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

351–360 of 808 posts

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

#351

Post by Bartweiss »

solatic wrote: post #95

Lenovo introduced a Touch Bar (Adaptive Keyboard strip) in the Thinkpad X1 Carbon in 2014. It flopped so hard that Lenovo pulled it and reinstituted a normal function row in the 2015 refresh. Why does Apple get a pass? No physical keys means not being able to find functionality by touch alone means no muscle memory means no productivity. This isn't a hypothesis, this is a proven market reaction to Lenovo's design cho…

I assume Apple is trying their usual model of duplicating failed projects later, and with better design.

I'm not sure it will work here - the lack of physical feedback is inherent to the design - but they don't shy away from reviving other people's failures. Better layout and contextual buttons will help, although I doubt they'll make me happy with the system. I still remember having an old Acer with a touch bar - some lunatic put a "disable wifi" setting on the thing, and then cranked the sensitivity way too high.

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

#352

Post by overcast »

SocratesV wrote: post #232

I remap my CTRL to CAPS LOCK because it's more convenient. Have come across a lot of Vim power users that do the same with ESC. Or buy the model without the Touch Bar. Can we stop with the drama now? It's becoming pathetic. Apologies for the bluntness. P.S.: more RAM and CPU? Get a desktop or buy another laptop. Since when was Apple the fastest, more bang for your money? This was clearly not a specs bump iteration.

There was really nothing preventing Apple from offering 32GB and even 64GB chips. 16GB MAX is pathetic for $3000. What's with the old chipset/cpu? DDR3?

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

#354

Post by fisherjeff »

ObjectiveSub wrote: post #133

You immediately lost any credibility when you complained that the 2.4 GHz processor is the "same" as the one back in 2010. Clock rate has nothing to do with performance these days. Skylake is 25-35% faster across the board (and multiples faster for number crunching) than whatever Nehalem or Core2 was in the Macbooks in 2010.

Actually, according to a few cobbled together Anandtech pieces, I think the IPC improvement may be closer to the 80-90% range.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700...

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

#355

Post by uw_rob »

cypres wrote: post #62
jws wrote: post #8

Bah, these entitled kids. I guess being old enough to remember keyboards before they had escape keys helps, but ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket . Read your ASCII table! C-[ is even a quicker type avoiding RSIs from all those long pinky reaches. (More seriously, as much as it bothers me to retrain my pinky, most uses of the escape key would be many times better if the lefthand side o…

I had no idea you could use C-[ as ESC

I am on Windows and it seems that not every program accepts C-[ as ESC. However Vim in Cygwin does accept it as ESC.

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

#356

Post by mcphage »

rifung wrote: post #127
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 mean it's still there, it's just not a physical key right? And you can use ctrl [ instead which is closer to the home row anyway.

It is, which means this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot which will look phenomenally dumb in 3 months.

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

#357

Post by copperx »

grey-area wrote: post #202
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.

Wouldn't it be even nicer if you had an Insert/Cmd mode key instead, which showed which mode you were currently in and let you toggle? The nice thing is with this touch bar thingy that's possible.

> The nice thing is with this touch bar thingy that's possible.

As long as it's supported by the program, of course.

What if you wanted to use mc (The Midnight Commander), which relies heavily on F keys? wait for the update?

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

#358

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

bisby wrote: post #284
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…

As a vim user, esc is pretty important. I would say the author clearly knows very little computer specs: "The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope." Because a 2010 2.4ghz dual core is identical to a 2016 2.4 ghz dual core.... I thought we got over comparing processors purely by their clock speed a long time ago. (I will agree that t…

I really like laptops for research and prototype stages of programming: my Macbook works great at finding, curating, reading, and composing documents; handling email, IM, VOIP, VPNs, etc to actually communicate with services; dealing with internet search and websites for services (github, aws, etc); and I find that I even do better at writing "naive" implementations of things with just some paper and a laptop at a coffee shop, because it forces me to skip over most of the technical details (eg, efficient file IO) and just write the essence of the program (ie, the main algorithm or idea I'm trying to implement).

For actually writing a finished production-ready product, a desktop with several monitors and a real keyboard is preferred. But being able to switch between the two modes -- research and creative, focused and technical -- gets the best results.

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

#359

Post by madamelic »

TACIXAT wrote: post #192
laddng wrote: post #18

I've had a good, satisfying run with MacBook Pros, but now I'm stepping off the Apple train. I understand that Apple is trying to go in a new direction with the new MacBook Pros, and I won't complain about it. I am now simply moving to an Arch Linux setup on an old Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 to continue living inside the Terminal.

I really feel most Linux distros were made for developers and development. Whenever I try to do things on Windows and OSX I get insanely frustrated with the amount of friction. It's nice to have an OS that trusts you and lets you make mistakes.

Windows is quite a nightmare for any time of compiled code in my opinion.

All of the Microsoft 'stuff' (anything in Visual Studio) works okay but once you start installing python or node modules, forget about it.

I remember the click finally happened when I spent an afternoon installing package after package to get a node module to compile on Windows. When I installed it on OS X, it just installed... I didn't have to do anything.

I installed Ubuntu that night and never went back (except to play games because WINE is just ehhh)

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

#360

Post by jljljl »

denzil_correa wrote: post #327
bisby wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a vim user, esc is pretty important. I would say the author clearly knows very little computer specs: "The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well… nope." Because a 2010 2.4ghz dual core is identical to a 2016 2.4 ghz dual core.... I thought we got over comparing processors purely by their clock speed a long time ago. (I will agree that t…

> As a vim user, esc is pretty important. Would it not be possible to map the dynamic touchbar keys to Esc when one is using vim?

During the demo, they showed an Esc key in the touch bar when using Terminal and a few other apps
Post reply on HN