Apple Plans to Ship 16-Inch MacBook Pro This Year | Hacker News Reader

Apple Plans to Ship 16-Inch MacBook Pro This Year

forbes.com

44 pointstheBashShell71 comments

Heart be still.

Please leave the headphone jack. And if it's too much to ask we don't want/use/need the touchbar, other than the fingerprint reader.

I'll take faceid over a fingerprint scanner.

I'll take the logo being a fingerprint scanner, so I can use it when my laptop is closed and hooked to a big external monitor on my desk.

That would be pretty awkward for anyone who uses their laptop while it’s open, which is the majority.

Pretty sure the majority use are people in cubicles with the machines connected to external peripherals and closed.

I've actually never seen anyone use a MacBook with it closed.

For a start you've lost a useful screen. And the thermal performance must be awful.

The exhaust on MBPs is positioned such that it blows out the bottom of the screen’s hinge when closed.

I have two 27” monitors in my office, and using the MBP’s screen just does not feel useful to me... and yes, I have tried using it on more than one occasion.

Anecdata, I know, but upwards of 75% of the people I've worked with in the last 5 year who used Mac laptops either used them standalone or with a monitor as a second screen.

And I’ve worked at places where everyone above a certain pay grade or closeness to the C-levels gets Mac pros and the nicest displays x2-3. I’m sure there are more corporate machines out there than home use because that’s where the money is in IT. Edit-though I could be wrong.

MacBook Pro≠Mac Pro.

Anecdotally this is very wrong.

I work remote and don’t have an external monitor a lot of time.

When I do my laptop stays open as a secondary screen.

When I’m at HQ most people have the setup above.

My wife has no external monitor. My entire non tech friend group has pros and don’t use them connected to any peripherals.

That describes my office.

Primary display is a 27” or 32” 4k monitor w/ standing desks.

Most hate the butterfly keyboard. Lots of mechanical USBs.

Some like the touchbar. Not our blind developer.

I think of them as Mac Minis, before the recent line upgrade.

Exactly. I’m pretty sure the most common Mac OS user is still in media or marketing. People who demand the fanciest, largest displays and printers. They’re not going to tie themselves down to a laptop display unless that’s just how things are done there.

It also is not comfortable, nor ergonomic (using the laptop without external peripherals).

> I’m pretty sure the most common Mac OS user is still in media or marketing.

I see hardly ever see any developer using anything other than macOS (it's not called 'Mac OS'). I don't think the majority are in some niche like marketing or media.

Not everyone can afford a Mac: I suspect the people you see are skewed towards the relatively well-off.

They normally get them provided by their employer.

This is a great demonstration of the inadequacies of anecdata. No, I am pretty sure the _majority_ of MBP users do not in fact use it with the screen closed, connected to external devices, in cubicles. If you're going to do that, why even have a laptop?

I don't doubt your observation - I merely point out that you are in a bubble. The vast majority of MBP users I have observed use it open. As you would expect.

My company has over 200 of them, and it's rare to see one closed, so your dead wrong. I drive 2 27" 4K screens with mine, and leave the laptop open as a third screen.

I don't know why you are being downvoted. You bring up a legitimate issue, although I'm not sure if your solution is very good.

Faceid is very nice on a laptop. I have “login with face” on my SurfaceBook and it’s very convenient

With the extra space maybe include the touchbar above a row of physical function keys?

I want more of this thinking. Make the most of the space available instead of shrinking form factor like the xps line. Ie go for a 16” class chassis and fit the largest, bezel-free display in there they can. Instead of fitting the smallest machine around a 16” display. I realize his is how they’ll do it, and it’s annoying.

I think, similarly, a touch bar in addition to a full keyboard would be useful.

I have a 2013 MacBook Pro so I haven’t tried the Touchbar.

With the exception of the ESC key, with I use a lot, I’m not sure I’d miss the rest of the function keys. The idea of a touchbar seems like it could work if done right.

Did Apple do something wrong or it just doesn’t work in practice?

If you want to use a function key then you may be out of luck. But you definitely have to take your eyes off the screen and hunt and peck for the right option. It’s a net negative for a power user.

The Escape key is on the Touchbar and you do get used to it.

The problem with Touchbar is the tooling. Get something like BetterTouchTool and it changes everything. You can customise buttons for each app and each button can link to a menu item or perform a sequence of commands.

I like it - I have it show the function keys in the few apps I know the keyboard shortcuts for, and the app specific buttons in other apps.

I makes it nicer to adjust system settings (brightness, etc) and has helped me with new shortcuts in several apps that I use regularly but not daily.

Biggest con is the escape key, I mapped Caps Lock to esc and haven’t looked back. 2nd biggest is that you have to look at the touchbar to hit the “keys”, but I was never able to touch type function keys on laptops anyway so that doesn’t affect me.

