I'm astonished and pleased to see they walked back the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPs - the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.
The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute, but perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team's desires.
It turns out that people who buy laptops -- a mobile-ish form factor differentiated from a tablet by its keyboard -- might really really care about keyboards as the main interface between user and device.
I'd concluded that Apple didn't really think much of laptops anymore, and had simply moved on to caring more about other form factors: it seemed a logical conclusion if one assumed that people at Apple were in fact competent.
This shows some real care regarding laptops as a form factor and puts them back in the running for a lot of buyers, including me. But there's still one major issue that I don't see people talking much about -- the way that Apple's decisions regarding storage (namely soldering it to the board AND making it so that there's no way to access it in the event of a logic board failure) increases consumer risk as well as decreasing consumer choice:
It increases risk of data loss. That's a choice that impacts the day-to-day experience much less than the keyboard, which explains why the keyboard has gotten much more attention, and it really is nice that a company arguably built on attention to experience returned to that aspect of it. But this kind of choice makes a huge difference in a moment of failure, and it's at least equally user-hostile, especially in a product bearing the name "pro" where data recovery can be a matter of business continuity.
I suppose that one can argue a responsible professional will be using network and external backups (and of course all responsible professionals worth considering or selling anything to will do this, right?), and so this isn't necessary, and Apple's thing (wise or unwise) is that they frequently reconsider and eliminate things that aren't crucial. But redundancy in some areas is wise, and I can't see what they think eliminating both removability AND emergency direct access when it come to storage actually buys them. Even if one assumes it's a lock-in action for service, it makes the actual service more difficult and costly.
I'm liking the keyboard correction. I just bought a 2014 MBP to replace an older failing MBP, so I'm not in the market for something else for a year or two, but when that comes up, I'll be seriously looking at the 16" as an option. And this will be what I'm thinking about.
I realize that this is idealistic of me but data loss should never be an issue. This is 2019 and backups have been drilled into everyone's heads for years and years and years. You can still access the drives in these via Target Disk mode (and I've had to do a few recoveries through that so I know it works) and it's likely that the pros outweigh the cons.
- There's the adage in the enterprise space that, if you haven't tested your backups, then you don't really have backups. Most consumers, and even professional users, aren't likely going to be in a position to verify their backups before they actually need them.
- Not even being able to do simple repairs or upgrades massively reduces the ROI. This is especially for high-end, professional equipment.
When I first started my current job, everyone was given the option of a Thinkpad with linux or a Mac. Both units had 16GB of RAM. When it became apparent that 16GB was insufficient for my workloads, it was simple for IT to upgrade my Thinkpad to 32GB. My coworkers with Macs were not so fortunate.
> There's the adage in the enterprise space that, if you haven't tested your backups, then you don't really have backups. Most consumers, and even professional users, aren't likely going to be in a position to verify their backups before they actually need them.
This is why having more than just one computer is beneficial. Because I jump between multiple laptops, desktops, and other devices, and perform my work and other activities, I bring with me copies of my data between devices by necessity, whenever I need that data.
And I think that is actually the way to do it. Not to focus so much on trying to keep multiple copies of all of your data since forever, because then you get bogged down in details about keeping everything in sync and everything organized, but instead to just focus on the data that you actually need, and being conscious about making copies of data when you use it.
In the past, when I was using fewer computers, I had one computer that was sort of the canonical location of data. And I’d access it over the network and work on my data there. It had great uptime too. On the order of months. Then one day there was a power outage and that was when I realized that I had no idea what I had set as the password for the full disk encryption on said machine. Ooops :^)
I lost a fair bit of data that day. But I learned something too, and that learning has shaped my habits in how I deal with data and I can proudly say that in the years that have passed since then I have been able to hold on to all of the data that is most important to me.
I almost got blindsided by 2FA a couple of years ago, because I didn’t know that the keys for the second factor were intentionally kept device-local. But thankfully I was changing phones with the old one still functional and in my possession and was waiting with performing factory reset until after I’d set up the new phone and seen whether or not I had all that I needed. So because of that all I needed to do was to log in with the 2FA of the old phone on each service I had it on, temporarily disable 2FA and then reenable it with the new phone and when I did that I also saved all of the new 2FA keys so that in the event that I might actually end up having to switch phones because the new one broke in the future I would not end up locked out of my accounts.
Even if data loss is entirely mitigated by backups, storage failure can also be a thing, and mitigating that issue used to be a matter of making at least one of your backups bootable and on media you could swap in, so this didn't take down the whole device. Not sure what techs do now, but I'll bet it involves more downtime and less continuity.
But data loss is an issue. Network backups are great, and I use them, but they're bandwidth bound. Local external drive backups are great, and I do them, but less frequently. And I don't test my backups (yet)... do you? Having removable storage -- or even storage that's reliably accessible in the face of other component failure -- provides an extra margin against the risk of loss that can creep in even with a set of responsible backup habits.
What's the pro of soldering storage to the board that outweighs these cons?
Just get a time machine, put on your wifi and you don't have to think about it anymore, it will just backup every day in the background. You can easily restore into another macbook using the builtin restore functionality. Apples solution to this is really good (still struggling to do it with the same ease with Windows without 3rd party software and Linux).
Just preheat the board, get your hot air station, heat and remove those bad modules, clean the pads, add your solder and remount some new ones before cleaning up all that flux you were using. Then reinstall macOS and restore your backups.
It might take a few tries before the solder balls up correctly under each pad. Use plenty of flux. Maybe give it a ultrasonic bath.
Ah yes, Apple is known for making things obvious, intuitive, easy, and user-friendly! /s
Having an actual mini-sata or m.2 connector won't be too taxing. But it will increase tech support costs, and lower profits from sales of new replacement machines at least.
Sad. (That's why my choice is Thinkpad T series, which is built like a tank: heavy, bulky, easy to replace any part, and hard to actually break; also, enough room for a good keyboard.)
Even the XPS 13s are more serviceable than their rival MBP 13"s. The RAM may be soldered on both but the XPS uses a standard NVMe SSD. It's saved me a few times already.
If you have AppleCare you won’t have to pay for that replacement. After 3 years, you would, however buying a laptop with an inferior OS just in case one day a machine catastrophically fails is like riding a horse because you are afraid your car might fly off a bridge at some point in the future.
I know I am anecdote-land, but I have never in 20 years of using Macs, had one catastrophically fail. Or fail at all for that matter.
Apple discontinued Time Capsule and their entire Airport line. The Time Machine software is still in MacOS, but de-emphasized and who knows if they'll retain it going forward.
With how hard they're pushing their cloud and integrating it into pretty much everything I'm surprised there's still no official cloud backup solution for Mac.
The pros are only size related. Size at all costs is excusable as a consumer or prosumer product, but most of the users of the high end pro's want power, cooling, good ports, reliability, and certainly upgradability. The 2012's were so nice featuring 2 internal sata connections and removable ram. Those computers weren't too thick in my mind, so for a pro, I think they have their objectives mixed up.
I feel the upgradability issue is relatively minor. For some extra money, I can order one with 64 GB of DDR4 and 8 TB of flash. That's probably enough to carry me for five or so years. Quite frankly, my local storage needs topped out somewhere between 1 and 2 TB and have been there for the past five years. Whether 64 GB of RAM will be enough is the big question for me. Even if it weren't, there aren't many laptops available today that can go further than that.
Upgradability is good if you intend to make a lower initial investment and increase capacity at a later point. This laptop is not a toy and, if you are buying one, it's reasonable to expect a return on your investment.
Some extra money? You’re talking about a nearly $6k configuration.
It almost never makes sense to overbuy storage and memory, which tends to be a cyclical market that drops in cost over time. Doubly true with Apple that marks up both commodities dramatically.
64GB will cost you $800 now. When you need it, it may cost half that, or less. And Apple was notorious for underspec'ing the maximum amount of RAM a machine could take - it was common for a machine to take double the Apple official maximum because the DIMM densities increased with time. Since the integration of the memory controller into the CPU this is less of an issue, but the soldered RAM means you're limited to the amount that Apple is prepared to give you, which until this model has been far less than the CPU actually supports - the 15" i9 could be spec'd to 32GB, but the CPU could address 64GB.
Apple's attitude to upgrading is to replace the entire machine. It's both expensive and absurd. I bought a 2008 MBP back in uni in 2010. I later upgraded the RAM and disk when I could afford to, and when I had reached the limits of what it had. That machine served me well for 5 years. There's nothing else on the market today I'd trust to be a daily use machine for 5 years straight.
Even then, it's getting more and more difficult to justify the increasing gap between Apple pricing and say - Dell or Lenovo. Almost $1k in it now for equivalently spec'd non-base MBP vs XPS15/X1 Extreme, and the gap just gets higher as you need higher requirements.
Let's have a look at what Apple have done since 2012.
1) Inflate the base prices of the machines and attempt to justify it via non-optional "features" such as the touch bar, wide gamut displays, extra thunderbolt ports, obsessively thin designs, T2 chip.
2) Solder everything, requiring customers to buy the specs they think they'll need in ~3 years' time upfront, when prices are at their highest. Look how expensive 1TB of flash was 3 years ago vs today, for example. Heck, in 2008-2012, several Apple machines could be upgraded to beyond their original BTO capabilities thanks to technology advancements and firmware updates by Apple at the time.
3) Where they didn't solder storage in the 2012-2015 machines, they used several different proprietary form factors for blade card SSDs when standardised form factors have existed the whole time (mSATA, M.2 SATA/PCIe AHCI/NVMe).
4) Removed the ability for customers to restore machines to working state either in the field or in a timely manner, and pushing customers toward Apple service and AppleCare.
5) Literally glue in the one consumable item in the machine (battery) that is almost certainly going to fail before the usable lifespan of the machine, pushing the price of a battery service up dramatically, reducing the economical lifespan of the machines.
6) Reduce serviceability of other components likely to fail or get damaged over time such as the keyboard and trackpad by riveting, glueing, sandwiching etc to ensure older machines are uneconomical to repair as soon as they can be, pushing customers toward buying a new machine.
This is a company that is doing everything to take away your choice as a customer, trying to turn expensive computers into disposable appliances. Don't try to justify this crap - just say no.
All the above, combined with the design flaws almost every 2016+ MacBook has (butterfly keyboard, flexgate, staingate, display connector issues, T2 chip integration issues), the seriously declining quality of Apple's OSs, the removal of useful features (MagSafe!, sleep light, external battery status meter, IR remote, non-type C ports, SD reader), have me now in the position where I not only don't want to buy any of there new MacBooks, I'm actively encouraging others not to as well.
Me, a once huge Apple fan whose personal portable machines have been Apple almost exclusively since the 90s. Whose OS of choice has been OS X/macOS since Jaguar. Who used to go out of his way to explain why Apple machines were worth it.
I recently bought a Thinkpad P1 Gen 2 with i9 9880H, 64GB RAM, 2x 2TB NVME, 15” OLED, basically all the options ticked, including a 3 year warranty with equivalent properties to AppleCare+.
It ran about $4700 before tax but after one of those coupons which Lenovo is constantly running and which knocks 10-30% off the MSRP of the device. Given Apple is now pricing NVME at $300/TB for upgrade, this seems comparably priced for what is largely the same internals.
I’ve been a MacBook Pro aficionado for the last decade. I’ve tried other stuff like the Surface Pro, never kept it.
I guess my point is there’s a myth that Apple is significantly more expensive than others, which doesn’t feel like it’s borne out by the manufacturer configurators when you’re dealing with high-end configurations?
Obviously, and this is highly subjective, I personally ascribe significant value to what Apple does to enhance thermal management (vs. the P1, which has throttling issues), to enhancing security through stuff like T2, Touch ID, FileVault 2 being so seamless, etc.
I’ve got enough nagging concerns about the maxed-out P1 Gen 2 that I’ve just ordered the new 16” MBP to do another compare and contrast — we’ll see how it goes. Extra 4TB of NVME over the P1 certainly doesn’t hurt.
Where I agree is some of the integration/packaging compromises impacting repairability are a pain, AppleCare+ is a subpar experience to Lenovo who’ll have parts and a technician appear next business day to fix your laptop. Also the mistakes Apple made around keyboards were deeply unfortunate, I had to get mine repaired multiple times.
> Upgradability is good if you intend to make a lower initial investment and increase capacity at a later point. This laptop is not a toy and, if you are buying one, it's reasonable to expect a return on your investment.
Not clear on your meaning here. Are you saying that upgradability increases ROI, and that it is something one should expect in a professional laptop? If so, I agree.
You can buy an upgradable computer specced to your current needs today and adapt it to your future needs as needed. You will pay less now because it doesn't need to be able to run now the OS that'll be available in 5 years and you probably will pay less for the capacity by then. The cost is the time you'll need to invest to make those upgrades: sourcing the parts, assembly, etc.
Upgradability is, in general, a good thing. In the case of these laptops, you buy them to the specs you'll need at the end of the machine's useful life, at the full current price.
> In the case of these laptops, you buy them to the specs you'll need at the end of the machine's useful life, at the full current price.
OK, I see what you are saying. The nit I have to pick with that particular sort of reasoning is that now Apple has put their customers in a bit of a bind:
- either you buy the absolute max spec (and hope that it includes the specs you'll need for that time span), or
- you risk buyers remorse as you end up in a situation where the laptop that you already handed over a small fortune for isn't up to the task
This past year I recently considered buying one of Lenovo's premium Thinkpad T-series laptops, but the fact that they had one (of two) RAM slots soldered put me off. I was buying this laptop for personal use, and so I didn't want to spend top dollar on it right then, but I didn't want to end up in a situation where what I had settled for wasn't enough.
I ended up going for one of the "budget" E-series Thinkpads, because (paradoxically) those do have fully upgradable RAM.
It's not just buyers remorse. If you use the machine for work and buy something under-spec'd - especially in RAM, you lose money by being less efficient with a slower machine.
The Thinkpad T490 (not the T490s) does have upgradeable RAM -- we settled on it for all our new developer machines. It's got an amazing keyboard and is fairly lightweight, but has every port you'd need, even VGA (and costs ~$1,000 for 8GB/256GB SSD).
It has one stick of upgradable RAM - better than nothing, but I wanted both sticks. Honestly, for a work laptop where you are going to be trading it out again in 3 years, that's probably fine.
My E495 currently has 8GB (2x4GB for better iGPU performance) and that's all I need for personal uses for now. But I can upgrade to 32GB later if I need to (and for less overall cost).
By how much? I understand that if instead of buying a laptop with the intention of replacing it with the then top-of-the-line model five years down the road I get one that I plan to outgrow in 2 years, I'll spend less money, but is that a relevant amount compared to the money you expect to make by using the computer?
The question is less whether the cost is lower, but whether it's lower enough to justify the extra work of upgrading.
To paraphrase a recent HN comment about the touchbar...
"I'm so glad this model has soldered storage"
"I would buy a dell xps but only if it had soldered storage"
things no one ever said. [1]
Soldering ram and storage on a laptop this big is an anti-feature, just a remnant of what Marco calls the "spiteful design" [2] of the last three generations. When a DIY upgrade to 128gb/16tb is affordable not a single person will be thankful they can't upgrade.
The point is I don't care. I'd rather have the specs of what I'll need five years from now right now and have a very comfortable machine than having a reasonable machine now, spending a day upgrading it later, having a then reasonable machine until it's retired.
The difference in cost is not that huge. I'm not talking about getting an 8-way Xeon Platinum box with 16 TB of RAM to put under my desk.
>have the specs of what I'll need five years from now right now
lol... like you can know this. My 2010 MBPro definitely needed 16GB ram in 2016, and thankfully I was able to put it in there even though apple never supported that much ram in that model.
Your entire perspective on this is entirely warped.
> whether it's lower enough to justify the extra work of upgrading.
Extra work? I upgraded the SSD in my 2015 MBP in 2 hours. And almost all of that was waiting for time machine to restore to the new disk. Is that worth it against the £2k+ I'd have to spend on a whole new MacBook? Of course it is.
I couldn't have afforded the bigger disk when I first purchased the laptop (if you have the ability to always be able to afford to top-of-the-line model, then that's a luxury that not everyone has). And this is Apple, who claim to be environmentally friendly.
Not everyone makes Bay Area money as an engineer especially in the hard sciences. Even though I’m one of the lucky ones, it’s annoying being forced to pay Apple prices for storage which is about double the market price eg Apple 8TB $2400 vs decent brand decent speed 8TB ~$1200-$1500. It is very hard to justify. This also doesn’t account for inflation and the general decrease in storage prices over time. Yes, the price drops are no longer as fast but in a year or two, we’re still seeing %25 price decreases; it’s still worth waiting for a lot of people including me. I feel the same way about Apple RAM. Soldering it down does nothing for me. it just helps Apple’s profits, since it seems they’re no longer able to substantially grow their user base. It feels like extortion and this isn’t helping growth long term even if they only see iOS as the future
But isn’t this exactly the point of the thunderbolt ports? You can buy your external SSDs and get as fast (even faster if you RAID them) access to your data.
I use this setup. It is annoying as hell when you have to constantly unmount drives. Using this setup for Apple Photos is even worse. In Catalina I’m unable to safely unmount unless I reboot (shutting down photos and waiting 30 min isn’t enough) Also this setup is not portable
Apple no longer just works anymore for me. It hasn’t for the past 2-3 years now.
It's also hard to imagine needing 8TB on-the-go capacity. That's certainly a niche use. I can imagine more cases where being tethered to a desk in order to get to the data would be not a big deal.
It's also worth considering that it extends the usable life of the machines. In some companies, older high end machines that are still in good condition are recycled and passed down to less demanding users - e.g. developer machines may get passed down to tech support.
For personal users, it means that passing it down to a family member may no longer be an option.
In addition, the lack of upgradability has tanked the resale value of lower end Macs - so lease companies aren't recovering as much value, and consumers machines are depreciating faster than Macs of old.
During the upgradability era, it was still cheaper to up your ram and storage yourself on day one than through apples gouging. You could even put in more ram than apple even offered.
If the disk is encrypted (and it should be) and the encryption key is stored in a secure enclave (like the T2 chip) or uses a machine specific key (UID), then having removable or swappable storage isn't helpful either.
In either case, you're not accessing any stored data from a broken Macbook.
Yet Apple still has no option to Time Machine backup to iCloud. I believe there are some third party ways to Time Machine backup to some cloud provider, but I don't see why Apple doesn't provide this as a feature out the box.
Because Time Machine does versioned delta backups and, as far as I know, no cloud provider offers the ability to store that much data unless their business model revolves around backup solutions.
But it’s just for Apple users? A terrabyte per user is surely within Apples reach? I can backup my phone to iCloud, but not my MacBook. It’s a glaring hole in their end-to-end experience.
Macbook drives typically can go to 1TB or more. You'd need much more storage than that to properly do a versioned backup solution that was online and that doesn't include any of the other uses of that storage.
This is kind of a cloistered view. Many people work in environments where bandwidth is hard to come by. And, of course, on-site backups are always risky.
The data migration connector will not help much in cases where your laptop and your local backup disk are destroyed.
My setup backs up to both local and networked disks (both disks listed in Time Machine, so backups alternate between them). The networked disk is actually a folder in a Debian VM that, from time to time, sends the backup to AWS.
A bit paranoid, but little added effort (figuring out and setting everything up took about an afternoon).
The paradoxical thing with recent Apple laptop keyboards is that their Magic Keyboard 2 is pretty darn good. I haven't bought any Apple products for more than a decade, but I keep recommending and buying their Magic Keyboard 2 for Linux workstations.
It has a very good mechanical feel, and it reduces latency perhaps due to shallow action point and/or firmware tweaks [1]. Also, it's really easy to source ANSI layouts outside the US.
I do in fact prefer it to my blue ALPS keyboard for long typing sessions.
Interestingly, the way you pair it with the Mac is to plug it in. When you unplug it is magically paired. It was embarrassing how long it took me to figure this out the first time.
I ran into this issue with 2015 MBP. I incorrectly assumed SSD where still removable and connectable to a USB adapter. When my display started failing I took it to Apple. They advised that data loss is possible. I had an old backup and figured I could just use the SSD via USB for more recent stuff.
Sure enough all data is lost. I ask them why they removed such a feature. They said they replaced it will a special port on logic board for accessing the SSD the same way. They tried that though and it failed. LOL at the nonsensical design decisions.
If Apple does a removable SSD again, it would go a long way to restoring faith in them.
Yep. That’s correct. Unless you have a working T2, any SSD you have is basically decorative. Which is good for data security but terrible for its integrity.
What's more likely--logic board failure, or the loss or theft of your entire laptop? If you're not backing up your data, your risk of data loss is unacceptably high. Worrying about whether the SSD is soldered to the logic board is like walking outside in the cold without a coat and worrying about whether you're wearing a long sleeve or short sleeve t-shirt.
Personally? I've never lost a laptop or had it stolen. However, I've had several laptops stop accepting power, including one of the three Apple laptops I used in a business setting. Lack of simple removable storage on the apple laptop made handling the power issue a lot more exciting; because I noticed it when I had a full battery, I was able to do a full backup in time.
Maybe not logic board failure specifically, but I see the possibility of my laptop dying as much more likely than it getting lost or stolen. And it's usually possible to extract a working SSD out of a dead laptop.
I suppose you could also repair the computer if the full logic board hasn't died, but that may not be worth it if the laptop was purchased a while ago, especially given how unrepairable these devices are. And depending on how Apple decides to go about the repair, they may end up not retaining your anyway, even if they could have.
Theft is a worthwhile risk profile to consider. People should do backups. Perhaps they should use encrypted volumes for sensitive information, too.
This does not change the fact that removable storage (or even storage that's accessible post board-failure) provides an additional margin of risk mitigation against hardware failure. AND a convenient way of making bootable backups you can swap in the event of storage failure rather than taking the entire machine out. AND upgradability.
What's the advantage of soldering the SSD to the board?
(And personally, I've experienced boot failure hardware issues on two laptops, theft zero times.)
> This does not change the fact that removable storage (or even storage that's accessible post board-failure) provides an additional margin of risk mitigation against hardware failure.
How much additional margin? If you have backups, you're covered against both failure modes; the only marginal benefit would be to recover the x hours of data since your last backup.
> How much additional margin? If you have backups, you're covered against both failure modes; the only marginal benefit would be to recover the x hours of data since your last backup.
I would wager that for 90% of people, that would be all of the data since initial power on.
Have owned laptops for about 20 years. Their internals take a beating inside of bags and such. Most of them I have owned had the power connector fail. One had a GPU become de-soldered in 2006. Zero of them have been lost or stolen.
> soldering it to the board AND making it so that there's no way to access it in the event of a logic board failure
I prefer this, considering how encryption works with the T2 chip. I'm probably in a minority of general users, but probably in the majority of HN users when I say that nothing on my laptop is important. I don't even have backups per-se. Code is in git and mirrored to multiple remote backups. Documents and similar exist solely in the cloud. If for some reason my laptop was stolen I want there to be an as close to 0% chance of an enemy retrieving data from my laptop as possible.
(Yes, I know SSD encryption exists, I think the T2 thing takes things a step further)
Not just the risk of data loss, but the inconvenience of restoring the machine is much higher. This means the only solution to restoring a modern Mac notebook is to replace the entire logic board - everything else may be functional except the storage, which is a consumable by most considerations, but now the entire board must be swapped. And if it's out of warranty, which let's face it, it's extremely likely to be, then you are completely and utterly stuck. You either have an enormous bill from Apple or an authorised repair shop (and Apple is notoriously cagey about allowing third parties access to their replacement parts) or you have to hunt down a machine for spares to do the swap yourself, and now with Apple's invasive security measures requiring communication with Apple's diagnostic tools to perform certain swaps, storage failure can render the machine entirely useless for months, if not permanently. Whereas if the disk was replaceable, just order one from the most convenient store, swap it in, restore from Time Machine.
The Function Key MBPs have a problem with their flash storage where they may randomly and unpredictably die, taking all the data with them. The fix is a firmware update, which also takes all the data with it. Fantastic, Apple, we bought six of those machines, and because the users are actively, y'know, using the damned things, it's not really convenient to tell them they'll be without their machine for a week while the service centre gets around to it, and then multiple hours of restoring their Time Machine backups. On the plus side, the SSDs in those machines are not soldered. Yes, they're proprietary, but it's something - if those machines suffer failure, I could grab an SSD on eBay and get them running again. It's almost worth the risk.
If you're dealing with Apple/an Authorized Service Provider, there is a replacement method available to them to get data off of a failing system. (Uses the USB-C ports and DFU mode).
Anecdotally, it does work on some boards that are otherwise hosed, but may be less frequently successful than with the prior data connector, as there's more pieces that do have to be still functional for it to work.
Interesting to note that the T2 chip in the new MBP supposedly contains the HD/Flash controller that used to be a separate IC -- according to the specs page. As it's a pretty fully featured SOC in its own right, that might make it easier to get to the HD in case of main CPU/RAM failures.
I bought a 1 TB Samsung T5 SSD for Time machine backups on a 512GB 15” MacBook Pro that I bought recently. With that and a Yubikey (with an off-site backup Yubikey of course), I’ve got everything I need if I ever have my laptop stolen or rendered inoperable. I’ve also got another older spinning rust external hard disk for backups, but that’s more of a backup of a backup thing.
Companies do not act according to their morals: they act according to their incentives. And there is an incentive to sell more iCloud storage if SSDs are hard to swap.
Except that when you don't have the disk space on your SSD to download the stuff from iCloud, the whole thing doesn't work. I think you've a conspiracy theory here.
When you don't, the local files that haven't been accessed in some time are deleted and only a local alias is kept. Next time you need it, it'll be downloaded.
> I'd concluded that Apple didn't really think much of laptops anymore, and had simply moved on to caring more about other form factors: it seemed a logical conclusion if one assumed that people at Apple were in fact competent.
Counterpoint, I love the new keyboards and hate using anything else. Amazing how far people go in assuming their opinion is correct, and then just keep going from there.
Maybe somebody at Apple got the idea that telling more users "Sorry, your data is gone forever, no way to get it back." increases user perception of device security (that it's hard to get your data off your device; if Apple can't do it then criminals can't either.)
I'd rather have FDE on a removable drive, but perhaps the typical user doesn't really have a clear mental picture of what's going on.
> "the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPs - the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys."
The "butterfly mechanism" keyboards are awful, unreliable, and get worse with time, so I'm very glad to see them go. Likewise, the return of the physical Escape key is very welcome.
But honestly, the design of the arrow keys has never bothered me in the slightest. If anything, the present configuration is slightly better because it's aesthetically cleaner and gives you a larger surface to hit the left and right arrows.
The "butterfly mechanism" keyboards never bothered me. I actually like the feel of my MBP's keyboard. Likewise the software Escape key never bothered me.
But honestly, the design of the arrow keys is super important. With the full-height left/right keys it's hard to quickly find the arrow keys by feel. The new (old) arrow key design is honestly what I'm most interested in with this computer after the 16" screen.
I am with you as far as the butterfly mechanism (aside from robustness issues), but for me the arrow keys are fine.
The bigger issue for me is lack of physical volume controls. I think it's extremely important for any device which produces sound to have a physical mute button. This would be less of an issue if the touch-bar were more reliable, but it often doesn't respond immediately, or else gets frozen and unresponsive, for instance with the volume slider up.
I know the subject has been beaten to death but still, as someone who was pleasantly surprised by the butterfly keyboard, I am living a nightmare with my just 2 month old MacBook Pro with keys starting to lose travel and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before bein completely stuck. To the point I’m now afraid to use the keyboard, feeling like everytime I use it without the external keyboard keys become more stuck. I’m so disappointed and was misguided on how the new generation had less problems.
The lady and right keys are easy. But up and down are difficult. With the half height left and right keys it’s easier to find the up and down keys. The down key is between left and right and the up key is an island (or a peninsula at least). Does that make sense?
I bought the last half height model when I upgraded my MBP 13”.
I can find the up and down easily because they are shaped differently. They are the only keys split horizontally, and the connecting edges are curved inward unlike the other keys. I find them easy to feel fore. I am glad the new keyboard solves this problem for others though, I don't think the full-height left/right keys are particularly better.
But when not looking at the keyboard, having full height left and right arrow keys makes them feel just like the nearby Option and ? keys. Having a distinct arrow-key-group shape makes them easier to locate by touch.
It's not always easy. If I need to quickly move to the arrow keys (I touch type, so no looking!), I have about 80-85% success finding the right key on the first press... with the inverted-T layout, that's about 99%.
There's something weird about the way my brain handles the key being the same size as the option key next to it, and the fact that the tops of all those keys are exactly the same.
If you touch type then learn the OS X shortcuts of CTRL-B, CTRL-F, CTRL-P, CTRL-N, far more efficient than moving your hand over to the arrow keys and works in (virtually) all places you are editing text.
I don't think I have anything special configured for my Mojave setup and these seem to work for me. In particular, I use Ctrl + Shift + F2 (on my external keyboard) to focus the menubar and then I can use Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f to navigate back (left) and forward (right) between menus, Enter to select a menu, and then Ctrl-n or Ctrl-p to navigate next/previous entries in the menu, with Enter again to select.
Interesting! I always use Cmd-Shift-/, which focuses the search field in the help menu, and Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f do not escape from there.
But focusing the menu bar with Ctrl-F2 does indeed allow me to use Ctrl-f and Ctrl-b. And after hitting Return to open a menu, I can use Ctrl-n and Ctrl-p to navigate down and up.
Interesting.
I will have to try more, but I still think that there are places in macOS where Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f do not work, and I have to use the arrow keys, instead.
When you're searching for the arrow keys, the break is one thin line only in the middle of one key. When the keys are half height, there is are two large gaps to find. The difference is a few mm vs almost a cm and 3 targets to find vs one.
I hate the full-size left and right arrow keys because it means I can't easily use my sense of touch to find the arrow keys. I mistype them all the time now, even after months of use. That was never a problem with the previous inverted-T design.
Seconded. I frequently mistype L/R as up/down, and this is infuriating when striking 'command' + arrow to go to the beginning/end of the line (an extremely common op for me), and instead going to the top/bottom of the file, completely losing my place.
(Of course that particular problem would be less of an issue if the keyboard had home/end/pgUp/pgDn, which I'm still sore about, years after they got rid of them).
Arrow keys are so important I might almost want them all full size, in a "+" configuration.
I wonder -- is this for a 13" or 15" laptop? I'm curious because after this thread I was checking on how I tend to find the arrow keys. I have a 13" model and finding the edge of the computer itself seems to help me find the appropriate keys.
Many PC laptop keyboards have full-size keys for all four arrows. Tiny keys for a feature I use so frequently is user-hostile, whether it's 2 or 4 of them.
It’s not about the size for me. Sure the full height inverted T is easy to use. The half height inverted T also works. But the one that isn’t inverted T is difficult.
They also usually have an awful-looking extra row just for the arrow keys. And FWIW, I find that the inverted-T arrangement is even easier to quickly find by touch than full-height arrow keys.
are you a touch typist? because lifting your hand, and repositioning it onto a grid of undifferentiated keys is MUCH harder when you can't feel the shape of the inverted T and can't see it (because you're not looking at the keyboard or because you're visually impaired).
The escape key will be especially welcome by me, as I found the touchbar exceptionally hard to deal with, and I would often have to hit it three or four times to get vim to exit insert mode. I actually didn't have much trouble with the arrow keys, despite all the negative feedback I saw for them online.
Hopefully this trend continues and they can iterate on this model even further.
Right? The solution is 'make the fuckin keyboard work'. These are workarounds.
I have twenty... seven, Jesus. Twenty seven years of muscle memory with VI. The only keyboard I can't 'vote with my feet' on is the built-in one on my laptop. As a result I'm hardly ever using my laptop untethered now. I don't think I've ever owned a keyboard I've typed less on than the touchbar macbook. Which means I'm barely using them as laptops, which is a little depressing.
Yep - I have mine set to be control if pressed with other keys, and escape if pressed alone. Works for everything except if I'm playing a videogame that uses ctrl to crouch.
Other people argue that all real vimmers use ctrl-[ instead of escape.
Edit: This is on a 2015 macbook pro, that still has the physical function keys. I almost never use the physical escape key, just capslock instead.
Install Karabiner-Elements. Go to the "complex modifications" tab. Add "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone".
Personally I find a classic Unix layout to work best for me. I’ve mapped the caps lock key to CTRL. I use that far more than I ever use caps, it feels quite natural to me after about a week or two of adjustment.
In addition to this you can do something like mapping Shift+Caps Lock to be an actual Caps Lock toggle. Now you get 3 buttons for one and it works amazingly well.
>The oversized caps lock key on keyboards is an inexplicably bad UI choice anyway.
It's probably largely a relic from typewriters when it was originally something of a mechanical necessity and then made more sense than today in the context of filling out forms etc.
I used to have really strong opinions about keyboards. I even still have a Northgate keyboard which was an "improved" version of the original IBM keyboard. (Which largely mirrored the Selectric.)
But TBH, I use so many different systems these days that I pretty much just accept that keyboard layouts and keyboard feel are going to differ from machine to machine and there's no point fussing about it.
