New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore | Hacker News Reader

New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

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519 pointsalexeysemeney775 comments

I dislike this post intensely. The opinion comes across as uncharitable, as the author probably has not used this Macbook Pro yet. How can you (alexeysemeney) be so sure?

I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative developer tools, such as timeline interfaces for Replay Debugging. There are already a lot of applications in the content creation (Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya) space, which developers frequently use to create assets.

Many common applications that developers use have many keybindings that heavily rely upon the Escape key (Vim for sure).

The escape key can be right there on the capslock (option to be enabled in System Preferences -> Keyboard). Using Esc key heavily with its default location is not practical at all. As for the F-keys I think this is more of a problem.

I use it in its default location literally thousands of times a day and I don't mind. (I use a Mac at work.)

Same here. I use the Escape key as Esc in vim and it would probably take me a long time to break that "muscle memory".

As for some recommendations others have had... I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl and Ctrl-[ remapped for tmux so those are out.

This is the same across several machines (MBP and multiples ThinkPads) so the more feasible solution for me is to simply stop using the Mac.

I had to install a third party program to get that to work, do they let you do that now?

Yes, it's an option in the normal Keyboard Modifier Keys system pane now.

IIRC Support for Caps Lock -> ESC mapping in System Preferences is new as of 10.12 (or maybe 10.12.1?), so many people may not know that's an option. I didn't until I read your post and checked!

How do you achieve this with just System Preferences? On 10.11.6, I see the System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys allows re-mapping to Nothing, Control, Option, and Command, but not Escape. Is this a macOS Sierra thing? Tell me your secrets!

It's a Sierra thing (and only the most recent update, 10.12.1, I believe).

OK. Just kicked off the download for Sierra. Thank you!

Yep added in latest Sierra

Check out Karabiner and Seil- you can even use these to map "tap capslock" to esc and "hold down capslock" to ctrl. (Seil has some issues in 10.12, but they're working on it.)

They have made karabiner-elements to do just some basic things and which works with sierra. I had a problem with it though as it remaps F-keys by default and it was clashing with Palua on 10.12

I've developed on a MacBook Pro for the last 5 years in vim and I have never touched the escape key or any of the F keys, ever.

If you're using vim and reaching for the escape key you are doing it wrong imho. Rebind esc to something else (like capslock) or learn another pattern that has more ergonomic value.

A lot of us live in a transient computing world, where we neither own nor have permissions to edit the bindings. Having one host with a binding and 6 other client's envs without, would a context switch failure invoke

The bindings are done on your macbook, it works seamlessly on the clients you connect too.

ctrl-[ works as escape. Also, what kind of devs don't get to customize their setup??

You'd be surprised. Some corporate environments keep machines pretty locked down in terms of what you can change in the System Preferences, or install on your own.

Can you request the change from your IT department?

Just fill in the ticket, call to follow it up, explain what you want again, re open the closed ticket, open the ticket again, do a few ritualistic incantations and you'll get there.

Adding a .vimrc file doesn't require administrator privileges on either Linux or macOS, nor does it require changing anything in System Preferences.

If for some reason you "can't" add a .vimrc file to a user account then you probably shouldn't be manually logging into that user account.

I'd say it's the norm for the 'enterprise' category of development.

> If you're using vim and reaching for the escape key you are doing it wrong imho.

So generations of Vim users are doing it wrong but you have the right answer?

The Vi editor was originally written on a terminal which had the Escape key positioned where the Tab key is on modern keyboards.

So yes, rebinding Escape is the right answer if you heavily use it. The normal positioning for Escape is very inconvenient for touch typing.

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

> So yes, rebinding Escape is the right answer if you heavily use it.

nobody does that because it was unnecessary. Of course, now developers need to ADAPT the Macbook instead of the Macbook ADAPTING developer's workflow. That's not the definition of a developer friendly machine. The touchbar is a gimmick and even then it doesn't justify the removal of an entire row of keys. It was purely an aesthetic decision. But I forgot, developers like to work with "beautiful" computers instead of functional ones /s

In my experience, quite a lot of people who take working on the keyboard seriously remap some keys.

I'm more of an Emacs guy, but still frequently hit Escape (I use it as the Meta key in Emacs). I've bound Escape to the Caps Lock key for as long as I can remember. Like I said, the normal location of Escape is way too far from the home row, and quite bad for touch typing.

In fact, the entire function row is too far for me to conveniently use while touch typing, and I have long fingers. I probably won't miss the function key row at all.

I haven't used or seen the actual touch bar, so cannot really make a strong statement whether it's a useless gimmick or actually useful. I have my doubts, but it could turn out to be useful in some applications.

Sorry, but removing this row of keys is entirely justified if you accept that the touchbar is a valuable addition. Having to reach over a row of useless keys (I suspect Apple's data would show ~90% of customers literally never use them, except for the system-control functions) to interact with the touchbar would seriously compromise it's utility.

> (I suspect Apple's data would show ~90% of customers literally never use them, except for the system-control functions)

Completely dishonest and backed by no fact at all, you can make up some data, I can too, I didn't. You call them "useless keys" but there are here for a reason. There are so useless than the touchbar can emulate this "useless" row, except that now users have to look at the keyboard to type since there is no physical feedback to guide them. this isn't innovation, this is a step back.

Calling it dishonest and backed by no fact at all and then go mentioning they are there for a reason. Can you elaborate? Historically they are programmable keys, not very standard at all. Same goes for the reason keyboards are staggered, to mimic mechanical typewriters that couldn't have the keys orthogonally placed. No problem changing that.

And no I'm not a fan of the Touch Pad at all, using a 2013MBP as a daily driver. I don't understand all the fuss.

> The normal positioning for Escape is very inconvenient for touch typing.

But what if you're not a touch typist? I'm not, and I use the ESC key all the time when using vi/vim, So much so, that it is almost a mindless reflex. I have no choice but to adapt, I know, but my most likely response to this will be to use my Linux laptop more frequently. I still have to use the Mac for OS X and iPhone development, but for other server side stuff, I guess I have to switch to Linux.

Recent generations, yes. vi was designed for a keyboard where the Escape key was where the Caps Lock key is today. When Escape ended up in a hard-to-reach place on the 103-key layout, vi users sighed and rolled with it (and new users didn't know any better.)

> the Escape key was where the Caps Lock key is today

Apparently it was where the Tab key was[1] as metafunctor pointed out.

[1] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

I've been a vi user since 1996 and have always remapped the Esc key because it's too far from home. I had assumed others also did this because I've never seen a vi user who works without some customisation on commonly used boxes and it seems like one of the obvious first changes to make.

This is bullshit. You know what else is not on the home row? Most of the keys on the keyboard. The ESC key is very easy to hit without looking down, there is absolutely no need to remap it and I refuse to believe that people that grew up with keyboards with ESC keys ever feel the need to remap it.

> This is bullshit. You know what else is not on the home row? Most of the keys on the keyboard.

...So? You know where you spend most of your time in Vim? the home row. It's called that for a reason...

I grew up with `esc` way up in the corner, and as soon as I started learning Vim I googled for common workarounds to reaching so far. Refuse to believe it, but it's true.

I've never been able to touch-type a function key on any keyboard, ever. Replacing them with a dynamic interface like the TouchBar seems fine for a row I have to look down at every time, anyway. Even on my 2015 MBP I have to make sure I'm hitting a volume button and not the power button.

Programming is not regular touch typing. There are all kinds of punctuations and weird key combos you have to do frequently that are not on the home row. And yes, I hit function key combos without looking many times a day. I will not be buying this laptop.

Good on you. Neither am I, and I have no desire to convince you to. Point still stands that not everyone is as comfortable as you with reaching. I certainly spend most of my time outside of insert mode, firmly on the home row. When I'm done inserting, I want to be back on the home row as quickly and comfortably as possible. Reaching for the furthest row from it before returning home will always be the last thing I want to do.

Eh. I'm using Dvorak, so most of the keybindings in Vim are total madness anyways. For most regular typing, my fingers stay on home far more than you Qwerty typists.

Remapping Esc has always been one of the first tips that I read from experienced Vim users.

I've had Caps Lock remapped to Esc for years now.

I map Caps Lock to Control.

I do both! https://github.com/alols/xcape (Linux only)

This is the kind of advice that young programmers need to get earlier. I'm new to Vim and I'm slowly realizing that A) Vim is way more powerful than I originally gave it credit to be and B) I'm vastly underutilizing its power.

You don't even need to rebind the escape key. I've been using ^[ for years, and it works in basically all standard terminals and vims as the escape key.

15 years using Vim with the esc key. I have large fingers though.

You've never hit Ctrl-F5 to dump cache and refresh a browser window?

I'm a big Vim user and I honestly wouldn't mind too much if I were to just remap the Esc key to capslock.

Vim user as well, while I haven't used the new device. Judging from the distance and where I hit the ESC key on the current keyboard, it shouldn't pose any issues. Even if they did remove it, the power of vim is the ability to just remap keys.

My control key is remapped to caps lock for tmux. Perhaps the lower-left control key could be escape?

I am a developer and don't use neither vi or Emacs.

I smash the esc key violently every time I climb myself into a corner with Emacs shortcuts and don't know how to get out.

But it's on a proper mechanical keyboard because prolonged use of builtin keyboards hurts my hands.

C-] might be a better bet - it will cancel any active command, like C-g, and also back out of any recursive edits, while leaving your window layout intact.

But it uses C-g as cancel, not Esc.

keyboard-escape-quit is bound to ESC ESC ESC.

I'm a vim user. Why in the world did they remove ESC? That's one of my most frequently used keys.

And no, I don't think remapping it is a great idea.

If I had to use this for work I would protest.

I don't understand why people keep saying they've "removed" the escape key. The thing is programmable. http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...

If it's anything like their existing dynamic stuff, I worry it will be too slow. There are far too many cases where I search for something, see it pop up, go to hit enter, and as I'm hitting enter, Spotlight decides to shift focus to something else. So for their magic toolbar thing to work, they'd have to do something they haven't been able to do in my experience.

That's fair. My experience has been, at least with the iPhone, that they've made an effort to make it more and more responsive as time has gone on. Tangentially, this is why I don't understand people who install these third party keyboards that make background network requests. It's like, the keyboard is slow enough as it is without having to go to the public internet on a cell connection :/

Yeah, I haven't noticed that yet. Not to say it hasn't improved, but I just haven't noticed an improvement. My other concern is workflow. Right now, the magic toolbar is only on the laptop. This basically means the magic toolbar is only useful when using my laptop's keyboard. Otherwise, it's really an awkward tool to use.

The controversy creates discussions and clicks.

> I don't understand why people keep saying they've "removed" the escape key.

Because programmers are at least as fond of hyperbole as the reality television programming they all claim to hate.

Do you remember texting without a touchscreen?

I used to do it without looking at my phone, now with touchscreen I lost that ability, I have to check every word, some keyboards help with that correcting my words if I moved my fingers a little to the side, but it's not the same, with physical buttons I was sure I pressed the correct buttons. Physical buttons give touch feedback and that's important when you're focused on something important in your screen. I don't want to switch my focus from my screen to my keyboard every time I need to use a function key.

Interesting.

I almost always text on my phone without looking because the visual effect where the selected letter appears above your finger actually makes me slow down. I was never able to use physical phone keyboards as easily as the adaptive software ones on modern phones.

Also I use vi mostly so I only use function keys rarely, in which case I look up.

Which phones did you use? I used Palm Treos from 2004 to about 2009 or so, some of the keys even had a bump so you could locate the home row keys. You truly could type somewhat accurately without looking at the keyboard.

edit: wrong year

I mean it's still there, it's just not a physical key right?

And you can use ctrl [ instead which is closer to the home row anyway.

If you can't rebind keys, Ctrl [ is THE most ergonomic way to use VIM. I really don't understand why you would use the real Esc key. It's too far away to be useful.

It is, which means this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot which will look phenomenally dumb in 3 months.

The answer is simple. Apple doesn't think you should use VIM. You need to move on to more modern methods of programming.

I'll give you the same answer I'll give Apple: don't tell me how to be productive. I have already found vim key bindings to improve my development experience by almost an order of magnitude. You're not taking that away from me.

Nobody is doing either. You're being paranoid.

"Modernize your methods!" says Robert DeNiro, an actor who's been phoning it in since the late 90s.

I'm 99% sure the escape key will be there when in Terminal.app, I also imagine terminals like iTerm2 will have some really sweet TouchBar options to make it even better with all your console apps.

Apple may prove me wrong with the ergonomics of the TouchBar, but I've yet to find a virtual button that I've liked as much as a physical button.

The feel of a real button is great, but you can imagine the possibilities of what you can do with that space when you look at your MacBook keyboard right now and notice you likely never use a thing but the escape key, brightness and volume.

I haven't used it yet, so I can't judge it too much, but I imagine Escape actually works well since it's the top corner of the keyboard and easy to feel, if escape were anywhere else it would really suck.

The only F key I don't use regularly is f6. (Though f2 is mainly a Windows thing... I doubt I use it much in OS X.)

I've got a keyboard with clicky button-type Esc and F keys, which might be a fair approximation to the new F key strip. (Pressing them isn't a million miles away from clicking on the Force Touch trackpad.)

It's bearable, but not really very nice.

Yeah because you can usually find it without looking!

> I'm 99% sure the escape key will be there when in Terminal.app

Confirmed correct:

http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...

Wouldn't it be even nicer if you had an Insert/Cmd mode key instead, which showed which mode you were currently in and let you toggle?

The nice thing is with this touch bar thingy that's possible.

> The nice thing is with this touch bar thingy that's possible.

As long as it's supported by the program, of course.

What if you wanted to use mc (The Midnight Commander), which relies heavily on F keys? wait for the update?

Most frequently used keys? I would agree that in Windows using the Esc key is common, but in OS X really isn't.

If on some box where you cant setup vim like you want, CTRL[ works as escape and CTRL[[ when in command-line mode.

It's just the typical post Apple event trolling.

ESC key is required for productive use of Vim and even Photoshop! And since we are talking about graphics, Inkscape is heavy on Fn keys too.

It's a terrible post, and a terrible site (did it break anyone else's back button?)

I gave up on Mac as a development platform back in 2012 when they removed expose and replaced it with that terrible Mission Control garbage. Then I went back to Linux and discovered tiling window managers and haven't looked back. (and yes, I realize there are some good ones for mac now).

But I will say on this post that the escape key is a good point. I use it all the time. Sure you can rebind it, but it's not a useless, SysReq/ScrollLock type key. Most developers will have to rebind it if it doesn't appear on that touch bar thingy.

I couldn't agree more, this kind of stance is embarrassing from a professional standpoint. It's ridiculous to act like this one special arrangement of plastic on a computer is so crucial to development. All 'real' developers remap their own modifier keys. All 'real' developers use full cherry-mx mechanical keyboards. All 'real' developers write assembly with pen and paper and then print their stack of punchcards once. etc, etc.

Also, Apple seems to think it has an escape key (see the header pic which clearly shows esc as an option):

http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

I don't think it would be very hard for terminal.app (or other apps targeted at developers) to show esc f1 etc along the top when it is open, and it can strictly have better function keys because instead of f4 etc they can be customised to say what they'd actually do.

I agree the fuss over the touch bar is overplayed.

I do some programming (Xcode and VS Code), I do some 3D art (blender, substance), and I do some photography (Lightroom). Not all of those programs will support it at launch, but I expect they will sooner or later. And the new screen sounds fabulous (I have a wide gamut external screen already, though it's AdobeRGB instead of P3, the MacBook will do better in reds and not quite as well in greens). I wish it were cheaper, sure, but this looks like a fantastic computer to me.

Yeah, you need some different cables. You might need to rebind some hotkeys. It might take a while for some pieces of software to support the touch bar properly.

If you don't want to be an early adopter or you can't get over your Vim muscle memory, pick up a refurbished 2015 model and the rest of us can buy a few new USB cables and move on with our lives.

If I were still a Mac user (back to Linux a year or so ago), I think I'd be annoyed by the new laptops. Not enraged...just annoyed a bit. It's not the end of the world, but like a lot of Apple's recent moves, I'm left with a feeling of "OK, but why?"

With both the headphone jack removal on the iPhone and the function keys here, Apple has used "but they're old" as part of the justification. Playing a slideshow showing me a keyboard from 1970 that had function keys is not itself any form of argument against function keys. Sure, the touch bar can serve the purpose of the escape key. Crucially however, so could the escape key. The demos look neat enough, but it's hard to envision a 0.5" strip of touch screen being all that broadly useful outside a few niche cases where a long linear control is just what you need (e.g., audio scrubbing).

It's not that I think these laptops are bad necessarily. It's more that I think they're gimmicky. Apple seems to do an awful lot of things these days that remind me of Samsung circa 2012 or so -- "press this button to send your heartbeat to your spouse" kind of stuff. Meanwhile, Microsoft looks to be absolutely on fire.

You, sir, are absolute rigth.

The justification isn't just "they're old" though. It's "they're old and almost completely unused."

I know in Windows there are actual actions on the f-keys (F1 for help, F2 for rename, F5 for reload, etc.), but the Mac has no such equivalents. They're used for hardware and music control, and have this whole secondary mode of fn+F_ chords that hardly anyone touches.

The touch bar will be useful in nearly every app. I wasn't about to set up and memorize custom F-key bindings in every piece of software I use, so it's going to be more useful. And it allows for types of input that buttons couldn't offer to begin with.

With the headphone jack, it was "it's old and we have something better," which I'm not thrilled by (but I wasn't planning on getting a new phone anyway). The USB-C and removal of F-keys I'm totally on board with.

You may never use the Fn and ESC keys (I hardly do either), but this does add to the list of events developers now need to handle in order to develop cross-platform compatible software.

Using function keys as shortcuts is already a terrible idea on macOS because these are used to control the screen brightness, volume, play/pause etc. The TouchBar might actually make it easier for new users to realise what the Fn key does.

either you don't use macbook or not interested enough to look for how to change that behavior. It is a single flag in preferences that allow you to use the keys as function keys and screen brightness etc. with 'fn' key.

I know, but that doesn't make the F keys a good choice for cross-platform app developers. Nobody would release a web browser on macOS where F5 is the only way to reload the page - not before and not after the TouchBar.

Yes, thank you, I was starting to think I'm not actually a real developer, since I can't even remember the last time I even used a function key...

I was configuring a server while walking through the airport the other day (long story and I won't bore you with details) on my ipad. There is no control key on the ipad keyboard meaning that I could not save any files from the ssh terminal. It was not the greatest experience and I can definitely see these kinds of things happening on laptop now due to apples "courage". They seem to be gung-ho on breaking things that work perfectly in the name of "progress".

Which ssh client doesn't give you a ctrl key?

Unless Apple made an iPad SSH client I don't know about, this sounds like you were just using a bad app. The first two that popped up when I just googled for "ipad ssh client" clearly have control keys, as seen in their screenshots, and some other ones I've tried also have control keys.

When I concluded my Thinkpad Tablet 2 was a little bit too small to work as a primary machine (switched to a Helix 2 for that), I re-paired the bluetooth keyboard w/optical trackpoint with my tablet. The keyboard fits inside my jacket.

I can't express quite how wonderful it is on the occasions I don't have a bag with me to still be able to have a proper keyboard+mouse setup when something goes sideways.

> I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac.

ESC usage just off the top of my head: cancelling any dropdown (e.g. IDE autocomplete, browser autocomplete, Spotlight, quick file search in Atom/Sublime), cancelling any OK/cancel dialog (e.g. save as), the ESC + '.' sequence in Bash to get the last word of the last command.

I could map ESC to the caps lock key I suppose.

I actually use the caps lock key sometimes, e.g. FORTRAN 77.

If you go to the current Apple homepage, the first image they present you with shows the Esc key right there. So all of those things you currently do with it? You'll still be able to do with it.

You are not the only one, took the words out of my mouth

Well, he goes trough more than the bar.

I have a 2013 15" MacBook Pro, the diference with the top of the line that came out yesterday comes down a slight bump in the dedicated Graphics Card (which I don't appreciate since I use CUDA a lot and as such I actually prefer the GTX 750M to a only slightly better AMD card in the new model), and a 0.1 GHz bump in the processor (back from the 2.3 GHz i7 my MacBook Pro has).

I do understand that taking out the Esc and F* keys and replace it for a smart bar can be seen as a valid design option, but I can't see how shipping a Laptop 3 years later with, lets face it, basically the same specs and ask for the same price can be something positive.

I'm surprised why more devs are not getting upset at the lack of an Nvidia GPU option.

About devs I'm not sure, but I use it a lot at work for simulations (optimised for CUDA) and some Deep Learning and the Nvidia card is a must.

> ask for the same price can be something positive.

Didn't they bump up the base price?

They did, but this is the top of the line option. The price for that one remained the same.

As a vim user, esc is pretty important.

I would say the author clearly knows very little computer specs:

"The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope."

Because a 2010 2.4ghz dual core is identical to a 2016 2.4 ghz dual core.... I thought we got over comparing processors purely by their clock speed a long time ago. (I will agree that theyve been going with lower and lower power to allow for better battery life, this is a terrible way to make the comparison. Id much rather see a processor comparison graph here).

Personally I think this is a terrible decision, but then again, I think using a laptop keyboard for programming is a terrible decision too. I need multiple monitors and an external keyboard to get anything done, so I typically use a desktop, and then use a lightweight laptop (basically a chromebook) to remote into the desktop if I absolutely need to be mobile.

Also, "What other people are saying" and then listing 4 anecdotal quotes seems pretty uncompelling.

I imagine this is not a great developer's laptop. But apple fanboys will keep buying it and either stop using vim just so they can keep using apple or buy an external keyboard. And Im really not sure what else you could really want out of a laptop then.

I think rather than stop using vim people will remap the ESC key to something else, like caps lock, which many already do.

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

My laptop should work the way I want it to, not the other way around.

Then just map Esc to Caps Lock if you like. Unless you feel Caps Lock is still critical for commenting on YouTube videos, in that case I guess the new MBP is just a useless paperweight.

Nope - at the moment, my CAPS lock does nothing. But I'm not going to adjust my habit of where to find the ESC key just so I can have some pointless colourful lights.

Instead you could adjust your habit of where to find the ESC key for the sake of ergonomics (Caps Lock is much bigger and closer), like I did years ago, and take the colorful lights as a bonus.

