Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro
engadget.com
engadget.com
All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags.
I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it feels like a total gimmick to me.
I applaud Apple's innovative spirit, but the touchbar wasn't useful at launch, it isn't useful now, and they don't seem to have put any effort into making it better. I hope they kill it with the next Macbook pro release and just go the touchscreen route like everyone else.
I guess there's a still tradeoff: this way you need to move your finger around, but you can immediately skip to exactly the level you want. With holding a button down you have to time it to get to the right spot instead.
Personally I like the slider better but that's just my opinion.
If that bugs you enough to bother with a workaround, you could try something like this using HammerSpoon: https://gist.github.com/spinscale/fd82f00da29447990f27f36b3f...
Edit for clarity: when you do this, your finger is not actually "on" the slider handle itself. The slider shows up in its usual place, which is offset from where your finger is. But the sliding still adjusts it.
It's a shame that this is not intuitive or discoverable. Its much more efficient but I had to have someone tell me about it.
I feel that if you do the press and slide, the interface shouldn’t change to a slider (that needs to fade away).
It’s not an intuitive or discoverable command.
So my question: once you discovered that you could do a swipe gesture, did you find yourself using it often?
The best fix for this for me (the sliding was still a pain) has been to customize the touchbar like this:
In keyboard settings:
1. Change "Touch Bar Shows" to "Expanded Control Strip"
2. Add the 3 button volume and the 2 button brightness controls.
This setup behaves the most like the functional keys for me and has been the best at alleviating frustrations.
I still hope Apple nukes the touch bar though, it's the worst aspect of the Macbook aside from the missing I/O ports.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Scroll down to "Design Considerations": "Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display."
But what I really want is for the touch bar to be a display and input device for things normally elsewhere: time, date, maybe CPU usage, etc. This to me is not a hardware problem, but one with policy.
Edit: what I really want is for Apple to let people experiment with new hardeware, rather than impose their vision on how it should be used. Unlike many others I don't actually hate the touch bar and see some potentials, but not if Apple restricts its use.
I think Apple lost their function and form way a while ago. It's never coming back. The new Mac Pro is the latest example of this. I bought a 2018 MB Pro 13" last year and the touch bar is a waste of space in my mind. We see now that Apple is ditching the scissor keys, but regardless, their design decisions for a while have just been wanting to have something look cool instead of a balance of looking good and functioning great.
As for power, I believe the two MPX bays provide dual 8pin connectors for up to an extra 300 watts, so should support most power hungry pci-e card designs.
Honestly though, if you can afford this machine it’s not like really any of this matters, this isn’t exactly a hobbyist computer people are going to buy and upgrade themselves all that much.
(It does matter to me, I have owned several mac pro towers and wouldn't touch the trash can with a 10-foot pole)
https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
They haven’t announced the maximum amount of flash drive space you can get from them (and I wouldn’t pay Apple prices for it anyway), but you can get 4TB of overpriced SSD storage on the current iMac Pro.
"Storage Configure up to 4TB of SSD storage"
(You can get that from a single 2.5" ssd right now on amazon)
Sort of underspec'd when you consider the 1.5tb of RAM you can configure.
MacOS wouldn’t fare any better as a touch screen OS.
App specific stuff, window-manager customisable stuff, all kinds of things. This would have given app developers an opportunity to do stuff with it that you can't do on a PC.
Developers could have liked it instead of feeling mightily pissed off and betrayed by the company they had given so much money to over the years.
Fortunately I got an external keyboard.
- magsafe vs new charger
- ports on 2015 MBP vs now
- keyboard on 2015 vs now
- physical keys vs touchbar
The only improvement that is really an improvement is CPU speed and memory, which I could not care less about. In the same timeframe (2015 to 2019) Apple went from the most innovative company to the 17th position.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/apple-is-no...
Readers of this site are mostly “hackers,” however mutated or dumbed-down that term has become over the years, correct? Everyone here has their windows and spaces just so, a full complement of shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and if they're serious about the Macintosh tools like TextExpander.
As standard as GUIs are, we've all experienced a moment of disorientation when borrowing another person's computer. The more experienced and skilled that other person is, the greater that disorientation due to the amount of “hacking” they've done on their own environment.
So how come this impulse stops at the Touch Bar?
I've hacked the hell out of mine. I've mapped inscrutable keyboard commands like cmd-opt-ctrl-D to context sensitive buttons, included globals for quick terminal visors and development tools and password managers… it's slick as hell and I hate giving it up when I occasionally opt for the external keyboard at home.
The Touch Bar is amazing, you just need to hack the damn thing. Yeah, Apple should have done a better job making it more useful out of the box, but it's possible to do some really wild stuff with it.
map your Caps Lock key to Escape and go to town. https://github.com/vas3k/btt-touchbar-presets
I've also used the same program to disable touch bar esc. This way there are no accidental presses. I did it by mapping esc to 'vk_none' for the 'no product name' device, which is how Karabiner sees touch bar.
I still dislike the keyboard because of its failure rate, but the layout is ok for me now.
I have the MBP "Escape" (without the Touch Bar), but if I did have the Touch Bar this would avoid 90% of the issues involving not having a hardware Esc key for me.
First, add half a centimeter of clearance between the touch bar and the number keys. I've never once accidentally hit the Touch Bar, but one of my close coworkers does all the time, after years with this, so I can't deny that it's an issue.
Second, allow users the ability to map any keyboard shortcut or menu item to a Touch Bar button. This would work similarly to how any menu item can be mapped to a keyboard shortcut in the System Preferences.
The idea of shifting it up a little is a good one. But at that point they might as well shift it even more and put back the hardware function keys, too. I don't think they can move it without effectively conceding that it's not the winning solution that they want to position it as.
Is there a preset that never shows anything on the touch bar, ever, except for the Escape key and the "global" brightness/volume buttons? Can this be done in, like, five seconds?
If not, then I might Frisbee this computer straight out the window. If so, I would love to know how.
Prefernces > Keyboard > Customize control strip (bottom of first tab)
There's a strange GUI for like dragging stuff in and out... I don't remember how it works exactly..
but it is very close to 5 seconds.
Not 5 seconds, but probably less than a minute.
EDIT: So I found it - if, in the Keyboard preferences pane, you pick "Expanded Control Strip" instead of "App Controls", apps can't awfulify the touch bar. I now have haptically null touch points that do what I expect a Mac's top row to do, which is worse than having keys that do what I expect a Mac's top row to do, but it isn't as bad as it was at the start of the day.
