I desperately hope this is true. I have the first MacBook Pro that came with the Touch Bar, and it's the worst computer I've ever owned. The keyboard has failed twice, and the Touch Bar is inferior to the old hardware keys in every way. I hate it. The only reason I got it is because the MacBook Air it replaced was dying and I couldn't wait any more. Assuming this report is true, my only remaining worry is that they won't offer a version of this new Pro without a Touch Bar, or that only a model with a smaller display will offer hardware function keys, like they've done in the past.
I did exactly this a year ago but one caveat to note is that if you're using an external monitor, the video card in this one doesn't support a good resolution. I'm stuck with 1080p.
Anecdote: I find 30 Hz to be totally unusable for development/office work. The jerky movement of the mouse cursor, jerky scrolling, etc, is all painful to my eyes. So, I think very much, YMMV, but 60 Hz is safe.
Note the "SST 4K" criteria. I have a late 2013 15" MBP that drives 4K at 60 Hz, but it is an MST "multi-screen transport" display (which requires enabling on the monitor menu). Don't know if they're made anymore. Mine is a Dell UP2414Q.
I have a 2015 and a 4K monitor and can confirm that this is the case. 30fps isn't great but it is usable for most day-to-day computer work.
However there is a workaround if you are willing to disable SIP and play around with a program called SwitchResX. You can customize the display timings in such a way that allows 4K60 video to just sneak in under the bandwidth limits of the Thunderbolt ports. It also requires a Thunderbolt to HDMI 2.0 adapter, and a compatible monitor. If you like fiddling around this is one way to do it, but I have found it finicky and not really worth it.
4k60hz is also possible over displayport, on my Late 2013 mbp I need to use switchresx to get it going (but I've found that pretty set-and-forget), but on the newer ones than that it works without any hacks AFAIK
Could you share some details about how you do this? Do you need displayport on both ends, and is it a monitor or TV? I have the same machine and a 4K TV with only HDMI-inputs and am curious if I can achieve this is in some way. Switchresx looks really useful anyway, so thank you for that. :)
If you have a Displayport display, you can use a displayport to mini displayport cable, use switchresx, should work good.
If it's HDMI only, as the sibling pointed out the HDMI port won't work. However, Startech makes a displayport to HDMI adapter which works ( https://www.amazon.com/DisplayPort-HDMI-Adapter-Converter-60... ) (just make sure you get one which supports 4k60hz, most DP -> HDMI adapters don't).
I'll consider this though I it would be probably be sitting unused after trying it anyway as I really have no need for it. Thank you for the information. Just to clarify, we're both talking about a late 2013 macbook pro retina? The other helpful commenter mentions the 2015.
Yeah, this is all on the late 2013 15" with the nvidia dgpu - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206587 has the official details on this BTW - they state that SST Displayport 3840 x 2160 displays are only supported at 60hz on the 15" from Mid 2014 on, but it actually works on the Late 2013 also with Switchresx.
also got a 2015 and 4k @60hz is possible plug and play with a thunderbolt to displayport cable. anything other than default scaling gets a bit choppy though
It's not about real estate, but rather about sharpness. At 3820x2160 ("4K") you can double every pixel, when compared to 1080p. That means that text at the exact same "size" is twice as sharp, producing less visual strain and improving readability (especially for fonts with complex strokes)
The difference is absolutely striking: I will never go back to a non "retina" display if given the choice.
It’s also real estate. I have the LG 5K 27” monitor—which I like, by the way, I don’t know why people give it crap—and routinely wish it was just a touch larger.
My screen is filled with Excel and some sort of online database, usually. I’m also using my 13” MBP screen below this one for chat windows, email etc.
When doing photography work, you can look at image thumbnails and actually judge sharpness and colour directly off them. And when filling the screen, you can have a much better idea of how they will look in print.
As for text, I've been able to use tiny font sizes and increase the information density since hi-DPI screens— my eyes are good for it. Ahh, iPhone 4 and retina MBP... they were astounding tech at that time.
I cant deal with 1080p anymore, and large (27"+) 1080p monitors make no sense to me. Maybe they're good for people who need to have physically large text etc. but I find it useless for fitting information densely on the screen. I for one would rather use my 13" MacBook pro laptop screen than a large 1080p display. (I use a 24 inch 4k monitor and it's pretty great.)
I use both a 12” MacBook (for Go and JS), and a Dell XPS13 with Ubuntu (for Rust). The UX on the MacBook is better in every way. Gestures, the window and desktop management, touchpad, Bluetooth, WiFi and printer drivers, etc. The screen, speakers, and other hardware components are much better as well.
The fast XPS 13 with Ubuntu also seems to really be taxed pretty heavily by electron apps, while the MacBook that is 8 times slower does just fine. When I switched, I finally understood why so many people on hacker news complain about electron.
Everything on the Mac feels like someone thought really hard about how to make it as good as possible, even if they were wrong in the end (like the keyboard). Everything in Linux always feels like someone said “ehhh... good enough!”.
I gave it a serious go for a year. Spent $1,600 on a Lenovo X1 Carbon. Wiped the disk and installed LTSC. The one feature it had that Apple didn’t (the built-in LTE) never worked properly. Stability was good, but lots of odd nits. (Auto-hiding taskbar would sometimes stop hiding.) Battery life was a crap-shoot. Rage quit and ordered the MacBook when it went from estimated 30 minutes remaining to dead in 5 minutes.
Speaking of which: Do you want to buy an X1 Carbon 6th gen? i7 8650U with 16Gb RAM and 256GB SSD.
I've got a late 2013 15" MBP with a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB of ram, 512GB SSD, and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, and have been using it for 5 years now it and it is a great laptop. Can run chrome, mysql server, web servers, and personal programs without breaking a sweat. The only thing it cannot run are new video games or if you are deep into ML but old games still work great (I played GTA V on it ok when that came out).
Only downside that happened is part of the trackpad stopped clicking and one of the fans starting running crazy loud. Took it in to the apple store and they diagnosed it as a swelling battery (seems like a problem for macs so if it looks like your case is fat, get it checked out). Ended up getting the battery, keyboard, trackpad, case, fans, and potentially the monitor (it looked new or was cleaned extremely well) for $300 which isn't too bad to make it feel like new. I'm probably going to keep this computer for another 5+ years unless it dies.
Would totally recommend and I would definitely not sell it for $600.
Not OP but my problem with larger trackpad was unwanted mouse movements. Maybe it was the way I rest my palms while typing but I never had this issue with previous mbp models.
Yep, the large trackpad is another design blunder. The heels of your hands are resting on it much of the time, resulting in the cursor suddenly jumping off to another part of the screen while you're typing.
Even dumber: Apple didn't make it work with the Pencil. WTF? Now THAT would be far more useful than the emoji bar.
Pencil does work with iPad and sidecar which is a much better experience for editing vs what would amount to a very small Wacom tablet on the trackpad (vs effectively an iPad sized Cintiq).
Yeah I dislike the bigger trackpad. There’s nowhere to comfortable rest my hands on it. At work they gave me a 2018 MBP and after 2 weeks of suffering I returned it for a 2015 version.
In the meantime I regretted so much that I bought my 2015 model with 8GB of RAM, which seemed like a reasonable decision back then. Everything else is still great and better than the newer model I got from work - but nowadays I seem to run out of memory all the time.
Buy a 16gb board off eBay and do a board swap? Or buy a 16gb and sell the 8gb?
The former shouldn’t set you back much. The biggest cost on the latter would be the commissions, but you may be able to find a forum with a decent buy/sell section.
> I have the first MacBook Pro that came with the Touch Bar, and it's the worst computer I've ever owned.
Same here (well, I have the "cheap" one without the Touch Bar). Everything has been replaced at least once (on Apple Care, fortunately) except the bottom plate.
> The only reason I got it is because the MacBook Air it replaced was dying
I'm still using my MBA from mid 2013. It's a wonderful thing. Battery is "replace soon" but it's mostly plugged in. It's battered and bruised, but still fast enough. I've been debating a change for a while and figured at the start of the year I'd wait to see if they were going to ditch the bf keyboard if they release a new MBA. Super glad I waited, fingers crossed I get the same life out of the next one!
Say what you want about Apple and price, but I've had PCs since 1994 and the two Macs I've had have (usefully) outlasted every other machine by quite some margin - this one in particular. 6 years without formatting a Windows machine (I can't talk for now, but especially back then) would be crazy.
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (Core2Duo + 4GB of ram), I've added an SSD years ago, and it runs absolutely fine, I use it almost daily to browse the web. Even the battery still works(only for about an hour, but it does).
> I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (Core2Duo + 4GB of ram), I've added an SSD years ago, and it runs absolutely fine, I use it almost daily to browse the web. ... the updates stopped at El Capitan unfortunately. ... I'm not that bothered.
You might want to consider running Manjaro[0] or Haiku[1] instead (I've had great luck with both on older MacBooks [2,3]).
Nessus reports El Capitan as a "Critical" vulnerability due to lack of security updates:
According to its self-reported version number, the Unix operating system running on the remote host is no longer supported.
Lack of support implies that no new security patches for the product will be released by the vendor. As a result, it is likely to contain security vulnerabilities.
Sure, but it's a laptop to look up some kitchen recipes, watch YouTube and use facetime occasionally. If it has security vulnerabilities I'm genuinely not bothered - any minute spent installing another system is a minute just not worth it for me.
Which is fine if you keep that laptop in its own isolated network. Otherwise it might end up being used for gaining access to other machines in your network.
i've got a 2008 MBP, these are great Linux machines unlike the latest macs. Very well supported hardware. Only issue I had was the custom gmux chip but it only takes a few lines of c to make a switch.
I gave my old Core Duo Mac Mini - circa 2006 to my mom after putting Windows 7 and Office 2010 on it. She uses it when she tutors and doesn’t want anyone on her main computer. That computer don’t die.
No, the updates stopped at El Capitan unfortunately. There is a way to force it to update to Mojave but I think couple hardware bits stop working(....camera?) and I'm not that bothered.
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree. I just don't think it's worth my time to update it to watch YouTube and open BBC Good Food from time to time. The laptop never leaves the house, my assumption is that the attack surface for it is literally zero.
I have a mid 2013 Air as well (and I recently replaced the battery for $100, it’s great and you should too), but I’d attribute the long life to simply the SSD and the software rather than anything else.
I think not having a dedicated GPU helps a lot too. Less heat, and one major component less that can break. In my small set of anecdata, consumer Macs outlive their Pro counterparts.
It's not super easy to replace, but if you're comfortable with a screw driver, it shouldn't pose much of a challenge, and the instruction from ifixit are great.
I'm still holding tight to my 2012 MBP, but it's got a replacement battery, and a roomier SSD to breathe some new life into it.
I am in a similar situation as you. Have a Mid 2012 MBA. Works fantastic. Also Catalina beta seems to have sped the system performance immensely. Always plugged in because of the battery.
Recently replaced my 2012 MBA battery, the batteries are quite cheap and the replacement is surprisingly quick and easy on this model. About a five minute job, you can buy the battery with the needed tools here: https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Air-13-Inch-Late-20...
I'm still rocking my MBA form 2010, it wasn't even top spec at the time, but the keyboard, size, weight and battery are all great. The screen is pretty terrible I'll be honest, but if I'm working on it it doesn't bother me much. Plus it has one of those ever so rare HDMI out ports (no accessories necessary). I just replace the battery every so often.
I'm currently weighing up the option of installing Linux onto it as I'm more inclined to move away from the Apple ecosystem, but I have reservations on what that will do the battery life :/
I have the 13" late 2013 Macbook Pro i7, 8GB. It is working perfectly fine, and as fast as it was on day one. Never replaced a single thing, and never had to do hard-drive wipe. The only problem I have is that, it is a 512GB SSD, and I have no free space left.
Sintech sell adapters via amazon US/UK etc for about $15 that allow you to take a regular NVME drive (which are VERY cheap just now) and adapt it to the apple SSD hardware interface. You can have up to 2TB of faster-than-ever storage. You'll also need torx screwdrivers to open the case.
If you do some googling you will see there are two versions, and depending on the size/shape of SSD you are buying it may be better to buy one rather than the other.
If you do more googling, people have tried various drives and report on performance/compatibility etc but generally compatibility is good except with some samsung drives.
I have an i5 version of this. Bought it from the refurb store in 2014 and it is the best computer I have ever owned. Unfortunately the keyboard is getting a little finicky, presumably from dust. In any case 6-7 years is a pretty impressive life span for a notebook in my opinion.
I got a maxed out MBA in 2016 after going with my gut and thinking that year’s MBP keyboard felt like a step down. My MBA is still going strong and I love this machine. I was worried I was going to have to switch in a few years to the worse new line, so if this is true I’m very excited.
I also have the first (13") MBP model to ship with a touchbar, which is also the only Mac I've ever had.
TBH, I think it's put me off Macs for life. While I haven't had a hardware failure, the keyboard is simply horrible - there isn't nearly enough key travel or feedback, and swapping useful physical keys for a useless touchpad is completely pointless - I have a cheap 13" netbook kicking around which has a far superior keyboard!
After having Macbook aficionados harp on for yeara about how wonderful Macbook keyboards are, I feel cheated.
I wish Apple would stop valuing thinness above all else - it's important, but there are diminishing returns. We've got the point where I don't want it to be any thinner - I want ports, good battery life and good heat dissipation (my MBP is quiet, but it gets bloody hot!)
I made a custom plate that sits over the default keyboard and I put my own better keyboard on top. I've been kinda curious if anyone else would buy one if I produced them for a nominal fee.
Well, not really 90%. The trackpad is too big and introduce false positive that to some user is above threshold. I don't need such a large track pad for christ sake.
The Display cable, while Apple making is 1cm longer, will only make it last a year or two more. That is 3 - 4 years of Display Lifespan. I hardly call this durable.
The Thunderbolt and USB-C design is a bag of hurt, the amount of short circuit , logic board failure due to it is unacceptable.
I've not had a laptop with Touch Bar, but I can imagine making the trackpad smaller, then having the Touch Bar and the F-keys would be amazing. What do you think?
IMO the Touch Bar is pretty useless for serious work. The thing is, you have to look at the Touch Bar to use it! I don't know how you type, but I never look at the keyboard when I'm typing. Plus where I rest my hands on the machine, they tend to touch the Touch Bar, and you can't feel when you are actually touching it and mucking things up.
(Disclaimer: I have a MBP with Touch Bar, but I do 95% of my interacting with it with an external keyboard and mouse because I hate the keyboard / Touch Bar so much.)
I too, would love to have both Touch Bar and Function Keys. I don't hate Touch Bar per se, I just don't like it replacing my F-Keys buttons. Pretty much like All Cars are going to Touch Screen interface, I mean UX designer will need to learn and understand, not everything requires software and touch screen.
The problem is though, Touch Bar and buttons would not work on 13" Macbook, the touch pad would be too small for some of the macOS gestures.
The Touchbar is a source of many complaints? Or just a small slice of people who complain loudly? Anecdotally, I have many relatives with touchbar MacBook Pros and they haven’t complained about it. Is it possible that many people actually like the touchbar but they don’t spend their time on specialized forums singing its praises? It just seems like the assumption that people hate the touchbar is selection bias. Aside from the aforementioned relatives, I have a few friends in the pro video/audio/photo world who love the touchbar.
I would caution Apple against placing too much weight on any particular opinion. Pleasing the curmudgeonly neckbeards might mean that you piss off the creatives, or vice versa.
The TouchBar is fine and looks nice.
The problem is not the TouchBar itself, but how Apple decided to not care about many usability details complementary to the TouchBar (besides the ESC key).
