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Comment by nkkollaw | Hacker News Reader

You should give the new MBP a try (the version without the touchbar, of course).

It's the best laptop I've ever used by a long shot.

I have the 15" with touch bar and absolutely love it - everything from the shallow keyboard to the brightness to the massive touchpad. Just perfect. The touch bar was admittedly next to useless until I ran across an app ("BetterTouchTool") that lets me customize it freely with my own shortcuts and widgets - now I actually use the touch bar multiple times a day as opposed to never.

So I wouldn't completely give up on the Touch Bar versions, especially since the 15" has a good performance bump over the 13".

Most complaints about the newest one are that it's slower, palms keep activating the larger track pad while typing, and of course the lack of memory.

Most people who enjoy the touch bar are video designers rather than devs etc who use a lot of function keys.

I'm a dev and I enjoy it. Though it kinda sucks when I can't connect to an external monitor at home, have yet to buy any dongles for that. I'm kinda curious who finds themselves needing more memory, and for what purpose. No doubt more can be helpful, but having 16 hasn't really ever felt slow to me. Even when running multiple virtual machines.

You run multiple virtual machines simultaneously and 16GB of RAM doesn't feel slow to you? They must have seriously optimized the hardware to the point that the RAM goes farther. Running multiple VMs on my 2015 MBP with 16GB RAM is a nonstarter. How much memory are you devoting to each VM, and how much do you allocate for overhead on the host system?

I'm spoiled though - these days I spend most of my time on a machine with 128GB RAM and an i7-6900K :). I can barely recall what it's like for a machine to hang.

The SSD is crazy fast, and can make up for a lack of RAM in many circumstances. Swapping isn't as painful when your disk can read and write at 1.5-2 GB/sec.

Depends on what VMs and what other software you're running, no? You could comfortably fit a LAMP VM in what an Electron app like Slack uses...

As someone who has a similar desktop (128gb RAM w/ 12 core 3.3ghz Xeon Mac Pro) and the aforementioned late 2016 MBP w/ touchbar, I can definitively state you're being hyperbolic.

Last week I noticed I had Android Studio, Xcode 8.3b4, Xcode, IntelliJ, VMWare w/ Windows 7 Enterprise running Simplicity Studio and IAR Embedded Workbench, and Adobe Photoshop all at once. I was happily running along just fine without realizing I hadn't closed anything while switching tasks until Google Docs started consuming 6gb of RAM in a single browser tab.

Are you talking about a 2015 MBP or the 2016 with touchbar in the second paragraph? I honestly can't imagine all of that running on my 2015 MBP.

2016 w/ touchbar. I've done similarly heavy workloads on a 2015 MBP with same RAM and it was "ok", but certainly noticeable. I think the biggest contributing factor is likely SSD speed, but that's just a guess.

Who does serious video editing on a laptop? The difference between editing on a laptop and a high end desktop is night and day and can't even imagine working more then a few hours on a laptop for editing.

Yeah, high end video editing goes way easier with a beefy GPU.

Louis CK edits his show on a MacBook. I don't know if you consider that serious, but it's a pretty good show.

I imagine for him the portability is required or he just hasn't tried it with a desktop :)

I am a dev, already tried it out in a few stores and enjoyed using it.

If I would be on the market for a new laptop, that wouldn't be the reason for me to avoid buying it.

Rather the lack of CPU/GPU features versus something like a Lenovo W541.

Yours is the first note I've seen that palms are causing problems on the trackpad. The reviews, and folks I know who have one, seem to give the "palm rejection" high praise.

I had problems with this until I disabled "Tap to click". It's disabled by default so maybe that's why it hasn't been widely noticed yet.

I ordered my first ever MBP last week (it should arrive this Friday) but I'm really worried about these palm rejection issues I've been hearing about. Is the touch pad ok even though you disabled tap to click? It just seems very unergonomical to select text, drag, etc, but maybe force touch makes it better?

I've always had issues with the palm rejection on my current computer (ASUS/Ubuntu), and only managed to live with it by disabling the touch pad and using an external mouse. If the palm rejection turns out to be a problem on the new MBP I'll return it. No way I'm paying that much for a computer I can't properly use to write code.

Not sure what other computer I should buy in that case though, if I want something running MacOS. I really, really want the MBP to be a great computer.

I haven't had any issues since if that helps! :)

Devs use function keys a lot, on the Mac?

I'm a web developer and am keyboard-centric, but I've never ever had to use one function key from I can remember.

What are they used for? I do use the ctrl key while in the terminal, but what I am missing with the function keys..?

Some IDEs make extensive use of function keys, e.g. IDEs from JetBrains (IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, …).

On the Mac?

Yes. http://imgur.com/a/4FeMz

I was disappointed with the MBP 2016 announcement especially because I was looking to replace my 2008 Macbook and was eager to buy, but then I thought about it and the disappointment was only related to the pricing and the touch bar. The touch bar annoyed me both in theory and in actual use for about 30 mins at the Apple store.

The one without touchbar has a worse processor but the benchmarks show the difference is not significant, it's also a more efficient processor, combined with a bigger battery and my dislike of the touch bar it became a no-brainer so I ordered one configured with 16 GB recently and I receive it next week. I am so excited, I'm changing from 2008 tech to 2016, the display is amazing, I have never had a retina display before. Happy to hear you think its the best laptop you have ever used. I upgraded my old Macbook several types from 2 GB to 4 GB to 8 GB , HDD to SDD, battery, but clearly no models allow that anymore so I had no choice in that respect.

> the version without the touchbar

If you're charging, it has one available USB port. It looks like a perfectly good and well priced machine otherwise, but I don't really want a hub constantly dangling off the side.

What kind of work do you do? I'm tempted to jump on the 13" but I'd be coming from a 15" and am worried I'll be missing the extra screen space.

Not OP but I went from a 15" to a 13" a few years ago. 90% of the time it doesn't bother me at all. I do think I'll switch back to 15" next time I upgrade. The main reason I switched was size/weight but by the time I'm due an upgrade again in a couple of years I have a feeling the 15" will be comparable to my current 13" in size/weight.

Can you explain your opinion? Sadly I am a jaded person who hears your words like yours and thinks "Fan Boy."

I have no interest in proving that I am not a "Fan Boy".

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