Hacker News Reader

Comment by sankyo | Hacker News Reader

I also concluded Dell XPS 13 or Thinkpad Carbon, but never did a writeup. Still have not bought anything.

I want: 16GB, no touch bar, good keyboard, retina screen. I want a stripped down OS X, there are so many processes on El Capitain that just take up memory, distract me, and clutter my screen. I want zfs, not apfs.

I do not want to lose weekends trying to get the webcam or the fans working in Ubuntu. I'll miss homebrew if I use Ubuntu.

I feel like a person with no country. Somebody please pick up the torch that Apple dropped and make a laptop for developers.

View on HN

> I'll miss homebrew if I use Ubuntu.

You'll prefer homebrew over aptitude...? I assumed the draw of Linux over OSX was proper package management.

With the benefit that you don't have to use an additional module/command (brew cask) to get functionality like "install Google Chrome".

Actually, there is http://linuxbrew.sh/, which is a fork of Homebrew, if one insists on using brew :) An advantage of brew over apt et al. I imagine would be simplicity, e.g. you don't need to add PPAs, import keys etc. Though I should add that in my limited experience with linuxbrew, I still had to deal with custom flags/builds/whatever in case of compatibility/version problems.

You should maybe learn a bit more about OSX and Ubuntu first.

Sierra is the latest OSX release (so not sure why you are talking about El Capitan). Apple deliberately broke up the OS into a lot of smaller processes to help with scheduling and isolation. It's a good thing. And given they are background daemons not sure how they would clutter your screen or distract you. As for ZFS you can use OpenZFS.

And Ubutnu has APT which is what Homebrew was based on so it should more than meet your needs. And as for drivers I've never heard of a situation where fans weren't working in Ubuntu.

As a former user of both Debian (waaaaay back in the day) and Ubuntu (back in the day), I can assure you homebrew is 1000x more pleasant to use than apt-get, dpkg, and the rest of that insanely baroque, non-ergonomic mess.

There was even an apt-get made for the Mac -- fink. Homebrew crushed it. And now there are projects brining homebrew back over to linux.

Also, a large part of what's great about the mac and homebrew is there's just one target -- it's, "oh shit, now we've all got to make our stuff work on Sierra". And there's a brief period of breakage, and then everything works.

On linux, there is no one fixed target, and the breakage is constant.

There is no way to install all updates to caskroom apps in homebrew. Apt with PPA just works.

You get stuff like not really being able to install qt4 and qt5 at the same time with Homebrew. Also the "just one target" thing is definitely the same with a Linux distro. Were you trying to install random .debs or something?

"16GB, no touch bar, good keyboard, retina screen."

Apple literally sells this configuration

They do, which is why, for my personal list, I have an addendum: "and a future for the model line." The non-touch-bar Macbook Pro has no future and after using the touch bar I really don't like it in a way I've never had an Apple product bite me. The reason this matters is that I'm at a good point in my professional life to switch away from Apple and to fully Linux for development and Windows for Adobe and other media tools--which is why I probably am going to.

I suspect that as early as the next version, they’ll add tactile feedback to the bar; they already know how to do it, they probably just made a judgment call to release on time. With that addition the bar would feel essentially like a keyboard and solve the biggest issues I think.

It's not tactile feedback, for me. It's that I can't touch-type on it because there are no keys. I really do want function keys, not widgets, for how I use a computer. I don't look down at the keyboard when I'm typing, I'm not going to want to do it to change brightness or volume or whatever, to say nothing of trying to send F-keys to parallels or whatever. And I also use vim. Blindly mashing at the top corner of my keyboard and having to wait until I can register "OK, I'm in command mode now" from the status bar was gross.

I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad. It doesn't even theoretically offer improvements over an on-screen toolbar with touch capability.

> I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad.

That would be a radical departure for Apple. They're always cannibalizing their own product lines.

Apple is very open about why they don't think a touch screen makes sense for Mac. They absolutely could change direction but as many others have pointed out, the PC form factor is slowly dying, so why would they?

Apple cannibalizes their product lines in favor of what they want to push, and it feels, given the steady disregard of the Mac over the last ~3 years, that they want to push iPads. A touchscreen doesn't make sense for a Mac because they make it not make sense for a Mac, yeah?

(I'm not even saying they should have one. I don't care either way. Just that the Touch Bar is not a good replacement.)

> I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad.

No because touchscreen makes zero sense for Apple.

OSX is simply unusable with a touchscreen. And we know this because you can remote desktop from an iPad and try it yourself. At some point when Apple has (a) built a unified iOS/OSX UIKit so developers are forced to auto scale their apps and (b) rewritten OSX to use it and (c) convinced enough developers to use it then it is a possibility. But that is years away.

I can very much see Apple bringing the iPad Pro's pencil to OSX however.

As I said in a side comment: OS X is unusable with a touchscreen because Apple makes it unusable with a touchscreen. That could change, if they wanted it to. They don't. And that's fine--I don't care either way, I'm touch-agnostic. I just think the Touch Bar is crap and that it exists because they don't want OS X to horn in on iOS.

