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Comment by madmax108 | Hacker News Reader

Another example of Apple trying to please the masses but pushing over developers. It's silly to think that the function keys and the ESC keys are used so little that they can be removed altogether. Agree with others in the discussion that such touch sensitive regions are largely useless besides the bling factor.

Also, what about the controls like screen and keyboard brightness or volume controls? Where do those go to?

I use a Macbook Pro 2015 and I don't think I'll be upgrading to the new one, especially if the specs are nearly similar.

Why Apple, Why do you insist on going against the standards on practically EVERYTHING? There has to be some method behind the madness.

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>> I use a Macbook Pro 2015 and I don't think I'll be upgrading to the new one, especially if the specs are nearly similar.

Seriously? I'm on a 2013, and the specs of the latest machine are already "nearly similar". I have factory SSD flash storage and 16 GB of RAM. The CPU and GPU upgrades haven't been remotely worth upgrading to.

How can you be on a 2015 MacBook, talking about upgrading to a 2016? Nobody cares whether you own the latest gadget; upgrades should wait at least 2, usually 3-4 years. I'm not talking about the severe case of frugality (use the same laptop for at least 8 years until it dies!). Just basic common sense.

I'm trying not to sound snarky, but: different strokes for different folks. Who are you to tell someone how to spend their money? Just basic common sense. Ok, that was a little snarky.

TBH, when I talk about this upgrade I'm talking my work laptop, which I have the option of upgrading (for free through the company) every year. Most of my configs and tooling is customized and backed up, so getting up and running on a new system is not too time intensive. And in the case of better specs or better tooling, then why not? It's not about owning the latest gadgets but the performance improvements that come along with them.

My home system is a 2012 rig running BunsenLabs Linux (https://www.bunsenlabs.org/) which I upgraded to from Crunchbang some time back.

I have a macbook pro from .. 2013? The main reason for me would be too get a fanless laptop. That could be a reason to update even from last year's model.

But if it's as silly as the 'new macbook', then I'll probably pass.

The 2015 MacBook Pro still has fans... You'd have to go to a MacBook instead. Two very different laptops.

But the new one might not have fans.

>How can you be on a 2015 MacBook, talking about upgrading to a 2016?

(Germany) Well, I personally can depreciate computers faster than the usual 3 years. Because I run a software business I was able to argue with the tax authorities that I always need the most recent model as the average life time of a computer in my field of business is 1 year.

But then again I don't make really use of this because as you said: There's not enough differentiation between consecutive Mac models so the trouble of writing off and switching machines isn't really worth it.

Some developers. Neither Emacs nor Vim use the function keys to any significant extent. Relatively rarely-used stuff like screen brightness and volume control seem like the obvious things to put on a multi-function OLED bar.

Speak for yourself; I have multiple functions mapped to the F keys in vim. They aren't on the home row, but they can still be useful.

I hardly ever use an IDE but Apple Pages allows you to assign each function key to a distinct style. For example F1 is document heading, F2 section heading, F3 subsection heading, F4 body, F5 blockquote etc. I have a document template with this mapping set and it's my default template in Pages. After using this setup for a few months I found that I can indeed touch type the function keys and it's extremely convenient. I imagine many office workers in the Apple universe (i.e. not MS office or google docs) would feel the same.

Maybe not by default but function keys are an obvious choice for custom key mappings because they are mostly left free by these programs.

Am I the only one who has emacs functions bound to every function key?

Perhaps the `fn` key will remain, and switch the bar into a mode that has screen brightness, keyboard brightness, volume, etc. I think that would work ok, but yeah, it's a shame about Esc.

Looks like that's the case. 'fn' is the lower left key on the Apple keyboard. 4th to the left from the space bar. The images still show a key there (but not enough to see what text is on it), but that's almost certainly still the 'fn' key.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's also used to make fn+` = Esc, fn+1 = F1 etc

That's how my filco Minila & other 60% keyboards implement the F keys, and IMO it's an improvement. [though... I do flip the ` key to be ESC by default]

I actually think this is excellent for developers as well – they are among the people who most strive to do everything by keyboard, but its really quite hard to remember all useful shortcuts of multiple editors/browsers etc.

I'd love the next generation to have tactile feedback, or maybe at some point to go full-on single-key OLED like that concept that went around a couple of years ago. But depending on the APIs, this may already be quite useful.

"It's silly to think that the function keys and the ESC keys are used so little that they can be removed altogether."

Not on macOS, at least for the Fn keys. Having a context aware row of buttons that will actually give some cue as to what they do, rather than some random, generic name will probably see those buttons get much more use than they currently do.

I imagine that when the product is actually announced tomorrow a lot of your questions will be answered.

> but pushing over developers

I'll wait until Thursday to check they still ship with the Terminal app...

I'm sure they'll ship with macOS Sierra, which includes Terminal.

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