Anyone here who has experience working with JS/TS development tools (vscode, yarn, webpack, Node.js etc.) on a recent MacBook Air? I wonder if the performance is noticeably worse than a 13” MacBook Pro for this type of work.
Up until late 2018, my MBA 2013 was doing ok with a stack transitioning to full js/ts. Now it’s close to unusable as our projects build multiple containers, load hundreds of node packages etc. Unfortunately, the 2019 MBA isn’t much better. I’m still wondering whether to hold until a new MBP 13/14”, or give this a try.
Optimizing your local workflows is worth the effort at every team size.
I think the attempts to make local workflows mirror production 1:1 (local k8s, for example) are misguided. They miss too hard on the productivity story. Especially once you start having to swap out local debugging for remote debugging (which only a handful of languages support effectively).
This is the biggest miss for many companies striving for microservice architecture. The local development story is terrible, and it stays terrible, without a lot of opinionated decisions around what your dev workflow needs to look like past the ~3-5 services mark. At a past gig I had to change 5 different repositories (5 separate PRs, all needing approval) to send an email. In a rails app that would have been a trivial task.
kasey: For deployment that makes sense, but for development, that seems like a lot of work to be happening.
If you change a small bit of css, the whole container is rebuilt? That seems super inefficient to me?
My backends arn't JS, but I still couldn't imagine rebuilding a container everytime I changed a piece of code. Right now I change a file, django picks up the change and reloads. No noticeable delay.
This has got nothing to do with JS. Plenty of devs (me included) work on frontend and backend JS without containers and everything is instant for us. OP has a special use case or build pipeline necessitating such complexity.
That's correct. Not building/re-building the containers constantly. However, the initial build takes forever and some containers tend to crash (e.g., Prisma). Plus, in our case where we're using Angular, the recompiling of the app on change sends the fan into overdrive and I get noticeable lag on application switching. Again, this is on a 2013 MBA, which is almost ridiculous, but I'm that type of person. Still proudly sporting my iPhone SE. My development partner is on the 2019 MBA and has noticed improvement, but albeit rather underwhelming.
As an aside, I haven't taken the time to pin point the exact problem, but as much I prefer to use Firefox, it doesn't seem to do a great job of managing resources for the SPAs we're building.
Make sure your node_modules directory is mapped to a local volume inside docker (not synced to your Mac). This dramatically improves build performance in Docker for Mac. If using docker compose, try this out https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29181032/add-a-volume-to...
This is a dumb question, but you're talking about using docker, right? Doesn't docker spin up an entire vm for containers? That does seem pretty heavy for a MBA of any generation?
> Doesn't docker spin up an entire vm for containers?
(It generally does not. Instead it uses more lightweight isolation primtives. That has always been one of its main selling points.)
EDIT: see reply
> That does seem pretty heavy for a MBA of any generation?
It very much depends on what you are running inside the containers. I regularly have a dev environment with ~8 relatively lightweight containers running on my Early 2014 MBA without any problems.
It's almost impressive that Docker-on-macOS works so seamlessly that people are downvoting this comment. Yes, Docker containers run in a Linux VM on macOS. It's just one though, and generally seems fine on low resource workstations, unlike Vagrant setups from a few years ago that tried to run a VM for every application.
JS build times? I guess that I haven't touched JS development in a while... My Early 2011 MBP (with SSD and RAM upgrade to 16GB) still rocks with intensive information retrieval and other big data tasks (Go, Java, Python).
It's perfect from a performance point of view.
I own the last generation (so no scissor keyboard) and I work the whole day in VSCode with JS/TS, Python, Go, Rust, etc.
While this MBA turned out really well, current Windows featuring WSL2 is quite impressive though. Having a full Ubuntu or Debian on your machine is priceless. Or you develop on a remote server, then you just need a good terminal. So currently both macOS and Windows are good for JS dev. It's a matter of taste and price.
Last fresh Windows install I did came pre-loaded with a bunch of loot box style gaming crap, Candy Crush, Xbox stuff, Netflix, Amazon Prime, loads of other foistware that should not exist on a fresh install.
A new Windows install requires at least an hour of de-cluttering and shit removal, while for a new Mac full setup to my liking takes about 5-10 minutes and I generally don't have to uninstall much of anything. The only thing I sometimes remove are apps I never personally use like Garage Band to save a bit of disk space, and that takes like ten seconds.
Then there's the almost Android level of obviously spyware telemetry going on. Yes I know Apple has telemetry but I trust them quite a bit more than Microsoft both not to do anything deliberately sketchy with my data and to be competent with their security. They also do a lot less and a lot less invasive telemetry. Redirecting local search, sending file list dumps, etc. to the mothership is unforgivable unless I have explicitly opted into that kind of behavior e.g. for tech support or debugging. That's the kind of stuff I associate with borderline malware, not an OS by a supposedly reputable company that I paid for.
Microsoft's recent behavior is pegging them in the low end of the market and ceding the high end of the market to Apple. Then of course there's Linux. If Apple did something barking stupid that forced me to ditch the platform that's where I'd go. I'd miss the Apple degree of trouble-free operation but at least I'd keep my privacy and security and lack of foistware.
I asked specifically about ads as I do not have those so curious why others do. I do not need generic Windows criticism as I am using it without any problem for like eternity, so do not really give a hoot if somebody else does not like it. I have whole bunch of Windows and Linux computers (laptops and desktops/servers) and am happy like a clam.
"Ceding high end of the market to Apple". I would not go into much details but for example my gaming grade laptop runs circles around Mac that costs twice as much. So sure I'd rather be a "low end" peon with the decent hardware.
Do you mean the start menu? I never open it, just use Win + number for pinned apps.
Windows is not perfect but it excels in many regards nowadays and the last years, Macs were really expensive and risky. They were too expensive to just have a fall-back machine lying around (if you make serious money with you gear, every hour counts). I have 3x 2.5lb notebooks here, if one needs to be sent in, so what.
Edit: just opened it but there are no ads... what do you mean?
Regardless of using the start menu or not, there's a lot of background tracking (for user behaviour and ads) that needs to be disabled by registry edits. In addition to those, there's probably more that cannot be disabled.
Replacing /Windows/System32/Drivers/etc/hosts isn't black magic and truly works wonders even for the more paranoid ;)
What I don't understand about this, however, are people being paranoid about W10 while they're happily accepting Google and friends to infiltrate their lives ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You are of course exempt if you don't use any cloud-based services that you don't host yourself :D
> Regardless of using the start menu or not, there's a lot of background tracking (for user behaviour and ads) that needs to be disabled by registry edits.
That stuff also has a nasty tendency to ""accidentally"" get re-enabled after updates from many reports I've heard.
I just looked at mine, no ads. In anyways I do not use start menu to launch apps. I just do Ctrl+Esc or Win key and proceed to type name of the app. 2-3 latters is normally enough to auto-fill result and off you go. I can't remember last time I used mouse to hunt apps in a menu
Even Chrome OS is pretty great. I found Crostini to be wonderful (esp in v82) and the Pixelbook Go has fantastic haptic impressions to me. The Keyboard is perfection.
NodeJS is, but neither modules nor backends have to be.
It's quite common to spin up a bunch of docker containers that provide databases and backends locally.
This is the point at which the MBA stops being a productive environment. I'm not saying this has to be the case for every project, but if your team uses local dev environments, it's quasi standard procedure at this point.
Right, but the GC was talking about developing JS applications on their computer, so presumably they were referring to compiling frontend JS projects, which multiple cores would not help, I think.
I have a 2017 Macbook Pro and the main project I work on brings it to its knees. This is a front end project with a nodejs graphql server, TypeScript, eslint, VS.Code, webpack. I think actually the linting is the worst CPU drain, but all in all with the graphql server and front end tooling running at once, it makes my laptop slower than running the .NET core back end it connects to.
Kind of annoying. Working with a simple create-react-app project with TypeScript is fine though.
There's something wrong with your setup &| stack. I've run a full stack locally, a build setup with a watcher, a django/gunicorn setup with file watching, mysql/redis/rabbitmq, and i barely nudge the cpu.
I'm betting your if you cpu is hot constantly while developing, it's file watching that's the issue. I had to do some work to get things to use proper file system events in macos and not just polling with my legacy gulp project. try installing fsevents if it's not already?
There is something wrong. I’m running two separate Rails apps, MySQL, Oracle, RabbitMQ as a broker between the two apps, Redis, and both have Angular FEs that I use VSC with. Same year MBP, and my CPU load rarely reaches 5%.
Check your package updates! We had the SAME issue in serving the app on macOS and no issue on windows. Updating node and updating to latest packages produced a 80% cpu drop. When I had this issue I couldn't serve the project while running VS code on my Air, the lag from input was way too bad, now it's snappy.
Webpack, very very large Angular project with over 2500 jasmine tests. I'm using a 2017 Air i5 8GB (First gen of new design, Came from a 2016 Macbook Pro 15 i7 (so other end of the spectrum)
Node performance has gotten a lot better since some updates, there was a period where CPU use and performance was just bad. I think it was a webpack bug. But now things are pretty good! Runs Sketch and other graphics apps not too bad.
As a comparison, It seems to be much faster at compile and test running than running the project on Chrome OS Crostini on my ChromeBook Pixel LS (higher wattage, older, i7 + 16GB ram) I imagine the Quad core in this would smoke the LS.
Same thoughts, I have the MBA 2018 and the keyboard is a deal breaker, I regret buying it and this is probably the last laptop from apple I will every buy
I bought the 2018 MBP and also agree. The keyboard has been a disaster. I’ve had it replaced 4 times now and won’t be looking back at their laptops anytime soon. The resale value has completely gone away for a 3500 purchase.
Your trade-in would cover over 1/3 of the price of a brand new machine. That's a fairly significant discount.
If you used it for a year would you say you got $959 of value out of it in that time?
If I purchase a new car, I can either trade it in for lower Kelly Blue Book value to dealership and avoid having to interact with eBay or Craigslist lurkers, or put up with strangers haggling and try to get more from selling it to private strangers.
I was looking at this (2017 13" mbp with 512gb) - they offered me £380 for an 18 month old machine that cost me nearly £1700!
I bought the mac because it was an investment when I got made redundant and to hopefully shift careers.
Sold it for £800 privately (worst loss I've taken on any item), and now think I'd be lucky to get £700 for it as the price plummeted further once the 16" came out as people expect a 14" with a fixed keyboard.
Currently using a mid 2015 15". Better than the 2047 in every way, other than appearance.
They should have offered a lot more than price gouging resale value for it, imo.
Yep the resale value for the current MacBooks are going to be junk, now that new ones are out with decent keyboards. I wouldn’t consider upgrading my 2017 MBP based on performance, but the keyboard literally hurts my hands so I’ll probably replace it.
There are tons of people like me who will be flooding the used market and driving down the price.
If you have an external 'magic keyboard' the feel is similar. Less mushy than the old 'chicklet' keys on the 2015-and-earlier laptops, but less stiff/unmoving than the butterfly keys on the 2016-2018 laptops.
