New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore | Hacker News Reader

New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

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519 pointsalexeysemeney775 comments

I dislike this post intensely. The opinion comes across as uncharitable, as the author probably has not used this Macbook Pro yet. How can you (alexeysemeney) be so sure?

I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative developer tools, such as timeline interfaces for Replay Debugging. There are already a lot of applications in the content creation (Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya) space, which developers frequently use to create assets.

As a vim user, esc is pretty important.

I would say the author clearly knows very little computer specs:

"The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope."

Because a 2010 2.4ghz dual core is identical to a 2016 2.4 ghz dual core.... I thought we got over comparing processors purely by their clock speed a long time ago. (I will agree that theyve been going with lower and lower power to allow for better battery life, this is a terrible way to make the comparison. Id much rather see a processor comparison graph here).

Personally I think this is a terrible decision, but then again, I think using a laptop keyboard for programming is a terrible decision too. I need multiple monitors and an external keyboard to get anything done, so I typically use a desktop, and then use a lightweight laptop (basically a chromebook) to remote into the desktop if I absolutely need to be mobile.

Also, "What other people are saying" and then listing 4 anecdotal quotes seems pretty uncompelling.

I imagine this is not a great developer's laptop. But apple fanboys will keep buying it and either stop using vim just so they can keep using apple or buy an external keyboard. And Im really not sure what else you could really want out of a laptop then.

I think it's a completely fair post.

Devs are a huge market for Apple, but Apple is ignoring them.

This isn't about ESC, it's about whether Apple has any interest in acknowledging the dev market and keeping devs on board.

The answer is "no."

Apple is making no concessions to developers or professional power users who need performance. Instead, Apple is producing vanilla-grade laptops with a touch of gimmicky brand frosting to justify the high price.

The real heuristic is skimping on performance and connectivity to maintain margins. The cost to users is significant lost productivity.

This is the MacBook Pro Intern Edition. It could have been more, but that's where Apple is now.

Many common applications that developers use have many keybindings that heavily rely upon the Escape key (Vim for sure).

I'm a vim user. Why in the world did they remove ESC? That's one of my most frequently used keys.

And no, I don't think remapping it is a great idea.

If I had to use this for work I would protest.

I was configuring a server while walking through the airport the other day (long story and I won't bore you with details) on my ipad. There is no control key on the ipad keyboard meaning that I could not save any files from the ssh terminal. It was not the greatest experience and I can definitely see these kinds of things happening on laptop now due to apples "courage". They seem to be gung-ho on breaking things that work perfectly in the name of "progress".

I find really amusing that after the Macbook reveal last year half of the response comments (in sites like ArsTechnica) were of the gist "just give me an updated Macbook Air, with the same form factor and a better screen".

Well, the base Macbook Pro model does exactly that. There is also an option (cheaper!) to keep the function keys.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-...

I might be getting old and grumpy, but more than anything else it boggles my mind when apparently everyone believes they should be the target user Apple (or Microsoft, or Google,or...) design their product for, and they consider a personal insult when that is not the case.

I don't think there was ever a time where the laptop market had so many options, at all price levels, many of those of such a high quality.

You don't like that a particular manufacturer is offering ? Vote with your wallet and choose another option, don't whine.

> I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac.

ESC usage just off the top of my head: cancelling any dropdown (e.g. IDE autocomplete, browser autocomplete, Spotlight, quick file search in Atom/Sublime), cancelling any OK/cancel dialog (e.g. save as), the ESC + '.' sequence in Bash to get the last word of the last command.

I could map ESC to the caps lock key I suppose.

Also, Apple seems to think it has an escape key (see the header pic which clearly shows esc as an option):

http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

I don't think it would be very hard for terminal.app (or other apps targeted at developers) to show esc f1 etc along the top when it is open, and it can strictly have better function keys because instead of f4 etc they can be customised to say what they'd actually do.

I agree the fuss over the touch bar is overplayed.

The claims about CPU MHz are hilarious, too. It's an entirely different CPU generation.

I'm a programmer and I'm pretty sure most of developers use F-keys and, especially, esc button. Let's believe together :)

It's a terrible post, and a terrible site (did it break anyone else's back button?)

I gave up on Mac as a development platform back in 2012 when they removed expose and replaced it with that terrible Mission Control garbage. Then I went back to Linux and discovered tiling window managers and haven't looked back. (and yes, I realize there are some good ones for mac now).

But I will say on this post that the escape key is a good point. I use it all the time. Sure you can rebind it, but it's not a useless, SysReq/ScrollLock type key. Most developers will have to rebind it if it doesn't appear on that touch bar thingy.

I've used the Lenovo's "adaptive keyboard". It's crap to use, especially for development. FN keys are especially easy to remap for macros or lesser used functions, and having no haptic feedback essentially kills their function for a touch typist.

It's also no wonder that newer carbon models came back to regular fn keys.

I actually bought/buy macbooks for their build quality, and generally only install linux on them. Looks like this particular model marks the end of this path.

ESC key is required for productive use of Vim and even Photoshop! And since we are talking about graphics, Inkscape is heavy on Fn keys too.

The ESC key should hardly be a deal breaker for Vim devs - most remap it to caps lock on a Mac because it's easier to reach.

The 13" model has a version that keeps that row anyway. And the Touch Bar does still have a function key row/view? with ESC. MacVim and iTerm could probably add the functionality that the whole row is an ESC key when they are the active apps.

For me though, Apple got it wrong by releasing a gimmick (touch bar) which may be useful for some groups of Pro users (designers/film editors?) but I can't see adding much value to what I think is their largest group - software developers.

For me my ideal developer laptop is small, light and powerful. So while it's great the Pro is now the same size and weight as the air (13" model), I think they could have gone even smaller - see the Dell XPS 13. A 13" full powered (i7, 16GB ram) in a 12" body (by having an edge to edge 'infinity' screen). Basically they should have released a MacBook that can run an i7 and 16GB ram.

I do some programming (Xcode and VS Code), I do some 3D art (blender, substance), and I do some photography (Lightroom). Not all of those programs will support it at launch, but I expect they will sooner or later. And the new screen sounds fabulous (I have a wide gamut external screen already, though it's AdobeRGB instead of P3, the MacBook will do better in reds and not quite as well in greens). I wish it were cheaper, sure, but this looks like a fantastic computer to me.

Yeah, you need some different cables. You might need to rebind some hotkeys. It might take a while for some pieces of software to support the touch bar properly.

If you don't want to be an early adopter or you can't get over your Vim muscle memory, pick up a refurbished 2015 model and the rest of us can buy a few new USB cables and move on with our lives.

hmm, looking at the comments -- am I the only who uses Fn + Arrow Keys for Page Up/Down and Home/End purposes? How can you not?

Do you use USB or HDMI? You don't use any of the function keys on a mac, like volume, brightness, play/pause? I use those constantly.

And then the lackluster specs. That alone leaves me no real reason to upgrade.

You may never use the Fn and ESC keys (I hardly do either), but this does add to the list of events developers now need to handle in order to develop cross-platform compatible software.

I couldn't agree more, this kind of stance is embarrassing from a professional standpoint. It's ridiculous to act like this one special arrangement of plastic on a computer is so crucial to development. All 'real' developers remap their own modifier keys. All 'real' developers use full cherry-mx mechanical keyboards. All 'real' developers write assembly with pen and paper and then print their stack of punchcards once. etc, etc.

Developer here. Dealbreaker for me. All my tools heavily use function keys and escape. If I had no other options I'd just deal with it, but Apple is competing with themselves: since they didn't bother to upgrade the actual performance, I have no incentive to move from my current macbook. And when I do, I'll probably just buy a different brand if they don't release a laptop that's actually useful for me.

I use the F keys a lot in Matlab, but I'd guess that Matlab users are just as much a minority of developers that developers are of Mac users, so I can see why it's not a big deal to Apple. Maybe Mathworks will add some of the functionality to the touch bar anyway.

'almost never use the Fn or ESC keys'

Then I'll wager your knowledge of the capabilities of the apps you use is limited and if you are developing UIs I'll bet that while you consider them slick and sophisticated, they are in reality limited and inefficient.

I put it to you that you've never used a debugger if you've never used Fn keys.

I smash the esc key violently every time I climb myself into a corner with Emacs shortcuts and don't know how to get out.

But it's on a proper mechanical keyboard because prolonged use of builtin keyboards hurts my hands.

Surely the weird thing about removing the escape key is that it is used to bring up the force quit menu (cmd-option-esc). Pretty ingrained in my mind at least, but to be fair not needed that often.

> I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac.

While my primary isn't a Mac, my default left hand resting position on my keyboard is index finger on ESC and thumb on ALT.

Apple didn't need to remove the Fn row to have their touch bar.

a huge number of technical types use vim and other CLI/Terminal type tools daily. There are many tools and apps that assume the Escape key exists.

You are not the only one, took the words out of my mouth

Yes, thank you, I was starting to think I'm not actually a real developer, since I can't even remember the last time I even used a function key...

It's just the typical post Apple event trolling.

Well, he goes trough more than the bar.

I have a 2013 15" MacBook Pro, the diference with the top of the line that came out yesterday comes down a slight bump in the dedicated Graphics Card (which I don't appreciate since I use CUDA a lot and as such I actually prefer the GTX 750M to a only slightly better AMD card in the new model), and a 0.1 GHz bump in the processor (back from the 2.3 GHz i7 my MacBook Pro has).

I do understand that taking out the Esc and F* keys and replace it for a smart bar can be seen as a valid design option, but I can't see how shipping a Laptop 3 years later with, lets face it, basically the same specs and ask for the same price can be something positive.

I'm always amazed at how techies are so often unable to consider other people's points of view. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but no.

If you don't like the new design, that's totally fine. I've seen a lot of people saying that. But when you say that the new design is bad for everybody, or bad for millions of people you haven't met, based solely on your own personal reasons, you've lost it.

I'm a developer. The only reason I'm not buying one of these is because what I currently have is just fine, and I don't feel like spending the money. The touch bar looks really cool. It might not end up being very useful, but I think I'd like to have it. If it's not useful, well, no big deal.

Function keys? Never use 'em. Escape key? Having it available as a touch button doesn't seem like a major problem. If it turns out to be, then I'll learn or configure some other shortcut for it and get on with my life.

Now, that's just me. Your opinion may differ, and that's fine. I just ask you to have the same attitude. It's silly to say that this machine "is not a laptop for developers." It's not a laptop for you, apparently, and for people with similar needs and opinions. But not all developers are you.

