21 ms·

I returned my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

559 points by geerlingguy 10y ago

Gorbzel 10y ago
As Steve famously said, if you don't want a tbMBP, don't buy it. If you buy one and you don't like it, take it back. Since that is/always has been the working approach, any chance the HN hive-mind could avoid posting EVERY single MBP->other laptop or macOS->*nix article?
- MatthewWilkes 10y ago
  The Macbook has been a very popular tool for a long time now. What's new isn't the ability to take it back, it's that people are actually doing it with this generation. I personally find this article useful, as the author actually tried the machine and didn't like it, rather than not buying it.
- mikeash 10y ago
  OK, sure. What else do you suggest I buy? When the best available product is no longer available, I don't think the "just don't buy it" approach is really a good response. (Full disclosure, I think the new MPB looks pretty decent, but for those who don't like it there's often no good alternative now.)
  - Gorbzel 10y ago
    So, I reject the premise of your question & the groupthink, namely that the best product "is no longer available." Just like every other Revision A  product, people are considering the tradeoffs vs whether they still want to be on the platform ("If you don't like the iPhone 4..." ). Cupertino also likely needs to fix some bugs. Since that's a normal part of life I'd fully agree if this were the first time, but this is the 15th take or so on the tbMBP since it came out. Simply going by my history, people seem to like the XPS 13 Developer edition, machines from System76, the Thinkpad T460, as well as mentioning the Surface Book and/or Studio in every article as incontrovertible proof that Apple is doomed. Full disclaimer that YMMV, as ultimately, buying a machine is a subjective decision that will always have tradeoffs (this stunningly controversial take was flagged last time). Perhaps, just maybe, people who chime in "I find this article useful" could do the rest of the community who doesn't think Apple is dying on a daily basis a favor and do a search when they're in the market for a new laptop. But now we're just degrading into basic forum etiquette, a tale as old as time...
    - mikeash 10y ago
      If you understand that buying a machine is a subjective decision, then you should also realize that you can't reject the premise that the best product is no longer available, because "the best product" is likewise subjective. A lot of people saw the old MBP as the best out there, and now it's gone, and that upsets them. "Buy something else" is not a good response to that.
geerlingguy 10y ago
Even if you don't care about the rest of the review, if you're interested in some real-world/empirical evidence about how the Touch Bar model's battery life compares to the Function Key model, please read through the Battery section of this post. I open sourced the script and methodology I used to run heavy battery use tests: https://github.com/geerlingguy/macbook-pro-battery-test https://github.com/geerlingguy/macbook-pro-battery-test And I also published the raw results of the third full battery test on each laptop: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16H6TeKCOZRwzsd5bZJM2IHVqN9fU6GZhUrDiu_SK2zU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16H6TeKCOZRwzsd5bZJM2...
- richardwhiuk 10y ago
  I'm confused: # Builds completed Total battery life Avg. Build time 2016 Touch Bar - 3.1 GHz i5 49 4:54:00 0:08:45 2016 Fn key - 2.4 GHz i7 30 3:54:00 0:07:52 2015 Retina - 3.1 GHz i7 24 3:30:00 0:06:02 suggests that the 2016 model did 19 more builds, and had a battery life of 1 hour longer, suggesting a _better_ battery life...
  - tcbawo 10y ago
    Looking at the data in his spreadsheet, I think he has the models and build times switched.
    - geerlingguy 10y ago
      You're correct. Sorry about that, I fixed the table!
      - yabatopia 10y ago
        Ah, that makes so much more sense now!
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - 10y ago
chrisseaton 10y ago
> I use a Mac as my daily driver What does the author mean by 'daily driver'?
- daveguy 10y ago
  Using something as a "daily driver" means you use it every day as your primary computer.
- tyingq 10y ago
  The phrase usually means your reliable, but not fancy, car that you drive to work every day. It also implies you have a another nicer car that you only drive for pleasure, or in good weather, etc.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- wavefunction 10y ago
  It's a reference to an automobile that one uses for most normal tasks, as opposed to a secondary car that may be a sports car or collectible car that one only takes out for leisure. Say you had a minivan for taking your kids to their schools and sports practices and picking up groceries, and a Lamborghini for going to da club on Saturday nights...
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  Sorry about that, I try to use idioms that are a little more widespread, but outside of car culture, you might not hear the term that often. It basically means 'the computer I use for day-to-day work' (see this for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/nexus4/comments/2b7pm5/what_does_daily_driver_mean_exactly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nexus4/comments/2b7pm5/what_does_da...). It would be opposed to an exotic car or computer I'd use only in certain special circumstances (like the Raspberry Pis I use for testing cluster configurations, at www.pidramble.com).
  - pyrophane 10y ago
    I really only ever hear the term from the tech press. Those folks might have 5 phones and 3 laptops sitting on their desk at any given time, so the term "daily driver" makes sense to describe the one they actually use. For the rest of us, we just have "a laptop" and "a phone."
muninn_ 10y ago
I don't understand why people are still going on about this
- op00to 10y ago
  I can only assume people like to be heard, and repeating the ideas heard in the echo chamber can be very reassuring when everyone agrees with you.
  - geerlingguy 10y ago
    Not in this instance. I know that there were still a lot of unanswered questions, like exactly how badly is battery life affected (not just measured in Wh), and how does real world performance compare (not just Geekbench numbers). Also, for those making a $2k+ purchasing decision, it pays to do a little research as to what other people who work in similar situations think about the different options. I read a lot of reviews for MacBooks, Lenovo T4xx series, Dell XPS models, etc. Just like with any other topic, the color of varied opinions helps one arrive at a better understanding.
    - nilkn 10y ago
      Complaining about Apple and the MacBook Pro has become a pretty dominant topic on Hacker News from the last few months. I really do think this negativity about the product has become excessive, and it's the first time I've personally been annoyed about something like this on HN in four years of reading the site more or less daily. --- Since my comment is abrasive -- much more so than normal for me here on HN -- I figured it was worth it for me to put some more effort into this and provide some evidence. I easily came up with the following list of topics here from the last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13244357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13244357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13251401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13251401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13157832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13157832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13214754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13214754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13220623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13220623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337727 (note that, while the headline is a bit general, much of the discussion is related to the new MBP) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185428 I just stopped after this point. There were more.
killerpopiller 10y ago
OT: My display was flickering last week, black and back until I rebooted. Does anyone had this problem as well? I filmed it and will ask apple what to do.
nailer 10y ago
The 'Touch Bar' is a plainly stopgap measure that only exists because Apple is delaying the painful transition to touch in OS X. Microsoft underwent that pain early in Windows 8 and the first few not-particularly-good Surface devices, and (with Windows 10 and the SP4) is there now.
- gst 10y ago
  > The 'Touch Bar' is a plainly stopgap measure that only exists because Apple is delaying the painful transition to touch in OS X. The transition to touch already happened with iOS. Apple still needs to keep macOS alive for a few legacy use-cases, but the long-term strategy is probably to move the remaining applications over to iOS, instead of converting macOS to iOS.
  - audunw 10y ago
    I don't think Apple has given completely up on macOS. They wouldn't do the touchbar if that was the case. It would be wasted effort. They could sell macOS for years just by iteratively updating the hardware specs. I think they're trying to find a role for macOS that would allow them to innovate there, but I don't they have it figured out. The touchbar is just testing the waters, to see if it can make sense to do a dual approach (they've probably played with replacing the area below the keyboard with a touchscreen as well).
  - coldtea 10y ago
    People keep saying that, as if it means something. Some huge breakthrough in CPU power and technology aside, including changes to the laws of physics and basic ergonomics, we are not going to be doing desktopy-style work on iOS style devices -- unless they get the ability to drive large 4K+ monitors, connect to multiple peripherals at once, talk to disk drives, etc. And even that would require hooking them with keyboards, stands etc for comfortable working. People care for laptops/desktops for all the OTHER work and usage patterns that are not good fit for iOS/iDevice form factors.
    - TorKlingberg 10y ago
gbog 10y ago
Never owned a Mac but I have just bought a LG V20 phone which has a second always on screen that looks like the touch bar. On a phone it is actually very useful, for instance having the last five apps you opened readily accessible is excellent, it brings the alt-tab power to your mobile. Also I use the flashlight often and it's just right there. Maybe, probably it's a bad idea on a laptop, but having another screen that apps cannot fight for above the main screen on a smartphone or phablet is great.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  The v20 always on screen is right where you're always looking on a phone, unlike MBP touchbar. I'd buy one tomorrow but LG feel Europeans are unworthy of them.
coldpie 10y ago
The thing designers are failing to understand this decade is that touch interfaces suck. Always. They are a compromise, not a feature. This includes touch screens and capacitive buttons, both in vogue for the past decade. Touch interfaces suck: they are too easy to press accidentally, and too difficult to press on purpose. In college, I actually taped pieces of paper onto my friend's TV with capacitive buttons so we could tell where the fucking buttons were in the dark. If you were off by a half centimeter, you'd turn the TV off instead of changing the volume. I regularly turn on my game consoles by lightly brushing my arm against them because of their awful capacitive buttons. Dumb, dumb dumb. Touch interfaces provide no benefit over physical buttons except in cases where you cannot have physical buttons. Phones are a good example: physical buttons add too much bulk to the phone or drastically reduce your screen size. You also don't have a defined set of functionality. A touch interface makes sense here. But on a laptop keyboard? You've already got a ton of keys there! Just add ten more! Instead, they've added the suckiness of a touch interface for no reason, since there was no compromise to make. Touch interfaces aren't modern, they aren't stylish, and nobody likes them. You use them when you must make a compromise for form factor. Otherwise, stick with physical buttons.
- christophilus 10y ago
  This is even more true in cars, where a touch interface is arguably dangerous. Give me buttons, and I can fiddle while keeping my eyes on the road. Give me a touch screen with heirarchical menus, and I've got to look away from the road in order to do anything at all.
  - base698 10y ago
    Seriously. My guess as to the reason Tesla did this was to skimp on manufacturing costs. Now that they are established I wish they'd remove that screen or reduce its size.
    - jp555 10y ago
      I hope they move it to a full windscreen HUD and add dashboard hardware controls.
consentfactory 10y ago
You know, Lenovo tried reinventing the keyboard a few years ago with their X1 Carbons by putting on a touch bar with function keys, volume keys, etc. and it was horrible. Trying to do any terminal work was horrible; for example, my insert key was touchbar FN + I or something ridiculous like that. AFAIK, they didn't reproduce that model. Surprised Apple didn't take note.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  Yeah, I remember reading all the comparisons to the Lenovo version, and thinking that surely Apple must've improved from Lenovo's version, or added something more compelling. But instead, they may have made it worse, if that's possible, because the escape key is indented, just to make the Touch Bar's graphical layout even on both sides. Definitely the worst case of form over function I've encountered with an Apple product.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    I actually think this could work better with the apple crowd. Some could be buying their first mac after owning an iphone / ipad and for those people touch does make sense. The Lenovo crowd on the other hand are old-timers that want real keys that click and thats why the Lenovo touchbar was so hated.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      Which, again, means "Pro is now just a marketing label, this is not a pro device."
