more battery life than save a little on weight. For me, 14" is the perfect screen size because it gives me a decent sized keyboard, enough screen to see what I'm doing, it's small enough to fit in my backpack, and large enough to fit a large enough battery to last all day. But for some reason the most recent Thinkpads don't offer a second battery and are trying to go thinner, which is precisely what I don't want.
I have my desktop for serious typing and my laptop for a mobile workstation. Sometimes I need to work while visiting family or when going to conferences, and I need a decent keyboard, battery, and performance to do so.
If I want thin, I'll get something like a MBA, a tablet, or my little Lenovo Yoga (11"). But that's not enough for me to get work done on the go, it's mostly just barely good enough to take notes and watch videos. I need something capable of compiling decently large codebases and 3D rendering, and no MBA is good enough for that.
Yes. I want my (non-proprietary) ports, and I want my disk media drive, I want a long-lasting battery, and I want key travel on the keyboard, and I want a power+KVM+USB3 dock with magnetic connector.
I will be working and playing on this thing, not waving it around in the air with just two fingers.
MacBook Pro 2025: The entire keyboard/touchpad area is now a screen with configurable controls. The touchbar was a tease of what's to come. People rejoice over the ability to swipe rather than type out a word.
If Apple truly wanted to kill the Macbook line, they wouldn't do it by spending millions of dollars over several years purposefully producing crappy products they don't believe in. They'd just announce they were killing the Macbook line.
That hasn't happened, so presumably, Apples believe that laptops fill a niche which tablets don't.
Well, what is that niche? The primary difference between a tablet and laptop is that the latter has a keyboard. If you're buying a laptop instead of a tablet, you probably want a good keyboard!
Linux has gotten to the point that it is no longer necessary to look at MacOS for a stable Unix environment. I don't need much from a laptop just decent keyboard, performance, battery life and for it to not thermal throttle, but unfortunately this seems to be incompatible with Apple's vision of the perfect MacBook. If this is the direction Apple is taking I cannot see myself buying a MacBook in the foreseeable future.
WSL is not good enough. I tried it, I really gave it a chance.
Breakages across Windows updates, atrocious filesystem performance, broken file permissions, so many rough edges buried deep in the issue tracker. I strongly recommend trying it but, but I can't possibly recommend it for professional use.
It's impressive, and from what I recall a small team working on it, who deserve tremendous kudos, but it's no replacement for real Linux.
Sorry, but Linux hasn't gotten anywhere in a long while. They were trying something that may have worked (Ubuntu + Unity), but this just looks and feels like a toy still. When it comes to GUI and user experience, let's face it, there is a very very TINY market left for Linux. I am a software developer for a very long time and had been running QubesOS as well as most popular distros. Of those QubesOS is the clear winner, since it looks pretty much as sad as any other Linux but at least it gives you something you can't get anywhere else: Security.
As much as I hate Windows and MacOS, they just both run circles around Linux when it comes to graphics, GUI design and user experience and that is why they have such a big market share. It's this old delusion of some Linux fanboys that Linux would spread around the globe if the evil Apple and Microsoft would just allow them. There are few people who CAN use it and much fewer still that are willing to use it as a desktop system.
Agreed. I recently gave every Linux DE an honest test drive and... it's clear that nobody really has the resources to perfect them. They all get annoying after a while. I'd be happy with something as polished as Windows 95, but even XFCE has the exact same bugs as when I used it 15 years ago.
I'm curious what languages you develop in? I primarily work in Java. On a Windows machine I generally install some way of using BASH (git-Bash suffices), but otherwise I can hardly tell the difference between MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I would imagine the experience is similar for languages like python, web development, etc.
Java is quite crossplatform. Python, by default, wraps system libraries, so the dev experience on Windows is very different, and special care must be taken.
But, it's the overall experience that sucks in Windows (and most linuxes imho).
I genuinely don't understand what you're referring to when you say overall experience. When I am coding I have one monitor full of IDE, one full of browser, and a console that is brought to and from focus from time to time. The experience on the 3 major platforms is extremely similar. What are you doing differently?
Not to be that guy, but what bugs have you experienced in XFCE? I've been using XFCE since Fedora 14. With the recent upgrade to Fedora 30 (from 28), I noticed they addressed my only beef with the environment by adding a greatly-improved GUI for managing multiple displays. It can save profiles for work vs home displays and (almost always) toggles between them correctly.
That was the only Linux pain point for me, having to manually toggle out of multi-screen mode after unplugging an HDMI cable. Obviously, that was some kind of kernel thing and not an XFCE-specific bug (I think?), but even the native XFCE tooling has improved in the last few years, despite the lack of a newsworthy major version release.
Fedora has been my daily driver for 8 years now. It keeps getting better. The last flaky distribution, for me, was Fedora 19, released in the summer of 2013! (Here, flaky is described as "difficult to get working the way I wanted" and "occasionally would do something weird and force me to reboot it to fix the problem")
I don't even think it's bugs that Linux desktops have a problem with. The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability.
> The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability.
