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Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

engadget.com

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Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#361

Post by wyclif »

thih9 wrote: post #71
petereisentraut wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caps Lock is already mapped to Control.

Same here. But I've used https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements to map the key under touch bar's esc to esc. I've also used the same program to disable touch bar esc. This way there are no accidental presses. I did it by mapping esc to 'vk_none' for the 'no product name' device, which is how Karabiner sees touch bar. I still dislike the keyboard because of its failure rate, but the layout is ok for me now.

I also have Caps Lock mapped to Command (Ctrl). And since my biggest use of the Esc key is when using Vim, I simply press Caps Lock + [ ( Ctrl + [ ) to switch to Normal Mode. So only my right pinky leaves the home row.

I have the MBP "Escape" (without the Touch Bar), but if I did have the Touch Bar this would avoid 90% of the issues involving not having a hardware Esc key for me.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#362

Post by giobox »

m463 wrote: post #350
scarface74 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac Pro is the perfect example of function over form. It’s big, not that beautiful and expandable like crazy. Did you mean the MacBook Pro?

I thought the mac pro wasn't super expandable. No spinning drives possible, miniscule flash drive space, no pcie power plugs.

Although apple doesn’t publicise the fact all that much on the new Mac Pro coming later this year, it does actually have two SATA ports and some 8 pin power connectors. Apple don’t provide the necessary “cage” to mount the drives (at least as far as we know so far), but third parties have already announced some products that mount internally and use these ports to connect a bunch of disks.

As for power, I believe the two MPX bays provide dual 8pin connectors for up to an extra 300 watts, so should support most power hungry pci-e card designs.

Honestly though, if you can afford this machine it’s not like really any of this matters, this isn’t exactly a hobbyist computer people are going to buy and upgrade themselves all that much.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#363

Post by eropple »

Roboprog wrote: post #344
eropple wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My preferred external keyboard only has a PC layout. Having my fingers confused by having none of my shortcuts work is a bummer. The real answer for me is going to be swapping for an X1 Yoga or an X1 Extreme, I think.

I have “recycled “ Dell keyboards for both home and work macs. The window keys map to command. Maybe there are some shortcuts / combos I’m not aware of???

The modifier keys are out of place. Which can be fixed with Karabiner. What can't be fixed is mapping every keyboard shortcut to things that make sense to my hands with that keyboard. It isn't practical to rebind everything off of Command to Control even where it's possible, for example.

I'm a keyboard-based person, though I don't use tiling window managers or the like. I've got a system (he said half-ironically). Some shortcuts are more comfortable to do with my left hand on the modifier. Some, the right. All of them are hosed on a Mac and fixing them would take longer than what I did today, which is ask my boss to let me give the Mac to the new guy and go order myself an X1. So this story has a happy ending!

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#364

Post by na85 »

willtim wrote: post #355
na85 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what point you're trying to make, but the person I contacted maintains a mac-specific port of emacs which adds nice features that GNU emacs lacks and won't add because of politics. So I'm not concerned about GNU zealotry and how it relates to the touchbar.

I was making the point that this would never get to Emacs mainline. But sure, no reason why it couldn't end up in a fork, but the fork is not going to give you the same "taste of freedom" ;)

If I wanted less functionality in exchange for more freedom I'd run Hurd ;) Emacs isn't any less free with touchbar support.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#365

Post by Razengan »

Lack of haptic feedback aside, the Touch Bar is objectively better than the function keys it replaced:

It can display more options, many different types of controls, and you can see what each control does without needing to memorize it or having to look it up like you would with the F# keys.

Why go back to a limited set of ambiguous numbers that do a different thing in each app? I can't even remember the last time I needed to use a F# key in a Mac app.

People saying they'd pay extra for a non-Touch Bar Mac, consider some free apps to customize it to your preferences:

[0] https://medium.com/@brendanleglaunec/making-the-macbook-touc...

[1] https://folivora.ai - BetterTouchTool for customizing the Touch Bar, Trackpad, Magic Mouse etc.

