5 ms·

"16GB, no touch bar, good keyboard, retina screen." Apple literally sells this configuration

eropple 10y ago
They do, which is why, for my personal list, I have an addendum: "and a future for the model line." The non-touch-bar Macbook Pro has no future and after using the touch bar I really don't like it in a way I've never had an Apple product bite me. The reason this matters is that I'm at a good point in my professional life to switch away from Apple and to fully Linux for development and Windows for Adobe and other media tools--which is why I probably am going to.
- makecheck 10y ago
  I suspect that as early as the next version, they’ll add tactile feedback to the bar; they already know how to do it, they probably just made a judgment call to release on time. With that addition the bar would feel essentially like a keyboard and solve the biggest issues I think.
  - eropple 10y ago
    It's not tactile feedback, for me. It's that I can't touch-type on it because there are no keys. I really do want function keys, not widgets, for how I use a computer. I don't look down at the keyboard when I'm typing, I'm not going to want to do it to change brightness or volume or whatever, to say nothing of trying to send F-keys to parallels or whatever. And I also use vim. Blindly mashing at the top corner of my keyboard and having to wait until I can register "OK, I'm in command mode now" from the status bar was gross. I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad. It doesn't even theoretically offer improvements over an on-screen toolbar with touch capability.
    - macintux 10y ago
      > I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad. That would be a radical departure for Apple. They're always cannibalizing their own product lines. Apple is very open about why they don't think a touch screen makes sense for Mac. They absolutely could change direction but as many others have pointed out, the PC form factor is slowly dying, so why would they?
      - eropple 10y ago
        Apple cannibalizes their product lines in favor of what they want to push, and it feels, given the steady disregard of the Mac over the last ~3 years, that they want to push iPads. A touchscreen doesn't make sense for a Mac because they make it not make sense for a Mac, yeah? (I'm not even saying they should have one. I don't care either way. Just that the Touch Bar is not a good replacement.)
    - threeseed 10y ago
      > I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad. No because touchscreen makes zero sense for Apple. OSX is simply unusable with a touchscreen. And we know this because you can remote desktop from an iPad and try it yourself. At some point when Apple has (a) built a unified iOS/OSX UIKit so developers are forced to auto scale their apps and (b) rewritten OSX to use it and (c) convinced enough developers to use it then it is a possibility. But that is years away. I can very much see Apple bringing the iPad Pro's pencil to OSX however.
      - eropple 10y ago
        As I said in a side comment: OS X is unusable with a touchscreen because Apple makes it unusable with a touchscreen. That could change, if they wanted it to. They don't. And that's fine--I don't care either way, I'm touch-agnostic. I just think the Touch Bar is crap and that it exists because they don't want OS X to horn in on iOS. The Pencil would be the only thing they could do to a standard, no-Touch-Bar-thank-you-very-much MBP that would make me stay with Apple, because I digitally draw and paint a lot. I currently have a DisplayLink-driven USB3 display tablet with a stylus for exactly that reason (and, as with everything else on an iPad, an iPad doesn't begin to replace it because it can't run Photoshop). I'd love it if they went that route. I doubt they will, though, because--well, I think they care about the iPad way more than they do about the Mac.
    - ScottBurson 10y ago
      Touch screens can't (reasonably) be optically coated, because fingerprints on an optically coated screen get very obvious very quickly. Personally, I'm upset enough that they no longer have a matte-screen option. To take away the optical coating so it could be a touch screen might be sufficient to drive me to another laptop. I hate glare, and the trackpad works fine for me; I have no interest in a touch screen.
    - lowmagnet 10y ago
      I think they made a weird decision here, not letting you hold fn the row of 1 through equals as fn keys. It's not too dodgy a solution, and I wish it was an option because I use both a Poker 3 and an ergodox with chording to do this and it feels entirely natural.
