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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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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

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.

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)

> 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.

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