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

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#381

Post by kristiandupont » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:22 AM UTC

magduf wrote: post #85

lioeters wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's where I will end but it makes me sad because my 2013 Macbook Air is without a doubt the best machine I've owned in my 20 years as a software developer. Everything about the hardware is pleasant and I mostly like the OS. I would love to just carry on but as it is currently, I find myself researching alternatives. That is time I would rather spend being productive.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

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Post by quicklyfrozen » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:43 AM UTC

atombender wrote: post #127

turtlebits wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this - wouldn't you just accidentally press the F-keys if the touch bar wasn't there? Also, when my fingers are on home row, I can't even reach the touch bar without overextending/completely flattening my hand, which is hard to accidentally do while typing (and I have larger than normal hands).

The Touch Bar is very sensitive and picks up accidental touches. F-keys require pressing down. Personally, I tend to unconciously rest my hands spread out over the keyboard when I'm not typing. My thumbs are down by the space bar, and my fingers on top of the Touch Bar.

Exactly this. Didn't even realize I did this until I spent 5 minutes trying to log in to my new MacBook while the user name/password fields kept resetting -- I was accidentally brushing the escape button.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#383

Post by jvzr » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 7:57 AM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #151

Kronopath wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out if you do a small rightwards/leftwards swipe on the brightness or volume buttons, then you can increase or decrease them by one notch without opening the slider. It’s not an intuitive or discoverable command.

Yeah, but that's still two gestures instead of one.

You don't need to tap then swipe, just swipe.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#384

Post by saberience » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 8:35 AM UTC

matwood wrote: post #188

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point, and I did do exactly that in the pre-Touch Bar days as I had no use for most of the "media keys." What the Touch Bar gives me is context sensitivity, different suites of commands on a per-app basis. Evidently I'm just lacking the mental agility of remembering that F2 is "open responsive desktop mode" in Safari and "clean build cache" in Xcode. As for the arguments of touch-typists here, I'm a tou…

I'm a touch typist, but never used the F keys enough to not have to look down. I think a lot of the TB hate is because the ESC key was removed and people just don't like change.

I've used Macbook Pros with the same keyboard for years and can reliably hit the volume buttons, display brightness, keyboard brightness, etc. without looking.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#385

Post by teamski » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 8:56 AM UTC

chisleu wrote: post #323

teamski wrote: post #183

Imagine a random manufacturer, let's say HP, was the one bringing a touchbar to their notebooks. Some press, a lot of laughter but quickly, nobody would talk anymore about them and/or buy that notebooks. With Apple, people keep on complaining OVER years. The touchbar, the prices, the crappy keyboards... the reason? IDK, maybe they are locked-in and can't move to another platform but there is only one single reason to…

I'm addicted to CMD+C/CMD+V. I've tried making it happen in Linuxes and windows, but always with failures in one app or another, or having to configure each individual application I use independently. The keyboard is the reason I love mac for running my Linux clusters. If I didn't have that, I would have the fantastic UX features like instant scrolling. Scrolling anywhere else is a choppy and laggy nightmare for me.

Just put Ctrl on Caps and then ctrl+c and +v is on par or or even better. Don't know anyone who is using the original control. Even better: create a tap/hold key with Esc/Ctrl on Caps. Then you have a superior keyboard experience because the alt keys are better positioned and usable. On Macs you have just Cmd as the only sane/reachable modifier key compared to crtl and alt on Windows/Linux. However you could also somehow get this setup on a Mac with fiddling with Karabiner. But here again Windows' Autohotkey is superior.

Re choppy scrolling, I have a Windows precision touchpad on my notebook and it's super close to a MBP but what is even much better than a MBP touchpad: get a Logitech mouse with a free wheel eg the G502, best scrolling experience and buttersmooth.

I thought also there is nothing else than macOS but there is even more good stuff outside. eg window management on Windows or linux eg with i3 there is just 100x better. on macos it's a joke to nonexistent.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#386

Post by dzhiurgis » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 9:47 AM UTC

tbolt wrote: post #308

kkylin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame this mostly on Apple's human interface guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... Scroll down to "Design Considerations": "Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display." But what I really want is for the touch bar to be a display and input device for things normally elsewhere: time, date, maybe CPU usage, etc. This to me is not a hardware pr…

Checkout Pock - https://pock.dev

Haptic Touchbar also helps a bit (but I am not going to buy it) https://www.haptictouchbar.com

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#387

Post by dzhiurgis » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

anthonybsd wrote: post #314

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…

Hah. I have dozens of horror stories like that. Listening to Spotify at work, headphone jack plugged in to the Macbook. Get a phone call from the wife, need to run to meet her in the restaurant in the city. Close macbook, pull out headphone jack, grab a soda from company fridge on the way down,run into a semi crowded subway car. Remember that I had Tomcat running in IntelliJ, need to kill it. Sit down, open the Macbo…

You need automute, buddy https://apps.apple.com/us/app/automute-preventing-awkward-si...

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#388

Post by chasely » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 12:37 PM UTC

ngngngng wrote: 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.

I see myself going down this road as well. I have an international trip coming up that is a little risky for my MBP so I am going to pick up a beater Thinkpad and install Arch. If that works out well my next laptop will likely be the Thinkpad X1 carbon series. They seem like good machines.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#389

Post by contingencies » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

pknopf wrote: post #372

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/

"Just use a VM/container/jail/dedicated machine" is a great solution to any problem except, now you have n+1 problems. I am a huge fan of functional/declarative environments, hence NixOS, but these approaches have limitations. General purpose computing's attraction isn't emulating single purpose microcontrollers...

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#390

Post by pfranz » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

josho wrote: post #378

pfranz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm a little surprised so much of your 8gb went away using Safari if you don't keep too much open. Safari is generally great, but I've had to deal with abysmally large Google Sheets and had it reload every time I switched away even though it was the only window/tab open--Firefox wasn't too much better, it would constantly recalculate formulas. I feel like I got that behavior in Safari one or two other times with heavy SPA, but normally it uses much less battery and seems to use much less RAM than Firefox or Chrome.

I also haven't seen much of a need at all for regular rebooting. Looking back it seems like I'll reboot my laptop every 2-3 weeks, usually for an app that has a kernel driver, to boot into Windows, or to troubleshoot an egregious problem like my sound or bluetooth breaking. I've never done it for RAM, but I have closed browsers to save battery/RAM.