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martinpw

The Benjamin Button review of improvements in older Macs compared with newer ones:

https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the...

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I think my 2007-ish macbook pro had the best keyboard of all. Light action concave keys

I don't think that the superiority of concave keys gets the attention it deserves.

- the keys fit your finger better - the force of the keypress is evenly distributed across the surface of your finger, especially as the key bottoms out. New keyboards deform your finger pad as you press down and are less comfortable.

- the concave shape helps you locate the keys and center your fingers by feel. This leads to more accurate finger placement initially and as you type. You will type more accurately.

Sounds simliar to the Thinkpad keys/keyboards - the best in the industry IMO. Mac trackpad + Thinkpad keyboard = perfect laptop :)

If you are speaking about the 7 row Thinkpad keyboards from before the Lenovo acquisition I totally agree.

yes, this early style MacBook Pro keyboard was my favorite, as well! I could never understand the preference for the newer ("chiclet") keyboards.

A comic from the same month making the same point: http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2016/10/29/the-new-macbooks-ar...

"We want to make a laptop so thin you'll close it and never find it again."

Guess this guy was pleased with his slower processor too.

Keyboard and processor are unrelated dimensions of improvement.

Probably still come out ahead with the additional time spent slower processing entails compared to Genius Bar visits and repair times. Ferrari vs Camry sort of thing.

I spend less than 10% of my time at my computer maxing my processor. I spend more than 90% of my time using the keyboard. I’ve seriously considered selling my 2017 MBP and buying a 2018 MBA. Then I heard the problems still haven’t been solved with that model and nixed that idea. But I would much rather have a slower machine with a reliable/comfortable keyboard than a faster machine with a brittle/uncomfortable one.

Speed and utilization are not the same. My 2018 MBP was a great speed improvement over the 2015 MBP I previously used, even in cases where the 2015 MBP wasn't using all cores (which really rarely happened, since for the workloads I use, multiple Electron apps and Docker for Mac, typing in Slack would start stuttering as soon as multiple cores were in constant use). I don't think it was ever usable enough at 6-7 cores maxed for me to start new things to try to use that last core...

I've had the opposite experience.

I use a mid 2012 retina that I bought used and have spilled water on 4 times. I keep 10 chrome windows open with around 15-20 tabs open each. In addition to microsoft word, sketch/figma, atom/pycharm/rubymine/intellij, multiple preview books, multiple iterm instances, postgres, and the Books app.

I don't have any trouble except when using docker for mac (which I just use the cloud for now) and photoshop.

I would like to get a new laptop though.

> I don't have any trouble except when using docker for mac

That's... the same experience? Not "opposite", for sure.

If you spend big bucks on a MBP, and still have problems with performance, you could start using the cloud or a home server for that docker stuff. Scaleway has reasonable priced servers, or you buy something like a simple Zotac Mini PC to run as linux server at home.

Do you happen to know any great guide for setting it up properly?

I did it a while back with docker machine but I remember it being quite the hassle and didn't work as smoothly as a locale instance, damn shame since docker is the number obesity leading reason I keep running out of ram on my laptop.

I have had a good time with Cloud9, now part of AWS. I default to t2.nano and scale it up for large bursts of workload.

This is exactly why I went for a 2015 MBP instead of a newer one last year. Having a better keyboard and physical escape/function keys (plus the significantly lower price) outweighed the lack of USB C/Thunderbolt 3. This may have a shorter "tail", in terms of long term utility, but hopefully there'll be a MBP refresh at around that time. If that is still found wanting, I suppose I can join the Thinkpad+Linux club.

I did the same, for the same reason. It’s a joy to use and every time I read one of the (so many) articles on the MB butterfly keyboard, I am reminded that I made the right choice. The 2015 MBP really is the best Mac laptop - which if you want a Mac rather than a Linux box, the best laptop ever - https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever

I also chose this route last June. My coworkers upgraded to the new rendition later and I've since listened to them complain about the keyboard and mess around with adapters in literally every meeting room. The hdmi port is incredibly useful, I've never had issues in any meeting room and it's inclusion means I never have to carry adapters around. Not so with my colleagues, they need one even just to share files with a thumb drive.

