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The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

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Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#151

Post by hultner »

pimeys wrote: post #129
davnn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely worse but not as bad as non-MB touchpads used to be. Plus, it’s motivating to use more keyboard shortcuts.

And when you learn to use the Lenovo TrackPoint, there is no going back. Having a T25, X1C5 and X1C6 in the family and the keyboard+mouse experience is so much ahead of everybody else.

Used a Thinkpad (T550-something, retina screen) for a couple of years and can’t say I ever got used to or liked the track point, the touchpad had “palm detection“ but it was horrible and I ended up using a toggle key for the touchpad instead. The nipple fell of constantly which was incredibly annoying. The keyboard had crammed print screen next to space causing numberous misclicks and annoying shifts between laptop and external keyboard, the official dock didn’t even work oob and had to be patched via a bootable dos-usb, half the times I docked and undocked the picture stopped working completely forcing me to reboot via ssh from my phone if it was alive at all, the picture quality and workability in sunlight was horrible on the badly lit matte display. Yet it’s still the best non Apple laptop I’ve used, however after a few years I went back to the new MBP with TB and it’s been a true pleasure in comparison.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#152

Post by hultner »

hultner wrote: post #151
pimeys wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when you learn to use the Lenovo TrackPoint, there is no going back. Having a T25, X1C5 and X1C6 in the family and the keyboard+mouse experience is so much ahead of everybody else.

Used a Thinkpad (T550-something, retina screen) for a couple of years and can’t say I ever got used to or liked the track point, the touchpad had “palm detection“ but it was horrible and I ended up using a toggle key for the touchpad instead. The nipple fell of constantly which was incredibly annoying. The keyboard had crammed print screen next to space causing numberous misclicks and annoying shifts between laptop a…

Oh yeah and the soft touch finish is nice at first but it starts to peel after about 2 years of use.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#153

Post by esmi »

procinct wrote: post #126
tedivm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

I don’t have a touch bar but I do this too. I have it mapped to escape when pressed on its own and Ctrl when pressed with another key and that works great.

This is really interesting. Did you have to do anything special to make it work in OSX?

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#154

Post by adanto6840 »

SyneRyder wrote: post #109
garmaine wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about?

Apple continued to sell the 15" 2015 pre-butterfly-keyboard MacBook Pro model until yesterday (it has just been discontinued). That model had a retina screen, MagSafe, an SD Card reader, HDMI & USB-A ports (as well as two Thunderbolt 2 ports), but no Ethernet. https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/12/apple-stops-selling-201...

I bought a refurbished one of these in January of this year -- though I see that there are none of them available in the refurb store as of right now. The refurb inventory changes pretty rapidly though, so it might be worth watching in case one does pop up -- I suspect that they'll go quickly, and I almost wish I had purchased a backup.

https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macb...

Oh well, hopefully my current one lasts another few years, otherwise I'll probably have to give Windows a try as my main machine again, for the first time in ~10 years.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#155

Post by zumu »

tedivm wrote: post #32
lancewiggs wrote: post #6

They fixed the keyboard, increased the max memory to 32GB and stuck to their guns on the touch bar - and that all seems reasonable to me. (I’m far more annoyed by Microsoft removing ESC as the dbox cancel key for errors in Excel than the disappearance of the ESC key)

Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

Me too. I really hope this catches on.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#156

Post by copperx »

tedivm wrote: post #32
lancewiggs wrote: post #6

They fixed the keyboard, increased the max memory to 32GB and stuck to their guns on the touch bar - and that all seems reasonable to me. (I’m far more annoyed by Microsoft removing ESC as the dbox cancel key for errors in Excel than the disappearance of the ESC key)

Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. It's much better to remap Caps Lock to Control (by the way, how do you press Control A and Control E and Control L and Control R hundreds of times a day in bash? By reaching to the far away corner located Control? That's absolute madness).

Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now. If you remap your keyboard like that, bash and the Emacs shortcuts enabled throughout macOS will suddenly make A LOT of sense. After a few days it will seem be impossible to work in any other keyboard, which is further proof that the remapping is essential for working efficiently in a Unix environment.

