Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

vas3k.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 477 posts

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#301

Post by tokenizerrr »

lloeki wrote: post #290
sametmax wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that infuriating, since you gave them your money anyway. And a lot of it. You warmly, and strongly screamed "do that again please" with a big heart shape.

The thing is, you: A. can scream money for nerfed hardware with F-keys B. can scream money for nerfed TB with serious hardware C. can't scream money for F-keys with serious hardware D. can't scream money for TB with nerfed hardware This means I'm currently stuck in a non-choice because either of A or B is lacking, as this is C that I want (or possibly B, but without the shitty guidelines, as demonstrated by TFA). D w…

E. Don't buy Apple.

You'll spend much less, and won't be supporting practices you don't approve of.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#302

Post by eneveu »

mikenew wrote: post #203
sundvor wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's their "because we know you'll buy it anyway" factor.

I know I’m just one guy, but I was planning on an upgrade before they released it and I did not, in fact, buy it anyway.

I would also be in the market for a new Macbook Pro, but their touch bar is dissuading me... The other thing I'm waiting for is 32 GB of RAM.

I guess I'll keep using my 15" MBP (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) for now... If it breaks before they fix their MBP lineup, I'll see if I can buy a 2015 version ( https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever ). Or I'll look at Thinkpads.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#303

Post by cup-of-tea »

reificator wrote: post #264
cup-of-tea wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to "touch" a completely different surface to press escape sounds absolutely awful. Unless there's a way to swap escape for a real key that you don't need I would consider that machine defective.

There's a builtin toggle to map the capslock key to escape. Not that that makes the touchbar good, but at least you can remove a useless key in favor of a useful one.

Capslock isn't entirely useless. I have mapped my capslock key to control but I still have access to it via a function key and do use it occasionally. Why do you think capslock is useless?

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#305

Post by LaGrange »

beamatronic wrote: post #127
usaphp wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In short, it’s for the 90% of software users that float between general public and pro users. It works. Then they should have not called it a “MacBook pro” there is nothing “pro” about touch bar, it’s something useless that I have to pay extra for and I don’t need it at all.

The only time I touch my Touch Bar is to hit the Escape key. Because I use vi. Because I am a professional and theoretically the target audience of $3,000 premium quality laptops.

Uh, no? I mean, the software you write _may_ be the reason, but it's in no way implied by the fact that you're a "vi user", I've ran fairly large pieces of software from old MacBooks with little problem, though _yes_, I did some data mining stuff that would kill the poor little things - but not every "vi user" ever does that. In the largest deployment I've worked with even Vi would be ran via SSH on a remote VM.

It's when you bring out Photoshop or (gasp!) Blender or Unity, or doing something else that requires serious memory, when things start getting dicey. It's a specific sort of professional they mean, otherwise almost every employed person would fit.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#306

Post by samsolomon »

rwz wrote: post #106

The biggest problem with touchbar is that Apple intentionally made non-touchbar model inferior in terms of hardware and the amount of USB-C ports to make sure ppl buy touchbar. This is truly infuriating and I'm sure, was done for purely marketing reasons. I'd buy a non-touchbar model if it had the same hardware as a touchbar model in a heartbeat.

I was certain I was going to buy the 2016 Macbook Pro. I had an aging 2011 Macbook Air that badly needed to be replaced.

Loss of MagSafe, carrying around a dongle, Touchbar—In the end it just added too much complexity to my life that I didn't need.

I decided to purchase an iMac instead. For everyone else I hope Apple produces a decent non-Touchbar model this year.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#307

Post by yoz-y »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #301
lloeki wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, you: A. can scream money for nerfed hardware with F-keys B. can scream money for nerfed TB with serious hardware C. can't scream money for F-keys with serious hardware D. can't scream money for TB with nerfed hardware This means I'm currently stuck in a non-choice because either of A or B is lacking, as this is C that I want (or possibly B, but without the shitty guidelines, as demonstrated by TFA). D w…

E. Don't buy Apple. You'll spend much less, and won't be supporting practices you don't approve of.

This is not very useful advice, kind of similar to "just use Linux" when people complain about some issue they have with Windows.

For many, dropping macOS would be a much larger disruption than having less usable F-keys. That does not mean we can't complain about it.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#308

Post by reificator »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #303
reificator wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a builtin toggle to map the capslock key to escape. Not that that makes the touchbar good, but at least you can remove a useless key in favor of a useful one.

Capslock isn't entirely useless. I have mapped my capslock key to control but I still have access to it via a function key and do use it occasionally. Why do you think capslock is useless?

Because on the very rare occasion in which I want to capitalize more than one word, I can either hold shift, use tab-completion, or highlight in my editor and switch case.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#309

Post by primitur »

bad_user wrote: post #298

I have the MacBook Pro 2017 edition and this is by far the worst upgrade I've experienced for such a high-end, luxury item. It's all USB-C. Virtually nobody else supports USB-C, not even Apple. Oh, you want HDMI? €100 please. I also have an iPhone 8 which is on the Lightning connector. The audio jack is gone and guess what, there's no Lightning connector on the MacBook, so you'll need 2 pairs of headsets or an adapte…

I'm with you. I had a 2017 15" Macbook Pro for work reasons, and just gave it back. I was not sorry. My list of reasons: worst keyboard on Macbook, since like ever. Useless touchbar that just annoyed me more than anything else - was never useful. USB-C is great, but guess how many times I've had to leap across the room because there's no more magsafe and smash my self into the floor in order to avoid the laptop doing it, hmmkkay.. bit of a devolution, I reckon.

I'm very happy with my 2015 MBP though, and will just push it through this particular iteration of upgrades for another year or so.. that is, assuming the thermal paste survives, lol, curse you Apple!

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#310

Post by primitur »

p1necone wrote: post #121
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #11

The Touchbar has been mostly a dud for me, and I don't miss it when using my older MBP. I have customized by touch bar to include my favorite actions such as locking the screen, but it is otherwise static. My 2 biggest issues are: - It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions away. - No haptic feedback. Even…

"It turns off after 1 min of inactivity" Oh wow I didn't know that, I've been kinda leaning on the "it might actually be pretty cool/useful" side of this touchbar thing, but now I'm squarely in the "it's totally useless" camp. What were they thinking?

Whats great is when seemingly intelligent apps adopt the Touchbar koolaid, such as .. iTerm. So yeah, now I'm greated with the very nice side-effect of having a massive row of blinking crud all over my vision, just because iTerm wants to show me what command is running, what keys I could use to kill the process, blink back to the shell, oh .. another app is running in the shell, better update the touchbar ..

Man, its just .. like .. such an 80's feeling.

Post reply on HN