8 ms·
I've had mine for a week now, and have been able to use it alongside my late-2014 rMBP, which has been a solid workhorse. I'm starting to notice very subtle pr
by mmjaa 10y ago
I've had mine for a week now, and have been able to use it alongside my late-2014 rMBP, which has been a solid workhorse. I'm starting to notice very subtle preferences for the 2017 model creeping in - after an hour of typing, for example, going back to the old keyboard feels really, really inefficient and antiquated, and my typing rate is lower than on the new rMBP.
I also really enjoy the Touchbar - it hasn't been too intrusive, and binding ESCAPE to Caps Lock has been an acceptable re-configuration for me as a vim user.
Speed: okay, it seems slightly faster than the old machine, but then the old machine is 95% full while new-rMBP is not even 5% full yet, so .. no indexing hassles. (old-rMBP would often become unusable during Spotlight re-indexing..)
All in all, I'm happy with the upgrade - but with one huge big fat caveat: I didn't buy it. My work did. If it weren't for this fact, I'd be very reluctant to upgrade..
- jmnicolas 10y agoYou don't address the point of the article which is battery life though.
- mmjaa 10y agoI've been getting 6 - 7 hours average runtime on a full charge for the last few weeks, but I'm working (Xcode, vim and builds) and I don't think I have a representative work load - but I do note that this laptop 'seems' to be as long-lived without the charging cable as my previous machine. I suppose I'll pay more attention over the next week and see if its as bad as everyone makes it out to be - so far, I haven't even noticed. One thing I do really like though, is being able to charge from either side of the laptop. This actually improves things for me when in 'hacking in bed mode', since the previous left-sided configuration was inconvenient .. and is now not an issue.
- davidf18 10y agoWhat's your config?
- mmjaa 10y agorMBP 15" 2.7ghz i7, 16G RAM, 500G SSD, Intel HD 530, etc. So far I haven't loaded the machine up with anything heavier than my preferred homebrew+iTerm+vim+cscope+make/XCode tools, and I've been able to work pretty well with it all week. Going to try to keep it as clean as possible.
- otalp 10y agoI appreciate the fact that they made the keys on the pro much more clicker than the MacBook. The butterfly keys on them seemed unusable for serious typing, though I've only used them in stores, so perhaps it takes getting used to.
- jsjohnst 10y agoThe keyboard on the 12" MacBook does take getting used too. Took me about a week, but loved it once I got used to it. My only "complaint" is how noisy it is. When I'm typing fast in a meeting, it's quite noticeable to others.
- jghn 10y agoAgreed on all counts. There are two other things I dislike about typing on my 2016 12" rMB: 1) if I have to make transient use of arrow keys I always mess it up and 2) over long periods of time my hands start hurting from always being pushed up against the sharp edges whereas on my 15" rMBP there are a few inches on each side of my hands. For the most part though I love that rMB. I wouldn't want to code on it several hours a day but for my general home computing and relatively light coding it is fantastic.
- jsjohnst 10y agoI think it's the best laptop for a management level person in engineering running from meeting to meeting who occasionally sits down to write some light code / test code that they are reviewing from others. Great screen, decentish (but not great) memory, and great battery life, all with the simplicity of a single cable connection for power/monitor/accessories. Best of all, it's fantastic traveling as it can be easily charged from a USB-C battery pack that doubles as a phone charger. If I was writing code all day, then yes, a 15" rMBP would clearly be superior, but as I don't currently the 12" makes a perfect work laptop.
- jghn 10y agoI could see that. My work machine is a 15" rMBP which is mainly used hooked to a keyboard and monitor. Even when not plugged in I enjoy coding on it. Thing was, it was just big enough that I disliked lugging it around everywhere, back & forth to home, when traveling, etc. For me my rMB is more for personal and light remote work purposes but that winds up being not dissimilar to your engineering mgmt persona you describe and I find it great for all of those reasons.
- izacus 10y ago> I've had mine for a week now, and have been able to use it alongside my late-2014 rMBP, which has been a solid workhorse. I'm starting to notice very subtle preferences for the 2017 model creeping in - after an hour of typing, for example, going back to the old keyboard feels really, really inefficient and antiquated, and my typing rate is lower than on the new rMBP. For me it's the EXACT opposite - everytime I return to my 2014, it feel so much better and the strain on my hands is significantly lowered. The new keyboard just doesn't feel right or comfortable even after weeks. > I also really enjoy the Touchbar - it hasn't been too intrusive, and binding ESCAPE to Caps Lock has been an acceptable re-configuration for me as a vim user. For me the touchbar is empty 90% of the time. And I can't even put application shortcuts there :/
- btown 10y agoFYI BetterTouchTools supposedly lets you customize the touch bar for arbitrary apps. Haven't tried it on a touch bar myself but it's an amazing utility regardless. https://www.boastr.net/bettertouchtool-pre-alpha-with-touch-bar-support/ https://www.boastr.net/bettertouchtool-pre-alpha-with-touch-... (I believe stable has this feature now as well.)