      - freehunter 10y ago
        Nonsense. For one, "pro" has always been a marketing label. Nothing inherent to the device excludes "normal" users, and not every "pro" user needs the MacBook Pro. I've seen a lot of professionals using iPads (and not the iPad Pro). I know that shatters your worldview, but a laptop marketed as "pro" has never signified that the user was actually a professional, and not using a laptop with "pro" in the name has never signified that the user wasn't a professional. Your definition of "pro" is not universal. It is not absolute. Anyone who says "the new MacBook Pro is not a pro device!" needs to get over themselves. You're not the arbiter of what can and cannot be considered "pro".
techterrier 10y ago
I must be the only person that has no issues with their touch MBP other than the price I paid for it. Which was a joke.
- bengale 10y ago
  Price in the UK is pretty painful now, but the machine is great. Its not a revolutionary change, but a very welcome improvement.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  If the price were the same as the function key model... I think the Touch Bar would've been a lot more palatable. It's a variety of issues that caused me to end up disliking the entire machine. I could live with the Touch Bar if battery were better, pricing were similar, etc.
- dabit3 10y ago
  Programmers are the only professionals in the world who complain about having to pay for quality tools. Can you imagine a dentist, truck driver, or doctor complaining about having to pay $2500 for a machine that would bring her hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next 5 years? Of course not.
  - steverb 10y ago
    I've heard doctors, truck drivers, construction workers and any number of other people complain about the cost of quality tools. For the same reason that people complain about the cost of Apple machines, they don't perceive enough quality difference to justify the price difference.
  - scott_karana 10y ago
    Are you kidding me? Professionals of any careers always complain about non-optimal tools. If improvements make them more money/time than they cost, people will buy them without a second thought. As they should ;)
ef4 10y ago
If you've got the previous generation of macbook pro and are wondering whether you should upgrade, here's an alternate suggestion: I took my 2014 retina macbook pro to the Apple Store and got a "topcase replacement" (because my keyboard was beat up with overuse and starting to get flaky). That had the side benefit of giving me a completely new external case, so it looks brand new again. And it includes a brand new battery. And I got a new display for free, because there's a recall on that generation of retina displays for delamination issues. It feels like I just bought a new laptop at one fifth the price. And the specs on it are still competitive with the 2016 models: 16GB ram, 3ghz core i7. Only the very highest 2016 configuration even beats it, and that by only a little.
- drchiu 10y ago
  How do you request a top case replacement? How much does it cost and how long do they take to do it?
  - okanesen 10y ago
    I'm not entirely sure if you can just request a top case replacement, but I just had my battery replaced and the top case replacement was included in it. It took them around 10 days to complete considering it was after Christmas.
  - dabeeeenster 10y ago
    I think they are about £200
  - raarts 10y ago
    I paid €378 last month. It was done in an hour. It was an 2013 MBA. They replaced the battery for free. Don't have Applecare.
- dizzy3gg 10y ago
  hard to find information about this, so would also like to know.
- jacobkg 10y ago
_stephan 10y ago
The battery comparison with the 2015 MacBook Pro is not really fair, because he turns the brightness "all the way" up for his benchmark, even though the new models have screens with 500 nits brightness while the 2015 model only has 300 nits.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  I'm less concerned with the 2015 -> 2016 battery life regression (general use with auto brightness bears this out as well, so the delta is there, it just might not be as great), and more concerned with the fact that the Function Key Pro gets 10% better battery life.
rado 10y ago
You hate the Touch Bar, even though the MacBook is closed most of the time? Strange.
blakesterz 10y ago
>> I have been using an 11" MacBook Air as my primary computer since 2011 So I think he's using this thing plugged into an external monitor most of the time? Can anyone actually use an 11" monitor as a primary monitor? If so, what do you do? I only ask because I struggle to work when I'm on the road using my 13" laptop and I can't imagine being able to get much done every day on an 11".
- thirdsun 10y ago
  It's not my preference but I think hiding the dock, working in fullscreen, one app at a time and alt+tabbing a lot will make it quite workable. In fact, thinking about it I imagine it to be a rather uncluttered, focused experience compared to the 27" screen full of windows I'm currently looking at. Which isn't an argument against large screens, but poor window management and lack of focus I guess.
  - geerlingguy 10y ago
    This, mostly. I have a 27" 4K display at my desk, but I can be just as productive (sometimes more so) on the short 11" screen. Heck, I just deal with streams of text 90% of my day.
- mojuba 10y ago
  Depends on what you do, but 13" or less means e.g. you won't be able to do vertical split of windows in Xcode. Which is annoying, because at times you have to have two windows open (such as one source and one IB storyboard or XIB, plus the navigators on the left and right hand sides). But this is still workable. I've written 3 or 4 iOS apps entirely on a 13" laptop. If there is an itch to finish and release something, suddenly those limitations aren't anymore.
  - blakesterz 10y ago
    >> If there is an itch to finish and release something, suddenly those limitations aren't anymore. Good point :-) Funny how things become less important when there's a push to get it done no matter what!
grabcocque 10y ago
So, unless I'm missing something, the primary complaint is "I don't like the position of esc on the touch bar". That's not a lot to hang a rant on, but clearly that's all it takes to get to the top of Hacker News these days.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  Spoiler: there's no way to find the keys on a touch display, unless you are looking at them. That is the main issue: not that the key is in a weird position, but that the key's position is a mystery unless you take your eyes off the screen. Hello hunt-and-peck.
- mikeash 10y ago
  That's rather odd, since the touch area for the escape key extends all the way to the left edge of the bar, even though that's not visually covered. I wonder if maybe the author just never realized that.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    From Gruber's account (Apple sycophant #1), no it doesn't extend all the way to the left edge.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      I don't own one, but it was one of the first things I tried when I was able to test a friend's, and it worked exactly as I described.
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        Hopefully they fixed it in a software update
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Did you miss the whole section on "the battery is crap"?
neximo64 10y ago
This was surprising succinct with the issues. I'm not going to get one, I thought it was a bit of HN overdo as usual but the 200ms delay is clear a symptom of a bad Apple product from the point of their quality, not the perception of the user.
coldtea 10y ago
Why couldn't they just add OLED programmable physical keys -- defaulting to the same layout/feature set as now? They'd lose the ability to do sliders etc, but they have a huge bloody trackpad they could use for that. Or make the trackpad a touch-screen itself.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  A slim touchbar above the trackpad would have been amazing. All the use cases for a touchbar I can think of are when I'm trackpad mode, not typing mode. Replacing the function keys makes way less sense.
  - addicted 10y ago
    My first indication that the touch bar was probably not gonna be very good was thinking that there is no way that the function keys just happened to be in the ideal spot for a touch surface.
chmars 10y ago
I actually like my 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Speed is fine with my upgraded model and the display is great. Touch ID is very useful too. I rarely use the touch bar and I still miss direct access to brightness / loudness up and down, but I have also learnt that a barely use function keys anymore. ESC on the Touch Bar is good enough, however, ESC has become less important on Mac OS, Photos.App for example seems not be support ESC at all. The battery is fine too. I use my MacBook mostly for long meetings, i.e., 5-6 hours, and up to now, there has always been plenty of battery left. That is of course with a rather new battery and for light news (using a text editor, viewing PDFs, some web browsing, distractions like e-mail / instant messaging / social media from time to time.) The keyboard … well, I don't really like it, but whenever I use my old 13" MacBook Pro (Retina), I don't like the old keyboard either. The real annoyance is the noise resulting from my fast and obviously rather hard touch typing. I am keeping my MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. On the other hand, I would immediately buy a MacBook Pro without Touch Bar if it came with Touch ID and more ports than the current MacBook Pro without Touch Bar. PS: How do you call the effect that you are more likely to like expensive products as a kind of self-deception? ;)
- syrrim 10y ago
  That would be cognitive dissonance. There is dissonance between your action (buying the laptop) and your thoughts (not liking the laptop). You either change your action (return the laptop) or change your thoughts (actually, I think I do like this laptop).
  - grzm 10y ago
    [Edit to add: Though I read the parent comment a number of times, I missed a key line. Leaving my comment for context.] I've read your parent comment a number of times. Where do they express general dislike for the laptop? They say the keyboard is loud, and that if a non-Touch Bar model were available, they'd buy one, but other than that, I read it as them being happy with it: I actually like my 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.
    - chmars 10y ago
Allower 10y ago
"I've owned three separate 11" models—I love this netbook-like form factor!" Seriously this has to be a joke right? 11 inch laptops are completely useless for a developer
grabcocque 10y ago
FWIW, I kinda like the touch bar. I know, I know, I'm not according the the Hacker News groupthink du jour, and am having my own, entirely unapproved opinion. But there it is, I quite like it.
- dkonofalski 10y ago
  I'm with you. I love the Touch Bar and, for the life of me, can't see how people are fat-fingering it all the time. Where are you people keeping your hands that you're fat fingering the keys while typing? Are you using the number keys as your home row or something?
  - Hupriene 10y ago
    For me when I hit number keys, I don't hit them with the tips of my fingers, instead I hit them with the pad, which naturally leads to some finger sticking out past the numbers. 3 and 4 are especially problematic since I hit them almost with the first knuckle of my middle finger).
    - geerlingguy 10y ago
      I also sometimes rest my finger up near the delete key, or a thumb near where the power button (Touch ID) is when reading for long bouts... and in those cases, just a light brush against the Touch Bar led to interactions I didn't consciously initiate.
- dorian-graph 10y ago
  I like it too. It'll be the same as with anything thought. You'll have the vocal group (which may be a minority) which is usually the dissatisfied group. There's now been a few of these stories on HN that are all the same, and they feed the people who dislike Apple and simply want to see repetitious negative stories. I've found it quite funny though to see the "The year of Linux desktop". ;) It's also interesting when people link to stories about Apple from previous product releases with very comparable comments. Nothing much changes, it seems.
therealmarv 10y ago
Would love to see the i7 Macbook Air 2013 also in the benchmarks (mainly because this is my laptop too ;) Very interesting review for me.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  I still have it... might be able to do a test run.
omfg 10y ago
He says the only thing he wants is a better keyboard and retina display. So he wants the 12" MacBook which has been out for over a year now... Why did he even buy the new 13" MBP in the first place?
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  Because the brand new MacBook is still slower than my 3-year-old i7 Air. I'm a developer, and I need speed still, too. If Apple could fit a competent i5 or i7 in the MacBook form factor, I'd be all in.
