I'd buy a non-touchbar model if it had the same hardware as a touchbar model in a heartbeat.
The biggest problem I see with it is Apple's hate of developers who touch type. Surely there's enough room on that unit to include both the function row and a touch bar? If so, it'd be pretty neat to have for presenting misc information. (It looks nice enough!)
Lenovo tried something similar with their 2014 X1 Carbon (I have gen 1, would like to upgrade to latest). Not anywhere as nice looking as the MBP's touch bar, but equal in that they messed up something good. https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/thinkpad-x1-carbon-2014-s...
Fortunately Lenovo saw the errors of their ways and quickly reverted to what I would say is the all-superior layout of the current model (i.e. the one that went before).
I never realized all of the complexity that developers were required to deal with.
I realise that whilst just about everything else I do on the keyboard is proper touch (based from F-J), I have to move my whole hands to use the FN keys. I will nevertheless hit F5, F9 etc for compiling / break points / step debugging without looking down at the keyboard.
I'm listening to music all day. Changing the volume and skipping tracks without looking is great to keep the flow going.
You warmly, and strongly screamed "do that again please" with a big heart shape.
A. can scream money for nerfed hardware with F-keys
B. can scream money for nerfed TB with serious hardware
C. can't scream money for F-keys with serious hardware
D. can't scream money for TB with nerfed hardware
You'll spend much less, and won't be supporting practices you don't approve of.
For many, dropping macOS would be a much larger disruption than having less usable F-keys. That does not mean we can't complain about it.
If you don't like the hardware you shouldn't be buying it.
Which is literally the reason why OSX is that good/stable.
>> High Sierra patch released, breaks file sharing
>> High Sierra patch re-enables passwordless root access on certain machines
> stable
It's worth it, trust me. I dropped it almost twenty years ago, and I've never looked back. My computers are less expensive, more powerful & more flexible. My computing environment is customised to my needs, not those of some generic 20-something in Cupertino. If I want to, I can dig deep in the guts of my system and fix bugs or add features. Or I can hire someone to do it for me. Or I can just rely on the work of others (which is ultimately what Apple's customers have to do anyway: rely on Apple to fix & extend — and as their recent spate of crippling security bugs indicates, they haven't been doing a great job).
I bought my first Mac in 2009 (still kicking and alive) because I was tired of tinkering with Linux (I have abandoned Windows years before). I do look back at these systems every day at work so I do know quite well how my life would be if I really had to use them for everything.
Just one example of why I like macOS - it has a copy/paste shortcut that really does work everywhere. From Vim running in a console to my vector based drawing program of choice, out of the box.
My family, friends & colleagues all use Apple computers & phones, so I believe that I've had pretty good exposure to them. There are a few things which macOS does better (system-wide copy/paste is clearly one), but overall I stand by what I wrote. Linux is great, and I don't thinking I'm missing anything by avoid Windows & macOS.
Given that we don't know whether or not you can live with non-Apple hardware, I think it's reasonable to at least float the idea.
http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-notebooks-and-2-in-1-...
Unless you tell more about what you like in the one and what not in the other it’s hard to get a value from your experience report.
- Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen
- Coil whine
- Shitty battery life
- Shitty touchpad
So as whatever is Apple doing is annoying faddy bullshit, it's still the better option, especially considering the XPS 13 cost as much or more than MBP.
> - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen
Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.
> - Coil whine
None of that.
> - Shitty battery life
What's shitty? It lasts 5 hours of me working with VMs. I don't think expecting more is reasonable. It's much less laggy than my collegue's MBP, which leads me to assume that Mac just throttles the CPU down to achieve longer battery life? I don't want that.
> - Shitty touchpad
Not at all. It works nicely. Much better than most touchpads I've used.
And as an added bonus, it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off. And it was like 1.5K EUR vs 3K EUR for a macbook pro.
The latest generation of Macs definitely run cool, fwiw. I've never once noticed the heat
> Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.
I've got a coworker sitting right next to me with a HiDPI main + non-HiDPI secondary screen. X or Wayland, it's a thousand cuts of hell: set native resolution and render scaling to 200% and you get some (most) apps at 200% on the non-HiDPI screen. Drag an app from HiDPI to non-HiDPI and notice how the overflow is wrongly scaled. There's no way to render at 200% on a non-native resolution then downsample to native, you have to set a non-native resolution, upsampled by the GPU/panel, which results in a useless blurry mess.