    - daveFNbuck 10y ago
      I use vim on an older Macbook Pro. Even with a physical escape key, mapping caps lock to escape is a huge improvement. Now one of your most highly used keys is right on the home row instead of far off in the corner.
      - eropple 10y ago
        That is an option. It is one I don't want to deal with. Escape is escape on every machine, in every terminal. I prefer it to not suck.
      - ryfm 10y ago
        try jj instead, i've been using it for years.
    - pyre 10y ago
      > And I also use vim. As another vim user, it's probably better to get in the habit of using Ctrl-[ or Ctrl-C (though Ctrl-C has caveats in certain situations).
- epistasis 10y ago
  >The non-touch-bar Macbook Pro has no future First of all, that's a big assumption. Second of all, even if it is true, it doesn't matter for the machine that you buy right now. It seems that people are mostly outraged that a laptop without F keys exists at all. Because even within the Apple line, people are not forced to buy laptops without F keys.
  - hartator 10y ago
    It's not about the f keys. It's about the touch bar being gimmicky and a distraction when no out right annoying. I am typing on one right now. Even changing brightness or volume which should be better now, it's annoying because of UI lag. Get right of the F keys will have been better.
    - epistasis 10y ago
      That's the first time that I've heard that perspective, everybody else I've heard complain has mentioned the lack of physical F keys. UI-lag is annoying and inexcusable, very un-Apple like.
  - n1000 10y ago
    Plus: Not having one single de facto standard USB port, no more MagSafe, no more optical audio out, apparently poor battery life, and an insane price tag.
- freehunter 10y ago
  >"and a future for the model line." Why? Why does a future device, one that hasn't been announced, released, or even built yet, one that will be at least a year away and won't actually obsolete anything you currently have, why would that have any impact on your purchase today? It's not like Apple will stop supporting it when/if the line is discontinued, as long as you have Apple Care, you're covered. They just stopped manufacturing parts for the iPhone 4 recently. Why should the future of the model line matter to the current model?
  - pyre 10y ago
    You're just kicking the can down the road with respect to switching from a Mac to a Windows/Linux setup though. That's the the parent was saying. They are are a point where it could make sense to make the switch. Why buy a laptop that will just push this cost a few years down the road?
    - eropple 10y ago
      Exactly. This is a good time, in my personal and professional life, to move back to Linux/Windows (which was my primary mode of doing stuff before I started buying Macs in 2010). I'm growing more aggravated with OS X (sorry, macOS (how about make it better instead of just renaming things, Apple?)), I don't really like what they're doing to their hardware, and the new MBP is not a good value for the money. I can invest some money and time in switching now without interrupting or messing with important stuff.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      Isn't everything just pushing costs further down the road? Eventually you'll have to get a new machine anyway. If the current one works for you, it's kind of crazy to reject it just because you'll have to buy something else in a few years. I fully expect that some day Toyota will stop making my car. But I'm perfectly happy driving it anyway, because it's still being made today, and it was made when I bought it. Does that make sense? Because saying "The Corolla will stop being made some day in the future, so I'm going to buy a Camaro now" doesn't make any sense at all to me.
platinumrad 10y ago
Yes, but they also said: >I want a stripped down OS X, there are so many processes on El Capitain that just take up memory, distract me, and clutter my screen. I want zfs, not apfs. I've lost so much time to wrangling with OS X to get it to behave the way I want, to get it to do things that would be trivial if I were running Linux. The two biggest reasons I've stuck with Apple are hardware build quality and the fact that Adobe CC is not available for Linux. >Apple literally sells this configuration The new macbook pro without touchbar is only available in 13 inches (which is the preferred form factor of many/most but still, it's a limitation), is only available with a slower cpu/gpu/memory (no really, even its i7 option is slower than the i7 option of the touch bar model--I have no idea why you can't just get it with the same internal hardware as the touchbar model), and only has two USB-C ports as opposed to four. For reasons I do not understand at all, it's very clearly a second-class product, which is a shame because if it could be upgraded to be otherwise identical to the touch bar model I would probably get one.