I haven't used a laptop, desktop, or other computer (windows/mac/Linux) in the last 15 years in which I didn't immediately configure Caps-Lock to be control within 5-minutes of setting up the system. So, to some degree - it's always been control for me.
FWIW, early PC keyboard layouts had the Control key next to the "A", where God intended it to be, too. (Don't have the link handy, but there was a story posted here on HN in the past week or so about the history of the PC keyboard that showed this...)
True, and as a longtime fan of the IBM Model 'M' that had that configuration and was mechanical and built to last with buckling springs, I'm glad I can get one of these:
That's a bit of a pain if you put that into muscle memory and use other Vi interface software that can't be remapped.
Personally I'm in the Caps to Ctrl and use Ctrl-[ for escape camp. Works in my shell, REPLs and in my database clients and anywhere else with a readline interface that isn't Vim.
Even with that I still want a physical escape key.
jk is a pretty rare combo to begin with, but when you do need it, just hitting j, and pausing for a second takes that input singularly, then you can type k safely. Slightly sub optimal, yes. But the benefits outweigh the negatives for me.
I was listening to the Upgrade podcast (from relayfm), the episode that was just released includes an interview with someone from Apple (I think she's the PM for the MBP?)
She specifically mentioned vim users as one of the reasons for bringing back the escape key
Not only is [ always in the same spot, but you don't have to move your fingers off the normal keys or stretch. I was fortunate that a friend told me about that early on, otherwise I couldn't have handled VI, the stretching is so inconvenient (especially so on those old IBM PS/2 keyboards with cubic keys).
Only if it's the same keyboard layout. For instance, on the US layout, [ is immediately to the right of P, while on the ABNT-2 layout, it's two keys to the right of P. Meanwhile, ESC is on the same place (top left of the keyboard) in both.
Personally an Emacs user---I use the esc key loads too. Best thing I ever did was install Karabiner to remap capslock to esc when tapped, and to ctrl when held down. (One meta key to rule them all!) Have you tried anything like that? Just curious.
I remapped `jj` to escape (shortly before the touchbar was announced), because I disliked either having to move my hand or use both hands to get out of insert mode.
For cruising around my code the advantage is that jk/kj doesn't do anything in normal mode (cruising mode, haha). So I can just start mashing jk in a terminal window that I don't know what mode I left vim in.
The biggest downside to jk/kj mapping is that words that end with k are somewhat common. So a few times a week I will type something like "splunk" and want to exit insert mode immediately so I mash jk/kj after the k. 50% of the time the j is first so I end up with "splun" (kj is <esc>) (k moves up since we're in normal mode now).
> The biggest downside to jk/kj mapping is that words that end with k are somewhat common. So a few times a week I will type something like "splunk" and want to exit insert mode immediately so I mash jk/kj after the k. 50% of the time the j is first so I end up with "splun" (kj is <esc>) (k moves up since we're in normal mode now).
This is why I use `jj` instead of `jk`/`kj` -- as a native English speaker in a job where everyone primarily speaks English, there are few cases where I'd be writing code with a `jj` naturally in a string.
Very rarely. The only place I notice a difference is if the last letter I type is a j, the cursor 'hesitates' for a moment because Vim is watching for a k.
The advantage I found of jk over jj is that, in normal mode, jk is a no-op, so if I hit jk as Escape when I was already in normal mode, it doesn't matter.
The only problem is that when I'm editing text out of Vim, I end up with the occasional jk at the end of my typing. That almost happened while writing this comment.
is it? I have ctrl mapped to caps-lock. so for me it's essentially home-row. left pinkie+right pinkie going almost nowhere. reaching for esc is decidedly not home-row.
The tough thing about the touch bar is how often it freezes. It's hard to get used to it when all that is noticeable is the few times a week it does it.
It's deeper than that. Control-[ is the same keycode as escape. [ is the next character after Z in ASCII, and Control-[ is the next character after Control-Z. It's not a mapping, they are one and the same.
I disagree. If you are a even modestly decent programmer you know to configure autoindentation so that you never need the tab key for anything. I cannot imagine a scenario where I would need the tab key in insert mode (except a very fringe case where I need to enter a tab character in a literal string and for some reason there are no escapes like \t. But then again you can still ^V^I)
can you point to a minimal example where vanilla vim autoindent cannot cope with python code editing? I never found any situation where I had to press the tab key
Have you ever refactored anything? Especially in Python, moving a line into a control block requires using the tab key. If you don't have to press the tab key either you're such a god programmer that you have never made a mistake or refactored anything you've ever written, or you're trolling.
When it comes to function keys, you either use them lots or rarely and for the former, yes - a physical key is prefered by far. However I see the advantages in other situations with the touchbar, however it would be great if the users had a choice. How hard would it be to have the touchbar in a modular design form that was user changeable and they could fit a row of keys instead?
However, there is always the option of an external keyboard. But then you end up carrying even more peripherals that you end up with a really thin light laptop and a second bag with all the adapters to enable to you to use the laptop in the way you want. For some it does feel like you got sold an electric sports car, yet end up having to tow a caravan about to carry all the spare batteries and other accessories you had in your previous car.
But certainly an opportunity to embrace modular design and allow the end user to customize in a way that has benefits and would win over pundits.
We have a modular laptop in our office-- it's a Dell Precision, and practically everything in the machine's serviceable and replaceable (complete with a detailed service manual, provided by Dell). Replaceable, externally accessible disk drives, replaceable RAM, replaceable modular keyboard, even (IIRC) a socketed processor.
The catch is that all that modularity makes the thing massive-- the thing's a good 2-3 inches thick (with lid closed) and weighs nearly 8 pounds. It looks like what you'd get if you took a '90s-era laptop chassis, stretched it to modern screen proportions, and stuck modern innards inside. It's just not practical unless it's going to spend all its time sitting on a desk, and that begs the question of why you wouldn't just buy a desktop in the first place.
On the other side, I have a Thinkpad T470s which has all the ports I could have asked for, a fantastic keyboard and replaceable SSD and expandable RAM but weighs less than a 13" Macbook Pro.
Thinkpads are nice, but that device has a much worse screen, worse processor (significantly older, but... Intel), lower max ram, lower max storage, and (for most people) worse trackpad.
if you comparing to this laptop, you should be comparing the x1 extreme gen 2... oled screen, equiv processor, same ram, lower storage (8tb == another laptop on apple upgrade pricing), trackpoint/nipple v trackpad. at that point your comparing effectively os (win/linux v OS X), on hardware pricing the Thinkpad is quite competitive and cheaper. bonus nvidia for folks that want to do ml, vs amd graphics, which afaics have pretty poor support in any major ml framework.. to which the answer is cloud.. at which point Chromebook ftw.
Except I have set up 100 of those X1 ThinkPads, and I can tell you that the display, in addition to being the stupid too-wide PC aspect ratio, isn't close in quality to what you get with a MB Pro. And as previously mentioned, the trackpad isn't close to Apple's all-glass trackpads, either. And the audio is laughable. And the case isn't as sturdy. And it doesn't have 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports, of course (although some prefer the selection of ports that Lenovo provides).
again its not a hw comparison per se, its a price (1-2k discount on hw) vs os sw. re sturdy its mil spec (810g), re ports its 2 usb-c/tbird plus no dongles (cause you have all the ports, hdmi, usb 3.1a x2, ethernet, sd). agreed re trackpad, but Thinkpad users I've noticed (linux mostly) tend towards the trackpoint/nipple to the point of disabling trackpad.
all that said I'm probably getting the MacBook due to apps, but the walled garden on graphics and ml as well as reasonable linux support gives me pause.
random aside, what did Nvidia do that apple won't talk to them..
> Just a little side note to correct your facts: no, the x2 extreme gen2 does not have ethernet.
Incorrect - it does not have a RJ45 connector, but it does have Ethernet, it just requires a dongle which may or may not come with the machine depending on the region its purchased in.
The benefit of the on board Ethernet is the fact you can PXE boot over it and other enterprise management benefits you don't get with a USB Ethernet adapter.
Heck, I wonder why they don't have BOTH function keys AND a touch bar. It looks like they could shrink the oversized touchpad slightly to recover enough space. Is it because the cost would be too high? Is it because it would ruin their design? Or is there some other reason?
I would love this. I have the touch bar set to show my dock at all times which just clicks for me. I'd love to still have function keys for IDE shortcuts in this configuration.
About the touchbar, I don't like it, for me it's not what the mediocre features it brought somewhat irrelevant most time, probably it can be a useful feature if it was designed better.
By nature, touchbar is a partial display and partial input device, blend it in with keyboard(a purely input) on the same flat surface angle, doesn't feel right. Currently, the only time I look at touchbar is when I need to click on touchbar, 50% of functionality just wasted in this sense.
If Apple kept the hinge design in pre butterfly keyboard macbook pro, that would be good place for touchbar. The location is more close to display, touchbar can act properly as a small assist display, also kept the keyboard part a pure mechanical input. The 45 degree elevation angle is also nicer.
If you still have pre butterfly retina macbook pro, just touch that hinge part, you may like what I said.
I like the Touch Bar a lot. Not having esc was the only gripe I had with it but I personally much prefer the multifunctional bar over some static f keys
I'm curious, do you usually blind type? If so, what advantage does it bring to you to look down on your keys? Also, in an optimal seating position (elbows at 90 degrees), do your fingers obscure the visibility of the touch bar?
I do blind type but I love the Touch Bar. There are many CAD programs that I use approximately monthly and I can never remember which F keys does what exactly. In my office I have cheat sheets on the wall but when out of office having icons makes using those applications much better.
I have my touchbar display the time, battery percentage and current song, so when I look down it's mostly to look at these. I also have a script that displays the last line of a particular file, so if I pipe a script's output in there I can look at its progress. I can swipe anywhere with two fingers to change the volume, three fingers is ctrl+tab (that one isn't useful, I need to figure out a better use), four fingers is brightness. I like it better than the F keys.
I did have to remap Caps Lock to ESC, because ESC on the touchbar was nigh unusable.
BetterTouchTool. It's not free, but it's cheap enough, and it lets you do a lot of cool things (including the multi finger swiping which you can assign to anything you want). You can write AppleScript routines and assign them to buttons, or have them run every n milliseconds to display something, which is what I did for the last line of the file thing.
Not parent, but I'm also a user that likes the Touch Bar (see comment history).
To answer,
> Do you usually blind type?
Yes.
> If so, what advantage does it bring to you to look down on your keys?
For simple actions (like opening a new tab) there is no need to look down on keys. IMO this is little Apple's fault, whenever I use a tabbable & Touch Bar-usable application I set the new tab button on the right. I usually place the trash button (on Finder, Mail and some other apps) on the middle of the Touch Bar.
For some more complex actions (like selecting an emoji/suggestion, or moving between photos, etc...) it's just as fast/faster to glance over and move your fingers instead of using shortcuts/trackpad.
> Also, in an optimal seating position (elbows at 90 degrees)
I'm not sure if I'm in optimal seating position, but...
(If you're meaning if my elbows are on the same height of the display yes)
> do your fingers obscure the visibility of the touch bar?
No, not at all. I can clearly see the Touch Bar whether my fingers are.
No, but I frequently find it easier to reach the Touch Bar (where only one finger needs to move) than to press Cmd-T (where two fingers need to move). I also use Cmd-T a lot too! :-)
What are you guys doing that you touch type using FN keys? Touchbar is far better — you can’t scrub audio or video. You can adjust things with more granularity with sliders. It’s contextual.
I don’t remember ever using a hardware F6 or F4 key in my life, but the touchbar I use all the time.
Lots of software uses Fn key bindings by default. IntelliJ & mc come to mind first, but there are many others. Sometimes they can be remapped, but given the number of key bindings required by pro software, replacing roughly 1/5 of the keys with a silly little nontactile screen is a nonstarter for me. I never look at the keyboard (that's what the real screen is for). Indeed this was the precipitating factor driving me away from the Apple 'ecosystem' in 2018.
You can easily reconfigure keyboard shortcuts in most IDEs. The function key row was never ergonomically placed to begin with. My current keyboard doesn't have one either (ErgoDox).
These actions are also not that important to be able to hit very quickly. Back when I did use function keys, I usually had to look anyway, because they're so far away from home row, and the time between using them is usually quite long. And even though I knew the function keys purpose in an IDE, I would never know them in any other apps, leaving that row useless when not programming. (Well, I use them for volume and brightness control, but again.. it's not a muscle memory action anyway)
I do think fundamentally speaking the Touchbar is the right idea. It's not better for everyone, obviously. But it's probably a bit better for most people. I'm just not convinced it's a big enough improvement to make the added cost worth it. It probably still ends up being mostly unused, which is worse when it's an expensive touch display instead of extra keys.
Personally I'd drop the whole row, maybe but the speakers up there instead, and make the keyboard wider.. put in keys between the two halfs of the keyboard like TypeMatrix or ErgoDox.. but that's never gonna happen
I feel the same. The stubbornness of Apple that was so frustrating is a bit more flexible now, paying attention to "subtle" feedback like the arrow key's sizes.
It may be "flexible" or their hand was forced. I know, personally, at least half a dozen people who have either delayed a Macbook purchased or outright moved to PC alternatives (e.g. XPS 13, Surface Laptop) because of the poor keyboard (both reliability and touchbar).
Now six people isn't statistically significant, but if that trend mirrors a wider one it could be costing Apple a measurable amount. The real question is will this be enough to satisfy e.g. programmers that actually want to bind the F keys to build/clean/run/step over/etc?
I've just ordered my first Windows laptop ever, literally. Dell XPS 13 (6 core model). I've been using Macbook Pros solely since the original Aluminium model when Apple moved to Intel processors. Apple's apparent hubris and inability to go back on their design decisions (Touch Bar...) has just pushed me over the edge.
I've been using my mid 2015 Macbook Pro and hopefully waiting for them to release a new MBP ideally without the touch or move the trackpad down/make it smaller, and have the Touchbar PLUS physical function keys (which I use for programming).
So yeah... "Pro" users at least in my case (and some friends) are moving away from Apple.
Go back to what? They already haven't purchased a new Macbook in five or more years, that money is already lost to Apple. All Apple can do is try to get them for their next upgrade.
It takes a long time to get a design through the point of manufacture... especially at that scale. And even before that happens, an organization needs to admit that it has to happen in the first place. For everybody saying the keyboard sucked and needed improvement, there were at least a few people within Apple that had staked something on the design as it was.
Not bad... as saagarjha says, you can slide on either that key or the brightness key. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for me because I've set the touchbar to default to F-keys for the sake of consistency with the other keyboards I use. For whatever reason, this means that the slide-on-button trick does not work.
For me the physical keys are better. With the touch bar, I have to look down to change the volume, and it occasionally hangs with the volume slider visible, but not actually responding to input. That's usually when I really want to turn down the volume quickly, and instead my laptop is blasting for another second while I have to adjust the volume with the mouse.
Also I really would like a physical mute button. It's often very valuable to be able to mute in a hurry.
The thing is, you can't use the touch bar without looking at it whereas I was constantly blind typing function keys. I think Apple have a different understand of "Pro" than I do.
Apple can innovate as much as they wish. For example put the touchbar above the keyboard or below the LCD. Nobody is complaining about the TouchID on the power button for example, since that maintains its core purpose.
People are complaining because 30+ year old keys they rely on to do their professional work were removed to add arguably a gimmick with a worse user experience/no touch feedback.
Just like people complained when they dropped floppy and and PS/2 for CDs and USB? Or when they introduced a smartphone with no physical keyboard?
Anecdotes don't make it fact.
You can see the difference in reactions to know that it wasn't wanted or desired by the target market. Its not anecdotes anymore, its data which we've had 3 years to accumulate.
Oh, don't underestimate the longevity of the no-floppy and especially the no-ethernet complainers. Just as one data point: there are non-ironic gripes about those decisions in this very thread.
I don't think there is a difference in reactions. A vocal minority complain every time Apple changes anything. Lots of people complained about the chiclet keyboard when the 2008 Macbook Pro came out. And shipping a computer without a floppy drive or a PS/2 port seemed crazy to many people at the time.
Change for the sake of change isn't innovation, it's a waste of time.
Spending hours fiddling with a dysfunctional keyboard that breaks after a week of normal use or has a gimmicky non-standard layout is not how I want to spend my finite time and mental energy.
Worst is certainly removal of 32-bit support. I'll personally never be using anything past Mojave. It would literally cost me from purchased software that is now incompatible and will not be updated.
To say Apple has lost its way would be an understatement. Apple is actively detrimenting those who have stayed in its ecosystem for decades. As a professional audio engineer, I refuse to lose several of my plugins to a quote-unquote 'upgrade.'
If I lose access to my software, you are not 'upgrading' my OS, you are removing access to what worked perfectly before.
I also refuse to lose Adobe CS6, by which I've paid a full license for. No, I have no interest in updates. I had no interest in updates post-CS3, to be honest.
There is no benefit to the lack of 32-bit support that could be worth losing it. If they did this because they're moving to ARM, fuck them. Don't let your behind the scenes process fuck with my day-to-day ability to work.
I'm literally going to have to leave behind my career as an iOS developer - I refuse by principle to purchase new Apple products ('vote with your money') - and I certainly refuse to accept an 'upgrade' that annihilates the usability of some of my most important software, in the name of...what? What possible benefit does removing 32-bit support lend to the customer? None. It's literally just a fuck you to me for supporting them for years. What a damn shame.
> To say Apple has lost its way would be an understatement. Apple is actively detrimenting those who have stayed in its ecosystem for decades.
Like they did with the transition from SCSI/ADB to USB, or the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, or the transition from PPC to Intel, or the transition from 30 pin to lightning, or...
Apple may or may not have lost its way, but dropping support for old software/hardware is something they've been doing consistently for a long time. There's nothing new about it.
I was there for most of that, but loosing 32-bit feels different to me. For the physical peripherals, I could still use them on old hardware. Forcing me to remain on an old OS is far more severe and I too (and everyone in my extended family) ran into this. In particular, my relatives depend on the old Microsoft office packages they bought eons ago. "Fixing" the problem Apple gifted us means buying and learning new software (and AFAICT, you can't even buy Office anymore, only rent it).
This is extremely disappointing and I'm not even sure what to do next time their hardware dies (which has happened multiple times).
It’s not so different from 10.7 dropping Rosetta, which led to a similar scenario where upgrading your OS meant a bunch of old PPC apps could no longer run.
Again I’m not defending Apple, just pointing out that all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again with Apple.
If you value compatibility with old binaries highly, Windows is a much better platform for that than macOS.
There was a reason for that - a benefit for users - there was a platform change, whose speed increases made an actual legit argument for the platform change.
There is no benefit to removal of 32-bit apps. There is no purpose, from the user's end, other than fucking them over, that I can see.
There's not even any reason given.
Rumours of an ARM platform change do not an ARM platform change make. Catalina is worthless and detrimental to me as an upgrade.
I'm not sure what this "new training" is, I've never had any training with Office and have been using it in most of its variations since it was first released.
Are you 75+? My parents are. Move an icon an they get confused (I say that without judgement - they have not like grown up with an intuitive for software)
The difference with 32 bit software is that there's nothing forcing them to do it. With something like a port, there are physical limitations to the device, so abandoning older technologies at least gets you something in terms of form factor.
With 32 bit support, these exact same CPUs could easily still run 32 bit software as they have for years. The tradeoff I guess is that it makes the OS a bit easier to support from Apple's point of view. The advantage to the user is not clear.
I develop iOS software as a hobby and a job. In order to support the newest iOS versions - Apple will support one major OS version behind, but what happens when 10.17 hits?
> ... the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.
Seems that if you scream hard enough AAPL listens:
> What Apple emphasized is simply that they listened to the complaints from professional MacBook users. They recognized how important the Escape key is to developers — they even mentioned Vim by name during a developer tool demo.
What I really don’t get is the Touch Bar could just sit in between the number keys and function keys. Even on 13” models there is space for both and a giant touch pad.
They have been forced to add it to just about every model to keep people from downgrading to avoid the thing. Which ok saved me money, but I would expect this to get the point across.
I'd want the touch bar to sit on top of the function keys, but I agree.
I also would be much happier if it was just easier to turn it off or if it at least made each touch action take 200ms or so so that I don't accidentally hit it all the time.
> perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base
What makes you think they stopped? You know it takes a couple years to design and ship hardware at this level (as well as to design the production lines to be able to build a few million more copies), yes?
It’s not like a web app where they can change, test, PR, and deploy in a few days or weeks or months. There is a lot of preproduction work that goes into building the kind of objects Apple is now famous for and are almost taken for granted.
If you look closely, not only is there a physical escape key, there's a physical fingerprint key, and the touch bar is also elevated. You still might not to be able to use the touch bar without looking at it, but at least you can find it without looking at it.
I was half expecting them to use haptics on the touch bar. Still no luck there.
When the touchbar first came out, I thought we'd see haptics in the second iteration. It seems so obvious that pressure-sensitivity and haptics could mitigate a lot of the weaknesses of the touchbar.
What I really miss is upgradeable RAM and SSD. Still using a 2010 MBP because I was able to upgrade it; that's no longer possible.
I’m sure someone has suggested this at some point but why not physical keys with an lcd underneath each key? This would allow those keys to be fully customizable and be worthy of the “Pro” designation.
Because it’s expensive, bulky, and unnecessary. Something like this already exists: the Optimus Maximus keyboard. And while it’s a cool concept, it’s not without its rough edges. [1]
Wasn't the Maximus made with tech that is now 10 years old? I can imagine that costs have decreased by at least an order of magnitude by now, now that oled is much more mainstream.
I wanted one of these when I first spotted it, but in hindsight it would be too dependent on software to work and I'd probably end up spending ages setting it up when the right thing to do would be to get blank key caps.
I'm sure there's a prototype of this sitting around somewhere in Apple headquarters, either waiting for some patent to expire, or some key component to become cheap/thin/reliable enough.
The touchbar has a lot of uses for many people. Developers may not see that much benefit from it (unless they use a native IDE or text editor), but for people who use native apps, the touchbar can be really useful.
Getting a physical escape key back and going with a more reliable keyboard design are big wins.
I don't get why they couldn't fit both a touch bar and the function keys on a 16 inch laptop. Other vendors manage to put a numpad on their notebooks of similar sizes.
Who cares about Watt-hours? What matters is how long it runs - I'd be perfectly happy with a laptop that runs a month on a 1.5 Watt-hour AAA battery. Kinda like Amps for vacuum cleaners, this can actually be a measure of INefficiency.
Escape key issue was so bad that a lot of my devs mapped caps lock to the escape key. Butterfly keyboard also has some weird workarounds with people carrying around mechanical keyboard.
To be fair, mapping caps to escape has been a thing for years and years. I started doing that once I learned vim about five years back, when I still had an older MacBook Air with a physical escape key.
Forget being forced to use it, I'd like to not be forced to pay for it. How much does the price of the MBP go up because of all of the parts required for the touch bar?
Sure, but besides a very low number of comments on HN I've never seen anyone who really appreciated the TouchBar (and the increased price it causes). Say Apple would offer a model with and without TouchBar and the TouchBar model would cost $400 more, how many people would be willing to pay that? I bet it would be less than 5%, maybe even less than 1%.
C-[ is the same thing in Unix. I haven't tried it on a Mac though. But if you're using vim (mostly where I hear this complaint) use C-[ (actually just use it in vim anyways because who wants to lift their hand up to do such a common movement?)
I prefer mapping caps to Ctrl over escape because it leaves me with loads of other useful shortcuts in both the terminal and Vim.
e.g. Ctrl-o to pop out of insert mode for 1 command only.
or
ctrl-w: delete the last word.
ctrl-u: delete to the beginning of the line.
ctrl-d or ctrl-t: change indent level.
ctrl-h: backspace without leaving the home row.
ctrl-m: without leaving the home row.
There's loads more that are useful in Vim. Of course you've still got the built in Ctrl keys but having ctrl in place of caps is really ergonomic for me.
I just tried that and that is super uncomfortable to me. Having all my fingers on the home row. My pinkies are much shorter than my index, middle, and ring, so it is pretty easy to hit ctrl with my pinky. I think your suggestion might be better if all your fingers are very similar in length, but I don't know a person like that.
I do use most of those ctrl commands btw. I didn't know about ctrl-o, so thanks for that!
Interesting. Because resting my left hand on the keyboard my pinky is on shift, ring on a, middle on e, index on f.
I also use tmux. I do a remapping to ctrl-s because I use ctrl-a (and ctrl-e) all the time to go to the beginning and end of lines. And let's be real, the normal behavior of ctrl-s (suspending) is not something I'm ever going to use on purpose.
But also I'm not using a mac.
> I hate having to press both keys with one hand for Ctrl key combos (ctrl-a being the only exception).
Do you not use panes? In vim? Because I use those quite a lot.
They even made it super simple to remap caps-lock to escape in OSX Sierra (the release of which, probably coincided with the release of the first Touch Bar MacBook Pro). You can do it from System Preferences, without any extra software like Karabiner. Although, I still use Karabiner Elements for some more complex keyboard remapping.
I don't understand this binding (it is a common one). I don't want a 50/50 shot of having caps lock on (or my light indicator). I'm also a fan of keeping things as vanilla as possible (I do use plenty of plugins and stuff, but almost every problem you have vim solves natively)
> I don't want a 50/50 shot of having caps lock on (or my light indicator).
What? Have you tried this feature at all? If you map Esc to Caps Lock in Mac OS, the light indicator never turns on, and you don't enable caps lock when you press that key.
Or do you mean that this is what'll happen if you use a different computer? In my experience that's not a problem at all. Muscle-memory can be made context sensitive. I use two different keyboard layouts (dvorak and qwerty), two different key arrangements (staggered on my laptop, grid on ErgoDox), Esc mapped to Caps-Lock on my home laptop, completely different key mappings on my ErgoDox at work, and still I have very little trouble using a Qwerty keyboard with standard mapping if a use a different laptop. I'm probably a bit slower, but that's not really a problem if it's a computer I don't use that often.
I mean I use ctrl-w all the time in vim (delete word back while in insert or moving panes. Basically I'm hitting ctrl ALL the time). I also frequently hit it when I'm writing a HN comment or something. Though this actually isn't a problem because sometimes I just shouldn't be replying.
Edit: I do notice that pretty much everyone that does the caps remap is using OSX. Is this because most people are using macs or just because macs have different behavior? Either way, I'd rather use a vanilla command than a remap if efforts are basically the same (my pinky rests on shift anyways and it is easy to contract my finger. I also use ctrl-backspace when typing in HN and other forms).
I do not understand this at all as the break in between the up/down arrow keys is far more apparent to touch than even the bump on the F key that's supposed to allow you to blindly return to the home keys. If that little bump works, how can a full break not be working for you?
That depends on which key you're referring to. On the Macbook, the left arrow key is right next to the up/down half-keys. If you touch to the right and you're hitting another full key, you're not at the arrow key.
Again, I don't understand how the bump on the F key works but somehow the giant dip in between the two up/down keys is the problem...?
The issue I have is that I will rest my index finger on the Option key instead of the left arrow key because they feel the same. The dip is fine for the up/down keys, but I can't "rest" my index and ring fingers on the arrow keys anymore.
They're hard to locate by touch. Seems counter-intuitive, maybe, but I'm sure I won't be alone in attesting from experience that it does make a difference.
I wonder if the screen reflective coating is better too. AFAIK, since introduction of retina screens of MacBooks (2012) it's a matter of time that the reflective coating will start to peel off and will leave ugly blotches.
I guess, though anyone I knew who used retina macbooks had issue with screen peeling off within 1-3 years of use.
There was a replacement program for a bit, so there was a possibility to change the screen, though after some time changed screens are peeling off too.
I know even an anecdote where almost brand new 2016 rmbp after working outside, had a spots of peeled off coating, because apparently light dust have scratched it. Thankfully Apple replaced the screen.
I wonder if it has any correlation with people who close the lid but continue running heavy workloads on their machine. The extra heat could possibly be a cause for delamination.
Nah, I see it on student laptops all the time (who aren't running anything with the lid off).
Also not correlated to putting pressure on the lid with it closed, I've lugged mine around in a backpack full of stuff for years and have no peeling issues.
Does anyone else remember when the macbooks came with two options for screen coating? The original anti-glare coating cost a few nits of brightness and some people had Feelings about this. I can't even recall now when they got rid of the option. Probably when the backlight got more powerful?
You're correct the 2012 model was when they stopped offering the Anti-glare screen - it was 1680x1050(if i recall?) compared to the default glossy screen's 1440x900, i recall there also being a 1680x1050 glossy display upgrade available too, at a glance the two could be distinguished by the aluminium bezel on the anti-glare display.
I picked up a grey market anti-glare display assembly (upper clamshell) for my 2011 model back in 2012 or so and it dutifully served another few years.
I predict that from now on the touch bar will slowly become smaller and smaller until it disappears completely. It would have been better if they'd gotten rid of it entirely in one iteration though.
Yeah me too, but I don't like accidentally touching something and then being out of context. Also happens with the gigantic track pad. It's really annoying.
>The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute
If the Touch Bar had been introduced above physical function keys, we'd consider it yet another Apple UI breakthrough, and other companies would imitate it the way every notebook today looks like the 2001 TiBook.
>perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team's desires
I don't think the fact that Jony Ive left the company a few months ago is a coincidence. Basically, Apple finally got notebook keyboards right ... after three years of worldwide embarrassment, and the departure of the company's chief designer!
I must be missing something out, but what's wrong with left and right arrow keys? I have 2018 15'' mbp and they are just fine. Or you mean up and down arrows?
coming from ubuntu before mbp(2013)
I anyways found the escape key to inconsistent to appreciate. depending on your state of full screen and what program you are in it will give you different response (exit full screen vs in program functionality) hence tried to disincorporate usage of escapekey from my muscle memory alltogether.
The touch pad is ridiculously huge now, going by my greasy finger smears I maybe use only 50% of the total area. They could easy sacrifice some of that real estate to put the touchbar as row above the function keys and feature a full size set of offset arrow keys.
Agree, I often end up brushing the touch pad accidentally with the heel of my hand while typing, and inadvertently moving the cursor somewhere up the page. Maybe someone else can weigh in on any advantages to having such a large touch pad.
You can drag further with it or use it at a higher sensitivity and drag as much as you used to. There are also more places you can start dragging so it’s more likely you will naturally touch your finger down and start dragging.
I almost never use the function keys and I am a programmer. They made the right call on that one. Just because you use an editor that makes use of rarely used keys doesn’t mean that they are a universal truth.
Do you debug and use the keys to control it? This is my biggest gripe, since most IDEs (and browsers if web dev) map debugging to the Fn keys, so I end up using them a LOT. I hate clicking the debugging icons, particularly since I tend to use a few different editors/browsers and they are all in different spots.
First thing that comes to mind when mentioning the Fn keys is debugging, however I always found that is feels unintuitive to use and would be eager to change my habits to learn more intuitive shortcuts.
those were not the worst things. a keyboard that breaks a week after you get it was the worst thing. the second worse thing is this redefinition of a computer into a big ipad. where does my sd card go? i cant plugin to the hdmi tv at a friends or a board room? why does it have a headphone jack? if we dont need it on our phone why do we need it on a laptop (lol)? oh yeah because inch by inch... apple is the epitome of capitalism, good and bad, and lately more bad than good.
I have to say that I agree with the parent post. I specifically haven't upgraded because:
1. no hdmi
2. no sd
3. escape key
4. keyboard
5. magsafe
6. usb a
I admit that maybe #6 is a little Luddite-like but there will be too many leads around which are usb-a which I'll need to use an adapter on. Right now, this is genuinely annoying that I need to carry around all these adapters which all cost quite a lot each.
Talking to one of my colleagues who has one of the 13" macbooks. He said that you just changed to be more careful about the lack of magsafe. Maybe I'll learn?
For HDMI. This is dumb for everyone who will ever have to do a presentation.
For SD. Tre-annoying, since my camera is usb-a. So I have to be $30 for an sd card reader. Yet another adapter.
Maybe someone should do some photos of a laptop with all the leads hanging off?! Then the designers might appreciate that it looks crap and do something about it....
Conclusion: you buy the MacBook Pro with max memory; upgrade the graphics card (why not... it isn't that much); up the disk size; buy a usb c adapter; buy a hdmi adapter; buy a sd card reader; buy a lightning cable converter too. That totals $5000. Ouch.
> He said that you just changed to be more careful about the lack of magsafe. Maybe I'll learn?
Having magsafe on my retina MacBook, with little kids in the house, may have been the best leisure hack I've ever enjoyed. The hack came from lack of anxiety about the kids tripping over the cord and bringing the laptop crashing to the floor, enabling me to simply set the machine down, walk away, and play with the kids instead. Now I would have to put the laptop somewhere out-of-sight in order for it to charge.
It's hilarious to me that their own marketing image has two dongles plugged into the laptop so that the user can still use USB.
Apple please for the love of usability: please give me back USB. I AM the pro that you want to feature in every one of your marketing videos. I have a music studio in my house, I build interactive lighting installations for the biggest music festivals in the world, I build custom hardware controllers for fire effects that travel all over the country, I travel around the world teaching people how to build hardware devices, and when home I spend the majority of my time teaching and building software that people love; I use my laptop for over 10 hours a day.