> it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off.
Early '13 and mid '14 13" rMBP here, VMs don't lag, slightly warm, but in no way "burning hot". Early '13 is dead silent thanks to dual fan design, mid '14 slightly less so, and only when I peg all cores for long enough.
I don't know any specific macbook models as I'm not an apple user and there is like no visual distinction between them. All I know is that I have two coworkers who use macbooks, and theirs are incredibly loud & warm.
The world became a better place when I swapped ubuntu for Debian and Unity for Gnome. Shit just works now...
Yea, I did have to set scaling at 200%, and tweak font scaling once. But it's been set and forget.
I have quite literally both sides of this problem on my Windows laptop at work. Either the 4K display on the laptop renders everything really tiny, or the 1080p displays make everything huge. I haven't found a decent solution, so I just end up using the 4K display only for Conemu because it's the only thing that doesn't render in some goofy way. Even then, the toolbar icons for it are tiny, and any windows it spawns (e.g. warning that I'm about to paste something with newlines) have tiny icons.
I stick to 1440p displays at home for now. Those work great with everything.
One handy feature you can use though is to place a manifest file [1] next to the exe with a bit of XML in it tellings Windows to render it at a bigger scale.
1. https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/054c1d49-9f24...
I‘m based in Germany by the way, so my choice of products here might be different...
I also agree that the trackpads are very poor, and that's still one of Apple's main strengths. Although quite why the trackpad needs to be quite so enormous on the current models is a mystery to me, so many people catch it when typing.
setfont sun12x22
Endure an objectively terrible keyboard with a massive failure rate if you stay.
(Ironically my £3K touchbar MBP return key failed to register a press right on cue when typing this comment)
The new keyboard is usable for me but is absolutely worse than the old models.
Equally annoying is when the palm rejection kicks in because I'm trying to press too close to an edge or something, and the lack of tactile feedback makes it feel like i just stubbed my finger.
I mean I don't have a side in this convo. But if you are gonna put up a argument at least make it not sound fanboyish.
Plenty of laptops with similar ppi (what makes retina...retina) and plenty with good touchpads.
Many reasons to choose different laptops including Apples, but those you listed the competitors have themselves. Apple just markets their retina displays as 'special' when its all about pixel density and most laptops have moved in the direction of offering comparable ppi.
> Plenty of laptops with similar ppi (what makes retina...retina) and plenty with good touchpads.
If you're going to put up an argument at least make it sound informed. The best trackpads I've used in any other laptop manufacturer was "acceptable", and that's Microsoft's. Plenty with good touchpads? Not even remotely close.
As for retina displays, plenty of laptops with higher PPI, also plenty of laptops with scaling issues up the ass.
Keyboard-nub-mouse-thing for life! How do MBP users survive without it? ;P
High-density ("retina") screens are a standard feature in high-end laptops. Asserting that it's an Apple exclusive feature proves your ignorance.
Many companies now make good touchpads, probably better because they actually have a physical click, which Apple has removed.
Many companies make much better keyboards today, while Apple makes worse. Even my Lenovo Yoga's keyboard, which retracts into the body of the laptop, is better than what Apple offers.
Operating systems are more subjective, but consider whether you really think and operating system whose developers have entirely abandoned it for the better part of a decade is really likely to be the best.
There are countless examples where it isn't true.
First, they introduced the touchbar, which is a feature that is clearly not designed for me (programmer, vim, etc.). In fact it isn't just useless for me; it interferes with the way I work.
Second, using the touchbar as justification, they raised the price to nearly $3000 if you want a 15" screen and a 500G hard drive. Upgrading every 3 or 4 years becomes incredibly expensive.
And third, they deliberately crippled the non-touchbar version of the macbook and will not let you spec it high enough to be competitive with the touchbar versions. You can't even get it with a dedicated graphics card. If the touchbar is so compelling then it should be a feature people choose. Intentionally crippling the machine to force people into an upsell is just maddening. Especially when I'm a developer that contributes to their ecosystem and what they're trying to upsell is completely irrelevant to me.
Not only am I no longer in their target market; they won't even accommodate my needs.
