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New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

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

#211

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…

Yes, thank you, I was starting to think I'm not actually a real developer, since I can't even remember the last time I even used a function key...

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

#213
post #135
post #36

I was waiting for the new Macbook Pros as I need to buy a new laptop, and was going to give my old Macbook Pro (2014 model) to my wife. But given that they have nothing of value (I don't care about gimmicks like the new touch bar), I've decided to abandon Mac and go back to Linux. I'm just a typical web developer, running a bunch of virtual machines, and an IDE. Any recommendations? I saw the Dell XPS 15 for around £…

I'm curious, what is driving the need for a new laptop from a 2014 version?

I don't need a new one, but my wife does as her one is the Macbook Pro from 2009 and is now extremely slow, and the battery lasts about 20 minutes. So I was going to buy a new one for me, and give her my current one.

As you say, the 2014 is a great model - I'm using it right now, and it's plenty sufficient for everything I do.

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

#214
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.

What about the trackpad? Most Windows laptops I've tried recently still have trash trackpads.

I own a ZBook 15 first generation, Ubuntu 16.04. The trackpad is large and works well. It has 3 physical buttons (actually two pairs of them, on the top for the mouse stick and on the bottom for the trackpad). I'm using it as a mouse (single finger) or to scroll (two fingers). It's probably multi touch up to 10 fingers but I can't remember.

I understand that OSX has gestures and maybe Windows too. Maybe there is some package that brings gestures to Ubuntu as well (apt-cache search gesture|grep gesture returns some) but the keyboard is good enough. Alt left to go back (it works in Nautilus too), etc. Sometimes I'd like pinch to zoom in Gimp like on the phone and tablet and some day I'll try those gesture packages, but I'm in no hurry.

On the other side, I find the push to click trackpads I see on Macs and some PCs very difficult to operate, especially when I don't want to move the mouse pointer when clicking (graphic programs) and especially the trackpads that actually move. That's why I bought a laptop with physical buttons and disabled push to click (it had that too).

TL;DR the Mac trackpad is almost a reason not to buy a Mac for me.

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

#215
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…

From Apple's site: - USB-C to Thunderbolt 2: $49 - SanDisk SD Card USB-C Reader: $49.95 - USB-C AV Multiport Adaptor (HDMI): $69 Spend another $168 and you access to add the same ports you have now!

"Don't buy cables/adapters from Apple" has been the general rule for decades. Grab stuff like this from Monoprice and it'll probably run you $20.

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

#216
I wouldn't really blame Apple for not coming up with faster CPU. Things have changed and the times when you got the double speed every few years are over. And I don't know if it is actually a bad thing. This means your hardware does not get old so fast and there's less reasons to update every two years.

The article also claims that you can get comparable hardware from any other vendor for for $1.5k. I wish this was true. Unfortunately it is not at all easy to find good alternatives for Macbook Pro. Even if you don't put limit on the budget. Especially when you limit the search for quad core CPUs, there's not that much choice (HP ZBook, Dell XPS, Lenovo T460P or P50). And then you are still stuck with Windows or can you get one of those with Linux pre-installed and supported?

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

#217
post #36

I was waiting for the new Macbook Pros as I need to buy a new laptop, and was going to give my old Macbook Pro (2014 model) to my wife. But given that they have nothing of value (I don't care about gimmicks like the new touch bar), I've decided to abandon Mac and go back to Linux. I'm just a typical web developer, running a bunch of virtual machines, and an IDE. Any recommendations? I saw the Dell XPS 15 for around £…

I really like the XPS 15 and use it as my dev machine. I would consider the 141ppi screen. It is excellent value and works well with all existing apps.

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

#218

While there's a lot in here that I can agree with, this one stands out like a sore thumb... > The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope. Aren't we done the whole gigahertz race?

author clearly doesn't care to understand about hardware.

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

#219
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've developed on a MacBook Pro for the last 5 years in vim and I have never touched the escape key or any of the F keys, ever. If you're using vim and reaching for the escape key you are doing it wrong imho. Rebind esc to something else (like capslock) or learn another pattern that has more ergonomic value.

A lot of us live in a transient computing world, where we neither own nor have permissions to edit the bindings. Having one host with a binding and 6 other client's envs without, would a context switch failure invoke

[deleted]

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

#220
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 :)

Agreed, I remapped it in vim 1 year into learning it because my pinky was starting to hurt.
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