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

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

#651

Post by overcast » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

SocratesV wrote: post #522

overcast wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you used to get pretty solid performance for the price/form factor from Apple. For instance when I purchase my Mac Pro desktop in 2008. It was a RIDICULOUSLY good deal for what you got. The Xeon processors alone were $1500 each on NewEgg the day I purchased it. They've just progressively gone less and less value, as the years have gone by.

Not doubting the price you were seeing in NewEgg, but find it hard to believe you couldn't build your own PC with the same CPU and equivalent RAM, GPU, cheaper by sourcing the parts from retail stores yourself. Was it a case where Apple was getting an incredibly good deal on those?

Yes, they basically bought up the entire market on those Xeons, and that 2008 line was THE Mac Pro to buy into. I'm still using it today, zero issues! Except of course the whole Apple no longer supporting it with their Sierra OS. There were articles on it comparing sourcing yourself, and you really couldn't just throw together a workstation grade PC like this for that price.

$3000 got you 2 x 2.8ghz Quad core Xeons, up to 64GB of FB-DIMM ECC, 4 x drive bays + 2 x CD bays.

There isn't much this thing still can't handle, it's just being phased out, and eventually it won't turn on one day.

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

#652

Post by mst » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

dunham wrote: post #617

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…

I've been using vi for over 20 years, but not a power user or anything (emacs for code, vi for quick edits), and have no idea how to use it without esc. Did vim change something? How do you switch modes?

Ctrl-[ == Esc. I had to learn Ctrl-[ three years or so back due to bluetooth keyboard paired with tablet and insufficient time to troubleshoot why Esc wasn't working, and then discovered that it's actually easier on my wrists to use Ctrl-[ and never went back.

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

#653

Post by SliderUp » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

blinkingled wrote: post #146

I'm sure the Touch Bar can be integrated with MacVim or VS Code etc to show keys that just look like regular Fn keys - that's not the problem developers would be irked of - it's just another thing to hack. Really problematic however is that the 15" starts at $2399, is still capped at 16GB soldered RAM, the port situation isn't convenient (esp if you've an iPhone), the obsession with thinness continues at the expense…

People (especially long time Apple users) really underestimate how nice Windows + Cygwin (or bash, etc) can be, on really powerful laptops, at much nicer price points.

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

#654

Post by oldmanjay » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:18 PM UTC

People like to use rhetoric to pretend that their opinion is universal as a preventative measure for suppressing disagreement. Programmers, unfortunately, like to apply this to things that are transparently subjective, targeted at an intelligent audience that often takes umbrage to being told what to think.

I feel like I should flag this article for being nothing more than rhetorical rabble-rousing[0], but frankly so many people have been arguing to let HN go to shit because that's the sort of comment community they want, so I'm more inclined to leave this particular cesspit bubbling.

[0] Here's the sort of logic the article employs: > There are ~ 19 million developers in the world. And Apple has managed to sell ~19 million Macs over the past 4 quarters. What a coincidence!

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

#655

Post by pvdebbe » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:18 PM UTC

peatmoss wrote: post #299

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.

A couple years back, I was (increasingly un)happily using Mac OS X on a MBP. I made the switch back to a Free *nix and a tiling window manager. While it's gotten some eye-rolls from tech friends, the UX of my current system is amazing. I have an almost vanilla Xmonad configuration, combined with dmenu, and passwordstore / dmenu integration. It simply rocks. I anticipate soon starting a new job with a firm that has mo…

Xmonad is pretty wonderful, even in vanilla. Excellent piece of software!

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

#656

Post by mst » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:18 PM UTC

biot wrote: post #540

mozumder wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Been using vi as my primary command-line editor for 25+ years, and have never used the ESC key, and just use the default setup. I don't even know what commands would use the ESC key?

Are you talking about the same editor? From a 1996 vi man page [0]: There are commands that switch you into input mode. There is only one key that takes you out of input mode, and that is the key. (Key names are written using less-than and greater-than signs, e.g. means the ``escape'' key, usually labeled ``esc'' on your terminal's keyboard.) If you're ever confused as to which mode you're in, keep entering the key u…

Ctrl-[ == Esc.

I'm a happy user of http://ex-vi.sf.net/ and can confirm that, since it's the exact same key code, it works -fine-.

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

#657

Post by erikb » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #337

I'm always amazed at how techies are so often unable to consider other people's points of view. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but no. If you don't like the new design, that's totally fine. I've seen a lot of people saying that. But when you say that the new design is bad for everybody , or bad for millions of people you haven't met, based solely on your own personal reasons, you've lost it. I'm a developer. T…

Techies don't say it's useless for everybody, though. They say it's useless for techies. And that should be a statement they are allowed to make.

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

#658

Post by Spartan-S63 » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #623

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow Vim user, I don't use the escape key anymore. It's awkward to hit and I rebind it to "jj" (or more recently "jk"). It's unergonomic to reach for the escape key where it customarily is. If it were where Caps Lock is, it would make much more sense. That said, I don't like rotating my hand or remove my fingers from the home row. It's really a non-issue because you can rebind keys so easily, it's not even fun…

If it were where Caps Lock is, it would make much more sense Which, interestingly, is where ESC was on the computer that vim was first written for.

That's what I was getting at when I mentioned it :)

Bill Joy's keyboard had escape where caps lock is today.

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

#659

Post by mst » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

biot wrote: post #597

palunon wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't switch to Ctrl-[ until sufficiently recently that anything I'm running vi-ish things on is over ssh.

I will, however, never forgive Excel for Esc being "abandon edit".

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

#660

Post by kentt » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

pilif wrote: post #83

slg wrote: post #23

This doesn't even get into the dongle problem. The simplest example is that if you want to hook up Apple's flagship phone up to their flagship laptop for development, you need a dongle. And if you want to share one of their flagship wired headphones between the two devices, you need another dongle. Therefore if you want to connect three of Apple's flagship devices together on a daily basis, you can't go anywhere with…

> 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…

> So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C...

I agree with you that in the future USB-C is better and makes more sense. However, I don't think that the logical conclusion is that we should get rid of USB-A prematurely. I liken this the the decision to remove the CD from computer when CD were still used daily. I agreed that CDs wouldn't be used in the future, but, that doesn't do much for me if I still use CD daily. In hindsight it just caused an unnecessary annoyance while the CDs were naturally phased out.