What about the fact that I frequently jump between machines, many of which aren't mine? It's the same as people telling me to learn the Dvorak layout. Any possible productivity gains are lost in forever remembering what keyboard I'm on.

It will not remap his muscle memory.

If it's a key you use frequently, and no longer have the other option, muscle memory isn't that hard to retrain.

You're wrong. Muscle memory is very hard to retrain. To buy laptop with esc button is much more easy. It will be just not MacBook Pro, but it's their problems.

You're wrong? Muscle memory is not that hard to retrain. I had to do it when I first started using a Mac, on which most of the non-qwerty keys (and some of the qwerty ones too) are in a different location to the standard IBM layout.

But any laptop you buy is a product of some design chosen by other people and not something you can make work precisely as you want. You've adapted to the designs already available, not the other way around.

I realise that, but I'm mostly adapted either to common standards (like QWERTY) or something that provides a benefit to me. I would like a laptop that fits the habits I already have as much as possible, unless there is some good reason for it not to be that way. From the demos I've seen of the touch bar, it will be a gimmick that I very rarely use, so why should I invest in the change?

Also, I work about 50/50 from a USB keyboard. With this keyboard layout, I would need to remember which keyboard I'm using - awful for productivity.

Yes! I can't believe no one will sell me a laptop with the ESC key in the proper place for vi: http://vintagecomputer.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/LSI-ADM...

+1 I don't touch the escape key and I've used vim for quite some time.

By default, when in command-line mode CTRL[[ is the same as escape and when in insert mode CTRL[ is the same as escape.

> As a vim user, esc is pretty important.

Would it not be possible to map the dynamic touchbar keys to Esc when one is using vim?

During the demo, they showed an Esc key in the touch bar when using Terminal and a few other apps

Pretty much. I am struggling to understand the issue here.

Three points: The escape key is not where it is normally. The escape key is not present in all contextual operations (that is, you can open up a menu on the touchbar which causes the escape key to disappear in favor of a "close" button). There is no physical feedback that you've hit escape.

I will admit, the lack of taptic feedback on the touch bar is surprising to me, given it's presence in the touchpad

The only thing I can accept is the lack of feedback.

As long as the Escape keys exist when required, why worry about when they don't?

For me? Because I can't tell without looking at the keyboard whether it exists or not (and potentially whether it's been moved by some program's integration with the touchbar).

I've been touch typing for years now, and the idea that I have to look down at the keyboard to see if a key exists (a key that that has existed for the entirety of my computing history) is ludicrous.

But then how do you change the volume when using vim? Does vim need a special touchbar that basically completely emulates the old keys? That seems excessive.

Uh, I mean the touchbar has so many keys. Escape would be one of them and the touchbar could behave like old keys once there is Terminal.

I fail to see the issue here.

The volume controls remain on the right.

Did you watch the presentation? Or are you just pearl clutching to try and crap on something you don't like?

It's a perfectly fair point. The function keys provide 2 operations each, depending on whether you use the [fn] modifier, so does the ribbon duplicate this functionality or are we effectively left with half the functionality of the old keys?

Personally, I don't see how you can quickly modify the volume from the ribbon if the application you are using has repurposed that space for some other functionality it thinks you are more likely to want

I really like laptops for research and prototype stages of programming: my Macbook works great at finding, curating, reading, and composing documents; handling email, IM, VOIP, VPNs, etc to actually communicate with services; dealing with internet search and websites for services (github, aws, etc); and I find that I even do better at writing "naive" implementations of things with just some paper and a laptop at a coffee shop, because it forces me to skip over most of the technical details (eg, efficient file IO) and just write the essence of the program (ie, the main algorithm or idea I'm trying to implement).

For actually writing a finished production-ready product, a desktop with several monitors and a real keyboard is preferred. But being able to switch between the two modes -- research and creative, focused and technical -- gets the best results.

Do you mean Ctrl-[?

The ESC key in vim can lead to RSI:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11443012/how-to-remap-key...

So can repeated use of keyboard chords. Not to mention the absolute position and shape of the control key can change based on the type of keyboard you're using (such as wired apple keyboard vs. wireless vs. built-in).

What does an external keyboard give you that you can't get from a laptop keyboard? I like the macbook pro keyboard. I plug in two monitors and I'm good to go. Vim users should remap somewhere closer. I use cap locks. Will that not be possible anymore?

Extra space and ergonomics to keep coding into my seventies is why I use an external keyboard. I'm in my thirties currently.

Maybe by the time I'm 70 I'll be talking to my computers, but still: why wreck my wrists?

The big obvious difference is the numpad, or lack thereof. Plus, mechanical keyboards are a lot more comfortable I find. I know they're a bit of a meme right now, but I definitely prefer them over tiny short press chiclet keys.

For me; I use a mechanical keyboard; and have not found a laptop w/ a keyboard that offers that same feel.

However, that is a preference; when traveling I have no issues doing work while using a laptop keyboard.

Not only is it possible, but Apple supports mapping Caps Lock to Escape by default as of macOS Sierra 10.12.1: https://i.imgur.com/2oMcDRg.jpg

It'd be awesome if the caps lock key was led screen as well and showed it's current mapping. That'd be pretty sweet.

For me personally, Home, End, PgUp and PgDown keys. Also, MX switches. I can work without them, but I really think my tools should adapt to me, rather than vice versa.

Split layout (optional); numeric keypad; navigation keys; cursor keys; Print Screen key; 2 control keys; symmetrical meta keys; separate volume and mute keys.

Another big thing that external keyboards give is the ability to hit the control key with the meat of your hand rather than using a finger.

A delete button, instead of just backspace

Have you never used a quality, full-sized mechanical keyboard? There's something kind of joyful about clickety-clacking away.

Maybe my hands are too big, but I am just not really comfortable typing on a laptop keyboard. It's not as bad as trying to do anything on a miniscule on-screen keyboard on a phone, but I still tend to hit at least two or three keys at once far too often.

As a fellow Vim user, I don't use the escape key anymore. It's awkward to hit and I rebind it to "jj" (or more recently "jk"). It's unergonomic to reach for the escape key where it customarily is. If it were where Caps Lock is, it would make much more sense.

That said, I don't like rotating my hand or remove my fingers from the home row.

It's really a non-issue because you can rebind keys so easily, it's not even funny. Everyone seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill.

Vim user here. I use the ESC key; I can hit it in a fluent motion while lifting the hand completely off the home row (much like a pianist).

It gives an opportunity to relax the hand. For the same reason I'm not a fan of hjkl and often use the arrow keys.

This. I never "learned" how to type, and while I've tried, I simple can't get rid of almost 20 years of muscle memory typing like a buffoon. It's much easier for me to use ESC and the arrow keys than people who keep their hands on the home row.

> If it were where Caps Lock is, it would make much more sense.

You can remap your key bindings to exactly this layout using Karabiner-Elements.

In fact, Karabiner can map caps lock to both control (if you use it with another key) and escape (if you just press it). Which is fantastic.

No, not in Sierra, because Karabiner classic does not work in Sierra. Karabiner-Elements, which is Sierra-only, can only do basic key remapping. None of the fancy stuff.

Yet. There's a pull request in the works that would do just that:

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/pull/247

You could build from the latest update and get that functionality.

You don't need Karabiner-Elements for this. Esc remapping is supported in 10.12.1 natively.

> If it were where Caps Lock is, it would make much more sense.

macOS Sierra allows you to rebind Caps to the Esc key, which seems like a good compromise to me. As a non-vim user, I just wish I could bind Caps to other keys as well :(

Mapping caps to ESC is not really an option when you have it mapped to something else already, and I'd imagine a lot of devs do.

Have a look at Karabiner-Elements. The author recently open sourced it and kept up his brisk development pace. Every year he updates I'm lockstep with macOS releases and every year, I donate. Amazing project.

I tried "jk" but I hated seeing the cursor pause every time I used "j" to go down.

That doesn't seem right- I use "jj" to escape insert mode and nothing unusual happens when I use hjkl to navigate in normal mode. The only "pause" is when I type the letter "j" in insert mode.

Yeah, I agree. That doesn't seem right at all. I use "inoremap jk <ESC>" to remap my escape key.

If it were where Caps Lock is, it would make much more sense

Which, interestingly, is where ESC was on the computer that vim was first written for.

That's what I was getting at when I mentioned it :)

Bill Joy's keyboard had escape where caps lock is today.

inoreamp jj <ESC>

This has made my life so much better.

> As a vim user, esc is pretty important.

Only if you're too lazy to rebind it to any of the many more finger friendly options.

What if you log in to a large number of servers on a regular basis, then you'd need ESC for vi.

Or Ctrl-C or Ctrl-[

> As a vim user, esc is pretty important.

So then wouldn't the esc be present on Touch Bar? It's not like it's the "useless stuff" bar.

Yes, though having it be a physical key is also ... ummm ... key.

Good joke. Ok but you haven't used it yet, just ease up, it might be great!

Remap caps lock to escape. Karabiner-Elements can do this (Karabiner for pre-macOS).

I use a 12 inch MacBook on my lap in an office where I could have any number of external monitors. I'm quite productive.

My neck hurts and wrists cramp at this thought, at least put it on a desk!

Similar here. When my coworkers have to detach from their 23" monitors they say they're no longer able to do anything but email and chat. I have a guy who won't WFH because work won't buy him a monitor for it.

I nearly exclusively use VIm and any other editor I use has a VIm mode plugin installed. I pretty much can't work productively in anything else.

I can tell you that I haven't used Esc in ages. I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl (as it is a vastly more useful a key than Esc and Caps Lock is a much better position for it and is just as an extraneous as Esc is). I use Ctrl-C or Ctrl-[ to exit insert mode and it works just fine. In fact I understand that most experienced VIm users do this.

Esc is, by and large a useless key. Even if it wasn't you can remap keys as you like so feel free to map Esc to Caps Lock if you want. Taken alone the lack of Esc and Fn keys is not an argument against the design of the new MBP for developers.

Same. Been using vi as my primary command-line editor for 25+ years, and have never used the ESC key, and just use the default setup.

I don't even know what commands would use the ESC key?

ESC key is the default in vim, most vim users do use it.

Thanks for some sanity.

The other anecdote is I've been using vim for about 15 years, and use esc daily. I am constantly in multiple vim environments - different servers, different clients, different OS, etc. I don't have the luxury of saying "I'm going to install all my default vim keybindings and plugins on every vim installation I ever use". Walking someone else over the phone who has to do vim - I need to count on some standard defaults being there, and 'esc' is one.

So yeah - some of you "power users" - fine - you've never touched ESC in 20 years - good for you. You're in the minority.

There are several built-in ways to get from insert mode to normal mode in vim, only one of which has now been removed.

Vim users that use escape to leave insert mode are not exactly a majority of Mac users. Also, many people have been complaining about the location of Escape for such an important command. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4416512/why-use-esc-in-vi...

Having said that, I use Escape myself in Vim - you know what? I'll adapt.

This has nothing to do with the new MBP being unsuitable for developers. This is about power users being forced to abandon ingrained habits.

Isn't ctrl-[ default on vim too ?

No, it's just a property of ASCII that (ctrl [) = (0x9f & 0x5b) = 0x1b = esc.

You don't need to customize your vim keybindings if you map Caps Lock to ESC at the OS level, which is a builtin preference as of macOS 10.12.1.

I've been using vi for over 20 years, but not a power user or anything (emacs for code, vi for quick edits), and have no idea how to use it without esc. Did vim change something? How do you switch modes?

Ctrl-[ == Esc. I had to learn Ctrl-[ three years or so back due to bluetooth keyboard paired with tablet and insufficient time to troubleshoot why Esc wasn't working, and then discovered that it's actually easier on my wrists to use Ctrl-[ and never went back.

I'd have to say that your use case is in the minority too.

just matching anecdote for anecdote...

For what commands? I'm trying to look up vim commands that would use the ESC key, and I only see one: https://www.fprintf.net/vimCheatSheet.html#select http://tnerual.eriogerg.free.fr/vimqrc.html

I'm not even a power user, & after 25 years, I just know the basic few commands that you need to do anything - insert, delete, search/replace, save, & quit.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!

ESC is the key that (roughly) takes you back to normal mode from insert mode, visual mode, etc. If you aren't using it, then you're either using one of the other ways to get back to normal mode (like CTRL-[), or you are using Vi in a very non-standard way.

See, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi#Interface

To switch modes from insert back to normal mode. I assumed ESC was the second key any Vim user used, just after `i`.

From the docs: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/insert.html#i_%3CEsc%3...

End insert or Replace mode, go back to Normal mode. Finish abbreviation.

Note: If your <Esc> key is hard to hit on your keyboard, train yourself to use CTRL-[.

I use vim, I just assumed that when you open Terminal, a virtual escape key would appear in the touch bar. It'd still be in the corner, so fitts law would still apply, and it'd be easy to find.

Yes, this is what I assumed too. Is there any proof that this isn't the case? I'm not sure what the worry is about.

What do you use to get out of insert mode? Like, you've just finished typing some text and want to save and quit, what do you press?

EDIT: Thanks for the replies, other people. I personally use ^C, I was curious what 'mozumder specifically used. :)

Ah, I see. I didn't even consider that a function command.

I was expecting more commands to use the ESC key?

Yeah, I'm not sure I'd even call it a command - but it is pretty fundamental to vi usage, unless you're using some alternative like ^C or the "remap typing 'jk' to Esc" trick. When you're saying you've never used the Esc key, you mean you only use the Esc key to take you out of insert mode, I guess?

Yes. I do use ESC that to exit insert mode. Sorry for any confusion.

I was expecting commands to be anything you did after the typing in colon.

The usual answer is 'C-[' or 'kj' (having added the appropriate line to your .vimrc).

Which is fine if you do everything locally (because you control that configuration), but not having escape really sucks when you are on servers a lot and you can't necessarily go changing vim settings around.

It's also difficult when using programs that emulate Vim's keybindings, because they tend to only use ESC by default.

C-[ is available by default; it's the actual control sequence sent by escape in many terminals.

CTRL-[ (of course if you're not using a QWERTY keyboard, it may be hard to hit)

I don't know why that would be anyone's preference given that if you used telnet to connect to a remote shell, ^] is the default escape character. So using ^[ to exit input mode is dangerously close to popping you out of your telnet session. Someone who claims to have used vi for 25+ years (get off my lawn, ssh didn't exist back then) would have likely used telnet and been bitten by that more than once.

I didn't switch to Ctrl-[ until sufficiently recently that anything I'm running vi-ish things on is over ssh.

I will, however, never forgive Excel for Esc being "abandon edit".

I have `jk` mapped to that in my vimrc. It's far nicer than ESC.

I love jk, been using that one for at least 8 years. I even got in the habit of tapping it a few times while thinking, sort of like how you might sometimes shake your leg or whatever. I trained myself off of that though when I had to use Eclipse more and more -- edits or undoes to a file can bring Eclipse to its knees....

I have 'jj' mapped to ESC.

Are you talking about the same editor? From a 1996 vi man page [0]:

  There are commands that switch you into input mode.
  There is only one key that takes you out of input mode,
  and that is the <escape> key. (Key names are written
  using less-than and greater-than signs, e.g. <escape>
  means the ``escape'' key, usually labeled ``esc'' on
  your terminal's keyboard.)  If you're	ever confused 
  as to which mode you're in, keep entering the <escape>
  key until vi beeps at you.

[0] http://www.sbras.ru/cgi-bin/www/unix_help/unix-man?vi

Ctrl-[ == Esc.

I'm a happy user of http://ex-vi.sf.net/ and can confirm that, since it's the exact same key code, it works -fine-.

That alternative doesn't work in many programs that use vim keybindings. Ctrl-c doesn't usually work as an alternative outside of vim either.

That's only true for a terminal. Programs built on electron don't behave the same way with vim emulation plugins.

Map Caps-Lock to Esc?

Esc is, by and large a useless key

I'm not a Mac User, but I use THE ESC key extensively to cancel out of dialogs.

Also... the F1 keys are like super important for debugging. Sure, you can click with the damn mouse in the button for step in, over, run, etc, but the thing is faster with F keys.

Even if mac apps come mapped to other keys, many peaplo still runs windows with bootcamp, virtual box etc and wine programs in apple computers, making things even harder.

And about external keyboards? Apple keyboards comes with F keys... they are going to be uselles now?

The F1 keys are not important for debugging. When I'm debugging, I'm not concerned with what's faster. So I use the icons and the mouse.

This is really just a war of opinions now, but the F1 keys are indispensable to me. My fingers rest on the hotkeys for "step into", "step over", "run to breakpoint" and I can keep my eyes glued to the watch list, inspecting the variables at each step. Some times you want to quickly step into functions, other times step over, and it's just really handy to have it mapped to keys.

I'm not even a power emacs user or something (IntelliJ is my preferred IDE). YMMV of course, but I find the hotkeys super useful.

But what if your IDE simply adds the debugger buttons to the touch strip instead? They could even have the correct icons and update state as you debug. Seems even better to me.

And/or other keyboard shortcuts. This is not some immutable situation.

I don't know why everyone is unnecessarily freaking out over this non-issue that has so many alternative solutions, some of which will be superior.

It's really odd when people say "I need one function key for some application specific operation", when those kinds of things are pretty much exactly what an adaptable, customizable touch row is perfect for. If apple could have read the touch bar complaints before, they probably would have been convinced to put a touch bar in earlier.

Aha, so you prefer the way that your sight just go back and forth between screen and touch bar.....?

If i'm using the F keys, it already is.

Main point for touch strip is changing icons/state. But that's absurd because not even my mother blind types. This is clearly another fancy thing that removes functionality.

Nobody types function keys blindly however

I have a blank keyboard, I never look at it, when I use for debugging I'm extremely fast as I don't have to look back and forth on keyboard and screen or use mouse (who uses mouse that much anyway?), I'd miss F keys if I bought the new macbook pro.

I hear all this talk about no more ESC key, but couldn't they potentially just put one up there on the bar, albeit not a real clickable key?

There will be one, they've shown it in some of the promotional imagery. I think everybody is just up in arms about the physical key being gone.

I'm a heavy vim user and use the ESC key all the time. If I get the new MacBook Pro I'll probably see how the touch key works, and then rebind if it's necessary. It's not the end of the world.

Command-period on macOS.

I'd expect that if a dialog is focused, the Esc key will be there.

Steve Jobs is smiling from heaven. He hated keys.

But seriously I use esc all the time to come in and out of modes in VIM.

I also use it in VIM mode in RStudio, VS Code and many other text editors.

FUNCTION KEYS - I use them all day with my IDEs. F2 is my go to help files.

Not even a developer key: `escape` is a very convenient UI mechanism for getting out of something modal or otherwise overlayed and open.

Command-period is the native Mac way to do it, though ESC works as well.

Esc is important in Excel too. More users than Vim.

The first thing that came to my mind was what will Vim users do without an escape key.

When did you switch to the Caps Lock mapping? How long did it take you to get use to it?

I'm a vim user as well, and I'm actually shocked at how many users apparently still use the ESC key. I actually didn't know any regular vim users did that, because to me, it seems super inefficient. I don't say that as a put-down or anything like that. But if you use vim, I'd highly recommend remapping caps lock to Esc. I think you will get used to it within a day and will never go back.

I'm a long-time vim user, and I use the esc for two reasons. First, because it's critical muscle memory, and if I go to a machine that is not my own don't want to be crippled. I would still consider remapping caps lock (as opposed to .vimrc remapping) since that would work when ssh'ed into arbitrary machines, but the problem there is I'm already using it for control, and because the control key is resized on the laptop keyboard I can't develop normal muscle memory when moving between different apple keyboards.

Personally I think people make way too big a deal about the escape key being difficult to hit. It's right there in the corner, never been a problem for me.

I've tried ctrl-c, ctrl-[, and ESC. The one that stuck for me was ESC. The others usually don't work in other programs that use vim keybindings.

Many people already map capslock to ctrl. You could map ctrl to ESC, but then it gets uncomfortable when switching computers, and it goes against 10+ years of muscle memory.

I tried remapping capslock once, but it got too confusing when switching computers.

I am a developer who writes code while in tmux and vim. I have remapped my Caps Lock key so it's Ctrl when presses with another key and Escape when pressed on it's own.

I used this software to do this https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

So wait for Apple to remove the Caps Lock key in the next generation.

> I use Ctrl-C or Ctrl-[ to exit insert mode and it works just fine. In fact I understand that most experienced VIm users do this.

That's pretty uncommon to imply it's generalizable. Most vim users, I feel comfortable in saying, actually use 'Esc', or a key mapped to the same. Speaking for myself, I can't see why I'd want to use two keys when one would do.

Well having to stretch your little finger all the way to the corner of the keyboard gets pretty annoying when you have to do it all the time, as you do with Vim. Much easier to remap another key close to the home row, and since caps-lock is so redundant, it is the obvious candidate.

So whether you map it directly to Esc or to a modifier, the parent's point stands: Vim users don't need the Esc key and are probably better off without it.

classic apple fanboy huh? I've a shortcut for my F1 key which toggles terminal on full screen. What there? You don't expect me to map one key for that as well, do you? I'd still prefer a physical button.

Two things:

- can you give me some details on your remap setup on macOS? if you have dotfiles somewhere that'd be great.

- as a vim user who only uses vim as an editor, I challenge the assumption that touch Esc is a horrible thing. Esc is a very special key and it may turn out to be ok for it to _be_ different, and _feel_ different.

> As a vim user, esc is pretty important.

I am pretty sure that when you open a terminal, esc and function keys will be up there. It'll not be a mechanical key, but I'm sure it'll still work.

In their presentation, Terminal had some contextual functionality mapped to it, including a tray which slid out and hid the escape key.

So no, by default, you will not get the F keys when you open Terminal.

I wonder if any of the people watched the demo. They showcased Terminal, and there was an escape key on the touch bar. They also specifically said pressing the "fn"'key would show function keys on the touch bar, which is exactly what you have to do on current Apple keyboards to use the function keys.

It seems like a non-issue to me unless people simply don't like the touch bar not being physical keys, which is fine, because they can just get the other Pro without it.

I haven't. I based my prediction on the assumption Apple engineers are not stupid. For what I observe, it's quite the opposite.

The bar's function varies according to the application being used. It should be trivial to make, say, iTerm, which is immensely popular (I use it myself) have Esc and function keys available by default.

I imagine Cathode (http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/), another favorite of mine, will have beautiful function keys.

> because they can just get the other Pro without it.

Plus, it's cheaper.

