MacBook Pro with faster performance and new features for pros | Hacker News Reader

MacBook Pro with faster performance and new features for pros

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889 pointsbriandear1,173 comments

Biggest new feature they could add would be to not have an additional screen taking up battery life and shining in my face, unable to be dimmed with f.lux.

Maybe instead we could have a row of keys that provide some sort of function, and maybe a key that allows the user to escape. That would be a pretty useful feature that I can guarantee I would use dozens or hundreds of times a day.

I'm considering replacing my MacBook Pro soon, and I might have to drop macOS from my 3 OS lineup. I can't justify an expensive but locked down desktop machine, so if the laptops aren't meeting my needs either then goodbye Apple.

I know it's trendy to hate on the touchbar... but for what it's worth, I personally find it more useful than the old function keys.

Most mac apps don't use function keys as shortcuts, so the old keyboard ended up being used for media keys (volume, brightness, play/pause, etc.).

The touch bar gives me a better version of that (I actually get a volume slider), plus more apps actually make use of that space to provide useful shortcuts now. And the scrub bar for media playback is really great when you have audio playing in the background.

Yes, you lose tactile feedback. But battery life doesn't seem to be a big problem. At least for me, it's been net positive.

I noticed a big regression in battery life (25-35%) between my 2013 and 2017 MacBook Pro. I don't know how much the Touch Bar had to do with it, but the 2017 was definitely worse.

From 2015 to 2016 models the battery capacity dropped from 74 watt hours to 49 watt hours in the new 13" design. The gap was made up for by efficiency gains of the CPU and possibly the display. But the display can also be cranked way brighter now, running it at the full 500 nits will hurt your battery performance for sure. Also if you are running demanding loads it will be worse off as well.

The Touch Bar likely sips power, but the real issue with it is the lost battery capacity beneath it (The non-touchbar models have larger batteries at 54 watt hours)

IMHO the touchbar requires more effort and distraction to control the brightness and volume. What previously was one key-press to dim/brighten or mute/volume - all without me having to take my focus from the screen now requires a multi-stages process with no tactile feedback.

No thanks. Plus the keyboard will likely have the same issues my 2016 version has. I’ve had keys replaced 4 times already.

Also the loss of global prev/pause/next keys was a regression that ensured I ordered the non-touchbar version.

Muting is still one key press.

I especially like the way the toucher handles dual screen brightness, 1 press and it brings up a brightness control for each screen.

Just to note because it is non-obvious and not documented - both volume and brightness buttons are one touch. You can just tap and drag up/down to immediately adjust, and you don't have to tap, move over to the slider, tap again, then drag.

Your tip only works for _decreasing_ the volume. If it’s turned all the way down, and you want to turn it up, you can’t tap-and-drag it because the fingerprint sensor gets in the way.

You’re right. It’s just two quick drags to maximize the volume. Or one drag to get about 80% there, which covers most situations. The slider stays open when you lift your finger.

Try moving your finger left, then right, without letting go (video: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVacED7iVnDn7JiHuUT7buAL96iSTzqHB7NTZR...).

Oh hey, neat.

It's not documented but you can:

1. You can swipe in each direction to quickly adjust 2. You can tap and drag to finely adjust

> I know it's trendy to hate on the touchbar

The touchbar hate is not trendy. It's based in specific complaints.

If, on the balance of how you evaluate the problems and benefits of the touchbar, it's useful for you, great. That doesn't mean the primary reason people express a distaste for the touchbar is essentially a social fashion.

I didn't mean to imply that the concerns were unfounded. I know there are real, legitimate complaints with the touchbar.

At the same time, I just wanted to point out that there are at least some developers who do prefer it, and that the dislike isn't universal.

So maybe a nice compromise would be having both... having a touchbar that can be customized in addition to a standard set of function keys.

Or one model with and one model without. I don't like the touchbar (keys move around and change size depending on context, escape can be triggered by touching areas outside of the escape key, touch bar locks up / crashes) but I'm largely indifferent to it. My primary complaint is the awful butterfly keyboard itself. There's too little travel, the keyboard itself is far too delicate (only took a few weeks for the spacebar to start crapping out on my 2016), and the layout is subpar.

My mid-2012 MPB is in need of a replacement, but the butterfly keyboard is a dealbreaker. I'm not thrilled with the touch bar, generally supportive of USB-C (although I miss magsafe), will tolerate the glossy screen and oversized trackpad, and don't give two hoots about the fingerprint reader. If Apple could see fit to provide a current gen MBP with a proper keyboard I'd buy one in a heartbeat. As it is, when my MBP dies for good I'm almost certainly moving to a Linux laptop.

That's what I don't understand- there is plenty of room for both, especially on the 15". Just add the Touch Bar strip above the function keys and call it a day...

In my experience, most of the people (not all, but most) who complain about the TouchBar haven't actually even used one for any significant period of time.

It's definitely trendy.

There's quite a bit of selection bias because people who don't want a touchbar generally have a strong enough opinion on it that they aren't buying computers with touchbars.

I don't need to use one to know that I already resent the one backlit screen. I don't need or want another.

More flexible is great, sliding for volume is great, I have no conceptual problems with the touchbar except that I don't want another screen.

It's a mostly-black screen with fairly low brightness. I'm not in the habit of sitting in a pitch-black room on my laptop, so I can't tell you how it looks there, but in my everyday use it hasn't been even the remotest problem.

I can’t say I have ever noticed the light from the Touch Bar at night, and I’ve had this laptop since they first came out. It’s so much dimmer than the screen it’s a complete non-issue.

I am convinced that the only people complaining about this have either never used this laptop or have such sensitive eyes that daytime light would render them permanently blind. And I say this as someone who was excited by the possibilities of the Touch Bar but have so far been underwhelmed and wants to go back to the physical keys.

Not once in this conversation have I insulted you or anyone else. Not once in this conversation have I dismissed your needs and wants. I acknowledge that there are benefits to it that for some outweigh the loss of tactile feedback or addition of a second screen.

Does it really help the conversation to say things like this?

> I am convinced that the only people complaining about this have either never used this laptop or have such sensitive eyes that daytime light would render them permanently blind

You've expressed a concern about having a second screen, but the concern seems to be unfounded. The parent is dismissing you because it appears that you're manufacturing a reason to hate on the touchbar and have already stated that you believe you don't even need to try it out to determine whether your concern is valid.

If you're not willing to consider that your concern is unfounded, then you shouldn't be offended when other people dismiss your concern.

I tape over the LED power indicator on my monitor, I have the screen disabled when not in use on my microwave oven, I disable the charging light on android devices, and I even cover the indicator on my refrigerator that tells you whether it's going to dispense ice or water.

Trust me, for me, it's not an unfounded concern.

Everything you’ve described are lights that can shine in the dark. But that’s not what the TouchBar is. The TouchBar can only be seen when the laptop screen can be seen, and is really dim (certainly dimmer than the laptop screen). The TouchBar can’t ever be a light shining in the darkness because it would always be drowned out by the laptop screen.

The LED power indicator on my monitor is absolutely equivalent. When the monitor is off it doesn't produce light because I press the button. It only shines when the monitor is on, and I still find the need to cover it.

I bet it's pretty bright though. LEDs like that usually are.

I thought the tone of the second part of my comment was very obviously tongue-in-cheek, simply serving to underscore how dim the Touch Bar actually is. The main point still remains: I have yet to find a person who's complained about the Touch Bar brightness who's actually owned one of these devices.

It's really not bright. I'd guess it's probably less bright than the keyboard backlight, which also isn't bright (but is at least dimmable). It's so not bright that I've literally never noticed the thing at night in well over a year of regular use. Whatever number of lumens it outputs is so far below the brightness of the main display that it's all but unnoticeable in use.

I'm not willing to spend the money to own one, specifically because of the touchbar brightness.

I cover my monitor's power LED as well as the status screen on the receiver for my wireless headset. I run F.lux on the reddest settings when I'm within 1-2 hours of bedtime. (and after that I don't run any screens)

I have no issues with daylight brightness, but must carefully control lighting at night due to a broken circadian rhythm. Trust me, I don't need to own it to know that it's too bright. Especially if F.lux is not supported, which it is not last time I checked.

>I'm not in the habit of sitting in a pitch-black room on my laptop, so I can't tell you how it looks there...

The one situation I can imagine the Touchbar brightness concerning me is when I'm on a plane. They always turn the cabin lights out, and I'm aware that I need to turn the brightness right down on my laptop when I'm in economy class, so I don't bother those around me. A quiet keyboard is also important on a plane.

I've not used newer Macs except in the store, so I don't know if the touchbar brightness is actually an issue or not. I definitely like my physical volume buttons for making sure my laptop is muted while flying though.

I'm at the 6 month mark on a 2017 15in and I still dislike it. It's not that its terrible...it's just worse than the function / media keys. Its a step backwards. Perhaps if the touchbar was in addition to the old function row I wouldnt mind it as much.

in system settings under keyboard you can set it to only show the function keys and act only as a row of keys (similar to how it runs while bootcamped into windows)

That's how I've set mine up, but even that mode is significantly worse than having physical keys, due to the lack of tactile feedback. I still accidentally touch the software keys without intending to several times per day, and I can't press them without looking at them to confirm that I'm touching the correct one.

Same. My typing precision has gone down due to a lack of tactile feedback with button shapes and what not.

You can set that up only per application, and you can't do anything fast like dragging all your apps into the window. You have to click the + button once for every app on your machine and manually select it from an Open dialog. And the dialog doesn't remember the last directory used. It's utterly hostile.

I was given an MBP with a touchbar when I contracted with Comcast for 10 months. Hated it.

My personal laptop is MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014).

I will NEVER EVER pay with my own money for a touchbar mac book.

My number one rule when getting a laptop is a good keyboard. Period.

Plus the USB-C drivers for external displays in the new mac books is complete trash. Misaligned windows, constantly forgetting window positions, occasionally completely not working.

The MBP line of computers keeps on getting worse and worse.

I’ve got an issue with the Touch Bar that, as far as I can tell, only I am experiencing:

Take your MacBook Pro, put it in a room indoors, and flick the lights on and off in that room several times a second. You’ll notice high CPU usage on a process called “TouchBarServer”, as it tries to adjust itself to the changing light levels so it can display its screen. For some reason, as it does this, it lags the entire rest of the computer: scrolling will freeze every couple of seconds, clicks won’t register, the mouse will lag, and keystrokes will just be ignored.

Why would you do this, you might ask? I work on trains a lot, and I get this same flicker effect as the trees by the tracks go past. As they pass the windows of the train, it’s like a bright light source is being rapidly turned on and off.

I don’t ever use the Touch Bar — nor did I want one — but merely having one renders my laptop unusably slow for two hours every day. I hate this computer.

That sounds both very frustrating, and quite bizarre. I can't imagine why ambient light sensing would need to peg the CPU ever.

If you haven't done so already, I strongly encourage you to file a bug report with Apple at https://bugreport.apple.com

I have filed a bug report. But yeah, it’s crazy that one part of the machine makes all the rest of it slow down! There was a time before I figured out it was the Touch Bar when I thought it was _moving fast_ that was making it lag (because it didn’t happen when the train stopped at stations). I was paranoid that it was trying to keep tabs on my location... so it could be worse, I guess.

This is fascinating, but wouldn't this be the case on older MBPs since they have ambient light sensors?

I’m not sure, but for what it’s worth, I’ve got “Automatically adjust brightness” unchecked in System Preferences. So either it’s just ignoring that option, or it’s using some secondary light sensor.

That's my main issue with the touchbar as well, not this specific light issue, but the fact that it drags the rest of the computer down with it.

I would have preferred buttons, but I'm pretty adaptable and can deal with the touchbar if I have too. But what really gets me is that mine frequently crashes and when it crashes it's impossible to control system volume. And since trying to mute or lower the volume is one of the specific situations that causes it to crash, it results in one of the worst user experiences you could have.

God, I hate the touchbar. I constantly brush it, which is particularly frustrating when I'm typing something in Chrome and it accidentally focuses the address bar or creates a new tab. Drives me up a wall! The lack of real function keys is another huge annoyance. Also had a couple keys on the keyboard get stuck. I've had it for a year now and I'd throw it out the window in a second if I thought there was a decent shot I could get a 2015 replacement.

I've got a 2015 for personal use and a 2016 for work and I can honestly say that at the end of the day I'm thrilled to work on a machine that doesn't get in my way. They had it so right and really, really dropped the ball for me.

I'd absolutely buy a new $3000 MBP if it was the new specs inside the 2015 body. As-is, I think my next machine will be Windows.

Is six months long enough for my hate to be valid? I actually had my place of employment take it back and started working out of my retina MBP again. I'm considering buying a Windows laptop for the first time.

My pie-in-the-sky idealized computer experience is a color e-ink display with a decent framerate.

Replacing tactile buttons with a second blinding photon emitter is not progress as far as I'm concerned.

I understand all the benefits you quote, and I'm not just complaining because it's "trendy". If it was eink, I wouldn't care at all. But it's another backlit screen shining in my face. No thanks.

Were you hoping for pixel qi to make it to market with their tech? I was. I so wanted a machine with that screen so I could work outdoors

Marry me

The touchbar was what I thought was most idiotic before I got my macbook with it, and is the least idiotic thing after I've had my macbook. It is ok, sometimes kinda nice. If they put a physical Esc key on the far left, and a physical Mute key on the far right, and stuck the touchbar between the two, it would be actually very nice, because I agree the function keys are useless on a mac. But the touchbar utility doesn't make up for not having a physical Escape key.

Question for someone who has a touchbar: is it possible to add app shortcuts to it (like an extension of the dock)? And what about a dedicated escape button?

I use F12 throughout the day to open iTerm and Cmd+F2 to open Spotlight, and the escape key is obviously generally useful. Losing equivalent dedicated buttons/shortcuts would be a dealbreaker, but otherwise I could take or leave the function keys.

Edit: If yes to the above, are there any situations in which my configured dedicated buttons might conditionally disappear?

The escape button shows up in practically all apps, and extends beyond the area indicated by the OLED screen to the edge of the glass. Basically, the entire left 1" of the touchbar is a large dedicated escape key.

System Preferences allows you to do some limited customization of what buttons show up, including adding a dedicated Spotlight button. (I replaced the Siri button with that on mine.) See: https://www.howtogeek.com/303733/how-to-add-or-remove-icons-...

Beyond that, BetterTouchTool allows more advanced customization of the touchbar. I've never used it, but it's worth a look. See: https://www.howtogeek.com/307468/how-to-add-custom-buttons-t... and https://folivora.ai/

Interesting, thanks! Sad that it requires third-party software to add the iTerm shortcut (which was my biggest concern since I use it so often), but sounds like the touchbar will probably be a net positive, or at least not a dealbreaker when I do eventually upgrade.

I'm a developer and BetterTouchTool is great. I have terminal shortcuts and others bound to touch bar buttons. BTT even lets you run bash scripts from the touch bar.

So... does either one let you have a dedicated escape key?

The majority of my use of my MBPr is in clamshell mode, with a large external monitor, and a mechanical keyboard. Even for people who use theirs open, beside a large monitor, it's usually on a stand. So a Touch Bar is either pointless, or so unwieldy as to be useless, in these situations, respectively.

Maybe I'm a backwards person but I barely use escape at all. I do however use the function keys, all day, every day. I have them mapped to various apps for screengrabbing, batch copy and paste of files, rename etc. Apps like keymaestro let me add extra functionality to these "spare" keys and I don't want then replaced by any damn touchbar

In my experience, adding those functions to the Touch Bar via Better Touch Tool was just as easy as making f-key bindings, plus I get easy and visibly-distinguishable per-app bindings.

The Touch Bar is great, Apple just isn't going far enough.

visibly distinguishable is great but IMO tactilely distinguishable is more important

>Yes, you lose tactile feedback

That's the only part I really can't lose.

I like the volume slider fwiw but the regular ones worked fine too.. it is a small bonus with a massive drawback .. of course I don't like it.

Not to mention that I don't ever look at my keyboard when typing, so touchbar is just a annoying glow at the periphery of my vision.

There is an app called HapticKey that triggers vibration when you touch tb.

I wonder why they don't just through haptics into the touchbar to diminish the tactile complaint? My Galaxy S9 has touch haptics that feel rather nice.

Smartphones have less mass to move. The touchpad is haptic but the Taptic chip is fairly large and the whole pad is kind of suspended so that you can feel the vibrations. I bet they will do this but it might be tricky since it has a display in it.

I use HapticKey, which makes the Touch Bar slightly less awful by clicking the trackpad when you touch it: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

> Most mac apps don't use function keys as shortcuts

Many buy MBPs for the perceived quality of hardware, and install Windows or Linux as their primary OS.

in bootcamp the touchbar continues to function independently and acts like the function row of keys

Adding media keys did not require the loss of Function keys (“fn” toggle) so low use in apps was not a reason to remove keys entirely.

How is a touch volume slider better? Using modifier keys you can achieve any level of precision from keyboard volume keys, without looking down to find and watch what you tap. There are also slider controls already, using the mouse (both in the menu bar and System Preferences).

My gripe with it is that it's not sufficiently customizable. If it were heavily customizable it could be pretty useful.

As a heavy IntelliJ user - I use the function keys all the time. Some examples: F1: show file in project view, F2/Shift F2: next/previous error, Ctrl+F2: stop process, F3/Shift F3: find next/previous, F6: move/rename, different F7 variations: find usages, F9/F10: run/debug options, also F8-F10 - step over/into/out/continue, F12 - toggle maximize editor, etc.

I don't understand what I'm supposed to do with a touchbar, or how to otherwise remap all of these shortcuts... Sticking to my 2015 MBP for now, but I really hope Apple get their act together and release a developer-friendly model (because otherwise I'm a huge fan).

Intellij could support the touchbar - I was going to say it's a great way to do debugging until I found that using arrow keys + modifier is a fantastic way to control the debugger. (up=continue, left=step out, right=step in, down=step)

Why have I never heard of this arrow key method of debugging? That would be much more natural than the typical "fn+shift+F8 is step" stuff

I use Control+S,Z,X,C for debugging, mapping Caps Lock to Control. (S=continue, Z=Step Over, X=Step In, C=Step Out). It keeps my right hand free for mousing around, drinking coffee, etc.

What modifier are you using for the arrow keys? Aren't they all taken already?

They already do, in the 2018.2 EAP there is support for touchbar. Since it's already in RC state I think the stable version will be out in a couple of weeks.

Nobody needs to re-map anything, if IntelliJ would just support the touch bar, then they could keep the same shortcuts and rename the keys from "F8" to "Step Over"

I'm not looking at the keyboard when hitting those keys (I've been using this exact keymap for over 8 years), touchbar support isn't helping, I need tactile keys.

Well, now it’s IntelliJ’s responsibility to add TouchBar support or remap those keys.

Nonetheless you can just turn the F keys back on.

FWIW they're adding support: https://twitter.com/bulenkov/status/984476361699069952 - it was supposed to be in 2018.2 but I haven't checked whether it made it or not.

I agree though, IntelliJ is my biggest worry when it comes to the Touch Bar.

I am using it right now. It works very well, also context aware so that it shows different stuff depending on what you are doing like in the debugger you will continue, next etc.

I use it, it made it, but I'd still prefer the old function keys back

Imagine not being able to mute your sound in public because your finger doesn't have enough capacitance for some reason.

The sound can also be muted by clicking the sound icon in the menu bar. There is a volume slider there.

Trackpads are capacitive, and that’s much too slow anyway. Often your menu will be hidden, or inaccessible until all of your processes have resumed

True. I can’t think of many situations where a laptop can be used, but capacitive touch cant, and the laptop can’t be switched off or the lid closed, and the noise will would cause a problem. I guess I thought that would happen, I’d keep a headphone jack handy as a silencer. I don’t think the utility in an unlikely situation outweighs the balance of use.

closing the lid doesn't mute the sound as a hardware switch. Lots of sounds will continue to play through the closing of the lid, including sounds for video.

For an example of when capacitive touch wonts work but the laptop would, simply get your finger a little bit wet.

The scenario I'm imagining is opening your computer only to discover that had closed it in the middle of a youtube video or something the night before, and it just continues playing where it left off. A crime of the highest order in OS design, to be sure, but hardly a rare occurrence.

Cmd+Q would be my first action in that situation (which I’ve been in!) But I agree not everyone knows that.

I was imagining someone wearing a glove, but you are right that a certain amount of water will start causing issues. I think it would be difficult to pool enough water on both the touch bar and the trackpad outside of a catastrophe.

I can’t get sound to continue emitting after closing the lid. I’m sure an app can be developed to make that happen, but it wouldn’t be something commonly used. The most likely candidate seems to me to be something like audio performance software, but a person in that situation wouldn’t be using the speakers as an out and would be used to quickly dealing with software/hardware quirks.

Researching this conversation has been fun. :)

When I'm wearing my cynic hat, the touch bar is the beginning of a plot to replace our physical keys with another screen with an image of keys. The 2030 MacBook will basically be two iPads taped together

I think so too, especially with further improvements to the Taptic Engine. This might also lead to a more “solid state” device with less mechanical parts to worry about. I wonder if there will be a backlash or if we will all get used to it.

I think that would be horrible. Yoga book has already brought this idea to market, and typing on it is a nightmare.

It's okay, if you don't like it you can just plug an external keyboard into the dongle you have plugged into the dongle you have plugged into the only USB-C port they plan on offering!

It's all about the implementation/execution. We'd need some new technology to really make this work well.

There was this [1] a few years back, not sure what happened to it.

[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=%23&ved...

Yoga book isn’t Apple. People were saying the exact same thing about iPhone vs Blackberry.

If done right, it is completely possible. But the old neck beards will certainly have a conniption fit.

Not sure I agree with the lenovo equals RIM comparison. By the way, lenovos had an oled bar on top of their keyboards but removed theirs when people said they didn't like it.

Lenovo keyboards are the industry leaders. ThinkPad keyboard is pretty much the gold standard on laptops

Is it a nightmare? I haven't used it but I had heard positive reviews

I couldn't use it without a lot of typos, but ymmv. It looks nice though.

I think Taptic engine + force touch is the key (ahem) to such a scenario working.

If there were little localized bumps every time my fingers moved outside the area of a given letter, and if the keys could tell the difference between resting, setting, and actually typing, then I'm not sure there would be any problem.

The new Macbook keyboards have such low travel that they feel like a step in that direction. I like the laptop overall but I make a lot more typos than I did on my old one.

For me the only acceptable improvement would be if each individual mechanical key had a OLED display integrated and was fully programmable.

That’s so 2008. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard

It's possible. There is a keyboard you can buy like this, and one of razers laptops had an OLED numeric keypad I think. But they won't do this.

My biggest problem with the touchbar is that I would only be able to use it half of the time. Because when I dock my laptop it is either closed and tucked in the corner of my desk, or perched on a laptop stand. Either way the touchbar is to far away to be of any benefit. So unless Apple comes with a (bluetooth) keyboard with touchbar, I cannot integrate it into my daily workflow.

My biggest problem with the touchbar is the escape key. I hate not having tactile feeling for a key I use on a regular basis. I'm constantly missing it or hitting something on accident.

This is the only problem I have with it too. I MUCH prefer having the Touch Bar. Even though I don't use it frequently, it comes in very handy for certain things, and I use it far more often than the function keys. Having a virtual escape key is just strange though. I wouldn't want to go back to a MacBook without a Touch Bar, but if they just cut out another button on the left like they have on the right for the power button and made it an escape key it would be perfect. As it is, the virtual escape key is actually pretty padded to the right. You could replace it with a hard key and not actually lose any space. You might actually gain a few usable pixels.

I've had Caps Lock mapped to escape for years. You used to need some tool to do this, but now you can do it right inside Keyboard settings "Modifier Keys".

Make sure you choose the real keyboard if you also have a Yubikey plugged in :)

I map caplocks to control, I find the default control button in a weird spot to always be moving my pinky to (and I hardly have a use for caplocks, like yourself). However, after you said this, it reminded me of the comment I caught once where someone had their caplocks setup to be esc on click, or control on hold... no idea how he had it setup, though I'm curious once again.

Karabiner Elements can do that.

> someone had their caplocks setup to be esc on click, or control on hold

I have this setup, and it is great. After you switch capslock to be Ctrl, just run (at startup):

    xcape -e 'Control_L=Escape'

I've had a touchbar-mBP since release day, and I've only just recently found a use for the touchbar: in Zoom, to start recording the session, and in iTerm to change the colours.

Just this week I noticed with surprise that I'm actually using the touchbar 'productively' in this fashion - but its been a long time coming.

However I'd throw away this newfound appreciation of the touchBar in an instant, if both of these apps just .. you know .. had icons for the task. Maybe some sort of strip of icons, even ...

I had to replace my 2015 MBP last week, because the kb started failing (it wasn't one of the ones eligible for a free repair, sadly, and I can't live without a machine for however long it takes them to fix it anyway). I was really torn, because although I could reluctantly live without the function keys, the escape key is a complete dealbreaker.

After much debate I decided to take a chance on a surface book. I figured I'd try it, try and get my dev environment in a decent place, and see how I felt about windows after 30 days, with the idea that I might have to return it if things didn't work out. I'm 6 days in, and I can pretty safely say there's no way I'm going back to apple. Windows has managed not to suck at all, my dev environment is arguably better than what I had before, and I'm absolutely loving the machine itself. Most joyful new laptop experience in many years.

Really? Window sucks for me even before I log in first time, with stuff like "wait while we are setting you up, just relax...".

I switched to Linux and felt the same feeling you did though. Happiness to be back in a nice new system where I feel at home!

I was extremely unsatisfied with the promise and then the delivery of my surface pro, ended up selling it to a friend with lighter computing needs. The touch bar macbook seems pretty useful itself considering how insanely good its IO is (4 thunderbolt ports!!!). I haven't been able to use it as much and im waiting for better eGPU options to come out.

in the mean time I'm stuck just like you in the world of linux. My primary desktop pc for the past 9 months was my galaxy note 8 with a usb c to hdmi adapter. it has an incredible chromebook like UI when docked and has all the linux tools i need! I've even been able to write an app and submit it to the app store all from there. You really cant go back after you've tried one device life and it makes filming and editing content for my youtube channel seamless since video never leaves the 256gb SD card inside my phone.

Huawei has a similar mode and i cant wait for google to support it. they do natively support windowed mode and moving apps freely but i mean just add a chromebook ui to the screen when u dock a pixel 3 and you will be golden :)

Yeah, I looked at the pros too. I don't think they were powerful enough for me, and I went with the SB2 instead.

You wrote a native mobile app on a Galaxy Note 8 and submitted it to the App Store? Can you tell us what was your workflow and tool set?

Maybe React Native?

Termux emulates Zsh for me and gives access to apt-get. so I installed nodejs through apt and made the project with react native and expo. compiling the binary for uploading to Google Play Store was a tricky step and I hope to improve the workflow in the future but for now had to cheat. Expo.io provides a build service for free where they will compile and sign your app for you.

ideally i need to get a copy of OpenJDK installed and build with gradle but this was much easier.

Expo also allows you to build an iOS blob from Android entirely assuming you have a way to get it onto an iphone through testflight.

I'd be interested to read a write-up of this.

> The touch bar macbook seems pretty useful itself considering how insanely good its IO is (4 thunderbolt ports!!!)

Can a machine have "insanely good IO" if dongles are required for everything from iPhones to hard drives to memory cards? I could agree that a machine with 4 thunderbolt ports on top of the regular complement of power, USB-A, and SD slots would be insanely great. But I'm living the dongle life and not loving it.

A machine can have "insanely good IO" if you're not judging it in the context of older hardware, yes.

Four thunderbolt ports is great. One adapter to plug in all of the things you mentioned is also great. iPhones and hard drives don't need dongles, they just need cables. A USB-C to USB-B 3.1 cable is $1.33 from Monoprice; USB 2.0 version is just $1.12. Not too shabby.

For iPhones: the only times I've had to plug my iPhone into my laptop is doing development, but a cable for that only costs $20.

But let's compare it to the previous (2015) MacBook Pro: two USB ports and two Thunderbolt-and-Displayport ports, and HDMI. Five ports total, but no flexibility. Our office was full of DP-to-DVI dongles already, so swapping one dongle for another seems like a no-op. Difference now is that we can buy USB-C monitors which also serve as a power source and a USB hub, meaning one cable to plug in my entire desk. That's something you can't really get on the old MacBooks (at least, not without spending a lot more than it costs to do it on the new MacBooks.

So yeah, the machine has "insanely good IO", and once the rest of the world catches up it'll be even better.

>So yeah, the machine has "insanely good IO", and once the rest of the world catches up it'll be even better.

I mean, that's the thing. Apple jumped ahead, and USB-C just isn't common. (At least, for me. I can't name any device I've used or even heard of that uses USB-C.) So, it's a less than practical option if you're in the market for a laptop, not so much insanely good.

I wouldn't buy a computer with only serial and parallel ports because none of my devices use them, and I wouldn't buy a computer with only USB-C ports, because none of my devices use them.

I actually have a few devices now that are usb-c now. Pixel phone, Mavic Air and GoPro Fusion are top of mind.

Though to be fair the Mavic Air controller charges with micro USB

I'm mid-transition. Nintendo Switch is USB-C, which joins the Macbook in new connector land.

USB-C to X cables solve most of the problems, but I have a 3-port USB-C to USB-A dongle for legacy stuff ...

I feel that these discussions are always going back and forth because TB3 is a fantastic docking station port, and a niche port for everything else, so both sides are right. Comparing the 2016+ port selection to the 2015 one is a false dichotomy created by Apple. The straightforward upgrade path would have been to replace TB2 by TB3, like they did on the iMacs.

Exactly. There's nothing wrong with TB3 as a connectivity option, but it shouldn't be the only option.

I understand the desire to make the machine thin, which means the old USB had to go. But taking out the SD card slot makes it seem like they don't want you to have an easy way to add more onboard (-ish) storage space.

> if dongles are required for everything from iPhones

I never understood this complaint. AFAIK, I've never seen a macbook with a lightning port or the older 13-pin iphone port. If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable. Then you can use the macbook to charge your phone, or the usb-c charger that charges your laptop to charge your phone. Or yes, you can get a usb-c to usb-a dongle - but you can just as easily get the appropriate cable. I'm also seeing that Apple is going to start producing usb-c chargers for iphones and ipads (with a usb-c to lightning cable) in the near future.

I'm a macbook + android user, so I've had USB-C phones for a while, so now I can use the same cable and charger for my laptop or my phone.

> If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable.

iPhones don't come with these, so it basically means you have to go out and buy another cable, which won't work with any of the wall charger power bricks that came with your previous iPhones. I understand a change needs to be made at some point, but it's strange for Apple to ship computers with no ports that are compatible with their iPhones.

iPhone syncs on WiFi to Mac. I do not charge my phone with my laptop. I have an inductive charger on my desk at home, desk at work, table next to bed. I just set the phone on it.

I guess that works great for people who spend hundreds of dollars on inductive chargers!

I work in many environments and just bring a charge cable with me.

Of course, the iphone was just one of many things that I was noting isn’t compatible. External hard drives? Thumb drives? SD cards? All easily plugged into my previous Apple laptop, but require a dongle here. I have a mini-hub, but even that isn’t great because it can’t charge anything.

Anker Wireless Charger Charging Pad for iPhone 8 / 8 Plus, iPhone X, Galaxy Note 5, S7/S7 Edge/S6/S6 Edge/S6 Edge Plus, Nexus 4/5/6/7, LG G3 and Other Devices

$9.99 on Amazon. So I spent $30.

Glad they're cheap now! I stand corrected on that point. Curious to know your thoughts on the question of hard drives etc. Seems to me like Apple jumped the gun here.

Eh, is what it is. I recently swapped my MacBook Pro with TB for a MacBook. The HD is plugged into the Apple (LG) 4K. It runs at USB2 in this setup. I duplicated the same keyboard, mouse, monitor, HD at work and at home. I like 1 cable and the smaller size of the monitor given the resolution works fine. For me, the size and weight of the laptop was key due to 150K miles a year on a plane. Does the rsync of the HD to the home NAS take longer, yup. Does it matter, no. It’s a script that runs when the device is plugged in, in the background. If I need to do heavy lifting, CPU, compile, etc, I ssh to a rack of build servers in a colo. 3 racks of 48 cores a blade with a huge SSD NAS and 10G or 25G NICs sort everything. It is really about YOUR workflow and what works for you. My laptop is pretty much a window to google docs and for everything technical it is pretty much the same as a dumb X terminal. It works for me as my goal workflow is always the same no matter where I am.

> If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable.

The problem is that when they purchased the iPhone, it came with said cable.

I purchased an iPhoneX this year and it comes with, you guessed it, a USB-A cable. So in order to connect it to my new Apple laptop I need to buy either a $20 cable or a special dongle? If Apple wants to go all in on USB-C then they shouldn’t still be shipping their top of the line “futuristic” phone with USB-A cables.

But obviously they already know that they would have gotten many dissatisfied customers complaining about having to buy a cable just to ‘connect their phone to their iTunes’ if they did that.

Not my experience. I have to use windows at work. Got ubuntu running in a vm. Buggy as shit.

- sharing screen in hangouts puts chrome on every virtual desktop so now you can't click on chrome to navigate to that desktop

- slack crashes silently every 24 hours

- virtual desktops is a mess, if one window overflows into another desktop, then when you click on that app ubuntu will take you to the desktop where you see the least amount of your application, usually just a few pixels on the top of the screen

- copy-paste sucks balls, in some applications it's ctrl-c in others its shift-ctrl-c and some applications will copy to clipboard if you select a string

- keyboard support is terrible, in intellij i can't type `or ´ or ~ but I can type all those in gedit and then i have to copy paste them over

- ctrl-a and ctrl-e don't work in most applications, even though these are old school shortcuts that work nearly everywhere on a mac

- installing applications is always terrible on ubuntu. You can install from their app-store, if that works (50/50 odds) but you can't get intellij there, or sublime. To install sublime I had to find a blog post with 4-5 steps I needed to do. For intellij I also found a blogpost, but when I need to upgrade intellij I couldn't find it anymore and had to delete everything inside my intellij folder and copy a new intellij in.

the only viable linux platform remaining is the one loosely organised and licensed around the world called "Android". with recent advances in ARM64 chips and extremely fast processors some OEM's are releasing desktop modes for android. Its truly the final frontier of linux, hopefully this idea can aleviate those issues you've had with linux. Applications work consistently on Android although there is still the app gap of stuff not yet ported onto google play store.

I was a windows guy for many years before switching to OSX in 2006 (I actually worked for microsoft in the early 90's, but we all hated windows as much as the rest of the world, maybe moreso, because we had to develop on weekly builds). Therefore I have seen windows suck in a wide variety of ways, hence my desire to try it for 30 days and return it if needs be. In all my years in the windows world. I've never seen an app use anything other than ctrl-c/ctrl-v for copy paste (ok, I think you used to be able to do ctrl-ins, shift-ins, but that was optional), but the rest of your experiences sound quite plausible. I haven't run into any of them.

Also, I don't have to restart my wifi 5 times a day anymore, which is kind of a nice win.

EDIT: Oops, I thought these were complaints about windows (highly plausible!). actually it's unix under windows. Apologies.

Does ctrl c work in a terminal window, either cmd, powershell or putty?

Just tried it in cmd, powershell, and cmder, and it worked in all three. Don't have putty.

Well, Windows only had Ctrl-Break for the thing you were thinking about, and it's probably still true.

I know classic Linux defense bullshit but these all aren't typical 'Linux issues'.

