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Comment by pronik | Hacker News Reader

I suppose someone has written this already, but today's presentation made it more than clear that it's indeed for (aspiring) professionals, but not for fully-fledged IT professionals. So a musician, artist, photographer, writer etc. is in the target audience. Those people do not use function keys and in most cases (except for writers) do not touch-type. Everyone else is not in the target demographics and will have found the new generation unusable.

So in that sense, Apple's positioning of the new MacBook Pro is spot-on and probably has been this way for years. Most of us just thought that a good notebook with a "pro" label is meant for IT professionals. It probably never has been, it's just this year that the distinction is this striking.

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Out of curiosity, what do you use function keys for?

I'm a developer, and the only key I routinely use from the top row is escape, for vim. (And Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop out of X11 on a Unix system... but that's not applicable here.)

Anyway, it looks like you can still put a virtual escape key on the touchpad when Terminal is active. Or if you want a physical key, you can also remap one of the other modifier keys to act as escape.

* F3 - Find(Rarely, generally only works in older applications.)

* F5 - Refresh(Works in many applications.)

* F6 - Cycle through input box focus in Firefox.

* F9 - Expose, All Windows

* F10 - Expose, Current Application

* F11 - Expose, Desktop

* F12 - Dashboard

Plus many other function keys that are application dependent. I started with function keys in MS-DOS and Word Perfect since it came with a keyboard overlay.

I think the touch bar design is fine, but I doubt I would get enough value out it to make it useful enough to me while not making me regret losing physical function keys. They kept a 13" model with function keys, which is the size I prefer, so it will be fine into the future for me.

F3 - In mac that's never used. But there is the CMD+? For searching menu pages. Not even sure what you're referring to with "find" though.

F5 - CMD+R is standard in MAC. I haven't used F5 in years, and I just tried it (didn't work).

F6 - Like TAB?

F9 - Well there is something like this on F3 but I never used it. I can do this with hot corners in mac, way easier.

F10 - Same like above

F11 - Same like above

F12 - Not sure, never used dashboard in osx.

This being said, I am sad for the removal because I use the top row a lot for volume/playback/brightness/esc.

Press F3 in Firefox, it brings up the Find interface.(Search in page.)

F5 does not work in Chrome or Safari, but works in nearly everything else I use.

F6 - It is a tabbing functionality for application input boxes, but related Firefox and other applications with similar design.

I actually have the top left corner set to do Expose all windows as well.

I'm an avid Midnight Commander user ;-)

I use the Function keys all the time while developing - mostly for debugging.

In IntelliJ, Visual Studio (through Parallels) and Chrome, the Function keys allow me to step through the debugger. It's pretty standard in my day to day workflow, and they all pretty much use the same keys.

Esc is pretty useful in vim and it's used frequently in Windows. I could remap a key, I just don't like being dependent on custom layouts since I sometimes have to switch between machines and I'd rather it be as consistent as possible.

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