>As a vim user, esc is pretty important.

If you're a Vim user and have escape as one of the keys farthest away from you, they did you a favour. I don't mean that as a defence of the MacBook Pro. At the very least, switch caps lock and escape if you're not using caps lock for something else.

   But apple fanboys will keep buying it

It's extremely patronizing and dismissive to insinuate that only "apple fanboys" buy macbook pros. There are plenty of reasons to buy an apple laptop without being a "fanboy". Searching for the best laptop leads many to apple simply because of logistics/price/ease-of-use.

That said, most of the other stuff you say is true.

To be honest, there aren't that many and they're becoming fewer and further apart.

My point was more that there are people who buy Apple regardless of quality or features. If you buy Apple because it's the best for you, go for it. I agree that they are quality built laptops.

You don't find people who are dedicated to buy only Dell laptops even if something negative happens. There are no Dell fanboys (that I've ever encountered). If Dell does something stupid, people will buy ASUS, HP, Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc and get basically the same experience.

The point was less that ONLY fanboys buy macbook pros, but moreso that Apple has a large enough loyal fanbase that they can basically do whatever, and people will defend the decision.

You will hear people say that 16gb of RAM is a non-issue and if you need more than that you are doing it wrong. That is a fanboy response. A logical response is "I don't need 16gb of RAM, but I'm not everyone, so I'm not going to start a debate over this"

The processor speed is less important to me. But the lack of more than 16 GB of RAM is a serious problem. As a developer, I frequently run a large number of VMs at once. My current laptop has 16 GB of RAM, and I frequently need more to run all of the VMs that I need, so I wind up having to use my workstation with has 32 GB of RAM, and just connect to that remotely when I'm on my laptop. That's cumbersome and doesn't work well when I'm on the road in places with flaky connectivity (I travel a lot, as I work remotely and come into the office, so being able to do all of my work on my laptop would be a big win).

The escape key issue doesn't bother me as much, but I'm not a Vim user and I already have Caps Lock mapped to escape or control depending on whether it's a modifier or not. I do use the function keys occasionally in cross-platform development tools like gitk, but I'm sure that other keybindings can be substituted and I'd be able to deal with that.

But the lack of RAM beyond 16 GB pretty much means there's no reason for me to upgrade from my 3 year old laptop. I would have considered upgrading this cycle if they offered more RAM, but as it is I'll probably hold off. Maybe if they release another in a year or so with more RAM I'll upgrade; if not, I may just switch to a Lenovo or other laptop that has more expansion room.

3 years without a bump in RAM capacity seems like an awful lot. I realize that Moore's Law is flattening out, but stagnating for 3 years like this seems like a long time.

The interesting thing is that Apple just released the ability to remap Caps-Lock to Esc. natively in macOS 10.12.1, which doesn't seem to be incidental.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818839

I find it interesting and perhaps a bit telling that the most common response to the Esc key portion of this post is remap/use a different key binding.

How is that a reasonable response? To me, the reasonable response would be, "I remap/whatever, but maybe it's best if you look at a different platform where this isn't a concern." Or, "I can see how that's a problem, here's what I do."

We do have some responses in the 'reasonable' category, by we also have replies like "Esc is, by and large a useless key." and "It's really a non-issue because you can rebind keys so easily, it's not even funny" and "the ESC key in vim can lead to RSI" and "Only if you're too lazy to rebind it to any of the many more finger friendly options". All of them saying, "You're doing it wrong" - even if not in so many words.

Telling someone they're wrong to dislike a specific change because a workaround happens to exist says to me that you're making a whole lot of assumptions about other people based on what works for you at best, and being patronizing at worst.

hmm, looking at the comments -- am I the only who uses Fn + Arrow Keys for Page Up/Down and Home/End purposes? How can you not?

I realize I don't know the first thing about MacBook keyboards. Are you saying they don't have Page up, Page down, Home and End?

Maybe a Windows thing but I use Function keys everyday, F3 for incremental search, F5, F9, F10, F11 for debugging. Not having these keys would be handicapping.

Home/end are not really necessary on a Mac, where you can use cmd+arrow keys instead (left=start of line, right=end of line, up=start of document, down=end of document).

The function keys are also not commonly used by apps because the system maps them to brightness control, volume, play/pause etc. by default and you need to use the Fn key to produce the actual function key keystrokes.

The convention for incremental search is: cmd+F to open the find dialog, cmd+G for "Find Next" (which is great because it's right next to cmd+F), and cmd+E cmd+G for "search for selection". Every macOS app works that way and the F3 key will not be missed.

It's really not that bad. The only key I miss on Mac keyboards is forward delete (Del).

You can change Fn keys behaviour from prefs and I believed all developers would have defaulted to Function keys but seems not so.

Chrome, IntelliJ, VSC all use Fn keys for debugging, and also at least I have mapped most of function keys to some tasks, like F5 for open symbol etc.

Touchbar is only good for some slider like things where continuous strip will help. It is also good for novice users like MSOffice ribbon, they can see a lot of things on screen now and they don't have to hunt in menu or remember shortcuts.

But for a real pro user spending whole day in few softwares, it makes no sense. I have seen pro photoshop users using 3-4 keys long shortcut like second nature, they need access to tonnes of features and variants so more keys the merrier.

Honestly, I haven't seen any real use cases of the touchbar, smileys and photo slider is cute but not something on top of my list to optimise.

fn+Backspace = forward delete

With the touch bar, you could now have buttons (virtual, of course) with those labels and functions.

I also make good use of the F-keys, as well as the pgup/pgdn/home/end/del block. I use both Linux and Windows.

You're describing the 'Fn' mod-key. Everyone else here is describing the F-keys. The 'Fn' key is still there and does what it always did. In fact, it calls up the traditional 'Fn' keys on the touchbar, functionally just the same as the old MBPs, making all this whining look particularly stupid.

I find really amusing that after the Macbook reveal last year half of the response comments (in sites like ArsTechnica) were of the gist "just give me an updated Macbook Air, with the same form factor and a better screen".

Well, the base Macbook Pro model does exactly that. There is also an option (cheaper!) to keep the function keys.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-...

I might be getting old and grumpy, but more than anything else it boggles my mind when apparently everyone believes they should be the target user Apple (or Microsoft, or Google,or...) design their product for, and they consider a personal insult when that is not the case.

I don't think there was ever a time where the laptop market had so many options, at all price levels, many of those of such a high quality.

You don't like that a particular manufacturer is offering ? Vote with your wallet and choose another option, don't whine.

I think there are lot of us who may never have really like Mac hardware, but find the OS is the best option out there to get our work done. Its just a little sad it locks us to specific hardware platform as well.

I've used the Lenovo's "adaptive keyboard". It's crap to use, especially for development. FN keys are especially easy to remap for macros or lesser used functions, and having no haptic feedback essentially kills their function for a touch typist.

It's also no wonder that newer carbon models came back to regular fn keys.

I actually bought/buy macbooks for their build quality, and generally only install linux on them. Looks like this particular model marks the end of this path.

I think it's a completely fair post.

Devs are a huge market for Apple, but Apple is ignoring them.

This isn't about ESC, it's about whether Apple has any interest in acknowledging the dev market and keeping devs on board.

The answer is "no."

Apple is making no concessions to developers or professional power users who need performance. Instead, Apple is producing vanilla-grade laptops with a touch of gimmicky brand frosting to justify the high price.

The real heuristic is skimping on performance and connectivity to maintain margins. The cost to users is significant lost productivity.

This is the MacBook Pro Intern Edition. It could have been more, but that's where Apple is now.

They're ignoring the giant behemoth that is ....Vim users..? What?

Wait till the EMACS crowd gets a whiff of how Apple refuses to sell pedals for their keybindings, then Apple is truly in trouble.

Look, I know VIM is popular, but so is XCode, so is Sublime, so is Atom, so is TextMate, so is a multitude of other text editors for God's sake, that to claim that Apple is somehow "abandoning the entire software development community", as if VIM users somehow speak for all of them, is pretty whiny and unrealistic.

Do you think Apple really worries that a bunch of what, Open Source "hackers" producing yet another Ruby testing framework are now going to abandon their platform? Seriously? Get off your high horse, man.

There's thousands of Visual Studio developers in the Windows world and thousands of XCode developers in the OS X world who don't give two shits about your 1970's vintage terminal mode text editor. Apple will be fine. Software developers (again, a much larger group than you obviously think) are also going to be fine.

And aren't you guys always bragging what power users you are? So now that one (remappable!!!!) key is gone your entire world is crashing around you?

If you're such a fossil that you can't adapt to the absence of this one key, that already is of extremely limited use for 99.9% of people, how did you cope with the disappearance of the floppy disk, the caps lock key, the parallel port, VGA, optical disc drives? How did you ever adjust from storing backups of your code on floppy disks once that went away?

What happens when Windows laptops one day follow suit and remove the Escape key and the (just as useless) Caps Lock key? If VIM users can't adapt to a simple change such as this, maybe you deserve to fade to irrelevancy? Just keep buying 2008-era laptops off Ebay well into the 2030's, I guess?

Truly pathetic rants, truly.

Anybody that's trying to use Visual Studio on one of these is going to be cursing the lack of F-buttons.

I hardly ever used them when I used VS, so I don't see why I would be cursing their lack now.

Were you clicking around the menus all the time or using a heavily modded keymap? Building, running, almost all of the debugger commands, viewing property pages, switching between code and designers, all make heavy use of the function keys out of the box. Those are pretty common tasks.

VS would probably repurpose the ribbon to provide debugging keys at that point.

So basically what you are saying is that Devs need to adapt to apple products not the other way around, because apple knows best.

IMO what is really pathetic is people tying the hardware to the software, I don't buy "Windows Laptop", I buy a Laptop with the hardware that suits my needs and install Linux on it if it's not already installed, but I guess my opinion is irrelevant as I'm an emacs core user and use VIM as a text editor. Let me give you a tip here, If you buy a Laptop and chose to have it without Windows pre installed you will get a discount ( The windows License fees)

And guess What I will never pay a license fee for an IDE (from M$ or Apple) that do not match half what I get from my open source "vintage editor", but that just only me!!!

I put it to you that you've never used a debugger if you've never used Fn keys.

Visual Studio is the only place I've really used the function keys (F5, F10, F11), and I rarely use VS anymore. Outside of that I use F2 when in any kind of GUI that permits renaming of a file or folder.

All of which can be rebound.

What about IntelliJ or Chrome or any IDE for that matter.

I use gdb and never use function keys.

To use the function keys on an old MacBook Pro, you have to chord with the "fn" key to override the brightness, volume, etc controls.

To use the functions keys in the touch bar in the new MacBook Pro, you have to chord with the "fn" key as well.

So where is the difference...

It has always been possible to set those keys to default to F-key functions instead of media functions. The difference here is that the position may not be constant, and you can't feel with your fingers what you're over before you commit to activating the function, so you must look. In some contexts you can "get used to it", but this is a steeper uphill battle.

I would not be surprised if one of the customizations of the touch bar is to set the function keys as the default.

If you have to use debugger then your code must be really bad

I'm a programmer and I'm pretty sure most of developers use F-keys and, especially, esc button. Let's believe together :)

Do you use USB or HDMI? You don't use any of the function keys on a mac, like volume, brightness, play/pause? I use those constantly.

And then the lackluster specs. That alone leaves me no real reason to upgrade.

The claims about CPU MHz are hilarious, too. It's an entirely different CPU generation.

Developer here. Dealbreaker for me. All my tools heavily use function keys and escape. If I had no other options I'd just deal with it, but Apple is competing with themselves: since they didn't bother to upgrade the actual performance, I have no incentive to move from my current macbook. And when I do, I'll probably just buy a different brand if they don't release a laptop that's actually useful for me.

Non-developer here. The new MacBook has both an escape key and function keys, as could clearly be seen in the demos and screenshots on Apple.com. So all your tools will still work.

Saying the new MacBook doesn't have an escape key is like saying the iPhone doesn't have an "L" key. It does when you need it to.

I use the F keys a lot in Matlab, but I'd guess that Matlab users are just as much a minority of developers that developers are of Mac users, so I can see why it's not a big deal to Apple. Maybe Mathworks will add some of the functionality to the touch bar anyway.

Apple didn't need to remove the Fn row to have their touch bar.

Surely the weird thing about removing the escape key is that it is used to bring up the force quit menu (cmd-option-esc). Pretty ingrained in my mind at least, but to be fair not needed that often.

> I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac.

While my primary isn't a Mac, my default left hand resting position on my keyboard is index finger on ESC and thumb on ALT.

The ESC key should hardly be a deal breaker for Vim devs - most remap it to caps lock on a Mac because it's easier to reach.

The 13" model has a version that keeps that row anyway. And the Touch Bar does still have a function key row/view? with ESC. MacVim and iTerm could probably add the functionality that the whole row is an ESC key when they are the active apps.

For me though, Apple got it wrong by releasing a gimmick (touch bar) which may be useful for some groups of Pro users (designers/film editors?) but I can't see adding much value to what I think is their largest group - software developers.

For me my ideal developer laptop is small, light and powerful. So while it's great the Pro is now the same size and weight as the air (13" model), I think they could have gone even smaller - see the Dell XPS 13. A 13" full powered (i7, 16GB ram) in a 12" body (by having an edge to edge 'infinity' screen). Basically they should have released a MacBook that can run an i7 and 16GB ram.

a huge number of technical types use vim and other CLI/Terminal type tools daily. There are many tools and apps that assume the Escape key exists.

'almost never use the Fn or ESC keys'

Then I'll wager your knowledge of the capabilities of the apps you use is limited and if you are developing UIs I'll bet that while you consider them slick and sophisticated, they are in reality limited and inefficient.

I'm always amazed at how techies are so often unable to consider other people's points of view. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but no.

If you don't like the new design, that's totally fine. I've seen a lot of people saying that. But when you say that the new design is bad for everybody, or bad for millions of people you haven't met, based solely on your own personal reasons, you've lost it.

I'm a developer. The only reason I'm not buying one of these is because what I currently have is just fine, and I don't feel like spending the money. The touch bar looks really cool. It might not end up being very useful, but I think I'd like to have it. If it's not useful, well, no big deal.

Function keys? Never use 'em. Escape key? Having it available as a touch button doesn't seem like a major problem. If it turns out to be, then I'll learn or configure some other shortcut for it and get on with my life.

Now, that's just me. Your opinion may differ, and that's fine. I just ask you to have the same attitude. It's silly to say that this machine "is not a laptop for developers." It's not a laptop for you, apparently, and for people with similar needs and opinions. But not all developers are you.

Here is my issue with the new touch bar as a general UI element. Things meant for fingers should have tactile feedback unless you're also looking at the same location (like a touch screen) where you can get visual feedback. This offers no tactile response when used, and its layout changes constantly, thus it needs to be looked at to use it. That means you have to shift your vision focus from screen to keyboard repeatedly as you move through apps (or even while in the same app if they make the content dynamic). To me this is bad UI design at a fundamental level.

I can see this being handy as a "slider" style control (though a touch pad edge could be as well). Otherwise though, especially when used as "buttons" my opinion is that it is going to be very tiresome to use extensively and slow general interactions down. If you need this kind of interaction style it should be on a touch screen without forcing the eyes to change focus or monitor changes in peripheral vision.

TLDR There is a reason we touch type. Touch. Exactly what this is missing.

I think the idea here is that it's easier to look down than it is to spend a long period of time holding your arm up to a laptop screen. Either you're moving you're eyes off the screen or lifting your hands up off the keyboard - I'd say there are arguments for and against each, and I look forward to seeing how this solution actually works in use as opposed to the armchair theories we've been seeing.

I don't think the "shift your vision" part is a big deal, since it's right next to the screen. I do think there is a disadvantage in not having tactile feedback all the same, and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. As it stands currently, the presence of tactile feedback for those keys doesn't do me any good, because I don't use them. If the touch bar ends up being useful for me, it'll be a net gain even if the experience of locating the controls is worse.

For people who actually use the function keys, I sympathize and I can totally understand how this is likely to be a huge step backwards. But "developers" does not equate to "uses function keys regularly."

I type a lot. But 99+% of that is A-Z and common symbols. While I normally touch type, I use the function row so infrequently that I don't have the muscle memory to correctly locate the f-keys. The only ones I can do blind are esc, volume up and volume down, and even those I only type rarely. All the rest require me to stop and look at the labels on the keys.

Furthermore, I'm not really using the key shape for those to hit them. I'm mostly just hitting them based on their relative position from the home row. So IMHO at least this wouldn't really affect me - If I end up with one of these laptops I'll still probably be able to hit the few I do infrequently use without looking just fine, and for all the rest I'm looking for labels anyways.

But when you say that the new design is bad for everybody...

It's a little funny, considering the inverse of this is basically a core plot point in "Silicon Valley". Life imitates art imitates life.

Techies don't say it's useless for everybody, though. They say it's useless for techies. And that should be a statement they are allowed to make.

I disagree. "Techies" is a huge group and it's ridiculous to think you can speak for all of them, especially when your argument comes down to function keys. As I said, I'm a member of that group and I don't use them. This person is saying that the new MacBook Pro is not for me. What makes it OK for them to speak for me?

See it this way. On one side you have a group this person cares about. On the other side there is this person, you, he doesn't care about. Maybe he just doesn't count you as part of the group as he says "we techies"? Then he's not speaking for you, right?

It's not so political correct, but that is how we techies are. Get used to it if you want to deal with us.

My problem is thus: I'm worried I won't like the new laptop and its going to decrease productivity.

I have a very small desire for change. I do like my existing mid-2014 15" MBP but I beat on them really hard so at almost 2 years old, it needs a replacement now.

I'm worried that I will basically end up in a position where I won't have anything that is a suitable replacement for this laptop when it breaks.

The lack of ANY USB ports is frustrating too. I have a hardware USB YubiKey Nano dongle that I leave permanently plugged into my computer for 2FA to various services. I don't want to loose the ability to do that (and I'm not even sure its physically possible to have something like that for USB-C -- its just too small)

I use vim for everything and thus obsessively use the esc key (yes, I know you can remap it, but I'll be fighting against 20+ years of muscle memory). Will the new virtual ESC key be enough? I hope so.

The lack of magsafe also really irks me. I used to destroy chargers like crazy before magsafe. Replacing magsafe with USB-C doesn't seem like a positive step to me.

I really want to love this computer, because I really don't see another option. I'm just worried that I won't and then I won't have any better options.

Bah, these entitled kids. I guess being old enough to remember keyboards before they had escape keys helps, but ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket. Read your ASCII table! C-[ is even a quicker type avoiding RSIs from all those long pinky reaches.

(More seriously, as much as it bothers me to retrain my pinky, most uses of the escape key would be many times better if the lefthand side of the touch bar had a word for the function, like stop being full screen, cancel, leave menu, or whatever. The function would then be discoverable instead of secret lore.)

I had no idea you could use C-[ as ESC

It's also a kinda crappy alternative, because it's not possible on a large number of non-English keyboard. Ctrl+c is also an option, although I think there's a slight difference.

Yep, ctrl+c is different than esc

ESC is 0x1B, traditionally the CTRL key reset the two highest bit of the ASCII code, [ is 0x5B, if you reset the two highest bits of 0x5B you get 0x1B which is why ESC and CTRL-[ are the same thing.

CTRL-C is completely different.

I wonder how many vim users have tried using CTRL + [ for the first time today. Muscle memory being what it is I fully expect that nobody will swap over to this new and improved Apple way of pressing the Escape key.

And vi too - works just fine, but you have a valid point about muscle memory, which is pretty much the only kind of memory many of us have left when it comes to vi-like editors, since the key sequences disappeared from our brains decades ago!

Much to my surprise, after I was forced by circumstances to use Ctrl+[ for a month or so, I found I didn't actually want to go back to Esc.

Had it only been a week or two I suspect my muscle memory wouldn't've shifted though.

I am on Windows and it seems that not every program accepts C-[ as ESC. However Vim in Cygwin does accept it as ESC.

That is kind of cool! It is much easier to hit then ESC all the way up in the northwest corner of my keyboard.

A lot of non-command-line developer apps use Escape though, like all Jetbrain's IDEs.

What are the odds that someone at JetBrains didn't order one of these because they realize how cool it would be if the IDE displayed real terms like “Refactor”, “Step Into”, “Open method declaration”, “Deploy”, etc. for the very large number of context-dependent shortcuts a modern IDE has?

I use ␛ as the Meta key in Emacs. I just tried using C-[ instead. It works, but you have to press down both CTRL and [ at the same time; you can't flam CTRL and then [.

I am reminded also of one time trying to write C code on an IBM AS/400, only to find that the keyboard did not have square bracket keys at all...

Awwwwww man!! You just brought back such green-CRT-tinted memories there...

> Bah, these entitled kids.

Yeah these entitled kids paying > $3000 for a product, they should just shut up and give money to Apple /s

What do you mean by that last line? Well for one thing the bar is customizable by each app, but still, from the examples, they show very clear icons of function.

This is already far superior than just F1, F2, etc, which are far far more cryptic than a descriptive icon.

That's the thing, most apps already do use F keys for custom bindings, but you have to manually memorize them for each different app. Here, you at least get to see the correct icon in each program you're using.

And as a bonus, you get variable size buttons, sliding input, colors, and much more that just isn't possible with simple buttons.

Ha, this is like "walked 5 miles in the snow uphill to school" territory.

I personally don't like the idea of losing some keys, keys are nice, my fingers can feel where they are at all times. But that said my fingers also know exactly where to go without the feedback of the keys. I do like the prospect of programming a custom touch bar for various programs, that seems kind of neat, but I would have also been fine with keeping my function keys (I mean custom bindings are what function keys are for in the first place, no?).

How about non-US keyboard layouts? [ alone is altgr-8 on german layout.

I wondered about that in the other thread. But it actually works with Ctrl+Ä or Ctrl-Ü (depending whether you are in OSX or Windows) in the console.

However this still does not help for a missing ESC in other applications (like IDEs where you sometimes want to close an annoying intellisense dialog).

  > ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket

Technically — and here I go of on the stereotypical irrelevant nerd tangent (bind the adjectives as you will) — it's the other way around. ASCII was certainly designed with Shift and Control modifiers in mind, and arranged so that a device could have those keys merely flip a bit (see e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard>), but nothing actually mandates that those keys exist and that Control+h generate Backspace or Shift+h generate H.

