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Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

engadget.com

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Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#161

Post by pfranz »

josho wrote: post #35
jimmy_f wrote: post #14

Is the baseline MacBook Air sufficient for a CS major? I don’t want to spend extra for the pro.

Not sure of the Air specs, but I generally recommend paying for 16gb of memory. I found google docs and other web apps quickly consumed my 8gb memory. But, if you don't mind closing tabs and being mindful of running programs you can get by with 8. If you ever find yourself CPU bound then you can spin up a VM image and run those jobs remotely. While running low on storage isn't a problem either as several cloud option…

> I found google docs and other web apps quickly consumed my 8gb memory. But, if you don't mind closing tabs and being mindful of running programs you can get by with 8.

I gather you're using Chrome? Safari seems to "do this for you" in a sometimes frustrating way. Similar to the iPhone, Safari on the desktop seems to aggressively unload webpages when they're not focused. This means large Google Docs get reloaded every time you switch windows. I haven't used Firefox heavily for this kind of work, but it seems to behave better than both.

Chrome with to wrong tabs open can absolutely murder your battery life, too.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#162

Post by kennysmoothx »

ravenstine wrote: post #23
retrac98 wrote: post #10

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…

Why on earth do I need to tap twice to adjust the screen brightness? I couldn't find a way to just have two increase/decrease buttons. Why can't I adjust how long the touchbar stays active for? Why does it disappear at all? I can't imagine the touchbar would exist in its current form if Steve were alive.

Hey ravenstine, this was 1000% the same frustrations I had with brightness and volume.

The best fix for this for me (the sliding was still a pain) has been to customize the touchbar like this:

In keyboard settings:

1. Change "Touch Bar Shows" to "Expanded Control Strip"

2. Add the 3 button volume and the 2 button brightness controls.

This setup behaves the most like the functional keys for me and has been the best at alleviating frustrations.

I still hope Apple nukes the touch bar though, it's the worst aspect of the Macbook aside from the missing I/O ports.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#163

Post by carlosdp »

AJ007 wrote: post #154
basch wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a developer. Ill bet you 99% of mac sales are NOT to developers. Despite them arguably wanting to court developers to write swift programs, their hardware sales team doesnt seem to care about developer prosumers.

Yeah but 99% of Apple hardware sales are dependent on Mac developers.

Yea this is one of Apple's largest advantages as a platform, they really don't want the Macbook to fall out of favor as the developer's machine of choice.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#164

Post by wffurr »

magtux wrote: post #47
jimmy_f wrote: post #14

Is the baseline MacBook Air sufficient for a CS major? I don’t want to spend extra for the pro.

I don't think you even need a MacBook Air. I've always used Linux for development. If you're not tied to MacOS, get a Thinkpad with Ryzen + Radeon. It will run better on Linux. If you want the MacOS experience, get a Air. Irrespective of what you get, you cannot do serious compute on a laptop. Because actually using it at full power kills your battery.

"serious compute" is for servers. For programming homework, a Macbook Air is fine.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#165

Post by traderjane »

basch wrote: post #150
lloeki wrote: 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…

> I am a developer. Ill bet you 99% of mac sales are NOT to developers. Despite them arguably wanting to court developers to write swift programs, their hardware sales team doesnt seem to care about developer prosumers.

But developers are basically more picky office professionals. I hardly see why a device made for a developer would be poorly fitting or divergent to a business person or accountant. The developer hardly demands anything as niche as the Apple Pencil. The iPad, however (“what’s a computer?”)...

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#166

Post by Ididntdothis »

docker_up wrote: post #9

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 may simply go back to Windows at home if that's the case, and will use a Windows Laptop at work if possible. Seriously, fuck Apple for this arrogance”

If only Windows was better. My home MacBook just broke after 6 years and I am looking for a replacement. At work I have Dell and Surface devices and after weighing everything I still think a new MacBook is the best of all. They are worse than the 2015 models but still better than everything else on the market once you look at hardware and OS. Just my personal opinion.

In general it seems there is a trend to making things worse for whatever reason. The new MacBooks are worse than the ones a few years ago and Windows 10 is worse than 7. They should just have added WSL, HyperV and other goodies to Windows 7 and left the UI alone and it would be a better OS.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#167

Post by wffurr »

jimmy_f wrote: post #14

Is the baseline MacBook Air sufficient for a CS major? I don’t want to spend extra for the pro.

I did all of CS grad school on an 11" Macbook Air with a Core 2 Duo. It was fine, even the machine learning class. The datasets were never big enough to be an issue; and if they had been my fallback plan was to use the lab servers instead.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#169

Post by tverbeure »

patejam wrote: post #12
jtdev wrote: post #4

It’s unfortunate that so many design decisions are made with little regard for the true utility of what’s being designed, of which the touch bar has essentially zero.

What utility did the previous bar have? Volume changing? Screen brightness? Those are better with the touchbar. Escape key for vim or whatever? Switch your caps lock with escape! You should have been doing that the whole time! The actual function keys? I don't use them enough to need them showing up all the time. And an extra key to get them up again is no big deal. I agree that the touch bar doesn't add a whole lot…

> Switch your caps lock with escape! You should have been doing that the whole time!

There are many touch typists who've been trained to use caps lock all the time.

The moment I need to type more than 2 upper-case characters in a row, caps lock it is. In combination with Vim.

The touch bar (or better: the removal of Esc) is a huge regression.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#170

Post by asperous »

DanHulton wrote: post #159

For those of you who've remapped Caps Lock as Escape, what do you do when you need to type a long string of capital letters? Do you have some other key combination mapped to caps lock, or do you just hold shift the whole time?

In those rare occasions in sublime text I select all, cmd+k, cmd+u.

If I was typing all-cap constants, I just type the variable in lowercase and use the autocomplete feature

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