  - bananadonkey 10y ago
    I switched to the 2nd gen m5 Macbook from the '13 rMBP 13", and would argue the m5 is surprisingly more than capable. Granted it's not as fast on paper or benchmarks, but it's so capable I am having a hard time trying to justify my next purchase (not enough screen real estate in rarer circumstances: Chrome DevTools alongside the browser window is impossible, OmniGraffle and other apps can feel cramped at times). The machine did feel a little slower than the i5 when I first started using it but nothing obnoxious. Context: As a devops guy I regularly build large RPMs, run grunt against a huge codebase, compile packages from source, and all the while with Docker running OpenShift and a bunch of LEMP apps in the background.
- gcp 10y ago
  Doesn't he explain why the 12" MacBoook doesn't fit him at the start of the article?
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  Yes, a 1.1GHz Core M is absolutely a comparable processor to his previous i7...
- jedikv 10y ago
  the 12" macbook has the same awful keyboard
rloc 10y ago
I bought one when it was announced. I desperately needed to replace my 13', 128G MBA (couldn't change the disk). My major concern about the touch bar is that it really makes things worse. I second the author opinion. I use Spotify a lot. Before, on my MBA, I could change the volume or hit play/pause with one key tap, straightforward and easy. Now I have to hit the tiny expand arrow to display these keys and then hit play/pause etc. It could get even worse because Spotify added their own touch bar buttons when you use the mac native app. But the dynamic display is different depending on whether the app is the front or in the background. When in the background it becomes a shortcut you have to click to make a different set of keys appear. You get lost very easily, plus it becomes redundant with Apple native play/pause keys... So I'm always confused when I just want to hit pause/play. From the settings, if I'd like to fall back to the always on standard set of function keys then I lose the dynamic app keys. Which is weird. The OS should be clever enough to expand the function keys when nothing else is available instead of a black unused zone and a tiny shortcut zone on the right. The esc key (as mentioned in the article) is really hard to reach most of the times because you have to quit the current display (cross) before it becomes available. Why not keep it always on the left ? It feels like the touch bar hasn't been thought through very much. It needs some more work... The good news is that it's mostly software improvements so let's hope Apple / App developers can fix that quickly.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  Quick tip: if you press and hold on volume or brightness, and start sliding immediately, you can get more immediate feedback. Don't tap then slide; tap and hold and slide at the same time :)
  - rloc 10y ago
    Yes I noticed it and that's great but it doesn't give you audio play/pause shortcut. It doesn't work on the expand arrow for example (that's an idea for Apple !). I have to make compromises if I want the play/pause control then I'll loose the brightness or volume because the shortcuts are limited to 4 max even if the touch bar is mostly unused black space on the left most of the time.
sjtgraham 10y ago
Apple should find it extremely disconcerting that developers are seemingly beginning to abandon them en masse. Every day there is something posted here, on Reddit, or Twitter by another developer moving to Linux and not looking back. A oft-used retort is developers are not a priority demographic anymore. Well who does Apple think will write software to run on their real cash cow iOS? Developers are the thin end of a large wedge. FWIW I switched to Linux on ThinkPad X220 on the day of the MBP announcement. I've added 16GB ram and a SSD. I can't think of any reason to go back.
- acejam 10y ago
  I don't consider a handful of outspoken developers who have their own blogs to be "en masse". Every developer that I know still uses a MacBook or MacBook Pro. The new MacBook Pro is a great product. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
  - plexicle 10y ago
    Just to add my anecdotal counter-point. (I don't have a blog.) I know a handful of people who normally upgrade every refresh and are flat out refusing this time. A couple (that aren't locked in by being iOS devs) have picked up other laptops instead. I disagree with your assessment that it's a "great product." I bought a spec'ed out one myself that I eventually returned. Not claiming either one of us are the majority but I wanted to add my side and not state it as ultimate fact and certainly not present it argumentum ad populum.
  - dustinmoris 10y ago
    Apple fanboy after reading a handful of negative blog posts about Windows: "Good bye Microsoft. You are losing all your customers to Apple now. Ballmer sucks. Windows 10 sucks. Everything sucks. Apple is going to rule the world." Apple fanboy after reading a new blog post on how developers with a huge followership give up their MBP, which are ranking in the top of HN every day since the announcement in Oct 2016: "These developers are only a minority. There's definitely no trend here whatsoever. 100%. Trust me. It's based on my opinion."
jordigh 10y ago
I love how these articles begin by listing their pro-Apple credentials. We're so tribal that we have to say, guys, guys, I'm not an Apple heathen! I'm a believer! A follower of Jobs! So please do not dismiss my bad news as the mad ravings of a heretic.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  That's what makes it all the more painful. Irrational Apple fanatics like burning you at the stake if you can't prove you were more irrational than they at some point in your life.
  - 91bananas 10y ago
    You could just ignore them? A fanatic is just that.
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    Let's be fair though – this always happens with any kind of fanboyism. It's nothing unique to Apple.
    - lmm 10y ago
      There are similar trends for many brands, but Apple fans seem to be more extreme than most.
smohare 10y ago
As a data scientist who spends most of my time in the terminal, I do not regret losing function keys. In fact, I find the touchbar to be vastly more useful and easier to operate in most contexts. That being said, I tend to eschew function keys in favor of key sequences.
- mattlevan 10y ago
  What do you find yourself using the TB for in your context?
awinder 10y ago
> Price: This is the kicker—you have to pay more for the > Touch Bar, even though it provides a worse computing > experience. And you can't get Touch ID, two extra > Thunderbolt ports, or a few other niche niceties without > also taking the baggage that is Touch Bar along for the ride. This has arguably been the worst part of Apple for many years. There's all sort of little fringe price-cutting measures that push you to the top of the line. They'll routinely kneecap the mid-tier in order to emphasize the top tier. And things ebb and flow, sometimes Apple seems to understand the value of the mac goes far beyond pure profit numbers (it's driving iOS profits, after all), but it really seems that they've taken a strong turn away from that especially in the past year.
Girlang 10y ago
Windows 10 got very good, and Mac OS gets worse and worse. No developer uses Macs anymore at my company.
thinkMOAR 10y ago
Reads to me that, You did not simply went to an apple store and tried it before you bought it? You could have saved yourself a purchase & return and the internet a review of which there are already uncountable amounts. Also you write you build enterprise grade products, but you cannot find alternative tools for covering that last 5 percent? Reads a bit strange. You can come up with clever solutions for enterprise stuff, but you can't properly get tools on linux to do what you need to do? Soldered-in-everything.. vs "I wish Apple made enterprise SSD controllers for my database servers—who needs RAM when disk I/O is so fast?!" make up your mind please.
- calvinlh 10y ago
  For him, the kicker was the battery life. How do you test battery life in the Apple store? You're not allowed to unplug the thing. (And even if you could, who's going to spend several hours there to assess the battery life?) You also speak as if fast SSDs and replaceability are mutually exclusive. They're not—check out the specs of the Samsung 960 Pro: 3.5 GB/s read, 2.1 GB/s write.
bertomartin 10y ago
What's the rationale behind offering the 13" pro the option of not getting the touch bar, but not offering that option on the 15"? I want to buy a 15" but I do not want that silly touchbar
- pyrophane 10y ago
  The rationale is that they needed something to replace the low-end Air models that they are phasing out of the line-up.
calebm 10y ago
Thanks for this review. The data is enlightening.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I considered the 2016 MacBook Pro, but ended up buying a MacBook. I was concerned about the M3 CPU, but it seems good enough running IntelliJ, RubyMine, XCode, etc. I have a 16 core, 60 GB RAM VPS that I start up for heavy processing, so a less capable laptop, but one with a great screen, works well for me.
dgrealy 10y ago
I love my 2016 Pro. Touchbar takes some getting used to. As far as speed, battery and performance the thing is a beast. Very happy. I have 4 VMs running at all times and many apps and browser windows and I haven't noticed it chug once. As for touchbar, I don't think it's just a novelty. I think this will only become more apparent as apps start to implement features with it. It's great for media scrubbing, for instance. I have started to adopt pressing the buttons it shows for confirm/cancel and other dialogs. The escape key no longer being a physical button feels odd to the finger and took some adjustment, no question. At first I didn't like the volume / brightness adjusters because I wasn't used to them and much preferred the buttons, but the sliders that popup are just as easy to use and I fiddle with them less to find the right level.
- Dolores12 10y ago
  The reason i like physical keys is when i am trying to press escape key i find it by touching. Like here is ESC (top left button), here is F1 right to it, etc... In case of Apple you have to look at your keyboard and press the spot exactly where it is.
  - dgrealy 10y ago
    I don't have the touch typing issue after a few weeks. Yes it feels different so you will not get it right always at first. Tilde is my new touch reference for where escape is (or I guess it always was).
- addicted 10y ago
  What's wrong with Enter/Esc for dialogs? I can't imagine that touch bar keys would be faster than that.
  - dgrealy 10y ago
    That only works when there are two options and the dialog is configured right.
- rickyc091 10y ago
epaga 10y ago
Just to add a data point as a developer - I bought the 15" second-tier tMBP and absolutely love it, but have to agree the Touch Bar, though intriguing, is currently a bit "meh". But all the strong points he mentions in the article are more than just "nice", they are really amazing. The big ones for me are: The SSD speed - I scanned all 300 GB of my current usage with DaisyDisk in 8 seconds. 8. Seconds. The keyboard - this is easily the most satisfying keyboard I have ever had. I can see why you'd go for the "MacBook Escape", but the 15" model only comes with Touch Bar, so that decided the issue for me. Plus, I think Apple may still have some tricks up their sleeve for the Touch Bar - allowing us to create our own custom touch bar buttons per app which run our own actions would be incredibly useful, I think.
- mbrookes 10y ago
  Thanks for mentioning DaisyDisk - I've been looking for something like that, and all the alternatives I've tried are horrible!
eapelgren 10y ago
One concern with the Touch Bar, is the low adoption rate among applications in my daily usage. Chromium development has not ramped up, forcing users with Safari if they want the touch bar experience on websites. And maybe never will Chrome allow for full customization for webapps or extensions. Rendering it useless in many contexts. The Chromium bottleneck also restricts developer tools such as VS Code to adopt touch bar features. None the less, I find myself looking down the keyboard more often than with the old fn keys, not really improving my workflow. This making me question my purchase. But as stated earlier, software issues can always be fixed. [1] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/7781 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/7781 [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=660126 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=660126
alexkavon 10y ago
I recently purchased a Dell XPS 15. I was caught between purchasing a Macbook Pro 15 (legacy/non-touchbar, which is still available on their site) and the Dell. You can't upgrade the RAM on the new machines or the old machines now. I wanted a Macbook Pro 15 because of how great they are for development (being all Unix based and what not), but "non-upgradability" is just a no go. I don't mind paying for the extra RAM even, but no dice. Since Windows 10 has the Ubuntu subsystem, my decision is so much easier.
Spooky23 10y ago
We get it, honestly. Enough with the dramatic MacBook articles. There are literally thousands of laptops out there. Buy one.
- scott_karana 10y ago
  There's a large captive audience who only wants to run Mac OS "properly", so their only option is to complain loudly and hope Apple listens for the next model.
nshunter 10y ago