I am not familiar with such conspiracies, from what I seen he is accusing Apple of incompetence a lot and the keyboard case confirms that Apple can do sometimes stupid designs and he is accusing Apple of anti-repair shit and this is also true see the right of repair laws that are debated in US states and EU.
We do not have any emails or other internal Apple materials to know for sure why Apple kept hidden the fact they crippled your iPhone CPU (again for the fanboys the issue was the HIDDEN part) but for now presuming Apple is hidden things for your own good is let's say naive.
...and yes, it's the same layout of the arrow keys that was there 14 years ago. If they were advertising new full size arrow keys that would definitely be worth mentioning, but I'm not sure why they had to draw attention to that particular aspect... especially given that half-height arrow keys are one of the more annoying things about laptop keyboards in general.
I still mis-hit one of the arrow keys about 20% of the time with the annoying 'full size left and right' arrow key arrangement. Going back to inverted-T makes perfect sense. It was an experiment that failed.
It was an awful experiment that should have never left the lab. What could possibly have been the thinking for the entire butterfly/touchbar line, "People should be looking at the keyboard more when they type. Also, there's not nearly enough wrist pain going around. I wonder what important part of the Macbook we can ruin to address both of these problems."
They're drawing attention to it because so many people complained about the old layout. For me, the arrow key layout was the sole reason I did not buy a new MacBook Pro in 2016, and one of the reasons I stayed away for 4 years.
This is a close Apple gets to saying "we fucked up".
bought macbook pro in 2017. Due to the issue with double typing keyboard I always regret everyday. And there is screen issue also. Probably they will charge $300. Looks like I did the worst investment in my life.
I bought a 13 inch Macbook Pro in 2017 and within six months of normal use the spacebar and other other key were intermittent. I was fortunately able to get it fixed under warranty.
However I've been using since then with no need for servicing and the keys are at this moment perfect. Various keys have become intermittent since then but I found a trick that so far has fixed it every time.
The key mechanism seems to be VERY robust and can take a lot of pounding. Usually the particles jamming the mechanism (e.g. food crumbs) can be broken up by repeatedly banging hard on the offending key.
I've had keys that were intermittent or even not come all the way up and this has always fixed them to be literally as good as new. It seems that once the particles are broken small enough they either remain in place but are harmless or maybe they are small enough to fall out by themselves.
> The key mechanism seems to be VERY robust and can take a lot of pounding. Usually the particles jamming the mechanism (e.g. food crumbs) can be broken up by repeatedly banging hard on the offending key.
I've done something similar by holding the base of an electric toothbrush against a misbehaving key that couldn't be cleared by some other technique. The high-frequency vibrations seem to do a decent job of breaking up or dislodging whatever's stuck.
This has worked for me as well. Whenever keys got stuck I could press them quite hard and seemingly crunch whatever is causing the issue. For example the tab key would only react intermittently. Press it, and almost massage it with lots of force and it works fine again.
The unintended benefit of this is that the battery is soldered to the keyboard. So, when your battery is failing, you can take your keyboard in to get fixed under the service programme and get a new battery for free.
Yes, I do, and I cannot believe they took every step of the life cycle into account, else the number would be 3-4 times higher.
That's why I was hoping for more details. But obviously this is not something we like to talk about, and it's so easy to sweep it under the carpet, so why bother?
The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience. The inverted-T arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments.
This isn't progress. This is the baseline. Apple have gone from bad to OK, and they're celebrating as though they've achieved something amazing.
We all (most of us anyway) wanted them to go back to the scissor design. Are we going to now complain that they did what the community has been begging them to do? Was butterfly a mistake? Yes. Were they slow to correct the issue? Yes. Now that they fixed it we should be happy about it.
As far as talking about it being amazing, its called marketing spin. This is how it works. However, those two sentences do not say anything about it being amazing. It simply focuses on the positive features of the keyboard. The two sentences above clearly communicate to mac users that the company has fixed the problems that people wanted fixed. Did you really expect a bunch of public self-flaggelation? They are telling us clearly that they did what we asked for. Perfect.
I dunno, I used to buy Apples because they had great hardware for a fair price (premium, sure, but if you're in the market for a premium machine...), but my last two machines have been a Dell and a Surface. It's different trade offs, but '\_o_/` I was never wedded to their operating system anyway.
I held off buying a new MBP replacement for two years now thanks to the massive criticism over the butterfly fiasco. I'd say the complaining was useful and had an impact. Not wasteful at all.
Honestly, Apple's marketing has always been worse than the other companies when it comes to sell basic things as a revolutionary, life changing progress.
IMO, when you see car companies 2020 model gets 3 more horsepower or 1 more MPG, it’s better to consider how difficult that was rather than simply expecting it. Even a slightly better toothbrush is a positive life change. We have normalized progress, but even seemingly incremental progress is making the world a better place.
Further, it can take revolutionary change to maintain incremental improvements. Filling HDD with say Helium has a lot of knock on effects hidden by the spec sheet.
The two sentence above clearly oversell the product: "refined", "delivers", "help you fly", plus all the details for something that is already known... It's not because everybody is doing glorified marketing, which often results in being deceptive, that we have to be okay with it.
I think it's the marketing copy most people are taking issue with with.
They tried a new design, which was horrible to use and had a high failure rate. They continued to claim the new keyboard was amazing, and stubbornly continued to use this crappy keyboard long after the problems were apparent.
And now they are touting a "normal" keyboard mechanism as if they've invented something new and wonderful... only Apple could get away with such transparent BS.
Yes, that's by design; it's a purposefully ambiguous choice of words that be read either way depending on what the reader's subconscious wants to hear. Either way, they don't have to admit that they were wrong, customers that hated the old now now feel relieved and vindicated, and people are probably more likely to buy the new one. That particular choice of words is probably the result of millions of dollars of marketing psychology, focus groups and A/B testing.
I assumed that was because it’s the same key-mech that’s in their (external, Bluetooth) Magic Keyboard. Where it itself was branded “magic” just in reference to its two sibling peripherals, the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad.
IIRC, the peripheral line itself was started with the original Magic Mouse, which was branded as such because it didn’t have separate external actuatable buttons, but rather was just a smooth surface with a multitouch digitizer on the top half + a single actuatable microswitch underneath the shell†. Apple wanted the image of it “magically” figuring out when you left/right/middle-clicked (despite no L/M/R buttons) or scrolled (despite no scroll-wheel.) Also, the “plug in to pair” experience might have contributed to the claimed “magic”—it was a fairly unique approach to pairing at the time.
† Which is a design with some real benefits, like being easily disinfectable, with no crevasses close to the hand for filth and germs to accumulate in. (There is a crevice on the Magic Mouse, but it’s on the bottom, where your hands will never touch it.)
There is also a bit of “magic” in the Magic line of peripherals that’s not in the hardware itself, but rather in the OS: when the Magic line of peripherals—Apple’s first Bluetooth line of peripherals—was introduced, Apple added a feature to macOS where macOS will “train” the Apple EFI firmware to recognize devices paired in macOS itself, such that the firmware will later attempt to connect to such paired devices on boot. This means that e.g. holding Option on your Bluetooth keyboard to select an alternate boot device on an iMac would actually work. Which was kind of necessary, as those are the peripherals iMacs shipped with.
Where does it say "we stuffed up, and in response to your feedback we've gone back to basics"? Sometimes, people want to hear acknowledgement of error.
A good value trade in program would have been nice. I managed to sell my 2017 15” for a bit under $2000 CAD to upgrade to the current 16”. I would have rather dealt with Apple than deal with hagglers and low ballers.
Last time I remember that happening was Porsche's recent launch of the 992 generation 911, in which they poked fun at the fried-egg headlights on the 996. If they can do it, so can Apple. They are both Jedi-level marketing orgs.
They did basically say that in the live announcement of the 16” MBP, but remember they still sell some models with the old keyboard, plus millions of people still will be using that one for years to come, so there’s no way they will disparage it for the next few years at least.
They said that when they announced the extended warranty program on the old keyboard. People who want to hear an acknowledgement of error can go back and read that, if they missed it.
People want to hear wailing and gnashing of teeth, which is silly.
The previous sentence: "Now features the new Magic Keyboard."
"Refined" is also an adjective that has a definition close to "new and wonderful". It's not just a word to bring out an emotional response to make people feel like buying the thing.
"Refined" means made better. This is better than the previous keyboard, and also features 1mm of travel, making it better in that sense than any of their previous keyboards.
Imagining a word to mean what you want it to, and then reacting negatively to that, that doesn't say as much about Apple as it does the observer.
They refined the scissor mechanism. It's an improved scissor mechanism with better key stability than previous scissor keyboards on their laptops (so sort of the "best of both worlds" between the butterfly keyboard and their old scissor keyboard). The new mechanism is also used in the Magic Keyboard and 16" MacBook Pro.
It’s marketing man. Next you will be complaining that the burgers look a lot better on the billboards compared to when you unwrap them, or that the shirt looked a lot better on the mannequin than when you put it on, or that car ads always show their car speeding on an open road instead of stuck in a traffic jam during the morning commute.
Ignore the marketingese and don’t let it bother you so much. The important thing is that they listened to their customers and created a better product as a result.
We do not expect people to be honest in other aspects of their life. Just look at the cosmetics industry. Politicians with their campaign promises. Management with their corporate right-sizing and synergies. Kids and Santa Claus. (haha!)
Anyway, I consider fake reviews to be dishonest .. I consider this to be more like "putting a positive spin on it".
Most hated the keyboards but didn't switch to Windows so I'm guessing it became cheaper to go back to the old keys there would have to be some business reason to change.
Marketing aside, thank god we're back to normal. Some things are just better left alone and don't need innovation (vim comes to mind). Refinement sure. I love my 2014 MBP keyboard.
Well it isn't normal, and it isn't the old Keyboard either.
Despite having Double the Key Travel of Butterfly ( 0.5mm to 1mm ) It still felt the same as butterfly. The old Scissor had 1.3mm, while only 0.3mm difference, it felt night and day.
The new scissors also claims higher stability. Although I doubt this has anything to do with the design but rather of the "height" of the key be lower.
It is indeed new, but I know if it is wonderful yet. I haven't had a long period of time to try and use it.
To be honest, yes, I'd like them to say "we messed up, and we finally recognised that, so we're fixing it".
I think it would be amazing if the most valuable, most design-focused company in the world admitted to everyone that they made a mistake. It would do a lot towards allowing everyone else to make mistakes without beating themselves up over it. After all, if the thousands of specialist engineers, paid billions in salaries, given the best equipment in the world, in a company that really (and I mean really) values design, can make a mistake, then it's kinda OK that your home page looks a little crappy on mobile.
Wasn't that the dust problem, though? Admitting that there's a problem when people are taking out class-action lawsuits against you seems a little late to me. And again, rather than a "we're so sorry, we made a huge mistake" speech, it's more of a "we're such an amazing company, we're going to fix your faulty laptops for free!" speech.
>To be honest, yes, I'd like them to say "we messed up, and we finally recognised that, so we're fixing it".
Exactly. In Steve Jobs days he would have either jokingly admit there was a mistake or at least say something that people dont like it ( hence admitting there is a problem ).