All of this stuff uses USB. ALL OF IT. Having to carry around stupid dongles all the time is the biggest pain in my ass when I'm trying to do all of this stuff. PLEASE give me back USB, you can even call it the "stupid loser old crappy loser lame macbook for loser non pros". I don't care. This nonsense minimalist sleek design stuff is actually harming my productivity.
No, USB-C is a step in the right direction. It's superior in every way imaginable to USB. It can handle almost every type of transfer (data/power), its orientation-agnostic, it's slim, etc. I could list the pros for days.
Having to deal with dongles for a couple years while the rest of the market catches up isn't a reason to push against the best port standard in decades.
USB-C is not superior in every imaginable way. And at least as embodied as a Thunderbolt 3 carrier, there are at least two.
There is no such thing as a USB-C hub. The protocol doesn't support it. That's one really concrete way that USB-C is inferior. I think I heard rumors that the proposed replacement fixes that, but Thunderbolt 3+USB-C is inferior that way.
It's also easier to snap off. That's two. Yes, it's better in a lot of objective ways, but there are also non-imaginary ways in which it's a pretty substantial compromise.
Maybe we should do a longbet on whether you're willing to talk smack about T3 once T4 hardware comes out. Because I bet you will.
Apparently all the hubs that have multiple USB-C ports are running USB 2 over them, or you can just use them for power delivery.
I am suddenly very happy that none of my other devices except for my USB-C hub, actually uses USB-C, I'd be limited to the ports that came on the computer!
Thunderbolt docks can do it, they just run multiple USB controllers on board, one for each port, but indeed, it USB-C 3.1 as it stands today doesn't support hubs.
My complaint about usb-c hubs, when I was looking for one a year ago is I couldn't find one that did 4k60, gigabit ethernet, and 2 or more usb 3.0 plugs. This has led me to plugging in two cables instead of one for years. If my monitor had a gigabit ethernet plug, I'd be set, because it outputs a bunch of usb (2) ports.
You have a dock, an adapter, a breakout box or whatever the cool kids are calling it.
A USB hub is just one USB port in and N out. There is no such thing for USB-c.
You can't even chain those adapters. The USB-c 'in' port that you plug power into? No data on that line. Just power.
And some of those adapters send the wrong voltage to USB-2 devices. Had a hell of a time with my keyboard and mouse until I started plugging the power directly into the computer.
I so wanted to be wrong it's not even funny. Like, how the fuck did you break this and why don't I remember screaming and bonfires in the streets over this? It's bullshit!
The weirdest one is that I at least expected those 'hubs' that have the port breakouts for everything to at least be able to take data in through both ports, but that doesn't work either. You can only plug a power brick into the USB-c female port.
USB A was very easy to ruin as well. It might look strong but usually its just held on with a couple of solder joints which I found very prone to bend enough to break the device if it ever got an up/down force on it.
> There is no such thing as a USB-C hub. The protocol doesn't support it.
Did you read the protocol specification? (It's freely available, with no paywall or even login wall.) The protocol does support a USB-C hub. Actually protocols, since there are three separate protocols involved, each on its own set of wires: USB 2.0, USB 3.x, and USB-PD. Each of them has its own support for USB hubs. The hub support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.x is the same as in the older USB hubs with the USB-A and USB-B plugs and sockets; only USB-PD is new (and has long chapters on how power delivery works through hubs in several different scenarios).
The only gotcha is that Thunderbolt 3 does not support a USB 3.x hub (but this is fixed by its successor USB4); this is worked around by including a full PCIe USB 3.x host on the Thunderbolt 3 device, since Thunderbolt 3 can pass through PCIe and Displayport at the same time (USB4 adds USB 3.x to the passthrough).
I mostly agree with you, especially on devices like phones where there's a single port, but here, there's 4 ports. Even if you use it for charging and two displays, you can still manage to put one USB-A in there. If you really like symmetry, maybe two of each. Unfortunately, Apple's obsession with uniformity and clean design would never let them do such a thing, even if the diversity would be objectively better here.
I can't sum it up in any other way than to say it's a user-hostile decision.
They should at a minumum have included a few choice dongles with the system. (usb-c to usb-a, and maybe usb-c to HDMI)
Additionally, they should have completed the ecosystem too. a mac-to-mac upgrade requires a dizzying variety of dongles, where one firewire cable was all that was required in previous systems.
Type-A has completely disappeared from my life and that of my family's.
Micro-USB is still clinging on but those will fade out within the next 2-3 years.
Additionally, four years is a laughably short period of time to measure Type-C's adoption, but even given that, I would love to see actual usage data for, say, American adults.
Maybe we just have to accept that people have different usage profiles. Personally I don’t have a single USB peripheral that is USB-C beyond simply charging. But I have many many devices that are USB-A, micro USB, HDMI, etc. A laptop that has USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI is significantly more useful to me than one which only has USB-C. I own all the adapters but I don’t always remember to bring everything with me, so even given my multi hundred dollar investment in adapters I often have trouble connecting with things. And as far as replacing all my peripherals with USB-C peripherals, those tend to be more expensive, and also my desktop computer does not support USB-C so I would basically need a separate set of everything. USB-C is undoubtably a better port in many technical ways, but for practical purposes it really doesn’t hold up against the ports it replaced in real life.
> Type-A has completely disappeared from my life and that of my family's.
I'm honestly surprised by this. I have eight different type A devices plugged into my PC right now[1] and I don't own a single type C device (and it's not that I've intentionally avoided it).
As for the rest of my family, I don't think any of them have computers that'd even have a Type C port. Mine has just one, and it's brand new.
Those mostly aren't "type-A devices". The connector is not the protocol. Except for those physically integrated into a type-A connector, those are mostly USB-2/3 devices that generally ship by default with a cable that includes a type-A connector at one end and a type-B or mini/micro-B at the other.
I too have an external audio interface, a printer, scanner, and external HDD, and they are all connected via USB cables that have a type-C connector at one end and the relevant B subtype at the other. These are now cheap and ubiquitous. My keyboard is lightning to USB-C, and my mouse is bluetooth. As for flash drives, I buy the double-ended ones these days.
The adapters I still use are for an older U2F dongle that is physically integrated into a type-A connector, which is due for retirement later this year, and a Thunderbolt display.
So the writing isn't just on the wall for USB Type-A connectors in my household, they're basically gone.
As for what happens to all the cables with type-A connectors that shipped by default, those are in my travel kit for device charging off wall-warts or vehicles that often still have type-A sockets.
5. My BT Dongle (which my BT headset won't actually pair with, thus #4)
6. Wi-Fi adapter
7. Xbox 360 controller
Now that is my desktop, my laptop is USB-C, with a dock plugged into the port. Said dock only has 2 USB devices plugged in, wireless adapter for my Mouse/Keyboard, and my headset.
None of this counts the many USB-A charging cables. I have USB-A to Lightning, USB-A to Micro, and USB-A to USB-C, all currently in use. I also have a single USB-C to USB-C adapter.
I see it as a wealth level thing. People will still be buying $30 Canon printers at Walmart with USB-B ports and USB-A flash drives in 20 years. Not everyone buys their entire family the newest, most expensive hardware every 2 years. It'll be ages before USB-C and USB 3 hardware becomes as cheap as the massively produced USB-A/B and USB 2 hardware.
A printer with a USB-B port can be plugged into a USB-C port. Only the cable needs to change, not the printer. After buying my Macbook with 4 USB-C ports I simply replaced the cables for the various devices, and I almost never need to use any adapter/dongle at all.
Do you and your family exclusively use laptops and phones manufactured after 2017 without any external peripherals? Because it's still hard to find USB-C on anything else. Even some of Apple's own devices still cling to lightning.
Sure, some motherboards, peripherals, and displays have type-C ports, but they're still very much the exception.
> Type-A has completely disappeared from my life and that of my family's
This might be true for end users, but in my electronics work, I don't see even a single USB-C device around me, and I'm looking at about ~50 devices right now around my desk (dev boards/kits, logic analyzers, interfaces, accessories, microscopes, oscilloscopes, and other equipment).
USB-C only is perhaps fine on consumer laptops, but these are supposedly the more capable "Pro" machines, for, well, pros.
It's decidedly inferior in its lack of hubs. If you don't have enough USB-C ports, you're SOL (and given I have a 2-port macbook pro, I feel this acutely).
I have a usb-c monitor connection, and of course the usb-c charger - so any third device requires unplugging one of those. In my case that's a usb-c yubikey. That dongle gives me an hdmi port I can't use (HDMI on the 13" pro can't drive a 34" monitor) and a usb-a port I can't use (I was good and got usb-c perpherals!).
As Steve Jobs says, you should start from the user experience and work backwards. Dongle hell is not a good user experience, especially when Apple's obsession with slimness is in part due to portability.
> Having to deal with dongles for a couple years while the rest of the market catches up isn't a reason to push against the best port standard in decades.
But why do I have to be the hostage here? I don't want to wait for "the rest of the market catches up", I want to get my work done, and my work requires plugging in lots of USB-A peripherals. The move to USB-C only was premature and trying to force the market using users as hostages shows incredible hubris.
Things change, deal with it. I've swapped USB cables to USB-C cables. Only USB drives, which i rarely use anymore require an adapter. Meanwhile, I can use all 4 ports to:
- Run a display
- Charge my laptop
- Charge a phone
- Connect a drive
I can even use a single port to both charge the laptop and run a screen with multiple USB devices attached to it.
I now need to daisy chain converters to use my PS/2 mouse on my MacBook Pro though, so that's a bit of a hassle.
Also, I can use the same charger and dongles for my work notebook, which is Windows based. I wish every new thing was USB-C, because I love it.
(This is a copy of a previous comment, because I feel it is relevant again.)
Having 4 USB-C's is a bit like having 4 Ferraris. Sometimes you need something a bit more practical. People will still be using USB-A for the next 10 years. Having to use a dongle for USB-A on a 16" macbook is pretty ridiculous. There's still a billion USB-A accessories out there and will be for a long time. Apple jumped the gun in a major way. This wasn't like dropping the floppy disc or CD-rom drive considering how small the USB-A port is.
The floppy drive died because a better option came out. If USB-C is truly better, than all new accessories would use it.
There needs to be a transition period where everyone has USB-C and USB-A so that the peripherals can naturally move to the better technology.
Right now I've never seed a good USB-C to USB-A converter. I work at a lot of conferences, and any time a speaker comes with a new MacBook and a USB adaptor, it's a disaster. They all suck.
They removed USB-A about a year before they should have, but now the industry has moved on. We can talk about it as a mistake in the past, but it would be wack to put USB-A back onto these devices.
How can we say "the industry has moved on" when the second piece of media on the linked announcement page has someone doing music production with a visible USB-C -> USB-A dongle connecting some rack-eared music gear. There's even a second dongle on their left that I don't recognize. I long for the C-only future, but we're not there yet. Apple's decision to go C-only always seemed to be an aesthetic one to me.
That's been my experience: at every conference I've talked at this year (three so far: ESUG, Macoun and SPLASH, heise MacDev still coming up in December), I plug in my USB-C equipped MacBook Pro and It Just Works™.
Only one of those was an Apple-specific conference.
Sorry your experience is still different. Mine was, too, a year ago.
If people actually started using electronics for 100 years instead of throwing them out every few years, that would be fantastic. It would also be a very radical departure from the status quo and I don't think it a likely scenario, so rest easy I guess..
While it may be fun to try to design something that lasts s hundred years and that people will want to use in a hundred years, who would want to sell it?
As the guy who gave up my laptop( MacBook pro 2015) in a meeting to project because the 2 other MacBooks in the meeting only had usb c and the presentation was on a usb a stick.
At least they got the projector using usb c with a dongle now..
Nothing like having choices. Why my new personal machine was a linux based laptop.
There are still devices currently that use floppy disks.
The only accessory I have that uses hardwired USB-A is my Logitech C920 webcam. All other stuff has a detachable cable. I will just change the USB-A to (Micro)USB-B cable to USB-C to (Micro)USB-B
While sacrificing something else. Battery, speakers, thermal management, or aesthetics would have to traded off for USB A to be included. Not worth it for an outdated port whose function can be duplicated by an inexpensive adapter.
If you were Apple's only user, you might have a point. But you're not.
Music professionals, video professionals, photographic professionals, and plenty of other professionals all have collections of USB peripherals which aren't going to be updated any time soon - either because there are no USB-C replacements, or because a complete replacement program might easily run to four figures, edging up to five for some users, and in extreme cases will be as high as six.
Some of these people tour or travel a lot. Having to rely on dongles - which can be lost, or stolen, or which may stop working for random reasons - is very much not a good idea.
Telling these professionals to "deal with it" is unhelpfully obtuse.
Speaking as one of those people, dongles don't bother me in the least. You're absolutely right that many peripherals are prohibitively expensive to update just for a connector, but they're also bulky and usually already involve lots of other cabling, so adding a dongle really doesn't make a big difference. Plus we're all used to having dongles just to hold license data anyway (thanks, Pro Tools), not to mention the menagerie of adapters that have been a way of life for decades in the audio world.
Yup. I DJ and use cameras all the time, so I'm not just a guy checking his Facebook. I swapped cables and have zero issues now. For every cable type there's now a USB-C equivalent for cheap on Amazon or Aliexpress. People just want to find something to complain about.
Edit: Before anyone mentions that ‘now you need to bring cables’...When I DJ I always bring a bunch of spare cables anyway, because I don't what to rely on the location for providing me what I need. So I did this with my old mac too. Nothing changed except the type of cable.
maybe they should be complaining to the peripheral manufacturers rather than Apple. USB C is better and a major player going all in is the only way to get the industry to switch.
Things do change, but change for the sake of change isn't a good thing.
Meanwhile, I can use all 4 ports to:
- Run a display
With a dongle
- Charge my laptop
Did you need 4 ports to do this? How is this better than a magsafe connector?
- Charge a phone
Existing USB ports do this fine, and most charger cables have USB-A on one end. USB-C-USB-C cables are extremely limited in their use and are more expensive.
- Connect a drive
Again, no advantage over USB-A
Apple has "solved" non-existent problems and in exchange they've created a whole new slew of problems. Why should I have to replace all my existing cables to work with a computer? It's because Apple is designing for slim cases above all else. (So slim and delicate that resting my hand on the case while typing causes random keypresses).
I broke an early macbook screen by tripping over the charging cable. When they made the switch to magsafe cables it was to explicitly prevent this very common occurrence. They traded trip-proof laptops for the ability to plug your charger into 4 different ports. What possible advantage could that offer?
> Charge my laptop Did you need 4 ports to do this? How is this better than a magsafe connector?
Being able to charge on either side is really, really nice. I miss MagSafe, sure, but this mostly makes up for it. I can also run my laptop off the ubiquitous USB-C battery packs now, which is glorious.
USB-C-USB-C are going to be much more ubiquitous too, especially when the iPhone switches next cycle.
it’s $23, available online with free next day in most cases. further the massive downside to the old magsafe adapters is how proprietary they were and that they were soldered to the brick. if one frayed on you, as they did all the time, all you could do is go to the apple store. if you travel for work this becomes a massive liability. if this cable cost $100, was useless on other devices and you didn’t have to carry a usb-c cable in the first place then i can see your point. but when you buy a $3000+ laptop then complain about a $30 cable then it becomes hard to take you seriously.
Other companies have dealt with change better than Apple. For example, I can buy a professional tier laptop from Microsoft or Lenovo with plenty of USB ports, while Apple's reaction to change has been to ignore their professional users' use-cases.
And you can’t compare an Apple to anything non-Apple. So as far as Apple laptops go, USB-C, adaptor or forget it. You can get adaptors so small you barely notice them. I’d rather have 4 USB-C ports than 3 because they scrapped the bandwidth of one to put in a old port. Most people keep apple laptops for years, and I doubt we’ll be using standard USB much longer
> And you can’t compare an Apple to anything non-Apple.
There are plenty of professional users doing just that.
For example, I can get my job done on a Lenovo just as well as on a Macbook, until I need to plug in a USB peripheral. Then, I can do my job better on the Lenovo than the Macbook.
and for the rest of the world where windows is a hinderance you can’t compare them. As a pro user i barely plug anything into my laptop now, just one usb-c cable connects my monitor, charger, keyboard / mouse (usb, not bluetooth) and gives me a few more usb ports. in fact this is better because i can shove my laptop in a pocket behind the monitor and not take up room.
every time apple changes someone people who don’t even use apples come out of the woodwork to complain.
Then go and buy one of those laptops. Use what works for you.
Just because you’re not a fan of it doesn’t mean it isn’t a solid solution for the rest of us. And the rest of us mostly like having change forced on us — it means we’re progressing forward instead of shouting at clouds for being in the way of the sun.
You're repeating the OP's "deal with it" sentiment. I'm sharing how other companies have dealt with it, and offer similar professional tier laptops with more USB ports.
I'm not having a go at you directly, I'm having a go at the idea that it's constructive to even point out how a piece of hardware doesn't solve a problem for you and that there are others options. We know.
> I'm having a go at the idea that it's constructive to even point out how a piece of hardware doesn't solve a problem for you
I'm going to have to disagree, the lack of USB ports doesn't solve a problem. It's just a limitation that doesn't affect you, but certainly affects other professionals and their ability to do their jobs efficiently.
You can't just change the goal posts to cause your argument to have more weight. This entire post has nothing to do with where you work or work at all: it's to do with a consumer laptop being released and you know right well we're talking about buying this for personal use.
The GP of the OP I responded to was talking about his profession and every post I have made in this thread was about professional users and their ability to do their jobs. How you can walk away from this conversation thinking that I was talking about personal use is beyond me.
>Just because you’re not a fan of it doesn’t mean it isn’t a solid solution for the rest of us.
Leaving out USB-A ports isn't a solution for you though, it's just a limitation that affects some people but not you.
>And the rest of us mostly like having change forced on us — it means we’re progressing forward instead of shouting at clouds for being in the way of the sun.
This just stinks of fanboyism, any time Apple makes a big hardware change like removing the headphone jack from iPhones, it's mostly negative voices disliking the change. The heat eventually dies down and people adapt, but it's revisionist history to imply people like having the change forced on them at the time.
> Leaving out USB-A ports isn't a solution for you
USB-C is faster than USB-A. Eventually all technology becomes obsolete and it's time to move on. Removing USB-A and forcing me to switch to USB-C is helping me adopt a technology that is popping up everywhere.
I believe modern smart phones now charge via USB-C? A colleague in work also has a power brick that can charge his laptop via USB-C.
USB-C is here and we'll only move over to it if we start implementing it. Use an adapter if you're not in a position to swap out A->C for a while.
> This just stinks of fanboyism ...
And this is just a shallow insult, hence why you've been down voted.
> ... like removing the headphone jack from iPhones ...
Which other manufacturers immediately did too.
> ... but it's revisionist history to imply people like having the change forced on them at the time.
The iceberg is melting. The cheese is being moved. It's time to change and for the better. It's easier to be comfortable and complacent, but that's not how reality works.
I don't want to research and keep up with the latest in IO technologies. I trust Apple to make good choices for me so I can get on with solving problems. That works out for me in a positive way far more than it impacts me negatively.
I'll continue with a (roughly) five year cycle for upgrading my MBP and a two year cycle for my iPhone. And I'll continue to trust that Apple's engineers are smarter than me and are making intelligent choices for me.
You're free to not trust them and do as you wish.
EDIT: In fact I'm actually finding it annoying how most new devices are USB-C and I don't have USB-C on my 2014 MBP. I want USB-C as power bricks, HDDs, pen drives, and more, are switching over (because it's the right then to do). Very soon I will be obsolete and you'll be telling me I need to move on...
You can also use one USB-C to both charge your Macbook and drive a powerful 4k monitor plus a few extra USB-A ports on the back of the monitor.
Being able to come to work and plug in a single cord and have it drive my mechanical keyboard, headphone amp, monitor, and power is pretty amazing IMO.
I have this exact setup on the Thinkpad in front of me. It is great, and it's hilarious to see my phone's lockscreen pop up on the screen when I end up charging it with that cable.
You know what else this laptop has? Two ports I don't recognize (thunderbolt and dock?) on the left, and on the right, two USB-A, ethernet, SD card reader, HDMI, and headphone jack. It's a false dichotomy to say that you can only get the one-port connection by throwing away all the other ports you might need.
No one made that dichotomy, idk who you guys are arguing against.
If you don’t want Apple products cool. I personally have no need for Ethernet, sd card readers, and USB A 24/7. Like I said elsewhere this is a non problem for me.
Obviously if it is for you you can buy a giant dell laptop with 20 ports.
>>Being able to come to work and plug in a single cord and have it drive my mechanical keyboard, headphone amp, monitor, and power is pretty amazing IMO.
Just imagine having a dock, and not needing to plug any cords :-)
Also, like most things Apple removed (I'm looking at you, 3.5mm), how has the removal enabled your use case?
To put it other way:
you could have everything you outlined even if they had magsafe + USB-A
but with removal of those things, we can't have things we want/need/desire, for no appreciable gain to you.
Like the original iMac eliminating SCSI, DIN-8 serial and ADB for USB-A, the point of removing old ports is to ensure support for the new ones. Local pain, long term gain. (Uh, once they sort out the many flavors using the USB-C form factor.)
All of those ports were already on the decline because their replacements already existed and were better. Every one of those ports existed on a machine with its replacement at some point.
Apple never made a machine with both USB-C and USB-A. They never allowed for a transition.
Because of that, people aren’t moving forward because they are holding back upgrades.
At home I bought a 2 pack of USB-C to USB-A the size of a quarter and never had a problem... only because I don't want to buy a new SD-card reader. But now even my external harddrive is USB-C (and incredibly fast/tiny at that) I almost never use them.
The new AirPods Pro come with lightning to USB-C. If the new phones aren't USB-C, they'll definitely have USB-C to lightning at least. Although realistically it'll be USB-C to USB-C (see iPad Pro)
I’m not sure you understand. Shouldn’t the people who want to plug their new iPhone into their new laptop be less inconvenienced when those products are all from Apple, not more inconvenienced? People with modern Thinkpads could use their iPhone out of the box while those with MBPs could not.
If Apple can’t be bothered, what a strange thing to blame me for.
I agree with the ridiculousness of it all, but to be fair, there is no such thing as a 2019 iPhone XS. It's a 2018 iPhone XS regardless of when it was purchased or manufactured, although that honestly just makes your situation even more ridiculous.
I liked charging and connecting displays from both sides.
What I didn’t like was that over three or four of the Apple USB-C to hdmi/usb-a/whatever the last one was (thunderbolt?) and one third party adapter I never found one that wasn’t super choppy with my input.
So my Webcam would stutter, and my keyboard would suddenly repeating the same key 12 times (admittedly making for a pretty exciting experience with ViM).
Very frustrating. It may have been my computer. Don’t think I’d heard of others with the same issues in my workplace. But really made working a PITA sometimes for me.
Meanwhile my 2015 MBP did just fine with the same hub through switch setup, so it was most likely the USB C hardware driver in the Apple Laptop.
I think it's key you have 4 ports. I think the very small number of ports and requirement of dongles in order to get enough ports (and lack of USB-C hub) perpetuates USB.
If you have 1 or 2 USB-C ports odds are you'll need a dongle. Since the only USB-C dongles don't multiply ports, it'll have multiple USB ports. If you had a lot of USB-C ports, you'd likely get adapters and switch to USB-C as you upgraded things. Now, unless you can switch to wireless, you basically have to replace it with a USB device.
That argument can be used to explain away any problem.
4 usb ports are massively redundant. Even if someone loves usb-C having a usb-A port will add a lot of usability without compromising on anything else.
I'm the opposite so I guess our desires cancel each other out. I will never buy a laptop or any device that has USB-A on it. None of my devices use USB-A and it's a legacy port that is ugly and wastes space. Same with micro-usb, mini-usb, lightning, etc. I'm living a 1 port lifestyle and it's phenomenal for traveling, minimalism, and just not having to worry about having the right cable in the right place.
Except for devices which have a hardwired cable, you can get USB-C to USB-whatever and nearly all, if not all, professional equipment I know of does not have hardwired cables. So in the worst case, you need to replace your cables and in the best case, you now have four direct ports, more than any portable Mac has had since the transition to USB-C. And for the cases where the connection must be USB-A adapters are small and reliable.
If you haven't used a USB-C/Thunderbolt-3 notebook, being able to go from portable to charging, full size monitor, peripherals, external storage, etc. with one cable is a welcome change.
Apple's commitment to supporting legacy ports (albeit through adapters) is pretty good, in my experience. As an anecdote, I needed to get some data off of an old Firewire 400 hard drive and linked Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire 800, Firewire 800 to 400 cable into the drive and it mounts like it would on a direct connection.
USB-C is great. Carrying around a dongle is not that hard IMO, but if you can't, just buy a bunch of these[1] and keep them attached to your USB cables all the time.
I can easily plug any USB device into my MacBook with a cable. I cannot however plug a firewire, thunderbolt or HDMI cable into a USB-A port. Yes I need to purchase different cables, but they are relatively cheap compared to something like a laptop docking station that I might need otherwise.
I take it you mean specifically USB-A? I can understand that, but I think I'd be satisfied if they would just put more than four USB-C ports on the thing. That should be the upside of a smaller USB connector, give me a dozen ports since dang near everything uses USB these days.
I think they are limited to 4 by available PCIe lanes since they are thunderbolt ports. It would a a confusing mess if they added more ports but only gave them USB 3.1 capability
They could switch them. It's unlikely that you need thunderbolt at 4 ports at the same time. On the other hand, 4 universally usable ports are already a lot. They might not cater for the long tail. Less than 4, and it's not only the tail you are cutting off.
I think it is to be expected by Apple to remove 2 of those 4 in the next generation, or one afterwards. It's a logical (to them) step towards cable-free computing, which is great and all, but is the only way towards it forcing it through the customers?
iPhones 8, X, XR, XS, 11 and 11 Pro have all supported wireless charging but retain the wired charging capability. I don’t think they are incredibly eager to eliminate ports if they don’t gain something from it (thinness, battery life, space for something else, or water resistance for example).
Interfaces change, but making the switch too early makes it needlessly painful. I mean, how does it make sense that Apple's own iPhone and iPad don't plug directly into Macbooks without a dongle?
I mean, why stop there? Apple could just go to zero ports and force everyone to use Wi-Fi peripherals. They could sell a wi-fi peripheral hub for backwards compatibility. Then they could get rid of the power port and use inductive charging. That would make for an insanely sleek machine, even if it were insanely painful to use.
Dongle? Just use a USB-C/Lighting cable. Having the right cable has never been considered odd.
And even that's optional. I never plug my iPhone into my MacBook, because everything syncs seamlessly via "the cloud"; only use Lightning cable for charging, and I'm looking forward to dumping even that when I upgrade to a Qi-enabled iPhone in a couple months. Yes, I look forward to "zero ports".
The only need for cables at this point is high-power/high-bandwidth/high-security applications. Qi doesn't deliver 60 watts, and my employer overloaded the security so I have to use a Lightning/USB-C cable for debugging ... so I'm happy to have 4 tiny identical ports that do the job.
> Apple's own iPhone and iPad don't plug directly into Macbooks without a dongle?
The newest gen of iPhones come with C to Lightning rather than A to Lightning now. Because that's also the requirement for USB-PD fast charging for the iPhone and Macbook. They've also sold the cables separately for the last two years for the USB-PD fast charging.
$10/mo (for 2TB) and the photos are promptly backed up, and transferred to your Mac. Full-res, backed up remotely, stored locally. Deliberate transfer becomes "already there".
I don't want my data in the hands of any cloud service. I'm sure theirs works well between all their products for you and many others, but it's just not for me. :)
What type of ports are you using that require USB-A on the laptop end? Pretty much every port I know of has a USB-C cable for it, no dongle necessary. Since 2016 I've slowly gotten USB-C-to-Lightning, USB-C-to-micro USB, USB-C-to-HDMI cables, etc. I gave away most of my USB-A to friends.
If you need a hardwired mouse, keyboard, and power cable, presumably monitor as well - why aren't you just leaving those hard wired to a dock with a single usb-c connection to the laptop?
If you're talking about using a keyboard and mouse while mobile, I have no idea why you'd be using wired instead of bluetooth...
I can't stand lag, inconsistent connections, or changing batteries, and with the exception of Airpods, every interaction I've had with Bluetooth devices leads me to believe the whole category of hardware is generally one big dumpster fire. So instead I toss a basic $20 wired logitech mouse into my bag, and it performs flawlessly every time I pull it out.
Yeah, I'm generally fine with that for that one example.
But the bigger problem is that I like being able to use friends' mice if I find myself without one, jack HDMI into my laptop for random conference room projectors (my MBP has HDMI out, it is frequently used), etc. I can carry around adapters/dongles, but I have multiple bags, and adapters don't always come with when I'm throwing my laptop into the bag I'm using that day. So the chances that I'll have something I want to use and can't because I just don't have the adapter on me are pretty high. This is a problem I never have on my 2013 13" MBP because of the port selection, but that I will if I don't change behavior if I get this 16" MBP (which I'm seriously considering).
I think the long game here is that USB will shift towards USB-C. Plenty of new Windows devices have USB-C ports, and it's only a matter of time until peripheral manufacturers transition over and the old USB ports become useless.
The long game may trend towards USB-C, but in the meantime Apple made the Macbook Pro less usable for people who want to do actual work. How is it better to have to manage a bag full of dongles when Apple easily could've included the ports that people frequently use like SD and USB-A?
It was a bad decision 2 years ago when they introduced this generation of Macbook Pros, and it's still a bad decision.
>Apple made the Macbook Pro less usable for people who want to do actual work
That's straight up nonsense. You can still do everything you could do with a USB-A port. I'm also in the full USB-C camp and any of my old USB-A devices just use a USB-C to USB-A cable. I am in no way hindered from doing actual work.
I just carry a small Anker USB-C hub in my laptop case -- has two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and an SD card reader. I must say, though, I've used it less than I expected to when I got it.
The point is not that you can't do those things, the point is that it's been made more difficult for little to no discernible benefit.
Apple has been going down this path of making thinness such a high priority that utility has become a second class citizen. So yeah I can carry around dongles for everything, but why? So the side of my MacBook Pro can have pleasing congruity in it's ports?
It is good that Apple has moved towards a standard port rather than just slapping 4 Thunderbolts on there. But the loss of HDMI, USB a, and sd card slots makes for more hassle with little upside, not to mention they did away with magsafe.
At least they fixed the keyboard and upgraded memory in a bug way, so maybe things are headed in the right direction now.
>the point is that it's been made more difficult for little to no discernible benefit
That is not true either. Although it cost me some money, I much prefer having 1 type of port to worry about instead of a million types and it has tremendously improved some of my workflows by being able to daisy-chain devices together. I can sit down at my desk, plug in 1 cable and have access to everything I need. Although I had a similar setup with a dock, I was limited to the number of ports. With the current system, I can keep extending and daisy-chaining to my heart's desire.
Just because it doesn't work for you doesn't mean it doesn't work for anyone just like my use case doesn't work for everyone either. To say that there's no discernible benefit is just silly. There are pros and cons just like with anything.
>carry around dongles for everything
That's a straw man. I don't carry any dongles with me whatsoever except for a multi-purpose video adapter because I still, unfortunately, have to present in a few rooms that have VGA outputs.
How would it make your life worse if in addition to the usb-c ports there was a sd card port and usb-a? Does switching away from magsafe make it more likely or less likely for the MacBook to get accidentally pulled to the floor?
I'm not saying that no one will find usb-c useful or that it works for no one's workflow.
I'm saying that going all usb-c doesn't provide much, if any benefit. They could've given you your usb-c ports and included the other ports.
If it works for you, great. The problem is that they could've made it work for a lot more people, but they chose not to in their Don Quixote-like chase for thinness and aesthetics.
The standard was adopted by IEC in 2016. How many years more do you reckon we should live "in the future" and use dongles because "one day we won't have to"?
I'm already living this future. I've replaced my usb-a, micro-usb, mini-usb, and lightning products. It's wonderful for travel, decluttering, and not having to worry about dongles.
That's pretty nice - but people who need to interface with a wide variety of devices in their line of work, or don't know upfront what the situation in the field will require don't have that luxury. So instead using a laptop with minimal 3 standard ports (USB-A, USB-C, HDMI), they have to carry dongles that get lost, bent, stop working etc...MBP is simply not a "pro" machine - it's a mainstream consumer machine that looks fancy on the desk instead of being functional. And that would be totally great if it was called "Macbook" and there was a "Macbook Pro", with ports, battery life, cooling, keyboard etc...
That's what they said about ADB to USB, USB to Micro-USB, Micro-USB to USB-C. Once everyone settles on USB-C, some new thing will come out that necessitates yet another port change. So much for "Universal".
If Apple cared about what its users thought about cables, they never would have replaced MagSafe with the wretched USB-C. Interestingly, if you want a MagSafe-like charger now, you have to buy a Surface...
Apple decided that their laptops are not power supplies. Is that so wrong? I need a single portable computer because it's expensive and has my data. I don't need a single dedicated portable supply.
One nice thing about not having a billion ports that can all fail is that now most long term interface failures will happen on easily replaceable dongles. I guess the downside is that the port that connects all the dongles failing is probably really really bad. So you would have to hope that is at least beefed up.
