Uupis

> The people who complain about the touchbar functionality must not be putting any effort at all into it.

I would say that people who complain about uselessness of F-keys must not have put any at all effort into using them.

Upon getting my MBP 2016, I spent numerous months trying to make the TouchBar useful; from customizing the contents where apps allowed it, to BTT.

What it came down to is that things worthy a keyboard shortcut are things I want to be able to do fast, reliably, and instinctively. I don't want to search for the button on the TouchBar – I'm using the keyboard, it needs to be as natural as typing, without the need to look down at it. I have a screen already, I don't need another one on my keyboard.

I firmly believe TouchBar can't even come close to the same realm of usefulness as F-keys, much less being worth the price hike it imposes. Function keys are twelve, tactile, solid, free, reliable(1) buttons for keyboard shortcuts; TouchBar is a touchscreen that sometimes(2) works.

> a button to "toggle mic in zoom" actually solves a real problem

I haven't used Zoom, but if it's a decent-ish Mac app, it either already has a keyboard shortcut to toggle microphone, or you can set one in Keyboard Shortcuts, in System Preferences.

(1) as far as anything is reliable on the butterfly keyboards.

(2) same story as butterfly keyboard – if it's even slightly sporadic, it is a shitty input device.

> I seek to understand.

I can't speak for the parent poster, but I find that "things are getting better" and other forms of 'incessantly positive' narrative give me some degree of dissonance. The bad things don't cancel out the good, but the good things don't make up for the bad.

The times I find myself talking about it are when things seem especially bleak, and a given positive spin just turns out to be that last straw of annoyance. Pointing it out just seems to bring back some sense of reality, sort of bracing for when the next awful thing inevitably comes up.

Personally, I try to keep it in my private notes, but sometimes things spill out. It's not an attempt to bring others down.

Of course, this is comment is just as moot.

Do you have multiple aliases set up in the Mail settings? And the Mail.app sends emails correctly from the one you select?

I've had to switch to FastMail app with iOS 14, because Mail.app sends emails from the wrong alias – from an address other than what's selected in the From field. I thought I'd messed up, but no, Mail.app just doesn't work correctly. Befuddling.

I switched to Firefox in the end of 2019, and I don't think it's entirely clear cut, slowness-wise.

In my experience, Safari slows down to a crawl if I open more than 5 or 6 tabs at once, especially something sadness inducing (think new reddit); and it's very eager to.. dump things from memory? I am not sure what happens, but as I switch these gargantuan tabs, it seems to re-draw things a lot.

Firefox handles that kind of thing like a champ. Add uBlock origin, and I have my almost ultimate browsing experience: JavaScript off default, enabled as I see fit.

There is one nasty oddity where I often found myself having to slow down for Safari: when I edit URL query parameters. If I hit return before some indecipherable arbitrary time, which I guesstimate by the auto completions showing up, Safari will throw away my changes and merely reload the current page. I have unchecked and toggled all possible autofill or search checkboxes in Safari settings, and it still happens. This and the extension apocalypse are what drove me away from Safari. In contrast, I've got all the extensions I want, and never ever have to slow down for Firefox.

Well worth giving it a shot for a few weeks. Container tabs are also awesome.

For me, tvOS 13 broke HDMI-CEC and rendered AirPlay audio extremely spotty.

DuckDuckGo have switched to Apple Maps as their mapping solution.

I don't know what exactly "modern" means here, but I think FastMail, Inoreader, and GitHub should count. All three have been fast and responsive. In particular, switching from Gmail to FastMail was a revelation.

Random aside: I've long been very down on web tech, but those 3 have sort of reinvigorated my interest in web stuff.

I'm in dire need for an upgrade, too, and have been broken up about the fact that there is no dGPU-free option this time around. As well as the battery life issues, which probably are at least tangentially related to the dGPU.

If there was any clarity as to when we could expect a new MBP, I'd very strongly consider waiting. But otherwise, I'm thinking I'll just bite the bullet on the current one, mainly because of the keyboard (entirely subjective, but I very much like it), and the screen (just as subjective). Anecdotally, I've seen a reasonable number of people say that the new MBPs run cooler and quieter, which, to me, is very appealing in a laptop.

As far as TouchBar goes: while playing with it at the store, I found some reasonably cute uses that might offset the loss of function keys, such as the seek-bar for Picture-in-Picture or AirPlay videos. And, of course, TouchID.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: if at all feasible – definitely wait for a refresh. But, personally, after taking the time to think about it, I've found sufficient reasons to upgrade even to the 2016 model.

Agreed. Apple's rebuttal does sound very fishy.

I'd love to hear how Consumer Report managed to get a nearly 20-hour battery life result in one of their tests, though.

> There are widespread reports of users returning their new MacBook Pro's as well and switching to PCs/Linux.

Without any data to back the claim up, I'm reasonably sure this is just a loud, extremely small, minority. There are some things wrong with the new MacBook Pros, but, in my opinion, they are still, very likely, the best laptops out there.

> It's too bad you can't get a non touchbar model with the faster CPU's as well.

You can actually get the top-tier CPU in mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15" (i7-4980HQ @ 2.8 GHz) for less than the current base model 15" (i7-6700HQ @ 2.6 GHz). And have it be ~16% faster for multi-core tasks, and some 9% for single-core.

2015 multi-core: 13945, 2016 multi-core: 12006

2015 single-core: 4292, 2016 single-core: 3926

http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks/

Admittedly, those are synthetic benchmarks, but my performance concerns are primarily related to CPU-bound tasks that should be well-captured in these benchmarks.

That plus the freedom from a dedicated GPU – I am strongly against having one in my laptop –, and I would very strongly consider the mid-2015 one.

With the strong push for color _quality_ (please excuse my lack of a better term) on iOS devices lately, I find the OLED-equipped iPhone rumors a bit confounding.

Last I recall they looked a bit off. Nice, but a bit off. That said, my experience with OLED screens is a bit dated, so maybe the color reproduction has improved.

I've been using iCloud Drive more ever since the Dropbox kernel extension. Dropbox had also started going wild with indexing, causing battery drain.

I guess with this, it's time to switch over for good.

My first guess was that those are diff markers as you edit.