I mostly agree with the author regarding the escape key, the touch bar isn't really a problem in that regard, it still works and I got used to "pressing" it on the touchbar really quickly.
I really really miss physical F keys though. I spend a lot of time debugging (either in the Chrome debugger or in IDEs) where pressing F-Something seems to be the norm to step into / step over. The lack of feedback makes it a lot harder to use these keys repeatedly (in my experience anyway). I know I could change the keys but...
To be honest, that's the one thing that really bothers me about the new machine, I got used to everything else pretty quickly. I should note that I was forced to switch to the new model (my 2014 MBP was stolen). I didn't want a new machine, wasn't happy about getting one and started using it in the worst circumstances which probably didn't help me "learn to love the touchbar". Insurance paid for the new machine so price wasn't an issue for me.
I don't think it's an abomination or anything, I just never find it better than a normal keyboard with F keys (I don't do video editing or anything where a timeline might help me).
Other developers who use the touchbar MBP, do you not miss the F-Keys ? Have you changed the keys you use to debug ?
First they came for Scroll Lock and I did not speak out -- because who uses Scroll Lock?
Then they came for the PgUp and PgDown keys and I did not speak out -- because I could always use Fn-arrows.
Then they came for Esc and I did not speak out -- because I use Emacs.
Then they came for the whole keyboard -- and there was no way I could write about it.
But unlike you and the OP, pressing the Esc key did affect me. I couldn't completely get used to the soft key even after using it for more than one month (currently). Every time I try to press Esc, I'm a bit hesitant. The inertia was higher than I expected. So I can't agree with the phrasing that "there is no justification for the apparent panic." The annoyance exists and I'm the living proof.
I'm using Karabiner Elements on Sierra.
brew cask install karabiner-elements
Xcode debugger looks pretty nice on touchbar IMHO. It would be great if other debugging tools catch up.
Is it not possible to make the touchbar work with IDEA? That would be a major disappointment.
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Press Fn Key to: Show F1, F2, etc Keys
And Apple will never give up on it. Every Mac is going to be worse for years and years because of it.
Enjoy.
Apart from the battery thing, the same could be (and was) said about a mouse.
I like the USB-C and have bought into the tradeoff of having no Magsafe. It's also a minor plus to be able to plug in either side of the machine. The TouchID is good too. However, I've found the TouchID extremely laggy for some reason (esp. on unlock) which really reduced the benefit.
The keyboard is _fine_ and in some ways I feel it's a good compromise for the form factor. However it is very, very loud. It's terrible for typing on calls. If your significant other is watching TV next to you they'll get annoyed too.
Battery life is average. I've found it quite variable to the point that I don't "trust" my charge on a long flight any more - which is still fine with my previous gen machine.
Maybe an outlier here - I feel the Touchbar is a UX nightmare. Maybe if you're principally in one app it makes a lot of sense, but I change around a lot. It goes totally against muscle memory. I have to look down to work out what's going on, and even then take it in. I see that they're going for some kind of "discovery" experience, but predictability and patterning is important too - especially with an interface that you're trained _not_ to look at.
I've locked it to the standard buttons that don't change, but even then my finger grazes it and the brightness of my screen changes... For me it's a distraction.
I've made my peace with USB C for power, but the battery feels like it's good for trips to the coffee shop but not for actually taking a long flight anywhere. As you say, variable battery life is more of a curse than a blessing. It leads to distrust rather than gratitude.
And all this mediocrity for an eye-watering price. It's my first regretted Apple purchase (I managed to avoid the brief wearable fad).
My screensaver says it all: "Don't buy one of these machines."
The most annoying thing I'm dealing with at the moment is HipChat stealing focus of the play button. When that happens and I hit that play button, HipChat just plays the new message sound. Its so dumb.
The TouchBar is more complicated and awkward at the moment. In my opinion Apple needs to tweak the Keyboard settings to let me deal with these "stupid apps" and we all need to report TouchBar issues to third party apps doing it wrong like HipChat.
Is the HipChat app built on something like Electron? It could be they're using a hidden <audio> element to play the new message sound which the browser engine thinks you want to play/pause.
Yup, had this with WhatsApp web too. My suspicion is there's a hidden <audio> tag for the sound and safari's just exposing controls for that.
You sure it was a reaction to MS?
In other apps, I don't know how much I'd use it.