They do, which is why, for my personal list, I have an addendum: "and a future for the model line." The non-touch-bar Macbook Pro has no future and after using the touch bar I really don't like it in a way I've never had an Apple product bite me. The reason this matters is that I'm at a good point in my professional life to switch away from Apple and to fully Linux for development and Windows for Adobe and other media tools--which is why I probably am going to.

makecheck 10y ago
I suspect that as early as the next version, they’ll add tactile feedback to the bar; they already know how to do it, they probably just made a judgment call to release on time. With that addition the bar would feel essentially like a keyboard and solve the biggest issues I think.
- eropple 10y ago
  It's not tactile feedback, for me. It's that I can't touch-type on it because there are no keys. I really do want function keys, not widgets, for how I use a computer. I don't look down at the keyboard when I'm typing, I'm not going to want to do it to change brightness or volume or whatever, to say nothing of trying to send F-keys to parallels or whatever. And I also use vim. Blindly mashing at the top corner of my keyboard and having to wait until I can register "OK, I'm in command mode now" from the status bar was gross. I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad. It doesn't even theoretically offer improvements over an on-screen toolbar with touch capability.
  - macintux 10y ago
    > I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad. That would be a radical departure for Apple. They're always cannibalizing their own product lines. Apple is very open about why they don't think a touch screen makes sense for Mac. They absolutely could change direction but as many others have pointed out, the PC form factor is slowly dying, so why would they?
    - eropple 10y ago
      Apple cannibalizes their product lines in favor of what they want to push, and it feels, given the steady disregard of the Mac over the last ~3 years, that they want to push iPads. A touchscreen doesn't make sense for a Mac because they make it not make sense for a Mac, yeah? (I'm not even saying they should have one. I don't care either way. Just that the Touch Bar is not a good replacement.)
  - threeseed 10y ago
    > I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad. No because touchscreen makes zero sense for Apple. OSX is simply unusable with a touchscreen. And we know this because you can remote desktop from an iPad and try it yourself. At some point when Apple has (a) built a unified iOS/OSX UIKit so developers are forced to auto scale their apps and (b) rewritten OSX to use it and (c) convinced enough developers to use it then it is a possibility. But that is years away. I can very much see Apple bringing the iPad Pro's pencil to OSX however.
    - eropple 10y ago
      As I said in a side comment: OS X is unusable with a touchscreen because Apple makes it unusable with a touchscreen. That could change, if they wanted it to. They don't. And that's fine--I don't care either way, I'm touch-agnostic. I just think the Touch Bar is crap and that it exists because they don't want OS X to horn in on iOS. The Pencil would be the only thing they could do to a standard, no-Touch-Bar-thank-you-very-much MBP that would make me stay with Apple, because I digitally draw and paint a lot. I currently have a DisplayLink-driven USB3 display tablet with a stylus for exactly that reason (and, as with everything else on an iPad, an iPad doesn't begin to replace it because it can't run Photoshop). I'd love it if they went that route. I doubt they will, though, because--well, I think they care about the iPad way more than they do about the Mac.
  - ScottBurson 10y ago
    Touch screens can't (reasonably) be optically coated, because fingerprints on an optically coated screen get very obvious very quickly. Personally, I'm upset enough that they no longer have a matte-screen option. To take away the optical coating so it could be a touch screen might be sufficient to drive me to another laptop. I hate glare, and the trackpad works fine for me; I have no interest in a touch screen.
  - lowmagnet 10y ago
    I think they made a weird decision here, not letting you hold fn the row of 1 through equals as fn keys. It's not too dodgy a solution, and I wish it was an option because I use both a Poker 3 and an ergodox with chording to do this and it feels entirely natural.
  - daveFNbuck 10y ago
    I use vim on an older Macbook Pro. Even with a physical escape key, mapping caps lock to escape is a huge improvement. Now one of your most highly used keys is right on the home row instead of far off in the corner.
