This was particularly painful to read. The mandatory new option that is the touchbar upended what was working fine for something that, for touch typists, is totally inferior. There's no feedback! This is a foundational aspect of usability; for apple to ignore this is a huge mistake.
One thing I've been pondering - I've been asking myself: "why on earth would someone actually like the touchbar...ever?". And I wonder if the answer has something to do with the new generation of technologists. The generation that has been using touch on phones/tablets from the beginning of their technology journey.
I have no idea if this has merit, but as someone who hasn't looked at a keyboard while typing in two decades (unless it has a touchbar), that's the only thing I can imagine. Maybe I'd be ok with it if I grew up with it.
I like adjusting brightness and volume with a slider. You can tap and hold the brightness or volume icon on the touch bar and slide it to where you want. Repeatedly tapping physical buttons feels vulgar by comparison.
I like seeing the progress and having transport controls of my full screen videos.
I like having the little animation draw my attention when I can use touchid for something.
In general it feels futuristic, fun, and like a way better use of the space than physical keys that I would almost never use.
If you’re someone who uses the function keys (JetBrains users maybe?) I can see feeling the same way I did about esc.
To me, using function keys is un-apple-ish.
I have command, control, and option keys that allow me to be quite expressive without moving my hands away from the home area of the board.
Perhaps those with larger hands can reach the function keys without disrupting their positioning. For me it is not possible.
At that point I may as well reach for a mouse or a touchpad.
Because it's programmable. I'm a programmer. I like things to be programmable.
I've got no hope of remembering what a key like F6 means in a given context - it's a meaningless number. The Touch Bar lets me have context-sensitive keys I can actually understand and use.
its like how roku tv offers remote control app for phones.. vs a physical device that you can change volume, channels etc without even looking at the device and in the dark, every time i used the app i had to see where to press couldn't do it blindly because i had no idea if i was pushing anything or the wrong button. How can anyone like touch interfaces if it could be done with physical buttons?
And then I bought a 2021 MacBook Air, without a touchbar, and I found it so much more pleasant. I find the touchbar to be a failed experiment. I no longer want one ever again. I just want buttons for my brightness and music.
I honestly wouldn't even say it's that small of a change. Apple took an extremely common activity that worked without a thought and turned it into something you constantly have to look at and think about. This is especially annoying in the context of the posted article, where saving fractions of a second opening an app is one of the biggest pluses listed. At least to me, the former is much worse than the latter is beneficial.
Edit: Looks like everyone else already said the same thing. Sorry!
I also have to disable force-touch (or whatever it's called on there) on the trackpad, for models that have that, or else my drag-&-drop success rate is reduced from about 100% to more like 30%. Took me quite a while to figure out why that was happening. Luckily I have no clue why I'd want that feature in the first place, so I don't miss it. I don't have any kind of motor-function disorder, I just can't drag-&-drop while maintaining perfectly even pressure, I guess.
One issue though, is that the touch app crashes sometimes and I need to cycle it's service. This happens rarely since I have updated to catalina 10.15.7, however, previously I would encounter the issue every month
They kept the same body while changing out the chip, I suspect the next update will bring the end of the Touchbar.
The M1 is awesome though - it makes the Intel MBA seem like garbage. I was helping my SO set up some stuff for a presentation (Zoom, Mmhmm) and the Intel MBA fan was screaming, the video had unusable lag, the entire thing was locking up.
We switched to my M1 with no fan and everything was fast and flawless.
Meanwhile Intel is pushing nonsense like this: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/02/08/2221233/intel-b...
Intel is in trouble - this is an e-risk for their business.
[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/15/apple-removing-touch-ba...
Alternatively grab a design system built by someone who already took care of all the typography decisions.
If you want something that will work well, copy the font and color styles from medium or substack. They've done all the research for you.
Here's a full list of the issues
- There's not enough contrast. The text color needs to be darker.
- The font is too large.
- The paragraph width is too wide
- The font weight is too light
I think that's honestly a bigger issue than paragraph width
Personally, I think you could increase the contrast between text and whitespace more (i.e. use a darker font color, maybe #222), shrink the font-size a little as the other comment said, and most importantly, set a max-width so that the text doesn't expand arbitrarily when viewed on larger screens. 700 or 900px feels nice to me.
A good start is using an Accessibility Contrast Checker. https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
I really want this as well, but I'm a bit sceptical: would any company release a product soooo good so that their users don't need to buy new models of such product for many years?
I still have a 2015 MBP that works like the first day although I would like to increase the disk and ram. 5 years with the same model; that's a lot. I know many people who replaces their laptops every 2 or 3 years. Now, I have the impression that a model like the one you just described, is a model that could easily "last" for more than 5 years without trouble. Wouldn't that hurt Apple's sales long-term?
Every person that I know with a Mac or an iPhone still has it and it's usable for years after they're done with it. I know some people that are still using their iPhone 6S because it has a headphone jack and that phone is almost 7 years old at this point.
I'm hoping this years gen will be like that 2015 model. But I share your concerns, knowing Apple they will gimp it somewhere like not allowing 2 monitors or limiting to 16GB then have next years model have it which will prob increase sales by a ton long term.
That’s almost 9 years on one machine and I didn’t have to switch; I just wanted to dabble in the latest iOS dev on Big Sur (which is unsupported on the 2012 model)
I've never seriously used OS X outside of struggling through it to develop apps, so I'm a bit nervous. I'm making the switch ironically so I can use MS Office (work is heavy on sharepoint), and for the portability.
Beyond that, I wouldn't change a thing about this machine. Very easy to recommend!
The positives are that it is very fast and battery life is great!
That’s surprising; “instant wake” is an advertised feature of the AS Macs.
Are you actually referring to how long it takes to get back to the desktop from the Lock Screen? If so, do you perhaps have lots and lots of Chrome tabs open, more than fit in memory, such that some are hibernated; and do you frequently put your Mac to sleep, change its power state (plug/unplug), then wake it up again? If so, that’s Chrome blocking wake by attempting to wake up all the hibernated tabs to tell them the power state changed. I get that all the time on my 2016 MacBook.
I still don’t have a new MacBook with it because they don’t support multiple external monitors yet, but hey, maybe this year.
The first couple of weeks I used the Rosetta Terminal as described in this and many other blog post, until I found out this was not necessary at all for Node.js as described over here: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/issues/2350#issuecomment-73413....
The only blocking issue was Docker so I used VSCode remote until they released the M1 preview. So with that and the release of HomeBrew 3.0.0 last month and many macOS apps adding M1 support, everything is now running smoothly for me and I think it's a really great machine to use as a developer.
Also, the battery life truly is amazing, and boy am I glad I finally got rid of that touch bar and that ridiculous butterfly keyboard.
These are games like factorio and CIV6. Only two years ago, a similarly priced (~$1000) dell ultralight was unable to play CIV6 at all (ok, it managed 1 frame every 2 seconds). My M1 Air plays it for hours.