Find people doing cool stuff and keep showing up and offering to help until they let you.
Basically my background is software (like everybody else here), but around 2009 or so that started bleeding into hardware via arduino/hackerspaces.
And then that bled into doing some consulting work on large advertising installations (building motor control software for robots, building interfaces etc. Some of the stuff I've worked on has been for SXSW,comic con, and the super bowl).
I got lucky in meeting some really cool people doing really cool stuff at burning man, and they eventually let me help on some lighting and fire effects control stuff. That group then eventually morphed into a group that is also building things for music festivals, and when custom stuff needed to get built for it, I was somebody who could help, and so I got to.
As far as the travelling stuff: that was something a friend of mine was doing, but when she wasn't able to go on a trip, she connected me with her employer, which then led to more jobs etc.
But yeah, basically show up and be nice to people. Offer to help a lot.
I would say you are not their target market - you have specific hardware needs a tiny fraction of the overall population have. It's been ages since I last used a parallel port to control external devices from a computer. When I do so, I use an $10 RPi-like board and its GPIO pins. I don't do hardware for a living, but I write software and this machine seems perfectly good for that. In fact, it's a bit of an overkill.
I'm the opposite. All of my stuff uses USB-C except my MBP. It seems finally I can upgrade that as well. I hate bringing my MBP charge whenever I travel.
Yeah it sucks, BUT if they are not going to add it how about throwing a nice hub dongle in the box for free? Something that gives me card reader, a couple USB ports, ethernet, hdmi. that would take some of the sting out of it. Since you can buy a good one for $50 this is not a huge deal considering the premium price you pay already.
Also while you are at it include the Apple Power Cable extension cable too. Crazy that is not included.
If you listen closely, you'll probably hear my eyes rolling all the way from Seattle.
I too connect a bunch of devices via USB to my laptop (minus the brag). The problem was that there were so many devices, I never had enough ports so I had to use a hub anyway. Then graduated to a docking station and carried my hub around with me in my electronics bag.
So I just bought an USB-C hub (as the docking station already had USB-C). I stopped using flash drives years ago, I have USB-C YubiKeys now so as a proficient user of multiple devices, I really don't feel any pain because of this..
for peasants still using USB-A flash drives, yes (not if you buy USB-C flash drives). You will pay the peasant fee. My mac is sitting in a docking station with USB-peasant ports 70% of the time so that's that.. I also don't really do flash drives anymore because of this whole internet thing. Also, the laptop costs more than 2 grand. Is $100 too much for you?
Can someone explain to me how Apple can justify only including a 720p FaceTime HD camera into the "the world’s best pro notebook"?
The last iPhone that had this FaceTime camera was the 6S, released in 2015. Since the iPhone 7 (2016) the phones have had at least a 1080p FaceTime camera. Given that FaceTime / Skype calls are such a common use case and rarely anyones uses external webcams anymore, why doesn't Apple use the existing camera system of the iPhone 11 for the MacBook?
Seriously, if I pay north of $4000 dollars for a laptop, why do I get an obsolete camera?
A phone camera is used to capture moments you want to preserve for posterity. A laptop camera is used for conference calls and no one needs to see all my facial flaws in 4K detail.
So, no, I don’t consider this in any way to be a dealbreaker.
I think if you're the type of person that records youtube videos regularly, chances are you probably already own an external camera with specialized functionality.
How does that address the original point in anyway? This laptop's base price is almost $4000 USD. That's a lot of money to spend on a laptop and one would hope that it'd at least come with a decent webcam.
You can't unilaterally claim what people do or do not care about, though. That's reverse rationalization. A 720p webcam is however, objectively, third class in 2019.
Even then you likely want something better than a webcam, those cams are of such poor quality. Even if you get a Logitech C930 you're paying a lot for relatively little. They're not really meant (they certainly can be used for it though) recording as much as they are for streaming/conference purposes. Image quality there isn't nearly as important as it is for recordings. A cheap camcorder will likely give you a much better image quality. Or hell, get one of those LED rings that you can mount your phone in and you're better off.
When doing user research (and I for one reason or another don't have other/better equipment around), I've used the MacBook as camera, mic, and screen recorder, when applicable (attaching a non-Apple mouse, of course, because those things are bonkers).
In these situations, a higher resolution camera wouldn't hurt. A better mic is higher priority though, so I'm happy to see that in the specs.
Reality comes at you fast! Their marketing for the feature was a bit dodgy, but overall it’s pretty smart. People will choose the conferencing software which presents them in the best light, and if you don’t think it matters, even subconsciously, to the people watching then you’re missing out on a potential advantage.
Such a wonderful slippery slope, but technology is disruptive that way.
In that case why don’t they have a back facing camera with three lenses and a flash just in case someone wants to take a picture on vacation with their MacBooks? I guess they should also have an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a gps chip just in case I need to use it for directions....
I guess this is more a rhetorical question as taking pictures with a back facing camera is an extreme^10 edge case while doing video calls with the FaceTime camera for most users is a daily or at least weekly occurrence.
Why not? Apple sells ~200M iPhones a year, so they already are ordering millions of FaceTime cameras for the iPhones. Why not buy 10M more of the same model and put them in the MacBooks?
Just to be clear, I don't think Apple should put a back facing camera into their laptops. However, they should consider updating the FaceTime camera as it is regularly used by most people.
For the pro line I would expect something I could just use to record video of me doing training or youtube reviews(at least in a crunch). I don't think it's too much to ask for at this price point. If I want to do the video editing it would be simple at times to use it for voice and video recording as well.
At a $2400 price point. You should get a 1080p camera included regardless of your use. If you don't want that much detail on a webcam, you should have a setting to turn it down to 480p or something. But higher quality should the ceiling. Besides some people vlog and want that type of quality on facetime
At a $2,400 price point I expect a usable computer. I sincerely don't care about the camera - there's a 4K one in my pocket that interfaces instantly with my computer.
At a $2400, other users want high quality video. The computer should have the option for both audiences. Don't want high quality, fine just turn the setting down.
> I don’t consider this in any way to be a dealbreaker.
Fair enough. But for some people it might be.
It is much more comfortable to perform video calls via laptop than via phone because a phone typically needs to be held in position manually. Therefore, I believe that most people would, if given a choice, prefer to use a laptop for video calls.
Also, people might actually want their video to have high resolution. For whatever reason. Even to show their facial flaws. Not providing them an option to do that, despite the fact that the required hardware is cheap and available, is an unnecessary restriction.
Finally, if a high resolution camera was included and someone would not want to use that high resolution, they can simply switch the camera to a lower resolution mode.
> So, no, I don’t consider this in any way to be a dealbreaker.
There are plenty of premium and luxury laptops at that price point that have HD cameras, and they don't prevent you from running unauthorized software[1].
'Posterity' is a stretch? Snapchat would dispute that.
In fact, if a phone really wanted to take good pictures (and not just market 'megapixels') they'd have focus, light balance, shutter speed controls. About all they can do is take still portraits.
> if a phone really wanted to take good pictures (and not just market 'megapixels') they'd have focus, light balance, shutter speed controls
Any high-end smartphone can manually control the focus, white balance, shutter speed and shoot RAW. On the iPhone you need a third-party app to access it, but plenty of Android devices include that in their default camera.
There's a lot of Good-Enoughism and Apple apologism in the responses to your question, even though you never said this was a deal-breaker. You are fairly asking why this particular corner was cut for costs, and it does seem a weird place to save a few bucks when, as you say, the price is ~$4,000.
For what it's worth, the front and rear cameras on Microsoft's Surface products are both high-quality and it's generally a pleasure to do video conferences with Surface users. As some others here have pointed out, it's not necessary to have a high-quality video stream—it's not necessary to have video at all—but it's a better user experience to have a more life-like image of the people you're speaking with. In a group conference in particular, the oddball with the low-resolution 720 web-cam does stick out, looking like a relic from 10 years ago. Especially with a high-fashion status symbol such as an Apple laptop, that's an awkward position to be in.
To be honest, I am also really surprised by the apologism and the creative possible reasons that people come up with (e.g. "Apple couldn't handle the traffic the increased resolution would cause"). But you're right, I didn't say it is a dealbreaker for me and it actually isn't. It is still very likely that I buy this machine - yet stuff like this bothers me, especially at the price point that Apple is commanding.
Imagine buying the top of the class Mercedes S-Class only to find out that the steering wheel is far worse than the ones that Mercedes uses in other models - you'd somehow feel cheated.
The number of Apple apologists on Hacker News is really jarring indeed. I don't think it's too much to expect a decent 1080p webcam on a ~$4000 USD laptop touted to be "the best notebook" and for professional use.
The number of Apple haters on Hacker News is also really jarring indeed.
One might accuse me of being the “apologist” you speak of (IDGAF), but if you’re correct we live in bubbles even here on HN, it’s much better and more honest if we don’t pretend the other doesn’t exist.
Sure, there are probably Apple haters here too. Never said there aren't. But given that this is supposed to be a community of technically inclined people it's really bizarre to see people make incredibly silly excuses for a ~$4000 machine.
Steering wheel analogy seems a little too much, but how about an S-Class with a tiny rear-view mirror? You use it occasionally, and it is useable, but at that price you'd expect something a little better.
>You are fairly asking why this particular corner was cut for costs, and it does seem a weird place to save a few bucks when, as you say, the price is ~$4,000.
Because the marginal cost of a better camera doesn't yield a sufficient increase in marginal revenue.
I wonder what their models predicted as marginal revenue of the touchbar and butterfly keyboard mechanisms, and how that compared to their marginal cost.
Maybe, but if I were designing this thing, both as an engineer or executive, it’d be a point of pride to me that the thing we advertise as the best laptop is actually the best laptop.
Especially if I know people are going to ask ‘wtf, why 720p’?
We turn all that off because inevitably someone starts saying: I can't hear you guys, it's coming in robot voice, can you turn off the screen/video share?
>the low resolution, low contrast, washed out, low fps video that makes it hard to read emotion or even detect where his/her attention is?
This is totally disingenuous. We're not comparing a 120p camera to a 1080p camera. We're comparing a sharp camera with great color rendition to a slightly higher resolution of the same camera.
You can use a Black Magic Design Web Presenter which allows connecting 2 pro camera/lens setups via HDMI/SDI, and XLR mic inputs. It shows up as a USB webcam like normal.
Not any good one that does it in hardware out of the box that I know of. There are mod kits for CS lenses for c920/930/brio, if you can live with a tighter shot. If you've an compatible RX100/A6000 or similar laying around, then an Elgato Cam Link like hanselman's setup above might be the easiest option.
Fair question, and I think yes! If you mainly do your meetings remotely (which I do), you want your interactions to be as high-bandwidth as possible.
There is value, and data, in real world interactions that is lost quickly in video calls. The lower latency, the higher the resolution and quality of the audio, the more you approximate a 'real' meeting.
This is way beyond baseline requirements for e.g. remote work, but it's _nice_, just as a slightly bigger screen is _nice_.
This is for audio, not video, as it's my "thing", but for the past year I've been doing all my video interviews with a Shure SM57 mic plugged into a nice preamp, into a good interface, and they've all gone much better than phone interviews. No one's ever said "wait, could you repeat that?" or "You're breaking up a bit". There's something to be said for smoothing out conferencing so it makes it more lifelike, and I'd assume that's even more true for video.
Or put another way, can you find any high-profile Twitch streamers using their integrated webcam/mic?
Could it be a limitation in thickness? Laptop display assemblies are thin, which means you need a very small lens and as a result probably can only fit a very small sensor. There's a lot more room for camera modules in phones.
That’s my guess as well. If you look at ifixit’s iPhone 11 tear down, the selfie camera takes up almost the full thickness of the phone[1]. The lid of the MacBook is much thinner. People are mentioning the front facing cameras of the surface are better, but they have much more depth to work with. I’m still disappointed the camera res hasn’t improved for almost a decade now, but I suspect you’re right in that the thinness of the lid is the limiting factor.
When talking about a camera for video conferencing, having especial high resolutions does not matter. Having good quality 720p (sharp, little noise) is way better than having bad full HD. Even TV in 720p holds up pretty well on large screens as long as the source is good quality.
Unfortunately the cameras in Macbooks are not of the "good quality 720p" kind. They make blurry images with lots of noise, have poor low light performance, and the colors don't look right.
Facetime on iPhones is a lot better than Facetime on Macbooks
Same issue with the super weak bluetooth antennae in macbooks.
My iphone6's bluetooth antennae lets me walk all over the house while listening to something with my headphones (an essential modern experience!) while my $2000+ macbook pro will barely let me leave the room without losing connection.
Wifi antennae too. On bad internet, my laptop cannot even connect to a wap that my phone can, so I'll tether my phone to get internet.
I want my laptop to be a portable powerhouse of connectivity too!
I would AT LEAST expect 1080p. That's a huge bummer in the year 2020, when even my phone can do 4K.
Conferences and Facebook livestreams just don't work with 720p :(
It's a fair point. If the camera were better, no one would be saying, "It's a great laptop, but the front facing camera, at 1080p, is excessive. I can't believe they did that." So I'm not sure why there are all these people trying to justify a low-res camera in these comments. :)
I wish they would take advantage of the thickness of the panel to make a bigger camera with a bigger lens. I don’t care about resolution at all, but I suspect conference call image quality might increase dramatically if it the lens could gather double the light.
They are probably not willing to sacrifice low-light performance and dynamic range for resolution. When you only have a few millimeters to work with, you can't make the sensor larger without making the lens wider, and no one wants a fish-eye for a web cam.
For a given sensor size, increased pixel density has to decrease low light performance, because each pixel will get less light. Since this camera will be almost exclusively used for online video confrerencing, frequently in low light, I bet it will lead to an overall better user experience.
I suspect it is related to them pushing a much thinner bezel to squeeze in a 16" screen in a 15" chassis. If true, I'd happily accept that tradeoff since screen realestate is far more important to me than a jump from 720p to 1080p for my webcam.
I envy your internet connection where the limiting factor is the quality of the camera and not the speed of your internet, which ends up compressing the video massively anyway.
Going to join others by saying I wouldn't want a higher resolution, and would actually prefer no camera. I got a new Dell Latitude last year, that when speced out, is probably in line with the Macbook Pro lineup, and it has similar camera specs.
Could be that they are not ready to support that amount of spike in traffic in their FaceTime services, so it's a way to limit it by not beefing up the cameras.
Would it materially harm a company with a trillion dollar market cap to offer a version of this without the touchbar (thus yielding a lower price), so people can afford to upgrade the soldered memory and NVMe drive?
Would it also harm them to make a version that didn't have soldered memory/NVMe drive?
Ultimately, this is why I switched to a Dell Latitude. Being user hostile to basic memory/disk replacement doesn't fly with me when spending $1500+ on a machine.
And if replacing either breaks the crypto chain - I don't need a black box T2 chip, I'll do my own disk encryption.
One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus. Options mean inventory, development and test costs etc... and can be sources of quality problems triggering warranty repairs or replacements. Doing few things allows one to streamline both product development and manufacturing.
Apple's product line is "simple" for marketing reasons. It's easier for customers to understand what product is right for them, then funnel them into configuration option trees. While limiting SKUs is still good retail practice (especially if you primarily sell through indirect channels), the ability for customers to easily understand your product portfolio is what's really important.
I do agree that they have slipped in this area, though I think it's an inevitable consequence of being a trillion dollar company. Apple was only able to become a trillion dollar company because their marketing and operations were easier to manage, and companies in a market-leading position typically grow until the point their size overwhelms their ability to steer the ship.
Except they still offered options, but without modularity, so you had more SKUs to track in your logistics - you still need to track the parts you solder down, except now instead of shipping a base system and being able to make a "CTO" version, or just let authorised resellers with authorised service points apply the right parts, you need to wait till a whole extra SKU gets moved through thousands of kilometers of logistic chain for your one tiny order.
Maybe the experience in USA with Apple Stores is different, but when forced to buy a Mac by work recently I had to deal with some ridiculous wait times just for asking for 32G ram.
It's so much better in the USA that I wait until I visit home to do anything Apple related, whether it's to order a new custom laptop or to send my laptop in for service.
For example, I needed my logic board + keyboard replaced and it landed on my doorstep 24 hours later.
Definitely a different experience everywhere else I've been when dealing with Apple whether it's Mexico City or Lisbon. Most places are even lucky to have an actual Apple Store rather than some sort of certified 3rd party with questionable liability.
When I ordered a max spec MBP there was a 2 week lead time before it was shipped overnight directly from Shenzhen to our office in California.
My interpretation was that Apple does not build and hold inventory of every SKU, certain configurations are built at the time of purchase and it took 2 weeks for the factory to process our order.
> One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus.
One way. The other is, if your computer breaks you either upgrade or spend a lot to have it repaired by Apple.
There's no downside in using non soldered down ram and storage, it's just the nth lock in strategy.
Storage is one thing and I agree it should be M.2 (though there are other complicating issues like compatibility with 3rd party SSDs), but RAM requirements for desktop / laptop PCs have largely held steady for the last decade (at 16 to 32GB). Sure there are specialized uses for more than that, but you're almost always better off executing those workloads in the cloud than on your laptop.
You mean like video editing / special effects?
I really qeustion this is something that should be moved to cloud, as it's really easy to have several Terrabytes of source material one has to handle.
The thing about that is they could minimize SKUs even more by providing socketed ram and storage. The permutations of that are much more numerous than adding a touch bar vs physical keys option.
Removing the touchbar has a material financial impact to Apple? We're talking about a CNC machine here, that's how they carve out the aluminum chassis. It would literally involve them carving out less aluminum from the block, because the touchbar would no longer be needed.
Quality problems? You mean like the over-engineered keyboard they've had issues with for three years?
Some decades longer design patterns are battle tested/aren't broken, yet Apple continually tries to break them - thinness to the extent that they now solder memory/disk to the board, putting out a keyboard design that isn't sufficiently tested, and all sorts of Catalina issues that people have documented online.
If they care at all about making the touchbar a thing then the best way to do that is make every mac developer get one on their daily-use laptop. I still think of it as a novelty more than a functional feature, but I don't think any third party apps would support it if it didn't come on every MBP.
Really annoying they continue to do this, especially given they charge excessive markup on memory upgrades (2x32GB DDR4 SODIMMS average $250-300, Apple charges you $800 for 64GB of memory).
> Really annoying they continue to do this, especially given they charge excessive markup on memory upgrades
This is exactly why they solder it on - so they can charge those prices. They've created a monopoly on hardware upgrades and repairs for their machines. This is why a lot of people refuse to buy Apple laptops these days.
They have a monopoly on repairs. And with other laptops, you can certainly upgrade at least the SSD independently. With Macs, you have to buy a whole new machine.
That is speculation based off the wording they used in the description. He reached this conclusion because it said RAM/SSD were "not user accessible" and they used to say "built into the computer" - no one really knows the answer. I imagine they remain soldered.
I'm pretty sure at this point if they make a version without the touchbar, they'll market it as a premium feature and charge more. Now with 100% physical function keys!
For others who might be wondering, this replaces the 15-inch MacBook Pro. There's a small increase in size (15 vs 16):
- Thickness: 1.55cm to 1.62cm (+0.7mm, +4.5%)
- Width: 34.93cm to 35.79cm (+0.86cm, +2.5%)
- Depth: 24.07cm to 24.59cm (+0.52cm, +2.2%)
- Weight: 1.83kg to 2.0kg (+170gr, +9.3%)
The display alone is ~1.3cm wider (and ~0.7cm higher), so there was a small reduction in bezel sizes, allowing the screen to grow more than the rest of the hardware.
This new model appears to be just slightly smaller and lighter than the 2015 many of us still have. It's basically the same size as the 2015, but with more screen in the same frame.
Yup, this is pretty much the reason I go with Lenovo Thinkpads. 14" fits nicely in all my bags and is big enough to see two things side by side.
So yeah, Apple is not even on my radar if they don't offer a 14" form factor. I also don't use other Apple products, so there's little reason for me to compromise.
FWIW I successfully did some work on a United 787 in cattle class (economy) with my 15" macbook pro in a middle seat. It was tight, but it helped that the guy in the window seat fell asleep leaning to the wall... But yeah, I might resurrect my old trusty 2011 macbook air for situations like this...
There are still people clamoring for a 17". The new 16" is apparently unnoticeably larger than the previous 15" model and I already feel a large difference when working on a 15" compared to a 13". If they enlarged the screen of the 13" to almost-edges it would be really nice tho.
I could live with the new touchbar on a 14" MBP. A 14" MBA might be perfect. Will be interesting to see if these other laptops also increase their thickness.
I have a question for you Mac users. Assuming that you don't treat the machine badly, no extra care (e.g. never open up to do maintenance), and have to carry it around half of the time. How long do you think a Macbook would last in average?
For the Lenovo I'm using I'd say about 5 years because I break things so easily...it's reaching retirement.
Up until almost 5 years ago, before switching to a Macbook Pro, I used to have various laptops with both Windows and Ubuntu. Here's my belief: A non-Apple laptop that lasts 2+ years, without having to be regularly formatted, without improving the hardware, without giving up performance or needing who knows what kind of tweaking/cleaning, upgrade after upgrade, is a myth. It doesn't exist.
Sure, I know plenty of people who've had the same Lenovo/HP/whatever laptop for 5, even 10 years but every single time I personally used their laptop I was embarassed at how bad the experience was. Sluggish, ugly, with fans spinning like they needed to put out a fire.
After almost 5 years the 13" 2015 Macbook Pro I'm currently writing on hasn't lost one beat. It's as snappy and as usable as the very first day. I haven't formatted once, I've easily kept it up to date, I only replaced the battery because it was lasting 4 hours instead of the original 6-7. I can still edit videos, run VMs, play not-too-demanding games, do Photoshop, like the first day I bought it. And everything makes me think I'll be able to do so for the next 2-3 years, at least.
I've travelled with it to 10 countries and dropped it 5 or 6 times. There are multiple dents on the corners but, damn, this thing is tough!
Experiences vary, some people have had bad experiences but I have a 13" late-2013 MacBook Pro that I take everywhere. The one concession to its comfort is a soft neoprene case but otherwise it gets shoved into bags and moved about constantly.
The thing is a rock. The keyboard still looks (and works) like new with no visible wear on the trackpad. There are a few scuffs and tiny dents on the outer case but nothing noticeable from any distance. One of the rubber feet on the base has fallen off in the last few months but that doesn't bother me too much.
One problem that has developed is that the glass at the top of the bezel has what looks like air behind it. This is cosmetic except that it interferes with the camera, which now is permanently blurry. I replaced the original battery ($49) recently - it lasted almost 6 years and still held 60 minutes of charge.
I figure I can get at least another 12 months out of this thing since it runs Catalina just fine. My next laptop will also be a Mac.
I’ve been using the same 2012 rMBP day in day out since I bought it. I carry it everywhere with me, even on a sailboat when I went on a few months sailing trip in 2015. The thing still runs everything i need for work and non-work (webdev + Final Cut Pro mostly)
I have had to do some surgery on it though (resolder some chip related to the GPU power because I missed the recall window), the battery only lasts about two hours and the screen has a few dead pixels.
Pretty happy about my purchase to be honest.
I have a 2015 rMBP (base model 15") that used to bike commute to work with me every day for 2 years. Now it's just used daily around the house and is still 100% as good as the day I bought it. I'm glad I worked out a way to keep the laptop from that company.
I'm at a different job now and have a 2018 MBP (usb-c only, 15" base model), less than a year old, that is used on a daily car commute (much gentler than the old bike commute) and the keyboard is giving me lots of grief. I will happily turn this one back into the company.
Well with the older models you absolutely didn't have to worry about things breaking. I used and abused a 13" late 2012 model for about 4 years:
* Used it under direct sunlight (and I live in Singapore so it's both hot and humid) multiple times
* Took it out to sea on boats multiple times for testing robotics
* Dropped it on concrete accidentally
* Left it in dusty labs etc
It's display finally died after being splashed with rain water but the machine itself still boots to this day. Apple made them really well but I can't say the same about the newer models.
My wife is still using 2011 Macbook Pro. I did upgrade it to 16GB RAM (not officially supported but works fine), replaced the original HDD with SSD and installed HDD instead of DVD reader so it ended up with 1.5TB of storage. Works fine so far.
They are fragile as fuck. Literally I dropped one three inches onto the carpet and the screen went pop. Also it slowly bent over time in my bag.
This replaced a 2010 MBP which caught fire after I spilled a drink next to it. The case sucks spilled liquids up like a straw!
I use a T470 thinkpad now. It cost less than a replacement screen for a 15” rMBP did! I have literally beaten the shit out of it for months and it just shrugs it off. I also had a T440 which was abused heavily and shrugged it off.
I had an X220 I poured a coffee in and nothing interesting happened too.
Stay with the thinkpads if you’re an idiot like me.
Holy heck, they re-added a physical escape key. That's a huge improvement. a slight shame they didn't just move the touchbar up and re-add the F key row too, but it is a good compromise and improvement regardless.
This could be the one a lot of people have been waiting for if the new switches/design pans out.
PS - Although I might be an unusual demographic as I touch type and wouldn't use the touchbar regardless (since I look at the screen, not the backs of my hands while I interact with a Mac).
I really recommend rebinding caps lock to escape. macOS lets you do that natively in keyboard setting nowadays. Still muscle memory to relearn, of course.
I got used to capslock in less than a day when I got MBP.
I recommend BetterTouchTool to remove the faux escape key and replace it with something as annoying as "Previous track".
After listening to the same track for a few hours it really stuck.
But you can't rebind esc to anything (natively), so you lose caps lock. Am I the only one who declares constants and envvars in capitals? And how do people write SQL? With their elbow on the shift key?
I've always just typed constants and SQL with my pinky on the left Shift key. It feels easier than having to toggle Caps Lock all the time.
In situations where I'm excited and messaging my friends to yell, I've typed entire sentences mostly holding down Left Shift. After some experimentation, it looks like even for normal sentence capitalization, I never use Right Shift unless I'm typing one-handed.
Caps for envvars is not a cosmetic convention, it's a style convention to indicate if a variable was sourced from the shell/parent/sourced file vs an internal definition.
Caps for constants is a long standing convention in many style guides and standard libraries.
You appear to be referring to shell scripts. I do not have an opinion on shell script capitalization. However, my opinion on capital keywords in SQL is that it is a relic of an older time when it was used to help visual parsing of the query.
Going further I’m of the opinion that color syntax highlighting does that job far better thus rendering the capital convention obsolete.
Note: you may have a different opinion than me and if you do the laws of the code formatting holy war demand that I assert that you’d be wrong.
Karabiner Elements is free and will let you bind Esc to Caps Lock. It actually allows general remapping for instance I use a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard with my Mac and have that stupid menu key remapped to be a second Option.
Yeah I SHIFT everything capital letters. Feel better than Capslock.
Not a Mac user but I wish my laptop has semi-full size keyboard (that includes everything excluding the number pad), but that's too big for laptops I guess :(
I’ve been doing this, as prompted by being assigned a touchstrip MacBook at my last job.
Have to say I was able to retrain pretty quickly. jj is now my first instinct even on full-sized keyboards. I now think it’s really an improvement. All about staying on that home row as much as possible..
I’ve only been using vim for about 10 years but I’m pretty sure I’ve hit escape less than a few thousand times in those years. One of the first things I did was imap jk <Esc> and it turns out that’s really all I need Escape for (Ctrl-C is goto to return to normal mode)...
You shouldn't be happy that they added that back, you should be pissed that they took it out in the first place, well knowing how many developers use Mac.
> a slight shame they didn't just move the touchbar up and re-add the F key row too
yeah, considering the massive 16" size, there's definitely room for another row of keys. I could see if a diminuitive air came out with touchbar, you want both weight and space savings so nuke it. but with 16" and six speakers just add the damn keys!
I am both a digital creative professional and a developer/programmer and I can't remember when was the last time I pressed the escape key. If anything, it might have been to exit a full-screen video where the UI had mysteriously disappeared because some crappy website couldn't deal with an ad-blocker.
Programmers and creative professionals don't unilaterally love or need the ESC key like you're suggesting.
That's fine but you can still do that without the physical key, can't you? I'm still able to escape out of dialogs like that without needing a physical key.
And having the hyper key is awesome (command+control+option+shift). Makes it super handy for shortcuts to open commonly used program shortcuts like calendar etc
I'm old and I've been using vim for decades. Remapping caps lock on the internal keyboard would just confuse me because I use my external keyboard as much as I use the internal one, and my external keyboard has caps lock remapped to Command.
The remapping can be used on all your connected keyboards and per keyboard, whatever you prefer.
And if you want extended remapping I'd recommend https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ especially if you're missing the function keys, you can remap that to be fn + number row. So you will have easy access to those as well.
It always seemed backwards that the touch bar is a pro feature. Aren't pros the group that learn all the keyboard commands? The touch bar seems like it would be most useful to non-pro users.
My assumption has always been that the "Pro" line is aimed at content creators. Because in lots of professional work you would want a plethora of ports which Apple doesn't give you.
When they started removing ports I use I switched to a Thinkpad T-series. It's been the perfect laptop for my use.
Faders are the right abstraction for a lot of pro media stuff. The touch bar is an okay middle ground between keyboard/mouse and a separate hardware control surface.
Can you do audio or video scrubbing with FN keys? Have you used touchbar with Photoshop or similar apps? A Pro User doesn’t mean “software developer” — there are a lot of other pros that really love the touchbar.
Now that I think about this more, if you are right, then why don't the Mac Pros come with a touchbar keyboard? Video and photo editing are probably the primary uses for the Mac Pro.
Because all of those use cases already have purpose built peripherals that would be more appropriate to use with a stationary workstation. Laptops benefit from something more portable and general purpose.
Which is fair — film, music, design, photography have been the core pro markets for Apple for much longer than developers have been — Final Cut, Logic Pro and the defunct Aperture are clear proof of that. The Touch Bar kind of became the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people, but this prioritisation at the hardware level is much older, and much more pervasive than that.
That sort of creative also gets much more benefit from the four Thunderbolt ports than developers do (we mostly use them as inconvenient USB and/or display ports, and AFAICT Thunderbolt is borderline irrelevant. Same as with Firewire back in the day). As much as I enjoy using my iMac 5k for programming, it's when I use it for Lightroom that I really get a real benefit from it. Most of my development work doesn't benefit that much from an SSD (when I wrote C++ professionally, that was a different story...), but by gods it makes a difference when I try to edit 4k video.
I mostly think of it as the emoji bar. It's genuinely useful for people (pros and non-pros) who type a lot of emojis to have them on the keyboard. But it's certainly not specifically a pro feature, I agree 100%.
Apple probably has better data on how it gets used than I do, but that's almost exclusively what I'd use it for if I had it.
Funny, I actually bought them for the transparency mode, precisely so that I can hear the clickity clacking of everyone's mechanical keyboards. It's comforting.
Agreed, I'm still on a 2015 model and still super happy, even battery life is OK.
Every time a new MacBook Pro is announced, I'm a bit excited but then I compare and I find no good enough incentive to upgrade yet.
I'm secretly hoping that my 2015 model dies so I can upgrade to a newer sexier one, but the damn beast keeps on working great.
I've looked, out of curiosity, at the prices you pay for refurbished ones around here (Germany), and most offers for the refurbished 2015 now exceed what I paid for a new one back in 2015 (same configuration, of course).
I'm still using a 2010, and while I did upgrade to an SSD and added some RAM, it's still going strong. The only thing making me consider upgrading is that OS X upgrades stopped supporting it.
On the 2010 models upgrading the RAM or hard drive just involved a specific screwdriver to take the back off. It took approximately 5 minutes to do at home.
Pretty sure its impossible to upgrade the Air unfortunately.
Also a 2015 MBP user chiming in. I see absolutely no reason to upgrade. Currently in need of a battery replacement. Still deciding whether it's worth attempting myself or to just shell out the extra $100 for Apple to do it.
My personal Macbook Pro is from 2014 and I actually like it better than my 2015 for work. Apple switched from NVIDIA to AMD graphics cards in 2015 and it seems to have had a huge thermal impact. The fans on my work machine run at full speed constantly whenever I plug in an external monitor, but I almost never hear them on my personal machine.
Same with iPhone 6s. Not sure why can't admit that reached the peak with a product and just keep producing it that way, maybe with minor modifications only. I would totally keep buying 2015 MPBs and iPhone6s till the end of times.
Sure, but instead of creating the Model T Apple created an ambling burro. Some people like it for some use cases, but a lot of those who just wanted a faster horse are understandably a bit miffed.
This is exactly it. I need a horse, it can be slightly faster, not required though. There is no horse vs car improvement between iPhone 6s vs iPhone 11, but they removed jack and increased price for no good reason. Btw. I do not think that there can be a horse vs car bump in UX for phones. Maybe I am my imagination is limited. :)
Same, I use a iPad mini for music & phone conversations because I will not give up my headphones, unless they produce a wireless one that I can charge once a year and it can transfer ALAC/FLAC, and it has the sound quality of the previous one.