I can only guess the desktop you used but I assume we talk about Unity/Wayland. Ubuntu removed Unity meanwhile for the Way cleaner Gnome Shell (however I don't know if they have some custom bullshit in there again)

Shortcuts are often miss configured on system level. I noticed nonsense issues therelike as well on Ubuntu.

There are highly different software repository concepts like pacman and the AUR on arch where you have a package selection right there you could never experience anywhere else.

What I am trying to say is that there is no one Linux, I don't like vanilla Ubuntu. However having used any OS in the recent years I love going back to MY Linux.

Edit:// oh the shortcuts are also likely due to the VM I just realized

He also complains about a Chrome bug, a Slack bug, and an IntilliJ bug. 3rd parties doing no QA and not respecting UX conventions on the most popular distro is a problem, but not really with Linux.

Kind of missing the point, when he/she is simply talking about the day-to-day experience of using the OS.

2 out of three are proprietary software that you pay for and all 3 have free alternatives that are better.

He's also running unknown version of Ubuntu, probably old, that he doesn't know how to use properly. Odds are really great he's one of those that pastes unknown terminal commands from blog posts to achieve goals he doesn't quite understand and his install is screwed up in some way that would require hours of troubleshooting or 30 minutes to install over top of.

Its like reading an analysis of Chinese quisine written by a guy who only buys past date 99c frozen dinners.

That CTRL+SHIFT+C thing in Gnome Terminal/Ubuntu (and some others) has driven me nuts for years!!! yes, I get that CTRL+c means something different in the context of shell execution. But it's still maddening.

Use the mouse to select and middle click to paste. Right-click copy if you want the primary clipboard.

Middle click to paste is an unrelated thing that drives me up the wall in Linux. Many of the programs I use on a daily basis have specific actions triggered by a middle click that I use often, but if I miss my target and hit a text area instead, it injects whatever I had in my clipboard into the text, often without me realizing it until later. (In one instance, my clipboard contents made it into an email I sent out. Thankfully, it was minor enough that it just looked like a typo, but it could have been much worse.)

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any way to turn off this behavior.

I have no mouse!!! (I'm a keyboard only type)

gpm FTFW!

I Have No Mouse, and I Must Scream

Bravo!

> installing applications is always terrible on ubuntu.

there are three main was of "installing applications on ubuntu":

1. main software repositories; this is essentially 1-click install (if you go through the software management application) 2. installing from a PPA (e.g. Sublime); this is 1-line copy/execute (add-apt-repository XYZ), then update (apt update) and 1-click install 3. rarely, you install binaries directly; this is a double click.

none of them is terrible. the vast majority of the Ubuntu/Debian linux software is provided and installed via 1. (update obsessed users use 2.), which is a much faster workflow than windows, and immensely safer.

If a software is fidgety in a version 3 installer, it has nothing to do with Linux, as it's almost exactly the counterpart of the typical windows installation, it's just badly packaged by the developer; binary installers are a small minority anyway.

> copy-paste sucks balls, in some applications it's ctrl-c in others its shift-ctrl-c and some applications will copy to clipboard if you select a string

this is not correct. Ctrl+C/V are the standard, the exception (not "some applications") being the terminal, because Ctrl+C has different semantics.

> keyboard support is terrible, in intellij i can't type `or ´ or ~ but I can type all those in gedit and then i have to copy paste them over

you may have a misconfigured keyboard. run the live version of ubuntu, test the keyboard with the installer, then configure the same on your installed system.

When using the "Ubuntu Software" application I am shown results for snaps, as well as results from the apt repos. Creates a bit of confusion as to which one should be installed, even more so when version numbers vary between the two.

I use snaps for isolated software that I want more or less continuous stable updates for, apt for system components that'll stay on the same major version until I upgrade the OS.

>> copy-paste sucks balls, in some applications it's ctrl-c in others its shift-ctrl-c and some applications will copy to clipboard if you select a string

> this is not correct. Ctrl+C/V are the standard, the exception (not "some applications") being the terminal, because Ctrl+C has different semantics.

I agree that it sucks (in a CMD shell). It's the reason I switched to a Mac when I became a developer. Maybe it's come a long way. I've heard good things about PowerShell, too, but honestly haven't played with it much.

As far as the Linux subsystem, I wouldn't use it for anything serious. It choked the first time I tried installing Elixir. I'd probably rely on a Vagrant VM running in VirtualBox (or whatever VM host makes the most sense on Windows).

I managed to install docker according to docker's own tutorial. Then 4 months later I get an update from ubuntu to upgrade my docker. I thought, that sounds about right....why not??? So after the "upgrade" I now had two different versions of docker installed at the same time in two different locations and neither of them wanted to start. That was a great start to my day and cost me an hour or so to fix.

> ctrl-a and ctrl-e

what the hell does ctrl-e do?

They're analogous to Home and End.

Emacs shortcuts for beginning and end of line.

Thus also shell/generic readline shortcuts.

I have a similar setup at work, albeit Ubuntu VM in a Mac OS host (I don't like Mac OS). A lot of these sound like VM issues. For example - the copy to clipboard if you select a string. That's how your VM is "sharing" the clipboard between the VM and the host. Try highlighting a string in the VM and then hitting paste in a text editor in the host and you'll see what I mean.

Are you using VMWare Fusion or Parallels or ??

I have been running Ubuntu or derivatives on a laptop for the past 6 years and I rarely had any issues at all. Rock solid and fast.

"Got ubuntu running in a vm. Buggy as shit."

I have 3 different distros running on as many machines all work fine and one is based on ubuntu LTS. Probably what you should be running but whatever.

"- keyboard support is terrible, in intellij i can't type `or ´ or ~ but I can type all those in gedit and then i have to copy paste them over"

Do you really believe people have this issue? Do you think we all have emailed ourselves documents full of all the characters are OS are too broken to recognize? Something is screwed up about how your vm or your vm software is configured that you are blaming on the OS. I have used over a dozen distros in a multitude of versions and none had any problem with hitting a key and having a character appear on the screen.

"virtual desktops is a mess, if one window overflows into another desktop, then when you click on that app ubuntu will take you to the desktop where you see the least amount of your application, usually just a few pixels on the top of the screen"

This sounds sub-optimal but may I suggest you keep windows on one screen. Most environments provide a hotkey to move a window to a certain screen and many provide hotkeys to resize it to either fill the entire screen or some portion thereof like the left/right/top/bottom half or just drag the window all the way onto the screen you intend to use it on.

Personally I prefer the way i3wm handles virtual desktops. They are PER monitor. Optimally you just assign each workspace to a particular output. Example 1-5 on left monitor 6-0 on right and switch a given output and to a given workspace with one click of super or cmd + number.

Want to view your chat app on the right monitor while leaving your browser alone on the left cmd + 7. Its also substantially lightweight which means it would work better on a vm.

The great thing about it is that there isn't ONE way to handle virtual desktops there are a bunch of different environments available one of which probably works optimally for you.

"- ctrl-a and ctrl-e don't work in most applications, even though these are old school shortcuts that work nearly everywhere on a mac"

Many applications are configurable but honestly different environments different conventions this isn't a bug its just a difference.

"- installing applications is always terrible on ubuntu. You can install from their app-store, if that works (50/50 odds) but you can't get intellij there, or sublime. To install sublime I had to find a blog post with 4-5 steps I needed to do. For intellij I also found a blogpost, but when I need to upgrade intellij I couldn't find it anymore and had to delete everything inside my intellij folder and copy a new intellij in."

Installing applications is fantastically easy and works every single time. Most common stuff is available in the repo and you can apt install foo or use the gui if you like.

Most less common stuff is available in a 3rd party repo. If you need such the workflow is google ppa somesoftware note the ppa involved and run

add-apt-repository ppa:something apt-get update apt install foo

if you get bored and want to automate that in fish

    function ppa
	 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:$argv
         sudo apt-get update
         if [ $argv[2..-1] ]
              sudo apt install $argv[2..-1]
         end
    end

ppa someaddress somesoftware bam installed

example want newer gimp

ppa otto-kesselgulasch/gimp gimp

When you say it works 50/50 you don't mean that it fails half the time you mean that it installs almost all things just fine save for a few quite frankly mediocre poorly chosen apps that you simultaneously actually pay money for but don't get good support for your environment.

This is probably because your environment is some 7 year old version of ubuntu that is similar to what your servers are running. Seriously the last time I installed intelij I just had to unzip an archive, add to path, and tell it where to get java. This "Install" in /opt actually survived multiple distros and worked without complaint.

Shockingly the instructions you found on the internet probably didn't cover the case of running new sofware on an obsolete base.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is what I'm running. Set it up about 9 months ago. Nothing special, haven't configured much expect hosts and the number of virtual desktops (which requires googling and special terminal commands to do, why is there no setting for this in the UI when it's a UI feature???)

Then I guess it runs Unity and when it comes to Unity I'll personally agree with some of the criticism:

Ubuntu Unity was always too opinionated and lacked the necessary UX testing IMO. (Yep, they seemed to have tested it, but not on enough power users; some power users (a lot of them around here it seems) love Unity. Others like me find it a producrivity disaster, probably for some of the same reasons as you found.

That said, a lot of the rest seems like a mix of misunderstandings and broken config either in the host or in the VM.

> - ctrl-a and ctrl-e don't work in most applications, even though these are old school shortcuts that work nearly everywhere on a mac

The shortcuts for text fields on Windows are not consistent either, are they?

I am very used to the organization of shortcuts on macOS, especially those for text editing. Strangely, that's what I miss on Linux the most now. However, it's probably easier to provide them to users when there is only one mainstream GUI toolkit (and, for instance, in Office for mac some of those shortcuts don't work).

My Windows machine at home is awful. Every time I go to boot it up, I have to wait another 5 minutes for it to… whatever it does, finish windows updates I assume.

I shut it down before a trip to Montreal; two weeks later I came back and it wouldn't boot. No idea why. Had to restore from a previous system snapshot and re-install a bunch of drivers and windows updates.

It's a lot better than it was, but there's still strange, ridiculous stuff that crops up seemingly out of nowhere.

My windows machine at home is always on, it's 6 years old and it's great. The only thing that has gone wrong is the motherboard failed, I replaced that and it's still chugging along quite nicely!

Surface Book is really great; I quite liked my SOs surface. I decided to go with an XPS 13 and have been incredibly happy.

I was considering the XPS series myself. Heard great things about it. Are you running windows or unix?

Check Costco. I bought an XPS 15 with 32gb ram for 1800 last winter.

I just moved from an XPS to a surface book and I'd say if you can afford it go for the surface book, it's everything I liked about the XPS but with a detachable keyboard and a pen extra.

How does it compare to the XPS 2-in-1 models? The 3:2 aspect ratio seems tempting (even if slightly lower resolution) as does the battery life. Pen support should be quite comparable (wacom AES vs N-Trig), I guess? Reviews said batterylife with the screen detached is very short?

The big drawback for me for the surface book would seem to be the subpar support for other OSs.

I can't compare to XPS myself, but:

Pen support is better than the original surface pro's, which I believe were wacom. Hard to pin that on pen tech vs OS improvements, though. The pen needing a Quad-A battery is a bit annoying, but they're not too hard to find, and just one lasts a long time.

Battery life with a detached screen is short, but you'll only really need it detached if you're walking around with it. If you're sitting or lying down, you can just attach it backwards and fold it back onto the keyboard. Heavier, but not to the point of annoyance, and it gives it a nice tilt for reading things if it's on a desk.

Battery life with the keyboard attached is incredible, especially if you can dim the monitor a bit and run in battery saving mode. (The battery saver mode does have a pretty significant perf hit, though). Just don't try to use it at full speed, at least with an i7 and discrete GPU - I can kill my battery in under 2 hours if I try to run something like a graphics-intensive game. For dev stuff I've never had a problem.

Multi-OS support is probably an issue, though WSL does seem to do a pretty good job of most things.

XPS is great. Runs Linux very well.

Source? I can only find articles of people complaining that they can not get the switchable graphics to work or can get it to work and have horrible battery life. This guy (https://medium.com/@kemra102/linux-on-the-dell-xps-15-919e6d...) tried 11 linux distributions and describes his experience as "horrible".

I heard it's super loud and the fan is running very much. Dell also seem to have very low quality.

You can control fan activation with power control utilities like powertop.

I don't know why you think Dell is "very low quality". I've seen Dell laptops last for years under heavy usage.

I can't speak to the 15" versions, but my XPS13 (onboard graphics only) runs KDE Neon beautifully with no noise or build quality issues.

It's probably my favorite work laptop to date. The only minor gripe is that I haven't been able to find a good combination of settings to prevent accidental touchpad activation while typing.

People also often mention coil whine which I haven't noticed on this model, the 15" might be different.

Windows because I use it primarily for gaming/light browsing when away from my desktop, VM for other things. I bought it when I injured my leg and couldn't easily get up to my office.

What’s your dev environment look like?

So my main concern was being able to easily run elixir/erlang, with some flavor of unix as a production target. Therefore running natively on windows was, at best, a nice to have. On OSX I could just work in the native environment, since it's unix, albeit a bit of a peculiar unix with the occasion random odd thing installed to trick me. On windows I've found two possible solutions so far. The first is Ubuntu installed under WSL. I've heard people complain that WSL doesn't always work, but so far I've had no issues. easily installed elixir, erlang, npm and vim. Phoenix works no problem. I installed elixir natively on windows as well, just to see if I could, and again, no problems at all, and it works fine. I'm using cmder, which gives you a much more unix-like command environment. Chocolatey is the equivalent of homebrew, and actually seems to be superior, or at least more complete. ("choco install chrome", "choco install spotify", kinda handy). I'm mostly a vim guy, but I'm not religious about that. Neovim worked fine in WSL, so that's all good for now. Might give vscode a shot, as it has some nice elixir plugins.

Finally, I installed vagrant under windows, with virtualbox. I haven't used that before, but I think it could provide another alternative dev environment in case WSL turns out to be unreliable. My ultimate fallback plan was always to use vmware or similar and just run unix for dev, windows for things like excel, but my feeling is I'm not going to have to do that.

Hey, what was wrong with your keyboard? Was the trackpad also not working when you had keyboard problems?

You may have had a common issue with the 2015 Macbook Pros, literally tens of thousands of people have Googled that problem on Youtube. Apple won’t admit that it’s a problem with hose models but if you take it to an Apple Store they’ll conveniently take $500 to replace the keyboard.

Anyways it’s an introduced bug due to a design flaw in the models released in 2015. They placed the ribbon cable flat on top of the battery on those models, and when the battery heats up and expands, as it does, it damages the ribbon cable. Prior models had the ribbon cable avoiding the battery by going around it. You can fix it yourself by replacing the ribbon cable. The ribbon cable costs $10 online and it’s the first thing you see when you open up the macbook, you don’t have to dig to get to it. No special equipment needed besides the screws to get the Macbook open.

For awhile the 'e' key was only working about 90% of the time. Then it began working about 120% of the time, so I had to remap it to nothing, move the 'e' to the backslash, and plug in an external keyboard. The trackpad and all the rest of the keys were working just fine. I usually replace machines every three years or so anyway, so the key issue was just the trigger. Thank you for your advice. Do you think that might be the issue, given that the trackpad worked fine?

Intermittent keyboard problems are the early signs. But I haven’t heard of it affecting just a single key.

The trackpad and keyboard both use the ribbon cable, so when it fails completely, both the trackpad and keyboard will stop responding.. With the exception of the power button.

It’s a toss-up if it’s the same issue with only one key being unresponsive. Could just be a bad key. But I’d give it a shot since it’s only a $10 fix with a t6 screwdriver. Or if you want, mail it to me and I’ll fix it and use the laptop as a secondary computer to run my data visualization computations =D

Heh... the current plan is to hold onto it as a backup (in case windows decides to rise up and ruin me in a couple months) and just use it with an external kb.

Trading a touchbar escape key for Windows? As a Mac user that uses Vim, that touchbar escape seems easy to adapt to compared to adapting to an entirely different OS (and Windows at that!)

I recall when touchbar first launched, someone on HN pointed out that Esc is a poor way to use Vim anyway and there are far better mappings. I swapped to Ctrl-[ before I even had a new MBP and much prefer it. The “Esc problem” is a drastic reason to throw your whole hardware/OS stack our the window IMO.

Caps-lock could work too. As a weird ctrl+c vimmer I probably wouldn't notice. I think my uses of escape in the past year fall into two categories:

- Ctrl-shift-esc (opens the task manager in Windows), and

- Trying to close dialogs when I'm not sure which button is "go away".

As a long time emacs user, I've always had cap-locks mapped as my control key (plus the emacs key-bindings work in html forms and in anything using gnu deadline) which is a bonus. So on my MBP with touch-bar, I have had this mapping so I can have a physical ESC key:

CAPSLOCK -> CTRL LEFT CTRL -> ESC

It's not great, but it works. The last time I had to deal with a company who put the ESC key in a weird place was back in college where we have several of these HP Apollo/720 keyboards:

https://alum.wpi.edu/~tfraser/Machines/hpapollo720.jpg

:-)

Escape key is non negotiable. Sorry, you won't change my mind on that point.

I feel your pain. You can remap caps lock, basically a useless key, to escape, however.

Sadly I already remap caps-lock to ctrl. Don't worry though, this SB2 is so nice I'm no longer feeling any pain. Literally my only complaint about it so far is that the headphone jack is in the wrong place (it's on the edge of the screen in the upper right, which is sort of an odd place for a wire to be coming out. It should be on the lower edge either left or right.)

> Sadly I already remap caps-lock to ctrl.

What about your ctrl key? You could remap that to esc.

It's a pain to reach. And now that I have an escape key, no need.

> Sadly I already remap caps-lock to ctrl

You can do both. Have it act as ctrl when held (for shortcuts) and as Esc when released on its own:

https://github.com/alols/xcape

I presume there is similar software for windows.

I thought the same thing until I actually used it. Turned out to not be that big of a deal.

Yeah, I thought it would be bad, but it is not.

The key actually extends to the edge of the touchbar even though the graphic for it does not.

it goes beyond the displayed icon certainly, but definitely not to the physical extent of the whole bar, for at least mine and another that I've tried.

There's at least 2-3mm of dead space on the LHS of the bar.

My sense of the comment was not that he was trying to change your mind, but rather saying it seems unusual to be so fixated on the escape key that nothing else matters.

Having said that, yes, Apple should allow individuals to, for example, always require the touch bar to provide an escape key (or any other key) on the far left (or anywhere else on the touch bar). The user should get to control what the touch bar does through an easy and powerful interface and API (so third parties can extend the capabilities). Can we even make touch bar keys act as new meta keys? That would rule! The benefit of the Apple approach is that even if this has not been done yet, it's all software: it could be done.

As far as Windows, I guess it must come down to which features are important to you, and personal taste. I use Windows a lot, and have owned a Surface Pro, and boy I hated it. The very, very best thing about Windows is the Linux compatibility layer, and even that's not as good as if it were a real Unix-like platform all the way down.

I am indeed glad you're happy with your laptop (seriously; not sarcasm), but I've been there, done that, and hated it.

I wouldn't say I'm so fixated on the escape key that nothing else matters. The base OS matters a great deal! I pursued three lines at this particular fork in the road, I considered buying a 2016 MBP, a refurb or whatever, I considered switching to unix on whatever hardware (leant toward dell XPS), and I considered a windows box, with unix living underneath, somehow. The first option just seemed crazy to me, perhaps irrationally, but making my new machine a two year old machine just felt wrong, the second option could have mostly worked, except that I really need excel, and I really want ableton. I decided to give the third option a try, thanks to the money back guarantee, and I'm amazed at the improvement.

I suffered the temporary pain of switching to OSX in '06 because I'm not religious about these things, and at that time macbooks running OSX were providing an exceptional environment for devs like me. It was a hard transition, but after a couple of months I was (mostly) fine. A fair amount has changed in the world in 12 years, and I'm no longer convinced that OSX inherently provides the best environment for a dev. I figured give windows a shot and see how it goes. It took me 24 hours to get the machine in a state where I could work as before (this would have been impossible on a windows box in 2006), and the question now becomes, why would I go back? It's only been a week, so perhaps windows will show me why very soon, but my gut feeling is it won't.

Also worth considering, is that from about 2000 onwards, apple was catering to open source focussed devs, at the exact moment that microsoft was making their lives impossible. I think that trend may have been reversed. Every upgrade to OSX for the past six years or so has represented more pain than pleasure for me. YMMV, but microsoft's offerings, even when flawed seem to be headed in the right direction.

As far as the comment, yeah, I was a little snarky I suppose, but a common response to complaints about the lack of an escape key is "you don't actually need one". I'm sorry, but I do. Ok, I don't need one. but I really want one, and this is a laptop we're talking about, and I use it as a laptop most of the time. I also want ports, a headphone jack, etc. But the escape key is for me the last straw, and enough of an incentive to actually look on the other side of the fence, which I've avoided doing for 12 years. I like what I see there.

I cut my teeth on Windows with Microsoft Visual Studio Basic in the 2000s, then Windows/Dev-Cpp because of poor MSVC++ support for some C++ features I thought I needed at the time, switched to Mac/Vim, then had a 6ish year stent with Ubuntu and Vim as an IDE. But then a botched upgrade from 14.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS lead to a few frustrating hours of my time to get X to even load. I'll never see that time again. Now I'm back on Windows, and somehow have drudged along without installing Cygwin yet, although that's coming. Developing Java has been a pleasant experience with IntelliJ IDEA. The GUI use is taking getting used too-- but configuring IDE things like language servers is mostly automagic and have very reasonable defaults. The biggest issue I've had is Windows upgrades requiring random restarts completely interrupting my workflow. But, overall, rediscovering Windows has been a pleasant experience for me too.

Check out Windows subsystem for Linux - you can almost certainly skip cygwin entirely and run the same binaries you like from Ubuntu.

I hear I could even run i3.... I can't wait to give this a shot.

Filesystem performance is a bit crap and you can't run Docker in Windows Home, but otherwise I found WSL pretty great. The Docker thing finally turned into a dealbreaker for me though, so after about two years of WSL I'm back to linux.

The lack of Docker support with WSL stopped me in my tracks too, or I'd have probably moved back to windows as my daily driver. I don't enjoy dual-boot for gaming as I only game occasionally and have to deal with a backlog of windows updates when I do.

Is there some missing repository you need to add to the Windows Ubuntu? Every time I've tried to install some one-off tool Stackoverflow has suggested (yesterday it was ncftp, the other day it was some ssh configuration, ifconfig isn't there) apt can't find it.

it's the same userland as "real" Ubuntu, so apt will give you the same results on both.

Perhaps do a "sudo apt-get update" (updates the local resources of apt, not the packages themselves) so that when you do a "apt search" or "show" in the future it has something to show?

> but configuring IDE things like language servers is mostly automagic and have very reasonable defaults.

What does configuring IDE things have to do with Windows? Wouldn't IntelliJ have the same reasonable defaults on Linux and macOS? Or is it a different product somehow (haven't used it myself.)

Good point, IntelliJ has first class support for Linux, Windows and Mac.

> upgrades requiring random restarts completely interrupting my workflow

You'll never see that time again.

Indeed, but you can do other work while Redmond holds your computer captive.

I use Cloud9 for 100% of my dev needs. It made switching to a Surface Book pretty easy.

Cloud9 is an amazing product that isn't very publicized. Makes developing right on AWS easy.

I left Mac for a Surface Book a couple of years ago. It was a challenge at first. Largely because of WSL speed, but that has been mostly fixed now (test suite may be a few seconds longer, but it isn't 10x longer)

I am browsing the thread out of FOMO and don't feel any urge to switch back.

I hear you. The little annoyances are far outweighed by the positives. Even the display seems crisper which I didn't expect over a retina display. WSL is not amazing performance, but it's probably about the same (the machine itself is faster, phoenix under WSL is not. Perhaps that's the perf issue at play)

kb? Are people really abbreviating the word keyboard with "kb" now?

nope.

I opted for a Xiaomi laptop. Best purchase I ever made. Amazing build quality, out of the box compatibility with Linux, great hardware specs. I can't believe that near MBP clone only set me back 550€.

How does the trackpad on the Xiaomi compare with the MBP? I'm considering buying a cheaper MBP alternative and running Linux on it but I don't want to be carrying an external mouse around with me.

What are you using for the terminal? I just started a new job with a Windows desktop provided and I can't get much done on it because every terminal emulator I can find sucks compared to iTerm 2 on my MBP, so much that I'm going in to IT to beg them to let me use it, or at least let me dual-boot Ubuntu. Bash on Windows has no way to add solarized light/dark or groovebox themes, much less switch between them daily like I like to do when I get stuck on something and need to see it differently. Also the Windows bash home is a no-mans-land once you want to open something up with Atom on Windows. Directories I make in Bash don't show up in File Explorer once I spend 5 minutes navigating to the right place. Font rasterizing and color-coding is awful too, on the native Bash, CMDR, and Hyper.JS. It's so frustrating.

Cmder - http://cmder.net

Then get chocolatey

I prefer this one.

https://imgur.com/a/cFgvQaH

It runs on Windows too, but I prefer it on Mac, as I don't like the Windows font rendering on HiDPI displays.

App is Hyper, https://hyper.is

You want the builds that use xterm.js from VS Code, their performance is much, much more like iTerm/Terminal.app.

Color scheme is Ocean Dark, from the hyperterm-base16-ocean-dark plugin.

Shell is ZSH, using prezto and a hacked up custom prompt.

Font is a custom build of Iosevka Term, weight bold, 13px. Using Greyscale font rendering, not subpixel, on Mojave DP3.

https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/

Commands for custom build:

make custom-config design='v-zero-dotted v-asterisk-low v-tilde-low v-underscore-low v-at-short v-brace-straight term' weights='book medium'

make custom && make custom-web

If you're not on Mojave, you can force the rendering to look like that for Hyper with this command:

defaults write co.zeit.hyper.helper AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

Otherwise it will be a bit heavy.

An Electron-based terminal emulator... I've seen it all!

I know, this was my first reaction too!

Yet, the customizability rocks, and since xterm.js now renders using Canvas, performance is decent, and with my incoming MBP 32GB, I can afford the memory hit even more!

Although installing the plugins is asking for your fans to spin up.

If you really want to start making old-timey admonitions, check out https://www.npmjs.com/package/hyperpower :)

If you're like me you're stuck in an older version of Windows 10 where WSL has serious bug the most recent version are very stable but if your work has you stuck on an old build it might not work well.

I use a fairly customized ConEmu.

I actually just got a new Dell XPS and took the opportunity to setup my shell exactly the way I wanted it.

https://imgur.com/a/GhemUQG

I use psreadline, oneget, conemu, powershell, oh-my-posh and posh-git.

You shouldn't use windows to access the WSL filesystem, there are several issues with that (which I believe are being worked on). If you want files accessible from both put them in the Windows filesystem. Regarding themes I can't help that much, I have successfully solarized vim though. I needed:

  let g:solarized_termcolors=256
  set term=screen-256color
  set t_ut=

WSL with ZSH and WSL terminal https://github.com/goreliu/wsl-terminal. Simply Rocks!

Not yet hit by a friendly update reboot in the middle of an important compilation are we?

not sure if shill !

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Job gave me a MBP with a touch bar. In the past I've been able to grab an older MBP 15" but they were out of them. So... a small slice of electrical tape solved the issue. Ugh, it's ghetto.

It's the worst invention. Anyone who worked on it should feel bad about their existence -- like drawing mustaches on the Mona Lisa. The 2013 MBP was a perfect laptop (for the time). It's nice they finally got around to adding more RAM... that's about all I would have wanted to change on the 2013 MBP.

agreed. happily typing on my 2013 now. best laptop in existence. and it cost half as much.

I’m tempted to start a movement called Tape the Touchbar™. Just put a stylish piece of black electrical tape over it and pretend it’s not there.

Seriously though, I share your frustration in regards to both f.lux and external monitor/stand use. It would be nice to be able to dynamically disable the Touchbar in a user configurable way.

Can’t you use Night Shift or the built in dimming? Not sure I understand what you are saying. (Not arguing, just genuinely interested in the complaint.)

The Touch Bar can't be dimmed below a certain threshold (either manually or programmatically). Normally we use f.lux or Brightness Slider to dim the main display, but touch bar brightness can't be controlled. Makes it hard to work late at night without putting electrical tape over it.

I never had this problem. But if it's really an issue you can use betterTouchTool or similarly to simply remove all buttons so it doesn't render anything.

Yeah, it's sad. I was hoping for a version without a touch bar too :(.

I'd also say that these new Macs are the most unpopular ones among devs. It's just that we are so used to MacOS :|

They've got one without the touch bar.

My biggest gripes:

- Dongles still needed

- Touch bar can't be dimmed

Re: the function row, I wish instead of the OLED strip they would have implemented something like the Optimus Popularis:

https://store.artlebedev.com/electronics/devices/optimus-pop...

To me, this is the best of both worlds. Just put the default keys to start and then let your users pick if they want to. I prefer individual keys to tapping a screen, which is why I use a laptop and not an iPad.

yes - this is a damn fine idea. i'm always accidentally resting my finger on the down brightness key and only notice when the screen suddenly goes dark. keys that press = good idea.

I turned away from the mac, first because the HW, second because prop. software is creaping me out more and more. I bought a lenovo T480 (big battery, higres screen, good keyboard, only the trackpad is shitty) and I installed the shiny ubuntu 18.04 and I have to say, it's the best setup I ever used. It's super stable, with some tweeking(https://github.com/erpalma/lenovo-throttling-fix) it's crazy fast, 7h+ battery life when doing web development. Even the LG UltraFine works great under linux. I never regretted it.

I've been thinking about doing this too for some time now. Just not convinced which Lenovo to go for..

Former macbook pro user here. I currently use a T480 with the 72wHr battery. Web Development and programming I pull about 20+ hours of battery life. Using i3wm under Fedora.

Absolutely gorgeous machine.

Can you use the switchable graphics or did you get the model without a gpu?

I got the one with the MX150 dGPU, because there was no other option from the students program I bought it from. But I personally would go for the one without a dGPU. Even-tough the dGPU version uses 2 heatpipes, there are thermal issues. As soon as the GPU hits 70°C, the cpu-package gets power throtteled to 5W... so it's not usable for graphic intense workloads. I would choose the one without the dGPU, manually buy and install the 2heatpipe cooler for better CPU temperatures and use a eGPU if I really needed the power. For the time being I just disabled the dGPU under linux with bbswitch. I'm still able to watch 4K movies with 60fps, no problem.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/8flj0i/t480_power...

Wow, what a shame. How is this even possible? A Macbook Pro 15" has a 45 Watt TDP CPU and is half as thick but throttles less? The new Macbook Pro has two extra cores and I could use the graphic cards as well. Switching graphic also works where in Linux it does not. Taking into account that resale value of Macbook Pros the price difference is not so big.

20+ hours is impressive. Do you also use lenovo-throttling-fix, and if so, what are your settings for the turbo-boost max power?

> I bought a lenovo T480 (big battery, higres screen, good keyboard, only the trackpad is shitty) and I installed the shiny ubuntu 18.04 and I have to say, it's the best setup I ever used.

If by hires screen you mean WQHD, I am wondering what you do with absence of proper fractional scaling support by desktop environments (and how workarounds interact with external monitors).

KDE supports fractional scaling

I used f.lux for 2-3 years. Then I stopped, and I haven't used f.lux for 2 years now.

The problem with f.lux is that it makes reading on the computer at night TOO comfortable. I was consistently staying up way past my bed time, and suffering for it.

Removing f.lux made it easier to go to sleep earlier. Sometimes comfort isn't worth it. I prefer getting my sleep.

for those in this thread excusing the touch bar how would you feel if apple replaced the entire keyboard with a large touch surface like typing on an iPad. Great idea? Can't wait? Or Ugh?

Keep seeing people on Twitter suggesting this as a fix to the unreliable keyboard, completely ignoring that the keyboards were never unreliable until the Butterfly Switches existed.

As for the idea, well if touch keyboards are so great why have they invested so much effort in adding a physical keyboard to their Pro touch devices.

> The new keyboard has the same dimensions and look as its two predecessors, but the keys feel just a little bit different. They're quieter, for one thing. They have a softer, less click-y feel that is a little closer to the pre-2016 models' chiclet keys. We found the new keyboard to be a little nicer to type on, but it's not a radical difference. It's unlikely to convert the detractors, but it's a welcome iteration for those who liked or didn't mind the previous butterfly keyboards.

I'm going to wait a year, maybe 18 months for feedback before I consider upgrading. Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts? No touchbar, smaller touchpad than the newer macbooks, but updated specs? Call it Macbook Developer... We build the software for the "Pros" after all.

I just don't get it.

Seems we share thoughts on this. I think a macbook developer model with the spec you mention would be quite popular.

The 15-inch 2015 Retina model is no longer being sold on their website, too. It was there as an option for some time, but it appears this new update called for getting rid of it. I was planning on saving up to finance that as my next laptop purchase, but seems as if I'll have to go through a third party seller.

The mid-2015 model (which I still use and think is way better) is over 3 years old now. It was always bound to be discontinued eventually.

There are still some available in the Apple Store under the clearance section (https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/clearanc...). Definitely your last chance to get this model new from Apple.

Bought a 2016, then returned it and got a refurb 2015. My only regret was getting the 500g SSD vs waiting for a 1tb model (which my friend got). The refurb levels were changing daily, and I kept missing the 1tb models, so I pulled the trigger on a 500g.

Didn't care for the touch bar - yes, hey, apparently all the cool kids 'remap' their ESC key, and many did it I guess 20 years ago(!), but I've got decades of muscle memory to overcome. But beyond that, yeah sure it was thinner and sexier, but had a 20% smaller battery, and for the work I do, I guess I'm not 'pro' enough, but never managed more than about 4 hours max of real work.

The 2015 model was 'good enough' in most respects, and better in others (keyboard, battery), and... cheaper.

Always interested to see and try the newer models, but probably won't upgrade in 2018 or 2019 without some massive reason to do so.

EDIT - well, the 32g option might be a worthwhile reason to upgrade. And the battery looks slightly larger than the 2016 model.

You can upgrade the SSD yourself (e.g. https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-pro-retina-d... ) although a 1TB drive is $600.

had looked at that - seemed potentially more trouble than it's worth, but... it might be a cost-effective avenue (factoring in time/value) before another upgrade. thanks.

I'm about to do that with my mid-2015 MBP, although I'm probably going to get an mSATA off of Amazon.

500g SSD is misleading. 'g' is used for 'grams' not for storage size. GB or GiB (or gb if you're really lazy), but not 'g'.

apologies - I can def see how it can read like that.

The battery increase for the high end i7/i9 models is to offset the increased power draw -- it supposedly won't give you much in terms of battery life in actual usage.

Pro models will probably not have amazing battery life, especially if you're saturating the GPU (i.e. gaming).

However, Apple has previously led the market in power optimizations. I'm not confident they'll do that this time.

Or just... running stuff that kicks on the GPU? Running development tools (ios stuff, java stuff) would always kick things in to overdrive and send the fans whirring, and killing my battery. Yes, I'm often plugged in, but knowing that, if I need to be mobile, I'm going to get 2-3 hours... was a hard pill to swallow for $3700, when for 30%+ less I'd have a machine that lasted longer, had quieter keyboard, etc.

And worth noting the 2015 15-inch MBP they've discontinued had the old non-butterfly keyboards. The old style keyboards are gone, Apple is 100% in on the keyboards they currently have a defect service program on. [1]

(Edit: Though these new MBPs apparently have a new third generation keyboard, so not exactly identical.)

[1] https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...

The 15-inch 2015 Retina model is no longer being sold on their website, too.