I hope someone at Apple comes to their senses and makes the next big refresh of the Pro turn it into a Pro computer again.

The lack of emphasis of good input is absolutely maddening when people were buying macbooks with lousy specs for the price, low-res displays for the price, who absolutely loved the fantastic trackpad, adequete keyboard, and good build quality.

Now the devices are getting more fragile and the keyboards aren't even average they're junk. The touchbar is shit. Apple seems to be regressing to their form over function puck mouse days.

Meanwhile desktop consumers are realising how undervalued input has been for a long time and are buying $100 keyboards in great quantities.

> The touchbar is shit.

It really is. Way to go making it impossible to (un)mute and adjust the volume without opening my eyes.

And in exchange of what, really? The privilege of losing the physical Esc?

Not to mention the touchid sensor is completely terrible. It never - ever - works for me. I never had this level of problem with touchid on the iPhone ...

The new iCloud Keychain password prompt, which shows only touchid with password prompt hidden behind a button is fucking terrible — along with the auto submit behavior after filling out the form - which very often results in extra password required popups.

I’m starting to wonder if anyone at apple is using this stuff — maybe corporate disabled all these features for security reasons and apple developers actually aren’t allowed to use in practice ...?

I use TouchID all the time. I think yours is simply broken, to be honest.

I have found the TouchID to be similarly unreliable. It's possible thought it's a mixture of different human factors (iPhone TouchID is easier to touch the same way every time) and more immature hardware.

No problem with touchId on my 2018 MBA. Actually it works with wet fingers better then my 6s.

I thought the missing escape would be the thing that drove me nuts since I spend a reasonable chunk of my day in VI. Turns out, it is the damn siri button above the delete. Not quite sure how I keep hitting it.

Same here. After a few weeks I finally found out how to remove that button. Who wants to speak out loud to their laptop anyway?

I would... if it did anything useful. “Hey Siri, mark a 2h task for Project X in Xero”. But it doesn’t do anything remotely like that, yet. Supposedly the next release will have Shortcuts, which should offer a bit more extensibility.

Who?

People that type with two fingers and can't tell the difference between Safari and google.

You live in a bubble my friend. I've seen it in the wild and it's a marvel to watch how much they use it.

I don't need peak processor power, but I sure would like a modern processor underclocked for battery life.

You can get the benefits of a faster processor without constantly maxing it out. A faster clocked processor will complete tasks faster. If you’re just browsing the internet, no difference, but if you do any type of compilation the extra cores and speed will make a significant difference.

In the case of node and client side development, the extra speed can shave seconds off hot code injection and compilation times on every code change (every time you save the file).

> If you’re just browsing the internet, no difference,

Even the modern web continually maxes many processors. Google Docs/Sheets, Slack, Hangouts. "Just browsing the web" has become a compute intensive task.

The only substantial difference between my 2011 MBP and 2018 MBP for what I use it for (browsing the web, the lightest of computation) is that the 2018 model has really sharp edges that make me hate carrying it around. For my heavier workloads even the latest, top-of-the-line MBP is completely inadequate.

Which is a shame since MBPs were once the fastest Windows laptops on the market. I don't think the form factor really allows for a true workstation laptop anymore akin to say the Lenovo W series.

My personal laptop is a 2012 MacBook Pro. Still going strong.

Pretty asinine comment. Most heavy duty computing is done on cloud systems these days.

There are niches like video editing, but those are increasingly becoming GPU dependent.

I don't know if you've noticed but Intel chips have hardly improved over the years. They've been content with die shrinks for since sandy bridge. And even then, they've had to turn off the speculative hacks because of spectre and meltdown.

Apple also doesn't care about thermal performance. Look at how their i9 models throttle and perform worse than the i7 variants.

If you're buying apple you aren't putting performance first and foremost. It's either because of mac os or the design. You've been able to buy much faster windows laptops for far less money since they switched to intel. That's why a lot of devs have switched to lenovo.

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