The 16-Inch MacBook Pro
marco.org
marco.org
Doesn't pretty much all professionals from programmers to editors to musicians _still_ use function keys as part of their workflow when touch-typing?
I mean if the touchbar was above the function keys it would be an added bonus, but removing function keys for "professionals" is like telling a pianist that he now has to play on a touch-keyboard with no tangents.
I am more than ready to pay for an upgrade but now i am going to keep my still excellent 2014 pro with no stupid gimmicks and a good keyboard.
EDIT: To all the people downvoting me, why? Why on earth earth downvote a fellow pro addressing an obvious downgrade - am i missing something? Why jump on a bandwagon an "be an optimist" or "stop complaining" if this gimmick makes coding/working slower for us?
It reminds me of when most of the pro market fled the revamped Final Cut X Suite which was so dumbed down it was almost a "kids editing program" while Apple gave no fucks.
EDIT2:
To all the people saying they don't use F keys. I simply don't believe you. You also control brightness, volume and playback with these buttons and i have never seen anyone NOT using these keys without looking. Especially the volume keys all the way to the right tap-tap-tap without looking - i know you have done this ha!
I use it a lot when I’m not on an external screen in media apps like photo or video editing, but I’m also the kind of person that never found f keys useful
I use the F keys a lot for intellij
Rant alert on tech-tactility:
I know it's pure anecdata but using the "sense of touch" when typing must surely be faster than having to context-switch while you have to precisely target a point on the screen with no sense-data to go with it.
I feel "alienated" by the cold dead glass texture of modern interfaces on large hard glass screens. There is just not enough feedback in my opinion which is why i still somewhat miss old cellphones with real keyboards. Also i think our primal brain actually prefers having switches and buttons, just as kids do from the earliest years. I am pretty sure there as also been some research into worsening performance from pilots when testing touch screens because you have loose the sense of both shape, touch and placement (space) - that's a lot of data you are sacrificing for the dynamism of a touchscreen.
Humans a tactile creatures and cold/hard/featureless glass screens are just not still as appealing as buttons and switches. It wouldn't actually surprise me if you got less of a dopamine response when typing on a glass screen compared to something with way more feedback, say an old keyboard with a lot of travel or a typewriter if you want to go crazy (as some authors do exactly because they feel like typing on modern keyboards is frustrating and "responseless").
This is also why i think a bit of DIY or gardening can be such a relief especially these days, because when you work with tech there is no feedback at all compared to real toolwork.
And it seems to be worsening. Today is already way different than the tactile feedback you got with a computer from 2002 with a keyboard that said "click", where you could feel a "micro sense" of accomplishment/affirmation when you pushed it, then listen to harddisk respond with the "reading" sound.
Sounds have also largely been removed and for good reason but this combined with all other feedback being removed and using tech can feel like yelling at a stone wall sometimes. The other day i tried using an old compaq computer from 1999 and i swear i got asmr-tingles and quite a dopamine rush just from the clickity-clack of it all, the harddisk sound, the small thraschan animation and sounds etc. Not just nostalgia but just the joy of getting feedback.
You may be interested, if you don't already know it, in Brett Victor's marvellous canonical rant on the topic - he calls touch "pictures under glass", as it's not really touch is it?
http://worrydream.com/#!/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionD...
Unfortunately I got the 2018 MBP which has no physical escape key. This was initially frustrating as a vim user, but I remapped Caps Lock and now that I've gotten used to that, I quite like it.
The main frustration is that I have the butterfly switches which are indeed terrible. This was after Apple claimed to have fixed them, but I have significant problems with mine and the only way to get it fixed is to send it away for several weeks, which is a very difficult prospect.
no.
If the gaps were there, I know I would use it. On my desk where I use the Mac around 60% of the time, I have an USB keyboard that has the gaps and I'm touch-typing F keys on it. It's the only thing I really hate when I use the laptop's keyboard directly.
Almost anyone i have seen use MBP i have seen at some point use the brightness or volume controls without looking. So you don't even have to be using them for some advanced purpose. The panic volume-down with the right hand is a classic.
I actually don't quite believe you guys saying that you don't use the built-in functions several times a day - that was the first thing that was annoying to me with the touchbar. That you can't control volume and brightness from pure memory.
But again, that's a personal preference. It's just so many technologies have changed over the last decades, that a slight variation in how I adjust my backlight doesn't bother me much.
FYI, holding shift+option moves brightness and volume in 1/4 increments.
This is something i do dozens of times a day -without looking-. Having to look down, find, then aim my finger at a long glass screen 50-100 times a day is a annoying if just for these features.
Kills me everytime. The MBP I had at my last job had a trackpad bigger than my forehead, there's real estate for both. Seriously Apple why the heck not?