The new Apple put up a big middle finger and didn't act until there are class action.
Even with the fix, I'm ddisappointed in their response. II had a 2013 MBP that worked great for years and years, and was excited to finally get a maxed out MBP about eiighteen months ago. The ffirst year was great and then this damn keyboard started doing its thing. I'm deliberately leaving the keyboard errors in place for this comment, they aren't typos. Yes, they havee the keeyboard replaceement program for the enext 3-4 years. But then you have to be wiithout your workhorse for a week while they replace it, and then what, you'll probably have the same problems a year later. (Incidentally, I have a job switch coming up wiith some tiime off - my plan was to use that time to send in the laptop for repairs theen when my clieint isn't relying on my availability, but now that plan is shot wiith the Apple Stores and malls being closed.) And yes, I can fix this by just buying the 16", but this computer was expensive and was supposed to last me at least 3-5 years. I'm supposed to iincrease my spending to Apple? A sane program would be to buy back this lemon at a heffty price so I can buy the new one and be made whole.
Marketing spin is not clear communication. It does not deserve praise. It's not mandatory, either.
None of:
> MacBook Air now features the new Magic Keyboard, first seen on the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience. The inverted-T arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments.
says anything about "fixing problems that people wanted fixed" or "doing what people asked for." That would read:
> We used a lower-travel keyboard with a butterfly mechanism and alternative arrow key layout on recent models, and you said you didn't like it. We listened. The MacBook Air now features a proven scissor mechanism with a return to 1mm travel and classic inverted-T arrow key layout.
They're implying that they've come up with something new, which is a lie. That's not perfect.
As far as I can tell, this is the first keyboard with 1mm of travel that Apple has made. Before the recent butterfly debacle, their keyboards had as low as 1.2mm travel (on the iMac keyboard) or more. The much-maligned butterfly design got down to 0.5mm travel.
So this scissor design with 1mm of travel seems to be something new. The inverted-T arrow keys are not new, but the scissor mechanism itself is, a refinement of previous designs.
To be completely honest, they should describe the keyboard as "a lot less bad than the previous keyboards, but not quite as good as the ones before them".
Imagine a country where a terrible leader comes to power, and the nation regresses for years. Then a new leader arises and reverses course. Does the country celebrate and boast?
Their (very) old keyboards are still amazing to type on. They went from high quality mechanical switches to bad rubber domes to okish rubber domes. The current magic keyboard is actually not bad, but I would still prefer the old alps switches.
I completely agree. My 2014 MacBook Pro purchased refurbished still has the best keyboard of all the devices I use. The Lenovo X1 I use for work is a close second.
What I noticed in the image that made me excited about this device is the function keys. If the 16in MBP had function keys, I probably would have purchased one already. I do wonder if the top spec of the new MBA is going to hold up to my usage though.
It is progress. Apple runs a monopoly, people seem to not be able to escape (I'm on Windows) and Apple has struggled to fix an utterly broken keyboard for 3 or more years. So, finally they did this on an entry model.
Even I who gave up on Apple thought, hey what a nice machine.
So is this a not-broken keyboard design? I have the (now) previous-generation Air, and need a keyboard repair.
Would be seriously tempted to just buy a new one if I was confident the keyboard wasn't absolute garbage. Typing on it was fine when it worked, but it double-spaces, and a couple of the other keys are now wonky.
Never had a keyboard die on me before this -- Mac or otherwise.
This is essentially the same type of keyboard from before the crappy design you ended up with. I've had a MBP 2014 since release with that keyboard and I love it. I can't express enough how good it feels to type on (although some personal preference).
I also tried out the new version of that keyboard on the recently-released MBP. It feels almost the exact same as the old one, just a slightly more shallow depth.
Conversely, I went from a MBP 2015 to the 16" model, and I think the "fixed" keyboard is still terrible. I've used all sorts of keyboard, and it's the first one where I regularly have doubled or missing letters when typing. Maybe I'm not hammering the keys hard enough?
I mean, this has a quad-core option, too. It's a no-brainer better machine.
I have the 16-inch that has the same keyboard mechanism as this. It's 100% an evolution on the previous design. While it is early, it's a proven design and there's no chance of it having any of the issues that the butterfly keyboard did.
I feel like my 16-inch is the computer I intended to buy in 2016.
If you can afford the upgrade cost after you sell your current one, you won't regret it.
I use my laptops for my business for 3 years under AppleCare and Joint Venture protection, buy the top of the line, and migrate the old one to the rest of the family. For children, the laptops are fine for another 5-7 years. The current laptop has the old scissor keyboard, and I'm waiting for Apple Stores to open again to pick it up from depot-sent-parts Genius-repair under an AppleCare that just ran out end of February.
Unfortunately, Apple will only replace the butterfly keyboard for 4 years after initial retail purchase of the laptop.
I dread the eventual breakdown of the new butterfly keyboard after the end of February next year, when I'm on my own. I hope iFixIt will start selling DIY repair kits, or the cost to repair at Apple makes such a frequent failure a non-starter (in which case I'll turn it into a fixed-place computer in the house, with an external keyboard).
Don't hold your breath on repair kits. It's a very difficult repair and you can't separate the butterfly keyboard from the top case. You have to replace the whole top case. The best you could maybe do is not replace the battery - but it's all glued. Good luck. I wouldn't attempt that sort of thing, and Apple doesn't.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple bended that 4 year rule, though. But also realize that Apple will eventually stop repairing all computers just due to time passage. And also, eventually, from a financial perspective it's more cost effective to find a working used computer (after heavy depreciation) than to actually do a repair even if that repair is doable.
I do think that their replacement keyboards have better reliability than the early models. I didn't have any problems after getting mine replaced - I believe I used the replacement keyboard for around two years. But I still wasn't willing to keep the computer longer. I went straight from the 2016 to the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro.
In any event, it was a nice opportunity for an upgrade. My 2016 was still worth $1000, and I ended up with 4 more cores, double the storage, and an absolutely massive increase in graphics performance. Using the education store and picking up in a state with no sales tax did a lot to make that price more palatable.
No, they're not saying it's innovative or amazing, they are simply calling it a "responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience", which I guess is true.
- Apple knows that at the very least, some set of vocal people don't like the previous keyboard. They also know that many of their customers had to get repairs, even if they liked the keyboard. Those customers might understand that "butterfly = bad"
- They need to tell people that they've fixed the problem but don't want to do so in a way that says "the last product was bad" (so they can't just say nothing about it)
I think we should also place some fault on other manufacturers for just blindly attempting to do what Apple does without thinking: check out the latest XPS 13. They've implemented the same arrow setup as Apple's butterfly keyboards. And yet, I haven't seen a single review online that criticizes the XPS for this choice.
"We've gone back to where we were three years ago after a mistake, sorry."
I don't understand what the issue is with Apple trying to sell their products. It sounds like people here are upset that marketing and sales exists, and that they use language to try to make their products seem impressive, and that consumers aren't rational when it comes to buying things.
"Half truths are lies". The pp is saying they're lying because they didn't admit fault. What's wrong with a company trying to sell a product by outright honestly saying "yeah, we tried to balance usability and thinness, and we went too far, we heard your complaints, and we've gone back and refined our old designs". I mean, they can tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth in an even more markety way if direct honesty is too much.
This seems like nonsense. Must they admit fault in every communication for the next three years? Must they use specific words while admitting fault?
There's nothing wrong with a company saying "we screwed up." Which Apple has done already. There'a also nothing wrong with a company saying, "This keyboard is great," if it is in fact great.
To be fair the butterfly keyboard was pretty nice after you got used to it but unnforrtunattelyyyyy itt enndddeed iin fffaiiilurree foorrr moosst off usss. I batted mine back to the apple store after 3 weeks. Thank goodness it was the Christmas no questions asked period.
> "We've gone back to where we were three years ago after a mistake, sorry."
Yep this is the right move, and as someone else says, this would be worthy of respect.
I think we've all just about had it with corporate bullshit -- and to be sure that says more about this moment in time than anything else.
Apple is consistently guilty of blowing smoke up our collective asses. It would be nice if they could give it a rest and simply be honest. But here we are.
> Ok. How should they communicate this? "We've gone back to where we were three years ago after a mistake, sorry."
Yes. We expect adults to own up to their mistakes, so why don't we hold corporations to the same standard and instead just accept corporate bullshit from them?
I think you're underselling how truly revolutionary the inverted-T arrow keys are. I hear they help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments.
Whole world seems to be celebrating that Javascript desktop turds runs 10 times slower and consumes 10 times more resources than 20 year old native applications. So I guess everything is worth celebrating.
In the olden days, we complained about apps that used all our ram. Nowadays, we complain about Firefox or proprietary web browsers using all our ram, when in reality they're doing the best they can. The task manager can't show users who's actually to blame, so lazy devs get the glory while hardworking browser developers cop the flack.
Except that when I use the old apps that used to use all my RAM, now they don't because I have more RAM.
I don't blame the browser vendors (except maybe that V8 made JS juuuuuust good enough to make something like Node viable). They took a thing that run slow for everyone, and they made it faster.
I do blame application developers for writing everything to the web because it's there. There's instances of folks doing better than most in Electron/JS land, but it's still nothing close to the native or even managed Java/C# apps of yesteryear.
So much this- I struggled with my butterfly mbp for about 18 months all under the guise of "its a stout machine, the keyboard isnt that bad" or "I can use an external keyboard".
Then I grew tired of the macbook fan noise when running windows 10 and debugging with the touch bar. I ordered a surface 3 laptop and immediately realized how important a nice keyboard is to me. Its tactile, its got enough travel, the keys feel nice. I type with fewer errors and I work faster. Anyone want to buy a 2018 macbook pro with 6 core and 32gb ram?
If you liked the stability of the butterfly switches, but the travel and reliability of the scissor switches, the new thing is really pretty nice, and is arguably an advance over both.
This is below baseline. I still don't understand why it's important for them to make compromises at the keyboard, which is an essential part of the notebook experience. A keyboard has keys, keys have a certain height. Get over it Apple. I've tried the latest 3 generations of keyboards and the 2015 still comes out on top. It looks as if Apple's engineers are trying to fight the keyboard. Macbook's keyboard were almost unquestionably the best among notebooks. Now we're happy if they're not crap. Of course this is all personal opinion and I'm sure Apple tests these things extensively and only release them if they make for a significant improvement. They wouldn't release a broken keyboard and deny they're at fault for years, right?
It's amazing how well received the "I'm cynical and world-weary" angle plays on Hacker News.
"This is the baseline. Apple have gone from bad to OK"
Apple's scissor keyboard is pretty broadly considered the best in the industry by a country mile. Their butterfly mechanism was a bad misstep (I mean...almost indistinguishable from my Yoga 720, but compared to prior Apple keyboards), but saying that they went from "bad" to "OK" is just nonsense.
"and they're celebrating"
Advertising doing what advertising does. So brave on HN to point out that marketing is marketing-ee. Are you also telling me that the new car isn't going to make me an adventure seeking extrovert?
> Advertising doing what advertising does. So brave on HN to point out that marketing is marketing-ee. Are you also telling me that the new car isn't going to make me an adventure seeking extrovert?