What you’d lose in being able to look down and see what a key does at the moment, you’d gain in having more tactile response allowing for easier pressing without looking.
Also, when I find an inscrutable keyboard shortcut I use frequently, I simply remap it. There are enough KB shortcut combos possible that running out of keyboard shortcuts is rarely an issue. And bonus, you can touch type those shortcuts in.
What the Touch Bar gives me is context sensitivity, different suites of commands on a per-app basis. Evidently I'm just lacking the mental agility of remembering that F2 is "open responsive desktop mode" in Safari and "clean build cache" in Xcode.
As for the arguments of touch-typists here, I'm a touch typist and don't look at the keyboard either, but the idea behind the Touch Bar is that it's just within visual range of the screen. Bumping it half a centimeter higher would make it even more so.
Basically everyone learns to type without looking at some point which is the ideal zone you want users in (a one-to-one connection with the machine, eyes straight, hands down).
Context switching the UI in a computer interface, often randomly depending on the app, while requiring the user to look down to use it is terrible UX. This whole technology screams ‘because we can’ (aka there was space to do it) rather than developers needed help with anything.
The worst part was including Escape key into it, which is where most of the complaints come from as it’s a critical part of modern OS and browser interfaces - not just vim/emacs.
By including the escape key it went from a voluntary / side interface for certain use-cases (complex music, photo, or editing apps for example) to becoming part of the primary keyboard/HCI itself which is where it crossed the line from a mediocre idea into a bad idea.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/9/16866206/ra...
[2] https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/05/asus-zenbook-pro-15-scre...
Hitting a function button is not "typing" in any real sense anyway, use being so relatively infrequent. Can you really hit F8 consistently, without looking?
Maybe the doctrinaire solution would be to delete the function keys, if "thou shalt not look at keys" is the ultimate commandment. But that's incompatible with legacy needs.
Back in the pre-GUI days when use of the function keys was far more prevalent, software would sometimes ship with cardboard overlays to indicate which key did what action. The touchbar is bringing that old idea into the 21st century.
I would have preferred they scaled it back and include physical Esc and power keys on either side, but in other ways it presents a real improvement in computing UX which is too rare these days.
If I played a game requiring something like that I'd learn it quick.
I previously bought an all-black mech keyboard with no key labels which looked sleek but I didn't like it, swaped the keycaps out two days later. Switching to a new keyboard is probably a good time to keep them until you get used to it!
The touchbar is basically a toolbar that Apple has moved to the least accessible part of the entire laptop.
Then where will I map my ctrl key? Apple stupidly put the fn key in the corner and i can't map ctrl to it.
I use emacs reasonably often and I reached out to Mitsuharu Yamamoto about touchbar support in emacs and sadly never heard back.
The ability to bind arbitrary emacs functions to the touchbar, programmatically, would be a killer feature.
"To improve the use of proprietary systems is a misguided goal. Our aim, rather, is to eliminate them. We include support for some proprietary systems in GNU Emacs in the hope that running Emacs on them will give users a taste of freedom and thus lead them to free themselves."
So I'm not concerned about GNU zealotry and how it relates to the touchbar.
If there was a small gap between the top of the physical keyboard and the touch bar, that might be enough to prevent false taps. Or I have to hack the Touch Bar to figure out where I'm accidentally hitting it, and don't put any buttons there.
I'm also triggering false taps on the Touch Pad, which never used to happen. I suspect if there was another gap between the bottom of the physical keyboard and the top of the Touch Pad, this wouldn't happen.
Also, when my fingers are on home row, I can't even reach the touch bar without overextending/completely flattening my hand, which is hard to accidentally do while typing (and I have larger than normal hands).
Personally, I tend to unconciously rest my hands spread out over the keyboard when I'm not typing. My thumbs are down by the space bar, and my fingers on top of the Touch Bar.
I would be thrilled if Apple offered an alternate "developer's configuration" with a row of physical function keys and a Touch Bar above it. There is plenty if room; they'd only need to shrink the almost comically oversized touchpad (which would still be plenty large).
I'm writing this on a MBP purchased earlier this year that has nothing but room for both with it's oversized trackpad that is nothing but a waste of space to me. I get more out of a trackball personally, but even if I am exclusively using the trackpad, I don't need all this wasted space, it is even bigger than my phone.
I like physical keys, I can get used to them and never have to look down to use them. You cannot deliver the same experience with a touch-anything (at least not in 2019).
It's not getting better over time, it's forcing me to constantly have to correct my spelling so now I just keep typing at a minimum on this computer and I'm waiting to get rid of this crappy device at the earliest possibility.
I may simply go back to Windows at home if that's the case, and will use a Windows Laptop at work if possible. Seriously, fuck Apple for this arrogance.
Having to replace a whole $80 proprietary charging brick because the cable connection frayed was a pretty shitty deal.
The option we have now are magnetic breakaway USB-C nubs, but I've been hesitant to jump on that train because of stories about them breaking off in ports, short circuiting, or failing to connect properly. And especially if you have a 15" MBP with the 87W power brick, I don't think they can handle that amount of power.
Eventually I hope to see some well made versions of that from known good vendors, but even things like Griffin BreakSafe have crappy reviews right now.
Since Apple never licensed out MagSafe, the market has been full of poorly built counterfeits rather than anything from reputable manufacturers. That’s another thing I don’t miss.
Anyway, I’d bet there’s still some market for used MagSafe chargers to be used with older macs whose chargers have frayed.
I hate Apple.
People who work as janitors probably aren't exactly wild about cleaning dirty toilets every day, but they do what they have to do to earn a living.
The touch bar is an unacceptable gimmick for me, a solution in search of a non-existent problem (my physical escape key is doing just fine). I'm also not going to buy Bluetooth headphones, just because they decided to drop support for standard headphone jacks.
The right to repair and extend my personal computer is another. It's common human decency, which apparently is not a priority at Apple anymore.
Sadly, this seems to be a symptom of a larger systemic issue among most large/"successful" tech companies - sheer arrogance and lack of respect for users ("useds").
I like physical escape keys, I really don't want expensive Bluetooth headphones, and I like having a headphone jack on my phone. I also like being able to repair and upgrade my equipment.
So what do I do? I don't buy Apple stuff.
Then I read discussions like this one and chuckle at all the people griping about all these things, and then continuing to buy and use stuff from the most hacker-unfriendly company on the planet. It's almost like they want to suffer.
