Live data from Hacker News

New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

blog.devteam.space

21–30 of 808 posts

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

#21
> This isn’t to say that the touch bar is an inherently bad idea. You could locate it on top of the Esc and function keys instead of eliminating them entirely! Something like this:

Not that there aren't worthy talking points in this article, but it's really annoying when a blogger has the arrogance to photoshop some keyboard image together and proclaim it's a better design than what a gigantic company carefully came up with.

Apple has its own reasons for doing things and they aren't going to please everybody, but does this Alexey Semeney fellow actually think Apple didn't consider all the possibilities before removing a whole bunch of keys from the keyboard? Apple might be a lot of things, but careless is not usually one of them.

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

#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 without bringing at least two dongles with you.

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

#25
It's worth noting that only the higher-end of the new MBP's have the Touch Bar. The lower end still has a traditional function row:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-...

So I suppose in theory if you wanted something new but without breaking your workflow, you could just go for that one.

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

#27
post #7

Honest question: what's the alternative? I've got a 2013 rMBP 15 inch. What's my next machine? I'm not willing to regress on display (220 ppi or better), screen size, or battery life (8-9 hours real use). I might regress on quad core to dual core if everything else is perfect. EDIT: The XPS 15 gets more like 5-6 hours with the high res display by my understanding. The Surface Book has the right combination of resolut…

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.

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

#28
post #3

So use an editor that supports a modern UI, like Sublime Text or Atom, and not something originally designed for an ADM-3A terminal.

Or use Emacs? ESC is bound by default to Meta, which is otherwise available on both sides of the space bar by hitting option/alt.

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

#29
post #11

Honestly, the only thing I will miss is the escape button but that was misplaced on the keyboard anyways. 10.12.1 added support for making caps lock into an escape key and that's if anything an improvement over where escape was before.

I agree that caps lock is an improvement over escape's location. But, if you're like me, you also find it to be an improvement over control's location so you have caps lock mapped to that already so rebinding esc to caps lock is not an option.

You can have the best of both worlds on *nix: tap == ESC, hold == CTRL http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-...
Post reply on HN