Here is my issue with the new touch bar as a general UI element. Things meant for fingers should have tactile feedback unless you're also looking at the same location (like a touch screen) where you can get visual feedback. This offers no tactile response when used, and its layout changes constantly, thus it needs to be looked at to use it. That means you have to shift your vision focus from screen to keyboard repeatedly as you move through apps (or even while in the same app if they make the content dynamic). To me this is bad UI design at a fundamental level.

I can see this being handy as a "slider" style control (though a touch pad edge could be as well). Otherwise though, especially when used as "buttons" my opinion is that it is going to be very tiresome to use extensively and slow general interactions down. If you need this kind of interaction style it should be on a touch screen without forcing the eyes to change focus or monitor changes in peripheral vision.

TLDR There is a reason we touch type. Touch. Exactly what this is missing.

My problem is thus: I'm worried I won't like the new laptop and its going to decrease productivity.

I have a very small desire for change. I do like my existing mid-2014 15" MBP but I beat on them really hard so at almost 2 years old, it needs a replacement now.

I'm worried that I will basically end up in a position where I won't have anything that is a suitable replacement for this laptop when it breaks.

The lack of ANY USB ports is frustrating too. I have a hardware USB YubiKey Nano dongle that I leave permanently plugged into my computer for 2FA to various services. I don't want to loose the ability to do that (and I'm not even sure its physically possible to have something like that for USB-C -- its just too small)

I use vim for everything and thus obsessively use the esc key (yes, I know you can remap it, but I'll be fighting against 20+ years of muscle memory). Will the new virtual ESC key be enough? I hope so.

The lack of magsafe also really irks me. I used to destroy chargers like crazy before magsafe. Replacing magsafe with USB-C doesn't seem like a positive step to me.

I really want to love this computer, because I really don't see another option. I'm just worried that I won't and then I won't have any better options.

Techies don't say it's useless for everybody, though. They say it's useless for techies. And that should be a statement they are allowed to make.

But when you say that the new design is bad for everybody...

It's a little funny, considering the inverse of this is basically a core plot point in "Silicon Valley". Life imitates art imitates life.

Bah, these entitled kids. I guess being old enough to remember keyboards before they had escape keys helps, but ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket. Read your ASCII table! C-[ is even a quicker type avoiding RSIs from all those long pinky reaches.

(More seriously, as much as it bothers me to retrain my pinky, most uses of the escape key would be many times better if the lefthand side of the touch bar had a word for the function, like stop being full screen, cancel, leave menu, or whatever. The function would then be discoverable instead of secret lore.)

I had no idea you could use C-[ as ESC

What do you mean by that last line? Well for one thing the bar is customizable by each app, but still, from the examples, they show very clear icons of function.

This is already far superior than just F1, F2, etc, which are far far more cryptic than a descriptive icon.

That's the thing, most apps already do use F keys for custom bindings, but you have to manually memorize them for each different app. Here, you at least get to see the correct icon in each program you're using.

And as a bonus, you get variable size buttons, sliding input, colors, and much more that just isn't possible with simple buttons.

I use ␛ as the Meta key in Emacs. I just tried using C-[ instead. It works, but you have to press down both CTRL and [ at the same time; you can't flam CTRL and then [.

I am reminded also of one time trying to write C code on an IBM AS/400, only to find that the keyboard did not have square bracket keys at all...

A lot of non-command-line developer apps use Escape though, like all Jetbrain's IDEs.

  > ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket

Technically — and here I go of on the stereotypical irrelevant nerd tangent (bind the adjectives as you will) — it's the other way around. ASCII was certainly designed with Shift and Control modifiers in mind, and arranged so that a device could have those keys merely flip a bit (see e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard>), but nothing actually mandates that those keys exist and that Control+h generate Backspace or Shift+h generate H.

I absolutely agree that Control+x ↦ x&0x3F is an established convention, and it continually annoys me that Windows and Windows-aping software violates it.

Ha, this is like "walked 5 miles in the snow uphill to school" territory.

I personally don't like the idea of losing some keys, keys are nice, my fingers can feel where they are at all times. But that said my fingers also know exactly where to go without the feedback of the keys. I do like the prospect of programming a custom touch bar for various programs, that seems kind of neat, but I would have also been fine with keeping my function keys (I mean custom bindings are what function keys are for in the first place, no?).

Awwwwww man!! You just brought back such green-CRT-tinted memories there...

How about non-US keyboard layouts? [ alone is altgr-8 on german layout.

> Bah, these entitled kids.

Yeah these entitled kids paying > $3000 for a product, they should just shut up and give money to Apple /s

This doesn't even get into the dongle problem. The simplest example is that if you want to hook up Apple's flagship phone up to their flagship laptop for development, you need a dongle. And if you want to share one of their flagship wired headphones between the two devices, you need another dongle. Therefore if you want to connect three of Apple's flagship devices together on a daily basis, you can't go anywhere without bringing at least two dongles with you.

> you need a dongle

or an USB-C to Lightning cable. Those exist. And so do any USB-C to any other USB-Plug cables.

Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now as two years from now, I'm quite sure no more peripheral will come out that has anything but USB-C.

So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C cables that will connect your devices directly to your MacBook Pro. No dongles what so ever.

USB-C is so much better than anything other USB that came before to the point where it can (and will) easily replace not only all other existing USB plugs out there, including on the device end (where there's a mess between USB-B, USB Mini and USB Micro right now) but also has the potential to replace the various ways how we currently connect screens (DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, or even VGA).

Going purely USB-C means that they could optimise as much as possible for this new connector without thinking of wasting space for a useless connector three years down the road, especially as you can convert USB-C to any other USB, but if they added an USB-A port, that would not be useful for anything but USB-A plugs.

I agree with you, but it seems they are already selling a USB-C to lightning cable.

http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK0X2AM/A/usb-c-to-lightni...

a.k.a the "lightning to thunderbolt" cable.

From Apple's site:

- USB-C to Thunderbolt 2: $49

- SanDisk SD Card USB-C Reader: $49.95

- USB-C AV Multiport Adaptor (HDMI): $69

Spend another $168 and you access to add the same ports you have now!

All those arguments were once said when the first iMac came out and all it had were USB ports. All devices will have USB-C connectors soon, and instead of getting dongles, you'll be simply replacing your cables to be USB-C versions of them all.

In the short term sure, but in the long term standardizing on usb-c is a good thing. If only they had done usb-c on the iPhone7 also.

What prevents you from connecting them using Bluetooth? I forgot when it was a last time I had to connect my iphone via cable, MacBook just always knows that it's there via Bluetooth, and for the headphone, their flagship headphones are wireless now, and I've been very happy using bose Bluetooth headphones, losing a cord is a major benefit that far outweighs any drawbacks of dongles for me

> The simplest example is that if you want to hook up Apple's flagship phone up to their flagship laptop for development, you need a dongle.

Why would you bother with a dongle when you can get a Type C — Lightning cable for the same price?

Two dongles at 49.99$ each make 99.98$ LOL xD

If I want to use it to connect to my Apple Thunderbolt Display, add another dongle.

Apple is turning into a more expensive version of Belkin

I'm really shocked about this, I mean, I had thought that they saw the future in USB-C after they previewed the MacBook.

I've had a good, satisfying run with MacBook Pros, but now I'm stepping off the Apple train. I understand that Apple is trying to go in a new direction with the new MacBook Pros, and I won't complain about it. I am now simply moving to an Arch Linux setup on an old Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 to continue living inside the Terminal.

A couple years back, I was (increasingly un)happily using Mac OS X on a MBP. I made the switch back to a Free *nix and a tiling window manager.

While it's gotten some eye-rolls from tech friends, the UX of my current system is amazing. I have an almost vanilla Xmonad configuration, combined with dmenu, and passwordstore / dmenu integration. It simply rocks.

I anticipate soon starting a new job with a firm that has more or less standardized around Apple hardware. I find myself kind of dreading going back to a Mac. I may decide to be "that guy" and ask for something like the Thinkpad Carbon X1 in lieu of the standard issue equipment.

I really feel most Linux distros were made for developers and development. Whenever I try to do things on Windows and OSX I get insanely frustrated with the amount of friction. It's nice to have an OS that trusts you and lets you make mistakes.

I'm feeling the same way. Clearly Apple doesn't care about the same things I do. The Pro is supposed to be for power users, and the touch bar to me feels like it's built for casual users(keyboard shortcuts for people who don't know keyboard shortcuts. I use almost no built in mac apps, so it's unlikely that I'll ever use it. It's just one more thing to raise the price and one more thing that can go wrong. Combined with the fact that I'd have to get a dock or a dock/monitor and things look super unappealing at this point. But they shaved off 1/2 a pound! that's better than having useful ports, right?

I'm not suggesting you do this, for legal reasons blah blah blah, but putting together a hackintosh is pretty easy these days if you really like osx.

Honest question: what's the alternative? I've got a 2013 rMBP 15 inch. What's my next machine? I'm not willing to regress on display (220 ppi or better), screen size, or battery life (8-9 hours real use). I might regress on quad core to dual core if everything else is perfect.

EDIT: The XPS 15 gets more like 5-6 hours with the high res display by my understanding. The Surface Book has the right combination of resolution and battery life, but 15.4" to 13.5" is a big step down if you're used to working with side by side windows. Is there anything out there I've overlooked?

Depends on your budget:

$2000 - A loaded Dell Precision workstation. Wait for Kaby Lake quads though. If you like the Surface Books that's an option too.

$1500 - Dell XPS.

$1200 - ASUS UX501VW. (Only one RAM slot is upgradable, though)

If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards.

All of these machines run Linux well (with an occasional driver compile). The biggest tradeoff will be the touchpad. I find the trackpads on par with my 2009 unibody White Macbook. If you prefer a mouse like I do, it wouldn't be that much of an issue. On the plus side, you can get much better specs for the price of a Mac. Xeons, lots of ECC RAM, beter displays, better battery etc etc.

I have had macbooks for years. I got sick of the really poor performance, constant spinner, etc.

Now, I have a Dell XPS running Ubuntu. It is considerably faster. Far better battery life. Far high spec. Extremely slick display.

I "defected" a few months back and I am now using a Dell XPS 15 Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz × 8 16GB Ram running Ubuntu 16.04. It is a beautiful machine, very sturdy, fast and an excellent keyboard. It is available with a 238ppi screen, but I chose 141ppi because I don't care about the extra pixels on a dev machine.

