So sad.
Also: Magsafe is great (it's saved my bacon a few times). Gone. ESC key, gone. Don't know about the keyboard yet, but everything I've read doesn't point to it being decent.
Probably not buying this generation of MacBooks. Might just bite the bullet and finally go to Linux on some decent hardware.
So, what's a decent laptop for running Linux? Good keyboard, good trackpad support, good sound . . .
I have been using the Dell Developer Edition (Precision 5510) since April. There were a few hiccups because of some driver issues related to their USB-C dock (Correct me if i'm wrong, but I guess this problem was not limited to just their linux laptop?) Ever since upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 things have been pretty smooth. I believe any distro with a 4.4 series kernel or higher will behave pretty well. Before this I had a Thinkpad T series (The best keyboard experience on a laptop that I have come across), and I never had any problem with running any distribution of Linux. In Summary: I think you cannot go wrong with either a Thinkpad or the Dell Developer edition. They are well made machines with good support for linux.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3zau8b/coil_whine_pro...
Edit: a link for ubikey usbc adapter. There's hopefully something cheaper. https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-nano-usbc-bundle/
Sadly enough, I think the lack of really great options is what may have pushed some engineers to macs in the first place. :)
Admittedly, last I looked was several years ago -- I'm interested to know too! Keep hearing good things about the XPS series, but last I had one it ran hot enough that I couldn't comfortably keep it on my lap.
Is this what we're calling web developers now?
Dunno about you. I develop native code.
I would need at least one if not two extra chargers (one for the office, one I leave in my bag, one for the other room I work in); dongles to connect to an external monitor; and dongles to connect to projectors. All told probably another $350+ on top of the $2.9k (w/o applecare!) the 15-in model costs.
They're probably going to save me $3500 by causing me to buy a mid-2015 laptop though.
I do love how you can't plug lightning headphones into this thing without another $19 adapter.
Esc key is still there, it's just not a physical key. You'll have to try it for yourself of course, but since it's on the edge of the strip it's still pretty easy to touch-type it.
They keyboard divides users. Some people hate it but I really like my 12" Macbook butterfly keyboard. I can type on it just fine at almost any speed. I do have to admit that it took a while to get used to it.
Yes, you will need to buy new hardware. You're buying a multi thousand dollar machine and you are concerned about the price of a YubiKey?! And for expensive stuff, like professional audio interfaces you can just use a dongle. With a YubiKey dongles are a PITA. For stuff that stays on your desk, not so much. I still use a FireWire audio interface.
On the other hand I regret the loss of HDMI. While I can expect to get a new YubiKey, it will take at least a decade for all the HDMI-only TVs and projectors and whatnot to be replaced. Carrying that dongle is a PITA, just like carrying the ethernet dongle.
Dunno how many still do that, the system may have been dropped in the pursuit of thinness.
I use a T450s for work. My wife took one look at the FHD screen (she uses a 15" rMBP) and said "can't the firm spring for something less shitty?" The backlight bleeds, the keyboard is warped near the touchpad, and the touchpad isn't that precise. I bought my own for personal use and then sold it because it was so underwhelming.
The one redeeming quality of the machine is sick battery life with the extended battery. But on the T460 series, you can either have the high-resolution screen or the giant battery, but not both. Doh!
I have about 14 ThinkPads at last count. The earliest functional ThinkPad I still have is a T42p. The newest one is a X250. My favorite one is the high-resolution X61T (I have two).
There was a time when the build quality of ThinkPads was great, that time has passed. The quality has declined, while the Mac quality has increased. There is simply no comparison on this front anymore.
What is sad is that ThinkPads are still better than other, non-mac laptops. I feel sorry for anyone who uses a non-ThinkPad, or a non-Mac laptop.
I've tried before. I've got a couple of laptops at home running Linux, but they didn't stick. I didn't actually move to them. Moving is a kind of commitment, you're saying "Well, this is probably good enough that I can make it work for the next decade or two." And that's unclear.
Moving platforms means changing some everyday tools. Visual Studio on Windows == XCode on OSX, but I'm not really happy with IDEs on Linux. (Visual Studio is really difficult to beat in terms of debugging experience, in my experience).
It's not necessarily worse, though some things are. OSX has some nice creature comforts where things just work and I don't want to waste time tweaking the environment any more than I have to.
So moving to Linux with the intent of staying there for the next decade or more is, indeed, biting the bullet.
So can you explain why everybody is so upset that they don't have a physical Escape key?
Sure, you can rebind it. But this starts to interrupt flow when you switch keyboards.
ESC wasn't broken. They broke it. I'm done.
As for ubiquity, that doesn't mean anything. Just because we've had something for a long time doesn't mean we need to keep having it. For example, my current physical keyboard has no Insert key, but that's a key that keyboards had for a long time (my keyboard replaced that with the Eject key). And yet I didn't even notice its lack until I looked at my keyboard just now.
Its possible Apple could go too far, but I don't think its fair to say Apple did anything wrong _yet_. They're always early on removing this stuff, but they've never been wrong. Literally never.
I miss my CD drive. On a almost daily basis. USB drive to the rescue, oh, wait. Serial ports are fantastic for interfacing with low level electronics. USB dongle for, oh, wait.
> but they've never been wrong. Literally never.
Riiight. That's why they sell so many dongles which replace all of these missing parts.
"Technology X will be obsolete at some point in the future" is almost tautologically true. They could remove the screens and the keyboards from their laptops today, and that might be a good idea in 50 years time when we're all using direct-brain interfaces, but I would still describe that as being wrong today.
And it doesn't address the lack of standard USB ports (for folks with YubiKeys, etc.), MagSafe, and the jury is out on the actual keyboard until I can type on it. I physically recoiled from the latest MacBook thin keyboard.
I put a piece of double-sided sticky tape on my ESC key just to make me notice how often I hit it. When I'm editing, it's all the time.
The seeming last-minute addition of a remapping feature for ESC in OSX leads me to believe that the software people at Apple were railroaded by some hardware folks. Hard to believe that whole teams using Emacs / vim were ignored, but I've seen it happen before.
Well, the guy in charge (Ive) is basically a hardware person.
What do you use ESC for in Emacs? I used to occasionally use it to hit M-x, but now I use key-chord.el to map 'xx' to M-x and it's all good.
Maybe Apple has decided to kill off the pesky Emacs and vim users. Yeah. :-)