Why is that acceptable? If you lie or misrepresent the truth in almost any other field, you get criticised. But when marketers do it, they're immune. That's just weird.
False advertising is, in fact, illegal. If in your opinion they've crossed the line into actual factual inaccuracy, it's your right to take legal action against them, or request that your state's attorney general do so on your behalf.
Some people just seem to choose a target for life (like the Favored Enemy of a Ranger from Dungeons & Dragons) and never give it a break, no matter what.
I suspect that even if Apple comes out with the best keyboard that mankind is ever going to make, some of you are still going to be angry about how they removed optical drives 4000 years ago.
Nope, that's exactly what I wanted to hear before buying. Rather than just saying they improved it, they explicitly pointed out it has the keyboard you want from the 16" MBP.
>MacBook Air now features the new Magic Keyboard, first seen on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
That saved me from having to google "hey, is the 'new magic keyboard' the thing in the 16" MBP that I've been waiting for in the Air and 13" MBP, or is it something else entirely".
Still puttering along with my 2012 Air, only replaced the battery once. I've definitely been waiting to upgrade and this looks promising, but I also have a company laptop again, so the pressure is lower to get my old Air replaced.
I have a 2012 air as well (i7, 8gb) that still runs quite well. I dont do much development on it anymore but I'm still impressed with how well it has held up.
It was one of the first stocks I attempted to buy puts for. It seems to be a high end luxury good, even for many professionals. Of course I'm not just talking about MacBooks, it's the whole (imo overpriced) product line, phone to earbuds.
1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i3, Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz, with 4MB L3 cache
Configurable to 1.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz, with 6MB L3 cache; or 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz, with 8MB L3 cache
The previous one ran an i5-8210Y which was also Apple specific 23% higher clocked version vs the more common i5-8200Y but that was only one, this time it would need two, both the i5 and i7 CPUs are special but the i3 seems to be the run-of-the-mill version. Note how weird the cadence is because usually the frequency drops with the number of cores. However, the Turbo Boost is the same 3.8 GHz which is way too low for the 10th gen Amber Lake Y CPUs.
Also, at first I thought the video resolutions weird but what's going on here is that there is a single USB C output and even with Thunderbolt, that's only a 40Gbps bus. So the ICL-Y DP 1.4 support is somewhat less useful here. If there would be two USB C outputs, two 5K monitors could be driven easily, for example. Which the previous generation Intel CPUs couldn't because to drive an 5K from DP 1.2 the monitor eats up two display outputs even if physically that's delivered on a single Thunderbolt cable.
If anyone can solve this mystery, it would be great to compare to other laptops like the Surface Pro, whose i7 is "Quad-core 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1065G7 Processor"(1.3 / 3.9)
What's it like to develop on a MacBook Air these days? I have a 2016 13" MacBook Pro and am thinking of upgrading, but I don't know how it'll handle JS/Docker/Rails.
How long would it realistically take for Apple to pivot to AMD? If things continue as they have been, it's hard to imagine the "premium brand" sticking with Intel.
Of course they might just shift everything to A series chips instead.
This announcement should mean that the current 13" Pro will soon be replaced by a 14" Pro with magic keyboard and higher power processor options, otherwise there will be too much overlap between product lines. But Apple has been content in the past to have overlapping product lines, so they might not.
True -- the next few months should be really interesting in this space. I was thinking of ditching OS X entirely for a linux box but I can't get over how great the Mac hardware is -- it just doesn't run Linux all that well and costs an arm-and-a-leg such that buying one to nuke OS X just seems like a waste
Speaking of which -- how does one go about buying an QWERTY layout XPS 13 dev edition with ubuntu in Germany? Navigating teh dell website is impossible to find it -- I just find the windows based units.
Apple makes nice laptops, but I am not interested until the come out with a convertible option. I bought a HP Spectre a couple of years ago and I am very happy with it. The convertible option is very nice for traveling in coach.
What I dislike about my convertible is that you can never use it as both a tablet and a laptop at the same time.
I know it’s obvious but I didn’t realize it when I switched from a laptop + tablet to a convertible in the hopes of simplifying my setup.
For example, it’s annoying when you’re taking notes and need to look something up on the web: either put up with poorly optimized interfaces or convert the device to a laptop.
So I’d much prefer a tablet plus laptop for my particular usage as a student but am too broke to buy another new setup. What makes convertibles so desirable to you?
I wish they provided an easy way to compare it to older MacBook Air models. I have a 2018 model - I’d like to be able to easily compare them and see the exact differences and where they’re the same.
My personal laptop is an 11" Air mid-2013 and I still use and love it. I especially love the keyboard on it because the keys have height, feel closer to a mechanical keyboard, and don't capture as much dust and dirt as the flat keys on my newer touchbar 2016 pro work laptop
This is good news from Apple as I was not into any of their more recent laptops but I'll probably upgrade to this one
I only wish they had a 11" version but not a deal breaker
you actually make use of 4 usbc connections? I'm genuinely curious on the use case. These days you can get 12 in 1 dongles from china that cover the last 25 years of input device standards into one usbc connection, and it will charge the thing.
Why though? I find buying one $30 dongle that has 10 inputs for cables I already own is a better deal than buying 10 $20 usbc cables. As a mac user I've been used to dongles for a while, mac laptops never seemed to have the standard AV out aside from that fluke generation with HDMI. Always some weird connector for the sake of being weird, it seemed.
Definitely going from 2015 MacBook Air to this new one for my personal at-home coding laptop, as long as I like the keyboard when trying it out.
I had really been wanting to upgrade for Retina & better processor but I knew they would upgrade the processor and fix the keyboard if I waited for 2020... no reason to wait now.
I don't run any crazy fat Docker stacks for my own stuff at home, so this is perfect.
why not the pro for a few more hundred dollars? or wait for the upgraded version in the summer? you get a noticeable performance boost, dedicated graphics card, touch bar, and so on?
Because wasting energy on a 4 GHz base clock is completely pointless (and so is your criticism) if you can adjust frequency as needed. 99% of the time 1GHz is sufficient. It’s only when you launch the browser that a faster CPU is useful, not when you’re reading through a website
The problem is that it ramps up by 250 Mhz increments, over a period of several seconds, and that can be extremely noticeable in some workflows.
I went from an 6700HQ (2.6 Ghz base) to a 10710U (1.1 Ghz base) and the difference is definitely there, and it's jarring enough to the point where I kind of regret it. It feels like a huge step backwards, despite the latter CPU being four generations ahead.
The first thing I notice in that comparison is that one chip is rated for a 45W TDP and other is 15-25W. While I think these cross-segment comparisons are exciting and show great progress, it's just not fair to the electrons.
This does not seem to be the case for my i7-8565U nor my older m3-something. The 8565U for example feels just as snappy as my desktop i7-6700, except it’ll throttle after about 30s.
With modern noteboock CPUs the base clock is only a loose indicator for how a CPU will perform. The CPU will still be downclocked and undervolted depending on the load.
> Because wasting energy on a 4 GHz base clock is completely pointless
That's not how base clock works. Base clock is not min clock. Base clock is what it's "guaranteed" to hit under sustained load if TDP is respected. It's the TDP clock. A 4ghz base clock CPU will still be far, far below that when idle.
Exactly. I'm deciding between 32GB or even 64Gb, just to be on the safe side. Because nowadays you're running Slack, Spotify, several messengers, Firefox, Chrome, IntelliJ, Docker and Kubernetes on your local machine.
Which is kind of horrifying, if you stop and think about it. You're wondering whether you need another 32G of RAM to run a basic working environment, a glorified text editor, and some communications software. I used a BBC that could do that in 32K of RAM in the 1980s! Obviously I'm not really suggesting the functionality today is equivalent, but the idea that ultimately you're meeting the same basic needs yet it now takes a million times as much space is... unsettling.
Its certainly amazing how much memory consumption has grown. I like to think of it in terms of economics, we could never write today's software using 80s methods. Slack in assembler? Impossible. Kubernetes in C++? Maybe, but there will be security holes, and Go is just more productive. Developers are expensive, very expensive.
Such is the accepted wisdom in much of the industry, but I'm a bit of a sceptic on this score. Of course developer time is expensive, particularly if you're in somewhere like the Bay Area where salaries are an extra 0 compared to most of the world. But we live in an era of virtualisation and outsourcing (sorry, "cloud computing") when businesses will knowingly pay many times the cost of just buying a set of servers and sticking them in a rack in order to have someone else buy a much bigger server, subdivide it into virtual servers, and lease them at a huge mark-up. All kinds of justifications have been given for this, many of which I suspect don't stand up to scrutiny anywhere other than boardrooms and maybe golf courses.
There's a nice write-up somewhere, though regrettably I can't immediately find it, of the economics of cloud-hosting an application built using modern trends. IIRC, it pitched typical auto-scaling architectures consisting of many ephemeral VMs running microservices and some sort of orchestration to manage everything against just buying a small number of highly specified machines and getting on with the job using a more traditional set of skills and tools. Put another way, it was the modern trend for making everything extremely horizontally scalable using more hardware and virtualisation against a more traditional vertical scaling approach using more efficient software to keep within the capacity of a small number of big machines. The conclusion was astonishingly bad for the modern/trendy case, to the point where doing it was looking borderline insane unless your application drops into a goldilocks zone in terms of capacity and resources required that relatively few applications will ever get near, and those that do may then move beyond it on the other side. And yet that horizontal scaling strategy is viewed almost as the default today for many new software businesses, because hiring people who are good enough to write the more efficient software is assumed to be too expensive.
We live in a world where any 1 man startup thinks and their investors hope they will have 10k employees by year end. Therefore, if you are going to be burning money anyway, what's another line item on the monthly outflow if it means you don't have to spend 3 months hiring someone to toil in the server room and a couple months ordering and assembling your farm that might crash the day your startup gets linked on hacker news.
There are technical reasons for this, being able to handle sudden load, but mostly it's for ideological reasons. We aren't building companies, we are building stock pumps guised as the utopian future. If you are wondering what a blue chip company looks like in tech, they are the ones that own their own infrastructure.
Maybe there is a middle road for cash poor companies, where you keep latent demand in house for the sake of cost and sense, but have some sort of insurance policy with a cloud service to step in if demand surges.
We don't have the same basic needs. People are running VMs on their laptops so they can test things in an environment similar to production without having to run extra servers for every developer/sysadmin to test with. Back in the 80s you're QA and Production environment were very likely the same!
I'll admit that modern text editors and communication software have grown resource hungry, but a lot of that comes from being able to deliver a strong, cross platform experience. I remember desktop Java doing much of the same with just as bad resource usage. Same with applets.
People are running VMs on their laptops so they can test things in an environment similar to production without having to run extra servers for every developer/sysadmin to test with.
Sure, but that immediately raises the next question of why those VMs are so big...
Yeah, the fixed cost of a VM context is on the order of kilobytes in the host kernel, megabytes in the guest kernel. And with VM balloon paging a guest VM acts much like a regular process in terms of memory usage. It's not VM usage that hogs memory, it's the applications, regardless of VMs.