I would personally remap the far away control key to act like an Escape key instead.

Sure, if you're a vi user, the caps lock as ESC will seem rational at first, but outside of vi, all other Unix tools work with control key combinations.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#157

Post by userbinator »

davnn wrote: post #93
corey_moncure wrote: post #69

Was the old keyboard engineering so bad? I feel like Apple has been fixing what wasn't broken since about 2010, regarding the MBP at least. Literally all they needed to do was retina screen, upgrade the internals, and add a few USB-C ports. Was anyone ever legitimately inconvenienced by the thickness of the 2010 MBP? I know I was directly inconvenienced by the loss of MagSafe, ethernet, SD card and USB-A, the loss of…

I switched from a MBP to a Lenovo X1 Carbon and the keyboard is so much better on the X1, it’s on another level. Lost macOS though, which, in the end, didn’t matter as much as I thought it would.

Lost macOS though, which, in the end, didn’t matter as much as I thought it would.

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/99-perfect-sierra-10-12-6...

Or you could run it in a VM. I had to test something with macOS not long ago (not a regular Mac user) and was pleasantly surprised when, after doing a small amount of configuration, VirtualBox booted up from the ISO and installed a macOS VM that ran pretty much perfectly.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#158

Post by SyneRyder »

adanto6840 wrote: post #154
SyneRyder wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple continued to sell the 15" 2015 pre-butterfly-keyboard MacBook Pro model until yesterday (it has just been discontinued). That model had a retina screen, MagSafe, an SD Card reader, HDMI & USB-A ports (as well as two Thunderbolt 2 ports), but no Ethernet. https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/12/apple-stops-selling-201...

I bought a refurbished one of these in January of this year -- though I see that there are none of them available in the refurb store as of right now. The refurb inventory changes pretty rapidly though, so it might be worth watching in case one does pop up -- I suspect that they'll go quickly, and I almost wish I had purchased a backup. https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macb... Oh well, hopefull…

You can use RefurbMe to get an automatic alert when/if it returns to the Apple refurbished store:

https://www.refurb.me/en-us

And refurb models are also eligible for AppleCare if you want a 3 year warranty, but you have to buy AppleCare within 60 days of the Mac purchase.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#159

Post by ksec »

designcode wrote: post #72
corey_moncure wrote: post #69

Was the old keyboard engineering so bad? I feel like Apple has been fixing what wasn't broken since about 2010, regarding the MBP at least. Literally all they needed to do was retina screen, upgrade the internals, and add a few USB-C ports. Was anyone ever legitimately inconvenienced by the thickness of the 2010 MBP? I know I was directly inconvenienced by the loss of MagSafe, ethernet, SD card and USB-A, the loss of…

After using my 2016 MBP for two years, going back to my 2014 MBP just feels wrong. The keyboard is so much better on the modern ones, so I’d recommend giving it a chance !

It felt wrong because it is not as "stable", but the depth of new keyboard is still "wrong".

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#160

Post by garmaine »

coldtea wrote: post #123
garmaine wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple having a hardware fix for their keyboard disasters in this revision is also inline with their repair program they just issued. Yes, they just issued a repair program. Until precisely 3 weeks ago Apple refused to acknowledge the issue and forced customers to pay for costly repairs on their own dime. This patent was filed in September 2016. Apple was fucking lying through their teeth for a full 22 months and ha…

> Yes, they just issued a repair program. Until precisely 3 weeks ago Apple refused to acknowledge the issue and forced customers to pay for costly repairs on their own dime. This patent was filed in September 2016. Apple was fucking lying through their teeth for a full 22 months and have been caught in that lie. Do you expect companies to immediately jump to full repair programs the minute the first few users compla…

> Do you expect companies to immediately jump to full repair programs the minute the first few users complain?

They designed a fix innovative enough to file a patent on, 22 months before they acknowledged the issue. That requires costly engineering time and organizational direction that is not used on a whim. They knew back then that this was a real issue.

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