Hacker News Reader

Comment by GreaterFool | Hacker News Reader

It looks like a perfect laptop for programming (tinkering).

Most of the time I just ssh to a remote server or keep a window with persistent mosh connection. All my stuff on the server is only tmux attach -d away!

I suppose I could compile small to mid sized programs on the Macbook itself. Benchmarks indicate it has enough power for that. Compiling something like boost or linux kernel might take a while but I don't do that very often.

In the end, I don't know. I'm keen to give it a go. I switched to 13" rMBP from Air for the retina screen and I still remember how clunky it felt.

Probably not enough to be my only laptop but wouldn't mind swapping my 13" rMBP for 12" Macbook + 15" rMBP (when quad core Broadwell or Skylake comes out).

View on HN

The CPU mark scores seem to be pretty good. (I wonder whether the turbo boost improves benchmark scores.) For something bursty like compilation, it should be perfectly usable, particularly when combined with the SSD.

Not sure about the RAM though... RAM requirements are climbing slowly enough that 8GBytes is probably fine, but it's still a bit stingy.

It looks like the keyboard is terrible, which rules out programming for me.

Why do you say the keyboard looks terrible? They have been touting the new keyboard a lot. See here: https://www.apple.com/macbook/design/

From the article you're notionally commenting on: Ultimately I don’t find the MacBook’s keyboard to be any different to type on as far as key size and feel goes (even with my large fingers), but your mileage may vary.

I spent some time with the keyboard. It's not terrible. It's very different in feel from the Air/Pro, especially when typing fast. It takes some getting used to but I would not complain if this keyboard made its way to the MacBook Pro.

Sort-of-agreed. I like the corner stability, but I think I'd be unhappy if the key travel was this poor on the MacBook Pro.

The loss of travel is the sticking point. The only reason to lose it on the Pro would be to standardize the feel across product lines and improve manufacturing efficiency.

I use an HHKB2 Pro and the IBM Model M on desktop computers, which are lightyears different in travel compared to scissor switches. But I've also become pretty comfortable touch typing on a full size iPad, and the new MacBook keyboard feels somewhere in between typing on an Apple scissor switch keyboard and an iPad.

Right, but you could use taller butterfly switches to retain the right kind of travel. I wouldn't mind that.

If all you're doing is sshing to a remote server then presumably a Chromebook would be a cheaper option.

True. But the screen.

Interesting you say this, since pretty much everyone agrees that this laptop is nothing more than a "facebook" machine. Has a slow processor, low amount of ram, awful keyboard, etc.

8GB of RAM is too low for anything other than Facebook? Wow browsers sure are getting bloated...

It's probably because of iTunes. Safari with 3 tabs open on my MBP is 222mb, iTunes is 291mb. YMMV.

My web browsing seems to consume obscene quantities of ram (there was an interesting article a little while ago about how Adblock can eat 400mb _per iframe_) -but them I am one of those tab-hoarding types.

Ironically (incidentally) Facebook seems to be one of the worst offenders. If I sign into facebook and then forget to sleep my desktop, I can get back from a weekend away to find firefox has eaten 15gb of ram and a painful amount of swap. Chromium seemed to be just as bad last I tried it.

Considering that nowadays every tab is basically an independent application (in Chrome, literally), if you have 20 tabs open is equivalent of having 20 separate applications open, it's kind of pointless complaining about RAM usage of the "web browser".

I just think it's odd to say because my development/gaming desktop was just upgraded to 8GB of RAM from 6GB a few months ago and I never close tabs or shut anything down until something crashes. So saying 8GB of RAM is only good enough for Facebook... you should see my Steam library that likes 8GB of RAM just fine.

Maybe the problem isn't that Facebook takes 15GB of RAM, it's that Firefox or Chrome will take literally as much RAM as it can get. I should try surfing Facebook on the 128GB servers we have at work and report back my findings...

Load of crap. It's plenty fast for most applications.

Uh, sources ?

It has the same amount of RAM as most ultrabooks (the base model it has more than the base Air models or Dell XPS ones, actually).

The keyboard is shallow, but I haven't seen it described as "awful" or even "bad" anywhere.

Besides the fact that it's probably good enough for things that are not compiling complex applications/gaming/encoding/simulations (heavy loads sustained in time), it is more than enough for the uses that the parent wrote about (remote ssh/compiling small programs).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com