Check Apple's refurb store: https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macb...

Also, Woot: https://computers.woot.com/plus/refurbished-macbooks-macbook...

They didn't do that because it is not what most people want. Apple has to make changes that will sell more laptops to the masses to maximize shareholder value.

The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does. Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products and make up 10% of the complaints then to focus on the 10% of customers who make up 90% of the complaints.

> The niche developer/macrumors posters

It's not just developers and MacRumors posters. Joe Rogan - the comedian and MMA commentator - did a massive unprompted rant on how poor (and he didn't use the word 'poor') the Apple keyboard was on his recent podcast (3rd most popular podcast in the world http://www.itunescharts.net/us/charts/podcasts/).

The keyboard affects anyone who types. It's not a niche group of obsessives at all.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Rogan is a good proxy of Hollywood creatives, which in turn has an enormous impact on how often Macs show up as default movie props.

Isn’t a better “proxy” for how well the Mac is doing reported sales numbers?

Have you seen reported sales numbers specifically for Hollywood creatives? Will you ever?

Apple sends hardware to movie production companies. They’ve been doing this for years.

There's a big difference between the AfterEffects guys and the writers. Rogan's complaints were as someone whose career requires massive amounts of writing and understandably wants a keyboard to have feedback.

I'm in complete agreement with him. In their obsession to make the thing thinner and fancier they have rendered it less usable. They've locked themselves into a marketing pattern that precludes them from having a "if it ain't broke" mindset.

..the difference being, Apple can send the hardware, other companies often have to pay for product placements.

I would also add Rogan has a massive following and is a big influencer in many areas. His opinion could easily affect people thinking about or considering moving to a Mac product.

I know a lot of his followers on Twitter are super loyal to the brands he promotes.

Consumer electronics movie props are typically paid advertising placements now. I don't think there's really a default anymore, at least not for big-budget Hollywood productions.

The Macbook Pro has been the go-to software developer machine for years now, and that segment is seeing a massive exodus after the touch bar launch. I don't know how big a percentage that is of total sales, but it can't just be a trivial niche.

I'm holding on to my 2013 mbpro with a real keyboard, but if it dies... looks like they only have emoji keyboards now. I'll have to join the exodus then.

Late 2013 mbp crew represent!

I think this is the longest i've held onto a computer.

Same here, I'm typing this with my late 2013 mbp, this was my first Mac. And it's amazing how it keeps working perfectly just like the first day, I haven't noticed any slowdown, it doesn't have any noticeable hardware issue. I never experienced this with other computer.

Same, I see mine as the last great computer ever made by Apple. & slowly look at Lenovo's just in case, it gives up.

I have a 2013 13" and a 2014 (I think) 15" for work and having had used a lenovo thinkpad for work briefly I can confidently say that there is no way I will be joining any sort of exodus when my work laptop or personal laptop come time for upgrade.

Same here. Well, that's my personal laptop which is perfectly fast and in great condition.

My work laptop was actually the same generation, until IT recently upgraded me to one of the new-keyboard models. I don't like how loud the keyboard is, and I don't like the touchbar. (sorry, I actually need to press "Esc" and also use non-beautifully-designed software that sometimes uses Fn keys.)

Needless to say, I have absolutely no desire to upgrade my personal laptop. When I do, I can only hope Apple has moved past this, or the F/OSS world has finally acknowledged that the touchbar actually needs to be supported.

Mine's a mid-2012 model. I've been quite happy with it. I've long been looking forward to Apple coming out with a model capable of 32GB, so I would have upgraded immediately, but my understanding is that the new machines haven't addressed the keyboard dust issue. So I'm probably going to hold on to my 2012 for at least another year.

With all of the (deserved) internet outrage about the MacBook Pro, Apple’s sales of Macs aren’t showing thier direction is the wrong one.

That being said, for a personal development machine, I would much rather have a 27 inch 5K iMac with the same specs. Work provides me a decent laptop.

It's hard to tell from the data. Sales should perhaps have been higher. The macbook pro hadn't been refreshed for a bit in late 2016.

Me and some other pro users were insta-buys for the new machines. But then they had few ports and no function keys. We're still on 2015 machines.

I'm holding out for the mac pro, but I would have bought 1-2 macbook pros if they had been suitable.

Is there a real, large exodus though? I don’t notice that, anecdotally, but others seem to (seemingly anecdotally too). Are there data about it? For the segment that are “professionals” or for work use, for example? At least broadly, 3Q saw Mac sales decline 7.5 percent YOY. But, the whole PC industry declined. So, I’m not sure what conclusions to draw — and in the absence of that it seems a bit hard to swing either way in claims.

Know any other data?

I have no data, and I personally use Linux and track point equipped machines, but my observation is Mac fans paying for their computers with their own money are not buying the new macs. I suspect that the sales number are reflecting corporate sales. I think Apple should remember that it is people from the former group who have managed to arm-twist corporations to look at non-Windows machines, that and the slow rise of Linux acceptance in more and more companies should make them listen to people who don't want Windows want.

The PC industry as a whole is declining from a sales perspective because refresh cycles moved from 30-40 months to 60-70 months. If you have 1000 computers, you needed to buy 200/year today, and would have needed 350 in 2005. Computers don't need to replaced as often, so slowdowns in momentum are very important because they indicate the institutions are slowing down purchases.

Microsoft is trying to push back on this by making it impossible to support Windows 10. We'll see how that goes.

When I was responsible for this at a large enterprise, I was buying 40k devices a year, every year. The Mac component was about 1,500/year. That dropped to 50 when the new keyboards came out and started failing. Losing a few hundred sales isn't a big deal, but some of that money that was going to MacBooks went elsewhere.

I bought a Dell XPS rather than buy a new 13" MBP because of the keyboard issues + touchbar.

I had a touchbar 15" from work and once I left I bought the no touch bar 13" version. I was waiting for the 15" no touch bar version, but it looks like I'll stick with the 13" for now. Eventually they'll probably fix it somehow, but if not it sucks as I used to like both the machine and the OS.

> go-to software developer machine

It really isn't. In some localized niches, perhaps. Overall, no.

At least among web developers (not just front-end, and not just JavaScript), it's completely ubiquitous in my experience.

You say that but it's the vocal but happy 10% that can sway the 90% to buy it. Mac wouldn't have been as big as it is today without its fans. The ones that complain are your best customers, because the ones that don't just walk away without giving you feedback as to why they walk away. The 90% is too indifferent to speak up.

You're greatly overestimating the tech community's importance. The average person doesn't need any swaying to buy Apple products.

See “leading” vs “trailing” indicators.

that's how it is now but it didn't happen overnight and without a reason.

I’d be willing to bet a big part of the base that buy the MacBook pros are the creatives. Most consumer consumers are happy with iPhones and iPads.

As someone who was a massive fan of Apple MacBooks and recommended them to other people, I don’t do that now. I highly unrecommend them nowadays. I’ve personally in fact bought older second MacBooks since they last longer and work better than the new ones.

So it slowly adds up. Microsoft surface is already making a good dent in what was a loyal Mac Pro market.

A lot of people ask techie friends for advice on what computer to buy.

As argued by Paul Graham:

"So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?

Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world."

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

PG’s argument is a meaningless non sequitur. The question isn’t about what new technologies people adopt; it’s about what product designs they go for. The former of course will start in CS departments and research labs, because that’s where they’re developed. That’s really not saying anything, and has no bearing on the latter.

A lot of people ask techie friends for advice on what computer to buy.

The number of people with HN-grade "techie" friends is a rounding error.

Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers,

If that were the case, Apple wouldn't be selling tons of iPhone's in their "wall gardens" and DRM'd media content and the "Year of the Linux Desktop" would have come ages ago....

You're greatly overestimating the tech community's importance. The average person doesn't need any swaying to buy Apple products.

“There’s a App for That” <—- who makes the apps?

The most popular apps made be made by computer geeks but which apps are made are decided by large corporations. Corporate America (and corporate marketing) have a far bigger sway than computer nerds.

If that weren't the case Samsung wouldn't be the most profitable Android manufacturer with their crappy bespoked custom Android version.

I'm pretty sure I switched my parents into an imac, and three iphones so far, with a fourth on the way soon.

If I was on android/PC they would have bought those, for tech support reasons.

I've influenced some friends, too. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing, and professional users talk about their machines a lot.

(Devs, video editors, writers, designers, photographers, etc)

Based on data or anecdotes?

Yeah, I don't think that's because you're a tech person. To most parents, their children may as well be tech experts because their bar for that is simply "they know more about computers than I do." I'm sure most people could probably convince their parents to buy a Macbook, or any other brand of computer, for even arbitrary reasons.

I may be wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that your parents had to be convinced to be a Macbook on the merits of it's technical prowess in relation to other competition. They probably just respect your opinion on technology regardless of what it is.

> The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does.

Haven't done a survey, but quite a few folks I know who work at Mac shops report that their employers have been steering clear of the new MacBooks and just trying to keep the older models they already have alive, while also looking seriously into the feasibility of switching to PCs running Linux if they don't get their act together.

Making the keyboard reliable would help, but that touchbar is also a legitimate ergonomic concern for anyone who uses software that requires you to be banging on F-keys all day.

>while also looking seriously into the feasibility of switching to PCs running Linux if they don't get their act together.

This is ultimately what I ended up having to do; not really by choice. My 2015 MBP was stolen, considered looking for a refurb model but found myself test driving an HP Spectre x360-a minute with the keyboard, another few minutes Googling linux driver support on my phone and some other specs. I was walking out the door with the new purchase 15 minutes later.

It's been a couple of days now, I still haven't gotten around to throwing *nix at it, but for a majority of purposes WSL is getting me by pretty nicely enough. A few days of getting a fresh Windows installation and ridding myself of all that retail bloatware, I'm actually not having a bad time with Windows 10 given it's the first time I've dailied a windows machine since XPSP1.

That's how far I'm going to avoid the new mbp because key input means that much to me-given how much time I spend in text fields, but this is a really enjoyable machine so far. After 3 years though my eyes definitely got used to the retina display, and this screen just can't match the color variation or the deep darks-then again it also may be the high gloss touch screen.

I wrote up some tips on how to make Windows 10 more palatable for a Linux user. https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi...

Good god almighty that easy window dragging is getting installed right tf now. Thanks for putting this list together!

I'm being forced into an timed upgrade by corporate and I couldn't be unhappier. If some of the extraneous software needed to work in the environment wasn't Mac/Windows only, I'd request a hi-res Thinkpad and throw Linux on it. Even my ~2010 iMac at home runs Ubuntu.

You might consider running Windows virtualized. About 5 years ago it was still a little janky and slow. These days those problems are mostly non-existent. I run heavy Adobe applications through VirtualBox and can't tell any difference from native speeds, even on my older laptop.

Maybe 2019 will be the year of the Linux desktop? :)

Every time one of the big boys screws up, we all hope for this. Then the relevant players in the Linux community fail to get their shit together and the cycle repeats itself.

In your view, what would it take for the big players to "get their [act] together"? I'd like to hear a bit more of how you see it. What players would need to work together or coordinate? What are some more-or-less realistic paths forward?

First, they'd need to have a willingness to license "encumbered" codecs, drivers, etc, even if it meant charging for a version of their product.

Second, it would involve a ton of product testing, and tedious ironing out of rough edges. Every single time an installation or upgrade fails, or runs into a strange error needing obscure forum searches to fix it, that's a problem.

Third, they'd have to seriously cozy up to proprietary software vendors for application support. This one is unfortunately an endless time and money sink, and can't pay off until they have enough users that they don't need to do it anymore. Thankfully F/OSS options provide some limits on this, but not entirely. Many times there are F/OSS options that are usable, but the proprietary ones are better (and worth paying for).

This is just a few thoughts off the top of my head. Its not well researched or thought out, but a starting point for a conversation.

I think you are spot on. These are such a huge issues that keep most people away from Linux. The perpetual denial of these issues is a ridiculously huge blind spot in the Linux comunity.

First, someone (RedHat?) needs to establish a partnership with an OEM so they can deliver an end product. "Some assembly required" in the software environment is, almost by definition, a hobbyist project. End users shouldn't need to spend hours researching what hardware is compatible and hunting down drivers. And yes, that means that proprietary codecs and other essential packages will need to be included.

Second, Linux systems have a bit of a jerry-rigged feel to them that needs to be addressed. Things like fd.o and the FHS are intended to help this, but don't go far enough. Compare this to FreeBSD, where every decision about which packages are used in the base install, what the filesystem hierarchy is, etc. is well documented and cohesive. Linux can't go mainstream until, say, a runit-based distro has no references to systemd in its documentation.

I recently tried Linux on the desktop. Which is why I just ordered the Macbook Pro.

> trying to keep the older models they already have alive

It's not a bad move - if you can maximize the return on DisplayPort monitors, USB keyboards, HDMI cables and MagSafe chargers, it makes sense. Keep in mind the company will eventually have to move to USB-C, as the MacBook Air is the only remaining MagSafe laptop and I won't bet on its longevity. OTOH, the old-style MBPs are enough for most uses, as are the Air for anyone who can live within 8GB.

> the company will eventually have to move to USB-C

Not necessarily. A minority of machines are Macs, and I wouldn't be surprised if not wanting to deal with the whole USB-C thing right now is yet another incentive for IT to be interested in ditching Apple.

If you have a substantial investment in MagSafe chargers, my bet is that you are a Mac shop already. USB-C is unavoidable.

> a few folks I know who work at Mac shops report that their employers have been steering clear of the new MacBooks

My office is a great example of this. Hundreds of developers here, and I've seen exactly one of the touchbar MBPs in the office. The CIO hates them with a passion, and nobody's demanding them, so it's 2014/2015 MBPs for everyone. There are a lot of Airs, too, but I've seen zero Macbooks.

My office has hundreds of developers as well.

We have about 20% of people with 2017 MacBook Pros, including, myself.

This is speculation at best, not a fact. There's no data to indicate that developers aren't the 90% customers.

The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does

The "niche developer/macrumors posters" were extremely happy with it before, and were hearty advocates of it.

Further, I would say that developers/enthusiasts comprise a very high percentage of macbook purchasers.

"Further, I would say that developers/enthusiasts comprise a very high percentage of macbook purchasers."

And you base this assumption on?

Every action from Apple in these last few years have gone towards the wishes of the average developer/enthusiast.

Worse keyboards, useless gimmicks, gimped CPUs, fewer ports, less repairability/configurability.

If they consider developers/enthusiasts as their main audience, they have a really weird way of catering to them.

And since Mac sales have been at least steady over the last years, developers/enthusiasts have a really weird way of showing their discontent.

https://bgr.com/2018/01/14/mac-sales-2017-marketshare-pc-dec...

I base it on the fact that among developers it is an extraordinarily popular laptop, and that there are a shitload more developers than most people seem to estimate. We are a pretty large "niche" nowadays. I have a Lenova Yoga 720 and I am almost always the single non Macbook user in any developer group.

"developers/enthusiasts have a really weird way of showing their discontent"

If you want to use xcode, you have no choice[1]. If you're in the ecosystem, you have no choice. So you complain about it and hope they change it the next time around.

[1]-I remote desktop to my desktop, but eh.

My point is that there is a much larger audience outside of our own "niche". The fact that we see a lot of developers with Macs, does not mean that they are a large audience among all of the Mac users.

My brother works at an Apple shop, and the vast majority of people he has to attend come from all walks of life, they are not developers/enthusiasts.

We are talking specifically about Macbooks. Among buyers of the iPhone, iPad, and iMac is a broad, society-representing demographic. For Apple laptop it is overwhelmingly developers and aficionados (e.g. designers). I don't have any official stats, but I don't know a single person who owns a Mac laptop who isn't in those two categories.

There are around 20 million developers globally and Apple has been selling 4.5 million Macs per year on average since 2013 (most of them MacBooks).

If 27% of all developers are using Macs (as the stackoverflow survey indicates) and the machines are replaced after 4.5 years then developers would be buying ~1.2 million Macs per year, 27% of all Macs sold.

In terms of revenue developers are probably an even larger share, perhaps a third? That's still not the majority, but it's certainly very significant even assuming that Mac users are overrepresented in the stackoverflow survey.

Happy? Every single MacBook that's come out has been booed, loudly, by the "niche developer/macrumors posters". Without exception.

This is a long trend that goes back to the old PowerBook days.

Yet the same group that was so vocal in denouncing the new model is suddenly a huge fan of it when a new-new model comes in.

And so the cycle repeats.

It happens with every Apple product since as far back as at least the original iPod. There is always one thing (or a small number of things) that people just can't stop complaining about... Yet the product gets super high sales numbers a year or two later the people who complained the loudest return to buy the newest verison anyway.

I mean, the people who don't like it are in their right to have that opinion. It sucks when your use case gets fucked. But when the removal of the ESC key is your reason to bemoan the sure death of the MacBook, you gotta at least be aware that you are in a tiny, tiny minority.

I just don't understand the grief over that. Even if you do use a notebook for programming, would you actually use the laptop keyboard all the time?

I always have an external keyboard around for any serious dev work. That way you can pick any style you want, clicky mechanical or wireless or whatever.

In the article they cite the MBP as being the most popular notebook for developers so this niche must be important, otherwise why list it?:

> Already the most popular notebook for developers around the world, the new MacBook Pro can compile code faster and run multiple virtual machines and test environments easier than before.

What we want is a functional keyboard. They are losing this market-share quickly but you're right maybe they don't care about this market anymore. They must not since they aren't doing anything about it.

Right. But it doesn't say developers are the majority of MBP users.

Then make it an option, or risk losing the segment. When my company gave me a 2015 MBP I was really impressed with it, it seemed like the perfect hardware. I knew when I upgraded my personal laptop it'd be a Macbook Pro.

Then they started handing out post-2015 MBP to others and so I've used them a bit. There is zero chance now that a MBP will be my next laptop.

People who want functional keyboards is the majority of MBP users. Even non-technical blogs like The Verge and The Outline are complaining about major failures with the keyboards. This problem isn't developer-specific in any way.

The niche is not developers themselves; the niche is a (vocal) sample of the developer community. I'm a developer and I like the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard with touchbar.

In particular:

What we want is a functional keyboard.

This is your opinion, but it's not necessarily the majority opinion. For example, I would rather Apple focus on other parts of the computer than the keyboard. The keyboard just isn't that meaningful to me, and I'm just as productive a developer without whatever platonic ideal of a keyboard Apple could put on the thing.

I think a lot of people vastly overestimate the number of Apple customers who have an opinion about this, because it's relatively easy to see complaints on HN, blogs or tech journalism.

IIRC the keyboard has hardware problems and dead keys are common

Sure, that would be shitty. But do we have an authoritative and empirical source indicating a meaningful increase in keyboard hardware problems?

When I search for information about this, I come up with articles like [1]. But none of the data is provided and the analysis isn't exactly...rigorous, to put it charitably.

EDIT: Why in the world has this been downvoted to -3?! This is a reasonable comment to make complete with an example. If you disagree, blindly downvoting isn't informative of anything except that you don't like a comment.

_________________

1. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/30/2016-macbook-pro-...

Google apple keyboard class action lawsuit

The only people that could conclusively provide that information is Apple, and they have no desire to do so. So all we have to go on is anecdata. My personal experiences suggest that the keyboard is problem is widespread, though by no means common.

Uncommon but widespread: Sparse?

The fact that Apple has made a keyboard repair program available indicates just how bad this is directly. We don't have numbers, no, but it's pretty obvious it's not just a small number of users experiencing this given their response.

But do we have an authoritative and empirical source indicating a meaningful increase in keyboard hardware problems?

Apple has that information, and they've decided it's a big enough problem to issue a repair program and adjust the keyboard in the new version:

https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...

So, in answer to your question, yes we do have an authoritative source - Apple.

Okay, that's fair. It looks like it goes beyond the tech reporting bubble then. Thanks for being the only one to provide a cited source in response to my own.

I'll concede that the hardware flaws - independent of personal taste about the touchbar or function keys - is a major problem then.

You can walk into any Best Buy or other non-Apple retail location that sells Apple computers and find at least one machine with keyboard issues. The most common one I've found is a left shift key that doesn't work unless you press it exactly in the center or with excessive force.

This is abslutely crrect.

The thing is it'd be easy to have a functional keyboard. Just give back the one they had been using. Doesn't need focus.

I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?

Maybe a crappier keyboard is cheaper to produce?

Doesn't matter. The crappier keyboard is probably .014mm thinner, which supersedes all other considerations because producing thinner hardware is really really REALLY important to apple.

>> I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?

Your question has already been answered by Apple with the current generation of problematic keyboards.

They already had a mature, reliable keyboard that felt pretty good and was not noisy. It was not "broke" and did not need "fixing".

They presumably chose to "improve" it with the current one so that their computers could be a little bit thinner and that Jony Ive could brag about the new technology in a video during a keynote.

Apple doesn't care because people (including myself) will continue to throw money at them even if they make something that sucks. All of their competitors' laptops simply suck more. Freed from market pressures, Apple's hardware designers have free reign to pursue form over function, a dream situation for any designer to be in.

This is a great question, but many people seem to have already decided that Apple is personally out to sell worse computers because they can, or something.

It's worth noting that they did change the keyboard on these new models, and I would guess they did so to avoid extending their special keyboard replacement program they have fro the current one.

No company is perfectly rational. Apple have built their empire on doing things that run counter to the received wisdom of the industry, things that many analysts and competitors saw as deeply irrational.

Personally, I think that the loss of Jobs has created a serious leadership problem, because so much of the company's direction was led by the personal taste of one man. Apple has retained the institutional knowledge and habits accrued during that era, but it hasn't found a satisfactory replacement for the functions that Jobs performed. It has retained an obsessive focus, but it has lost the compass that guided that focus towards the user experience. They know how to do thinner, lighter, fewer ports and so they keep doing it, but there's no why. So many aspects of Apple's corporate culture are uniquely ritualistic, but the meaning of those rituals died with Jobs.

I didn't want to be this explicit with my point because I think it's patronizing. But your comment isn't responding to what I intended to say, so here it is. I'm not talking about ideological design mandates and I'm not talking about perfect rationality. I'm talking about charitable estimation of competency and an assumption of baseline rationality.

Apple is one of the most valuable and critically examined companies in the world, with 125,000 employees and end-to-end vertical integration across its hardware and software development process. In consideration of feedback from design decisions, like choosing to develop progressively thinner products, removing physical function keys and implementing touchbars, why would Apple make those decisions? More importantly, why would Apple double down on these decisions in a line refresh of the product 18 months after the initial launch? Presumably Apple is well aware of the number of developers who use their machines, and presumably Apple is aware of developer feedback (again: basic competency as an organization).

So let's reframe this question as follows: why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised? A very reasonable answer is that customers in the aggregate - developers included - don't care that much about the touchbar or the virtual function keys, and will continue to buy the products.

Regardless of my own opinion about the keyboard design, I try to approach this from the perspective that as a single individual with vastly fewer resources than Apple, I likely have a fundamentally less perfect understanding of Apple's product goals, customer demographic and design initiatives. So if I see an incongruence that seems to have a simple answer ("Why doesn't Apple just do the thing everyone clearly wants"), my instinct is that my priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.

Apple has built a substantial quality lead over competitors, over the years. That gives them a lot of room to make mistakes (like removing a useful key from the keyboard) while maintaining sales. That doesn't mean every decision they make is perfect.

Think of the thickness thing - Apple made billions of dollars before it wasn't even possible to make razor thin laptops. Is razor-thinness, to the point of losing port connectivity in a Pro device, really necessary or optimal?

Your charitable estimation of Apple's competency and baseline rationality is a reasonable one and absolutely could be correct, and I agree it would follow that your priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.

But I find jdietrich's argument totally plausible. They could have tons of negative user feedback that they ignored. "They" probably being a handful of designers (so the total number of talented people at Apple is basically irrelevant). Apple's always had a certain arrogance. They (believe they) know what customers want better than their customers do: in this case a thinner and thinner laptop. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they lose their way and I end up with a really expensive MacBook Pro that I hate typing on.

I've certainly seen a few cases inside Google where a small team ignored dogfood feedback from other Googlers ("you aren't the user", basically), then were shocked when they got the same feedback from real users. It's absolutely possible for a small number of people inside a giant organization to make decisions that later bite them. I don't have any particular reason to believe Apple's immune to this.

>why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised?

Because their approach to design is completely unique. Their industrial design studio is small, insular and incredibly secretive. That studio has almost complete independence; most Apple employees won't see a new product until the design is finalised and ready for launch. They have an overt belief in the wisdom of ignoring user feedback and media criticism, going back to the original Macintosh. They don't think that their role is to provide people with what they want, but what they should want.

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Apple-Americas-Admired-Secreti...

That approach is one of Apple's greatest assets. They were right to ignore the people who said that a computer needed serial ports and a floppy disk drive. They were right to ignore the people who said that a phone needed buttons. They're willing to ignore conventional wisdom and the demands of the market in favour of a singular design vision for what technology should be. They're willing to tell their customers trust us, this is for the best. That approach is necessary if you're going to be a highly innovative company that creates entire new categories of product, but it's not right 100% of the time and it can be infuriatingly stubborn.

The strain relief on the MagSafe connector was too short. Any cable manufacturer would tell you that it was too short. Any electrical engineer would tell you that it was too short. The internet was full of pictures of frayed (and sometimes charred) MagSafe cables. The Apple store website was full of one-star reviews for MagSafe power adaptors that had frayed. Apple did nothing for over five years until a class action forced their hand; they offered replacements, but didn't fix the defect.

To answer your question, it is because Apple is an example of a company where the design people have run amok.

They don't want to improve the keyboard, because it would make the laptop slightly less thin, and the people with the power, (the design department) don't want that.

Just because Apple has lots of people working there, doesn't mean that the RIGHT people are in charge.

No company is perfect. And although apples religious focus on design has helped it in the past, this time it seems to have hurt thebl company.

And maybe they will learn from their mistakes or maybe they wont.

It could be that the keyboard is actually amazing, that the concerns are overblown, and that the engineers, developers, journalists, and consumers that have been complaining about it are either lying for some reason or lack the perspective to realize what is and isn't important to their workflow.

It could be that it would be a huge public image loss to admit that they were wrong about this. No matter how Apple phrases it, it's always look bad to say "we've spent the last 2-3 years telling you this was a technical achievement, turns out we were wrong." One of Apple's biggest marketing angles is "we put the work in and get it right the first time." That's going to be something that people mock them over, regardless of whether or not it's the right decision to make.

It also might open the floodgates on more expensive litigation and warranty requirements in the future. Apple's current warranty that they just rolled out is only valid up to 3 years after the initial purchase. Is a judge more likely to force them to extend it if a lawyer can argue in court "they lacked so much confidence that they reverted their own design?" Are their significant investments into blocking Right to Repair going to be hampered by that kind of public admission?

They've also invested large amounts of money into the current manufacturing process and design. Their recent decision to discontinue the 2015 model might point to this being about manufacturing costs - you could ask the same question of that decision: "why not allow the holdouts to keep purchasing the older model?"

Along with that, it could also be sunk-cost fallacy at play. One way to check if Apple has a problem with sunk-cost is to look back in the past to see if they've exhibited a pattern of doubling down on controversial decisions and rejecting criticism or blaming customers for issues.

It also could just be that the keyboard looks sexier in advertisements, and perhaps Apple optimizes for advertisements over extended customer experience because they have enough built up goodwill and reputation to do so. The devices might sell better right now when marketed as futuristic status symbols, rather than as practical machines.

Finally, don't dismiss the idea that it could just be the result of designers and engineers running wild without enough practical input to reign them in. I'm all for giving companies the benefit of the doubt, and I understand what you're getting at. But you should apply your philosophy in moderation or else someday you'll find yourself defending Microsoft Bob. Companies are made of people after all.

I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the size of the problem with the keyboard. Apple has had atleast three class action lawsuits regarding the defective keyboards. They have setup a warranty program to try and placate consumers and resolve the lawsuits. It's a real problem and just because it did not impact you does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted. So here we are, I'm a developer of 1 and have been impacted you're a developer of 1 and have not been impacted. It doesn't make yours or my experience any less real but I think the class action lawsuits speak for themselves. For me personally, it's hard to write a lot of code when keys don't hit or they endlessly repeat. So, I picked up a Lenovo and through Linux on it and ditched the MBP.

I honestly don't know how any of the other market shares can put up with this failing keyboard either. For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.

> It's a real problem and just because it did not impact you does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted.

This is a good point, which I acknowledge. Maybe I've been lucky with my keyboard. But while you point this out, I think most folks complaining about the keyboard are not acknowledging the other side - that it may not be as important as they think it is either. Hence my original comment indicating my own opinion.

> For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.

For what it's worth, I wrote a ~170 page paper (in LaTeX) on a 2016 MacBook Pro. I cared a lot more about screen real estate than the keyboard, so I added a few monitors. All anyone seems to be able to provide is an exchange of anecdotal evidence for or against the keyboard. If there's a real issue I'm not defending it. But I am saying it might not be worth it for Apple to fix it depending on incidence rate, and it might not be as prevalent as the tech blogging/journalism sphere would have us believe.

The feel of the keyboard is certainly a matter of preference, but the reliability issues are prevalent enough Apple has a special repair program (again): https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...

Actually it is more widespread than the blogging would have you believe as most people don't blog. They just take the computer in and pay for it to be fixed and go back to life.

If your keyboard ever breaks and you find yourself unable to type, then you will discover why people with defective keyboards think its super important. Until then you can minimize the impact it has on people all day long as they cannot type properly without an external keyboard. I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...

You're not discussing this in good faith, and I don't understand why you feel the need to be passive aggressive in response to my comments. You also seem to be almost willfully misreading what I'm saying.

To make this particular point painfully clear, I didn't postulate the problem is not widespread because literally only bloggers have the problem, and there are relatively few bloggers. My postulate was that the problem seems more widespread than it is due to the magnifying effect journalism and blogging has. If you disagree then critique the point I made, not the contrived false equivalence you seem to think I made.

Other than that yes, I've had a broken keyboard on a laptop, and no, I'm not minimizing anything. Devil's advocacy and a request for some quantitative evidence (which was elsewhere provided, and to which I conceded) does not constitute minimization or dismissal of a problem. This especially:

> I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...

is a false dichotomy, and one which I did not make.

> because literally only bloggers have the problem

It could be the ambiguous way you've phrased this, but if I'm reading this right, then that's what you're not getting: a lot of people actually do have this problem. Not just bloggers.

I don't think we have enough information to know whether or not "millions were affected." Neither class-action lawsuits nor a warranty program nor complaints on Hacker News prove this one way or the other.

> does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted

"millions"? Let's not spout hyperbole here. You can't say that without some backup.

Sorry, I was spouting hyperbole to counter-act hyperbole. You're right, that is not helpful, I agree. As someone says below: Only Apple can conclusively provide the numbers and they have no desire to do so. So, everyones opinion is just that. Anecdotal and an opinion because _no one_ can back up their claims. I'll take my statement back though, because it's not useful to fight hyperbole with hyperbole. What I can say is, I was impacted twice and I have since switched vendors.

I strongly disagree with you that I was being hyperbolic. In fact, my comment (the one you responded to) did not quantify anything, much less in a hyperbolic way. I expressed an opinion. As it stands, your comment is a pretty passive aggressive way to withdraw a statement.

> I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the size of the problem with the keyboard.

Actually the opposite is true.

Apple itself has said it is a tiny, tiny percentage of users. If they were to lie about this then it would be an SEC violation since they would be lying to markets about potential impact of replacements/lawsuits.

I love the new keyboard and touchbar. I haven’t had any issues with the keys not working.

I loved my mbp 2017 keyboard as well until one key started "double typing", then another one, and another one... now my life is misarable..

So I use a lot of different keyboards - my main ones are a whitefox with blue switches and a CODE with greens. I actually like the MBP keyboard - key stability and clickiness are the parameters I like, and the MBP has both.

My problem with the keyboard is just reliability - I now keep a can of compressed air at my desk just because a key is going to get screwed up at least once a month. And I have one key that is particularly bad, so I assume some piece of dust is just trapped under the key and the compressed air pushes it somewhere until it eventually falls back into place. I'm waiting a little longer to bring it in for repair in hopes that they start using this new v3 keyboard as a replacement - maybe it secretly fixes the dust issue (And they don't want to say it because that would be admitting that there was a problem.)

mainly interested in this news to learn if they'll start exchanging 2016/17 mbps for this new model. Does the new keyboard require dozens of tiny screws to assemble/dissemble?

I may be wrong but I was under the impression the difficulty in replacing the keyboard is due to it being fused to the battery. You pretty much have to replace both when attempting to replace one or the other.

Yeah, that is the issue. A keyboard replacement means replacing both battery and keyboard because they are glued together.

But I have heard that they were replacing older keyboards (2016) with 2017 models (You could easily tell because they add new symbols above control/option.) I wonder if they'll be doing replacements with 2018 keys now. It would be really nice - the keyboard reliability is pretty much my only complaint, minus not having a physical escape key.

> The keyboard just isn't that meaningful to me

That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes. You're basically saying, "Whatever Apple sells I will buy, regardless of its qualities." That strikes me as a strange stance to take.

You act as though I said I wanted to use something outlandish as a keyboard, like a reprogrammed toaster. The MacBook Pro is a qwerty keyboard. It doesn't have the full function row or numpad, yes, but it's fundamentally a usable keyboard.

I'm not "basically saying whatever Apple sells I will buy", and to think that would indicate you have an unrealistically uncharitable interpretation of my comment. In fact, I explicitly stated elsewhere in this thread that screen real estate matters to me.

If you feel strongly about the keyboard, that's fine. But that's not intrinsic to your capacity as a developer, it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.

There's a fundamental difference between a keyboard whose feel I might not like (travel distance, click feel) and a keyboard which has been reported to fail catastrophically from the smallest bits of dust.

If Apple decided to go for a chiclet, or other variety of keyboard, I probably wouldn't care. I'd deal with that. In this case, though, I pretty much have to expect (based on news and class action lawsuits) that it will stop working correctly, in a matter of months, in a way which directly impacts my productivity. I'll use one at work if I have to, but there's no way I'd buy one for home while the keyboard is that unreliable.

To be clear, I'm talking about the design of the thing here. There are two different conversations being had - one is about a dislike of the design, the other is about the hardware reliability of the thing.

>> it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.

I find that people who take themselves very seriously tend to project their preferences on others.

As it relates to laptops for developers-- not agreeing on things like keyboards, matte screens, aspect ratios, touchscreens, etc. - that can elicit very strong absolutist responses from them.

> That's ridiculous.

No it isn’t. Plenty of people use external keyboards. I do, for one.

I think what OP is saying is: I'm not picky about the keyboard. I can relate -- I actually prefer the new keyboard -- but also still like the old one (my work laptop), as well as two other external keyboards I switch between (a mechanical keyboard and another wireless keyboard). There's keyboards out there I don't like -- but there's plenty more that I do. So I think overall, Macbook could probably ship with any of these keyboards and it wouldn't be a factor affecting my purchasing decision. That's probably what OP means.

>> That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes.

This is true, but not everyone is picky about keyboards.

I started using mechanicals in the 80s, and I know a lot of people think it's the only way to type, but I actually don't like mechanicals any more.

Today, I use a dome keyboard (shudder!) as my daily driver and I can adapt to most keyboards, regardless of feel.

So while I get what you're saying, the OP is probably implying that he/she can adapt to different keyboard types -- as such keyboard type is not a meaningful selection criterion for him/her.