This generation of MB hardware generally seems to have issues from trivial through severe. I purchased my fiance one of the new Macbooks for school along with one of the USB-C dongles to allow her to connect to an external monitor. She constantly has flickering issues when it's connected without a reboot after connecting. It seems to be an unacknowledged issues with video and the macbook, which was attempted to be solved via a visit with Apple where the replaced the dongle to no effect. The machine is fantastic in terms of weight, screen, and layout. I don't really mind the single USB-C and would love to have one, but the hardware issues have made me decided to sit this generation out and wait for what's next.
rsync 10y ago
The ironic thing is how much simpler it would have been for Apple to give people what they actually wanted. All anyone wanted was a retina macbook air. That's it. Everyone was perfectly happy and just wanted a nicer screen. All anyone wanted was a mac pro tower with updated SATA and USB speeds and new processors, etc. That's it. Instead, in both cases, we got silly weird things that nobody wants. I'm never going to buy the non-tower mac pro. Similarly, when the new touchbar macbooks were announced, I ran to the apple store and bought a nice, new max spec 11" air to hold in reserve in my closet. Now I'm covered on the laptop front for at least five more years and apple has cumulatively lost out on 3-4 laptop and mac pro purchases from me.
- usaphp 10y ago
  Nobody wanted iPhones, they only wanted a tougher Nokia and more Java games... I love the touch bar and I was really impressed with a form factor and design of the new Mac Pro. I don't find touch bar silly, Apple would not be Apple if they did not try new things and experiment.
  - DavideNL 10y ago
    I agree, nobody wanted to ditch Flash either in 2010 (1), the reactions then were the same as all the crap you read about Macbooks now. 6 years later, and everyone realises they need to get rid of Flash. I think it's the price you pay for innovation, many people can't handle (the) change. (1) http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
    - TomVDB 10y ago
      Did you read the part of his article where he's constantly fat fingering the wrong keys on the TouchBar? And never finding the ESC key? The issue of the TouchBar is not that it exists. It's that it replaces a good, well functioning component by something much worse.
      - epistasis 10y ago
wodenokoto 10y ago
I hadn't thought about this until I read this article, but what do you use the FN-key for when there are no function keys?
binaryapparatus 10y ago
All different decisions from Apple in last 12 months made me clean up the dust from my ancient linux pc. Reinstalled arch and I am feeling normal again. I have few Mac / iOS apps to maintain but I use vnc or synergy to do that.
jacobsenscott 10y ago
I'm happy with mine. I'm plugged in to power, and nice big monitor and an external keyboard 99% of the time and it makes a fine dev machine. Do people really spend a significant amount of time writing code directly on an unplugged laptop? Sounds really painful no matter the model or brand.
- pyrophane 10y ago
  I do, but I work from home and need to get out of my apartment from time-to-time. I think there are a lot of people in that boat.
DoodleBuggy 10y ago
More terrible first hand reports about the Touch Bar Pro. So it seems many power users are saying Touch Bar is useless at best and annoying and interfering at worst. And the battery life is terrible. And you pay more for less. Who is this thing built for? I really hope Apple fixes this situation in the 2017 update.
vladimir-y 10y ago
Someone has to make Apple great again.
retreatguru 10y ago
This is so funny. I just boxed mine up and shipped it via UPS back to apple not 5 minutes ago and was thinking to post something here on hacker news! I did not like the touch bar for programming. Maybe when my ide supports the touch bar it will be better. But the clincher was the poor battery life. I've been a mac user since the mac plus days. First time I retuned one.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Same here. Wrote about the experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098257. tl;dr: Touch bar is in the way, and provides near-zero utility; at best, it's a distracting visual element for touch-typists. Other than that, the new features are not worth the hassle/price. The only feature I really do like is the fingerprint reader.
kstenerud 10y ago
What I like about my new MBP 15" with touch panel: 1. The size is almost the same as my 2011 mbp 13" 2. Retina screen 3. I actually like the touch bar. 4. No more magsafe! Finally I can get the damn thing to charge reliably! 5. No more annoying illuminated logo on the lid. 6. All usb-c is nice. What I don't like about it: 1. The keyboard is terrible. The older ones are FAR nicer. The keys get stuck down randomly, then after a few days come unstuck, but even the very feel of the keys is pretty gross. 2. Trackpad isn't as nice as the one on the 2011 mbp. Drag and drop is flaky at best, especially in Finder. Press feedback is simulated, and doesn't feel as nice as an actual button. 3. Not much speed improvement. It's a big improvement for compiles since I went from 2 to 4 cores, but single core performance has hardly budged. 4. Stability is iffy. Many apps just crash when you suspend (including Sublime Text, VLC, Firefox. Even the Firefox crash reporter crashes). I also get system freezes (where everything freezes except the mouse). So upgrading was nice because of the 4 cores, but I'd probably have been happier with a 2015 model.
bdcravens 10y ago
> Even after two weeks' use, my pinkie could never find the escape key. The touch bar accommodates this. The space to the left of the "key", as well as the "key" itself, all triggers ESC. In other words, the escape key has a target much larger than the physical key, about the size of the physical tab key.
- bartvk 10y ago
  That, and in System Preferences -> Keyboard tab -> Modifier Keys button, you can map Caps Lock to Escape. Works great, in my opinion.
dreamfactory2 10y ago
> I nearly lost it when my laptop was under 10% battery remaining after only three hours of use. ... With my older 11" MacBook Air, I was used to 3-4 hour battery life does not compute
pm24601 10y ago
My review of the Mac Book Pro (w touch bar): I am a developer at Evernote (we are hiring fyi) 1. Touch bar - By far and away this is the most annoying thing ever. IDEs use function keys all the time ... and the touchbar does not know how to display. > defaults write com.apple.touchbar.agent PresentationModeFnModes -dict-add appWithCOntrolStrip 'functionKeys' > defaults write com.apple.touchbar.agent PresentationModePerApp -dict-add org.eclipse.platform.ide 'functionKeys' > defaults write com.apple.touchbar.agent PresentationModePerApp -dict-add com.jetbrains.intellij 'functionKeys' I hate that I get no tactile feedback when trying to use the function keys. I can no longer touch type the function keys. 2. Keyboard - without the full travel I have to constantly readjust my typing pressure between my detached keyboard and the laptop keyboard. Painful on the fingertips. 3. Memory size: 16g! WTF - my 5 year-old 17" MBP has the same amount of memory 4. Performance - here is the kicker. I play a multiplayer game: World of Warships. The performance on the new MBP is WORSE than on my 5 year-old MBP. Mind you the 5 year-old computer does not have a SSD drive and its battery is EOL. 5. No ports - seriously? I can't hook my laptop to any display in a conference room without a dongle. I have to haul the powerbrick around with me. So instead of just the laptop, I have to take a backpack of gear with the various dongles to meetings. Looks very unprofessional. I can't hook my external ethernet RAID drive to it. Nothing. 6. Other missing things: you no longer get an extension cord with the power brick. This means you have to be right on top of the power outlet to use it. Like I can't use the power outlet right behind me at the dining room table. 7. Siri - really. Like the last thing I am going to do is talk to my computer at the office. Based on my personal experience with the new MBP, I am not spending my personal money to buy a new mac at this time. I will just keep my older macs functioning as long as possible.
willtim 10y ago
These machines are unfortunately already obsolete (relative to their premium price) now that Intel Kaby Lake machines are starting to appear. Kaby Lake offers significant battery life improvements over Skylake.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
The developer world isn't going to immediately switch en masse to Microsoft or Linux laptops because of this. They're probably just going to hold onto their legacy Macbooks for an extra year or two, and it's likely the used market for pre-2016 Macbooks will be competitive. But gradually, as the imitators catch up to the Macbook in weight and usability, we will see some migration away from Apple. I hope and believe Apple's not so dumb as to suffer major attrition among power users and developers. They're a big enough company that they could come out with a "Macbook Classic" that restores some of the lost functionality (function keys at least, maybe non-welded components). If you examine a pre-2016 MBA or MBP, there seems to be enough real estate above the function keys to squeeze in the touch strip thing as an additional feature rather than a replacement. Why not provide both, and let the users decide? I wish there were a new Retina MBP with optical disk drive, USB, USB-C, Thunderbolt, and memory card slot. Also, make it easier to upgrade internal components. Is this really so hard? I'd pay extra. Even if the masses are going another direction, there ought to be a power user's version that has it all, and price it accordingly. There's a certain cachet in being known as the power user's platform of choice and Apple really should try harder to hold onto that.
caconym_ 10y ago
> Maybe it would work better as a neat gimmick in the 12" MacBook. Please no, my 12" Macbook is the best development machine I've ever owned.
- csiegert 10y ago
  I chuckled at your defensive reaction. Apple’s TouchBar has such a bad reputation that people genuinely fear it will spread to their beloved Mac models.
hellothree23 10y ago
best part of the whole article what how you named it the "Function Key Pro" hahaha, gold.
Corrado 10y ago
I think the most telling part of the story was that Apple seems to have lost the Good, Better, Best split. Way back in the olden days of Apple you had to really pay attention and work to find out which system would be best for your needs. Then Jobs came along with the 4 quadrants of computers (Personal Portable / Personal Desktop / Professional Portable / Professional Desktop) and suddenly everything was much clearer. Over the seasons that morphed slightly into Good, Better, Best laptop or desktop, but it was still pretty easy to pick your system. Fast forward to today and the Apple ecosystem is a soup of MacBook / Air / Pro / Retina / TouchPad machines that are nearly impossible to tell apart. And that's just the laptop line; forget talking about phones, tablets, and desktops! I used to be able recommend the perfect device for almost anyone, right off the top of my head, without doing much (any) research at all. Now, I don't think I could recommend anything in the Apple lineup with confidence. This to me is a huge failing and saddens me beyond whatever particular piece of hardware Apple has built lately. :(
soulhakr 10y ago
so... long story short, a guy who repeatedly states that he was used to using his MacBook Air and has used that and it's form factor and utility for five years doesn't like the the new MacBook Pro - which is a differently-styled product targeted at a different audience. Now this is not to say that he doesn't have some (read: several) objectively valid points. (coughbattery-lifecough) but it seems that chunks of his user experience might have been improved by choosing a product marketed as being a little closer to his most recent previous experience.
daveheq 10y ago
What developer uses an 11" screen? Are you serious?
- majewsky 10y ago
  Free business idea: Notebooks with tiny screens... that come with zooming glasses. :)
Arkaad 10y ago
About the battery issue, couldn't he buy an extra battery? That wouldn't be too cumbersome.
joeevans1000 10y ago
Really, now that apple is only making products for the humans in WALL-E and not developers, we only have one option. That's to stock up on the last good developer MacBooks (up to 2015) and spare motherboards. Once those give out or become too incompatible, load them with linux, or switch to better machines from other companies who still care about developers. I guess the era of MacBooks being the choice for professionals is over. However, I guess all good things like this have to end sometime.
voidr 10y ago
These are my personal opinions: I don't like the touch bar because it forces me to look at my keyboard, which is inefficient and probably unhealthy(moving my neck like that). I don't like the keyboard because it's too noisy. I'm disappointed that Apple seemingly ceased to care about the professional user. I'm expecting the top Mac Book Pro to be a machine that's optimized to get work done, the touch bar and the overemphasis on making it thinner and lighter suggest otherwise. It seems that my next main machine will not be a Mac Book Pro, I will most likely go with a Windows laptop, since Linux still has issues like Wayland vs. Mir.
antfarm 10y ago
I wish Apple had figured out a good way to make the MBP touch pad double as a touch screen.

