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Comment by colinjoy | Hacker News Reader

Switched from 2015 to 2018 model recently.

The good:

  - fingerprint for unlock is a nice convenience
  - 32GB RAM are nice. A much needed bump, allowing me run some workload on the client that previously required an additional workstation

the bad:

  - keyboard is noisy
  - touchbar = useless gimick - I actually used the F-keys and ESC a lot, now they are effectively gone.
  - touchpad much worse with it‘s fake press (i.e at drag and drop) and the increased size means more accidental inputs occur
  - removal of magsafe ... „it just works“ apparently is too boring
  - headphone jack moved to the right so the cable gets in the way of the mouse
  - thermals ... I hear the fans spin up a lot more.
  - port mono-culture. maybe usb-c is the future, but my present is now full of dongles

Overall, I‘d much prefer a 2015 or 2012 MBP enclosure with updated internals. Not to mention the hefty price increase YoY.

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Wrt drag and drop: I always enable three finger drag on any macbook.

Same here, the trackpad is so frustrating to use without this feature. I hope apple doesn't remove it in the future.

I already used 3-finger swipe to navigate between spaces. Can’t have it all I guess.

I use 3-finger drag and 4-finger swipe to navigate spaces.

> touchpad much worse with it‘s fake press (i.e at drag and drop) and the increased size means more accidental inputs occur

Google around and find out how to turn on 3 finger drag. I have no idea why they decided to hide this feature, but its the only sensible way to drag and drop on the trackpad.

> - touchbar = useless gimick - I actually used the F-keys and ESC a lot, now they are effectively gone.

You can go to the Keyboard section of System Preferences, and there's a drop down the lets you change back to F-keys ("Touch Bar Shows:")

But in that case it's nothing more than a strictly worse set of F-keys, as you lose the tactility.

Exactly. For example it is next to impossible to use them for quick debugger navigation, as you can no longer rest your fingers on the keys, much like you would with WASD clusters in a game.

I also use F-keys with modifiers for all sorts of shortcuts. I know that using layers and sticking to the home row can be more efficient, but being forced to use third party tools to restore basic functionality is not my understanding of “it just works”™ - it did work just fine before they broke it.

> I actually used the F-keys and ESC a lot

Then remap Caps Lock to Escape right now. There's no good reason not to, considering how easy MacOS makes it.

Can't help you with F-keys though. Never used them myself. On Mac OS there's usually an alternate keyboard shortcut. That row of keys is too far away from home row to be ergonomically useful.

My current keyboard doesn't have that row at all. Actually that was a bit of an issue since I'm using Windows with that keyboard, and unlike Mac OS, there's some real need for F-keys. So I had to remap F3 and F4, but that was all.

In my opinion, the trackpad is a really great idea on paper, as that row should never be used for frequent typing anyway. And it's pretty close to the screen, so it's not too far to look down. But it doesn't seem like they've managed to make it work in practice. I've seen some people who have had success with some customisation though.

> the trackpad is a really great idea on paper

I guess you meant "Touch Bar"

but my caps lock is my control key!

> Then remap Caps Lock to Escape right now.

I already remapped Caps Lock to Control. And I use Control a lot more than Escape.

Use Karabiner-Elements to remap it to both. Escape when hit and control when held.

I wonder how many more functions we can remap on this one key before Apple finally removes it :/.

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