- Quad core processor
- Scissor keys
- No touch bar
- Quad core processor
- Scissor keys
- No touch bar
Supporting more options is expensive, so it's understandable that Apple didn't want to give their customers a choice. Still, it seems like a gimick. And it appeared at the same time as the butterfly keyboard, cementing the notion that Apple had lost its way.
- I can't adjust the volume without looking at it. Because the touchbar is flat with no haptic feedback when I land on a button, it's hard to remember the exact position of the volume 'button' without looking. Sounds trivial - but combined with point 2....
- The way the volume control expands - it actually moves the 'volume down' button AWAY from your finger, which again requires me to keep looking at the control.
This means that when a loud song comes on, it can take 2-3 seconds to quickly turn the volume down in total. I could do that with one single keypress in half a second or less on a keyboard, without needing to look at the keyboard.
That can also be the difference between missing a key detail from a quiet speaker on a Hangout.
Flashy, but it's a terrible user experience by every metric other than looks, I guess.
(This is clever, but basically undiscoverable unless someone tells you in, for example, a comment on Hacker News, which is how I found out.)
No you can't! There is a pretty long delay. If you move your finger during the delay, nothing happens. Then when it finally decides to switch modes, you have to move your finger again for it to change the volume. Hope you didn't hit the edge of the touchbar yet. Combined with the phantom button presses when using the top row of the keyboard, especially the Siri button, plus other small issues, the whole thing is bafflingly terrible.
Also pro-tip: you can change the buttons that show up in the touch bar. Settings > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip. I swapped out Siri for a "Sleep" button, which is super convenient when I walk away from my desk.
I just timed it at ~580 milliseconds, more than half a second from finger hitting the bar to the time when it stops ignoring touch input. It's easy to slide your finger more than the entire length of the volume bar in that time. It's absurdly bad. It would be weird and pretty lame if they fixed this only on newer models.
Also, where on earth is the escape key??
Different strokes for different folks, but I've never liked using the function keys for debugging. I just click the buttons on the screen. I'm a little surprised they don't have a way to set the Touch Bar buttons up to do that in Xcode though.
Moving the mouse cursor up to the toolbar always seems a lot of travel and swishing around if you're hovering over variables to see their contents in the source code.
I have found the auto/local/all view in Xcode to be a bit dumb and unable to properly expand some template objects in C++ so it's all just an exercise in frustration anyway!
Does that statement strike you as reasonable at all?
This could not have happened without the touchbar. This is horrible UX and I will never trust that (work) computer again.
Using Terminal, I use the Esc key a lot for navigating and having a touch bar Esc key is not a great experience since you also don't feel feedback that you're touching the right key.
I've also accidentally hit the touch bar a few times while hovering one of my fingers above it as I press down on one of the number keys.
on a personal note, i've randomly refreshed webpages because i've overreached on the number row with the touch bar.
I press the physical button a few more times? I find that 10 times easier.
- 2 cores
- 1.1 GHz
I went from an 6700HQ (2.6 Ghz base) to a 10710U (1.1 Ghz base) and the difference is definitely there, and it's jarring enough to the point where I kind of regret it. It feels like a huge step backwards, despite the latter CPU being four generations ahead.
Isn't this completely down to the cpu frequency governor in the OS?
My impression was that this "stepping" is customisable, at least in linux, I regularly step my CPU manually even.
I'm not sure what Apple has here, but maybe it's not what you expect.
This does not seem to be the case for my i7-8565U nor my older m3-something. The 8565U for example feels just as snappy as my desktop i7-6700, except it’ll throttle after about 30s.
That's not how base clock works. Base clock is not min clock. Base clock is what it's "guaranteed" to hit under sustained load if TDP is respected. It's the TDP clock. A 4ghz base clock CPU will still be far, far below that when idle.
This is good news from Apple as I was not into any of their more recent laptops but I'll probably upgrade to this one
I only wish they had a 11" version but not a deal breaker
Still just waiting on a new 14" MBP.
I had really been wanting to upgrade for Retina & better processor but I knew they would upgrade the processor and fix the keyboard if I waited for 2020... no reason to wait now.
I don't run any crazy fat Docker stacks for my own stuff at home, so this is perfect.
My at-home hobby work is in Golang and Python, and not particularly compute-intensive stuff. Neither of those have huge heavy toolchains.
Really the main thing driving an upgrade from my minimum-spec 2015 Air is the Retina display.
- 16GB RAM
Such is the accepted wisdom in much of the industry, but I'm a bit of a sceptic on this score. Of course developer time is expensive, particularly if you're in somewhere like the Bay Area where salaries are an extra 0 compared to most of the world. But we live in an era of virtualisation and outsourcing (sorry, "cloud computing") when businesses will knowingly pay many times the cost of just buying a set of servers and sticking them in a rack in order to have someone else buy a much bigger server, subdivide it into virtual servers, and lease them at a huge mark-up. All kinds of justifications have been given for this, many of which I suspect don't stand up to scrutiny anywhere other than boardrooms and maybe golf courses.