I absolutely agree that Control+x ↦ x&0x3F is an established convention, and it continually annoys me that Windows and Windows-aping software violates it.

This doesn't even get into the dongle problem. The simplest example is that if you want to hook up Apple's flagship phone up to their flagship laptop for development, you need a dongle. And if you want to share one of their flagship wired headphones between the two devices, you need another dongle. Therefore if you want to connect three of Apple's flagship devices together on a daily basis, you can't go anywhere without bringing at least two dongles with you.

If I want to use it to connect to my Apple Thunderbolt Display, add another dongle.

> The simplest example is that if you want to hook up Apple's flagship phone up to their flagship laptop for development, you need a dongle.

Why would you bother with a dongle when you can get a Type C — Lightning cable for the same price?

Or a wifi connection for free!

I don't believe you can sideload or debug applications over wifi, the comment I replied to was specifically talking about development.

MACBOOK: Must Acquire Costly Bunches Of Other Kit

I agree with you, but it seems they are already selling a USB-C to lightning cable.

http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK0X2AM/A/usb-c-to-lightni...

a.k.a the "lightning to thunderbolt" cable.

That might remove the dongle but is it any better? I now need either two cables, one to hook my phone up to my laptop and one to hook it up to my computer, or a new charger that accept USB-C but won't be compatible with most other devices out there.

> That might remove the dongle but is it any better?

Er… yes?

> I now need either two cables, one to hook my phone up to my laptop and one to hook it up to my computer

Except you carry one cable with you and the other one stays hooked to an eventual desktop computer, rather than having to carry around a cable and a dongle.

What kind of plug do you find in cars? What kind of plug do you find in hotel nightstands? What kind of plug do you find in airplanes? What kind of plug do you find in almost every outlet charger made by Apple or anyone else? The answer to all of those isn't USB-C. So if you want to connect your iPhone to both your laptop and almost all charging sources in the real world, you need either two cables or one cable and a dongle.

Correct but by this line of thinking we're never ever going to evolve beyond USB-A.

What prevents you from connecting them using Bluetooth? I forgot when it was a last time I had to connect my iphone via cable, MacBook just always knows that it's there via Bluetooth, and for the headphone, their flagship headphones are wireless now, and I've been very happy using bose Bluetooth headphones, losing a cord is a major benefit that far outweighs any drawbacks of dongles for me

> What prevents you from connecting them using Bluetooth

I don't think you can connect via BT and then use that connection from Xcode for deployment and debugging. That still requires a cable.

You can, starting from Xcode 6

How? I just tried it: Made my phone discoverable, paired to it using the Mac's bluetooth preference pane. Xcode (8.1) doesn't list the phone in the "Devices" pane nor does it offer it as a deployment target.

In Xcode 8 you can't. They briefly had it as a feature but it has never worked properly and is not supported. EDIT: It was also using Wi-Fi, not Bluetooth.

Correct. I've hacked at it a bit in an attempt to re-enable the functionality but I haven't been successful yet. After reversing some old XCodes and iOS binaries I found a MobileDevice.framework call that is related to WiFi debugging but even after poking the iDevice with it, XCode doesn't show it in it's device list.

  extern int AMDeviceSetWirelessBuddyFlags(struct am_device *device, uint8_t flags);
  AMDeviceSetWirelessBuddyFlags(device, 1|2);

I see another reply saying you can but I've never done it

At one time, back in the Xcode 4.x days I believe, they did support development over WiFi. It didn't seem to be very well tested at the time and got pulled out soon after. They seem to have given up on the idea for some reason but it would be nice to go that route again.

You must have some of those magical Bluetooth devices that actually work.

I've never found Bluetooth to work without having to fiddle for ten or fifteen minutes to get the cussed things to pair up.

All those arguments were once said when the first iMac came out and all it had were USB ports. All devices will have USB-C connectors soon, and instead of getting dongles, you'll be simply replacing your cables to be USB-C versions of them all.

All these arguments were also said when Apple replaced Firewire/mini-DVI/... by Thunderbolt, a fantastic new standard, and we all had to buy the adapters that we'll now throw away.

It seems that USB-C will be more successful than Thunderbolt 1/2 have been, but Apple really isn't helping it with the way they're doing the switch (some devices USB-C only, some devices USB-A only, Lightning headphones...).

I'm really shocked about this, I mean, I had thought that they saw the future in USB-C after they previewed the MacBook.

? Thunderbolt 3 is compatible with USB-C (in terms of the port)

More specifically, TB3's connector is the USB-C port.

Oh, didn't know that. Thanks.

So does that mean that it also supports the USB protocol?

In the short term sure, but in the long term standardizing on usb-c is a good thing. If only they had done usb-c on the iPhone7 also.

> you need a dongle

or an USB-C to Lightning cable. Those exist. And so do any USB-C to any other USB-Plug cables.

Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now as two years from now, I'm quite sure no more peripheral will come out that has anything but USB-C.

So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C cables that will connect your devices directly to your MacBook Pro. No dongles what so ever.

USB-C is so much better than anything other USB that came before to the point where it can (and will) easily replace not only all other existing USB plugs out there, including on the device end (where there's a mess between USB-B, USB Mini and USB Micro right now) but also has the potential to replace the various ways how we currently connect screens (DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, or even VGA).

Going purely USB-C means that they could optimise as much as possible for this new connector without thinking of wasting space for a useless connector three years down the road, especially as you can convert USB-C to any other USB, but if they added an USB-A port, that would not be useful for anything but USB-A plugs.

Like I said in another post, is a new single purpose cable a solution for a missing dongle if I still have to carry the old cable with me too? Great, I don't need a USB-C to USB-A dongle, I just need both my USB-C to lightning and USB-A to lightning cables. It is the same problem, just shifting around the inconvenience.

And if USB-C is so great and the future of all tech, why isn't Apple moving to it on their mobile devices? In my mind the problem isn't the specific technology used on any of these devices. The problem is that the devices aren't using the same technology between them.

>And if USB-C is so great and the future of all tech, why isn't Apple moving to it on their mobile devices?

because the proprietary Lightning plug allows them to control who is connecting to their phones and it allows them to charge for the privilege of doing so.

What's happening on the other end of that USB-Cable that's the question. My guess: In the package of the next (or the one after) they will ship an USB-C to Lightning cable.

Google has moved to USB-C with the Pixel.

https://madeby.google.com/phone/

Within 24 months, most Android phones will ship with USB-C.

That's over a billion devices a year.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11836816/iphone-vs-android-...

Chromebook are starting to ship with USB-C.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/03/hp-chromebook-13-review-th...

USB-C is the future. I'm really not sure why PC vendors having put a couple of all of their desktops and laptops. Many will probably offer both A and C, for at least a few years.

If you have buy a new computer with 0 USB-C ports, you're going to regret it in a few years.

They had actually moved even before that with 5X and 6P. They were some of the first phones to do it. I believe a few samsung and other phones have already switched too.

In my opinion, that's courage that actually matters. USB-C is a huge step forward which everyone will benefit from once we all move. Removing the audio jack? meh.

Most new-ish Android phones (as counted by number of models) are likely already coming with USB-C. Both the Pixels, the Nexus 5X and 6P before them, the LG v20, the Moto Z, all come with USB-C. As far as I'm aware, only Samsung hasn't made the jump yet.

> Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now

This would make a lot more sense if Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C as well. That way, you really could just use one cable for everything. Instead, you need three separate charger for your iPhone, Macbook Pro, and Apple Watch. Oh, and the iPhone comes with lightning-USB-A cables, which means you can't even connect a brand-new iPhone to a Macbook Pro out-of-the-box without getting a dongle.

High-end Android phones like the Nexus 5x, 6P, and Pixel already use USB-C, as do some non-flagship Android phones. It's brilliant - it means I only need to carry one charger for both my phone and my computer, and that charger also can be dismantled if I want to connect my phone to my computer.

>This would make a lot more sense if Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C as well

yes. it would have. And this is the actual problem there. Lightning is just another way of controlling their walled-garden around iOS and I really hate it for that reason.

But that's beside the point of the port choice of the new Macs: The phones always have a lightning port, so the cable connecting to them will always have a lighting plug on one end.

What they could have done is ship the iPhone with an USB-C to Lightning cable instead of a USB-A to Lightning cable, but then people would have been even more pissed as USB-C isn't that wide-spread yet and in-fact until yesterday was only supported by one single machine made by Apple.

> [USB-C] in-fact until yesterday was only supported by one single machine made by Apple

Really, have a look at this [1] half-year-old list of 10 non-Apple laptops that have USB-C ports... Of course pretty much all of these have USB-A ports too, because their manufacturers don't have a blind following and actually have to compete with each other.

[1] http://windowsreport.com/usb-c-laptops/

I think you might have misunderstood me.

I didn't want to say that USB-C was only supported by Apple.

What I meant was that of all the devices that Apple makes, until yesterday only one supported USB-C, so shipping the new iPhone not just without Headphone Jack but also with a cable that can only be used with the minority of all their computers would really have been a strange move (plus, there's no small USB-C power brick yet, so they would have had to produce one of those too - or give you their 29W one for free which would probably have been a bit too expensive)

> USB-C isn't that wide-spread yet and in-fact until yesterday was only supported by one single machine made by Apple.

USB-C isn't "widespread" yet in laptops, but it's hardly brand new. USB-C has been supported for a while by other laptops. In fact, Apple isn't even the first to release a laptop with Thunderbolt 3.

I know because Dell's XPS 13 has been shipping with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C for over a year now, and it's not the only one.

Is anyone else tired of all this "walled garden" blather?

They designed Lightning because it best solved their needs.

Why the specious and unprovable claim it's to lock people out? Can you read their minds?

(Sure, down-vote away, HN groupthink always wins...)

In order to add lightning support to a device of yours you need to be part of the MFI program which comes with NDAs, influence on functionality through Apple and, of course, a license fee per unit you ship.

If lightning was purely about the technical advantages it provides, they would have made it an open standard or at least documented it.

There were some technical reasons for not going with MicroUSB of course, but don't tell me that their MFI licensing model isn't a huge reason for a proprietary connector.

Or they could be like everyone else in the world, who have finally given up on proprietary ports and settled on micro-usb, to much rejoicing. But no, they are special.

> or an USB-C to Lightning cable.

How is that different in any way?

Before: you were carrying a cable (type A - lightning)

GP: you have to carry a cable (type A - lightning) and a dongle (type A - type C) rage rage eleventyone

If you have a brain: you carry a cable (type C - lightning)

Instead of two things, you just need one. They're saying that instead of a USB-A-to-Lightning cable and a USB-A-to-USB-C adapter, you can just use the one cable.

I think Apple could’ve avoided a lot of the hate if they’d bundled a few of the more common adapters as standard, to ease people through the transition to using USB-C for everything.

If I bought a new MBP today, I’d need:

* a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter at £49

* a USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter (giving HDMI and a USB port) at £69

* a USB-C to USB Adapter at £19

That’s £137 just to connect the things I have currently connected to my 2015 MBP (external monitor, Thunderbolt HD, my phone and a USB->FTDI programmer).

Couldn't agree more. I priced Macbook Pro 15" plus adapters in CDN $ and got sticker shock.

Did the same in UK. They also bumped the prices in the UK for all machines due to the fall in GBP. Double shock.

Did you vote for brexit? ;-)

This would lessen the blow: http://www.monoprice.com/search/index?keyword=usb-c+adapter

With the abysmally low margins typically made off of keyboards and mice along with the fact that the highend of the market is driven by desktop gamers, I think you're going to see plain USB Keyboards and Mice sticking around for a long, long, long, long time. Hell, I can still buy some of my favorite keyboards with a PS/2 connection or with an included adapter.

I've been using external devices for these with my macbook for years.

Edit: In fact, I think this applies to almost any low-cost, low-margin pluggable. Laptop coolers/fans are another. Either USB-C is going to kill the market for these or you're wrong.

> I think you're going to see plain USB Keyboards and Mice sticking around for a long, long, long, long time

I'm not saying the old USB A peripherals will stop to exist. I'm saying that two years from now every conceivable peripheral will be available with a USB-C plug or at least a USB-C to whatever they need cable.

And in the case of the devices I mentioned, that will almost always be a dongle.

No thanks.

> So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C...

I agree with you that in the future USB-C is better and makes more sense. However, I don't think that the logical conclusion is that we should get rid of USB-A prematurely. I liken this the the decision to remove the CD from computer when CD were still used daily. I agreed that CDs wouldn't be used in the future, but, that doesn't do much for me if I still use CD daily. In hindsight it just caused an unnecessary annoyance while the CDs were naturally phased out.

That's the price of progress and this dropping support of older technology sooner than everyone else has been part of Apple's MO forever. The day 3rd parties will stop making older parts/accessories is the day they're no longer viable to make. If Apple were to keep a USB A jack for legacy compatibility reasons, 3rd parties will certainly delay moving forward to the new USB-C standard.

From Apple's site:

- USB-C to Thunderbolt 2: $49

- SanDisk SD Card USB-C Reader: $49.95

- USB-C AV Multiport Adaptor (HDMI): $69

Spend another $168 and you access to add the same ports you have now!

For 200$ you can order an acceptable, good looking laptop with 8 Gig ram and a low range Celeron quad core from China.

Gotta love apple. ^^

I cherish the memory of paying 60 Euros for my Apple HDMI adapter, another 40 for the VGA one, 80 Euros for a freaking charger,...

Always the same thing with Apple, you need to pay extra (actually premium) to get the things that used to be standard.

"Don't buy cables/adapters from Apple" has been the general rule for decades. Grab stuff like this from Monoprice and it'll probably run you $20.

"Don't buy RAM from Apple" was the general rule, but now they solved the pesky problem by soldering the RAM.

The nice thing about USB-C is that its a standard, so you don't have to buy it from Apple only anymore like before. For example I have https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K7C53K2 for $69, which is really useful: plug one cable in and everything is connected.

Apple is turning into a more expensive version of Belkin

Two dongles at 49.99$ each make 99.98$ LOL xD

I've had a good, satisfying run with MacBook Pros, but now I'm stepping off the Apple train. I understand that Apple is trying to go in a new direction with the new MacBook Pros, and I won't complain about it. I am now simply moving to an Arch Linux setup on an old Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 to continue living inside the Terminal.

I'm not suggesting you do this, for legal reasons blah blah blah, but putting together a hackintosh is pretty easy these days if you really like osx.

How easy is it to maintain? Last I heard every update breaks everything.

nah it's not bad. Sometimes you just need to reinstall the same audio kernels, etc (depending on your hardware). There are many guides to find compatible hardware

link?

It’s not. You’re pretty much stuck on a static OS unless you want to spend hours dealing with various problems each update.

I used a hackintosh for a year for development. It took a day to setup, which is of course a lot more work than for a typical osx experience. However, once setup it was better than the mac pro I was using. Might have even been more stable. Upgrades were a bit of a hassle, but not horrible.

If you can run Linux not sure what's the ultimate benefit of OSX (from a pure development standpoint).

I moved from Linux to OSX a few years ago. The smoothness of 3-finger swiping between full-screen windows and just the smooth UI / build quality of the Macbook is what I liked the most. Also the battery life!

I am now considering a Hackintosh. Don't want to put in too much time maintaining it though so still not sure about it.

I really feel most Linux distros were made for developers and development. Whenever I try to do things on Windows and OSX I get insanely frustrated with the amount of friction. It's nice to have an OS that trusts you and lets you make mistakes.

I had that problem with Linux where I wanted to be able to seamlessly use my Wacom pad with a decent graphics editing suite... oops no, it's terrible. Mainly because the environment for these tools is proprietary and there aren't enough graphics people in the Linux market to support it as a platform.

So... mac it still is. Windows is looking better these days.

When was this? Wacom drivers come built into Ubuntu now. I use my tablet with MyPaint. I agree that the graphics suites could be better, but it works for my not-so-artistic pursuits.

The last I tried it the baseline works. All of the buttons, wheels, pressure sensitivity, tip angles, etc... not good.

Just want to re-iterate it's not Linux's fault, it just doesn't work well as a proprietary platform. So if your program needs art assets you'll have to get them elsewhere. And if you want to deploy on Mac or Win you'll have to have one of those anyway... so shrug.

I like programming on Linux for sure it's just not there as a personal OS. And I used to run a very stripped down, customized Arch distro... on a desktop PC. It never worked well on any laptop I've owned and required too much hand-holding with rolling releases breaking things occasionally.

UNIX developers.

Windows is quite a nightmare for any time of compiled code in my opinion.

All of the Microsoft 'stuff' (anything in Visual Studio) works okay but once you start installing python or node modules, forget about it.

I remember the click finally happened when I spent an afternoon installing package after package to get a node module to compile on Windows. When I installed it on OS X, it just installed... I didn't have to do anything.

I installed Ubuntu that night and never went back (except to play games because WINE is just ehhh)

True story, tried compiling a node machine learning thing.

After 3 hours on Windows, I just brew-installed the damn thing from github on Mac and it just pulled all the dependencies.

A couple years back, I was (increasingly un)happily using Mac OS X on a MBP. I made the switch back to a Free *nix and a tiling window manager.

While it's gotten some eye-rolls from tech friends, the UX of my current system is amazing. I have an almost vanilla Xmonad configuration, combined with dmenu, and passwordstore / dmenu integration. It simply rocks.

I anticipate soon starting a new job with a firm that has more or less standardized around Apple hardware. I find myself kind of dreading going back to a Mac. I may decide to be "that guy" and ask for something like the Thinkpad Carbon X1 in lieu of the standard issue equipment.

Ask.

I was given a Macbook, and thought I'd get used to it, but I couldn't. Basic stuff is broken, like maximizing a window. Focus-follows-mouse doesn't work properly, and multiple windows from the same application are broken -- I'm not sure what the "correct" way to switch between multiple Firefox windows is, but it's clunky.

Linux on the Macbook can probably work if you're determined, but I'm (obviously) not a fan of Apple hardware. It was much easier to take a spare Dell desktop -- which has twice the RAM and a better CPU than the Macbook.

Standard way to switch between application windows is command-backquote. (cmd-`) Works great.

It does work great, meaning that it reliably executes the intended functionality correctly. My problem is that the intended functionality is not what I want. I have lots of terminals, Emacs windows, browser windows, etc. open at any given time, and I want my window manager to be agnostic to which is which. When I signal "focus next window", I want that to both jump between windows of an application AND jump to a window of another application, whichever is next in the focus ring. You can't (easily at least) do that on a Mac.

I installed https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch to get this behavior (it even has thumbnails of the window), but ideally you would have that option out of the box indeed.

BetterTouchTool is also a handy way of dealing with the lack of a maximize option. Also provides window snapping, which can be quite useful.

Yes!

I've spent so much time in my ion3 setup (now notion..) that changing things is just silly, and I'm so glad I don't have to. Open source code lets you continually port forward what you care about, because you have access to the source code.

I'm on something like 14 years using it? It's just awesome to me that everyone else is off inventing new ways of managing windows, and I'm here pressing F3 to run a program like I always have.

Xmonad is pretty wonderful, even in vanilla. Excellent piece of software!

Any chance you're willing to share your config with me? I'm really tempted to get a carbon.

I'm feeling the same way. Clearly Apple doesn't care about the same things I do. The Pro is supposed to be for power users, and the touch bar to me feels like it's built for casual users(keyboard shortcuts for people who don't know keyboard shortcuts. I use almost no built in mac apps, so it's unlikely that I'll ever use it. It's just one more thing to raise the price and one more thing that can go wrong. Combined with the fact that I'd have to get a dock or a dock/monitor and things look super unappealing at this point. But they shaved off 1/2 a pound! that's better than having useful ports, right?

Honest question: what's the alternative? I've got a 2013 rMBP 15 inch. What's my next machine? I'm not willing to regress on display (220 ppi or better), screen size, or battery life (8-9 hours real use). I might regress on quad core to dual core if everything else is perfect.

EDIT: The XPS 15 gets more like 5-6 hours with the high res display by my understanding. The Surface Book has the right combination of resolution and battery life, but 15.4" to 13.5" is a big step down if you're used to working with side by side windows. Is there anything out there I've overlooked?

Microsoft's Surface Book.

Surface boook is just as gimped - 16gb ram, about same cpus, same expensive storage, and other gimmicks (detacheable screen won't do you much good in helping to develop stuff)

Escape key included

> about same cpus

That's charitable. It has a dual-core 15W TDP CPUs, the 13" touchbar uses a dual-core 25W CPU and the 15" uses a quad-core 45W CPU.

Incidentally, all Kaby Lake laptops use either 4.5W duals or 15W duals, there's nothing else out yet.

16GB of RAM and a mobile i7 has been perfectly acceptable for my day-to-day development needs. As for expensive storage... that's unfortunately true of basically all laptops.

Doesn't help for development per se, but I do enjoy having the flexibility of the "gimmick" screen. I still prefer paper, but it's a viable alternative for note taking.

I see a lot of people choosing the XPS (including Linus).

I tried it and for those who prefer Linux it's pretty great!

The one issue I have with the XPS is that the camera is in the bottom corner instead of at the top. Although the slick bezel looks great, I just don't think the trade off was worth it.

I think the trade off of small bezel for the camera being at the bottom really justifies it. I am commuting and bringing my laptop around more than I am on the camera.

If I am skyping and the person I am skyping with has upward view of me, I don't really see an issue with that.

I "defected" a few months back and I am now using a Dell XPS 15 Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz × 8 16GB Ram running Ubuntu 16.04. It is a beautiful machine, very sturdy, fast and an excellent keyboard. It is available with a 238ppi screen, but I chose 141ppi because I don't care about the extra pixels on a dev machine.

What about the trackpad? Most Windows laptops I've tried recently still have trash trackpads.

The trackpad is excellent, highly tunable (I just use the standard settings) with very good precision.

I own a ZBook 15 first generation, Ubuntu 16.04. The trackpad is large and works well. It has 3 physical buttons (actually two pairs of them, on the top for the mouse stick and on the bottom for the trackpad). I'm using it as a mouse (single finger) or to scroll (two fingers). It's probably multi touch up to 10 fingers but I can't remember.

I understand that OSX has gestures and maybe Windows too. Maybe there is some package that brings gestures to Ubuntu as well (apt-cache search gesture|grep gesture returns some) but the keyboard is good enough. Alt left to go back (it works in Nautilus too), etc. Sometimes I'd like pinch to zoom in Gimp like on the phone and tablet and some day I'll try those gesture packages, but I'm in no hurry.