Something really stupid (related to TouchBar design) happened to me about 2 weeks ago.
I watched a movie using an external TV, and I set the laptop screen brightness to zero. The movie ended, so I shut down the machine using the TV as a monitor.
Next day, when I turned on the laptop (without the TV). Zero! No sound, nothing, only the artificial "ESC" key in the TouchBar. My first reaction... "ohh the brightness", it happened before with older MBP models.
But... Where are my brightness keys!? For some reason, there were not displayed. (after a little bit of search in support forums, I found that some users were not seeing TouchBar keys during login too).
I connected the TV again... nothing.
I tried to login... but since I couldn't see the login screen, I ended in the password recovery mode.
In total desperation (that included trying to reboot in recovery or to do a SMC reset without any visual and auditive feedback), I found by chance that the screen displayed the right brightness if I open/close the lid.
When I saw the password reset mode screen, I was happy. But if I restarted the brightness remained in zero! and no TouchBar...
After another trial & error of open closing the lid, I saw the pass recovery screen again. Then I deactivated FileVault to reboot in recovery mode, and finally, I saw the brightness keys in the TouchBar!!! (it was a WTF moment).
I searched in a lot of forums if it was possible to change the brightness with another key combination, but it wasn't possible. My secondary keyboard is a MagicKeyboard that is Bluetooth only... so I almost have to contact support for a very stupid design decision to not give the users a secondary method to control brightness when the TouchBar fails.
BTW previous Mac models emitted a sound during power on... that would have been helpful. It's very hard to know if your computer is working without any feedback. And it's also very hard to hit the recovery key combination without auditive feedback.
I like the aesthetics of Apple design, but as an Apple user for many years... the change of priorities in the hardware user experience is noticeable.
Guaranteed anyone who doesn’t mind just doesn’t need to use escape very much.
The problem with touchbar is it’s hard to use without looking at it - like most professionals do because it’s just muscle memory.
Give me a real escape and I won’t mind the rest being a touch Bar.
But I hope they make it like gaming keyboards that have real keys with tiny lcd displays on so you can customise the function but still have a real key to press.
I am a heavy programmer, and I do not mind the touch Esc key. It’s a bigger hit box. Though it does not offer tactile feedback, I find that just something to get used to as you don’t really need to locate it through tactile feedback.
It very much is a small set of people who complain loudly about the touchbar, and many of whom have not even used it that just think they won’t like it.
It can be both. I know people who have it configured to be escape when it's pressed and released, but control when it's held down in combination with another key.
How do you do that? I normally use the keyboard preferences to change the capslock on my MBP to control. I'd like escape there too, but I'd like to avoid running additional software to enable it.
I use Karabiner and it's truly a wonderful piece of software. I'm super sensitive to any lag or missent keys, but this actually works very well and I don't even think about it anymore.
I'm not sure. I think on linux/X11 it's just xmodmap wizardry, any maybe on macos you need third party software, but don't take my word for it. It's not something I've really investigated since I'm personally satisfied with capslock=escape.
I use Ctrl+[ instead of escape a lot of the times. Granted this is with mapping caps lock to control.
I’m afraid of mapping the caps lock to escape as a holdover from flash games where escape quit your game and so I fear destructive actions if I accidentally press escape instead of the “a” key, whereas if I accidentally press control nothing happens.
Would it be that hard to just have both a Touch Bar and a row of keys? At this point the Touch Bar component can’t add that much in terms of manufacturing cost. An entire A10 iPod Touch is only $199.
Have the same MBP as you, and haven’t really had any issues.
I actually almost prefer the keyboard, I feel like having less travel means I have to press slightly less and can type marginally faster on my Mac keyboard than a normal one.
I’ve not had to replace anything, I’ve had a key that felt stuck once or twice, but after a good bash it fixed itself. But it is almost 3 years old now!
The Touch Bar is a bit useless I’ll admit, but using BetterTouchTool I’ve made it more useful. Shows me my company share price live, tube status and the time of my next train as well as shortcuts to my most used apps.
> I actually almost prefer the keyboard, I feel like having less travel means I have to press slightly less and can type marginally faster on my Mac keyboard than a normal one.
There are actually mechanical switches, like the Cherry MX Brown, that register the keypress before actuating. They're usually preferred by gamers because you can rapidly tap the keys without fully depressing them.
It's a shame there isn't a convenient way for people test out the variety of switches out there to find the style they prefer. Like Warby Parker for mechanical keyboards.
I imagined they’d expand it with more functionality, but I don’t think it’s getting any update in the new models?
At the minute it doesn’t do much except replace your function keys with a display. If it could render the dock or maybe take over some of notification centre, it might have some novel functionality.
What I’ve been trying to do so far is see if I can integrate it with emacs through a dynamic module, so it could render the modeline.
I just purchased an Apple-refurbed 2015 MBP. It was a little surreal to be paying almost full price for a 4 year old model. The list of "pros" for the purchase decision was mostly a mirror of the "cons" of the more recent generations.
Overall, the 2015's are reliable machines with only the relatively minor annoyances of the battery recall and the "staingate" anti-glare coating issue.
Really hoping Apple returns to the ethos of their older designs, with serviceability and modularity higher on the list of design goals.
Agreed. Still on a 2013 model at home and every time I use it after the new one I have at work I love it even more. Please please hold out another year so I can upgrade to something that actually works
I have a Macbook Air (2017 version) which I spilled a can of beer into. I thought it was dead but after leaving it to rest for a few days it resurrected from the dead and it works ever since like nothing happened. I love that machine. Indestructible.
While I am happy for you, I am also pretty surprised and would be interested in more details. A full can of beer is 355 mL, so how much beer are we talking about here? Are the keys not sticky at all?
I dropped a full bottle of gin on it last week. The bottle literally broke over my open backpack with the mbp there. It seemed like I threw it on the distillery.
After letting it fully dry, isssues are:
- Couple small spots on the monitor. I think water got inside between the glass and display. They were very big (20% of the screen) and been reducing and now just 2 small spots (maybe 2-3%). These don't seem to reduce anymore but I will try to see if applying some subtle heat over will make them disappear.
- At first a couple keys didn't work, but now just the P and S seem to sometimes not register a tap, but when I press again, I get two of them. Not exactly sure what is going on or if it will go away. I would say it happens once every 20 or so taps (funny, writing happens there caused it on both the s and the p :))
Apart from that, all seems to be working fine. I can't say if it will continue, but I was sure it would be 'trash' after I saw what happen. Super happy it is working
80 proof alcohol is one of the better things you can spill on your computer. I spilled a glass of milk on my Titanium G4. Had to replace a bunch of components (back when you could pop out the keyboard) and it smelled bad.
The can wasn't full luckily. It might have been 150 ml or so. It mostly flowed under the keys from the grill right under the screen next to the hinge on the right side. Of course the machine shut off immediately and first I thought I bricked it. But I didn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I totally understand, as do I. If you are trying to make a MacBook Pro more usable than they are currently, you have to get https://pock.dev It has been the best $0 app I have ever downloaded, and has changed my Touch Bar experience completely.
I makes your Touch Bar into your dock, and can include the date time, battery life, a mini Spotify/music controller, and several other useful things.
I am sat here trying to work on a computer with about 8 buttons loose and two buttons which double press.
I've had the keyboard replaced once already for exactly the same problem, but I'm a contractor and Apple can take weeks to repair the keyboard so I'm probably going to be stuck working like this for a while longer - at least until I take holiday.
It's far from acceptable for a $2,000 [pro]fessional machine.
When the iPhone was announced and Steve Jobs commented how they were going to replace the keyboards on the screen, it seemed like a great idea. The adaptation was instantaneous. But when they announced this for the Macbook Pro models, the experience was not the same. Not to mention the bugs I had.
Now, if we could get a durable keyboard and two keys at the touchbar row, esc to the left and power/fingerprint to the right and a nice touchbar in the middle with haptic feedback, that would be perfect.
I don't use function keys much, and I need to confess the emoji keyboard is pretty neat.
Having used the 2018 MacBook Air for about 3 months now, I can say I really detest it and I would return it if that were possible.
1) the keyboard. This thing really feels like slamming your fingers into a metal slab. I think my iPad Pro keyboard is better. The MacBook Air keyboard is also very loud. For something with so little depth the sound is shocking.
2) the webcam. Total garbage. In a laptop this expensive I think this is inexcusable. my old ipad has a significantly better camera for video calls so I’m not carrying around both. Ridiculous.
3) the new charger is so much worse than I could have expected. The lack of MagSafe I knew about, thought it would be ok. Really a big loss. There’s also something wrong with the cable. It’s constantly getting kinks/twists in the wiring which I can’t straighten out, even though I baby it.
If they release a new MacBook Air this year I’ll definitely feel a bit betrayed. Like they knowingly released something that was a stop-gap PoS.
Having no real insight into who made what decisions, I think Apple’s focus on design is laudable. There are many things done right. It’s just that as someone that relies heavily on my tech, the things they’ve done wrong really hit home.
The keyboard I can almost understand. You might argue that there were true believers in the tech, thinking they just needed to iron out some problems and then it would be “so much better.”
The webcam is something that just makes me mad. It is clearly just bad. Even with ok lighting the video quality is just horrendous. There’s absolutely no excuse. It’s basically apple saying they don’t give a fuck.
Oh I don't need any convincing that many people are happy with Apple's designs. People are happy to carry dongles to compensate for miniscule no. of ports, deal with accidents due to removal of magsafe, getting rid of escape key, bad keyboard (never thought developers would be ok with the last two) etc etc while insisting on continuing to buy fairly expensive Apple products. It pretty much underlines that Apple can basically get away with murder.
> If they release a new MacBook Air this year I’ll definitely feel a bit betrayed.
With one exception, they've released a new MBA literally every year from 2008 to 2018. At this point it would be a betrayal not to release an update this year.
At least for the magsafe thing you can buy USB-C magnetic adapters like the “CONMDEX USB C Magnetic Adapter”. Doesn’t address the other major shortcomings, but it’s a small win.
Regarding the keyboard: you really need to take time and learn how to use it. You don't push the buttons, you more like softly touch them. It's strange at the beginning but then you really appreciate the fact that you don't have to work that hard to get the same result.
Those who are very pleased to hear they will be backpedaling on their updated keyboard designs.
Those who "don't understand" because they actually like the new keyboards (and the TouchBar even).
No matter where you stand, the new keyboards are highly controversial and divisive, and that's not good. The old keyboards didn't put people into opposing sides, they just were there. Sure people compared them to other manufacturer keyboards, sometimes for the worse and other times for the better, but it wasn't a hate or love relationship by the user base. There was no "getting used to it," it was just a keyboard.
I look forward to a return to a non controversial, highly usable and widely accepted as "fine", keyboard. I hope that's what we get.
> The old keyboards didn't put people into opposing sides, they just were there.
Have you ever spoken to a thinkpad advocate re: chiclet keyboards? The previous mac keyboards were absolutely controversial. It took years for the previous keyboard to be 'just a keyboard', which I do acknowledge happened.
> I look forward to a return to a non controversial, highly usable and widely accepted as "fine", keyboard.
Honestly, this will never happen for two reasons:
1) people's needs are diverse enough where that's simply an impossible job. I happen to _really_ like the current apple keyboards, but the reliability is bad enough for me to want a change. The consensus where I work (100ish mac laptops) is that the keyboard is awful. Someone is going to be unhappy, and it sounds like it might be me :(
2) There's some segment of the technology world (non-unix people?) that will latch onto any criticism of apple - fair/deserved or not - and shout it endlessly.
> The previous mac keyboards were absolutely controversial. It took years for the previous keyboard to be 'just a keyboard', which I do acknowledge happened.
I would dispute that people stopped caring about the keyboard shortcomings. They're ergonomically bad keyboards, just not bad enough to keep complaining for this many years. If all Apple cares about is what people are currently chattering about, they're missing an opportunity to improve the product, because I still regard the MacBook keyboards as a reason to buy something else. When I think of the painful adjustment that I'll have to make if I ditch Apple laptops in favor of something else, there's a voice in my head saying, "Remember when a laptop keyboard could feel good to type on?" Banging my fingertips into a hard surface all day never became "just a keyboard."
Most of the technology works just hates any sort of change. Apple’s core base is different, they embrace change regardless of its utility. So that makes it hard to evaluate this kind of tech online.
I’m also noticing that the article suggests that apple’s real reason for change is poor yield and reliability. Those are objective measures, so I think we can agree that the current keyboard is bad.
> Apple’s core base is different, they embrace change regardless of its utility.
I really don't know how one can come to this conclusion. Apple people bitch about _everything_ that changes. I think the one and only exception might be any time that they added retina screens to something.
Well, IMO it depends on what you get used to. After typing for one day on my mechanical keyboard, even the Thinkpad feels like typing on cardboard. Conversely, using the mechanical keyboard, after spending a few days on my laptop, feels like an old typewriter. I can say that I enjoyed my 2016 Macbook keyboard after getting used to it and I was even faster than on the old macbook. Also, another example, the 2014 model had shorter travel and crisper feeling than the 2011 model. I guess, after a while you get used to something and it feels ok. Until it breaks that is.
This is the real point. A keyboard IS AN INTERFACE. The point of it is to move information between two things: the computer and me. It is a means. If I notice it at all, that’s a negative.
Regardless of who likes the current keyboard, there is a large reliability issue. I don’t mind the small travel but I have had to constantly air duster my keyboard and finally completely replace it (through apple) because the e key would sometimes register nothing and sometimes register twice - that’s not a subjective keyboard taste thing, that’s just a reliability problem I have never had with any other keyboard, certainly not in under just 8 months of use.
What about we who like the new keyboards (sans Touch Bar, personally) but understand (being intellectually mature adults) that people's preferences differ, probably at least in part because their typing styles also differ?
To be honest I expect this group greatly outnumbers your number 2), but being quietly satisfied with a thing is not a state of mind as conducive to jumping into an internet flame war as one of contempt for those who don't agree with your own subjective opinion of a thing or things.
The big problem I have with the new design is the reliability. I haven't personally had a key stop working, but it seems to be a real problem, and I do think the keys on my machine that has them (12" Macbook) have gotten fairly mushy after just a few years of use. That shouldn't happen—a really good keyboard will last for decades and/or tens of millions of strokes per key.
I'm in the former camp and I don't really know a lot of people that own Apple products that actually have anything positive to say about either the keyboard or the touchbar. So the other camp is probably pretty small. I know a disturbingly large number of people that already had keyboard replacement (multiple in several cases) and the only reason I haven't gone in myself yet is that not having a laptop for a week plus is very inconvenient so I've been living with a flaky command key for a while now.
This isn't what Apple does. There are many examples of them making changes that people dislike initially, but then over time emerge as 'the way'.
It seems in this case they may have gone too far and have not managed to convert enough people over to thinking the new keyboard is actually better than the old one - though this is certainly compounded by the reliability issue and might have been true otherwise.
But what they don't do, and shouldn't do, is drive for non controversial and fine. There are plenty of laptop manufacturers that use this strategy, and we can all agree that Apple make vastly, vastly superior laptops to those brands. Mistakes might be made, but they're part and parcel of what make Apple, Apple. Without the risk of mistakes, we also wouldn't have all the other great features that the MacBook has.
Finally! It took four years to admit there is something wrong. And one more year to change upcoming laptops. - It‘s unbelievable how this crap could be released. Coming from a ThinkPad to a MBP in 2015 I was even disappointed by the keyboard of the MBP 2015. Then switching to a MBP 2018 I was shocked how much worse things could get (for the sake of thinness?)