That's funny because it's exactly the way I feel about macOS where they obviously design things based on the way things look and sell over how usable they are. This is actually part of Apple's DNA as we've read in the past: The only reason they stuck with the Dock was because of how well it marketed. You can read about it from the guy who developed Apple's first HIG - https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Meanwhile my preferred Linux DE (XFCE) gives me perfectly tasteful design and coherent usability. Instead of having things look or work the way Apple wants, I am able to do things the way I want to, which means that things fit into my opinion of what is tasteful or usable. It's a ton of little things you know? Like being able to quit an app with a single gesture (a middle click on its pane icon, similar to how you close a tab in your browser) - built into XFCE and not even available in macOS unless you're Apple and you have some access to their private API.
That's because most Linux desktop environments take after Windows, which has by far a better system of usability than macOS. To point out just one small thing: In macOS the keyboard shortcuts are an insane jumble of incoherence with no pattern which is why you simply cannot navigate the entirety of macOS with just the keyboard, something that I can do all day long on Windows and Linux.
If you think you can, I'll challenge you: Open the About this mac dialog, then switch to another program. Now try to switch back to that window with just your keyboard, without using one of your special usability-fixing programs that you have to install to fix such things on your Mac, like Witch.
I was trying out xfce recently. When you orient the taskbar vertically and the clock stays vertical instead of changing to horizontal. This sort of stuff pisses me off so much. But I'm OCD like that.
Many years ago people would complain about even getting things installed, have stories about driver problems, missing software, incompatibilities.
If today's strongest criticism is "the clock widget sometimes does not rotate automatically", I think that is a great endorsement.
That's true, but it's like a lot of little things add up. Windows 10 for example lost some of my files I was copying over from a linux drive, because ntfs is not case sensitive (by default?) and it didn't see there were two directories. So now the fear of losing more files is keeping me away from Windows.
I've been using XFCE for about 8 years and one problem I had since beginning is how sessions (don't) work (restoring open windows after reboot). I have experienced it not saving session at all, not saving Thunar at all and saving Thunar only if it was started from Applications Menu, seemingly completely independently on settings. I have never managed to debug what was causing it. Currently it works correctly on my work computer and is buggy on my home PC, even though they are both same distro and version and I'm not aware of changing any setting that could affect that.
That said, I consider XFCE great and all bugs I encountered while using it were minor.
Linux rewards customization, if you don't have the time for that Gnome is a good starting point assuming you can adjust yourself to its workflow. XFCE is amazing (and was my primary before I switched to wayland/swaywm) and I have deep respect for its developers for what they have managed to produce with thunar being one of the most if not the most customizable lightweight file managers. It can have its issues at times but nothing that I have not been able to work around.
I feel like the local maximum of Gnome was in the 2.x days. Gnome has really become a truly awful environment. All of the UI is needlessly dumbed down, and the window chrome is ridiculously wasteful of space.
> I recently gave every Linux DE an honest test drive and... it's clear that nobody really has the resources to perfect them.
That's not strictly true. The resources were (and are) there, but they have been pointlessly squandered.
KDE3 and GNOME2 were great desktop environments. I would argue that KDE3 was the pinnacle of all desktop environments to date. Polished and usable, it was absolutely fantastic to use. Great UI, great design, and having KParts embedded in Konqueror made it really flexible and extensible. I used it for many years, and took advantage of its functionality unlike any other DE. I also used GNOME since the 0.9x days, and it also became very polished, if not less sophisticated overall. GNOME2 was definitely its peak.
What happened though was CADT. All the effort expended to build up these DEs was carelessly torn down to be rebuilt in an inferior form. Today, both of the major DEs seem to be busy aping mobile UIs instead of creating desktop UIs. GNOME/GTK have scrollbars with zero buttons and sized about 4px wide; totally unusable on a 4K display. They even broke the old paging and panning behaviours, which were excellent. They have almost completely lost their focus on the desktop, and with it, the developer base which formed the long tail of contributors.
Part of the problem is that the upcoming generation of developers have predominantly known mobile UIs; they haven't fully experienced or understood the sheer breadth and depth of rich desktop UIs. The other is that with the switch to mobile devices, there simply isn't the money in desktop UIs nowadays. While this isn't strictly a bad thing, in practice it's the loss of diverse commercial inputs which has driven GNOME off the rails and made it an insular echo chamber of bad ideas.
I've tried to switch from Ubuntu+Unity to OSX, and OSX feels so clunky in comparison. A year later, the mac still feels unpolished. Tiny but significant things:
- Unity puts multiple dots next to an app on the dock when you have multiple windows open. On the mac you have one dot even if you have 10 windows.
- Clicking a dock icon on unity when you have multiple windows and the app is already on top, does an expose' style selection; On a mac, you need to use expose (among all apps), right click the dock icon, or find the "Window" menu on top -- and that's assuming you know that there are multiple windows ... see first point.
- I have unity set up to make the active window 5% brighter than any other window (or dim the others to 95%, don't remember). Hardly visible, except you instantly and intuitively know which window is active, even if it's on another screen.
This is a kind of polish that OSX is missing, and that once tasted, it is painful to go without. On the other hand, when I occasionally have a chance to use Unity, there is nothing from OSX that I miss.
Exactly this! As a full stack web dev, Manjaro has given me exactly everything that I need with way, way, way less work and less hassle than any Mac or Windows machine I’ve ever used in over 20 years of my programming career.
