Updated 13in MacBook Pro with Magic Keyboard, double storage, faster performance
apple.com
apple.com
Step 1: Remove features and call it an innovative new design.
Step 2: Add those same features back in and act like it is an innovative new design.
Most (?) human's middle fingers are longer than the surrounding ones so from the ergonomic point of view an inverted T is the only thing which makes sense. Getting your middle finger on the same row as the other 2, or the row above, feels ok. Row below feels awkward. Multiple buttons on same row as well unless the keys are quite big: middle fingers are also not very small. It's likely also why an inverted T is the de facto standard for 'normal' keyboards I guess. So one can only wonder why anyone would ever do that differently. Just for the sake of being different and the revenue that might bring? Which would be a bit of a shame for a company which takes pride in design.
There’s a word for this:
Gaslighting.
Inverted-T arrow key arrangement? No no, that’s new.
It says that it's new (as in a change for this model) and better for users.
Those two items, inverted-T arrows and an escape key, are very specific user complaint points about their keyboards since 2016.
Apple didn't get rid of them in some conspiracy to look like the good guys in 2020 after four years of user complaints.
Did you want Tim Cook to appear in a video groveling for forgiveness?
Calling “new” comes across as, I was going to say “intentionally deceptive”, but it’s not deceptive, it’s just lying to your customers.
> Apple didn't get rid of them in some conspiracy to look like the good guys in 2020 after four years of user complaints.
I’m not convinced.
> Did you want Tim Cook to appear in a video groveling for forgiveness?
I wouldn’t be offended if he resigned.
For reference here's the iPhone 4S press release after the "antennagate" iPhone 4:
> Improving on the innovative stainless steel external, dual-antenna design of iPhone 4, iPhone 4S is the first phone to intelligently switch between two antennas to send and receive.
Smoothing over the flaws in your previous product by focusing on the new and improved version is about as standard marketing-speak as it gets.
"At Apple, we realised the touch was mostly used to trigger the same actions, and we wondered how we could provide a better experience. Then after years of research, crafting the best design, we created the Function Keys. Instead of the touch bar, there would be a row of physical keys to change the volume, the brightness, and media controls."
I bet whoever wrote that sleeps well at night.
Bill Hicks:
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself…
No really, there’s no rationalization for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself – seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you’re going, “there’s going to be a joke coming,” there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself…
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing, he’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market, he’s very smart.”…Goddamnit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
That will allow them to reduce the screen bezel that looks very last gen now and also match the work the done on the 16" line.
A few more iterations and they'll hopefully realize what an awful idea it was and we'll go back to a normal and functional keyboard.
Personally I've loved the fingerprint id in the latest Macbook Pro, and found no real use for the touch bar. I regret buying my last Macbook Pro because of the terrible quality of the keyboard (replaced keys 3 times).
I do care about the terrible build quality of the keyboard which meant keys fell off and even wore through within months of buying it. The basics are a lot more important than Apple's latest magic x, and the basics on Apple products used to be top notch.
I dont think any execution can overcome the fact that going from analogic to software keys is a downgrade in terms of usability.
If only someone had made something like this already... oh yeah gamer keyboards have had this for YEARS.
The foundational problem with the Touch Bar is that it's a UI only for some use cases that are desktop-first workflows (like design and music production). And not only is the Touch Bar not available for the desktop, the form factor is so compromised by the small size of a laptop that it ends up not even being good for the use cases that it is a good fit for on a laptop.
I was initially excited when I saw the Touch Bar, because I hate adjusting sliders and knobs with the mouse (and find that UI element to be nicer to use on an iPad for example). But the Touch Bar is so small it's terrible for adjusting sliders and knobs, and I usually use an Exeter all keyboard and mouse when I'm doing these tasks anyway...
I find force touch trackpad unusable, too. Can't drag+drop reliably on it—like, maybe a 25% success rate for a click & drag of any significant length. Wife's the same way (except she didn't know the feature existed, so thought her new laptop was broken). Had to disable it on both our machines, which is fine since I don't remember what they said it was for at the event where it was announced, so I'm missing nothing. Both of us are young-ish and have entirely OK manual dexterity and sensitivity, as far as I know.
I personally prefer the 2020 Air as it also has physical function keys (but still has Touch ID). If I wanted to go Pro I'd probably go for the 16 inch with eight cores.
That said, the Air indeed is a great machine and I too prefer the function keys to Touch ID.
With no dedicated GPU and still quad core, the 13” MBP is a bit in no mans land in terms of Air vs 16” Performance.
The downside to the 16-inch is that it’s heavier, and expensive. And most people don’t need 8 cores.
The Touch Bar is down to personal preference. I find it’s better for granular sound and brightness adjustments, and the keyboard suggestions for emojis come in handy (laugh it up, call it an emoji bar, but it’s great for someone with an iPhone that writes messages on the computer). People who customize it with BetterTouchTool can get a lot out of it.
In other words, I don’t consider it enough of a downside to choose a slower computer just to avoid it. Choose the Air if you don’t need the extra performance and you’d like to save a couple hundred bucks.
Applications that have serious need of the F keys are few and far between, usually games that are better played elsewhere anyway. Macintosh systems in the early 90’s never even had F keys, they’re very much a DOS-ism.
I keep presuming 10th gen chips are 10nm and then realising they’re actually 14++
This might also explain the lack of an eight physical core option for this 13" pro. There may be no octacore 10nm desktop/laptop chips yet. It would make sense that Intel would prioritize lower power chips like the one used in the Air as these benefit most from the new process node.
I checked my (now sadly defunct) 2010 13" MBP and they are arranged the same way. Is this just a sentence they left in for >=10 years?
- going to 14 inch like with the transition from 15->16 inch sounded like the obvious thing to do, especially to separate from the Air.
- just quad-core processors in a day and age where AMD launches 8-core low power mobile chips
- no dedicated graphics unit.
What is a "Pro" app?
Main reason 2 cores + hyperthreading gets laggy and unresponsive at times, too, for that matter, compiling aside.