- irq 10y agoI have used BetterTouchTool to add a lot of app shortcuts to my touch bar. It works great.
- izacus 10y agoHmm, doesn't this still require you to cmd-tab to the tool, since TouchBar only allows the currently focused app to display things?
- wlesieutre 10y agoNever used it myself, but can you not set a global hotkey to bring it to front?
- pilif 10y ago
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- mmjjaa 10y agoWhy would you create a new HN account just to post this?
- sctb 10y agoPlease don't create new accounts just to post like this.
- amelius 10y ago> after an hour of typing, for example, going back to the old keyboard feels really, really inefficient and antiquated Isn't that just because you are used to a different keyboard now?
- rsl7 10y agoI've had a similar experience. the new keyboard is much better. Except I keep palming the new huge trackpad.
- toyg 10y agoI honestly don't get why they'd make the trackpad bigger. It's one of 99 reasons for which I won't buy these new models.
- mmjaa 10y agoI do too, but over the last few days have trained myself not to rest on the trackpad and to find the little 'lip' region between keyboard and trackpad to rest on instead. I guess this is a habit thing though, and it can be difficult to break those habits. I do occasionally find myself thumbing the mouse around by accident, but generally don't find it that inconvenient. I do wish to note that it has been difficult for me to acclimate to the new motionless trackpad and do things like complex hold/drag/click manoeuvres .. this has required a bit of getting used to, but generally I'm not bothered by the bigger trackpad. Just the haptic adjustment felt like user fail for the first few days - I've gotten over it.
- Tempest1981 10y agoA friend and I were testing out the huge trackpad. It fully rejected/ignored my palms, no matter how I typed. Impressive! But it didn't reject his nearly as well. Conclusion: it depends on the shape of your palm, or the sharpness of the heel of your hand.
- mmjaa 10y agoIts because the new keyboard doesn't require as much haptic effort as the old one, in my opinion. A direct A/B comparison between the two leads me to conclude that I do in fact prefer the new keyboard on the 2017-rMBP over the old one. However, both are pretty decent and a matter of taste, I expect.
- thought_alarm 10y agoHow do you deal with the arrow keys? I like the feel of the keyboard, but I found absolutely no way to orient my fingers over the arrow keys. There is no way tell whether I'm hitting the up arrow or the right shift. As someone who works with text, it's a deal breaker for me.
- HalfwayToDice 10y agoYes I don't understand why more people aren't talking about this. The new left/right cursor layout is awful for me, I keep having to look down at the keyboard.
- mmjaa 10y ago>How do you deal with the arrow keys? I'm a vim user, so its hjkl all the way.. for the most part. And while I do agree that the older invert-T configuration of the arrow keys was ergonomic and sensible, I've found myself not having any problem with locating the arrow keys on the new 2017-rMBP due to the fact that the gap between up/down is also pretty easy to find by feel. I guess I might be a little more tolerant for this change than most, since I try to change my keyboard every 6 months (for RSI reasons) anyway, and am also a keys/synth player with a room full of diverse haptic interfaces. But I do understand the frustration of having these ergonomics yanked out from under us by Apple ..
- ubernostrum 10y agoYes I don't understand why more people aren't talking about this. Because it's a subjective matter of personal opinion and not all people everywhere have identical opinions. Yet it is often presented, especially in places like HN, as an objective opinion that the new MBP is 100% completely, totally, permanently and irrevocably unusable for any person, for any use case, in any logically-possible universe. Perhaps that is not the case, and instead it is the case that there are things you dislike which other people like.
- bluedino 10y agoThe whole keyboard feels like that to me. When they made the keys bigger they basically took away the ability to 'feel' the outside edges of the keys and know where your hands are. It's very disoriented and most of my typing errors are off by one.
- dingo_bat 10y agoWhat's the 'r' in 'rMBP'?
- robert_foss 10y agoRetina. Apples very own throughly innovative marketing term for high resolution displays.
- dguo 10y agoIt stands for "retina display", which means the display has a higher pixel density.
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- Bud 10y agoThe "r" will very likely be dropped going forward, since the last remaining non-Retina MBP is now no longer produced.
- dashoffset 10y agoYeah, people seem to be calling the 2016 models tbMBP and ntbMBP.
- WildUtah 10y agoIt's the MacBook Escape and the Macbook Pro.
- RandomOpinion 10y ago>binding ESCAPE to Caps Lock has been an acceptable re-configuration for me as a vim user I've seen a lot of people say this but I dunno. I'm kind of leery of doing something that would cause me to develop problematic muscle memory when typing on normal keyboards, e.g. on other people's machines. I have enough trouble flipping between Mac and Windows keyboard shortcuts already.