How Apple has destroyed their high end product (at least as far as devs is concerned) is baffling to me, as the rest of the design is exquisite - at least if you could get use to the short key travel. The 4:3 display is especially a highlight, and so is the unibody with that titanium colour.
I develop on a new, non-touch MBP. Even though it's a basic model, I struggled to believe the price of the unit when compared to a high end Dell XPS 15 or X1 Carbon. I would have preferred the (much) faster touchbar model, as I just use it with an external keyboard/mouse anyway.
(I'll give Apple bonus points for forcing me to boot into OSX before rebooting with Bootcamp to Windows 10 to get CPU virtualisation / Docker enabled.)
I'm still happy with that move.
I guess I'll keep using my 15" MBP (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) for now... If it breaks before they fix their MBP lineup, I'll see if I can buy a 2015 version ( https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever ). Or I'll look at Thinkpads.
I would almost assume that if they ever make a new model without the touch bar, there would be no price reduction for it.
To be fair it's not the TB itself that bumps the price but the addition of a second TB controller and a beefier CPU.
Apple's hardware is just a total farce.
Loss of MagSafe, carrying around a dongle, Touchbar—In the end it just added too much complexity to my life that I didn't need.
I decided to purchase an iMac instead. For everyone else I hope Apple produces a decent non-Touchbar model this year.
Power users have begged for a desktop between the iMac and the Mac Pro for years. Apple has totally ignored them.
The iMac Pro (the similarities in the name are probably deliberate) will then take over in the same slot, with the difference that you already have the built-in screen that you have to pay for. Whether this is an advantage or not depends on your studio setup. If nothing else, the starting price of the iMac Pro is significantly (25%-ish?) more than the machine that /should/ be higher level than it.
The iMac Pro has proprietary SSDs, and although the RAM is still upgradeable, it requires almost complete disassembly of the machine to get to it. It's a step backwards from the current iMac in this regard, ostensibly because the cooling vents got in the way. The GPU is built in, despite being the component most likely to become obsolete the fastest, and although upgrades are possible through an eGPU box, that means you won't be able to use the built-in screen for output.
The model desired to slot in between the iMac and Mac Pro would have been a PowerMac G3/4-style tower with user-upgradeable components - CPU, optical drive (for those who need things like BR discs), GPU etc. Apple's attitude is that you should spec your machine at the time of ordering, no later. They offer no upgrades to their proprietary SSDs after purchase (although third parties do, but that probably voids the warranty).
So no, I would argue the iMac Pro is not the middle slot we've been hoping for :(
† in a real, makeshift, or conceptual rack.
And FFS, the number of USB-C adapters I need to keep on hand is a joke, at least you can plug things directly into a Retina without a dongle!!
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+D...
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Touch+Ba...
Not a lot has changed in the past few years. Macbook Pros are NOT easy to mod/change or swap parts. This is very clearly the intention of Apple.
Of course, but that hasn't completely stopped determined people from trying (and succeeding) --- look at the link I posted to where someone added a headphone jack back to an iPhone.
As long as the dimensions are vaguely compatible, the guts of the touchbar model might fit into the non-touchbar case. Some machining and creativity required.
The only downside is the cost (unless you somehow find salvage parts), but someone who really wanted to could do it.
And high stress tolerance. I mean, if - per recent HN thread - people obsess over putting a CPU into their PC because it feels like breaking a piece of expensive electronics, I can only imagine what a Macbook owner feels when applying a lathe to their prized possession...
I don't think they've done it on purpose, this is just how it has ended up because of other priorities. I think their priority is tight packaging - across every hardware line they have, doing that well has allowed them to ship more hardware features (and/or more battery life) in a smaller package that anyone else. Designing in user servicability would get in the way of this.
They may be happy that not being able to swap parts is a side effect of this, but it'snot the priority.
But: 15W TDP CPU; RAM&SSD not soldered; USBA, USBC, HDMI, SD, SmartCard and even Ethernet(!).
Or the HP Elite X2 1012. Surface-class tablet/convertible with similar specs, but...well, 10/10 on iFixit.
Sure, those devices may have other issues (that trackpad on the Lifebook...), but tight packaging is not an excuse for unmoddability.
Just you wait for the class-action lawsuit when people's logic boards start failing and there is zero hope of pulling any data off the dead drive.