5 ms·

Same problems as you, but I disagree on the touchbar. It’s one of the better things Apple has added recently. But holy hell do they need to work on their exter

Same problems as you, but I disagree on the touchbar. It’s one of the better things Apple has added recently. But holy hell do they need to work on their external monitor support. Yesterday I had one of my monitors randomly go black for a second. I’ve had audio over usbc just not show up anymore and it refusing to see my gigabit ethernet when waking up unless I unplug the actual ethernet cable. Simply amazing this passed their QA - and Id find it hard to believe no one at Apple uses clamshell mode with two monitors.

arprocter 9y ago
My iMac seems to get a 169 IP on wake-up about once a week No problems with my Debian or Win 7 boxes which are presumably on the same switch
- chungy 9y ago
  That's a link-local IPv4 address, typically means that it hasn't got a lease from your DHCP server.
  - arprocter 9y ago
    Normally messing with the cable gets it to pick up a proper address. Strange that other two machines aren't effected if the DHCP server is to blame
DoodleBuggy 9y ago
> but I disagree on the touchbar. It’s one of the better things Apple has added recently. Strongly disagree, and I can not conceive of how it could be viewed as "better" than hardware keys. Maybe if they moved it above the FN row and we regained the hardware escape key, while making it a build to order option. Even then, I personally would have no interest in it, and neither would anyone else I know. I do not want to look at my hands while I type, ever.
- brazzledazzle 9y ago
  I don't know how far out it would be but with the changes to their keyboard and the addition of their touchbar I wonder if their long term plan is a touch screen in the bottom half to replace the keyboard and pad. Without some kind of tactile interface I hope I'm wrong about my suspicions.
  - DigitalJack 9y ago
    dear God I hope not. I wouldn't mind if they made the touch pad into a screen. Probably not that useful, but it wouldn't bother me.
    - kogepathic 9y ago
      > I wouldn't mind if they made the touch pad into a screen. You mean like making the laptop LCD a touchscreen? Like other PC manufacturers have been doing for years?
      - zeveb 9y ago
        Ah, but you see when Apple release the iTouch it'll be a whole new paradigm of human-computer interaction! Never before have people been able to control their computers by touching the screens! … or that's what the fanboys will think.
- eridius 9y ago
  > Strongly disagree, and I can not conceive of how it could be viewed as "better" than hardware keys. I hope this is hyperbole, because it shouldn't be hard to understand. The TouchBar is absolutely an improvement. I can't remember the last time I actually used a laptop keyboard's F-keys for anything, but the TouchBar makes that space useful.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > I can't remember the last time I actually used a laptop keyboard's F-keys for anything I use them regularly to switch consoles. MacOS supports multiple consoles, right?
ghostly_s 9y ago
We have many staff with MBP + dual external displays and it's always been the least reliable aspect of the platform. From reading between the lines in the unusually arcane history of support docs on the topic, I've surmised their stance can be summed up as "it might work!" Which of course runs counter to the Apple It Just Works ideal, so they can never come out and admit as such. They've gone to great lengths to squeeze impressive performance out of their stingy graphics hardware choices at the OS level, but there's not much you can do to massage the numbers when adding up pixels, I guess.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  For what it's worth (anecdote incoming) I use a touchbar MBP with a Dell UP2414Q, which is driven using multi-stream transport. Effectively its panel is presented to the system as two separate displayport streams running daisy-chained over a single port. Once I found the right cable, everything worked fine. (The first cable was advertised with DP1.2 and MST support, but it would only operate in the legacy mode that dropped down to 30 Hz). God forbid you try to use this with Windows though. Sometimes half of the screen cuts out, sometimes one side of it shifts by a couple hundred pixels (and wraps the right edge of the image around to a stripe down the middle of the screen), and god knows what other problems that I can't even remember. This was with a GTX 900 series GPU which is definitely "supported." I used to have it hooked up to my Windows desktop since that's the fast computer with more storage and RAM, so it should be great for stuff like Lightroom. But since the screen doesn't work reliably, I moved that back to my MBP. A friend with the same screen had identical issues on Windows and a similar solution. It's now on his wife's desk for her to plug her Macbook into. Display signaling has gotten a lot more complicated than DVI/VGA were, and the reliability problems that have cropped up from that are present across the industry.
  - nerpderp83 9y ago
    Do you have a link for this cable? I am always interested in foisting esoteric firmware and poorly implemented protocol bugs upon myself.
    - 9y ago