> Finally! It took four years to admit there is something wrong. And one more year to change upcoming laptops
I think they admitted something was wrong as soon as they created the replacement program, it's just they have been completely unwilling to alter their planned product schedule to fix it early. When they create a laptop design they expect to be able to ship the same basic chassis design for 3-4 years and in this design the keyboard and chassis are so entwined they're literally bolted together.
We're getting a new non-Pro design revision with it fixed right on schedule and the Pro isn't scheduled to redesign till next year so we get the fix then. Both these fixes could have been in the market 1-2 years ago if they company truly wanted it.
They just decided it either wasn't worth the money, or wasn't worth changing their cadence to fix it early. Just don't think they have much respect for their Mac customers anymore and know they'll stick around.
> Both these fixes could have been in the market 1-2 years ago if they company truly wanted it.
How much development time does Apple need for a new laptop design? I think it takes them about 2 years.
So if you say they could have had fixed keyboards in 2017, they would have had to start designing them in 2015, which is a year before the 2016 models even went on sale.
My assumption is that they only realized that the butterfly switches are unsalvageable after the July 2017 upgrade failed to fix the problems, so they started working on new Macbook designs with scissor switches in late 2017, which will be released in 2019/2020.
I don’t think the parent was implying that it took them 4 years to design a keyboard but that once Apple made a new design they expected it to last a minimum of 3 to 4 years. So they could’ve fixed it earlier but they insisted on getting their 3-4 years out of the original design.
> unwilling to alter their planned product schedule
Given that Apple is a company headed by a COO, run entirely on tight logistics, my strong belief is that they just wanted to use up all the butterfly keyboard key-mechs they had already pumped out.
Yeah I was going to say that but I definitely don't think it would have stayed in the market this long if the CEO was a product person rather than ops.
I mean I'm not trying to downplay how huge it would be to dump that design early, they have an insane amount of machinery and production line set up which they expect to get a few years of usage out of and at the end of the day only the CEO can make a call on if its important enough to go back and retool early and your Ballmers, your Tim Cooks are just never going to make that trade off.
An ops person isn't going to lose any sleep over the MacBook line being downgraded from a great product to an ok product.
In code the reason we don't do wholesale rewrites of complicated systems very often is because while there are bugs in the current system they're known quantities; going back to the drawing board and starting from scratch results in a newer, better, but unknown system with unknown bugs. That might be worse. It's a massive risk.
This is true for Apple's new keyboard too. We can't automatically assume it's better than the existing one, or that it has no issues. It's an unknown. For all we know a new keyboard might be even worse than the current one. Hopefully Apple will have learned from their mistakes but whether or not they've corrected all the problems or introduced new problems is something we can't know.
It's good that Apple appear to be listening and are trying to fix the problem (if that's the reason for the new keyboard) but I won't be rushing out to buy one for a while.
Nobody said they need to start from scratch. This failure of a keyboard already proved your point. Simply going back to the previous design and iterating from that would have been a massive improvement.
I love my Carbon X1, especially because of it's excellent keyboard. Unfortunatly the same can not be said about it's touchpad which causes constantly accidental clicks while typing.
A combination of Lenovo's keyboard and Apple's touchpad would make a strong combination.
I think I used a ThinkPad back in 1997 when my Uncle had a laptop. But aside from that possibility I don’t believe I’ve ever touched one until beginning of this year.
I have a T520 at home as my linux box. At work I use a 2015 MacBook Pro.
I don't know.
I don't find the T520's keyboard to be any better than the MBP's. The differences in key placement are much more noticeable than any difference in key shape, travel, or response.
Am I missing something?
... and thanks to Linux, it runs like on the first day.
The integrated Intel GPU in my T520 is stuck on XDDM and never got an updated WDDM driver. So it can't run a modern version of Windows anyways.
Funny there's a conversation about the ThinkPad 2015 going on - my x240 was the generation that had the buttonless trackpad (which screwed the trackpoint).
Credit to Lenovo, they backtracked within one generation, but I am not nearly so rich as to be able to change laptops that often so it was a costly design "innovation" to me on their end!
I really dislike #2 and #3 but to their credit it is thin (which I don't care much about). You can argue about #2 and #3 being subjective which is fair enough (the same is true for it being thin). However #1 is not subjective, and doesn't occur in a "few isolated cases". It is a proven design issue.
What I'd furthermore argue though is that #1 and #2 and #3 are together the sole result of going for thinness. After all, the previous keyboards worked great (and I owned 4 MBPs of the 2010-2015 range).
Meanwhile, the prices of the MBPs have only increased which adds insult to injury!
There's this saying, "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". At the same time there's "release early, release often". The first version of the iPhone had serious disadvantages. Apple didn't release AirPower. These each had their minus. However Apple has failed to address this specific minus. We've been beta testing this feature enough. It is time to admit the design flaw, and move on (but don't Osbourne the current series).
Everyone here, including e.g. IT, uses HP membrane keyboards with not a whole lot of travel. They don't make noise. I grew up with a IBM keyboard. Only thing I remember is I loved the feeling of it because they keys were always under my finger. I don't remember how much noise it made. I guess it is different if you're the person who's typing.
Not every mechanical keyboard creates as much noise as the other one though. And it also depends on how you use the keyboard.
If I'd work from home, a MBP butterfly would make my partner insane though. It could wake up my child, even. If you make your own noise, it is might be soothing or something. If it is other people around you whilst you're trying to concentrate you are violating their ability to use their time efficiently. I'm of the opinion that we should value such as "extremely rude".
It may make a bit more noise than the older one, but it certainly does not make "a lot" of noise. And the short travel is also not a problem, just a personal preference. As I said, I much prefer it, as do many others.
Personal anecdote but I was on an film set recently with mine, I'd planned to just work away because I was only going to be needed if things went wrong but on a quiet set I actually felt the keyboard was so noisy that I'd worry it would be getting picked up on the microphones. It felt uncomfortably loud even if they're filming a good 10 meters away.
I actually do like noisy keyboards in my own home, but the issue with Apple is if one size fits all then you really need to think of all the places that machine is potentially going to end up.
I often travel with public transport, including by train. Noisy people on smartphone is annoying, but there is a silence coupe where people have to be silent. So you can go sit there, right? Then it becomes apparent how noisy these newer Apple MBPs are. Whenever I get annoyed by the noise of a laptop, it is that.
And unfortunately I cannot listen to music and read... I wish I could! But I can't...
It is a lot of noise compared to my flaretech red switches. It is a lot of noise compared to my current and previous MBPs are previous ThinkPads.
Also, I even have my TouchPad on silent (I prefer than over the < 2015 versions even though the 2014 have less design flaws).
You prefer it, I don't. Many others prefer it, many other's don't. Like the touchbar, it was a controversial change. But if it then turns out to break regularly, then it is better to return to the previous design.
Yep. I find myself unable to use my personal MBP 2015 after using the 2018 MBP for work. The feel is just so much better. The reliability is the issue(though I haven’t faced any issues yet).
I can't stop but speculate if departure of Ive had anything to do with this. I guess there was a lot of push-back internally about this, but because of Ive, they had to endure 4 generations of butterfly switches. Touchbar also is just a resource hog for nothing extraordinarily useful. I haven't seen people use it too often. I bet they did user studies and found out that the Touchbar wasn't the new interaction method they hoped it would be. And now, they are planning to introduce new macs without them. I bet Ive feels bad about having to see his decisions being rolled back. Anyway, I hope the rumored 16' Macbook pro actually caters to the professionals by prioritizing thermals over thinness, and if one can wish, it would be nice if Magsafe could ride this rollback train.
It puts the dock in your touchbar. It's the first time in the 9 months I've had this laptop where I've actually gone "ok, this is useful" and I am actually using it. I now have the dock auto hide and I mostly use the touch bar to open apps.
That said, I'd still prefer they ditched the touchbar in favor of function keys. I'd be happy if they shrunk the ridiculous size of the touchpad a bit, and put a row of function keys in between the touchpad and keyboard as well.
Personally, while I have never once used the touchbar, I do think the ability for apps to display contextual function keys has a lot of use cases. I would be happy if they released physical keys with little oled screens on them, like that old Optimus keyboard. Apparently it was garbage but the tech has come a long way in ten years.
I think that one thing holding this back is the lack of a desktop keyboard with a touchbar display. If there was a normal sized keyboard where you could have a full keyboard and a TB display, that would help give an incentive to have more touchbar apps like pock.dev.
Unfortunately, so many people hate the current version of the touchbar that there hasn’t been much innovation in this area.
The problem with the touch bar is that you have to look away from the screen to use it. Physical buttons would allow you to touch type, and I don't think it's a problem to scan the keys a few times when you start using a new app. In that sense they are just as discoverable as keyboard shortcuts. You look them up a few times, and eventually you use them without thinking about it.
Interesting, I've been wondering for years why nobody makes e-ink keyboards. I'm old enough to remember the $1,200 Optimus keyboard that had OLED screens in each key. Everybody wanted one, but then it turned out they were total shit to use. E-ink should have far fewer challenges than oled screens though. Just a bit of feedback: your product page doesn't tell me anything about the hardware design. I would want to know what kind of switches you are using, materials, travel distance, tactility, etc before I would consider buying one. You might want to include some detailed technical specs on another page if you want to attract the hardcore keyboard nerds. While they aren't a large market, they are influencers. I'd also like to see some video of the keyboard being used before I plop down $200 on a preorder.
Windows laptops are far worse than the touchbar: replacing the function keys with volume, brightness etc.
The two worst keys are the touchpad lock key, and the WiFi key. Both of which "crash" the laptop when your average user hits them unintentionally: because either the touchpad stops working or the internet stops working. Absolute madness.
In all the laptops I've seen, volume and brightness controls require the Fn modifier to be pressed (or can be set to do so), else they behave as F1-F12 normally.
honestly what do you use the dock for? i find i set up my windows in different workspaces at the beginning of the day and just toggle between them. the dock is more of an annoyance nowadays.
The https://pock.dev Touch Bar is great. It can show you the DateTime, battery life, all of your open apps, but the thing I use it for most is Spotify. You can do swipe gestures on the Spotify Touch Bar icon to control the music player without opening the app at all.
Outside of the keyboard fiasco what else has Apple designed that’s so bad?
I quite like Face ID, the latest gen iPad Pro, and even the new Mac mini, and Mac Pro.
Sure the keyboards were bad, but like it or not Apple has a pretty obvious goal to get MacBooks as thin and light as possible. At some point they needed a switch from the existing keyboard design to make it thinner.
> Outside of the keyboard fiasco what else has Apple designed that’s so bad?
How about the first generation Pencil? To charge it you had to plug it in to your iPad.... it looked ridiculous and was very distracting. Thankfully, they fixed this in the second generation.
iOS 7 with zero affordance was slap in the face. It was epitome of form over function. Unfortunately the entire joined the bandwagon and it took yeas to dial back and undo the damage and or people just got used to it.
It’s pretty suggestive that Ive leaving was precipitated by this. He may have been forcing the keyboard against criticism. I’m sure he had huge clout from his big successes over the years. Good riddance, I say. I hope they make a dramatic back step on their laptops.
Once I got used to the new keyboards, I actually far prefer them. Ditto with the TouchBar. Yeah, I'm a heretic I suppose.
Keyboard: pleasant clicky-ness and little movement required. Thin AF.
TouchBar: customized with BetterTouchTools to be a hybrid of my most often-used shortcuts (expand menu, alfred, fantastical, window management, and 1password on the left, notification center and lock screen on the right) and music controls with gestures in the middle: shows current track, can change volume, switch tracks, play/pause, mute, or tap into a submenu to pull up most frequent playlists and add current songs to my library. Way better than using the function keys of old.
Oh and the escape key… long remapped to caps lock. If I really need caps lock, fn + caps lock key toggles it.
The problem that most people have is not with how it feels, it's how unreliable it is with buttons failing or missing keystrokes. Sometimes only caused by a spec of dust.
Getting used to the feeling of the flatter keyboard isn't really an issue for most people.
According to Twitter Poll by 50 different Web SaaS companies, All of them had MacBook Pro Keyboard failure in their team and have been working around them.
If you are telling me even a 5% keyboard failure rate within the first 2 year of purchase is an acceptable number that we can simply stop further discussion and say we agree to disagree.
I haven’t had a failure yet and I hate HATE the butterfly switches. I thought the old scissor switches were subpar and prefer a mechanical keyboard, though, so obviously thin and non-tactile are akin to profanity in my world...
How is "little movement required" a good thing though? Having a healthy amount of key travel makes typing a lot more comfortable. I'm not impressed by thinness either. Laptops are thin enough to be functional. When Apple says "our new keyboard design is 40% thinner" it's a non sequitur. The question should be whether it's better, not whether it's thinner. That should attract ridicule like if an energy drink advertised: "Our formula is now 11% more dense!" Like, I'm sure their flavor scientists are aware of the density but that's a random and bizarre data point to be bragging about publicly.
I think it's impossible to make an objective judgement about whether more key travel is better or worse. Personally I got used to the new keyboard in a couple of hours, and never thought key travel again. I do like the "clickiness" of the keys, but I don't really care how far I have to press it.
I would say the toucbar is a completely useless liability, and the poor durability of the keyboard is an issue, but if they were able to produce a butterfly keyboard which worked reliably and had a physical escape key it would be more than fine for me.
Yeah after a year getting used to it I thought the same. Then I went back and used my old Macbook Air while it was getting repaired (for keyboard issues, of course). After using the old MBA keyboard for more than 30 seconds I changed my mind pretty quickly.
I've tried BTT, but the biggest issue is you're trading touch typing for contextual hunt and peck, even worse if you're opening one of those submenus. You can fit 100x the shortcuts in the same real estate with f1~12 + modifier keys, and you don't have to look down from the screen.
Thank goodness. MacBooks are the best laptops in many respects, but I had to cross them off the buy list due to the keyboard. I understand it's controversial, but for me I've spent plenty of time using the butterfly keyboard and it just doesn't feel comfortable to me. And I'm not some mechanical keyboard purist, actually my favorite keyboard of all time was the previous chicklet keyboard. A runner up for me is a travel Bluetooth keyboard with round keys that Logitech makes.
For several years (after the ThinkPad brand got sold to Lenovo who promptly started shipping it with spyware) there wasn't really a PC laptop brand with a rock solid reputation for high build quality.
Lots of companies were putting their badges on inch-thick, mostly plastic 15" laptops with mediocre touchpads that never delivered the battery life they promised. And if your employer issued you with a Windows laptop, that was what you got. Remember laptop bags, when moving a laptop needed padding and a shoulder strap and pockets to carry your mouse and power brick?
That's not to say there weren't some good products out there - there were some well designed Vaios, some pretty daring early tablet PCs and so on. But there wasn't a brand where you could say "Just buy an X" and know that you'd get a good quality product.
Of course, in recent years a lot of PC manufacturers have stepped up their game (or maybe I'm just spending more money?) while Apple has had a few stumbles.
Oh, I would never just advise someone to buy a Lenovo. They might end up choosing some mediocre IdeaPad!
I only advise people to buy ThinkPads, and I make specific recommendations on what model to get and which options to choose after we talk about their needs. For example, most people are better off getting a better display instead of a faster CPU if they don't have the money for both.
Everyone I've advised like this has been delighted with their ThinkPads. If there is any "shadow" over the brand, it hasn't affected them or me.
Best overall balance between performance/weight/battery life.
Best trackpad, hands down, no caveats, no balancing against other concerns. It's just that good.
Best integration with other devices (iphone, watch, etc). Making calls/sending text messages from a laptop is something I'm unwilling to give up at this point.