On the other side, I find the push to click trackpads I see on Macs and some PCs very difficult to operate, especially when I don't want to move the mouse pointer when clicking (graphic programs) and especially the trackpads that actually move. That's why I bought a laptop with physical buttons and disabled push to click (it had that too).

TL;DR the Mac trackpad is almost a reason not to buy a Mac for me.

>On the other side, I find the push to click trackpads I see on Macs and some PCs very difficult to operate, especially when I don't want to move the mouse pointer when clicking (graphic programs) and especially the trackpads that actually move.

That was a concern I had when upgrading to a MacBook with no physical button, but it hasn't actually been an issue. You can treat the trackpad as though it has a separate physical button (leave your thumb at the bottom the whole time, and use it to click instead of the tracking finger), and it's smart to detect that and ignore the thumb except for clicking.

I don't understand why any dev would want to use a touchpad of any kind?

They're not nearly as precise as a mouse. They cause you to rotate your cuff even further than a mouse. Dragging and dropping things is more difficult with a touchpad.

Touchpads all stink, including Apple's.

Evoluent's vertical five button wireless mouse is where it's at. Everything else is second rate.

Because sometimes you need to work on the move? I like to get things done on flights, and there's no space for a mouse there.

> Touchpads all stink, including Apple's.

Couldn't disagree more. I've actually ended up getting a Magic Trackpad for my desk - the gestures etc are genuinely useful.

> Because sometimes you need to work on the move? I like to get things done on flights...

Uggh. That sounds like a terrible way to work. If open floor plans are bad, working on a flight has got to be even worse. I guess I'm lucky that I don't have to do any of that.

> I've actually ended up getting a Magic Trackpad for my desk...

Well, you're a rare bird then.

I also use a Magic Trackpad instead of a mouse at work as a dev. I also do music production exclusively with my Macbook's trackpad. I'm definitely more comfortable with it than a mouse for my normal work habits.. and I was able to beat people online in Starcraft pretty handily with a trackpad. I don't doubt that I couldn't become more precise with a mouse over time, but I really prefer scrolling and gestures to what's available on a mouse.

See if you can find sales numbers for your elitist 5 button vertical mouse vs. the trackpad.... Then we'll talk about who the 'rare bird' is. Grow up.

> Uggh. That sounds like a terrible way to work.

Welcome to the real world- sometimes we have to do things in environments that are less than ideal!

Given that Apple have iterated and released multiple versions of the Magic Trackpad, I doubt I'm that rare of a bird.

No, no, no. Travel distance is supremely important, and if you're working on a MacBook the trackpad is right there! I loathe all trackpads except MacBook's. In fact, I have a Magic Mouse and Keyboard that I use when I place my MacBook on a stand, and it feels tiring to move my hand so far to move the mouse.

I use a Mac Pro primarily, but I actually have a mouse, trackpad, and Wacom tablet attached. Each get used for the things they work best at with the trackpad getting the most use.

How are the trackpad and the battery?

Trackpad is excellent, not as large as the Macbook Pro but works very smoothly under Linux with excellent precision. Re battery I get a solid 8 hours of work from it.

I think the Dell XPS15 or the HP Spectre x360 15t are both solid choices for a 15" at this point.

I have had macbooks for years. I got sick of the really poor performance, constant spinner, etc.

Now, I have a Dell XPS running Ubuntu. It is considerably faster. Far better battery life. Far high spec. Extremely slick display.

Agree on the speed. I routinely run a bunch of VMs and docker images without any sort of impact.

Forgot to mention the other reason... The magsafe charger is ridiculously poor quality. I've had several of them fail. They all burn the casing off the wire just outside the plug, and then it stops working. The advantage of a magnetic connector isn't worth spending another ton of money to replace it every year.

How did you manage to get better battery life? Is power management in Linux that much better than Windows?

Far better than a macbook I meant.

Lots of discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815472

I'm looking at the Asus Zenbook line at the moment.

I also have a late 2014 macbook, and it's been a really great workhorse. I won't buy this new one though, and am considering the XPS.

I'm testing out a strange setup that is working surprisingly well: I have a beefy desktop: 64GB RAM and 32 cores. Then I carry an Intel Compute Stick, portable laptop and mouse with me. I just plug into any HDMI monitor to do basic work, or RDP/TeamViewer into my desktop for real work. Surprising how well this is working...

Latency, even as low as 30ms if you're right near your desktop, is simply unbearable to me.

I've been working with remote desktops for a few years now, and I don't feel the latency, if any. Plus, I'm not gaming, I'm writing code.

I guess you're lucky, or generally have a good connection. There's a dev in my office who's bluetooth keyboard has a latency of around 100ms. Two of us get instantly sick when trying to type on it, but no one else in the office can detect the latency.

That won't work if you can't get a reliable connection everywhere you go.

Ive been wondering about doing something similar with a compute stick and a nexdock http://nexdock.com/

Those look really nice. I just might try them too. :)

Depends on your budget:

$2000 - A loaded Dell Precision workstation. Wait for Kaby Lake quads though. If you like the Surface Books that's an option too.

$1500 - Dell XPS.

$1200 - ASUS UX501VW. (Only one RAM slot is upgradable, though)

If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards.

All of these machines run Linux well (with an occasional driver compile). The biggest tradeoff will be the touchpad. I find the trackpads on par with my 2009 unibody White Macbook. If you prefer a mouse like I do, it wouldn't be that much of an issue. On the plus side, you can get much better specs for the price of a Mac. Xeons, lots of ECC RAM, beter displays, better battery etc etc.

The precision 5510 looks great, but: http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/dell-precision-5510.

> This workstation can get some serious work done, but its battery life of 5 hours and 34 minutes means you likely won't be taking it far from your desk.

The 13" rMBP gets 12 hours on the same test: http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/all-day-strong-longest-las....

I don't feel like I'm being unreasonably picky here. I've been using a laptop with a great display and 8-9 hours of actual battery life for the last two years. Everything on the market right now (including probably the new MBP) is a downgrade from that.

> Why can't anyone else?

OS X vs. Windows?

Maybe. I think Apple sticking to 2.5K and 3K displays, instead of rushing to 4K has something to do with it.

The only issue I have with the 5510 is they keyboard. Compared to my 2011 MBAir, this thing is really sub-par.

There is a lot of trackpad jitter as well - which is easy to disable when a mouse is plugged in, but still.

edit: the camera is also in a stupid place.

> If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards

Meh. The one on my 2015 X1 Carbon is okay, but the keyboard and trackpoint are the worst parts of my X1 Yoga – the trackpoint only allows the "soft dome" caps (i.e. the convex ones, not the nice concave ones which save you a bunch of stress in the fingers) and the keyboard just feels very cheap and weird. The keypress is still well-defined, it’s just that the keys are incredibly shallow.

Especially for people who are tied to macOS for iOS development reasons. I guess it is time to look into Hackintoshes again.*

Apple really seems to loath their developers either through active malice or passive indifference. I've wasted too much time reverse engineering Xcode/LLDB/MobileDevice.framework to get automated iOS testing to work (no, XCTest is not adequate). Of course, once my company wanted to move from physical hardware to virtual, we were screwed again by the near total lack of virtualization products for macOS guests. VMWare ESXi seems to be the only player in town for server deployments and that still requires Apple hardware. Sure, go ahead and spend well over $3,000 on their laughable Pro/"server" products that cannot be reasonably placed in a server room. Apparently Apple hasn't heard of the whole "cloud" thing.

* But not really, I would never dream of violating the macOS EULA by running it on non-Apple hardware...

Ok, I'll put in a word for the HP ZBook Studio.

You can have i7 quad-core, dual 1 TB SSD, 32 GBytes RAM (maybe more), backlit keyboard, thin(ish) form factor, and a fantastic 3840 x 2160 screen. Graphics are NVidia M1000M which is desktop class and runs CineBench 11(?) OpenGL test at 93 fps (faster than my NVidia GTX 970).

This is by FAR the nicest and thinnest portable workstation-class laptop I've ever used. It's easily carryable-around, which is more than I can say for any previous laptop such as the larger Dell Precisions, HP Elitebooks I've previously used in this class.

In particular, fast Samsung NVM SSDs and fast laptops are a match made in heaven.

Why do you need a new Macbook when your machine probably does everything? The specs between a 2016 and 2013 are negligible for web browsing and programming. Unless you're doing heavy video editing or 3D rendering..

So many people upgrading notebooks when they don't need to.

I think that's the point of the article -- developers have little reason to upgrade -- if they want more memory, faster CPU's or more cores, then they need to go with a non-Apple laptop.

I would say for a machine that is only three years old, just wait? I mean, if it's working well for you now, why are you considering upgrading?

I'm sitting here on a 2008 Mac Pro, and was hoping to move to a mobile solution. But 16GB of RAM just isn't going to cut it for the VM's and what not a run. So I guess I'll just be running this into the ground.

You immediately lost any credibility when you complained that the 2.4 GHz processor is the "same" as the one back in 2010. Clock rate has nothing to do with performance these days. Skylake is 25-35% faster across the board (and multiples faster for number crunching) than whatever Nehalem or Core2 was in the Macbooks in 2010.

Actually, according to a few cobbled together Anandtech pieces, I think the IPC improvement may be closer to the 80-90% range.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700...

I get though that it doesn't feel like Moore's Law type growth for system speed though, which is perhaps what people are hoping for. I have a hard time imagining that the 2016 model feels 16x as fast as the 2010 model.

I've got a 2010 MBP with an SSD, and it feels pretty much the same as my 2013 with an SDD, and expect this 2016 one to feel roughly about the same for most tasks (35% isn't a difference I'll notice for most tasks)

Moore's law died a decade ago.

25% faster is still a joke. I want 100%!

It's probably closer to 90% as another person notes, with far greater power efficiency. If that's not enough, feel free to complain to intel or alternatively, the laws of physics

If you expected shit to shrink linearly over time, our transistors would be occupying negative space right now. If you expected clocks to increase linearly, we'd need liquid nitrogen and shit would be full on behaving like waves. That is the reality until we leave silicon land.

There's room for debate about the new Macbook Pro, but this post is bad.

#1 - The touch bar is dynamic and contextual. It's likely that you can enable the traditional ESC/Fx row when you're using Terminal, your editor, etc. It's extremely unlikely that the ESC key is gone forever, given that existing software relies on it.

#2 - RAM is a valid point, but this part is wrong/dishonest: "The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well... nope." The 13" MBP now has a 2.9 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, upgradable to 3.3 GHz. The 15" MBP now has a 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7.

#3 - So there are four negative snarky people on Twitter. Not a surprise. And they're just repeating issues #1 and #2.

This is a garbage post. A much better critical article is linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817332

Dramatic click bait IMO. You could really hack that touchbar to do some great productivity enhancements.

Just need the 'Macbook Is DEAD' style articles...

Maybe you could enlighten me to some of the possibilities. Besides a slider, I'm not really seeing much productivity enhancements that functions keys cannot do.

Dynamic function keys (are you in insert mode? some functions show up. Normal? different functions)

Also you don't need to remember which key does which

Not sure if there will be TouchBar user interface toolkit for java applications, but I spend a lot of time in IntelliJ. It would be great if the TouchBar rather than having to remember mappings, could have sets of labels [Step In, Step over...] during an active debug session or a different set during editing or presentation modes. Currently, the solution is to have myriad toolbars and icons bespeckle the window frame, which can be distracting and confusing, and all together take up some valuable laptop screen real estate.

Why is everyone so upset about this? It is a dynamic part of the keyboard. I would be shocked if there was no option to set it "classic mode" for certain applications (or even universally if you wanted), which would have the ESC key and the function keys. Why the opposition? Having a dynamic part of a keyboard is pretty innovative, what are some of the possibilities, I am not 100% sure but I am sure that developers will find neat and useful (and probably unexpected by us and by apple) things to use it for.

For one: they aren't buttons. It's a touch screen. I like to be able to feel the buttons I'm using instead of have to look down at what I'm doing.

I guess you can have virtual function keys as well as buttons for specific terminals. It depends how locked down the SDK is - knowing Apple it'll probably become more extensible as time goes on. I imagine that when IDEs can integrate with it, you'll be able to get some pretty nice features.

You can also show stuff like CI status, notifications for IMs, etc.

Here's the thing though:

How is that any better or different than notifications that already exist on your system?

GitLab has web browser notifications that trigger on CI builds.

Literally every instant messaging service has notification systems that work on the OS.

What is the added benefit of putting it off of the main screen and on a small 1" tall screen where you have your hands?

Yeah, I don't understand all the outrage over the touchbar. It changes depending on your application. So can't you setup VIM so the touchbar displays a "normal" or "classic layout", which would display all the keys that the previous model had? I am far more disappointed in the elimination of magsafe and only having USB C ports.

I'm not outraged, more like disappointed. After no significant update in a very long time we get a touch bar, but still cannot put 32GB of ram in the MB-PRO.

The killer is that the lack of feedback on that bar would probably make it difficult to touch type the "buttons" on that classic layout

I am sure people could adjust to this. I am not certain how many people actually use those buttons without looking at the keyboard anyway. When I learned to type the function keys weren't included, I for one, always have to look when use a function key, and generally have to look when typing numbers too.

If you're constantly using one or two function keys, it's fairly common to do it by memory. For example I can hit the volume and brightness buttons and f5 without looking. But really, all the other functions that will become available with the touch bar will more than make up for the time lost looking down.

Nothing you can't already do. It's just buttons with pretty graphics on them. If you want buttons to do "great productivity enhancements" the tech has been available for that on Macs for over a decade. Possibly decades plural; the Mac has had an active extension community for a long time, let alone the official stuff from Apple like AppleTalk, however flawed it may have been.

And there isn't much you can do with the pretty graphics on the buttons that you couldn't already do with pretty graphics on the screen, especially in an era of touchscreens. The whole touchbar strikes me as a demo-feature; demos great, in practice, not especially useful.

They're not just buttons. They are also sliders, pickers and any other GUI elements that you can think of.

They are visual. So you don't have to memorise any key combinations. Also they are context aware. This means you don't have to memorise all those key-context-application combinations.

It is multitouch. You cannot click at two different points on the screen with the touchpad. So this is an improvement over the current input mechanism.

Is touchbar better than touchscreens? Maybe or maybe not. Who knows now. But note that it is not placed on the screen. It is placed near the keyboard, where the other input mechanisms and your fingers normally are.

You don't need to "look down at the keyboard". In a laptop you are already looking there. It's already in your peripheral vision. And if you use an external monitor (but not an external keyboard), you simply don't have to use the touch bar.

I don't understand this negativity on HN. There will be many creative applications for this new input/output method. I'd rather see people brainstorming on all those new possibilities.

Can you hack in tactile feedback so I don't have to look down at my hands like a toddler to use it?

also: can you hack in a magsafe port and other reasonable number of ports?

No the 16gig thing is real. It's a travesty that 32GB is not an option.

I think people are going to hate it... and then try it... and then start to like it.

I was waiting for the new Macbook Pros as I need to buy a new laptop, and was going to give my old Macbook Pro (2014 model) to my wife. But given that they have nothing of value (I don't care about gimmicks like the new touch bar), I've decided to abandon Mac and go back to Linux.

I'm just a typical web developer, running a bunch of virtual machines, and an IDE. Any recommendations? I saw the Dell XPS 15 for around £1,300: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B018FSX9GA/

Any others? I'm not a Linux diehard, so I'd probably go with Ubuntu.

The XPS machines (both the 13 and the 15) are excellent. I haven't found anything else that compares across the board.

+1 The XPS is a fantastic line

I had an XPS 13 in 2008, and was really happy with it. The quality was much higher than most of the Dell laptops I've seen.

Do you know how well they work with Linux?

They work excellent with Linux. Dell actually sells a "Developer Edition" of the XPS line with Ubuntu pre-installed.

Seems like the Developer Edition is EOL in the UK at least. I'll look for some reviews about the standard edition.

There was a new update a month or two back, I think they're just waiting for it to filter through to the UK.

I thought this too, I then found this link which brings you to the Ubuntu XPS editions: http://pilot.search.dell.com/xps%2013%20ubuntu

Does sound like a great spec - but only available in the US right now. I'm in the UK.

It's available in the UK. We've moved the XPS 13 Developer Edition to be in the same place as the Windows version. One side affect is that this (well, the internal details of how that's done in our catalog) makes it easier for us to change up the Dev Ed configs. If you go to http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd and scroll to the right ("Next" button) you'll see them.

I have heard good things about https://system76.com/

I would also recommend Lenovo Thinkpads, which are quite popular with Linux folks. The X and T in particular give a lot of bang for your buck. I am also eying Thinkpad 13 as a great beater machine replacement for my aging x230.

How easy is it upgrading the RAM? I like the look of T560, but it only comes with 8GB.

Iirc they come with some soldered-on RAM (4 or 8 GB) and an empty SO-DIMM slot, so you can stick another 16GB in there for a total of 20 to 24GB

Are Lenovos still a good go-to? I've just seen them fall apart pretty quickly amongst my friends. Just wondering if the build quality has gotten better...

I got the 1st gen Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and it didn't hold up great. The balance of weight, power, battery life, and Linux support were huge for a traveling programmer. By the end of year 2, though, I had replaced a broken screen, and the battery life was down to 30-60 minutes (from about 6 hours).

I decided to give them another chance on the 4th gen X1 Carbon, and I've been very happy so far. The build quality seems much better, and they've nixed some of the annoying "innovations" from the 1st gen one (ironically including a touch bar at the top; they reverted to normal keys). That said, I've only had this one for about 5 months, so I might change my mind by the time another year or 2 passes.

Not all Lenovos. Stick to the mature strains like Thinkpad X2xx and T4xx. They are built like tanks.

Good luck with HiDPI. It is very application dependent, so I would check what you typically use. From what I have tried and read, macOS handles HiDPI and multi-monitors much better than any other OS out there right now.

I'm so used to HiDPI just working on my MBP that I never even realized it was an issue on the other OSes until I started thinking about switching.

> multi-monitors much better than any other OS out there right now.

No it doesn't. OSX in fact has a completely innane behaviour when a MBPr is connected to an external monitor. Meaning you have to mirror or put it in clamshell mode. You can't extend the monitor ontot he laptop screen. Works perfectly well in Linux for me.

Huh? I have 2 external monitors (connected using DP) and my laptop running as 1 large desktop right now. Both externals are 1920x1200 running off a rMBP. Dragging windows around scales properly and mostly works.

Last time I tried this on Linux it was a mess, particularly when moving windows from the HiDPI to the normal and back.

How do you mean? I'm connected from my Macbook Pro to two (non-Apple) external monitors (one on thunderbolt, other on HDMI) and they extend just fine - no mirroring or clamshell mode.

If anything, clamshell mode is the buggy one - it has a tendency to go into or come out of sleep mode when I don't want it to.

That's both surprising and disappointing. I'll check for that, thanks.

This is false. My Ubuntu desktop handles 4K DPI scaling perfectly, while attached to a 1440p with normal scaling as well. On the other hand my 2012 MacBook scales extremely weird when connected to a 4K display through HDMI.

This is why I said it is very application dependent. How does MySQL Manager work on your Ubuntu desktop for example?

I'm curious, what is driving the need for a new laptop from a 2014 version?

I'm wondering this too. I'm using a 2010 version with a new battery and SSD installed, and besides that everything is working fine. I would like a Retina on that but I don't see the huge problem

I looked at this option, but started to think it was good money after bad. The repair shop I got a quote from said around £400 for the upgrade, and it just doesn't seem worth it.

I don't need a new one, but my wife does as her one is the Macbook Pro from 2009 and is now extremely slow, and the battery lasts about 20 minutes. So I was going to buy a new one for me, and give her my current one.

As you say, the 2014 is a great model - I'm using it right now, and it's plenty sufficient for everything I do.

You could get your wife a refurbished MacBook. They're pretty cheap.

I did look at this, and I found that they weren't cheap at all. The Macbook Pro 13 2012 model is around £800.

Ah the hand-me-down train, I know it well. Brothers and nieces supply the demand for a generation or two old iDevices and gives me a bit of a way to cut into the purchase price of the new shiny.

I really like the XPS 15 and use it as my dev machine. I would consider the 141ppi screen. It is excellent value and works well with all existing apps.

I like this price :)

As a developer and an Apple user for last decade, this has certainly been the most disappointing Keynote I've ever seen from Apple. I do think, however, some of these concerns are overblown.

If you're a VIM user and haven't tried overriding the Caps Lock key to be an Esc key, you should give it a try, it has made VIM a much better experience for many people.

On the memory side, doing development work I can hardly think of a time when 16GB was limiting on the RAM side, and I hardly notice the performance hit when using swap on the incredibly fast SSD.

And the processors have definitely improved, I'm currently running a 15" MBP Late 2013 at 2.0GHz. The new base models are starting on newer architecture at 2.7GHz.

Having said that, I'm still not sure whether I'm going to be upgrading any time soon...

The problem is that as soon as you need a VM (and doing any web development typically needs one to test IE/edge with), you're pushing your RAM limits.

> On the memory side, doing development work I can hardly think of a time when 16GB was limiting on the RAM side

I can, but then we're probably developing different things in different ways.

To be honest, the only thing that's causing me to say it's not a "developer machine" is the keyboard. It features the same butterfly switches that the 12" MacBook has and my good are they horrible. I seriously can't imagine writing long sessions of code with this mushy keyboard.

I don't get it. With the new touch bar and stereo speakers they WANT us to use the MacBook as is, without external keyboard and then they give us these dreadful switches that almost feel like you're pressing a sheet of paper.

I understand that for the 12" MacBook they wanted a machine as thin as possible and the keyboard was too thick. But why oh why ok the pro lineup.

I actually REALLY really liked the type feeling of MacBook keyboards

The new MacBook Pro uses version 2 of the butterfly keyboard. Not the same one as 12" MacBook. Verdict is still out how much is the improvement.

The onsite reviewer from the verge says its pretty much the same. Maybe a lil more travel but they feel the same.

So i guess that version 2 thing is just pure marketing to avoid people raging

I'm no Apple fanboy nor apologist, but this sentiment is everywhere and overtly dramatic. They continue to provide a 13" model with function keys as an alternative. If that machine isn't fast enough you probably aren't a "developer" anyways. Also, I rarely use the keyboard on my mac because I use it on a stand with an additional monitor. If you want to complain about the new Mac, complain about price or the fact that the touch bar is unusable in an ergonomic setting, just don't act like you can't still use VIM.