Why does it matter when you can afford that RAM? Just buy and forget about it, it's cheap enough. We used to land to the moon with CPU less performant than Apple's HDMI adapter cable, it's fun comparison but not very useful, that's just the way things are and it's not going to change anytime soon.
I realise it's how things are today and not going to change any time soon, but it still feels like we as an industry have moved all too easily in a very wasteful direction. Sure, with RAM you can just buy more, but it's symptomatic of a wider malaise. Other capacities, particularly CPU core speeds, have long since stopped increasing on a nice exponential-looking curve to compensate for writing ever more layers of ever more bloated software in the name of (presumed) greater programmer efficiency. It just feels like we've lost the kind of clever, efficient culture that we used to have, and I'm not sure we weren't sold a bill of goods in return.
I'm not sure whether curve is still exponential or not, but it's there. Single-thread performance is increasing every year a little bit and core count is increasing like never before. 16 cores consumer CPU is not a dream anymore.
RAM size slowly increases as well. 4 GB was enough 10 years ago. 8 GB was enough few years ago. Today I would suggest 16 GB as a bare future-proof minimum and one can buy 64 GB for a reasonable price.
We still have room for more layers. And it's not only about efficiency, it's also about security. Desktops are still not properly sandboxed, my calc.exe still can access my private ssh key.
Once performance growth will really stop, we will start to optimize. Transistor density will double every few years until at least 2030 and AFAIK there are plans beyond that, so probably not soon.
I have 8GB on my work laptop with almost all of this (except Kubernetes, but I fail to understand why you would need a local Kubernetes) and it's fine, I usually have 2GB free memory.
Don't exagerate your memory requirements, you would be more than fine with 16GB.
That's not even close to an exaggeration. I'm running only half those things (or their competitive equivalents) right now on a Windows box. I just checked and I've got 14.8 GBs in use.
Fortunately, I have a Dell XPS 15 with 32 GBs of RAM, but the second I start up a single VM, one more messaging app, a small handful of Docker containers, or any IDE (of which I'm running none right now), I'm going over 16 GBs.
Realistically, most of us on HN probably need around 20-24 GBs, but laptops don't come in those increments.
Right now on macOS I'm running Firefox, Outlook, 2 VSCode instances, Postman, 1 Electron chat app and another chat app and I'm under 5GB. Uptime 4 days.
I develop for a living. I use 6 GB including a browser, a VM and an IDE.
Some of you greatly exaggerate the needs. Some workflows require 16+ GB of RAM, but most people complaining about RAM mismanage it or do not understand that caches are not mandatory.
I can't tell if you're joking, but I have a 2018 Mac Mini with just 8GB of RAM, and I often run Eclipse, IntelliJ, and PyCharm at the same time (along with multiple browsers and other stuff), and performance is fine.
I was actually surprised by this--when I first started using this computer, I thought for sure I would need to add more RAM, which for the 2018 model is too complicated to do yourself (at least to me it seemed too risky).
Same. I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) with 8GB of RAM and I've been doing fine. Sure, there are some hiccups every now and then but it works. I have Spotify, VS Code, Slack, Kitty tmux sessions and more open 24/7.
What? It's probably swapping like a bastard, which with SSDs is probably not that horrible. Even 16GB for me is low (I do run in a Linux VM guest). I got myself a Mac Mini with 64 gigs, for great justice.
If I open up PyCharm and IntelliJ and Spotify and SourceTree and Docker and three different browsers and iTerm and Remote Desktop and a few other apps all at once, I will get an occasional hiccup, but it's really not as bad as I would have expected. I think 16GB would be nice though.
For comparison, I also have a 2012 Mac Mini at home with an SSD and 16GB RAM, and it's still chugging along pretty well too, although it's noticeably slower than the 2018 model with 8GB RAM.
I'm curious with regard to swapping if that might mean my SSD is going to wear out sooner. Maybe investing in more RAM would be worth it even if I don't feel like I need it.
Semi-joking, but the problem is real for me. I've a 2013 13' MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM, and my system can't cope with my workflow ... tens of tabs in Safari, webapps in Chrome (YouTube, Google Docs, ...), Eclipse with Scala / Java, ... it's a huge struggle.
I was handed a 2017 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM at my current job while waiting for my actual laptop to be delivered, and it was a nightmare.
I keep a lot of tabs open to look things up, but nothing excessive on that machine. I also run VSCode or Pycharm and would also bring up 5-10 containers at times.
It seriously hurt not only my productivity but also my mood afterwards just by having to put up with it for weeks.
Unless you're a very basic user I don't get why you would settle for 8GB in 2020. 8 gigs of RAM cost basically nothing, it's not worth changing your workflow in the slightest to work around that artificial limitation.
It is odd because these memory issues are very real, but if you ever say "wow, devs are getting lazy and these 'desktop' apps that rebundle Chrome are really killing my machine (eg. Slack, Skype) with inordinate quantities of logic in javascript" you get shouted down.
It's bizarre. If everyone used the native toolkits we'd have far less memory usage and everyone (even the memory-constrained) would have a good experience.
Also, with these memory hogs they will do a lot of allocation and deallocation. This is also a problem with interpreted languages. And allocation is the enemy of speed, and energy usage. It'll destroy your daily battery expectancy as everything gets interpreted.
I remember feeling the same when I was forced to upgrade from 32 mb of ram to 128 mb of ram to run the combination of browser, chat and IDE on windows NT4, back when they moved from hand-optimized assembly to mass-produced C++ for most software.
With every layer of abstraction added to ease development the hardware requirements go up. You can build things fast, or you can build fast things, doing both is tricky.
I think OSs in general just eat a portion of whatever memory you give them. Right now I'm puttering around with a dozen tabs in firefox, in fact my biggest memory hogs right now are firefox with 3.5gb and apple mail with ~500mb, not really doing anything else, and somehow 12GB/16GB are in use. Better for the ux to keep things open in memory if you have it to spare, I suppose.
When you are memory constrained, you can definitely tell. Everything comes to a halt and you just twiddle your thumbs between commands. This 16GB machine I have shipped with 4GB which was painful even 8 years ago when it was released, and I upgraded myself to 8GB 6 months into ownership. A few years later when javascript became more pervasive on the web, I hit memory constraint on 8GB a lot just from having tabs open in chrome, back when it was perhaps more of a memory hog, so I opted for 16gb and haven't had issues since.
I think at 16gb you should be set for at least 5 years. Most people, even a lot of devs on company issued equipment, are working with 8gb complaining about it right here in this very thread.
If you have larger requirements, a lightweight, thin laptop with a teensy fan isn't for you. Even if it had the hardware specs, the physics of heat dissipation don't work for you and you are better off spending the same money for more hardware sitting in a box under your desk. Me and my sore back are eyeing this up, all my computing is done on a cluster anyway.
I honestly never understood the hate for the touchbar. It allows me to be much more granular with volume and brightness, and I never really used F-keys anyway.
Much of the hate is that the touchbar wasn't optional, at least not unless you wanted to opt out of an Apple laptop. If the touchbar had been something users could choose, Apple users wouldn't have minded so much.
Supporting more options is expensive, so it's understandable that Apple didn't want to give their customers a choice. Still, it seems like a gimick. And it appeared at the same time as the butterfly keyboard, cementing the notion that Apple had lost its way.
I appreciate the touchbar every day (esp. with bettertouchtool) but the soft escape is horrendous as it's used in so many of my workflows and isn't 100% responsive and doesn't give any tactile feedback.
Volume adjustment is actually a great example of why I hate the touchbar.
- I can't adjust the volume without looking at it. Because the touchbar is flat with no haptic feedback when I land on a button, it's hard to remember the exact position of the volume 'button' without looking. Sounds trivial - but combined with point 2....
- The way the volume control expands - it actually moves the 'volume down' button AWAY from your finger, which again requires me to keep looking at the control.
This means that when a loud song comes on, it can take 2-3 seconds to quickly turn the volume down in total. I could do that with one single keypress in half a second or less on a keyboard, without needing to look at the keyboard.
That can also be the difference between missing a key detail from a quiet speaker on a Hangout.
Flashy, but it's a terrible user experience by every metric other than looks, I guess.
You can actually just tap the volume icon on the Touch Bar and slide your finger back and forth immediately and it works; you don't have to tap, then move your finger to the volume slider and move back and forth.
(This is clever, but basically undiscoverable unless someone tells you in, for example, a comment on Hacker News, which is how I found out.)
> You can actually just tap the volume icon on the Touch Bar and slide your finger back and forth immediately
No you can't! There is a pretty long delay. If you move your finger during the delay, nothing happens. Then when it finally decides to switch modes, you have to move your finger again for it to change the volume. Hope you didn't hit the edge of the touchbar yet. Combined with the phantom button presses when using the top row of the keyboard, especially the Siri button, plus other small issues, the whole thing is bafflingly terrible.
It's potentially that I'm using a 2019 MPB, but I can absolutely touch and slide to change volume immediately. Just press and slide on the icon for volume or brightness.
Also pro-tip: you can change the buttons that show up in the touch bar. Settings > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip. I swapped out Siri for a "Sleep" button, which is super convenient when I walk away from my desk.
On my 2017 with Catalina there is an animation that occurs to show the volume slider. Any sliding of your finger that occurs before the animation completes is definitively ignored. Additionally, there is a significant delay before the animation even starts.
I just timed it at ~580 milliseconds, more than half a second from finger hitting the bar to the time when it stops ignoring touch input. It's easy to slide your finger more than the entire length of the volume bar in that time. It's absurdly bad. It would be weird and pretty lame if they fixed this only on newer models.
This is assuming the touch bar isn't asleep and you can even see where the volume button is in the first place. Often I have to touch the bar once just to wake it up, then find the button and touch and hold and slide.... ech I hate it personally.
Just go all in with BetterTouchTool + GoldenChaos-BTT (https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...) -- I don't know why Apple hasn't bought BTT and made this the default, it's truly the best way to use the Touch Bar and the reason why I miss it when I'm using any other keyboard.
I only hate that it replaced the top row of keys. If it were an addition instead of a replacement, I'd be okay with it. It has it's moments, but so do the keys it replaced.
I fully agree with ESC, as that's a universal key and used very often, but the other ones are more specific and having them be adaptable always made sense. Now that they returned the ESC key, that part is solved.
As a developer, how would I step into, step over, step out in Xcode without function keys?? (Continue being ctrl-cmd-Y is the worst shortcut ever). It truly hampers my development because I have to look at the touchbar to see where on earth those keys are (F6, F7) or step in/continue in Chrome (F10, F11).
In Intellij IDEA when debugging the touchbar has a debugging-specific menu with all those controls. I don't find myself needing to look at the touchbar all that often. My muscle memory has adjusted over the past couple years I guess.
The escape key is back on the new 16 inch, but even on older Touch Bar Macs you can tap anywhere on the left side of the Touch Bar (doesn't have to just be the escape button area) and it will still work.
Different strokes for different folks, but I've never liked using the function keys for debugging. I just click the buttons on the screen. I'm a little surprised they don't have a way to set the Touch Bar buttons up to do that in Xcode though.
