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MacBook Pro

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421–430 of 1001 posts

Re: MacBook Pro

#421
am I the only one wondering who wanted a 67% brighter display? I for one would like a display without a backlight...

Re: MacBook Pro

#422

Is the Touch ID sensor the new power button? When I buy it, how am I supposed to power it up? I feel stupid and old just for asking this question :-(

Didn't notice, but I like your hypothesis as it makes for a smart design. That you can't even power on the hardware unless your fingerprint matches--saves me from setting a firmware password that I may forget since I never go into the firmware.

Ironically this is the only thing that impressed me from the announcement, yet it wasn't discussed.

Re: MacBook Pro

#423

Unbelievably unimpressive compared to Microsoft's announcement yesterday, and 45 minutes into the keynote I still have no idea what the specs are. I don't need some stupid touch strip on my Mac, I need a touch screen. I haven't been this let down by product announcements ever as I have been this year with everything Apple's done. Now we get all our standard USB ports removed, very little by way of actual hardware imp…

Didn't think about the 'touch typing' thing others have mentioned...totally valid. Furthermore, the lack of a Mac Pro update is just frickin' pathetic.

Suggestion: don't think about touch typing.

What you are seeing is pure change resistance. It has no useful predictive power when evaluating whether the change will be good or bad overall, especially since the set of touch-bar use cases and the set of touch-type-heavy workloads does not seem to overlap much.

Re: MacBook Pro

#424
How come all that complaining and rambling about the missing upgrades for the iMac or Mac mini? I really think that Apple did a great job at evolutionally improving the MacBook Pro under the hood, and the TouchBar seems to be a really usefull addition for creative professionals.

Quite a fraction of the HN community really seems to enjoy complaining about what possibly could have been, rather than just beeing happy about the stuff Apple delivered today. And if you just can't stand the new MacBooks? Who cares! There are tons of other manufacturers to choose from and a different machine may just fit your taste perfectly.

Re: MacBook Pro

#425

I'm surprised (and a bit disappointed) by the lack of HDMI and DisplayPort/Thunderbolt ports. I'm even more surprised by the lack of a physical escape key. I'm concerned that it could break some applications (Vim, Emacs, all kinds of command-line stuff), even if isn't as big a deal with Apple's non-developer user base. ... At least they kept the 3.5mm jack.

Surely the Touch Bar will have Esc, along with a bunch of F keys if in Terminal. Indeed, many photos I saw today featured Esc in the Touch Bar. Indeed, it was a large Esc, which would be nice for Vim work. I'm surprised people see a touch screen and somehow think there would be no way to make it a bunch of old-fashioned F keys.

Re: MacBook Pro

#426

This event was by far the most disappointing Mac event in the history. A lot of the time was wasted in: - Mildly funny jokes and comparison with 90's technology. - 90% of the talk was about the touch bar. - Awful demos of Photoshop & some cringy DJ. I was hoping we would see: - A new MacBook with all day battery life and touch bar, even thinner design. Ok, I understand that they are trying to consolidate their produc…

The overlap between the Macbook, Macbook Air, and old and new Macbook Pro lines now is painfully weird. https://gist.github.com/icopp/29f225279a39ba9e3ea0d1f596e97c... I'm getting serious shades of "IBM clone vendor throwing darts at a board to try to appeal to every possible price point" instead of coherent product lines here.

My guess is it's a transitional period. The new low-end 13″ MacBook Pro, the new 12″ MacBook, and the outdated 11″ and 13″ MacBook Air probably ought not to coexist. But the MacBook Air is important to Apple as their entry-level (i.e. cheapest) laptop, and the MacBook is still too expensive and not quite featureful enough to replace it.

I think Apple would like to drop the MacBook Air in favour of a cheaper MacBook at some point, but they can't right now.

Re: MacBook Pro

#427
What I wanted:

- 7th generation Intel chips. Skylake (6th generation) is from August 2015.

- A move to Nvidia GPUs

- Retain the magsafe power adapter

- At least one dedicated display-out port, preferably HDMI

- 32GB RAM for the 15 inch base model

- Support for the airpods using their new W1 chip

What I'm mad they included:

- Price increase for low value

- Touch Bar does away with physical keys I use daily (most importantly escape), while providing very little functionality I see using in my daily workflows (auto-complete on a desktop? I type faster than that.)

What they could have surprised me with:

- A full touch screen

- Support for the Apple Pencil on the new larger trackpad

- Any mention of their desktop lineup

Re: MacBook Pro

#429
post #143

Apple has replaced the MacBook Pro with a faster MacBook Air labeled "Pro". I have no idea how they could think that professionals would use a MacBook Air (no ports, shallow keyboard, no expansion, no innovative features, marginally lighter). A tiny ribbon display is completely useless to me. They removed the escape key. Twenty years of using Macs and I'm not sure what my next laptop is going to be.

Four standard (non-proprietary) multi-use ports is a complaint? No innovative features? What do you call a ribbon display that no one has ever done before? No expansion - nothing new to the MBP line.

> Four standard (non-proprietary) multi-use ports is a complaint?

which one of those ports can I use to plug in my lighting headphones?

Re: MacBook Pro

#430
post #122

Of course, as some wag said a while ago, the cost of the MBP that I want remains at $3K. ;-)

I don't know if John Dvorak was the first to say it, but I recall him saying that in PC Mag (?) in the mid-80s: the price of the computer you want will always be about $3K. Less accurate over the last ten years or so, but for Macs it remains true.
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