And most importantly, it's _by far_ the best support for a commercial unix/unix-like OS on a laptop. Dell isn't too bad though.
In the end, unix or a unix-like os is hard requirement for many of us, and I'm just too tired of fiddling with xorg/powertop to get decent battery life. I just want to get work done.
The older (say 2008-2015) trackpad is best -- a dream to use. The newer one is too big, alas. It's shocking how often I accidentally press it when I'm just trying to rest my palms on my laptop.
(But yes, the unix-like OS that doesn't require a lot of fiddling about and has nice GUI is the big thing for me, too.)
Near-instant sleep/wake, best trackpad, Exceptional battery life, good weight/thinness balance for the power, industry-leading I/O performance with their SSD (which were PCIe years before the mainstream), very fast external ports (USB-C now) which can drive RAID disk arrays, fast flash drives, even eGPUs.
After the hardware, the software:
it's a GUI that just works with minimal fuss, supports most mainstream software, and also works with all the *nix stuff from Linux and BSD.
AND I can dual boot to Linux, Free/Open BSD, or Windows
AND I can run VMware or Parallels or the native Mac hypervisor (Docker)
I've seriously given consideration to the Surface Book Performance Base and the Dell XPS 15, but there are a lot of tradeoffs that keep me coming back to Apple's choices. The touchbar is not very useful to me but it's a minor thing. The keyboard I've been lucky (for 2 years).
The trackpad makes it impossible for me to use a non-Apple laptop (I particularly love the haptic ones) - if anything else comes close I would love to try it.
Except for trackpad and a decent MacOS, nothing really. Low quality hardware, increasingly subpar battery life on newer MBPs, battery swellings too common.
The hardware issues are common, but PR damage control teams, stakeholders, and fans will bury anyone who mentions it.
I’m still using my 2012 MacBook Pro desperately hoping they release a new 15-inch line without the Touch Bar. I had bought a MacBook pro with the Touch Bar and after a few weeks I just hated it more and more and returned it.
I’m still mad about them ditching MagSafe but I can get over that at least.
In the same position. Though I actually don’t like MagSafe that much. It falls out if you’re working on your lap, and the light is inconvenient if you charge at night. I much prefer the sound to notify charging.
> But will they still keep that awful touchbar where the Esc and F1-12 are supposed to be?
If you use the escape key often, it should be where caps-lock is. Mac OS X even has a built-in setting for this.
If you only use it once in a while, it doesn't really matter that it's a virtual touch key.
F1-12 has always been a horrible interface. They're too far away from home row. There's a reason why many hyper-optimized keyboads like Ergodox don't come with one. Letter-based keyboard shortcuts are always better, and are usually easier to remember because you can associate the letter they use with a word (Cmd+B for "Build").
The touch bar is objectively a better use of that space if you ask me, it just came with an unacceptable price jump. It's not that much better than the old key row
I realize this is a joke, but when typing e.g. "echo $ITERM_PROFILE", you have to press shift anyway to type the $ and any subsequent _'s, and I find it considerably easier to hold down the shift key, type the whole word, and release, instead of: press shift for $, release, press caps lock, release and press shift for _, release, type rest of word, and disable caps lock at the end.
Seriously, the only non-facetious use case (CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL) for caps lock that I've ever encountered is how EV Nova uses it as the 2x speed toggle. And even then, its open source successor Endless Sky emulates the same behavior even when I have caps lock still mapped to ctrl.
Does anyone have a real use case for caps lock? I'm even willing to accept a serious, no-kidding "YES I ACTUALLY TYPE IN ALL CAPS MOST OF THE TIME WHEN CHATTING WITH MY FRIENDS AND IT'S EASIER" as an answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caps_Lock#History and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Shift_key give some background. "However, because the shift key required more force to push (its mechanism was moving a much larger mass than other keys), and was operated by the little finger (normally the weakest finger on the hand), it was difficult to hold the shift down for more than two or three consecutive strokes. The "shift lock" key (the precursor to the modern caps lock) allowed the shift operation to be maintained indefinitely." This seems not very applicable to modern keyboards.
For non English keyboards, they let you toggle between different ‘alphabet’ sets. For Japanese keyboards, you can toggle them between hiragana and katakana, or full and half width characters.
There used to be an option for Chinese keyboards but I don’t remember what those were anymore.
I have a personal 2015 MBP but my current client has provided me with a 2018 MBP. Despite being a Vim user, I’ve discovered that the Touch ID allows me to shut my laptop more often due to the quick login, rather than it being an always open distraction. (I work from books and paper a lot). This is not applicable to many others, I’m sure, but I’ve found a new way of using the laptop as a result: as yet another tool and not the dominant one.
Yeah, it seems to me the ideal version still has TouchId but not the rest of the touch bar (Like modern Macbook Air). Combine that with scissor switch keys, and then I'll be happy to upgrade
Am I the only person who likes the butterfly keyboard? I like the feel of the low travel and the clickiness, whenever I use an old style MacBook the keys feel mushy.
I have had reliability problems though. Mostly I’ve had keys that don’t respond, but have always been able to fix those with compressed air. But once I had a sticky key that popped every other time I pressed it, that required a free Apple repair.
>> Am I the only person who likes the butterfly keyboard?
> Yes
No. I like it. To me it feels precise enough for a laptop keyboard, and better than the good but mushy previous version, with which I could have tactile feedback but no key event from time to time.
The only issue I have with it is the Damocles sword of reliability (crossing fingers here, it's been perfectly fine for now) and the up/down arrow keys but I'm a liberal user of vim as an editor and generally emacs shortcuts so it doesn't bother me too much.
i love it but in the time i owned it, the thing jammed up full of dust/crumbs and failed 3/4 times necessitating trips to the service center coz compressed air just wasn't doing the job
That's good news—for the people who are buying laptops next year.
Hopefully the return to scissor switches is combined with some improvements to the touch bar. My suggestion to Apple would be: put a small physical ESC key on the far left of the touch bar on 13 inch models, and include both physical F-keys AND a touch bar on the larger models.
Bonus points: allow people to choose classic F-keys on the 13 inch models as a BTO option.
I would love to see Apple make the touch bar an option. If Apple sold two identical MacBooks models, except for the touch bar, my guess would be that they would sell significantly more units without the touch bar.
Is anyone seriously benefiting from the touch bar or even using it for anything other than as a gimmick?
IMO it's a liability and an unmitigated failure. It feels like a decision which came down from the board room, not from UX. Like: how can we make this product "pop" and at the same time make keyboard replacements produce more revenue?
The toudchbar is useless without developer adoption, and there will never be developer adoption if the only people using the feature are those who can spend a couple thousand dollars on a laptop. It seems to me the non-inclusion on the new Macbook Air was an admission of failure.
I hate it, but I think there are definitely uses for the TouchBar. My main issue is the lack of indexing. You really can't use it without looking at your keyboard. I already dislike that the chiclet keyboards have no grouping of F-keys, unlike my standard layout keyboard that groups them into groups of four. But at least there I understand it's due to space constraints, and at least I still have some physical guide to the key I want.
Apple has squandered a lot of its goodwill. It reminds me of my relationship with Microsoft products. As long as they were shipping, they were making money in the short term because people were coerced to buy in.
For 5 damn years the Air didn't get a Retina display. Right now, I can't buy 2.8Ghz Macbook Pro unless I get the TouchBar. I can't buy an Air unless I settle for much lower specs.
The dongles and USB-C are a mess. The 2-meters-at-most charging cables are a downgrade which will mean shorter battery life due to lesser plugging in. The lack of Magsafe is a downgrade, they removed a feature. The lack of any port variety which my 2013 Macbook Air did exceedingly well is a major downgrade. Consumers must carry a variety of dongles because the laptops don't offer a variety of ports.
Profits are fine as long as they don't lead to perverse behavior. Apple needs to stop playing these fucking games and ship some pragmatism.
The Apple of Cook is reminiscent of the Microsoft of Ballmer. He is totally out of touch with the product -- the very thing that Jobs inculcated.
See, I use a retina MBP touchbar and really don't agree. Apple has made some missteps but it's still the best pro laptop for my uses. Over two years with one replaced keyboard (because I spilled wine on it!) and no sticking keys.
USB-C is awesome. I can reuse all my 3rd party and Apple adapters for my USB-C peripherals, including tablets and the Nintendo Switch. In retrospect, Magsafe wasn't that great (comes off too easily). Moving back to older USB ports really would make no sense. They're obsolete. If you have older peripherals, get the dongles. We've been using dongles since the VGA/DVI days or Serial/USB days, so I really don't get the problem with them. Life moves on.
I have a need for HDMI and VGA and Mini DisplayPort and old USB... not to mention lightning. MUCH rather would have a single standard of multi-port w/ dongles than a mess of fixed ports.
Also, on what planet did anyone have a Magsafe cord over 2m? It was fixed to the adapter. The 2m usb-c cable is removable, add it with the 1m (edit: 2m!) power cable and it is a further reach than any prior Mac laptop adapter I've had, though I suppose third party ones exist.
> Also, on what planet did anyone have a Magsafe cord over 2m? It was fixed to the adapter. The 2m usb-c cable is removable, add it with the 1m power cable and it is a further reach than any prior Mac laptop adapter I've had, though I suppose third party ones exist.
The power brick had a 2m detachable line-voltage cable, and fixed 2m low voltage cable. 2 + 2 = 4. I can sit 4m from the wall and charge using only the power adapter that came with the computer.
I'm also confused why you seem to think that Apple couldn't engineer a low voltage cable with connectors at both ends. Wouldn't that solve the cable fraying issue mentioned in your other post?
I see many people making the same argument as you: that USB-C is better because the cable is detachable from the power brick. Can you help me understand why you believe that Apple needed to move to USB-C to on the computer end in order to make a cable removable at the power supply end?
Apple could have easily had the best of both worlds: Put a USB-C plug on the cable and USB-C receptacle on the power brick. Then put both USB-C and magsafe receptacles on the computer. The USB-C -> magsafe cable could either be included with the computer or sold as an optional extra.
> The power brick had a 2m detachable line-voltage cable, and fixed 2m low voltage cable. 2 + 2 = 4. I can sit 4m from the wall and charge using only the power adapter that came with the computer.
You can use the very detachable line-voltage cable on your Apple's 60W (or was it 80?) USB-C charger too. The cable is removable at the power supply end.
> The power brick had a 2m detachable line-voltage cable, and fixed 2m low voltage cable. 2 + 2 = 4. I can sit 4m from the wall and charge using only the power adapter that came with the computer.
There's also the usual Apple Upgrade tax, the old charger was 85-90 euros and came with 4m of cable. The new one comes without a cable, is 99 euros and needs a 30 euro USB-C PD cable.
The new one is also much more useful, because it charges any arbitrary USB device: smartphones, tablets, visitors’ PC laptops, miscellaneous small gadgets, ...
Also, if the USB-C cord frays or breaks, it is replaceable.
I’m a bit sad about the loss of the magnetic connector, but overall I much prefer the new chargers.
I still wish someone would get around to putting 2–3 USB-C ports in a power strip which were capable of charging laptops though.
The old MagSafe stuff you could only (legitimately) buy from Apple. The USB-C stuff you can buy from anyone, and there are some decent quality cables and power supplies available that don't require you to pay the Apple tax.
> "Can you help me understand why you believe that Apple needed to move to USB-C to on the computer end in order to make a cable removable at the power supply end?"
The thing is, once you make the cable detachable at both ends, it eliminates the need for MagSafe in the first place.
A USB-C laptop will not go flying across the room if someone trips on the cable, because the cable will detach at either or both ends before that happens.
That's not quite true. The USB-C port is pretty strong relative to MagSafe. Depending on the surface where my laptop is resting, the laptop will move before the cable detaches.
I'm not going to test this, but I seriously doubt it.
My 13" MacBook is very light, and I can even lift it half way with the USB-C cable. Pretty certain it would fly to the floor if my feet swept the cable that way. Of course, I don't have it set up so that can happen.
Good point about the MacBook - they're much lighter than my MacBook Pro.
I'm surprised you can actually pick it up by the cable, however! The fit of the power cable in the USB-C ports on my (2017) 13" Pro is very loose - in fact, sometimes the power cable slips out on it's own with even a small movement. Maybe this has changed in the 13" MacBook?
> "The power brick had a 2m detachable line-voltage cable, and fixed 2m low voltage cable. 2 + 2 = 4. I can sit 4m from the wall and charge using only the power adapter that came with the computer."
You can still do this with the USB-C power brick. Apple sell the matching extension cable, or you can re-use one from an old MagSafe brick.
USB-C has lots of advantages, but it took 2-3 dark years before we started seeing commonly available peripherals that take advantage of the built-in protocols such as driver-less USB-C Ethernet adapters. I think USB-C on the iPad Pro and various phones has done more to turn USB-C into a viable standard than putting it on the laptops, since pros would obviously prefer existing and new Thunderbolt devices to USB-C devices. They could have moved iPhone/iPad to USB-C and used the MFI program to encourage USB-C for three years there, while adding USB-C support in a backwards-compatible way to their existing laptops. I would have been happy if they simply left me an HDMI port. As much as I want AirPlay everywhere, it's only in 2019 that we can buy a TV with AirPlay and make truly wireless/dongle-less Mac connections possible, which was the dream with Miracast on Windows/Android and the reality for many years with Chromecast.
Also, Magsafe might have come off easily, but every time it did, I went "oh, that is a nice feature!" I never once complained that I couldn't charge my laptop with it, the battery would die before the magsafe adapter would. Plus, why did Apple remove functionality from their power cords, forcing you to buy all the cables for the power cord separately? There were so many downgrades to the MacBook Pro, I wonder why I stuck with it... (Frankly, Windows was just that bad at the time. It's since improved, so maybe that'll light a fire under Apple a bit.)
A lot of people made the same argument when Jobs removed the cd drive from laptops. It seemed like an issue at the time given most software was still installed from CDs. After a two year dark period where you had to use an external cd drive, most people didn’t miss it.
The first USB-C MacBook came out four years ago. I've just taken a look at Amazon: the top hits for keyboards are USB-A, the top hits for projectors use HDMI, the top hits for 4K screens have HDMI and DisplayPort ports. Apple's portable devices all ship with USB-A charging cables. Do USB-C thumbdrives even exist?
Yes, some transitions in the past worked really well. That doesn't mean that other transitions are automatically going to be a success.
ThunderBolt 3 is successful as a successor to the niche port that was ThunderBolt 2: for eGPUs, docking stations, some displays. USB-C seems to be doing okay in replacing Micro-USB. But HDMI, USB, and (for what they do) SD cards and Ethernet seem like they're almost in the same categories as wall sockets by now.
The top hit for laptop in a windows machine, so what?
I remember being so worried about dongles and got extra. But then I found it better to just replace the cable to the printer and not have a dongle. Now they sit in a drawer unused.
The only hits I find on google are for a few sandisk drives with terrible amazon reviews reporting they're slow and get searing hot in the drive after only a few seconds of use. I'm kind of surprised sandisk would release that, one reviewer even reports theirs smoking after being inserted into a recent MBP. I'm also a bit surprised nobody has produced a working drive yet? Maybe there's so little demand for thumb drives these days it's just not worth the r&d to accomodate the standard with adequate cooling.
I found the Magsafe adapter cords would fray, corrode, and blacken pretty easily, becoming a fire hazard. Every Macbook I owned, I would need at least one replacement over a 3 year period.