The Pencil would be the only thing they could do to a standard, no-Touch-Bar-thank-you-very-much MBP that would make me stay with Apple, because I digitally draw and paint a lot. I currently have a DisplayLink-driven USB3 display tablet with a stylus for exactly that reason (and, as with everything else on an iPad, an iPad doesn't begin to replace it because it can't run Photoshop). I'd love it if they went that route. I doubt they will, though, because--well, I think they care about the iPad way more than they do about the Mac.

Touch screens can't (reasonably) be optically coated, because fingerprints on an optically coated screen get very obvious very quickly.

Personally, I'm upset enough that they no longer have a matte-screen option. To take away the optical coating so it could be a touch screen might be sufficient to drive me to another laptop. I hate glare, and the trackpad works fine for me; I have no interest in a touch screen.

I think they made a weird decision here, not letting you hold fn the row of 1 through equals as fn keys. It's not too dodgy a solution, and I wish it was an option because I use both a Poker 3 and an ergodox with chording to do this and it feels entirely natural.

I use vim on an older Macbook Pro. Even with a physical escape key, mapping caps lock to escape is a huge improvement. Now one of your most highly used keys is right on the home row instead of far off in the corner.

That is an option. It is one I don't want to deal with. Escape is escape on every machine, in every terminal. I prefer it to not suck.

try jj instead, i've been using it for years.

> And I also use vim.

As another vim user, it's probably better to get in the habit of using Ctrl-[ or Ctrl-C (though Ctrl-C has caveats in certain situations).

>The non-touch-bar Macbook Pro has no future

First of all, that's a big assumption. Second of all, even if it is true, it doesn't matter for the machine that you buy right now. It seems that people are mostly outraged that a laptop without F keys exists at all. Because even within the Apple line, people are not forced to buy laptops without F keys.

It's not about the f keys. It's about the touch bar being gimmicky and a distraction when no out right annoying. I am typing on one right now. Even changing brightness or volume which should be better now, it's annoying because of UI lag. Get right of the F keys will have been better.

That's the first time that I've heard that perspective, everybody else I've heard complain has mentioned the lack of physical F keys.

UI-lag is annoying and inexcusable, very un-Apple like.

Plus: Not having one single de facto standard USB port, no more MagSafe, no more optical audio out, apparently poor battery life, and an insane price tag.

>"and a future for the model line."

Why? Why does a future device, one that hasn't been announced, released, or even built yet, one that will be at least a year away and won't actually obsolete anything you currently have, why would that have any impact on your purchase today?

It's not like Apple will stop supporting it when/if the line is discontinued, as long as you have Apple Care, you're covered. They just stopped manufacturing parts for the iPhone 4 recently. Why should the future of the model line matter to the current model?

You're just kicking the can down the road with respect to switching from a Mac to a Windows/Linux setup though. That's the the parent was saying. They are are a point where it could make sense to make the switch. Why buy a laptop that will just push this cost a few years down the road?

Exactly. This is a good time, in my personal and professional life, to move back to Linux/Windows (which was my primary mode of doing stuff before I started buying Macs in 2010). I'm growing more aggravated with OS X (sorry, macOS (how about make it better instead of just renaming things, Apple?)), I don't really like what they're doing to their hardware, and the new MBP is not a good value for the money. I can invest some money and time in switching now without interrupting or messing with important stuff.

Isn't everything just pushing costs further down the road? Eventually you'll have to get a new machine anyway. If the current one works for you, it's kind of crazy to reject it just because you'll have to buy something else in a few years.

I fully expect that some day Toyota will stop making my car. But I'm perfectly happy driving it anyway, because it's still being made today, and it was made when I bought it. Does that make sense? Because saying "The Corolla will stop being made some day in the future, so I'm going to buy a Camaro now" doesn't make any sense at all to me.

The choice isn't "this machine or that machine." It's "stay on the same platform or incur greater switching costs later." It is a question of ecosystems, and one only gets more enmeshed with more use. There's nothing crazy about deciding whether to rip off the band-aid now rather than create more of a sunk cost to deal with later.

Yes, but they also said:

>I want a stripped down OS X, there are so many processes on El Capitain that just take up memory, distract me, and clutter my screen. I want zfs, not apfs.

I've lost so much time to wrangling with OS X to get it to behave the way I want, to get it to do things that would be trivial if I were running Linux. The two biggest reasons I've stuck with Apple are hardware build quality and the fact that Adobe CC is not available for Linux.

>Apple literally sells this configuration

The new macbook pro without touchbar is only available in 13 inches (which is the preferred form factor of many/most but still, it's a limitation), is only available with a slower cpu/gpu/memory (no really, even its i7 option is slower than the i7 option of the touch bar model--I have no idea why you can't just get it with the same internal hardware as the touchbar model), and only has two USB-C ports as opposed to four. For reasons I do not understand at all, it's very clearly a second-class product, which is a shame because if it could be upgraded to be otherwise identical to the touch bar model I would probably get one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com