Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#371

Post by dmix » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 1:12 AM UTC

nvrspyx wrote: post #343

tzakrajs wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F8 is right next to F9, which is super important for loading autosaves in Bethesda Softworks' games, so thats a big affirmative over here.

The main question was can you hit F8 without looking? Assuming your point was you can because you've become familiar with hitting F9 on a keyboard from your experience with Bethesda games, a better question would be: can you hit the F8 key without looking on a MacBook Pro (without Touch Bar), the laptop in question with an OS that doesn't play Bethesda games?

I think the fn keys are the only ones I havent memorized - because I havent needed to for any applications.

If I played a game requiring something like that I'd learn it quick.

I previously bought an all-black mech keyboard with no key labels which looked sleek but I didn't like it, swaped the keycaps out two days later. Switching to a new keyboard is probably a good time to keep them until you get used to it!

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#372

Post by pknopf » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 1:39 AM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #358

Swore I'd never buy another Mac but bought one this week (had a Dell XPS15 for a year and a half) to supervise a cross-platform app development project and many things were annoying me with NixOS (clean but not quite there yet for desktop use and may never be: too many missing packages) which had replaced Gentoo (~biannual reinstall required due to portage rot), neither of which work perfectly on laptop hardware. (Al…

I wrote a tool that I'd like your opinion of. It should solve your "OS rot" problem.

https://godarch.com/

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#373

Post by dang » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 1:58 AM UTC

jtdev wrote: post #18

patejam wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t know where to start... I hope you’re never in a position to design something that people have to use.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Also, please don't post unsubstantive comments.

If you'd read the guidelines and follow them, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#374

Post by banku_brougham » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 2:00 AM UTC

Absolute deal killer for me. I’ll get good use of my current MBP but in the horizon I see a migration out of the walled garden.

Wait till they replace the keys with iPhone keyboard.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#375

Post by zepolen » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 2:04 AM UTC

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…

This is my story in a nutshell too.

After the 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard started breaking down (after 1 year of use, once replaced already) I gave up on Apple and bought a 3 pound LG Gram 17 inch laptop.

Using Windows for the first time in 10 years, all I can say is it has come a long way. They've put serious effort into making development for linux via WSL and VS Code a dream.

The laptop is also fantastic, 17" of 16:10 real estate, light, the macbook feels like a stone now.

The downsides are the keyboard is a tad too small as it includes a numpad and takes a couple weeks to get used to. I wish it was a bit bigger, there was room for this.

The other issue is by default the laptop is set to too aggressively throttle in software and requires tweaking.

Other than that fantastic all around, 2 nvme slots, 1 upgradable ram slot, lots of IO. .

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#376

Post by exabrial » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

Why do we endure this.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#377

Post by cloverich » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

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.

There's a preference "Touch Bar Shows" -- change it to "Expanded Control Strip". That makes them work like the actual keys used to. I barely notice its a touchbar and not the old keys now (absurd of course, I'd prefer to have an actual choice).

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#378

Post by josho » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 3:01 AM UTC

pfranz wrote: post #161

josho wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

I am a safari user and don’t keep _that_ many tabs. I experienced tab reloading, which I didn’t mind. But even after a week of use I found I benefitted from rebooting to clear out memory.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#379

Post by 43920 » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 3:28 AM UTC

peterkelly wrote: post #264

I wasted two hours the other night because of the touchbar. I had turned my macbook pro's screen brightness down to complete black as I was using an external monitor only, and in a dark environment. Some time later I happened to restart my machine, and both the internal and external displays came up completely black. The touchbar displayed only "Esc", without the normal brightness control. I had to figure out from me…

If this happens again, you can start typing the first few letters of your username to select it (similar to how typing in a input works), and then hit enter to get the password input. Probably a bit easier than guessing at the location!

(I definitely agree this is a bad design, though).

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#380

Post by chipotle_coyote » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:29 AM UTC

lbotos wrote: post #295

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working in Silicon Valley at tech companies for the past 15 years, and MacBook Pros have been massively dominant for the web developers, server-side developers, database developers, technical developers, and mobile developers on not only iOS but Android. None of this can be explained by "Apple provides them a toolkit and exposure." I am pretty confident that developers use OS X because, yes, they like the h…

Yes, but also, it was basically linux, which meant that it was close enough to the hosts that you were connecting to. It was a nightmare to admin Linux from Windows in the past. I have a college aged brother, and Microsoft currently owns GitHub, and is providing the linux subsystem, which is a huge signal that "developers are welcome." His whole generation is developing on $300 Dell laptops and it's easy . Mac used t…

Microsoft's moves to become more developer (and Linux) friendly are undoubtedly paying off. It's my understanding from recent data -- although I can't find a linkable reference at the moment -- that Apple laptops are still the #1 choice on college campuses by a substantial margin, but this could certainly be changing. (K-12 schools are full of Chromebooks, but anecdotally, that doesn't seem to be translating into a preference for sticking with them after high school.)