- mmjaa 10y agoI have suffered from RSI for some decades and one thing that helps alleviate it is to change my keyboard every 6 months or so .. and in that light, this change has actually been quite smooth for me. I've gotten used to it in a week, and will probably adopt it as standard from here on out, anyway ..
- adtac 10y ago`Ctrl + [` is the best way IMO.
- WildUtah 10y ago:ino kj <Esc> 'kj' is the ideal key combination for changing out of insert mode. Keep your fingers on their home row. Try it and you'll never go back. (Some people like 'jj' or 'jk' and they're fine people, too.)
- Philipp__ 10y agoRebinding Ctrl to Caps Lock key was the lifechaning experience for me (I started to use Emacs for some things, and I couldn't stand using Ctrl down there). And as a matter of Vim, there are plenty of solutions to rebind exit to something like `jk` or use `Ctrl+[`.
- platz 10y agoI bind Ctrl to Alt and Alt to CapsLock so I can use my thumb to hit the remapped Ctrl next to the spacebar
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- pcl 10y agoIn my experience, spotlight re-indexing mostly happens if you run out of disk space and the OS decides to drop spotlights caches in favor of swap space. If you keep an eye on the size of your swap files (in the /var/vm dir), you can see when things go nuts and take corrective action before the index gets whacked.
- davidf18 10y agoIMHO, this is a "bug" because if you are running on battery, the indexing is a problem and it is also a problem if you are using spotlight. Is there an option to ensure that the spotlight cache is not deleted?
- mmjaa 10y agoSpotlight has given me so many headaches in the last few weeks that I'm seriously considering investing the time to understand it well enough to build an app to wrestle it to the ground and beat it over the head with a big stick. If only there'd be a reason to do it other than "gain control over my life again" ..
- manmal 10y agoWell, I'd buy that tool. Spotlight watchdog.
- pcl 10y agoIf you just want to beat it over the head with a stick, you can simply turn indexing off on a per-volume basis: sudo mdutil -i off / You can also exclude certain directories or volumes in the Privacy section of Spotlight preferences.
- davidf18 10y agoBut if you turn it off, then you can't use Spotlight to find files at all, whereas if it is on, then one can use it.
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- BlakePetersen 10y agoThis sounds EXACTLY how my impression is after about 2 weeks of non-primary machine use. !00% agree with the keyboard, I even made a joke about it to my visiting parents yesterday (received no laughs). After working for a few hours on my new machine, jumping back to my old machine definitely feels greasy. 98% agree with touchbar, I wish there was a way to edit the default touchbar view (escape and mini functions). I'd love to have the mini functions maximized so I can have the old hot keys one less click away, but its a minor gripe. 100% agree with speed -- it's been awesome. No worries at all. I don't have as much on my new machine yet but it seems to not get bogged down at all where my last-gen rMPB gets all hot and bothered rather quickly. It also doesn't seem to run as hot, I don't think I've heard a fan kick in yet (it is the winter ;D). I used to run my neural-styles on my last-gen rMBP as it would max at like 60GB (thanks swap!) where my 32GB linux box would tap out at... ~31.5GB. I am dying to run an apple to apple to penquin RNN death match here soon, but... yanno... people need gifts. RAM -- 16GB is fine, it runs swap off an SSD, life could be A LOT worse. I am not sure how big swap can get but my last machine was touching 60GB under max loads of the RNN. Touchpad -- it's HUGE and it's AWESOME! I don't have to do that lil finger-shifty maneuver to drag all the way across the screen now. I don't have any palming issues either. It's AMAZING! Battery -- I saw some weirdness when I first got it, like being stuck at 80% for 3 hours. But it seems to have gotten enough data now to make better calcs on the power remaining. It feels like it lasts a lot longer than my old machine while doing generally the same work (usually local GAE instances, pycharm, chrome, webstorm, bundler watchers, the usual). Ports -- I got one dongle and have only needed to use it once to test mousewheel events on a standard mouse. It worked great and everything else I plan to upgrade to USB-C and reading the instructions (it's really not THAT confusing guys...) I am super pumped about my new upgrade and I definitely DID buy this myself (though it's a business write-off I suppose). I was waiting for the next MBP for a new lappy and had plenty of time to make a choice and every other laptop I got my hands on simply didn't have the same build quality or level of standard that this does. I also am not a fan for ultra-do-anything coffee-breath Windows and Linux support is always more trouble than it's worth at times (personally, macOS is my favorite unix-like os flavor by far).
- davidf18 10y agoWhat's your exact config?
- tibbon 10y agoSame on all accounts (including work buying it and those feelings). The keyboard I thought I'd hate, but it's actually so much better than I imagined.
- caycep 10y agoThe OS X Terminal integration is quite spiffy...amused they had an engineer specifically working on Terminal Touchbar integration!
- pier25 10y agoAre you enjoying the noise of the new keyboard? https://vimeo.com/195645497 https://vimeo.com/195645497