New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#141

Post by macmac » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

lbebber wrote: post #72

macmac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I "defected" a few months back and I am now using a Dell XPS 15 Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz × 8 16GB Ram running Ubuntu 16.04. It is a beautiful machine, very sturdy, fast and an excellent keyboard. It is available with a 238ppi screen, but I chose 141ppi because I don't care about the extra pixels on a dev machine.

How are the trackpad and the battery?

Trackpad is excellent, not as large as the Macbook Pro but works very smoothly under Linux with excellent precision. Re battery I get a solid 8 hours of work from it.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#142

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

chairmanwow wrote: post #102

ericjang wrote: post #37

I dislike this post intensely. The opinion comes across as uncharitable, as the author probably has not used this Macbook Pro yet. How can you (alexeysemeney) be so sure? I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative d…

Many common applications that developers use have many keybindings that heavily rely upon the Escape key (Vim for sure).

[deleted]

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#143

Post by mgberlin » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

cypres wrote: post #24

It's funny they bring up devs using vim, because the only vim key they removed is Esc, which a lot of vim devs remaps to caps-lock or similar anyways. I almost never use the F keys, so if they kept the Esc key but removed the rest it would be perfect :)

Yeah, I'm totally baffled as to who productively uses VIM and reaches waaaay up there with their pinky. In the first 10 minutes of learning I was googling "mac remap caps lock escape", and I haven't touched the actual escape key in years.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#144

Post by fatbird » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

Very few vi power users actually use the ESC key, I think: the first tip given to everyone trying to transition to vi is to remap jj to ESC so you can do so without leaving the home row.

The RAM bugs me; replacing the F row with the touchstrip doesn't.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#145

Post by davej » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

My understanding is that the escape key is there by default but the active application can choose to override it. I don't need the escape while I'm using Spotify.

I quite like the new Macbooks. Would have been nice to have a 32GB RAM option but I can survive with 16GB to be honest.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#146

Post by blinkingled » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

I'm sure the Touch Bar can be integrated with MacVim or VS Code etc to show keys that just look like regular Fn keys - that's not the problem developers would be irked of - it's just another thing to hack.

Really problematic however is that the 15" starts at $2399, is still capped at 16GB soldered RAM, the port situation isn't convenient (esp if you've an iPhone), the obsession with thinness continues at the expense of battery life and if you had to ding the Touch Bar it feels gimmicky.

There are much better games in PC town - don't even need to run Linux if you're not into it - Windows 10 is pretty good and with Ubuntu/bash built in, install a X server you're good to go.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#147

Post by SG- » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #111

ericjang wrote: post #37

I dislike this post intensely. The opinion comes across as uncharitable, as the author probably has not used this Macbook Pro yet. How can you (alexeysemeney) be so sure? I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative d…

I'm a vim user. Why in the world did they remove ESC? That's one of my most frequently used keys. And no, I don't think remapping it is a great idea. If I had to use this for work I would protest.

I'm 99% sure the escape key will be there when in Terminal.app, I also imagine terminals like iTerm2 will have some really sweet TouchBar options to make it even better with all your console apps.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#148

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

egeozcan wrote: post #80

slg wrote: post #23

This doesn't even get into the dongle problem. The simplest example is that if you want to hook up Apple's flagship phone up to their flagship laptop for development, you need a dongle. And if you want to share one of their flagship wired headphones between the two devices, you need another dongle. Therefore if you want to connect three of Apple's flagship devices together on a daily basis, you can't go anywhere with…

I'm really shocked about this, I mean, I had thought that they saw the future in USB-C after they previewed the MacBook.

? Thunderbolt 3 is compatible with USB-C (in terms of the port)

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#149

Post by bananicorn » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

hellofunk wrote: post #54

I'd like to see stats on how my VIM users actually still use the ESC key. Most (including me) have mapped this to Caps-lock a long time ago because the Esc key for a long time has not been in the same place on any keyboard as it was when VIM was originally created.

There sure are some to be found - I personally find it too hard to override my habit of reaching for the upper left corner for esc. And believe me, I tried the caps-lock as esc key, but I kept hitting either shift or tab as well... Might just be a matter of practice though. Currently my caps-lock key is still remapped to esc since accidentially hitting caps lock is the worst.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#150

Post by usaphp » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

pilif wrote: post #97

usaphp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents you from connecting them using Bluetooth? I forgot when it was a last time I had to connect my iphone via cable, MacBook just always knows that it's there via Bluetooth, and for the headphone, their flagship headphones are wireless now, and I've been very happy using bose Bluetooth headphones, losing a cord is a major benefit that far outweighs any drawbacks of dongles for me

> What prevents you from connecting them using Bluetooth I don't think you can connect via BT and then use that connection from Xcode for deployment and debugging. That still requires a cable.

You can, starting from Xcode 6