Almost every piece of software that I really need to use was in the package manager for one thing. It’s also made being a developer fun again because I feel like I’m actually in control of my desktop OS! I can make it do whatever I want and have been doing just that for over a year now on 3 different machines. I have it on one work desktop, one home desktop and on a laptop, a beautiful and cheap 15” Acer/i5 unit with 16gb, expandable up to 32gb of RAM if I want... and the desktops are 5 year old HPs both with 32 GB of RAM and i7s that run circles around macOS on the newest MBPs due to things like it being a sane nix environment and not having to jump through hoops to be productive…
I also set it up for a couple of my coworkers and they love it too. Furthermore we occasionally do some ASP.net and SQL Server work and have had no problem doing so right on these same machines was nothing more than Docker and Azure data studio.
Honestly the only thing I’ve ever needed a Mac for is to compile stuff for iOS and I’ve been doing that for years already. Mostly because I just can’t stand the UX on macOS...like at all. So before Manjaro, I’d mostly stuck to Windows and virtual machines or Docker. But I had been trying desktop Linux on and off since the late 90s and this is the first time it ever stuck. I think it’s also because it’s not that hard to make cross platform apps anymore as it used to be when all you had was C++.
I used Linux (Gentoo/KDE) quite a bit about 10 years ago, this year I ran Manjaro as one of my clients used that for their developer workstations.
I was severely disappointed. UI scaling for high resolution displays was terrible. Configuration still spread in a billion places, badly documented, and with the polish of a gravel road. Still no smooth scrolling, and no good remote access solution, unless you think VNC is still considered good. It's not.
Apart for some pretty logos, it felt almost exactly like the system I left 10 years ago. I actually felt rather sad that day.
It's rather shameful, but not unexpected how all those massive companies that built their businesses on Linux can't be bothered support what is - in a sense - the "origin" of that success: That people wanted a decent OS with a nice GUI where we also wouldn't have to be prisoners of Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else.
If you're going to scale the UI, why even bother with a high resolution display? Honest question: What do you do that requires more than 1080p?
> Configuration still spread in a billion places, badly documented...
Not quite a billion, but hey at least you can configure things the way you want very much unlike macOS where you have absolutely no choice whatsoever.
I can't remember the last time I even used official documentation for macOS or Windows. Don't you just google everything? Aside from that, what resources do you have for mac/win that are better (more detailed?) than the Arch Linux website (which applies to Manjaro)?
When I first setup Manjaro, I looked at all the remote access solutions as well and I found that X2Go was the best performing solution. Did you give that a try?
What has changed with Linux in the past 5 or so years? That makes it true now but not then? Or any other recent further back date like 2012, the first year they did a back to back yearly release (10.8, Mountain Lion)?
I'm not a fan of their thin-first addiction, but when in the history of Apple have they asked customers what they want? Steve Jobs:
"Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do."
It doesn't seem like that is the problem with Apple's keyboards. It's Tim Cook not knowing the difference between aesthetics and the qualities that give a product an overall "high end design" feel. You know, like, how it is to actually use it.
The bean counter issue is causing them to leave out the extender part of the power cord and the basically required USB hub with all the ports that "Pros" need.
"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." - Conway's law
I mean that a perfectionist dictator must be in charge of design if a company is to make truly differentiated and tasteful hardware, instead of trending towards the mediocrity pumped out by typical corporations. It's riskier, of course, but that's how you make a $1T company, and it's the only way to overrule the bean counters. It's like making art as an individual instead of handing everyone a paintbrush.
Apple's design is (or was) completely under the control of Jony Ive, due to the leadership of Steve Jobs. He is an opinionated, controlling industrial designer and, although you may not like his designs, he sticks to his principles. It is much easier to lead the way - and screw up - as an individual. You can't please everybody, but you can at least have a cohesive whole. Same kind of thing with Tesla vs every other major car company.
Dear Sweet Baby Jesus I want a thicker MacBook Pro that WORKS. I literally do not care about millimeter or two. I care very seriously about a quality keyboard I can type on.
My 2016 MBP is the worst Mac I’ve owned, and my first Mac was bought in 1989. And I don’t feel like I can upgrade because I’m unwilling to pay for more of the same crappy design. It’s embarrassing.
Apple making thin laptops was great, it moved us away from these giant thick things we had for so long. But this obsession with thinness is crazy now. They are chasing tooo thin.
I used to love my old Macbook Pro Retina, great keyboard, great laptop.
I'm on Lenovo's team now, it's keyboard is superior in everyway. I do miss the trackpad but I use the keyboard 99% of the time, and I like the nipple.
As someone who gave up on Apple in the late 1990s, I experience schadenfreude when they are having these totally unnecessary issues... Year after year after year after year.
I'm in the process of switching to a 2015 MacBook Air at work because the keyboard on my 2019 MacBook Pro is just unusable. I love the Mac external keyboards. I don't understand why they can't put them in their laptops.
Note that the patent's Publication Date is listed as November 17, 2016. So we shouldn't read into this that Apple still thinks that they should keep going thinner and thinner. Hopefully they have heard loud and clear that people want a keyboard that has adequate travel, and this tech will therefore never see the light of day.
For the record, I have a 2017 MBP and agree with all the anti-butterfly sentiment voiced here.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadI shudder to think what a glass of beer would do to my MBA.
