A Programmer Evaluates the MacBook Pro (Touch Bar)
2ality.com
2ality.com
> The MacBook Pro is more an evolutionary than a revolutionary upgrade over my MacBook Air.
That seems to sum up this review. The macbook pro is a successor to the air, not the old macbook pro.
That seems illogical.
The problem I have with that statement is that "the MBP" is an ambiguous term. It's a product lineup, and there are products in that lineup that are not in any way the successor to the Air.
That's the most obvious conclusion of all those MBP review and comment. Apple just serve a small slice of the consumer market that intersect a narrow slice of the professional market. That narrow slice just gets smaller with each major iteration and Apple is not sad about it.
Lack of ports, lack of DVD reader, lack of configuration options, lack of OSX corporate feature, lack of customisability, lack of Windows, too expensive, ...
It was a bit bulky, but I really miss some of those features these days.
The article is talking about the 13": I’ve moved from a MacBook Air 13" to a MacBook Pro 13".
I could see that argument for the MBP13 but not 15. You should clarify your remarks if that's what you meant because it looks like you're trolling otherwise.
Apple should have taken the boring, predictable step of giving the MacBook a 13'' version, rehashing the 12'' if necessary to match; that would gave been the super-thin Air line. Then they could have designed MBPs around the 15'' and power users -- which is what they basically did to great success in 2010-2012. But I guess the current solution has better margins, so 15'' users can go screw themselves.
Spooky is the word.
I completely agree though, I checked it out in-store and was far more impressed with the new MBP than the reviews had me believe I would be. People must be very spoiled to downplay it IMO. The keyboard and trackpad are really impressive. I'm debating whether to replace my old desktop with a i7-7700K or pickup the MBP15 1TB with a few dongles to hookup to my existing peripherals. It would be my first Mac ever (I had a Commodore 128 in the 80s) and it certainly seems like a marvel of engineering to me. I'm starting to think the best way to run Linux or Windows would be using either in VMWare under macOS or using Parallels to get the best of every world.
The one thing the Apple folks could've done better is make the tilde key the new escape and make the tilde/grave alt remaps. If I got one that would likely be the first thing I do.
I still think they could have kept a couple standard USB ports to help ease the transition, but overall it seemed like a fine machine.
It's not really new. It was introduced with the early 2015 MBP. You can even get it in the new magic trackpads.
I thought about a keyboard cover but I don't think apple left room between the keycaps and display for that when the lid is closed.
Not sure about emacs (I use spacemacs). Does esc come in for more than just cancelling commands? If you don't need to use your caps lock for ctrl for emacs, the same remap to esc would work as well.
Anyway, basically boils down to two things: 1) the touch bar escape is fine for occasional use but I wouldn't want to use it frequently and 2) that isn't a problem if you don't mind remapping caps lock and have nothing more important to do with it.
evil-escape module for evil mode adds the 'fd' functionality discussed here.
if we use carat for cursor,
this is a line of text
^
this is a line of text
^
this is a line of text
^(because they decided not to make one, actually)
Apparently they did actually consider making a car, which I didn't know.
When you consider what the keyboard layout on the machine on which vi was made looked like: http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/vi/terminal_ADM-3A_keyboard.jpg , it's easy to understand why dual-use caps-lock makes the usage feel smoother and more natural than on regular PC keyboard layout.
For anyone that would like to do this, here are example instructions for both Linux and MacOS: http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-...
tl;dr: If you, like me, touch-type and work very fast, then the absence of tactile feedback on the new Esc is unnerving. It's like a work-stopper. Even if something did happen when you hit it, the lack of feedback means your brain automatically thinks you didn't hit anything. I don't know if this is something one gets used to. After a week, it's still awful.
Then they came for the headphone port, and I did not speak out - because I could still plug into my external audio interface or mixer _when at home_.
Then they came for my keyboard, and NOW I CAN'T ESCAPE!
By the way, I visited an Apple store and played with the new 15" MBP. It's even worse than I thought. I downloaded the latest Gnu Emacs, and the Fn virtual keys were not available. And in no case did I see the Esc and Fn virtual keys present at the same time.