    - eropple 10y ago
      That is an option. It is one I don't want to deal with. Escape is escape on every machine, in every terminal. I prefer it to not suck.
    - ryfm 10y ago
      try jj instead, i've been using it for years.
  - pyre 10y ago
    > And I also use vim. As another vim user, it's probably better to get in the habit of using Ctrl-[ or Ctrl-C (though Ctrl-C has caveats in certain situations).
epistasis 10y ago
>The non-touch-bar Macbook Pro has no future First of all, that's a big assumption. Second of all, even if it is true, it doesn't matter for the machine that you buy right now. It seems that people are mostly outraged that a laptop without F keys exists at all. Because even within the Apple line, people are not forced to buy laptops without F keys.
- hartator 10y ago
  It's not about the f keys. It's about the touch bar being gimmicky and a distraction when no out right annoying. I am typing on one right now. Even changing brightness or volume which should be better now, it's annoying because of UI lag. Get right of the F keys will have been better.
  - epistasis 10y ago
    That's the first time that I've heard that perspective, everybody else I've heard complain has mentioned the lack of physical F keys. UI-lag is annoying and inexcusable, very un-Apple like.
- n1000 10y ago
  Plus: Not having one single de facto standard USB port, no more MagSafe, no more optical audio out, apparently poor battery life, and an insane price tag.
freehunter 10y ago
>"and a future for the model line." Why? Why does a future device, one that hasn't been announced, released, or even built yet, one that will be at least a year away and won't actually obsolete anything you currently have, why would that have any impact on your purchase today? It's not like Apple will stop supporting it when/if the line is discontinued, as long as you have Apple Care, you're covered. They just stopped manufacturing parts for the iPhone 4 recently. Why should the future of the model line matter to the current model?
- pyre 10y ago
  You're just kicking the can down the road with respect to switching from a Mac to a Windows/Linux setup though. That's the the parent was saying. They are are a point where it could make sense to make the switch. Why buy a laptop that will just push this cost a few years down the road?
  - eropple 10y ago
    Exactly. This is a good time, in my personal and professional life, to move back to Linux/Windows (which was my primary mode of doing stuff before I started buying Macs in 2010). I'm growing more aggravated with OS X (sorry, macOS (how about make it better instead of just renaming things, Apple?)), I don't really like what they're doing to their hardware, and the new MBP is not a good value for the money. I can invest some money and time in switching now without interrupting or messing with important stuff.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Isn't everything just pushing costs further down the road? Eventually you'll have to get a new machine anyway. If the current one works for you, it's kind of crazy to reject it just because you'll have to buy something else in a few years. I fully expect that some day Toyota will stop making my car. But I'm perfectly happy driving it anyway, because it's still being made today, and it was made when I bought it. Does that make sense? Because saying "The Corolla will stop being made some day in the future, so I'm going to buy a Camaro now" doesn't make any sense at all to me.

platinumrad 10y ago

Yes, but they also said: >I want a stripped down OS X, there are so many processes on El Capitain that just take up memory, distract me, and clutter my screen. I want zfs, not apfs. I've lost so much time to wrangling with OS X to get it to behave the way I want, to get it to do things that would be trivial if I were running Linux. The two biggest reasons I've stuck with Apple are hardware build quality and the fact that Adobe CC is not available for Linux. >Apple literally sells this configuration The new macbook pro without touchbar is only available in 13 inches (which is the preferred form factor of many/most but still, it's a limitation), is only available with a slower cpu/gpu/memory (no really, even its i7 option is slower than the i7 option of the touch bar model--I have no idea why you can't just get it with the same internal hardware as the touchbar model), and only has two USB-C ports as opposed to four. For reasons I do not understand at all, it's very clearly a second-class product, which is a shame because if it could be upgraded to be otherwise identical to the touch bar model I would probably get one.