The only time I ever use a laptop keyboard directly is when I'm on a plane. I travel with an external keyboard and mouse. This is partially for ergonomic reasons, and partially preference. I like having a larger keyboard and full numberpad. So I agree with this comment completely. The keyboard would never be a factor in purchase for me.

If you don't use it much, I'd recommend getting one that can survive a semi-permanent coating of dust...

Add me to the list of people who don't give a crap about the keyboard, so long as it's functional. The #1 thing I was looking for when I opened the page was...

"how many relevant ports does it have? will I have to carry around a dongle to do the same things I can do on my 2015 MBP without a dongle? oh wait.. nope still need dongles."

And then "Wait why is the 13 inch form factor not even getting discrete graphics processing, nor up to 32GB ram?"

A dysfunctional keyboard is a no-no, because I need a functional keyboard. But in general I'm not bothered at all about the other things that are important to other people, such as key travel, etc. So I haven't been vocal about it.

Wanting a functional keyboard on a laptop is a niche opinion? Wowwwwww. The reality distortion field is strong.

I've used every MacBook model and the new ones have unacceptably bad keyboards. I am in an office with dozens of broken ones and the things have become a joke amongst the developers. The IT department got so tired of Apple's time to repair them that they started just ordering extra keys from third party websites for $20/each.

I worked at Apple with Steve Jobs and I can assure you he would not say that the keyboard isn't meaningful and its fine if its broken. There is a reason all the major Apple bloggers have written piece after piece about their poor reliability and repairability. If your space bar breaks with one piece of dust you need to replace the entire top of the computer including the battery since its glued to it.

> Wanting a functional keyboard on a laptop is a niche opinion? Wowwwwww. The reality distortion field is strong.

This is a deliberate misreading of what I said. My point is that reasonable people can disagree about what a "functional keyboard" is for software development. You're free to disagree with me, but don't accuse me of being under a "reality distortion field." And for what it's worth, the comment of mine that you responded to is talking about design and aesthetic choices. You're primarily talking about hardware faults and reliability.

The source comment was not about design and aesthetic choices. Here is the first comment that you responded to: “What we want is a functional keyboard”

We want a functional keyboard. This is not about reasonable people disagreeing. If your space bar does not work, your keyboard is broken and typing sucks.

> In the article they cite the MBP as being the most popular notebook for developers so this niche must be important, otherwise why list it?:

Marketing 101. The majority of smokers weren't cowboys.

Well, if they continue, they'll lose the cowboys.

I really doubt it.

What does wanting a functional keyboard have to do with being a developer? All laptop users use the keyboard, not just software developers.

Good point. I was pretty myopic when I wrote that. Having a good keyboard that does not fail is something all laptop users would want.

Developers are more likely to use software that's designed for multiple platforms, without priority given to the Mac. (I guess if you assume not all developers live their life in Xcode.)

This means that developers are more likely to be regularly using software that actually depends on the keys they stripped off to make the touchbar, and/or software with sub-par to nonexistent touchbar support.

Most developers I know use rarely touch the laptop keyboard. On my desk I have a bunch of monitors and an awesome mechanical keyboard. The only time I need the built-in keyboard is when I'm away from my desk.

i for one love the new keyboards, i don't give a damn about the touchbar and i dislike the battery usage, but the keyboard to me is near perfect. When i type on the old model now the keys feel overly mushy and inaccurate. Maybe people just give it a try for more than 20 minutes.

Take a look at the photos for a moment. Curious what the keyboard is like? Too bad - Every single photo shows the keyboard from the side.

Ah but you can still tell something. If there's anything to the idea that a picture sends a message or that there's such a thing as "visual language," this group of photos is loudly and stubbornly doubling down on "Thin is all that matters."

Customer: "Does the keyboard work this time?"

Apple: "IT'S THIN!"

Considering that the drive toward thinness is precisely what's ruining the keyboards, that tells you plenty, without even reading anything.

Every single photo shows the keyboard from the side.

This is standard operating practice for an international firm like Apple. The first set of images doesn't show certain details because you want it to have broad appeal. Since Apple keyboards come in a dozen or so different configurations for different markets, you show the more vague master images.

Once the global media outlets have had their splash, then the regionals will get images with more details. In this case, the regional keyboards.

Sorry. No conspiracy here. Just good marketing.

Nice try, but Apple's international press release pages also show English graphics https://www.apple.com/jp/newsroom/2018/06/football-fans-can-...

Now way, this is ridiculous that not a single picture shows even a glance of keyboard. They just don't show you half of the laptop (and the other part is screen which you can't say much without seeing it in person).

Why’s that a relevant argument? The web site is localised, the physical objects are localised, surely it’s not beyond them to take localised photos of localised keyboards for their localised versions of their site?

(I’ve just looked at some of their locations, and German seems to use photos with German text on screen, while Greek seems to use photos with English on screen).

It reminds of the nForce chipset from 15 years ago. It was a godsend. The audio chip had an optical input, rivaled the best consumer-grade audio sound card, true dolby 5.1, etc. and... reviewers tanked it.

When the next generation of north/southbridge motherboard appeared and sound wasn't a priority for motherboard builders only then journalists noticed what they missed.

In the article they cite the MBP as being the most popular notebook for developers so this niche must be important, otherwise why list it?

That "most popular" is marketing - they have all of the developers running OSX and most of those are probably on MBP or Air, where developers using Windows or Linux are fragmented across multiple models from multiple manufacturers.

Here's the thing - I am big on ergonomics, keyboard and trackpads are always a super high priority for me.

At my desk I have a Topre Realforce 88UB 45g keyboard that cost me like £200, a Razer Blackwidow for gaming, and a Microsoft Sculpt to switch it up.

I'm fairly big on keyboards, but I do love the new MBP keyboard.

I can't remember the old one enough now (I had the 2014 model previously), but I know I spoke of it as the best laptop keyboard - so I agree I probably rate it more than this one, BUT I am so used to typing on this now that I really don't think about the keyboard as a con in the slightest - you have to sit with it for a few weeks and you'll be flying - I break 120wpm on this because there is practically no travel.

What I DO hate, is that effing touchbar. Worst design decision on this laptop. I am 'over' it in that I can work fine with it and don't feel like it hinders me anymore, but everytime I look at it I get annoyed they are still sticking with it.

The only two cons of this MBP now it has a spec refresh -> touchbar sucks and not having ONE USB-A slot really pisses me off everytime I reach for the adapter...

Agree about the keyboard speed. I can fly on the new keyboard (2017). My only complaint is the noise which they seemed to have attempted to address in the 2018.

>They are losing this market-share quickly

are they really though? or are people complaining but still buying it?

Internet hearsay (Apple store/reseller staff quoted in podcasts etc.) often mentions that the MacBook Air is (was?) their best-selling laptop. It has no TouchBar, more keyboard travel, a smaller trackpad, arguably more useful ports, and longer battery life. If the trade-offs in the latest MacBook Pro were universally loved, why wouldn't they spread into Apple's other, more popular product lines?

I honestly don't see how their current laptop line-up makes any sense for consumers (and shareholders). If the TouchBar really makes it easier for non-nerds to find shortcuts, why only offer it in high-end laptops?

The Air is their best-selling laptop because: (1) it's by far the cheapest and (2) it's tiny. It's also extremely outdated -- people universally love the retina screen but the Air doesn't have that either. Also, rumor has it the Air is being replaced this fall, so we won't see what features make it downstream until then.

The above is to disagree with all of your specific arguments, but I do not disagree with your implied conclusion -- I don't think the touch bar is universally loved. I suspect most consumers do not care about it one way or the other, and I think it was a mistake that Apple should kill.

Fair enough. In any case, the MacBook Pro hasn't been Apple's laptop for the masses in a long time, unlike what r0fl implied. We can't infer from its design what 90% of customers want.

>If the TouchBar really makes it easier for non-nerds to find shortcuts, why only offer it in the top-end laptops?

Maybe it helps the laptop feel more highend/luxury?

... but the DJ in the video can slide the volume up and down with his finger. Surely that counts for something big.

It's big alright. A big $300 extra for Apple on every laptop.

I think most laptop DJ's will be using an external control surface.

Longtime Mac user (I had an Apple II+). I've had a new MBP since Jan '17. Replaced a five year old MBA. The keyboard itself isn't terrible (although my left command key seems to be going, so yay) the Touch Bar is worthless. I simply cannot fathom who though putting something non-tactile on the keyboard was a good idea. I was so hoping they brought back regular fxn keys with the next iteration.

One of the key tenets of touch typing instruction is to NOT LOOK at the keyboard. And the lack of universal control over iTunes is admittedly a first world problem however they didn't replace it with anything meaningful. I've had this machine for 18 months and I have found zero utility in the touch bar.

I'm very curious to try the new BlackMagic eGPU though!

honestly, I don't think a touchbar is "bad" so much that the implementation may not've been the best. Maybe as an external piece of hardware like Microsoft's dial where I could use it for the cases it seems best suited for (sliders, picture thumbnails to render full screen on display, etc.), that would've been optimal. Although, I would've probably preferred a Magic Trackpad-sized device with a touch screen instead of a long bar. Would seem to allow for more use cases.

Though honestly, I was never much for the f keys beyond the browser and in Visual Studio. So the loss of those keys didn't hit me as much as it has others.

The MacBook Air competes with Chromebooks. It lost the low end to Chromebooks, and I see more and more high end MacBook Air users switching to Chromebooks as well. Neither the Air nor Chromebooks currently target developers.

Most of Apple's shareholder value these days comes from the fucking iPhone and iPad. They won't be terribly hurt by switching back. This is purely marketroid-driven product design, and if it keeps up it'll bust Apple back down to also-ran status.

(Not that Jobs wasn't a Dire Marketroid himself, but at least he knew that practical and functional sells better in the long run than snazzy but busted.)

And who builds the apps?

I'm starting to question how "niche" the creator/developer market actually is

I don’t necessarily agree that it’s what most people want. I think the reason that most people keep buying macs is because of MacOS. It is so nice to have a UNIX-based OS with great UI, so we keep buying the overpriced, out-of-date, defective laptops because we have no other choice. I’m convinced that a solid, secure, reliable and polished Unix-based OS for developers would quickly wipe out a large segment of Apple’s market share.

I think that's right. Our only two options are the Linux desktop with its high-maintenance potential of timesink, and Windows that, while it has improved, suffers from an authoritarian approach to things like reboots, updates, ability to customize and so forth. I use Windows 10 + MobaXTerm after moving off of the increasingly annoying MacBook design choices.

But there's something far worse: killer apps (for some professionals and hobbyists) only exist for Mac OSX and Windows. I'm looking at you, Adobe.

Linux has improved a lot in the last couple of years. Even on state-of-the-art hardware you can expect reasonable support if you choose a distro that uses a recent kernel (ie. Manjaro instead of stock debian).

I've been using a 8th gen computer for a year and I haven't had any problems. On the contrary the hevc hardware decoder/encoder works on linux, but I couldn't get it to work on Windows.

On the other hand Windows looks more polished than KDE and GNOME.

Having recently built an AMD gaming rig and bought a Aero 15 laptop with the latest 8th gen chip and installed the latest Ubuntu on both, not everything works out of the box (sensors and discrete graphics specifically), but both machines did everything I asked of them.

I've long felt that the greatest threat to Linux on the desktop (for the past ~15 years) has been OSX, not Windows.

We all want a solid and reliable UNIX-based OS, but we also want an OS that won't be treated as a bastard child by hardware and software vendors. As much as we all love the world of free software, sometimes we actually do want/need to use commercial software as well.

Apple has given us what we fundamentally want, so we just put up with all the baggage that comes along with it. After all, what else are we going to do? Use Windows?

I have been going back and forth for many years between Linux and MacOS. In 2013, I just got annoyed at how finicky it was to get something compiled. I ended up with a Mac at my current job at the beginning, but a year into it, I had enough.

Ubuntu has been a fine OS for me. It's not perfect, but it serves its purpose well enough.

Agreed... we need another apple that makes laptops and polishes the linux OS that it comes with (great software/hardware integration). I'll buy those over macs

> great UI

Curious. Have you tried Gnome Shell or recent KDE or some modern Linux desktop like that for a while?

Because I always assumed MacOS as a Unix with shiny UI as well, however once I worked on one for a year or two I realized it long lost its uniqness. In many ways the UI is closer to Windows 7 than Windows 10 is. And things like Unity/Gnome Shell or even win 10 long went in a more productivity focused UI concept.

>> Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts? No touchbar, smaller touchpad than the newer macbooks, but updated specs? Call it Macbook Developer... We build the software for the "Pros" after all.

> They didn't do that because it is not what most people want.

What's your basis for saying that, besides the assumption that Apple can't be wrong, so whatever it's doing must be what people actually want?

Apple has a habit of designing from an ivory tower and not admitting to its mistakes. I would say it's arguable that their design priorities are currently out of whack: chasing thinness when you're going from 1.5in to 0.75in is one thing, it's quite another when you're going from 18mm to 15mm. It may not be a fatal mistake for them, but it's evidence that they may longer deserve the design deference they've traditionally gotten.

> Apple has to make changes that will sell more laptops to the masses to maximize shareholder value.

Many of those changes could be characterized as pointless sidegrades: merely change for change's sake.

It’s a pretty important “niche” of customers though, since 100% of Apple’s App Store revenue is derived from apps built by users in that “niche”...

And users in that "niche" would build those apps using Macs whether it was their preference or not if the money was in it.

> They didn't do that because it is not what most people want.

> Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products

So either you're wrong, or Apple's PR team is really bad positioning their product. From the Press Release itself in the first few paragraphs:

ideal for manipulating large data sets, performing complex simulations, creating multi-track audio projects or doing advanced image processing or film editing.

Already the most popular notebook for developers around the world, the new MacBook Pro can compile code faster and run multiple virtual machines and test environments easier than before.

MacBook Pro now delivers faster performance for complex simulations and data manipulation.

With the new MacBook Pro, developers can compile code faster and more easily run multiple virtual machines and test environments.

Aren't those all features described exactly for the "niche developer/macrumors posters"?!

They trumpet those features only because it doesn't conflict with their MacBook Pro aesthetic that's meant to appeal the the wider audience.

Given a choice between a sexy MacBook Pro design and a pro-developer feature, Apple will choose the sexy design everytime.

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that those niche developer/macrumors posters are part of the described target audience, but no in the sense that they are a small fraction of the described target audience.

I believe this is a case of a disparity between who they say their products are for (power users), and who they are actually for (people who want to think of themselves as power users).

This would be similar to, for example, many sportswear brands who say they are for professional athletes, but whose primary consumer base is... not.

In both cases, they may still attract the audience they claim to target, but in practice, that niche market makes up only a small fraction of their total sales.

> I believe this is a case of a disparity between who they say their products are for (power users), and who they are actually for (people who want to think of themselves as power users).

That's true for most gaming rigs and high-end Windows laptops ;-)

computer advert in 2018, truth in advertising version:

"stalk your ex on Facebook, 37% faster"

"Cat videos on youtube look great in Retina full screen"

"Your stolen music files sound fab thanks to deeper bass response from the stereo speakers"

"chat with your dumb friends for hours, with a new longer-lasting battery"

"call in sick without removing your phone from its case, thanks to bluetooth."

Other than dying batteries, or physical damage (broken trackpad/keyboard) I seriously wonder why the average person needs anything but the most basic laptop when a $99 android phone is in all measures more powerful than a 10 year old laptop but we're doing basically the same activities: surf the web, chat, email. Very, very few people create content. Most consume.

YouTube videos don’t serve 4K on Safari. When they do, it’s over Chrome which is using 10W more powerr, which over entire world equals power use of a small country...

h264ify [1] will save you power on Chrome. It does not support 4k however.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd...

Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake have full hardware VP9 decoding, so all told you'll probably be using more energy playing H.264 in Chrome if you're on a Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake processor.

Yes, been using that. Problem is that YouTube quietly removed 1440p h264 videos too! Used to be my indicator that I can turn off h264ify for a minute to view 4k content...

Nicely put. People also like to buy over-featured products for “bragging rights” (huge pick up trucks used to go shopping, ultralight trekking gear for 5 km hikes, €300 knives to cut apples in slices etc.)

I'm reminded of the recent "news story" making the rounds, that some researchers found iPhone ownership to be the clearest signal of wealth.

"Signal"

There is a lot of signaling going on, using these product choices. And Apple's at the top of the heap.

It has transitioned from "tech" to "brand".

I've seen people write off William Gibson's more recent work, that takes this on as a central topic for examination and exposition. It may not be as... "awesome" as the universe of Molly and Wintermute. But it's a very good and engaging application of creating writing to this topic. Recommended.

I agree with you, but also think there might be more nuance going on here than all that.

I think this is actually sometimes about minimalism. I'd rather have one nice, good, high-quality thing than to accumulate junk over the years as I get deeper into a hobby. The longest hike I've done was a three-day section hike on the AT, but I have ultralight hiking and camping gear. I know, in the future, when I have more time, I'll do longer and more frequent hikes, and even now, lighter is more comfortable to carry.

There's also the Paradox of Choice. Upper middle class folks are strapped for time and flush with cash. Would I rather spend two hours reading reviews to find out whether the discount pocket knife is really as good for my purposes as a Benchmade, or just make the purchase secure in the knowledge that I bought a well-regarded brand with excellent customer service? Maybe I overpaid, but the speed and hassle-free nature of the transaction are worth it.

Well, in this case, the deluxe/upsell machine is just the wrong tool for the job. An overbuilt kitchen knife, a high-performance light truck, or ultralight hiking gear will generally accomplish those tasks as well or better than a mid-market alternative. A new MacBook Pro is worse for most developers than one from a couple years ago, and worse in all sorts of other ways (namely the slashing of battery capacity in exchange for an ultimately minor reduction in size and weight).

> €300 knives to cut apples in slices

Oh, I really enjoy prep-work. I have to admit, I like using a nice, sharp knife (plus, it's much safer).

I hate doing prep-work at other peoples houses. The knives are just so dull.

So, I spend more money on knives than I should because I enjoy good knives and get lots of good use out of them.

What are your fave brands?

I have to admit I've gone through a few, but my daily driver can be found for ~ $30 online if you watch for it. I also spend good money on sharpeners, etc. Ironic? yes.

https://www.amazon.com/Victorinox-Fibrox-Chefs-Knife-8-Inch/...

Very nicely put. A $1600 MBP pro user is different than a $4500 MBP pro user. The niche market also drives credibility.

“complex simulations” strikes me as particularly wannabe-ish. I really do run pretty complex simulations that take hours, sometimes days, to run to completion (on a maxed-out 2012 Mac Mini with dual SSDs and the maximum amount of memory it will support). It would never occur to me to run such stuff on a laptop that might run out of power, throttle back the processor because of heating, or something else going wrong.

“Managing data and complex simulations” seems to allude to ‘em Excel jockeys who should be using a humble database and/or are running some kind of what-if calculations.

Agree with you. I have a ~4k touchbar Macbook Pro and do HPC type of stuff all day... and I rarely consider doing anything more than a toy simulation or computational experiment on my laptop. When I previously used a Macbook Air, my toy PoC stuff ran pretty must just as well.

Anything else either quickly gets offloaded to one of my group's servers with 64-80 threads and 100s of GB of RAM or, if it's even bigger, to the local HPC cluster with 1000s of CPUs.

Even without access to existing resources: I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where, if I have a fixed budget of ~3-5k to do computational work, it'd be better for me to spend that on a top-end MBP than a two-piece solution of laptop+linux server.

A couple months ago, building projections for a rabies elimination program while sitting in a hotel bar in Zambia, I was pretty pleased I wasn't relying on a server.

Edge case, sure, but shrug

Haha fair enough.

How's the rabies situation there? Are people still doing multicompartment SIR models? That kind of stuff is hard to parralelize.

It's still a big deal, but getting better - my university's running a decently successful program in Kenya.

And yeah, people still use compartmental models pretty heavily. A lot of my stuff is stochastic (it's about the beginning or end of epidemics, or in small populations) so that's nicely parallel.

On the other hand, I do this all the time on my laptop, and have found having some more RAM or a couple more cores to be something that would make my life actively easier.

It’s funny because I “perform complex simulations and handle massive data sets” but no laptop (or even desktop) is capable of handling them. I normally need to SSH to some cluster with thousands of CPU cores and terabytes of RAM. I’m actually kind of curious who the target user is for a high performance laptop nowadays. Video editors? What kinds of tasks require more performance than a standard laptop but less than a desktop?

I currently have a 2012 MBP Retina, but am not sure if I want my next laptop to be another MBP or just the regular MacBook. I really like the 15” screen and would have a hard time giving that up. I wish they had a regular MacBook with a high quality screen, battery, and keyboard and not much else.

I suspect that a ryzen+ or even eypc+ when its out would be good or initial investigations on the desk top and as an interface to a bigger hpc cluster when needed.

I can get a much better idea how my ML models will behave at scale if I prototype on my 16GB MBP than if I only had whatever ram is leftover from 8GB after Chrome and everything use up most of it. It's no match for server GPUs but I can run multiple Jupyter notebooks with decent size datasets loaded and not have to think about it.

> What kinds of tasks require more performance than a standard laptop but less than a desktop?

I suppose it depends on the desktop! I just moved from a MacBook Pro to a Dell XPS 15. I thought I'd replace the MBP with the Dell, but I ended up replacing my desktop machine with the Dell, and still using the MacBook in my dining room.

The XPS 15 I bought has an i9, 32GB RAM, and 1TB SSD for $1100 less than the equivalent MacBook. My workload is primarily Adobe- and WordPress-centric, with some coding and article writing thrown in for good measure.

I do video editing, photo editing, and run code with zero issues. The i9 beats the pants off my Skylake i7 desktop. And it's portable! And the screen is amazing. I have it hooked up to my 5K monitor in my home office, and it's gorgeous.

Since my workload is 98% Chrome, Adobe products, Microsoft products, or text editors, everything was pretty much identical from one platform to another. I turned off automatic updates on Windows 10 (I do this on my Mac too) and had no issues at all migrating over.

I don't think I'll be buying a new Mac at this point.

I also "perform complex simulations and handle massive data sets" and often do mockup on my laptop (where power is nice) before shipping it off to the cluster, and often truck the results back to my laptop for analysis.

> Aren't those all features described exactly for the "niche developer/macrumors posters"?!

Yes, and, trust me, most developers I know who got newer MBPs are pretty happy with theirs. I know I am and I hope I get one of these newer ones next week. 6 cores and 32 gigs of DDR4 make a lot of a difference. The vi users make jokes about the Esc key, of course (but I'm into Emacs, so no problem for me). One company I know of offered the "classic" model for those who wanted to have it and nobody took the offer.

Among developers, the 10% troublesome to 90% happy rate seems to be present.

I, personally, have different priorities and have no problem with thicker laptops. My next personal one will probably be a maxed out Lenovo or Dell XPS, since they are cheaper than Macs at the cost of features I don't really need (high-fidelity screen, for instance).

> I know I am and I hope I get one of these newer ones next week. 6 cores and 32 gigs of DDR4 make a lot of a difference.

Even if they provide 64 GB, it will never be enough RAM. OSX is dogshit at memory management, with massive memory leaks. On my work laptop (-1 generation), I have 16 GB. Normal workloads (i.e. not even developer workloads/compilation tasks) consume memory to the point where I’m constantly swapping. Until they fix their shit, I’m not going to buy a new one, nor will I ask my company (I am good friends with IT) to refresh.

I guess 32 gigs can take me through the next 5 years like 16 took me through the past 4.

That’s not a remotely true for the vast majority of users. If you’re having this problem, you should push for a clean install because nobody on a dev team full of Macs at two different companies has had your complaint (although plenty have had a Slack or Chrome is leaky/bad memory management complaint)

Ok, then why I do only run into this issue on hardware running OS X? This is across machines (I worked at Apple btw, and had to dogfood Mavericks at the time) and across time. Same problem, it was never fixed.

I run Chrome and Slack on Windows and I never have had memory issues. Using Occam’s Razor, it has to be an issue with memory management at the OS level. I’ve also run Chrome and Slack on Linux - 1/10th of the memory footprint. I will write a blogpost in the future about it.

The developers where I work who have new MBPs complain a lot about the keyboard, the lack of ports, the lack of an escape key, and the lack of an SD card slot.

I had a new MBP for a few months and hated it.

As soon as an old MBP freed up, I traded in for it. SO much happier, and my friends are jealous.

And I pretty much live in emacs. Where I use the escape key regularly. C-x ESC ESC is one of my go-tos.

YMMV.

Oh, and the trackpad is too big, so I was always hitting it accidentally. (Or maybe my paws are too big.)

For me, the trackpad is the thing that got me to get rid of my MBP and replace it with a Pixelbook. I was getting false positive clicks all the time while typing, which would move the cursor and destroyed my productivity. And I was not hitting it accidentally - I contorted my hands into all sorts of strange positions and it still happened, I had people observe me while it occurred, etc. Happened on two different MBPs, but the tech support folks at my company couldn't make it happen. Must be something weird about my capacitive field. Much happier with the Pixelbook, especially since I can now run Android Studio on it along with other Linux apps.

I'm pretty happy with mine. Ports were annoying until tech caught up (yubikey was awful until the usb-c version came out, for example).

My esc key has been caps-lock for the past like 6 years, so that isn't an issue. (HIGHLY recommend this either way)

I don't use the touchbar too much (just like I didn't use the f bar too much), but the sliding action for volume control and a few others is nice.

Exactly. The escape key has never been an issue for me either (for what it's worth, I use Spacemacs as my primary editor).

I just open the macOS preferences, and remap Caps Lock to Control. Then escape becomes a Caps Lock + [ combination. Simple, and no fumbling around for an Escape key.

This also works well on both macOS and Linux, especially when moving about the command line (e.g. Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E to move to the beginning/end of the current line, respectively). See [1] for more shortcuts. Especially useful is Ctrl+K to cut text after the cursor, and then Ctrl+Y to paste it back.

Of course, the regular control key will do the same thing. But using Caps Lock as control reduces strain, at least for me. In fact, it's the first change I make on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

And on Ubuntu, gnome-tweak-tool makes it trivial to make Caps Lock and additional Control key (if you really need Caps Lock, you can also swap Caps Lock and Control).

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/keyboard-shortcuts-fo...

FWIW you can do C-x M-: instead of C-x ESC ESC

what key do use for meta then on emacs? capslock? esc key was default for my 2012 mbp

Option.

ctrl-[

(a habit I picked up on DEC and Wyse and etc... terminals where the key labeled ESC was in different locations)

The MBP with the new keyboard has been a bad experience for as well as a few of my co-workers. I switched back to a 2015 version we had laying around.

When I am forced to move to a new machine I am strongly considering grabbing a Dell or Lenovo and throwing Ubuntu on it. Experience has been that bad.

I think those descriptions are aspirational for large segment of those buying MBPs (current MBP owner)

I think this is like cars that market themselves as capable of racing and/or off roading, but people use them to commute in stop and go traffic. Majority of people don't select products for rational/practical reasons.

> The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does. Better to focus on the 90% of customers who buy products and make up 10% of the complaints then to focus on the 10% of customers who make up 90% of the complaints.

I was very happy with every single MacBook Air since I had one (which I think might have been 3rd generation?), and in fact purchased every single MacBook Air thereafter. People really liked the original Retina MacBook Pros.

This idea that these Pro customers who regularly spend $3,000 on their computers are a fickle whiny bunch who are never happy about anything and have always found something to be upset about is complete fantasy and ignores the reality of an actual degradation in quality.

We didn't just imagine the extension of the warranty on MacBook Pros with butterfly keyboards: Apple had to take action because the computers were ACTUALLY BREAKING. I own one of these, my t key ACTUALLY FELL OFF. I'm not just trying to come up with arbitrary reasons to hate on Apple, the "t" key is not some ivory tower feature only some 10% niche care about, this is a serious quality problem.

No one is saying they shouldn't innovate and come up with gimmicks to sell new computers. In fact, the T2 gimmick might be perfect: they get to tell "the common user" that the computer now runs Siri without compromising existing behavior -- brilliant! Compare this to the Touch Bar, which while flashy infuriates me every single day as I repeatedly mute and unmute my computer as my pinky brushes the touch bar so delicately I don't even register the feeling on my finger.

Ugh. A problem? No. Everyone can go on fine never using such a dumb key. Simply avoid. Move on. Adap...t.

hink differen

>The niche developer/macrumors posters will never be happy regardless of what Apple does.

That's not entirely accurate. The original 15 inch Retina Macbook Pro is an ideal laptop as far as I'm concerned. I'm still holding on to mine for home use. It was extremely well received in development communities at the time of release. On the other hand I have 2017 Touchbar Pro from work and it's horrendous for undocked use, borderline unusable.

Apple has notoriously aggressively focused on a future-facing scalable way. I.e. where they see enough of the market in say 5 years (i.e. firewire, USB-C). However, they have been wrong before, AND I don't think anyone can argue that they aren't focusing on non-mobile hardware right now.

While it's easy to say "just trust apple, they're doing it for the shareholders," I think it's also fair to say that they're losing their touch in this venue.

It used to be the only reason you didn't buy a Mac for pro creative-type work was the price. Now there are many great reasons from ergonomics to computing power.

I actually like the Touchbar MacBook Pros'. Including the keyboard. I love how small they are and how all the plugs are the "same" :)

I use it as my home-notebook and iOS development.

You are funny. I like :D

The 10% are the "word of mouthers" (evangelists) that influence the other 90%.

Apple isn't where it is today because of TV advertising. It's where it is because of brand advocates like the people who are now complaining about the new products.

That niche of developer/macrumors posters USED to be happy with everything Apple did. Under Steve Jobs, it seemed like Macbooks got cheaper every year, with more value. Now, every year the price goes up, but less value.

You can tell no one is clamoring for those features because they're not getting copy-catted.

No one wants that touchbar and Apple themselves just replaced the keyboard so to say its what consumers want is just pure fantasy. There's no data yet. Maybe they'll want this new keyboard but you're assuming anything Apple does is what the consumer wants.

> They didn't do that because it is not what most people want.

Bingo. Most people on this site don't realize they are in the minority.

Look at the iPhone SE. For customers who prefer a compact form-factor at a low price point, Apple still make a phone with the body of an iPhone 5 and the guts of an iPhone 6s. It's a niche product, but an important part of the line-up. "Old chassis, new internals" is a standard part of the Apple playbook. Mac sales represent an almost irrelevant part of Apple's revenues, but they're a vital part of the overall Apple ecosystem.

Apple still have the tooling for the 2015 Macbook Pro. The NRE costs to put a modern processor in that chassis would be relatively modes, because it's a much larger chassis with a more straightforward thermal design. The market for such a machine might not be large, but it's extremely important for the health of their ecosystem, because developers developers developers.

Personally, I think that the post-Jobs Apple has developed a nasty case of cargo cultism. Obsessive focus on the user experience has transmuted into obsessive focus on arbitrary design goals - thinner, lighter, fewer ports. They're making record profits thanks to the huge margins on iPhones and the strong vendor lock-in on iOS, but they're burning the goodwill that kept them alive during the lean years. If Apple can't find a way to delight customers rather than frustrate them, they're facing a serious long-term problem.

Developers are influencers. Lots of people I know ask me what kind of laptop they should get.

For normal humans, having a card slot and being able to use old chargers and accessories is a real consideration.

If you can’t reuse that stuff anyway, then fenestrating may become less distasteful.

Then they'd be wrong. You focus on the 5% of people who tell the 95% others what to think.

And you don't ask people what they think, you observe their behavior and hope you can make sense of it. People have no fucking clue what they want. You would have to be insane to ask people for their _opinions_ and expect something you can work with.

How do you know what consumers want without offering choice?

If you're used to MacBooks, check out the Surface Laptop or Surface Book.

- The hardware (particularly the keyboard and massive trackpad) is great

- apt-get on WSL is better than homebrew will ever be (powershell too if you have the time to learn it)

- Windows 10 has a dedicated team working on it (Apple has merged iOS and macOS teams since a few years ago, which may be because iOS makes a lot more money).

Can you develop for iOS on a Surface?

Not for Swift/Objective C - you'll need a Mac device to run the simulator. I mainly used my Macbooks for Python, node.js, some C and bash.

Edit: changed emulator to simulator (which is true, it's x64 iOS).

Same here. My work provides us with Macs (I just got the touchbar one), and 90% of my time is spent in iTerm ssh'd into my linux work desktop with tmux. We had a choice of a ThinkPad, but it is just so goddamn hard to get used to a different trackpad after a mac.

It is a simulator, not an emulator.

Good to point out that iOS developers want a good solid laptop. It is definitely the case though that there are developers who don't/won't do iOS development but want a solid, well-built laptop with good components, good support, and good drivers. I have no idea if the Surface laptops fit that bill, but I assume they have lots of support from Microsoft.

I've been running a ZBook G3 with Debian 9 and have been having a pretty good experience so far. The laptop feels pretty good but I'm sure a MacBook Pro would be a step up in terms of hardware quality.

By running virtual desktop using MacInCloud, MacStadium, HostMyApple, Xcode Club etc.

I have a MacOS vm running on my new surface pro 2017, I really wanted built in LTE and a detachable keyboard for reading articles, docs, email, etc

XCode even connects over WiFi to my iPhone when both are on the same network, but I did have to jump through a few hoops to get it all working

Does anything works correctly? e.g. buiilding with xcode?

What's your best online resource for figuring out how to do and, more importantly, maintain that?

I'd be interested in knowing how many people switched from the MBP to the Surface(Book) due to delays and changes/issues in the MBP range.

I bought a first generation Surfacebook a few years ago because I couldn't wait any longer for Apple to release their new MBP range, and I'm glad I didn't wait. It's the best laptop I've ever owned.

Even though I've moved away from .NET dev and work mostly with Ruby and Node it's still my favourite machine to use. I run Debian with minimal problems, and I'm started to get more into WSL, which seems to work brilliantly for all the use cases I've thrown at it.

If the numbers are strong on people moving from MBP to the Surfacebook, then it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for it to become a real option for developers, regardless of whether they want to use Windows or not.

Count me in, for one. My main machine is still the 2013 MBP (2015 MBP at work). But every laptop / portable / desktop I've bought since then has been a Windows machine, because they offer either 1) similar value at a cheaper price, or 2) greater flexibility and usability at the same price. The Surfaces are the best laptops a non-Apple-dev "Pro" can get right now, in my experience. They've got ports, they've got portability, their hardware is now up to par with the best of the Macs.

I still love my 2013 Macbook Pro, but I'm probably not going to be buying a Mac again until they make something of similar usability and flexibility (mostly the keyboard and the ports).

Agreed. I also have the 2013 model and it's a great machine, but it's starting to show its age now, and the keyboard on the Surfacebook is now light years ahead of the MBP. Unless Apple can release a laptop on par with the flagship Windows laptops I cannot see myself buying one.

And same here - Surface Book after the previous 10 years of Mac (two MacBook Airs and a MacBook). Used Ubuntu and Fedora for the 10 years before that.

God I just want to run MacOS on a surface book. I hate windows but love the hardware. Can anyone tell me if this is possible ?

It might be, but it's a lot of work putting together and maintaining a Hackintosh. You can try using VMWare but you will lose video acceleration.

I run Mavericks in a VM to do Mac builds for Electron, and it works fine if you've got plenty of RAM and a fast SSD.

Alas, is cruel dream.

Coming from windows to mac I just love the simplicity. In windows you have so many options, so many updates, preinstalled apps which I never use. I open the mac, click the app in the dockbar, that's it. All apps scale nicely on the screen, unlike windows on a 4k display, terminal is great.