The amount of time taken to re-plugin it in vs. times it saved my laptop from flying, really it was an overrated feature. USB-C comes out easily enough.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Magsafe. But I don't understand the passion for it, it had flaws and was a (nifty) minor feature.
>I found the Magsafe adapter cords would fray, corrode, and blacken pretty easily, becoming a fire hazard. Every Macbook I owned, I would need at least one replacement over a 3 year period.
That wasn't a fundamental problem with the MagSafe connector, but yet another symptom of Apple's detrimental obsession with aesthetics. The cable (like all Apple cables in recent years) had inadequate strain relief. Apple knew this, but decided that frayed and burned cables were preferable to an ugly strain relief boot. The problems with Apple cables are easily prevented with a few inches of electrical tape or a couple of pieces of heatshrink tubing to provide a satisfactory level of strain relief.
I wonder if you had a counterfeit Magsafe adapter? They commonly get shipped with used Macbooks, and get quite a bit hotter than their genuine counterparts.
I have personally preferred the Magsafe adapters ever since I had a USB-C powered Macbook slide off my bed by accident. It didn't fall far, but it landed right on the power cable and damaged both the USB port and the cable.
Understandably, Macbooks are not designed to withstand any sort of drops, but I'm positive that the Magsafe of my 2015 MBP would have popped out, and the body of the PC would have been fine.
I never had any cords fray ever on any product I ever owned.
Except for basically every single Apple product I ever got that had one of those stupid white cords no matter how gently I treated it. I've never bought anything Apple related from somewhere other than Apple and have been buying Apple products since the first iPod with the physical moveable wheel.
I think within the last few years they finally changed how they made the cords. My replacement Apple brick for my Macbook pro still looks filthy after a couple years of use, but has surprisingly not started fraying.
Almost half of my Apple cords are frayed, in the same spot, right next to their poor excuse for strain relief. Apple has a chronic problem with proper strain relief, and seem unwilling to fix it. Every other cord manufacturer on Earth has solved this problem with designs like this: [1]. Why Apple won't follow suit is beyond me. Maybe the appearance of it offends the sensitivities of one of their ID artists.
> "Why do you attribute fraying and/or blackening of the cable to the connector at the end?"
It was at the point where the cable meets the connector that the fraying problem occurred. I suspect that because of the nature of MagSafe, many people tended to pull on the cable to remove it rather than actually grip the connector, which contributed to the problem.
But the real flaw with MagSafe (other than it being proprietary) was that the cable was permanently attached to the power brick. At least with USB-C, if the cable fails, you can just replace the cable - not the entire power supply!
I'm not comparing platonic ideals of connectors, I'm talking about the actual physical product that shipped. Magsafe was a proprietary connector attached to a fixed, non-removable cable. That cable had noted flaws.
Whereas USB-C is a standard connector on a removable cable.
Probably because it happened at where the connector joined.
I, too, miss magsafe. I, too, believe that the newer USB-C cables are better engineered, and like the fact that I can replace the cable separately from the adapter if there's ever a problem with it.
> I found the Magsafe adapter cords would fray, corrode, and blacken pretty easily, becoming a fire hazard. Every Macbook I owned, I would need at least one replacement over a 3 year period.
My Magsafe power supply is a decade old, and except for being dirty has no problems.
You've repeated it a couple of times in this thread, and this doesn't hold up.
1. The cord is standard plastic sheathing: how does that fray?
2. Are you in a damp atmosphere for it to corrode?
3. You don't qualify what "blackening" is. Do you mean become dirty, or burnt?
1. See sibling posters. The plastic sheathing would split, and eventually splay. Electrical tape was the solution many used.
2. North America?
3. Burnt, i.e. the cable would turn brown at the edges connecting to the power supply or the Magsafe adapter.
I'm glad your power supply still works. This situation is sort of like the new MBP Keyboard: I've never had a problem with it, but many have. With the older power supplies, I've gone through at least three replacements over 10 years of MagSafe, not counting the new ones I received with new laptops. Much less expensive and time consuming than the keyboard so not as big a deal.
My point is that the Magsafe power adapters weren't this shining beacon of perfect design. They had flaws in practice, and USB-C has so far corrected those flaws (and introduced its own tradeoffs).
Steve Jobs used to constantly claim that Mac’s RISC processors were much faster than Intel, until the day Mac adopted Intel, then without blinking he said they are now much faster and never looked back.
That is salesmanship on a large scale. I thought Steve Jobs was the king of spin (ie convincing people of bullshit) until I saw Donald Trump run for President, and realized that you unlock a whole other level when you do this:
Well the G3 when it shipped it was pretty competitive if not faster, the G4 still was pretty good in some benchmarks but the Intel / AMD post Athlon fight broke loose by then so by the time Apple switched to the Core architecture they were pretty far behind in performance unless you were using 2 or 3 hand picked Photoshop filters all day.
I believe this was also an attempt to address the fraying problem and make the MagSafe cables/connectors last longer. By decreasing the tension needed to release it, it would reduce stress on the cable.
I get the warm and fuzzy feeling USB-C gives nerds, cause of the open standard and interoperability, and cause it only takes one attempt to actually plug it in; but I just cannot fathom how Apple replaced Magsafe with USB-C.
Magsafe was one of those magical Apple features from the mid 2000s that just delight and work incredibly well and almost seem like science fiction. It's not like they had shitty power adapters and USB-C was an upgrade. It was the Hofmeister Kink of Apple computers, and they got rid of it. I just do not understand at all.
You don't understand because you haven't shifted your mindset about Apple correctly. As a former Apple fan I was the same way.
Apple under Tim Cook is motivated by shareholder value, not usability or design leadership, as they were under Steve Jobs.
They got rid of Magsafe and the rest of the useful ports and added USB-C not because of the warm and fuzzy feeling it gives nerds, but because it streamlines factory production and makes the laptop thinner.
At some point Cook decided to shift their decision making from being driven by the power user's needs to being driven by the shareholder and average consumer (which is motivated more by marketing flourishes like thinner laptops and the Touch Bar than usability). Shareholders would likely applaud that.
The point is that Apple is more Microsoft than Apple these days and we should shift our expectations as such.
> They got rid of Magsafe and the rest of the useful ports and added USB-C not because of the warm and fuzzy feeling it gives nerds, but because it streamlines factory production and makes the laptop thinner.
A “former apple fan” should surely remember the hand-wringing over the iMac USB switch too. And Lightning?
Apple has always pushed almost-there technologies with benefits over legacy tech, this isn’t about “shareholder value”.
Sure, I remember ... The disabling of Flash and removal of CD drives, ethernet ports and headphone jacks are good examples too. I still have the dongles I bought for my Powerbook.
But up until now it hasn't been a unilateral replacement of all ports with just one type. The dongle I bought was an adapter for one port and one use-case. I didn't have to buy a new adapter for every peripheral I owned.
Ultimately if Apple had included a portable docking-station-like adapter that had HDMI and a few USB-not-C ports along with the laptop purchase I would be OK.
They got rid of Magsafe and the rest of the useful ports and added USB-C not because of the warm and fuzzy feeling it gives nerds, but because it streamlines factory production and makes the laptop thinner.
Except for the “make things thinner part”, there was the same complaint about the original iMac when they got rid of all of their ports and went USB all the way. The Macs before then had serial, ADB, and SCSI - and of course the floppy.
Magsafe adapters had quality issues. My company is all-Mac (3000 employees now), and you'd not believe the turnover of Magsafe power adapters frayed, blackened, corroding.
They got rid of magsafe because it's a lot less useful in a world of 8+ hour battery life. I generally don't plug in my laptop except for at my desk and/or at night.
> Moving back to older USB ports really would make no sense. They're obsolete.
I sure wish I could join you in the year 2030 where USB-C is everywhere, but unfortunately I’m stuck here in 2019 and USB-A is still the de-facto standard on just about everything.
It’s nice to design a product to be forward-looking and adopting standards early when it’s foreseeable that they will soon become big. Like the Mac mini 2018, with its 4x USB-C and 2x USB-A. Got the future ports, but also the still-current ports. Awesome! But designing a product with USB-C only, for a future that is many years away, is pretty stupid, it just makes the product inferior and inconvenient in the here-and-now.
You can get USB-C monitors, external hard drives, most modern phones connect via USB-C. What else do you need? Bluetooth fills in the gaps for things like external keyboards and mice and most modern printers can be connected to via wifi.
I appreciate my needs/requirements are not everyones but USB-C isn't exactly elusive these days.
Sure, if I throw away all the USB-A things I have and start over now... but that would be quite a waste.
Also, try to find a true USB-C hub. With that I mean a box with one upstream USB-C input and several (>= 3) USB-C downstream ports. As far as I can tell, such products still do not exist. There are many USB-C-docks with USB-C input, various other downstream ports, and sometimes an additional USB-C port which is power-delivery-only, with no data connection.
I have only found one such product at all, but it fits the description just barely: Belkin has a USB-C-hub, but with only 2 USB-C downstream ports, and only supporting 5Gbps and no Alt-DP-Mode on any of the ports.
When I looked into the issue of USB-C hubs some time ago, all I could find is this claim in a blog article [0] that suitable chips for such USB-C-hubs are not available:
> Update (2018-07-30): Accidental Tech Podcast reports on a rumor that next year Intel will finally ship the chip that’s needed for making a USB-C that adds additional type-C ports.
I just bought a brand new (released 2019) wireless Logitech mouse. Wireless dongle and charging cable are USB-A
I just bought a brand new (released 2019) audio interface, connects with USB-A
In fact, besides my recent 2018 external SSD which came with an interchangeable USB-A/C port, none of my newer devices are USB-C
So, this is more like... I've got my VCR and a DVD player, and all the new movies are only coming out on VHS
Edit: I'll add to this - it's also frustrating not having any other ports on the MBP as well. I recently had surgery and was bedridden for a while, and the nest of cables I needed for ethernet, HDMI, mouse, etc.. was insane. Normally it's not a huge deal, but there's a lot of factors that have been making me regret not getting a Razer Blade when I was deciding between the two.
I get your point, and at some point in the future I’m sure USB-C will prevail. My point is that we’re not there yet, and right now, having at least one old-fashioned USB-A port on a laptop is just useful.
Right now, it’s like throwing out your VCR and all VHS movies when DVD just came on the market and there’s barely any movies released on DVD yet. Did anybody with a sizeable VHS collection throw them away the day DVD arrived?
It’s too soon for “USB-C only” - at least for me - it would mean constant need for all kinds of dongles.
I bought a USB-C to alighting adapter for my phone, got USB-C Sony wireless headphones, and a couple USB-C adapters for my regular USB 3 devices. Kept all my Thunderbolt peripherals (bought a TB2->3 adapter), and a hub and a video adapter or two (HDMI and Display Port)
$200 later I’m happy but when I use my old 2013 MBP I feel kind of slighted.
You can buy cheap cables with USB-C on one end, and USB-A, USB-B, Display Port, mini-DP/Thunderbolt, HDMI, Lightning, mini/micro-USB, etc. on the other end. No need to change devices, just get new cables. There are even tiny little adapters that fit on the end of your existing cables; you’ll hardly notice them.
You cant keep everyone happy and I personally love having 4 USB-c ports, with any one of them supporting power to the mac adapter (with any 3rd party cable).
I have an external UCB-C 1TB M.2 and last night it transferred an entire 50gb directory of movies in <1-2 minutes to my MacBook Pro.
Amazon sells USB-A to USB-C converters that’s the size of a tip of an old USB-A and they work great. I have 4 of them and use them less and less as more of my external products are USB-C. The 3rd party parts market always responds in kind, just don't be a first year adopter and you'll be fine.
I have used a converter like the one you are linking to, but they damage easily, instead I recommend one with a bit of wire, like the ones Anker sells: https://www.anker.com/products/variant/powerline-usbc-to-usb... (they are also available on Amazon).
I agree that the laptop is great. Personally I love the USB-C ports and don't miss the magsafe. I bought plenty of cables for all my devices (i.e. usb-c to micro usb) so I'm not caught in dongle hell. The only reason I miss the USB-A port is I can't find a wireless mouse with a low-profile USB-C wifi adapter. Bluetooth mice kinda suck and the ones that do exist have annoyingly large adapters right now.
That keyboard though, nearly ruins everything, I can't stand it. This is both the absolute best and absolute worst laptop I've ever owned.
I do have a bluetooth mouse although it's not a Logitech. It works ok. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody but it gets the job done.
Maybe I should give a Logitech BT mouse a try. I've been holding out waiting for Logitech to release a mouse with a USB-C adapter but they don't seem to want my money.
Obsolete was an exaggeration. "In sunset", perhaps?
PS/2 mice and keyboards shipped for many years after USB. I expect USB-A will be around for a long time even though most of us will have moved on to USB-C.
The vast majority of USB accessories are still USB-A. Big manufacturers still use USB-A for everything. For example Logitech still has no USB-C mice or keyboard AFAIK.
The truth is that USB-C has seen a very slow adoption outside the mobile world.
If USB-C adoption surpasses USB-A in a couple more years it will make sense to call it "in sunset", but IMO that doesn't make much sense today.
The wireless keyboards and touchpads have a Lightning-to-USB-A cord, which can be plugged into the computer directly. Primarily for charging, but if you charge off the computer it'll use the wire instead of Bluetooth for typing.
Do you know of any PC keyboards/mice that do this? I want to be able to do things in the BIOS so having a Bluetooth keyboard that charges and is functional over a mini USB adaptor would be really useful. Same with a mouse, Bluetooth is not always great but a mouse that did both wired and wireless would be neat.
Even if this is only used once every six months when something goes wrong it would be nice to have. I prefer to use the same keyboard/mouse combo for all machines. Just having that full flexibility helps.
Not saying it wasn't useful for you, but I've literally never once used my SD Card reader. Having the option for putting it in would be nice for customers like you, but I'm happy it's not there for my laptop.
Yeah it totally depends on your workflow. If you do a lot of photography (I do Drone photography) you need an SD-Card reader to get the raw images off of your drone. I have a dongle so it's no big deal, but I would love to have a micro-sd card slot in my MBP. It's the only dongle I use regularly.
Apart from the OS, hardware wise there are quite a few laptops that are better pound-for-pound.
The XPS and Huawei MatebookX pro seem to be better in every way, with the polish that is expected of Apple products.
Think pads cater to a different market, but have all the same bells and whistles too.
The XPS and Thinkpads have great linux support, so it helps bridge the OS downsides to a certain extent.
The XPS 15 looks fantastic in theory. Great ports, high resolution, Linux support, there's even an Intel-only Precision model so I wouldn't have to deal with Nvidia drivers.
But every time the XPS line is refreshed, people confirm that there are still issues with coil whine. It baffles me that this issue hasn't been fixed in all these years.
For years I've been buying "Snuglets" and using them on my magsafe connectors to make them more secure. http://www.snuglet.com/ They are a cool little product making the cable less easy to pull out but still able to come out if pulled a bit harder. On probably a total of eight or more Macbooks over the years I've never had the cable pull the jack too hard or have the cable break. Highly recommended...
Honestly I think the touchbar is for Apple’s original constituents: creatives. I don’t use it when doing software development, but it’s amazing when I’m going through scuba movies. I can scrub through videos to get the perfect frame for my subject, which is especially nice since I have one of a creature none of my friends can identify. Only through scrubbing did I catch that two frames revealed a distinctive blue sheen on part of its black bands under a dive light.
I just last week bought a pristine, maxed-out 2015 MacBook Pro. Yet I think you're wrong about most of this.
* I hate magsafe. I've owned a dozen of these and almost all of them have come apart just behind the magsafe connector. Expensive, proprietary, and fragile. I would much much rather have USB-C than shell out $90 every two years.