Thankfully, Apple is not a monopoly, or even close to one, and there's lots of alternatives (which of course have their own downsides, but not for basic stuff like these issues), so none of this stuff bothers me, and I wonder what anti-consumer action they'll take next to piss people off so I can laugh about it.
They may not have a monopoly, but they do control ~40-50% of the smartphone market in the West and force developers to use MacOS to target their phones. In other markets like pro media production, they absolutely have a monopoly on machines.
A lot of us are frustrated by the fact that with each generation, Apple has made an inferior product that costs more money at every tier of their Mac catalog. Even if we're not paying for the machines, we have to go through the rigamarole of repair delays and thermal throttling under load even on the "pro" machines.
Then you need to stop whining and use the tool you have to use to do your job.
I don't like Windows, but there aren't many jobs out there where I don't have to use it in some capacity. Luckily, I get to do my development in Linux, but I still have to use Windows for Office applications, Outlook email, running Linux VMs, etc., so I can't get away from it entirely. It's one of the things I put up with so I can make a living, just like I also have to put up with a commute, getting up in the morning, etc.
If you don't like developing iOS apps, then move into another line of work. I don't have any interest in developing Windows apps in C#, so I don't go into that field, and stick with work which lets me do at least some of my work in Linux. But to be fair, if I was forced to choose between writing C# .NET Windows 10 apps and cleaning toilets for a living, I'd take the Windows job.
>A lot of us are frustrated by the fact that with each generation, Apple has made an inferior product that costs more money at every tier of their Mac catalog.
That's their entire business model: sell fancy-looking stuff at inflated prices to non-technical people that they're able to operate, and who also are willing to spend a lot of money on that image and that brand name. It's like getting a job as a Bentley mechanic and complaining that Bentleys aren't as practical as a Toyota or F150.
But it's just one of the things I have to put up with for the job, like many other annoyances, and overall things are pretty good which is why I'm still here. Thankfully my job doesn't entail a large amount of email. So I don't understand why people complain so much about Macs; if you don't like it, don't buy it, but if you're being given it for work, that's why it's called "work": it's not supposed to be fun. If Outlook started causing me so much trouble that it was impairing my work performance, I'd bring it up with my management and let them deal with it. If they didn't, I'd just continually remind them of how much of my time is being wasted by it so they don't think I'm slacking off.
It is a bit hypocritical (or masochistic) for me to complain about Apple products while still using them, albeit older models.
One reason why I'm frustrated is that I fondly remember the era of Apple ][. To quote, "Wozniak's open-architecture design and the Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices, including peripheral cards such as serial controllers, display controllers, memory boards, hard disks, networking components, and realtime clocks."
Recent trends seem to be an affront to the spirit of personal computing, and that's what I'm lamenting essentially.
MacOS and Apples seemingly honest dedication to privacy are the only reason I use Apple hardware.
Apart from hackintosh type solutions I don’t see a way to have both.
At home, I use Linux. No, I don't "need" access to Adobe software. I do my work at work, using the tools they provide me.
>MacOS and Apples seemingly honest dedication to privacy
Seemingly. You can get real privacy if you use Linux, and you can use it on all kinds of hardware.
Linux and open BSD variants are calling...
Nobody gets it right all the time but Apple has a history with this type of behavior of being correct.
But beyond that, we have to define what being _correct_ entails. It is _because_ of Apple that other manufacturers followed suit and their justification was ostensibly for making a slimmer phone (fitting more components into the shell) which was quickly proven to be irrelevant. I don't romanticize about the headphone jack but the premise behind the claim that Apple could be "correct" to remove it doesn't seem foundationally solid as an argument (let alone from a historical standpoint).
If only Windows was better. My home MacBook just broke after 6 years and I am looking for a replacement. At work I have Dell and Surface devices and after weighing everything I still think a new MacBook is the best of all. They are worse than the 2015 models but still better than everything else on the market once you look at hardware and OS. Just my personal opinion.
In general it seems there is a trend to making things worse for whatever reason. The new MacBooks are worse than the ones a few years ago and Windows 10 is worse than 7. They should just have added WSL, HyperV and other goodies to Windows 7 and left the UI alone and it would be a better OS.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/01/apples-dramatic-q1-2019-r...
I get that they don't always hit the nail on the head, but then who does? Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and get better.
Also, I think a lot of their users do like the computers they make. There are inherent tradeoffs in any product that isn't isn't entirely custom designed for a specific customer. (Actually, that's a tradeoff too, since an entirely custom designed computer with tiny production runs would be very expensive.)
Anyway, I don't think you should get mad. For yourself, go get the computer you want. (And for work, well, like most of us, you lose some personal flexibility when you work with other people. Hopefully, the greater things you can accomplish as part of a group is good compensation, or if not that, then at least the paycheck is.)
I've had devices from from Dell, Microsoft (3x), and Lenovo (2x) in the past few years, and they've all had hardware or driver issues either from the start or within the first few months. Tried countless registry hacks and driver reinstallations, spent dozens more hours on the phone with support reps who have no idea what they're doing, finally gotten a replacement but it doesn't include warranty coverage so the next failure is game over. Worst support by far was Dell -- they refuse to admit there's a problem, transfer you to wrong departments, and just wait for you to hang up. Their basic warranty coverage also only includes "depot service", which means you mail the machine away for two weeks and literally all they do is wipe it and reinstall the OS. Lenovo sent somebody to my home and actually resolved the issue.
Even when the system is put together correctly, every Windows update breaks something, or reverts some setting to a default value, and you don't get to choose which ones you need and which to skip. That Persian calendar fix is going to break your touchpad. Your system event log will be full of errors, and you won't know if you should be concerned. But that's just how Windows is, rotted and barely clunking along. Not to mention the built-in app ecosystem -- my wife tried their Mail app for a while, and one day it deleted all of her emails and calendar events. OneDrive sucks. Everything about Windows sucks.
I've done the "Reset This PC" thing on 3 different machines, and it's bricked all of them.
By contrast, the MacBook Pro that I've used at work for a few years has had zero problems and the OS feels so much more coherent. I do passionately hate the touch bar; I accidentally brush it all the time and suddenly the volume changes or Siri pops up or whatever irritating thing. I miss having a real Esc (yes, I've remapped Caps Lock, but muscle memory dies hard).