> I run Debian with minimal problems

This. I love this about most modern PC laptops. Sometimes you get some driver issues like I did on this MSI where I had to go through a kernel mailing list and use some python scripts to extract the firmware from Windows to get Wi-Fi working:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/

But that was also a gaming laptop. Every Dell and HP I've purchased in the past few years works perfectly with the mainline kernel. I've never had an issue with missing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or video drivers for years in a PC laptop.

Trying to get Linux working on a MacBook is a fucking nightmare:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/linux-on-a-macbook-pro-14-3/

I prefer i3/tiling window managers and package management to Win/Mac and I'd hate to work at a job where I'm forced to use either.

Sorry, but Windows 10 is godawful. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. If you want to sell the surface laptop to power users and developers, you're better off mentioning that you can install Ubuntu (as an actual host OS, not WSL bullshit with Microsoft's spyware still running in the background) just fine on certain models.

I've tried some simple ops stuff on my home computer (Windows), and it's horrible because the alt-tab behaviour is completely ridiculous / arbitrary. Old style was alt-tab goes to previous open window, new one goes ???

What problem do you have with alt-tab? For me it goes exactly to the last window that was open/had focus.

AFAICT alt+Tab is entirely identical to what it was in win7.

I disagree with this sentiment. What makes it "god awful" in your eyes? I've been using it at work for the past year or so, and I've had no real issues to speak of.

Do I like more than Ubuntu (which I use personally)? No, but I find it to be pretty easy to use.

Also, the Ubuntu subsystem has been fantastic for working on remote Linux servers. I was using git bash (or Ubuntu in Virtual Box) previously, but I don't need that anymore. It will freeze once in a while, but it's trivial to get going again.

I feel like the trajectory over the last few years has been to make things worse... I guess if you used Windows 8 a lot it's a bit of an improvement but I still don't feel like it's anywhere near as good as Windows 7 was... I'm not even talking about things like deciding it wants to update and spending half an hour doing that when I'm trying to get work done, it randomly installing Candy Crunch and some other crap automatically one update (again, work machine) or the fact that my start menu stops working surprisingly often (seriously, not sure if this is just my machine but it's damn annoying - it just doesn't do anything when I click on it sometimes)...

But just things like the network settings - they have been making getting to Network and Sharing Centre harder each big update, and the replacement (the new metro-style settings app) is just rubbish in comparison. You can't change an IP address in it, can't easily get to the network status, etc... Network and Sharing Centre wasn't even that good but it would be a big improvement to just can the settings app and go back to the Windows 7 control panel...

I have little insight on spying issues (or how MS compares to what Apple, Google or everyone else is doing regarding that nowadays) but coming from Windows 7 I have zero practical complaints about using Windows 10 over it. I like the WSL bullshit a lot, too.

If you use Windows 10 Pro in an enterprise environment, AD policies can turn off most of the spying (although there have been various issues on that and plenty of other HN threads).

That being said, I don't mind Win 10 when I have to use it. I use it for games and Adobe products and I find it really nice and prefer it to macOS easily.

My main box at home and my laptop at work are both Linux though. Gentoo for life! When it comes to development nothing compares to a good tiling window manager and a solid Linux ecosystem.

I've heard this before too, that the Surface Book is the best replacement MBP you can get right now, even if you never plan on separating the tablet.

Also that the current-gen Surface Book solved a lot of the shortcomings of the first-gen

Have also heard this. It's on the top of my list for my next laptop

However, the base model has weak specs and the upgrades get pretty pricey. So it's similar to MBP in that way, at least

It's only got a max 16GB ram though???

If you're used to MacBooks, check out the Surface Laptop or Surface Book.

I’ve also switched from MBP to Surface, couldn’t be happier. Great keyboard, great 3:2 screen (since you can’t buy 4:3 anymore), nice trackpad, WSL is great too. Rather than complain, vote with your wallet.

Having managed a suite of them (SP4's) I disagree veheremently with your assesment. of the 30 I had, 26 had to be returned for repair; fan falures followed by battery issues were the main faults. To add, the dock is just a pile of junk. Utterly worthless, despite an endless series of updates. The Windows 10 team are responsible for Server and Embedded versions of Windows as well as the desktop version. Suggesting that the have a "dedicated" team is mileading.

My experience with WSL has unfortunately been different to yours.

I tried running Docker on it, which was a disaster. WSL doesn't seem to fully implement things that Docker or other Linux apps require. Various network things seem to be half working or absent.

I don't want to start an argument with you on this, I'm glad your experience has been different to mine. I've started using WSL as a simple shell to access a Fedora VM running under Hyper-V.

AFAIR there was a story stating that the windows team is now part of azure and some other project, no longer having its own team.

Apt is so different from homebrew that I don’t think they’re worth comparing directly. Fwiw people run homebrew on ubuntu, presumably because it is «better» (i.e has something to offer over) than apt.

And there’s a lot of applications that don’t work under WSL - a while back, not a single haskell app worked. (I haven’t bothered checking)

Better yet, why don't they go back and grab the 2006 17" form factor?

That was the best developer laptop I had. The missing 2" on the 15" just makes the IDE too narrow.

I keep wanting to buy a 17" and then walking back from it after seeing/handling 17" laptops in physical stores.

All the bezel-shrinking R&D being done for phones has to reach laptops at some point. I'm seriously losing half an inch of luggable-but-not-lookable space on each side of the screen, plus a good inch below. (I have like the most common 13" Dell in the world; just walking around in the study room of the library I see three more.)

The HP Spectre x360 is a good example of bezel-shrinking in laptops. I have a 13" model and it's nice to have a more compact laptop.

I have no idea why this style isn't more popular. Maybe it seems too fragile to consumers?

It is extremely popular, in the PC market and to some extent in the Mac market as well. The MacBook Pro 2016 had smaller bezels than the 2015.

Dell XPS 13

The Apple 17" laptops were about the same size (maybe even smaller) as large 15" laptops though. Presumably, an Apple 17" laptop in this day and age would be pretty manageable size-wise.

I can definitely attest to this, having had one back in the day. Of course back then, everyone else made super-chunky laptops, at least with the cheaper models (so chunky that people bought netbooks because laptops were insufficiently portable.)

I frequently put Apple's 17" laptop in a backpack/case slot designed for 15" normal laptops, and it fit just fine.

I wouldn't mind that either, but OTOH, I don't work on a laptop screen all day as a rule. I'd rather have a compact machine that I can just plug into a screen. I wouldn't mind a Mac Mini style machine with magsafe power and/or an easily detachable docking station.

Without a battery, you'd have to shut down each time you moved from seat to seat. You might as well carry a fast, bootable drive around and treat the actual computer at each seat as the docking station.

My favorite was the first Aluminum Powerbook 12 and 17. I wamted both. I owned the 17 inch. I envied the 12 inch also. The 17 inch was almost the size of a Dell 15 inch at the time, so it wasn't as large it seemed. It was and is my favorite laptop I owned, ever. Well, that or my IBM Thinkpad 600e.

The 2006 17" MacBook Pro only had a resolution of only 1680x1050. A 15" Retina MacBook Pro has a "true" resolution of 2880x1800 but is normally used at an effective resolution of 1440x900. However, you can easily adjust it to be an effective resolution of 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 (the resolution of the last 17" MacBook Pro in 2011).

Of course the effective pixels per inch may make some features too small but the effective PPI of 1680x1050 on a current 15" MacBook Pro is lower than the actual PPI of the last 17" MacBook Pro's screen:

147 PPI 15.4" 1920x1200 133 PPI 17" 1920x1200 129 PPI 15.4" 1680x1050 116 PPI 17" 1680x1050 110 PPI 15.4" 144x900

That was back in the day when you had to buy Apple's 17" model just to get the same number of pixels on your screen as everyone else's 15" model. Apple had worse density than the competition back then.

Then a few years passed, and Apple went all-in on high-DPI "Retina" displays, while the whole PC laptop world had a great display regression.

They have to recover the money spent on TouchBar R&D. We won’t see a proper MacBook Pro until 2020.

I also think that part of there are economic and organizational commitment reasons the touchbar is still getting made. I do not think it is because people love the touchbar.

Color me optimisitic, but I'm hopeful a new arm-based mac will come earlier than 2020, though.

It seems to me the touchbar was just a clever way to get their own processor into their laptops for some large scale real-world testing before they ditch intel and build the entire thing themselves. 2020 is a good guess I'd say.

I'm surprised this is the first time I've seen the "touchbar as a way to get the A-series chips into macbooks" take. It's the most sensible explanation.

Even without the Touchbar, using the T1 for securing the TouchID sensor (amongst the other duties it fulfills) would've been justification enough. So no, that's no excuse for the Touchbar.

Maybe the Touchbar was just a "clever" way to prepare all of us for sole touch-based input, which is going to be included in the MBP in 2020. ;-)

P.S.: I don't even think touch-only input is neccessarily a bad idea. All Apple has to do to make it work is to implement some kind of really good haptic feedback which also allows to feel individual keys. I even expected that for this iteration of the MBP for the Touchbar.

Re: your P.S.: If a touch keyboard could give haptic feedback that let us distinguish between a "correct" keypress and a missed one, it might work. Perhaps a pleasant haptic vibration in proportion to how close to center your finger strikes would work.

> Hypothesis: Apple's low-profile MBP keyboard is just a temporary stage that should prepare us for solid state keyboard.

> What is that? A non-moving keyboard where a feedback is faked convinvingly enough via localized haptic feedback.

> See iPhone home button and MBP trackpad.

https://mobile.twitter.com/keff85/status/1011350819210498050

Sure, there are downsides to the touchbar (I get it), but I'd suggest we ask this question: where does Apple want to go with the touchbar? Instead of focusing on where it is right now, think about what it could be.

With haptic feedback and perhaps different locations/placement, it has the potential to augment or even transform the ways we interact with the computer.

Put another way, the current problems are not insurmountable. Changing habits is not easy. What if there are better options than current keyboards? All I'm saying is consider what might be in the works.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we should blindly accept anything Apple does. But we should not blindly assume that their decisions are based on the worst intentions, either.

I kinda wish they were able to implement the touchbar in some sort of hybrid way, like those Art Lebedev keyboards we all saw hyped (but probably never in person) back in the day.

While I'll admit there are cool things you can do with embedded OLED displays, the keys they sacrificed for it are keys I actually need to press. Regularly.

That's the sunk cost fallacy. If the traditional function keys would sell better than the new touchbar, their best move would be to start selling the old ones right away, even if that meant "throwing money away" on r&d.

>They have to recover the money spent on TouchBar R&D. We won’t see a proper MacBook Pro until 2020.

The amount of money spent on the TouchBar has nothing to do with anything. Apple makes a new set of chips for each new iPhone, iPad and Mac; they have the in-house expertise and the budget to make whatever they want whenever they want.

It's not like the Mac division has it's own profit/lost statement it has to worry about.

The main reason why it's taken this long to get MacBook Pros to this level of performance is due to delays by Intel; simple as that.

Where is this quote from? Was the original link to something other than the Apple release?

The linked Apple release just says:

> an improved third-generation keyboard for quieter typing

That got me, too. It's from the Ars piece on today's news: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/apples-new-2018-macb...

i'm a developer and the keyboard is fine

I'm a developer and I love the touch bar.

There will be a gen 4 keyboard in 18 months.

Web developer here. The MacBook Air is fast enough for me, so I am very much interested in thinner, lighter, and non-performance related features (Touch Bar and Touch ID) in the Pro lineup.

Do you speak on behalf of all "developers?" The 2016 revision is Apple's fastest-selling iteration of the MBP.

I notice you don't quote two paragraphs right before that:

> The butterfly keyboard design Apple introduced in 2016 has been divisive. Some people really like it, claiming it has fast travel and a sturdy, responsive feel to it. Others feel it's uncomfortable to type on. We haven't seen a keyboard this polarizing in a long time; it's a point of passionate disagreement even among Ars Technica reviews staff.

The reaction is mixed, even among people who compare laptops to each other for a living. But you make it sound like anybody who knows what they're doing would prefer the old model.

>Do you speak on behalf of all "developers?" The 2016 revision is Apple's fastest-selling iteration of the MBP.

Isn't that mostly because they let the Macbook Air languish, rather than either upgrading it or letting it drop to netbook-level pricing.

So lots of people (myself included) who wanted a Mac laptop bought the Pro one instead.

> The 2016 revision is Apple's fastest-selling iteration of the MBP.

This is after an (at the time) abnormally long period of little to no substantial updates to the laptops. If you remember at the time, people were worrying about the lack of a new laptop the way they worry now about the Mac Pro. It's really not completely fair to state this metric without the realization that there was a lot of pent up demand for modern components, which would probably overrule any other issues. I was one of the people that bought the 2016 model -- and I'm not happy (not least of which because one of the keys literally fell off), so "fastest selling" != "well received". As it stands now, for me the defining quality of the hardware is that it is the easiest way to run macOS. The fact that the 2015 model and the Air keep selling so well is in my opinion a better demonstration of the "reception" of this new MacBook.

> The reaction is mixed, even among people who compare laptops to each other for a living. But you make it sound like anybody who knows what they're doing would prefer the old model.

This is also just not a fair representation of the actual state of affairs. Regardless of whether the keyboards are enjoyable when functional, the reality is that they have quality issues. Apple having to create a program for replacing the keyboards since they break so often is just a fact. Interestingly enough, I'm in this camp: I really have no issue with the new keyboard except for the fact that the keys break. Well, that and the Touch Bar which is a separate topic.

Independent of the like or dislike of the keyboard, it is interesting to highlight that Apple will employ the classic PID style of marketing speak.. (as in like PID controller).

what I mean is, if they are selling a ton and its sustained best case scenario), then they talk about that number (thats the proportional term) -- they say things like "we are shipping 1k units per day and projected to hit 50k per month soon".

If they are they aren't selling very many, then they find the derivative of the number sold and see when it is the highest.. "like in a weekend we sold 1 million units!!"

And then if its a slow burn after a period of time they eventually tell you a cumulative number that have sold (integral). "There have been 100 million macs sold to date.." that kind of thing..

So when somebody says "fastest selling", that gives me pause because it basically can mean whatever you want it to mean -- that somehow they have a metric of sales within a period of time of their choosing that was higher than other previous devices. That could literally be because of their ability to fulfill them compared to previously.

Anyway, I'm still holding onto my MBP 2012 and waiting for basically a lighter version of it that has the ability to replace internal M.2 cards (not proprietary), ability to max out my ram and also doesn't have a touchbar.. I mean that touchbar is so lame.. what a waste of effort/time on apples side.. also, talk about fixing something that wasn't broken -- the trackpad.. basically up until the force trackpad people thought it was better than anything else out there by a factor of 10, and apple then changes it and basically everybody says its substantially worse feeling except novice users who know no different..

You are wording my exact thoughts. mid-2015 13" MBP was good balance.

They've played this thinness and flashy lights game too much too long. My new Lenovo T480S (24GB DDR4, is coming next week :) Sweet Linux with i3 tiled window manager. All the ports & productivity I can ask for.

I'm voting with my wallet and my vote doesn't go to Apple.

Right now, I'm hoping my maxed out 2015 13" lasts forever.

Sorry I am missing something here.

I just looked up my laptop's info: 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 from 2012. So you are telling me 6 years later, I can get a 2.9GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 processor for ~$2800. So Moore's law was incorrect?

I believe Moore's law hasn't been true since before 2012

Anyway, yes, this is why a lot of people, myself included, think the new MBPs are not at all worth the price, especially if you have an older one. There is essentially no reason for me to ever upgrade from my late 2013 model unless it completely breaks. I love this computer, it was probably one of the best purchases I've ever made

Why are you assuming that Apple's pricing strategy has anything to do with reality?

Who are we to believe has a grasp of the reality of value-for-money? Hacker News commenters smugly declaring that Macbooks are junk? Or Apple's sales figures?

If we're going to be rational, we can't wave it all off as marketing or shiny toys, we have to accept that if they are consistently selling tons of products at high margins, they are delivering value, and the market is voting for that value with their pocketbooks.

If we say, "Well, their prices are out of whack with their value because we can get the exact same thing from Bob's Motherboards for half the price," then we are wilfully choosing to emphasize the part of their value that their customers don't care about, while ignoring the part of their value that customers care about.

Moore's Law is with respect to transistor counts and has nothing at all to do with performance.

Historically speaking transistors and performance were coincidentally related: More transistors helped do more things at once, and tinier transistors ran faster than bigger ones.

Now we're at a different inflection point where the transistors aren't shrinking as quickly, but the dies themselves are getting bigger and the chips are growing more complex in terms of 3D structure. There's more transistors in there, but the easy gains in terms of pitch reduction leading to higher clock-speeds are gone.

If we'd been on the same track as before you'd have a ~140GHz CPU. Instead you have a 2.9GHz one because physics is a buzzkill.

Here's an older article discussing the problem from 2012 but the same trend has held: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/116561-the-death-of-cp...

Transistor counts continue to climb but power consumption, clock speeds and performance per clock have all hit a wall.

> Why they couldn't grab a 2012-2015 model and upgrade the guts?

That would have been far more desirable.

I am repulsed by the Touch Bar, and the keyboard which is widely reported to be notoriously unreliable and requiring very expensive repairs does not inspire confidence.

Sigh.

All that talk about the keyboard in the article and not a single picture of it...weird.

I like the touchbar and the bigger touchpad, and even the new keyboard (at least, while it works). Granted there are a few bugs with the touchbar which are rather annoying, but nothing they can't fix with a software update (fingers crossed).

It's not possible to buy it without the TouchBar any more :(

I really wanted to like it, and the concept could perhaps eventually be good, but the current implementation is infuriatingly bad:

• I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.

• The buttons are in different locations depending on context, so it's not possible to use it by muscle memory.

• TouchBar automatically goes to sleep, making the previous two points worse.

• It's not even that good for its intended purpose. Previews of things on it are too tiny. Most actions still require multiple taps, and it's in the uncanny valley between direct and indirect manipulation.

Fingerprint sensor is convenient, but the TouchBar ended up being a gimmick, not a pro feature.

> • I need more than one tap to change the brightness,

For what it's worth, if you tap and hold the brightness and volume buttons, it turns into a slider under your finger that you can immediately use. One tap + drag.

It's the one thing I miss about the Touch Bar after leaving it for the MacBook Escape.

Wasn't the Touch Bar-less model 13" only? That's hardly a Pro machine anyway, since it has no discrete graphics.

There are a huge number of pro users that don't require integrated graphics. Most developers don't need them.

Most web developers, maybe.

Hence most developers.

But discrete graphics aren't needed for lots and lots of other software either.

depends what your definition of "pro" is, even if it's 50% of all users who do pro work that need a GPU (Video, photo, CAD) there's at least as many who need a lot of memory/CPU for various other things.

Programming/compiling not-withstanding there are many tasks today that are CPU intensive.

Plus, real professionals use slack, so that extra memory is needed.

Yup, The 32GB version should really be called Slackbook Pro.

Using this.

The touchbar-less 13” is last year model with 7th gen CPU and old keyboard design.

> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.

I discovered recently that you could just do a "quick swipe" (very fast) on the button in the right direction on both the volume and brightness virtual button to apply the expected effect. Good enough for my usage.

No need to "quick swipe," you can just tap-and(-hold-and)-swipe. This is really easy and allows for fine-grained control

Wow, makes the whole thing much more pleasant to use. Pretty bad that I only discover this now, after a year and a half.

This comment was the best thing to happen today. This is still not as good as hard buttons, but it improves the experience tremendously.

>I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.

this is the dealbreaker for me. :( i hope they release a model without the touch bar in the future

OP is incorrect, just tap and hold and then slide left or right to change the volume or brightness. It’s quicker than physical buttons and more granular.

Tap and hold brightness/volume icons then drag to change. Don't know how I figured this one out.

I’m fairly sure it was in the demo on stage, it is a publicised feature from day one (when I got mine) but people are so bothered about the escape key and other things that this feature gets lost in the noise.

Better Touch Tool addresses almost all of your concerns

Check our BetterTouchTool it has a 40 day free trial so you give it a proper work out and let's you customise the touch bar completely. It's brilliant and worth every cent.

I wouldn't care about the touch bar if the esc+(sleep key) were still regular hardware keys. Those are the only ones that I actually use.

But an even bigger problem for me is the price increase. The base TB version costs 200€ more (or 400€ if you'd buy the nTB 128gb version). With ne nTB version not getting the update, the updated MBP is too expensive compared to non Apple machienes.

I believe the price increase is purely based on the profit-maximizing strategy. If people will pay that much then Apple has no reason to ask for less. Unfortunately, I can not imagine myself switching to a Windows-based laptop. This is just another example of why monopoly is bad.

I agree that this is profit maximization, but the only monopoly Apple has is on sucking less than others at particular things that particular niches care about (privacy, UX, ecosystem integration come to mind).

A non-Apple device will do all the same stuff. It just might not do it the exact way you like out of the box.

I pay the Apple tax (albeit exceedingly infrequently) because I can afford it & it reduces friction in my life, not because I have no other options.

Of course you are right, Apple is dominating the market, not behaving monopolistically in the negative sense of the word.

If you have the choice to purchase a comparable competing product, then it’s not a monopoly.

I still request a MacBook for work, but I can no longer buy it for my private use. It's just too expensive compared to their competitors.

As an aside, I switched Caps Lock to ESC a few years ago and after the 6 weeks(?) or however long it took to fully adjust, it's fantastic. I wish I could bring Caps Lock -> ESC joy to everyone.

The only issue with that for me is that Caps Lock as Control is also a useful mapping.

I do caps lock to control, and control to escape. I also set right_shift when pressed alone and not a modifier to forward_delete.

Complex key behaviors can be defined with Karabiner-Elements.[1]

There are tons of settings posted on Github, and I just modified someone else's to get:

    {"description":"Change right_shift alone to delete_forward",
    "manipulators":[{
    "from":{"key_code":"right_shift","modifiers":{"optional":["any"]}},
    "to":[{"key_code":"right_shift"}],
    "to_if_alone":[{"key_code":"delete_forward"}],
    "type":"basic"}]}

[1] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

On my Mac I use Karabiner to map Caps + [key] to Ctrl, and a lone press to Esc. It's amazing.

Oh that's neat, thanks for the tip.

Wow, that's a great idea. I didn't realize it had support for that.

That sounds like a perfect setup! Mind sharing the modification rule?

I map it to Hyper, but you can tweak this to just be control:

    {
        "description": "Change caps_lock to hyper/escape.",
        "from": {
            "key_code": "caps_lock",
            "modifiers": {
                "optional": [
                    "any"
                ]
            }
        },
        "to": [
            {
                "key_code": "left_shift",
                "modifiers": [
                    "left_command",
                    "left_control",
                    "left_option"
                ]
            }
        ],
        "to_if_alone": [
            {
                "key_code": "escape"
            }
        ],
        "type": "basic"
    }

I've done the same but Caps + key to Hyper (cmd+ctrl+option+shift), just to pair with custom shortcuts.

But I really love using it for escape. I'm on a 2014 model but not going to the corner for escape is great. Plus I'm about to get one of these new ones, and I feel prepared since I have zero usage of the top row (other than the special functions).

Yep. Every single thread about TouchBar complaints has this or a very similar comment and people. Spread the knowledge!

I feel like I'm the only one who actually uses caps lock for its intended purpose, and often...

Are you writing a lot of FORTRAN 77 or something?

as a french, on linux (and mac too), caps lock is the correct way to get accentued capitals.

If it's any help, I found this tool useful: https://www.haptictouchbar.com/ (I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't build this into the Touch Bar at some point.)

This is $5 and there's a free alternative: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

For those who are wondering, it's creating a haptic bump via the trackpad. You'll feel it right there if you put one finger on the trackpad and then touch the touch bar.

It's a good enough effect, though, I will probably keep it. Thanks for the suggestion.

The endpoint security stuff on my work machine rejected this software. I would be wary if I were you.

You don't need to worry so much about most of these. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard. Change the Touch Bar shows to Expanded Control Strip. Then go to Customize Control Strip... and set the keys you want to always have displayed. I can guarantee you will be using the touch bar more often then you did the F* keys.

> It's not possible to buy it without the TouchBar any more :(

It is, but they didn't update the model at all.

My favorite is when my hands naturally come to rest near the top of the keyboard at least once a day they land on the brightness control in the touchbar and dim my screen to black.

Or that I try to press delete, and if my fingers are a tiny bit off, the computer goes to sleep since the touch bar is really sensitive. Even the edge of my finger triggers it.

Just an aside ... I set my lower-right "hot corner" to "sleep screen" on all macs I use - including desktop imacs ...

That way you can just drag the mouse to the lower-right corner and black the screen anytime you like ...

Lower right for me is Mission Control, and has been for years. It would be a tough unlearning experience on your computer ;)

I learned that while reading email and using "e" to archive that my pinky rests on the escape key. Took me a bit to realize why weird things were going on.

Other than that, I like the 2017 keyboard (assuming mine doesn't break) and touch bar.

> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song. > > The buttons are in different locations depending on context, so it's not possible to use it by muscle memory.

You can add Volume/Brighness Up/Down buttons to the "always-on" touchbar by going to View -> Customize Touch Bar on the finder.

You can also start sliding from the "open slider" button without releasing your finger, which is more granular and IMO much nicer than having to press many times to adjust volume. If they only removed that giant pop-up on the screen with the current brightness and volume it would be a big improvement.

That’s really good to know, thanks!

The lack of direct volume control really annoyed me. I probably should have poked around the config instead of just being annoyed about it.

> but the current implementation is infuriatingly bad:

You left out how easy it is to accidentally brush with a finger and trigger various actions that you didn't want to do.

Especially infuriating when using Calculator and clear a result or turn a multiplication in to an addition.

The touchbar is awesome--you can immediately blow away all the worthless function keys and have a minimalist setup. I keep the escape key and the volume/brightness sliders, that's it. Keeps the entire setup feeling clean. People actually use the touchbar for context-dependent tasks?

Its great for scrubbing through video. Tap and hold for fast, fine grained control.

My only complaint with the touchbar is its too easy to accidentally engage Siri.

Other than that it’s a good idea IMO.

you can remove Siri from the touchbar

System Preferences > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip

> My only complaint with the touchbar is its too easy to accidentally engage Siri.

You can remove the Siri shortcut in the system preferences.

Literally the first thing I did was remove the Siri button from the touch bar.

> Its great for scrubbing through video.

The touchpad is fine for that. No need for duplicating functionality.

Eliminating the entire keyboard for a touchscreen would also be "clean".

Clean != good. These are tools, not pieces of art.

I don't understand your argument from that point of view... with the same argument, I could tell you that adding 15 new keys to the middle of the keyboard would be good, because those keys may have esoteric function for a small number of users, and if you complain about their addition, I'd just remind you that this is a tool, not a piece of art.

Look at how many people here recommend rebinding caps lock to "esc" and control to caps lock and all other sorts of editing to the keys... should you remind them that rebinding keys is unnatural and the tool should be used the same way it's always been?

I guess it stems from the fact that I've never understood the argument that the touch bar took away the "esc" key... but on every touch bar MBP I see at the Apple Store, the esc key is still there, still right where it was, and still has the same functionality. The only difference is now if you don't use the esc key, you have the ability to remove it and put a more useful key there instead. But somehow this is a bad thing. I don't understand it.

If it's a tool, like you claim, it should be useful for getting work done. But instead you seem to actually want it to be made according to your exact design and visual preferences, which to me sounds more like you're actually looking for a piece of art.

Consider “remapping keys” as the digital equivalent of “customizing a tool’s grip to for your hand”. Or maybe “rearranging the workshop to put your most-used tools in easy reach”.

Replacing the top row with the touch bar, in this analogy, is like someone else coming into your workshop and replacing several tools’ grips with big padded things that completely ruins the physical feedback you expect to feel, and never realized you used for fine control until you didn’t have it.

Maybe I'm part of the minority (or since Apple's sales are still doing pretty good maybe the minority is just louder), but it's just weird that the line in the sand is being drawn at "the uncommonly-used keys are still there, but now they can be customized too, but only if you choose to use the default keyboard instead of an external keyboard".

For me when I switched to a Mac, the hardest thing to get used to was the lack of a forward delete key (the Windows-style use of the delete key) and having to use a key combination instead. Even today I still struggle with the lack of pgup and pgdn keys, and the lack of home and end.

In light of commonly-used keys that are actually missing, I just struggle to accept the idea that the Esc key being a touch button but still existing is a hill worth dying on. Especially when, since the touch bar is customizable, everyone can now swap their (relatively) useless F1-F12 keys for the (relatively) more useful Home, End, Forward Delete, Page Up, and Page Down keys. Or whatever else they want it to be.

To me, it's like the digital equivalent to swapping a workshop's dedicated phillips-head screwdriver with one that lets you switch ends to be phillips or flathead or torx or whatever. Some small number of people may complain "but it's not the same way it's always been!", but it sure does make life a lot easier for a lot more people.

"It's not the same way it's always been" has been Apple's driving mission since... well basically forever. Think Different, right?

Why didn’t they keep both the touchbar and the F keys. That would have been so awesome for developers, it would have enabled so many usecases without killing existing ones.

Hopefully see this article? [0] I don't have on-hands feedback on this but it sounded kind of promising (or at least a possible stairway to escape that special circle of hell)

[0]: http://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/

You can swipe the volume or brightness buttons left and right to adjust in a single press.

> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.

Happily, you don't - tap and hold the button on the touchbar and drag your finger from there. You do not need to move your finger to the slider. Same works for volume. Tap, hold, drag. Not sure about skipping songs.

> I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume

Not true; you can change them by beginning a slide over the brightness/volume (and maybe other buttons that expand into a slider) in a single gesture without lifting your finger.

"... so many reports that it can be rendered inoperable by a grain of sand and that is incredibly difficult and expensive to repair or replace. This new third-generation keyboard wasn’t designed to solve those issues, Apple says."

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563640/apple-macbook-pr...

Wow.

Just wait until you see Apples own instructions for removing the sand.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/ht205662

I don't see the problem? Holding at an angle and using compressed air is the most sensible way to dislodge a small foreign object from under a key.

Oh crap, this is the only thing I cared about. Ok so it's a no-go from day one.

I don't care if Apple has a 4 year warranty program for the keyboard. The fact is, I can't give up my main laptop for 2-5 days every 6 months to have them fix it for free.

I take advantage of Apple's no questions asked return policy for stuff like this:

Take my laptop in to be repaired, buy a brand new MBP at the same time. Load everything onto the new laptop using a time machine backup (takes about 2 hours), and use that while they're repairing my laptop.

When my laptop is fixed, I pick it up and return the one I bought at the same time for a full refund.

It's a bit of fuss making sure I keep the 'free-hire' laptop completely pristine, but it's fun to use a brand new machine every so often.

Not everyone has thousands of dollars sitting around to “rent” new apple hardware. Fine, if that’s your solution. I’ll stick to buying hardware that works.

>Not everyone has thousands of dollars sitting around to “rent” new apple hardware.

I imagine the vast majority of people using MBPs also have a credit card. I think you're imagining a problem here.

It could also be that this is an imaginary "solution" to a "real" problem.

I have done this in the past and its the way to go for sure.

I find it odd that "so many" reports are related to a grain of sand. I get a lot of dirt in my keyboards, but never sand. But maybe that's because I don't use a laptop on a beach or construction site?

A grain of salt (ahem) would be much more believable.

Sand is everywhere, it doesn't require you to be at a beach or construction site. In the northeast, they salt/sand the roads every winter and plenty of it ends up inside my house. Not hard to believe that it can transfer to my hands/clothes and eventually my laptop.

My municipality even sands our sidewalks in the winter, but not a whole lot gets into my house past the shoe mat. But I kick my shoes/boots off vs using my hands, so maybe that's why.

I don't believe it for one second.

This is of course PR bs to prevent adding more wood to the bonfire.

I’m glad to see that Apple has finally updated its MacBook Pro line, but it’s a little too late for me. After using Macs for nearly 12 years, I bought a Dell XPS 15 9570 a week after WWDC 2018 (I couldn’t put off a new computer purchase any longer), and I couldn’t be happier. It turns out that Windows 10 really shines on a computer with six processor cores, a 4K display, and a NVMe SSD, a dramatic improvement from the refurbished ThinkPad T430 I used with a spinning hard disk and a 1366x768 display. Windows 10 shines on top-of-the-line hardware, and I’ve found the experience to be quite competitive to macOS so far for my needs. Granted, I’m still getting used to the Windows ecosystem again after being away from it for 12 years, and there are still some aspects of Windows 10 that annoy me (namely the prevelance of ads), but other than that it’s quite an improvement from my Windows XP days.

Anyway, I’m pleased that Apple updated its MacBook Pro lineup today, and I hope that Apple will start regularly updating its Macs again. Competition is very important in the personal computing marketplace. I’m glad that Windows 10 is working well for me, and I hope that Apple will still be a force in computing so that way Microsoft won’t get lazy again like they did in the dark ages of Internet Explorer 6. I have a Mac Pro I still use regularly as a desktop at home, and so I still have one foot in the Mac ecosystem.

Echoing this sentiment, got a precision 5520 pre-loaded with Ubuntu and it's been a real champ. The build-quality is on-par with Apple and the fact that I still have HDMI/USB-A has been a life-saver a whole bunch of times.

There's one other thing that I like too; it's linux.

If I bought a macbook I'd definitely leave OSX on it, OSX is a decent system but the lack of decent window manager, the fact that I can't navigate with just a keyboard and the fact that I don't have the ability to mount linux-y/windows-y filesystems except fat is an annoyance too. But they're not annoying enough to make a good Mac Laptop a half-decent linux laptop.

How's the fan noise on the 5520 during basic usage? Browser, email client, text editor, etc.

Have an old M4700 here, thinking of upgrading to the 5530, but am not sure what thermal effects of going slimmer/lighter has had on the new design.

For easy tasks it's silent, it's very rare the fans roar, but they do roar when doing something that pins cores at 100%.

(example: compressing things for more than 3~ minutes with xz)

Once the fans are spinning it's rather loud but around the same level as a 15" macbook pro (which my colleague has)

I have found chunkwm to be an enjoyable window manager for macOS: https://koekeishiya.github.io/chunkwm/

When I was still on OSX, I loved Moom: https://manytricks.com/moom/

I have a Dell 2n1 for both my work laptop and my personal laptop. I have no problem with either. For the last 20+ years I’ve been exclusively a Windows Developer. But lately as I’ve moved to cloud implementations, Docker and cross platform languages, the “Microsoft Tax” is starting to hit home in terms of costs and resources.

My next personal computer will be a Mac. I’ve had a few in the past. But it will either be a 5K iMac or a hopefully updated Mac Mini. With the Mac you get a true Unix environment and the flexibility to develop for any platform - .Net Core, Android, iOS, etc. and in a pinch you can run Windows.

Out of curiosity, have you had a chance to explore the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)? WSL allows you to run your favorite linux distro with access to most command-line tools, utilities, and so on[0]. I have been a .NET developer for about 5 years now and recently began working in Ruby. The WSL had allowed me to effortlessly set up my Ruby dev environment, while still maintaining Windows 10 as my main OS of choice. While the WSL might not be a full on replacement to a linux OS, it is definitely a neat addition to Windows 10.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

It's not so much about development. Even if I did move over to Mac OS, I would still probably use the same or similar tool set - Visual Studio Code for everything except .Net Core. For .Net Core I would probably use JetBrain's Rider.

It's about deployment. Anytime you use Windows in a cloud hosted environment, you end up spending more on licensing and needing larger instances -- increasing the costs and startup time. I can easily development on Windows and auto deploy on Linux instances when I'm using either Python, C#, or NodeJS. But if I am going to be using Unix like environments anyway for deployment, why not use a Unix environment for development? MacOS gives you the best of both worlds -- a Unix environment for development and polish for everything else.