Well at least with the new phones you can use a lightning -> headphone converter and a wireless charger so there is that. Not ideal as i miss the headphone jack and don't like wireless too but it works well.
btw. the 16" model is cheaper than the 15" from the year before (in the base configuration they are equal, if you add additional ssd space or so, the 16" model comes out cheaper).
not that it matters much, since the 15" pro late 2013 model was cheaper than both.
I just got a 2019 at end of May - earlier 2015 broke, needed one ASAP. Didn't want a Touch Bar (had returned a 2016 model I got on release - didn't like it). Now... same price, this has physical escape key and 1TB out of the box. Slightly annoyed...
yeah I would be annoyed also. I knew that my late 2013 has his issues after hard usage (battery swelled, etc) so I need one really soon, but I knew that the 2019/2020 will have a new model so I waited exactly for that.
Have you gone to apple for the battery swelling issue? I took mine in after part of the trackpad stopped working and a fan starting whining non-stop. They ended up replacing the case, battery, fan, and potentially even the keyboard and screen (looked like it from what I could tell) for only $300. It felt brand new when I got it back.
My 2012 Retina was solid, lasted for 7 years till the battery just started going. Had they not glued it in I would have replaced battery and kept going.. hunted for a replacement and really not happy with anything. A compromise was switching to a Razer Blade Base (here in New Zealand we have Consumer Gaurentees Act - so even if it's iffy quality next 5 or so years I can get it fixed for free). From a quality perspective still doesn't really touch a 7 year old machine.... yes it's awesomely fast and at least upgradeable. But the trackpad definitely not the same sensitivity & consistency, chassis I think is ever so slightly warped, fan and heat when it's plugged in is a problem, and screen, well....
> here in New Zealand we have Consumer Gaurentees Act - so even if it's iffy quality next 5 or so years I can get it fixed for free
A quick search reveals the Razer costs around $500 USD more in NZ than in the US (converted prices to USD). The MBP 16" is $400 more. Wouldn't part of the reason it costs more be because of this legislation?
Generally speaking we have taxes included in our pricing (often forgotten when doing conversions) and because small market we often get "taken for a ride" as there's limited volume. Not many people actually use the CGA, but if you know about it, it's gold :)
I'm sure that would go to one of the old Thinkpads; e.g. X220 still has a massive cult following to the point where it's being moded with modern parts just so people could still use it.
You have a very valid point though - seems like 2010-2015 was the golden age of modern laptops then innovation was replaced by gimmick all of a sudden.
Apple should just release a really really expensive version of the air. That way people looking for a designer laptop have something they can throw too much money at, and the rest of us can have a mbp that makes some allowances for performance.
Edit: I may be overly snarky, but I find it hard to imagine that recent mbp models were not influenced by the social clout that the iphone brought to the apple brand.
Apple had social clout way before the iPhone. Macs were always expensive.
Apple created a twentieth anniversary Mac (TAM) that cost $7,500 in 1998 and was delivered to your house by a Limo. The driver wore white gloves and hand delivered the TAM.
64GB RAM is like "hallelujah". Doing enterprise dev with Docker + Java is pretty horrible with 16GB on my 2017 MBP.
The fact that this review didn't even once mention the fact that this machine is now thicker & bigger and yet they didn't add any useful ports back in is amazing.
I still hate that the 2017 one I have has only USB-C + Headphone jack. I appreciate that it still has the headphone jack.
But at our office we all got OWC Thunderbolt 3 Docks @ $300/desk and the whole experience sucks.
I have the 15" with 32gb and I thought docker was making my laptop shit the bed - screens flickering all the time, mouse barely moving, etc.
It turned out to be docker plus Firefox (current version/Quantum yada yada) that was too much - I can't stop using all this docker stuff but I switched to Safari and haven't had any problems at all
Both Chrome and Firefox are much more demanding than many realize. It’s gotten to the point that they should consider a feature freeze and focus on nothing but efficiency and performance for the next few years.
I'd get an external display with a dock built-in. I have the new 4k LG one at my desk, and I love needing only one cable to connect to my MBP when I'm at my desk. It even handles power.
Then you have to pay for cloud processing. Owning your hardware is an investment that pays off more than ever now that things like Kubernetes’ resource provisioning can escalate costs to the stratosphere even when the nodes are not doing any real work.
I think my next Mac will be whatever laptop still has all of its keys and I’ll just keep building machines to run linux with a one-step Kubernetes solution for development clusters. Many people don’t want to assemble machines and that makes a beefy laptop running Minikube the easiest solution to dodge cloud costs outside of production.
It's not ideal right now but cloud dev is clearly the way it's going. I'd say buying el cheapo chromebook + cloud dev environment would work out to be cheaper even if the cloud provider somehow screwed up and took off(not been my experience but i haven't needed to work with k8 yet)
I work at a financial institution that is going the reverse, potentially because of internal issues - the dev environment is underprovisioned, and I guess they can't/won't beef it up, so all the developers are going back from virtual desktops to fully loaded for local dev and testing.
On AWS K8s provisioning a basic 4-node cluster to sit there and do nothing costs over $300 per month. The amount you spend in a year can be used to build an unreasonably powerful cluster in your home or office.
It's still one of my goals to be able to get half a dozen devs in a room and be able to emulate most of our infrastructure on those 6 machines, for purposes of prototyping and debugging.
Literally every single TV or projector I've ever given a presentation on
Ethernet
(micro-)SD card
Keyboard
Mouse
Displays
Flashing microcontrollers (technically could be done over BT but it is a pain in the ass)
Gamepad
I've bought dongles/docking stations for all of these devices but it is a huge hassle when traveling, which is a use case a laptop should be able to excel at. Adding just a single USB-A port and HDMI would be a complete gamechanger for me. Apple wouldn't be able to sell as many of their $70 dongles though.
> Logitech mice work better with the receiver than over bluetooth.
I've found the opposite to be true, with my MX Master 3 using the receiver resulted in some odd "bald spots" on the mat that made no sense, switching to bluetooth fixed it.
I've given up on wireless mice and have gone back to wired. It feels futuristic! Just plug it in and it works immediately! No pairing, no charging, no dongles, and it's lighter.
If you're using DisplayPort, that suggests you're at a desk, with an external monitor; for this, a dock works great. I routinely use all of those simultaneously on the TB3 dock I've got at my desk.
This is Apple going all in on pro for this laptop.
The display is fantastic all around, 64 GB of ram, 8 GB of DDR6 VRAM, 8 cores, biggest battery FAA will allow on planes, 8 TB SSD, etc.
This will also be able to connect to Apple's upcoming 6K 32-inch display.
This is a very impressive update all around and it shows Apple putting a lot of space between their pro laptops and the MBA and iPad Pro now. The lineup is starting to make a lot of sense again.
When people cite the great feat of putting in a 100Wh battery into this laptop they seem to keep forgetting that the 2012-2014 models had a 95Wh battery and the 2015 model had a 99.5Wh battery.
Only when flattening the design for the 2016 year did they reduce it to 76Wh.
For the longest time the iPhones were getting thinner and thinner and hn/reddit complained that they really wanted chunkier iPhones with better batteries.
Then Apple turned the battleship and since 2014 (iPhone 6) we've gotten a thicker phone with improved battery life in every redesign.
Some ruggedized laptops have two separate batteries for hot-swapping while keeping the PC on, and this way you can take a laptop with more than 100 Wh on a plane. The same way I take a 95 Wh laptop with a 75 Wh power bank. So never say never :)
As long as consumers are willing to shell out several thousand dollars per iteration of mistake-undoing then it's likely that some day you'll see actual progress.
The article mentions the new keyboard right in the subheader, multiple times in the first couple paragraphs, and has a whole section devoted to it.
TL;DR: Yes, it's a completely new keyboard design, with scissor switches, not butterfly, more key travel, slightly more key separation, more offset for the Touch Bar, and a physical escape key and separate Touch ID sensor.
You are going to have to put up with people asking about the keyboard for a while. They've been blowing smoke up our asses for two years about how they 'fixed' the old one. 4 revisions in it's... better, but still reminiscent of the sorts of keyboards that nobody would buy after trying.
The reaction is going to be, "Yeah, I know they said they fixed the keyboard, but really, did they fix the keyboard?" from quite a lot of people.
"Pro" has basically been sapped of all meaning as a term.
Will there be some "pro" users (really: power users, people who run stuff that maxes out this new model's capabilities)? Yep. Will they be a minority, while most users will buy it because of its luxury status, keeping up with the times, or ecosystem familiarity/lock-in? Also yep.
Except for the small fact that its starting price is $2300, that buys you absolutely nothing better except for something that looks nice. Mac OS has been declining in quality, and the hardware design still lacks quality. Im willing to put money on the fact that this thing will thermal throttle.
Looks nice and has the specs to back it up, you might can find another laptop with the same specs for $2300 but the build quality, software, and support will be lacking.
Build quality is not that great. Did everyone forget about the Fiasco with the keyboards? Apple messes up hardware design quite a bit.
Software is purely personal choice. Some people prefer windows, others mac, others linux. Modern Linux does everything you want, including support for a good portion of popular games through Proton under Steam
Apple support is a joke, they will upcharge quite a bit for replacing whole boards when its a matter of a simple repair. Watch any of Louis Rossmanns videos. Not to mention that for any of the other manufacturers, you can order and replace parts yourself with relative ease - all it takes is a screwdriver.
11 years ago I bought a 15” MacBook Pro, the first model year with the unibody design. I’m still using it almost every day for web browsing, watching videos, editing documents, etc.
In 2008, it cost $2,400. The new 16” released today costs... $2,400.
So after inflation, the new version is about 20% cheaper and a lot more powerful? Yes, I get that you can do every day web browsing/watching videos/document editing, but that's not really the point of this machine.
Which means they took a reduction in margin to keep the price the same. Prices otherwise have risen, because of inflation. Check an inflation calculator and then you’ll be overjoyed Apple has a commitment to maintaining pricing standards for its products.
Meh, it's just a matter of efficiency, the bulk prices they get from manufacturers, the fact that they're basically using the same assembly lines for 10 years, with the same suppliers &.
TV got much much cheaper in the last 10 years too and that's not because manufacturer cut their margins, mass production + mature tech + price/perf going down = price stagnates or drops.
TV's became a lot cheaper because they are 'Smart" all these companies are now subsidizing the TV cost because they are data mining and selling off your information.
The first plasma TV I bought was 42" and $2400. It was replaced a few years ago by a 62" plasma that has a tenth of the bezel, weighs at least half as much, and cost $800. There is no network hardware in either device.
A Samsung from Costco that I am sure is no longer available, which is why it was probably at Costco. Costco's order archive doesn't go back far enough for me to find the model #, sorry.
Yes, I stated as such. I don’t work at Apple, but I am a Product Manager. Pricing is a critical part of product market segmentation. Apple’s pricing is a deliberate choice, not an accident, and they absolutely give up margin for volume.
I agree, though. My old 2011 MBP was fantastic. A few months ago the video card finally died, otherwise I'd still be using it. Modern macbooks barely seem to have any keyboard keys anymore.
Also have a 17 in. 2011 mbp, There is a workaround to get it working with the on board video bypassing the failing video card, but it doesn't seem like a long term fix.
I recently threw my 2010-2011 15" MacBook Pro out of the door, I actually couldn't believe how chunky and heavy it was, it was super weird to hold it. I actually still worked, although a bit slow, and the battery would only last for about 30 minutes, but still worked.
>11 years ago I bought a 15” MacBook Pro, the first model year with the unibody design. I’m still using it almost every day for web browsing, watching videos, editing documents, etc.
You are very fortunate; mine got hit with the EM209 issue twice. An AASP told me that it almost inevitably affects the 2008 and 2009 models.
Apple did improve the model, though. The mid-2012 non-Retina model I'm typing on is seven years old and going strong, albeit with one keyboard repair (something that also affected my 2008 model twice).
I have the same 15” from late 2008 sitting in storage at home. Surprised you’re still using it! What OS version?
Sometimes I like to look at the price of Apple stock in 2008 and wonder how much money I would have today if I had instead bought 2.5k USD worth of shares in 2008 instead of the laptop - it’s depressing.
I'm using a 15" from mid 2009 every day still, it's on Mojave (with dos1dude's patch). Some software starts to flake out but it's still perfectly usable. (i need a custom homebrew patch because all new binaries require architecture beyond Penryn)
My processor speed is 2.53, so based on your [1], I must have bought the $2,500 model. But I remember getting some kind of Black Friday deal on it; that's how I know it's about 11 years old.
I initially found the touchbar to mostly be a gimmick, new for the sake of being new and not really bringing anything useful to the table.
A couple of years later and I'm a convert. If I had to buy a new MBP today I would definitely make sure it has a touchbar. It turns out app makers have found some nifty uses for it, like the ability to quickly mute/unmute when in conference calls, quickly changing volume/brightness, stepping through code while debugging etc etc. These are seemingly insignificant quality of life improvements, but I definitely miss them when on a machine without a touchbar. Conversely I haven't missed the Fn-keys, not even once.
That hardware esc key looks tasty though, I hope they bring that to the 13" model.
I respect your opinion, but all of the examples you gave are already possible with Fn-keys.
I think what the touchbar brings is always active tutorial/reminder as to what's possible with the touchbar. Due to it's very nature you don't have to be taught what's on there, you can see, you then don't have to remember/rely on building up muscle memory.
I imagine it sucks for accessibility. I'd still want one before my faculties faulter, I imagine I'd get some use out of it with my IDE.
I buy what people say that it's way better for scrubbing video/audio if you do that a lot (lots of people previously bought special-purpose accessories for the same)... and mostly worse otherwise.
Maybe not true for 2019 version but previous versions have had a serious issue with the touchbar just hanging/becoming unresponsive - requiring a reboot to fix the issue.
Most computer users aren’t hardcore users. Of course not scientific, but I know a lot of users that are intimidated by strange FN keys and are glad the touchbar clearly labels the current function of the virtual keys. We as HN crowd and hardcore freaks need to accept that no major hardware company can survive by delevoping for us niche users.
I was part of the spell correction team at Google, and we made sure that we aren't overly aggressive even though lots of people mistype their web query.
Nowdays I find it much harder to research rare things on Google, and I have to undo the automatic correction that the spell corrector does all the time (which is OK as long as it's easy to undo).
A question for you, given your expertise: why do most (all?) spell checking/correcting not take into account key locality (is, neighboring key accidentally pressed). A big one for me is hitting n or b instead of space. I think it has gotten better recently, but has a loooong way to go. Just curious on your thoughts. Cheers!
It was there from the first iteration of spelling a long time ago (the first iteration was just looking at misspelling frequencies, second iteration 12 years ago moved to understanding multiple spelling mistakes/mistypes)
If you see these kind of easy-to-correct mistakes, it probably means that the spell corrector wasn't given that big attention in the past 10 years.
While we are trading anecdotes, my extremely-non-technical girlfriend returned her Macbook in part because of the touch bar; the other part was the terrible keyboard.
In any case, it is very non-obvious that removing the function keys used by power user and non-power user alike (often for work) is necessary for the survival of the company.
It is also very non-obvious why the function keys had to be removed for a touchbar to be added to an already relatively expensive piece of hardware. The touch-bar/function keys are already non-reachable from the home row for most people; so what's another row? I think this was a design-oriented decision, not a regular-user-centric one.
Making scrubbers for audio/video (more) physical is nice, since scrubbing video with a mouse usually requires that you first move the mouse to wherever the video player puts its scrubber, and scrubbing with the keyboard usually requires multi-key combos and always has the “wrong” granularity. (It’s also helpful in that you can now combine this scrubbing in a gesture with mouse movement, e.g. picking up a clip from your library in iMovie, scrubbing through the timeline to scroll it to the right position, and then moving the mouse over to the timeline and dropping it. That’s basically an impossible gesture with mouse-movements alone; you’re left to hover the clip over the scroll-edge of the timeline and wait for it to accelerate its scrolling [and then usually overshoot].)
Come to think of it, Sublime Text and other IDEs with a minimap could display it (rotated to horizontal) on the touch-bar, and let you scrub on it, too. Do they?
When I first got a touchbar Mac I was really excited about video scrubbing, but in practice it's been useless to me. If it was a virtual scrubber wheel (like the old mouse-based Final Cut scrubbers) it would have been great, but with the current "scrollbar" type implementation, the precision is so bad that it's always been totally useless for me.
The basic VLC two-finger scroll scrubbing works way better.
One big difference is that using Fn-keys requires me to remember which key does what. They also provide no visual feedback on what state I'm currently in. For example, I may have a Fn-key that works as stop/start, but unless I already know what's going on, I don't know what impact pressing the key will have.
It’s half an inch away from the bottom edge of the screen, but a considerably longer distance away from the things a person usually looks at when working.
> I may have a Fn-key that works as stop/start, but unless I already know what's going on, I don't know what impact pressing the key will have.
Someone in a related thread said the app-specific keys are only available when the app has focus, so wouldn't you have the status of the app in front of you anyway?
In any case, I found the statement funny, because touch is flakey for me, so I never know what impact pressing a touch key will have.
I find this similar to software key vs hardware keys for android phones. Hardware keys are more reliable and do not disappear of move under you, but with software keys you can add contextual options as is used to add a "change keyboard" key in the bottom right when on a textbox.
Essentially a partial fusion of the two things would be physical keys with screens on top for dynamical renaming. but that would have its own problems.
You’re right, and I wasn’t very clear with my comment which is unfortunate. I never meant to imply that any of those things were impossible with fn-keys, just that they weren’t very discoverable. The Touch Bar shows me what features are available at any given time, fn-keys don’t. Sure I could go hunting for the relevant docs, maybe I’d even learn a few key combinations along the way, but my experience tells me I won’t. Other people might, but I never much cared for the fn-keys for this very reason – I never knew quite what they did in what contexts, and didn’t care enough to find out.
So for me, the Touch Bar makes these contextual commands discoverable, and that’s worth more than the tactility of physical keys. Doesn’t matter if I can touch without looking, if I don’t know what the keys do. Besides, after a couple of years with the Touch Bar I feel like muscle memory seems to work about the same anyway, I never have to look for the mute button in Zoom for instance, I know where it is.
Thanks for challenging my comment, prompting me to (hopefully) clarify!
I do have touchbar envy! I tend not to look at my keyboard too much on desktop, but when on a laptop it's definitely in my peripheral vision and would hopefully encourage me to learn it's shortcuts. There's a lot of UX work involved to make it all work perfectly though. App's especially, shouldn't just use the touchbar, they should make it easier with visual in app reminders about what's down there. They should do this with the standard FN-keys too for us non-touchbar folk. I'm a big fan of having keyboard shortcuts shown on screen UI's.
There's no denying it can do more in than Fn-keys.
I've found the touchbar to be useful for only two things: 1) It's decent for things like volume control that need an analog slider, and 2) To give Pock a placed to live, so that there's actually some slightly above caveman task management on the Mac. There's NOTHING that the touchbar can do, though, that a real touchscreen can't do better. This entire stupid feature exists simply because Apple refuses to admit that touch screens are really useful - something you'd think they'd know after iPhones and iPads, but I heard an Apple employee making the ridiculously disproven"gorilla arm" claim as recently as last year. Apple just refuses to do what customers clearly want - the voice of Steve Jobs still controls them from the grave...
It seems like Apple associates the TouchBar more with “touching” than with keyboarding. As in, when you connect an iPad to a Mac using the Sidecar feature, the iPad will display a Touch Bar emulation, because that’s the accessory they think of a Touch Bar as belonging on: an external touch surface, not an external keyboard.
Which is honestly interesting; it seems almost like they’re suggesting that this could grow into a larger feature, where Sidecar is really a kind of “Remote Touch Bar.app”, and you could add larger Touch Bar controls to your app that are only visible through Sidecar. (So you could have OS-level support for e.g. DAWs to display their VSTs onto your iPad for direct manipulation, without needing their own iPad OS app.)
———
I should note, as an aside, that Sidecar lets you keyboard on the Mac host through an iPad’s attached keyboard-case, but doesn’t really treat finger-gestures done on the iPad screen in the Sidecar app as being equivalent to mouse touchpad gestures on the host.
I’m wondering if that’s a conscious design choice, and whether someone at Apple is thinking that the “new HCI paradigm” for desktops will involve still having an external Bluetooth trackpad, but no external Bluetooth keyboard, with that role instead being served by an iPad with a keyboard-case attached to it.
That’d kind of fit—it enables all five(!) interaction methodologies Apple currently has: mouse gestures, keyboard commands, touch inputs, pencil inputs, and touch-bar controls.
But, importantly, it does so while entirely avoiding “gorilla arm” (unlike the huge Microsoft Surface Studio), because your touch surface is small and on the table in front of you, rather than “being” the display. (For most Sidecar iPad gestures, even with a full-sized iPad Pro, you never really have to lift your arm off the table.)
In Apple’s envisioned desktop paradigm, touch is seemingly an input method that you get from a separate input device—one that happens to have a screen—rather than touch being just a “way to do” mousing.
Maybe now that it's called a "Magic Keyboard" they will sell it as a stand-alone product.
I usually put my laptop in front of me with an external screen above it. That way I get used to the laptop keyboard and can feel right at home in a conference room or wherever.
It's very unlikely, but I would like Apple to release the touchbar as a standalone piece of hardware (not attached to a keyboard at all). That way we could have the best of both worlds: physical function keys and a nifty touch device. Would be really useful for music/video editing
> It turns out app makers have found some nifty uses for it, like the ability to quickly mute/unmute when in conference calls, quickly changing volume/brightness, stepping through code while debugging etc etc.
Maybe I've just had a limited, poor experience with it, but from the apps I've used these functions are only available on the touchbar when the app is focused... which has the controls anyway.
I was using Skype for Business and it had the audio controls in the touch bar, and also on the screen about 1.5" inches above the touchbar. I wanted to mute and unmute when I had the app in the background, but I couldn't. Useless.
...but you cant do that with a regular keyboard, nor phone, nor other OS. How would it know if the app is non focused which app you're commanding without taking more processing power for independent 'quick keys',and from all the new electron apps we already know how efficient they are with memory usage.
Well having shortcuts to stuff that you don't want to have to trackpad up to and click every time, or remember keyboard chords for. Same purpose as function keys, but without the memorization necessary to use them.
To the context it was used. Apple apps take full advantage of the touchbar. Adobe is finally doing the same. Not all pros are the same and you can turn off its override features in the system preferences. Not all revolutions are immediate.
I laughed when they showed the music professional using the touchbar to scrub through audio/video. like any pro is using anything less than a whole another macro keyboard to handle that issue
This is interesting. I don't have a touchbar model (yet) so I'm unfamiliar with the API. But it seems to me like the best way to utilize it would be to allow the user to reserve some fraction of it for global shortcuts/controls/macros, and the rest for the in focus app.
Or how about a modifier key (e.g. Cmd/Super) to make the Touch Bar display global hotkeys rather than local hotkeys? I think it already somewhat does this. But it could also display any applicable Services, which (through making Services in Automator) would cover the macro use-case.
The right-hand side of the Touch Bar is already the "control strip", which is systemwide, and it has a < at the left of the control strip that expands it to the whole Touch Bar. You can even set that to be the default if you don't like the context-specific softkeys and just want the systemwide ones.
Yeah... it's really contextual (of course). I work with MSSQL a lot these days and really like that Azure Data Studio has a decent sized "Run query" button in the touch bar, and I use the brightness/volume sliders all the time.
Most apps don't use it very well though - I actually quite dislike Safari's overcomplicated tab buttons - I can't make out anything so it's basically useless, and I use cmd left arrow to go back not the touchbar button.
I would love to have a hardware escape key. But despite the shitty butterfly keyboard issues I'm currently going through I want to keep this Macbook as long as possible.
> like the ability to quickly change volume/brightness
Well, these have physical buttons pre-touchbar, so the touchbar is definitely slower since it requires two clicks (one to summon the slider) and you have to look at it instead of just feeling it.
Do you find that you can use the touchbar without having to look at it? For me I can press the volume up/volume down buttons without having to take my eyes off the screen. Plus the volume increases and decreases with a constant interval. At this point it's pure muscle memory for me to adjust volume and requires no thought. With the touchbar slider I have to physically look down and put the slider to where I want. For me pressing keys is easier than moving a slider and it's faster.
By "touch type", do you mean "without taking your hands off the home-row" or "without looking down?"
I can't do the former, but I can absolutely do the latter. I can change the volume and brightness without looking down, and do so all the time.
Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't think I am—it's not that hard to learn by feel which keys are towards the opposite ends of the top row.
What I can't do without looking is access the middle keys, namely F4–F9. If Apple wanted to put a touch-bar there, I'd find that perfectly acceptable—I wouldn't consider it a downgrade, at least. The bar would be pretty small by that point though.
The latter. Maybe it's not that hard to learn but I suppose I've never really felt inclined to try and touch type since hitting the wrong function key can have a higher "cost" than just typing a wrong letter. Bringing up a help dialog, going full screen, developer console, etc.
Big difference: I can rest my finger on a fn key while looking at the screen, and not need to look down before pressing it. Not possible with the current implementation of touch screens / bars.
The biggest thing I miss about tactile keyboards (on a phone, anyway) is the no-look interaction without necessitating input. Maybe tactile navigation is the term. RIP HTC Tilt2.
I can do it. Show desktop, brightness, media keys, debugging keys. My fingers know them.
I went with a 13" Air this time around. I still have physical function keys, and the fingerprint reader which I like.
Unfortunately, I'm still subject to the quality problems. I'm four months post-purchase, two weeks out of my first keyboard repair(!), and my caps lock and Q keys are already starting to go. :(
Outside of Apple world of "aesthetics over usability", Function keys are grouped spacing so you can easily find the one you need by touch. Ironically, Apple's TouchBar is less touch-friendly than a traditional keyboard.
To be fair, everyone who took computer typing should have the entire keyboard memorized. I know I can touch type a full keyboard and even use shift+keys as touch typing. You are projecting your own lack of keyboard knowledge.
I touch type everything but the function keys, including using shift, alt, and control.
I'm sure the lack of a touchbar is very annoying to people who have taken such a class but I'm skeptical that most people, or even a significant portion of developers, have taken computer typing.
If you've been developing for 35+ years and you still have to look at the keyboard.... you teach yourself touch typing. Unless touch typing means something other than "not looking at the keyboard before you press the keys"?
Physical keys, period. People seem to not know that keyboard shortcuts have existed "forever" because they're faster than mousing about-- no need to look where you're pointing, or where to target on a touchscreen that lacks tactile feedback. They come with "muscle memory" and they don't change position based on context.
Learn keyboard shortcuts, and no one needs a touch bar.
If the touchbar works best for infrequently used actions then is it worth it to use so much of valuable keyboard real estate and sacrifice tactile feedback for infrequently used actions?
I think the touchbar is a cool idea and I loved that Apple explored it innovated. But I also think that ultimately it's not a good idea and good design. Particularly for the power users.
Those who use FCP, Logic X would beg to differ. It depends on use case, but not every power user is the same. Watch the video, look at their marketing, they're showing you who they think their pros are.
Are these industry pros just not talking about it? coz every review by any kind of pro i see on youtube talks about how worthless teh touch bar is as a con against a macbook
I live on the keyboard using vim/spacemacs, yet I almost never use the function keys. It's kinda annoying when I have to work with ncurses apps that insists on function keys (I am looking at you, htop).
Then again, I hardly ever use the touchbar either.
I tried to give this a good go. I remembered when I was the young kid thinking about all those old fogies who could not adapt to changing technologies, and now, I am the one yelling "get off the lawn!"
I never meant to imply they didn’t, but I never really used them because they weren’t very discoverable. With the Touch Bar I can tell just by looking at the “keys” what they do, whereas with fn-keys all I see is F1, F2, Fn... none of those tell me anything.
I can find out, sure, but my experience tells me I won’t, so for me the Touch bar is a win, simply from a discoverability standpoint.
My 2016 MBP has icon labels for each function you listed right on the F-key, except step debugging. Totally discoverable, just by looking, the exact same as the Touchbar. Those same icons have been in the same spot for the three other MBP's I've owned dating back to 2008.
Each to their own, but I've set mine to always and only display the brightness and volume knobs, and I still find it significantly slower to adjust those, than on my old mbp.
But in all fairness, the F-keys on a mac never really worked like function keys, they've always been more of a row of OSX-keys. I can understand why Apple felt a need to innovate that space, but I am not impressed.
No haptic feedback. I am a hunt-and-peck typist, and there is nothing more frustrating than
1) opening a web page to the user manual;
2) starting a build;
3) closing a dialog box;
4) mistakenly completing a word I am typing;
all because my ring or middle finger brushed the touch bar.
It's a solution looking for a problem. It's garbage.
That does make me wonder: why the hell is the capslock button so big? Seems like a huge waste of space.
(Edit: In case anyone else is wondering the same things, the main answers seem to be (1) on manual typewriters, both the shift and capslock needed to physically lift the entire carriage, and so required more force and was for some users a two-finger operation; and (2) all the buttons on the sides of the letters simply fill space to the edges, if we shorten the capslock, we'd need to put something else there or we'd move the A.)
I tried that too. I am getting mixed results. I have to change the way my hands and fingers move, being so used to moving the whole hand as a signal to say, "esc". I am a very tactile/kinosthetic learning, so changing the sequence my body has to move in space can really mess things up for me,
It is not working well: the very limited travel on the keys is not giving my fingers the feedback that I actually hit the "esc" key (capslock). It introduces errors.
I'd probably have to live with this laptop for a while though. I don't think the startup I work for is going to buy a new MBP for me anytime soon.
Being able to go to 32 GB will be nice though. Up until this 2019 MBP, I had seriously looked into switching back to a Linux laptop.
Yeah, it was a bummer it took so long. I started using remote AWS instances to do all of my work because my 8 GB 2015 MBP just could not keep up ... with Slack, Zoom, Chrome, and running Rails. Let alone the VM, running a local version of Kubernetes ...
Nowadays that I am working with Elixir, multi-core is much more appreciated :-D
It wasn't until I got a touchbar that I realized the only function key I ever consistently used was F5 for refreshing pages. Even the few I needed in my IDE for 3-4 button hotkeys are replaced with a single button that does what I want. The touch bar is great, and I really don't understand why people cling to function keys so much
I might have to eat crow on this, but I can't imagine Apple holding out the Esc as a 16" power upgrade. It doesn't require extra motherboard or fan space.
You know, if you buy a Surface Pro or Surface Book (or most any other Windows portable), THE WHOLE SCREEN IS TOUCHABLE! The touchbar is the biggest UI/UX screwup since the one button mouse and Jobs' insistence that there be only one menubar - a decision we still suffer from today that was driven by the original Mac's laughable 9-inch 512x342 pixel screen! BTW - You people are seriously acting like an Esc key is an innovation? I'm still waiting for a real delete key... and Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, etc....
I'm interested in why you think only one menu bar is a bad thing. In my experience it makes it easy to use. On Windows, a menu bar is maybe 20-50 pixels high, and you have to hit that small target to use the menu bar. On Mac, because the menu bar is at the top of the screen, it has effectively infinite height, and I can get my mouse into it with a quick and imprecise motion, which is ideal.
I have seen numerous people who have a MBP 2016 or later which just can't use computers without the Touch Bar experience.
If somebody doesn't find it useful, that's OK, but please, there are a lot of people (who doesn't loudly complain at HN) that finds the Touch Bar useful & incorporates it in one's workflow.
I for myself uses my Touch Bar extensively, from when I'm using Emacs (with a bit of scripting & BTT), Terminal.app, Safari, MS Office Suite, and on and on and on.
I really won't care if Apple would release a MBP without one, but I'm worried Apple will remove the (IMO very useful) concept altogether just because of the loud complainers on the net (like the butterfly mechanism).
Well they can actually measure the repair rate of the butterfly mechanism, this is a different thing. That's why they also extended warranty on those keyboards. The defect is measurable, this isn't about complainers on the net.
It shouldn't be impossible for Apple to offer models with and without. Let the market actually decide. Something tells me that if Apple produced exactly the same model of MBP, one with and one without, you'd see a huge preference away from the Touchbar. I could be wrong! But it would be good if users had the choice.
Apple isn't in the business of giving user's choice. I think their argument always has been against the inertia of familiarity and in the case of the butterfly switches and touchbar it's bitten them in the ass but they can't undo the choice for whatever reason
The thing is, you are bound to come across someone who finds a feature useful even if the feature is not useful for the vast majority of the people. I like Apple laptops and own a MBP myself, but I definitely think that the butterfly keyboard and touchbar hurt Apple's reputation. The butterfly keyboard has had a lot of technical problems which is frustrating for the users and hurts Apple's bottom line due to the repair costs. The typing experience on the butterfly keyboard is also not the best due to lack of travel.
The touchbar is a flawed design concept imho. The entire reason I touch type is so that I don't have to look down from my screen. My eyes remain on the screen for 99% of the time I am working. It's jarring and discontinuous for me to have to look down to use the touchbar. That's why I personally never liked it. I think the tactile feedback of a real physical button is essential.
I think Apple realizes this already to some extent because they went and added a physical escape key.
The thing is, you are bound to come across someone who finds a feature useful even if the feature is not useful for the vast majority of the people.