I've always used Windows laptops, but recently I've realized the MacBook is actually not more expensive after you factor in the hours of maintenance and the fact that Windows machines will die much more quickly no matter what you do.
After the 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard started breaking down (after 1 year of use, once replaced already) I gave up on Apple and bought a 3 pound LG Gram 17 inch laptop.
Using Windows for the first time in 10 years, all I can say is it has come a long way. They've put serious effort into making development for linux via WSL and VS Code a dream.
The laptop is also fantastic, 17" of 16:10 real estate, light, the macbook feels like a stone now.
The downsides are the keyboard is a tad too small as it includes a numpad and takes a couple weeks to get used to. I wish it was a bit bigger, there was room for this.
The other issue is by default the laptop is set to too aggressively throttle in software and requires tweaking.
Other than that fantastic all around, 2 nvme slots, 1 upgradable ram slot, lots of IO. .
I had turned my macbook pro's screen brightness down to complete black as I was using an external monitor only, and in a dark environment. Some time later I happened to restart my machine, and both the internal and external displays came up completely black.
The touchbar displayed only "Esc", without the normal brightness control. I had to figure out from memory how to log in without being able to see the screen, i.e. exactly how far I needed to move the pointer on the trackpad to click on my username, without any indication of what state the UI was in. There was no controls on the touchbar to adjust the display brightness and an external Apple USB keyboard which did have the brightness control keys was not recognised. Fixing it required both an SMC and PRAM reset.
I would pay a significant premium for a macbook pro without the touchbar. I've had other cases where the machine appears to be (but isn't necessarily) bricked and there's no indicator lights anywhere to show what's going on, even if the machine has power. I hope with Ive's departure they'll dial it back a bit and start building machines which might be slightly less beautiful but include some of the more practical affordances.
/rant
If a less-powerful CPU is fine, the MacBook Air is great. It doesn't have the touch bar, and in my opinion, its tapering design look way cooler than a MacBook Pro (acknowledging the fact that the MacBook Pro is already one of the coolest looking laptops out there).
I don't even want to go into the horrors that is working in vi with touchbar escape key...
At least the resale value of the MBP is something no other hardware can really compete with. I mean, I know I kind of cheated by buying on a students discount for a diploma course I was taking on the side at the university. But I managed to get 80% of what I originally spent on a 8 month old machine, and I most certainly won’t be able to do with whatever I replace it with.
(I definitely agree this is a bad design, though).
I am also a musician. The Touch Bar is fantastic to adjust tuneables in GarageBand, without the gorilla arm or wobbly screen effect you get on touchscreens.
If it were annoying to me I'd just remap the two or three functions I use as a developer to some keyboard shortcut. After all I'm a developer, I think I can handle that fairly swiftly by myself if no tool were available (and I'm fairly convinced there is).
... but both pale in comparison to the mighty AHK for Windows, imho https://www.autohotkey.com/
AHK is so incredibly useful it should be bundled with Windows at this stage
I futzed around with the touch bar in Logic when I got one and wrote it off almost immediately. Logic Remote (which works with GarageBand, AFAIK) already exists and works with an iPad. Clear labels, clear text, manipulating multiple elements easily at once--it's a better solution than what they tried to wedge in with the touch bar.
The bigger problem with the touch bar is that, as a developer, I end up hitting the touch bar controls all the time. VSCode "helpfully" has previous tab/next tab buttons on it--and so when I try to hit 2 or 3 on the keyboard, sometimes I brush against them and suddenly I'm disoriented and typing in a completely different tab.
This machine is a work laptop. (Typically my music stuff is done on a 2012 rMBP, which is why I already had Logic and Logic Remote set up.) When I started, I asked for a half-the-price Thinkpad on which to run FC30 and was denied because "everyone else uses a Mac." I love the job but between the garbage touchbar and the hand-wreckingly shallow keyboard travel the computer they gave me it's easily the worst part of my day.
The real answer for me is going to be swapping for an X1 Yoga or an X1 Extreme, I think.
Maybe there are some shortcuts / combos I’m not aware of???
I'm a keyboard-based person, though I don't use tiling window managers or the like. I've got a system (he said half-ironically). Some shortcuts are more comfortable to do with my left hand on the modifier. Some, the right. All of them are hosed on a Mac and fixing them would take longer than what I did today, which is ask my boss to let me give the Mac to the new guy and go order myself an X1. So this story has a happy ending!
This suggests a fun and interesting way forward for Apple UI design - layered augments from additional devices. Let OS X be the core of the system, but enable big apps like Logic or Photoshop to have connected supplementary UI's in iPad or VR/AR that provide a high-quality interface to some specific functionality. Reduce alt-tabbing on the main screen.
Now, I don't disagree with your sentiment, touch bar is definitely a nuisance without any superior use case over the buttons that were there before... But why do you think this keyboard wrecks hands? It is definitely the fastest keyboard I've typed on, and shallow keyboards are definitely inherently easier on the hands by any metric I can think of
1mm travel keys just leave me thumping my fingertips off the laptop chassis all the time. It hurts.
I don't get it, the rest of your comment is mostly positive?
Even if it were annoying for the non-development functions I use it for when developing (volume control is not exactly "development", only auxiliary at best) I'd just remap them to actual keyboard shortcuts.
But it's not.
What's "annoying" is apps that could make it useful but put nonsense actions in there because horror vacui, not making use of its potential; but it's only so in an intellectual way, pragmatically I just ignore the Touch Bar in such cases and use the app as if I had if there was none.
Ill bet you 99% of mac sales are NOT to developers.
Despite them arguably wanting to court developers to write swift programs, their hardware sales team doesnt seem to care about developer prosumers.
I have a college aged brother, and Microsoft currently owns GitHub, and is providing the linux subsystem, which is a huge signal that "developers are welcome." His whole generation is developing on $300 Dell laptops and it's easy. Mac used to provide that, but you paid for it.
* I need to develop for this shitty platform, which I hate, because my customers are on it
* I want to develop for this awesome platform, because I just love it and my customers are also on it
If Apple loses touch & favor with developers, their platform will slowly but surely die out over a decade or two. Apple is expensive, the only reason for Apple to even exist is because they deliver quality products. If they ever go down the road of consistently failing this core value, they will die more quickly than reindeer thrown down a cliff.
(Heck, technically, Mac developers don't even have to use Apple products to develop Mac applications. I've done native macOS app-dev and the only thing I have that runs macOS is a Hackintosh.)
