I keep seeing people say things about how the Mac is sidelining serious developers and content producers, but I haven't seen any actual argument as to why this is so. Can you explain?
The hardware on all Macs are updated on a very infrequent basis as mentioned in the article. GPUs sold with machines today are often the same as ones sold years ago.
Apple killed their external monitor option.
I don't know that I really need any of the things TouchBar offers, but it seems to be unreasonably vilified without no one actually using it.
For me the key issue is the performance, which no amount of key remapping can solve.
Boot Camp drivers are also terribly out of date.
I do this because all of Apple's material has focused on it's context-sensitivity and configurability. Here's a screenshot of function keys: http://images.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/j/images/overview/touc...
Yes, I'm sure the Touch Bar will useful for the consumer demographic. However, there are many of us who are much more effective with the keyboard rather than using a touchscreen or a mouse.
1. The Esc key isn't butted against the edge of the touch bar. Because it's not always in the same place means it's hard to press without looking down.
2. The same is true for the run tests shortcuts. I'll miss the f keys less than Esc but things like test shortcuts, I find, are best committed to muscle memory.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/28/using-touch-bar-with-boo...
You can drive two 5k displays with the new MacBooks, and they ask me to tell you they're fine. The just need a bit of time to think things through.
Sure you can argue about the tactile nature of the escape key being important, but the soft versions are still available.
The hardware update statement is simply not true of all Macs. The iMac has been regularly kept up to date. It is true of the MacBook Pro, but they have just released a new design, and we can expect them to incrementally improve it as they have done in the past after a new design is released.
Who cares about Apple not selling an external monitor when they are readily available from other vendors?
From the screenshots released, the Esc and other keys have been centred in the middle of the bar. This means that the Esc "key" now moves depending on context.
That might still be fine for "hunt n' peck" typists but it's a real pain for touch typists as it will kill our muscle memory.
If the screenshots and product videos are to be believed it means Apple either didn't consider heavy console users or considered them but deprioitised their needs. Neither of these is a good thing for me. :(
Also it's rumours that Apple killed their external monitor option.
I was considering switching from years of buying Thinkpads to getting some Apple hardware. One of my big beefs with Lenovo is that they keep redesigning the keyboards, steadily making them worse from my perspective. But the Esc key thing kills it for me. Partly because the escape key location is baked into my brain, and I want it to be a physical key with tactile response. And partly because this is a sign to me that they are likely to keep screwing with the keyboard in a way that makes it better for whomever they're targeting but worse for programmers.
I might be an outlier, but I don't care too much about the Escape key - I think the on screen one will probably work just as well for me - I am annoyed however at the net removal of two ports, inclusion of just one USB A port would have been enough to make me happy - that one USB A port would be enough to make up for the loss of Magsafe and HDMI. I also don't like that I now need a bevy of adapters to do everything I did before without any adapters at all.
16GB is nowhere near enough for my work. And I can't seriously justify buying a iMac or MacPro at this point when their hardware is so out of date.
The biggest limitation is RAM, but in the near future we may start using the GPU too. Between the database, middleware above the database, an IDB, a web browser, etc. macOS decides to start compressing pages rather aggressively when I run unit tests. If the IDE gets compressed, pretty much the only solution is to restart.
I could switch to Linux development, but aside from Linux laptop support generally being poor, macOS just works so I can spend more time working instead of fighting with my computer's configuration. Still, I am very seriously considering getting a Linux desktop in the near future, because I'm just tired of waiting for Apple.
I wonder what the next round of iMacs will look like. If you're looking at a desktop system anyway, perhaps they'll be available with larger memory options. As I understand it, the memory limitation on the new MBP is due to the chip choice, which in turn was chosen with energy efficiency in mind. That shouldn't be a driving factor in the iMac. But then again, when will the next rev of iMacs come out?
I hope you're able to find a system that suits your needs!
1) No esc key or fkeys. These are pretty important for vim, and vim is the defacto editor on most Linux systems. If you want these keys, you have to accept the lower end dual core CPU and no discrete GPU.
2) 16GB of RAM, not really enough for running multiple VMs. 32GB has been common for years from other manufacturers. Phil Schiller responded that this was to conserve battery life.
3) Skylake. This CPU is old. Kaby Lake has been shipping since late August. It's a bit of a stretch to call a laptop "premium" or "pro" when it ships with the last generation hardware.
4) GPU. Same gripe. NVidia is the undisputed leader in GPUs. Shipping a Radeon which is half the speed of a comparable NVidia offering is really disappointing.
5) Magsafe. They removed Magsafe in favor of USB-C charging. Great for Apple repair and replacement sales, not so great for end users.
6) Price. Everyone expects to pay some premium for an Apple, but this round is really excessive. They've made it worse by axing the lower priced Macbook Air line, so the least expensive model available now is a $1299 Macbook, and that's an even older 5th generation Broadwell CPU model they've been selling for nearly two years now.
Ooohhh, I can already see the angry complaints from Emacs users.
More seriously though, vim doesn't rely on F keys at all. (The only default function mapped to an F key is F1 for help, which is only there to assist newbies AFAICT.) The F keys are useful as a blank slate for one's own mappings, though, so a lot of individual vim users (me included) might be upset about their favorite functions gone.
The F keys are of much bigger importance in Xcode, where F6/F7/F8 are the default bindings for stepping during debugging. (I cannot comment on this myself as I'm from the printf-debugging camp, but a lot of people pointed to this concrete function in HN commentary in the past few days.)
This one is understandable - the AMD 450/455/460 all fit within a 50W TDP. The Nvidia 1060M is at 80W... way too high. The 1050M should be 50W, but it won't be out until early 2017.
The timing of all of this seems weird to me. Since Apple already waited so long to release this update to begin with, would it have killed them to wait just a bit longer to be able to integrate Kaby Lake and the mobile Nvidia cards?