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New MacBook Air

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Re: New MacBook Air

#171
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean the start menu? I never open it, just use Win + number for pinned apps. Windows is not perfect but it excels in many regards nowadays and the last years, Macs were really expensive and risky. They were too expensive to just have a fall-back machine lying around (if you make serious money with you gear, every hour counts). I have 3x 2.5lb notebooks here, if one needs to be sent in, so what. Edit: just open…

Regardless of using the start menu or not, there's a lot of background tracking (for user behaviour and ads) that needs to be disabled by registry edits. In addition to those, there's probably more that cannot be disabled.

> Regardless of using the start menu or not, there's a lot of background tracking (for user behaviour and ads) that needs to be disabled by registry edits.

That stuff also has a nasty tendency to ""accidentally"" get re-enabled after updates from many reports I've heard.

Re: New MacBook Air

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience." What in that says "invented" "new" or even "wonderful?" It seems like you're reading into the text what isn't even there.

Well, they are calling it the "magic" keyboard. How does that strike you?

I assumed that was because it’s the same key-mech that’s in their (external, Bluetooth) Magic Keyboard. Where it itself was branded “magic” just in reference to its two sibling peripherals, the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad.

IIRC, the peripheral line itself was started with the original Magic Mouse, which was branded as such because it didn’t have separate external actuatable buttons, but rather was just a smooth surface with a multitouch digitizer on the top half + a single actuatable microswitch underneath the shell†. Apple wanted the image of it “magically” figuring out when you left/right/middle-clicked (despite no L/M/R buttons) or scrolled (despite no scroll-wheel.) Also, the “plug in to pair” experience might have contributed to the claimed “magic”—it was a fairly unique approach to pairing at the time.

† Which is a design with some real benefits, like being easily disinfectable, with no crevasses close to the hand for filth and germs to accumulate in. (There is a crevice on the Magic Mouse, but it’s on the bottom, where your hands will never touch it.)

There is also a bit of “magic” in the Magic line of peripherals that’s not in the hardware itself, but rather in the OS: when the Magic line of peripherals—Apple’s first Bluetooth line of peripherals—was introduced, Apple added a feature to macOS where macOS will “train” the Apple EFI firmware to recognize devices paired in macOS itself, such that the firmware will later attempt to connect to such paired devices on boot. This means that e.g. holding Option on your Bluetooth keyboard to select an alternate boot device on an iMac would actually work. Which was kind of necessary, as those are the peripherals iMacs shipped with.

Re: New MacBook Air

#173
post #146
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except - 16GB RAM Can you even run Eclipse with just 16GB?!

I can't tell if you're joking, but I have a 2018 Mac Mini with just 8GB of RAM, and I often run Eclipse, IntelliJ, and PyCharm at the same time (along with multiple browsers and other stuff), and performance is fine. I was actually surprised by this--when I first started using this computer, I thought for sure I would need to add more RAM, which for the 2018 model is too complicated to do yourself (at least to me it…

What? It's probably swapping like a bastard, which with SSDs is probably not that horrible. Even 16GB for me is low (I do run in a Linux VM guest). I got myself a Mac Mini with 64 gigs, for great justice.

Re: New MacBook Air

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience." What in that says "invented" "new" or even "wonderful?" It seems like you're reading into the text what isn't even there.

Well, they are calling it the "magic" keyboard. How does that strike you?

It strikes me as completely in line with their other peripheral offerings such as the:

- Magic Mouse

- Magic Mouse 2

- Magic Trackpad

- Magic Trackpad 2

- Magic Keyboard

- Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad

Re: New MacBook Air

#175
post #146
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except - 16GB RAM Can you even run Eclipse with just 16GB?!

I can't tell if you're joking, but I have a 2018 Mac Mini with just 8GB of RAM, and I often run Eclipse, IntelliJ, and PyCharm at the same time (along with multiple browsers and other stuff), and performance is fine. I was actually surprised by this--when I first started using this computer, I thought for sure I would need to add more RAM, which for the 2018 model is too complicated to do yourself (at least to me it…

Semi-joking, but the problem is real for me. I've a 2013 13' MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM, and my system can't cope with my workflow ... tens of tabs in Safari, webapps in Chrome (YouTube, Google Docs, ...), Eclipse with Scala / Java, ... it's a huge struggle.

Re: New MacBook Air

#176

My least favorite thing about HN is that it upvotes trivial Apple hardware news to the top link. Literally no one in the world cares about Apple keyboards except Apple fans.

Not true. Apple's redesigned keyboard where keys bricked when a small crumb got wedged in impacted not just keyboard fans.

Re: New MacBook Air

#178

The inverted-T arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments. That sentence made me check again... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macbook_white_redjar_2006... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBook_Air_1b.jpg ...and yes, it's the same layout of the arrow keys that was there 14 years ago. If they were advertising new full size arrow keys that would definitely be worth mentio…

I find Thinkpad keyboards have always been pretty nice:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wpje8JydZq3y_R5C-LMe3N-fiMk=...

Re: New MacBook Air

#179

The inverted-T arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments. That sentence made me check again... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macbook_white_redjar_2006... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBook_Air_1b.jpg ...and yes, it's the same layout of the arrow keys that was there 14 years ago. If they were advertising new full size arrow keys that would definitely be worth mentio…

They're drawing attention to it because so many people complained about the old layout. For me, the arrow key layout was the sole reason I did not buy a new MacBook Pro in 2016, and one of the reasons I stayed away for 4 years.

This is a close Apple gets to saying "we fucked up".

Re: New MacBook Air

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all (most of us anyway) wanted them to go back to the scissor design. Are we going to now complain that they did what the community has been begging them to do? Was butterfly a mistake? Yes. Were they slow to correct the issue? Yes. Now that they fixed it we should be happy about it. As far as talking about it being amazing, its called marketing spin. This is how it works. However, those two sentences do not say a…

I think it's the marketing copy most people are taking issue with with. They tried a new design, which was horrible to use and had a high failure rate. They continued to claim the new keyboard was amazing, and stubbornly continued to use this crappy keyboard long after the problems were apparent. And now they are touting a "normal" keyboard mechanism as if they've invented something new and wonderful... only Apple co…

It’s marketing man. Next you will be complaining that the burgers look a lot better on the billboards compared to when you unwrap them, or that the shirt looked a lot better on the mannequin than when you put it on, or that car ads always show their car speeding on an open road instead of stuck in a traffic jam during the morning commute.

Ignore the marketingese and don’t let it bother you so much. The important thing is that they listened to their customers and created a better product as a result.

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