Consider also this analogy: you don't develop console games on the console itself. You develop and build them on a computer using a cross-compiler, and then push them to a dev-kit unit to test them. Same thing applies here: just because you're writing macOS software, doesn't mean you need to be using macOS. You could stand up an office EXSi server running macOS VMs to serve as a CI server and test environment, and then actually write your macOS software in VSCode on Linux, pushing it over to the server to test it. People have done this. It's no harder than, say, developing for Android.
And Xcode doesn't use a function key to pause, since that would also interfere with any apps that use function keys. The default keyboard shortcut for pausing in Xcode is ⌃⌘Y, and I think you have to bring Xcode to the foreground for that to work anyway.
Unless I’m missing something I can’t think of anything the touchbar could do better for me. (just my 2c anecdote)
I would guess Apple will revive the fanless model when they switch to ARM processors in 1-2 years.
I always viewed it as a v0.1 of the future of their light travel-friendly laptop model, and fully expected it to receive incremental performance upgrades and eventually replace the Air. I was hoping that in a few more years, I'd be able to buy one of these as a complement for travel or maybe even to replace (depending on the weight / performance tradeoff) my 13-inch MacBook Pro.
I assume, since they only gave it a minor upgrade once in like 3/4 years and the price was pretty ridiculous, that they just couldn't make it work. I hope, as you say, they can figure it out, perhaps using their own ARM CPUs, and eventually relaunch this model or continue making the Air thinner and lighter with the same performance.
Only because it was out of date, probably. Aside from its specs it served the market of "thin and light computers that are easy to take around" just fine.
The Air is barely more compact than the Pro (look up the specs, it is a bit thinner on one side and is 0.25 pounds lighter).
The MacBook is a true ultraportable laptop (it is 0.75 pounds lighter than the Air) - sad that Apple doesn't sell one now.
I own both a 12" MacBook and a Pixelbook, and the Pixelbook is notably chunkier/heavier. (And every other comparable Chromebook is even worse.)
Next best fanless option is probably a Surface device.
In short, with the 12" MacBook discontinued, nobody's making a notebook I'm interested in at the moment. That's fine, though, as my 2015 MacBook is still working great (especially since I just had the battery replaced) and presumably I can still get a refurb if I drop this one in a lake or something.
Time to replace the battery of the MBP I've been using since 2015 I guess.
It was lighter and thinner than the MacBook Air - so why was it not the MacBook Air? This is the lack of product logic Jobs killed when he returned to Apple.
If they had simply left all the keys, shrunk the touchpad, and added the Touch Bar above the keyboard, people who didn't like the Touch Bar would simply choose not to use it (or even shut it off) and people who loved it could continue to do so.
That's the issue. Not the Touch Bar itself's benefit, that's a red herring.
- Touch Bar clearly factors into the cost. There is simply no way it is cheaper to have this when one could have just keys.
- It adds brightness to peripheral vision. Even if you don’t use it, it is “there” as a distraction.
- It is a great way to randomly trigger events by mistake.
- This is a laptop with limited battery power, it is more efficient to have keys doing nothing than to have a touch screen.
Given how much everyone around here hates similar things like UEFI and the Intel IME (with good reason), I'm surprised this one seems to slip under the radar. Probably because everyone is much more incensed about losing necessary physical keys. Classic misdirection.
I am of the opinion that the secure enclave for fingerprint reading should be something that updates ideally never, and requires a hardware jumper to be set if one is absolutely necessary.
Ideally I'd like the firmware to be open source too. Those are two related but different issues though.
This is my last MacBook. Xubuntu on a Thinkpad x1 carbon works great for everything I do, at a fraction of the price, with a keyboard the doesn't stop working with dust, and with more than just USB-C.
It looks like a great laptop, and I'm tempted to get one instead of a new MacBook. But it might also be dangerous to get the latest model if Linux devs haven't had time to support it yet.
Was this install pretty painless? I'm due to buy a new laptop and Thinkpads are where I'm thinking about moving to. The x1 carbon and the T480. It's too bad that models after the T480 don't have a removable battery.
I can definitely recommend everyone who has been disappointed by Apple to come to the Linux/Thinkpad ecosystem. It's not difficult to switch. Give it a try! :)
I tried to purchase a new MacBook Pro last week, but they refused to accept my payment for some reason (even after multiple calls to Apple support and my bank.) I'm living in Thailand so it's probably something to do with fraud prevention, but I didn't get any answers.
I think my order problem was a blessing in disguise, because I recently saw that they are releasing a much better keyboard for new MacBooks in 2019/2020. I wish they would also get rid of the touch bar and bring back the MagSafe charger, but at least there's there a better keyboard.
But now your comment (and some replies) have convinced me to start looking at a Thinkpad x1 carbon, and maybe going back to Ubuntu. I don't do too much iOS development any more, but hopefully I can still get MacOS running in a VM if I need it. I was also using Sketch quite a lot, but I've switched to Figma now (which runs in a browser.) I also saw that there's an unofficial Electron app [1]. I think I can probably do everything else I need on Linux: Chrome, Terminal, VSCode, Slack, Spotify, Skype. Looks like I can even run Line desktop app [2] (chat app used in SE Asia.) The Docker storage driver has been painfully slow on my Mac, so it would be nice to start incorporating Docker in more of my development and testing workflow.
I'm just not looking forward to all the random issues I'll need to figure out.
"When I invited Jobs to take some time away from NeXT to speak to a group of students, he sat in the lotus position in front of my fireplace and wowed us for three hours, as if leading a séance. But then I asked him 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 on Steve Jobs 2011-10-06 By Steve Jurvetson.]
click the "Caps Lock" dropdown and set to escape
More people need to map Caps Lock to Control. It just makes sense, and it's where control use to be on many old Sun keyboards.
As a vim user, escape is too high up on most modern keyboards anyway. The ADM-3A terminal vi was invented on placed it to the left of the Q key, which was a lot easier to reach. HHKB puts it where the tilde key traditionally is, which is pretty close to the original intent of vi.
Remapping tilde on touchbar MacBook Pros would be a good solution, if there was an obvious other place to put tilde/backtick.
I've been used to the control key in that position since about 1980:
http://www.hp9845.net/9845/history/comparison/images/closeup...
That said, I've had caps lock bound to backspace for years, so I'm not advocating for something I do myself.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/132564/how-can-i-r...
Volume changing? Screen brightness? Those are better with the touchbar.