I want a thicker laptop, and even more important: greater key travel.
Must have a very short key travel distance causing one to bottom out on every keystroke.
Please, stop. Make things functional first, thin if possible, not the other way around.
Apple users will claim that mimicking typing is the new cool thing, feeling keypresses is for losers.
It seems like the conclusion to their “Taptic” engine, touchbar, and pressure sensitive touchscreens R&D.
I don't like their poor reliability.
Apple already got there.
I am a huge fan of thin and small laptops, even at the expense of things like connectivity. However, 90% of what I do with a laptop is type. If there's no key travel, I can't type.
I got lucky and ended up with a 32G work laptop. I've got enough headroom to run a couple docker containers at the same time. My co-workers stuck with the 16G laptops are really in a tough place. As things stand, I end up stuffing a pile of dongles into my bag as I transition from work to home and back again.
It is unfortunate the person who keeps demanding 'thinner' over 'professional' keeps getting listened to. Wish I could find a 16:10 laptop that had expandability.
As someone who took a job using Windows after 4.5 years away from it, I completely disagree.
I hate windows with a passion, and it’s part of the reason I’m looking for a new job.
I’m not saying it’s not good enough for some, a lot of things in it still suck.
1. I absolutely hate the latest UI changes. Not only are things hard to find and not organized very well, especially in the system settings, but the UI feels jerky and rough compared to MacOS when moving windows around or when the “Are you sure you want to do this?” dialog pops up.
2. I cannot stand working with Windows Explorer, drive letters, and the overly complex tree view.
3. Things that are easy on MacOS (i.e. rotating and cropping pictures, editing and signing PDFs, etc.) are either hard or not supported on Windows.
4. Device driver issues are more frequent on Windows and suck to fix.
5. Windows has a LOT of shitty software for it and it seems that everyone who asks me for help is running that shitty software.
6. I don’t like the cluttered UIs that most Windows applications have; like the Ribbon thing that Office introduced.
7. I don’t like .NET and Visual Studio much, and I don’t like programming for Windows. I prefer Swift and Xcode. Having said that, I do like F# quite a bit.
One area where I think Windows really shines is gaming.
And no, in my opinion WSL is not real solution if the OS still makes life harder and more weird. Just a new twist to the cygwin/mingw/virtualisation scheme when running the real thing would be a lot better option.
And no, Macs and Linux are not perfect either, but they both are more friendly and humane options for developers.
Since VMs and containers because standard for development, I honestly have no idea what problems your colleagues are having. I haven't had a "Windows problem" other than the clunky UI since Win7, and the UI is 100% customizable.
- a windows 2016 server for which we needed to dig deep in powershell so it wouldn't reset the clock every 6 hours - a user whose local account services is totalled and he can't access his desktop any more
Personally I would like the start menu search to only look for applications but I gave up on that.
I suppose using windows only for office would help, of course.
I attribute the other one to a brutal shutdown of the PC that somehow corrupted a running update, some random clicking from the user in a misguided attempt to fix things behind the back of IT et voilà.
Why doesn’t WSL work? It’s Linux. It’s closer to what you’re deploying on for production than a Mac
WSL2 is a lightweight VM and is Linux. It has some new quirks.
I dual boot constantly and sometimes I forget what OS I am running. Until I see one clock instead of the other.
Of course there are some specific tasks that are more suited to one OS over the other (a reason for restarting), but things like using the browser, the text editor, VPNs, Kodi, epub readers, Anki, etc, they basically work the same.
So, for some games-> Windows, for CLI -> Linux, for anything else, any of them.
Directory management: 'Directory Opus'
Fast search: 'Everything' and 'Agent Ransack'
Powershell is actually pretty neat once you get past the odd syntax.
But yeah, you can't turn it into a native unix env.
Has no one used WSL? It’s pretty close compared to the past. No need for powershell. You have bash now
honestly, powershell is a superb weapon. Yes the syntax is .net-ish and not my preference but really the functionality is high.
I mostly use Linux Mint Cinnamon and the window and workspace management just feels more consistent and snappy.
Also Windows apps have a very annoying habit of showing windows for background tasks (file sync? software updates?) which I don't want to care about -- all they really accomplish is that sometimes the service gets stopped altogether just to forget about it.
It's like Total Commander: efficient and good in a way, but not in a way of modern streamlined UX that e.g. Apple software was once known for.
/rant
With WSL, it’s usable for me now since Linux is baked in. Are the apps as good on a Mac? Usually not, but a lot apps on Mac aren’t even native anymore.
On WSL (one? whatever) there is no raw socket access, zero. Cannot run something as simple as tcpdump. Plus the copy and pasting (CTRL-SHIFT-c/v) is incredibly annoying and inconsistent. Also the redraw in the terminal is really screwed up, half the time I try to go back to WSL and my terminal prompt is drawn in 3 different places on the screen.
I prefer my Mac with iTerm etc etc but I still work with WSL just as well today
The onus is on you to prove that this is true and endemic to the platform and not your unfamiliarity with the workflows on Windows.