I will try the "left of the escape key" trick - thanks!
Moving the mouse cursor up to the toolbar always seems a lot of travel and swishing around if you're hovering over variables to see their contents in the source code.
I have found the auto/local/all view in Xcode to be a bit dumb and unable to properly expand some template objects in C++ so it's all just an exercise in frustration anyway!
I hope I didn't get permanent damage but I hurt myself badly with it. I was trying to put the volume up a bit while wearing earplugs (it was very low) so I pressed the "up" volume key. I accidentally pressed few pixels to the left from where I should have pressed and it went to FULL VOLUME without a warning, blasting audio and hurting myself badly.
This could not have happened without the touchbar. This is horrible UX and I will never trust that (work) computer again.
It doesn't add any benefit to my experience. I'd prefer real keys that I don't need to look at. I could hit volume up/down easily on the previous models.
Using Terminal, I use the Esc key a lot for navigating and having a touch bar Esc key is not a great experience since you also don't feel feedback that you're touching the right key.
I've also accidentally hit the touch bar a few times while hovering one of my fingers above it as I press down on one of the number keys.
Want granularity? Just hold alt+shift while pressing the volume buttons to adjust the volume in quarter-box increments. You can do it without looking and it’s way easier than moving that slide on that gimmick touch bar. Works for brightness, too.
keyboards are meant to be used without looking at them. with the introduction of the touchbar, you have to look at what you're pressing. it's like a giant touch screen in a car, it works, but you have to look at it, where as if you have buttons, you can find what you want to do by feel/memory.
on a personal note, i've randomly refreshed webpages because i've overreached on the number row with the touch bar.
You can be just as granular by using shift + alt + volume/brightness. That way your changes will be in 0.25 step increments rather than the default full steps.
580 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadI think the attempts to make local workflows mirror production 1:1 (local k8s, for example) are misguided. They miss too hard on the productivity story. Especially once you start having to swap out local debugging for remote debugging (which only a handful of languages support effectively).
This is the biggest miss for many companies striving for microservice architecture. The local development story is terrible, and it stays terrible, without a lot of opinionated decisions around what your dev workflow needs to look like past the ~3-5 services mark. At a past gig I had to change 5 different repositories (5 separate PRs, all needing approval) to send an email. In a rails app that would have been a trivial task.
If you change a small bit of css, the whole container is rebuilt? That seems super inefficient to me?
My backends arn't JS, but I still couldn't imagine rebuilding a container everytime I changed a piece of code. Right now I change a file, django picks up the change and reloads. No noticeable delay.
As an aside, I haven't taken the time to pin point the exact problem, but as much I prefer to use Firefox, it doesn't seem to do a great job of managing resources for the SPAs we're building.
(It generally does not. Instead it uses more lightweight isolation primtives. That has always been one of its main selling points.)
EDIT: see reply
> That does seem pretty heavy for a MBA of any generation?
It very much depends on what you are running inside the containers. I regularly have a dev environment with ~8 relatively lightweight containers running on my Early 2014 MBA without any problems.
I agree, though, that it's next to unusable on a low-power dual-core system like the MBA if only for limited RAM.
Rust compilation takes like 15 seconds for small changes in actix project. For amethyst game library i wouldn't even try.
A new Windows install requires at least an hour of de-cluttering and shit removal, while for a new Mac full setup to my liking takes about 5-10 minutes and I generally don't have to uninstall much of anything. The only thing I sometimes remove are apps I never personally use like Garage Band to save a bit of disk space, and that takes like ten seconds.
Then there's the almost Android level of obviously spyware telemetry going on. Yes I know Apple has telemetry but I trust them quite a bit more than Microsoft both not to do anything deliberately sketchy with my data and to be competent with their security. They also do a lot less and a lot less invasive telemetry. Redirecting local search, sending file list dumps, etc. to the mothership is unforgivable unless I have explicitly opted into that kind of behavior e.g. for tech support or debugging. That's the kind of stuff I associate with borderline malware, not an OS by a supposedly reputable company that I paid for.
Microsoft's recent behavior is pegging them in the low end of the market and ceding the high end of the market to Apple. Then of course there's Linux. If Apple did something barking stupid that forced me to ditch the platform that's where I'd go. I'd miss the Apple degree of trouble-free operation but at least I'd keep my privacy and security and lack of foistware.
"Ceding high end of the market to Apple". I would not go into much details but for example my gaming grade laptop runs circles around Mac that costs twice as much. So sure I'd rather be a "low end" peon with the decent hardware.
Windows is not perfect but it excels in many regards nowadays and the last years, Macs were really expensive and risky. They were too expensive to just have a fall-back machine lying around (if you make serious money with you gear, every hour counts). I have 3x 2.5lb notebooks here, if one needs to be sent in, so what.
Edit: just opened it but there are no ads... what do you mean?
What I don't understand about this, however, are people being paranoid about W10 while they're happily accepting Google and friends to infiltrate their lives ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You are of course exempt if you don't use any cloud-based services that you don't host yourself :D
That stuff also has a nasty tendency to ""accidentally"" get re-enabled after updates from many reports I've heard.
This is the point at which the MBA stops being a productive environment. I'm not saying this has to be the case for every project, but if your team uses local dev environments, it's quasi standard procedure at this point.
If you are using make to call Babel or other JS build tools you can use the jobs flag to parallelize it and again the cores will help.
Kind of annoying. Working with a simple create-react-app project with TypeScript is fine though.
I'm betting your if you cpu is hot constantly while developing, it's file watching that's the issue. I had to do some work to get things to use proper file system events in macos and not just polling with my legacy gulp project. try installing fsevents if it's not already?
Node performance has gotten a lot better since some updates, there was a period where CPU use and performance was just bad. I think it was a webpack bug. But now things are pretty good! Runs Sketch and other graphics apps not too bad. As a comparison, It seems to be much faster at compile and test running than running the project on Chrome OS Crostini on my ChromeBook Pixel LS (higher wattage, older, i7 + 16GB ram) I imagine the Quad core in this would smoke the LS.
It will only be $800.
Although it would have been better for them to be more solid in the first place for you.
No chance I’m buying another one any time soon.
Shame.
Or do you mean partial refund when you say coupon?
I do not mean partial refund I mean a coupon for a significant discount so I can try to sell this one on eBay or similar.
If you used it for a year would you say you got $959 of value out of it in that time?
If I purchase a new car, I can either trade it in for lower Kelly Blue Book value to dealership and avoid having to interact with eBay or Craigslist lurkers, or put up with strangers haggling and try to get more from selling it to private strangers.
Same applies to a laptop.
I bought the mac because it was an investment when I got made redundant and to hopefully shift careers.
Sold it for £800 privately (worst loss I've taken on any item), and now think I'd be lucky to get £700 for it as the price plummeted further once the 16" came out as people expect a 14" with a fixed keyboard.
Currently using a mid 2015 15". Better than the 2047 in every way, other than appearance.
They should have offered a lot more than price gouging resale value for it, imo.
There are tons of people like me who will be flooding the used market and driving down the price.
Thank you Louis Rossmann!
I think this video speaks for itself.
It’s not like his regular allegations of planned obsolescence tend to be much better, https://youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU
We do not have any emails or other internal Apple materials to know for sure why Apple kept hidden the fact they crippled your iPhone CPU (again for the fanboys the issue was the HIDDEN part) but for now presuming Apple is hidden things for your own good is let's say naive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22615803
That sentence made me check again...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macbook_white_redjar_2006...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBook_Air_1b.jpg
...and yes, it's the same layout of the arrow keys that was there 14 years ago. If they were advertising new full size arrow keys that would definitely be worth mentioning, but I'm not sure why they had to draw attention to that particular aspect... especially given that half-height arrow keys are one of the more annoying things about laptop keyboards in general.
They are advertising the switch back to the old style that people actually liked.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wpje8JydZq3y_R5C-LMe3N-fiMk=...
This is a close Apple gets to saying "we fucked up".
However I've been using since then with no need for servicing and the keys are at this moment perfect. Various keys have become intermittent since then but I found a trick that so far has fixed it every time.
The key mechanism seems to be VERY robust and can take a lot of pounding. Usually the particles jamming the mechanism (e.g. food crumbs) can be broken up by repeatedly banging hard on the offending key.
I've had keys that were intermittent or even not come all the way up and this has always fixed them to be literally as good as new. It seems that once the particles are broken small enough they either remain in place but are harmless or maybe they are small enough to fall out by themselves.
I've done something similar by holding the base of an electric toothbrush against a misbehaving key that couldn't be cleared by some other technique. The high-frequency vibrations seem to do a decent job of breaking up or dislodging whatever's stuck.
This is definitely lower than the real number. Is there any more info on how this carbon accounting is done?
That's why I was hoping for more details. But obviously this is not something we like to talk about, and it's so easy to sweep it under the carpet, so why bother?
This isn't progress. This is the baseline. Apple have gone from bad to OK, and they're celebrating as though they've achieved something amazing.
As far as talking about it being amazing, its called marketing spin. This is how it works. However, those two sentences do not say anything about it being amazing. It simply focuses on the positive features of the keyboard. The two sentences above clearly communicate to mac users that the company has fixed the problems that people wanted fixed. Did you really expect a bunch of public self-flaggelation? They are telling us clearly that they did what we asked for. Perfect.
Somehow I think Apple can handle it. Anyone wasting energy complaining is only doing so because they are waiting to buy again.
It makes as much sense defending them as it does yelling at them about a keyboard.
No, we moved on and do not care. There are many companies that make laptops and keyboards. 5 years too late.
Further, it can take revolutionary change to maintain incremental improvements. Filling HDD with say Helium has a lot of knock on effects hidden by the spec sheet.
They tried a new design, which was horrible to use and had a high failure rate. They continued to claim the new keyboard was amazing, and stubbornly continued to use this crappy keyboard long after the problems were apparent.
And now they are touting a "normal" keyboard mechanism as if they've invented something new and wonderful... only Apple could get away with such transparent BS.
What in that says "invented" "new" or even "wonderful?" It seems like you're reading into the text what isn't even there.
Uh... "refined"?
> with impurities or unwanted elements having been removed by processing.
> developed or improved so as to be precise or subtle.
It basically just mean improved, which most people would agree.
IIRC, the peripheral line itself was started with the original Magic Mouse, which was branded as such because it didn’t have separate external actuatable buttons, but rather was just a smooth surface with a multitouch digitizer on the top half + a single actuatable microswitch underneath the shell†. Apple wanted the image of it “magically” figuring out when you left/right/middle-clicked (despite no L/M/R buttons) or scrolled (despite no scroll-wheel.) Also, the “plug in to pair” experience might have contributed to the claimed “magic”—it was a fairly unique approach to pairing at the time.
† Which is a design with some real benefits, like being easily disinfectable, with no crevasses close to the hand for filth and germs to accumulate in. (There is a crevice on the Magic Mouse, but it’s on the bottom, where your hands will never touch it.)