I concur. I have a problem with the (European) price hike and the RAM cap, for the rest it's not going to be worse for me at all.

I really only used the volume keys and esc keys really and once in a blue Monday the brightness controls. The On / Off switch will be replace by the TouchID input I assume.

I'm really not sure what I even had to expect more from this update than what I've got.

Sadly this seems to be the same old pile-on that happens after every apple product announcement:

> #1. No Escape and function keys [...] The Escape and Function keys on the laptops have been abandoned in favor of a touch bar that changed depending on the application that is being used.

They went out of their way to display the escape key and many other contextual keys with Terminal.app in the foreground† They did this despite it being possibly the least "sexy" demonstration of the hardware. This article seems to have been written after skimming some reporting on the keynote without researching the specifics.

† http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...

yea because a soft key in a different location is the same as a tactile key where it has always been.

It's programmable. I'm sure iTerm2 will allow you to make the whole damn thing an escape key if you want. Also sure, its not a physical button, but it's still pretty dishonest to go around saying they removed the key and thus it is no longer a "developer computer." This pretty clearly implies that the functionality is lost which is easily proven false.

I'm not even trying to _defend_ Apple here. I don't even really like laptops, though I might have to buy one. I just hate these surface-y pile-ons that happen after every hardware announcement that seem an attempt to mask an aesthetic argument of "i don't like apple's products" as technical one.

> This isn’t to say that the touch bar is an inherently bad idea. You could locate it on top of the Esc and function keys instead of eliminating them entirely! Something like this: <image>

Not that there aren't worthy talking points in this article, but it's really annoying when a blogger has the arrogance to photoshop some keyboard image together and proclaim it's a better design than what a gigantic company carefully came up with.

Apple has its own reasons for doing things and they aren't going to please everybody, but does this Alexey Semeney fellow actually think Apple didn't consider all the possibilities before removing a whole bunch of keys from the keyboard? Apple might be a lot of things, but careless is not usually one of them.

Although people place a lot of trust in Apple, I think the proverb of "trust but verify" applies here. We shouldn't just take it on faith that Apple has made the correct choice.

What does "correct" mean? They are at least consistent. For decades they remove major hardware controls and ports that were initially thought to be critical for use. They were the first to get rid of CD drives, floppy drives, the list is quite long.

The best definition I can come up with is that Apple does not regret removing it in the future. I suspect they will be correct. I don't see people passing up on MBPs over this, and in 5-10 years people will stop missing the function keys.

The reality is that apple has been pretty much universally right whenever they ditch something "way too soon". There's never been a moment when a year down the line apple realized "wait, this USB thing is never going to catch on, go back to the old ports we were wrong!"

It's funny they bring up devs using vim, because the only vim key they removed is Esc, which a lot of vim devs remaps to caps-lock or similar anyways.

I almost never use the F keys, so if they kept the Esc key but removed the rest it would be perfect :)

I don't know anyone who remaps capslock to esc. It just sounds like something that is fun to say on hackernews. You didn't even say you use it, you said a lot of vim devs do, to which i would counter--they dont.

The better choice is remapping capslock to ctrl.

I know a lot of people doing that. Personally, I map caps lock to esc when pressed, and ctrl when pressed with another key. The best of both worlds.

I do. And judging from the list of articles that explain on how to do it for various platforms I suppose a lot of people do. The carabiner-elements is a whole (popular) program to do just that (by default, it has more options as well)

I do! I'm both a heavy vim user and have my ESC remapped to capslock. And otherwise ESC=>^] anyway so you can always do that (however it's a bit awkward so I'd rather use capslock).

Another thing I really do think deserves to be mentioned is which developer do really spend extended amount of time on the laptop keyboard when not traveling? Both at home and work I'm using the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard and keep the laptop docked with 3 external displays, with these new 5k-monitors two will probably be enough.

I'm not the GP, but for what it's worth I do remap capslock to esc. I mostly use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard where the escape key is one of the chiclet rubber keys, so using vim (at all) really begs for either a remapped esc or brain-retraining to use ctrl-[.

I'm not sure if it's a better or worse choice to remap capslock to ctrl - but it's certainly viable. The old Sun keyboards used to have that layout...

I know lots of people who do (including myself). Just look at the support requests on Karabiner, etc.

Yeah, I'm totally baffled as to who productively uses VIM and reaches waaaay up there with their pinky. In the first 10 minutes of learning I was googling "mac remap caps lock escape", and I haven't touched the actual escape key in years.

Agreed! The old laptop had a bad placement for ESC anyway — major stretch!

I suspect that any devs picky enough about their typing that this would prevent them from buying this laptop are using alternate keyboards anyhow.

Agreed, I remapped it in vim 1 year into learning it because my pinky was starting to hurt.

Lenovo introduced a Touch Bar (Adaptive Keyboard strip) in the Thinkpad X1 Carbon in 2014. It flopped so hard that Lenovo pulled it and reinstituted a normal function row in the 2015 refresh.

Why does Apple get a pass? No physical keys means not being able to find functionality by touch alone means no muscle memory means no productivity. This isn't a hypothesis, this is a proven market reaction to Lenovo's design choices.

I ran Xubuntu on one of the 2014 X1 Carbons and can confirm the adaptive keyboard strip is terrible. It worked but was clumsy at best. I just upgraded to the t460s with 24G RAM and proper function and escape keys. Great light weight Linux laptop.

I assume Apple is trying their usual model of duplicating failed projects later, and with better design.

I'm not sure it will work here - the lack of physical feedback is inherent to the design - but they don't shy away from reviving other people's failures. Better layout and contextual buttons will help, although I doubt they'll make me happy with the system. I still remember having an old Acer with a touch bar - some lunatic put a "disable wifi" setting on the thing, and then cranked the sensitivity way too high.

> Why does Apple get a pass?

Do you remember trackpads before Apple got them right?

Currently every time I open iTerm, I need to change directory into my project, spin up my virtual env, and then initialize some stuff within my virtualenv.

Now I can map those commands to icons in the toolbar, rather than having to page through the history command each time. How is that not a huge improvement for developers? Any time you can replace a command or alias with a visual icon that's a significant reduction in cognitive overhead.

While the fact that you can only get 16 gigs of RAM is annoying, the fact that the SSD is 50% faster at least ameliorates this somewhat. And the fact that there are seemingly several low hanging fruit things that Apple can make to improve the product, while annoying to people like me who needed to purchase one of these today, at least shows that they will probably continue to make improvements to the lineup.

> Now I can map those commands to icons in the toolbar, rather than having to page through the history command each time.

Why not just create a bash function? Call it setupproj1, write the commands you need in a function ~/.bash_profile, export the function and that's it!

Even better, install Alfred and bind a hotkey to your bash function.

It's worth noting that only the higher-end of the new MBP's have the Touch Bar. The lower end still has a traditional function row:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-...

So I suppose in theory if you wanted something new but without breaking your workflow, you could just go for that one.

Yeah buying a new product which is more expensive than last year's and with worse specs.

Note that that is only the very base 13" model. You can't get the 15" without the Touch Bar.

Any idea why it only has 2 USB ports? Seems like an intentional crippling.

The frustrating thing is that machine only has 2 USB ports, rather than 4. So one port for power and another for a single wired accessory. I guess buying a dongle isn't a huge deal, but kind of frustrating that you'd have to spend more money for what I would expect to be included functionality for a "pro" machine.

I had to scroll pretty far down the page to get to comments that weren't about the escape and function keys and vim. It's the other stuff that really matters. In 2007 and 08 when Jobs was alive there was absolutely no question that MBPs were the absolute best laptops in the world. There were maybe a few huge gamer laptops with faster specs, but nothing had excellent specs in such a small and well build package. This is no longer the case.

If I were NVidia I'd be making a very big deal that not even the initial development of that cool new depth of field stuff on iPhone 7 could be done on any Apple computer.

Another major point is that this thread says apple is leaving developers behind. Sure it might only be leaving VR, gaming, and AI developers behind, but wait, where is the industry going?

More fuel for the fire. Apple proudly claims they have the biggest gaming platform in the world with iPhone. They just lucked into it. They never purposefully set out to make a gaming platform. But now that they have it they should own it. Imagine how thrilled the world would have been if Cook had stood on stage and said something like "and now for the first time ever because of this amazing new GPU, you can play your favorite games on your Macbook Pro on ultra at 60 frames per second." It would have blown the doors off Apple stock. Macbook Pro is about PRO users not about executives that need 13 hours of battery life to give Keynote presentations. People would have been completely happy with even a little increase in width and weight and decrease in battery life for the sake of a major performance upgrade in memory and GPU.

> The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope.

I find it very hard to believe that these processors perform on the same level as the ones in 2010. Equal cores / GHz does not mean equal performance.

Agreed. Not only is there no option less than 2.9 GHz on the touch bar Macbook Pro, but I'm also not sure how a developer could equate a Core2 Duo with a Skylake core i5/i7.

This article is terrible. I am not pleased with the new MBP models but the reasoning in this article is beyond stupid.

1. No Esc and Function keys? They are available and I'd wager you can change the settings on the touch bar to make them available. They demo'd the customizability of the bar. I'm not keen on the bar but it's not because it takes away options, it's because it's unnecessary complexity and will encourage bad application design.

2. No RAM improvements? The RAM is faster. The included RAM has increased. This is just factually wrong.

3. Judging CPUs on clock speed? What is this 1995? Clock speeds have been constant for a decade. The performance still increase and the power consumption improves as well. Come on.

I'm bent out of shape about the new MacBooks because they've gotten rid of one of my top 3 reasons for choosing MBPs for the last 10 years; MagSafe. MagSafe has saved my laptops dozens of times, literally. Removing it means that if I got one of these new machines I would never be able to use it plugged in on my couch. I'd be putting it at too much risk. It means any time you have it plugged in you have to be super conscious of where your power cord is and who's walking by it. They got rid of it I assume just to save a few mm's of thickness?

On top of that the TouchBar is a gimmicky feature I'd never ask for and have no use for. So much of my work is web based and cannot (as far as I know) take advantage of it. It adds tons of unnecessary complexity. Plus I'm sure it doesn't do any favors for battery life.

My rMBP is four years old and for the first time in a decade I'm finding myself not excited to upgrade. The addition of TouchID is nice. The loss of MagSafe and addition of the TouchBar are terrible decisions by Apple and make me question if they know what they're doing.

What they could have done (one or more):

1) Bezel-less display

2) Full Touch screen

3) Detachable Screen - IPad Pro +

4) Stylus input (from Apple Pencil)

5) 15-20 hr battery life

6) NVidia Graphics

7) 64 Gb Ram option

8) Kept the HDMI & SDXC port

What they did do:

1) Gimmicky Touch bar - Useless when you close the MBP & Dock; Hard to do for touch typists

2) Hiked the prices by crazy margins

3) Pegged the RAM at 16 Gb Max

4) Battery is not much better

5) All in on USB-C - Get ready for Dongle-o-rama

Feels like a pure greedy money grab with nothing to justify it. Steve must be spinning in his grave.

Please -- no touchscreen, not on a laptop. It seems very uncomfortable; it smudges the screen, which I cannot stand; and if there is a touchscreen then apps will start exploiting it, making it more and more difficult to not actually touch the screen.

> What they did do:

Not really surprised by any of it except number 3.

I think there are some technological limitations behind the 16GB maximum RAM configuration. The highest-density DDR3 DRAM packages I could find that run at the rated speed are 8 gigabits, which means 16 chips are required on the board. There probably just isn't enough room there for 16 more chips.

16-gigabit packages are slowly arriving on the market, but I imagine it'll be a couple more years before they're available at the right speed and sufficient quality/quantity to include in a future MBP model.

Correction: It's a CPU limitation when used with LPDDR3 modules. See http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/7th-g... (See section 2.1.1.3, "LPDDR3 supported memory devices")

They could use ddr4, cpu supports it

You can't fit DDR4 SODIMMs on a notebook of this form factor. And this processor generation doesn't support LPDDR4 memory yet.

Indeed it doesnt support LPDDR4, I was wrong. Thanks!

> #1. No Escape and function keys

The new MacBook Pro has Escape and function keys. You just need to summon them now if you want them. Phil Schiller even showed this in the demo!

Also, context aware actions are much more useful. You saw that they even included a whole set for developers (and XCode) right? And you can bet other tools will soon follow.

> #2 Power. Almost no improvement for RAM and a processor

That it doesnt have a new CPU is not Apple's fault. It's Intels. Apple wants their professional equipment to have at least a quadcore processor. The latest generation Intel processors, Kaby Lake, currently only has dual core processors available which is a absolute disaster for people who actually need fast multicore processing. So because of this they used a Skylake quadcore. Which IMO isnt a disaster since it is still the fastest quadcore x86 CPU architecture out there.

Regarding RAM I think 16 Gigs is more than enough for any purpose.

There might be some useful things in the Xcode set, but anything that can't be done with a shortcut already? I find Cmd+<key> far easier to hit than reaching up to the F-keys. I imagine more-so if that action now has no tactility.

Honestly, the only thing I will miss is the escape button but that was misplaced on the keyboard anyways. 10.12.1 added support for making caps lock into an escape key and that's if anything an improvement over where escape was before.

I use caps lock as control.

Then you can now use control as escape if you so desire.

I agree that caps lock is an improvement over escape's location. But, if you're like me, you also find it to be an improvement over control's location so you have caps lock mapped to that already so rebinding esc to caps lock is not an option.

You can have the best of both worlds on *nix: tap == ESC, hold == CTRL http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-...

That's not a bad option and I had not considered it. I will try it out, thanks!

Interesting, but on macOS 10.12.x it must be Karabiner-Elements and at least the UI does not make me replicate this behavior.

Editing the JSON config will do the trick as described here: https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/issues/8

There is also a solution for Hammerspoon users here: https://gist.github.com/arbelt/b91e1f38a0880afb316dd5b573275...

Or Keyboard Maestro: http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/256055

https://files.grid.in.th/11RiNt.png

but where will i put the ctrl key then :(

in all seriousness, switching the ctrl - caps lock keys was probably the best layout improving decisions i've ever made. highly recommending it for ergonomic and health reasons.

For ages I've had ~ remapped to escape (if no modifiers pressed so tilde still works as expected, and caps to ctrl) so the missing ESC isn't a big deal, although I did have it remapped for `

Anyone looking for extremely fine grain keymap control (with a UI that far surpasses any kind of keyboard remapping I've tried doing in Linux) should look up karabiner.

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner

Make sure you don't upgrade to Sierra yet! The next version of Karabiner (karabiner-elements) that works on Sierra is still under development.

I wouldn't really blame Apple for not coming up with faster CPU. Things have changed and the times when you got the double speed every few years are over. And I don't know if it is actually a bad thing. This means your hardware does not get old so fast and there's less reasons to update every two years.

The article also claims that you can get comparable hardware from any other vendor for for $1.5k. I wish this was true. Unfortunately it is not at all easy to find good alternatives for Macbook Pro. Even if you don't put limit on the budget. Especially when you limit the search for quad core CPUs, there's not that much choice (HP ZBook, Dell XPS, Lenovo T460P or P50). And then you are still stuck with Windows or can you get one of those with Linux pre-installed and supported?

I am a developer and I have a mechanical keyboard hooked up to the rig, so I seldom use the mac keyboard anyway. My main complaint would be the hardware doesn't seem to get better. The USB-C ports I do see them coming, but given my 2014 MBP is still running strong, I will hold on to upgrade for a little longer.

Nah, I am completely out from Linux around 5 years ago. Had spent my fair share of time and effort (~10years) using Linux, solving some corner cases that hit me along the way. To me, using Linux is just like driving on a highway with sink holes sprinkled along, the ride will be gay and smooth _until_ you hit those holes. Either you fix those yourself (It is open-source remember!?) or hope for some kind souls to help out.

Thanks but thanks...

Isn't that image with the red 'ESC' and 'F1' text not an official Apple image but an image that was made by speculating Apple fans during the lead up to the official product launch? It seems dishonest and manipulative to use that image to make the point that Apple has completely eliminated the escape key. Official Apple images might have featured the touch escape key in that position on the touch bar, weakening the author's argument. Even though I'm also not a fan of the latest Macbooks, it's dumb to stretch the truth to make your point.

It's not just the function and escape keys.

- The rollout of USBC has been a mess. Apparently you now need to purchase a separate cable to connect your iphone to the new MBP.

- I haven't tried the new keyboard, but from what I've read, it is less like the old MBP keyboard, which was quite good, and more like the awful MacBook keyboard.

- The generally horrible design of their major desktop apps.

- The disaster that is Apple's cloud strategy. Too many ids, too difficult to know what is physically where and how to get it where you want.

I haven't yet played with the new MBP, but I am seriously wondering whether my current MBP is my last one.

Strange arguments in threads about new MBP. It is well known much more powerful laptop computers are available to developers for many many years. It is the nice combination of weight/size/screen/touchpad and Unix like OS all in one package that made people look beyond relative shortcomings. Individually none of the feature may be best but all above average together in one machine is not so common.

Advanced users might very well buy an objectively better computer than Apple's if they so wish. People are reacting as if Apple mandated touch bar in all computers in market.

All Lenovo would need to do is start supporting Unbuntu on their ThinkPad line and Apple would be in big trouble overnight. With then Thinkpads they are doing the opposite, locking Linux users out instead!

Totally agree with you. Ubuntu needs to have a mainstream manufacturer to go big. MBP is perfect so far because of the combo of UNIX and Office products and support for various softwares.

Everybody is talking about the ESC key but I think the function keys are even worse. My editor has tons of fn key bindings and I touch type them without looking down many times a day. You can imagine being able to touch type a virtual ESC key since it would hopefully be at the far edge of the strip, but for fn you'll have to look down every time.

Let's face it, the bean counters at Apple only care about the iPhone. They've put their b teams to work on the Macs. And the engineers at Apple that actually have to use the laptops obviously have no say.

I'd like to see stats on how my VIM users actually still use the ESC key. Most (including me) have mapped this to Caps-lock a long time ago because the Esc key for a long time has not been in the same place on any keyboard as it was when VIM was originally created.

There sure are some to be found - I personally find it too hard to override my habit of reaching for the upper left corner for esc. And believe me, I tried the caps-lock as esc key, but I kept hitting either shift or tab as well... Might just be a matter of practice though. Currently my caps-lock key is still remapped to esc since accidentially hitting caps lock is the worst.

If you don't have the data, you have no position saying most vim users do anything. There is no reasonable way to assume that most users of any software make the same configuration changes away from default.

Which is why I said "I'd like to see stats"...

Fn keys are heavily used in Intellij and Eclipse. Basically, that OLED strip is a "no go" for me. I'm trying to decide between buying Dell XPS 13 right away or waiting for XPS 15 refresh. Any other suggestions are welcomed.

This setup certainly makes IDEs cry. That said, I'm willing to wait a revision or two of IntelliJ to see what they come out with while I enjoy the use of my 2014 MBP.

If you're considering purchasing a currently available computer, what about the current 15" MPB?

Who is buying these new MacBook Pro's? Serious where the heck do the guys in Apples Mac division see the market?

- Developers? Not excited. Disk speed better that is relevant. CPU less so. But ESC and RAM not acceptable if anyone is looking into a machine to last 3 years.

- Gamers? PCs offer a better price / performance relationship.

- Personal users? Win10 vs. OSX has advanced a lot compared to Win XP vs OSX. Secure enclave to make Apple Pay purchases? With what money after buying the laptop?

- Managers? At this price point? Maybe the show-off kind in the C suite.

- Employees? It would make sense as it is cheaper to support but at this price penetration into the enterprise - which is all the Apple/IBM relationship is about has no chance.

One of the challenges running businesses that are in different markets where one has a different market position is dealing with the very different margins. Laptops everywhere else except in Apple land are low margin. IOS is high margin but it is in an exceptional position. Pretending that Macs are in the same is foolish.

Missteps can happen. I'm sure it will show in sales. Let's just hope they are able to adjust course quickly enough.

While the RAM complaints are valid, I don't know anyone who actually uses their laptop keyboard for serious development. Almost all of these laptops spend 90% of their time docked somewhere with a real keyboard hooked up.

The plural of anecdote is not data. I know many people who do use their laptop keyboard, myself included.

For me, the MBP was all about the nice screen, the touchpad, the keyboard, and the build quality. If you are only using it docked, none of these really matter.

> "The plural of anecdote is not data."

An anecdote is a single data point. So numerous anecdotes would, in fact, be data.

So the touch bar is useless in 90% of the time.

And so is the entire keyboard on the MBP I currently work on. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate it 10% of the time.

> The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope.

I feel the OP's disappointment but oh my.. does he really do not understand that cpu's clock speed is not the main comparing factor between processors?

It's like saying he will not buy a car with 2.0L engine, because they were making such capacity engines 50years ago

I have to say, this feels like a lazy hype-train post. Everyone is complaining about the lack of the esc key, but I'm sure it won't be so bad. It does depend somewhat on how integrations work with the bar. I could imagine hopping between files and functions in your IDE using the bar. And surely you would be able to map the section where esc was to esc?

I've bought every single MBP since 2007, when I switched over from Windows to focus on iOS. This may be the first one I skip. Not sure.

PRO: My muscle memory is solidly in the MacOS+Xcode camp. Switching from ctrl key to command key for basic operations resulted in my RSI injury going away. Why? My guess: because the thumb is now the pivot point for commands, instead of the pinky. As a result, my hands splay inwards instead of outwards. Back during my MS-Win days, the solution was to get a split keyboard for the desktop. No longer need that.

CON: The main problem a dynamic set of keys is that you have to look at them. Each eye saccade wastes 200 milliseconds. I also assign app shortcuts with cmd-option-fn and use divvy + cmd-option-fn to assign reorganize window placement.

Plus, I wanna play with ML using CUDA. Am missing the Nvidia GPU that came with my 2013 MBP.

There is a MacBook with escape and functions keys still available. So the choice is still there.

Personally I think the touch bar could be great for programmers so I'm gonna take that.

Sure, the specs of this choice shouldn't be called Pro any more I guess.

I don't understand the lack of escape/function keys argument. Isn't the touch bar powered by software? Can't you put whatever keys you want there? It's sounding to me like the argument from people who were opposed to a touchscreen mobile keyboard.

I get it may not be the laptop for the developer who wrote the article, but I see no big issue with the new Macbook Pro.