I had a similar transition. I used DOS through XP/2000 heavily growing up. I worked jobs that used Linux and had a Mac at home until I had a recent job as Win10 was being adopted. I tried to give it my best effort. I got a book on Powershell and read it and researched. I was aghast that the same frustrations I had with XP and earlier hadn't been touched. I wish I had kept a log as I re-discovered them.
* Nobody used PowerShell. I tried to push it, but then I realized I needed a BAT file wrapper to run PS1 files, anyway. I was hoping PowerShell would be a next-gen BASH, but having verbose flags is great in scripts, but horrible interactively. The system I was on was air-gapped and the documentation required an extra download on each system.
* Man, Windows still updates a lot. Often requiring reboots. MacOS asks to reboot like twice a year (and doesn't force it). With Linux it's very, very rarely necessary to reboot.
* I found window management awkward. I was coming from Linux where META+LMB moved Windows, META+MMB resized them. I tried the hot-corners shortcuts and other built-in things, I tried installing a few things.
* When the UI is busy I still can't resize or minimize it?
* Control Panel and other configurations were a huge mishmash of tacked on menus with a mix of old UIs and icons.
* I really missed ssh-ing in to query and poke at stuff. RDP felt so heavy for small stuff that should be quick or automated.
After a few months I toyed with WSL, but spent most of my time sshed into a Linux box using vim or bash when managing files or source code. Most of the small services I set up running in Linux. After a year and a half I left for a variety of reasons.
Nothing stops you from installing an SSH server also.
Also, you can change the update policy (although that might be due to your IT).
> Nothing stops you from installing an SSH server also.
I didn't want to get too much into this in my previous comment because it has more to do with how the place was managed, then Windows itself. But it does speak to Windows out of the box. This was an air-gapped setup and they were fairly open to me making changes, but I was very careful about jumping in suggesting big changes since I had 0 practical experience managing Windows. They mostly started with Windows as it was installed when it was delivered. Windows 10 was fairly new and they were comfortable with 7. Things were managed with PDQ. Most things were done in an "artisanal" fashion (individually done in a simple or straightforward way). I was used to installing a bunch of software on a network drive and running it directly off NFS. I've been told at multiple places that's unfeasible with SMB because of performance. (I'm definitely not speaking to NFS or SMB as a whole here--just with this specific use-case)
This also meant our rack of headless machines, when the power went out, had to be brought up individually since the disk checker was waiting for input before booting. I had on my todo list to change this, but it's difficult to test and roll out and doesn't come up often.
Back to that question; it would have meant finding a third-party ssh and rolling it out just to appease me. I likely would have done it if I stuck around, though. Maybe in tandem with a full update to Win10.
On that topic, though. Currently, I support Windows users who work from home. It's a bit odd you need admin privileges to create a symlink (I admit, that need mostly comes from trying to get feature parity with Linux/macOS), but detecting and running Admin rights is incredibly awkward [1]. We also need these non-technical people do to some port forwarding or to ssh into our Linux servers. PuTTy's configuration interface is horrid to describe to random people. Since you can't import/export configs we've looked at creating a Registry file with the right configuration, but it's not a trivial thing. For a few people we've had them install WSL, but it's a bit overkill to install however many Gigs along with Linux just to get an ssh client (and it's not an option for non Windows 10 users).
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4051883/batch-script-how...
These days I'm on macOS not linux but my desire for that kind of control and speed remains; fortunately tools like BetterTouchTool enable this really nicely, and I get the best of both worlds: nice mouse-driven control when I want it, and a quick/easy way to throw a window where I want it the rest of the time (i.e. most of the time).
(I'd also say, addressing the parenthesised part of your first question, that for me, this isn't just about dev - this is a general preference; for some tools, e.g. the GIMP, tiling's a bad fit and the mouse is where it's at, but in general, if I can keyboard it, I will.)
So I've got a whole bunch of hotkeys doing things like "maximise window", "put window in top-right quadrant", "put window on display 3, taking up 1/3 of the width of the screen at the right and at full height". That kinda thing. This allows me to quickly/easily set things up as I want (not _automatically_ but that's fine for me in practice since the world and my needs are always in flux.) If you dig into it you can do some fairly powerful things... E.g. you can set up named triggers (i.e. actions not bound to hotkeys) which you can then call from AppleScript triggered by hotkeys (or, if you want, triggered externally by, e.g. Alfred, though I don't do that); the AppleScripts can maintain state between calls, so I have some hotkeys that move windows in cycles, e.g. "maximise the window's height and push it all the way to the left, and on each call cycle its width between 1/6, 1/3, 1/4, 1/2, 2/3" - stuff like that.
It's true you don't get "real" tiling with this - but as I say, for me, it satisfies the "why" of tiling WMs, without doing the "how". Hope that makes sense.
Weird, I always ask people the opposite. Why would you spend time manually positioning windows when the window manager can do it for you?
What is "tedious" about tiling window managers?
In a tiling WM full screen is the default. I never have to manually full screen something, it’s automatically taking up the whole screen. I usually have it in tabbed mode, so all new programs are just full screen in tabs. (And split view is just a hot key or two away)
Really though my favorite thing is the easy multiple desktops. Win+4 is always my chat program. Win+2 is always my ide, win+1 is always my web browser. I never have to mash alt+tab a varying number of times. and more importantly if the second desktop is actually two programs in split screen, it’s still easy to switch to and from. Otherwise I frequently find myself looking at one thing in full screen, then having to alt+tab multiple times to bring two half-screen programs back to the front.