* USB-C is great. A bunch of different ports means carrying a bunch of different cables, so it doesn't matter what's on the computer-side. USB-C to microusb is no different than the USB-A to microusb. Actually it's better; the tiny dongles give you options without carrying a multitude of cables.
* The touchbar is meh. I would probably enjoy having dedicated Step In/Step Over/Step Out buttons when debugging, but I'm not willing to pay $300 for that.
The real problems with the new machines, which pushed me into buying a 2015 model, are:
* The new keyboard. The ergonomics are fine, but I am hard on keyboards and nevertheless expect 5+ years of duty (my last machine was bought new in 2013, and just wasn't cutting it with 8G of RAM). I can't have an unreliable and expensive keyboard.
* The price. A reasonably spec'd MBP is now pushing $3k. It's just too much! The specs of a modern maxed-out MBP are nearly identical to the 2015 model I just bought. Critically, I can't get more than 16G of RAM in a 13" form factor (and I'd really rather have something smaller). I bought a functionally equivalent machine and paid less than a third of what a new one costs.
I don't want a sexy svelte fragile expensive luxury status symbol. I want a rugged capital good that will reliably allow me to work for the next half-decade.
USB-C is a clusterfuck and Apple forcing that as their only connector is just plain bad design.
I have a MBP but opted for the non-touchbar model because I happen to like the escape key (lots of time spent in vi - amongst other things). My MBP only comes with TWO USB-C ports. That means I have no choice but to carry around a dongle when before I rarely used to. What's worse, the charger uses one of those ports and most dongles are garbage that die after 3 months (finding one that doesn't is an expensive game of pot luck). To add insult to injury, one of the USB ports on the MBP has now stopped working as a display out (the USB-C connector is just garbage - but that's only one of the many reasons USB-C is a clusterfuck).
And as for the keyboard, how anyone can say "the ergonomics are fine" - particularly when you're a self-confessed hard typist - is just weird. It's by far and away the worst laptop keyboard I've ever typed on. It's no exaggeration that I prefer the keyboard on budget laptops and those things are cheap and nasty (but at least they work and don't send uncomfortable shock waves back up your fingers as you press the keys)
The new MBP's are what you'd design a laptop for looks rather than actual everyday usage. The fact it comes with a "Pro" label is really just an insult to everyone's intelligence.
> I have a MBP but opted for the non-touchbar model because I happen to like the escape key (lots of time spent in vi - amongst other things).
Incidentally, the worry isn't about no ESC key but the opposite. There's still the soft key on the touchbar, right where muscle memory expects it; but, since my finger hovers there by default, I frequently find myself triggering it unexpectedly. I eventually realised that a lot of what I thought were bugs were caused by my ESC-ing out of some intended action without being aware of it.
Whether or not you stick with the keyboard you dislike, you should try to fix this if possible. RSI is no joke, and “hard typing” causes excessive impact on your joints irrespective of keyboard.
You want to be using just enough force to reliably actuate the key.
(This is one reason that bad rubber dome keyboards are terrible: they don’t reliably actuate unless you really mash them, which trains people to type much too hard.)
USB C connectors are rated for a life of 10,000 cycles the same as USB micro. If your computer has only two USB C ports, especially if one is always used for charging leaving only one for general use, they will wear out faster than if you had a say a power jack and two or three USB ports plus maybe an HDMI port.
> The new keyboard. The ergonomics are fine, but I am hard on keyboards and nevertheless expect 5+ years of duty (my last machine was bought new in 2013, and just wasn't cutting it with 8G of RAM). I can't have an unreliable and expensive keyboard.
I just don't get it. I've had my MPB with the new keyboard for 9 months now and I hate it more than ever. The ergonomics are absolutely terrible, the layout (particularly the arrow keys is terrible) the feedback is terrible, the fragility is terrible, the touchbar is terrible.
9 months and I still can't type for shit on this keyboard. This is coming from somebody who can type over 100 WPM with 98% accuracy. On a normal keyboard, when warmed up, I can correct many mistakes without even looking at the keyboard OR the monitor. I just know I made a mistake and my fingers know what to do to fix it (a side-effect of having done dictation and typing out handwritten papers/notes professionally for a couple years).
They keyboard is objective crap. It's past time for it to go, or at least give us an option.
Personally, I have an older wired Apple "chiclet" keyboard (short-throw, not long) and I can hit ~120 WPM on it- which is way above the 90 WPM max I get on a clicky mechanical keyboard (Cherry Blue / Green / Red).
I don't like their new keyboards, and I have a Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard which I love to use, too, but Apple's slightly older keyboards have a spot in my heart.
I just switched to the Apple keyboard at work from my CODE keyboard (too loud in conference calls and I always forget to unmute) and I was shocked to find I’m faster on the Apple keyboard, even without any time to get used to it.
Soon after buying a 2016 Macbook Pro quicly I learned from personal experience how fragile thekeyboards were. Ater it was repaired under warranty I quickly sold it and bought two maxed out 2015 MacBook Pros hoping they would last until Apple got around to fixing the keyboard. It looks like my bet will be rewarded.
Also contributing to my decision is that the Touch Bar did not work for me at all. I have less than perfect eyesight. I need keys with tactile feedback and that don't move around to be sure I'm sure I'm accurately hitting the right key.
I do still have a non-touchbar 13 inch 2017 MacBook Pro that I use from time to time. I move around a lot and work in many locations. I've cursed Apple many times when suddenly needing to connect to an older USB or HDMI device but not having my dongle collection with me this time... The need to carry dongles seems like a kludge that detracts from the elegrant compactness the computer itself.
I’m only two months in having been clinging to my 2015 MBP until recently forced to upgrade by my company. Now I feel borderline incompetent at times when I can’t hit the arrow keys or escape smoothly. One solution is to use an external keyboard, but then I won’t adapt to the new feel and I’ll be stuck like this forever, unable to type competently in a meeting or any other time I’m away from my desk.
I could probably get used to the feel of the latest butterfly keys, but the arrow keys and virtual escape key and to a lesser extent virtual F-keys are intolerable. It’s like has Jony Ive ever had to type something? Hell no, he has people to do that for him, the important thing is everything he touches look immaculate in a 90-degree closeup and framed above his mantel.
You should make the caps lock key your escape key, that's what I do. It's vastly superior to the touchbar escape key. In fact, I even prefer it to a regular escape key at this point, although my muscle memory does cause problems when I use somebody else's computer.
I removed the escape key from my touchbar entirely because I kept accidentally brushing it when I went to type ` or ~. I also had the lock screen widget on the touchbar for a couple months, but I removed that because again I kept accidentally brushing that and locking my laptop when I meant to hit delete.
I think you are right, Ivy probably never really used the keyboard. He probably has a desk both at home and at work with the magic keyboard and that keyboard is decent enough. The couple hours he spends on the plane travelling between Cupertino and London isn't enough time for him to build up empathy for what the rest of us have to go through.
If you get a Japanese layout keyboard, you get a bunch of extra free keys which you use for whatever you want. https://i.imgur.com/tuCklIJ.jpg
Particularly handy are the extra thumb keys (I use the one to the right of the spacebar for backwards delete, but vim users could put escape there.). Also control is in the right place and caps lock is in the hard-to-reach corner, where it should be.
One especially nice approach is to re-map all of the right-hand letter keys one position over to the right, spreading the hands apart, making right enter and shift more accessible, and leaving an extra column of easily accessible index-finger keys in the middle of the keyboard.
If you shift the right hand over to the right by one key, then return will be in the same position relative to your hand as on a US-ANSI keyboard. You then only need to find an appropriate key to use for the right bracket and backslash, but there are plenty of good choices.
> I don't want a sexy svelte fragile expensive luxury status symbol. I want a rugged capital good that will reliably allow me to work for the next half-decade.
Then why are you looking at Apple products at all? You're looking for a ThinkPad or an EliteBook. Fragile expensive luxury status symbols are exactly what Apple makes and always has ever since Jobs. Now they're just more blatant about it.
I've seen such recommendations before, so my first non-Mac purchase in a decade (~2014) was a ThinkPad. I used to love the nub in the '90s, and I got used to it again, but otherwise the keyboard was horrible, and I eventually had to replace it. (A big plus: it was really easy to do.) Right out of the box I had a dead pixel on the screen, and, when I told customer support, they said that they regarded a certain number of dead pixels as normal, and would not replace it.
I'm sure I just had a bad experience, but I have never had either of these problems with any Mac purchase (aside from the fucked-up-by-design modern keyboards).
Yup, non-corporate customer support is terrible. The bright side is, everything is easily replaceable (or at least used to be until very recently) and if you don't want to do it yourself, chances are you can find a cheap third party tech to replace any screen, keyboard, etc.
Also, for what it's worth, in over a decade of using and recommending ThinkPads, I've never encountered a bad keyboard before. Dead pixels are fairly common, though.
That's just plain nonsense, and reveals that you've never actually supported 100 or 1000 laptops at once and become familiar with real-life failure rates of PC laptops from 2005-2015 vs. Macs.
If you have good statistics on real-life failure rates between Macs and ThinkPads/EliteBooks that contradict me (hopefully going past 2015, when Mac build quality really went down), by all means share them. I don't work in IT support and never claimed that I did.
ThinkPads have certainly gotten steadily worse over the years, along with every other laptop, but relative to the rest they still seem to be the most sensible choice. Personally, I just use and maintain a collection of old ThinkPads for laptops, relegating real work to the desktop.
More like $15 if you don't mind 3rd party adapters...
> I would probably enjoy having dedicated Step In/Step Over/Step Out buttons when debugging
This is the main drawback of current MacBooks, difficult to debug with them.
> A reasonably spec'd MBP is now pushing $3k
Yeah, on the other hand 13" now has a quadcore i7 that is faster than 4790k. 16GB RAM limit is too low (32GB chips are available) and SSDs are way overpriced. Latest butterfly keyboard is much better than the previous variants; touchbar is the only thing that really kills it for serious developers.
Yes, removing magsafe was regression. They could (or somebody could) do a magsafe adapter for them perhaps.
But this fetish to produce the smallest - we saw this before with mobile in the early day and that ended with what got affectionately known as the mars bar phone, then things got sane again.
But with laptops it is different - what we effectively have is - hey look at our new cool smaller and lighter laptop. Don't look at the now heavier, larger bag of adapter and accessories you now need to carry so you may use it as you intended.
Why their consumer base puts up with it makes no sense until you view the core of them as you view religion. Almost case for many that if Apple says jump, they jump. [EDIT ADD] This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEERq5tLiOY maybe sums it up :).
I like you comparision of Cook, maybe we will get a video of him one day doing a parody of Ballmer's infamous developers developers developers speech, with smaller smaller smaller. Maybe that has already happened - nobody would be supprised.
Had a quick google and yay - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Magnetic-Compatible-MacBook-Reversi... - though that was one of the first links that jumped out, nice picture of what it is, but if your getting one, do look around more as probably better or cheaper options.
Apple doesn't support USB-C adoption themselves, look at the cables included in all of their peripherals and the iOS lineup. They are all USB-A. Everything they sell is incompatible out of the box if you have anything in the MacBook line.
I'm spending $300 on your keyboard and trackpad... and I can't even plug it into my MacBook. I have to buy a separate $20 USB-C cable.
Why are they not including USB-A and USB-C cables in the box... if you're pushing for transition, put your money where your mouth is and take the (insignificant) hit. Or sell multiple unit versions that include the different USB types.
There is no transition strategy. Years after introducing USB-C, they don't even support it themselves. It's just so thoughtless and careless, and cheap.
> How do people see removing Magsafe as a downgrade?
Because it's so much easier to plug in. Get the plug close, and the magnet does the rest.
In contrast, with USB-C, you not only have to align it with the receptacle, you also have to apply considerable force. I've had my MBP fail to charge overnight because I mistakenly thought the USB-C cable was plugged in all the way.
USB-C cables also don't have the little LED to tell you that a) the computer is receiving juice (yellow or green); and b) whether the computer is fully charged (green). Just that feature alone would have save me from the not-charging situation I mentioned above.
Have you ever tripped over a cable with the Magsafe connector while attached to your laptop? It comes off, like it's supposed to. What about the USB-C connectors? The laptop comes off the desk.
What is the use case for tripping over your laptop charger cable?
I just can’t see myself having to do that very frequently, but I definitely remember the constant struggle that was keeping the magsafe cable plugged in.
This assumes that Magsafe laptops will never fall off the table, even if pulled at less than ideal angles, and USB-C laptops will always fall off the table, even if pulled at the perfect angle for unplugging.
Unless you read it uncharitably and require disclaimer clauses in every internet comment, their comment just suggests that one is better than the other and points out a practical and reasonable scenario that demonstrates this difference.
I really don't want an HN where we have to constantly hedge against an absolute reading of our comments with disclaimers like "btw, there are exceptions."
I disagree. I love the Magsafe adapter on my mid-2013 Macbook Air.
> And if the cable gets torn, I can just plug in another.
Personally, I am less concerned with the cable than I am for the power socket on the laptop, which if damaged could require replacing the whole motherboard.
I'm conflicted about the power adapter. I miss Magsafe. But I don't miss paying ~$80 when I (admittedly, stupidly) forget my charger on a trip. I can buy a $30 USB power brick, and then a USB C extension cable for a couple of dollars if I need a longer cable.
My dream is a Magsafe cable. USB C on both ends, magnetic connector in the middle (or near one end). Best of both worlds. But Apple wouldn't be able to charge $80 for that.
My favorite MagSafe adapter ever has been a 3rd party one with a giant cable (that uses the '8' connector that is used by a lot of my TVs etc as well) which I bought on Amazon for $35 bucks. It also has 3, 2.1Amp USB-A ports for charging my phone / kindle / etc.
It's really great and has lasted for 2 years so far with zero problems.
I disagree with all of these. USB-C is great. You can use non-Apple chargers now, and external batteries. I never understood the dongle issue. You almost always need a cable to connect to something anyway, right? So why not carry a C-A cable instead of an A-A cable? Or a C to HDMI cable instead of an HDMI to HDMI cable? Or do people really leave cables at home and count on their destination having the right ones?
I don't even know why anyone would need that many cables. I've had to plug in a USB drive into my Macbook literally once in six months, and for that, I got a $5 C-A adapter that's half the size of my thumb.
I used to think that Apple dropping CD drives in the original Air was a dealbreaker, but we all know how that CDs are largely redundant. The same way, we might realize in a few years that USB-A is redundant
I didn’t even mind the non-retina display on the Air. But ffs give me an IPS panel at least. For years I see it being called the best laptop again and again by tech journalists. I always wondered if I was in a parallel universe.
Despite not having IPS, I would still consider the Air of yesteryear to be the best laptop (for most people). I had the 2012 and 2014 models and found they were the perfect balance of form factor, build quality, and non-pro performance.
I haven't evaluated the latest Retina Air, but if it improves on the non-Retina air with a better display and TouchID, it's still probably the best laptop for most people.
The failure here is that they did not leverage their power over the market to drive adoption faster. Apple managed to get all the music labels in line back in the day, perhaps they could have done a little more to encourage peripheral makers. They could have, at the very least, dropped their proprietary lightning connector in new products in favor of USB, but I suppose they were blinded by the potential to increase short term revenue by selling superfluous future e-waste.
One would assume that they had gained knowledge as to how to encourage adoption of Type C with their experience with their previous supported standards which failed to become popular, but evidently not.
Adaptor and cable sales may have given them some revenue, but the need to use them, together with the other problems with their laptops have tarnished their brand.