559 points by geerlingguy 10y ago

As Steve famously said, if you don't want a tbMBP, don't buy it. If you buy one and you don't like it, take it back. Since that is/always has been the working approach, any chance the HN hive-mind could avoid posting EVERY single MBP->other laptop or macOS->*nix article?

MatthewWilkes 10y ago
The Macbook has been a very popular tool for a long time now. What's new isn't the ability to take it back, it's that people are actually doing it with this generation. I personally find this article useful, as the author actually tried the machine and didn't like it, rather than not buying it.
mikeash 10y ago
OK, sure. What else do you suggest I buy? When the best available product is no longer available, I don't think the "just don't buy it" approach is really a good response. (Full disclosure, I think the new MPB looks pretty decent, but for those who don't like it there's often no good alternative now.)
- Gorbzel 10y ago
  So, I reject the premise of your question & the groupthink, namely that the best product "is no longer available." Just like every other Revision A  product, people are considering the tradeoffs vs whether they still want to be on the platform ("If you don't like the iPhone 4..." ). Cupertino also likely needs to fix some bugs. Since that's a normal part of life I'd fully agree if this were the first time, but this is the 15th take or so on the tbMBP since it came out. Simply going by my history, people seem to like the XPS 13 Developer edition, machines from System76, the Thinkpad T460, as well as mentioning the Surface Book and/or Studio in every article as incontrovertible proof that Apple is doomed. Full disclaimer that YMMV, as ultimately, buying a machine is a subjective decision that will always have tradeoffs (this stunningly controversial take was flagged last time). Perhaps, just maybe, people who chime in "I find this article useful" could do the rest of the community who doesn't think Apple is dying on a daily basis a favor and do a search when they're in the market for a new laptop. But now we're just degrading into basic forum etiquette, a tale as old as time...
  - mikeash 10y ago
    If you understand that buying a machine is a subjective decision, then you should also realize that you can't reject the premise that the best product is no longer available, because "the best product" is likewise subjective. A lot of people saw the old MBP as the best out there, and now it's gone, and that upsets them. "Buy something else" is not a good response to that.

geerlingguy 10y ago

Even if you don't care about the rest of the review, if you're interested in some real-world/empirical evidence about how the Touch Bar model's battery life compares to the Function Key model, please read through the Battery section of this post. I open sourced the script and methodology I used to run heavy battery use tests: https://github.com/geerlingguy/macbook-pro-battery-test https://github.com/geerlingguy/macbook-pro-battery-test And I also published the raw results of the third full battery test on each laptop: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16H6TeKCOZRwzsd5bZJM2IHVqN9fU6GZhUrDiu_SK2zU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16H6TeKCOZRwzsd5bZJM2...

richardwhiuk 10y ago
I'm confused: # Builds completed Total battery life Avg. Build time 2016 Touch Bar - 3.1 GHz i5 49 4:54:00 0:08:45 2016 Fn key - 2.4 GHz i7 30 3:54:00 0:07:52 2015 Retina - 3.1 GHz i7 24 3:30:00 0:06:02 suggests that the 2016 model did 19 more builds, and had a battery life of 1 hour longer, suggesting a _better_ battery life...
- tcbawo 10y ago
  Looking at the data in his spreadsheet, I think he has the models and build times switched.
  - geerlingguy 10y ago
    You're correct. Sorry about that, I fixed the table!
    - yabatopia 10y ago
      Ah, that makes so much more sense now!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 10y ago

chrisseaton 10y ago

> I use a Mac as my daily driver What does the author mean by 'daily driver'?

daveguy 10y ago
Using something as a "daily driver" means you use it every day as your primary computer.
tyingq 10y ago
The phrase usually means your reliable, but not fancy, car that you drive to work every day. It also implies you have a another nicer car that you only drive for pleasure, or in good weather, etc.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wavefunction 10y ago
It's a reference to an automobile that one uses for most normal tasks, as opposed to a secondary car that may be a sports car or collectible car that one only takes out for leisure. Say you had a minivan for taking your kids to their schools and sports practices and picking up groceries, and a Lamborghini for going to da club on Saturday nights...
geerlingguy 10y ago
Sorry about that, I try to use idioms that are a little more widespread, but outside of car culture, you might not hear the term that often. It basically means 'the computer I use for day-to-day work' (see this for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/nexus4/comments/2b7pm5/what_does_daily_driver_mean_exactly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nexus4/comments/2b7pm5/what_does_da...). It would be opposed to an exotic car or computer I'd use only in certain special circumstances (like the Raspberry Pis I use for testing cluster configurations, at www.pidramble.com).
- pyrophane 10y ago
  I really only ever hear the term from the tech press. Those folks might have 5 phones and 3 laptops sitting on their desk at any given time, so the term "daily driver" makes sense to describe the one they actually use. For the rest of us, we just have "a laptop" and "a phone."

muninn_ 10y ago

I don't understand why people are still going on about this

op00to 10y ago
I can only assume people like to be heard, and repeating the ideas heard in the echo chamber can be very reassuring when everyone agrees with you.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  Not in this instance. I know that there were still a lot of unanswered questions, like exactly how badly is battery life affected (not just measured in Wh), and how does real world performance compare (not just Geekbench numbers). Also, for those making a $2k+ purchasing decision, it pays to do a little research as to what other people who work in similar situations think about the different options. I read a lot of reviews for MacBooks, Lenovo T4xx series, Dell XPS models, etc. Just like with any other topic, the color of varied opinions helps one arrive at a better understanding.
  - nilkn 10y ago
    Complaining about Apple and the MacBook Pro has become a pretty dominant topic on Hacker News from the last few months. I really do think this negativity about the product has become excessive, and it's the first time I've personally been annoyed about something like this on HN in four years of reading the site more or less daily. --- Since my comment is abrasive -- much more so than normal for me here on HN -- I figured it was worth it for me to put some more effort into this and provide some evidence. I easily came up with the following list of topics here from the last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13244357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13244357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13251401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13251401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13157832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13157832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13214754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13214754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13220623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13220623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337727 (note that, while the headline is a bit general, much of the discussion is related to the new MBP) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185428 I just stopped after this point. There were more.

killerpopiller 10y ago

OT: My display was flickering last week, black and back until I rebooted. Does anyone had this problem as well? I filmed it and will ask apple what to do.

nailer 10y ago

The 'Touch Bar' is a plainly stopgap measure that only exists because Apple is delaying the painful transition to touch in OS X. Microsoft underwent that pain early in Windows 8 and the first few not-particularly-good Surface devices, and (with Windows 10 and the SP4) is there now.

gst 10y ago
> The 'Touch Bar' is a plainly stopgap measure that only exists because Apple is delaying the painful transition to touch in OS X. The transition to touch already happened with iOS. Apple still needs to keep macOS alive for a few legacy use-cases, but the long-term strategy is probably to move the remaining applications over to iOS, instead of converting macOS to iOS.
- audunw 10y ago
  I don't think Apple has given completely up on macOS. They wouldn't do the touchbar if that was the case. It would be wasted effort. They could sell macOS for years just by iteratively updating the hardware specs. I think they're trying to find a role for macOS that would allow them to innovate there, but I don't they have it figured out. The touchbar is just testing the waters, to see if it can make sense to do a dual approach (they've probably played with replacing the area below the keyboard with a touchscreen as well).
- coldtea 10y ago
  People keep saying that, as if it means something. Some huge breakthrough in CPU power and technology aside, including changes to the laws of physics and basic ergonomics, we are not going to be doing desktopy-style work on iOS style devices -- unless they get the ability to drive large 4K+ monitors, connect to multiple peripherals at once, talk to disk drives, etc. And even that would require hooking them with keyboards, stands etc for comfortable working. People care for laptops/desktops for all the OTHER work and usage patterns that are not good fit for iOS/iDevice form factors.
  - TorKlingberg 10y ago

gbog 10y ago

Never owned a Mac but I have just bought a LG V20 phone which has a second always on screen that looks like the touch bar. On a phone it is actually very useful, for instance having the last five apps you opened readily accessible is excellent, it brings the alt-tab power to your mobile. Also I use the flashlight often and it's just right there. Maybe, probably it's a bad idea on a laptop, but having another screen that apps cannot fight for above the main screen on a smartphone or phablet is great.

anexprogrammer 10y ago
The v20 always on screen is right where you're always looking on a phone, unlike MBP touchbar. I'd buy one tomorrow but LG feel Europeans are unworthy of them.

coldpie 10y ago

The thing designers are failing to understand this decade is that touch interfaces suck. Always. They are a compromise, not a feature. This includes touch screens and capacitive buttons, both in vogue for the past decade. Touch interfaces suck: they are too easy to press accidentally, and too difficult to press on purpose. In college, I actually taped pieces of paper onto my friend's TV with capacitive buttons so we could tell where the fucking buttons were in the dark. If you were off by a half centimeter, you'd turn the TV off instead of changing the volume. I regularly turn on my game consoles by lightly brushing my arm against them because of their awful capacitive buttons. Dumb, dumb dumb. Touch interfaces provide no benefit over physical buttons except in cases where you cannot have physical buttons. Phones are a good example: physical buttons add too much bulk to the phone or drastically reduce your screen size. You also don't have a defined set of functionality. A touch interface makes sense here. But on a laptop keyboard? You've already got a ton of keys there! Just add ten more! Instead, they've added the suckiness of a touch interface for no reason, since there was no compromise to make. Touch interfaces aren't modern, they aren't stylish, and nobody likes them. You use them when you must make a compromise for form factor. Otherwise, stick with physical buttons.

christophilus 10y ago
This is even more true in cars, where a touch interface is arguably dangerous. Give me buttons, and I can fiddle while keeping my eyes on the road. Give me a touch screen with heirarchical menus, and I've got to look away from the road in order to do anything at all.
- base698 10y ago
  Seriously. My guess as to the reason Tesla did this was to skimp on manufacturing costs. Now that they are established I wish they'd remove that screen or reduce its size.
  - jp555 10y ago
    I hope they move it to a full windscreen HUD and add dashboard hardware controls.

consentfactory 10y ago

You know, Lenovo tried reinventing the keyboard a few years ago with their X1 Carbons by putting on a touch bar with function keys, volume keys, etc. and it was horrible. Trying to do any terminal work was horrible; for example, my insert key was touchbar FN + I or something ridiculous like that. AFAIK, they didn't reproduce that model. Surprised Apple didn't take note.

geerlingguy 10y ago
Yeah, I remember reading all the comparisons to the Lenovo version, and thinking that surely Apple must've improved from Lenovo's version, or added something more compelling. But instead, they may have made it worse, if that's possible, because the escape key is indented, just to make the Touch Bar's graphical layout even on both sides. Definitely the worst case of form over function I've encountered with an Apple product.
- pawadu 10y ago
  I actually think this could work better with the apple crowd. Some could be buying their first mac after owning an iphone / ipad and for those people touch does make sense. The Lenovo crowd on the other hand are old-timers that want real keys that click and thats why the Lenovo touchbar was so hated.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    Which, again, means "Pro is now just a marketing label, this is not a pro device."
    - freehunter 10y ago
      Nonsense. For one, "pro" has always been a marketing label. Nothing inherent to the device excludes "normal" users, and not every "pro" user needs the MacBook Pro. I've seen a lot of professionals using iPads (and not the iPad Pro). I know that shatters your worldview, but a laptop marketed as "pro" has never signified that the user was actually a professional, and not using a laptop with "pro" in the name has never signified that the user wasn't a professional. Your definition of "pro" is not universal. It is not absolute. Anyone who says "the new MacBook Pro is not a pro device!" needs to get over themselves. You're not the arbiter of what can and cannot be considered "pro".