[2] https://pock.dev - Display the Dock in the Touch Bar + play controls + some status

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#366

Post by magduf »

magduf wrote: post #331
holy_city wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the thing you'll see on forums like this towards apple is the fact that there is a disproportionate number of developers who for one reason or another need to use MacOS professionally, such as developing iOS apps. A lot of us use Macs because we have to in order to target Apple platforms with our products. They may not have a monopoly, but they do control ~40-50% of the smartphone market in the West and force…

>there is a disproportionate number of developers who for one reason or another need to use MacOS professionally, such as developing iOS apps. A lot of us use Macs because we have to in order to target Apple platforms with our products. Then you need to stop whining and use the tool you have to use to do your job. I don't like Windows, but there aren't many jobs out there where I don't have to use it in some capacity…

I'd like to add to the above, about using Outlook: I truly despise using Outlook for my email. It's truly horrible. It's so incredibly slow and buggy and I have to frequently kill it and restart it so it'll show me my emails and there's even a very noticeable lag between my typing and the characters showing up on the screen. I can't believe people pay for this turd.

But it's just one of the things I have to put up with for the job, like many other annoyances, and overall things are pretty good which is why I'm still here. Thankfully my job doesn't entail a large amount of email. So I don't understand why people complain so much about Macs; if you don't like it, don't buy it, but if you're being given it for work, that's why it's called "work": it's not supposed to be fun. If Outlook started causing me so much trouble that it was impairing my work performance, I'd bring it up with my management and let them deal with it. If they didn't, I'd just continually remind them of how much of my time is being wasted by it so they don't think I'm slacking off.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#367

Post by rixed »

notafraudster wrote: post #39

To me the bigger news here is killing the MacBook. It's a weird product -- crazy overpriced, and with a bunch of concessions in terms of the design, but I like that it's extremely light (33% lighter than a MacBook Air) and has no fan. I had hoped never to buy another laptop with a fan again. Yes, I know performance sucks, which is why I run most of my code on a server instead of locally on my computer. I think really…

Regarding the price: there have been very few other machines with similar specifications (12", fanless, Time to replace the battery of the MBP I've been using since 2015 I guess.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#368

Post by addicted »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #109
addicted wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure why you couldn’t do the same with the Fn keys instead. What you’d lose in being able to look down and see what a key does at the moment, you’d gain in having more tactile response allowing for easier pressing without looking. Also, when I find an inscrutable keyboard shortcut I use frequently, I simply remap it. There are enough KB shortcut combos possible that running out of keyboard shortcuts is rarely…

That's a good point, and I did do exactly that in the pre-Touch Bar days as I had no use for most of the "media keys." What the Touch Bar gives me is context sensitivity, different suites of commands on a per-app basis. Evidently I'm just lacking the mental agility of remembering that F2 is "open responsive desktop mode" in Safari and "clean build cache" in Xcode. As for the arguments of touch-typists here, I'm a tou…

But that’s a solved problem. It’s a toolbar. It’s way more flexible, and you don’t need to look away from the screen, and your hands stay in their normal typing/tracking position.

The touchbar is basically a toolbar that Apple has moved to the least accessible part of the entire laptop.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#369

Post by msaharia »

magduf wrote: post #85
lioeters wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in agreement with your eloquent response. The touch bar is an unacceptable gimmick for me, a solution in search of a non-existent problem (my physical escape key is doing just fine). I'm also not going to buy Bluetooth headphones, just because they decided to drop support for standard headphone jacks. The right to repair and extend my personal computer is another. It's common human decency, which apparently is no…

I really don't see the problem with any of this stuff. I like physical escape keys, I really don't want expensive Bluetooth headphones, and I like having a headphone jack on my phone. I also like being able to repair and upgrade my equipment. So what do I do? I don't buy Apple stuff. Then I read discussions like this one and chuckle at all the people griping about all these things, and then continuing to buy and use…

For me, MS Office is the only reason I use Mac OS. If it were available on Linux, I would move tomorrow.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#370

Post by scarface74 »

m463 wrote: post #350
scarface74 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac Pro is the perfect example of function over form. It’s big, not that beautiful and expandable like crazy. Did you mean the MacBook Pro?

I thought the mac pro wasn't super expandable. No spinning drives possible, miniscule flash drive space, no pcie power plugs.

Just to make sure we are on the same page, the parent poster said the “new Mac Pro”.

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

They haven’t announced the maximum amount of flash drive space you can get from them (and I wouldn’t pay Apple prices for it anyway), but you can get 4TB of overpriced SSD storage on the current iMac Pro.

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