Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

I decided to switch back to the (new) MacBook Air instead. I feel that had the butterfly fiasco never happened, this generation of laptops may have just dumped the Touch Bar entirely, but instead, there were so many general keyboard complaints (escape key specifically, general Touch Bar complaints, and of course the butterfly keyboard complaints), that it is reasonable that they are trying to see if this new "reduced" Touch Bar will stick, but it's just not for me. I feel that the fact that the Touch Bar has not made its way into any other keyboard (desktop keyboards or even iPad keyboards), is somewhat of an admission that it's not that crucial.

It's a really weird feeling, because on the Air the keyboard has once again returned to just being something I don't think about. I'm not ecstatic or something. Just overnight I stopped getting infuriated at my machine and feeling like a complete idiot when I'd see an email where I sent "butt" instead of "but" due to repeated keys. But it's like fixing a dead pixel, my experience is not amazing now, it's just not an issue anymore.

The problem I've always had with the Touch Bar is that I'd lightly brush some random button and all of sudden I would have triggered some action. When I first got a Touch Bar MacBook Pro, I could swear we had some weird state-resetting bug in our website. Turned out, I would just every so often accidentally hit the refresh button on the Touch Bar. Do "normal people" ever refresh a website? I feel that refresh has basically become a pro-level feature now for development. Anyways, I ended up just manually removing just about every button from the Touch Bar.

So, back to where we were 3 years ago as far as I'm concerned (on the Air).

The Touch Bar feels to me like a stopgap measure from Apple because they don't yet have touch-sensitive screens on their laptops. Eventually Apple will have to put touch-sensitive screens on their laptops -- just like everybody else does -- and on that day the Touch Bar will be history.

I know Apple doesn't think touch-sensitive screens on laptops are a good idea. I would have agreed with them 5 years ago. But every time I have to show my MBP screen to a colleague who's not an Apple user, they try to scroll the window by touching the screen with their finger. Every time. Apple is out of step with the world on this issue.

I dont think that is a good enough reason to add touch screen. Do you have a better reason for adding one?

One of the reasons for me to keep using a Mac has been not having a touch screen. It has become very difficult to find non-Mac laptops without a touch screen now. I for one hope they never add it.

Personally I don't care. I already have a Dell XPS running Ubuntu and I never use the touch screen even though it has one. I just think the non-hacker marketplace has come to expect all screens to be touchable.

I'm considering switching to the Air as well. How have the first impressions been? I'm somewhat worried about using an Air for development performance-wise.

For me the big factors are that I actually use functions keys (in Emacs, mostly) and just cost. My previous Macbook Pro (2011), which is in its death throes, at the time a top-of-the-line 13", was $1200. With aftermarket 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, I managed to keep it usable for almost a decade. At the current MBP configurations, I'd almost certainly end up shelling out a mind-blowing 3-4x that much.

This gives me pause for three reasons:

- All of the soldered on crap means that I can't use aftermarket upgrades to extend the life

- It sounds like an ARM switch is in the cards in the next 1-2 years

- I just don't like having a $3000-5000 portable device. I have my laptop out with me quite often, and I don't relish the idea of having something worth > $4000 with me that may get lost or stolen.

So I am going to have an unsatisfactory answer, but maybe its helpful:

1. Performance was kind of a reason for the Air. I want a machine that gives me the perspective my users will have when using my software. 2. But doesn't that suck for actually building? Yes except... I also just have a nice computer on the network that I offload the actual rough tasks to. This might end up being a good solution for you too. 3. This might also future-proof you for the ARM switch. If you have a good build computer, and a cheap "interface" computer, you can switch to a new ARM computer in a bit with little pain: none of the the "real" stuff has to change.

It kinda sucks for multi-monitor though. It really struggles with it.

I naively picked up a late 2018 air without considering the thermal aspects of the performance. It sounds obvious but I totally missed it and bought on basis of the benchmark numbers, make sure to look at the thermal performance under sustained loads. Notebookcheck do a good job at deep diving on this in their review https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-2018-i5-256-....

It's basically passively cooled! There's no heatpipe connecting the fan to the CPU so it kicks up to max all the time trying to cool it but can't make much of a dent on the temp. Really mind boggling.

I had to switch back to my old pro machine and felt like a bit of a berk for not reading up on that aspect.

> I feel that the fact that the Touch Bar has not made its way into any other keyboard (desktop keyboards or even iPad keyboards), is somewhat of an admission that it's not that crucial

It's worth noting that the Touch Bar is driven by an entirely separate processor that also handles Touch ID and some other security stuff, so porting it to an external accessory is probably nontrivial.

> Do "normal people" ever refresh a website?

College football fans on national signing day.

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