Especially for people who are tied to macOS for iOS development reasons. I guess it is time to look into Hackintoshes again.*

Apple really seems to loath their developers either through active malice or passive indifference. I've wasted too much time reverse engineering Xcode/LLDB/MobileDevice.framework to get automated iOS testing to work (no, XCTest is not adequate). Of course, once my company wanted to move from physical hardware to virtual, we were screwed again by the near total lack of virtualization products for macOS guests. VMWare ESXi seems to be the only player in town for server deployments and that still requires Apple hardware. Sure, go ahead and spend well over $3,000 on their laughable Pro/"server" products that cannot be reasonably placed in a server room. Apparently Apple hasn't heard of the whole "cloud" thing.

* But not really, I would never dream of violating the macOS EULA by running it on non-Apple hardware...

I see a lot of people choosing the XPS (including Linus).

I tried it and for those who prefer Linux it's pretty great!

Ok, I'll put in a word for the HP ZBook Studio.

You can have i7 quad-core, dual 1 TB SSD, 32 GBytes RAM (maybe more), backlit keyboard, thin(ish) form factor, and a fantastic 3840 x 2160 screen. Graphics are NVidia M1000M which is desktop class and runs CineBench 11(?) OpenGL test at 93 fps (faster than my NVidia GTX 970).

This is by FAR the nicest and thinnest portable workstation-class laptop I've ever used. It's easily carryable-around, which is more than I can say for any previous laptop such as the larger Dell Precisions, HP Elitebooks I've previously used in this class.

In particular, fast Samsung NVM SSDs and fast laptops are a match made in heaven.

I would say for a machine that is only three years old, just wait? I mean, if it's working well for you now, why are you considering upgrading?

I'm sitting here on a 2008 Mac Pro, and was hoping to move to a mobile solution. But 16GB of RAM just isn't going to cut it for the VM's and what not a run. So I guess I'll just be running this into the ground.

I think the Dell XPS15 or the HP Spectre x360 15t are both solid choices for a 15" at this point.

Why do you need a new Macbook when your machine probably does everything? The specs between a 2016 and 2013 are negligible for web browsing and programming. Unless you're doing heavy video editing or 3D rendering..

So many people upgrading notebooks when they don't need to.

Microsoft's Surface Book.

I'm testing out a strange setup that is working surprisingly well: I have a beefy desktop: 64GB RAM and 32 cores. Then I carry an Intel Compute Stick, portable laptop and mouse with me. I just plug into any HDMI monitor to do basic work, or RDP/TeamViewer into my desktop for real work. Surprising how well this is working...

Lots of discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815472

I'm looking at the Asus Zenbook line at the moment.

I also have a late 2014 macbook, and it's been a really great workhorse. I won't buy this new one though, and am considering the XPS.

You immediately lost any credibility when you complained that the 2.4 GHz processor is the "same" as the one back in 2010. Clock rate has nothing to do with performance these days. Skylake is 25-35% faster across the board (and multiples faster for number crunching) than whatever Nehalem or Core2 was in the Macbooks in 2010.

Actually, according to a few cobbled together Anandtech pieces, I think the IPC improvement may be closer to the 80-90% range.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700...

I get though that it doesn't feel like Moore's Law type growth for system speed though, which is perhaps what people are hoping for. I have a hard time imagining that the 2016 model feels 16x as fast as the 2010 model.

I've got a 2010 MBP with an SSD, and it feels pretty much the same as my 2013 with an SDD, and expect this 2016 one to feel roughly about the same for most tasks (35% isn't a difference I'll notice for most tasks)

25% faster is still a joke. I want 100%!

There's room for debate about the new Macbook Pro, but this post is bad.

#1 - The touch bar is dynamic and contextual. It's likely that you can enable the traditional ESC/Fx row when you're using Terminal, your editor, etc. It's extremely unlikely that the ESC key is gone forever, given that existing software relies on it.

#2 - RAM is a valid point, but this part is wrong/dishonest: "The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well... nope." The 13" MBP now has a 2.9 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, upgradable to 3.3 GHz. The 15" MBP now has a 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7.

#3 - So there are four negative snarky people on Twitter. Not a surprise. And they're just repeating issues #1 and #2.

This is a garbage post. A much better critical article is linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817332

Dramatic click bait IMO. You could really hack that touchbar to do some great productivity enhancements.

Yeah, I don't understand all the outrage over the touchbar. It changes depending on your application. So can't you setup VIM so the touchbar displays a "normal" or "classic layout", which would display all the keys that the previous model had? I am far more disappointed in the elimination of magsafe and only having USB C ports.

Can you hack in tactile feedback so I don't have to look down at my hands like a toddler to use it?

Maybe you could enlighten me to some of the possibilities. Besides a slider, I'm not really seeing much productivity enhancements that functions keys cannot do.

Nothing you can't already do. It's just buttons with pretty graphics on them. If you want buttons to do "great productivity enhancements" the tech has been available for that on Macs for over a decade. Possibly decades plural; the Mac has had an active extension community for a long time, let alone the official stuff from Apple like AppleTalk, however flawed it may have been.

And there isn't much you can do with the pretty graphics on the buttons that you couldn't already do with pretty graphics on the screen, especially in an era of touchscreens. The whole touchbar strikes me as a demo-feature; demos great, in practice, not especially useful.

Just need the 'Macbook Is DEAD' style articles...

I think people are going to hate it... and then try it... and then start to like it.

No the 16gig thing is real. It's a travesty that 32GB is not an option.

I was waiting for the new Macbook Pros as I need to buy a new laptop, and was going to give my old Macbook Pro (2014 model) to my wife. But given that they have nothing of value (I don't care about gimmicks like the new touch bar), I've decided to abandon Mac and go back to Linux.

I'm just a typical web developer, running a bunch of virtual machines, and an IDE. Any recommendations? I saw the Dell XPS 15 for around £1,300: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B018FSX9GA/

Any others? I'm not a Linux diehard, so I'd probably go with Ubuntu.

The XPS machines (both the 13 and the 15) are excellent. I haven't found anything else that compares across the board.

I have heard good things about https://system76.com/

I really like the XPS 15 and use it as my dev machine. I would consider the 141ppi screen. It is excellent value and works well with all existing apps.

I'm curious, what is driving the need for a new laptop from a 2014 version?

Good luck with HiDPI. It is very application dependent, so I would check what you typically use. From what I have tried and read, macOS handles HiDPI and multi-monitors much better than any other OS out there right now.

I'm so used to HiDPI just working on my MBP that I never even realized it was an issue on the other OSes until I started thinking about switching.

I would also recommend Lenovo Thinkpads, which are quite popular with Linux folks. The X and T in particular give a lot of bang for your buck. I am also eying Thinkpad 13 as a great beater machine replacement for my aging x230.

I like this price :)

As a developer and an Apple user for last decade, this has certainly been the most disappointing Keynote I've ever seen from Apple. I do think, however, some of these concerns are overblown.

If you're a VIM user and haven't tried overriding the Caps Lock key to be an Esc key, you should give it a try, it has made VIM a much better experience for many people.

On the memory side, doing development work I can hardly think of a time when 16GB was limiting on the RAM side, and I hardly notice the performance hit when using swap on the incredibly fast SSD.

And the processors have definitely improved, I'm currently running a 15" MBP Late 2013 at 2.0GHz. The new base models are starting on newer architecture at 2.7GHz.

Having said that, I'm still not sure whether I'm going to be upgrading any time soon...

The problem is that as soon as you need a VM (and doing any web development typically needs one to test IE/edge with), you're pushing your RAM limits.

> On the memory side, doing development work I can hardly think of a time when 16GB was limiting on the RAM side

I can, but then we're probably developing different things in different ways.

To be honest, the only thing that's causing me to say it's not a "developer machine" is the keyboard. It features the same butterfly switches that the 12" MacBook has and my good are they horrible. I seriously can't imagine writing long sessions of code with this mushy keyboard.

I don't get it. With the new touch bar and stereo speakers they WANT us to use the MacBook as is, without external keyboard and then they give us these dreadful switches that almost feel like you're pressing a sheet of paper.

I understand that for the 12" MacBook they wanted a machine as thin as possible and the keyboard was too thick. But why oh why ok the pro lineup.

I actually REALLY really liked the type feeling of MacBook keyboards

The new MacBook Pro uses version 2 of the butterfly keyboard. Not the same one as 12" MacBook. Verdict is still out how much is the improvement.

I'm no Apple fanboy nor apologist, but this sentiment is everywhere and overtly dramatic. They continue to provide a 13" model with function keys as an alternative. If that machine isn't fast enough you probably aren't a "developer" anyways. Also, I rarely use the keyboard on my mac because I use it on a stand with an additional monitor. If you want to complain about the new Mac, complain about price or the fact that the touch bar is unusable in an ergonomic setting, just don't act like you can't still use VIM.

I concur. I have a problem with the (European) price hike and the RAM cap, for the rest it's not going to be worse for me at all.

I really only used the volume keys and esc keys really and once in a blue Monday the brightness controls. The On / Off switch will be replace by the TouchID input I assume.

I'm really not sure what I even had to expect more from this update than what I've got.

Sadly this seems to be the same old pile-on that happens after every apple product announcement:

> #1. No Escape and function keys [...] The Escape and Function keys on the laptops have been abandoned in favor of a touch bar that changed depending on the application that is being used.

They went out of their way to display the escape key and many other contextual keys with Terminal.app in the foreground† They did this despite it being possibly the least "sexy" demonstration of the hardware. This article seems to have been written after skimming some reporting on the keynote without researching the specifics.

† http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...

yea because a soft key in a different location is the same as a tactile key where it has always been.

> This isn’t to say that the touch bar is an inherently bad idea. You could locate it on top of the Esc and function keys instead of eliminating them entirely! Something like this: <image>

Not that there aren't worthy talking points in this article, but it's really annoying when a blogger has the arrogance to photoshop some keyboard image together and proclaim it's a better design than what a gigantic company carefully came up with.

Apple has its own reasons for doing things and they aren't going to please everybody, but does this Alexey Semeney fellow actually think Apple didn't consider all the possibilities before removing a whole bunch of keys from the keyboard? Apple might be a lot of things, but careless is not usually one of them.

Although people place a lot of trust in Apple, I think the proverb of "trust but verify" applies here. We shouldn't just take it on faith that Apple has made the correct choice.

It's funny they bring up devs using vim, because the only vim key they removed is Esc, which a lot of vim devs remaps to caps-lock or similar anyways.

I almost never use the F keys, so if they kept the Esc key but removed the rest it would be perfect :)

I don't know anyone who remaps capslock to esc. It just sounds like something that is fun to say on hackernews. You didn't even say you use it, you said a lot of vim devs do, to which i would counter--they dont.

The better choice is remapping capslock to ctrl.

