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New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

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

#81

Post by matwood »

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…

In the short term sure, but in the long term standardizing on usb-c is a good thing. If only they had done usb-c on the iPhone7 also.

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

#82

Post by 51Cards »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #25

It's worth noting that only the higher-end of the new MBP's have the Touch Bar. The lower end still has a traditional function row: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-... So I suppose in theory if you wanted something new but without breaking your workflow, you could just go for that one.

Note that that is only the very base 13" model. You can't get the 15" without the Touch Bar.

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

#83

Post by pilif »

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 connect your devices directly to your MacBook Pro. No dongles what so ever.

USB-C is so much better than anything other USB that came before to the point where it can (and will) easily replace not only all other existing USB plugs out there, including on the device end (where there's a mess between USB-B, USB Mini and USB Micro right now) but also has the potential to replace the various ways how we currently connect screens (DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, or even VGA).

Going purely USB-C means that they could optimise as much as possible for this new connector without thinking of wasting space for a useless connector three years down the road, especially as you can convert USB-C to any other USB, but if they added an USB-A port, that would not be useful for anything but USB-A plugs.

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

#84

Post by mcintyre1994 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #25

It's worth noting that only the higher-end of the new MBP's have the Touch Bar. The lower end still has a traditional function row: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/10/no-new-macbook-airs-as-... So I suppose in theory if you wanted something new but without breaking your workflow, you could just go for that one.

Any idea why it only has 2 USB ports? Seems like an intentional crippling.

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

#85

Post by leejo »

I'm a long time vim user, and i have the following in my .vimrc:

    nnoremap  T
    nnoremap  t
    nnoremap  set invnumber
    nnoremap  N
    nnoremap  n
So you think i'd be annoyed about the culling of the Esc and function keys? Not really, mac keyboards are terrible for typing IMO/IME so i always have an external one hooked up.

The lack of decent updates to the RAM and CPU bug me more given the price increase. Here i am running 5 VMs so that's sucking up almost 1/2 of my 16GB of RAM. Chrome is eating a good chunk of the rest and i don't have many long lived tabs.

And at home i have over 500GB of photos alone so would like a machine that doesn't have a tiny storage option as the default config. But alas...

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

#86

Post by waffl »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #2

Honestly, the only thing I will miss is the escape button but that was misplaced on the keyboard anyways. 10.12.1 added support for making caps lock into an escape key and that's if anything an improvement over where escape was before.

For ages I've had ~ remapped to escape (if no modifiers pressed so tilde still works as expected, and caps to ctrl) so the missing ESC isn't a big deal, although I did have it remapped for `

Anyone looking for extremely fine grain keymap control (with a UI that far surpasses any kind of keyboard remapping I've tried doing in Linux) should look up karabiner.

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner

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

#87

Post by po-tee-weet »

What a terrible article. It compares how the processor speed has remained the same from 2008 without mentioning the architectural changes.

There are reasons why I think the new macbook is less suited for developers, but not these reasons. This article is entirely misleading.

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

#88

Post by mindcrash »

> #1. No Escape and function keys

The new MacBook Pro has Escape and function keys. You just need to summon them now if you want them. Phil Schiller even showed this in the demo!

Also, context aware actions are much more useful. You saw that they even included a whole set for developers (and XCode) right? And you can bet other tools will soon follow.

> #2 Power. Almost no improvement for RAM and a processor

That it doesnt have a new CPU is not Apple's fault. It's Intels. Apple wants their professional equipment to have at least a quadcore processor. The latest generation Intel processors, Kaby Lake, currently only has dual core processors available which is a absolute disaster for people who actually need fast multicore processing. So because of this they used a Skylake quadcore. Which IMO isnt a disaster since it is still the fastest quadcore x86 CPU architecture out there.

Regarding RAM I think 16 Gigs is more than enough for any purpose.

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

#89

Post by Alex3917 »

Currently every time I open iTerm, I need to change directory into my project, spin up my virtual env, and then initialize some stuff within my virtualenv.

Now I can map those commands to icons in the toolbar, rather than having to page through the history command each time. How is that not a huge improvement for developers? Any time you can replace a command or alias with a visual icon that's a significant reduction in cognitive overhead.

While the fact that you can only get 16 gigs of RAM is annoying, the fact that the SSD is 50% faster at least ameliorates this somewhat. And the fact that there are seemingly several low hanging fruit things that Apple can make to improve the product, while annoying to people like me who needed to purchase one of these today, at least shows that they will probably continue to make improvements to the lineup.

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