Absolutely, and Apple put function keys in that category. Yeah, maybe you touch-type those keys way up there at the top, but I'd bet a paycheck that the vast majority of MacBook users will look down before hitting a function key. I've touched typed since I learned on manual typewriters, and I still can't reliably hit the one I want blindly.
Doesn't matter anyway, as soon as I Cmd-Tab to annother app, the key functions all change anyway. But those handy "Fx" labels stay exactly the same despite the function change. But since it's always been this way, it is therefore a superior design and should not be changed.
It's a MacBook Pro. Surely it should care to Pros who have leanred how their keyboard works. Apple doesn't think the touchbar is a noob feature, because the Air (and the actual "MacBook") doesn't have a touchbar)
I think pros should be able to embrace new things. I use emacs and vim for about 70% of what I do and I never use the fn keys. ESC is remapped to caps as well so I'd have preferred a macro key or something instead that I can customise as I please (there is probably some software for that out on the net somewhere anyway but I like native stuff) like define app/global specific keystroke patterns (e.g. you define it as cmd-s so you can use it to save or something) .
The touchbar for sure is lacking something, not sure what though. I agree with apple that the fn row could be utilised better so I applaud them for trying something, not sure if the touchbar is the right way though but should apple stick with it and keep going in the right direction again I will for sure customise the hell out of the touchbar.
> The thing is, you are bound to come across someone who finds a feature useful even if the feature is not useful for the vast majority of the people.
Yeah, and I believe that the fn-keys are the exact symptom. I haven't encountered anyone that uses fn-keys to it's full potential (or at least, more than the Touch Bar can provide).
> The touchbar is a flawed design concept imho. The entire reason I touch type is so that I don't have to look down from my screen.
For simple actions, gaining muscle-memory on Touch Bar virtual buttons are possible. (I myself don't look the Touch Bar when performing simple & repetitive actions like open new Tab, or when pressing the escape key.)
> It's jarring and discontinuous for me to have to look down to use the touchbar.
Well, isn't it something like saying that it's discontinuous to move my hands from the keyboard to the trackpad to operate some GUI app? It's a glance away, and mostly the Touch Bar's actions are predictable & you know when you use it (for example, editing the formatting of some text in the MS Office Suite, or opening the emoji selector, or selecting autocomplete, etc...).
> That's why I personally never liked it.
Yeah, the feature has a variety of tastes. I think I can understand why some people just don't like it, but...
> I think the tactile feedback of a real physical button is essential.
> Well, isn't it something like saying that it's discontinuous to move my hands from the keyboard to the trackpad to operate some GUI app? It's a glance away, and mostly the Touch Bar's actions are predictable & you know when you use it (for example, editing the formatting of some text in the MS Office Suite, or opening the emoji selector, or selecting autocomplete, etc...).
I use Vimium for browsing, liberally use keyboard shortcuts and use Vim/vim extensions in other IDE's. So my trackpad use is very limited indeed because I find it discontinuous. But I think the trackpad is much better than the touchbar at least because it's huge, you don't have to precisely touch it in any particular spot, unlike the touchbar.
On my personal lenovo laptop I don't use the trackpad at all and use the trackpoint because it's an easier/faster transition than using the touchpad.
Can you say slightly more about how you use it in Emacs? I've wondered if something like this is possible (although I'm not sure what would be useful to have it do).
It's a hacked-in-a-afternoon solution, but the gist is that I run a server in Emacs based on the emacs-web-server package[0], and I wrote some scripts that request to them.
I used Better Touch Tool[1] to add the buttons that execute the scripts.
> How on earth do you use Emacs without an ESC key?
Hmm, I think I've never used my ESC key when using Emacs, I bind Ctrl to Caps-Lock and call it a day.
BTW, I also frequently (~3-4 times a day) use vim, and I never found it hard to edit with the Touch Bar Esc key. I can find the Esc location without looking, I'm pretty sure anyone can do that. It's just simple: just press the most left part. The non-display part left on the esc button display also works as the esc key, so no problem with that.
(Yes, and that's why I believe that people who hate the Touch Bar b.c. of the no Esc key have never used the MBP. It's really a non-issue.)
Well, speaking as a daily vim user, you must be much more talented than I am at using a keyboard. I could never get the hang of touch-typing the virtual ESC (especially since in certain workflows I want to be able to rest my finger on the key without pressing it).
It was the thing that finally got me to rebind my mode switch to `jj`. Which works great, until the keyboard decides that "j" is the key it's going to double that day, then it's very frustrating... Fortunately today the keys it has decided to double are "bb" and "88"
What do you use escape for in emacs? It’s not in any default kebinding, do you mean vi? Even that doesn’t need escape, ctrl + ] keeps you on the home row.
It's funny but I've been using Emacs for almost 25 years and still use ESC instead of ALT/OPTION, guess that's muscle memory from using Emacs via telnet sessions.
I use caps lock the moment I need to type 2 consecutive upper case characters.
Reading through the comments here, it’s amusing to see how many people make assumptions about how things should be just because that’s how they work.
Someone above claimed that not being able to blind type function keys shows severe keyboard incompetence, something all trained computer typists should be able to do.
Well what about us poor souls who are trained mechanical typewriter typists? We didn’t have function keys?
You can still hit ESC on a touchbar Mac. You tap the end of the touchbar where the ESC key should be. It's annoying and unnecessary, but it's not like they just pried the key out with a screwdriver.
Ctrl-[ - I hated no escape key, but my fingers no longer look for that physical key, even on keyboards that have it. Ctrl-[ is always there, and it is less of a stretch. I've gotten un-used to pressing a real esc key (I hate the touch-bar esc).
When I was in the market for the 2019 model (bought a second hand 2015 instead) I tried the touchbar and really liked what it offered in terms of context aware controls. But I quickly realised I could never incorporate it into my workflow since I use my laptop docked most of the time. Meaning I have an external keyboard, without a touchbar. So all productivity gained by a touchbar would only work when I'm not behind a desk. Making investing into the touchbar useless and leaving it as just a gimmick indeed.
For the record: think twice before buying Dell XPS. I'm on my second now. Poor hardware quality on both.
The first got a full replacement of mainboard, keyboard and battery after short circuiting.
The second came with a broken hinge cover out of the box and there still seems to be a driver problem I haven't figured out (random lags up to 5 seconds or so but usually less multiple times a week if not multiple times a day).
Just my experience though. Have good experience with Latitude though, so this is not to say you should avoid Dell entirely.
I got a refurb XPS 13 9370 that still seems to be doing fine after a year (I run Fedora on it). I'd previously owned a latitude and while I thought it was a good machine, I wanted something lighter - the quad-core U-series CPUs finally convinced me to try an ultrabook :)
I have heard the XPS 15s tend to have more "issues."
I was about to disagree before I realized with my Precision 5520 (analogous to XPS 15) the left hinge is broken and my battery is dead, and they both broke after about a year.
I don't know about the battery but the hinge was certainly a problem with the line in general, since it was a flimsy plastic thing unable to hold the weight of the 4k screen it came with...I'd be a bit surprised if that hasn't been fixed in the around 2.5 years since I bought it though.
My 5520 has been flawless and is also just over 2 years old. I have the 1080p matte screen though. Only other laptop I had that has come as close to nirvana as the 5520 was a Thinkpad T42 and 2012 mbp 15.
dead battery might have been my fault, I opened up the laptop to take a look at the hinge and may have shorted something...I think I used a screwdriver or metal tool to push in the connections when reassembling
I've been a fan of XPS for a long time, and I'd say Dell is repeating mistakes of Apple. The moment XPS got popular, they started penny pinching, and each subsequent model from 9343 got worse and worse from that.
I saw companies repeating the same mistake times and times again. I'd call it a "Mercedes disease." Mercedes 600 series used to be a supercar of the time, but the moment Mercedes management saw that Americans are OK with it being a regular consumer level car, they made Mercedes the reputation it has in US now "expensive and disposable."
S classe is still a luxury car, but under the skin there is nothing really special about it, and it could've easily sold for half the price if not for Mercedes logo on it. Most of clientele for S600 are the people who are just fine with paying extra $50k for the badge, and there are a whack a lot of them in the US.
I'd say the overoptimisation and product management are the issue. Quoting myself:
> See, a first reduction from ~64Wh to 62Wh might've not been even visible and been a valid "product management" decision, and not impacted the sales.
> A second cut from 62 to 56 might've only deterred few power users, and could also be validated from the same standpoint, if evaluated without knowledge of the context.
> But the third cut from 56 to 52 will blow up, despite the rest of the product getting the biggest year on year improvement ever.
A decision to cut the battery a tiny little bit to save some pennies might've made sense business-wise every single time, but it did cut deep into the positive image of the product.
Same here. One morning I came downstairs and found laptops vents working on full. I left it on the table in sleep mode the previous evening. Laptop was extremely hot, luckily there weren't any papers underneath. After that the fans were constantly on full, often the CPU even locked itself on 0.78GHz and needed to be restarted to stop the throttling. They then replaced the mainboard, CPU, but it seems it's still overheating.
>Phyisical keys are great but 12 buttons labelled F1 to F12 with different functions depending on the program also isn't he pinnacle of UX
x1000. Function keys have almost always been useless to me. Once in a while I will remember what one is mapped to and use it, but for the most part they go unused.
They used to make cardboard guides that could sit on top of the older ibm keyboards when most of the world used one... I don’t know that you can replace the feel but some haptic taps or something might improve the touch bar. I generally like it bur on it and my older MBPs I pretty much used escape and volume and screen brightness settings and otherwise never used that row. Since laptops, the f-keys simply aren’t what they used to be, it’s not unusual for them to be overloaded or even require a shift like key to be pressed for f-key behavior.
I can see this in a small number of situations, but how many developers use the laptop's screen and keyboard for coding?
Pretty much everyone I know and every workplace I've seen has proper monitors and keyboards for everyone (developers included). A laptop has terrible ergonomics. That makes the touchbar a bit pointless, except when working on a train or plane, or at a meeting or conference.
I'd assume you'd be right, but anecdotally I am really surprised walking around my office how many people have their MacBook Pros connected to an external monitor -- and have the MBP open, typing on the internal keyboard and using the internal display as a second monitor. I've seen more than one person with two external monitors and still do that, so they have three monitors total. I don't know, to be fair, how many of them are actually using the Touch Bar; most folks use Visual Code, which I don't think does anything with it. (I am a technical writer still using BBEdit for reasons I should eventually write a dorky blog post about, but BBEdit doesn't use the Touch Bar, either.) Personally, I think it's a really neat experiment that turned out to be a solution in search of a problem.
(For what it's worth, I have one external monitor at work and run my MBP closed, with an external keyboard -- up until last week a Matias "Laptop Pro" mechanical, but ironically, the Matias developed a seriously malfunctioning key before the butterfly keyboard did. Currently I'm using a "full-sized" Magic keyboard there.)
I'm probably an outlier, but I use the laptop's screen and keyboard most of the time. My normal environment is in a La-Z-Boy in front of the TV with a lap desk. It's quite nice.
I have a computer room / office as well that's a really nice setup, but I prefer sitting in the recliner.
I love my 15” 2017 MBP with a Touch Bar. It’s much easier to mute and slide the volume than my previous MBP. Safari and VScode have Touch Bar features I like. Glad they brought back the esc key.
On previous MBPs you still had to touch the fn key to use F1 etc... I do the same on my newer Mac. Press FN and you get what you need back.
Personally I don’t see why they get all the hate. It’s a little gimmicky but I don’t dislike it. The keyboard was my biggest gripe but Apple replaced it for free in a couple days.
I still have physical f-keys, and every time I use my gf's touchbar macbook, I realize I have to look at the touchbar just to do anything, like modify the volume or change the brightness. I run into this every time I use it when I just want to make quick volume adjustments. And it takes multiple taps to get things done that used to take a single button press. Also, I immediately missed global media playback controls.
It's just a showstopper for a lot of us that it's another screen you have to look at. I don't want my eyes to leave the main screen. It's like if they tried to turn the trackpad into a screen: no matter how much functionality it might have, it's still somewhere I don't want to have to look when I'm using a computer.
I also was amazed at how unused it was. You probably named the only apps that use the touchbar because nothing on her computer did. And if they did, it was just cloned UI of UI that the main screen already had. I think the only useful usecase I've noticed is that the touchbar will show the url of the current video when you fullscreen it, if I want to damn it with faint praise.
When I’m doing work I use 2 external monitors with a keyboard and mouse. All the keys I need to be efficient are right on my full sized keyboard. I have a coworker who refuses to use more than one monitor (either his laptop or laptop closed with a small square monitor) so I guess people don’t like to use them.
For personal use I use it on my lap in a chair or on the couch. The extra time it takes to look down is not a show stopper. Switching tabs is nice in Safari because you get a slight preview and it’s also great for media controls.
Do you work on your MPB and do you use external monitors? What apps do you use the function keys for?
If you think it’s unused then take a look at these 3rd party apps.[1] Pock looks pretty cool.
A touchbar above the function keys would have been a radical improvement if it helped explain what the Fn keys did. Or leds in the keys that allowed them to show icons for what they did.
If I wanted a super-sexy fn experience, I'd have function keys with leds for changeable icons, and a bigger touchbar above it for app-specific bling.
And I'd drop the size of the touchpad. That thing is too big, the retina one was more than adequate.
And there's no option to get legacy ports, but it's Apple, ports are a religious jihad not a customer convenience.\.
It depends on what you mean by "remap," maybe? The Shortcuts tab in Keyboard preferences lets you add/change keyboard shortcuts for a tremendous number of things, including every menu item in every application. (And of course if you were willing to go third party you could investigate something like Keyboard Maestro.)
“Our pro customers tell us they want their next MacBook Pro to have a larger display, blazing-fast performance, the biggest battery possible, the best notebook keyboard ever, awesome speakers and massive amounts of storage"
things every pro user said, since the invention of laptops, for every brand.
One of the reasons I'm keeping my MBP w/o touchbar. Although initially I thought I was missing out, I found that by discontinuing this model, they're only proving how great it is.
I'd say it. I use the touchbar and like it, and have been touch typing since the late 80s. Can't say why, as a touch typist, I like it, though. I just do.
Well having a Gen1 2016 MBP I feel quite reassured that they didn't drop the concept altogether, because that mean better support for my current machine.
Yes it's a little gimmicky, main feature being that you can swap between customized buttons and ad-hoc sliders when adjusting things. But still nice that they didn't throw everything aboard and manage to compromise between reintroducing ESC and keeping innovation.
So... if I don't use Zoom I have one reason? Maybe? 1 and 2 are essentially the same reason anyway (Zoom integration) and I lost my function keys for it.
Imagine they offered the same configuration with and without TouchBar, with the model with TouchBar costing $400 more - how many people would choose the model with? I bet less than 5%.
Is Apple afraid to offer this because it clearly would show that almost no one is ready to pay for it?
Even from this audience, who of you would be willing to pay the premium for the TouchBar?
Back when they first introduced the Touchbar they offered MBPs in both configurations and the price difference was $400 for the same model with and w/o the Touchbar.
Didn't the non-touchbar version have lower specs? I'm pretty sure I tried speccing the other one to the same level and the price difference was very small.
And before everyone accuses him of being an Apple fanboy and biased, there is no disputing that he is very much a keyboard snob. He hated the last generation keyboard and he called it out during his initial review. He also famously still prefers an old ADB Apple Keyboard and he never bought a laptop with the old one.
He’s also linked to a lot of articles criticizing it.
If he praises it, I think you can trust him.
Edit:
And Marco Arment’s review. He’s never pulled punches when it comes to Apple’s hardware, their development tools, or the quality of the OS frameworks. He’s gushing over the review unit.
The issue with the keyboard is whether it's good after a month or more of use, not how good it is fresh out of the box.
I thought the previous macbook pro felt great for a week out of the box. Then switches started breaking and keycaps started coming off within the first three months.
In fact, the issue seemed to be that it feeling good out of the box was the only testing Apple did on it.
But neither Gruber nor Marco Arment [1] liked it out of the box. Marco did buy one - he buys everything. You can listen to his review on the latest Accidental Tech Podcast.
[1] just for those who don’t know, Arment is probably one of the best known indie IOS developers and the creator of Instapaper and the first developer for Tumblr.
A co-worker is really impressed with all the improvements, but they seem to mostly be improvements over previous poor ideas from Apple, that other brands already had or never abandoned.
I admit, a 16" screen in a 15" body sounds really nice. But most of this is stuff other brands already had.
The other brands don't have macOS. Running a Mac isn't just hardware.
People were annoyed because they don't want to run a different OS. Yes, you could get cheaper/powerful hardware somewhere else... but it's not macOS. Hackintoshes need not apply here.
And that's the big thing that keeps surprising me: that there's no laptop maker that produces high quality laptops with their own custom super nice Linux-based but Mac OS-like OS on it. Everybody seems content saddling their hardware with Windows.
Thing is, Mac OS isn't as great as it used to be either. They used to be brilliant developer laptops, but Apple seems to want everybody in their walled garden.
PopOS is great but I think system76 needs to design their laptops from scratch instead of relabeling Clevo laptops if they’re serious about challenging Apple. Their laptops have the specs, but the fit and finish is just not there.
I have a Clevo laptop (a few years old now) and even at the time, it was not exactly state of the art in terms of weight, battery life, etc. It's proven to be a fairly tough beast (even having fallen off my bike and lived). It is, unlike many new laptops, relatively easy to open up for upgrades and repair. Getting Apple's 'fit and finish' means a closed box.
That's true now, but it doesn't have to be. Before the retina MacBook Pro, the MacBook Pro used to be one of the easiest laptops to service. Opening it up, it was very easy to access almost every component.
When I was searching for a new laptop, I stumbled upon this comment from a System76 employee that goes into more depth about the work they do on new laptops that seems more than just relabelling Clevo laptops.
I'm thinking about using PopOS on my Thinkpad X1 Extreme, as it's rumoured to be the only Linux that supports hybrid graphics, and it's specifically designed for developers and other creators (which Macbook Pros once seemed to be).
Their hardware, though, seems to be meh. Give me this on some high quality hardware.
I dual book my X1 Extreme with Windows 10 and Pop OS and it works about 98%. The trackpad is buggy as hell, auto date/time switch is broken, and a few other minor usability issues endemic to using Linux just drive me crazy.
Not until there are accompanying ecosystem apps on par with Logic Pro, Final Cut, etc... I've found with almost every linux distro there's always an area where it falls short.
It absolutely depends on which "Pros" your targeting. A software developer obviously has different needs in terms of software than a video editor or UI designer.
I use Windows at work and at university. My private desktop has a dualboot install with Windows and popOS. Works perfectly fine for me
Yeah, that is still a problem. I couldn't really move completely away from the Mac until I got to a point where I didn't need InDesign anymore. There's no good Linux substitute, even for money. Sadly Adobe has hidden away FrameMaker, which started as a Unix program.
You're going to get some responses where people say System76 and Pop_OS!, but it really only visually looks decent and optimizes much of the Linux laptop experience. It still doesn't have, for instance...
- Application support for graphics editors that people need in 2019... you can either run macOS or Windows for this
- Built-in cross-device syncing like iCloud/CloudKit
- Smooth integration with peripheral devices (e.g, HandOff)
This list could be extended for quite a ways, as people seemingly want to ignore part of what still makes macOS great - you have very well done product integration across the entire stack. I want it to "just work" in 2019 so I can live my life instead of tinkering with an OS/hardware combo.
The analogy I like to give people is that buying a Macbook is kind of like buying a BMW after years building your own tuner car. I'll always enjoy building my own, but man... if my daily driver breaks, I just wanna pay someone to fix it. Gimme the luxury feel already.
Compared to Linux on a laptop: the over-tweaked Mazda RX7 rolling down the road, loud as hell, where the slightest wrong bump may give you hours of fun/hell in fixing parts. You're also missing seats because you put a roll-cage in for whatever reason.;P
One of the things that stops a custom Linux distro from taking off is the lack of support for pro applications. If you can't run Creative Cloud natively, it's a non-started for many people in the target market.
> Thing is, Mac OS isn't as great as it used to be either.
That's 100% true. MacOS gets a little worse with each new release.
But there is still one area where MacOS shines: backup and restore. I've had the same user account on five different machines now, because I just restore from a time machine backup every time I buy a new Mac.
And I cannot think of an easier way to backup my wife's laptop than pointing it at our time machine server and letting it just work.
Time machine is the biggest thing keeping me on MacOS right now. If your fancy Linux distro solved that, I'd be very tempted to switch.
It has plenty of differences from Mac OS, but most of them are positive.
If Google could get Adobe on-board with Linux support, and built a consumer foot-print a la Apple, I'd probably go there.
Dealing with their crappy third-party resellers is just a non-starter. It says that Google doesn't stand behind their own product with their own customer service, and I just can't abide that.
I tried this by the way, you pay in performance in a big way. Even if you don’t need hardware acceleration the general compile performance is bad, about 3X longer on a large angular project than a MacBook Air.
>If Google could get Adobe on-board with Linux support
Google may convince Adobe to make one for Android like in iPad Pro which will function fine on Chromebook, there's no reason for Adobe to start supporting Linux.
The biggest problem with that idea is that you would need to convince the developers who write Mac software to also develop for Linux. There are some really powerful pieces of software on Linux, but almost none of them are designed half as nicely as most Mac software.
> There are some really powerful pieces of software on Linux, but almost none of them are designed half as nicely as most Mac software.
That is probably not because Mac developers are inherently more "design affine" but because there is a very clear design standard on MacOS while Linux is basically a complete clusterfuck with 20 different desktops etc. So it's not as much a matter of getting Mac devs to also make stuff for Linux as getting Linux to be more standardized.
Yeah, could definitely be a combination factors. Mostly I think it is that people who care about design have frequently gravitated toward the mac because of their nice design.
Windows Update makes Windows barely usable. Weekly restarts to update OS at random points in time are unacceptable. There are plenty of other usability issues, for me lack of working Unix-like shell out of the box is one of them.
It's crazy how a billion people and millions of developers are using Windows when it's barely usable. Is there some small possibility that you're wrong about this?
Also, does macOS have a Unix shell that you can just start using for your work out of the box or do you have to use something like Homebrew to bring it up to modern standards first?
Usability is certainly an opinion. I can get a Unix shell on any OS, have been able to for decades. But we don't just want a shell do we? We want a decent desktop environment with a good system for managing application windows... We want updates that don't cause problems. We want a good file browser.
macOS has none of these things, not out of the box and not even with third party utilities to fix things and fill in missing features.
> Also, does macOS have a Unix shell that you can just start using for your work out of the box or do you have to use something like Homebrew to bring it up to modern standards first?
I'll take a Mac terminal over any Windows one, every time. Speaking as someone who uses all 3 OS's at work. The hoops I've had to jump through on Windows just to do basic things are maddening. Mac's terminal experience is one of the reasons I keep going back to it. I'm truly confused how one prefers a windows terminal.
> We want a decent desktop environment with a good system for managing application windows... We want updates that don't cause problems. We want a good file browser.
Again, you just described Mac. Spaces work amazing and still have better behavior than the windows version that's trying to catch up. Snapping left/right is nice in theory but I don't actually use it that much unless I'm on a huge monitor. And I have no idea what issues you see with Finder, which is generally a super smooth experience for me. Again, I'm just really confused here.
The current shell in macOS is zSh and the Mac wrote the book on window management (other than the windows snapping ideas, which, fair, but it is just one app. On the other hand, macOS is like a wonderful land between windows and Linux with ease of use plus all the power features.
"..Windows Update makes Windows barely usable..." I find this claim to be over exaggerated. I'm not exactly sure how their update schedule works exactly but in my case it updates some parts transparently without me needing to stop working. Updates that require reboot definitely do not happen once per week and never when I am in front of computer.
I have no problems with access to working "Unix like" shell either. My laptops and desktop are beastly and have no problem running Ubuntu in VM. WSL works like a charm as well. But I rarely use either since for Linux development work and for running servers I use real Linux computers in headless mode running NoMachine for remote access. Windows being used for developing Windows GUI software duh, and for productivity tools, Video, Photo, CAD, PCB design etc. etc.
To be fair, I think these days Windows has a better auto-update story than OSX. They may both be equally annoying. I have suffered involuntary restarts on both operating systems.
I have never turned on auto-update, and I have had my work laptop restart on me without my permission. It simply showed me a dialogue box stating that the computer is going to restart upon hitting ok and that I better save my work. Where I work, we mob program, and this has happened to my team mates on many occasions.
Windows has full linux distros installed from the store. Unlike mac that comes with outdated shell and yout have to trust whoever it is that runs brew.
Technically not yet, once WSL2 is mainline there will finally be proper Linux support in Windows. WSL1 is a series of shimmed calls to the NT Kernel and as a first implementation it’s pretty bad ass but to call it an environment for full Linux distros is misleading consider things like systemd are completely missing at the moment.
Windows updates go out once a month unless there’s a massive problem. If you’re seeing weekly restarts it is not microsoft that’s doing that.
I see a restart prompt about once every two months on my sole remaining w10 laptop, and it hasn’t forced a reboot on me in the middle of my work in over a year. Ubuntu prompts me to restart more often.
I dislike Windows too, but PowerShell is pretty nice if you are stuck in the Windows environment. It's not really a Unix-like shell, but it is comfortable enough compared to the rest of the ecosystem.
That's like comparing current MacOS with one from years ago which also has some weird UI things going on. In Windows, certainly some of these have been fixed but aside from being visual anomalies everything works.
The kicker for me is Apple hiding / removing the things I use, such as Keychain in the menu bar. OSX / MacOS is slowly getting worse.
Windows is getting worse. They are adding crazy design ideas that they can't possibly support, with new UI quirks. While the foundation is tragically broken (typography differences etc). The new timeline has a hilarious hiccup in the animation that makes no sense at all.
The challenge with Linux on the desktop is achieving a seamlessly integrated between drivers, software and hardware. Achieving even parity with OSX is a tall ask and likely extremely challenging, but I'm certainly rooting for them. Trying to install vanilla Windows and Ubuntu the other day on my desktop reminded me how much of a challenge playing the driver hockey game was. I eventually settled on a stable configuration (thank goodness), but it really dawned on me how much more I would have paid for something that worked perfectly out of box and remained working perfectly out of the box. My time is valuable! If I get an OSX laptop, I know I can rely on certain foundational things working without any tweaking which I _could_ do but would really rather avoid.
You've got a point! I haven't tried a system 76 yet, but I have nothing but respect for them. To be honest, I wish they'd more aggressively compete for mindshare in the professional market than OSX -- imagine what the world would be like if the default startup/bigco laptop were a system76.
Beyond that, for the desktop at least, I didn't realize how competitive they were on cost -- wow! I'm not sure why, but it looks like I can't configure it in a 4GPU configuration. If I could, while there would be a price premium over what I paid for my devbox, I think it could be worthwhile given the polish.
Windows 10 has improved a lot and in many ways gives better user experience than MacOS. And for terminal needs, yout very an actual linux environment fully updated with latest software unlike the hack that brew on mac is.
>laptops with their own custom super nice Linux-based
They did, they're Pixelbook from Google. Once you build a competitive 'mass market' laptop with Linux, you'll inevitably end up with something like ChromeOS.
People buy a Mac or Windows machine because they want to run Mac or Windows software. What good does a super high quality Linux laptop do for the person that needs to run Visual Studio?
The quality of MacOSX just degraded over the last 5 years or so. It became buggier and slower. At this point, I would actually prefer Linux for my main desktop instead of macOS (if the hardware is well supported by Linux). I used to like macOS, but just as the hardware, it became worse and worse. So, comparing the MacBook with another notebook with similar hardware quality which is well supported by Linux, I would prefer the Linux notebook.
I recently went through the experience of having to adopt OS X after switching employers coming from primarily using unix flavors and Windows my entire career, avoiding OS X at every turn.
My summarized conclusion is that: OS X isn't that great. It's not "bad," don't get me wrong, but it's nothing marvelous. Perhaps at one point in time there was some advantage over a Windows or linux environment but at this point in time, unless you're tied to some package tied to a specific environment for some reason, just work with the environment you're most comfortable with. I don't know how much time I've had to waste adjusting to the OS X environment (especially muscle memory keyboard shortcuts I'm accustomed to), finding replacement niche applications that were environment specific, figuring out how to do basic tasks that are simply different.
On that note, avoid committing to a specific environment unless your application really needs to squeeze out every cycle of performance. It's 2019 and we have portable options now for most application demands.
Your experience is just you finding what you like and then running up against something doing it differently. This is like moving to another country and complaining the culture is different.
In which case, move home or somewhere else more to your liking? There's nothing inherently wrong with the way things work on Mac.
I think the point was missed since this reiterates what I stated. The analogy isn't correct.
I have nothing against OS X but why switch if there's no justification other than for the sake of doing it (unless it's to satisfy your own interest, in which case: don't complain)?
Using the above analogy: why would I move from... NYC to HK if there's no reason to do so? Why push someone or promote a change from X to Y unless there's a justified rationale for it? Change for the sake of change isn't inherently justifiable in-and-of-itself.
Pushing OS X as being generically inferior (or superior) needs justification because I don't necessarily see it.
1. I think we can agree that making a switch of OS imposes quite some costs. You made the switch to macOS and found it all right. Now imagine I'd make the switch from macOS to some other OS - I'm quite certain that it would be worse.
2. I've used Windows and macOS concurrently, and was always amazed at how bad the Windows experience was (though, yes, it has improved, and unfortunately, as alluded to by Gruber in his piece on the new MBP [1], Apple has paid too much attention to looks and not enough to functionality in the last half decade).
3. I found most "portable" options (eg Electron, qt, etc.) generally worse than native apps. Exceptions are pure CLI tools - they're great (use homebrew on the Mac to manage those!)
Disclaimer: My apple experience is pretty much limited to trying to figure out why Safari is the only browser once again not doing things right, to helping my mother with her iPhone and to trying to make iTunes work in an (imo) sane way.
> Now imagine I'd make the switch from macOS to some other OS - I'm quite certain that it would be worse.
My impression of everything Apple has always been "There is one god-given way to do a thing. And it’s wonderful". But as soon as you don’t want to do it that way, things become weird or impossible.
If that’s even close to the truth, it would make a lot of sense that the opposite road is hard as you are trained to do things one certain way only.
> Apple has always been "There is one god-given way to do a thing. And it’s wonderful". But as soon as you don’t want to do it that way, things become weird or impossible
Interesting, I find hacking and automating and customising on macOS much easier than on Windows, with the UNIX underpinnings and command line tools and Automator and script support etc.
Yep, it's the high reliability & quality of the first party software (Safari, their office apps, notes, and so on), the excellent battery life (largely due to the software—run a browser other than Safari and watch that benefit take a huge hit), having a Unixy OS that's way less of a PITA on a laptop than Linux (ran it for years as my main OS, including on a Thinkpad, so yes, I'm familiar), and the touchpad that doesn't make me feel like I have to have a mouse to use the machine for more than five minutes, that keep me on board.
There were other things (good-enough port selection complementing the high battery life and good trackpad to mean I could just grab my laptop and go for nearly any situation, without taking anything else, being high among them) but they're gone now. It's basically the software and the trackpad keeping me around. I'd rather use a "worse" Macbook specs-wise than a Win10 or Linux laptop that's much better on paper, because the experience will still suck far less. Design, "thinness", trendiness, all that, don't give a shit. Give me a brick of a Thinkpad with an Apple trackpad, official macOS support, and a 20% lower price than a MBP at same specs, and I'll take that option in a heartbeat.
No, this _is_ macOS - you won't have the same gesture(s), the fidelity, on other OS's. Apple goes to great lengths to ensure their trackpad is amazing on both the hardware and software side, and it shows. The drivers on Linux even running on a Macbook don't compare.
I wouldn't. Maybe on pure specs, yes. But there is just no substitute for me for the trackpads Apple builds into their laptops. And the overall quality and longevity of the devices. I've only bought/got a new Apple device because I could, never because I had to (ie: it was broken/unusable).
My old Macbook Pro from 2011 just broke. But that's certainly a respectable lifespan. I never replaced it because no new Macbook excited me like that one: they were increasingly hard to maintain, glued components, no 17 inch screen anymore, and keyboards kept getting worse.
When it finally broke down, I got a Thinkpad.
This new 16" Macbook would be the first in years that I'd consider, but it's just a couple of months too late. I found my replacement.
I was afraid of having to go that path when Apple would continue with their direction in pro hardware. I was only allowed to use a Linux laptop (Dell) in my previous job and even with how customizable Linux is I just could never get comfortable with it.
" I've only bought/got a new Apple device because I could, never because I had to (ie: it was broken/unusable)."
Same case for me but desktops and laptops are Windows based. Laptops: very old Toshiba which was super nice at the time. After that gaming laptops from Asus and HP. All desktops are built to order from the components I chose.
Hardware problems during last 20 years:
3 hard drives had died (one on desktop, 2 on servers). Does not mean of course that I use the same one for 20 years. Keep upgrading them every once in a while as the amount of stuff I have to keep grows.
1 Video card from nVidia died.
1 Desktop began crashing. Further investigation revealed that thermal paste deteriorated completely and the CPU would shutdown after a very short while. Put new thermal paste and all works again like a charm.
Other then that I kept upgrading things but now it does not happen so often as the hardware became generally good enough for just about anything. Well I am sort of looking at that new 32 Core AMD for server when it comes out.