There's a nice write-up somewhere, though regrettably I can't immediately find it, of the economics of cloud-hosting an application built using modern trends. IIRC, it pitched typical auto-scaling architectures consisting of many ephemeral VMs running microservices and some sort of orchestration to manage everything against just buying a small number of highly specified machines and getting on with the job using a more traditional set of skills and tools. Put another way, it was the modern trend for making everything extremely horizontally scalable using more hardware and virtualisation against a more traditional vertical scaling approach using more efficient software to keep within the capacity of a small number of big machines. The conclusion was astonishingly bad for the modern/trendy case, to the point where doing it was looking borderline insane unless your application drops into a goldilocks zone in terms of capacity and resources required that relatively few applications will ever get near, and those that do may then move beyond it on the other side. And yet that horizontal scaling strategy is viewed almost as the default today for many new software businesses, because hiring people who are good enough to write the more efficient software is assumed to be too expensive.
There are technical reasons for this, being able to handle sudden load, but mostly it's for ideological reasons. We aren't building companies, we are building stock pumps guised as the utopian future. If you are wondering what a blue chip company looks like in tech, they are the ones that own their own infrastructure.
Maybe there is a middle road for cash poor companies, where you keep latent demand in house for the sake of cost and sense, but have some sort of insurance policy with a cloud service to step in if demand surges.
I'll admit that modern text editors and communication software have grown resource hungry, but a lot of that comes from being able to deliver a strong, cross platform experience. I remember desktop Java doing much of the same with just as bad resource usage. Same with applets.
Sure, but that immediately raises the next question of why those VMs are so big...
Why should everyone have to afford that RAM?
RAM size slowly increases as well. 4 GB was enough 10 years ago. 8 GB was enough few years ago. Today I would suggest 16 GB as a bare future-proof minimum and one can buy 64 GB for a reasonable price.
We still have room for more layers. And it's not only about efficiency, it's also about security. Desktops are still not properly sandboxed, my calc.exe still can access my private ssh key.
Once performance growth will really stop, we will start to optimize. Transistor density will double every few years until at least 2030 and AFAIK there are plans beyond that, so probably not soon.
Don't exagerate your memory requirements, you would be more than fine with 16GB.
Fortunately, I have a Dell XPS 15 with 32 GBs of RAM, but the second I start up a single VM, one more messaging app, a small handful of Docker containers, or any IDE (of which I'm running none right now), I'm going over 16 GBs.
Realistically, most of us on HN probably need around 20-24 GBs, but laptops don't come in those increments.
I develop for a living. I use 6 GB including a browser, a VM and an IDE.
Some of you greatly exaggerate the needs. Some workflows require 16+ GB of RAM, but most people complaining about RAM mismanage it or do not understand that caches are not mandatory.
I was actually surprised by this--when I first started using this computer, I thought for sure I would need to add more RAM, which for the 2018 model is too complicated to do yourself (at least to me it seemed too risky).
For comparison, I also have a 2012 Mac Mini at home with an SSD and 16GB RAM, and it's still chugging along pretty well too, although it's noticeably slower than the 2018 model with 8GB RAM.
I'm curious with regard to swapping if that might mean my SSD is going to wear out sooner. Maybe investing in more RAM would be worth it even if I don't feel like I need it.
I keep a lot of tabs open to look things up, but nothing excessive on that machine. I also run VSCode or Pycharm and would also bring up 5-10 containers at times.
It seriously hurt not only my productivity but also my mood afterwards just by having to put up with it for weeks.
Unless you're a very basic user I don't get why you would settle for 8GB in 2020. 8 gigs of RAM cost basically nothing, it's not worth changing your workflow in the slightest to work around that artificial limitation.
It's bizarre. If everyone used the native toolkits we'd have far less memory usage and everyone (even the memory-constrained) would have a good experience.
Also, with these memory hogs they will do a lot of allocation and deallocation. This is also a problem with interpreted languages. And allocation is the enemy of speed, and energy usage. It'll destroy your daily battery expectancy as everything gets interpreted.
Sad.
With every layer of abstraction added to ease development the hardware requirements go up. You can build things fast, or you can build fast things, doing both is tricky.
I'm running linux with an anemic window manager, and with nothing but chrome and slack open (20tabs in chrome) I am consuming 6GiB.
If you add teams, pycharm and outlook (electron) it consumes 9GiB... Actually, that's also less than I expected.
Well done pycharm.
When you are memory constrained, you can definitely tell. Everything comes to a halt and you just twiddle your thumbs between commands. This 16GB machine I have shipped with 4GB which was painful even 8 years ago when it was released, and I upgraded myself to 8GB 6 months into ownership. A few years later when javascript became more pervasive on the web, I hit memory constraint on 8GB a lot just from having tabs open in chrome, back when it was perhaps more of a memory hog, so I opted for 16gb and haven't had issues since.
I think at 16gb you should be set for at least 5 years. Most people, even a lot of devs on company issued equipment, are working with 8gb complaining about it right here in this very thread.
If you have larger requirements, a lightweight, thin laptop with a teensy fan isn't for you. Even if it had the hardware specs, the physics of heat dissipation don't work for you and you are better off spending the same money for more hardware sitting in a box under your desk. Me and my sore back are eyeing this up, all my computing is done on a cluster anyway.