techterrier 10y ago

I must be the only person that has no issues with their touch MBP other than the price I paid for it. Which was a joke.

bengale 10y ago
Price in the UK is pretty painful now, but the machine is great. Its not a revolutionary change, but a very welcome improvement.
geerlingguy 10y ago
If the price were the same as the function key model... I think the Touch Bar would've been a lot more palatable. It's a variety of issues that caused me to end up disliking the entire machine. I could live with the Touch Bar if battery were better, pricing were similar, etc.
dabit3 10y ago
Programmers are the only professionals in the world who complain about having to pay for quality tools. Can you imagine a dentist, truck driver, or doctor complaining about having to pay $2500 for a machine that would bring her hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next 5 years? Of course not.
- steverb 10y ago
  I've heard doctors, truck drivers, construction workers and any number of other people complain about the cost of quality tools. For the same reason that people complain about the cost of Apple machines, they don't perceive enough quality difference to justify the price difference.
- scott_karana 10y ago
  Are you kidding me? Professionals of any careers always complain about non-optimal tools. If improvements make them more money/time than they cost, people will buy them without a second thought. As they should ;)

ef4 10y ago

If you've got the previous generation of macbook pro and are wondering whether you should upgrade, here's an alternate suggestion: I took my 2014 retina macbook pro to the Apple Store and got a "topcase replacement" (because my keyboard was beat up with overuse and starting to get flaky). That had the side benefit of giving me a completely new external case, so it looks brand new again. And it includes a brand new battery. And I got a new display for free, because there's a recall on that generation of retina displays for delamination issues. It feels like I just bought a new laptop at one fifth the price. And the specs on it are still competitive with the 2016 models: 16GB ram, 3ghz core i7. Only the very highest 2016 configuration even beats it, and that by only a little.

drchiu 10y ago
How do you request a top case replacement? How much does it cost and how long do they take to do it?
- okanesen 10y ago
  I'm not entirely sure if you can just request a top case replacement, but I just had my battery replaced and the top case replacement was included in it. It took them around 10 days to complete considering it was after Christmas.
- dabeeeenster 10y ago
  I think they are about £200
- raarts 10y ago
  I paid €378 last month. It was done in an hour. It was an 2013 MBA. They replaced the battery for free. Don't have Applecare.
dizzy3gg 10y ago
hard to find information about this, so would also like to know.
jacobkg 10y ago

_stephan 10y ago

The battery comparison with the 2015 MacBook Pro is not really fair, because he turns the brightness "all the way" up for his benchmark, even though the new models have screens with 500 nits brightness while the 2015 model only has 300 nits.

geerlingguy 10y ago
I'm less concerned with the 2015 -> 2016 battery life regression (general use with auto brightness bears this out as well, so the delta is there, it just might not be as great), and more concerned with the fact that the Function Key Pro gets 10% better battery life.

rado 10y ago

You hate the Touch Bar, even though the MacBook is closed most of the time? Strange.

blakesterz 10y ago

>> I have been using an 11" MacBook Air as my primary computer since 2011 So I think he's using this thing plugged into an external monitor most of the time? Can anyone actually use an 11" monitor as a primary monitor? If so, what do you do? I only ask because I struggle to work when I'm on the road using my 13" laptop and I can't imagine being able to get much done every day on an 11".

thirdsun 10y ago
It's not my preference but I think hiding the dock, working in fullscreen, one app at a time and alt+tabbing a lot will make it quite workable. In fact, thinking about it I imagine it to be a rather uncluttered, focused experience compared to the 27" screen full of windows I'm currently looking at. Which isn't an argument against large screens, but poor window management and lack of focus I guess.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  This, mostly. I have a 27" 4K display at my desk, but I can be just as productive (sometimes more so) on the short 11" screen. Heck, I just deal with streams of text 90% of my day.
mojuba 10y ago
Depends on what you do, but 13" or less means e.g. you won't be able to do vertical split of windows in Xcode. Which is annoying, because at times you have to have two windows open (such as one source and one IB storyboard or XIB, plus the navigators on the left and right hand sides). But this is still workable. I've written 3 or 4 iOS apps entirely on a 13" laptop. If there is an itch to finish and release something, suddenly those limitations aren't anymore.
- blakesterz 10y ago
  >> If there is an itch to finish and release something, suddenly those limitations aren't anymore. Good point :-) Funny how things become less important when there's a push to get it done no matter what!

grabcocque 10y ago

So, unless I'm missing something, the primary complaint is "I don't like the position of esc on the touch bar". That's not a lot to hang a rant on, but clearly that's all it takes to get to the top of Hacker News these days.

Piskvorrr 10y ago
Spoiler: there's no way to find the keys on a touch display, unless you are looking at them. That is the main issue: not that the key is in a weird position, but that the key's position is a mystery unless you take your eyes off the screen. Hello hunt-and-peck.
mikeash 10y ago
That's rather odd, since the touch area for the escape key extends all the way to the left edge of the bar, even though that's not visually covered. I wonder if maybe the author just never realized that.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  From Gruber's account (Apple sycophant #1), no it doesn't extend all the way to the left edge.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I don't own one, but it was one of the first things I tried when I was able to test a friend's, and it worked exactly as I described.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      Hopefully they fixed it in a software update
kalleboo 10y ago
Did you miss the whole section on "the battery is crap"?

neximo64 10y ago

This was surprising succinct with the issues. I'm not going to get one, I thought it was a bit of HN overdo as usual but the 200ms delay is clear a symptom of a bad Apple product from the point of their quality, not the perception of the user.

coldtea 10y ago

Why couldn't they just add OLED programmable physical keys -- defaulting to the same layout/feature set as now? They'd lose the ability to do sliders etc, but they have a huge bloody trackpad they could use for that. Or make the trackpad a touch-screen itself.

kalleboo 10y ago
A slim touchbar above the trackpad would have been amazing. All the use cases for a touchbar I can think of are when I'm trackpad mode, not typing mode. Replacing the function keys makes way less sense.
- addicted 10y ago
  My first indication that the touch bar was probably not gonna be very good was thinking that there is no way that the function keys just happened to be in the ideal spot for a touch surface.

chmars 10y ago

I actually like my 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Speed is fine with my upgraded model and the display is great. Touch ID is very useful too. I rarely use the touch bar and I still miss direct access to brightness / loudness up and down, but I have also learnt that a barely use function keys anymore. ESC on the Touch Bar is good enough, however, ESC has become less important on Mac OS, Photos.App for example seems not be support ESC at all. The battery is fine too. I use my MacBook mostly for long meetings, i.e., 5-6 hours, and up to now, there has always been plenty of battery left. That is of course with a rather new battery and for light news (using a text editor, viewing PDFs, some web browsing, distractions like e-mail / instant messaging / social media from time to time.) The keyboard … well, I don't really like it, but whenever I use my old 13" MacBook Pro (Retina), I don't like the old keyboard either. The real annoyance is the noise resulting from my fast and obviously rather hard touch typing. I am keeping my MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. On the other hand, I would immediately buy a MacBook Pro without Touch Bar if it came with Touch ID and more ports than the current MacBook Pro without Touch Bar. PS: How do you call the effect that you are more likely to like expensive products as a kind of self-deception? ;)

syrrim 10y ago
That would be cognitive dissonance. There is dissonance between your action (buying the laptop) and your thoughts (not liking the laptop). You either change your action (return the laptop) or change your thoughts (actually, I think I do like this laptop).
- grzm 10y ago
  [Edit to add: Though I read the parent comment a number of times, I missed a key line. Leaving my comment for context.] I've read your parent comment a number of times. Where do they express general dislike for the laptop? They say the keyboard is loud, and that if a non-Touch Bar model were available, they'd buy one, but other than that, I read it as them being happy with it: I actually like my 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.
  - chmars 10y ago

Allower 10y ago

"I've owned three separate 11" models—I love this netbook-like form factor!" Seriously this has to be a joke right? 11 inch laptops are completely useless for a developer

grabcocque 10y ago

FWIW, I kinda like the touch bar. I know, I know, I'm not according the the Hacker News groupthink du jour, and am having my own, entirely unapproved opinion. But there it is, I quite like it.

dkonofalski 10y ago
I'm with you. I love the Touch Bar and, for the life of me, can't see how people are fat-fingering it all the time. Where are you people keeping your hands that you're fat fingering the keys while typing? Are you using the number keys as your home row or something?
- Hupriene 10y ago
  For me when I hit number keys, I don't hit them with the tips of my fingers, instead I hit them with the pad, which naturally leads to some finger sticking out past the numbers. 3 and 4 are especially problematic since I hit them almost with the first knuckle of my middle finger).
  - geerlingguy 10y ago
    I also sometimes rest my finger up near the delete key, or a thumb near where the power button (Touch ID) is when reading for long bouts... and in those cases, just a light brush against the Touch Bar led to interactions I didn't consciously initiate.
dorian-graph 10y ago
I like it too. It'll be the same as with anything thought. You'll have the vocal group (which may be a minority) which is usually the dissatisfied group. There's now been a few of these stories on HN that are all the same, and they feed the people who dislike Apple and simply want to see repetitious negative stories. I've found it quite funny though to see the "The year of Linux desktop". ;) It's also interesting when people link to stories about Apple from previous product releases with very comparable comments. Nothing much changes, it seems.

therealmarv 10y ago

Would love to see the i7 Macbook Air 2013 also in the benchmarks (mainly because this is my laptop too ;) Very interesting review for me.

geerlingguy 10y ago
I still have it... might be able to do a test run.

omfg 10y ago

He says the only thing he wants is a better keyboard and retina display. So he wants the 12" MacBook which has been out for over a year now... Why did he even buy the new 13" MBP in the first place?

