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Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

engadget.com

281–290 of 397 posts

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#281
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud this sentiment. I use emacs reasonably often and I reached out to Mitsuharu Yamamoto about touchbar support in emacs and sadly never heard back. The ability to bind arbitrary emacs functions to the touchbar, programmatically, would be a killer feature.

Quoting the Emacs web site: "To improve the use of proprietary systems is a misguided goal. Our aim, rather, is to eliminate them. We include support for some proprietary systems in GNU Emacs in the hope that running Emacs on them will give users a taste of freedom and thus lead them to free themselves."

Not sure what point you're trying to make, but the person I contacted maintains a mac-specific port of emacs which adds nice features that GNU emacs lacks and won't add because of politics.

So I'm not concerned about GNU zealotry and how it relates to the touchbar.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#282
post #6

Disclaimer: I like the touchbar. I swapped escape and caps lock, installed Pock, and never looked back. This is my last MacBook. Xubuntu on a Thinkpad x1 carbon works great for everything I do, at a fraction of the price, with a keyboard the doesn't stop working with dust, and with more than just USB-C.

> Xubuntu on a Thinkpad x1 Was this install pretty painless? I'm due to buy a new laptop and Thinkpads are where I'm thinking about moving to. The x1 carbon and the T480. It's too bad that models after the T480 don't have a removable battery.

Most flavors of linux are pretty painless on thinkpads. Although I wouldn't recommend using anything other than a thinkpad if you can't put up with some things not working.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#283

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…

If you check the lates "innovations" you see almost all of those are like that (previous version was better).

- magsafe vs new charger

- ports on 2015 MBP vs now

- keyboard on 2015 vs now

- physical keys vs touchbar

The only improvement that is really an improvement is CPU speed and memory, which I could not care less about. In the same timeframe (2015 to 2019) Apple went from the most innovative company to the 17th position.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/apple-is-no...

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#284
post #6

Disclaimer: I like the touchbar. I swapped escape and caps lock, installed Pock, and never looked back. This is my last MacBook. Xubuntu on a Thinkpad x1 carbon works great for everything I do, at a fraction of the price, with a keyboard the doesn't stop working with dust, and with more than just USB-C.

Same! Got a ThinkPad carbon X1 Gen 3 as a "pilot" for 300 euro, and then when I realised I could easily work with Linux as a daily driver I bought a ThinkPad T480. The Thing is a beast.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#285
post #17

The Touch Bar was what finally pushed me over the edge to remap caps lock to escape. I'm shocked at how much I enjoy ESC being close to the home row (I'm not even a big vim user). For this change alone I am glad to have the Touch Bar.

I've had my Caps Lock key mapped to 'delete word' after having it mapped to several other things while trying to combat RSI and am loving it. Great for both writing/editing prose as well as code.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#287
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Touch Bar is fantastic to adjust tuneables in GarageBand, without the gorilla arm or wobbly screen effect you get on touchscreens. I futzed around with the touch bar in Logic when I got one and wrote it off almost immediately. Logic Remote (which works with GarageBand, AFAIK) already exists and works with an iPad. Clear labels, clear text, manipulating multiple elements easily at once--it's a better solution th…

> Logic Remote (which works with GarageBand, AFAIK) already exists and works with an iPad. Clear labels, clear text, manipulating multiple elements easily at once--it's a better solution than what they tried to wedge in with the touch bar. This suggests a fun and interesting way forward for Apple UI design - layered augments from additional devices. Let OS X be the core of the system, but enable big apps like Logic o…

I agree, and a lot of what I do for fun (live video production) is kinda exactly that. Not iOS- or Mac-specific, but I've got multiple iPads talking to vMix at all times.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#288

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 100% agree with you about the touch bar, but you might be underestimating the user-hostility of modern Windows and the shoddiness of Windows computer manufacturers.

I've had devices from from Dell, Microsoft (3x), and Lenovo (2x) in the past few years, and they've all had hardware or driver issues either from the start or within the first few months. Tried countless registry hacks and driver reinstallations, spent dozens more hours on the phone with support reps who have no idea what they're doing, finally gotten a replacement but it doesn't include warranty coverage so the next failure is game over. Worst support by far was Dell -- they refuse to admit there's a problem, transfer you to wrong departments, and just wait for you to hang up. Their basic warranty coverage also only includes "depot service", which means you mail the machine away for two weeks and literally all they do is wipe it and reinstall the OS. Lenovo sent somebody to my home and actually resolved the issue.

Even when the system is put together correctly, every Windows update breaks something, or reverts some setting to a default value, and you don't get to choose which ones you need and which to skip. That Persian calendar fix is going to break your touchpad. Your system event log will be full of errors, and you won't know if you should be concerned. But that's just how Windows is, rotted and barely clunking along. Not to mention the built-in app ecosystem -- my wife tried their Mail app for a while, and one day it deleted all of her emails and calendar events. OneDrive sucks. Everything about Windows sucks.

I've done the "Reset This PC" thing on 3 different machines, and it's bricked all of them.

By contrast, the MacBook Pro that I've used at work for a few years has had zero problems and the OS feels so much more coherent. I do passionately hate the touch bar; I accidentally brush it all the time and suddenly the volume changes or Siri pops up or whatever irritating thing. I miss having a real Esc (yes, I've remapped Caps Lock, but muscle memory dies hard).

I've always used Windows laptops, but recently I've realized the MacBook is actually not more expensive after you factor in the hours of maintenance and the fact that Windows machines will die much more quickly no matter what you do.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#290
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…

As a developer, the thing that excites me the most about the Touch Bar is the fact that there's a dedicated Xcode "pause" button on it when you're debugging an app in Xcode. If I were developing a macOS app that would finally be a great way of pausing in the middle of a mouse gesture or keyboard chord. But since I'm doing iOS development these days I don't actually end up using it, oh well.

There's nothing stopping you from just remapping a regular key. You don't need a Touch Bar to get a "pause" button for XCode.
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