Go to its settings, disable per-app configuration so it always stays the same, then, from whichever part of it you accidentally brush most often (for me it's the right half or so) replace everything with a "spacer" element, so it's blank.
You can still use the function toggle to see your F-keys if you need them.
I also have to disable the force-sensitive functionality on the touchpad or I can't reliably perform drag-n-drop operations. Took me way too long to figure out what was making that happen.
IOW I have to disable all the fancy new hardware "features" on modern MBPs to make them usable. And god, is #DongleLife ever even worse than I expected it to be.
I mean, you're right that I use them to change brightness or change volume. But the touch bar can still do that, so... Meh.
It would probably be awkward to use for about a week, and then I'd get used to it. So it's kind of a whatever.
I do agree it's a dumb gimmick though, and is unlikely to offer anything more than the meme of running Doom on the touchbar.
I can't use the touch bar without looking at it, in contrast to Fn keys. It's hit or miss
Of course not, you're too busy holding 3 modifier keys instead.
No need to hold 3 modifier keys.
So you kinda have to believe me when I say I don't use F keys ;)
Also to your point about people having to look at the keys to use the F ones: why not replace them with something useful? If you are going to have to look anyway improve the situation.
> Why on earth earth downvote a fellow pro addressing an obvious downgrade - am i missing something?
It's not an obvious downgrade to most people.
F3 in Eclipse CDT to jump to function/variable declaration. IIRC, F12 does the same in MSVC - useful if you have bootcamp in the laptop. Same as F2 to rename files in Windows.
And, of course, Fn + F1/F2 to adjust screen brightness.
For example, the fact you're talking about tap-tap-tap to change the volume leads me to believe you're not aware of the swipe-to-change function. You don't have to tap the volume button, you just swipe over it in one go. A single tap-swipe. In my opinion that is a superior experience than indeed having to tap the correct F-key a few times. Is that so hard to believe?
What other neat features does it have, for which the UI designers appear to have given no thought to discoverability?
edit: Apparently on the 2017 model it doesn't exist. Neat.
Regarding discoverability - it's a touchscreen, why wouldn't you swipe it? No one complains about two-pinch zoom not being discoverable. It requires a single a-ha moment which you could've had from taking a cursory look at the Touchbar documentation.
As a hacker news reader, it's on you for not checking out the powerful possibilities before categorising it as bad.
Edit: I'm finding articles explaining the swipe-to-change from 2017, so it should be on that model (I believe it's on every model since the beginning).
I don't know. Maybe you're right. Maybe I was wrong to assume that Apple knows how to build discoverable user interfaces. I guess I should've spent a lot more time reading manuals and dinking around with the keyboard on this machine, instead of letting myself be distracted with trivialities like building software, solving problems, and getting work done.
My two most common use-cases for the previous F-keys (changing brightness, music/sound controls) are precisely those things that I want to be able to do without breaking flow or looking away from the screen. What used to be muscle memory now requires looking down, hunting, targeting, making sure to not the hit the wrong thing, swiping to the correct value. It's a tiny annoyance, but it's the kind of thing I used to do constantly, reflexively, and now there's friction every time.
The Touch Bar would be great if it were optional or lived in a new row, but as it stands, it's been 3 years, and it's still a regression for my workflow.
FWIW I use FKeys all the time, and I'm going to retain F6 step over, F7 step into and others forever as that seems to be the default across many IDEs, not just XCode.
FWIW2, I don't like the new Pro retaining a touchpad the size of a football field - I had lots of rejection/false activation issues with my brief ownership of a 2016. The 2015 I replaced it with, and previous MBPs haven't.
As to why not just part of the main screen - well Apple don't want to go entirely touch on the main screen implying two different devices, and separated it clearly serves a separate, distinct purpose.
Your certainty and refusal to acknowledge other points of view is condescending and annoying.
I'm a software engineer. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I never learned which function keys control which hardware (brightness vs volume) so have to look every time. A touch bar would suit me.
And I don't know about your workflow but most programmers I know do NOT like function key shortcuts because it requires moving fingers too far. People I know prefer additional modifiers (i.e. CTRL-R vs CTRL-SHIFT-R vs CMD-CTRL-R)
Because apple pay with the touch bar is more important revenue stream than the vocal minority of users (who I'm a member of) who hate the touchbar.
It's for audio, video, designer, animation "pros". It's for scrubbing and equalizers and color picking. Which much improves the workflow.
And to join the chorus, no -- you always have to look when using the F keys, for the simple physical reason that they're too far away from the home row to hit accurately touch-typing -- certainly for myself, and I've been touch-typing since I was 10. The only key I can hit without looking is Esc, because I slide my whole hand/finger to the edge and feel it at the corner. (Well, and the eject/power button at the other corner, of course.)
