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The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

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Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#171

Post by danieltillett »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #139
danieltillett wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is really interesting is the up and down voting patterns as we swing around the working world. Asia/Australia is quite different to Europe which is very different to the USA. You can have a comment voted way up in one region and then massively slammed down as the sun moves into another.

I really experienced this with my anti-GDPR comments. In the afternoon EST they’d be positive and then take a nosedive in the evening / overnight, I assume as Europeans woke up and took umbrage :)

Yes GDPR is one of the topics sensitive to regional voting. Another is anything questioning if humans might not be born blank slates. Human evolution discussion is also quite sensitive to the time of day.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#172

Post by nicolas_t »

akvadrako wrote: post #130
nicolas_t wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a way to pay a lot less. Ask apple to replace the battery, it costs $219 and because they have to replace the topcase when replacing the battery, you will get a new keyboard. I was in the same situation and Apple also quoted me $500 until I asked to replace the battery.

He's talking about an older model.

I have a mbp 2015 retina so same as he has I think, Apple quoted me $500 to change the keyboard but $219 to change the battery which included the topcase.

For newer models, no need to do this since keyboard repairs are free.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#173

Post by xvf22 »

xvf22 wrote: post #77
thadk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The area around the hinge on the 2011-2015 Era Macbook was plastic. It seems like they wanted to do away with that, a major mechanical break point, which meant removing travel distance from the keys so the screen could close more directly. (My 2011 MBP screen hinge was a bit wobbly a few years in.) You could look at the USB-C dongles in a similar way: older USB ports could fail eventually on that era MBP. The newer U…

Each of the USB-C ports needs a controller and if any of the four have an issue the computer will not charge.

Was going by this [1] which seems to show that if one of the charging ICs goes bad it can cause the rest not to work. This is probably one of many failure mechanisms.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=MY8LlHfK9ZA

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#174

Post by philwelch »

copperx wrote: post #156
tedivm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key.

1. Having never used caps lock in years, I think any remap is an improvement.

2. I'm guessing you don't use Vim ;) For me, esc is one of my most frequently used keys.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#175

Post by berti »

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 !

Totally agree. I mostly type on Cherry MX blues, and a 2017 MBP. I just setup some stuff on my 2012 MBP (using it as a CI slave, the only reason it's not my daily driver anymore is because the battery is down to only 2-3 hours)... the keys feel very mushy and awful compared to the 2017 model.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#176

Post by washadjeffmad »

cmplxconjugate wrote: post #135
coldtea wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was anyone ever legitimately inconvenienced by the thickness of the 2010 MBP? Sure. Here's a certain Linus Torvalds: "I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky things. (...) I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin a…

I absolutely adore the Air. I do a lot of remote HPC coding and typically just connect to the cluster via SSH. I have a monstrous desktop at home for when I'm back. To me the Air is magical because it has a balance of my exact needs: portability, toughness and, battery life. I would give anything for an updated model.

Be cheered, there are a lot of great 13" devices that are at least as good as the Air for every category you list with the addition of price.

Most people ignore Chromebooks as direct comparisons, but many are just as tough, have similarly crummy/capable internals, cost a pittance, are as unupgradeable, and run Linux like champs. They're the platonic ideal of single function computing.

The 13" Acer I bought in 2012 had a 1080 display, could output over HDMI at 2160p, and played video for at least 8 hours on a full charge. Cost maybe $250 and had a very sturdy case that didn't bend or break when dropped. Not that shabby.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#177

Post by torstenvl »

copperx wrote: post #156
tedivm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is exactly what I've done. CapsLock -> Ctrl, Ctrl -> ESC.

It actually improves the ergonomics of bringing up the Force Quit dialog (my primary use of the ESC key, since I'm not a vi user).

I do this even though I don't currently have a TouchBar model.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#178

Post by sjwright »

philwelch wrote: post #174
copperx wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. 1. Having never used caps lock in years, I think any remap is an improvement. 2. I'm guessing you don't use Vim ;) For me, esc is one of my most frequently used keys.

> Having never used caps lock in years

THAT KEY HAS A LOT TO ANSWER FOR

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#179

Post by cerberusss »

copperx wrote: post #156
tedivm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now

Couterpoint: when I was working at Lucent around 1999, they gave me a Sun workstation with a keyboard that had Esc instead of Caps Lock. There were others that had a Control key there, though.

Edit: I'm searching online and can't find a Sun keyboard with that layout. Now I'm wondering if I misremembered...

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#180

Post by procinct »

esmi wrote: post #153
procinct wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, install Karabiner Elements. It's a handy tool that will let you do a lot of keyboard customization.
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