Not only on pure specs. By any measure you'd like. Apple device have some of the worst build quality of the industry. Watch a guy that repairs them daily list the issues for you. I'd challenge you to show a similar list of huge design flaws of any other manufacturer.
https://youtu.be/AUaJ8pDlxi8
Not really, "better" hardware is subjective in a laptop. For all the complaining people do, Apple is very good about ensuring that the hardware in their machines works as expected and hits a solid baseline performance level for given tasks.
The butterfly keyboard had design flaws. This is a well known and well documented fact. There is literally an Apple keyboard repair program for the butterfly keyboard, and this new MacBook pro uses a different keyboard design altogether.
When something rises to the level of a recall, especially for Apple (who denied that logic board issues were an issue on two separate models of MBP for me for months before issuing recalls), it rises a bit beyond "anecdote".
I may have not been verbose in the first post, but it was intended to be less about the technical and more about how there's this weird demand culture just because we know a couple people who have a similar issue.
Slightly larger anecdata then: I have a group chat with some friends where we were discussing the 16" MBP announcement this morning. One computer out of six has (so far) gotten by with a reliably performing keyboard.
Some of the others haven't gotten bad enough to deal with shipping them off for repair, but that doesn't mean they're working acceptably.
But I'll concede it's possible that this all a coincidence and we're a very unlucky sample. There's probably not a good source of hard numbers, since Apple only know about the ones who were able to deal with getting it repaired. I read that they're trying to do next-day turnaround for in-store keyboard replacements now, but not all of us live anywhere near an Apple Store.
Specifically take note of the 2018 numbers. 6 of 13 keyboards having problem, and if every single one of those was purchased the day the 2018 model was released, they're a maximum of 10 months old when the poll was taken. Many of them are likely newer than that. 6 out of 13 in less than a year. Even if there's a biased sample in who responded to this, that's a lot of bad keyboards.
Anyway, I’m glad to see a new keyboard design, and if I seem salty about it that’s because I’m personally annoyed at my 2016’s keyboard and all Apple can do about it is replace it with another of the same keyboard that will probably fail in the same way again.
EDIT - corrected my group figures. One person has a working keyboard. And for what it's worth, another person who works in IT hasn't seen an overwhelming failure rate in their office (knock on wood, he notes). But most them are using external keyboards for data entry (with numpads), so the internal keys aren’t used heavily.
His own MBP is counted among the failed ones though.
If that’s true, I haven’t found it when I’ve shopped for a laptop to install Linux onto. This wasn’t always the case, but right around the time of Windows 8 when everything needed a touchscreen and chromebooks were eating the low end of the market, good affordable hardware seemingly disappeared. I would have to spend $1500 to get something in the same ballpark as an entry level MacBook and it would still have profoundly terrible touchpad (whether running Linux or Windows, it never mattered), a mediocre keyboard, a plastic body, and noisy fans.
Chromebooks do offer better hardware per dollar than other computers, but you are (or perhaps were) pretty locked-into the ChromeOS, or at least none of the workarounds seemed palatable. So if you like ChromeOS then there is better value hardware out there, but Mac is it for the rest of us.
There is a lot of competition in the laptop space now. Apple no longer produces hands down the best notebooks in terms of hardware. The touchpad on the new Lenovo/Dell laptops have gotten very very good. Same goes for screen quality.
I've had the opposite problem: I love Apple hardware, but have never been a big fan of macOS. Unfortunately, since 2016 or so, Apple has been putting so much non-standard, proprietary hardware in their laptops (getting worse and worse every year) that the struggle to get Linux running well enough on them has been more than I've cared to deal with, so I recently jumped ship (junk like the Touch Bar and the general keyboard issues haven't helped my opinion either). I genuinely do like my new Dell XPS 13, but it still just doesn't have the same nice feel that a MacBook does.
MacOS as an experience includes things like proper handoff support, Messages support, and so on - things that historically become a pain in the ass with a Hackintosh.
So no, I don't consider it the same. It's a great hack if you want a ton of power for a build machine, but otherwise... I'd rather pay the financial cost up front and just be done with it.
The only thing linux/other laptop manufacturer need at this point is better touchbar.
There are nothing else making the macbook lines worth it. If Linux with hardware manufacturer come up with a standard for greater touchbar control, the mac will be out of circulation in no time.
I've noted this in a few other comments here but there's more to it than just the base computing system. Apple products as an ecosystem dwarf whatever you'd cobble together in some homegrown Linux-based setup, and Windows in general just feels... really messy, like there's no clear consensus on how the ecosystem should work.
Let's face it iOS and need for software for it is keeping Apple computers alive. If one day it would be possible to develop iOS apps on other operating systems Macs sales would crash.
Every software company I've worked in building websites/webapps (Ruby, Python, Java, HTML/CSS/JS/React/whatever etc.) tends to issue their developers with MBPs. None of them need to do so for Xcode to build Mac/iOS apps. A few people may opt for Lenovos running Linux, but they're a distinct minority who really likes compiling their own tiling window manager from scratch etc.
Why MBP as standard? Because you get a reasonably stable Unix box that also runs commercial business and productivity software (Office, video conference stuff), and the Adobe suite for the front-end/creative folks.
Windows is going after that with WSL. Linux is going after that with, err, GNU/Freedom I guess?
Writing Python/Ruby/JavaScript/Java/Go/Elixir/whatever hot new shiny, in Atom or Vim or VSCode, is about as easy on Linux as it is on Mac (and it is getting better on Windows with WSL). But when you've got to use some awful video conferencing corporate crapware, there's at least some chance it'll work on a Mac in a way it won't on Linux.
Just a guess - but you are in the US, right? In most other places of the world I have not seen macbooks being used for non Apple related development tasks due to pricing.
I am in Europe, and in the country that used to be a part of USSR. The last four companies I worked for also offered Macbooks for developers by default.
It's interesting to hear. I have not seen a lot of Macbooks in any of the companies I worked for nor the one we partnered with in germany. At least in software development, in creative domains (photo, video) things are different.
In north america Macbooks seem to be more or less the default hardware (also mainly my personal impressions - since I moved there).
That seems unlikely given that the Air range are by far the most popular models, and are squarely aimed at the mass consumer market. Also it’s seems a bit unlikely the masses of people crowding in the Apple stores in the UK all the time are all developers.
you get a reasonably stable Unix box that also runs some commercial business software and worst terminal experience than running full ubuntu on windows wsl. Ubuntu on WSL> brew on mac.
The worldwide installed base of the Mac is 100 million. There only a bit over 2 million apps in the app store, so it seems unlikely a large proportion of those 100 million Macs are used to develop iOS apps.
Changing your assertion from Mac users in general to "professionals" is moving the goal posts a long way.
As of last year, roughly 10% of all personal computers on the internet are Macs. Do you think a majority of those--say 6% of all PC users worldwide--are iOS devs and other professional MacOS lock-ins?
I love the USB C/Thunderbolt 3 connector on my Macbook. I just have a single cable going into my mac from the display which also has the keyboard and mouse connected to it. The single cable does charging, display and peripherals.
Wait til the CMD key loses responsiveness. Hate having to CMD+V multiple times to paste something. Maybe I should just reprogram the option key or go back to my old Mac where all the keys work flawlessly.
For others who have the annoying keyboard issue being hinted at here (double key-press) and who, like me, can't be without their machine for weeks on end while they ship it off to get a new keyboard, I've been able to fix the issue by using Unshaky: https://github.com/aahung/Unshaky
The repair program in the US is currently on a <48 hour door-to-door turnaround. Still unworkable for some people, but you can get your laptop repaired in two days of PTO.
I once saw a heat map of the Macbook Pro keyboard after a while in use. Heat spiked around WEASD location. Maybe it's where the CPU is located, but the extra heat could be why those keys always seem to be the ones that go (mine were s and d, and e sometimes). But you never know..this other Macbook Pro is from Mid-2014, and keys work fine.
Makes sense if you thing about it. Which user cohort needs the lowest possible latency for keyboard input? Gamers. And which keys are the most used in games? WASD. So it’s logical that these keys would be the closest to the CPU to minimize signaling latency!
I did mean actual heat, but the commenter's observation about WASD also probably contributes to why those keys in particular go bad. I don't know whether the heat source underneath them or the WASD gaming use is more of a factor though.
Yeah. My "F" key broke in a way that isn't fixable without replacing the whole thing (one of the ultra tiny pins that keeps the keycap in place snapped off). At least you get two shift keys.
As much as I appreciate Apple's U turn on the idiotic design of the butterfly keyboard switches, I still:
- cannot even begin to understand why these things lack an important usability feature like MegSafe: there is really absolutely no reason why it cannot coexist with the ThunderBolt I/O (4 TB ports, one MegSafe: charge it however the heck you want).
- find the presence of the castrated TouchBar an offense to users. It seems they just want to shove it down our throats whether we want it or not.
Just make it optional: I'm sure that there are certain users out there that love it but every single peer of mine [1] hates the sole idea of something like that.
It's amazing to see such a positive response to such weak sauce with the touchbar. Our expectations really have fallen through the floor. There is no reason the escape key needs to be physical that doesn't also apply to the function keys. So why has Apple admitted the touchbar doesn't work, but still forces you to use it for F keys. With this form factor it wouldn't have been difficult to have function keys as well as a touchbar- but Apple don't seem interested in actually solving this problem.
I'm very tired of having to settle for serious shortcomings in what used to be such a great product.
> There is no reason the escape key needs to be physical that doesn't also apply to the function keys.
IMO, those are completely different.
The sscape key provides access to a fundamental concept, "go back, undo, I didn't mean it, no!". This even goes beyond humans. E.g, my dogs have the same concept.
Function keys are abstract in a distended way... they mean, generally, some function specific to a certain context that doesn't fit into the general patterns, but is maybe pretty commonly needed in that context.
IMO, the Touch Bar, with text and graphical cues, is better suited. Of course, various software has been written to the F1-12 abstraction, and physical keys are nicer to type on, so it's not all good. But I think this is a case of one step back, two steps forward.
Am I the only one that is scared at the prospect of losing physical keys for changing volume and brightness? I do this all the time, changing volume up/down during conference calls, adjusting the brightness when working late at night. Can you even map the Touch-bar to have "keys" for these instead of the slider which seems way less precise and direct? Genuinely asking since I'm still on 2014 MBP.
Yes you can have buttons to change volume and brightness. In fact the icons next to the slider are buttons you can tap to lower/increase volume/brightness. Or you can configure them to always show up as buttons without slider.
If you don't mind spending a few bucks on a third-party tool, Better Touch Tool (https://folivora.ai/) will let you map two or three finger swipe gestures to control volume and brightness. This lets you adjust either without having to look at the touch bar and find the virtual button. It's still a slide instead of a press though, which takes a little getting used to.
I'm completely with you. I have the older TouchBar model and every time I use the external Apple keyboard I am so much happier with the physical brightness, music controls and changing volume keys.
For me I'd actually pay to have a model without TouchBar (but with TouchID, which actually is really useful).
I'm pleasantly surprised that Apple decided to implement a physical escape key, the inverted "T" arrangement along with redoing the keyboard.
While I don't know if we should be applauding Apple so heavily, it's good to see that they "listened" to customer feedback and made these changes. I know that I'll be looking forward to getting one after my 2015 MBP gives out.
This is what I am hoping. As a MBP 15" user I don't want something any bigger (even just a few mm bigger). I want something in the current 13" models size just with more screen/less bezel.
Yeah, generally a cloud based approach to training models is better than on your mac. AMD folks have been working on RoCM for some time and it works reasonably well for common models but the AMD GPU HW isn't pervasive like Nvidia GPUs in places like AWS.
If you are looking at using Colab for prototyping, you can also try TPUs which are now supported for PyTorch. Here is the link some additional info including some Colab NBs: https://github.com/pytorch/xla
You really don't though? The top of the line comprable configuration has a significantly worse display, 75% of the SSD storage (that's also significantly slower), a worse graphics card and costs ~$4700.
> for $6099USD. I wonder how it will handle the thermals
45W is easily doable, gaming notebook vendors can easily get up to 100W in a mobile package.
Apple and other "major brands" had a string of borderline laughable engineering mistakes over the past 5 years.
For example, in their latest 12 inch Macbook, they simply put a blower to work as an exhaust fan, but then forgot that the keyboard membrane has no sealing just above it.
That is quite respectable! As large battery as possible, instead of saving the few grams or cubic millimeters.
I'm comparing this to for example Lenovo, which seems to like coming up with imaginary battery life promises ("The T490 delivers up to 16.1 hours of battery life") and then cutting the actual battery to minimum.
> Featuring a new Magic Keyboard with a redesigned scissor mechanism and 1mm travel for a more satisfying key feel, the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers the best typing experience ever in a Mac notebook.
Feels like they claim "best typing experience" every time they release a new laptop.
Yeah... at this point I half expect to read from Apple:
“When we changed the key travel from 1.0mm to 0.5mm, it was so much better that it became the best keyboard in the world. And now, with the change from 0.5mm to 1.0mm, we’ve made it even better than ever: Welcome to the world’s best typing experience.”
Their 2018 MacBook is by far the best typing experience I had on a laptop. Other laptop keyboards would be happy with just writing down what I just typed, the MacBook goes one step further and doubles many letters. That's after 6 months of use and 95% of the time using an external keyboard.
Meanwhile, every time I take out my 6 years old Thinkpad T440s the keyboard feels nice instantly.
But it makes consumers feel better about their decision.
Imagine you're a techie and wondering if this very minimal refresh to the iPhone is worth buying?
"It's our best yet"
or
"It's made for pros"
I mean, as you pointed out, it's fancy PR/textbook examples of good PR.
It feels like a single child is in charge of directing, writing, editing these marketing materials. It’s the “best”? Surely that alone will convince your customers who saw how you made the worst laptop keyboard ever when you shrank the depth. Surely you want to convince them you fixed that issue. Oh? You’re just going to ignore it and say its the best? The baseline price is $2400? In the highly competitive $1500+ laptop space? Bold move, Cotton.
The standard for releasing new software is that it should be better than its own previous self, in some way. It doesn't have to be better in all ways, or best in the world in any way, so long as the overall value proposition has improved. What rubs many people the wrong way about Apple is that they always claim to be the absolute best in all dimensions, as though engineering tradeoffs or accommodation to users' priorities and preferences are only for lesser companies. "Our car is the fastest and the most comfortable and the most fuel efficient, so you'd have to be an idiot to want anything else." It's the computing equivalent of snake oil, and people react to that.
My 2015 era MBA was great. They just screwed up, and told us they fixed it so many times it doesn't matter if they've actually fixed it this time (which they may have - https://marco.org/media/2019/11/mbp16-graph.png - we'll see in a few months) because we don't believe them. Typing this on a Surface with WSL2.
And it's never true (or hasn't been for awhile at least). It's clear they're engineering for thinness above all else, usability be damned.
I'm typing on a 2014-era Macbook Pro right now and I doubt any new scissor keys are gonna feel better than this. All of the newer Macbook Pros I've typed on have been terrible.
It's not just the switch mechanism. The keys are too big and the gap between them is too narrow. I used to intuitively feel where my fingers were and pressing a key off center was much less likely to cause a typo.
> There’s also more space between keys — about 0.5mm. This difference is much more noticeable by feel than by sight. Making it easier to feel the gaps between keys really does make a difference.
Yeah, I was quite encouraged by the description of the changes in that blog post. I haven't had an issue so far with keys sticking, but literally every complaint I did have about the new keyboard (low keypress travel, keys too close together, touchbar too close to the keyboard, no physical Escape key) was addressed. If there was an easy way to trade in my 2018 15" Pro for a reasonable price I would totally do it.
If my peers experience is any indication, they all have the switches that break spontaneously and keys that start double-entering, stop working, or even detach from the keyboard.
I expect that their laptops won't have any working keys at 1 year of use.
While it's nice to see an opinionated company like Apple admit fault and revert to what people want, I wonder if this move is too late for many of those that decided to move away from Apple?
Years ago, I switched to a Surface Book, and while I'm tempted to go back for this MBP I reckon that a Surface Book update would be enough to kill any desire for the Mac range. While Apple stagnated, many of the high-end manufacturers caught up.
MacOS. These points have been made a million times, but I'll make them again.
Windows is fine for day to day casual use, but the moment you attempt to peek under the hood you encounter a hostile and alien landscape.
Linux is usually consistent, well organized, and highly configurable when you are under the hood, but is a pain in the ass for day to day use. Edit: Illustrator and Photoshop still aren't available for Linux as I just discovered.
MacOS is Unix under the hood, but it has software support near that of Windows, and it also adds a layer of convenience and thoughtfulness on top that isn't matched elsewhere. Ffs, It is still the only OS that recovers basically flawlessly from running out of batteries.
I waited a couple of years to replace my MBP. I will never switch back to Windows. I hate Windows more than I hate the butterfly keyboard and I knew Apple would have to come up with a better MBP at some point.
Doubt it. For devs there still isn't a great alternative. No one has the build quality of Apple and the XPS has been disappointing. Can't speak much for other pros but I'd imagine that they held off on an upgrade rather than switch to a new manufacturer. Apple's branding helps here.
Apple did have impressive build quality, but those days are long gone. I can run happily on a MBP from a few years ago, whereas the newer ones have had numerous issues.
In terms of overall quality, I'd say that MBP is now behind some of the other high-end devices. The Surface Book knocks the latest MBP versions out of the water in every department, except for the track pad. It's not difficult to argue that the keyboard, screen, durability, or even the OS is superior to Apple's (current) offering.
My Surface Book 2 with a GTX 1060 can’t drive two 4K monitors at 60Hz using the Surface Dock 2 unless you purchase DisplayLink adapters. That laptop retails for $3,200 in that configuration before taxes and the Surface Dock itself. Fortunately, it’s a corporate device so I can’t complain. Had it have been a personal purchase it would have found its way back to the store.
There are absolutely better alternatives. Ubuntu 18 with Gnome (or any other modern Linux) + modern laptops with intel/nvidia work fantastic. Plenty of good aluminum chassi out there.
Apple build quality isn't even close to being good. Hardware failures are common, they had the shitty keyboards in previous gens that started failing after dust got stuck in them, e.t.c.
Keep in mind that on something like a Lenovo, if a keyboard fails, it takes 2 days to order a new one from amazon for a very cheap price, and 10 minutes to swap it.
Of course not. The people who complain on HN and switch to the “windows subsystem for linux” are a fringe minority. The rest of the industry is still jamming on a Mac.
The whole "developers use Mac" thing is not because Macs are better, its because when companies need to give their devs hardware, Macs are the least shitty alternatives.
For example, Amazon gives most of the devs Macs. However, they still use Amazon Linux (RHEL based) VMs for building and testing services, because the EC2s that run these services in prod are all RHEL based. Half of my time is spent in an ssh shell, because either half the shit doesn't work on Mac because of some native dependency, or because I don't want to run into some weird bug like I had due to the case insesitivity of the MacOs system where the code reads a file, but the same code doesn't work when its deployed to EC2.
And as such, there are issues galore with the computers. External display over usbc for presentations sometimes don't work and require a restart of the laptops, which takes 2 minutes for some reason even with ssds. Some USBc hubs fuck up SMC controllers, which then requires a reset, and others straight up fry computers. Copy and Paste on websites often doesn't work as intended. Wifi randomly drops out.
I dunno how the old Macbooks held up, but modern ones are a complete ripoff for what you get if you are spending your own money on one.None of these issues are present on my personal $300 laptop running Linux Mint with minimal customization.
The biggest group that I've seen move away from the MBP range aren't developers, but are creatives - either in design or in sound/music. I know a few DJ's in my local area that have largely switched to Windows laptops because they feel tools like Ableton work better, and because they feel that for the price they're paying they're not getting value for money from the MBP range.
For what industry? You're on HN not SAP daily. The rest of the world definitely runs on Windows but if you’re building software and reading HN you’re probably on macOS.
I don't know if that's true. Software devs in consulting shops (especially the megacorps - Accenture, TCS, Infosys, Cap Gemini) are probably the bulk of workers that write software. Most of them are likely not on HN but they do build software and they do it on Windows.
I bought a 17" Dell laptop with Ubuntu and have no plans to go back after 10 years on OSX. It's got everything I need and I can open it up to improve it more.
It's also huge, which I kinda like now...but that huge comes with the ability to have 3 disks, a huge replaceable battery, 8 cores and 64gb of RAM.
There's a slight learning curve to using Linux as your daily driver but it's hard to go back once you figure it out.
They certainly missed out on one sale of a MBP from me about a year ago, but after experiencing the competition (I settled on a high-end Gigabyte laptop) I'm eager to go back.
Even just little things like being able to charge USB devices while the laptop is closed make a real difference in my life.
I already moved my workstation work to windows after waiting years and years for a Mac Pro. Seems like it was definitely the right thing to do because even though I do VFX work the Mac Pro they've created isn't suitable at all for it.
Although I'm in the market for a new laptop this isn't an instant buy for me, starting to feel I should move all my computing away from Apple because although this is a step in the right direction, we've had years of them not caring about computers.
I wish it had one USB-A. I plug in a mechanical keyboard, and when a job provided the previous macbook pro, I managed to lose or break a dongle about once a month.
Yup, the lack of USB-A (and the removal of the ESC key) is the reason I stopped buying MacBooks after many enjoyable years of using the MBA11, 2 x MBA13, and the 2015 MBP13 (arguably the best laptop ever made). Every peripheral that I own is on USB-A. Adding USB-C is great, but why remove USB-A? I just don't get it.
Also the SD-card reader. That was a deal breaker for me, I use these as much as USB keys.
I use a laptop with a reader, the card is flush (not sticking out) and it's a great way of expanding storage. It's also the best way of getting photos out of digital cameras. Wireless is so much slower.
Why remove the CD drive?
Why remove the floppy disk?
They did a cost benefit analysis and made that risk. There's usb-C to usb-A converters. It's not that big of a deal as it seems.
I have one device which is USB-C - a mouse. In what world is a mouse better with USB-C?
As for CD drives, the world moved on to bluray and that has a licensing cost as well as not fitting with the iTunes strategy of rent-and-never-own. Apple led, others followed. I'd still use it if it was built-in but not as an external: too much hassle to balance it on my lap and not drop the drive ruining the disk.
Well for one the connector is better. It's quicker to plug it in if you know you aren't going to plug it in the wrong way the first time. Second, for my wireless mouse the charging is faster. Third, the cable itself is slightly smaller and you don't need to carry around an old USB-A to USB-C cable.
It didn't seem like a big deal to me before I tried it, but it was since I couldn't keep from losing/breaking connectors. It gets annoying buying new ones all the time. I don't want to spend $2500 for a machine that annoys me.
I'm not against spending money on essential tools of the trade that you keep for years but carrying around a super expensive laptop makes me feel really nervous e.g. it could get stolen, dropped, get wet in the rain, drinks spilt on it.
When I don't need the extra power, I think I'd rather travel with an easy to replace $900 laptop than a $3,000 one for ease of mind.
It's the opposite for me. I would use the €4000 HP ZBook from work on the subway or on the street. But I wouldn't use my €1000 mid-2015 MacBook Pro because I know I wouldn't be able to buy a new one if it got stolen or would break.
Money can't buy everything - if they don't make the 2015 chassis anymore (ie. no Touchbar, which some people still very much prefer), then you cant really get a replacement for it, no matter the price.
I've made a claim on a laptop before and it took a couple of weeks to get a replacement, plus claims make your premiums go up. I'm not saying it's not workable, but I feel more at ease carrying around less expensive equipment that's easier to replace.
I am very happy about this and the Mac Pro -- it seems like Apple is finally admitting where it has room for improvement in hardware.
Which, of course, makes me wonder whether they will ever abandon their hubris with software. There really ought to be a Rosetta-style compatibility layer for 32-bit and GC apps in macOS. Sadly, I don't think that will ever happen. Anyone know whether it's possible to install Mojave on one of these?
I've been a Mac user for thirteen years this month. I'm not sure I can buy another one.
If your workflow allows for switch then just pull the trigger and buy cheaper and faster Windows or Linux machine. IMHO Macs are extremely overpriced and should be bought only by people who are tied to MacOS ecosystem (iOS development, Final Cut Pro etc.)
RAM and HD are still soldered down, which means you have to decide up front how much you want and you have to pay the 3x-4x Apple markup on both. These are both dealbreakers for me, and the continuing inadequate port situation just seals the deal. It's a no.
The stock configurations are exactly the same price as the 15" used to be, but now with double the storage. So it's actually better value now than it was.
It costs the same as the 15" did while starting at a much better base configuration, so if anything it's nice that they didn't felt like increasing the price.
This is too irresistible not to upgrade. I'm more interested in CPU/Memory and the Graphic card bump is only $100. In total, it should cost $3.900 excluding taxes (or $2.500 if I "trade in" my current machine). Looking at the competition, a ThinkPad P53 Mobile Workstation with the 2.3Ghz processor / 32GB of RAM will cost $3.759.
I think the pricing is very competitive, given that the ThinkPad is a giant box. So even if Lenovo lowers its price in the next iteration of its ThinkPad, the MacbookPro will quite match up.
I have a Pro at work and dislike its keyboard so much that I still have a 2013 Air at home. This is the first Pro I’ll consider in a long time because of the Esc key.
By unusable you mean it's possible to hit the wrong key by accident? Having to go into settings for your preferred layout seems reasonable to me too...
Yeah, I forgot, of course. In that case, who knows, there are 22110 enterprise 4TB SSDs using MLC even -- maybe they have enough space on the board for MLC or TLC. We will know when iFixit tears one down :)
Totally agreed. My T480s is an amazing machine. High performance, great keyboard, every imaginable port (RJ45!), excellent battery life. I can't believe it doesn't get more love.
I loved the marketing copy in the "New Magic Keyboard" section...
Wow! A physical escape key?!? A scissor mechanism?!? Will the innovation ever cease?!!?!
But more seriously, kudos to them for the full 180 fix.
(Well, I know some hate the existence of the Touch Bar, but I think it has very interesting potential which perhaps could be realized with its major fatal flaw finally fixed.)
I ran the gamut looking for comparable laptops recently in an effort to figure out what I'd do if they didn't get it together, and the options really vary and nothing feels as nice.
It's really something that one of the first promotional photos on the page is a macbook hooked up to audio gear through daisy-chained dongles and adapters instead of just a regular USB or ethernet cable like it would've been in the old days. The price of thin.
The big problem with the Touch Bar for me is the difficulty building muscle memory because it's only used part of the time. I have to learn 2 workflows "Docked" and roving. Since for me I spend so much more time docked, the Touch Bar patterns never get added to my muscle memory. If there was a Touch Bar based external keyboard I would at least have the chance to try it full time.
This is a little tangential, but does anybody find it weird that, even on desktop, the article seems hyperoptimized for mobile? The huge margins made it feel like I was reading on a phone emulator instead of on a desktop.
I was so hoping for a constant bezel width. Unfortunately the top bezel is still a lot larger than the side ones. I know it's because of the camera, but that makes for an awkward looking device…
> Most devices (phones, tablets, TVs, laptops) don't have constant bezel width.
Some phones and tablets have varied bezel width because they are touch-screen devices that need to be held by their screens.
In my experience, most TVs and laptops have uniform bezel widths. Especially TVs since they are so commonly treated as furniture, and therefore receive a great deal of design attention. On laptops, an exception is often the bottom bezel, where you often will see some additional surface material.
I agree with GP that laptops should have uniform bezel widths to look their best. It's not a must-have, but a uniform narrow bezel is optimal for laptop aesthetics.
That's your personal opinion. I don't like thinning of the machines (and that's a opinion) but I have actual reasons for it (overheating, battery size, upgradebility). Saying that uneven bezels are bad because you don't like them is like saying that recycling is bad because I don't like multiple bins in front of my house.
Made a special point to request an Air instead of a Pro when I started my new job recently. Office manager was confused and insisted everyone else was using Pros but I stayed strong. No regrets.
The line about the “Apple-designed rubber dome” sticks out. Why even say that? Did Apple not design the other bits? My sympathy for whomever over there is trying to navigate the whole keyboard situation and messaging.
Even though I dislike their now standard 16:9 ratio, Thinkpads are top tier. I've been using them since the late 90s. I think the 770ED was my first one. I still have a W500 that's in use from time to time.
It is unfortunate to see the jump from 16 GB to 32 GB of ram cost so much. I realize this isn't anything new for Apple, but I would have hoped for the base 16-inch model to have 32 GB at this point.
After much deliberation, I bought a 2017 13" MBP, upspecced to 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM. While I've not had a complete failure from the keyboard, it did need looking at at the Apple Store when it also had the entire display assembly replaced because the keyboard had damaged the screen - despite me looking after it well, always putting it in a soft slip case and then a laptop bag.
While I've liked some elements of the design, it's not (to me) a Pro piece of kit, and I've sine replaced it with a 2016 15" MBP which is much better built and doesn't need extra dongles to connect to everyday devices (and has magsafe, which is the best piece of design I've seen in many years).
Given this performance, I'll never buy a new Macbook again - particularly given all the issues about thermal throttling, battery life and indeed the way that macOS seems now to be going.
Don't get me wrong, there are elements of the 2017 MBP that I love - it looks amazing, the screen is fantastic and it's just so precisely made. But the lack of ports, the lack of ruggedness, the keyboard and the performance outweigh any 'look, shiny!' feeling I have about it - so much so that I've not sold it because I feel like I'm stitching the buyer up - even though they've not held their price compared to previous models, which shows that people know this to be the case, and the keyboard still has the 4 year warranty in place.
OMG, I'm very depressed as a user who loves the butterfly mechanism. I hate the wobbly feeling that the scissor mechanism produces. Apple didn't need to return to the scissor mechanism, it should have reiterated the design. I'm very disappointed that Apple just gave up & used the safe way of regressing back.
It feels like Apple is losing the spirit of doing things itself, whether other people dislikes it. Apple is more and more becoming a usual company that just does what consumers demands. And I'm sad with that.
“And they didn’t throw away the good parts of the butterfly keyboard — including excellent backlighting and especially the increased stability, where keys go down flat even when pressed off-center. The keys on this keyboard don’t wobble like the keys on pre-2016 MacBook Pro keyboards do.” — https://daringfireball.net/2019/11/16-inch_macbook_pro_first...
Wow, that's pretty great! I'm not sure I'll change my mind until I actually touch them, but that's pretty great, kind of removes my stereotypes of scissor keyboards.
The Butterfly mechanism was tainted by a number of design flaws that forced Apple to provide a soft recall:
https://support.apple.com/keyboard-service-program-for-mac-n...
I'm literally getting my new Macbook serviced today due to sticky butterfly keys.
All they really had to do was find a way to make the keys more easily removable. The butterfly mechanism is really nice when it works, but when a single key can stick and there is no easy way to clean / replace it so you have to replace the entire cop case which is insane.
And you are correct. Just got back from the Genius Bar, they have to replace the entire top case because the R key tends to stick or misfire. 2 week repair because they don't have the parts. Sounds like an expensive repair for a single key.
The person sitting next to me had the exact same issue (but different keys)!
I simply don't get it. NH reader base are usually well versed in technology and as such we should expect them to get some attitude towards their computer.
We have basically a computer which will never allow you to install what you want except if that software is signed by apple in a process taking 1 minute and said to garantee an extra level of security (how this process is able to check on any security issue in 1 minute is beyond my understanding) to user.
So they simply lose the ability to install anhthing not signed by apple. Old programs, a ton of open source programs. If Apple decide tomorrow to stop its signin program (and it will happen soon or later), user will be basically stuck with a computer limited to install Mac Appstore Software.
This is as significant as the fact there was a nodejs issue regarding the inability of the team behind it to distribute new release of nodejs because apple server simply refused to sign the package that contained the binary.
Apple computers are destined to become giant iPhone once apple decide to ditch apple notarization program, and the user will be leftwith absolutelly no control of what's happen in their computer like what is the case in ios device.
How someone with technical education can be satisfied with such scenario is beyond me. AApple computer are simply becoming Grandma computer.
I'm sure they're still rolling this out.. the "buy" button on the MacBook page leads to "Page Not Found".[0] Unfortunate, because I've been waiting for the 16-inch ever since the first rumor came up..
I have a one year old 15” that I’m super bummed about now. It’s a pretty powerful machine w/ 32gb of ram but I wish I could have waited for this.
Problems I currently have that are annoying:
- I miss the 13” air form factor a lot. I knew it would be a trade off for the performance, but using this beast anywhere but on a desk is pretty tough. On a plane you need a first class seat to open it. It gets super super hot with most workloads.
- there is an obnoxious electrical whine coming from the mainboard and it might be the SSD. Lots of videos on YouTube show that the ssd actually makes a lot of noise and almost sounds like it’s a physical disk. Poor manufacturing from Toshiba.
I guess that’s really it. I just wish I could use it on the couch without burning my thighs. I don’t have any qualms with the keyboard or touchbar. I have caps lock remapped to escape so that doesn’t bug me. Also the touchbar is in “old school mode” or whatever so it looks like a regular function key bar on a non touchbar Mac.