Escape key for vim or whatever? Switch your caps lock with escape! You should have been doing that the whole time!
The actual function keys? I don't use them enough to need them showing up all the time. And an extra key to get them up again is no big deal.
I agree that the touch bar doesn't add a whole lot of utility, but I can't see the argument of it removing any utility.
Again, I don't see how its worth all the hassle and surely extra cost for Apple to push it, but really don't see how it's any worse than the previous bar.
- consistent button locations across any apps. An F1 is an F1 whether you are in Finder, in Safari, or in a programming IDE.
By default Touchbar displays whatever the developers of the currently focused app put there. So switching to any app will change the touchbar rather unpredictably.
- consistent physical button locations. For any shortcut that involves physical buttons you don't have to look at your keyboard. You could change the volume easily because it was mapped to Fn + F<X> (or just to F<X>) that just was there.
On Touch Bar for any button that's not on the far left or on the far right edge of the touchbar, you have to look down. It becomes significantly worse as you move towards the middle of the touchbar.
- Physical buttons have affordances built-in. If you can't long-press, you can just tap on a button repeatedly. If you accidentally brush against a button or even rest your fingers on a button, it won't trigger. A physical button has tactile shape, so you can feel your way around a button to see feel you hit it correctly, or if your finger is between buttons.
Touch Bar has none of that.
Default volume and brightness controls all but require long press and slide (a huge problem for a huge number of users).
Accidental brush against Touch Bar will trigger it.
Resting a finger on the Touch Bar will trigger it.
There's no tactile feedback on the buttons.
--------
In general, Touch Bar is significantly worse in usability while providing very little in terms of usefulness. So bad that in just a second minor update Apple brought back the F1 layout that you can set for it in System Preferences.
Touchbar affordances are better than the iPhone in that the persistent touch buttons are immediately above hardware buttons. My mute button is directly above the + key. My volume control is directly above the - key. My brightness control is directly above the 0 key. I can get a finger there without looking and immediately adjust by sliding left or right.
> Touchbar affordances are better than the iPhone
Nowhere in my text did I once mention the iPhone. I did mention, insistently, and several times, the actual physical keyboard on the laptop.
And yes, a laptop keyboard is very different from a phone.
Here's my test. Take a Touchbar-equipped Mac, and a non-touchbar equipped Mac. Sit them side by side. Play a video or song on both of them.
Then, one hand on one mac and your other hand on the other mac, turn the volume up and down using the keyboard and touchbar.
One hand gets confused on where to go on about your third or fourth time turning it back up or down. There's nothing for your fingers to call home.
It's the exact same problem when you try to use a touch screen phone as a game controller, vs an actual gamepad.
If you'd read the guidelines and follow them, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not really. My wife has low vision. Changing the volume used to be a muscle memory sort of thing. Now it's an awkward fumbling mess, especially if she's in the middle of a meeting and trying to mute her laptop.
We've locked the buttons to a static position so she knows where to press but there's still no tactile feedback.
Not tactile, haptic only but there is https://github.com/niw/HapticKey
Function keys are used heavily in IDEs, and forcing a large reach of fn + f# key isn't adding any utility either.
I have yet to see a situation where the touchbar adds some utility that merits the loss in other areas for users.
So many times I would want to adjust volume, keyboard brightness, display brightness by muscle memory and feedback alone, which isn't possible with the horrible touch bar.
I literally am still using my beloved Macbook Pro 2015 because I can't stand the damn thing. At my old job I had to use one of the new MBP machines at work and the keyboard + touch bar killed me every time.
I won't be buying a new MBP unless Apple fixes the keyboard and makes the touch bar optional. In fact, with the new improvements to Linux in Windows I may just got for a new AMD based Windows laptop instead, which is huge for me because I've been Macbook Pro since Apple first went to Intel...
Physical keys were a huge improvement. I'd have loved it if it was programmable keys with little LED displays, but being a flat, easily triggered surface makes it a big loss for me.
Control is already mapped there because apple put fn at the bottom left corner! Esc is the only key i think i really need that is missing. It needs to be a physical key. Why design something where the right way to use it is immediately remap keys?
There are many touch typists who've been trained to use caps lock all the time.
The moment I need to type more than 2 upper-case characters in a row, caps lock it is. In combination with Vim.
The touch bar (or better: the removal of Esc) is a huge regression.
With Apple, people keep on complaining OVER years. The touchbar, the prices, the crappy keyboards... the reason? IDK, maybe they are locked-in and can't move to another platform but there is only one single reason to be locked-in on macOS: if you develop apps for iOS, otherwise every other platform is currently way better and switching is a matter of days. Once I had the keyboard trouble on a $4K MBP I switched instantly and never returned to macOS.
There's an entire world of excellent, powerful and cost-effective hardware outside of Apple's bubble.
I've tried making it happen in Linuxes and windows, but always with failures in one app or another, or having to configure each individual application I use independently.
The keyboard is the reason I love mac for running my Linux clusters. If I didn't have that, I would have the fantastic UX features like instant scrolling. Scrolling anywhere else is a choppy and laggy nightmare for me.
Re choppy scrolling, I have a Windows precision touchpad on my notebook and it's super close to a MBP but what is even much better than a MBP touchpad: get a Logitech mouse with a free wheel eg the G502, best scrolling experience and buttersmooth.
I thought also there is nothing else than macOS but there is even more good stuff outside. eg window management on Windows or linux eg with i3 there is just 100x better. on macos it's a joke to nonexistent.
If that's the case I'm not sure it makes sense to read too much into this. They will probably reintroduce a non-touch bar option when they refresh the pro line later this year.
That said, I did get a lot of "oohs" and "aahs" from other employees coming to look at it. Those went away when I'd open vim and ask them to take it for a test drive.
There is nothing "Pro" about a touch bar, even for fields outside of software. Apparently Ive's departure means Apple is not returning to function-over-form.
I get that it's not for everyone but to generalize and say that it's not "Pro" is delusional.
I don’t know about the US, but Danish workplace regulations require an “external” keyboard. You’re not allowed to work all day on a laptop keyboard. Similarly you also need a height adjustable screen. Using your laptop as a laptop is suppose to be a exception.
So if you can’t sit directly in front of your laptop and touch bar 99% of the time you can’t actually use it for work.
Further, why does the spacebar have to be so wide? It makes the Alt and System (mapped to Hyper, Meta, leader keys whatever) harder to reach without looking. Microsoft offers an new ergo keyboard with a split keyboard, but then doesn’t provide a way to map the left and right pieces to separate bindings.