The Ballmer comparison seems apt. Coasting on astronomical financial success while pursuing a vision (remember “Windows everywhere”?) that consumers don’t actually seem to want.
Fortunately it seems that Microsoft has experienced a renaissance. I wonder if Apple has the humility and self-reflection to do the same.
> The 2-meters-at-most charging cables are a downgrade
From what exactly? My 2015 MBP and partner's older Air both have 2 meter cables from the Magsafe connector to Transformer. Mac power supplies have always had a modular transformer to mains connector that you can swap out for longer if you need.
The MagSafe has a brilliant feature which is often forgotten: You can take someone else's MagSafe cable and plug it into your own MacBook without disturbing that person.
This is possible because of the magnetic connector, of course, but it's also because the connector has a light that tells you that the laptop is fully charged.
I frequently sit in an office with co-workers, or in a room with friends, and there's an unspoken rule that you can nab someone's charging cable if you need to charge your own MacBook.
The light helps in situations where the other person isn't near their MacBook, too. You'd obviously never take a charging cable from someone's laptop that might be low on juice. But if the light is green, you can.
> The light helps in situations where the other person isn't near their MacBook, too. You'd obviously never take a charging cable from someone's laptop that might be low on juice. But if the light is green, you can.
If they were doing any computation with the lid closed, that's not going to make you any friends.
I personally like the lack of Magsafe. It means I can charge my macbook pro and my iphone with the same cab... oh wait, no I can't. Add iPhones still using lightning to this list.
You can get cables longer than 2m. I have 4m usb-c cable for charging my computer.
And as for dongles, most people will need only one.
And it's not like with other computers you don't need any dongles.
Lottery with display connectors was always PITA (vga, hdmi, mini hdmi, micro hdmi, displayport, minidisplayport, dvi, mini-dvi). Having usb-c for that should finally solve this in some time.
> The 2-meters-at-most charging cables are a downgrade which will mean shorter battery life due to lesser plugging in.
You must be referring to the fact that the extension cable is no longer bundled with USB-C MacBooks like it was with Magsafe MacBooks. To me that's extremely minor. I almost used my extension cable. And the new wall charger that lets you just unplug the USB-C cable and replace it with your own is a big plus for portability because it means you can use whatever USB-C length cable you want for charging. Plus the USB-C standard means I can buy a very lightweight and relatively cheap PowerPort Atom PD 1 charger for my MBP that I keep in my backpack so I always have a charger with me even when I'm not home or at the office. In other words, way better battery life.
> The dongles and USB-C are a mess. The 2-meters-at-most charging cables are a downgrade which will mean shorter battery life due to lesser plugging in. The lack of Magsafe is a downgrade, they removed a feature. The lack of any port variety which my 2013 Macbook Air did exceedingly well is a major downgrade. Consumers must carry a variety of dongles because the laptops don't offer a variety of ports.
Must we? My USB-C external hard drive and USB-C phone disagree with you. As does my USB-C magnetic adapter and my USB-C monitor. No dongles here.
USB-C is the future (for USB), someone has to force the change.
The only place I ever plug anything besides a power cord into my macbook is at my desk, where there's a usb-c hub that has power, an external monitor, a USB mouse, a USB keyboard, and another open USB A port on it. I plug that single thing into my macbook and my entire workstation is plugged in. It's way less of a hassle than you're making it out to me.
You trained Deep Learning models with a 2GB GPU? It must be a very niche problem where it both fits on an onboard mobile GPU and provides a significant performance gain over CPU considering the data transfer overhead?
No, they are not. People have been saying the same when Apple killed NuBus, SCSI, serial, the old iPod adapter... USB-C is leaps better than old USB and is here to stay.
I wish Dell had an XPS 13 with 2x USB-C Thunderbolt.
People should really stop complaining about the dongle situation.
Just about any portable device can be bought with USB-C or wireless. For fixed desk hardware (keyboard, mouse, monitor, ethernet) you should use a TB dock anyway.
Yes, if you do presentations you probably need a dongle for the projector, but that has always been a mess anyway (VGA, HDMI, DP, DVI, it's never the same connection as your laptop).
Yes, if you use a camera you'll need an external SD card reader, but you'll need that for many other computers too.
People should really stop defending the dongle situation ...
My 4K monitor bought in 2016 doesn't have a USB C input so I need to purchase a $20+ USB-C to HDMI or DP cable if I want to use a monitor?
My iPhone SE bought in 2016 uses Lightning so I have to buy a $20+ Lightning to USB C cable to charge that as well? I guess I should throw out all of the other Lightning to USB-not-C cables I've had to purchase over the years?
My Apple USB keyboard bought in 2016 also uses USB-not-C so I guess I have to buy an adapter for that too?
Meanwhile my 2013 MBP is perfectly capable of connecting to a monitor and keyboard and charging a phone without paying for add-ons.
On top of that you suggest we "should" be using a $200+ TB dock anyway?
How about Apple doesn't require users to buy $300+ of adapters to use their latest laptop with modern peripherals?
This is not an Apple situation. I own a Lenovo laptop and I also had to invest in ~450 euro in peripherals (TB dock, extra chargers, cables). That's just the reality if you want multiple places (work, home, on the road) to work comfortably with a laptop.
In 2016 there were already usb-c peripherals that you could've opted for though. I've used a thunderbolt/usb-c monitor since then, which uses 1 cable for video data and mbp charging. This convenience alone has sold me on usb-c as the future.
> People should really stop complaining about the dongle situation.
You're not really refuting anything below, just essentially saying to people: you know, I know better than you, you don't really need these things (the same thing Apple is saying).
> Just about any portable device can be bought with USB-C or wireless. For fixed desk hardware (keyboard, mouse, monitor, ethernet) you should use a TB dock anyway.
Never had a need for a dock before...
> Yes, if you do presentations you probably need a dongle for the projector, but that has always been a mess anyway (VGA, HDMI, DP, DVI, it's never the same connection as your laptop).
I dunno, HDMI is pretty standard these days.
> Yes, if you use a camera you'll need an external SD card reader, but you'll need that for many other computers too.
No my current MBP, though, which is the point here.
I think I'm definitely in the minority here on this community, but I actually don't mind the keyboard and TouchBar.
The keyboard, although not as good as my Thinkpad, is far superior to many still and not bad. The problem I have with the keyboard is that it's not a user replaceable part and is nigh impossible to replace. Since it's the most used component arguably and wears and has moving parts and is exposed to the real world being able to for example like my Thinkpad of past take it out or replace it or clean it. Similar case could be said for the battery.
The Touch Bar I don't mind and like. Mapping the Esc key to caps lock works better for me anyway since I have small hands with short reach. I look at it as an evolution of the finger print reader you would often see in previous years on other laptops. Plus, it's programmable, which you would think the creative and entrepreneur bunch here would love and find many hacks and ways to take advantage of. I guess not.
I do look forward to any changes Apple decides though. The only Apple keyboard and computer I hated was the Titanium PowerBook. The keyboard on that and the fragility of the whole computer was terrible. My favorite so far as been the Aluminum PowerBook G4 12 and 17. Followed by the first MacBook Pro.
We likely are in the minority, but I find the 2016-19 era MacBook Pro to be the only laptop I can comfortably type on all day without triggering RSI pain. I also make extensive use of the Touch Bar. I will think twice about buying an updated machine.
The thing is you have to type differently on it -- no more banging down your fingers as you might be used to, just a very light touch that, once you get the hang of it, feels so much more graceful and civilized -- and no longer any strain in my wrists.
But I think a lot of people either don't realize they need to change the way they type physically, or are resistant to it. It takes a couple days to change your habits like that.
Tip: if you're one of the people complaining about the butterfly keyboards being loud... they aren't if you use less force.
I won't think twice, I'll be jumping right in on the new one, I think at least. Assuming it only gets better from here on out. I'm still deathly scared of the battery becoming worthless as well as my keys stop working reliably. The 'L' right now on my 2017/2018 MacBook Pro might need an Apple Store visit soon and I have had a keyboard cover on it since the split second I took it out of the box. I don't feel safe without the cover until the keyboard is a replaceable part again.
A counterpoint: I have not had an issue with my 2017 model despite never having had a case or keyboard cover, and travelling weekly with it. If you want a laptop with a replaceable keyboard I would look away from the Apple ecosystem, it’s quite obvious that is never coming back regardless of any design updates.
I remap Command to Caps, because I got used to Ctrl being there as a Sun admin, and now Command usually works where I expect Ctrl. At least Apple makes it easy to remap, though you have to remap every mechanical keyboard you own. ;-) I can't believe that it still takes a registry hack (and a re-login) on Windows.
I agree with you. I like the new keyboard, as long as it's reliable. After using the new keyboard for awhile I certainly do not want to go back. Hopefully the new keyboard keeps the current feel while fixing the reliability issues.
Too late for me. I've already jumped ship and the effort of moving back isn't worth it. I still have and use apple products, but I've no interest in buying any more now, thanks to the shoddy experience I had with their more recent products. I also have no interest in airpods, so a new iphone is out too. Apple won me over quite late and then within about two years lost me again. It made me sad, because I really liked their products during that time, especially the multi-device experience, but I now already use too many non-Apple devices for that to matter and don't care anymore now.
Mixture between a desktop, a cheap laptop (which I plan to replace with an X1 Carbon or a Thinkpad isn’t he coming months, although I haven’t researched it yet) and an old Mac Mini when I want to use mac software. OS-wise, I use Manjaro Linux.
Don't understand the problem. I like new keyboard more than the previous one, I'm indifferent to touchbar and mapping escape to capslock was the best thing ever. The only thing I hate is keys getting stuck, but it actually stopped happening(2017 model). I wouldn't like to come back to old keyboard now.
Yeah, I was very sceptical about both the keyboard and the touch bar until I actually got a new MBP for work. Now it's my favorite keyboard. Less effort pushing the keys seem to always mean swifter typing.
If you're always in a clean environment, the keyboard is ok.
I've used 3 consecutive mac laptops on the same balcony, open air. The one from 2010 and the one from 2014 are just fine thank you. The one from 2018 already has keyboard problems and it hasn't even been a year since i bought it.
Yeah that’s crucial. I’m still using my 2012 MBP. I clean it once or twice a year, more for aesthetics. It’s great not having to worry about where and how I use it (outside of extreme environments) every time I use it.
The new keyboard is less wobbly than the old keyboard. It would have been an awesome keyboard, if there is little more travel and they had completely fix the keys getting stuck issue. Maybe returning back to the scissor keys confirms that there isn't a solution yet.
Apart from reliability concerns (mine hasn't failed yet), the macbook 12" butterfly incarnation has become my favorite mobile keyboard now. Other keyboards, like my old-gen macbook pro feel mushy in comparison now, and at least for the ultra-svelte macbook 12" the obsession with thinness and lightness does pay off. I wonder if we will see a wave of butterfly nostalgia when the new design comes out.
I see many people complain about Apple products recently, but very few actually moving away to alternatives. It seems many are caught in the comfort zone of that walled garden, not to say locked in. This is why I started avoiding Apple products many years ago. Watching things evolve "from the outside" now I find it sad and funny at the same time.
It is possible for something to be simultaneously (a) crappy; (b) expensive; and (c) the best option available.
Prior to 2006, I was a hardcore Linux (and then FreeBSD) fan, but I had to use Windows for a lot of work- and school-related tasks. When Mac switched to x86, I felt less nervous about investing in it, knowing I could go back to Windows/Linux if I wanted.
When I switched, what I came to realize was that Apple - and Jobs specifically - was mostly not content to just be the best option available. They thought through the last little details. They added accelerometers to hard drive enclosures to stop the disk if the laptop fell. They made power cables attached by magnets so you wouldn't send your laptop flying if the cord was pulled. They had a philosophy that the computer should Just Work and - for the most part - their execution showed how dedicated they were to that.
Apple is no longer in that league. Hardware failures, design failures, software failures including goto fail and root password vulnerabilities... Apple simply isn't a perfectionist company anymore. Sure, there is a litany of "What about..." comparisons you can make from times Jobs got defensive instead of being a perfectionist, but this is different. It used to be the exception. Now it's the rule.
That's why people are upset. Something that used to be reliably great is now merely better than the rest - a low bar.
For many, there isn't a better option to turn to. If you want a mostly hassle-free Unix experience with wide COTS software support, macOS is your best choice. But it's a lot sloppier than it used to be and that justifiably causes some angst.
HP spectre and Dell XPS 13 are the laptops that people silently moved away to. These laptops saw a crazy amount of iteration(relative to other companies) to grab the apple dissatisfied niche. They're pretty successful, i see a lot of ex-macbook people who disliked the keyboard/touchbar switch with some variation of them
I've been gradually moving over to all USB-C peripherals, and the experience is great. It's an ergonomic connector, and it's nice not to have a bunch of separate subtypes for different applications (normal, micro, that weird long one etc.). The main problem has been lack of support for USB-C in peripheral manufacturers.
For instance, in the last couple years I purchased a high-end E-Reader and a pair of noise-canceling headphones, and neither of them had USB-C as an option (the headphones do as of the most recent iteraation, but oh well). Also it's impossible to find a Thunderbolt over USB-C external SSD which has a small form-factor and isn't obscenely expensive.
I'm ready to move into the USB-C-only future, but the ecosystem still isn't quite there yet.
Most stuff people use USB for still have the good old USB-A adapters: mice, keyboards, USB sticks/other drives, card readers, LTE dongles.
The things that actually need the massive speed benefits from USB-C (10G network adapters and PCIe enclosures) can have USB-C, fine with me, but please don't force users to buy and especially lose adapters just to be able to use their existing stuff. And no need to make shit ever more expensive and complex, a mouse won't ever need anything from USB-C.
I have a hard time understanding people that just keep complaining about the new USB-C ports instead of just buying a handful of those (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CVX3516) and permanently attaching them to the mouse/keyboard cables.
My late 2017 MacBook
Pro just started exhibiting signs of the butterfly effect. Not looking forward to giving up the machine for a couple days only to have it fail again. For me, the touchbar is also useless except as an annoying feature that tries to reactivate Siri or suddenly creates a new document when I overkey. Such a poor design.
It’s sad because other than the fact that I hate it I actually love the machine.
Finally!
Now please also admit that the TouchBar is a colossal failure that only a few niche users grew to like and either:
1) Ditch it completely - return the Fn key row back but add button for Touch Id (a. la the new MacBook Air)
OR
2) Invent a better version with Haptic Feedback so that Touch typists get a FEEL for hitting keys instead of moronically having to look down to ensure that they did not F* things up
Not the OP but yes I’ve used it and yes I hated it. 95% gimmick and frustrating as hell to use. Had to return my laptop and I’ve been desperately waiting for them to remove it for a 15-inch pro.
The "consulting" thing is pure window-dressing IMO. I have several friends who work for Apple, and from talking to them (+ everything I've ever read about their culture) either you're in the tent or you're out. Outsiders have no meaningful role in their process.
It really makes me appreciate how valuable it is to have a physical mute button on every device which makes sound. Especially when it gets hung for a few seconds, and I have to manually mute from the task bar using the cursor.
I'm really hoping for materials improvements across the board on the next 13" MBP. I haven't had that many issues with the keyboard, though do find it a little loud. However, I find that the aluminum scratches too easily, gets stained quickly, and the screen coating is very vulnerable to damage from both the keyboard pressing against it and just bout anything touching it. Likewise, while I happen to have only been using it exclusively as a portable laptop with not much plugged into it, the thought of trying to plug this into the wall, a monitor, and an external HD at the same time is infuriating. Even if I had a USB-C to displayport connector, I'd be out of ports. Couldn't even plug in a Logitech wireless mouse at the same time. It's pretty upsetting that I spent so much money and have more constraints than I did before.