I’ve tried to install various windows tools to either provide hot keys to virtual desktops, or otherwise replicate my tiling WM setup but nothing seems to be quite as convenient to me. I feel like I waste so much time alt+tabbing and getting things where I want them whenever I’m in a normal WM. In i3 it’s all either already the way I like or it’s 1-2 hotkeys to fix it.
It automatically makes the window you're using take up 100% of the screen. You can also switch between tiling and a maximized view in pretty much every tiling wm. Also, there are usually multiple desktops (or even better, "tags" like in dwm) which allow you to easily switch between applications in any of the different tiling modes.
As long as it runs well on anything newer than 5 years old, I'm happy. This captures enough users without requiring me to go to great pains to get the remaining, much harder hardware/software setups.
People may read that and hate it, but the reality is I have deadlines to meet, demanding bosses, and a never ending queue of features and bugfixes. I suspect a lot of folks are in the same boat.
I mean, I know it's useful, but at my previous job I was able to use my vintage 2GB Macbook Air after installing things with brew + rbenv, while everyone else needed 16GB. All it took was a couple hours to setup the local environment.
Never had a problem because the environment was different and my app startup times were much smaller.
Thanks to the XPS when I picked out my new laptop keyboard quality/travel was my #1 requirement by a tremendous margin.
What I'm not willing to do is make any drastic usability sacrifices in exchange for more thinness.
Started in 3-4 months for me...
MAKE THEM THICKER, I want more battery life and better performance! I am a fat out of shape need and I can carry 40lbs on my back, no sweat. MAKE THEM THICKER.
Let the skinny-jeans kids get their skinny phones and have to charge everywhere, but I'm fine with a brick in my pocket if the battery can go for a couple days.
Yes. Anyone who carries them around demands thinner, where possible. I could have bought a MBP and am typing this on a MBA. The latter has various advantages but the latter is fast enough and also lighter. PG uses (used?) 11" MBAs. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/740739637572997120?lang=en
I use my machine to do work. Better performance makes we work better and faster. It's my bread and butter. Less weight... is a slight convenience while commuting, I guess?
If weight is an issue then swapping aluminium for plastic would be more effective. But then it would be function over form.
If you put it in a single strap bag like a satchel then it can dig into your shoulder after a few hours. If you use a briefcase then you have to mount it somewhere or continually have one hand occupied.
1) desktop (Ubuntu), main daily use at home 2) laptop (t410s/Ubuntu). For work in apps rooms. Really falling to bits now, but still using it due to things like Ethernet port. The keyboard is now worse than the air so looking how beast to replace it 3) MacBook Air, for portable use
Right tool for the right job. If I want a portable I’ll go for a small air. If I want a useful machine I’ll go for something larger and heavier, but with the ports I need
Well, they could be tightened back when I carried a few around.
I am (perhaps incorrectly) assuming that your hinges are loose and not actually breaking apart.
The cpu fan doesn’t work either.
Why? Because I want the least possible weight, and a screen size I can use. The only way to hold screen size constant and drop weight is to get thinner.
I just got a 13" MBP, which is about the same weight and size as my 2012 Air, but gives me better battery life, better performance, and a way better screen. It's great. I even like the new keyboard better.
I see the appeal of light and minimal, but I also see the idea of heavy and feature packed.
Plus pursuing thinness as end in and of itself (edit: to the point that reliability is impacted) is preposterous. Is a few millimeters thinner really going to change the way you feel about your laptop? Probably it would not impact any functional aspect of your relationship with the laptop.
After all, thicker doesn’t necessarily mean heavier. I’m fact thicker things are more resistant to bending, so perhaps it could mean lighter. If you want to understand the mechanics, check this out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_modulus
Like yeah, going from 2.8 to 2lbs is great and all but it's not as notable as the jump 10 years ago from the 5lbs bricks to the original MacBook Air. The computer still takes up about the same space in my bag and I wouldn't really notice ~1 lbs difference, especially if I still have to carry around a 1lbs power adapter because the thin battery lasts less than 8-10 hours of moderate use.
In the meantime, the design compromises to get to 2lbs are becoming increasingly aggravating: thinner keyboards that jam, screens bonded to glass so that repair is impossible, RAM and SSD soldered onto the board, batteries broken up into pieces so that replacement is annoying or impossible, passively cooled Intel chips that throttle, weak integrated GPUs. And probably a bunch of other stuff.
But… why?
I won't say I'm for thinner laptops, per se, because I'd rather that every laptop came with the maximum permissible 99 WHr battery, but I want everything as light as possible hell yes.
Or get rid of bezels. Or have a better aspect ratio.
> gives me better battery life, better performance, and a way better screen
That is be expected after so many years. Also, before apple started its "retina" branding it just had worse screens than comparable competition, e.g. sony vaio or hp and lenovo with nice high-res IPS screens while the air had a rather low res TN screen.
Current MBPs have problems with thermal throttling already, but you want them to be even thinner _and_ more powerful??
I want something I don't even notice in my shoulder bag when I commute. Battery life is good enough, performance is good enough (and can boost a bit when the machine is plugged in).
