I'm certain people who are OK with the touch bar don't care about it as much as the people who hate it, but I for one prefer that they are iteratively innovating on the keyboard for macs. I'd rather they do that than make a thick brick of a laptop with a row of mostly useless function keys that a vocal minority has been harping for.
The keys that the touchbar replaced were definitely not useless - they were media control, sound control, screen/keyboard brightness and expose/mission control/launchpad (and of course, ESC.) Those are all extremely common keys to use. And yes, you could also use them as "F#" keys I guess. Now, those keys are non tactile and much, MUCH less pleasant to use. Also, if you're watching a movie in the dark and you turn of…
They are ditching butterfly keyboards due to the reliability issues (dust causing keys to malfunction), not because of they've abandoned the quest for thinner, lighter laptops.
my 2015 Pro is so much better than mycompany 2017 Pro w/ touchbar like people are saying, most people just don't care about the touchbar. It does get annoying at times (as a vim user). Why WHY do they hide the esc key and have it take two inputs to increase the volume/brightness by more than 1 tick (sliding is terrible). Other than that, I totally agree, the real focus should be the keyboard. Because it's shit. Here…
For your keyboard problems, just get it repaired. It's free under a four-year warranty, and it usually only takes one day: Just drop it off at an Apple store, and pick it back up the next day. (Also, if you're a vim user, you should really remap Caps Lock to Esc. There's a pane in System Preferences for it, and it should be done whether or not you have a touch bar.)
I'd also like to add that there's a chance they also swap out your battery during the keyboard repair.
I'm certain people who are OK with the touch bar don't care about it as much as the people who hate it, but I for one prefer that they are iteratively innovating on the keyboard for macs. I'd rather they do that than make a thick brick of a laptop with a row of mostly useless function keys that a vocal minority has been harping for.
I use my function keys constantly as text editor shortcuts
Most people don't, and the touchbar just makes it more versatile for more users at the cost of tactility.
This is the final "fuck you and fuck off" to professional developers from Apple. I expect the next generation of MBPros (and MBAirs) that are rumored for later this year to continue in this direction giving us developers the middle finger and likely it will continue into next year and beyond. Apple doesn't care. The laptops look great from the outside and most people don't know any better. Everything that makes this…
If Apple was working on a complete redesign of the MBP with a new keyboard, how long do you think it would take them to release it? And if Apple were indeed working on that wouldn't it make sense to ditch the 12'' MB since it could not accommodate a thicker keyboard? I'm bitter too about what has been happening on the Mac front for the last 5 or so years, but I think Apple is correcting course albeit slowly.
Rumors are a new mbpro is coming this fall. Or next year. So I guess about four to five years or so. It makes sense that they ditched the regular mb because it was garbage. You may be right, and I hope you are, but I doubt it. If they were correcting course why not ditch the touch bar for function keys instead of the other way around? They have both. Their software choices also point to the same thing with sip, their slow phasing out of apps not signed by Apple, and the increasing difficulty in installing and running any other OSes on their hardware, especially new hardware. Even if the new mbpro comes out this year or next with a new redesign, I wouldn't hold my breath that it would be better. It's likely to be worse given so many years of bad design and ideas not only in laptops but in all their products. They are literally making computers for computer illiterate people these days. That's great for the masses who can afford them. It's great for a phone that has very limited functionality and use cases as smart phones tend to have. It's terrible for an alleged general purpose computer.
I also hate that MacBook Pro touchpads are oversized and easy to touch with your thumbs by accident. I had one issued for a job and had annoying, error-inducing swipes about three times a day.
“...and are really stylish...” classic! That thing is hideous in my humble opinion
Fair enough. I'm in love, which perhaps blinds me. Their Premium site gives a better gallery: https://ec-club.panasonic.jp/pc/premium/ And their colour/aesthetic customizations exceed anything I can find in the west: https://ec-club.panasonic.jp/pc/sp/customize_letsnote/ Panasonic has even had partnerships with e.g. Star Wars to have unique laptop-backing options, which is a bit wild for a business-series laptop. But…
How do you buy those Panasonics in US/Europe? eBay not showing anything relevant
Thank you for showing that different options still exist for laptops.
I remember using a Toshiba Libretto, and a weird Japanese Sharp 10-12 inch laptop in late 90s both of which seemed amazingly small.
Now the XPS13 and Lenovo P1 that I use are nice but feel so.. normal.
The 11” Air was one of my all time favorite laptops and the 12” rMB was such a great replacement.
The 2015 11" Air was the best performance / value macbook Apple has ever made.
Mine was a 2010 base model, but by 2015 I had grown weary of it's limitations.
The form factor was just amazing, and even though the Core2Duo CPU wasn't anything special, with the SSD (at the time, they weren't very common) it was still a very usable machine. The battery life was my biggest complaint, only about 4 hours, and they didn't fix that until 2014.
Macbook Pro "improvements" over the last 3-7 years: * No more matte display * RAM soldered to the board * SSD soldered in * remove all ports except USB-C * make keyboard worse * remove function keys, replace with touch surface that's redundant at best But it's very thin! And even thinner was the recent Macbook, and if the law of "diminishing returns" matters as little as the usual defenses of all the above tradeoffs…
I really (really!) appreciate how thin they are. The new 15in is as heavy as the old 13in. Really nice when you have to carry it around all the time. The biggest pain point is the lack of ports (4 ports including power) is not enough. The older models had around 5+ ports and still required dongles. Everything else aside from the keyboard is a minor issue (e.g. getting more ram today versus in the future is just a que…
>getting more ram today versus in the future is just a question of deferring costs
What scenario did you have in mind? RAM in macbooks is soldered. Getting more ram in the future means finding a new computer.
The 8gb ram/256gb config is insulting. It's like a base model car without power windows or locks or a radio. Pure lemon.
Unless you are really good at keeping your hands off the trackpad when you rest your hands, the previous generation trackpad was overall better in day to day use, and anything bigger is better as an external peripheral. The problem is, Apple’s palm rejection tech just isn’t good enough, and if you have to write fancy software to cover a deficiency in the size of a piece of hardware, then you’re better off going with…
The palm rejection tech is so good that I can't recall a single time I ever accidentally triggered it. In fact, it was so good I didn't even consider that it had palm rejection tech until I read about it, I just never considered that it was a problem.
YMMV. People have different palms. Sometimes when it's cold or my hands are a little clammy not even my index finger registers on the track pad or my phone.