That polish has slipped of late, at least with MacOS itself. I used Macs professionally for 14 years but switched to a Thinkpad+Ubuntu 4 months ago and haven't missed much. If you're going to invest time in the switch, I'd recommend giving Linux on desktop a try, as MacOS has been trending the wrong direction for years.

Ubuntu still doesn’t have the commercial software support, the hardware support, and more finicky than MacOS.

Most importantly. You the lose the flexibility of developing for two of the four major platform targets -MacOS and iOS. I don’t see a future of developing for MacOS but that may change with Apple’s announced efforts of unifying the APIs for Mac and iOS.

With tools like Vagrant and Docker, this is a solved problem. Use whatever OS you want for development, but the dev environment will still run on Linux, isolated from the rest of your system.

Going back to the point. If you’re going to deploy to Unix like operating system anyway, why muck around with Windows and add another level of complexity?

Because you prefer it to another OS? My point is that, with some exceptions[0], the OS your software runs on in production should not have much (if any) sway on the OS you use for development. If you don't care about your OS, that's fine, but some of us would prefer to use a specific operating system given the choice, and these days there are very few constraints to getting a dev environment running on any modern OS.

[0]: Obviously certain types of development, like iOS, are inherently and unavoidably OS-specific, but for them this discussion isn't relevant either way.

What kind of development are you doing on it? Have you found a good workflow yet?

I've given up running Linux natively on my computers and I'm trying to find the best Windows 10 workflow

I'm still in the process of completely moving my workflow to my Dell XPS 15, but my occupation is computer science research, particularly in the area of distributed systems. My day-to-day tasks involve reading and annotating academic papers, writing code (usually in C and Python, but sometimes I use C++ and Java), writing papers in LaTeX, and making presentations (on my Mac I used Keynote but I use PowerPoint in Windows). So far I'm able to do my work using WSL. At times my work involves interacting with the OS kernel, and on my Mac I sometimes find myself using a Linux or FreeBSD VM to do my work rather than programming directly on macOS. For these tasks Windows 10 with the WSL can replace macOS, although sometimes I need to use a Linux or FreeBSD VM.

To be honest, I could probably get away with doing my work on a 2001 PowerBook G4 Titanium if it weren't for the browser situation for PowerPC Macs these days, but I love having a powerful yet lightweight laptop with a six-core Intel Core i7-8750H, a 4K screen, and a fast SSD at my disposal.

I thing I like the macbook for is the longevity. My refurb 2014 Mac Pro still boots up faster than my new XPS from the same year with equivalent hardware. Also, almost no loss in performance as opposed to the XPS. I hope the newer windows machines up their ante in that regard so when my mac pro kicks the bucket, I have something good to go to. With the ugly touchbar and no magsafe charge, the new macbook has lost its appeal for me.

I decided to leave Apple a while ago too, and a decision like that usually lasts many years.

I'm on a weird cycle of switching every 10 years or so.

Mid 80s to mid 90s: Apple 2 and Mac

Mid 90s to mid 00's: Windows

Mid 00s to Mid 10s: OSX

Mid 10s to Present: Windows 8/10

> Windows 10 really shines on a computer with six processor cores, a 4K display, and a NVMe SSD

I have anecdotally found that just replacing a spinning disk with a nice SSD is enough for win10 to shine.

Me too. I have an old ThinkPad that I use for car diagnostics. Cheap Gumtree buy, with Win10 and a standard HD. Put a spare 120GB SSD in it, and it's now really usable - previously it was like thick treacle. Win10 seems to be very heavy on drive use?

> (namely the prevelance of ads)

Where are all these ads that people complain about? Is it the half pre-installed apps that come with your computer that you can promptly uninstall?

They're in a few different places, but it will sometimes show ads in the Start Menu for apps you can buy on the Windows Store. It also nags you quite often to buy a subscription to Office 365 or OneDrive. You can turn most of the ads off:

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-ditch-the-ads-in-the-windows-...

Microsoft does a lot of cross-promotion: e.g. the weather app that upon first run shows an ad for the news app.

Under the default and recommended settings, it sends telemetry, and occasionally asks you to rate how likely you are recommending win10 to a friend.

When you launch Firefox or Chrome for the first time, a popup appears from the start bar, saying something like "Have you tried Edge? Edge is XX% faster than firefox/Chrome".

Basically you have to be prepared for a new product placement everytime you launch a Micrsoft app for the first time.

I've related on reddit that psychologically, this feels like the difference between being in your own house and being a house guest of an old acquaintance trying to get you into their MLM scheme.

> and there are still some aspects of Windows 10 that annoy me (namely the prevelance of ads)

This is why I won't run Windows 10. It's spyware you pay for. No thanks!

Has anyone actually paid for windows 10? Everyone I know got it for free.

Technically I did pay around $60 from Dell to upgrade from the Home version to the Pro version, so in a way I did pay for my copy of Windows :).

You pay for the license when you buy a new machine. The free upgrade is now over, so if somebody is on Windows 8 and wants to upgrade to 10, he will have to buy a license.

Anyone who buys a computer with it pre-installed is paying as part of the computer's cost.

Regardless of its price I still won't willing run spyware on my hardware.

How is the build of the XPS15 compared to a MBP? One thing I've always appreciated about Apple is their aluminum and absolutely solid builds. Their exterior builds is one of the reasons I buy their products. I know the new keyboard has issues for a lot of people but it has not been a problem for me and I enjoy typing on it.

A aluminium body adds significant weight when compared to composite materials; it can also attenuate radio and be prone to warping. IMHO, it is not an obvious choice for a laptop casing. The X1 Carbon is significantly lighter than a MacBook Pro, despite having a better (deeper) keyboard and a removeable battery.

I have a 2013 MacBook Air (that's no longer working) and a Dell XPS 15 9570. I also used to use a 2015 MacBook Pro during my previous job. The Dell XPS 15 9570's build quality is quite wonderful and quite Apple-esque. The only complaint I have about this laptop after two weeks of use is sometimes I need to use extra force on the space bar in order to register a keypress (I don't know if this is normal or if I need to have Dell explore this issue), but other than that I enjoy using this laptop.

> namely the prevelance of ads

There are ads... baked into the OS?

Yo I cannot reply to some older comments you've made that I found, but I thought you'd be interested to know about this [1].

These guys are working on a version of the Cog VM that will run on its own, and also working on the relevant Squeak / Pharo libraries that could use it (they need the equivalent of "drivers" — these dudes are even implementing tcp in Smalltalk).

Check it out. Let me know what you think.

[1] https://github.com/nopsys/CogNOS

After ongoing problems and repairs with my gen 2 butterfly, I switched to Linux (Ubuntu). After many months, I'm still a little shocked at how much worse the desktop experience is. 11 year old OS X Leopard is more consistent, intuitive and usable.

Hardware is slightly less polished, but no major complaints there (except for how poor the buying experience was).

Still, keyboard works. It would take something amazing to win me back (like a custom CPU that just completely redefines what we expect from battery life and performance)

What hardware did you settle on?

The new XPS 13. It's fine. My disappointment is 98% software. The XPS has poor camera placement (but you know that going in), the buying experience is awful (here in Asia anyways). I see myself sticking with Linux, but no loyalty to hardware vendors. I'm hoping the MateBook or Chromebook become [relatively] cheap and powerful first class linux options.

Install Xubuntu on XPS, and set up i3 as your window manager - this is my current setup and I love it. Takes a bit to get used to a tiling window manager, but once you get it it's amazing - I never understood why people value overlapping windows anyway.

I like UIs that feel premium. Needless to say, Xubuntu and i3 do not make the cut. Left with Gnome 3 (ugh) or KDE (options galore). All other DEs feel clunky (graphical glitches, sub-par design) and are also usually buggy (which is normal for an open source project with such a big scope).

XFCE looks a lot better with a different window theme installed, the defaults are absolutely terrible. There's as many options for XFCE as KDE, but it definitely takes tweaking before it looks good.

i3 is generally used for its productivity benefits, not for appearance. You can still spruce it up with a new bar (see Lemonbar or Polybar), but overall people choose it because it feels nice to use. The people on /r/unixporn have done a pretty good job of making it look good though.

Try Budgie. It's the DE developed for Solus and it's great.

I have an older XPS 13, the touchpad is bad on Linux only. Have you noticed that issue?

I recommend Lenovo T480 for Linux. Supports 32GB ram as well.

Well if you're comparing it to Leopard / Snow Leopard no wonder. That's probably the most neat and polished a desktop operating system has ever been.

edit: To clarify, I think current macOS is a better OS, its features are worth less neatness, but Snow Leopard did a smaller amount of things in a neater and more polished way.

Ahh yes, who can forget the extremely polished Snow Leopard bug that just flat out deleted people's user accounts https://gizmodo.com/5379817/reports-snow-leopard-bug-eats-us...

OS X was once great and now it is shit. Please stop ruining the narrative!

It is well known that Ubuntu is going through a phase of rapid change at the moment. I understand how you feel but I'm pretty sure the quality and consistency will only increase from here on. Otherwise, try a Plasma desktop or Mate (if you feel like a minimalist).

> It is well known that Ubuntu is going through a phase of rapid change at the moment. I understand how you feel but I'm pretty sure the quality and consistency will only increase from here on.

People have been saying things like that about various Linuxes for over 20 years, and it still isn't close.

Well I think that from about April 2012 (first generally positive feel about Unity) until about April 2021 (yes I know, this is the end of 16.04 support) you could have had (and can have) a fairly consistent experience. Now, with the introduction of Gnome into Ubuntu there is some (avoidable) flux. If you don't like it, go for a more conservative distro like CentOS, or pick Ubuntu Mate.

Linux is always rapidly developing but there are always distros which suit the more conservative users who hate change. I agree that this is a difficult concept when first entering the Linux world but it is how it is.

I do wonder what makes you say it isn't close though... I feel it is more than that and would really love to replace my companies Windows 10 environment with Kubuntu 18.04. Still, I think even Ubuntu's standard desktop is pretty nice and very usable.

> I feel it is more than that and would really love to replace my companies Windows 10 environment with Kubuntu 18.04.

Get all their .net apps and office/excel stuff to work, and get whatever integrations with office365 are required to work actually working and get it all to sync with their mobile devices... I'm sure you can have them switched in no time...

> Linux is always rapidly developing but there are always distros which suit the more conservative users who hate change. I agree that this is a difficult concept when first entering the Linux world but it is how it is.

I first entered the 'Linux world' in 1994, when I downloaded SLS onto floppies and installed it on my 486/33. I consider myself less of a 'conservative user who hates change' and more of a person with better things to do with my time than fight with my computer to make it perform basic functionality.

I'm also a person with better things to do with my time than fight with my computer to make it perform basic functionality, this has made me pretty conservative in my Linux Distro picks ;)

> People have been saying things like that about various Linuxes for over 20 years, and it still isn't close.

That was part of my reason for going full mac 10 years ago. Had one in the house, but my main laptops were linux. And it was always such a pain, wireless networking in particular. And ever few months I'd hear/read "oh, but ubuntu's great - everything just works". And then I'd try it on a new laptop, and things wouldn't work, and there'd be no answers, or the answers would be things like "dude, you have to research all your parts before you 'just buy something' - linux isn't like that!" And then I'd read more about "hey, everything now 'just works'!" I came to realize it was mostly people who'd didn't have moderately complex needs (like wanting to use 2 monitors without rebooting an X session), or needing to vpn easily, or... whatever. None of this was simple then. I'm going to guess it probably still isn't now for many 'edge cases' (most of my tech life apparently was an 'edge case' when I was a linux/desktop users). It was tiresome. After 10 years of "year of linux on the desktop" I got too tired of wrestling with all that crap and switched to a macbook.

> I got too tired of wrestling with all that crap and switched to a macbook.

This is pretty much exactly my experience. There were usually ways to make things work on Linux, but it always required more effort than it was worth. Back in school, spending that effort made sense because it was a learning experience and at the time that was my primary goal. These days, there are enough competing priorities in my life that spending hours wrestling with my computer to make it perform basic functionality just isn't worth the opportunity cost. (I could be learning something people value or doing paid work or spending time with my family or exercising....)

One of the things I did love about Linux was the ability to switch to a tiling window manager. That said, as nice as it was, customizations required modifying C source code and writing scripts and never did work nearly as well as anything else. (In particular, I never figured out the right NetworkManager incantations to connect to a new WiFi network.)

https://github.com/mschaef/dwm-tools

To put this in perspective, my experience with Linux dates back to 1994, installing SLS from floppies on a 486/33. There has always been this belief that 'the community' will solve the problems and turn Linux into a fully competitive desktop platform. While there's definitely been progress, the reality is that the community has neither the time nor the attention to achieve near the level of polish that the vast majority of people expect these days. (Note that I don't view this as necessarily a problem, just an artifact of people making the same sorts of resource allocations choices for themselves that I described myself making back in the first paragraph.)

Similar view on 'young and learning' and 'older with other priorities'. Started using linux on servers in 99 (slackware, mostly), and desktop/laptop (mostly redhat, and some debian and gentoo for a while) in 2000.

I do miss the fish protocol in konqueror/kde. I will say that with... KDE4(?) I just gave up caring about moving back to desktop Linux. Never cared much for gnome experience - had really liked KDE3.

As recently as a month ago, a colleague was writing to our local Linux list about laptop sleeping vs suspending, and how to get those working, and there was some discussion about why you'd want to do that, hardware support, BIOS issues, etc. Life is just way too damn short for me to care about any of that stuff. Yeah, I may be giving up some 'freedom' in an abstract sense (or perhaps even, maybe, a real sense) but... really, I just want to close the lid and not think about it.

An all too familiar story. At some point you just need to get work done without worrying about every last detail of CUPS printing a document out using Liberation Serif, and whether it looks close enough to your colleagues' printouts, etc.

I wanted a Unix machine I could use to hack together bash scripts, play flash video without jitters, and use Photoshop and Word... without constant emotional labor coercing the system to do what I needed. Apple provided the best technical solution to my problem set.

(By the way, not really a tiling window manager, but have you checked out Magnet? It's one of my favorite Mac utilities.)

> I wanted a Unix machine I could use to hack together bash scripts, play flash video without jitters, and use Photoshop and Word... without constant emotional labor coercing the system to do what I needed. Apple provided the best technical solution to my problem set.

Pretty much my reasoning too. I was also surprised that, once I factored in build quality, etc., the Apple was price-competitive as well.

> (By the way, not really a tiling window manager, but have you checked out Magnet? It's one of my favorite Mac utilities.)

No, but I'll check it out. I like it by the sound of it's name already. Thanks!

So you are surprised that a randomly chosen hardware has problems with a GNU/Linux while the hardware specifically designed for MacOS works flawlessly with the latter?

Of course one has to choose the hardware to be sure the drivers are compatible... You are asking something impossible from GNU/Linux developers.

Sure... and there are other reasons too, but knowing them doesn't really help solve the problems.

Just go for vanilla Gnome, the UI is solid.

Second comment about buying experience. I got a Dell XPS which is great, though I would never buy anything again from Dell due to their horrible customer service. By which I mean pathetically rude and unprofessional (German store).

Desktop experience of clean uninterrupted GNOME is great for me. Move from Ubuntu to fedora. Ubuntu really messes up GNOME with their BS ideas of usability. I.e horrible terrible ugly Unity, RIP.

Recent releases of Ubuntu use regular GNOME 3 with the Dash to Dock extension installed by default.

As far as I remember (before I switched) they’re messing up nautilus and keeping older versions. Also installation, software management and other little things. This mishmash of ideas and concepts of two separate projects is bad.

Ubuntu does not understand usability and they should really allow GNOME’s vision to come through. GNOME is probably not perfect, but it is consistent.

Yeah, the whole Unity look and feel was always terrible for me. My first experience with Linux was the last version of Ubuntu with Gnome2, then I did a system update and everything changed and back then I didn't know about changing DEs. Now I avoid Unity whenever possible, as even the Gnome lookalike Ubuntu has now seems so much slower than XFCE or i3.

I think the Unity dock concept is a lot more approachable for naive computer users: commonly used applications are always availabe, it’s clear which applications are open, and it’s clear which windows are open within those applications.

Older relatives of mine have taken to it immediately, Gnome’s equivalent has an appreciable learning curve. Also, I recently installed 18.04 on a relative’s three year old laptop, and it was really really fast, faster than my vanilla Gnome installation, although that could be because I’m using more applications at once.

Ubuntu’s ideas of usability are valid for some use cases, even if they’re not mine.

Never used a Macbook before; always been a Windows user until my switch a few years ago to Ubuntu Gnome. Gotta say Gnome was the most counter-intuitive DE coming from a Windows background, making the switch brutal.

Several years later, loving and still using the Gnome look. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

It is all what you're used to. I switched from a Linux KDE desktop to a Mac 11 years ago. I ended up switching back to Linux & KDE after about 6 months of use, and giving the Mac to my inlaws.

What it came down to for me is that I've been using the same window manager shortcuts since the late 80s, and I can't make them work with OSX. Eg, I use focus-follows mouse, and some strange mouse-button + ALT key combos to move/raise/iconify windows. The loss of focus follows mouse is what really drove me nuts. I was forever deleting emails because I'd move my mouse to a terminal or emacs window and start typing, like I'd done for the last 20+ years, but without a click "random stuff" was happening in Mail, which was still getting the keystrokes.

thats a huge part of it for sure. certainly thats why windows remains so dominant. its just hard to switch.

Yep, I'm a long term Windows user and developing on a mac for the last 6 months, and I find it pretty terrible, I'd rather be using Ubuntu. But I'm happy to admit it's because of what I'm used to.

"It is all what you're used to"

I don't think this is true.

Ubuntu is far less consistent with keyboard shortcuts and menu bars from app to app (OSX has this nailed). This is overwhelming my biggest problem. cmd+c, cmd+v for copy and paste across all apps. Not all apps minus terminal. Double click URL portion in firefox, entire url is highlighted, double click url part in other places, only that word/segment is highlight (I guess it's this 8 year old bug? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611162)

Sublime sometimes opens with the menu shown, sometimes with it hidden (I've tried to script this, doesn't always work). Sometimes the window shows up minimized (scripting this catch 90% of the cases)

On quit, Firefox always restores the DDG and Amazon search options, but not the other ones. Why can't it remember this? (there are other cases of partial configuration amnesia for various apps)

"Ubuntu Software" doesn't list available updates for installed "Add-ons", you have to remove and and re-add when you know one exists. It also doesn't let you "search" installed even if you're on the installed tab.

When my I wake my screen up, there's a brief flash of my unlocked screen (someone could theoretically take a picture) before the lock screen comes up.

In OSX and android I just enter my carriers free wifi settings and it works. In Ubuntu, I'm given a bunch of detailed options, and I've yet to find the magical combination that works.

While on battery, the time remaining can be comically off when waking from sleep (23 hours, really?!). I've also had it say 10 minutes left when it shut down.

There are plenty of apps on extensions.gnome.org (available in "Ubuntu Software") that constantly crash gnome. Go through systemd logs, find which ones are causing the problem, try to fix or uninstall.

The list goes on and on. Correct battery time, configurations that stick, consistency from app to app are polish, not preferences.

> This is overwhelming my biggest problem. cmd+c, cmd+v for copy and paste across all apps. Not all apps minus terminal.

I really wish one of the major *ix toolkits/desktops would make some effort to attract or accommodate Mac refugees or dual OS users. I just wanna type Ctrl-W to erase a word and GUI-W to close a window — consistently.

> Sublime sometimes opens with the menu shown, sometimes with it hidden

After a year of using Sublime on Ubuntu for work, I have yet to have this issue happen. Even if it does happen, it seems like an application issue not an OS issue.

> On quit, Firefox always restores the DDG and Amazon search options, but not the other ones.

Same case, Firefox on Ubuntu for years and never had any kind of application amnesia.

> When my I wake my screen up, there's a brief flash of my unlocked screen (someone could theoretically take a picture) before the lock screen comes up.

What DE were you using, and what screensaver application? The only time I've had that happen was on old hardware without much support, and I'm still not sure what the entire cause of the issue was.

> While on battery, the time remaining can be comically off when waking from sleep (23 hours, really?!). I've also had it say 10 minutes left when it shut down.

That seems like an issue with hardware as much as with the OS. The only time my battery has reported inaccurate information was when the BIOS was also having trouble detecting battery stats.

Everything you've mentioned has been pretty anecdotal, as has everything I've mentioned. The biggest advantage of OS X is that you have guaranteed hardware support so you don't have to worry about half of the issues you've mentioned. I admit that it does take some tweaking occasionally, but for the most part Linux just works now.

Yes the issue with Linux terminals using different shortcuts than the rest of the system drives me absolutely bonkers, probably more than any of the hundreds of small cuts found in the desktop Linux experience.

> Not all apps minus terminal.

Note that you can change terminal to use ctrl-c and ctrl-v for copy/paste. Then if you want to interrupt a running program, use ctrl-shift-c (which as far as the shell is concerned is the same as ctrl-c).

"The loss of focus follows mouse is what really drove me nuts."

This is a killer for me and I am trying to solve it currently ...

I ran Snow Leopard from 2009-2018 and had FFM due to "mondomouse" but that is no longer published or supported.

Now that I have upgraded (my 2009 mac pro) to Yosemite, I sort of have a FFM solution with a tool called dwellclick and one modification[1] but it's not perfect.

HOWEVER, it appears that there is a new accessibility option in High Sierra that allows you to turn on FFM without third party software. Not helpful for me because I can't install High Sierra on a 2009 mac pro ...

[1] defaults write com.pilotmoon.DwellClick MoveDistancePixels -float 600

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ may actually do more than you want, but FFM is among its abilities.

(Free, OSS)

Do you have more details about the new accessibility option in High Sierra that allows you to turn on FFM? I can't seem to find it, both by looking at the Accessibility menu on my laptop or by googling. Thanks!

I recently switched from macOS High Sierra to Fedora.

I felt that Fedora was smoother, way more responsive on the same hardware (and yes, comparing fresh macOS to fresh Linux install), more consistent and more intuitive, and more usable. The only thing I can think of that's better on macOS is the touchpad, which to the best of my knowledge is a gift given to us mortals by the gods.

Oh, and the macOS default wallpaper is better.

> The only thing I can think of that's better on macOS is the touchpad, which to the best of my knowledge is a gift given to us mortals by the gods.

I'm absolutely unwilling to give up the Mac trackpad. When I see people who aren't artists using mice I have to question their value system, or assume they haven't discovered the absolute joy that is "tap to click".

Obviously the configuration matters a great deal.

nailed it. the trackpad is THE killer feature of the macbook. everything else has a comparable in other products.

On my Thinkpad the whole touchpad depresses like a giant keyboard button. Yes, there is slightly more force than on an apple Touchpad, but you don't accidentally click by tapping, which is nice.

To my recollection, after discovering tap to click, I've not once accidentally clicked. That would be, hm, maybe 15 years now?

The extra effort required/friction added to click really annoys me now.

I remember experiencing some issues around that, but it's been years and I was not used to the device it happened on. It might not have been a MacBook, but the alternative then would have been a dedicated area or physical button in the corner of the touchpad, so then it was preferable. I don't remember why, but I think the issue with palm rejection being necessary on some of the laptops I used (not owned) was the lack of sufficient space to rest the hands on that would neither result in them being on the edge of the case nor on the edge of the touchpad. This Thinkpad (T540p) does not have that issue, as the size seems to allow the keyboard to be far enough away from the front edge of the base.

To be fair, the noise of clicking the touchpad is annoying some times, but mostly due to the mushy bottoming of the keyboard, which results in low noise despite a clear actuation point.

My aversion to a MacBook is mostly coming from the repair-unfriendlyness, combined with the high prices on the secondary market compared to T/X series Thinkpads. As long as I can hold it for at least one hour on one hand, while walking, in a position that I can keep an eye on the screen and use the other hand for hitting keys if needed, I don't consider it to heavy. And screen size is only really restricted by needing to fit inside commonly available backpacks, and not hindering maneuverability which happens if it is too wide in the middle dimension (approximating as a cuboid) to fit within the width of the chest. Being able to fit with it on my lap in a row on e.g. public transit/long distance trains/ (airplanes) also sets a limit to the width in the maximum dimension of the cuboid approximation. As this limit is lower than that imposed by fitting within the flat space on my back, that restriction dosn't really apply for the laptop.

I prefer the trackpad on my (personal) X1 carbon to the trackpad on my (work) Macbook Air

Configuration matters, but so does size. My built-in trackpad is fine, but the larger external one is the real joy.

> I'm absolutely unwilling to give up the Mac trackpad.

Too bad they already ruined it when they switched from the 2014 to 2015 models.

Haven't had a complaint with my 2015, but as I indicated elsewhere, the external Bluetooth trackpad is the real winner.

I was just looking into external trackpads yesterday because I'm about to switch to thinkpads. There's nothing! Even Logitech discontinued their version of Magic Trackpad. How is this possible?

when I see people who don't use a mouse with additional buttons for things like navigate forward and backward in terminal and IDES, I also question them.

Because during the work day if I have to touch the mouse to do anything that isn't web browsing then I and my operating system have failed.

An aspect that is often left out of the discussion: language support is way better on osx/windows. In particular japanese IME was still very primitive in comparison on linux (tried last year).

That's the same situation as for ios/android really, it's not a deal breaker, but the quality of life difference is clear.

Hmm, I have used both Linux and Mac Japanese IME's, and I didn't feel that big a difference. I may remember wrong, though.

A cool but probably useless feature in the Chinese IME for Mac is the ability to draw Hanzi on the trackpad as a giant digitizer.

Internationalization wise, I could never dream of using a computer in any language other than English, despite it not being my mother tongue.

i know. dammit. i think the part of the brain that allows one to use linux in the first place (ie bash) is at odds with the aesthetic and visual centers of the brain. seriously.

that said, with a non-trivial amount of time and work, you can get your desktop experience to be pretty slick. but it requires knowing your desktop environments, window managers, compositors, default apps, etc...

You can change desktops very easily on the popular linux distros. Try r/linux and ask about what you want specifically. It's very likely there is a desktop out there for you. If you just want a macOS copy, most of that can be done by configuration. The development environment is really good on arch linux bdw.

Unity is very commonly despised in the Linux community. Some do like it, but to form your opinion of Linux DE usability based on that one experience isn't fair. Try Linux Mint for all the ease of Ubuntu in terms of setup and bundled software, but for the best DE out there.

I have limited eyesight - good enough to work on a bright magnified computer screen. When I bought a new Macbook Pro I couldn't read the Touchbar and of course there's no tactile feedback. It's even worse that the keys can change with context. Due to my eyesight I also often tweak the screen brightness for best readability with the up/down function keys. The slider doesn't work well for incremental adjustments especially when you can't see it clearly.

I returned the Macbook within a week and had to buy a lower model with real function keys.

I tried configuring fixed locations for the most important keys but could not work without the tactile feedback of being centered on a given key. I guess there's some sort of voiceover but it would be annoying and slow. I didn't need voiceover before so why would I want to use it now to accommodate Apples latest gimmick?

Actually I wonder if it would work to add tactile feedback by 3D printing a thin overlay that adds frames around keys configured for fixed location. Or maybe someone could offer a product that is a Touchbar overlay made of clingy silicone?

Edit: Something else I wanted to add: I've tried switching to Windows (several times) but I can't work without Apple's Ctrl + two-finger up/down full screen magnification. Window's magnifier is a poor substitute because it's not full screen. The magnifier can be made the size of the screen but then it's clunky to move the focus of magnifier, and update is jittery. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please look at Apple's screen zoom and give your magnifier a mode like that - a full screen infinitely variable zoom that continually centers the focus on the mouse pointer.

Impossible! Apple is the UX king. How could they produce anything less than divine inspiration?

I am in the exact same boat. I am still on an older MacBook Air because I need those shortcuts for visibility.

Have you tried using Touch Bar Zoom? It won't solve tactile issues though. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207258

I am also bad sighte, apple's zoom is very superior. Switched to Windows, Linux, and then back to mac for mainly the accessibilities features -- using an 8 year old macbook for your same reasons (big screen, no touchbar, please)

I'm looking forward to the very first "real development takes 64GB RAM, 32 just isn't enough" complaints.

Honestly, this looks like a good revision. I've been wanting a quad core 13 inch for a while.

Hopefully the keyboard revision helps with all of the issues people have had.

I did too, but the fact that they limit it to touchbar models means I'm out.

That's next year complaint.

I'd be very happy with the 32GB at this point, but sadly my company just got me the previous new model with 16GB and I doubt I can convince anyone to reduce my refresh cycle to mere months.

Haha, 32 gb is enough for me at the moment, but I am sure that the engineers at google are doing their best to make sure that chrome consumes record amounts of ram per tab, so soon 32 will no longer be enough.

> "real development takes 64GB RAM, 32 just isn't enough"

cough kubernetes cough

13" is still capped at 16gb.

Looking at the specs on the sales pages:

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/15-inch https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch

It's interesting to me that they've widened the gap between the 13" and 15" -- it looks like the 15 has been updated to use DDR4 while the 13 is still on LPDDR3. I get where they're coming from in that the 15 has notably more battery to work with, but it seems surprising that they'd widen that gap between devices.

At this point (assuming no issues with gen3-keyboard) I think a lot of people will find the 15" to be a great pro laptop and the 13" will still be rather disappointing to many. Here's hoping some reviewers do a meaningful comparison between the two.

Apple really doesn't seem to grok that small doesn't necessarily equal low-end in customers' minds. People want small laptops and small phones for reasons other than spending less money. They keep making this mistake with the iPhone SE too.

I'm not sure it's an issue with them not understanding, but rather straight up physics. It's an engineering marvel to get the components into the 15" as they do. Now try cramming that same tech into 77% of the space. There are going to be compromises. I would guess it's a similar story with the iPhone.

They could probably do it with the iPhone if they didn't insist on also making the phone inexpensive. After all, the SE is significantly thicker than the current generation phones.

And they could probably do the same with a variant of the 13" MBP if they were willing to sacrifice a bit of battery life or just go back to the thickness of the 2015 models.

If they didn't have to the fit the pointless Touch Bar and its extra co-processor in there...

The iPhone SE was just as fast as the flagship phone (6S) when it was released. It didn't have the faster TouchID or 3D Touch, but neither did my iPad Pro, so I don't think they were trying to hold the phone back.

Now if they only kept updating it...

I would love the iPhone X features in an SE sized device.

I used the iPhone SE for longer than any other cellphone (from iPhone SE release to iPhone X release)

There's not a million miles between LPDDR3 and DDR4

This. If I remember right, RAM hasn't changed much in performance between LPDDR3 and DDR4.

You and parent are right - the performance isn't like miles apart or anything. Best comparison I can find is here[1] (it's not testing low-power specifically though) showing basically that there's a small but measurable performance benefit from DDR4.

I'd suspect the biggest difference is the base clock boost that DDR4 provides (2400 vs 2133).

My point was simply that the number of differences between the two seem to be widening. It feels more like the 15" is the real Macbook Pro, the 13" is the standard-Macbook, and the 12" is the Macbook Air.

Apple's naming choices in the laptop lineup have been strange for years - but the widening gap between the Pro linup is interesting.

[1] - https://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-670...

The 13" only gets 16G of RAM though.

That's really sad, the 13" would be the best machine for my case if it had parity on the memory side (dealing with a lot of VMs, it really makes a difference)

That was my discovery. I was about to suck it up and deal with a cement keyboard to upgrade my 2012 Air that i still use as a daily dev machine. Instead i am presented with:

  - no 32GB on 13" models
  - no touchbar-less 15" models

At what point did developers at apple cave to this quality of life hit. I am seriously curious about this. How do people code without literal Esc and F-Keys?

As a counterpoint, the 13" finally now has a quad core processor - that's a game changer.

Pretty sure my 2012 macbook air feels faster than the 13in 2016 mbp only because of the additional cores.

I would love a discreet graphics option on the 13" version.

Apple sells this now: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicegpu/

see: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HM8Y2/blackmagic-egpu?fno...

I've no idea why anyone would buy an eGPU where the GPU can't be upgraded.

No I mean inside the laptop.

They’re laptops, just cover the brand name in stickers and nobody will know what kind of GPU you have inside there.

Was very disappointed to see tha the new 13" models don't come with a 32GB of RAM option.

I would pay a lot for a 15 of the current model that did NOT have a touch bar. Everything about the new MBPs I can deal with except that.

Also, the fact that they keep the higher spec-d models with the touch bar and if you want no touch bar you have to get low-spec-d 13s is downright hostile to consumer choice.

Please Apple, you're leaving money on the table here.

As a developer the new keyboards have ruined macbooks for me - I find my macbook pro quite comfortable to type on for longer periods when I am away from my desk. I feel like the new keyboards are not practical for real use and it doesn't sound like the new models will greatly improve that which is a shame because I would love an upgrade.

I think those keyboards are great on the smaller more portable macbooks but I don't understand why the 'pro' models are favouring a couple of mm in size over a more practical keyboard designed for 'pro' use.

(I assume that you meant uncomfortable instead of comfortable based on context.)

Counterpoint: I'm also a developer, and I love the 2017 MBP keyboard. I'm of course disappointed to hear that they fail so regularly and that the repair process is so absurdly sledgehammery, but I think they feel amazing to type on and the recall replacement program satisfies my failure concerns.

Chiming in with more annecdata - I love the feel of the new-style keyboards. Sure, it took a little bit to get used to, but now I can't stand the old keyboards - they feel so soft, mushy and inprecise.

The part where they're completely unreliable though, I hate.

Ditto, I work on one most of every day and the overall design is fine and works well for me. The occasional "double press" and having to blow out the keyboard with air, though, annoying. I hope the re-engineering on this new one resolves most of the issues.

Comfortable was referring to my current (2015) macbook pro keyboard. I wouldn't say I find the newer keyboards 'uncomfortable' so much as just lacking travel which I generally prefer.

Based on yours and other comments, perhaps I need to find an opportunity to use the newer keyboard a little more than I have to see if I get used to it.

Same. I often take work from my work-provided 2015 MacBook Pro to my personal 2017 just for the keyboard. I didn't like the 2017 at first, but after a bit of using it, the 2015 feels sluggish, squishy, and effortful.

They need to take a page from “G4 Cube” and kill this entire product design, not tweak it.

Touch Bar adds cost (both money and battery) for a net negative in functionality and has no external-keyboard equivalent. Wrong design, take it out.

Machine is thin enough to cause unwanted trade-offs in capacity and performance. Wrong design, take it out.

“Improved” keyboard means waiting more years to see if it breaks, whereas “reverted 100% to 2013 keyboard” might have created instant customers. Flaky keyboard frought with risk? Wrong design, take it out.

There is nothing about this design that deserves risking spending so much money on it. They haven’t truly fixed any of the requests (except maybe maximum RAM).

To play devils advocate...

- I rebound caps lock to ESC, it is noticeably more comfortable to type on.

- I use Touch ID loads, it makes having a long password much more practical for things like login/1Password.

- I don't use the Touchbar much, but for volume/screen brightness it's ok. Net positive with the above.

- I love typing on the keyboard, it's a significant improvement on the 2013 design for me, mine is fairly dusty, no issues. It also now has a 4 year (?) warranty.

- My battery life is noticeably better than with my 2013 laptop (despite that laptop having a battery in excellent health).

- It's fast, especially with the PCI-E SSD.

I really found very few trade-offs. It was maybe £150 more than I thought was a reasonable price, but that's < 10%.