I recently went from a 2015 MBP to a 2018 MBP with Touchbar. There is a utility called BetterTouchTool (https://folivora.ai/) that adds lots of great features to the Touchbar and made it worthwhile.

The Touchbar is a good idea, though it's not a killer feature - mostly because of issues with Apple's software support for it (same story as Force Touch). The biggest issues with it are the lack of a physical Esc key (a mistake, especially because the virtual Esc key is broken in some apps), lack of tactile/haptic feedback (BTT actually has an option to shake the force trackpad as a haptic feedback substitute), and poor customization support (you can show app-specific keys or "control strip" keys, but can't mix the two - there are artificial limitations to what's available created by Apple's idiosyncracies).

Here’s hoping that Apple will do what they did in the Air 2018 to the new mbp 19.

I had few hopes for the Touch Bar to be actually useful when it was announced. So far it hasn’t been any more useful than physical function keys, and I do miss physical button for volume up/down/mute. It was kinda nice to scroll through a video timeline or media library.

In the end, I don’t mind it being there, but it’s not useful enough to swap physical buttons for. It might be different if they add haptic feedback and Force Touch.

Though, I’ve been running Catalina for some development work, and have found Touch Bar to make a lot of sense in Sidecar context (where you cannot use finger to navigate around, but it shows the Touch Bar at the bottom, so it sort of become the primary navigation for touch)

The biggest problem with the touchbar for me, which can't be solved I think, is that you can accidentally graze a button and trigger something without realising what you've done. I do this constantly by accident and I can only stop it by severely slowing down my typing.

I had this issue too and used BetterTouchBar to remove all buttons except for a big ESC in the upper left. (I show the system Touch Bar if I hit the fn key, so I can still control brightness and volume.) Unfortunately BTB is buggy and occasionally stops hiding buttons, but it’s the best solution I’ve found so far.

I think better functionality and UX could be achieved with iPod, iPhone or iPad integration.

Use it as a touchscreen numpad / macro interface with context changed around the ‘focused’ application running on OS X.

Come up w cutesy mounts for desk, traveling, etc.

Or, get rid of the mechanical keyboard and touchpad, and make the entire bottom half a lower fidelity touchscreen.

I personally like the touchbar and I always map the Esc key to my Caps Lock key anyway, so the touchbar Esc key has never been an issue for me.

There is tons of space to the sides of the trackpad.

Mostly thinking for the fingerprint reader. Don't use the rest of my touchbar.

And please be three times as thick, with excellent cooling, and huge dual removable modular batteries, and a pony while I'm at it.

I'd like it if they added a lightning port also. I can't always use bluetooth headphones, and that way I don't have to carry around two sets of corded headphones; I could just use the lightning headphones I have for my phone.

Word on the street is that lightning's going away anyway. No sense for both lightning and USB-C. Next iPhone probably the last with lightning - if it's not gone already.

Ah I never made that connection. That would be good news if USB-C headphones could plug into both.

My wants:

- Mini oled screen [0]

- 4k resolution

- 2012 body

- 2012 keyboard

- magsafe

- 32gb minimum

Most of these will guarentee a purchase from me as I'm replacing an ageing 2012.

- AMD Ryzen [1]

This will have me foaming at the mouth lol. I can dream I guess.

I'd love for the keyboard to not be piping hot under load. Or the laptop to be throttling under load or extremely hot weather. An AMD Processor or even an ARM can maybe have it warm or perhaps cool to touch?

[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/21/apple-samsung-oled-ipad...

[1]: https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-3800x-benchmarks-leaked-cru...

Can I add a swappable battery to your list?

Please give it real ports. Not just USB-C. And please make it not catch fire. And the keyboard not break. And the CPU not thermal-throttle terribly. And Nvidia GPU option. And a screen that has a reasonably-durable ribbon cable. And a keyboard that's not trash.

Isn't USB-C real? Ideally, it would have 3-4 USB-C ports but USB-C is definitely the future.

Yeah, but for now, I need something other than just USB-C. I don't want to replace all my peripherals, nor do I want to carry dongles.

I use a single hub for everything but video, for which I use a USB-C -> DisplayPort adaptor that supports 4K@60Hz. It’s a minor sacrifice to contribute to the normalization of a new, universal port standard that is orders of magnitude better than the old standard.

If they had retained just one USB-A on the MBP I would be so much happier with mine.

That said, even with just USB-C the dongle situation is still complicated— the plug form factor may be universal but the signals aren't. IIRC Apple's own Thunderbolt dongle doesn't actually work with Displayport signals

I agree it's a much better standard, but it's not a minor sacrifice for every one. There are a lot of old things which will be discarded and contribute to e-waste, though that may be somewhat offset by one connector. I wish people didn't go quite so scorched-earth on one port, especially apple. Just offer both for a while.

