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2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

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Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#5

Post by mikeash »

Not supporting DisplayPort with an adapter is just insane. Apple's new top-end laptop is incompatible with the most common way to connect external monitors?

I've been willing to give Apple and the new MBP the benefit of the doubt on this stuff, and in particular I don't mind that it needs dongles now if that means we get universal USB-C adoption faster. But the dongles need to actually exist and work now!

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#8

Post by Tom1971 »

While, over time, a lot of today's annoyances with the new Macabook's will fade away, the lack of ESC key is a deal breaker for me.

I tried it at the Apple Store and it's pretty much unusable. (It had the seen issue as the writer, apparently relying on the physical click to know whether or not I had pressed it. In addition, I also mistyped it a lot. Maybe hack to replace the whole touch bar as one single ESC key will do it...)

I've been told to remap the ESC to CAPS LOCK to vim usage, but I seem to be one of a rare breed who uses the latter the way it was intended to be, so that's a no go for me.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#9

Post by otterley »

We bought a 15" 2016 Macbook Pro ("Retina" is redundant; there are no 2016 MBPs that lack a Retina display.) We also bought a LG 27UD88-W monitor to go with it. (It's one of the few that has a USB-C input.)

I have to say, I'm really impressed by the single-cable solution. The monitor charges the laptop (57W maximum, which is less than the Apple charger, but "good enough"), and the laptop sends both video and USB peripheral connections to the monitor, which acts as a USB 3.0 hub.

One cable. It's kind of amazing and magical if you think about it.

There are some rough edges, though:

(1) Sometimes the computer reports that it's not charging. Sometimes it does. We don't know why just yet. We can always connect the Apple-supplied charger though.

(2) When the display goes to sleep, it disconnects all the devices on the hub. This is a problem for external disks, as the OS complains that it has been detached without being ejected first. I hope LG fixes this in a future firmware version.

(3) We can't use the Apple-supplied USB charging cable to connect the laptop to the display. The connectors are the same, but.. it just doesn't work. As a technical person, I understand why; but it's going to be unnecessarily confusing to people if two cables that look alike don't act alike. This is going to raise technical support costs greatly until all USB-C cables are capable of all transports and functions and the old ones are phased out. Why Apple didn't ship a fully-capable cable in the box is puzzling to me.

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