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Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

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351–360 of 477 posts

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#351
post #290

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…

Or you can do what I did and switch to Windows. I'm 100% happy with my Surface Book Pro, after having nothing but MacBooks for years. I even used to work at Apple.

But it's now time to use other platforms for laptops and desktops.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And have even crappier hardware (thinkpads with screen resolution and disk sizes of last decade, not much cheaper, anyone?) with Win 10 preinstalled...

Dell XPS 13 has build quality comparable if not better than MacBooks, comes with Linux preinstalled, and has an optional high resolution QHD+ screen. http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-notebooks-and-2-in-1-...

I can't say anything about Linux on XPS 13 because I didn't tried it, but for build quality... that's questionable. In my small company we have horrible failure rate with XPS 13 (seven of eight had some problems, from failing fans and SSDs to 'it just died on me'). Macs are much better in that regard. And the price between these two is comparable.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of other hardware manufacturers out there. One of the practices you might not wish to support is an OS being tied to a specific hardware vendor. If you don't like the hardware you shouldn't be buying it.

> One of the practices you might not wish to support is an OS being tied to a specific hardware vendor. Which is literally the reason why OSX is that good/stable.

Is it? It used to be.

And you can buy Chromebooks or Microsoft Surface products if you want strong hardware/software integration.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#354
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still have the 2015 at home. I think that was the best MacBook Pro made thus far I recently purchased a new non-touch-bar MacBook Pro and I find it to be the best machine I've ever owned -- super reliable, fast, all the ports, incredible 12 hour battery life, even with all day coding in either Java or C++, the magsafe adapter, and all quite reasonably priced too. I hope Apple considers keeping these in their line…

i was thinking about doing the same until i read this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16761389

I don't know how many fans mine has but it's never been too hot, certainly never something I thought was unacceptable.

If you are doing multithreaded machine learning or some long running intensive tasks across all cores (which few applications do but developers often do), then the fan does kick in and you can hear it. Not really been a problem for me though.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#355
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried that for half a year, and it has some issues: - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen - Coil whine - Shitty battery life - Shitty touchpad So as whatever is Apple doing is annoying faddy bullshit, it's still the better option, especially considering the XPS 13 cost as much or more than MBP.

I wonder why people downvote others who just report their experiences, and not even have the balls to write a word about it... i share your opinion that it seems so that we can only chose between things that suck least and have no generally great option

I wonder why people downvote posts who wonder why people downvote posts in which others state personal experiences...

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#356

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…

> Oh, you want HDMI? €100 please. More like €25: https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-USB-HDMI-Adapter-Thund...

That one only does 4k at 30 Hz (acceptable to some, not relevant if you're connecting a FHD display). But others -- even cheaper ones, in fact -- seem to do 4k at 60Hz (HDMI 2.0).

Apple really should be including an HDMI 2.0 adapter with every USB-C only laptop. Instead they're selling an HDMI 1.4 adapter for $69. Kind of insulting.

Not that other manufacturers are better. Dell's new XPS 13 is USB-C only and I'm sure there's no adapter in the box. They sell a "mini-dock" which includes Ethernet and VGA (!) in addition to HDMI (indeterminate version) for $59.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#357
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried that for half a year, and it has some issues: - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen - Coil whine - Shitty battery life - Shitty touchpad So as whatever is Apple doing is annoying faddy bullshit, it's still the better option, especially considering the XPS 13 cost as much or more than MBP.

I don't understand why this was downvoted. This has been consistently my experience whenever I tried switching to a non-Mac notebook. On paper the specifications look great, but in practice the hardware configuration is better tested for Macs and everything just works smoother.

Some people here use downvotes obviously to unfavor opinions they don’t like or that you have a bad experience with their loved products... downvoting should be bound to write a reason, as it’s encouraged in Stackoverflow...

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#359
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell XPS 13 has build quality comparable if not better than MacBooks, comes with Linux preinstalled, and has an optional high resolution QHD+ screen. http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-notebooks-and-2-in-1-...

I tried that for half a year, and it has some issues: - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen - Coil whine - Shitty battery life - Shitty touchpad So as whatever is Apple doing is annoying faddy bullshit, it's still the better option, especially considering the XPS 13 cost as much or more than MBP.

I'm using my XPS13 for like a year now.

> - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen

Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.

> - Coil whine

None of that.

> - Shitty battery life

What's shitty? It lasts 5 hours of me working with VMs. I don't think expecting more is reasonable. It's much less laggy than my collegue's MBP, which leads me to assume that Mac just throttles the CPU down to achieve longer battery life? I don't want that.

> - Shitty touchpad

Not at all. It works nicely. Much better than most touchpads I've used.

And as an added bonus, it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off. And it was like 1.5K EUR vs 3K EUR for a macbook pro.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#360
post #267
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always used iPhones and had no idea this feature existed. Thanks.

I don't want to digress into why 3D touch is bad design. But you are sort of pointing it out right there. Everything has to be learned. There is no natural metaphor or "affordance" that guides how it is supposed to be used. It changes from device to device, from application to application. I am pretty sure that Apple had plenty of design people (or just people with common sense) pointing out the flaws of the touch ba…

I feel like 3D Touch is very much right-clicking for phones; useful when you know it's there, but the vast majority of people don't know it's there.
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