New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by elboru » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:47 PM UTC

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-...

Do you remember texting without a touchscreen?

I used to do it without looking at my phone, now with touchscreen I lost that ability, I have to check every word, some keyboards help with that correcting my words if I moved my fingers a little to the side, but it's not the same, with physical buttons I was sure I pressed the correct buttons. Physical buttons give touch feedback and that's important when you're focused on something important in your screen. I don't want to switch my focus from my screen to my keyboard every time I need to use a function key.

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

#592

Post by tstrimple » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:47 PM UTC

mibbiting wrote: post #46

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 have had macbooks for years. I got sick of the really poor performance, constant spinner, etc. Now, I have a Dell XPS running Ubuntu. It is considerably faster. Far better battery life. Far high spec. Extremely slick display.

How did you manage to get better battery life? Is power management in Linux that much better than Windows?

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

#593

Post by kelsus » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:47 PM UTC

I had to scroll pretty far down the page to get to comments that weren't about the escape and function keys and vim. It's the other stuff that really matters. In 2007 and 08 when Jobs was alive there was absolutely no question that MBPs were the absolute best laptops in the world. There were maybe a few huge gamer laptops with faster specs, but nothing had excellent specs in such a small and well build package. This is no longer the case.

If I were NVidia I'd be making a very big deal that not even the initial development of that cool new depth of field stuff on iPhone 7 could be done on any Apple computer.

Another major point is that this thread says apple is leaving developers behind. Sure it might only be leaving VR, gaming, and AI developers behind, but wait, where is the industry going?

More fuel for the fire. Apple proudly claims they have the biggest gaming platform in the world with iPhone. They just lucked into it. They never purposefully set out to make a gaming platform. But now that they have it they should own it. Imagine how thrilled the world would have been if Cook had stood on stage and said something like "and now for the first time ever because of this amazing new GPU, you can play your favorite games on your Macbook Pro on ultra at 60 frames per second." It would have blown the doors off Apple stock. Macbook Pro is about PRO users not about executives that need 13 hours of battery life to give Keynote presentations. People would have been completely happy with even a little increase in width and weight and decrease in battery life for the sake of a major performance upgrade in memory and GPU.

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

#594

Post by kelsus » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

I had to scroll pretty far down the page to get to comments that weren't about the escape and function keys and vim. It's the other stuff that really matters. In 2007 and 08 when Jobs was alive there was absolutely no question that MBPs were the absolute best laptops in the world. There were maybe a few huge gamer laptops with faster specs, but nothing had excellent specs in such a small and well build package. This is no longer the case.

If I were NVidia I'd be making a very big deal that not even the initial development of that cool new depth of field stuff on iPhone 7 could be done on any Apple computer.

Another major point is that this thread says apple is leaving developers behind. Sure it might only be leaving VR, gaming, and AI developers behind, but wait, where is the industry going?

More fuel for the fire. Apple proudly claims they have the biggest gaming platform in the world with iPhone. They just lucked into it. They never purposefully set out to make a gaming platform. But now that they have it they should own it. Imagine how thrilled the world would have been if Cook had stood on stage and said something like "and now for the first time ever because of this amazing new GPU, you can play your favorite games on your Macbook Pro on ultra at 60 frames per second." It would have blown the doors off Apple stock. Macbook Pro is about PRO users not about executives that need 13 hours of battery life to give Keynote presentations. People would have been completely happy with even a little increase in width and weight and decrease in battery life for the sake of a major performance upgrade in memory and GPU.

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

#595

Post by douche » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

PopsiclePete wrote: post #472

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a completely fair post. Devs are a huge market for Apple, but Apple is ignoring them. This isn't about ESC, it's about whether Apple has any interest in acknowledging the dev market and keeping devs on board. The answer is "no." Apple is making no concessions to developers or professional power users who need performance. Instead, Apple is producing vanilla-grade laptops with a touch of gimmicky brand fr…

They're ignoring the giant behemoth that is ....Vim users..? What? Wait till the EMACS crowd gets a whiff of how Apple refuses to sell pedals for their keybindings, then Apple is truly in trouble. Look, I know VIM is popular, but so is XCode, so is Sublime, so is Atom, so is TextMate, so is a multitude of other text editors for God's sake, that to claim that Apple is somehow "abandoning the entire software developmen…

Anybody that's trying to use Visual Studio on one of these is going to be cursing the lack of F-buttons.

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

#596

Post by pherq » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:49 PM UTC

palunon wrote: post #552

mgkimsal wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for some sanity. The other anecdote is I've been using vim for about 15 years, and use esc daily. I am constantly in multiple vim environments - different servers, different clients, different OS, etc. I don't have the luxury of saying "I'm going to install all my default vim keybindings and plugins on every vim installation I ever use". Walking someone else over the phone who has to do vim - I need to count o…

Isn't ctrl-[ default on vim too ?

No, it's just a property of ASCII that (ctrl [) = (0x9f & 0x5b) = 0x1b = esc.

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

#597

Post by biot » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:49 PM UTC

palunon wrote: post #558

geofft wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use to get out of insert mode? Like, you've just finished typing some text and want to save and quit, what do you press? EDIT: Thanks for the replies, other people. I personally use ^C, I was curious what 'mozumder specifically used. :)

CTRL-[ (of course if you're not using a QWERTY keyboard, it may be hard to hit)

I don't know why that would be anyone's preference given that if you used telnet to connect to a remote shell, ^] is the default escape character. So using ^[ to exit input mode is dangerously close to popping you out of your telnet session. Someone who claims to have used vi for 25+ years (get off my lawn, ssh didn't exist back then) would have likely used telnet and been bitten by that more than once.

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

#598

Post by TheGRS » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:49 PM UTC

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…

Ha, this is like "walked 5 miles in the snow uphill to school" territory.

I personally don't like the idea of losing some keys, keys are nice, my fingers can feel where they are at all times. But that said my fingers also know exactly where to go without the feedback of the keys. I do like the prospect of programming a custom touch bar for various programs, that seems kind of neat, but I would have also been fine with keeping my function keys (I mean custom bindings are what function keys are for in the first place, no?).

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

#599

Post by geophile » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

suprgeek wrote: post #559

What they could have done (one or more): 1) Bezel-less display 2) Full Touch screen 3) Detachable Screen - IPad Pro + 4) Stylus input (from Apple Pencil) 5) 15-20 hr battery life 6) NVidia Graphics 7) 64 Gb Ram option 8) Kept the HDMI & SDXC port What they did do: 1) Gimmicky Touch bar - Useless when you close the MBP & Dock; Hard to do for touch typists 2) Hiked the prices by crazy margins 3) Pegged the RAM at 16 Gb…

Please -- no touchscreen, not on a laptop. It seems very uncomfortable; it smudges the screen, which I cannot stand; and if there is a touchscreen then apps will start exploiting it, making it more and more difficult to not actually touch the screen.

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

#600

Post by douche » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

m3ta wrote: post #132

chairmanwow wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

You've never hit Ctrl-F5 to dump cache and refresh a browser window?