You sound like you might be in the market for a workstation-replacement thinkpad.
Particularly the Air is weird, it's not a lot slimmer or lighter than the 13" pro now, but it is a lot less powerful. It's a weird market segmentation (to my eyes).
It's fantastic and I love it. I just wish it were bigger - 17 inch laptops were a nice, but sadly almost extinct, form-factor. Particularly the 2010ish 17" MacBook Pros were rock-solid, indestructible machines.
Also, you give people reason to have more than 1 Apple laptop, one with ports and great keyboard when ultra portability is not necessary, and the other for portability above all.
I have my desktop for serious typing and my laptop for a mobile workstation. Sometimes I need to work while visiting family or when going to conferences, and I need a decent keyboard, battery, and performance to do so.
If I want thin, I'll get something like a MBA, a tablet, or my little Lenovo Yoga (11"). But that's not enough for me to get work done on the go, it's mostly just barely good enough to take notes and watch videos. I need something capable of compiling decently large codebases and 3D rendering, and no MBA is good enough for that.
I will be working and playing on this thing, not waving it around in the air with just two fingers.
yes. a lot of people, myself included.
Macbook Pro 2020, newest even thinner than butterfly keyboard.
iPad Pro keyboard cover now the most travel, best typing keyboard among Apple portables.
2022: iPad OS on iPad Pro now the professional portable, MBP discontinued.
That hasn't happened, so presumably, Apples believe that laptops fill a niche which tablets don't.
Well, what is that niche? The primary difference between a tablet and laptop is that the latter has a keyboard. If you're buying a laptop instead of a tablet, you probably want a good keyboard!
You can add Windows 10 as an option too. WSL2 and Ubuntu is a nice combo. It’s pretty close to native.
Breakages across Windows updates, atrocious filesystem performance, broken file permissions, so many rough edges buried deep in the issue tracker. I strongly recommend trying it but, but I can't possibly recommend it for professional use.
It's impressive, and from what I recall a small team working on it, who deserve tremendous kudos, but it's no replacement for real Linux.
As much as I hate Windows and MacOS, they just both run circles around Linux when it comes to graphics, GUI design and user experience and that is why they have such a big market share. It's this old delusion of some Linux fanboys that Linux would spread around the globe if the evil Apple and Microsoft would just allow them. There are few people who CAN use it and much fewer still that are willing to use it as a desktop system.
But, it's the overall experience that sucks in Windows (and most linuxes imho).
Regardless your last point is why I stick with macOS. I don’t really care that much about the laptop aesthetic.
That was the only Linux pain point for me, having to manually toggle out of multi-screen mode after unplugging an HDMI cable. Obviously, that was some kind of kernel thing and not an XFCE-specific bug (I think?), but even the native XFCE tooling has improved in the last few years, despite the lack of a newsworthy major version release.
Fedora has been my daily driver for 8 years now. It keeps getting better. The last flaky distribution, for me, was Fedora 19, released in the summer of 2013! (Here, flaky is described as "difficult to get working the way I wanted" and "occasionally would do something weird and force me to reboot it to fix the problem")
That's funny because it's exactly the way I feel about macOS where they obviously design things based on the way things look and sell over how usable they are. This is actually part of Apple's DNA as we've read in the past: The only reason they stuck with the Dock was because of how well it marketed. You can read about it from the guy who developed Apple's first HIG - https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Meanwhile my preferred Linux DE (XFCE) gives me perfectly tasteful design and coherent usability. Instead of having things look or work the way Apple wants, I am able to do things the way I want to, which means that things fit into my opinion of what is tasteful or usable. It's a ton of little things you know? Like being able to quit an app with a single gesture (a middle click on its pane icon, similar to how you close a tab in your browser) - built into XFCE and not even available in macOS unless you're Apple and you have some access to their private API.
That's because most Linux desktop environments take after Windows, which has by far a better system of usability than macOS. To point out just one small thing: In macOS the keyboard shortcuts are an insane jumble of incoherence with no pattern which is why you simply cannot navigate the entirety of macOS with just the keyboard, something that I can do all day long on Windows and Linux.
If you think you can, I'll challenge you: Open the About this mac dialog, then switch to another program. Now try to switch back to that window with just your keyboard, without using one of your special usability-fixing programs that you have to install to fix such things on your Mac, like Witch.
Many years ago people would complain about even getting things installed, have stories about driver problems, missing software, incompatibilities. If today's strongest criticism is "the clock widget sometimes does not rotate automatically", I think that is a great endorsement.
That said, I consider XFCE great and all bugs I encountered while using it were minor.
That's not strictly true. The resources were (and are) there, but they have been pointlessly squandered.
KDE3 and GNOME2 were great desktop environments. I would argue that KDE3 was the pinnacle of all desktop environments to date. Polished and usable, it was absolutely fantastic to use. Great UI, great design, and having KParts embedded in Konqueror made it really flexible and extensible. I used it for many years, and took advantage of its functionality unlike any other DE. I also used GNOME since the 0.9x days, and it also became very polished, if not less sophisticated overall. GNOME2 was definitely its peak.