Yeah, I'm totally baffled as to who productively uses VIM and reaches waaaay up there with their pinky. In the first 10 minutes of learning I was googling "mac remap caps lock escape", and I haven't touched the actual escape key in years.

Agreed! The old laptop had a bad placement for ESC anyway — major stretch!

I suspect that any devs picky enough about their typing that this would prevent them from buying this laptop are using alternate keyboards anyhow.

Agreed, I remapped it in vim 1 year into learning it because my pinky was starting to hurt.

Lenovo introduced a Touch Bar (Adaptive Keyboard strip) in the Thinkpad X1 Carbon in 2014. It flopped so hard that Lenovo pulled it and reinstituted a normal function row in the 2015 refresh.

Why does Apple get a pass? No physical keys means not being able to find functionality by touch alone means no muscle memory means no productivity. This isn't a hypothesis, this is a proven market reaction to Lenovo's design choices.

I ran Xubuntu on one of the 2014 X1 Carbons and can confirm the adaptive keyboard strip is terrible. It worked but was clumsy at best. I just upgraded to the t460s with 24G RAM and proper function and escape keys. Great light weight Linux laptop.

I assume Apple is trying their usual model of duplicating failed projects later, and with better design.

I'm not sure it will work here - the lack of physical feedback is inherent to the design - but they don't shy away from reviving other people's failures. Better layout and contextual buttons will help, although I doubt they'll make me happy with the system. I still remember having an old Acer with a touch bar - some lunatic put a "disable wifi" setting on the thing, and then cranked the sensitivity way too high.

> Why does Apple get a pass?

Do you remember trackpads before Apple got them right?

Currently every time I open iTerm, I need to change directory into my project, spin up my virtual env, and then initialize some stuff within my virtualenv.

Now I can map those commands to icons in the toolbar, rather than having to page through the history command each time. How is that not a huge improvement for developers? Any time you can replace a command or alias with a visual icon that's a significant reduction in cognitive overhead.

While the fact that you can only get 16 gigs of RAM is annoying, the fact that the SSD is 50% faster at least ameliorates this somewhat. And the fact that there are seemingly several low hanging fruit things that Apple can make to improve the product, while annoying to people like me who needed to purchase one of these today, at least shows that they will probably continue to make improvements to the lineup.

> Now I can map those commands to icons in the toolbar, rather than having to page through the history command each time.

Why not just create a bash function? Call it setupproj1, write the commands you need in a function ~/.bash_profile, export the function and that's it!

It's worth noting that only the higher-end of the new MBP's have the Touch Bar. The lower end still has a traditional function row:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-...

So I suppose in theory if you wanted something new but without breaking your workflow, you could just go for that one.

Note that that is only the very base 13" model. You can't get the 15" without the Touch Bar.

Yeah buying a new product which is more expensive than last year's and with worse specs.

The frustrating thing is that machine only has 2 USB ports, rather than 4. So one port for power and another for a single wired accessory. I guess buying a dongle isn't a huge deal, but kind of frustrating that you'd have to spend more money for what I would expect to be included functionality for a "pro" machine.

Any idea why it only has 2 USB ports? Seems like an intentional crippling.

I had to scroll pretty far down the page to get to comments that weren't about the escape and function keys and vim. It's the other stuff that really matters. In 2007 and 08 when Jobs was alive there was absolutely no question that MBPs were the absolute best laptops in the world. There were maybe a few huge gamer laptops with faster specs, but nothing had excellent specs in such a small and well build package. This is no longer the case.

If I were NVidia I'd be making a very big deal that not even the initial development of that cool new depth of field stuff on iPhone 7 could be done on any Apple computer.

Another major point is that this thread says apple is leaving developers behind. Sure it might only be leaving VR, gaming, and AI developers behind, but wait, where is the industry going?

More fuel for the fire. Apple proudly claims they have the biggest gaming platform in the world with iPhone. They just lucked into it. They never purposefully set out to make a gaming platform. But now that they have it they should own it. Imagine how thrilled the world would have been if Cook had stood on stage and said something like "and now for the first time ever because of this amazing new GPU, you can play your favorite games on your Macbook Pro on ultra at 60 frames per second." It would have blown the doors off Apple stock. Macbook Pro is about PRO users not about executives that need 13 hours of battery life to give Keynote presentations. People would have been completely happy with even a little increase in width and weight and decrease in battery life for the sake of a major performance upgrade in memory and GPU.

> The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope.

I find it very hard to believe that these processors perform on the same level as the ones in 2010. Equal cores / GHz does not mean equal performance.

Agreed. Not only is there no option less than 2.9 GHz on the touch bar Macbook Pro, but I'm also not sure how a developer could equate a Core2 Duo with a Skylake core i5/i7.

This article is terrible. I am not pleased with the new MBP models but the reasoning in this article is beyond stupid.

1. No Esc and Function keys? They are available and I'd wager you can change the settings on the touch bar to make them available. They demo'd the customizability of the bar. I'm not keen on the bar but it's not because it takes away options, it's because it's unnecessary complexity and will encourage bad application design.

2. No RAM improvements? The RAM is faster. The included RAM has increased. This is just factually wrong.

3. Judging CPUs on clock speed? What is this 1995? Clock speeds have been constant for a decade. The performance still increase and the power consumption improves as well. Come on.

I'm bent out of shape about the new MacBooks because they've gotten rid of one of my top 3 reasons for choosing MBPs for the last 10 years; MagSafe. MagSafe has saved my laptops dozens of times, literally. Removing it means that if I got one of these new machines I would never be able to use it plugged in on my couch. I'd be putting it at too much risk. It means any time you have it plugged in you have to be super conscious of where your power cord is and who's walking by it. They got rid of it I assume just to save a few mm's of thickness?

On top of that the TouchBar is a gimmicky feature I'd never ask for and have no use for. So much of my work is web based and cannot (as far as I know) take advantage of it. It adds tons of unnecessary complexity. Plus I'm sure it doesn't do any favors for battery life.

My rMBP is four years old and for the first time in a decade I'm finding myself not excited to upgrade. The addition of TouchID is nice. The loss of MagSafe and addition of the TouchBar are terrible decisions by Apple and make me question if they know what they're doing.

What they could have done (one or more):

1) Bezel-less display

2) Full Touch screen

3) Detachable Screen - IPad Pro +

4) Stylus input (from Apple Pencil)

5) 15-20 hr battery life

6) NVidia Graphics

7) 64 Gb Ram option

8) Kept the HDMI & SDXC port

What they did do:

1) Gimmicky Touch bar - Useless when you close the MBP & Dock; Hard to do for touch typists

2) Hiked the prices by crazy margins

3) Pegged the RAM at 16 Gb Max

4) Battery is not much better

5) All in on USB-C - Get ready for Dongle-o-rama

Feels like a pure greedy money grab with nothing to justify it. Steve must be spinning in his grave.

Please -- no touchscreen, not on a laptop. It seems very uncomfortable; it smudges the screen, which I cannot stand; and if there is a touchscreen then apps will start exploiting it, making it more and more difficult to not actually touch the screen.

> What they did do:

Not really surprised by any of it except number 3.

I think there are some technological limitations behind the 16GB maximum RAM configuration. The highest-density DDR3 DRAM packages I could find that run at the rated speed are 8 gigabits, which means 16 chips are required on the board. There probably just isn't enough room there for 16 more chips.

16-gigabit packages are slowly arriving on the market, but I imagine it'll be a couple more years before they're available at the right speed and sufficient quality/quantity to include in a future MBP model.

Correction: It's a CPU limitation when used with LPDDR3 modules. See http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/7th-g... (See section 2.1.1.3, "LPDDR3 supported memory devices")

They could use ddr4, cpu supports it

> #1. No Escape and function keys

The new MacBook Pro has Escape and function keys. You just need to summon them now if you want them. Phil Schiller even showed this in the demo!

Also, context aware actions are much more useful. You saw that they even included a whole set for developers (and XCode) right? And you can bet other tools will soon follow.

> #2 Power. Almost no improvement for RAM and a processor

That it doesnt have a new CPU is not Apple's fault. It's Intels. Apple wants their professional equipment to have at least a quadcore processor. The latest generation Intel processors, Kaby Lake, currently only has dual core processors available which is a absolute disaster for people who actually need fast multicore processing. So because of this they used a Skylake quadcore. Which IMO isnt a disaster since it is still the fastest quadcore x86 CPU architecture out there.

Regarding RAM I think 16 Gigs is more than enough for any purpose.

There might be some useful things in the Xcode set, but anything that can't be done with a shortcut already? I find Cmd+<key> far easier to hit than reaching up to the F-keys. I imagine more-so if that action now has no tactility.

Honestly, the only thing I will miss is the escape button but that was misplaced on the keyboard anyways. 10.12.1 added support for making caps lock into an escape key and that's if anything an improvement over where escape was before.

I agree that caps lock is an improvement over escape's location. But, if you're like me, you also find it to be an improvement over control's location so you have caps lock mapped to that already so rebinding esc to caps lock is not an option.

For ages I've had ~ remapped to escape (if no modifiers pressed so tilde still works as expected, and caps to ctrl) so the missing ESC isn't a big deal, although I did have it remapped for `

Anyone looking for extremely fine grain keymap control (with a UI that far surpasses any kind of keyboard remapping I've tried doing in Linux) should look up karabiner.

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner

but where will i put the ctrl key then :(

in all seriousness, switching the ctrl - caps lock keys was probably the best layout improving decisions i've ever made. highly recommending it for ergonomic and health reasons.

I use caps lock as control.

I wouldn't really blame Apple for not coming up with faster CPU. Things have changed and the times when you got the double speed every few years are over. And I don't know if it is actually a bad thing. This means your hardware does not get old so fast and there's less reasons to update every two years.

The article also claims that you can get comparable hardware from any other vendor for for $1.5k. I wish this was true. Unfortunately it is not at all easy to find good alternatives for Macbook Pro. Even if you don't put limit on the budget. Especially when you limit the search for quad core CPUs, there's not that much choice (HP ZBook, Dell XPS, Lenovo T460P or P50). And then you are still stuck with Windows or can you get one of those with Linux pre-installed and supported?

I am a developer and I have a mechanical keyboard hooked up to the rig, so I seldom use the mac keyboard anyway. My main complaint would be the hardware doesn't seem to get better. The USB-C ports I do see them coming, but given my 2014 MBP is still running strong, I will hold on to upgrade for a little longer.

Nah, I am completely out from Linux around 5 years ago. Had spent my fair share of time and effort (~10years) using Linux, solving some corner cases that hit me along the way. To me, using Linux is just like driving on a highway with sink holes sprinkled along, the ride will be gay and smooth _until_ you hit those holes. Either you fix those yourself (It is open-source remember!?) or hope for some kind souls to help out.

