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Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

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Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#871

Post by idontpost »

bhnmmhmd wrote: post #494
jarym wrote: post #418

Stupid Apple - I blame Schiller. They won’t support 32Gb ram because it might decrease battery life and requires them to reengineer the logic board but they’re totally cool with a fragile ass keyboard GLUED to a battery! Really there’s no way to call this anything other than insanity. I remember the media used to talk about the ‘halo effect’ - well I’m someone who has Almost every MBP between 2002-2012 and every iPho…

I mostly agree with you. But really, who needs +16GB RAM on their laptop?! I think the need for more RAM is correlated with the need for more CPU clock, more powerful graphic card, and a better Motherboard, all of which result in a huge decrease in battery life (which is supposed to be a laptop's main strength over heavy, power-consuming PC).

> But really, who needs +16GB RAM on their laptop?!

I need it on whatever machine is my development machine. Clojure REPLs are memory intensive. I'm sitting at 7GB in use right now, mostly thanks to Chrome, even without anything major running.

I could probably squeeze under 16GB if I was aggressive about shutting down server applications (e.g. Apache and MySQL) I'm not using at that moment and only starting them up when I need them, but that's just adding more chores to my workflow.

Having more than 16GB of RAM just means I never need to worry about it. It's one less headache to deal with.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#872

Post by partiallypro »

spiritcat wrote: post #164
partiallypro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinner for the sake of being thin has been an Apple problem for a while now.

Thinner for the sake of making other laptops look thick and crappy.

Maybe at some point that was true, it's not true anymore. Unless you're getting a gaming laptop, pretty much every ultrabook is only mildly thicker than the MacBook Air or Pro, some of them are thinner.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#874

Post by CASHforGOLD »

hliyan wrote: post #759
roystonvassey wrote: post #586

I am a huge fan of Apple's products and never understood the fuss when the new Pro Keyboard attracted bad press, reading it on my old, robust pre-2015 era Macbook. Until now. I got the new one at my job three months back. And, here I am, still struggling with and super annoyed with the missed keystrokes (the buttons are so thin/don't press properly), the almost non-existent 'Enter' keys (seriously, who messes with th…

Earlier this year, I returned my brand new MacBook Pro and asked for my old 2016 MacBook Pro back. I'm a touch typist and I just don't get enough feedback from the new keyboard to be sure I pressed a key. It actually slowed down my typing. And the lack of and ESC and function keys means that I just can't develop on it anymore. I'm still happily using my 2.5 year-old MacBook Pro.

I also find that I accidentally, slightly hit the touchbar whenever I type on it and all my windows expand. Incredibly annoying. Not to mention the awkward placement of the escape button without any haptic feedback.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#875

Post by jacobsenscott »

stcredzero wrote: post #798
jacobsenscott wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My school's primary languages were C and C++, and a smattering of java because it was just getting popular. Certainly the low level understanding that comes from writing a lot of code in those languages is helpful. But the imperative/procedural mindset that it drills into you leads to some really terrible application code, and it takes a lot of exposure to higher level languages to break out of that mindset. It took…

By all means hire a C++ programmer to write your web app. No one is advocating that anyone write web apps with C++. There are other kinds of servers. The complaint is that the once generalist value of a Comp Sci degree is now dumbed down, and grads are missing background knowledge they once had. But also be prepared for some heinous procedural js/ruby/php/clojure/elixer/whatever. This is yet another failing of Comp S…

I think you are making a few assumptions that don't hold anymore based on your own CS education (I'm obviously making an assumption there...). I got my CS degree in 98 and there was a strong emphasis on C, C++, algorithms, and systems programming at the time because that's where the jobs were. We only had a cursory overview of other programming languages and paradigms, and no assembly - there were no jobs there. Scripting languages were for unwashed systems administrators, and no real programmer would touch them. Functional programming was a weird little academic thing with no future. OO was "if it is a noun make it a class".

There was a fairly good chance you would end up needing to write your own data structures, algorithms, sockets code and come up with a network protocol. You would run compilers, linkers, etc. Basically systems programming lined up with the job market.

Naturally after that I thought that was the "proper" way to teach CS. It worked for me. I got a jobs doing things I learned.

20 years later, I literally haven't run a compiler in years. I use libraries for data structures. I don't need to worry about allocating memory, billion dollar industries run on scripting languages. People are passing functions to functions that return functions like that's how it's always been.

I guess my point is "generalist" education needs to evolve with the industry. That means spending less time on low level details so you can spend more time on the tools, techniques and concepts used today. It isn't a "dumbing down" - it is changing the mix. You can only do so much in 4 years. What was "generalist" 20 years ago is "specialist" today, and it should be.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#876

Post by Symbiote »

brian_herman wrote: post #623
Symbiote wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running Linux, of course. I wish more people would. That's the best way to get any issues fixed, whether by filing bug reports, writing up a workaround on a wiki or Stackoverflow to help others, or fixing the bug. It's important for us to own our own tools, and keep the right to do with them as we wish. We expect this for our servers, but ignore it for laptops and desktops. If developers continue like this, then us…

How does hdpi work on kde?