I just wish someone made a multiple port USB-C hub, not just another dumb USB-C-to-USB-A hub. I preordered an Arc Hub, but just as with stock options at a startup, there's a 50/50 chance I'll ever see any value there...
I don't understand why people get so worked up on the dongle thing anyway, for me it really is a non-issue, and I have only a single C-to-A cable. I do think Apple should not have been so damn greedy and just put a dongle in the box though, there really is no excuse for leaving it out considering the already crazy high price of the MBP 2016.
The problem with dongles is more than just price-point.
I thought about getting a 2016 MBP, and I'd just get a charging hub with legacy USB support and be happy.
May be even better in the new MBP because you don't have to care what port to plug into since they're all the same- I always end up trying to plug USB into the magsafe on my 2015 MBP since USB is in the same position on the right side.
You'd be much better off buying a cheaper laptop (even a MacBook, or MBP without TouchBar) and a more powerful desktop (Hackintosh if you will)
...or five cheaper laptops. You could do that and still have money to spare.
Then you could make a big laptop dispenser, shaped like a gigantic Kleenex box, and just discard your computer whenever the screen gets a bit dirty.
But it's a huge hassle keeping application settings, development environments, large datasets or VM images, etc in sync on two computers.
With a single laptop I can just unplug the monitors and keyboard, and go to a client meeting or a hackathon without checking that everything is set up on the laptop.
http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/20170111122165...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-Chromebook-C201PA-FD0009-Proce...
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/9693510?checkin=06%2F01%2F2017&...
Perspectives. I wouldn't throw that much money on a laptop BTW.
Hell its almost worth it to do a hackintosh laptop and desktop but I don't want to have to deal with supporting it. I like at least one of my machines to "just work" and Apple hardware is nice.
Regardless I'm not buying new until the price goes back down!
I plugged in a new external 1080p monitor and thought at first there was something wrong with it, but no it's just the difference in crispness. Not only that you can run 2 external 5K monitors! from a laptop!
The SSD's are so fast, it's also so quiet - you never hear the fan. The only negative is it gets warm when charging on my lap.
I too don't see the point of the touchbar though, it's a cute gadget to play with. The sound is remarkable, though the whole laptop vibrates when the sound is turned up (edit: though there's no audible distortion or vibration noises which is pretty unique for a laptop too).
It is without a doubt the most perfect laptop I have ever owned, like everyone I would have liked to pay less for it. I'll use it for the next three years then give it too my daughter and she'll use it for another three years like my last one. I'm very happy with my purchase.
Since everyone is running essentially commodity Intel hardware with commodity SSDs and commodity RAM and commodity GPUs with third-party sourced flat panels, the only thing that matters is the Touch Bar, keyboard and trackpad, and no matter how great the trackpad is, the Touch Bar is so bad it destroys everything else, and the keyboard and how loud it is destroys the rest.
I mentioned it in my article. It has a wider gamut and brighter panel, but color fidelity wise it's worse than it's predecessors.
https://medium.com/@Pier/why-i-bought-a-2015-macbook-pro-fad...
The rules vary a bit between England and Scotland and I am too tired to look up Wales and Northern Ireland right now.
https://www.gov.uk/accepting-returns-and-giving-refunds
https://www.businesscompanion.info/sites/default/files/Retur... (linked from the above gov.uk URL)
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...
I'll stick with my 2013 and look at a Lenovo 2-1 next. Pretty tired of OS X too.
I then bought a new Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and was really surprised that a) the scaling doe snot even work with dells own "tweaked" Ubuntu (even the installer looked horrible) and b) "coil whine" is a thing at this price point. I was so unhappy with it that I sold it weeks later. To replace the Dell I bought an HP spectre x360 and was really happy with the hardware but could not get the thunderbolt ports to work with ubuntu. Eventually I also returned it. I "surrendered" and bought the new MBP and so far I'm quite happy with it. But it still feels very uncomfortable to be so "dependant" on one manufacturer.
Other than the thunderbolt problem (which I'm sure will be fixed soon) I was really happy with Ubuntu as my main OS. I really do hope that other manufactures step up their game so I can finally switch without too much compromises.
I then discovered Clevo, they sell very customizable laptop where you can have crazy specs (two HDD, 64gb ram, latest i7) for very reasonable prices (compared to apple). I'm waiting for mine but it seems like the perfect solution.
Also, that's what System76 and many "custom linux laptops" shops sells but under other names.