Thanks but thanks...

Isn't that image with the red 'ESC' and 'F1' text not an official Apple image but an image that was made by speculating Apple fans during the lead up to the official product launch? It seems dishonest and manipulative to use that image to make the point that Apple has completely eliminated the escape key. Official Apple images might have featured the touch escape key in that position on the touch bar, weakening the author's argument. Even though I'm also not a fan of the latest Macbooks, it's dumb to stretch the truth to make your point.

It's not just the function and escape keys.

- The rollout of USBC has been a mess. Apparently you now need to purchase a separate cable to connect your iphone to the new MBP.

- I haven't tried the new keyboard, but from what I've read, it is less like the old MBP keyboard, which was quite good, and more like the awful MacBook keyboard.

- The generally horrible design of their major desktop apps.

- The disaster that is Apple's cloud strategy. Too many ids, too difficult to know what is physically where and how to get it where you want.

I haven't yet played with the new MBP, but I am seriously wondering whether my current MBP is my last one.

Strange arguments in threads about new MBP. It is well known much more powerful laptop computers are available to developers for many many years. It is the nice combination of weight/size/screen/touchpad and Unix like OS all in one package that made people look beyond relative shortcomings. Individually none of the feature may be best but all above average together in one machine is not so common.

Advanced users might very well buy an objectively better computer than Apple's if they so wish. People are reacting as if Apple mandated touch bar in all computers in market.

All Lenovo would need to do is start supporting Unbuntu on their ThinkPad line and Apple would be in big trouble overnight. With then Thinkpads they are doing the opposite, locking Linux users out instead!

Totally agree with you. Ubuntu needs to have a mainstream manufacturer to go big. MBP is perfect so far because of the combo of UNIX and Office products and support for various softwares.

Everybody is talking about the ESC key but I think the function keys are even worse. My editor has tons of fn key bindings and I touch type them without looking down many times a day. You can imagine being able to touch type a virtual ESC key since it would hopefully be at the far edge of the strip, but for fn you'll have to look down every time.

Let's face it, the bean counters at Apple only care about the iPhone. They've put their b teams to work on the Macs. And the engineers at Apple that actually have to use the laptops obviously have no say.

I'd like to see stats on how my VIM users actually still use the ESC key. Most (including me) have mapped this to Caps-lock a long time ago because the Esc key for a long time has not been in the same place on any keyboard as it was when VIM was originally created.

There sure are some to be found - I personally find it too hard to override my habit of reaching for the upper left corner for esc. And believe me, I tried the caps-lock as esc key, but I kept hitting either shift or tab as well... Might just be a matter of practice though. Currently my caps-lock key is still remapped to esc since accidentially hitting caps lock is the worst.

If you don't have the data, you have no position saying most vim users do anything. There is no reasonable way to assume that most users of any software make the same configuration changes away from default.

Fn keys are heavily used in Intellij and Eclipse. Basically, that OLED strip is a "no go" for me. I'm trying to decide between buying Dell XPS 13 right away or waiting for XPS 15 refresh. Any other suggestions are welcomed.

This setup certainly makes IDEs cry. That said, I'm willing to wait a revision or two of IntelliJ to see what they come out with while I enjoy the use of my 2014 MBP.

If you're considering purchasing a currently available computer, what about the current 15" MPB?

Who is buying these new MacBook Pro's? Serious where the heck do the guys in Apples Mac division see the market?

- Developers? Not excited. Disk speed better that is relevant. CPU less so. But ESC and RAM not acceptable if anyone is looking into a machine to last 3 years.

- Gamers? PCs offer a better price / performance relationship.

- Personal users? Win10 vs. OSX has advanced a lot compared to Win XP vs OSX. Secure enclave to make Apple Pay purchases? With what money after buying the laptop?

- Managers? At this price point? Maybe the show-off kind in the C suite.

- Employees? It would make sense as it is cheaper to support but at this price penetration into the enterprise - which is all the Apple/IBM relationship is about has no chance.

One of the challenges running businesses that are in different markets where one has a different market position is dealing with the very different margins. Laptops everywhere else except in Apple land are low margin. IOS is high margin but it is in an exceptional position. Pretending that Macs are in the same is foolish.

Missteps can happen. I'm sure it will show in sales. Let's just hope they are able to adjust course quickly enough.

While the RAM complaints are valid, I don't know anyone who actually uses their laptop keyboard for serious development. Almost all of these laptops spend 90% of their time docked somewhere with a real keyboard hooked up.

So the touch bar is useless in 90% of the time.

The plural of anecdote is not data. I know many people who do use their laptop keyboard, myself included.

> The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope.

I feel the OP's disappointment but oh my.. does he really do not understand that cpu's clock speed is not the main comparing factor between processors?

It's like saying he will not buy a car with 2.0L engine, because they were making such capacity engines 50years ago

I have to say, this feels like a lazy hype-train post. Everyone is complaining about the lack of the esc key, but I'm sure it won't be so bad. It does depend somewhat on how integrations work with the bar. I could imagine hopping between files and functions in your IDE using the bar. And surely you would be able to map the section where esc was to esc?

I've bought every single MBP since 2007, when I switched over from Windows to focus on iOS. This may be the first one I skip. Not sure.

PRO: My muscle memory is solidly in the MacOS+Xcode camp. Switching from ctrl key to command key for basic operations resulted in my RSI injury going away. Why? My guess: because the thumb is now the pivot point for commands, instead of the pinky. As a result, my hands splay inwards instead of outwards. Back during my MS-Win days, the solution was to get a split keyboard for the desktop. No longer need that.

CON: The main problem a dynamic set of keys is that you have to look at them. Each eye saccade wastes 200 milliseconds. I also assign app shortcuts with cmd-option-fn and use divvy + cmd-option-fn to assign reorganize window placement.

Plus, I wanna play with ML using CUDA. Am missing the Nvidia GPU that came with my 2013 MBP.

There is a MacBook with escape and functions keys still available. So the choice is still there.

Personally I think the touch bar could be great for programmers so I'm gonna take that.

Sure, the specs of this choice shouldn't be called Pro any more I guess.

I don't understand the lack of escape/function keys argument. Isn't the touch bar powered by software? Can't you put whatever keys you want there? It's sounding to me like the argument from people who were opposed to a touchscreen mobile keyboard.

I get it may not be the laptop for the developer who wrote the article, but I see no big issue with the new Macbook Pro.

I want a well-built laptop with a decent Unix-like OS, long battery life and a good screen and keyboard for when I'm not on my desk. When I'm on my desk, which is most of the time, I have a big screen and a keyboard attached. If I really cared about portability, I probably could get by with a MacBook.

TB3 promises a single cable to connect the screen, keyboard and power. I like that (I currently connect 2). Will I need to get a new monitor? Yes. It happens every couple years anyway. I once had a wonderful Intergraph CRT that could go all the way up to 2048x1536 and I miss it, but things change and we eventually move on.

I'm sure the Touch Bar can be integrated with MacVim or VS Code etc to show keys that just look like regular Fn keys - that's not the problem developers would be irked of - it's just another thing to hack.

Really problematic however is that the 15" starts at $2399, is still capped at 16GB soldered RAM, the port situation isn't convenient (esp if you've an iPhone), the obsession with thinness continues at the expense of battery life and if you had to ding the Touch Bar it feels gimmicky.

There are much better games in PC town - don't even need to run Linux if you're not into it - Windows 10 is pretty good and with Ubuntu/bash built in, install a X server you're good to go.

People (especially long time Apple users) really underestimate how nice Windows + Cygwin (or bash, etc) can be, on really powerful laptops, at much nicer price points.

What a terrible article. It compares how the processor speed has remained the same from 2008 without mentioning the architectural changes.

There are reasons why I think the new macbook is less suited for developers, but not these reasons. This article is entirely misleading.

Since the article doesn't even mention that the escape functionality is still there (although it's no longer a physical key but a touch button), I'm going to assume that its only source is jokes on twitter.

Did you see how they had to peck type on the Touch Bar in the demo? How is this an improvement for me?

Do you remember "Human Interface"?

Moving to touch-screen for thing that need to be tactile is a betrayal of the ergonomics of a laptop. Is as demand the use of a mouse in a iPad. Is not what the machine is.

I think the touch pad is a nice gimmick, and maybe, could be get some useful applications. But the removal of the Esc + F-Keys break a lot of the workflows. This is also the trend of make keyboards worse and worse with each iteration.

Is ironic that people demand good touch pad and complain when is bad, but think is ok when the keyboards get worse.

I'm on mobile so not sure if anyone else has pointed this out but Apple mentioned in the keynote that the escape key is still present when using the terminal. There is also a way to bring up the full row of function keys.

Personally I think this is the great advantage of the touch bar. The only app that I personally use the Esc key in has it available, but all other apps use the space for more appropriate shortcuts. Plus it can be customised too (finally I can add a screenshot button!), although not per app yet, as far as I can tell.

Do we really need 10 blog posts basically saying the same thing with extremely low effort on the frontpage?

The people who disagree with the post are ignoring the argument because it may not apply to their specific circumstance. It is a real setback to those of us who rely on those keys (features, really) but more worryingly a design direction that offers a net decrease in usability.

All MacBooks already have a touch surface that currently performs the functions shown in the touch bar demo. While I can see the appeal of some scenarios where it accelerates what might otherwise require lengthy finger travel on the touchpad, that doesn't come anywhere close to offsetting the loss of the function keys.

Virtually all of the MacBooks we buy we set up with Parallels or Fusion, and the F keys are absolutely necessary for Windows functionality. Having to break concentration to look at where the keys are, or their state, is a profound productivity drag.

Doubt that I'm right? Use an iPad instead of your physical keyboard for a week and let us know the results.

On a sidebar this reminds me a lot of the move to touch screens in cars, and the resulting challenges. Touch surfaces are great but not the answer to everything.

The Esc key is annoying but not a big deal for me. What I am worried about is the new butterfly switches. I have used a MacBook with butterfly switches quite a bit and it is not a nice writing experience. It feels like I am using a Blackberry or old Nokia phone.

With Bash on Ubuntu on Windows I think my next machine will be a Dell XPS 15 or ThinkPad T560. Probably the Dell as it comes with a quad-core for like £50 more. Plus a nicer screen (according to reviews).

This seems like a combination of trolling for page-views and begging the question of whether your personal tastes are universally shared.