99.9% great. Text looks wonderful, almost everything has hi-resolution icons in the correct size. It's not easy to find things to complain about.

My workflow hasn't really changed since upgrading — I still prefer to focus on one or two windows (often with the "Always on Top ᨑ" button) and just see more code/webpage in that window.

Anyway, I arranged some stuff and took a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/7FOZkdk

Under KDE's display settings, I have the scale set to 2.0.

Problems:

- Minor UI issues. Some UI elements in Amarok don't quite line up correctly. The loading dialog of LibreOffice is at 50% size. GIMP's toolbox buttons seem small. The default steps of shrinking/enlarging text in Konsole aren't great.

- As far as I know, the HDR capability of the monitor isn't supported in Linux.

- About two years ago when I last tried, mixing resolutions with multiple screens didn't work correctly.

If you use a desktop, and can afford to upgrade all its screens to 4K together, I recommend doing so tomorrow. Investigate further if you'd be mixing resolutions; see if you can borrow one.

Referring to [1], I have a UHD-1 screen, which is much rarer than I thought. Just 1.2% of Steam users. The more-common WQHD screens could be OK without any scaling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution#/media/File...

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#877

Post by EpicEng »

matwood wrote: post #632
isostatic wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all lose in the long run. Those companies all existed in 2005, but Apple was streets ahead of them for the average person. Apple pushed the industry forward. Remember what the typical phone was like before the iphone? Or the typical mp3 player before the ipod? Sure, the ipod may have had less space than a Nomad and no wifi, but it was what people actually wanted. The question is, is apple really going backwards, o…

> Is USB-C really a step back from magsafe? For magsafe, yes. But overall, I like the move to USB-C. I plug 1/2 as many things into my computer each time I sit at the desk as I used to. Once these docks come down a bit more in price I'll plug a single wire into my computer at the desk. > Is removing the function keys really a step back? Not sure. Right now I'm indifferent. > How about removing 3.5mm jacks from a phon…

In other words, these changes are all great if you pretend your laptop is actually a desktop.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#878

Post by dsego »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #458
dleslie wrote: post #252

I like machines that are built to take a beating. My penultimate laptop was an HP Mini 101; I only replaced it on a whim, and still use it from time to time. The keys have been worn to be smooth, concave and most are missing the printed text. When I last opened it up to add an SSD a suprising amount of sand came pouring out; having been taken to many beaches, tossed in bags, and generally used outdoors it had accumul…

I bought a new laptop recently. I was very close to paying well over £1k on an XPS 13 with an 8th gen quad core i5, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. At some point, I came to my senses and bought a used Thinkpad X230 for just £80. I spent £100 on upgrading the RAM and SSD to match those of the XPS I mentioned (I got a rather lucky deal on the SSD). I'm currently planning on spending approximately another £100 on upgradin…

That 1k is a week or two of dev work depending on where you live. If you've spent more than a week on procuring that laptop, you haven't actually saved any money.

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#879

Post by gowld »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #45
spraak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I agree but that's a rude way to tell the above poster you disagree

Considering it reinforces a commonly held engineering ideology that only engineers understand or are capable of solving a problem or goal, and every other job function in a corporation is clueless deprivation of engineering, I’d say the response is fair. Apple is quite successful despite organizing in a way that baffles engineers, and will spend a bit recovering from this, then everyone will forget about it within a…

I don't know. A lot of people are searching and holding out for non-Mac alternatives, because Apple ruined the calculus of "$200/yr premium in exchange for a device engineered to satisfy needs and comforts you didn't even realize you'd love", and replaced it with "No way I'm paying a fortune for a physically painful and unreliable keyboard that missing one of the critical keys just because some industrial designer was wants to feel special."

Re: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

#880

Post by gowld »

cptskippy wrote: post #710
protonimitate wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone have any insight into why Apple's QA took a turn for the worse over the past couple years? Buggy IOS/OS releases and now the hardware issues... I always equated Apple with quality and consistency (along with price), but now I can't really see how the price is justified with the issues they have been having.

They no longer have Steve Jobs Quality Control? He was the type of person to play with something for 5 minutes and say "yeah... no" or to eagerly take something he liked and abuse the hell out of it for 24 hours then come back with a laundry list of improvements. He was a jerk and he cared deeply about user experience. In his absence you have what exactly? Tim Cook lacks vision, if you want your mountain moved to Plu…

What's wrong with chamfer?
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