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Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

engadget.com

81–90 of 397 posts

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#81
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still salty about the magsafe.

MagSafe was nice, but I'm a big fan of being able to use an industry standard $30 charger with 60W USB-C, 3x USB-A ports, and a removable charging cable. Having to replace a whole $80 proprietary charging brick because the cable connection frayed was a pretty shitty deal.

Is it impossible to have a removable Magsafe cable?

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#82

This thread is going to dissolve into a pile-up on the Touch Bar, so I wanna jump in front of this. Readers of this site are mostly “hackers,” however mutated or dumbed-down that term has become over the years, correct? Everyone here has their windows and spaces just so, a full complement of shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and if they're serious about the Macintosh tools like TextExpander. As standard as GUIs are, w…

I am a touch typist. I never look down at the keyboard, ever. The only time the Touch Bar is involved is when I accidentally switch tabs because the Touch Bar buttons trip even while you're pressing the 2 or 3 key on the keyboard, and then I'm lost in a different tab than the one I was working on in the first place.

Is there a preset that never shows anything on the touch bar, ever, except for the Escape key and the "global" brightness/volume buttons? Can this be done in, like, five seconds?

If not, then I might Frisbee this computer straight out the window. If so, I would love to know how.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#83
post #61

I am a developer. The Touch Bar is useless to me. I remapped Caps lock to Esc expecting to be annoyed, but still hit Esc nonetheless because it works. And I deftly adjust volume using the Touch Bar slider using press-and-slide (not tap then pick-and-slide), relying on the += key for tactile positioning (but the position itself is largely muscle memory by now) I am also a musician. The Touch Bar is fantastic to adjust…

> Touch Bar is useless to me.

I don't get it, the rest of your comment is mostly positive?

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#84

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags. I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it f…

Touchbar has been used effectively by Zoom. Only app that I use and love using touchbar with right now.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#85

I will never ever buy a MacBook Pro if they don't get rid of the TouchBar. The sheer arrogance of Apple to think they know better than their customers infuriates me. I only use a 2018 MacBook Pro because work supplied it, and because my 2015 MacBook battery was dying and the only option the IT department gave me was to upgrade to the 2018 model. I may simply go back to Windows at home if that's the case, and will use…

I'm in agreement with your eloquent response. The touch bar is an unacceptable gimmick for me, a solution in search of a non-existent problem (my physical escape key is doing just fine). I'm also not going to buy Bluetooth headphones, just because they decided to drop support for standard headphone jacks. The right to repair and extend my personal computer is another. It's common human decency, which apparently is no…

I really don't see the problem with any of this stuff.

I like physical escape keys, I really don't want expensive Bluetooth headphones, and I like having a headphone jack on my phone. I also like being able to repair and upgrade my equipment.

So what do I do? I don't buy Apple stuff.

Then I read discussions like this one and chuckle at all the people griping about all these things, and then continuing to buy and use stuff from the most hacker-unfriendly company on the planet. It's almost like they want to suffer.

Thankfully, Apple is not a monopoly, or even close to one, and there's lots of alternatives (which of course have their own downsides, but not for basic stuff like these issues), so none of this stuff bothers me, and I wonder what anti-consumer action they'll take next to piss people off so I can laugh about it.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#86

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags. I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it f…

and here I am always on the look out for a good external keyboard that has separate buttons for volume, brightness, and more. This is because on the desk top front Apple long ago decided that multi-key combinations was better than separate keys for some functions and too many vendors followed suit.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#87

This thread is going to dissolve into a pile-up on the Touch Bar, so I wanna jump in front of this. Readers of this site are mostly “hackers,” however mutated or dumbed-down that term has become over the years, correct? Everyone here has their windows and spaces just so, a full complement of shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and if they're serious about the Macintosh tools like TextExpander. As standard as GUIs are, w…

I’m not sure why you couldn’t do the same with the Fn keys instead.

What you’d lose in being able to look down and see what a key does at the moment, you’d gain in having more tactile response allowing for easier pressing without looking.

Also, when I find an inscrutable keyboard shortcut I use frequently, I simply remap it. There are enough KB shortcut combos possible that running out of keyboard shortcuts is rarely an issue. And bonus, you can touch type those shortcuts in.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#88

This thread is going to dissolve into a pile-up on the Touch Bar, so I wanna jump in front of this. Readers of this site are mostly “hackers,” however mutated or dumbed-down that term has become over the years, correct? Everyone here has their windows and spaces just so, a full complement of shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and if they're serious about the Macintosh tools like TextExpander. As standard as GUIs are, w…

There are two huge low-hanging fruit that Apple could do to make the Touch Bar better and appease (some of) the haters. First, add half a centimeter of clearance between the touch bar and the number keys. I've never once accidentally hit the Touch Bar, but one of my close coworkers does all the time, after years with this, so I can't deny that it's an issue. Second, allow users the ability to map any keyboard shortcu…

The bigger and most immediate thing they can do is put a physical Escape key back on. It would violate their Holy Symmetry or whatever, but it'd fix the number-one problem with the thing.

The idea of shifting it up a little is a good one. But at that point they might as well shift it even more and put back the hardware function keys, too. I don't think they can move it without effectively conceding that it's not the winning solution that they want to position it as.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#90

I will never ever buy a MacBook Pro if they don't get rid of the TouchBar. The sheer arrogance of Apple to think they know better than their customers infuriates me. I only use a 2018 MacBook Pro because work supplied it, and because my 2015 MacBook battery was dying and the only option the IT department gave me was to upgrade to the 2018 model. I may simply go back to Windows at home if that's the case, and will use…

You won’t buy one, but you’ll use one daily to make a living. I was expecting a different conviction given your strong language. ;)

I use Windows at work, but there's no way I'd pay for it on my own or use it at home.

People who work as janitors probably aren't exactly wild about cleaning dirty toilets every day, but they do what they have to do to earn a living.

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