Nobody has even used the touch bar yet so we don't know how well the escape + function key mode works for the average developer, or how often the wins of other features (e.g. the dedicated “man page” button shown in the screenshots, the kinds of context-sensitive things something like a debugger, browser dev tools, etc. could do, etc.) would balance out the lost of a physical key.

There's a small mistake in assuming that the quad-core 2.4GHz processor you got in 2010 is exactly the same as the 2016 Skylake version, and I think that masks a much larger question: how many people actually need more CPU or even RAM? Some developers definitely do – if you're working with a 20GB model, there's no alternative – but a large number don't.

For me, most of my development laptop hardware requirements plateaued somewhere around the MacBook Air somewhere around the 2010-12 range because this thing called the cloud happened and most of the work which can't be done on a small laptop with an SSD also isn't a good fit for a slightly larger laptop. Everything else I'd look for are different areas like screen size.

Why Apple doesn't offer swappable RAM any more, the disks in a weird format instead of SATA, glued batteries, ... is all about one thing: making more money.

See, I have a Fall 2011 MBP. Its battery still sports 3-4h usage, and it's rare that I max out the 16GB RAM. I have virtually no reason to upgrade.

Now, with one of the new(ish) MBPs: Want to upgrade the RAM because you thought "oh, 8GB will be sufficient"? Straight outta luck. Want to upgrade the disk because 512GB SSD isn't big enough? Straight outta luck (because it's likely to be expensive as hell compared to an ordinary mass market Samsung 850 SSD). Want to replace the battery in 4 years? Quite likely going to be impossible. Anything broken (scratched/smashed screen, broken touchpad, worn out keyboard)? Have fun spending $$$$ in the Apple Store because it's a PITA to replace anything.

Except for the disk, if you want to upgrade anything you MUST shell out serious amounts of cash for a new mac.

That you'll need to part with even more cash in order to use basic interfaces (Ethernet, SD cards, Firewire to just name a few) sucks even more - and dongles are far more likely to just break, e.g. if your laptop gets fallen from your desk by a playful cat...

The new TouchBar is fully defeatable and can behave exactly like an old school fn key row.

This post is totally devoid of substance and should actually be flagged.

No tactile feedback means no go for many people for obvious reasons.

This sort of surface-y anger makes the rounds every time apple does _anything_ to their hardware.

I'm always confused by the interface outrage from hard core devs around new laptops. As a dev, I spend the absolute minimum time possible developing by interfacing with my MacBook itself. 98% of the time I'm plugged into a mechanical keyboard, giant monitors, and a real sound system. My MacBook sits to the side and only gets touched when I'm on an airplane or a meeting.

I was thinking the same, and I realized the answer is simple: it is not "hard core devs".

Who cares so much about 6+ hours of battery life, if most of the time you are just at your workplace - whether at the office or at home? People whose workplace is at neither of those, and instead they work in some damn coffee shop.

So use an editor that supports a modern UI, like Sublime Text or Atom, and not something originally designed for an ADM-3A terminal.

I'm sorry, what constitutes a modern UI? And what do ST or Atom do that hasn't existed for decades in one form or another?

Good luck using Sublime or atom over SSH.

Or use Emacs? ESC is bound by default to Meta, which is otherwise available on both sides of the space bar by hitting option/alt.

I like terminal editors because they're easier to use in a distributed computing environment, furthermore, you're almost certainly going to able to run vim no matter what the hardware looks like and you /really/ can't say the same thing about some of these others (especially if they need some weird HID like the touch bar).

Applications that have terminal UIs tend to be significantly more well behaved than those that don't, this isn't always the case it's just a trend I've noticed.

What about when you ssh into a server?

or bind CapsLock to Esc

Wow, guys... We are all developers, but most of us work for companies. So next time your boss asks you : "What do you want as your primary machine?" I bet you will reply : "Latest MacBook Pro".

That simply sums it up. There's no better alternative at this point. You can't reply "I want a Thinkpad and make it Hackintosh" or smth.

I'm not a fan of the bar, but I'd really like mechanical keys with individual oled screens on the fn row.

I'm thinking about getting a Surface Book for my next laptop, since I've been spending a lot of time on Parallels using Visual Studio.

My only concern is the tracking pad. Is it possible to replicate the 3 and 4 finger gestures using the Surface Book trackpad? I don't think I can live without swiping to move between desktops.

Surprisingly for myself I'm going to write a comment defending Apple somewhat.

First specs - are we real tech people, or ignorant crowd? RAM is not only the amount of it. Previous MacBooks had 1066MHz memories, current one 1866MHz/2133MHz. And CPU power is not only the frequency. I have upgraded my desktop from 5 year old i7 to new i7. Both have similar frequencies and number of cores, but new one supports faster buses (like memory) and is in fact noticeably faster!

I am a big Vim/Neovim/Spacemacs user and I have CapsLock mapped to Esc. And you should do to, before you develop problems with your hands.

Now, would I buy new MacBook Pro? Hell no. I didn't back then, and I won't now. I'll keep my Linux box. And that touch bar is silly. But all these crying is so silly, and I think mostly motivated by trying to attract audience on your blogs and get some publicity.

Mixed feelings about this. Everyone says: "if you dont like MBP there are dozens of options in these brands" etc. That leaves you basically: Linux or Windows.

If you are a 100% developer, Linux is obviously the option to go. But if you happen to be a hybrid and use some kind of design graphic tools, such as anything from Adobe, then you are forced to stay with Windows.

The new Surface Book looks awesome, but its running Windows 10! 16GB of ram means nothing under window. The whole system itself needs those 16GB and eventually it becomes a dinosaur that will expand itself and use the 1TB of space you put in there.

Want it or not, so many people are still forced to stay with Apple for those reasons, and they know it. They can literally do whatever they want and these people will have to keep using MBP.

Aside from cost, is there any reasonable technical reason to not have 32/64GB options available? My desktop in 2000 had 2GB of ram, and I'm shocked that 16 years later my laptop maxes at 16GB. I remember in 2009 building a server with 32GB and the memory was only a few hundred for decent ECC RAM.

Linux/Mac/Vim/Emacs user here. Every ui/hardware update yields wave of discontent. People will always complain if they have to change their habits. Alexey don't tell me that you cannot live without these keys :) Re. unchanged performance - 95% of us don't need more.

I'm a long time vim user, and i have the following in my .vimrc:

    nnoremap <F2> T
    nnoremap <F3> t
    nnoremap <F4> set invnumber<CR>
    nnoremap <F5> N<CR>
    nnoremap <F6> n<CR>

So you think i'd be annoyed about the culling of the Esc and function keys? Not really, mac keyboards are terrible for typing IMO/IME so i always have an external one hooked up.

The lack of decent updates to the RAM and CPU bug me more given the price increase. Here i am running 5 VMs so that's sucking up almost 1/2 of my 16GB of RAM. Chrome is eating a good chunk of the rest and i don't have many long lived tabs.

And at home i have over 500GB of photos alone so would like a machine that doesn't have a tiny storage option as the default config. But alas...

Apple has been backing away from power users for years. Ever since they removed dual monitor full screen, imo. My MacBooks don't have Mac OS on them and I'm never buying another one. The premium price used to get you the best product... now it's an accessory.

I'm a developer with a 2-year-old macbook pro right now, and while I'm not going to run out and buy a brand new one right now, I wouldn't have a problem with the new ones if it were time to upgrade today. I'd have to replace my thunderbolt 2 dock with a thunderbolt 3 one (or maybe just a dongle?), and I'd probably want at least one USB-A dongle, but meh... it doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

I rarely use the function keys, and aside from exiting full-screen youtube videos, I don't use escape all that often either. I can imagine I'd use the new touch bar at least as much as I use that current row of buttons.

I do think it's funny that Macbooks are now standardized on USB-C + headphones, while iPhones aren't.

My understanding is that the escape key is there by default but the active application can choose to override it. I don't need the escape while I'm using Spotify.

I quite like the new Macbooks. Would have been nice to have a 32GB RAM option but I can survive with 16GB to be honest.

Sure I would like Apple just have kept the keyboard as is, and not having the ESC key is going to take some getting used to, but even as a Vim user it's a solvable problem.

Depending on your workflow and platform choices, you don't even need to upgrade your Macbook Pro, the last to generation are perfectly fine for a very large number of people.

Scott Hanselmans comment that not having a ESC key for Vim is messing with Apple core audience the just plain stupid. The VAST majority of Apple MacBook Pro customer aren't installing Vim.

Only having USB-C connectors seems like pushing it in terms of how fast you can expect users to adapt and it's going to be an adaptor hell for a year or two.

Looks like an entire generation of javascript devs is going to have to learn how to do ^[

Just curious: how many folks can accurately touch-type the Fn-keys? Personally they're too far away from the home row for me to hit accurately, but maybe that's because I use too many different keyboards and they're all slightly different with spacing. The esc key is easy with it being located in the corner, though.

So in my case, I would already look down to hit an F-key, and I imagine functionality such as "compile" would now be represented by a touch button. So no problem there. And point #2 is just ridiculous -- today's MacBook CPUs and Memory are faster and consume less power than they did 6 years ago.

Touch typing or not, I think you are missing an important point here with regard to programming - tactile feedback. Doubly so with anyone that uses mechanical keyboards like me.

For example, you may not know where the "f8" key is on your keyboard, but once you look down and locate it, you won't have trouble repeatedly pressing it, accurately, with velocity. A good example of where and why this pattern happens is debugging. A lot of IDEs and editors are setup by default to use f-keys for debug or other ancillary functions like build, specific menus, etc. I believe IntelliJ and Visual Studio in at least a few default setups and versions did this.

More specifically, I can't imagine pressing a touch button possibly dozens of times, sometimes rapidly to advance through a bunch of break points, set new break points, eval things, etc. It is true you could just map these to other keys, but that becomes an issue with anything that is using default key maps for functions as I describe. Additionally, touch buttons promote people to start using more and more keyboard chords as they start shuffling around things in their keymaps, which a lot of people dislike. I'm an Emacs and IntelliJ user primarily, so the former and my arthritis in my hands are well acquainted with regard to keyboard chords and complex mapping sequences.

I have not used this keyboard obviously, but it seems to me from my experiences using similar tech that this is only good for much lesser used macro-like or launch actions. Useful still, yes, but I don't think it is a 1:1 replacement for function keys. I said it in another article and I'll say it here, I don't think this keyboard setup is aimed at programmers, but for most consumers it is likely just fine as much as I hate it. As for value added, that's another discussion.

I do know that if I ever buy or am forced to use one of these, it will always be with my own keyboard. I don't mind the chiclets as much as some people, but at home or the office I use external monitors and mechanical keyboards whenever I can.