I do not miss Retina and I would have missed USB. The Air was $800 all up since I got an exceptionally good Presidents' Day deal.
My eyes would hate me for going back in DPI though -- I even had to switch my desktop monitors out, its just that much less eye strain for me.
Retina on my iPhone SE is a major plus because it has a smaller screen and I hold it closer, 8" away. On a laptop, I'm reading 24" away. I'm not saying Retina on the MBP isn't nice. But price/USB/retina/weight/memory/storage in totality came out in the Air's favor. If Apple had kept USB and not jacked the price, I probably would have bought another MBP.
One big surprise is that after nearly 3 months of using it every day for software development, I am still getting 15 hours battery life. This just amazes me and was far beyond my expectation. (Now, I mainly use emacs, clang, and terminal, but even compiling every few minutes my c++ doesn't hit the battery much at all).
Buying previous generation hardware feels weird, I hope I don't regret this decision.
"In cognitive science, choice-supportive bias or post-purchase rationalization is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected"
I can't imagine many people would say many negative things about their $3700 laptop, even if it has multiple issues.
Eye watering indeed.
Since then, I've used the new MBP, and while it's a great machine I don't regret my purchase for a second. My only gripe with the Surface Book is that installing Linux is a bit of a nightmare (not sure if this is still the case), but I'm happy enough with running Ubuntu on a virtual machine.
I haven't spent that long trying it out but managed to get a Rails 5 app up and running without much fuss, I'm with you on it being a game changer.
Agreed about Linux too, I didn't even try (yet). But WSL is nearly there, I think the next update will be able to launch windows executables from bash (they say it's in the insiders build).
also.. the touch bar.. I'm a programmer, I don't look at my fingers when I type, why would I want to have a screen there
The other big rub with the new MBP for me is that smaller battery. As mentioned I run Parallels which is just awful for sucking CPU (even when Windows itself appears to be using none; see their support forums). It's actually turned into a really crappy and aggravating product across a number of fronts but this is by far the biggest problem because it absolutely canes the battery. I often find myself having to work disconnected, so it's a real issue when running Windows.
I also don't much appreciate the non-user-upgradeable SSD. I've enjoyed (and used) the option to swap out the stock drive in previous MBP incarnations, to great effect (and cost savings), so the fact that you can no longer do so and are forced to pay Apple's prices for storage (albeit very fast storage), is frustrating.
The other changes don't really bother me too much. I can actually see the touchbar being much more useful than function keys in many cases because it'll reduce the need to remember keyboard shortcuts. Instead custom rendering will make it obvious what the widgets are for. I agree with the author's point about haptic feedback though.
For me, thinness and lightness are not fundamental driving factors. Sure, I appreciate a lighter laptop - and I don't want to return to the bad old days of massive, heavy laptops with giant power supplies (I'm looking at you, Dell) - but not if that means compromising in other important areas. I'd prefer a slightly heavier machine with more (user-upgradeable) RAM, a bigger battery (especially to compensate for the extra RAM), and upgradeable storage. I've said it before but I feel like, despite the machine's name, Apple are somewhat disregarding the needs of the "pros" who use it.
As it is, it feels like a little “fuck you, suckers” from Apple and I can’t help but feel a little disappointed.
That is due mostly to the price.
So i started remapping everything to fn + control so my pinky can start doing the heavy lifting (like on windows) and vow to never use the cmd key again.
There's a little overhead switching back and forth if you go (pinky) ctrl on a windows machine, but I generally find that my subconscious picks up on the context and finds the right pattern.
I can see how this would be a problem, however.
But, in it's defense, I will say one thing: I thought I would hate the keyboard. I'm the guy who spends hundreds on the best mechanical keyboards, but I was left completely impressed with the new keyboard and how well it just works. Everything about is wrong on paper, but when you begin typing, the results are undeniable. The old macbooks had the best laptop keyboard bar none and this generation's is even better.
Now that I'm done praising one thing about it, I'll go back to beating the dead horse: Where's the 32GB model? :)
You could actually always set it to do this; they've just changed the defaults. A surprising number of users seem to be unaware of this, though.
Most of the time the full name is something I recognize. Problems arise because abbreviated names frequently collide, a short identifier can apply to several different things especially across fields.
Even a list at the end of the piece would be better than having to hunt around trying to find out what was meant in a particular context.