Basically don't make it thin. No one gives a F* if its thin or not.

I also don’t need them to focus on excellent bass and audio output via the internal speakers.

Not a priority guys.

Perhaps the device will the same size and will simply reduce the bezels on screen, since 15.4 to 16 isn't much more.

I still think the 17" models that they produced until about 2012 or 2013 were the best machines they have made. Everyone I know who had one kept those monsters running as long as they could. A refreshed version in that form factor might be enough to make me buy an Apple product.

Serious question: what are super-large laptop screens good for?

If I'm using my laptop on the go, I prefer a small screen so it's usable on a small plane tray, on a cramped cafe table, in a conference room where I don't want my device to distract, etc. And weighs as little as possible.

While if I'm using my laptop for real work, at work or at home, I want to plug it into an actual large screen, which 15" or 16" is not -- it's just too small. Let's do 25" or 30".

Large laptop screens are this weird middle ground for me that seem to be worst-of-both-worlds.

What am I missing?

I usually find a coffee shop with large enough tables intended for laptops. I just enjoy being out and doing work on my 15” screen from time to time.

I find I use the 15" laptop screen more when it's on my desk than the smaller laptop screens. Sometimes you want to get work done so ignoring other distractions on secondary screens are great. i can go full screen at 1680P and not feel out of sorts but full screen on a larger display doesn't do it for me.

You can pack more battery into a larger body.

Speaking for myself, 15” is a comfortable size to write code on using a larger font, due to slight vision issues.

I thought the same until last year when I had these awkward 3 week business trips to our various satellite offices.

I would bring my small laptop, set it at my temporary cubicle, and basically leave it there for the duration. I always asked for a spare monitor, but sometimes there wouldn’t be any at the smaller offices, or they would be crappy TN monitors.

It was then that I realized having a large screen would be very convulsions.

That seems strange to me. 15" seems like a pretty standard size for carrying cases, etc. 17" made sense as significantly larger. Unless they plan to replace the 15" with the 16" and get it in the same chassis form factor, this seems like overloading that space with too many options. Apple generally has pretty segmented product lines, perhaps one good option for large categories (casual users, power users, etc.) without making you think too hard after getting in a general segment.

I bought a 14 inch sleeve for my MBP retina 15 inch (2015) because my old 15 inch sleeve was to loose. Especially with those soft material sleeves the thinness of the laptops plays a factor in fit size.

Current 15.4” VS new 16”. Does is make a significant difference? Both being a 1.6 aspect ratio

Anything < 17" feels sub optimal compared to my to 3x 24" setup on my main desktop

I'm not sure why the larger options are not offered I can't believe I'm the only one and that the margin isn't there

> I'm not sure why the larger options are not offered

Probably because the market for very large laptops is smaller.

have a personal 2013 13" macbook air that is getting pretty old and needs to be replaced. I have a 2016 15" pro from work... Very hesitant to upgrade my air because paying 1.5-2.5k for a laptop with this keyboard is a deal breaker.

I feel like if there was a 3rd party service replacing the keyboard with one that has better travel it would make tons of money.

I guess the numbers are really showing people want bigger laptops... In my circles most think the 12inch MacBook is too large. iPad Pro 10.5 with a better keyboard and more software freedom would be perfect. But almost everyone I know is a 'traveling coder'.

Edit: seems downvotes because of disagreeing? I am just adding a data point from a few 100 people I know/work with who would never buy this machine. Or any other larger than 13inch machine for that matter.

11” macbook air is _almost_ perfect form factor. Just a handful of apps don’t handle how widescreen it is well.

Yes, that one was great. I am also saying that the market apparently shows people want bigger laptops as they cancelled that 11inch one which was really perfect... I miss it; there is nothing to replace it really.

As a counterpoint, I’m a traveling coder/student and I abhor tiny screens. If the LG Gram 17 gets an update with a 4K screen, or better yet if Apple releases a zero-bezel 17” MBP the same size as the current 15.4” model, I will jump on that like my cat on anything dairy.

Thanks for the counterpoint. Come to think of it, I really know one person who likes as-big-as-possible and he is a pilot and avid gamer, so he buys 'portable' gaming laptops.

The laptops I encounter when working with people all over the world are usually 13 inch or smaller and people nag a lot about that they are not comfortable to carry or use in cramped spaces. There are quite a few Japanese laptops that are popular among this crowd, especially this[0] jewel pops up more and more.

[0] https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/products/rz8k/

Allowing a fully customizable touch bar that has an API would be an option for me at least.

The keyboard will be gone, this time, replaced with a oled touch-panel.

All input will happen through dance movements interpreted via a depth-sensing notch at the top of the screen.

"Capoeira is an extraordinary new technology that we've been developing to revolutionize the human computer interface experience."

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