Honestly, I've always felt that Fn keys were an outdated and faulty design. They're too far away to reach gracefully, usually offset from the standard zig-zag of other keys, and awkwardly multi-roled with screen/sound options on most keyboards.

If I'm in an IDE that uses a function key for something like 'compile', I usually rebind it for my own sanity. I have mixed feelings about this update (contextual buttons are often terrible, and I don't mind escape), but losing Fn won't really matter.

I work on a Windows machine, but I rely very heavily on function keys and have don't have to look at them.

F1 for help F2 for jump to bookmark F3 for search F4 for next error F5 for debug - go (I live in Visual Studio) etc...

For the longest time, I stuck with a keyboard that had the function keys on the left and I still think that's a superior layout for my purposes.

I suppose a front-end developer isn't considered a developer? Linux doesn't work for me as we need Photoshop and Sketch and well, Linux kind of looks ugly as well (with the notable exception of Elementary OS, which tries to be the OS X/macOS of Linux).

It's also mentioned that the ESC key will still be there, and you can map your own keys to the Touch Bar as well, it just won't be a physical key anymore. This generalization that just because you can't use Vim anymore (which you can) the entire MacBook brand is gone to shit (which it hasn't) or worse, that Apple is stupid (it's not).

I was very very against the new Macbook Pro yesterday and I made up my mind to get the new Razer Blade Stealth (for daily computing/dev) and a mac mini (for iOS dev).

But after watching a few first hands-on with it, I intend to give it a try when I can, at the store to see if it's really as bad I've made it out in my head. If I don't mind it too much, I'll probably get the new Macbook pro 15" - i7 quad core/16 GB Ram/256 GB SSD (~ $3000 CAD + tax).

A good night's sleep can give you a new perspective on things.

BTW those who want to utilize Apple's "student discount"...it's around $50 off :/

If you already have a Mac, the upside of this release of limited machines (up to 16GB) is that it will intrinsically force Mac developers to refrend from designing BigMemory applications.

So if I currently have a 16GB Mac, it is likely that its useful life will be longer than if 32GB or 64GB Macs suddenly become mainstream and you find that your 16GB Mac cannot run anymore the latest and greatest apps so you are forced to buy a new Mac.

This also sort of happens with the Windows ecosystem, where the RAM-based licensing of Windows 10 for OEMs naturally drives manufacturers to offer machines with less RAM so its pricing is more attractive.

None of the article's points is relevant.

1. Function keys were a convenience. You can map ESC to other physical keys.

2. 16GB RAM and processor are fine, if you're still able to fit your processing in that configuration. Otherwise you're probably using a laptop as a terminal to a computing cluster (AWS/cloud/etc), which have more computing power and memory than an Apple warehouse.

3. Who cares what people on Twitter are saying.

The MacBook Pro was never meant to be a developer's machine. Any developer with half a brain knows there are more configurable and cheaper laptops out there. MBP is mostly for conspicuous consumption.

Well, at my last two jobs my work computer was a macbook pro, and my current job it's a macbook pro. So, three separate employers seem to disagree with you.

This is what they call "newsjacking" - and a really bad version of it.

Guys.

You can configure the touch bar thing.

Let's give it a try before raging over it? Otherwise this and the other recent HN threads may be this year's version of the famous Slashdot "Apple introduces the iPod" thread.

My biggest complaint is that they increased the size of the touchpad. I HATE touchpads, as the cursor tends to shoot off into space when I accidentally touch it with the heel of my hand when typing. The last thing I want is a larger touchpad.

If they're going to steal innovations from Thinkpads, I really wish they'd have taken the eraser nub instead. Back when I had a Thinkpad (running linux) as my work laptop, I would just disable the touchpad in the BIOS and use the eraser nub. The eraser nub is the thing I miss most from the thinkpad.

Lack of physical escape key with vi is not a problem for me. An old trick is to remap caps lock (never used) to Ctrl (constantly used), which is easier to reach from "asdfhjkl" hand positioning. Then Ctrl-C is mapped to escape, and I never have to reach up to the fn row from the home row. Makes working with vi a bit more seamless and this lack of fn row is a moot point. So maybe we have to change few key bindings for ancient but still useful software. Really not a deal killer.

A physical ESC isn't that important because multiple presses are idempotent usually; there's only one dialog in the foreground of the active application (at least there should be) or you're only in one insert mode. I also don't see this being a big deal for key-combos. As long as it's available in apps that make use of it or Apple let's you enable it, and there's a way for you to learn where it is by touch, this shouldn't be that big of a deal.

Not to go too far off topic, but I'm surprised at the number of vim users in this thread who still use the escape key and haven't mapped it to something that doesn't require you to move your finger to the most inconvenient spot of the entire keyboard. Sometime 10 years ago I took someone's advice and remapped jj to escape in my vimrc. By far one of the best changes I've ever made. the speed gain is significant (unless your name is JJ Abrams)

I thought the current application determined what is displayed in that area? How do we know the Terminal won't cause the escape and FN keys to appear? Same for TextMate, Atom, etc.? Yes, Apple owns the default Terminal app so there is no controlling what happens with it (or is there, i.e., can you, via preferences define what you want to show up regardless of what the app chooses...). But the makers of TextMate, Atom, and IDEs can decide to make the function keys show up, no?

Maybe not a good laptop for vim users, but it's the perfect Emacs laptop.

http://imgur.com/a/G6WOk

I know the post is complaining about removing physical keys, but wasn't it completely idiotic to have removed the SD card slot? I know that most people don't use it. And maybe having it in the 13" is overkill, but what about keeping it in the 15" one Apple? It's a "Pro" computer, and the most common use case isn't for developers, but hobby, prosumer, and pro photographers, who use (gasp!) dedicated cameras with SD memory.

The reason I'm not impressed with the new Macbook Pro is I, like a huge percentage of developers I know, use the computer as a 3rd monitor and use a different keyboard than the built in one. I'm not going to reach 3 ft away to hit a Spotify shortcut on the TouchBar ever when I can use my finger on my magic trackpad to do it in a fraction of the time. WTF. And will the function keys on my keyboard of choice even work now?

I believe the short video that introduced the new MBP showed the ESC key in the system bar in the first few seconds, they practically zoomed in on that ESC key. And it showed up in other configurations, just not all of them.

I would think if you are in a shell or similar context, the ESC will be there in the expected place. Why don't you wait and try it out at the Apple store?

No, let's fly to the internet to dash off a disposable opinion.

Well, according to info about the new MacBook, news of the the function keys' death has been greatly exaggerated.

"Access the function keys by holding down the FN key on the keyboard." -- http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

One might also optimistically hope that the touchbar itself has some practical level of re-programmability.

I can't believe people are debating whether or not you need function and escape keys. It's just...are Apple people living in another universe? The escape key is used by nearly every application. Are you not aware of this? The function keys are used by nearly every non-game application. Cripe. Did you people buy your premium CPU-holding boxes just to use vim?

I don't understand, this insane hype over the removing the esc key. I use vim on a daily basis, and there are several ways in vim, or in the system to remap the keys. But above all that I'm pretty sure they said yesterday in the presentation that the esc key would just be on the touch bar when the terminal is open. And if that's the case its a simple signal to the OS.

I am sticking with MBP for the combination of UNIX, MS Office and support for software like Turbotax etc. Ubuntu is not an option for me yet, since LibreOffice has lot of kinks. My only gripe is that processor and memory did not get an upgrade. Touch bar is a nice touch, we have to wait and see how it plays out.

Oh, I like Apple commitment privacy compared to MS.

I may be asking too much here, but I hope someone comes along with a laptop with amazing build quality, amazing linux support, and hackintosh support (XCode).

I've been holding off replacing my old MBP because none of the new models have wowed me. I got a laptop sized tumor on my budget just waiting to be removed by some company with a viable product.

I really hope my current air doesn't breakdown. It's proper USB ports, fn keys and built in hdmi port. I use fn and esc every single day. Fn6-8 are debugging continue, break etc shortcuts.

I see absolutely zero value in buying the new iPhone or Mac line. Why apple why? Precisely this reason why I am selling all my stock in Apple.

In one keynote I went from being excited about what was coming to feeling held hostage, yet ignored, in the Apple ecosystem due to iOS app development. 16gb of RAM is just too limiting for some workloads.

I may need to outfit my team with powerful linux desktops and low end macbooks for app development and remote/emergency work.

Apple users these days must be masochist to keep coming back for more year after year.

It used to be a joke... http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary...

No escape and function keys? Seriously? I've been using Karabiner (now Karabiner-Elements, which is rapidly becoming fully featured) to remap those keys for years anyway, since they're already located in a place that makes me hate having to use them.

The most useful key remapping, by the way, is Caps Lock to Escape.

As someone doing highly CPU intensive computations, I would have appreciated more than 2 cores (or 4, with hyperthreading, I assume) in the 13' MBP. Granted, most of the time I can use my 80 core remote compute node, but it would still be nice to have a bit more parallel CPU power for local development

Apple needs a built-in, system level, per-app configurable Touch Bar settings tool. Apps may provide their own configurations, but they have to be customizable.

Only by putting this in as part of the system settings, will a standardized way of apps making touchbars and users making customizations work across all apps.

Lots of people point out about touch bar being context sensitive. Why cant each app have context sensitive widget bar. Or why not just have another context sensitive menu bar which each apps can customize. Are we not getting the same user experience but with a mouse/trackpad instead of a touch bar ?

Ubuntu for Windows works really well (on insider preview) and since then I have no desire to even look at mac...

I feel like removing the function keys their original idea to where they couldn't go back when they were first conceived. It will be better to know what their function is without having to look it up in a manual. It makes the function keys on older computers look like index cards in a library.

I'd actually say devs (web/mobile) are one of the only professionals served by this laptop. They don't need high powered GPUs.

This however is a massive kick in the face to anyone working in design, art, 3D, video editing or effects.

The only other professional this seems to target is the professional blogger.

As an iOS developer I've been waiting for a single feature: the ability to drive a 5k monitor. Bonus for a single cable that I can plug in vs power + DisplayPort. Apple finally delivered. The fact that any manufacturer can develop such a monitor now is just a bonus.

I don't really understand the outrage about the touchpad when the actual keyboard is likely a far worse problem. Unless they have significantly upped their game from the 12 inch MacBook I don't see anyone typing on that keyboard for longer than 10 minutes.

Why doesn't anyone mention that Apple still sells the 13" version without that touchbar?