Allow me to touch it without pressing anything. Let me slide my finger and feel a click whenever I "hover" a different button. Add an option to show me an indication on screen of what I'm hovering, so I don't have to look down. Then when I decide to "press" the button, trick my brain into thinking there's moving parts like the trackpad does.
Give me the buttons of the future.
The big problem for me is that it's a touch-screen instead. Keyboards and trackpads are designed to have you rest your hands on them until you press, so it's awkward to have something that doesn't let you "rest" on it. They both are meant to be used while looking directly at the screen, so it's annoying to have to look down to know what you're pressing.
Add back the physical top row, but keep the touch bar. Just put it above the physical top row.
I like the idea of the touch bar for customization and various use cases, but I don't do that now, because I want my top row to continue to act as simply and consistently as possible.
For example, the contextual menus for programs. I think the whole concept is really interesting and adds a cool layer of interaction. However, I don't want to give up my quick access to my normal functions like volume, expose, etc. So the end result is that I just turn all the contextual options off. So I've never had a chance to fall in love with the touch bar, because all I use it for is a crappy version of what my top row use to be.
The Touch Bar is meant for graphics, audio and film professionals. That’s the “Pro”. It’s an incredibly flexible “picker/slider” for colors, volumes, mixing, and so on.
I know HN hates the touch bar... and I personally have no use for it... but we’re not the market for it. There is a market for it, but it’s not us.
I think it’s helpful to acknowledge that in these conversations, rather than act like Apple is making dumb decision in a vacuum.
(And I’m personally happy there’s now a retina MacBook Air without it, which will probably be my next machine.)
If I could do that, then I can live with it, since then it is just a massive battery drain instead of being a massive battery drain as well as extremely inconvenient.
About the only benefit is that it doesn’t take up screen space, but in that case a single trackpad gesture which brings up a touchbar like toolbar right where your mouse pointer is seems like a much nicer input mechanism.
Between the touch bar (which bothered me enough to downgrade my work laptop to not have it), keyboard problems, and migrating away from their BSD roots, I'm completely done. I don't care if Linux desktop is clunky or bad, at least I can use it on a laptop that doesn't suck.
- The 12" "MacBook" (which I adored, largely because it was so tiny)
What's strange is that it appears that this was a streamlining effort—but if you get into the weeds and look at the "base" model 13" MacBook Pro, it's not the same machine: it has two Thunderbolt ports, rather than four, despite sharing the same moniker as the higher-end MacBook Pro. Go up a model, and you get four for more money along with the better processor, which isn't immediately clear, either.
That means it's got fewer thunderbolt lanes, as well, which is a classic nickel and dime move that's going to make it even more confusing given most people just buy the base model.
Now, my question is: are they clearing the decks at the low-end 12" for a clamshell/ARM laptop? It seems incredibly obvious that it'll start at the bottom to avoid disrupting the pros.
Is the touchbar useful? Is it good? Who cares, it is not getting used. Given Apple's butterfly keyboard issues using the laptop keyboard as your primary keyboard isn't really an option anyway. For the limited amount of time I use the laptop keyboard the touchbar certainly isn't worth it.
If Apple sold a decent external keyboard, not the fucking aluminum chiclet keyboard, with a touchbar I would certainly be willing to consider the touchbar on whatever merits it has, but as a tiny touch enabled 3rd screen above an infrequently used keyboard it is irrelevant. I, like many people, thought that the Optimus OLED keyboard with programmable dynamic keycaps was neat. I'd be willing to give a touchbar external keyboard a fair shake.
I think it's a bad call. To me, these input devices create a lot of confusion for very little benefit. I think it's a sign Apple has given up on the philosophy of trying to make everything accessible to the average user.
They have gone over to Microsoft's philosophy, which was that UIs should be like an iceberg, with a deep well of hidden functionality for advanced users to discover, and then a separate "normal people" UI layered on top of that.
I think there's a MASSIVE opportunity right now for someone to build a new OS, designed around a very limited set of inputs, and a highly constrained widget library. With an emphasis on speed, putting as little as possible on the screen, and like Apple of old, having simple apps that let people do things pros typically do.
For example, you could design a UI that would allow you to easily cut together clips from multiple videos. This was hard, and then iMovie made it easy, but now it is hard again. Those kinds of features make good ads, and lead to good word of mouth.
Basically, take Steve Jobs' original strategy with the iMac/iPhone and do it over again. Apple has totally departed that path.
Swapping hardware buttons for touchscreen controls has been a huge success for Apple for over a decade, with the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, even the Apple Watch. The Touchbar is just another step down that path.
It's arguable whether a fixed set of hardware "F" buttons are more usable, or well-labeled touchscreen buttons. Again, a decade of evidence suggests that software-defined touchscreen buttons are more usable. An iPad is much easier to use than a Mac. You can hand an iPad to a 5-year-old and they get it right away.
> They have gone over to Microsoft's philosophy, which was that UIs should be like an iceberg, with a deep well of hidden functionality for advanced users to discover, and then a separate "normal people" UI layered on top of that.
Apple invented that paradigm by adding keyboard shortcuts to a GUI. They have continued it by adding a command line interface and multitouch gestures to Mac OS.
The Touchbar is similar. If you take it out of the box it is simple and easy to use. But if you are an advanced user, there are all sorts of options to customize it.
It isn't a step down that path though. With the iPhone/iPod/iPad the new interface completely changes how you use the device (moving to a phone without physical keys for example). The Macbook touchbar doesn't do that, it just makes things a bit awkward by adding an additional way to interface with your device.
They didn't swap in this case though, they added. Equivalent to the touchscreen + keyboard phones of yore.
In terms of degrees of freedom, the touchbar adds a lot. It's not a simple swap. The iPhone input system has fewer degrees of freedom than a blackberry did.
Well, using Linux makes more sense after new MBP specs, every time.
It's true, the touch bar is annoying, and I am a vi user so escape is critical. But it's not really any more annoying than adjusting between apple keyboards and PC keyboards: a bit of muscle memory. I just wish you could disable the whole thing entirely, at least the lights, while keeping the escape key. Haven't figured out right click on the touchpad yet, it's currently quite irritating. The press-to-drag brightness is kinda cool, and the fingerprint lock is also cute. The Mac is about 1/2 the weight of the Dell, although the Dell was last-year's model on sale 1.5 years ago so that's to be expected. My back will thank me on business trips. USB-C is the biggest physical adjustment, and I'm all for it. Yet to select an appropriate external keyboard (might buy Apple) or HDMI adaptor (won't buy Apple), happy to take recommendations.
oh yeah, that's what my 2012 MBP has.