arprocter 9y ago

My iMac seems to get a 169 IP on wake-up about once a week No problems with my Debian or Win 7 boxes which are presumably on the same switch

chungy 9y ago
That's a link-local IPv4 address, typically means that it hasn't got a lease from your DHCP server.
- arprocter 9y ago
  Normally messing with the cable gets it to pick up a proper address. Strange that other two machines aren't effected if the DHCP server is to blame

DoodleBuggy 9y ago

> but I disagree on the touchbar. It’s one of the better things Apple has added recently. Strongly disagree, and I can not conceive of how it could be viewed as "better" than hardware keys. Maybe if they moved it above the FN row and we regained the hardware escape key, while making it a build to order option. Even then, I personally would have no interest in it, and neither would anyone else I know. I do not want to look at my hands while I type, ever.

brazzledazzle 9y ago
I don't know how far out it would be but with the changes to their keyboard and the addition of their touchbar I wonder if their long term plan is a touch screen in the bottom half to replace the keyboard and pad. Without some kind of tactile interface I hope I'm wrong about my suspicions.
- DigitalJack 9y ago
  dear God I hope not. I wouldn't mind if they made the touch pad into a screen. Probably not that useful, but it wouldn't bother me.
  - kogepathic 9y ago
    > I wouldn't mind if they made the touch pad into a screen. You mean like making the laptop LCD a touchscreen? Like other PC manufacturers have been doing for years?
    - zeveb 9y ago
      Ah, but you see when Apple release the iTouch it'll be a whole new paradigm of human-computer interaction! Never before have people been able to control their computers by touching the screens! … or that's what the fanboys will think.
eridius 9y ago
> Strongly disagree, and I can not conceive of how it could be viewed as "better" than hardware keys. I hope this is hyperbole, because it shouldn't be hard to understand. The TouchBar is absolutely an improvement. I can't remember the last time I actually used a laptop keyboard's F-keys for anything, but the TouchBar makes that space useful.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > I can't remember the last time I actually used a laptop keyboard's F-keys for anything I use them regularly to switch consoles. MacOS supports multiple consoles, right?

ghostly_s 9y ago

We have many staff with MBP + dual external displays and it's always been the least reliable aspect of the platform. From reading between the lines in the unusually arcane history of support docs on the topic, I've surmised their stance can be summed up as "it might work!" Which of course runs counter to the Apple It Just Works ideal, so they can never come out and admit as such. They've gone to great lengths to squeeze impressive performance out of their stingy graphics hardware choices at the OS level, but there's not much you can do to massage the numbers when adding up pixels, I guess.

wlesieutre 9y ago
For what it's worth (anecdote incoming) I use a touchbar MBP with a Dell UP2414Q, which is driven using multi-stream transport. Effectively its panel is presented to the system as two separate displayport streams running daisy-chained over a single port. Once I found the right cable, everything worked fine. (The first cable was advertised with DP1.2 and MST support, but it would only operate in the legacy mode that dropped down to 30 Hz). God forbid you try to use this with Windows though. Sometimes half of the screen cuts out, sometimes one side of it shifts by a couple hundred pixels (and wraps the right edge of the image around to a stripe down the middle of the screen), and god knows what other problems that I can't even remember. This was with a GTX 900 series GPU which is definitely "supported." I used to have it hooked up to my Windows desktop since that's the fast computer with more storage and RAM, so it should be great for stuff like Lightroom. But since the screen doesn't work reliably, I moved that back to my MBP. A friend with the same screen had identical issues on Windows and a similar solution. It's now on his wife's desk for her to plug her Macbook into. Display signaling has gotten a lot more complicated than DVI/VGA were, and the reliability problems that have cropped up from that are present across the industry.
- nerpderp83 9y ago
  Do you have a link for this cable? I am always interested in foisting esoteric firmware and poorly implemented protocol bugs upon myself.
  - 9y ago