Very interesting. I had assumed I'd buy a 13" Pro as a personal laptop replacement for my 2011 Air when they updated the keyboard. However, when the 2020 Air dropped, I snapped one up because it ticked all the boxes, and I really don't need the "power" of the Pro, especially given its presumed expense. I bought a loaded Air with 512gb which was I think $1650. Speccing out the Pro, the pricepoint for a similar machine…
But the CPU on Air 2020 is passively cooled which means the case fan has to work twice as hard and you get hard throttling if you do anything that needs sustained work.
I cannot agree more. At least for myself i would add MacOS as a huge plus over any other laptop. I know many people work in Linux but I just for the life of me cannot make it as comfortable as MacOS.
The thing I dont understand about OSX is the Finder situation. It's just awful. Installation is awful, finding applications is awful, navigating to the system folders is awful. It's very much like Windows and it's pretending Desktop is the root folder and then hiding everything behind databases of My Documents. Dont make me jump through hoops to find computery stuff.
CMD+up and you in `computery stuff`. Don't understand the problem
I wonder how many people buying Macbook Pro's this year are trying to load up before Apple starts the ARM migration, thereby avoiding what may be a rough first year or two
If Apple made a 13 inch MBP without touchbar but with 4 ports I’d buy 3 because I know they’d immediately discontinue or “improve” it.
Apple should simply re-release the pre-touchbar 2013 Macbook Pro, with USB-C ports. "Peak MacBook Pro" was 2013 (once they fixed the screen-coating deterioration).
Bringing back the escape key is such a admission of their original screw up. I'm glad they admitted it and reversed the design decision. But I'm still on a 2012 15" MacBook that's running strong. I normally would have updated but using my work 15" has been horrific between the dongles, the keyboard randomly dropping keys (last week "G" would not work, now it's back. The most infuriating thing about the touch bar, out…
I could care less about the ESC key being gone (remapped that to caps lock) but I hate the touchbar so much. Half the time i'm listening music and go to pause it the bar doesn't work, or tells me it's already paused even though music is playing.
A year or two back chrome implemented media controls for tabs that have media on them. Before I realized (and disabled) that, I thought the media keys weren't working on my 2014 MBP. That could be happening to you?
I decided to switch back to the (new) MacBook Air instead. I feel that had the butterfly fiasco never happened, this generation of laptops may have just dumped the Touch Bar entirely, but instead, there were so many general keyboard complaints (escape key specifically, general Touch Bar complaints, and of course the butterfly keyboard complaints), that it is reasonable that they are trying to see if this new "reduced…
> I feel that the fact that the Touch Bar has not made its way into any other keyboard (desktop keyboards or even iPad keyboards), is somewhat of an admission that it's not that crucial
It's worth noting that the Touch Bar is driven by an entirely separate processor that also handles Touch ID and some other security stuff, so porting it to an external accessory is probably nontrivial.
I'm still surprised that so many people are stuck on the Escape key but it's probably no surprise that the ones that are stuck are all developers using vi or emacs. I love the Touch Bar and had no problem adjusting/remapping and find the utility of the Touch Bar for video and audio editing to be invaluable now. I wasn't sold on it before but, over the last year or so, I'll be really disappointed if they remove it. Ad…
The problem is most heavy computer users set themselves up with a proper ergonomic setup, i.e. external keyboard. And by not building the touch bar into external keyboards, they killed the entire concept of the Touch Bar, because any "pro" application has to assume that you may or may not have a touch bar and can't put essential functionality there. Which limits the Touch Bar to proper first-class support primarily i…
I guess the actual, underlying problem is, the Touchbar is bad UX for a bunch of software engineers, but pretty great for most everyone else. Think about it – you lose some keys you never really had a use for anyway except as media keys, and you get almost analogue-ish volume and brightness controls, apps can give you context-dependent options that are really discoverable (which F-keys totally aren't) and can adapt to your feature use patterns and be a lot richer than static bindings on 12 keys. As a musician, you get a neat little slider – no replacement for a proper external controller, but it's always there when needed, and it can change its behavior dependent on the context. As a photographer, you get a multi-function slider in post that feels (to me) a lot more precise than any touchpad acrobatics I'm capable of.
Plus, and most importantly by a long way, it makes emoji really usable on MacOS, and emoji are super, super important stuff, it's hard to overstate their value. Text-based communication loses a lot of emotional cues, that's really hard to get used to if you're used to mostly in-person communication or at least voice, and in my experience keeps causing small (or not-so-small) misunderstandings and microdose vitriol even among people who have been doing this for ages and ages, been socialized in it, aren't too keen on lots of face-to-face, and detest emoji with a passion.
Those are things that make the Touchbar a pretty neat feature for lots and lots of people, even given its many "legitimate" issues (it tends to micro-freeze for some people, it isn't as precise as it could be, lots of apps use it in not-well-thought-out ways, it's very hard to use blindly, ...) But not having F-keys is so disruptive to a lot of deeply-ingrained software development muscle memory and UI conventions transplanted from other OSes and other decades that I guess it just wouldn't fly with this crowd in pretty much any shape and form factor.
Everyone keeps talking about vi/emacs stuff. While that was annoying, the more annoying aspect was when macOS softlocked and I was unable to hit the chord (cmd+opt+esc) to get the kill task window because the touchbar froze as well. Having a virtual ESC key in software that can be frozen, where part of your keyboard chord to kill apps includes the ESC key is really, really, stupid and caused me lots of wasted time th…
Real Vi/emac users don’t use the esc key. It’s way too far frome home row.
I decided to switch back to the (new) MacBook Air instead. I feel that had the butterfly fiasco never happened, this generation of laptops may have just dumped the Touch Bar entirely, but instead, there were so many general keyboard complaints (escape key specifically, general Touch Bar complaints, and of course the butterfly keyboard complaints), that it is reasonable that they are trying to see if this new "reduced…
The Touch Bar feels to me like a stopgap measure from Apple because they don't yet have touch-sensitive screens on their laptops. Eventually Apple will have to put touch-sensitive screens on their laptops -- just like everybody else does -- and on that day the Touch Bar will be history.
I know Apple doesn't think touch-sensitive screens on laptops are a good idea. I would have agreed with them 5 years ago. But every time I have to show my MBP screen to a colleague who's not an Apple user, they try to scroll the window by touching the screen with their finger. Every time. Apple is out of step with the world on this issue.