This is blocked at my DNS level. Why is engadget.com forwarding to this address?
I just unblocked guce.advertising.com and it forwarded to engadget, so this must be some sort of tracking system.
While I’m not a fan of replacing physical controls with touch-sensitive counterparts in safety-critical settings like cars and airplanes I think the Touch Bar is a significantly underrated improvement that I use and enjoy constantly.
I wonder how many other users feel the same way but never comment?
It can display more options, many different types of controls, and you can see what each control does without needing to memorize it or having to look it up like you would with the F# keys.
Why go back to a limited set of ambiguous numbers that do a different thing in each app? I can't even remember the last time I needed to use a F# key in a Mac app.
People saying they'd pay extra for a non-Touch Bar Mac, consider some free apps to customize it to your preferences:
[0] https://medium.com/@brendanleglaunec/making-the-macbook-touc...
[1] https://folivora.ai - BetterTouchTool for customizing the Touch Bar, Trackpad, Magic Mouse etc.
[2] https://pock.dev - Display the Dock in the Touch Bar + play controls + some status
When you start working, you'll probably want to invest in the pro line for a faster CPU especially if you start booting up multiple services (databases, servers, etc.), mobile development, or crunching large sets of data.
If you ever find yourself CPU bound then you can spin up a VM image and run those jobs remotely.
While running low on storage isn't a problem either as several cloud options exist for that.
I gather you're using Chrome? Safari seems to "do this for you" in a sometimes frustrating way. Similar to the iPhone, Safari on the desktop seems to aggressively unload webpages when they're not focused. This means large Google Docs get reloaded every time you switch windows. I haven't used Firefox heavily for this kind of work, but it seems to behave better than both.
Chrome with to wrong tabs open can absolutely murder your battery life, too.
I also haven't seen much of a need at all for regular rebooting. Looking back it seems like I'll reboot my laptop every 2-3 weeks, usually for an app that has a kernel driver, to boot into Windows, or to troubleshoot an egregious problem like my sound or bluetooth breaking. I've never done it for RAM, but I have closed browsers to save battery/RAM.
Jetbrains IDEs works fine, not sure about XCode haven't done much with this machine yet in Mac Development.
The only thing I've found lacking is the Kerbal Space Program doesn't run very well on it. It runs but the fam quickly ramps up to 100% and get annoying.
Irrespective of what you get, you cannot do serious compute on a laptop. Because actually using it at full power kills your battery.
Surface pro with the surface pen is a killer feature for note taking.
Buying apple product is already "spending extra".
If I was typing all-cap constants, I just type the variable in lowercase and use the autocomplete feature
I use it to show my active TODO, time and date, when I am on break and soon current calendar event running + Karabiner profile.
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os/tree/master/btt
People who like to hate on it, didn't invest time in learning that you can program it to show what you want. And as for physical keys, with Karabiner, there is no need for those keys as they are too far away from home row anyway.
I already program different things most of my time. Why tale away my convenience (aka part of keyboard) and make me program something on top of what I'm already programming?
Three years on Touch Bar is still a solution in search of a compelling problem.
Which is, to be honest, a much better use of the touchbar than anything else I’ve seen.
But it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not a great input mechanism. Your usage, however, makes me wonder if Apple would have been better off promoting it as a secondary monitoring screen, which has Touch capabilities, as opposed to primarily an input mechanism.
Of course, that brings up the question why it couldn’t be a bar on the actual screen your looking at, or if you don’t want it to be omnipresent something that comes up with a KB shortcut, but I guess there is some value in a monitoring screen that is visible at the nod of the head.
I especially like the idea of putting your current active task. It can be a nice reminder on doing a fairly passive action, such as tilting your head, as opposed to a more active keyboard press.
"And as for physical keys, with Karabiner, there is no need for those keys as they are too far away from home row anyway."
Or you know, we could just have the physical keys.
So maybe slow your roll on how all of the haters just didn't "invest the time". Sometimes stuff doesn't work for people and it's not a learning curve issue.
I can appreciate that it may work for some folks. Maybe you should appreciate that it doesn't work for others.
How much time investment is required? I inadvertently spent a month travelling with a Touchbar MacBook, and it only took me a few days to get it configured for all my uses, and it was fine. However, when I switched back to a non-Touchbar system, it felt like an immediate and significant upgrade in keyboard capability. (Plus the non-Touchbar systems are cheaper.)
My 5 year old macbook pro has a 128GB SSD. With the size of docker images and software modules that fills up in no time.
I would be sad is they do kill the MacBook 12”.
To date, support has been spotty, even within Apple's own programs. Now programs without Touch Bar support will stand out. It's not something that can be seen as a gimmick anymore, even if to many it is.
(Still, I think dumping the escape key was a mistake.)
I never understood why the Air and the standard Macbook continued to coexist, one of them had to go.
This makes their product line make a lot more sense:
Macbook Air, Macbook Pro (I'd probably drop the 'Air')
iMac, iMac Pro
Mac Mini, Mac Pro
It will go away in a year or two, but they need to apply a marketing rationale (newer! better!) to their course change.
We all know it sucks, but PR says they need to save face.
It’s the reason I use a Das Keyboard instead of the laptop keyboard when doing just about everything now. It’s too easy to fat finger that blasted thing.
Two finger slide for brightness or volume. Different from/to direction with 2+ fingers, maps to different functions, to ease use without looking down.
Unless you're suggesting global gestures where two-fingers anywhere on the TB would control volume. In that case, I'd have to see a use-case. I can see that going horribly wrong and being triggered accidentally all the time.
If you hit anywhere on the Touch Bar (or maybe left/right side) with two fingers and drag, you could map to volume/brightness.
When you press the wrong key and drag, the buttons disappear and you have to wait a moment for it to clear, difficult UX if you aren’t looking.
Wait till they replace the keys with iPhone keyboard.
- It has ALL THE PORTS
- No gimmicky touch bar
- No butter-a$$ keyboard
If Apple doesn't revert these dumb changes, I will simply get a Dell or something else.
Pro users need a physical ESC and F keys, that seems fairly obvious.
Seriously I’m 100% Mac, but the touchbar is consistently awful