Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

blog.devteam.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 808 posts

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

#261

Post by xigency »

drewg123 wrote: post #136

My biggest complaint is that they increased the size of the touchpad. I HATE touchpads, as the cursor tends to shoot off into space when I accidentally touch it with the heel of my hand when typing. The last thing I want is a larger touchpad. If they're going to steal innovations from Thinkpads, I really wish they'd have taken the eraser nub instead. Back when I had a Thinkpad (running linux) as my work laptop, I wou…

> I HATE touchpads, as the cursor tends to shoot off into space when I accidentally touch it with the heel of my hand when typing.

Apple touchpads don't have this "feature".

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

#262

Post by easytiger »

ixtli wrote: post #123

Sadly this seems to be the same old pile-on that happens after every apple product announcement: > #1. No Escape and function keys [...] The Escape and Function keys on the laptops have been abandoned in favor of a touch bar that changed depending on the application that is being used. They went out of their way to display the escape key and many other contextual keys with Terminal.app in the foreground† They did thi…

yea because a soft key in a different location is the same as a tactile key where it has always been.

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

#264

Post by Dru89 »

easytiger wrote: post #174
pilif wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need a dongle or an USB-C to Lightning cable. Those exist. And so do any USB-C to any other USB-Plug cables. Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now as two years from now, I'm quite sure no more peripheral will come out that has anything but USB-C. So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C cables that will…

> or an USB-C to Lightning cable. How is that different in any way?

Instead of two things, you just need one. They're saying that instead of a USB-A-to-Lightning cable and a USB-A-to-USB-C adapter, you can just use the one cable.

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

#265

Post by ixtli »

jasonlotito wrote: post #184
ixtli wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people keep saying they've "removed" the escape key. The thing is programmable. http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...

If it's anything like their existing dynamic stuff, I worry it will be too slow. There are far too many cases where I search for something, see it pop up, go to hit enter, and as I'm hitting enter, Spotlight decides to shift focus to something else. So for their magic toolbar thing to work, they'd have to do something they haven't been able to do in my experience.

That's fair. My experience has been, at least with the iPhone, that they've made an effort to make it more and more responsive as time has gone on. Tangentially, this is why I don't understand people who install these third party keyboards that make background network requests. It's like, the keyboard is slow enough as it is without having to go to the public internet on a cell connection :/

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

#266

Post by rickyc091 »

ixtli wrote: post #124
echelon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a vim user. Why in the world did they remove ESC? That's one of my most frequently used keys. And no, I don't think remapping it is a great idea. If I had to use this for work I would protest.

I don't understand why people keep saying they've "removed" the escape key. The thing is programmable. http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...

The controversy creates discussions and clicks.

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

#267

Post by [deleted] »

dorianm wrote: post #17
rayiner wrote: 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 see a lot of people choosing the XPS (including Linus). I tried it and for those who prefer Linux it's pretty great!

[deleted]

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

#268

Post by [deleted] »

chairmanwow wrote: post #102
ericjang wrote: post #37

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…

Many common applications that developers use have many keybindings that heavily rely upon the Escape key (Vim for sure).

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by blowski »

WUMPUS_SHOOTER wrote: post #209
kejaed wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm wondering this too. I'm using a 2010 version with a new battery and SSD installed, and besides that everything is working fine. I would like a Retina on that but I don't see the huge problem

I looked at this option, but started to think it was good money after bad. The repair shop I got a quote from said around £400 for the upgrade, and it just doesn't seem worth it.

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

#270

Post by WayneBro »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #58
macmac wrote: 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 don't understand why any dev would want to use a touchpad of any kind?

They're not nearly as precise as a mouse. They cause you to rotate your cuff even further than a mouse. Dragging and dropping things is more difficult with a touchpad.

Touchpads all stink, including Apple's.

Evoluent's vertical five button wireless mouse is where it's at. Everything else is second rate.

Post reply on HN