Having just downloaded the AJA System Test Lite from the App Store and run it, I was slightly disappointed to see how far it's fallen behind: 703 Write 709 Read
On the other hand, I haven't ever felt slowed down by my disk, while the maxed-out 32GB of RAM have been very useful...
The touch bar is finally useful now - contextual, customizable, visual shortcuts for anything I'd want to do on the Mac. Super powerful.
However the TouchBar is just a UI deadend. We are trained to not look down at our keyboards. My BTT shortcuts for the trackpad and MM are completely memorized so my eyes keep focus on the screen and work in front of me. I can't not do the same for the Touchbar with its changing contextual visual shortcuts. I have to glance down to confirm the context and the shortcuts. Glancing down at the touchbar means breaking concentration. Even if Apple adds haptic feedback in V2 it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of glancing away from my main screen to a tiny touchstrip. T
he touchbar is simply a crutch until the iPad wins or Apple makes a full touchscreen Mac. It's a waste of time. I'd much rather Apple have continued to implement the trackpad haptic feedback controls into the rest of their apps.
I got a 2015 Macbook as soon as it shipped. Within a few months, the butterfly mechanism had collapsed on several keys. A couple Apple Store repairs later, they're still breaking often enough that the 2015 Macbook is mostly collecting dust and shame.
When I saw what they'd done with the MBPr for 2016, I decided to overhaul pre-2016 ones indefinitely, because it's pretty much that or Dell XPS13 hackintosh. That keyboard is proof that the devil is not only real, but has subverted Apple's once-rigorous design process.
The rest of the machine looks good to me.
Despite author's belief in haptic feedback, it cannot actually fix this problem. Touch bar is always going to be like that, always slower to use than physical keys.
I have no end of problems with the ESC key. The touch bar ESC key has no tactile feedback. It has no haptic feedback. I can't tell if I hit it or not. Literally, what used to be a completely unconscious use of a heavily used key (vim, Command-Tab change mind, drag & change mind, etc.) now is literally a 2-3 second mental interrupt every time I want to use it, because now I have to make sure I hit it, and that the hit registers.
The rest of the touch bar is similarly problematic. Using interactive debugging? I used to rest my fingers on F5-6-7 for step-over, step-into and continue, then I could just wiggle one finger to keep stepping. Well, no longer. I can't rest my fingers, I have no tactile feedback when I hit one of these things, and I have to look at the keyboard to make sure I'm doing the right thing.
I haven't looked at a keyboard since 1982, and probably earlier. (Well, maybe except when I was learning my way around my Symbolics keyboard.)
Use WINE? Too bad - you can't force the touch bar to always be F1-12 in System Preferences. Sucks for huge numbers of games. Which, even if you hit Fn-F-key, still suffers from the problem that it does a 2-3 second mental interrupt and glance at the keyboard. Essentially the Mac is no longer suitable for keyboard gaming.
My wife generally goes to sleep an hour or two before me. I very often will take my laptop and do some recreational coding at night as she likes it when I'm there with her while she falls asleep. Well, not anymore. This keyboard is so loud that several nights a week she tells me to leave. I finally gave up and bought an Alienware 13R3 so at least I can play some games while in bed. (That OLED display is the most amazing display I've ever had, parenthetically.) On top of this, several keys have started to "squeak." I don't know how better to describe it, but several of the keys definitely make odd high pitched sounds when you hit them. Not all the time, but if you hit them off center.
Absolute disaster. I will never buy another Apple computer until they get rid of this.
Please give me a non-Touch-Bar model ASAP!
The track pad, however, is excellent.
I don't use the Touch ID. I really don't want the police getting into my stuff without my authorization.
When the laptop gets warm some keys' key-up sound change. I have the issue on the N (worst), X, B, and caps lock keys, but it seems to be different keys for everybody.
I hope that you will be able to have it fixed in-store soon, don't want to wait days for a replacement laptop especially if it's likely to have the same issue.
Now, admittedly it's quite a minor annoyance. But it's such a basic "feature" that keys sound the same that I don't want them to get away with it, if that makes sense.
Come on Apple, lift your game.
Spot on how I feel about it. Every MBP I've had to date felt like there was room to grow. The new one... meh, feels like a placeholder.
This is only best if you type by yourself in a soundproofed room.
In a business workplace where everyone has the prior model MacBook Pro, when you start typing on this one, the sounds of your 'assured' typing become the topic.