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Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

9to5mac.com

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Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#401

Post by kkarakk »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #364
lajawfe wrote: post #232

I can't stop but speculate if departure of Ive had anything to do with this. I guess there was a lot of push-back internally about this, but because of Ive, they had to endure 4 generations of butterfly switches. Touchbar also is just a resource hog for nothing extraordinarily useful. I haven't seen people use it too often. I bet they did user studies and found out that the Touchbar wasn't the new interaction method…

This app was released recently: https://pock.dev/ It puts the dock in your touchbar. It's the first time in the 9 months I've had this laptop where I've actually gone "ok, this is useful" and I am actually using it. I now have the dock auto hide and I mostly use the touch bar to open apps. That said, I'd still prefer they ditched the touchbar in favor of function keys. I'd be happy if they shrunk the ridiculous size…

honestly what do you use the dock for? i find i set up my windows in different workspaces at the beginning of the day and just toggle between them. the dock is more of an annoyance nowadays.

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#402

Post by dasil003 »

jacobolus wrote: post #396
dasil003 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already use it for Ctrl in the UNIX tradition, and it's really hard to change that muscle memory.

If you get a Japanese layout keyboard, you get a bunch of extra free keys which you use for whatever you want. https://i.imgur.com/tuCklIJ.jpg Particularly handy are the extra thumb keys (I use the one to the right of the spacebar for backwards delete, but vim users could put escape there.). Also control is in the right place and caps lock is in the hard-to-reach corner, where it should be. One especially nice approa…

Oof, the vertical return key on the UK keyboard almost made me tear my hair out when I did a 3-year stint in London :)

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#403

Post by s17n »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #230
parasubvert wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I use a retina MBP touchbar and really don't agree. Apple has made some missteps but it's still the best pro laptop for my uses. Over two years with one replaced keyboard (because I spilled wine on it!) and no sticking keys. USB-C is awesome. I can reuse all my 3rd party and Apple adapters for my USB-C peripherals, including tablets and the Nintendo Switch. In retrospect, Magsafe wasn't that great (comes off too…

I get the warm and fuzzy feeling USB-C gives nerds, cause of the open standard and interoperability, and cause it only takes one attempt to actually plug it in; but I just cannot fathom how Apple replaced Magsafe with USB-C. Magsafe was one of those magical Apple features from the mid 2000s that just delight and work incredibly well and almost seem like science fiction. It's not like they had shitty power adapters an…

They got rid of magsafe because it's a lot less useful in a world of 8+ hour battery life. I generally don't plug in my laptop except for at my desk and/or at night.

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#404

Post by kkarakk »

shawkinaw wrote: post #303

Am I the only person who likes the butterfly keyboard? I like the feel of the low travel and the clickiness, whenever I use an old style MacBook the keys feel mushy. I have had reliability problems though. Mostly I’ve had keys that don’t respond, but have always been able to fix those with compressed air. But once I had a sticky key that popped every other time I pressed it, that required a free Apple repair.

i love it but in the time i owned it, the thing jammed up full of dust/crumbs and failed 3/4 times necessitating trips to the service center coz compressed air just wasn't doing the job

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#405

Post by Xcelerate »

dasil003 wrote: post #390
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should make the caps lock key your escape key, that's what I do. It's vastly superior to the touchbar escape key. In fact, I even prefer it to a regular escape key at this point, although my muscle memory does cause problems when I use somebody else's computer. I removed the escape key from my touchbar entirely because I kept accidentally brushing it when I went to type ` or ~. I also had the lock screen widget o…

Already use it for Ctrl in the UNIX tradition, and it's really hard to change that muscle memory.

I have caps lock mapped to Ctrl and Ctrl mapped to Esc. Seems to work pretty well.

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#406

Post by pault »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #364
lajawfe wrote: post #232

I can't stop but speculate if departure of Ive had anything to do with this. I guess there was a lot of push-back internally about this, but because of Ive, they had to endure 4 generations of butterfly switches. Touchbar also is just a resource hog for nothing extraordinarily useful. I haven't seen people use it too often. I bet they did user studies and found out that the Touchbar wasn't the new interaction method…

This app was released recently: https://pock.dev/ It puts the dock in your touchbar. It's the first time in the 9 months I've had this laptop where I've actually gone "ok, this is useful" and I am actually using it. I now have the dock auto hide and I mostly use the touch bar to open apps. That said, I'd still prefer they ditched the touchbar in favor of function keys. I'd be happy if they shrunk the ridiculous size…

Personally, while I have never once used the touchbar, I do think the ability for apps to display contextual function keys has a lot of use cases. I would be happy if they released physical keys with little oled screens on them, like that old Optimus keyboard. Apparently it was garbage but the tech has come a long way in ten years.

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#407

Post by chadlavi »

aleem wrote: post #188

Apple has squandered a lot of its goodwill. It reminds me of my relationship with Microsoft products. As long as they were shipping, they were making money in the short term because people were coerced to buy in. For 5 damn years the Air didn't get a Retina display. Right now, I can't buy 2.8Ghz Macbook Pro unless I get the TouchBar. I can't buy an Air unless I settle for much lower specs. The dongles and USB-C are a…

The only place I ever plug anything besides a power cord into my macbook is at my desk, where there's a usb-c hub that has power, an external monitor, a USB mouse, a USB keyboard, and another open USB A port on it. I plug that single thing into my macbook and my entire workstation is plugged in. It's way less of a hassle than you're making it out to me.

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#408

Post by kkarakk »

blauditore wrote: post #288

I see many people complain about Apple products recently, but very few actually moving away to alternatives. It seems many are caught in the comfort zone of that walled garden, not to say locked in. This is why I started avoiding Apple products many years ago. Watching things evolve "from the outside" now I find it sad and funny at the same time.

HP spectre and Dell XPS 13 are the laptops that people silently moved away to. These laptops saw a crazy amount of iteration(relative to other companies) to grab the apple dissatisfied niche. They're pretty successful, i see a lot of ex-macbook people who disliked the keyboard/touchbar switch with some variation of them

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#409

Post by reneherse »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #292

I'm still nursing along my 2011 MBP. It's my work truck. Everything in it has been replaced or upgraded, but it still works well. The point is that it was possible to upgrade it myself. I won't buy another Apple product unless it has that feature. Oh, and no dongles necessary.

I was doing the same until last week, happily chugging along on my pet project when my 2011 15" MBP screen went white as a ghost. Diagnostics all point toward a problem with the GPU; apparently that generation has a known defect that's only (temporarily) repairable by replacing the logic board. A repair too costly for me to justify.

My recommendation would be to avoid graphically intense work if you hope to continue using the machine for a long time.

I was seriously bummed when my machine died. Fortunately I was able to buy one of the very last Apple refurbed 2015 MBPs, which is still user upgradable to some extent, and avoids all the horrendous design trade-offs of the more recent generations.

Best of luck keeping the old machine going!

Re: Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook

#410

Post by jacobolus »

dasil003 wrote: post #402
jacobolus wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get a Japanese layout keyboard, you get a bunch of extra free keys which you use for whatever you want. https://i.imgur.com/tuCklIJ.jpg Particularly handy are the extra thumb keys (I use the one to the right of the spacebar for backwards delete, but vim users could put escape there.). Also control is in the right place and caps lock is in the hard-to-reach corner, where it should be. One especially nice approa…

Oof, the vertical return key on the UK keyboard almost made me tear my hair out when I did a 3-year stint in London :)

If you shift the right hand over to the right by one key, then return will be in the same position relative to your hand as on a US-ANSI keyboard. You then only need to find an appropriate key to use for the right bracket and backslash, but there are plenty of good choices.
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