I want a well-built laptop with a decent Unix-like OS, long battery life and a good screen and keyboard for when I'm not on my desk. When I'm on my desk, which is most of the time, I have a big screen and a keyboard attached. If I really cared about portability, I probably could get by with a MacBook.

TB3 promises a single cable to connect the screen, keyboard and power. I like that (I currently connect 2). Will I need to get a new monitor? Yes. It happens every couple years anyway. I once had a wonderful Intergraph CRT that could go all the way up to 2048x1536 and I miss it, but things change and we eventually move on.

I'm sure the Touch Bar can be integrated with MacVim or VS Code etc to show keys that just look like regular Fn keys - that's not the problem developers would be irked of - it's just another thing to hack.

Really problematic however is that the 15" starts at $2399, is still capped at 16GB soldered RAM, the port situation isn't convenient (esp if you've an iPhone), the obsession with thinness continues at the expense of battery life and if you had to ding the Touch Bar it feels gimmicky.

There are much better games in PC town - don't even need to run Linux if you're not into it - Windows 10 is pretty good and with Ubuntu/bash built in, install a X server you're good to go.

People (especially long time Apple users) really underestimate how nice Windows + Cygwin (or bash, etc) can be, on really powerful laptops, at much nicer price points.

What a terrible article. It compares how the processor speed has remained the same from 2008 without mentioning the architectural changes.

There are reasons why I think the new macbook is less suited for developers, but not these reasons. This article is entirely misleading.

Since the article doesn't even mention that the escape functionality is still there (although it's no longer a physical key but a touch button), I'm going to assume that its only source is jokes on twitter.

Did you see how they had to peck type on the Touch Bar in the demo? How is this an improvement for me?

Do you remember "Human Interface"?

Moving to touch-screen for thing that need to be tactile is a betrayal of the ergonomics of a laptop. Is as demand the use of a mouse in a iPad. Is not what the machine is.

I think the touch pad is a nice gimmick, and maybe, could be get some useful applications. But the removal of the Esc + F-Keys break a lot of the workflows. This is also the trend of make keyboards worse and worse with each iteration.

Is ironic that people demand good touch pad and complain when is bad, but think is ok when the keyboards get worse.

I'm on mobile so not sure if anyone else has pointed this out but Apple mentioned in the keynote that the escape key is still present when using the terminal. There is also a way to bring up the full row of function keys.

Personally I think this is the great advantage of the touch bar. The only app that I personally use the Esc key in has it available, but all other apps use the space for more appropriate shortcuts. Plus it can be customised too (finally I can add a screenshot button!), although not per app yet, as far as I can tell.

Do we really need 10 blog posts basically saying the same thing with extremely low effort on the frontpage?

The people who disagree with the post are ignoring the argument because it may not apply to their specific circumstance. It is a real setback to those of us who rely on those keys (features, really) but more worryingly a design direction that offers a net decrease in usability.

All MacBooks already have a touch surface that currently performs the functions shown in the touch bar demo. While I can see the appeal of some scenarios where it accelerates what might otherwise require lengthy finger travel on the touchpad, that doesn't come anywhere close to offsetting the loss of the function keys.

Virtually all of the MacBooks we buy we set up with Parallels or Fusion, and the F keys are absolutely necessary for Windows functionality. Having to break concentration to look at where the keys are, or their state, is a profound productivity drag.

Doubt that I'm right? Use an iPad instead of your physical keyboard for a week and let us know the results.

On a sidebar this reminds me a lot of the move to touch screens in cars, and the resulting challenges. Touch surfaces are great but not the answer to everything.

The Esc key is annoying but not a big deal for me. What I am worried about is the new butterfly switches. I have used a MacBook with butterfly switches quite a bit and it is not a nice writing experience. It feels like I am using a Blackberry or old Nokia phone.

With Bash on Ubuntu on Windows I think my next machine will be a Dell XPS 15 or ThinkPad T560. Probably the Dell as it comes with a quad-core for like £50 more. Plus a nicer screen (according to reviews).

This seems like a combination of trolling for page-views and begging the question of whether your personal tastes are universally shared.

Nobody has even used the touch bar yet so we don't know how well the escape + function key mode works for the average developer, or how often the wins of other features (e.g. the dedicated “man page” button shown in the screenshots, the kinds of context-sensitive things something like a debugger, browser dev tools, etc. could do, etc.) would balance out the lost of a physical key.

There's a small mistake in assuming that the quad-core 2.4GHz processor you got in 2010 is exactly the same as the 2016 Skylake version, and I think that masks a much larger question: how many people actually need more CPU or even RAM? Some developers definitely do – if you're working with a 20GB model, there's no alternative – but a large number don't.

For me, most of my development laptop hardware requirements plateaued somewhere around the MacBook Air somewhere around the 2010-12 range because this thing called the cloud happened and most of the work which can't be done on a small laptop with an SSD also isn't a good fit for a slightly larger laptop. Everything else I'd look for are different areas like screen size.

Why Apple doesn't offer swappable RAM any more, the disks in a weird format instead of SATA, glued batteries, ... is all about one thing: making more money.

See, I have a Fall 2011 MBP. Its battery still sports 3-4h usage, and it's rare that I max out the 16GB RAM. I have virtually no reason to upgrade.

Now, with one of the new(ish) MBPs: Want to upgrade the RAM because you thought "oh, 8GB will be sufficient"? Straight outta luck. Want to upgrade the disk because 512GB SSD isn't big enough? Straight outta luck (because it's likely to be expensive as hell compared to an ordinary mass market Samsung 850 SSD). Want to replace the battery in 4 years? Quite likely going to be impossible. Anything broken (scratched/smashed screen, broken touchpad, worn out keyboard)? Have fun spending $$$$ in the Apple Store because it's a PITA to replace anything.

Except for the disk, if you want to upgrade anything you MUST shell out serious amounts of cash for a new mac.

That you'll need to part with even more cash in order to use basic interfaces (Ethernet, SD cards, Firewire to just name a few) sucks even more - and dongles are far more likely to just break, e.g. if your laptop gets fallen from your desk by a playful cat...

The new TouchBar is fully defeatable and can behave exactly like an old school fn key row.

This post is totally devoid of substance and should actually be flagged.

This sort of surface-y anger makes the rounds every time apple does _anything_ to their hardware.

What were people upset about with the last retina macbook pro refresh?

I can't source this at all but I remember getting into an argument (maybe on reddit?) about how the lack of changes after almost two years between refreshes meant the product line was "dead" or that apple could no longer innovate.

Edit: It just seems to me that if they do nothing it means that steve job's death is also the death of apple, but if they do something big its an indication that they've forsaken their core user base.

No tactile feedback means no go for many people for obvious reasons.

I'm always confused by the interface outrage from hard core devs around new laptops. As a dev, I spend the absolute minimum time possible developing by interfacing with my MacBook itself. 98% of the time I'm plugged into a mechanical keyboard, giant monitors, and a real sound system. My MacBook sits to the side and only gets touched when I'm on an airplane or a meeting.

I was thinking the same, and I realized the answer is simple: it is not "hard core devs".

Who cares so much about 6+ hours of battery life, if most of the time you are just at your workplace - whether at the office or at home? People whose workplace is at neither of those, and instead they work in some damn coffee shop.

This is true; but to me, the problem is the diminutive RAM/CPU/drive profile. Just not enough horsepower. The touch panel would bug, but I rarely use my laptop mobile. But my 64G Windows gaming laptop kills my 2014 MBP for perf. That seems to be nothing that is going to change soon.

So use an editor that supports a modern UI, like Sublime Text or Atom, and not something originally designed for an ADM-3A terminal.

I'm sorry, what constitutes a modern UI? And what do ST or Atom do that hasn't existed for decades in one form or another?

Lack of depending on the function keys and the escape key to do basic text editing.

Conformance with Apple's UI standards, or at least something resembling them.

Escape and f-keys are used to send commands to the computer, not to enter text. Apple feels that this is better achieved with touch, gestures, and the mouse, so they've removed the temptation for developers to fall into old bad habits. See also: the removal of arrow keys on the original Mac.

Or use Emacs? ESC is bound by default to Meta, which is otherwise available on both sides of the space bar by hitting option/alt.

Good luck using Sublime or atom over SSH.

Sublime has an SFTP/FTP plugin that makes it trivial to edit files over SSH. Since you are running ST on your local machine and only using SSH to save/read the file it actually works better over a flaky connection (like on a plane) than SSH+vi.

Sometimes I've a feeling that some people really like it complicated. Today it is no mysterium to mount a remote machine via SSH and edit all the files using atom/sublime/vs code/... so mostly no need for a terminal editor on a remote server.

And have you ever tried to use a terminal (editor) on remote over a connection with high latency? Awful.

1. VS Code doesn't support SSH/SCP/SFTP natively, and Windows/Mac support for sshfs is non-existent/bad. Not to mention it breaks down in tons of cases, especially low latency or dropped connections. And even in Linux, depending on where you mount to, you can basically hork your system to the point where it requires a reboot.

2. Gotta agree with easytiger. I work all the time from 3G tether connection. Mosh makes it a breeze.

> And have you ever tried to use a terminal (editor) on remote over a connection with high latency? Awful.

That's why ed doesn't prompt. (ed is the standard text editor.)

https://wrgms.com/editing-files-remotely-via-ssh-on-sublimet...

Edit locally and copy the file?

Or you could use nano.

I've never understood this argument where you limit yourself to something that will work in the worst case scenario. For programming projects as well, the only time I'm using SSH directly is to troubleshoot rare server issues. Besides this, server admin should be automated/scripted so I'm not doing complicated edits over SSH.

What about when you ssh into a server?

You know, I agree with the idea this isn't a big deal, or at least, it might not be eventually.

The bar is programmable, so I would expect that applications like iTerm will write in support for it and they probably would include an ESC key on the bar. It would be nice if Apple had thought of this and Terminal.app already did that. Maybe they didn't think about that, but my guess is that they work mostly in Xcode.

Then there is the suggestion from someone else in the comments to remap the Caps Lock key to ESC which might be something I try even though I pretty much use full keyboards. The ESC key on home row might be a great idea.

I like terminal editors because they're easier to use in a distributed computing environment, furthermore, you're almost certainly going to able to run vim no matter what the hardware looks like and you /really/ can't say the same thing about some of these others (especially if they need some weird HID like the touch bar).

Applications that have terminal UIs tend to be significantly more well behaved than those that don't, this isn't always the case it's just a trend I've noticed.

or bind CapsLock to Esc

Wow, guys... We are all developers, but most of us work for companies. So next time your boss asks you : "What do you want as your primary machine?" I bet you will reply : "Latest MacBook Pro".

That simply sums it up. There's no better alternative at this point. You can't reply "I want a Thinkpad and make it Hackintosh" or smth.

I'm not a fan of the bar, but I'd really like mechanical keys with individual oled screens on the fn row.

I'm thinking about getting a Surface Book for my next laptop, since I've been spending a lot of time on Parallels using Visual Studio.

My only concern is the tracking pad. Is it possible to replicate the 3 and 4 finger gestures using the Surface Book trackpad? I don't think I can live without swiping to move between desktops.

Surprisingly for myself I'm going to write a comment defending Apple somewhat.

First specs - are we real tech people, or ignorant crowd? RAM is not only the amount of it. Previous MacBooks had 1066MHz memories, current one 1866MHz/2133MHz. And CPU power is not only the frequency. I have upgraded my desktop from 5 year old i7 to new i7. Both have similar frequencies and number of cores, but new one supports faster buses (like memory) and is in fact noticeably faster!

I am a big Vim/Neovim/Spacemacs user and I have CapsLock mapped to Esc. And you should do to, before you develop problems with your hands.

Now, would I buy new MacBook Pro? Hell no. I didn't back then, and I won't now. I'll keep my Linux box. And that touch bar is silly. But all these crying is so silly, and I think mostly motivated by trying to attract audience on your blogs and get some publicity.

Mixed feelings about this. Everyone says: "if you dont like MBP there are dozens of options in these brands" etc. That leaves you basically: Linux or Windows.

If you are a 100% developer, Linux is obviously the option to go. But if you happen to be a hybrid and use some kind of design graphic tools, such as anything from Adobe, then you are forced to stay with Windows.

The new Surface Book looks awesome, but its running Windows 10! 16GB of ram means nothing under window. The whole system itself needs those 16GB and eventually it becomes a dinosaur that will expand itself and use the 1TB of space you put in there.

Want it or not, so many people are still forced to stay with Apple for those reasons, and they know it. They can literally do whatever they want and these people will have to keep using MBP.

Aside from cost, is there any reasonable technical reason to not have 32/64GB options available? My desktop in 2000 had 2GB of ram, and I'm shocked that 16 years later my laptop maxes at 16GB. I remember in 2009 building a server with 32GB and the memory was only a few hundred for decent ECC RAM.

Linux/Mac/Vim/Emacs user here. Every ui/hardware update yields wave of discontent. People will always complain if they have to change their habits. Alexey don't tell me that you cannot live without these keys :) Re. unchanged performance - 95% of us don't need more.

I'm a long time vim user, and i have the following in my .vimrc:

    nnoremap <F2> T
    nnoremap <F3> t
    nnoremap <F4> set invnumber<CR>
    nnoremap <F5> N<CR>
    nnoremap <F6> n<CR>

So you think i'd be annoyed about the culling of the Esc and function keys? Not really, mac keyboards are terrible for typing IMO/IME so i always have an external one hooked up.

The lack of decent updates to the RAM and CPU bug me more given the price increase. Here i am running 5 VMs so that's sucking up almost 1/2 of my 16GB of RAM. Chrome is eating a good chunk of the rest and i don't have many long lived tabs.

And at home i have over 500GB of photos alone so would like a machine that doesn't have a tiny storage option as the default config. But alas...

Apple has been backing away from power users for years. Ever since they removed dual monitor full screen, imo. My MacBooks don't have Mac OS on them and I'm never buying another one. The premium price used to get you the best product... now it's an accessory.

I'm a developer with a 2-year-old macbook pro right now, and while I'm not going to run out and buy a brand new one right now, I wouldn't have a problem with the new ones if it were time to upgrade today. I'd have to replace my thunderbolt 2 dock with a thunderbolt 3 one (or maybe just a dongle?), and I'd probably want at least one USB-A dongle, but meh... it doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

I rarely use the function keys, and aside from exiting full-screen youtube videos, I don't use escape all that often either. I can imagine I'd use the new touch bar at least as much as I use that current row of buttons.

I do think it's funny that Macbooks are now standardized on USB-C + headphones, while iPhones aren't.

My understanding is that the escape key is there by default but the active application can choose to override it. I don't need the escape while I'm using Spotify.

I quite like the new Macbooks. Would have been nice to have a 32GB RAM option but I can survive with 16GB to be honest.

Sure I would like Apple just have kept the keyboard as is, and not having the ESC key is going to take some getting used to, but even as a Vim user it's a solvable problem.

Depending on your workflow and platform choices, you don't even need to upgrade your Macbook Pro, the last to generation are perfectly fine for a very large number of people.

Scott Hanselmans comment that not having a ESC key for Vim is messing with Apple core audience the just plain stupid. The VAST majority of Apple MacBook Pro customer aren't installing Vim.

Only having USB-C connectors seems like pushing it in terms of how fast you can expect users to adapt and it's going to be an adaptor hell for a year or two.

Looks like an entire generation of javascript devs is going to have to learn how to do ^[

Just curious: how many folks can accurately touch-type the Fn-keys? Personally they're too far away from the home row for me to hit accurately, but maybe that's because I use too many different keyboards and they're all slightly different with spacing. The esc key is easy with it being located in the corner, though.

So in my case, I would already look down to hit an F-key, and I imagine functionality such as "compile" would now be represented by a touch button. So no problem there. And point #2 is just ridiculous -- today's MacBook CPUs and Memory are faster and consume less power than they did 6 years ago.

Honestly, I've always felt that Fn keys were an outdated and faulty design. They're too far away to reach gracefully, usually offset from the standard zig-zag of other keys, and awkwardly multi-roled with screen/sound options on most keyboards.

If I'm in an IDE that uses a function key for something like 'compile', I usually rebind it for my own sanity. I have mixed feelings about this update (contextual buttons are often terrible, and I don't mind escape), but losing Fn won't really matter.

I work on a Windows machine, but I rely very heavily on function keys and have don't have to look at them.

F1 for help F2 for jump to bookmark F3 for search F4 for next error F5 for debug - go (I live in Visual Studio) etc...

For the longest time, I stuck with a keyboard that had the function keys on the left and I still think that's a superior layout for my purposes.

Touch typing or not, I think you are missing an important point here with regard to programming - tactile feedback. Doubly so with anyone that uses mechanical keyboards like me.

For example, you may not know where the "f8" key is on your keyboard, but once you look down and locate it, you won't have trouble repeatedly pressing it, accurately, with velocity. A good example of where and why this pattern happens is debugging. A lot of IDEs and editors are setup by default to use f-keys for debug or other ancillary functions like build, specific menus, etc. I believe IntelliJ and Visual Studio in at least a few default setups and versions did this.

More specifically, I can't imagine pressing a touch button possibly dozens of times, sometimes rapidly to advance through a bunch of break points, set new break points, eval things, etc. It is true you could just map these to other keys, but that becomes an issue with anything that is using default key maps for functions as I describe. Additionally, touch buttons promote people to start using more and more keyboard chords as they start shuffling around things in their keymaps, which a lot of people dislike. I'm an Emacs and IntelliJ user primarily, so the former and my arthritis in my hands are well acquainted with regard to keyboard chords and complex mapping sequences.

I have not used this keyboard obviously, but it seems to me from my experiences using similar tech that this is only good for much lesser used macro-like or launch actions. Useful still, yes, but I don't think it is a 1:1 replacement for function keys. I said it in another article and I'll say it here, I don't think this keyboard setup is aimed at programmers, but for most consumers it is likely just fine as much as I hate it. As for value added, that's another discussion.

I do know that if I ever buy or am forced to use one of these, it will always be with my own keyboard. I don't mind the chiclets as much as some people, but at home or the office I use external monitors and mechanical keyboards whenever I can.

I suppose a front-end developer isn't considered a developer? Linux doesn't work for me as we need Photoshop and Sketch and well, Linux kind of looks ugly as well (with the notable exception of Elementary OS, which tries to be the OS X/macOS of Linux).

It's also mentioned that the ESC key will still be there, and you can map your own keys to the Touch Bar as well, it just won't be a physical key anymore. This generalization that just because you can't use Vim anymore (which you can) the entire MacBook brand is gone to shit (which it hasn't) or worse, that Apple is stupid (it's not).

I was very very against the new Macbook Pro yesterday and I made up my mind to get the new Razer Blade Stealth (for daily computing/dev) and a mac mini (for iOS dev).

But after watching a few first hands-on with it, I intend to give it a try when I can, at the store to see if it's really as bad I've made it out in my head. If I don't mind it too much, I'll probably get the new Macbook pro 15" - i7 quad core/16 GB Ram/256 GB SSD (~ $3000 CAD + tax).

A good night's sleep can give you a new perspective on things.

BTW those who want to utilize Apple's "student discount"...it's around $50 off :/

If you already have a Mac, the upside of this release of limited machines (up to 16GB) is that it will intrinsically force Mac developers to refrend from designing BigMemory applications.

So if I currently have a 16GB Mac, it is likely that its useful life will be longer than if 32GB or 64GB Macs suddenly become mainstream and you find that your 16GB Mac cannot run anymore the latest and greatest apps so you are forced to buy a new Mac.

This also sort of happens with the Windows ecosystem, where the RAM-based licensing of Windows 10 for OEMs naturally drives manufacturers to offer machines with less RAM so its pricing is more attractive.

None of the article's points is relevant.

1. Function keys were a convenience. You can map ESC to other physical keys.

2. 16GB RAM and processor are fine, if you're still able to fit your processing in that configuration. Otherwise you're probably using a laptop as a terminal to a computing cluster (AWS/cloud/etc), which have more computing power and memory than an Apple warehouse.

3. Who cares what people on Twitter are saying.

The MacBook Pro was never meant to be a developer's machine. Any developer with half a brain knows there are more configurable and cheaper laptops out there. MBP is mostly for conspicuous consumption.

Well, at my last two jobs my work computer was a macbook pro, and my current job it's a macbook pro. So, three separate employers seem to disagree with you.

This is what they call "newsjacking" - and a really bad version of it.

Guys.

You can configure the touch bar thing.

Let's give it a try before raging over it? Otherwise this and the other recent HN threads may be this year's version of the famous Slashdot "Apple introduces the iPod" thread.

My biggest complaint is that they increased the size of the touchpad. I HATE touchpads, as the cursor tends to shoot off into space when I accidentally touch it with the heel of my hand when typing. The last thing I want is a larger touchpad.

If they're going to steal innovations from Thinkpads, I really wish they'd have taken the eraser nub instead. Back when I had a Thinkpad (running linux) as my work laptop, I would just disable the touchpad in the BIOS and use the eraser nub. The eraser nub is the thing I miss most from the thinkpad.

> I HATE touchpads, as the cursor tends to shoot off into space when I accidentally touch it with the heel of my hand when typing.

Apple touchpads don't have this "feature".

    I HATE touchpads, as the cursor tends to shoot off into
    space when I accidentally touch it with the heel of my
    hand when typing.

Have you used a macbook touchpad? I hated this about touchpads, got a macbook from work in ~2010, and have never had this happen to me in 6+ years of using mine.

Lack of physical escape key with vi is not a problem for me. An old trick is to remap caps lock (never used) to Ctrl (constantly used), which is easier to reach from "asdfhjkl" hand positioning. Then Ctrl-C is mapped to escape, and I never have to reach up to the fn row from the home row. Makes working with vi a bit more seamless and this lack of fn row is a moot point. So maybe we have to change few key bindings for ancient but still useful software. Really not a deal killer.

A physical ESC isn't that important because multiple presses are idempotent usually; there's only one dialog in the foreground of the active application (at least there should be) or you're only in one insert mode. I also don't see this being a big deal for key-combos. As long as it's available in apps that make use of it or Apple let's you enable it, and there's a way for you to learn where it is by touch, this shouldn't be that big of a deal.