There is also a bit of “magic” in the Magic line of peripherals that’s not in the hardware itself, but rather in the OS: when the Magic line of peripherals—Apple’s first Bluetooth line of peripherals—was introduced, Apple added a feature to macOS where macOS will “train” the Apple EFI firmware to recognize devices paired in macOS itself, such that the firmware will later attempt to connect to such paired devices on boot. This means that e.g. holding Option on your Bluetooth keyboard to select an alternate boot device on an iMac would actually work. Which was kind of necessary, as those are the peripherals iMacs shipped with.
- Magic Mouse
- Magic Mouse 2
- Magic Trackpad
- Magic Trackpad 2
- Magic Keyboard
- Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad
When has any tech company ever done that?
People want to hear wailing and gnashing of teeth, which is silly.
"Refined" is also an adjective that has a definition close to "new and wonderful". It's not just a word to bring out an emotional response to make people feel like buying the thing.
Imagining a word to mean what you want it to, and then reacting negatively to that, that doesn't say as much about Apple as it does the observer.
I actually liked typing on the butterfly switches, the only thing I did not like was the left/right arrow keys being bigger.
Ignore the marketingese and don’t let it bother you so much. The important thing is that they listened to their customers and created a better product as a result.
Anyway, I consider fake reviews to be dishonest .. I consider this to be more like "putting a positive spin on it".
Despite having Double the Key Travel of Butterfly ( 0.5mm to 1mm ) It still felt the same as butterfly. The old Scissor had 1.3mm, while only 0.3mm difference, it felt night and day.
The new scissors also claims higher stability. Although I doubt this has anything to do with the design but rather of the "height" of the key be lower.
It is indeed new, but I know if it is wonderful yet. I haven't had a long period of time to try and use it.
What ? No. They are telling us they refined it, not that they fixed their mistake. It's not perfect, it's lame and cheesy.
I think it would be amazing if the most valuable, most design-focused company in the world admitted to everyone that they made a mistake. It would do a lot towards allowing everyone else to make mistakes without beating themselves up over it. After all, if the thousands of specialist engineers, paid billions in salaries, given the best equipment in the world, in a company that really (and I mean really) values design, can make a mistake, then it's kinda OK that your home page looks a little crappy on mobile.
[0] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-macbook-keyboard-service-...
Exactly. In Steve Jobs days he would have either jokingly admit there was a mistake or at least say something that people dont like it ( hence admitting there is a problem ).
The new Apple put up a big middle finger and didn't act until there are class action.
None of:
> MacBook Air now features the new Magic Keyboard, first seen on the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience. The inverted-T arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments.
says anything about "fixing problems that people wanted fixed" or "doing what people asked for." That would read:
> We used a lower-travel keyboard with a butterfly mechanism and alternative arrow key layout on recent models, and you said you didn't like it. We listened. The MacBook Air now features a proven scissor mechanism with a return to 1mm travel and classic inverted-T arrow key layout.
They're implying that they've come up with something new, which is a lie. That's not perfect.
So this scissor design with 1mm of travel seems to be something new. The inverted-T arrow keys are not new, but the scissor mechanism itself is, a refinement of previous designs.
What I noticed in the image that made me excited about this device is the function keys. If the 16in MBP had function keys, I probably would have purchased one already. I do wonder if the top spec of the new MBA is going to hold up to my usage though.
Even I who gave up on Apple thought, hey what a nice machine.
Would be seriously tempted to just buy a new one if I was confident the keyboard wasn't absolute garbage. Typing on it was fine when it worked, but it double-spaces, and a couple of the other keys are now wonky.
Never had a keyboard die on me before this -- Mac or otherwise.
I also tried out the new version of that keyboard on the recently-released MBP. It feels almost the exact same as the old one, just a slightly more shallow depth.
Hopefully that's helpful.
1. Get your keyboard repaired (free, I assume)
2. Sell that thing online
3. Get this one.
I mean, this has a quad-core option, too. It's a no-brainer better machine.
I have the 16-inch that has the same keyboard mechanism as this. It's 100% an evolution on the previous design. While it is early, it's a proven design and there's no chance of it having any of the issues that the butterfly keyboard did.
I feel like my 16-inch is the computer I intended to buy in 2016.
If you can afford the upgrade cost after you sell your current one, you won't regret it.
Unfortunately, Apple will only replace the butterfly keyboard for 4 years after initial retail purchase of the laptop.
I dread the eventual breakdown of the new butterfly keyboard after the end of February next year, when I'm on my own. I hope iFixIt will start selling DIY repair kits, or the cost to repair at Apple makes such a frequent failure a non-starter (in which case I'll turn it into a fixed-place computer in the house, with an external keyboard).
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple bended that 4 year rule, though. But also realize that Apple will eventually stop repairing all computers just due to time passage. And also, eventually, from a financial perspective it's more cost effective to find a working used computer (after heavy depreciation) than to actually do a repair even if that repair is doable.
I do think that their replacement keyboards have better reliability than the early models. I didn't have any problems after getting mine replaced - I believe I used the replacement keyboard for around two years. But I still wasn't willing to keep the computer longer. I went straight from the 2016 to the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro.
In any event, it was a nice opportunity for an upgrade. My 2016 was still worth $1000, and I ended up with 4 more cores, double the storage, and an absolutely massive increase in graphics performance. Using the education store and picking up in a state with no sales tax did a lot to make that price more palatable.
- Apple knows that at the very least, some set of vocal people don't like the previous keyboard. They also know that many of their customers had to get repairs, even if they liked the keyboard. Those customers might understand that "butterfly = bad"
- They need to tell people that they've fixed the problem but don't want to do so in a way that says "the last product was bad" (so they can't just say nothing about it)
I think we should also place some fault on other manufacturers for just blindly attempting to do what Apple does without thinking: check out the latest XPS 13. They've implemented the same arrow setup as Apple's butterfly keyboards. And yet, I haven't seen a single review online that criticizes the XPS for this choice.
"We've gone back to where we were three years ago after a mistake, sorry."
I don't understand what the issue is with Apple trying to sell their products. It sounds like people here are upset that marketing and sales exists, and that they use language to try to make their products seem impressive, and that consumers aren't rational when it comes to buying things.
"The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience."
Is any of that false? How do we know?
They pretty clearly admitted fault when they offered free out of warranty repairs for keyboard issues.
There's nothing wrong with a company saying "we screwed up." Which Apple has done already. There'a also nothing wrong with a company saying, "This keyboard is great," if it is in fact great.
Sent from my MBP 13" 2018 with sticky spacebar.
That would be refreshing, I'd respect that.
Yep this is the right move, and as someone else says, this would be worthy of respect.
I think we've all just about had it with corporate bullshit -- and to be sure that says more about this moment in time than anything else.
Apple is consistently guilty of blowing smoke up our collective asses. It would be nice if they could give it a rest and simply be honest. But here we are.
Yes. We expect adults to own up to their mistakes, so why don't we hold corporations to the same standard and instead just accept corporate bullshit from them?
New Apple doesn't act. Refuse to listen. Even with the Repair programme they still act as if it was not their fault.
I don't blame the browser vendors (except maybe that V8 made JS juuuuuust good enough to make something like Node viable). They took a thing that run slow for everyone, and they made it faster.
I do blame application developers for writing everything to the web because it's there. There's instances of folks doing better than most in Electron/JS land, but it's still nothing close to the native or even managed Java/C# apps of yesteryear.
Really I should just link to my last Electron rant, seems like they're getting closer together nowadays... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22598148
Then I grew tired of the macbook fan noise when running windows 10 and debugging with the touch bar. I ordered a surface 3 laptop and immediately realized how important a nice keyboard is to me. Its tactile, its got enough travel, the keys feel nice. I type with fewer errors and I work faster. Anyone want to buy a 2018 macbook pro with 6 core and 32gb ram?
"This is the baseline. Apple have gone from bad to OK"
Apple's scissor keyboard is pretty broadly considered the best in the industry by a country mile. Their butterfly mechanism was a bad misstep (I mean...almost indistinguishable from my Yoga 720, but compared to prior Apple keyboards), but saying that they went from "bad" to "OK" is just nonsense.
"and they're celebrating"
Advertising doing what advertising does. So brave on HN to point out that marketing is marketing-ee. Are you also telling me that the new car isn't going to make me an adventure seeking extrovert?
Why is that acceptable? If you lie or misrepresent the truth in almost any other field, you get criticised. But when marketers do it, they're immune. That's just weird.
Some people just seem to choose a target for life (like the Favored Enemy of a Ranger from Dungeons & Dragons) and never give it a break, no matter what.
I suspect that even if Apple comes out with the best keyboard that mankind is ever going to make, some of you are still going to be angry about how they removed optical drives 4000 years ago.
>MacBook Air now features the new Magic Keyboard, first seen on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
That saved me from having to google "hey, is the 'new magic keyboard' the thing in the 16" MBP that I've been waiting for in the Air and 13" MBP, or is it something else entirely".
It was one of the first stocks I attempted to buy puts for. It seems to be a high end luxury good, even for many professionals. Of course I'm not just talking about MacBooks, it's the whole (imo overpriced) product line, phone to earbuds.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/
====
1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i3, Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz, with 4MB L3 cache
Configurable to 1.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz, with 6MB L3 cache; or 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz, with 8MB L3 cache
8GB of 3733MHz LPDDR4X onboard memory
Intel Iris Plus Graphics
====
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codenam... this matches the frequency cadence but it's LPDDR3 and Intel GT graphics.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codenam... the fourth digit is the power tier and the fastest https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/197120/... is only 1GHz. So if this theory were true, Intel would need to take the cream of the by and large broken 10nm process Ice Lake Y CPUs on the i5 Y and i7 Y tiers and give them to Apple.
The previous one ran an i5-8210Y which was also Apple specific 23% higher clocked version vs the more common i5-8200Y but that was only one, this time it would need two, both the i5 and i7 CPUs are special but the i3 seems to be the run-of-the-mill version. Note how weird the cadence is because usually the frequency drops with the number of cores. However, the Turbo Boost is the same 3.8 GHz which is way too low for the 10th gen Amber Lake Y CPUs.
Also, at first I thought the video resolutions weird but what's going on here is that there is a single USB C output and even with Thunderbolt, that's only a 40Gbps bus. So the ICL-Y DP 1.4 support is somewhat less useful here. If there would be two USB C outputs, two 5K monitors could be driven easily, for example. Which the previous generation Intel CPUs couldn't because to drive an 5K from DP 1.2 the monitor eats up two display outputs even if physically that's delivered on a single Thunderbolt cable.
The i5 option could be an i5-1035G4 with a cTDP of 12W or even an i5-1030G7 with a cTDP-up of 12W and an increased base clock.
The description of the i7 matches an i7-1060G7 at 9W TDP.
HTH
"Configurable to 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz, with 8MB L3 cache" and "3733MHz LPDDR4X onboard memory"
so it's probably one of these: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro...
which means it's Iris Plus "G7" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology#Gene...
...which appears to be the fastest integrated GPU Intel have done yet, according to the GFLOPS on wikipedia above
TDP seems to be a bit higher here, so let's see if they've managed to do something better than just blowing air (heh) into the chassis.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/197123/...
Ticks all the boxes as far as I can tell.