Also, to post on HN attacking other commenters with "I don't believe you?" Not cool, man. Not cool.
After a year, I became very accustomed to touchbar, and use it more than I used F keys. Experience may vary, though.
(Of course, the answer is that this is a laptop that's marketed to freshmen film and music students, not professionals or engineers...)
Because Apple doesn't do optional, except very rarely.
>Doesn't pretty much all professionals from programmers to editors to musicians _still_ use function keys as part of their workflow when touch-typing?
I do programming, music (DAWs) and videos (NLEs) and hardly ever use the function keys...
>To all the people saying they don't use F keys. I simply don't believe you. You also control brightness, volume and playback with these buttons and i have never seen anyone NOT using these keys without looking.
Not sure what you mean with the double negative, but whether you "believe us" or not, it's neither here nor there.
"brightness, volume and playback" I control so rarely with the buttons (like 2 times a day or so, 5 if it's some special circumstance) that I absolutely don't care if I use the buttons or the touch strip, and never used them "without looking".
For one, as a musician and video editor, I have an external audio card, so the volume is not controllable from the function keys anyway (needs the special audio card manufacturer's control app which talks to their driver), except if I'm at some remote location with just the laptop.
I would also say it’s worth saying a lot of developers don’t actually touch type, or have grown more used to GUI workflows. The idea of a hardcore developer building software with their mouse turned upside down is one that I find outdated.
Apple is one of the most valuable companies in history building hardware that a large portion of the professional computer user workforce use on a daily basis. For them to make such an egregious error as shipping fatally-flawed keyboards should teach us two things:
- Humility. We can all make big mistakes and shouldn't rely on track record to assume that everything we're doing now is the right thing.
- Focus. Shifting its focus to design at the expense of human factors cause Apple to make a colossal blunder.
This move back to a better keyboard, along with the Mac Pro (for what it's worth), are hopefully signs of Apple listening to some of its most important -- and seemingly neglected -- customers.
Seeing this new 16”, I am so glad I skipped upgrading and waited. I still might not, but at least I won’t be dealing with regressions if I do.
trust needs to be regained.
Listening to customers is a fine art. It can be a bad thing if you listen slavishly without thinking. You'll end up with a haphazard ball of features. This looks like they listened and understood what power-user customers wanted: a true pro machine that remains quite portable and aesthetically pleasing.
IMHO the 13-inch Pro should just be the MacBook, and of course the Air is great for people who want a tiny lightweight "ultrabook" type machine. You'd have:
Macbook: the current 13-inch Pro
Macbook Pro: the 16-inch
Macbook Air: the ultralight
I really hope this is the mid-oughts Apple coming back. Bravo!
They still are shoving the touchbar down people's throats, they just aren't using a piledriver at the moment. An option for legacy ports (USB3/HDMI/minithunderbolt) would have been very nice.
But it's apple, for a new-age company with new-age CEO and new-age values, they are very stubborn and closed minded.
Google/Samsung/etc aren't much better.
SSD prices in phones and laptops are such a fraud.
How does he know? Sounds overoptimistic to me.
The keyboard vim was designed for had ESC where tab is on modern keyboards.
The biggest problem with a number pad on a laptop, is it puts the rest of the keyboard off-center from the screen. No way around that I can think of.
Because I (and other professionals) use them. What kind of question is that?
I'd much rather use a generic $10 USB number pad if I really had to do a bunch of data entry. Or sit down at a desk and use a full size monitor and keyboard for that task.
Usually they put up the splash page prior to new Macs being available.
FWIW 6-core over 15" (2019 model) is working nicely for me, but I suspect 8-core might be a bit too much for 15".
Experience reports welcome.
I just got a new 15” MacBook Pro a couple weeks ago because my video card fried in my 2013. If I had just held out I could have had a glorious escape key and old style arrow layout... GAH
No, it's all of those things when you use them professionally as well. There's a couple of things that people (usually business/operations people) overlook with respect to the cloud. Let's take a look:
1. The cost of compute clouds grows exponentially with every addition. Need an SSD? Extra money. Need an extra large HDD? Extra money. Need it on a secure private network? Extra money. You can very easily rack up the cost of a single local GPU system per-user per-year if you work on the cloud as a large organization.
2. Security: The cloud causes a lot of privacy issues and security issues. Are you a government agency with confidential information? Do you need to keep exact track of where it is at all times? The cloud will never let you do this.
3. Connectivity: I've yet to have any cloud provider provide uptime on the level that a local GPU box can provide. Our record cloud down-time was over a week.
For these reasons, in larger organizations, cloud tends to get a lot of push back. Unfortunately, this is largely ignored by executives who have drank the cool-aid from Microsoft and think "cloud is the future"
Edit: not really. I did some research and it appears they use IJKL because it's easier to reach SPACE bar with the right thumb.