How do you know they haven’t done precisely this? It takes more than 18 months to bring a brand new case and motherboard design to market. This could have been underway for more than a year now. (To be clear: I don’t think they have. But if they did, neither you nor I would know.)

If they want to talk about "courage," admitting the flaws of their recent designs and reverting, or at least bringing back some of the features users are concerned about along side the current offerings would take courage. Aside from production, which I am pretty confident they could easily sort out, there is no reason they can't bring a 2015-styled MBP with beefed specs back on the market.

This seems like a pretty unusual/rare step of releasing an upgrade with just a press release; they clearly wanted to get this machine out before some part of the buying cycle rather than waiting for a press event. I know it's still just a spec bump, but it's different enough that it would normally appear at an event.

I don't need to rehash all of the 2015 vs touchbar arguments, the touchbar machine is "good enough" that I like it as my work machine. But as my 2011 Air home "kitchen table" machine (128gb ssd/4gb RAM) is getting infuriatingly slow, I realized I don't have to decide between a Macbook or a Macbook Pro to replace it. Suddenly buying a gently used 2015 Macbook Pro to replace it seems like a killer idea. Not quite as svelte as my work machine, and nowhere near as light as the air, but for a versatile home/travel machine, having the great keyboard, USB ports, and most importantly, CHEAPER than a brand new one, would really sell me.

It is not unusual or rare for Apple to announce (what they consider) mere spec bump releases via press release. Apple has a long history of doing this.

I don't even think the MacBook has had a keynote reveal since the first one right? Every update has been a small press gathering and press release.

I'm definitively buying this one. Upgraded RAM and processors. Good Graphic card. And 512Gb of SSD is plenty for my line of work.

Now to the issues:

- The keyboard: I don't know. I say wait and see. I'll probably wait a few months to see if there are any bad news. Worst case scenario, I'll just take extra care.

- Touchbar: Do not mind this one.

- Battery life: I'm concerned that the top spec laptop will have poor battery life.

I think this macbook is good given that it is an update not a new re-design. I say wait and see.

Aren't they supposed to be the same GPUs as before, but with a little overclock? Hence the _x_ branding to the name

I have ordered a 15" 2.6Ghz/32GB/1TB model, I am just hoping they have improved the keyboard reliability.

If only they might restore the escape key in the 15 inch model...

Seriously, how do you exit vim insert mode without an ESC key?

https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/300/other-ways-to-exi...

The situation with emacs isn't much better!

Why do you say that? I've used emacs for years and use the escape key very infrequently. (Although I do swap control and caps lock, and have for years.)

At a guess, it's the layout of Ctrl and Alt on Mac keyboards. They're small and crammed right next to each other. It's physically painful to use Mac keyboards for Linux-y tasks and I don't understand people's love of them.

The Touch Bar has a soft escape key in the same position. It takes a bit to get used to, but I found it find as a non-frequent vim/ESC-key user.

you can bind for example caps lock globally on mac to esc, thats what i did

You can use Ctrl+[

I'm yet to see a serious VIM user who didn't remap ESC to caps lock yet. Regardless of keyboard configuration.

You must found one.

I used caps lock all the time for its intended function (shocking!), so remapping it is just not an option.

While I haven't remapped it for Esc (I have for Ctrl), you can reassign both keys. It took about a week to get used to it, but now my Control key acts as caps lock and honestly it works like it was designed to work that way. No more accidental hitting of caps lock with my pinky, and no weird gestures to hit a key I use all the time. Not saying your method is by any means worse or wrong, just thought it'd be worth pointing out!

COBOL developer?

IBM Selectrix typewriter trainee. It’s just how we learned to speed type in high school. :-)

This is interesting - what are the typical use cases where you need to write more than 2-4 letters (e.g. "FBI" or "NASA" or something like that) in all caps ? It seems like quite unusual domain of writing - is it legal documents or something like that?

The hardware registers in our designs are all defined and used in upper case.

The file names in our code base have a lot of upper case in them as well.

But the real reason is tbat I learned speed typing in high school on an IBM Selectrix typewriter. I use CAPS LOCK even for FBI and NASA. It comes totally natural to me.

Also, if you ever use SQL with the all-caps convention for commands; my right pinky hurts thinking about using shift for all of this.

I can't do that because I've already mapped Caps Lock to Ctrl... Also being a heavy Tmux user, it seemed more useful at the time.

Get Karabiner-Elements and you can map press-and-hold on caps lock to control and press-and-release on caps lock to esc. Massive win for emacs users and most vim users I have introduced it to seem to like it.

Ooo, interesting! I'll definitely look into that when I go into one of my next "optimize my workflow as a form of procrastination" mindsets I tend to end up in

ControllerMate is another really powerful tool, though not just for keyboards but for USB devices in general. Interface is a bit funky but it's really worth checking out, not just mapping but conditional reactions, timing, scripting, for any key or arbitrary combinations of keys or non-keyboard devices (I made a DS4 work with a Mac at launch except for the touchpad part of it for example).

HHKB users probably haven't as that key is Ctrl on their keyboard.

been using vim for almost 10 years now, never remapped esc to caps, because remapping caps to control is a lot more comfortable for me.

i could do the tap -> esc, hold -> control, but every solution i tried has some delay that makes it super uncomfortable.

Try getting in the habit of typing escape with Ctrl-[

You don't know many serious vim users. I remapped Caps Lock to control years ago (primarily for the tmux prefix ctrl+a), and escape is remapped to jj. So easy. Besides, my understanding was that Escape wasn't an option on Mac until a couple years ago.

> Besides, my understanding was that Escape wasn't an option on Mac until a couple years ago.

Indeed, Mac keyboards didn't originally have Escape or Control keys; they weren't added until 1987.

Either by pressing the virtual "Esc" key displayed on the TouchBar (that's what I do), or by using Ctrl-[, or by remapping any other key to ESC

Ctrl-C also exits insert mode (and replace mode) and some people find that easier to type than Ctrl-[ (especially if you have a keyboard where '[' is not handy)

The escape key is there in terminal in same position it would be if there was no touchbar. Its been a complete non issue that people who do not have the touchbar like to complain about.

inoremap jk <esc>

Edsger Dijkstra disapproves.

Around when they introduced the first touchbar models, they finally made it so you can remap caps lock to escape which I'd been wanting for years. So at least there's that option.

This complaint always strikes me as trolling of the highest order. As though a 2018 laptop should definitely be designed to accommodate software structured for the limitations of 1970. In 2050, when the world has moved to direct neural interfaces, vi trolls on HN will still be saying "but my escape key!"

I've never failed to hit the software escape key on my 15. Not one time since the past rev was released. What is that, six months? Not once in six months. I just put my finger in exactly the same place as I would on any other keyboard and it always works.

I really think that dismissing this complaint as "trolling" is odd. The escape key is used in a lot of applications, not just vim. It's used to cancel out of actions, it's used to often dismiss modals, it's used across a lot of software for a lot of purposes. And I'm personally someone that misses the key often enough that I wish it was still there. And the escape button on the touchbar is actually not at the same place as it is on other keyboards, which makes me think you've maybe not used one of these new touchbars and are arguing just for the sake of it.

> And the escape button on the touchbar is actually not at the same place as it is on other keyboards, which makes me think you've maybe not used one of these new touchbars

Nonzero finger width easily makes up for the difference. You don't have to hit the center of it to register a touch. In fact you don't actually need to touch it at all.

Edit: Video proof https://streamable.com/ao18b

> which makes me think you've maybe not used one of these new touchbars

You were saying?

Anyone who uses a keyboard to navigate their computer (most software professionals worth their salt) hit the escape key often enough to warrant it as a complaint. Try not using your mouse for your computer

Anyone who uses a keyboard to navigate their computer and has not already re-mapped their keyboard to put esc into a more RSI-friendly location is going to be paying for this choice in a decade or so...

Unfortunately in a locked down computer environment, remapping isn't always an option.

I use an ergodox with escape mapped to a very easily accessible location. On my laptop keyboard, I have caps lock mapped to escape.

> As though a 2018 laptop should definitely be designed to accommodate software structured for the limitations of 1970.

Hardware should be designed to accommodate the software that is actually being run on it, regardless of when it was first written.

Seems like a nice differentiator for the 'Pro' models might be to give them both the physical F/escape-keys _and_ the touchbar in an additional row.

That's what I always thought. The touch bar could be an interesting/useful addition to f-keys, but it's god-awful at being f-keys.

I just switched to a new Touchbar machine, and am adapting to the fact that I had several of my most common shortcuts bound to F-keys. At this point, I'm seriously considering trying to add better touchbar support to Emacs to work around this.

You should. Better Touch Tool is great, it was a must-have even before the Touch Bar came along.

I just remap Caps Lock to the escape key.

But then you can't use it for Ctrl!

You can set it up so that tapping caps lock is interpreted as escape, while holding it is interpreted as control. It's one of the first things I do whenever I get a new machine.

You can map CapsLock to Ctrl, and Ctrl to Escape. Then it's a simple right-to-left to bring up the Force Quit dialog.

I highly encourage mapping the Escape key to the Caps Lock key for a couple days and seeing how it feels. I gave it a spin last year out of curiosity and have since fallen in love with it. My poor pinky no longer has to frequently stretch out to the farthest upper left reaches of the keyboard!

If you're on macOS, you can do this in System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... and selecting the "Escape" in the Caps Lock dropdown.

I've been using Caps Lock for CTRL for years now. Instead of Caps Lock for Escape, in Vim, I use jj and that has served me well. I mention this because there are others out there that have already remapped Caps Lock, and mapping to escape might not work well for them.

I tried all the above suggestions for extended periods of time. Ultimately the most productive thing for me was caps lock as control, and Ctrl-[ for escape since it works everywhere in the system.

Ctrl-[ is interesting. Haven't seen that one before. Like most people, I'm used to the keys now, and muscle memory drives all. =)

This guy ️for president. Took me several weeks to adjust. One of the best computing changes I've ever made.

Thanks... unfortunately I've already co-opted the caps lock key to be the control key... a common thing for emacs users to do. Now I need to find another home for esc. shakes fist at sky

Using karabiner-elements, https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/, you can map caps to behave a esc when pressed alone, and as ctrl when pressed with another key.

I wonder why the marginal price of more SSD storage is positive, non linear

  +512GB | 0.78 / GB
  +1.5TB | 1.56 / GB
  +3.5TB | 1.79 / GB

Maybe the costs of getting denser chips is higher or maybe there's just enough consumer demand at those capacities to warrant the price.

The keyboard and the touch bar are deal breakers for me. For the first time in a while I've been considering buying a new laptop, but the touch bar is basically zero utility and the keyboard is negative utility. I can't spend $2400+ on a laptop and feel good about it.

Don't forget the trackpad so big that your palm interrupts your gestures. And the touch bar actually has negative utility as you'll end up accidentally pressing some buttons.

I disagree on this point. I've been using the new form factor with the large trackpads since initial launch in 2016 and the large trackpads are amazing, and I don't seem to have any issues with palm interaction. Anything smaller just feels downright primitive and old to me now.

I can tell you from personal experience that the touch bar is more useful than the function keys it replaces. You will not miss them after a few weeks. They keyboard is solid too. I cringe if I have to type on the old pro keyboard with its soft keys.

I've had the Touch Bar model twice now (long story). Each time I switched back to a 2015 model after about two weeks.

The missing Escape key is annoying. The lack of tactile feedback makes it awkward for touch typists who expect some kind of feedback to sense that their press reached the right place. Remapping to Caps Lock requires a long muscle memory retraining period that is not helped by the fact that external keyboards still have an Esc key, moving your training progress backwards (unless you pry it off or something).

The new keyboard is not very nice to type on, but the worst aspect of it is that it is extremely loud. I didn't experience any key failures myself, but I have a colleague who did. (And of course he encountered the classic problem: What do you do when the laptop you absolutely rely on for work is in the shop for 7+ day's to fix a single key?)

Also, the new arrow key layout is very bad for touch typists like myself. I frequently had to look down at the keyboard and see that my fingers weren't finding the right arrow key. The old pyramid layout of the four arrow keys was much more friendly.

The Touch Bar is literally useless to me as a touch typist who is used to not looking at the keyboard. One of the first things that annoyed me was that the contents of the Touch Bar changes depending on the app, so in order to use it without glancing down you have to remember the exact widget placement for each app. So I pretty quickly switched to the "extended" control bar that always has the same layout. But that basically just gives you the functionality of a pre-Touch-Bar Mac.

I frequently found myself accidentally touching the Touch Bar, often because I rest my hands in a splayed position across the keyboard. My fingertips would end up resting on the Touch Bar and cause surprising things to happen.

Another annoyance is the fact that if you do want to invest in using the Touch Bar efficiently, you can't use the Mac with an external keyboard. In my home office I have an external screen and "dock" my MacBook there and run it with a closed lid and a wireless Apple keyboard. No Touch Bar there.

I don't mind all the other problems so much -- USB-C, no MagSafe, trackpad that is too big (yet another case of accidental touches), etc. -- but I'd pay a lot of money to get rid of the Touch Bar.

> I cringe if I have to type on the old pro keyboard with its soft keys.

The soft keys are quiet while the new keyboard is noticeably louder.

True story: The other day I was in the living room and I hear this crunch crunch crunch sound from the kitchen. I call over to my SO "what are you eating?" Her response was "I'm not eating, I'm typing." I use a 2013 MBP and she uses a 2017 MB.

I still dont understand how could anyone at Apple approve this change in loudness. Its not subjective, you can literally measure it.

The touch bar is an ergonomic nightmare.

Apple's soul truly died back in 2011 with the loss of Steve Jobs.

Their computers are now appropriate funeral attire. Lifeless, fragile and gaunt. The operating system, a pale reflection of the past, reminds me of disney movies and EA games these days -- forumlaic, unimaginative, designed to take your money. iTunes sucks the soul right out of you. It's Apple's laboratory and you're the experiment. Welcome to an homogenous, sterile prison of an operating system. You're no longer unique, nor empowered with an Apple computer. When the shallow keyboards make your fingers sore, when you need to replace the $600 display of your 12" macbook because you pinched the screen for the first time, you'll lose your love for Apple. Something like this will happen to you

> The touch bar is an ergonomic nightmare. > > Apple's soul truly died back in 2011 with the loss of Steve Jobs.

Hilariously, the TB was in the works way before Job's disappearance (according to a tweet by Bret Victor I can't find right now).

Now that is irony.

Long ago, Apple sold keyboards that are regarded as some of the best ever made (up with the IBM M, but quiet).

‘I asked [Jobs] if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard. He burst out: “This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It’s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.” And with his car keys he pried it right off. “How about this F2 key?” Off they all went. “I’m changing the world, one keyboard at a time,” he concluded in a calmer voice.’ — Steve Jurvetson at https://web.archive.org/web/20111007191749/http://www.busine...

The tweet, sent upon reveal of the Touch Bar: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/791767756928462848

What exactly is formulaic about Moana and Coco?

Lol that main image showing the laptop with a USBC -> display dongle... at least they are being representative.

damn OP changing the link.. here's the original article linked, completed with the utter fail of marketing image

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/apples-new-2018-macb...

Like they said, Apple are being representative, and also what else could they do? There aren't any HDMI -> USB-C cables as far as I'm aware.

I hear all the complaints about keyboard and touchbar, but we use these with external keyboards and never use the touchbar.

32GB DDR4 Ram and 6 Core processors honestly is making this a no-brainer here. We have been waiting on the ram for years. Price is the big question. At this time, the Select on the apple store is disabled so no idea what this will cost.

Why not just get an iMac if you're not going to use it as a laptop?

Identical desk setups at home and work. Carry it back and forth. Awesome setup actually.

Awesome for me would be two iMacs and no carrying.

then you have to sync your desktop, apps and files between them though

Already do that between four systems running 2 different operating systems. Dropbox makes it a lot easier.

What you really need is one of these fashionable carrying bags for the 27 inch iMac.

https://www.amazon.com/Lavolta-Carrying-Case-Apple-27-inch/d...

Are people really moving their iMac around so much they require a bag?!

This is the first comment to make me laugh on Hacker News in quite a while.

I believe my dad’s old Osborne luggable was heavier than a 27” iMac. Of course, it came in it’s own case and a whopping 4” monochrome text only monitor.

That's quite a ridiculous sight in my opinion. I'm imagining that person trying to bring that thing aboard the tube in London.

because it's not portable, duh

you can configure it now.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MR942...

Fully specced out = $6,699.00

Order is open: 32 GB Top CPU 1TB $3899 US. 2TB and 4TB are insanely priced.

Is that the royal "we"? :P

Personally I always use my MacBook Pro set up below my external monitor. I always use the built in keyboard and trackpad because I find a small, short travel keyboard with a centrally mounted trackpad more ergonomic. I'm pretty sure this setup might only relevant to me though, so horses for courses.

I haven't upgraded because the new macs don't seem to match my use-cases and I can get by with my old 2013 model for now.

I agree about price though. The new MacBook Pros seem poor value to me. You have to decide whether to max the RAM/SSD upfront, get the new dongles you need all while Apple are nickel and dimming over things like the PSU extension cable which is no longer included despite the price rises.

The most interesting thing here is that Apple previously did not ship 32gb ram in laptops because it was not available as a LPDDR3 single chip. Here you see the 15 inch models now use DDR4 (not LP - low power).

Basically Phil Schiller relented and said, meh, fuck it, lets give them what they want and put the more power hungry DDR4 in there. I wonder why the chip manufacturers couldn't make LPDDR4 or 32gb LPDDR3 modules after all this time.

Well, it's a limitation of Intel's processors. Either you use LPDDR3 which maxes out at 16GB or you go with DDR4, which is more power hungry, but allows more than 16GB.

I don't mind about touchbar being there or not, just make escape key physical again :-(

It's not that hard, I mean, esc takes half the size of a regular key. Right below it in old Macbooks we have a full sized key just for ~` they could make the space of this full sized key contain instead two half sized keys.

The top would be esc, the bottom would be ~`. If you notice the Macbook already has this, for the up/down arrows. They are two half sized keys taking the footprint of a single full sized key.

You can remap caps lockto ESC iin System preferences / keyboard. Took me under thirty minutes to get used to.

The split key thing is an intriguing idea, but I don’t think ESC is something you want to accidentally trigger.

32gb MAX ram is a nice change, and the true-tone display is a positive. Really wish Apple were in the nVidia camp instead of the ATI camp.

yeah... nice alternative for deep learning: https://lambdal.com/raw-configurator?product=tensorbook

Apple have improved (and probably fixed) the keyboard and increased maximum RAM top 32GB for the 15-inch. These resolving two of the most common complaints seen here previously. Apple have also improved the display, added Siri, better system security and much faster CPUs. The leather sleeves are nice too - wildly expensive but lovely.

It's sad therefore to read so many complaints here - but I suspect many people have silently purchased one.

My previous job (80+ devs shop) provided laptops as primary machines, and we were free to choose size and mac or linux.

I knew 3 people who choose 15”, and about 15~20 people choose linux. We were all devs working with a set of VMs.

Getting 32G only on the 15” puts most of us in a corner. The 4x4 matrix becomes two choices only:

- 15” 32G mac - 13” 32G linux

That’s a really tough choice, I wish Apple just gave 32G to the 13”.

Doubling down on the Meme Bar. Yikes. Did they at least add some kind of haptic response for the new generation touch bar?

If they ever do decide to kill the touch bar, I'd expect it to occur along with a more significant rev where the whole design gets updated. This is more of an interim spec update -- not even announced at a keynote!

It's not that minor though, given they dropped LPDDR3 and switched to DDR4.

Oddly they still advertise 30 days standby.

Dropped LPDDR3 on the 15" model.

The new 13" models still have LPDDR3, and thus are limited to 16GB

I would advise folks to hold off on this. I've a base configuration iMac Pro. There is an issue with either the video card, T2 chip or some combination of the 2.(or maybe something entirely different) There is a kernel panic issue that has yet to be solved, even though there is a very long thread going on the apple support community. Ive been contacted by apple engineers based on my participation in the thread, so I believe they are on the verge of officially acknowledging a problem here. So far those affected have done everything from re-imaging, replacing and returning their iMac Pros and nothing has fixed this issue. I want to upgrade my macbook pro, but until they fix this, Im not buying any more macs...

Not a MacBook user, but being in a US university campus for almost 5 years now there is one change that I noticed with the latest crop of Macbooks. Everyone seems to carry their chargers. 2-3 years ago really I don't remember any Mac user carrying a charger.

Likely because a new MacBook is no longer backwards compatible with the last 3-5 iterations of chargers.

The new laptops have much worse battery life under load. I have the 13" non-touchbar (best battery life) and, with light work, I can get about 7 hours. However, if I'm doing anything CPU-intensive that goes down to 3 or 4. I think it's even worse with the dedicated GPUs.

I guess that unpredictable battery life is way worse than short battery life, in terms of battery anxiety.

I just switched to Mac for work 2 months ago... Before that I was using a 2016 Razer Blade Stealth (which I loved)...

Touchbar is worse than useless for me because I am constantly accidentally grazing the esc key on the touch bar with my ring finger... infuriating. Keyboard is pretty bad also... I needed to take my macbook to the apple store (thunderbolt issue) and so I had to use a loaner for a week... I got the last macbook before the 2017 one... SO much better! First of all having a variety of ports is awesome... keyboard is awesome... Why did they just not add 2 thunderbolt ports and a 4k screen to that one (and upgrade CPU etc)?

This hardware should have been here in the previous iteration. Also, I've yet to meet a single person who fancies the touch bar. It's now just something that's tolerated. Bring back the hard keys, shorten the oversized track pad, and add a shorter touch bar to the top if you really want to keep it.

(All prices Canadian)

- A $2400 entry price for a quad-core 13" Macbook Pro. - Minimum $3675 spend for a Macbook with 32GB of memory (and still only comes with 256GB of storage). - Non-touchbar Macbook Pro stagnating with 7th-gen dual-core at the same exact price.

Looks like I'll be holding on to my 2014 model like grim death.

The 32GB RAM bump is huge. This will be the first MacBook that has greater than 16GB of RAM since 2012. That's a 6 year plateau where MacBook RAM was capped at 16GB.

Meanwhile that whole time RAM prices dropped and servers and desktops have been packed with more and more and more RAM. Not every workload needs that much but I have certainly hit limits when doing large heap dump analysis, local processing of large data sets, running many many local services to try to debug. I'm very happy with the change.

Ports, dammit! I have a project of capturing old videos from VHS tapes -- via an ElGato EyeTV box WITH USB-3 OUTPUT -- and saving the captured videos onto an external 3GB hard drive WITH USB-3 I/O. I can plug these to the opposite sides of my 2013-era MBP and off we go, smooth as butter.

New MBP? Either buy an RGB video capture device with thunderbolt output (which I don't think exists) and a new enclosure for the HD, or interpose an extra dock thing.

Or you simply buy two USB-A-to-USB-C-Adapters for a few cents and put them permanently onto the ends of the cables. Makes the plugs a bit longer, but just works.

Finally we've up to data CPUs but now it's even more overpriced.

Guess Dell just won a new customer, the XPS line is really good in specs and price.

3.846,71 euros ~= 4500 USD for 4 Tb of SSD storage? Long live Hackintosh, macOs is good but the price isn't just there.

I'm with you but not because of price. It is still under $4K with a 1TB SSD, which is right in line with my other MPBs. I'd expect to spend about the same on the now inevitable Dell.

LOL

3.846,71 euros ~= is ONLY for the 4 Tb SSD.

If I buy the cheapest 15 inch and only upgrade the SSD I have to pay: 6.986,98 € ~= 8.200,00 USD

Prices in Europe are always higher than the states. On time I found out that I would save 100 euros If I took a flight to New York, stayed there for and maximum of 2 days to buy it :D

The prices are just INSANE, I built a Hackintosh for 800 euros and it is faster than the latest iMac 2017 with the maximum specs. Damn, I'm even using an Haswell CPU (i7 4790k) not the latest ones.

I get that Apple is making it's own hardware and it's good enough to rival top brands, example: Apple SSDs are in line with Samsung 970 Pro M.2 in terms of performance. Also the industrial design is second to none but it's just a terrible investment even for programmers.

With iPhone 8: same story, if you drop it and you're unlucky to break the screen and the back plate: It is cheaper to buy a new iPhone :D

Ah, yes: eight grand is a lot for a laptop. I can't imagine jumping through hoops for an OS I'll mostly experience as a browser and a command line, but if you're set on it I'd definitely hold out for a NYC trip in the Fall when the weather is nicer ;)

The bump in specs is very much welcome, but I'm considerably irked by the continuation of USB-C only connectivity. I'm not joking with this. I would like, at least on the 15-inch model:

- An HDMI port

- Two mini-display ports

- At least two standard USB 3 compatible ports

- A mag-safe power connector to avoid damage to the machine, and the connector itself, if somebody (like me!) trips over the power cable

- At least they haven't got rid of the headphone socket but I'd also like the line in back, please: makes recording on the fly much more convenient, which is something I need to do reasonably regularly

Overall these additions would make the machine much more convenient and versatile when travelling because it means I don't have to carry (and find space for) a bunch of dongles that will inevitably suffer periodic loss and replacement. I know this will make the machine cost more but I JUST DON'T CARE.

Seriously Apple, the clue is in the name: Macbook Pro. Please: wake up - stop building toys and start building tools! You used to be really good at this and I don't really understand why you chose to stop.

I definitely recommend you check out the Dell XPS 15. I just picked one up and it has plenty of ports, an excellent display, and it’s super fast. As an added bonus, the one I got (core i9, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) was $1100 cheaper than the equivalent MacBook Pro.

I am using a 9570 also (same specs as yours) but have an annoying audio issue with crackling/static at random times. Also some coil whine. tbh I don't expect this on a £2000+ machine. I have already had one replacement and I have ordered a new MBP as I don't think I can deal with another replacement from Dell.

Have you had any issues with your 9570?

No issues whatsoever, except the fans get loud when I’m pushing it hard. I blame the i9. Other than that, no problems.

I am jealous tbh. I have isses with coil whine and audio interference (crackling/popping) in audio.

Update: I stuck my ear next to the keyboard and I do hear coil whine on it. I actually hadn't heard it before because the fans are usually pushing hard on it (I sit in the Adobe suite most of my day) and I also have it off to the side, on a stand, with an external keyboard/monitor/mouse.

I'm not sure if this is something that will bother me in the future. I am sensitive to sound and have misophonia, but I can't hear it unless I literally stick my ear on the keyboard. So this one is still TBD for me, though I appreciate your comment, as it made me check it out more closely.

I haven't noticed the audio issues, but there again, I have it using a USB DAC to a receiver with bookshelf speakers, so I really haven't used the speakers at all. And rarely would I--if I'm out and about with it, I have noise-cancelling headphones I take everywhere.

Well I hope it doesn't get to the point where it bothers you. I also have a hatred of some noises with coil whine being one of them.

In my on-going saga with this XPS 15 the space bar has now developed a wobble and is not picking up presses except directly in the centre of the spacebar.

I have had enough of this thing. I can't wait to return it.

Thanks for the recommendation. The XPS is one that keeps coming up, so it's definitely a contender. Looking to replace my current MBP within the next 12 months.

Do you travel so much then?

I travel between my customer, my workplace and home. I don't have a single dongle -- I just replaced the cables or bought a dock.

Yes: enough for it to be bothersome. Different customer sites, different offices, different meeting rooms with differing AV connectivity, the occasional conference in venues with a range of connectivity. I commonly encounter HDMI, Mini DisplayPort, and DisplayPort cables. I still occasionally encounter DVI and even VGA. Obviously I don't expect support for all of those but HDMI and Mini DisplayPort are extremely common so it's wearing having to have at least two dongles all of the time[1]. It's just extra crap to get lost.

[1] I also have a Microsoft Surface Pro/SurfaceBook Pro (I still can't remember which is which) that's annoying in that it has a single Mini DisplayPort and no HDMI. Even more galling, the rather expensive dock which is a pain to carry around has two MiniDisplayPorts yet still lacks HDMI.

Good to see improvements in the keyboard, surprising they didn’t just go back to the pre 2015 version which has no issues at all though

They can't because the body is too shallow for it.

It has a new keyboard, which means Apple recognized the problem with the old keyboard months, maybe a the better part of a year before the recently announced new warranty on keyboard + body replacement, long enough to design a replacement.

That's a pretty shitty thing to do to keep denying the problem and collecting repair fees from their customers in the mean time.

Ars said they didn't know the status of a 15-inch without Touch Bar. I take it we'll never see a 15-inch without it?

I wouldn't say never, but they haven't given up on it yet.

I clicked on the link hoping that there would be an option with no emoji bar. Unfortunately this is another generation of disappointing MacBooks I will pass on.

For all the talk about the keyboard and Touch Bar, isn't this the first MBP to offer 32gb of ram and an i9 processor? I can live with the keyboard, I don't care about the touch bar, but the ram and processor are the main reasons I've been holding out buying a new one.

I really hope they don't retire 2015 models anytime soon. Those were the last usable MacBook Pros.

They did

I ended up buying a used mid-2012 model, hopefully the 16GB RAM upgrade I got makes it nice and snappy. Kicking myself for giving away my 2014 Air.

Mid-2012 MBPs have the nice bonus features that (a) you can actually upgrade them and (b) matte screens were still available.

I was using a late 2011 that I had outfitted with 16GB of ram and a larger SSD, save for the screen, it performs comparatively to the latest models. Now, its graphics just went bad and Apple now considers it "vintage" and won't fix it. I assume the 2012 models will suffer form that fate soon as well.

Send it to Louis. Could just be the backlight.

https://www.rossmanngroup.com/

One of the things I think and hope is going to start happening is an aftermarket parts economy springing up around these particular Macs.

Yep. Last call https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1151721-REG/apple_z0r...

I was waiting for this new update, hoping for a Pro Model without touchbar. Apple lost a customer in me now.

Time to look for new alternatives, the HUAWEI MateBook X Pro is something that I am excited to give a try. I just hope that the Linux support for it will become a bit better.

But they waited so long to do this upgrade that a year from now I'm already going to start complaining that it doesn't have 64 GB of RAM. They're just catching up to what is an acceptable development machine at this point.

Maybe I'm just not picky enough but as someone running whatever the current Macbook Pro is as my daily work driver, I haven't had any issues with the Esc key not being physical. I'd love to hear issues that users are having since I haven't really been exposed to the discussion around it.

On a side note, I agree the touchbar is useless on its own but BetterTouchTool + some python scripts has made it a neat feature for me. Personally, I use mine to display our on call roster from Pagerduty + the number of open incidents (if any)

Oh, I should mention I do use neovim somewhat lightly and it works alright.

USB C only can be a pain in the butt too

The 32GB memory option is using DDR4 memory as opposed to LPDDR3 for the older models. That's because the current Intel core i CPUS don't support more than 16GB of LPDDR. How is that going to affect the battery life?

At least there's some movement but this upgrade still falls far short of what I'm hoping for. The 13" model is still limited to 16 GB. And the model without touch bar only has 2 USB-C ports. Why, Apple, why?!

I was so sad to see that too! I'm still waiting on a 13" 32Gb macbook.

I really can't stand the keyboard. Been using it the last year and a half and it is definitely causing joint pain. I ended up buying an external keyboard to use with it most the time. Also, I want my escape key back. Not having tactile feedback is annoying and frustrating, especially given how much I'm in vim everyday. Just go back to the old keyboard please, you can even keep the touch bar if you must but I will not buy another until the keyboard is made useable and not just flat for no reason beyond making the computer slightly thinner, which is of no value to me.

Sounds like another iteration of 'touchbar my way or the highway.'

I'm disappointed: no USB ports that I can use (I don't have a single peripheral that plugs into USB-C and it's unlikely that any of my peripherals will be "updated"), useless touchbar instead of the function key row, the same "ultra-thin" form factor sacrificing battery life and keyboard for "thinness" (which I don't need), and keyboard which is still an unknown.

I wish Apple had serious competition. As in: competition that makes an integrated hardware/OS combination that is comparable to what Apple makes.

> I wish Apple had serious competition. As in: competition that makes an integrated hardware/OS combination that is comparable to what Apple makes.

Microsoft and their Surface line comes to mind. I've read nothing but good things about the Surface Book 2.

What use is updating the specs if they're going to keep that god damn touchbar? Apple is sabotaging themselves and I can't feel sorry for them because at this point they're literally ignoring their customers.

Glad I sold my Macbook Pro. Not only is it exorbitantly overpriced, it's an inferior laptop due to entirely preventable idiotic design decisions. They had something fantastic with the 2015 model, but they've thrown it away for this atrocious touchbar and uncomfortable keyboard.

Not recent, but last time I bought a new MacBook Pro, it was $1800. Now starting price is $2400. Is there similar inflation for other laptop manufacturers or it's just Apple?

My goal memory/storage specs for my next laptop is 32Gb, 1Tb SSD. But that is only available in the 15" (I prefer 13"), and it costs $3600 (which is more than I'm willing to spend at this time).

It's not just laptops. You could get an entry-level Power Mac G4 in 2003, or Power Mac G5 in 2004, for $1499 (~$2000 in today's dollars). Today the Mac Pro starts at $2999.

The cost of entry to the Apple world has gone down, but the cost of entry to the Apple pro world has gone up.

“Hey Siri” is available because a T2 chip is included.

We’re slowly crawling towards Voice as a User Interface on the personal computer.

Hope this happens in my lifetime. I’ve been waiting several decades.

"Hey Siri"'s increasing presence in Apple's lineup is very problematic, at least with it's current implementation, especially with the wildly varying capabilities between devices.

The HomePod is very greedy with Hey Siri, even for things that it can't handle. I'll be in my living room and try to "Hey Siri" something to my phone, and my HomePod in the kitchen will somehow here me, take the request, and then fail because it's incapable to doing it. Throwing a Mac into the equation just makes things harder.

Sounds like Apple could fix by allowing a more specific name:

“Hey Mac”

“Hey HomePod”

> We’re slowly crawling towards Voice as a User Interface on the personal computer.

> Hope this happens in my lifetime. I’ve been waiting several decades.

Can I ask why? I find voice interfaces basically useless. They're too awkward to use in public, too unreliable to use in general, and almost never quicker than just typing or mousing anyway.

I can see how it's great for accessibility (e.g. for blind people), but that's about it

“Too unreliable “

“Faster to type”

You’re doing that thing where you take the current implementation that isn’t very good and ignore that it will greatly improve.

For example, people say electric vehicles don’t work for them because they only go 300 miles on a charge with today’s battery technology.

Anyway, at some point, someone will get it right then you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Macs had support for always-on speech control for over a decade: http://etc.usf.edu/techease/4all/input-devices/how-do-i-use-...

(The earliest mention of macOS voice control that I can find is almost two decades old: http://lowendmac.com/1999/computer-tell-me-a-joke/)

The issue is that Siri can't do a whole lot on macOS. I don't think the T2 chip is a game changer here.

My most recent personal laptop (after having been a MacBook user for a while) is a ThinkPad with ArchLinux. For a fraction of the price, I have a much more powerful laptop with a much better battery life. I no longer have to worry about things like the best older version to buy to avoid things like only having 2 ports or the infamous TouchBar. Still calling these machines "MacBook Pros" is an insult.

Apple fanbois downvotin you

Will the non-touchbar MBPs continue to ship with the prior version of the keyboard?

I can see why Apple wouldn't go around trumpeting that the old models are getting upgraded, since it could dampen sales for the high-end models. At the same time, it would be pretty lousy to ship new units with keyboards that they've basically admitted are borderline defective (by offering a 4-year replacement program).

So, let's bet; everyone will be having the same keyboard issues as the last two models.