What happened though was CADT. All the effort expended to build up these DEs was carelessly torn down to be rebuilt in an inferior form. Today, both of the major DEs seem to be busy aping mobile UIs instead of creating desktop UIs. GNOME/GTK have scrollbars with zero buttons and sized about 4px wide; totally unusable on a 4K display. They even broke the old paging and panning behaviours, which were excellent. They have almost completely lost their focus on the desktop, and with it, the developer base which formed the long tail of contributors.
Part of the problem is that the upcoming generation of developers have predominantly known mobile UIs; they haven't fully experienced or understood the sheer breadth and depth of rich desktop UIs. The other is that with the switch to mobile devices, there simply isn't the money in desktop UIs nowadays. While this isn't strictly a bad thing, in practice it's the loss of diverse commercial inputs which has driven GNOME off the rails and made it an insular echo chamber of bad ideas.
- Unity puts multiple dots next to an app on the dock when you have multiple windows open. On the mac you have one dot even if you have 10 windows.
- Clicking a dock icon on unity when you have multiple windows and the app is already on top, does an expose' style selection; On a mac, you need to use expose (among all apps), right click the dock icon, or find the "Window" menu on top -- and that's assuming you know that there are multiple windows ... see first point.
- I have unity set up to make the active window 5% brighter than any other window (or dim the others to 95%, don't remember). Hardly visible, except you instantly and intuitively know which window is active, even if it's on another screen.
This is a kind of polish that OSX is missing, and that once tasted, it is painful to go without. On the other hand, when I occasionally have a chance to use Unity, there is nothing from OSX that I miss.
Almost every piece of software that I really need to use was in the package manager for one thing. It’s also made being a developer fun again because I feel like I’m actually in control of my desktop OS! I can make it do whatever I want and have been doing just that for over a year now on 3 different machines. I have it on one work desktop, one home desktop and on a laptop, a beautiful and cheap 15” Acer/i5 unit with 16gb, expandable up to 32gb of RAM if I want... and the desktops are 5 year old HPs both with 32 GB of RAM and i7s that run circles around macOS on the newest MBPs due to things like it being a sane nix environment and not having to jump through hoops to be productive…
I also set it up for a couple of my coworkers and they love it too. Furthermore we occasionally do some ASP.net and SQL Server work and have had no problem doing so right on these same machines was nothing more than Docker and Azure data studio.
Honestly the only thing I’ve ever needed a Mac for is to compile stuff for iOS and I’ve been doing that for years already. Mostly because I just can’t stand the UX on macOS...like at all. So before Manjaro, I’d mostly stuck to Windows and virtual machines or Docker. But I had been trying desktop Linux on and off since the late 90s and this is the first time it ever stuck. I think it’s also because it’s not that hard to make cross platform apps anymore as it used to be when all you had was C++.
I was severely disappointed. UI scaling for high resolution displays was terrible. Configuration still spread in a billion places, badly documented, and with the polish of a gravel road. Still no smooth scrolling, and no good remote access solution, unless you think VNC is still considered good. It's not.
Apart for some pretty logos, it felt almost exactly like the system I left 10 years ago. I actually felt rather sad that day.
It's rather shameful, but not unexpected how all those massive companies that built their businesses on Linux can't be bothered support what is - in a sense - the "origin" of that success: That people wanted a decent OS with a nice GUI where we also wouldn't have to be prisoners of Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else.
> Configuration still spread in a billion places, badly documented...
Not quite a billion, but hey at least you can configure things the way you want very much unlike macOS where you have absolutely no choice whatsoever.
I can't remember the last time I even used official documentation for macOS or Windows. Don't you just google everything? Aside from that, what resources do you have for mac/win that are better (more detailed?) than the Arch Linux website (which applies to Manjaro)?
When I first setup Manjaro, I looked at all the remote access solutions as well and I found that X2Go was the best performing solution. Did you give that a try?
"Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do."
"Sure, by using a crappy keyboard/display/_______ we only save 89 cents per unit - but multiply that by 100,000 units!" (99% of laptop manufacturers)
The bean counter issue is causing them to leave out the extender part of the power cord and the basically required USB hub with all the ports that "Pros" need.
I mean that a perfectionist dictator must be in charge of design if a company is to make truly differentiated and tasteful hardware, instead of trending towards the mediocrity pumped out by typical corporations. It's riskier, of course, but that's how you make a $1T company, and it's the only way to overrule the bean counters. It's like making art as an individual instead of handing everyone a paintbrush.
Apple's design is (or was) completely under the control of Jony Ive, due to the leadership of Steve Jobs. He is an opinionated, controlling industrial designer and, although you may not like his designs, he sticks to his principles. It is much easier to lead the way - and screw up - as an individual. You can't please everybody, but you can at least have a cohesive whole. Same kind of thing with Tesla vs every other major car company.
My 2016 MBP is the worst Mac I’ve owned, and my first Mac was bought in 1989. And I don’t feel like I can upgrade because I’m unwilling to pay for more of the same crappy design. It’s embarrassing.
I used to love my old Macbook Pro Retina, great keyboard, great laptop.
I'm on Lenovo's team now, it's keyboard is superior in everyway. I do miss the trackpad but I use the keyboard 99% of the time, and I like the nipple.
(Except for the arrow keys)
For the record, I have a 2017 MBP and agree with all the anti-butterfly sentiment voiced here.