Ok, I think Apple is not hitting the Dev group of consumers at all. But what I certainly do not want to do is judge a machine that I have not tried. Yeah, I am almost 100% I won't buy this machine, no reason, cause I use maxed out 13" I bought 9 months ago, but I will go to a store and spend some time with it, and after that come to the internet and tell my impression.

Markets and products change over time, sometimes for worse, sometimes for better. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy this machine, yes it is expensive, yes it is not geared towards Pro consumers as we all used to think and expected from this one the same, yes it is Apple on the verge of their creativity. So what? It has never been better situation with alternative laptops and hybrids. You have fantastic products from Microsoft and Dell!

What is my opinion on this whole thing, is that with laptops we got to the point of saturation. They started as big and clunky boxes in 90s, to a slimmer but still heavy and chunky plastic bricks in early 2000s. Then we got aluminum body, after that CPUs staled with performance, and went with the rout of lower voltage, which allowed for longer battery life and less heat exhaustion. Then aluminum bodies went really slim, tablets and touch screens came in play, opening whole new market of hybrids.

And now we come back to the point where we say, we do not want gimmicks in our laptops, that's okay, Apple shoulda have given the option of non Touch Bar 15" MBP, but it would require further price tweaking. And then we come to the point of price. Yeah it is going up! We had a period from 2012 to 2016 where computers were pretty affordable, in terms where you get solid battery life and computer performance with at least FHD screen slight under thousand dollars. Now market is shrinking, because of the nature of technology and innovation, market got saturated, and we are here where we are. I just do not understand people screaming all over the internet. I mean I was too when I watched the presentation, this isn't the Apple I fell in love with more than 10 years ago. But what can you do... When the time comes for purchase of my new computer (I am Software Engineer, so quite niche market) I will evaluate every option with my head cool. Yeah, I like UNIX and I was using Mac computers for more than 10 years, but Microsoft has never been stronger with hardware and PC games, and Dell is fine too. That is the good thing both for whole market and Apple fans, because change is needed inside Apple! When their money and stocks start to go down the sink that will make them realize and fight for the lost costumers. Have a nice day, just my 2c.

Very few vi power users actually use the ESC key, I think: the first tip given to everyone trying to transition to vi is to remap jj to ESC so you can do so without leaving the home row.

The RAM bugs me; replacing the F row with the touchstrip doesn't.

While there's a lot in here that I can agree with, this one stands out like a sore thumb...

> The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope.

Aren't we done the whole gigahertz race?

If you don't mind an additional dongle, maybe the following can help: https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch

Yep, I'm another developer who rarely uses Escape or the F keys. I moved Ctrl to Caps Lock, and you can put Escape there too if you are a hardcore vim/emacs user. It's better on the hands and faster.

Second, my current laptop has 8GB ram and it is more than enough to edit text files. The only time it could potentially be a problem is when running VMs, but as it is I can run two or three at a time with 1GB a piece no sweat. Combined with the cloud and ssh I'm not sure that 16GB is a burden to many.

As an aside I used to work at a vfx company in the late 90's. We'd do simulations such as tornados that ate RAM for breakfast and would run on a full SGI Origin 3k across 16 CPUs. Guess how much ram it had and used? Yes, 16 GB. The idea that we have an Origin in our laps under 2kg would have impressed the younger me.

People like to use rhetoric to pretend that their opinion is universal as a preventative measure for suppressing disagreement. Programmers, unfortunately, like to apply this to things that are transparently subjective, targeted at an intelligent audience that often takes umbrage to being told what to think.

I feel like I should flag this article for being nothing more than rhetorical rabble-rousing[0], but frankly so many people have been arguing to let HN go to shit because that's the sort of comment community they want, so I'm more inclined to leave this particular cesspit bubbling.

[0] Here's the sort of logic the article employs: > There are ~ 19 million developers in the world. And Apple has managed to sell ~19 million Macs over the past 4 quarters. What a coincidence!

I feel like I can boil this post down to:

1. There's no escape key! 2. It has roughly the same specs as existing MBPs

ergo now totally useless for developers

Anyone sw developer that cares about the escape key remapped it to the caps lock key years ago

My PFU HHKB external 'board has an Esc key, and there's usually a way to map things anyway. Not sure what the fuss is about.

I haven't been this upset since Chrome removed using the backspace key as a back button, and it took me a few minutes to find a chrome extension that allowed me to replicate the functionality.

I'm surprised that so many people use them even today. Unless you're fully ingrained into the Mac ecosystem, there are just too many idiosyncrasies that make moving between platforms in possible, like the use of the 'command' key which no other platform in the world uses, or the weird placement of the control key which completely negates years of muscle memory (a trend which some Windows laptops are unfortunately beginning to follow, even in business-class machines; thankfully mine at least lets me rebind it in the BIOS).

Honest question for people who develop on Macs: Do you exclusively develop on them, or have you just learned to put up with differences between it and Linux/Windows?

All softwares, including wim, will come with a plugin (or a built in feature) to display a custom menu on it, including the equivalent of an escape key. And you can bet the first app to be developpped will be something to display the old Fx bar in the widget.

I usually really dislike apple politics, being a linux boy myself, but I can see how this, while causing some issues, can be an interesting tool.

You want people to innovate and cry when they do so. It doesn't work that way.

Let the community try to work with it for a bit to see if interesting patterns emerge before judging.

And come on, 16GB limit? I got 32 just in case, but currenly, I can't reach 14GB without forcing myself to open everything I can. This is complaining for complaining.

At first I was ornery about the touch bar thing. Then I remembered I'm using a Kinesis Advantage that has soft function keys, which I've touched about 3 times in the past year.

The author is just complaining, but has not done any amount of in-depth analysis of the feasibility of customizing the touch bar in the apps developers use!

Why no mention of the lack of MagSafe? I can't count the number of times that brilliant little connector saved my laptop from certain death. So sad to see it's gone.

The escape key always seemed a horrible choice for such an essential key in vim.

I mapped it to capslock like 2 days after starting with Vim.

Many people also use "jj" or something similar.

It is not only developers, this change also kills the MBP for gamers. My child has all the function keys mapped to spells in World of Warcraft (including ESC).

You can use the Caps Lock as ESC key, for example

I suppose also there's a terminal mode with ESC and the other keys (or iTerm might do that)

But yeah, the RAM issue is not good

A possible substitute for vim keyboards is that touch bar will display vim power commands. losing escape may not be such a big deal for them.

but other users ...

I lost it at:

> There are ~ 19 million developers in the world. And Apple has managed to sell ~19 million Macs over the past 4 quarters. What a coincidence!

The real concern for me is the trackpad. It's size makes it impossible not to rest both palms on it when using they keyboard.

well, if you you want a touchbarless macbook pro then get a 13' touchbarless macbook pro. Just came to mind this thought "Maybe they're selling that one as part of a sales control group". But then: it's Apple, they just do whatever they think is innovative.

Do you think system76.com is a good alternative from the developers point of view?

Isn't the apple market getting soft? The app gold rush is over and it never was a very good deal to begin with. Apple wants a cut of your development profits, they can yank your app or worse, yank your developer account arbitrarily. Swift, while not finished yet, commodifies the the apple dev market further. I don't think devs have a choice, they have to move on to other markets.

The esc and F key is a red herring. I do most of my coding on a Das Keyboard.

So many DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) features are mapped to function keys.

Is Apple abandoning their digital recording arts audience too?

For people who really need to touch-type function keys, I would recommend remapping ALT+1 -> F1, ALT+2 -> F2, etc.

Am I the only one here who noticed that there IS a version without touch bar and with plain old function keys?

The touch bar is customizable. Surely they will allow users to add an esc key on their touch screen, right?

While I understand people's frustrations. Couldn't the escape key be on the toolbar when in Vim?

I don't use vim and consider myself highly biased towards guis despite being a long time programmer. I am also an Apple user since the Apple II, and owned the original inside Mac and Human Interface Guidelines books.

Even for me, losing the escape key is a bit scary. It may be mitigated by customization of the bar. Function keys have always been dumb and replacing them with dynamic controls is awesome.

Google cache, since it's down currently: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UleFaa...

Connecting an iPhone 7 to the new macbook pro requires a $19 Adapter. This is beyond a joke now Apple!

According to Apple's presentation, the function keys are available when you press the Fn key!

I remap my CTRL to CAPS LOCK because it's more convenient.

Have come across a lot of Vim power users that do the same with ESC. Or buy the model without the Touch Bar.

Can we stop with the drama now? It's becoming pathetic.

Apologies for the bluntness.

P.S.: more RAM and CPU? Get a desktop or buy another laptop. Since when was Apple the fastest, more bang for your money? This was clearly not a specs bump iteration.

Does nobody use external keyboards?

I'm pretty sure I can adjust to the soft esc key, If not then evolution is a myth. :)

folks, thanks for all your comments, didn't expect that. The main issue with the keys appears when you have a full-size keyboard and a laptop with a different set of major keys. And there is one more thing — tactile feedback.

So how long before we see a "function row extension" that plugs in via usb?

It looks like they have also removed the § key. How am I going to type § now?

"The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016?"

This was really disappointing to read. Aside from the total lack of imagination and overall butt hurt tone, the author demonstrated a lack of basic understanding of performance.

Worst HN post and comments ever. Sounds like a kindergarten fracas.

I really dislike the tone of this kind of blog posts, as if one is only allowed to be called developer when using UNIX, vi and Emacs.

I don't want a portable PDP-11, rather a Xerox PARC workstation, a BeOS, Amiga, Atari, Acorn, Oberon System 3...

True ViM users have already mapped Esc to the Caps Lock key.

don't the majority of developers work with the lid closed using an Extertal monitor and keyboard?

i only use the internal keyboard when traveling.

I'm not sure what are the alternatives though. You still need a mac as a developer for mobile app development or even checking out rendering.

Your developers. Stop moaning about lack of this or that key and just remap the existing keys.

R.I.P F5! :-)

True developers used MacBooks?

I was talking to a washed-up developer today who swears by them actually. Every single reason was totally bogus. It went something like this:

Reason 1) "They come with native SSH capabilities"

Me) "Uh, you can just get Putty for windows. It takes 20 seconds."

Reason 2) "MacOS uses the PC's hardware more efficiently"

Me) "Uh, it's because it's a very basic OS and has much less the deal with, i.e less threads to micromanage, so it's not really 'efficiency'. Also, Apple products have very poor hardware specs for the price, so the performance ends up the same if not worse than an equivalent windows machine, even when factoring in poorer hardware utilization efficiency."

Reason 3) "B-but, Photoshop and video-editing software runs better on MacOS."

Me) "No. It doesn't. It really doesn't. What the hell"

Honestly, there is no getting through to them.

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