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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

I'm not actually clear how this laptop is supposed to be worse for developers. It's not like most of us are EEs; we hardly ever need any sort of weird ports or anything. In fact, about half my work is EE and I'm doing fine with a 12" MacBook. The only thing we've lost is the physical escape and function keys, and that's not exactly a show-stopper. Possibly a mild inconvenience.

I'll probably buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro for my next laptop, unless something obviously better (including quality and support lifetime) is on the market, which right now it doesn't appear to be.

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I feel like this is a common, quiet sentiment amongst developers. The freakout about the direction the line is going is very vocal minority.

Yep. I'm a freelance developer and I bought a new MBP. I don't mind a soft-key function row, and I'm kinda curious what people can do with it. I don't need an SD card slot.

Losing Magsafe, 16GB top-out on the RAM are disappointing, but when I looked at alternatives nothing stood out as 'better'. I could get something much more powerful, but generally bigger and/or with worse battery. I've got a desktop for when I need nothing but horsepower. When I'm out working for clients I need something that fits in my bag on my bike.

I'm an EE. I use my mbpr when I can, which is generally when I'm developing a tool.

I do python, clojure, haskell, rust dev on my mbpr using spacemacs and VSCode. I make heavy use of the escape key, and I'll probably miss that. On windows my capslock is both escape and ctrl depending on how I use it. On my mbpr it's just ctrl until karabiner catches up with the current OSX release.

I have 16GB right now. Photoshop makes use of it, but it's gratuitous use. It worked fine on my 8GB previous mbpr too. ZBrush does just fine with it. I'd have to look again, but I don't think I've ever come close to using all my ram without running VMs.

And with docker-for-mac maturing, I don't really run many VMs anymore.

I think all the people complaining about having to "look down" at their keyboard for the touchbar are full of it. There has to be something wrong with your eyes if you have to move your head to see it. It's about an 30mm away from the edge of the screen.

You can still buy Macbooks with an escape key. Most of the TouchBar layouts still have Esc (though not in the optimal fitts-law position).

I personally think the issue is way overblown. 16GB RAM is far more of a concern for me. Logging in via TouchID would be a very nice feature.

For me the other issues I can overlook somewhat, but the killer is the keyboard. It seems to divide people strongly one way or the other, but to me its horrendous. There's basically 0 key travel, the keys just click. I average about the same typing speed as my 2014 mbp but the experience is not nice, and for longer days spent coding I'm sure it'll become uncomfortable on your finger tips.

And the question is why? I can only think the decisions behind the keyboard are to facilitate the goal of making the MacBook thinner and thinner, the point of diminishing returns on that was passed 2 years ago.

On top of that, I bought my MacBook pro in 2014 for £1200, to replace it today with the bottom 13" model would cost £1750. That's some price hike!

Completely agree. The keyboard is the dealbreaker for me too. When I need a new laptop Apple will no longer be producing a machine with an adequate keyboard. Stupidly, the keyboard is what will force me to switch to Windows/Linux.

I actually like the keyboard. I tend to glide over the keyboard to find the right keys, minimizing wrist movement. Combination of feel, sound, flatness are somehow very satisfying.

But! The butterfly keys are stiffer for smaller keys so ironically(?), the Fn keys and arrow keys are hard to find and press. I actually use the arrow keys so I find using the Ctrl shortcuts more often for moving the cursor around.

The problem is that we were expecting a significant upgrade and got minor tweaks. The new Macbook Pro doesn't give me a strong reason to upgrade, and I would have liked to have one.

The physical function keys seem like more of an issue than escape, since I thought most people who use escape a lot in their work already use the capslock key in its place. The discussion can be weird here, someone posted that they wished the MacBook Pro came with a GPIO port, though maybe it was only that they wished it did, rather than they thought it should have a GPIO port.

Just an opinion, but I do kind of wish that the new touch bar was at the bottom of the keyboard (with good palm rejection intelligence) instead. I'm not sure I'll transition to using it if it is a pain to reach. Being able to choose external keyboards with the touch bar at the top or bottom would be kind of nice.

One thing that I would have liked about having an SD slot was the potential to store 100-200GB iTunes library on silent, slow, inexpensive flash, rather than wasting space on the main fast but expensive drive. Even though a cheap SD card could be unreliable, the music would be backed up elsewhere, and changes within the last day aren't important.

> The physical function keys seem like more of an issue than escape, since I thought most people who use escape a lot in their work already use the capslock key in its place.

I assume you are talking about Vim users. The escape key is the default. Be careful about assuming that "most people" change the defaults, that's almost never the case.

HW developer here with similar experience. The only thing I could really use is more than 16 GByte of memory. Otherwise, the new MBPs are enough for basically all my work. Being able to that in a small package is great.

I went from MBA to MBPr for the better screen resolution and more than 8 GByte RAM which was a big problem running VMs with FPGA tools, but missed the size and low weight of the MBA. The new MBP without TouchBar is basically the machine I wanted when I switched to MBPr

When the MBP don't have the oomph to build a big FPGA, run huge simulations in reasonable time, build big SW systems etc, you need to use a server anyway. IMHO.

> The only thing we've lost is the physical escape and function keys, and that's not exactly a show-stopper. Possibly a mild inconvenience.

Show-stopper for me. I have no need to retrain my coding habits, there are plenty of computer companies that still happily provide the ESC key as they have for the last 30 years, so I'll just move to one of those computer brands.

or use an external keyboard, which is what I plan on doing.

I code a lot sitting on the couch, external keyboards are pretty inconvenient.

But to your point, there are many ways I could workaround this change (changing key mappings, for example). But my point is; I don't have to. There are plenty of companies willing to sell me a computer with the same keyboard layout that's been standard for the last 30 years. I'll just buy one of those.

I see this no different than any other product I use on a daily basis; I would be resistant to change if it aversely affected my use. Luckily, I don't need to change my habits to conform to Apple's latest bravery. Apple needs to know this; they don't own their customers.

Have you tried using 'jj' or 'jk' instead?

Honestly curious, as I don't have a strong opinion against the Touch Bar.

Is your main gripe that the esc key is no longer a physical key? Or that learning a new placement of the esc key is difficult to adjust to?

Agreed that it's not actually worse, but it is a bit underwhelming after the (long) wait and the (high) price.

I would have liked one or more of

- an extra port (or included dongles)

- CUDA-ble graphics card (obviously mostly for testing)

- More RAM.

but I can live without all of those things for now....

Its pretty bad for on-the-go audio people. Many good/common/popular audio interfaces are still firewire-based, and I havent seen a solution that involves fewer than 2 dongles.

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