I have a newish iMac 5k and a really old '11 Macbook Air. I'm due for a laptop upgrade but don't see the value. Touch Bar doesnt excite me at all (who wants to look down at their keyboard). Magsafe saves my butt at least once every couple months - thats gone. And while a 2TB SSD sounds great, it's not essential. Especially not for an added $1200. The non-Touch has 16gb of ram available so I might grab that if I'm desperate and/or the Air dies.
Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
51–60 of 103 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#52I have a newish iMac 5k and a really old '11 Macbook Air. I'm due for a laptop upgrade but don't see the value. Touch Bar doesnt excite me at all (who wants to look down at their keyboard). Magsafe saves my butt at least once every couple months - thats gone. And while a 2TB SSD sounds great, it's not essential. Especially not for an added $1200.
Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#53Yes, my personal machine is a late 2008 Macbook Pro 15". The screen alone on the new one would be an amazing, huge upgrade. The touch bar looks very cool to me. I think it's a great idea that will get copied (poorly) by other laptop manufacturers in a year or two. A lot of good ideas look bad at first. Remember the eternal warning of CmdrTaco's iPod review. Not that the touch bar must be good because it's getting pan…
it already is a copy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L-mIqJW1v0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkB6T6LrhQ
they already went back on it because it wasnt apple quality. apple always waits until its refined, but you cant give them credit for creating the idea.
Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#54I have a newish iMac 5k and a really old '11 Macbook Air. I'm due for a laptop upgrade but don't see the value. Touch Bar doesnt excite me at all (who wants to look down at their keyboard). Magsafe saves my butt at least once every couple months - thats gone. And while a 2TB SSD sounds great, it's not essential. Especially not for an added $1200. The non-Touch has 16gb of ram available so I might grab that if I'm des…
>who wants to look down at their keyboard
It's an inch from the bottom of your screen so unless you never use the bottom third of your laptop screen you probably see that part of your keyboard pretty clearly all the time.
Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#55I have a newish iMac 5k and a really old '11 Macbook Air. I'm due for a laptop upgrade but don't see the value. Touch Bar doesnt excite me at all (who wants to look down at their keyboard). Magsafe saves my butt at least once every couple months - thats gone. And while a 2TB SSD sounds great, it's not essential. Especially not for an added $1200. The non-Touch has 16gb of ram available so I might grab that if I'm des…
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Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#56Yes, my personal machine is a late 2008 Macbook Pro 15". The screen alone on the new one would be an amazing, huge upgrade. The touch bar looks very cool to me. I think it's a great idea that will get copied (poorly) by other laptop manufacturers in a year or two. A lot of good ideas look bad at first. Remember the eternal warning of CmdrTaco's iPod review. Not that the touch bar must be good because it's getting pan…
I continue to dislike touch-screen interfaces and would love to have a hardware smartphone keyboard back. For me that has not changed since 2007.
There are actually a few out there, like the Blackberry Priv. Curious: Have you looked at them, and if so, what kept you from getting one?
Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#57No. I do want to upgrade, my current machine (13" MacBook Air with 4GB RAM) but even the top spec'ed 15" I feel would only last a year or two before it starts to feel limited - and I can't justify spending that much if it's not going to last.
I'm thinking either a Dell XPS 15" (when they refresh them with Kaby Lake) or keeping this and getting/building a powerful desktop PC.
Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#58Yes, my personal machine is a late 2008 Macbook Pro 15". The screen alone on the new one would be an amazing, huge upgrade. The touch bar looks very cool to me. I think it's a great idea that will get copied (poorly) by other laptop manufacturers in a year or two. A lot of good ideas look bad at first. Remember the eternal warning of CmdrTaco's iPod review. Not that the touch bar must be good because it's getting pan…
it already is a copy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L-mIqJW1v0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkB6T6LrhQ they already went back on it because it wasnt apple quality. apple always waits until its refined, but you cant give them credit for creating the idea.
I didn't intend to give them credit for creating idea, just that I think other manufacturers will copy Apple's implementation in the future.
One reason I think that, is the functionality that vendors are writing for Apple's touch bar. If Adobe and Microsoft create UI elements for the bar on Apple, they could pretty easily port that to a Windows machine with a touch bar.
Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Besides, no one who uses Vim is gonna be happy to see the physical Esc key go away. What kind of self-respecting Vim user physically reaches up to the top corner of their keyboard constantly? Even if you have a physical esc key up there you should be hitting ctrl-[ or remaping it onto the capslock. It's wasted motion to constantly pull off home row to hit escape.
I do for one. I have capslock mapped to Ctrl. Of course, I started in EMACS and got sucked into vim and had already gotten used to the capslock as Ctrl.
I think putting ctrl on the capslock key is the more efficient move, honestly. But Vi was designed for a machine that had esc where your tab is. It's built for efficiency but you lose all of it when you have to physically pull your whole hand up off of the home row.
The Vim wiki has a lot of tips for more efficient mappings[1], but if you don't want to be dependent on your own idiosyncratic config, ctrl-[ is literally the keycode that the physical esc key generates, and it's soooo much easier to hit there's no reason not to retrain your muscle memory to prefer it.
Re: Ask HN: Would You Upgrade to the New MacBook Pro?
#60Yes, my personal machine is a late 2008 Macbook Pro 15". The screen alone on the new one would be an amazing, huge upgrade. The touch bar looks very cool to me. I think it's a great idea that will get copied (poorly) by other laptop manufacturers in a year or two. A lot of good ideas look bad at first. Remember the eternal warning of CmdrTaco's iPod review. Not that the touch bar must be good because it's getting pan…
I agree with most of what you said but I really miss physical keyboards on smartphones and know I'm not alone. I think they went away because they're disproportionately expensive to design and manufacture and they make localization more difficult. Touch screen keyboards just aren't as good, though I don't think slide-out qwerty is the answer either. We need mobile tactile input!
The flaw with this is that on the mobile phone the keyboard and screen are infront of your eyes the whole time -- while on a laptop you don't want to switch between looking at the screen and looking at the keyboard to see wtf the bar suggests for example.