geerlingguy 10y ago
Because the brand new MacBook is still slower than my 3-year-old i7 Air. I'm a developer, and I need speed still, too. If Apple could fit a competent i5 or i7 in the MacBook form factor, I'd be all in.
- bananadonkey 10y ago
  I switched to the 2nd gen m5 Macbook from the '13 rMBP 13", and would argue the m5 is surprisingly more than capable. Granted it's not as fast on paper or benchmarks, but it's so capable I am having a hard time trying to justify my next purchase (not enough screen real estate in rarer circumstances: Chrome DevTools alongside the browser window is impossible, OmniGraffle and other apps can feel cramped at times). The machine did feel a little slower than the i5 when I first started using it but nothing obnoxious. Context: As a devops guy I regularly build large RPMs, run grunt against a huge codebase, compile packages from source, and all the while with Docker running OpenShift and a bunch of LEMP apps in the background.
gcp 10y ago
Doesn't he explain why the 12" MacBoook doesn't fit him at the start of the article?
FireBeyond 10y ago
Yes, a 1.1GHz Core M is absolutely a comparable processor to his previous i7...
jedikv 10y ago
the 12" macbook has the same awful keyboard

rloc 10y ago

I bought one when it was announced. I desperately needed to replace my 13', 128G MBA (couldn't change the disk). My major concern about the touch bar is that it really makes things worse. I second the author opinion. I use Spotify a lot. Before, on my MBA, I could change the volume or hit play/pause with one key tap, straightforward and easy. Now I have to hit the tiny expand arrow to display these keys and then hit play/pause etc. It could get even worse because Spotify added their own touch bar buttons when you use the mac native app. But the dynamic display is different depending on whether the app is the front or in the background. When in the background it becomes a shortcut you have to click to make a different set of keys appear. You get lost very easily, plus it becomes redundant with Apple native play/pause keys... So I'm always confused when I just want to hit pause/play. From the settings, if I'd like to fall back to the always on standard set of function keys then I lose the dynamic app keys. Which is weird. The OS should be clever enough to expand the function keys when nothing else is available instead of a black unused zone and a tiny shortcut zone on the right. The esc key (as mentioned in the article) is really hard to reach most of the times because you have to quit the current display (cross) before it becomes available. Why not keep it always on the left ? It feels like the touch bar hasn't been thought through very much. It needs some more work... The good news is that it's mostly software improvements so let's hope Apple / App developers can fix that quickly.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
geerlingguy 10y ago
Quick tip: if you press and hold on volume or brightness, and start sliding immediately, you can get more immediate feedback. Don't tap then slide; tap and hold and slide at the same time :)
- rloc 10y ago
  Yes I noticed it and that's great but it doesn't give you audio play/pause shortcut. It doesn't work on the expand arrow for example (that's an idea for Apple !). I have to make compromises if I want the play/pause control then I'll loose the brightness or volume because the shortcuts are limited to 4 max even if the touch bar is mostly unused black space on the left most of the time.

sjtgraham 10y ago

Apple should find it extremely disconcerting that developers are seemingly beginning to abandon them en masse. Every day there is something posted here, on Reddit, or Twitter by another developer moving to Linux and not looking back. A oft-used retort is developers are not a priority demographic anymore. Well who does Apple think will write software to run on their real cash cow iOS? Developers are the thin end of a large wedge. FWIW I switched to Linux on ThinkPad X220 on the day of the MBP announcement. I've added 16GB ram and a SSD. I can't think of any reason to go back.

acejam 10y ago
I don't consider a handful of outspoken developers who have their own blogs to be "en masse". Every developer that I know still uses a MacBook or MacBook Pro. The new MacBook Pro is a great product. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
- plexicle 10y ago
  Just to add my anecdotal counter-point. (I don't have a blog.) I know a handful of people who normally upgrade every refresh and are flat out refusing this time. A couple (that aren't locked in by being iOS devs) have picked up other laptops instead. I disagree with your assessment that it's a "great product." I bought a spec'ed out one myself that I eventually returned. Not claiming either one of us are the majority but I wanted to add my side and not state it as ultimate fact and certainly not present it argumentum ad populum.
- dustinmoris 10y ago
  Apple fanboy after reading a handful of negative blog posts about Windows: "Good bye Microsoft. You are losing all your customers to Apple now. Ballmer sucks. Windows 10 sucks. Everything sucks. Apple is going to rule the world." Apple fanboy after reading a new blog post on how developers with a huge followership give up their MBP, which are ranking in the top of HN every day since the announcement in Oct 2016: "These developers are only a minority. There's definitely no trend here whatsoever. 100%. Trust me. It's based on my opinion."

jordigh 10y ago

I love how these articles begin by listing their pro-Apple credentials. We're so tribal that we have to say, guys, guys, I'm not an Apple heathen! I'm a believer! A follower of Jobs! So please do not dismiss my bad news as the mad ravings of a heretic.

geerlingguy 10y ago
That's what makes it all the more painful. Irrational Apple fanatics like burning you at the stake if you can't prove you were more irrational than they at some point in your life.
- 91bananas 10y ago
  You could just ignore them? A fanatic is just that.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  Let's be fair though – this always happens with any kind of fanboyism. It's nothing unique to Apple.
  - lmm 10y ago
    There are similar trends for many brands, but Apple fans seem to be more extreme than most.

smohare 10y ago

As a data scientist who spends most of my time in the terminal, I do not regret losing function keys. In fact, I find the touchbar to be vastly more useful and easier to operate in most contexts. That being said, I tend to eschew function keys in favor of key sequences.

mattlevan 10y ago
What do you find yourself using the TB for in your context?

awinder 10y ago

> Price: This is the kicker—you have to pay more for the > Touch Bar, even though it provides a worse computing > experience. And you can't get Touch ID, two extra > Thunderbolt ports, or a few other niche niceties without > also taking the baggage that is Touch Bar along for the ride. This has arguably been the worst part of Apple for many years. There's all sort of little fringe price-cutting measures that push you to the top of the line. They'll routinely kneecap the mid-tier in order to emphasize the top tier. And things ebb and flow, sometimes Apple seems to understand the value of the mac goes far beyond pure profit numbers (it's driving iOS profits, after all), but it really seems that they've taken a strong turn away from that especially in the past year.

Girlang 10y ago

Windows 10 got very good, and Mac OS gets worse and worse. No developer uses Macs anymore at my company.

thinkMOAR 10y ago

Reads to me that, You did not simply went to an apple store and tried it before you bought it? You could have saved yourself a purchase & return and the internet a review of which there are already uncountable amounts. Also you write you build enterprise grade products, but you cannot find alternative tools for covering that last 5 percent? Reads a bit strange. You can come up with clever solutions for enterprise stuff, but you can't properly get tools on linux to do what you need to do? Soldered-in-everything.. vs "I wish Apple made enterprise SSD controllers for my database servers—who needs RAM when disk I/O is so fast?!" make up your mind please.

calvinlh 10y ago
For him, the kicker was the battery life. How do you test battery life in the Apple store? You're not allowed to unplug the thing. (And even if you could, who's going to spend several hours there to assess the battery life?) You also speak as if fast SSDs and replaceability are mutually exclusive. They're not—check out the specs of the Samsung 960 Pro: 3.5 GB/s read, 2.1 GB/s write.

bertomartin 10y ago

What's the rationale behind offering the 13" pro the option of not getting the touch bar, but not offering that option on the 15"? I want to buy a 15" but I do not want that silly touchbar

pyrophane 10y ago
The rationale is that they needed something to replace the low-end Air models that they are phasing out of the line-up.

calebm 10y ago

Thanks for this review. The data is enlightening.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I considered the 2016 MacBook Pro, but ended up buying a MacBook. I was concerned about the M3 CPU, but it seems good enough running IntelliJ, RubyMine, XCode, etc. I have a 16 core, 60 GB RAM VPS that I start up for heavy processing, so a less capable laptop, but one with a great screen, works well for me.

dgrealy 10y ago

I love my 2016 Pro. Touchbar takes some getting used to. As far as speed, battery and performance the thing is a beast. Very happy. I have 4 VMs running at all times and many apps and browser windows and I haven't noticed it chug once. As for touchbar, I don't think it's just a novelty. I think this will only become more apparent as apps start to implement features with it. It's great for media scrubbing, for instance. I have started to adopt pressing the buttons it shows for confirm/cancel and other dialogs. The escape key no longer being a physical button feels odd to the finger and took some adjustment, no question. At first I didn't like the volume / brightness adjusters because I wasn't used to them and much preferred the buttons, but the sliders that popup are just as easy to use and I fiddle with them less to find the right level.

Dolores12 10y ago
The reason i like physical keys is when i am trying to press escape key i find it by touching. Like here is ESC (top left button), here is F1 right to it, etc... In case of Apple you have to look at your keyboard and press the spot exactly where it is.
- dgrealy 10y ago
  I don't have the touch typing issue after a few weeks. Yes it feels different so you will not get it right always at first. Tilde is my new touch reference for where escape is (or I guess it always was).
addicted 10y ago
What's wrong with Enter/Esc for dialogs? I can't imagine that touch bar keys would be faster than that.
- dgrealy 10y ago
  That only works when there are two options and the dialog is configured right.
rickyc091 10y ago

epaga 10y ago

Just to add a data point as a developer - I bought the 15" second-tier tMBP and absolutely love it, but have to agree the Touch Bar, though intriguing, is currently a bit "meh". But all the strong points he mentions in the article are more than just "nice", they are really amazing. The big ones for me are: The SSD speed - I scanned all 300 GB of my current usage with DaisyDisk in 8 seconds. 8. Seconds. The keyboard - this is easily the most satisfying keyboard I have ever had. I can see why you'd go for the "MacBook Escape", but the 15" model only comes with Touch Bar, so that decided the issue for me. Plus, I think Apple may still have some tricks up their sleeve for the Touch Bar - allowing us to create our own custom touch bar buttons per app which run our own actions would be incredibly useful, I think.

mbrookes 10y ago
Thanks for mentioning DaisyDisk - I've been looking for something like that, and all the alternatives I've tried are horrible!

eapelgren 10y ago

One concern with the Touch Bar, is the low adoption rate among applications in my daily usage. Chromium development has not ramped up, forcing users with Safari if they want the touch bar experience on websites. And maybe never will Chrome allow for full customization for webapps or extensions. Rendering it useless in many contexts. The Chromium bottleneck also restricts developer tools such as VS Code to adopt touch bar features. None the less, I find myself looking down the keyboard more often than with the old fn keys, not really improving my workflow. This making me question my purchase. But as stated earlier, software issues can always be fixed. [1] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/7781 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/7781 [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=660126 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=660126

alexkavon 10y ago

I recently purchased a Dell XPS 15. I was caught between purchasing a Macbook Pro 15 (legacy/non-touchbar, which is still available on their site) and the Dell. You can't upgrade the RAM on the new machines or the old machines now. I wanted a Macbook Pro 15 because of how great they are for development (being all Unix based and what not), but "non-upgradability" is just a no go. I don't mind paying for the extra RAM even, but no dice. Since Windows 10 has the Ubuntu subsystem, my decision is so much easier.