For the i5, they claim 1.1/3.5 which could be a match for https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/197119/... with the "configurable TDP" of 1.1 instead of base 800 MHZ.
If anyone can solve this mystery, it would be great to compare to other laptops like the Surface Pro, whose i7 is "Quad-core 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1065G7 Processor"(1.3 / 3.9)
It is just a different bin.
Of course they might just shift everything to A series chips instead.
... I think though this new MacBook Air is going to be my next portable
loved the hardware, but returned the box.
I know it’s obvious but I didn’t realize it when I switched from a laptop + tablet to a convertible in the hopes of simplifying my setup.
For example, it’s annoying when you’re taking notes and need to look something up on the web: either put up with poorly optimized interfaces or convert the device to a laptop.
So I’d much prefer a tablet plus laptop for my particular usage as a student but am too broke to buy another new setup. What makes convertibles so desirable to you?
https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-comparison-chart/?compare=...
There is legitimately nothing wrong with this computer. All of its previous shortcomings have been rectified
- It has an agreeable keyboard
- It's cheaper
- It has a quad-core processor, finally
now /that/ is a powerful pitch!
Seriously though, a quad core processor at this clock speed in 2020 is incredibly underwhelming.
This is good news from Apple as I was not into any of their more recent laptops but I'll probably upgrade to this one
I only wish they had a 11" version but not a deal breaker
Still just waiting on a new 14" MBP.
I had really been wanting to upgrade for Retina & better processor but I knew they would upgrade the processor and fix the keyboard if I waited for 2020... no reason to wait now.
I don't run any crazy fat Docker stacks for my own stuff at home, so this is perfect.
My at-home hobby work is in Golang and Python, and not particularly compute-intensive stuff. Neither of those have huge heavy toolchains.
Really the main thing driving an upgrade from my minimum-spec 2015 Air is the Retina display.
I went from an 6700HQ (2.6 Ghz base) to a 10710U (1.1 Ghz base) and the difference is definitely there, and it's jarring enough to the point where I kind of regret it. It feels like a huge step backwards, despite the latter CPU being four generations ahead.
Isn't this completely down to the cpu frequency governor in the OS?
My impression was that this "stepping" is customisable, at least in linux, I regularly step my CPU manually even.
I'm not sure what Apple has here, but maybe it's not what you expect.
This does not seem to be the case for my i7-8565U nor my older m3-something. The 8565U for example feels just as snappy as my desktop i7-6700, except it’ll throttle after about 30s.
That's not how base clock works. Base clock is not min clock. Base clock is what it's "guaranteed" to hit under sustained load if TDP is respected. It's the TDP clock. A 4ghz base clock CPU will still be far, far below that when idle.
Such is the accepted wisdom in much of the industry, but I'm a bit of a sceptic on this score. Of course developer time is expensive, particularly if you're in somewhere like the Bay Area where salaries are an extra 0 compared to most of the world. But we live in an era of virtualisation and outsourcing (sorry, "cloud computing") when businesses will knowingly pay many times the cost of just buying a set of servers and sticking them in a rack in order to have someone else buy a much bigger server, subdivide it into virtual servers, and lease them at a huge mark-up. All kinds of justifications have been given for this, many of which I suspect don't stand up to scrutiny anywhere other than boardrooms and maybe golf courses.
There's a nice write-up somewhere, though regrettably I can't immediately find it, of the economics of cloud-hosting an application built using modern trends. IIRC, it pitched typical auto-scaling architectures consisting of many ephemeral VMs running microservices and some sort of orchestration to manage everything against just buying a small number of highly specified machines and getting on with the job using a more traditional set of skills and tools. Put another way, it was the modern trend for making everything extremely horizontally scalable using more hardware and virtualisation against a more traditional vertical scaling approach using more efficient software to keep within the capacity of a small number of big machines. The conclusion was astonishingly bad for the modern/trendy case, to the point where doing it was looking borderline insane unless your application drops into a goldilocks zone in terms of capacity and resources required that relatively few applications will ever get near, and those that do may then move beyond it on the other side. And yet that horizontal scaling strategy is viewed almost as the default today for many new software businesses, because hiring people who are good enough to write the more efficient software is assumed to be too expensive.
There are technical reasons for this, being able to handle sudden load, but mostly it's for ideological reasons. We aren't building companies, we are building stock pumps guised as the utopian future. If you are wondering what a blue chip company looks like in tech, they are the ones that own their own infrastructure.
Maybe there is a middle road for cash poor companies, where you keep latent demand in house for the sake of cost and sense, but have some sort of insurance policy with a cloud service to step in if demand surges.
I'll admit that modern text editors and communication software have grown resource hungry, but a lot of that comes from being able to deliver a strong, cross platform experience. I remember desktop Java doing much of the same with just as bad resource usage. Same with applets.
Sure, but that immediately raises the next question of why those VMs are so big...
Why should everyone have to afford that RAM?
RAM size slowly increases as well. 4 GB was enough 10 years ago. 8 GB was enough few years ago. Today I would suggest 16 GB as a bare future-proof minimum and one can buy 64 GB for a reasonable price.
We still have room for more layers. And it's not only about efficiency, it's also about security. Desktops are still not properly sandboxed, my calc.exe still can access my private ssh key.
Once performance growth will really stop, we will start to optimize. Transistor density will double every few years until at least 2030 and AFAIK there are plans beyond that, so probably not soon.
Don't exagerate your memory requirements, you would be more than fine with 16GB.
Fortunately, I have a Dell XPS 15 with 32 GBs of RAM, but the second I start up a single VM, one more messaging app, a small handful of Docker containers, or any IDE (of which I'm running none right now), I'm going over 16 GBs.
Realistically, most of us on HN probably need around 20-24 GBs, but laptops don't come in those increments.
I develop for a living. I use 6 GB including a browser, a VM and an IDE.
Some of you greatly exaggerate the needs. Some workflows require 16+ GB of RAM, but most people complaining about RAM mismanage it or do not understand that caches are not mandatory.
I was actually surprised by this--when I first started using this computer, I thought for sure I would need to add more RAM, which for the 2018 model is too complicated to do yourself (at least to me it seemed too risky).
For comparison, I also have a 2012 Mac Mini at home with an SSD and 16GB RAM, and it's still chugging along pretty well too, although it's noticeably slower than the 2018 model with 8GB RAM.
I'm curious with regard to swapping if that might mean my SSD is going to wear out sooner. Maybe investing in more RAM would be worth it even if I don't feel like I need it.
I keep a lot of tabs open to look things up, but nothing excessive on that machine. I also run VSCode or Pycharm and would also bring up 5-10 containers at times.
It seriously hurt not only my productivity but also my mood afterwards just by having to put up with it for weeks.
Unless you're a very basic user I don't get why you would settle for 8GB in 2020. 8 gigs of RAM cost basically nothing, it's not worth changing your workflow in the slightest to work around that artificial limitation.
It's bizarre. If everyone used the native toolkits we'd have far less memory usage and everyone (even the memory-constrained) would have a good experience.
Also, with these memory hogs they will do a lot of allocation and deallocation. This is also a problem with interpreted languages. And allocation is the enemy of speed, and energy usage. It'll destroy your daily battery expectancy as everything gets interpreted.
Sad.
With every layer of abstraction added to ease development the hardware requirements go up. You can build things fast, or you can build fast things, doing both is tricky.
I'm running linux with an anemic window manager, and with nothing but chrome and slack open (20tabs in chrome) I am consuming 6GiB.
If you add teams, pycharm and outlook (electron) it consumes 9GiB... Actually, that's also less than I expected.
Well done pycharm.
When you are memory constrained, you can definitely tell. Everything comes to a halt and you just twiddle your thumbs between commands. This 16GB machine I have shipped with 4GB which was painful even 8 years ago when it was released, and I upgraded myself to 8GB 6 months into ownership. A few years later when javascript became more pervasive on the web, I hit memory constraint on 8GB a lot just from having tabs open in chrome, back when it was perhaps more of a memory hog, so I opted for 16gb and haven't had issues since.
I think at 16gb you should be set for at least 5 years. Most people, even a lot of devs on company issued equipment, are working with 8gb complaining about it right here in this very thread.
If you have larger requirements, a lightweight, thin laptop with a teensy fan isn't for you. Even if it had the hardware specs, the physics of heat dissipation don't work for you and you are better off spending the same money for more hardware sitting in a box under your desk. Me and my sore back are eyeing this up, all my computing is done on a cluster anyway.
Supporting more options is expensive, so it's understandable that Apple didn't want to give their customers a choice. Still, it seems like a gimick. And it appeared at the same time as the butterfly keyboard, cementing the notion that Apple had lost its way.
- I can't adjust the volume without looking at it. Because the touchbar is flat with no haptic feedback when I land on a button, it's hard to remember the exact position of the volume 'button' without looking. Sounds trivial - but combined with point 2....
- The way the volume control expands - it actually moves the 'volume down' button AWAY from your finger, which again requires me to keep looking at the control.
This means that when a loud song comes on, it can take 2-3 seconds to quickly turn the volume down in total. I could do that with one single keypress in half a second or less on a keyboard, without needing to look at the keyboard.
That can also be the difference between missing a key detail from a quiet speaker on a Hangout.
Flashy, but it's a terrible user experience by every metric other than looks, I guess.
(This is clever, but basically undiscoverable unless someone tells you in, for example, a comment on Hacker News, which is how I found out.)
No you can't! There is a pretty long delay. If you move your finger during the delay, nothing happens. Then when it finally decides to switch modes, you have to move your finger again for it to change the volume. Hope you didn't hit the edge of the touchbar yet. Combined with the phantom button presses when using the top row of the keyboard, especially the Siri button, plus other small issues, the whole thing is bafflingly terrible.
Also pro-tip: you can change the buttons that show up in the touch bar. Settings > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip. I swapped out Siri for a "Sleep" button, which is super convenient when I walk away from my desk.
I just timed it at ~580 milliseconds, more than half a second from finger hitting the bar to the time when it stops ignoring touch input. It's easy to slide your finger more than the entire length of the volume bar in that time. It's absurdly bad. It would be weird and pretty lame if they fixed this only on newer models.
Also, where on earth is the escape key??
Different strokes for different folks, but I've never liked using the function keys for debugging. I just click the buttons on the screen. I'm a little surprised they don't have a way to set the Touch Bar buttons up to do that in Xcode though.
Moving the mouse cursor up to the toolbar always seems a lot of travel and swishing around if you're hovering over variables to see their contents in the source code.
I have found the auto/local/all view in Xcode to be a bit dumb and unable to properly expand some template objects in C++ so it's all just an exercise in frustration anyway!
Does that statement strike you as reasonable at all?
This could not have happened without the touchbar. This is horrible UX and I will never trust that (work) computer again.
Using Terminal, I use the Esc key a lot for navigating and having a touch bar Esc key is not a great experience since you also don't feel feedback that you're touching the right key.
I've also accidentally hit the touch bar a few times while hovering one of my fingers above it as I press down on one of the number keys.
on a personal note, i've randomly refreshed webpages because i've overreached on the number row with the touch bar.
I press the physical button a few more times? I find that 10 times easier.