Also ridiculous is the fact that the touch bar is not available on any keyboard other than the built-in MBP keyboard. So you now have to choose between the features of the touch bar and the comfort of external peripherals.
It is astonishing how many bad decisions were packed into this one revision of a formerly great machine.
>For some apps, you can make the function keys display permanently in Touch Bar: In System Preferences, choose Keyboard. Click Shortcuts. From the left sidebar, select Function Keys. Click the “+” symbol, then navigate to the app and select it.
From: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207240
If you want always function keys, you can do that too:
>If you prefer the top row of keys to always behave as standard function keys without holding the Fn key: Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu. Click Keyboard. Click the Keyboard tab if it's not already highlighted. Select "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys"
What percentage of programmers use vi or emacs?
I would say maybe 1% of developers actually use them as an IDE given how poor they are compared to something like IntelliJ or Visual Studio.
Depends on the language, some of them are IDE friendly, e.g. Java, C#, Eiffel, VB, Delphi, C++ Builder,
When Visual Studio Code came out, the VIM extension was one of the most sought after.
If you get used to editing vim or the extreme ease of laying out windows on the fly, jumping between window configurations and saving UIs in emacs, then even IntelliJ seems quite old-fashioned. I've tried 3 times to switch to CLion by JetBrains and every time I immediately miss all the ways emacs has streamlined my development life. (I use emacs with vim-emulation)
Vim keyboard macros (supported in emacs), the use of the "." key for all kinds of editing magic, and other things are extreme improvements over old-school editing that most "modern" editors use. The makers of VS Studio seem to think that a better autocompletion is going to improve the lives of developers, and other similar cockpit-like features. It's just basic text editing prowess that actually improves their lives, and that is where vim and emacs shine.
This little detail is a big problem for me when using any image or music program where I want to quickly find the arrow keys and shift things around.
Edit: Just checked Atom, there's not really any F-key dependence there. But I use escape all day long to cancel out of UI dialogs. Just saying there's a lot more affected here than just vi users (and I do use vi all day long too, for git commits and editing smaller param files).
The new touch bar/keyboard combo, however, is. Here are the issues I'm having.
* No tactile feedback. Having no tactile feedback for the Escape key is... unnerving. Did I hit it correctly? Did it do anything? Even if something actually did happen on the screen, a little feeling of self-doubt follows, and you feel like hitting it again. It feels wrong. I'm a developer, and I use the Escape key about 10 times per minute as part of my workflow. Yes, I know that you can map it to Caps-Lock, but chalk it up to 30+ years of muscle memory; I want my Escape key to be where it is, and it's hard to switch, especially since you can't turn the fake Escape off, either during the learning period. (Maybe I should try covering it with tape.)
* Unintended touchbar touches. I discovered to my chagrin that I have a habit of resting my fingers around the area where the function keys are; my default position for the left hand is above QWERTY, and with my fingers outstretched, they reach into the touch bar. This has resulted in some incidents where the machine seems to have come alive and is doing things on its own, when in fact I was just obliviously holding down on the escape key or some other touch bar widget. Muscle-memory again, but then: It'd be nice to be able to be able to just touch my computer without causing accidents.
* It's pretty useless. As a touch typer, I never look at the keyboard. Not even to touch farther-away function keys like volume, play/pause, previous/next. Having a touch bar that changes its contents might be great for novice users who look at the keyboard all the time, but for me, it's a distracting context switch. The app-specific touch bar widgets are also generally useless (the little Safari preview of your browser's page is particularly ridiculous). I can see where they'd be nice for providing "analogue" controls for things like music and audio editing, but the rest are pretty close to useless. Consider the emoji one — sure, maybe it's nice when you use on of the common ones. But the moment you want a snowman, good luck to you, there's no search (unlike the much nicer Ctrl+Cmd+Space dropdown which probably few people know about). In the end, the app controls got so distracting — and the lack of fast one-click access to things like volume and brightness — that I turned off the app controls altogether. Which gives me the same layout, nearly, as my previous MacBook. In conclusion, while the touch bar is clearly technologically very cool, it feels like a marketing gimmick more than a carefully thought-out feature.
