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Comment by pushpop | Hacker News Reader

> 4. MacBook Pro has 4 USB-C ports.

Only if you get one with a Touch Bar - which are the more expensive end of the MBP range.

However many users don’t like the Touch Bar. For myself, I used escape and the F-keys a lot and the idea of remapping caps lock is really more of a kludge than a proper fix (not least of all because I do frequently hope between USB keyboards and Linux laptops as well - so pressing caps lock isn’t a habit I particularly want ingrained into muscle memory).

Given the premium you pay for Apple and the form factor of USB-C, having more than 2 ports shouldn’t be a feature reserved for the upper tiers of MacBook Pro’s. In fact it never used to be back before MBPs took on the design stylings of their “Air” counterparts.

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All current MPBs have a Touch Bar. Apple no longer sells any without one.

That change happened literally only a couple of months ago (maybe 3 tops). Seems a bit pedantic to down vote him/her when their point was true for most of the last 3 years.

I can’t code with those damn things. I got one from work and returned it, I do not understand how they decided people needed it. I haven’t looked at my keyboard since Mavis Beacon back in elementary school and suddenly it demands my attention, so annoying

I have to all but disable them (using spacer elements to make most of it blank, disabling per-app buttons so it stays that way all the time) to make them tolerable. Otherwise I brush the bottom edge of it too often, making a variety of undesired shit happen.

So they hiked the prices in order to give me a "feature" I wouldn't care about even if it did work well, and have to effectively disable to be able to use the laptop. Thanks.

If they'd kept prices about the same (the modest spec bump certainly didn't justify such a large increase...) and left off the damn touchbar I'd be on a new one now. Still on my 2014 instead, tempted to drop a few hundred on a fast Dell or Lenovo and stick Linux on it but knowing it'd just piss me off so much I'd return it. Really wish anyone would give them some real competition on their OS.

Doesn't matter, the $1299 base model and $1499 mid model still only have 2 USB-Cs even with the Touch Bar. The $1799 model upwards have 4.

All MBPs in my company have 2 USB-C ports because my company (like many others) only buys the cheapest model of laptops.

And those "Pro" machines only have 8GB RAM (shared with Graphics, which need 2GB) unless you add another $200 for $40 more worth of RAM.

Wish they’d still stick with the function keys... but axed it off this year. Regardless it’s ridiculous to sell any machine with only two ports.... even the $35 Raspberry pi has ports than this!

I'm good with 2 available ports like my MBPs 2015 have (as they still have MagSafe; which I prefer, btw). The problem with MB(P)s with 2 USB-C is that one is used for charger, hence you got effectively only 1 port.

Right.

1 port? Apple, I will go ahead and follow the USB C revolution. But you think that'll happen with effectively 1 port?

I would encourage you to reconsider rebinding the caps lock key, unless you have a good reason to keep it (perhaps you're a COBOL programmer?).

You can change it to behave that way for all usb keyboards and you can also use xmodmap or a program called xcape to add dual functionality to the key in linux.

Not the OP but I too switch between lots of systems. The idea of reconfiguring each and every one of them, including work colleagues machines, physical terminals for on-prem systems, my wife Windows laptop and so on and so forth, just to fix a bad design on a singular work laptop, seems like insanely bad advice. Instead I'm going to order myself a Linux machine for my next upgrade and have my hardware function the way I find productive.

YMMV but the appeal of MBPs for me was never OSX/macOS but rather the build quality of their hardware. I don't feel that's the case any longer. I guess if Macs are your main platform then remapping might be a more favourable option but for people where the MBP is the outlier (like myself) changing everything else to fit is just bad advice.

It's your prerogative to do what you want with your machine.

Caps lock being on the home row is a bad design in my opinion. Remapping it to something useful is making your hardware work for you, not against you. You obviously can't make your coworkers change their behavior but you're completely in control of your own, where most of your work is likely being done.

My hardware does already work for me. Remapping caps lock is a micro-optimisation where as committing keystrokes to muscle memory is not. So the jarring effect I'd experience when switching back to a system that doesn't have caps lock remapped would easily outstrip any benefit I'd receive from it.

I switch between different keyboard layouts fairly frequently (I use a kinesis advantage 2 which is quite different from traditional keyboards) so maybe it is just being used to being somewhat uncomfortable when having to type on other keyboards that is making it harder to appreciate the difficulty it actually presents to others.

It seems like you are using different keyboards constantly so fixing it on one laptop maybe doesn't offer you much benefit. I doubt that everyone that reads this is constantly changing keyboards, though. For those it would certainly be beneficial unless they are for whatever reason using caps lock frequently.

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