Not to go too far off topic, but I'm surprised at the number of vim users in this thread who still use the escape key and haven't mapped it to something that doesn't require you to move your finger to the most inconvenient spot of the entire keyboard. Sometime 10 years ago I took someone's advice and remapped jj to escape in my vimrc. By far one of the best changes I've ever made. the speed gain is significant (unless your name is JJ Abrams)

I thought the current application determined what is displayed in that area? How do we know the Terminal won't cause the escape and FN keys to appear? Same for TextMate, Atom, etc.? Yes, Apple owns the default Terminal app so there is no controlling what happens with it (or is there, i.e., can you, via preferences define what you want to show up regardless of what the app chooses...). But the makers of TextMate, Atom, and IDEs can decide to make the function keys show up, no?

Maybe not a good laptop for vim users, but it's the perfect Emacs laptop.

http://imgur.com/a/G6WOk

I know the post is complaining about removing physical keys, but wasn't it completely idiotic to have removed the SD card slot? I know that most people don't use it. And maybe having it in the 13" is overkill, but what about keeping it in the 15" one Apple? It's a "Pro" computer, and the most common use case isn't for developers, but hobby, prosumer, and pro photographers, who use (gasp!) dedicated cameras with SD memory.

The reason I'm not impressed with the new Macbook Pro is I, like a huge percentage of developers I know, use the computer as a 3rd monitor and use a different keyboard than the built in one. I'm not going to reach 3 ft away to hit a Spotify shortcut on the TouchBar ever when I can use my finger on my magic trackpad to do it in a fraction of the time. WTF. And will the function keys on my keyboard of choice even work now?

I believe the short video that introduced the new MBP showed the ESC key in the system bar in the first few seconds, they practically zoomed in on that ESC key. And it showed up in other configurations, just not all of them.

I would think if you are in a shell or similar context, the ESC will be there in the expected place. Why don't you wait and try it out at the Apple store?

No, let's fly to the internet to dash off a disposable opinion.

Well, according to info about the new MacBook, news of the the function keys' death has been greatly exaggerated.

"Access the function keys by holding down the FN key on the keyboard." -- http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

One might also optimistically hope that the touchbar itself has some practical level of re-programmability.

I can't believe people are debating whether or not you need function and escape keys. It's just...are Apple people living in another universe? The escape key is used by nearly every application. Are you not aware of this? The function keys are used by nearly every non-game application. Cripe. Did you people buy your premium CPU-holding boxes just to use vim?

> The function keys are used by nearly every non-game application

Used OS X much, have you?

The primacy of the Command ⌘ key (which is distinct from Ctrl) has, in practice, given keyboard-shortcutting on Mac a different structure to what's traditional elsewhere.

I don't understand, this insane hype over the removing the esc key. I use vim on a daily basis, and there are several ways in vim, or in the system to remap the keys. But above all that I'm pretty sure they said yesterday in the presentation that the esc key would just be on the touch bar when the terminal is open. And if that's the case its a simple signal to the OS.

I am sticking with MBP for the combination of UNIX, MS Office and support for software like Turbotax etc. Ubuntu is not an option for me yet, since LibreOffice has lot of kinks. My only gripe is that processor and memory did not get an upgrade. Touch bar is a nice touch, we have to wait and see how it plays out.

Oh, I like Apple commitment privacy compared to MS.

I may be asking too much here, but I hope someone comes along with a laptop with amazing build quality, amazing linux support, and hackintosh support (XCode).

I've been holding off replacing my old MBP because none of the new models have wowed me. I got a laptop sized tumor on my budget just waiting to be removed by some company with a viable product.

No laptop will ever come along with "Hackintosh support" because that would be illegal.

I really hope my current air doesn't breakdown. It's proper USB ports, fn keys and built in hdmi port. I use fn and esc every single day. Fn6-8 are debugging continue, break etc shortcuts.

I see absolutely zero value in buying the new iPhone or Mac line. Why apple why? Precisely this reason why I am selling all my stock in Apple.

In one keynote I went from being excited about what was coming to feeling held hostage, yet ignored, in the Apple ecosystem due to iOS app development. 16gb of RAM is just too limiting for some workloads.

I may need to outfit my team with powerful linux desktops and low end macbooks for app development and remote/emergency work.

Apple users these days must be masochist to keep coming back for more year after year.

It used to be a joke... http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary...

No escape and function keys? Seriously? I've been using Karabiner (now Karabiner-Elements, which is rapidly becoming fully featured) to remap those keys for years anyway, since they're already located in a place that makes me hate having to use them.

The most useful key remapping, by the way, is Caps Lock to Escape.

As someone doing highly CPU intensive computations, I would have appreciated more than 2 cores (or 4, with hyperthreading, I assume) in the 13' MBP. Granted, most of the time I can use my 80 core remote compute node, but it would still be nice to have a bit more parallel CPU power for local development

Apple needs a built-in, system level, per-app configurable Touch Bar settings tool. Apps may provide their own configurations, but they have to be customizable.

Only by putting this in as part of the system settings, will a standardized way of apps making touchbars and users making customizations work across all apps.

Lots of people point out about touch bar being context sensitive. Why cant each app have context sensitive widget bar. Or why not just have another context sensitive menu bar which each apps can customize. Are we not getting the same user experience but with a mouse/trackpad instead of a touch bar ?

Ubuntu for Windows works really well (on insider preview) and since then I have no desire to even look at mac...

I feel like removing the function keys their original idea to where they couldn't go back when they were first conceived. It will be better to know what their function is without having to look it up in a manual. It makes the function keys on older computers look like index cards in a library.

I'd actually say devs (web/mobile) are one of the only professionals served by this laptop. They don't need high powered GPUs.

This however is a massive kick in the face to anyone working in design, art, 3D, video editing or effects.

The only other professional this seems to target is the professional blogger.

As an iOS developer I've been waiting for a single feature: the ability to drive a 5k monitor. Bonus for a single cable that I can plug in vs power + DisplayPort. Apple finally delivered. The fact that any manufacturer can develop such a monitor now is just a bonus.

I don't really understand the outrage about the touchpad when the actual keyboard is likely a far worse problem. Unless they have significantly upped their game from the 12 inch MacBook I don't see anyone typing on that keyboard for longer than 10 minutes.

They went out of their way to point out that it's not the same keyboard as the 12". Aside from that, there are plenty of opal who are more than happy with that keyboard - personal preference is just that, personal.

Why doesn't anyone mention that Apple still sells the 13" version without that touchbar?

Ok, I think Apple is not hitting the Dev group of consumers at all. But what I certainly do not want to do is judge a machine that I have not tried. Yeah, I am almost 100% I won't buy this machine, no reason, cause I use maxed out 13" I bought 9 months ago, but I will go to a store and spend some time with it, and after that come to the internet and tell my impression.

Markets and products change over time, sometimes for worse, sometimes for better. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy this machine, yes it is expensive, yes it is not geared towards Pro consumers as we all used to think and expected from this one the same, yes it is Apple on the verge of their creativity. So what? It has never been better situation with alternative laptops and hybrids. You have fantastic products from Microsoft and Dell!

What is my opinion on this whole thing, is that with laptops we got to the point of saturation. They started as big and clunky boxes in 90s, to a slimmer but still heavy and chunky plastic bricks in early 2000s. Then we got aluminum body, after that CPUs staled with performance, and went with the rout of lower voltage, which allowed for longer battery life and less heat exhaustion. Then aluminum bodies went really slim, tablets and touch screens came in play, opening whole new market of hybrids.

And now we come back to the point where we say, we do not want gimmicks in our laptops, that's okay, Apple shoulda have given the option of non Touch Bar 15" MBP, but it would require further price tweaking. And then we come to the point of price. Yeah it is going up! We had a period from 2012 to 2016 where computers were pretty affordable, in terms where you get solid battery life and computer performance with at least FHD screen slight under thousand dollars. Now market is shrinking, because of the nature of technology and innovation, market got saturated, and we are here where we are. I just do not understand people screaming all over the internet. I mean I was too when I watched the presentation, this isn't the Apple I fell in love with more than 10 years ago. But what can you do... When the time comes for purchase of my new computer (I am Software Engineer, so quite niche market) I will evaluate every option with my head cool. Yeah, I like UNIX and I was using Mac computers for more than 10 years, but Microsoft has never been stronger with hardware and PC games, and Dell is fine too. That is the good thing both for whole market and Apple fans, because change is needed inside Apple! When their money and stocks start to go down the sink that will make them realize and fight for the lost costumers. Have a nice day, just my 2c.

Very few vi power users actually use the ESC key, I think: the first tip given to everyone trying to transition to vi is to remap jj to ESC so you can do so without leaving the home row.

The RAM bugs me; replacing the F row with the touchstrip doesn't.

While there's a lot in here that I can agree with, this one stands out like a sore thumb...

> The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope.

Aren't we done the whole gigahertz race?

author clearly doesn't care to understand about hardware.

If you don't mind an additional dongle, maybe the following can help: https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch

Yep, I'm another developer who rarely uses Escape or the F keys. I moved Ctrl to Caps Lock, and you can put Escape there too if you are a hardcore vim/emacs user. It's better on the hands and faster.

Second, my current laptop has 8GB ram and it is more than enough to edit text files. The only time it could potentially be a problem is when running VMs, but as it is I can run two or three at a time with 1GB a piece no sweat. Combined with the cloud and ssh I'm not sure that 16GB is a burden to many.

As an aside I used to work at a vfx company in the late 90's. We'd do simulations such as tornados that ate RAM for breakfast and would run on a full SGI Origin 3k across 16 CPUs. Guess how much ram it had and used? Yes, 16 GB. The idea that we have an Origin in our laps under 2kg would have impressed the younger me.

People like to use rhetoric to pretend that their opinion is universal as a preventative measure for suppressing disagreement. Programmers, unfortunately, like to apply this to things that are transparently subjective, targeted at an intelligent audience that often takes umbrage to being told what to think.

I feel like I should flag this article for being nothing more than rhetorical rabble-rousing[0], but frankly so many people have been arguing to let HN go to shit because that's the sort of comment community they want, so I'm more inclined to leave this particular cesspit bubbling.

[0] Here's the sort of logic the article employs: > There are ~ 19 million developers in the world. And Apple has managed to sell ~19 million Macs over the past 4 quarters. What a coincidence!

The best way for smart people to kill a community is to go somewhere else. Because when the smart people are gone, there is nothing interesting left in the community to follow. Therefore that's an option I want to suggest to you. Let us stupid people destroy ourselves here. Thanks.

No. I don't much care about your opinion of me, as is only appropriate.

I feel like I can boil this post down to:

1. There's no escape key! 2. It has roughly the same specs as existing MBPs

ergo now totally useless for developers

Anyone sw developer that cares about the escape key remapped it to the caps lock key years ago

My PFU HHKB external 'board has an Esc key, and there's usually a way to map things anyway. Not sure what the fuss is about.

I haven't been this upset since Chrome removed using the backspace key as a back button, and it took me a few minutes to find a chrome extension that allowed me to replicate the functionality.

I'm surprised that so many people use them even today. Unless you're fully ingrained into the Mac ecosystem, there are just too many idiosyncrasies that make moving between platforms in possible, like the use of the 'command' key which no other platform in the world uses, or the weird placement of the control key which completely negates years of muscle memory (a trend which some Windows laptops are unfortunately beginning to follow, even in business-class machines; thankfully mine at least lets me rebind it in the BIOS).

Honest question for people who develop on Macs: Do you exclusively develop on them, or have you just learned to put up with differences between it and Linux/Windows?

I use a MBP[1] at my day job and Linux on my personal machines.[2] I am a developer at a digital design agency so my priorities may not line up with those of other developers, but MBPs rock for what I do because:

1) Photoshop (the designers use Photoshop, so this largely rules out using Linux boxes)

2) Extremely colour-accurate display out of the box (PC displays have always been a bit of a crapshoot on this count in my experience)

3) Being Unix

3a) A real command line (admittedly I haven't tried the Ubuntu-on-Windows thing)

4) I'm not paying for it!

Speaking only for me, switching between using two platforms has really not a problem for me - I do it every day. When I first went into this job I was worried that a Mac was going to be a very difficult transition to make, but it turned out to be straightforward - just needed a little muscle-memory retraining :)

[1] Never really sure if this should be "an" or "a"...

[2] Written from my 2006 Thinkpad of Death :)

(edited: linebreaks)

All softwares, including wim, will come with a plugin (or a built in feature) to display a custom menu on it, including the equivalent of an escape key. And you can bet the first app to be developpped will be something to display the old Fx bar in the widget.

I usually really dislike apple politics, being a linux boy myself, but I can see how this, while causing some issues, can be an interesting tool.

You want people to innovate and cry when they do so. It doesn't work that way.

Let the community try to work with it for a bit to see if interesting patterns emerge before judging.

And come on, 16GB limit? I got 32 just in case, but currenly, I can't reach 14GB without forcing myself to open everything I can. This is complaining for complaining.

Between VMs, Chrome, maybe Chromium/Firefox/Safari it is easy to get to 16gb

With docker, firefox, chrome and the android emulator running, I can't reach 14GB. I probably could by faking it, but I've been dev on an 4 Go machine for years and it was ok.

At first I was ornery about the touch bar thing. Then I remembered I'm using a Kinesis Advantage that has soft function keys, which I've touched about 3 times in the past year.

The author is just complaining, but has not done any amount of in-depth analysis of the feasibility of customizing the touch bar in the apps developers use!

Why no mention of the lack of MagSafe? I can't count the number of times that brilliant little connector saved my laptop from certain death. So sad to see it's gone.

The escape key always seemed a horrible choice for such an essential key in vim.

I mapped it to capslock like 2 days after starting with Vim.

Many people also use "jj" or something similar.

It is not only developers, this change also kills the MBP for gamers. My child has all the function keys mapped to spells in World of Warcraft (including ESC).

You can use the Caps Lock as ESC key, for example

I suppose also there's a terminal mode with ESC and the other keys (or iTerm might do that)

But yeah, the RAM issue is not good

A possible substitute for vim keyboards is that touch bar will display vim power commands. losing escape may not be such a big deal for them.

but other users ...

I lost it at:

> There are ~ 19 million developers in the world. And Apple has managed to sell ~19 million Macs over the past 4 quarters. What a coincidence!

The real concern for me is the trackpad. It's size makes it impossible not to rest both palms on it when using they keyboard.

well, if you you want a touchbarless macbook pro then get a 13' touchbarless macbook pro. Just came to mind this thought "Maybe they're selling that one as part of a sales control group". But then: it's Apple, they just do whatever they think is innovative.

Do you think system76.com is a good alternative from the developers point of view?

Isn't the apple market getting soft? The app gold rush is over and it never was a very good deal to begin with. Apple wants a cut of your development profits, they can yank your app or worse, yank your developer account arbitrarily. Swift, while not finished yet, commodifies the the apple dev market further. I don't think devs have a choice, they have to move on to other markets.

The esc and F key is a red herring. I do most of my coding on a Das Keyboard.

So many DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) features are mapped to function keys.

Is Apple abandoning their digital recording arts audience too?

For people who really need to touch-type function keys, I would recommend remapping ALT+1 -> F1, ALT+2 -> F2, etc.

Am I the only one here who noticed that there IS a version without touch bar and with plain old function keys?

Yes, but only 13" with slower CPU and 50% less USB ports.

The touch bar is customizable. Surely they will allow users to add an esc key on their touch screen, right?

While I understand people's frustrations. Couldn't the escape key be on the toolbar when in Vim?

I don't use vim and consider myself highly biased towards guis despite being a long time programmer. I am also an Apple user since the Apple II, and owned the original inside Mac and Human Interface Guidelines books.

Even for me, losing the escape key is a bit scary. It may be mitigated by customization of the bar. Function keys have always been dumb and replacing them with dynamic controls is awesome.

Google cache, since it's down currently: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UleFaa...

Connecting an iPhone 7 to the new macbook pro requires a $19 Adapter. This is beyond a joke now Apple!

According to Apple's presentation, the function keys are available when you press the Fn key!

I remap my CTRL to CAPS LOCK because it's more convenient.

Have come across a lot of Vim power users that do the same with ESC. Or buy the model without the Touch Bar.

Can we stop with the drama now? It's becoming pathetic.

Apologies for the bluntness.

P.S.: more RAM and CPU? Get a desktop or buy another laptop. Since when was Apple the fastest, more bang for your money? This was clearly not a specs bump iteration.

There was really nothing preventing Apple from offering 32GB and even 64GB chips. 16GB MAX is pathetic for $3000. What's with the old chipset/cpu? DDR3?

Those that do need more RAM are probably are already using desktop options. I understand it would be nice to have more RAM by default or optional, I would also like it since I tend to keep my laptops for a long time (current one is a 2008 13'' Macbook Unibody), but there's always a reason for not doing it, either it be technical, economical or commercial. It's not a decision you take on a whim.

They introduced a major piece of hardware to the configuration and reduced size and weight. Making other changes would be increasing the risk of something going wrong. That's my take at least.

You can probably expect the specs bump within the next year. :)

If you are going for price, criticising Apple's pricing is by now a tradition. I thought we had established that Apple is not where you get more bang for your buck. You buy it for the OS and construction quality (and now the ecosystem of services).

Actually, you used to get pretty solid performance for the price/form factor from Apple. For instance when I purchase my Mac Pro desktop in 2008. It was a RIDICULOUSLY good deal for what you got. The Xeon processors alone were $1500 each on NewEgg the day I purchased it. They've just progressively gone less and less value, as the years have gone by.

Not doubting the price you were seeing in NewEgg, but find it hard to believe you couldn't build your own PC with the same CPU and equivalent RAM, GPU, cheaper by sourcing the parts from retail stores yourself.

Was it a case where Apple was getting an incredibly good deal on those?

Yes, they basically bought up the entire market on those Xeons, and that 2008 line was THE Mac Pro to buy into. I'm still using it today, zero issues! Except of course the whole Apple no longer supporting it with their Sierra OS. There were articles on it comparing sourcing yourself, and you really couldn't just throw together a workstation grade PC like this for that price.

$3000 got you 2 x 2.8ghz Quad core Xeons, up to 64GB of FB-DIMM ECC, 4 x drive bays + 2 x CD bays.

There isn't much this thing still can't handle, it's just being phased out, and eventually it won't turn on one day.

> What's with the old chipset/cpu

Intel doesn't have laptop-ready quad cores shipping in their 7th gen chips yet...

Ok, so why isn't the Kaby Lake dual core in the other offerings? As far as I can tell they have released mobile SKUs. Why are we still on DDR3?

Does nobody use external keyboards?

I'm pretty sure I can adjust to the soft esc key, If not then evolution is a myth. :)

folks, thanks for all your comments, didn't expect that. The main issue with the keys appears when you have a full-size keyboard and a laptop with a different set of major keys. And there is one more thing — tactile feedback.

In your experience getting actual work done with the new touch bar, what was your personal feedback on how it felt not to have the tactile feedback?

So how long before we see a "function row extension" that plugs in via usb?

It looks like they have also removed the § key. How am I going to type § now?

"The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016?"

This was really disappointing to read. Aside from the total lack of imagination and overall butt hurt tone, the author demonstrated a lack of basic understanding of performance.

Worst HN post and comments ever. Sounds like a kindergarten fracas.

I really dislike the tone of this kind of blog posts, as if one is only allowed to be called developer when using UNIX, vi and Emacs.

I don't want a portable PDP-11, rather a Xerox PARC workstation, a BeOS, Amiga, Atari, Acorn, Oberon System 3...

True ViM users have already mapped Esc to the Caps Lock key.

don't the majority of developers work with the lid closed using an Extertal monitor and keyboard?

i only use the internal keyboard when traveling.

I'm not sure what are the alternatives though. You still need a mac as a developer for mobile app development or even checking out rendering.

Your developers. Stop moaning about lack of this or that key and just remap the existing keys.

R.I.P F5! :-)

True developers used MacBooks?

I was talking to a washed-up developer today who swears by them actually. Every single reason was totally bogus. It went something like this:

Reason 1) "They come with native SSH capabilities"

Me) "Uh, you can just get Putty for windows. It takes 20 seconds."

Reason 2) "MacOS uses the PC's hardware more efficiently"

Me) "Uh, it's because it's a very basic OS and has much less the deal with, i.e less threads to micromanage, so it's not really 'efficiency'. Also, Apple products have very poor hardware specs for the price, so the performance ends up the same if not worse than an equivalent windows machine, even when factoring in poorer hardware utilization efficiency."

Reason 3) "B-but, Photoshop and video-editing software runs better on MacOS."

Me) "No. It doesn't. It really doesn't. What the hell"

Honestly, there is no getting through to them.

> True developers used MacBooks?

Yes, three out of four tech companies I've been employed at and many more I've visited have been mac shops.

Your made-up justifications don't even touch on the real reasons people prefer macs a lot of the time; it's UNIX, it's easy to use, and the hardware is high-quality.

I think this might just be bait, but I do hear comments like this all the time off HN, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

>the hardware is high-quality.

On the outside, maybe? The internal components of Apple products are notoriously planned and built for obsolescence and failure to keep you trendy folk giving them money, line after line (and then charge you to fix the failures!)

>it's UNIX

People would use Linux if the platform had the money to bribe software makers to support them. That's a "forced-reason", and not a positive design point of Apple itself.

>made-up justifications

Call everything you don't agree with "made-up"?

But seriously though, the reasons that devs use macs are mostly forced/non-reasons:

a) Earn a tonne of money and terrible value is not a problem for them

b) Need it since the thing they are developing needs to be tested on macs

c) Need UNIX and software that supports running on it.

d) etc.

After a while, you realise most of the reasons why any developer ever buys Apple starts with "need", which, hopefully, you should understand is a statement to the marketing, underhand, and monopolistic tactics of Apple (forcing you to "need" their products, rather than want them)

I thought the same thing. The only place I've ever seen "developers" use Mac products is when they must for technical reasons (e.g. targeting Mac OS specifically), or in the Valley where it's trendy.

It's not even that suitable for the fashionable toy webapp development that seems to reign here in the Bay. I've seen the homebrew or ports hoops the 'webdev' crew at the company I work for have to jump through just to get a basic development environment running. It's silly. I fire up my linux-guest VM or else use my company-provided MacBook as little more than a terminal to remotely access our development servers to write my code (which isn't web or mobile application code).

Outside of the Bay, webdev shops, or targeting Apple OSes specifically, if I seriously suggested using Apple products for development I'd expect to be laughed out of the room. And rightfully so, in my opinion.

They're fine computers for the consumer market, better than linux or any other alternative for that purpose (in my opinion) but as development platforms they're...wanting.

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