I'm sad to see it's 'not a radical difference'.

I own a touchbar MPB and the last model without one. I use both and I wish I could fuse the best elements of the two together. I would GLADLY trade a smaller touchpad for an extra row of keys on the keyboard. The touchbar would be a fine addition if it didn't replace the function keys. My biggest complaint by far is not having hardcoded volume buttons and an escape key.

All the keyboard talk is kinda lost on me as I still hate typing on any laptop keyboard and drag one of these around with my laptop: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CYX26BC/

It seems silly but I'm more worried about typing.

It might be something to consider for those with keyboard issues.

You are not alone. My laptop travels from work to home in my backpack and is immediately plugged into a dock connected to my Kinesis keyboard, mouse and monitor where I do all my serious work. I guess I mostly use my laptop like it's a desktop.

I think the touch bar is dumb, but I must admit I do like the fingerprint sensor, and it's cool I can use it to unlock 1Password now. The built-in keyboard is mostly fine for the light typing I do on it taking notes in a meeting or something.

Fingerprint sensors are one of those things I was all "naw I don't need that" until I got one ;)

I'm the same, in my bag basically a mini docking station with usb hub, keyboard and mouse travel with me.

If you fix the keyboard, I'll buy a new MBP. If you don't fix it, I won't. I have zero interest in any other changes.

Apparantly these have their new "3rd Generation" butterfly keyboard, whatever that means.

Presumably not the "costing us a bunch of money in Applecare repairs" version.

Yeah it almost feels like incentives are aligned, huh. I'm a big fan of the new keyboards, just not the being broken part.

Looks like they incrementally improved the three biggest gripes about the last generation. You can now have up to 32GB RAM, the keyboard is better, and battery life is slightly better.

Apple seems to have a "tick-tock" release cadence these days, at least with laptops. If you want the best machine maybe wait for the "tock?"

Only the 15" can go to 32GB ram. The 13" cannot which is a bummer.

The first line of this press release should say:

"We have done a thorough review of the keyboard issues people have been experiencing and have made a series of significant improvements..."

That's literally all I care about. As I sit here typing on my MacBook Pro with a second keyboard sitting on top of the completely unusable built-in keyboard.

Most people who are considering buying this computer have never heard about any keyboard issues.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this other than the keyboard?

I thought most people use their MacBook the same way I do — docked to a full size keyboard and big monitor 95% of the time.

So I don’t really care much about the keyboard. I almost never use it.

What do you guys thing about the other upgrades? Would you get this assuming you didn’t care about the keyboard?

Why not use a desktop w/ Linux then? Or a cloud machine? I do the same as you but I'm beginning wonder if a light MacBook & beefy Desktop is a better model.

I'm looking for a path forward, and I haven't found one; I'd appreciate anyone's insight.

My actual work could be done on a Chromebook, but in my free time I do a lot of music recording, which requires me to have an SD card reader and USB ports for the myriad synthesizers and interfaces I use.

I've been getting by on a 2012 MacBook Pro, but it won't hold up forever. I've looked at Hackintoshes, but none of them seem reliable. I'm used to UNIX, I like using UNIX, and I don't trust Microsoft (after realizing that messages I was sending over Skype to a Chinese friend were being sent back to the Chinese government without notifying me). Linux would work, except there's no usable digital audio workstation.

Am I screwed? Do I have to buy a $250 dock for each room I work in as well as a $3000 machine? Seriously, what should I do?

I have a 2014 retina Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM and it is holding up very well. Maybe look for a spec'ed out used 2014/15 edition? Battery replacement kits are available for around $100 and Apple will do it for $150 (I think...) which should buy you a few more years.

The upgrade to a retina display will be nice if you're using a 2012 laptop.

I've been using an Hackintosh for the last 14 months and I even sold my macbook pro. The performance per dollar is amazing, you can get 32 Gb of RAM when you want, a hexacore cpu, a Samsung 970 pro M.2, etc.

In the beginning i was a little bit anxious because I read that it is unstable but it's not true, it took me around 1 month to figure out the limitations and find my own setup. My next computer is going to be an Hackintosh, I keep a 13 inch macbook pro late 2013 with a mere intel i5 dual core and 8 gigs of RAM just to do light tasks and get out of the office.

For 800 euros I built an hackintosh faster than an iMac 2018 with the maximum specs, if you live in the states, computer parts are even cheaper than in Europe.

So, who's actually buying it?

I'd like to upgrade my 2013 MBPro because the built-in camera has died and I could definitely use the speed bump in both CPU and GPU for my work.

But I'm wondering if there is a much more significant upgrade coming within 6-12 months, since Apple is not making a big deal of this upgrade?

I wouldn't expect anything new for about the next year. https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Retina_MacBook_Pro

ok. Bought :)

This release finally ends my relationship with Apple laptops. I was hoping for a more capable non-touchbar version with a fixed keyboard. I won't spend that much for a machine that has a feature I dislike. Time to move on for me. Also the price for a 32gb/1TB model is a bit much.

Is this the only x86 laptop where disk encryption keys are not vulnerable to Spectre attacks, since they are on T2 Arm processor that doesn’t support speculative execution? Or, if T2 does support speculative execution, it only runs trusted code?

OPAL-certified drives running in OPAL mode are not vulnerable to Spectre attacks, as the encryption happens on-disk and not in the OS or application processor.

So, they didn't seem to have fixed the horrible keyboard problems that all their newer model of laptops have.

Why would anyone spend this much money on a laptop, with 2 class actions in the going and Apple not even seriously acknowledging the problem?

No 15 inch pre-touchbar model: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/15-inch

No! Nooo God No! No! :(

They updated the keyboard (Yay!) but max RAM for the 13" models is still 16GB (Boo!)

[edited]

Did you... read the link... at all?

Right at the very top of the article:

> Now Featuring Up to 6-Core Processors and 32GB of Memory, True Tone Display and the Apple T2 Chip

Ha! Sorry, I glossed over the 15" models, and looked at the 13" models, which are still stuck at 16GB.

Only 13" is limited to 16GB. 15" moved to DDR4 and 32GB max.

Right, sorry about that. I was looking at the 13" models; I didn't think they had supported different amounts of RAM previously.

> They updated the keyboard (Yay!)

Let's hope some of the mechanical issues cleared up.

Also, I really miss having real keys instead of a touchpad. I never knew how much I subconsciously relied upon a "thunk" from the ESC key. Remapping (my keys and muscle memory) is an arduous process.

So, I guess this is the fix we've been waiting for huh?

Really disappointing to see a 16GB RAM on 13" MBP continue to be the max.

HP and Lenovo have no problem offering 32 Gb in a similarly sized machine.

It seems Apple is more interested in forcing people up to the 15" for 32 GB - it might just be time to look at windows again for development / vm purposes. There is zero practicality in lugging around a 15" laptop compared to a 13" after having owned both.

While 32GB of ram makes sense for a 15" discrete GPU laptop, 16G will limit the number of vms or services that can run locally.

+1 for CPU updates

The machines released today were obviously in the pipeline long before the most recent wave of Mac backlash, so it's probably a mistake to call them a response in any way.

Still, when Apple spec out their base configs like this, at these prices? I find it hard not to get the message.

The entire line is under-specced by about 50%, or $500 too expensive. Fix that, and I'd still mutter about the Touch Bar, but I'd do it carrying it out of the store. Now? I'll hold off upgrading for at least a few more years.

I agree with your first statement, but apple products have always been too expensive. Eventually you just learn to live with it.

Absolutely, and I have been happy to pay that premium. Still am for some product categories (iPad). But a mid-2018 laptop for $2400 that comes with 256GB of storage?

Given what a small piece of the pie Mac sales now represent, their company wide profit margins would be infinitesimally affected by equipping their flagship laptop with at least a 512 GB stick.

Bill it to marketing if it helps, but Jesus, throw us a fucking bone.

I have a 2015 15-inch MBP, 16gb RAM, 512gb SSD. I dropped it going through TSA and dented in the side. It still works. Case is bent, etc.

Last week I bought a 13-inch MBP, 16gb, 512gb, non-touchbar model.

With the upgrades to the 15-inch MBP and DDR4, True Tone display. I am seriously thinking about returning the new 13-inch and buying a new 15-inch. I waited 10 days for Apple to deliver the 13-inch and if I order today with 32gb RAM they are shipping July 23-25. Still another 10 day wait.

UPDATE: I over looked the spec part with their Intel chips... however I presume they tie directly into the T2 chip, and will probably leave them altogether in an iteration or two.

As I predicted in a former post on why they haven't updated their hardware line up... "using their T2 chip..."

This is them leaving their dependency and insecurity of Intel and AMD.

Good luck to them. I do remember a time when their ARM G series CPU's out performed x86 cpus on all things creative.

This is so frustrating. I'm a longtime/loyal Apple customer, but they refuse to make any hardware lately I'm willing to buy. I don't want a laptop with a touchbar. They don't make any desktop computers: Their last Mac Pro was a disaster, the Mac Mini hasn't been updated in many years, and the iMac Pro is just a (powerful) laptop on a desk. I need to upgrade my home computer and I guess I'm switching to Linux?

The iMac Pro is absolutely nothing close to “a powerful laptop on a desk”. You’re fooling yourself with your narrative.

By laptop-on-a-desk I mean it's non-upgradeable with an integrated monitor. It's not a desktop machine.

It uses Xeon processors, AMD Vega GPUs, has incredibly fast PCIE NVMe SSD storage, and obviously contains a 27" 5k display...just because you can't take out the hard drive doesn't mean it's not a desktop machine. This is a weird statement to make. Companies using these machines are not interested in physically upgrading them...they use them as long as they can, then buy the newer, faster version.

What you're saying is: "I define 'desktop machine' different than you do, therefore you're wrong".

Give me that hardware in a box that I could upgrade, and don't make me buy a monitor I don't want or need, and I'd probably buy that machine.

I loathe the new keyboards, touchbar included, but I'm happy they're decoupling upgrading the internal specs from finishing the promised keyboard changes.

Interested in trying out the new Black Magic eGPU. I freaking love Black Magic products and the price of this is very reasonable, like most of their products.

2 USB ports on the 13" version. Really? I don't get how this isn't the stupidest idea ever.

1 external monitor, and a charger.

A charger and USB ethernet card.

1 external monitor and USB ethernet card.

Pick one!

There are plenty of hubs with charging, ethernet and monitor built in. Of course more USB ports would be nice, but that probably comes with a price tag, as an extra Thunderbolt controller would have to be added.

This is great news for me personally as it means that I will never have to see anybody complain about how you can only get 16gb RAM in Apple laptops.

32GB RAM only for 15" :-(.

Why is Apple's approach on introducing new things so punishing?

iPhone X - introduce Face ID AND remove Touch ID

Macbook - introduce Touch Bar AND remove physical function keys

I'm sure there are other examples but I don't follow Apple's hardware close enough to know. It doesn't have to be this way. In both cases above, both items could easily have been kept to maximize user choice AND maximize innovation at the same time.

You forgot the doozy… iPhone – a smartphone without a physical keyboard. The outrage back then was immeasurably worse. And here we are now in 2018 and where is Blackberry?

Having both Face ID and Touch ID at the same time doesn't make sense and would just be confusing.

Having both the Touch Bar and a function key row makes even less sense. It's a replacement not an addition.

Confusing? Is having a pin code and a fingerprint reader confusing? You just pick the one you want to use.

I like mechanical keyboards, and they pretty much all use regular USB. Last year my employer gave me a new Pro, so I bought some adapters to plug in my mech. Somehow I kept losing them. I've got multiple keyboards, other computers that don't need the adapters, and with all the shuffling around they just disappeared one after another.

New Pro looks nice but I don't think I want to do that again.

>"With the option to add up to 32GB of memory on the 15-inch MacBook Pro, users can run more apps simultaneously or load larger files into memory."

So the 13 inch models are stuck with 16 Gigs. Is there a technical reason why they couldn't put 32 Gigs of RAM in the 13 inch model?

I feel like the 13 inch is the workhorse for most devs and by extension a significant portion of the 13 inc MBP user base no?

Faster CPU and more memory while still running OSX? My only complaint is it doesn't come with a GPU upgrade.

I love the touchpad, the os, and the thunderbolt ports. The 10% of the time I have my computer undocked the keyboard doesn't bother me and interacting with the touchbar never was a problem. I'll buy one with the i9 and 2TB SSD within the next 72 hours to replace my 2016 MBP.

As much as I agree with detractors comments here, this could be close enough. Use capslock for esc rather than ctrl and maybe someday the touch bar will have a use for me. The alternative of using Linux on another brand is fine too, so for me might just come down to configured pricing. The only minor downside is no Xcode for iOS apps. I tend to use flutter now anyway.

Deciding between with/without touchbar. Is there a real difference between both? I'm really bad comparing hardware. Here the main difference I've notice:

Non-touchbar:

• Up to 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i7, with 64MB of eDRAM

• 2 USB-c ports

• Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640

With-touchbar:

• Up to 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 with 128MB of eDRAM

• Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655

• 4 USB-c ports

As a developer point of view, it looks like the non-touch bar is a good option, and there is not a big gap between both?

13” inch non touch bar is last year model, no upgrade to keyboard and with 7th gen CPU. This refresh updates only the touchbar models with new keyboard design and 8th quad core CPU, which could means significant CPU performance improvement.

The non-touchbar model didn't get any updates, its the 2017 model with the 7th gen processors.

This. There is supposedly a large difference in performance between these CPU generations.

Non-touchbar's wifi card supports up to 867Mbps while the touchbar's wifi card supports up to 1300Mbps.

Adding to what others here have said, non-touchbar has one fan instead of two and runs hotter even at idle. Apple really doesn't want anyone to buy it.

It is telling that there is not a mention of this on the front page of Apple.com . So much for caring about the Mac!

Um, maybe it wasn't update when you looked but the entire homepage is dedicated to: The MacBook Pro, The iMac Pro, and Mojave in that order. There is no reference to iPhone/iPad anywhere other than the top nav bar.

It certainly looks very different now! I stand corrected!

Sorry, didn’t mean to sound condescending. I re-read my comment and I’m sure it wasn’t updated at the time you looked. My bad.

I really hope there's going to be a 15' MacBook Pro without Touch Bar.

edit: clarify I was talking about the 15' model.

There wont't be one :(

Ars says: "We don't know the status of the 15-inch without the Touch Bar at the time of this writing." So I'm still holding out hope.

So... still no USB-A or SD card port, still with the Touch Bar no one needs, even THINNER than before so likely the keyboard is shit, and the touchpad probably as oversized as on the current model. And I don't want to know the battery life of a 6-core CPU with so little space left for an actual battery.

Jeez, Apple.

It's 2018 and we still can't get a decent video card in $3k-$4k+ Apple laptop? The new MBP will still be horrible at delivering a high-ish end gaming experience and I'll continue to be forced to perform all of my GPU-based machine/deep learning work on a separate machine (or eGPU).

Related question: Anyone that has tried an eGPU for a MacBook Pro and care to share their experiences if it is worth it?

I am looking for something to make my workstation high performance for handling multiple monitors while I have the flexibility of just grabbing the computer and run into a meeting with it.

I run the mid 2016 15" with two dell 27" 4k monitors over thunderbolt 3. Also use the mbp monitor open so really 3 monitors. Use a dock that break them out to display port.

Works absolutely fantastic. Not a gamer, developer though.

I want a thicker laptop.

Apple is oblivious that Pros want _more_ functionality, not less. Editions that would frustrate their supply line but be incredible:

- MBP Engineer: 32GB+ RAM, 2+ NVMe SSD, 10gbe, dedicated real A12 ARM chip for simulating iOS

- MBP Scientist: 32GB+ RAM, an FPGA with fun Apple SDK, dedicated GPU

- MBP Video: 4 SDI ports (integrated BMD DeckLink Duo 2), timecode BNC, dedicated GPU, 10gbe

- MBP Audio: MADI and AES50 ports, 8 mini TRS inputs and outputs designed by Lynx or Apogee

Across board: fast SD card reader, HDMI even if mini.

Releasing even one of these sure would indicate that they're with the times. I'll admit to being an odd user though, my dream laptop would have a 16x PCIe slot exposed on one side.

aside: It's good to see Blackmagic Design get such a loud shout-out from Apple. Since dabbling in the live production world I've been consistently impressed by their FPGA and industrial design chops. possible acquisition? https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HM8Y2VC/A/blackmagic-egpu

An edition with an Nvidia GPU would certainly be appreciated, even after years of Apple exclusively pushing AMD GPUs there's still a non-trivial amount of software that doesn't work on them.

There's been a mass-defection from Mac to Windows in the motion graphics industry just because they want/need Nvidia GPUs to run their preferred renderers.

Completely agree. Nvidia's typical performance is also way ahead of the GPUs Apple is integrating.

Just having 32GB is enough to make me consider upgrading. But man, why can't they ship an LTE modem?

Maybe because they have a dispute with Qualcomm…?

Yes, I do think it must have something to do with that. There is no good technical reason why they would not have one.

I used to post rants about how I wanted a laptop that only focused about battery life, crispy graphics and Linux friendliness. Now I find myself wishing I could buy a laptop without CPU vulnerabilities. The hardware market is definitely at it's lowest point ever right now.

Apple have surpassed themselves with wallet-gouging markup on SSD and RAM upgrades. £360 for an extra 16GB RAM (£160 retail) and £360 for an extra 500GB SSD (£95 retail). This locking down every component is big business. Nothing like hacking-off your pro customer base.

I’m at the point where I still greatly prefer MacOS, but Windows hardware.

Unless things have changed dramatically, my 2017 MBP will be my last when it’s time for a replacement. Hundreds of dollars in add-ons to make it functional and a terrible keyboard are too much to live with.

This seems like an actual upgrade for users still on 2013/14 hardware. Going from dual core to quad core for the 13" users sounds like it might actually be time to upgrade. The benefits of the 15" sound very compelling compared to the 13" tho!

Apple really dropped the ball. Wow. They must have been thinking, "Let's pretend XR, VR, AR don't exist and maybe we'll be able to extend our relevance with people who know nothing about computers." Otherwise, I can't even.

I'm hesitant to get this because the touchpad looks huge compared to my 2014 MacBook Pro. I'm looking at where I rest my hands and I think I would be constantly touching on the touchpad while typing. Does anyone have this issue?

I was afraid of this as well, but in practice it has never been an issue for me. Apple did a really good job making it ignore your palms.

Notice no pictures of the horribly unreliable keyboard, useless touch bar, and ridiculously over-sized track pad in the marketing release.

I hope my personal MBP 2013 never dies... it's still a better machine than anything Apple has done since.

It’s 2018 and in the MacBook lineup, Apple is still selling laptops with:

- 480p webcam (MB) - NonRetina displays (MBA) - Huge display bezels (all) - inconsistent keyboards (MBA vs all others)

I guess it take “courage” to no longer innovate the Mac laptop line.

The $999 MBA is Apple’s best selling computer. It would be ridiculous for them to discontinue it without another laptop at that price point to replace it.

I wish I could get the non-Touch Bar 13" with the maxed out processor and RAM

Does anyone know if Apple has any policy in place for those customers who recently purchased a Macbook Pro without these new upgraded specs? Can they be turned in for these newer models with an upgrade fee of some kind?

You can return it within 14 days, no questions asked.

Is anyone aware of any upgrade options for a machine that's older but still quite new (end of Jan this year) - highest MBP spec at the time?

I did see one Apple trade-in programme, but it seems oriented towards much older models with a max trade-in value to match.

No there aren’t any

Please give me back the escape key. I have a 2012 Macbook Pro it is very good.

If the 2012 MacBook is still good, then you should keep using it. When you're ready to upgrade, you will see that the new touch bar is just as good as the function keys, if not better. I used them every day.

I have a newer MacBook too (work issued) so I have some experience using the touchbar. Two things I dislike about it -- the cannot mindlessly adjust the volume, I have to use the slider. Also as aforementioned, pressing the touchbar esc key is unsatisfying. Makes escaping in vim feel perilous.

I'm surprised there's only 2 top level comments on this article here.

The price point for an indie developer is quite steep. $1800 for a base level 2018 13" is the price to develop apps for the Apple ecosystem. iMac and Mac Mini are out because they're not portables. MacBook Air is pointless as it's so out of date.

At least throw in 16GB at that price point. Selling it with 8GB/256GB just hurts. I'm currently on a 2014 13" that I was able to pick up brand new for $1100 a month after release and I just can't convince myself that the new TouchID models are worth $700 more. The non-TouchID model will be around as a low priced Pro entry, but why would you want to buy last year's model with an even less performance gain (compared to the 2014 model)?

Has anyone here bought or used the Thinkpad Retro? I'm curious about what people think who have used it for awhile. This iteration of the MBP still doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for.

No refresh on the non touch bar model. I guess a new Macbook Air is coming.

I thought this was a top post because they were removing the touch bar :(

I was hoping for this refresh to have powerful not-touchbar models.

Does anyone know when the store will update? Here in Germany it says on the sales page 8th generation Intel chips, and when I go to the sales page it is all still 7th generation.

The price point just doesn't make sense any more. The 15 inch model starts out at $2800. You can get a much better machine, hardware wise, from competitors at the same price.

All this power and whizbang stuff doesn't impress me... I got a $4,000 MBP for work and it's really full of itself...

Anyone else dying for a fresh mac book air? That's all I need!

Too late, just got a refurbished 2015 model instead. Looks like a step in the right direction, but quite how Apple justify those prices for the hard drive upgrades is beyond me!

What people on HN don't seem to understand is that developers are a tiny fraction of the professionals who use a MacBook Pro.

The "Pro" doesn't mean "developer."

Meh, doesn't solve any of my current problems (eg. reverting the touch bar would be one fix). Had they offered a 17" version, I would have been all over it.

Wonder why they wont put the xeon in there with ECC. Lenovo P50/P51 are still my choice.. 2x nvme, ECC, 4k color corrected, undeniably superior keyboard

Because 99.99% of laptop users have no need for ECC.

It doesn't really hurt anything, especially with Apple's purchasing power. The "pro" in there means something to a lot of people, if you are doing a live DJ set and your laptop crashes it can be catastrophic for instance. Rare, maybe, but yes studies confirm bit flips are real and at 32GB you are going to see them a few times a year. A DJ isn't going to necessarily know that adding $50 to the BOM and $100 to the purchase price is worthwhile, but a company like Apple is one of the few that can make good design decisions like this for their users.

Also the caches and data buses in the very same computer are all ECC protected. This is basically intel propagating ignorance, and Apple not stepping up. They whiffed on APFS and data checksums too.

What amazing timing! I'm expecting to receive a shiny new Dell XPS today, and switch back to Linux after ~8 years on a MacBook Pro running MacOS...

The biggest performance boost I have had is going from an HD to an SSD. I don't think I need that much RAM anymore because of that.

Of course what would be really cool is Face ID and the consequent minority report style gestures that would be possible... eventually!

I wonder if the previous model keyboard repairs will get the third gen keyboard at some point (didn't see any info about this)?

I wonder how's the battery life with an i9.

According to the article it's the same as 2017, thanks to a bigger battery.

Battery life with a 2017 model is horrible, especially if you are using anything that requires using the discrete graphics card.

Not expecting anything great from the new models on this front.

For external 4K displays is it the same as before with the 13" supporting 2 at 60Hz with the 15" supporting 4 at 60hz?

I am simply glad to see the T2 chip move into more lines as the promise of more secure storage appeals to me and likely others.

The New 15inch maxed out ram and cpu + the blackmagic eGPU + the new ultrawide from LG at 5k2k and you have a perfect setup.

With the amount of repairs needed on the keyboard it’s unbelievablee they didn’t even mention that issue.

written on my mbp

Mention it in what way? They mention it is a new 3rd gen keyboard. They aren't going to mention anything negative in a marketing page.

Unless they release a video depicting how the new keyboard has improved, I see fewer people trusting Apple on this one.

In the world outside of Macs how much would £2,699.00 get me and what would be worth getting? For development work.

Dell Precision 5530 looking like a killer machine at that price point.

It definitely looks like a nice machine and probably the best competitor to the 15" rMBP right now (alongside it's twin the XPS 9570) but do a search for all of the QC issues on the Precision 5510/5520/5530 and XPS 9550/9560/9570 and you will quickly see that there are a huge number of problems with this computer. That said, you can configure it with Dell's "Next Business Day" international onsite service (which is more like service in 2-3 days, at least based on my anecdotal experience) which is a nice touch.

I've spent a very long time researching 15" mobile workstations for the last year or two since I will eventually need a replacement to my 2015 15" rMBP and I have come to the conclusion that pretty much every one of them has some sort of huge deal breaker for me. At this point I'm just hoping that my 2015 15" rMBP can last for another couple of years while we await some design refreshes from Lenovo, Dell, and Apple.

None of the pictures shows the “pro” keyboard.

I going to venture a guess why: lack of a real keyboard row for esc + function keys.

My predicition for the next MBP:

* No headphone port

* Entire keyboard replaced with a touch screen

* Comes with one thunderbolt port (standard), second port is +$800

6 cores!!! Third gen butterfly keyboard — not great but hey. 4tb ssd top cpu and 32GB ram is almost 7k though...

What's a "pro", anyway? The category of people who use computers for work is a comprehensive one.

According to Apple, someone who can afford to spend $1300-$6000 on a laptop.

Any advice on getting my lemon 2017 (multiple faults) replaced with a new model rather than another 2017?

Apple will swap a device for the latest model if it fails and is repaired for the same reason 3 times . It’s called “crewing” (or maybe “cruing”?) I don’t know the spelling. You have to get it repaired by Apple 3 times though.

CRU-ing. Customer Replacement Unit.

There's no hard and fast 'three repairs' rule, but that's generally the rule of thumb that employees stick by.

Cool, good to know, thanks!

Has anyone gotten this done at a Authorized Repair partner or is this an Apple Store thing only? How about via mail-in to Apple?

Nearest Apple Store is 4 hours away...

Apple can definitely do this over the phone. I believe they will require a deposit to be held on a credit card though to cover the cost of the machine in case you don't send back your old one.

> Also new to MacBook Pro is the Apple T2 chip, first introduced in iMac Pro. With the Apple T2 chip, MacBook Pro now delivers enhanced system security with support for secure boot and on-the-fly encrypted storage, and also brings “Hey Siri” to the Mac for the first time.

Boring security stuff, boring security stuff, oh, and Hey Siri Support! Now that is really what the world has waited for.

And they will keep making the default HDD smaller so that you will subscribe to icloud for storage

This is such a golden opportunity served to Google on a platter. Even MS realized that they can get more sales by putting linux (wsl) on windows, and yet chromeos which is linux had no aspirations other than showing ads on chrome. At least they are trying to change that with crostini. Hopefully, they'll have some sensible hardware options in the future.

YES!...YES!...YES!..."MBP's with the touch bar" close window Fuck that.

The 13" model does not offer 32gb of RAM as an option.

I guess I'll have to continue waiting...

The price says it all - totally not worth it. There are a lot better options available.

Anyone here knows if we can upgrade existing post 2017 MacBook Pro’s from 16gb to 32gb?

It'd be better if the OS wasn't garbage to be honest. Sierra and High Sierra, either through poor design or planned obsolescence has entirely soured my organization to the benefits of the MBP. Between that and the incessantly bad consumer garbage they push out with the OS, it's just not worth it.

So much for holding out for a CUDA compatible GPU to do machine learning on...

Isn't CUDA Nvidia only? Apple and Nvidia are not in good terms, I believe.

Ya I was hoping they would come to an agreement ;(

Didn't you know about that time when Apple got screwed over by Nvidia when their chips failed? Had to provide out of warranty repairs for quite a few MBPs.

mehhh... 32GB of RAM might have been interesting in my laptop 5 years ago, but with cheap and nearly infinite VPS instances at the execution of a script, large amounts of local memory is hardly a requirement for developers anymore.

For creative professionals it will help; but as a software professional I see no reason to be interested in Macs anymore.

I'm sure the top tier model will push nearly $4000. frankly Apple lost me to Fedora/Gnome-Shell about 4 years ago with slow or no updates to their core software applications (Terminal.app... really?), less than impressive hardware when compared against Dells or Thinkpads, and a vertically integrated walled garden model that I just didn't want to be part of anymore.

But.... hey look, more clock cycles. Wooohooo, I guess

Radeon, so still no CUDA.

do y'all think, as a programmer as well as an adobe user (photoshop, lightroom, premiere pro, etc), that upgrading ram, storage, or processor on a 15" is best?

I'd upgrade RAM if you anticipate using such resource heavy applications. The processors are pretty close in speed, I would anticipate RAM being more helpful.

And still no ports, so you get to buy apple approved hub.

I don't understand why they don't have the same CPU/RAM spec for both models. The 13" is the perfect size and it's not like they can't make it happen. dumb.

Nice update but SSD 1TB to 2TB upgrade $700 ???

Apparently I had twins in 2013, as I'm not giving up my 2013 MBP in the same way that I'm not giving up my son.

Can I please buy a 15" macbook without the touch bar? Thanks!

hey Apple, this is how Hacker News' MacBook Pros pain looks like:

search "keyboard" on this page ... 166 entries right now

The TouchBar models have much worse Linux compatibility. That's my make-or-break feature. :(

I won't be buying a MacBook that can't play audio through its speakers.

Wake me up when it has control-alt-delete.

I like the keyboard design but think it's also important to fix the reliability issues. Going back to the old design feels like the wrong thing to do.

Let's call it the MacBook Pro Pro

Am I the only one excited by the True Tone display?

I think my eyes are my main concern, and seeing Apple making a real push to preserve it is reassuring.

Insane prices as always, bravo apple

too late (waited a few years for a apple laptop with proper specs). Dell XPS sounds much better.

We need a version without the touch bar. Please. We are begging it.

all this talk about the specs and no mention whatsoever about ports. people. cpu speed has basically reached a plateau. its the least relevant thing to talk about.

It's an internals change, the case itself has not changed, what would be the point of mentioning that the connectivity is the exact same?

They also didn't mention RAM on the 13", because the 13" remains on LPDDR3 and thus there was no change to the possible configurations set.

ah ok, well thats disappointing. still, glad to see larger ssds. its taking a very long time (years and years) for their capacities to grow

Shoot. Isn’t there a new model of 14”?

> ever

Ctrl+F keyboard

Good

3600 with 32GB ram and 1TB ssd.

I'd probably get one, but I don't use it for work and my 2013 is still trucking along just fine.

Actually I could probably get a decent chunk of money for it and then use that to help finance a new one. hmmm

I'll wait and see if the keyboards are still crap.

Those bezels look real ugly compared to Huawei Matebook X Pro and other innovative companies like Dell.

I guess it comes down to if developers keep wanting MacOS. New MacBook is faster and supports 32 gb of memory if you want to pay astronomical sums of money.

Pros need an escape key.

It's a very important key.

I was with you until I remapped caps lock to esc. It's really an enhanced, bigger, easier access esc key now. And I don't miss caps lock.

x86 has been obsolete since it was born, and putting the silicone under the keyboard today is absurd. The portable workstation is not the machine that should be doing the hard work (builds/tests). They have it wrong almost the whole way, except maybe for a nice screen.

Wait, 6 cores is a 70% speedup but 4 cores is a 2x speedup? What?

Every time Apple releases a new product, these comments are the same. "blah blah, apple sucks, I am totally thinking about switching to the Microsoft <insert latest failed product here> and let me tell you all about it". This year it is the "WSL totally makes development easy on windows now" garbage.

The fact is that the competitors are garbage. Dell makes crappy, low quality computers, windows has the design of a sleezy casino, and programming on windows is still a massive compromise. The same with Android. Samsung s9+, note 8, etc are not even remotely competitive with the iPhone. Android and Windows serve different markets and every attempt to break in the high-end market since the history of time have failed.

Personally, I think that macbook's are kind of old fashioned. When I went into the Apple store a few months ago, the iPad Pro seemed like a much better mobile computer. The fact is that you don't spend all day on a laptop. If you do, then you need to go see a physiotherapist and start your treatment now. Whether the keyboard is perfect or not really isn't that important. Nothing about a laptop is anywhere near perfect. The processor is lower powered, the screen is smaller, the ergonomics are terrible, etc.

It makes much more sense for a lot of these tech companies to start issuing iMacs and macbooks or iMacs and ipad pros. That is what Apple themselves seem to do, and the majority of the people I know who work from home do. You can't even buy a screen as good as the one in the iMac 5k for the same price separately. Text looks much better on a retina screen, you get much more power, more storage, etc.

People say "well you have to sync between work and home". These people must be an extreme minority because how many people work at home one day, work at work the next and keep rotating like that so that syncing becomes an actual problem? Further, you can just ssh into your own machine.

Anyway, that is what I think. Everyone seems to be moving to iMacs instead of laptop + external screen. You get more power, no need to charge as much, a retina screen, and it is all at a very very competitive price.

Yet Apple leaves severe bugs in their terminal, which causes every open terminal to crash, unfixed for years after the bug has been reported. Yet Apple requires 3rd party applications for basic window management: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/, https://manytricks.com/witch/. Yet Apple presents a macOS API so crippled, that sending a window to the back isn't even directly possible: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/233687/how-can-i-s....

I've used Terminal almost every day for the past 10 years and it's not crashed even one time. I can understand why sending a screen to the back wouldn't be a part of the API for security reasons alone. I think you're digging at some pretty niche edge cases.

Still has a Touch Bar? With no option to get rid of that unwanted nuisance and gimmick? Does nobody at Apple use an ESCAPE key or function keys?

Pass.

But did they fix the keyboard? I have a new MB Pro for work and two weeks of using the flat keys actually gave me horrible wrist pain. Now I use an external keyboard.

I use a 2015 MacBook Air at home that I can type on for hours without any wrist pain.

They did.

“an improved third-generation keyboard for quieter typing.”

Looking forward to reading the first reviews.

The keyboard still has the same design. It's just a third revision of the same basic flat design. They are not going to be making a completely different keyboard design unless they change the design of the computer itself.

Apple's failure to retire the novelty keyboard has entirely vindicated my decision 2 weeks ago to replace my 2013 MB Pro with a Dell XPS 15. The transition to Windows has been moderately painful, but Apple now doesn't offer any laptop hardware that even makes it onto my longlist.

Were I to consider their silly current line, an equivalent MBP to my fully-spec'd XPS (6 core 2.9+, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) would cost a ludicrous AUD$5860, compared to the $3500 I paid. My new machine has ports, a real keyboard, is very speedy, and has all the software availability one could wish for.

Macs are needed to develop for iOS and macOS, but other than that, in 2018, they seem like a pointless corporate affectation, a kind of high-priced technological suit & tie.

Still only 16GB of memory. Keyboard, this and lack of ports means I'm going to switch to a Thinkpad T480s for at least a year.

Apparently not! From the press release:

15-Inch MacBook Pro Highlights

6-core Intel Core i7 and Core i9 processors up to 2.9 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 4.8 GHz

Up to 32GB of DDR4 memory

Powerful Radeon Pro discrete graphics with 4GB of video memory in every configuration

Up to 4TB of SSD storage2

True Tone display technology

Apple T2 Chip

Touch Bar and Touch ID

Thanks, I see - on the Tech Specs it's easy to miss since it's nowhere the default config.

15 inch can have 32 gigs of ram

The 15" models go up to 32GB and have 4 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on them.

32 GB available on the 15" touchbar model.

Personally holding out for a 32GB 13", if my 2012 makes it that long.

Do you have a link? Haven't spotted that yet.

You can upgrade to 32 on the 15" models: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MR932...

Thanks!

You're mistaken: they got bumped to 32 for this model, which is now DDR4.

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