Super interesting how they kept the touchbar on the Macbook Pro keyboard but not on the Air. As a software developer, I'm going to be more likely to buy an Air just due to the keyboard.
Which other key do you miss now that Esc is back?
I'm happily tapping away with them on a 2020 MBA
In my particular case, I use them all the time. Edit some SQL, press F9. Select some files, press F5. And so on.
I can't work without the function keys.
Either way, based on this announcement I'll probably hold off on upgrading for another generation. That'll leave some time to see how the transition goes, and with any luck the next ones will include 32 GB RAM, Mini-LED, and 5G (along with a full keyboard).
EDIT: My mother also says she gets distracting autocomplete suggestions on the touch bar while she's typing. I vaguely remember doing something to turn that off on mine, but she is terrified of Covid so I haven't had a chance to get at her laptop and fix it for her. I don't know what human factors genius at Apple decided it would be helpful for people to see words hopping around at the edge of their vision while they're trying to type.
You can choose a few different options there - try "Expanded Control Strip".
You can use Messages to easily initiate screen-sharing (with you controlling her Mac) to do that. No 3rd party software, no action on her side needed.
While I prefer the physical keys, once you get the TouchBar configured properly (I use MTMR), it's really quite nice. Combined with a physical escape key, it would be ideal.
Considering how the people on HN boast so much about being L337 Haxxorz, I'm surprised they don't see the value in a secondary interactive screen that they can make do anything they want.
One minor annoyance, however, is that the TouchBar isn't visible in direct sunlight, which is to be expected of any screen. Function keys don't have that problem.
I really need a Forward-Delete key - pressing Cmd+Backspace just doesn't work for me.
[1] Yes, I've remapped/swapped the Ctrl+Fn keys on my ThinkPad too.
If the new graphics capabilities are that much better I would be very tempted to upgrade
the air is really sluggish for anything but the lightest of tasks. there was even extremely noticeable latency using gmail.com
The only time I'm speed constrained is deep learning, but generally I just run tiny test sets locally and then run full jobs on a cluster or the cloud.
In the mid 2010's I had a desktop with like 64GB of Ram and four million processors, and I found programming on the Air I was still more productive. Productivity wise I think it's a very high dimensional space to consider.
(P.S. Can't wait to get this new Air!!!)
I've always used powerful desktops (Mac Pro, iMac Pro) and MacBook Airs while traveling, and while the Airs aren't very good for video games like StarCraft II, I've never had a problem with performance while doing anything else (I work in VS Code on TypeScript). My unit tests run in ~20 seconds on the MacBook Air as well as the iMac Pro.
I've used the last 2 Air for developing including Photoshop and VMware fusion but I could work just fine.
Even setting the touch bar to vanilla F-keys, grazing triggers F-key actions which is so frustrating.
MTMR also solves the other main problem with the Touch Bar which is that it hides brightness and volume controls behind a tap (so you can't, for example, instantly mash "volume down" when you find it is unexpectedly loud.) With MTMR (and others I believe) you can make multi-touch gestures on the bar to adjust volume and brightness swiftly.
All that said, I'm not convinced that the touch bar adds enough value to justify its cost. If your day-to-day computer use includes tasks it is good it, maybe. As a developer, probably not.
Just my $0.02 as a touchbar-skeptic-cum-macbook-owner.
I also occasionally use the emoji picker or app specific stuff. For example- my markdown editor has Touchbar selections for code blocks and all that sort of stuff. I don't write enough markdown to remember everything- so the touchbar makes it nicely discoverable without having to click through menus.
It went back to the Apple store within a week and I got an air. Which went to the Apple store in a week because the keybbboooaaarrdd wwaaass aawwwful.
Then I bought a thinkpad. Which is less of a shiny toy.
I'm trying to figure out what my next laptop should be, but I have no prior experience with Thinkpads.
Yes, I miss the physical esc, but F-keys are usually SW configurable and I can configure splat-1-10. That said, I am not a frequent programmer...
It's great if you take the time to actually customize it.
Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables some cool stuff like three-finger-trackpad-swipes to cycle through window tabs! Worth the price of admission for that feature alone, give it a look. https://www.folivora.ai
Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one?
The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point.
As a result the touchbar lives in this weird limbo state. Apple themselves clearly are uncertain what they want from it, and it shows. Since its release the touch bar has been left mostly abandoned and it’s been up to third party developers to make it useful.
It can be useful, at least after heavy customization – something a screen lends itself well to. Why isn’t apple doing more to help users customize it?
macOS comes with an application called Automator. Automator is confusing for power and regular users alike and as a result, nobody uses it. Why not rethink Automator completely with the touchbar in mind? Bring the power of programming to regular users with an easily accessible ‘create your own button’ feature that lets users add custom commands accessible from their touchbar?
Add that, plus the ability to map any menu command to a Touch Bar button, and it would be vastly more useful.
I normally keep the touchbar configured to only show the ~4 most used buttons (night mode, brightness, volume, and mute), and find that I use the other buttons rarely enough that I forgot what else was on there -- mainly because I use touchpad gestures instead.
I rarely (never?) used F-keys in my IDE (Jetbrains) or other apps, so I don't miss them. I have a physical Esc key (which is nice), though I used it rarely enough on my previous generation touchbar mac that it wasn't very infuriating. Having the physical escape + power keys removed any complaints I previously had about it.
If it were a physical slider, I'd totally agree with you.
(Not that there's any right or wrong or answer here.)
The ability to use touch sliders, filmstrips, etc. is a huge boon.
It just gets a ton of hate here on HN because obviously there's very little overlap between the populations.
A lot of people forget that "Pro" has never referred to software professionals, it's always referred to multimedia professionals.