Genuinely curious, why did so many developers ask for the return of the physical Escape key when you could easily re-map it to caps lock? Before this was an officially supported option, I always hated having to do big hand-shimmies every time I needed to press the escape key, which is quite often for programs like vim!
That's fascinating, I didn't realize that key serves multilingual support in some countries. Is that the standard configuration in China or a common setting for that key there?
It's been the macOS default for a few yeas. Before that, we usually assign Cmd+Space for this (in Windows it was Ctrl+Space for switching language and Shift for toggling between English and Chinese). Then Siri came so the combo stopped working. Possibly it was then when Caps Locks became the default.
Speaking for myself - I find hitting the normal escape key location natural and easy. Especially when I'm typing fast, I can hit it without accidentally hitting another key (e.g. tab).
This might be in part because I'm a tall man, with large hands and long fingers, and also Esc normally has more of a separation from adjacent keys than capslock does.
But another reason I don't want to remap caps lock is that when I am typing on a coworker's computer, odds are high they don't have things remapped the same way. Imagine looking like an idiot in front of your peers, because your muscle memory makes you not know how to type :)
(Also, I'm not sure if people who do that remapping swap caps lock with a different key? Personally, I fully utilize the caps lock key - it wouldn't be much of an improvement to put it in an unusual location, and getting rid of it is not something I'd consider.)
tl;dr - Different people have diverse habits, preferences and needs. Apple's challenge is to design a keyboard layout that works well for as many as possible.
I wonder if they fixed the trackpad? The previous trackpad's palm rejection never worked properly.
It always surprised me how broken the palm rejection was on the recent MacBook Pro since previous models (2012-2015) running the same macOS version had no such issues; moreover, palm rejection also works fine on the iPad and iPhone.
I'm amazed how accurate the rumour mill is in Shenzhen.
First heard about it back in March, when all OEMs were scrambling to make lookalike products before Apple's release.
Would be interesting to know if they went back to Samsung panels from LG. I remember Samsung salesmen were pushing hard their new 500 and 600 nit panels a year ago.
Funny enough I just replaced my MBP 15 with a Sager notebook due to two of the issues they seem to have addressed with this release. First and foremost was lack of ram I have to virtualize a lot of specialty hardware for one of my clients so that I can simulate a total environment on a single machine. There can literally be 1000's of nodes running custom embedded systems. 16GB was stretching it on my last MBP and 32 just got me back in the game with my 15. I really needed 64GB and my new Sager has the ability to go to 128GB.
The second was the move away from the 17 MBP I know they are not popular and I know the reasons for killing it, but I develop on the road a lot and the extra screen space helps when a second monitor is not practical.
Had this been out 6 months ago I may have reconsidered my switch to a PC. That being said I am happy with my switch.
Pricing is shot across the bow to Lenovo: higher end configs of Carbon X1 Extreme have similar prices, even though they aren't really comparable in terms of brand recognition and in some aspects of hardware quality. Good. Then there's also the fact that X1 Extreme is troublesome when it comes to Linux compatibility, so if you want a proper Unix-like experience, Mac is still one of the best options, although Microsoft is really trying nowadays. If someone from Lenovo is reading this: I like Carbon X1. I'd buy X1 Extreme if it ran Linux as well as plain X1 does. I'm not price sensitive. But Windows is not really viable for me when it comes to professional use.
Looks like Apple will be getting another $3K or so of my money 6 months from now after other people beta test the new MBP for bugs.
Thanks for pointing this out! In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find this 16-inch model is very slightly smaller in each dimension than the 2015 15-inch rMBP.
> You can spec this machine up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB (not a typo) of storage on the SSD. That’s just a massive amount of storage — and it will cost $6,099 to get a fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Wow, that is a lot of computer. Even the base model is 16gb and 512gb.
"The 16-inch MacBook Pro features a new Magic Keyboard with a refined scissor mechanism that delivers 1mm of key travel and a stable key feel, as well as an Apple-designed rubber dome that stores more potential energy for a responsive key press"
> They keep announcing it, yet you still can't buy it. I wonder why.
There's some custom parts involved, so maybe it just required getting new manufacturing processes up to speed and it took longer than expected? I think the Mac Pro is not manufactured or assembled in China, which might be part of that additional time, too.
> Inverted-T arrow keys! A millimeter of key travel!
Which is still quite poor - Thinkpads offer between 1.3 to 1.9mm of travel depending on the model. It is surprising that a $1Trillion computer hardware company cannot design the best keyboard in the world while tiny Lenovo seems to have done much better.
Why would a "pro" user care more thinness and form than the usability of the primary input mechanism?
Add: It's not merely the travel. Lenovo keyboards are so slightly concave which offer perceivably better support for finger tips. The key surface also has a rougher texture instead of being flat, smooth and glossy, which I hope more manufacturers will emulate.
Well, from someone who's had to rely on his work-issued Thinkpad a lot over the last week... Thinkpad keyboard are complete crap. Those keys can travel all the way into a garbage can for all I care.
I have no idea if this new laptop's keyboard is any good, but it would have to take several steps back before you get to lenovo. One arrow key pops on and off as I use it. (This lappy is 4 months old and I've rarely done anything but remote into it so the keyboard should be pristine.) The escape key needs to be pressed extra hard -- beyond the "click" -- to register sometimes. Also, the right-click area on the trackpad expands and contracts mysteriously (best just to turn that off.)
I like the macbook pro's keyboard out of the box. The low-travel clicking feels ideal to me, for maybe that first week.
Of course, my issue is that they have some sort of internal catastrophic process failure if they were able to release a keyboard that fails so consistently. It wasn't just bad design, it was a process that seemingly did zero testing behind some Apple employees typing "hello world" on a ground floor clean room and going "yep, seems good."
I look forward to see how the 16" MBP shakes out. I can believe that they redesigned the keys, but not that they fixed a gaping hole in their fundamental processes responsible for a dud keyboard that they had no idea how to fix.
It wasn't just the design or testing process that was bad, it was how they responded and it's ongoing. The four-year free keyboard replacement program is only temporary and was only put in place after many people paid for the expensive repair while Apple stayed silent then claimed it affected very few people.
Now that Apple has alternative hardware what they do next is very important - will they replace the lemons or spend the next decade claiming they're not responsible in court? Will the four year keyboard program be extended or are the 2016 MBPs almost junk already?
Literally nothing about Lenovo even holds a candle. Every Lenovo I used is a cringeworthy piece of plastic hot trash that deserves to be in the garbage. Comparing it to MBP quality is absolutely laughable.
Have you used the ThinkPad X1, or the old-school X220/T420? Those can hold their own with the retina MacBook Pro (display quality notwithstanding), and I'd take any of them over the current-gen with the butterfly keyboard.
I'm not a fan of Apple but there are a few things I like of this laptop. Starting with the most important:
- It's got no number pad, so the screen, the keyboard and the touch pad are aligned with the nose of the user, which doesn't have to shift the laptop to the right to work and have 2/3 of the screen to his/her right.
- It's got a slightly larger screen than my HP ZBook but it's narrower and lighter: 14.09 inches (35.79 cm) and 4.3 pounds (2.0 kg)
- It can go up to 8 TB of storage and 64 GB of RAM (but there are laptops with 128 GB in 2019).
I didn't investigate if it can be upgraded (RAM and SSD) or if everything is soldered.
Wow! The "New Magic Keyboard." I wonder what it is. Oh, wait, it's the old scissor keyboard. "Largest Retina display ever." With 226ppi... But the Esc key is back! I'm so excited! /s
I bought one. If they hadn’t produced this I would have walked on Apple hardware. The only thing that is jaw dropping to me: the price tag.
I’m surprised to not see people talking about it in the comments. 3900 US without Apple care? Holy god. I bought the max spec or close to it in 2015 for 800+$ less. The differences are negligible, and then I spent an additional 200$ on dongles I don’t want. I’m probably not done. When all was said and done I spent 4600$ on this machine. I make my living on a computer and I need the pro part of the MacBook Pro, but it is still a really jaw dropping price for what it is.
Total difference in cost? ~1500$. That seems a ridiculous difference for modest hardware improvement and the requisite gaggle of adapters. I’m happy with the machine, but it’s probably 500$ more than what I would have been comfortable paying for the hardware. In the past I remember feeling like what I was getting was worth it. In this case I feel price gouged.
Yeah agreed. I have 16GB in the MacBook Pro I bought back in 2013. Surely in 6 years a doubling of ram should not be too much to ask without breaking the bank.
How long until they walk back the touchbar though? I figure if it was useful to anyone it would be cloned by now. I cant imagine they're holding onto that feature for any other reason than to save face.
I'm a bit surprised no one has talked about the price. Starting at 2400$US? That's... a lot.
For anyone who is going to use this as their primary computer, the real price is 2800$.
That's a lot... Who is the end consumer here? Folks who are computer illiterate and want 'the best' laptop apple has to offer?
Laptops promote poor posture, can't match desktop speeds and are expensive! Their use-case to me is limited to business people who hop from meeting to meeting all day, but then you don't need the horsepower and will be fine with a 500$ option.
I am really stoked about this. I am typing this on a 15 inch MB Pro. I survived the keyboard issues by not buying a new MB Pro.
There is always this lurking sense that if my existing MB Pro dies, that I would have to transition to something with a defect.
This new model has piqued my interest. I am excited to see that it has a bump in memory. That has always been something that has not sat well with me. Newer software demanding more and more memory while models of the MB Pro has been released with no increases in RAM.
The lack of a larger screen size coupled with the keyboard deficiencies are what drove me away from macOS to various linux distros.
While I'm immensely happy with my new OS - a lot more could be said about the hardware ( especially when running larger screens on pc that just can't keep up battery wise ).
This is a phenomenal step in the right direction, but one that comes too late for me. At this point I can't begin to consider jumping back until macOS sees some substantial improvements.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526058 has few comments but points to a long interview with Phil Schiller that has some interesting things but (brace yourself) says basically nothing about the touch bar.
This looks really nice and I want one, but 1mm of key travel doesn't seem like something to brag about. I know it's a personal preference thing, but 1mm ?
Those full sized arrows on current 15” MacBooks were driving me crazy! It’s great to see them put half sized left and right arrows back! I’ll Definitely b buying it
I like it, finally Apple although I’ll still wait for the 13” to downsize (the touchbar is still just an excuse to drive the price up.)
The real issue here is the intel chip. New vulnerabilities have just been found and the company isn’t addressing them so I’m starting to question the platform.
What about an AMD machine. It would be cooler, slower yet un-throttled so about the same performance. But it wouldn’t be a sitting duck.
Off topic, but can someone explain to my why their releases start this way:
> Cupertino, California — Apple today unveiled an all-new 16-inch MacBook Pro — the world’s best pro notebook
It’s on apple.com for fuck’s sake and if you don’t know that Apple is based in California, do you really care? Why do they write this stuff as if it’s some other entity writing about Apple as opposed to “today we are pleased to announce...”?
The idea is that press releases that look like articles make lazy journalists less critical. Because the phrasing is already very similar to the end result the journalist has to produce, the path of least resistance is to simply copy as much as possible. Lots of big comapanies do this nowadays.
I've been scared away from Apple for some time. It started with the touch function keys, then the butterfly keyboard, reducing ports, reducing the machine to near throw-away status when the warranty is up, while remaining very expensive. Never say never but I don't see anything here worth pulling me back, when their are PC laptops that could do the job just as good, perhaps better.
For those of you mentioning the esc key, I suggest mapping capslock to esc, I've been doing that for years now (both Linux and Mac) and it's awesome. Except when you're using someone else's computer and constantly turn capslock on and off...
Edit: You can do this natively since Mojave(?) in the keyboard settings without having to resort to something like Karabiner.
I had that setup, then I noticed something didn't feel quite right on some apps: apparently sometimes I tend to press Ctrl to enter some key combination, depress it immediately after and it fires the ESC key, which might have unintended consequences (i.e. closing a window I was reading)
Why not both? My QMK mechanical keyboards (and, I just noticed, Karabiner Elements) can support turning Caps Lock into Ctrl+KEY if pressed with something else, and ESC if pressed by itself. Best of all possible worlds.
I do that on my Macbook Pro. The only drawback is when I go to any other machine that doesn't have Caps Lock remapped and I'm toggling caps lock on/off all the time.
I'm still using the last Macbook Pro without a touchbar, and plan on not upgrading until either this dies, or Apple decide to make a laptop with a full keyboard. If it dies before that, it's Hackintosh or Linux time.
It honestly astounds me that the device that has traditionally been adopted most by developers has lost so much of what developers need in favour of gimmicks.
As a developer I rarely use the function keys, I only need it for debugging purposes. I much prefer ergonmic keyboards, so I rarely use the one on my laptops. But whether it's Windows/Linux/MacOS I rarely require the function keys. As a mechanical keyboard enthusiast I have them in a different layer for the rare occasion that I actually "need" them. I have far less gripe with having my mousehand of the keyboard when debugging than I do when typing regularly.
You can easily use a tool like https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ or `brew cask install karabiner-elements` to remap fn + number keyrow to be the function keys.
Offtopic: Typing this on a Redox Wireless keyboard, it's great for developing on. It's a split ergonomic columnly staggered ortholinear keyboard, the [] keys are in the middle of the split parts. And you have thumb clusters.
Boy, every new Apple laptop release people harp endlessly about the cost.
Look, people, Apple high-end laptops generally cost $3-4K. And if you think that's high, you're forgetting that (in many of our cases) you're running your whole business on that.
$3-4K every couple of years should be in the noise. Cost relative to other laptops has little meaning, if you want high-end Apple gear.
I've been holding onto my 2015 MacBook pro now for ages, waiting and waiting.
I'd like to see the touchbar disappear completely, and the function keys return - but the real escape key and no butterfly keyboard is enough of a change that I think I can finally buy another MacBook!!
It was definitely off the cards for a few years there, and I was starting to wonder what I was going to do!
I think my question will be ports. The article didn't say what they broke there. Will it only support Bluetooth headphones? Bluetooth monitors? No USB? No SD card slot?
Especially for a 16" laptop, I'd like something without a mess of dongles and adapters. The 2015 15" Macbook was pretty good in this department, but Apple is on a port-cutting rampage.
Hmm, so they improved the keyboard? Kinda makes me wish I'd waited a bit longer to buy a MacBook Pro, since I think I would have preferred this version of the keyboard to the one on the version I'm using right now.
Still, the important thing is that Apple seemingly listened to feedback. Too many double down on bad decisions regardless of feedback.
I have a TouchBar MacBook and I was pretty peeved about the escape key at first, but once I remapped the caps lock key to escape I never looked back. The caps lock key is worthless anyway.
That said, the only cool use for the TouchBar that I've noted is with iTerm2. Changing terminal colors on the fly from the TouchBar is actually kinda nifty.
I am actually using CapsLock for typing capital letters. I learned it that way when I first got computer and it stick with me. Plus it's much easier to write capital, accent letters from my language because I don't have to hold two modifiers (Shift+Alt), just one.
I’m totally not regretting upgrading to this year’s 15 inch model.
Just a huge bit.
Apple do take your current model back for credit but given I’ll only get 900 pounds for it (presumably much more in the USA!) I guess I’ll stick to it for now. I’d be happy to pay a few hundreds for the upgrade; it’s unjustifiable to upgrade for full price minus a 900 pound discount.
The Touch Bar is still there and horrible. The price on the 16" model is downright insane. Add some customizations past the bare bottom and you are up in the stratosphere.
I'll be sticking with my 13" 2015 MBP for the foreseeable future. I'll just build up a home machine that I can log into and do some heavier workloads on.
Looks pretty good, I think I'll wait until the new microled displays though.
The thermal design updates are welcome, that was seriously crippling previous Macbook Pros.
I'd love to know how long and what clock rate the 8-core 16" MBP can sustain multi-core workloads running at 100% core utilisation. My guess is for a minute or so at 3.5ghz+.
Windows development -- specially if you develop with a terminal editor -- has become very feasible with WSL.
I was scared away from Apple by the keyboards and found a new dev home in Windows. I've tried to go back for personal projects, but it's just too much conversion for very little compensation.
I agree that the improvements like the ESC key and 16" screen are good things.
But is it strange to anyone else that a company that prides itself on being innovative and motto is "think different" is parading around a screen size change and a keyboard regression as the biggest selling points for a product launch?
No it's not strange. The MBPs are (were?) great, reliable tools on which thousands of professionals rely on every day. They also rely on being able to replace them with equivalent or better replacements when they break.
They work. There's no need for needless new gimmicks. It's fine to have a reliable, consistent tool available for purchase. Just like Thinkpads, hammers and multimeters. It's ok to be conservative on new things in some market segments.
This release is essentially a "we messed up, this is what you wanted all long", but they can't say that so they're using the regular MBP marketing talk.
This release is more of a "we listened" release than anything else. That's likely why they didn't parade it around with an October event and instead went with a private press review and press release.
They listened to the complaints and addressed them but whether or not the fixes worked remains to be seen. Maybe they did this release without much fanfare because they're being cautious themselves...
Well, that or you could look at it like this:
They made a new 1.6 inch macbook pro three years ago with all kinds of design, performance, and battery life but the keyboard turned out to be highly defective and the Touchbar's replacement of the escape key was super annoying, that laptop got generally lamented and trashed by the press and public. (If you are not a hardcore function key user and the keyboard has not broken yet, it's a pretty fantastic laptop, generally still the best at first, but obviously based on your needs and the worry of having the kb break)
So you can see this as an improvement to the current gen MBP.. or you can see this as a selling item to those who skipped the 2016 and still have a 2015 (or who had a 2016 and got burned). When you are drowning your goals are not to get on a ship or to go someplace, they are to get air.
Trying, failing, and backtracking is an inherent part of innovation. It's not as sexy as trying and succeeding, but even Apple can't win them all, so the alternative is never trying. That would be the real stagnation.
Well to be honest there's very little fanfare around this MacBook by Apple but it just happens to let the internet explode a bit because so many people were waiting for it.
It just seems like, for people who aren't wealthy, it might make more sense to buy a gaming laptop and get very close to or better specs/performance and save $500 or maybe even $1000.
Although I guess the reason people waste money like that is partly just to prove they can waste money.
Too little too late. By now, Apple has lost me. The only Apple HW I might (theoretically) still buy is a Mac Pro, but not in practice, since you can't get it with a 32-bit capable OS any more. So fuck Apple. I'll have to get Windoze hardware and put a BSD Unix on it.
Sweet, a MBP that lives up to the name again. Congrats on listening to your customers, Apple. Too bad for me, I gave in and 'upgraded' my 2011 to a top of the line used 2015 MBP about six months ago, now I kinda want this new one. Ah well
Interesting that the tag line is "world's best". I feel as though they usually go with something more quantitative like "fastest" or "most powerful", etc. "Best" obviously being completely subjective.
The Touch Bar is forgettable and a row of physical function keys would be an improvement. I don't know any "pro" user who likes the Touch Bar or who wants to look down at the keys when typing or interact with a microscopic touch screen.
Still puzzled by the lack of ports for a pro laptop. It's 16" with a huge body, not particularly thin or light, and they couldn't add two USB-A, SD slot, HDMI? The age of a dozen dongles continues.
64GB RAM option is a big plus, though the prices are 2x-3x market.
Presumably the SSD is still soldered onboard, which basically makes these unrepairable and disposable premium priced laptops.
Overall far better than what it replaced, but still missing some key features from the 2015 MBP line which remains the best Mac laptop ever made.
Will be interesting to see if they ditch the 13" and move to a 14" with similar specs.
I didn't have a touchbar but wouldn't the escape key have been the easiest non-physical key to reach without looking, due to its indexed location? Or was the problem that it wasn't always exposed by the software?
I was constantly bringing up the help view in Vim by hitting F1 instead of Esc. Decades of muscle memory wouldn't allow me to actually use Caps Lock remapped as ecape.
Got my 2019 top spec but then revert to get a macbook old stock for daily use. The macbook 12 inch is great. Work nicely with my ipad. Can’t do two screen even the 2nd screen did show. But all is fine. The 15 cold feet.
Still wish it had a touch screen. The physical escape key is nice. The fact I can hackintosh a touch screen dell xps to see if my app's gestures work etc is just so crazy why they won't give in.
With the 15" MBP being EOLed into a 16", it's hard not to wonder if the 13.3" displays might become 14". Makes a big difference at the size, as the X1 Carbon is able to prove.
“ The new Magic Keyboard also features a physical Escape key” - really? It was there as a physical escape key, Apple removed it, put it back in and called it, wait for it ... a physical Escape Key.
I'm curious why this memory controller that supports 64 Gigs would not have made it into the recent refresh of the 15" MBP. Is this related to the new thermal design they mentioned maybe?
I'm curious why the memory controller in that supports 64 Gigs would not have made it into the recent refresh of 15" MBP. Is this related to the new thermal design they mentioned maybe?
Is the form factor the same as 15" Macbook Pro or is this bigger? Did Apple simply reduce bezels on the sides of the screen to fit 16" display instead of the standard 15"?
The photos in the article do show the physical escape key but do not show the sides of the laptop where the ports would be. I hope that it has a MagSafe charge adapter and an HDMI port.
I'm guessing you're trolling, but just in case not, or for anyone else who doesn't want to look at Apple's web page:
It's four USB-C/thunderbolt ports, two on each side, and a head-phone jack.
BTW, magsafe is an optimization from a bygone era when you had to keep your laptop plugged in while using it. You can now (generally) leave your laptop unplugged as you use it and stow it somewhere out-of-the way to charge when you aren't. Like your phone or tablet. Magsafe is nice, but probably not worth it now that you don't need to routinely charge your laptop in a vulnerable position. And, of course, USB-C is very easy to plug in.
It would be ideal if Apple could figure out a way to make a magnetic USB-C port. At the end of the day, the USB-C cable brings much convenience but it is loose and constantly comes out, just slightly to lose the charge.
I was thinking to buy that line of MB, but since September I fully switched to Linux after being OSX user for the last 14 years. I ditched my mbp for a Dell XPS 7390 (latest model, 16GB RAM, i7 10th). Me and my girl couldn't be happier.
Me, because I ditched that monopolistic machine, which you can't fully enjoy if you are not in Apple's ecosystem. The only Apple machine I have is macbook. Even my desktop was a hackintosh. As a developer Linux gave me extreme freedom. The only thing I miss, is the touchpad but I learned to live without it.
My girl because I gave her my Macbook Pro 2015 and moved away from windows, win-win situation, the machine will just "work"
As the keyboard replacement program starts ending next year for the earliest lemons it will be interesting to see if Apple voluntarily recalls and replaces anything with these.
Too bad I bought a ThinkPad back in June after THREE YEARS of ESC'less computing. This after almost two decades of not even looking at non-Mac machines.
Why does everyone seem grateful that they kept the headphone jack? Where did Apple give the impression that they would remove it from a more stationary device?
Music production is usually Mac at this point, and that requires wired headphones/speakers. Not sure it’s big enough of a market that Apple wouldn’t drop it anyway, but Bluetooth latencies are too high to be a substitute there.
Anyone doing pro music work will have a USB interface anyway.
But, like, people listen to music and watch videos on their laptops, and it would be absurd to force them to use bluetooth headphones for no good reason.
There are still many places (classrooms, lecture theatres, meeting rooms) where the only way to drive the projector is VGA. Not because it's good, but because it's the lowest common denominator. In these places, when using VGA, the only audio input to the speakers is usually a 3.5mm jack. Remove the 3.5mm jack, and anyone who teaches or makes business presentations won't buy it.
My first laptop was an Apple PowerBook 140 and I've owned a succession of Mac laptops since then (Wallstreet, G4 Aluminum, 2012 & 2017 Macbook Pro) and yet I'm typing this on a Surface Pro because I had such a poor experience with the 2017 Macbook Pro that I'll probably never go back. That keyboard was such junk that I literally feel like Apple robbed me. I really regret not returning the computer within the two week window for a full refund. I realize this rant isn't very productive but I still hope the ghost of Steve Jobs reads it.
So Apple made a decent MacBook Pro again. Good. But they still haven't made things right for the lemon they sold me. My keyboard is still not working, even after I handed it in for repair twice. Now I'm expected to shell out a few more grand just to have a working f key, and Apple is not even willing to acknowledge that they for years sold faulty products to gullible idiots like me.
Would it really hurt their octibajillion dollar valuation too much to just make things right for the customers who got shafted by their broken keyboard design?
That's a big deal for everyone. I do not know why it's not 100W but I will take what I can get. You see, Apple landing on 87W for their USB C adapter led to a lot of third party chargers also being 87W (or if multiple ports then one maxing out there) which is very frustrating to those who need more oomph. There's something to be said about education in the US when you need to explain to people a higher wattage charger doesn't damage their equipment...
Now if they would just support the new 7nm AMD mobile processors, I'd buy one of these without question. But I have a feeling that next spring I'll have to choose between this Mac and lower compute performance or a half price Linux model from some Asian company with ~50% more oomph. Tough call. If you're a developer, which would you pick?
It is, that’s the Touch Bar that has replaced the function keys on MacBook Pros. Not a fan at all as I use the fn keys a lot on a MacBook but I can’t see them getting rid of it for a while
I ordered one. It will be replacing my 2017 with a swollen battery and messed up keyboard. I'm worried I'm throwing good money after bad, but hopefully the MacBook Pro is back on it's game.
I'll be taking the 2017 to the Apple store and get them to fix it up under their keyboard (and hopefully battery) replacement program.
I wonder how many developers purchase MBP that don't require to build iOS apps or install xcode.
I realize i don't even look at other laptop makers just because i need to build iOS apps (which in theory shouldn't have any kind of relation) That's probably the textbook definition of monopolistic abuse.
Out of myself and my nine coworkers (all developers) I believe that 6 of the 10 use MPBs. We don’t build iOS apps or use Xcode. I should also note that we have a BYOD policy so.
I am still pretty astonished at the strict lack of the ports you would expect on a typical pro laptop: Ethernet, HDMI and at least one USB-A in particular. As someone who occasionally forgets to bring dongles with me, it's a bit of a shame.
Why do they get away with saying the world’s best pro notebook“ when I don’t see anything materially better than the dell precision 55xx and 75xx line?
More pixels in the 15.6
Xeon chip 5ghz
128GB ECC memory
I guess I’m wondering what metric singles this one out as being best?
> I guess I’m wondering what metric singles this one out as being best?
Apple have probably decided that it is the best because it has the best hardware that is running OSX. I think they consider any other OS inferior, no matter what hardware it is running on.
I’m kind of amazed that people want a better laptop speaker. I feel that’s like the one thing that could be just decent and nobody would complain. Everybody I see either uses headphones or a bluetooth speaker.
The hyperbole really isn’t cute anymore after all of the fuckups. Like, some humility this time would be great. “We listened. We made some mistakes, but we want to fix them.” Don’t come out guns blazing like “this is the BEST laptop EVAR!” You don’t get to claim the world’s best anything when some people have been waiting the length of an entire presidential administration just to buy a usable laptop from you.
a couple of months ago I bought a fully decked out 15" for $6k CAD; for the same amount, I can now get a 16", and double the storage and slightly better graphics.
What the hell! I'm going to try getting a replacement from Apple. The 15" upgrade that I got was just announced too when I got it.
Why does every Apple promo read like a Trump speech or propaganda out of North Korea? "Most superlatives ever!" Am I being facetious? This kind of excessive language - every single time - is actually a big turnoff to trusting Apple's product announcements. With such excessive adjectives, I can't take it seriously.
It wouldn't be pointless for me. I quite often use my iPhone to provide an Internet connection for my MacBook Pro. I wish it were more reliable and didn't consume so much battery. Dell and other laptop vendors have been embedding cellular modems in laptops for a long time. Apple manages to put one in a watch and every other device.
It appears that the Qualcomm license problems are the only impediment to Apple putting an LTE modem into a bigger device.
They pretty much only exist in business laptops because in that context it can be useful to issue someone a field laptop with a SIM in it, and it doesn't really mean much for cost on a large corporate data plan.
What if you want to save battery life on your phone while you're on the go? I imagine having LTE modem in the machine must be a less laggy experience as well.
LTE modem in laptop will take more power and you always can charge your phone from laptop. And also, I know this is kind of stupid solution but because of crappy battery life on most of the smartphones this days I can imagine going out for a day without emergency powerbank.
Having used laptops with LTE modems, I prefer having the option. That the option is not available from Apple indicates that the Qualcomm patents are causing market failure.
To be fair in some countries providers give data SIM pretty much for free. Here where I am, my provider gives one SIM with data plan for free every other normal SIM, so in my mini company I have 2 company phone numbers and I got SIM card with data plan for free and there was literally no way to opt out of that SIM without paying more.
AFAIK, basically there are two: dang and sctb. That may have changed, but this topic is not routinely discussed and I have not heard otherwise. Cultivating HN seems to be their full time job.
I urge everyone to remember Apples actions regarding HK protests,specifically how they are able to remove an app from the store, without any easy way to side load it on devices.
Also keep in mind that warranty and repairs on Mac products are a complete ripoff.
right... a "Pro" computer with only USB-C ports, no HDMI out, no SD card reader, soldered memory.... dongle dongle dongle. no thanks. (before i'm accused of being a troll. I have a MBP with all those things circa 2005 or so, it's old and slow AF now. But still works for what I use it for and I have quite a few PC laptops as well.
They're just notoriously bad at admitting being wrong. Just look at how many keyboard iterations it took to get back to the old working keyboards.
For me personally think this could work, not having an esc button was a deal breaker for me but this might just convince me to finally upgrade my old mbp retina
Please give the same keyboard at the less than $1500 price point on the regular MacBook models. Also, give us ports and please stop with the thinner == better. This is a great step but I’m not spending $2600 on a new machine.
A good guess would be that all laptops will get this new keyboard over the next year. There is no benefit to Apple shipping a keyboard that is in a repair program day one (which all of the butterflies are). This new keyboard is not part of the repair program because apparently Apple thinks it will be reliable.
I'm thrilled that they've rolled back some of the worst post-2015 MBP changes. I'm a vim user, so I was never going to switch to something without a physical escape key. The key travel on the new machines were terrible; it's like typing on a piece of glass. Most importantly -- regardless of whether or not I have an external keyboard plugged in (sometimes I do, right now I don't) -- an internal keyboard needs to be reliable! I'm really glad Apple has seen the light and returned to the reliable scissor switched keys that I'm currently typing on.
My Late 2013 MBP has been serving me well for the last 5 or so years, but I've been wanting to upgrade it ever since 2016 (the battery life is quite poor & the GPU is showing its age). I refused once I saw the changes in the 2016 MBP, and was glad I never bought in after seeing more and more complaints about the machines roll in every subsequent year. I spent the next two years hoping for a redesign & started to give up. As much as I didn't want to, I've been spending the past few months looking at ThinkPads and Dells and mapping out my transition from OS X to Linux.
As much as I love OS X (and I do -- I've been dreading having to leave it), I just could not spend $2000+ dollars on a computer that I was going to have to fight with to make it work like my old one. This is going to be a daily driver, not a novelty or a toy. Yes, I could've remapped my escape key to caps lock. Yes, I could've bought a bigger laptop bag that could fit a small external keyboard. Yes, I could have learned to live with the new key travel. This is all beside the point if you ask me: I shouldn't have to do that.
Frankly, I'd be okay if Apple kept the old model around, as some people (including many commenters above me) have grown to prefer the butterfly keyboard. Maybe some people prefer the extra touch bar space? (I don't see why it has to be one or the other; I remember how many MBP variations/SKUs Apple carried when I started buying MBPs back in 2010.)
Just give me the option to opt out of these things -- even most of these things -- and I'll keep writing you checks. I'm looking forward to doing this in a couple months assuming the reviews on this machine are good.
I don't believe this press release indicates which ports the laptop has. I assumed that meant it had a crappy selection, and further googling proves correct - 4 Thunderbolts and a headphone jack.
In my eyes, that makes it a non-starter for an alleged "Pro" laptop. For the professional work I do, an SD card reader (for photos and video), HDMI/DisplayPort (for presentations, either in the boardroom or better viewing of photos and videos), USB A (because thumb drives), and for my specific work, an ethernet jack, are all required to do my job. Also magsafe power is a lifesaver.
I'll be holding onto my 2014 15" until it's cold and dead. And if Apple still doesn't have a suitable replacement, Lenovo likely will still have great pro laptops.
It feels as though Apple looked at the two biggest complaints, and gave the smallest concessions they possibly could.
• The keyboard uses scissor switches (and thus hopefully won't completely die), but still only has 1mm of key travel.
• They added back an escape key to the top row, but the touch bar is still there—and there's still no function keys as a result.
The keyboard, okay, maybe Apple really needs those thinness metrics for marketing purposes—but would it really have killed them to up the travel to 2mm? And, why the heck are they so dug in on the touchbar? While I admittedly only have anecdotal evidence, I think it's relatively clear at this point that neither users nor developers have taken to it in any significant way. Just kill it already. It's been three years—if people haven't discovered how amazing it is by now, they aren't going to have a sudden awakening.
> maybe Apple really needs those thinness metrics for marketing purposes
Surely the thinness of the keyboards hasn't been relevant in marketing in a while? what kind of consumer does this excite? Surprised Apple are still shouting about it.
The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute, but perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team's desires.