Spooky23 10y ago

We get it, honestly. Enough with the dramatic MacBook articles. There are literally thousands of laptops out there. Buy one.

scott_karana 10y ago
There's a large captive audience who only wants to run Mac OS "properly", so their only option is to complain loudly and hope Apple listens for the next model.

nshunter 10y ago

This generation of MB hardware generally seems to have issues from trivial through severe. I purchased my fiance one of the new Macbooks for school along with one of the USB-C dongles to allow her to connect to an external monitor. She constantly has flickering issues when it's connected without a reboot after connecting. It seems to be an unacknowledged issues with video and the macbook, which was attempted to be solved via a visit with Apple where the replaced the dongle to no effect. The machine is fantastic in terms of weight, screen, and layout. I don't really mind the single USB-C and would love to have one, but the hardware issues have made me decided to sit this generation out and wait for what's next.

rsync 10y ago

The ironic thing is how much simpler it would have been for Apple to give people what they actually wanted. All anyone wanted was a retina macbook air. That's it. Everyone was perfectly happy and just wanted a nicer screen. All anyone wanted was a mac pro tower with updated SATA and USB speeds and new processors, etc. That's it. Instead, in both cases, we got silly weird things that nobody wants. I'm never going to buy the non-tower mac pro. Similarly, when the new touchbar macbooks were announced, I ran to the apple store and bought a nice, new max spec 11" air to hold in reserve in my closet. Now I'm covered on the laptop front for at least five more years and apple has cumulatively lost out on 3-4 laptop and mac pro purchases from me.

usaphp 10y ago
Nobody wanted iPhones, they only wanted a tougher Nokia and more Java games... I love the touch bar and I was really impressed with a form factor and design of the new Mac Pro. I don't find touch bar silly, Apple would not be Apple if they did not try new things and experiment.
- DavideNL 10y ago
  I agree, nobody wanted to ditch Flash either in 2010 (1), the reactions then were the same as all the crap you read about Macbooks now. 6 years later, and everyone realises they need to get rid of Flash. I think it's the price you pay for innovation, many people can't handle (the) change. (1) http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
  - TomVDB 10y ago
    Did you read the part of his article where he's constantly fat fingering the wrong keys on the TouchBar? And never finding the ESC key? The issue of the TouchBar is not that it exists. It's that it replaces a good, well functioning component by something much worse.
    - epistasis 10y ago

wodenokoto 10y ago

I hadn't thought about this until I read this article, but what do you use the FN-key for when there are no function keys?

binaryapparatus 10y ago

All different decisions from Apple in last 12 months made me clean up the dust from my ancient linux pc. Reinstalled arch and I am feeling normal again. I have few Mac / iOS apps to maintain but I use vnc or synergy to do that.

jacobsenscott 10y ago

I'm happy with mine. I'm plugged in to power, and nice big monitor and an external keyboard 99% of the time and it makes a fine dev machine. Do people really spend a significant amount of time writing code directly on an unplugged laptop? Sounds really painful no matter the model or brand.

pyrophane 10y ago
I do, but I work from home and need to get out of my apartment from time-to-time. I think there are a lot of people in that boat.

DoodleBuggy 10y ago

More terrible first hand reports about the Touch Bar Pro. So it seems many power users are saying Touch Bar is useless at best and annoying and interfering at worst. And the battery life is terrible. And you pay more for less. Who is this thing built for? I really hope Apple fixes this situation in the 2017 update.

vladimir-y 10y ago

Someone has to make Apple great again.

retreatguru 10y ago

This is so funny. I just boxed mine up and shipped it via UPS back to apple not 5 minutes ago and was thinking to post something here on hacker news! I did not like the touch bar for programming. Maybe when my ide supports the touch bar it will be better. But the clincher was the poor battery life. I've been a mac user since the mac plus days. First time I retuned one.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
Same here. Wrote about the experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098257. tl;dr: Touch bar is in the way, and provides near-zero utility; at best, it's a distracting visual element for touch-typists. Other than that, the new features are not worth the hassle/price. The only feature I really do like is the fingerprint reader.

kstenerud 10y ago

What I like about my new MBP 15" with touch panel: 1. The size is almost the same as my 2011 mbp 13" 2. Retina screen 3. I actually like the touch bar. 4. No more magsafe! Finally I can get the damn thing to charge reliably! 5. No more annoying illuminated logo on the lid. 6. All usb-c is nice. What I don't like about it: 1. The keyboard is terrible. The older ones are FAR nicer. The keys get stuck down randomly, then after a few days come unstuck, but even the very feel of the keys is pretty gross. 2. Trackpad isn't as nice as the one on the 2011 mbp. Drag and drop is flaky at best, especially in Finder. Press feedback is simulated, and doesn't feel as nice as an actual button. 3. Not much speed improvement. It's a big improvement for compiles since I went from 2 to 4 cores, but single core performance has hardly budged. 4. Stability is iffy. Many apps just crash when you suspend (including Sublime Text, VLC, Firefox. Even the Firefox crash reporter crashes). I also get system freezes (where everything freezes except the mouse). So upgrading was nice because of the 4 cores, but I'd probably have been happier with a 2015 model.

bdcravens 10y ago

> Even after two weeks' use, my pinkie could never find the escape key. The touch bar accommodates this. The space to the left of the "key", as well as the "key" itself, all triggers ESC. In other words, the escape key has a target much larger than the physical key, about the size of the physical tab key.

bartvk 10y ago
That, and in System Preferences -> Keyboard tab -> Modifier Keys button, you can map Caps Lock to Escape. Works great, in my opinion.

dreamfactory2 10y ago

> I nearly lost it when my laptop was under 10% battery remaining after only three hours of use. ... With my older 11" MacBook Air, I was used to 3-4 hour battery life does not compute

pm24601 10y ago

My review of the Mac Book Pro (w touch bar): I am a developer at Evernote (we are hiring fyi) 1. Touch bar - By far and away this is the most annoying thing ever. IDEs use function keys all the time ... and the touchbar does not know how to display. > defaults write com.apple.touchbar.agent PresentationModeFnModes -dict-add appWithCOntrolStrip 'functionKeys' > defaults write com.apple.touchbar.agent PresentationModePerApp -dict-add org.eclipse.platform.ide 'functionKeys' > defaults write com.apple.touchbar.agent PresentationModePerApp -dict-add com.jetbrains.intellij 'functionKeys' I hate that I get no tactile feedback when trying to use the function keys. I can no longer touch type the function keys. 2. Keyboard - without the full travel I have to constantly readjust my typing pressure between my detached keyboard and the laptop keyboard. Painful on the fingertips. 3. Memory size: 16g! WTF - my 5 year-old 17" MBP has the same amount of memory 4. Performance - here is the kicker. I play a multiplayer game: World of Warships. The performance on the new MBP is WORSE than on my 5 year-old MBP. Mind you the 5 year-old computer does not have a SSD drive and its battery is EOL. 5. No ports - seriously? I can't hook my laptop to any display in a conference room without a dongle. I have to haul the powerbrick around with me. So instead of just the laptop, I have to take a backpack of gear with the various dongles to meetings. Looks very unprofessional. I can't hook my external ethernet RAID drive to it. Nothing. 6. Other missing things: you no longer get an extension cord with the power brick. This means you have to be right on top of the power outlet to use it. Like I can't use the power outlet right behind me at the dining room table. 7. Siri - really. Like the last thing I am going to do is talk to my computer at the office. Based on my personal experience with the new MBP, I am not spending my personal money to buy a new mac at this time. I will just keep my older macs functioning as long as possible.

willtim 10y ago

These machines are unfortunately already obsolete (relative to their premium price) now that Intel Kaby Lake machines are starting to appear. Kaby Lake offers significant battery life improvements over Skylake.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago

The developer world isn't going to immediately switch en masse to Microsoft or Linux laptops because of this. They're probably just going to hold onto their legacy Macbooks for an extra year or two, and it's likely the used market for pre-2016 Macbooks will be competitive. But gradually, as the imitators catch up to the Macbook in weight and usability, we will see some migration away from Apple. I hope and believe Apple's not so dumb as to suffer major attrition among power users and developers. They're a big enough company that they could come out with a "Macbook Classic" that restores some of the lost functionality (function keys at least, maybe non-welded components). If you examine a pre-2016 MBA or MBP, there seems to be enough real estate above the function keys to squeeze in the touch strip thing as an additional feature rather than a replacement. Why not provide both, and let the users decide? I wish there were a new Retina MBP with optical disk drive, USB, USB-C, Thunderbolt, and memory card slot. Also, make it easier to upgrade internal components. Is this really so hard? I'd pay extra. Even if the masses are going another direction, there ought to be a power user's version that has it all, and price it accordingly. There's a certain cachet in being known as the power user's platform of choice and Apple really should try harder to hold onto that.

caconym_ 10y ago

> Maybe it would work better as a neat gimmick in the 12" MacBook. Please no, my 12" Macbook is the best development machine I've ever owned.

csiegert 10y ago
I chuckled at your defensive reaction. Apple’s TouchBar has such a bad reputation that people genuinely fear it will spread to their beloved Mac models.

hellothree23 10y ago

best part of the whole article what how you named it the "Function Key Pro" hahaha, gold.

Corrado 10y ago

I think the most telling part of the story was that Apple seems to have lost the Good, Better, Best split. Way back in the olden days of Apple you had to really pay attention and work to find out which system would be best for your needs. Then Jobs came along with the 4 quadrants of computers (Personal Portable / Personal Desktop / Professional Portable / Professional Desktop) and suddenly everything was much clearer. Over the seasons that morphed slightly into Good, Better, Best laptop or desktop, but it was still pretty easy to pick your system. Fast forward to today and the Apple ecosystem is a soup of MacBook / Air / Pro / Retina / TouchPad machines that are nearly impossible to tell apart. And that's just the laptop line; forget talking about phones, tablets, and desktops! I used to be able recommend the perfect device for almost anyone, right off the top of my head, without doing much (any) research at all. Now, I don't think I could recommend anything in the Apple lineup with confidence. This to me is a huge failing and saddens me beyond whatever particular piece of hardware Apple has built lately. :(

soulhakr 10y ago

so... long story short, a guy who repeatedly states that he was used to using his MacBook Air and has used that and it's form factor and utility for five years doesn't like the the new MacBook Pro - which is a differently-styled product targeted at a different audience. Now this is not to say that he doesn't have some (read: several) objectively valid points. (coughbattery-lifecough) but it seems that chunks of his user experience might have been improved by choosing a product marketed as being a little closer to his most recent previous experience.

daveheq 10y ago

What developer uses an 11" screen? Are you serious?

majewsky 10y ago
Free business idea: Notebooks with tiny screens... that come with zooming glasses. :)

Arkaad 10y ago

About the battery issue, couldn't he buy an extra battery? That wouldn't be too cumbersome.

joeevans1000 10y ago

Really, now that apple is only making products for the humans in WALL-E and not developers, we only have one option. That's to stock up on the last good developer MacBooks (up to 2015) and spare motherboards. Once those give out or become too incompatible, load them with linux, or switch to better machines from other companies who still care about developers. I guess the era of MacBooks being the choice for professionals is over. However, I guess all good things like this have to end sometime.

voidr 10y ago

These are my personal opinions: I don't like the touch bar because it forces me to look at my keyboard, which is inefficient and probably unhealthy(moving my neck like that). I don't like the keyboard because it's too noisy. I'm disappointed that Apple seemingly ceased to care about the professional user. I'm expecting the top Mac Book Pro to be a machine that's optimized to get work done, the touch bar and the overemphasis on making it thinner and lighter suggest otherwise. It seems that my next main machine will not be a Mac Book Pro, I will most likely go with a Windows laptop, since Linux still has issues like Wayland vs. Mir.

antfarm 10y ago

I wish Apple had figured out a good way to make the MBP touch pad double as a touch screen.