* Unintended trackpad touches. Again, you have to rest your hands somewhere. The trackpad is now so big that it's almost impossible not to inadvertently touch it, especially in a resting position. I have now disabled all the gestures so I don't trigger anything unintentionally. It's a nice idea that should probably have received more focus-group testing.
* The arrow keys. This is probably one that I'll get used to, but at this stage it's annoyance. While the new keyboard is probably objectively better than the old one — I like it very much, at least — Apple changed the shape of the arrow keys, which means that they don't feel any different from other keys. Again, as a touch typer, I'm used to just "finding" that pyramid of arrow keys under my first three fingers, and muscle memory is now telling me that left/right aren't positioned correctly, and I keep hitting the Shift instead of Up. Unlike the Esc key, it's probably, hopefully a passing problem because they are, after all, physical keys.
After migrating to the new machine, my productivity went down a surprising amount, which has never happened with an Apple machine before. If these seem like small gripes, keep in mind that as a developer, all I do is type. I see some comments here that "I got used to it"; but after a week, the touch bar is still as disruptive as when I started. I like learning new ways — but only when they're superior to the old way.
At this point, I'm strongly considering returning the machine and going back to my mid-2015 MBP, based on a simple cost/benefit analysis: The bad/meh simply outweighs the good by a wide margin. I still have a few days to decide. I'd love to hear if anyone else had the same gripes and overcame them somehow.
If Apple comes up with a new machine next year that's faster, has longer battery life (I get about 3.5 hours with this working full-time in VSCode, Terminal and Safari, same as my last MBP) and takes at least 32GB RAM, I might weather the bad touch bar, but at this point I fear (and I mean literally that I fear) that a Linux-based laptop might be in my future. It's even possible that I could downgrade to the 13'', which still comes with function keys. Maybe the performance isn't terrible? But it probably is.
I ended up up buying a 2015 MBP model and know several others who have done the same after avoiding or returning the 2016 MBP. I personally could have probably stomached the various 2016 compromises and nuisances for much improved performance and 32GB/64GB RAM, but as is, just can't do it. Maybe next year.
All told I can probably get 5-7 hours out of it depending on the day. The need to plug it in and out frequently really makes me miss the magsafe jack. Whoever made that call should get fired.
Think there is a market for high end laptops for developers that are maybe 30% more expensive than a macbook? Looking at System76 and Dell they are all bricks. The Razer Blade Pro is probably the closest thing. Even that is huge and heavy.
It could either be because it's a good way to edit text, or because of inertia and extreme conservative nature of developers.
I was referring to the claim that a popular choice amongst IDE makers meant it was a good idea.
> If you think Esc then I is the future of programming tools, I don't know what to tell you.
It's certainly not the complete future of programming, but it seems like we'll be in the command line and remoting into machines for a long time. It's condescending to write off those concerns as being "in the past."
It is actually still full of *NIX programmers. What's your real point?
Certainly for our purposes, the new MacBook is pretty sub-par. All the lost connectivity options were used heavily. I doubt when the time comes around to refresh them they will be as compelling as they were in 2011-2012. I'll probably just get a stock Dell or HP and find it massively less frustrating. It's not like the old MacBook Pros didn't make compromises either, but now it's making so many its use is difficult to justify.
Would they be better off using KDE 5 to develop? Probably, but good luck getting your manager to sign-off on a linux laptop, especially when all the other devs use 3000€ devices to manage their xterm sessions.
Of course text editing isn't the future of programming, but when I can create and run macros as fast as I can think through a formatting change, an IDEs regex find/replace and refactoring menu with a dozen options irrelevant to the task at hand feels clunky and limited.
This device is not catering to the past, sure, but its also not catering to a large group of users the previous device did. It also seemed to have caught a lot of them off guard.
Why didn't they make the touch bar an option rather than force it on all users? they could easily have added it above the previous keyboard configuration.