You've pretty much summed up where I am with my 2017 13" MBP. It was a huge purchase for me and I felt it was an investment at the time (I'm spending a few years learning coding skills having been made redundant), but having had to have the screen replaced because of keybaord damage, and having ugly-looking wear around the thunderbolt ports - all of this on a laptop that I treat very well, and which had had a hardshell case since day one and always travels in a padded slip case - I can't say I'm impressed at all.
If it really was a 'pro' piece of kit, I wouldn't need to put a sheet of A4 paper between the screen and keyboard to avoid the glass getting damaged every time I shut it (it's now out of Apple Care warranty, and another screen would be £500). I actually like the feel of the keyboard (although it is noisy), and I love the trackpad - anything else feels like a cheap toy in comparison now.
I've needed on occasion to use it with external hardware - soundcard, dongle for Cubase, USB memory, etc., and it's a messy pain. I also have a 2010 15" MBP I was recently gifted, and it's better overall because it's solid, reliable and has lots of ports, and doesn't need to be treated with kid gloves. Yes, it has the procesing power of a ZX Spectrum in comparison to the 2017, but I can live with that. It's become my travelling laptop instead of the 2017 because it's not a hothouse flower.
I don't know if this trend was solely Jony Ive's, but I sincerely hope they will make actual 'Pro' machines in the future.
However, I shall not be buying one. This cost me a fortune (twice as much as any laptop I've bought in the past), and it's once bitten, twice shy, I'm afraid.
I hope this is true. I was about to replace my 2013 MBP with a used 2015 or shift over to Windows. (The Lenovo Carbon has a great keyboard.) I can wait until next year to see if Apple really does the right thing but if not - it's Lenovo for the new machine.
I feel like I'm the only one that actually preferred the new butterfly keys over the old one; even after some keys got sticky and I had to get them replaced.
I was able to get a few more 2 year old internal parts replaced while it happened so it was pretty worth it IMO.
All said and done, the problem with butterfly keyboards is the reliability. We don't associate 'unreliability' with Apple devices and screwing up on the keyboard is a big screwup because for those whom it won't work, it just makes your laptop unusable. Hence the justified pushback.
That did not happen with removal of CD drive, adding USB C only ports, removing magsafe. All these cause some painful transitions, they did not make your laptop unusable.
FWIW, I have 2018 MBP and so far the keyboard has worked fine, though I don't enjoy the lack of tactile feedback; I can see the perspective of those who bought it and the butterfly became kaput.
Avid user of Apple gear for many years and so happy they are throwing out that garbage. Ive never had the displeasure of actually using the butterfly keyboard on my daily driver (holding out with mid-2015 MBP 15) and dont plan on upgrading to a new Apple laptop if I have to deal with the touchbar/keyboard non—sense.
You’d think with the thousands of skus they ship today they could figure out most people would be happy with a refreshed 15 with 2 USB-A and 2 USB-C ports (I can live w/o Magsafe)
I was prepared to hate this keyboard when I bought a 2019 MBP bc my beloved 2015 MBP just wasn’t cutting it conpute-wise anymore, but...I don’t. It’s not bad, maybe I even slightly prefer it to the old one. I have experienced some sticking on the “l” key and that IS super annoying and needs to be solved. But the functional experience is...good. I miss MagSafe and usb-a and the touchbar is worthless so I’ve got gripes but to my surprise the keyboard really isn’t one of them!
I'm still nursing along my 2011 MBP. It's my work truck. Everything in it has been replaced or upgraded, but it still works well. The point is that it was possible to upgrade it myself. I won't buy another Apple product unless it has that feature.
I was doing the same until last week, happily chugging along on my pet project when my 2011 15" MBP screen went white as a ghost. Diagnostics all point toward a problem with the GPU; apparently that generation has a known defect that's only (temporarily) repairable by replacing the logic board. A repair too costly for me to justify.
My recommendation would be to avoid graphically intense work if you hope to continue using the machine for a long time.
I was seriously bummed when my machine died. Fortunately I was able to buy one of the very last Apple refurbed 2015 MBPs, which is still user upgradable to some extent, and avoids all the horrendous design trade-offs of the more recent generations.
I recently bought a MBP, my first ever Mac, and it is absolutely amazing. Smooth, fast, secure, and the trackpad is an incredible experience. My only significant complaint I have of it is the keyboard.
If Apple replaces only the keyboard, the MBP is the undisputed best laptop available today.
I'm still using a dual core. Apple thinks if you want a high end laptop, you want a touch bar. I don't, I played with it and returned it. I vastly prefer the real keys.
Also while your at it - produce a proper Pro laptop!
Worry less about the thinness and
- add better thermal control
- more memory
- more storage.
- extra port or too so less requirements for dongles.
- option for matt rather than shiny displays
- old style trackpads with physical click - the new ones give me
cognitive dissonance
In terms of touch bar - it's mixed. I really miss the physical escape key ( but then I'm an emacs user ), but quite like the context dependence of the rest - as day to day escape is the only one that's really memory mapped.
So can't we have a physical escape key and the rest be touch bar?
You should just get the new Macbook Air thats being referenced in the article. Proper keyboard, No stupid touch bar, but still has Touch ID. Great machine.
Exactly - road warriors, who want lightness and style ( sales and senior management ) over substance can get an Air. Serious users - developers, scientists, artists - want a serious machine.
I'd be interested in MBP sales figures from the batch of MacBooks with the new keyboard/touch bar.
From my perspective, despite a whole host of issues, very few people seem to have actually moved away from Mac's. I hear a lot of grumbling, but you only need to look at this thread to see people claim that the MBP is the best professional-grade laptop available today, when the issues with the OS, the keyboard, and the touch bar indicate that this hasn't been the case for years.
I assumed that for this reason Apple would have stuck with their design choice, and would iterate over time - unless there has been a significant enough drop in sales.
There's been room in the budget for me to upgrade my work MBP for about 6 months. I haven't considered it. I've got the old keyboard and I've seen what my coworkers have to deal with.
I've also convinced my wife to wait on replacing her decade-old MacBook.
Hmm, that's probably also a big part of it. A good professional-grade laptop can last for years. I've had my 1st gen Surface Book for about three years now and it's as fast as the day I bought it. Unless something breaks, I have zero reason to upgrade to anything different.
I'm in the same boat as you at work. I've got an older MBP, and despite a dent in the screen and some trackpad issues I would rather stay with this model than upgrade to a newer, inferior one.
I've moved from a MacBook Pro to a Lenovo IdeaPad running Linux Mint and have not looked back. While it was more for cost reasons than any dissatisfaction with Mac features, I haven't really missed anything from the Mac at all.
I stick with it because, in only my very subjective and personal view, there's no other OS available that is as streamlined as Mac OS. I try all modern offerings just about once a year, and have yet to find anything better for myself. It's their one saving grace in my view.
Would you say that this is because the alternatives aren't as good, or because your workflow is tied towards using Mac?
In my case, I think it's definitely the latter. For Ruby dev I could switch to Debian tomorrow and probably be fine, especially since most of the stuff I work on from day to day uses Docker. That won't stop my workplace from buying MBP's, though..
For me personally, the alternatives aren't as good. I came from a long history of Windows use (back to 1.0, up to Windows 7) and have kept a watchful eye on Linux and newer Windows versions.
Or a significant increase in repair work. It'd be hard for them to know that I'm waiting to upgrade my 2013 MBP until they switch, but easy to count the number of service appointments for keys blocked or sticking due to tiny amounts of dust.
Great! Maybe next year I can finally get a new mbp :) I've been staying on 2013 mbp because of that but it's getting long in the tooth (plus affected by staingate but apparently too late for Apple to fix)
About time, been wanting get a MacBook pro to replace my 2011 MacBook Air but wasn't going to get one with that keyboard. Will still wait a while to see if new design is any good.
Yep, same here. I broke down and got a used 2015 MBP when the new Gen Airs came out, because I needed something and just couldn't handle the butterfly keyboard. ($day_job machine is a 2017 MBP, and 95% of the time, I use an external keyboard/monitor)
You can pry my early 2015 macbook air from my cold dead hands! Easily the best laptop I have ever used, sturdy, cool to touch, lightweight, keyboard is fantastic and never hurts to use for a long time.
I want Apple to release this same model with updated specs, why ruin a great formula by adding touchbar which I never ever ever use. It's like the R&D department/marketing had to use their budget or lose it and they cooked something up which made no sense but looked cool in promos.
I own MacBook 12 inch with 2nd gen of this keyboard from 2017 and actually like it more than on MacBook Pros that I got from a company I worked for. It seems to be a bit different, like click is smaller and is quieter. In MacBook 12 it matches whole laptop philosophy of being the thinest and lightest and even has smaller trackpad that you doesn't accidentally touch while typing.
I have the 2017 MacBook Pro. It did take a while to get use to the keyboard. Now I find other keyboards are mushy by comparison. On the touchbar, never really thought much about it. Seems to work okay for me. I'm amused by some of the folks that just seem to hate the later MacBook Pro's. Their hatred seems misplaced and over-wrought.
I think one of the bigger failures with the Touch Bar is that it's not available for a desktop computer - it would be far more advantageous for developers to support it in useful ways and invest developer time in it, if we could buy an external one, especially for an iMac Pro, for instance, where it could be included. My two cents.
While good recognition in the flaws of the keyboard mechanics, this still doesn't fix:
- no esc key (ok fine, ctrl-[)
- oversized trackpad where palms in resting position actuate it
- the "fat" keys with little to no gaps
- the weird oversized and awkward arrow keys
Seriously, just go back to 2015 keyboard/trackpad.
The Lenovo Yoga Book is a hinged tablet. Bottom half is a glass surface with both capacitive touch and Wacom digitiser. It comes with a Wacom pen, which has a swappable ballpoint pen nib so you can draw on paper and have it digitised. There's a backlit silkscreen-type stencil that shines through a (permanent) keyboard layout. And touchpad. So, it's touch-screen typing on a fixed keyboard layout. And you can swap between pen-digitiser and keyboard mode. A crazy set of features. I was very excited to buy it.
They keyboard is very hard to use. The pen is laggy and there's no really useful Android software. I use it exclusively for watching videos. Go figure.
Still, I'm glad they tried it. There's too much device monoculture IMHO.
Most products hit a point where the design space has been explored and there are only a few reasonable options. Outside of the recent touchbar and keyboard missteps apple picked up on the notion that people want laptops that are thin, and light with low bezel screens and big touchpads, a battery that works for the whole day and performance sufficient for huge numbers of tabs.
They've run with that design philosophy for a long time which has made their laptops hard to replace. I've been looking for a Linux laptop with similar specs to an mbp but it simply doesn't exist.
The bit about the swappable pen tip picked my interest, cool feature! As an avid believer that pen input is the most flexible way to express your thought process, I find it a bit of a lost art though, people born in the new millennium just wont spend the time to learn to write cursive. I went through most of the Note generation from Samsung and the SPen is getting really close to the look and feel of writing on paper. There's a Google hand writing keyboard for Android that is really good, in fact I am writing this using it.
Still, it looks like it will continue to be a niche functionality at best.
About 15 years ago during my studies I dreamt of a tablet device with pen input and hand writing recognition for advanced maths. I was writing a lot during my physics lectures but almost no plain text. I would still like to have such a device, but also with a CAS integrated with the handwriting recognition. This would take the pain out of typing stuff into a CAS using obscure syntax.
IMO iPad Pro with the appropriate software would be perfect. However, I think handwriting recognition for math might be too much a niche for developer to focus and polish into software that’s a pleasure to use.
And recognizing math is hard. That is a huge set of symbols (sometimes with semantically meaningful "tiny" variations like doubled up vertical lines on an R) and their size and relative positioning carries a lot of meaning. Handwriting is a walk in the park compared to that.
As someone with bad writing, I have very fond memories of the Graffiti input system from Palm. I can still remember the alphabet 20 years (it was painful writing that!) later.
Upon clicking that link: annoying survey popup, long loading times, chat with a Lenovo specialist modal on the side, not a great color scheme, buggy scrolling.
It baffles me that anyone would even attempt this, considering that a very similar technology -- not touchscreen keyboard, but with roughly similar properties -- has been tried in the 1980s, repeatedly, and has been, well, pretty much a failure for general-purpose computing.
(Edit: for confused readers, what we used to call a "membrane keyboard" looked like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Magnavox... . I.e. literally a membrane, with key outlines printed and nothing else. You'd press on the outlines which would go down, traveling no more than a few mm, a distance that was barely perceivable).
The ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000 in the US), the Magnavox Odissey, all had membrane keyboards and they were absolutely miserable. They weren't laggy or anything, it's just that the nearly complete absence of tactile feedback made them extremely annoying to use for any kind of productive purpose. They were beyond terrible and I can't imagine why anyone would want to go back to almost that. I say "almost" because membrane keyboards actually had a modicum of tactile feedback, and some manufacturers did eventually give in and produce membrane keyboards with some sort of tactile hints (e.g. embossed letter outlines). Touchscreens are even worse than that.
Membrane keyboards were ok (and still are) for things like limited consumer electronics controls and 16-key industrial touchpads (they're basically immune to liquids and dust). But they turned out to be useless for typing more than 20-30 characters at a time and they were abandoned save for a few niches.
But it's cheap. Had it been priced at 1500 USD, and had Windows 10 instead of Android - well, at very least the pen wouldn't be so laggy, and there would be software. And then, perhaps, there would be something akin to haptic feedback for the keyboard.
My point is: if Apple would ever attempt to do something like this the user experience would probably be out of the ballpark. And if it couldn't hit it - they wouldn't sell it.
See also: foldable phone craze.
Counterpoint: I hate the Touch Bar.
The machine is cool though. I have one and use it just for testing purposes. So the strange keyboard is a feature for me.
The thing is that the on-screen keyboard is far more preferable than the expensive Wacom stand.
I don't think it is bad as a spare power brick, plus the sound on it is pretty good. For pose value the TRON style keyboard works every time.
I'm amazed by my iPhone 8 home button. It's not a real button, it's just an imitation, but its feedback is so real. I don't know whether it would be possible, but I think that it's a possibility: to imitate an entire keyboard with just flat touch panel. That would solve all problems with those movement parts that always failing and there would be no holes for dust at all!
Taptic Engine is a very good click emulator. The touchpad of newer MacBooks and tactile feedbacks of newer iPhones are just amazing.
On the other side, nothing can emulate a good (even membrane) keyboard, because typing's most important sensory feedback is not touch or sound, but finger travel.
I'm a programmer and use a variety of keyboards. I have an 2014 MacBook Pro, a lowish end membrane keyboard at office and a Logitech G710+ with CherryMX Brown switches.
The winner is Cherry MX, hands down, but MacBook has a very nice tactile travel feel, so I can write way faster for a membrane keyboard.
The promise of butterfly keyboard was sharp tactile feed to enable faster writing speeds, but it proved to be too fragile as far as I can see. I've never used one for a long time, so I cannot comment on it with any authority.
It's pretty hard to go back to membrane or scissor switches when one has gotten used to a mechanical keyboard.
When I bough the small Magic Keyboard 2 for use with my midi controller(I needed a bluetooth keyboard), it took me weeks to adjust. It felt like banging on a flat table for a while.
I'll never understand the infatuation with mechanical kb's. I am old enough to be trained on them, but the low-travel scissor types are so much nicer to type and don't give you RSI.
A low travel scissor keyboard, Apple keyboards or a high quality membrane keyboard like Microsoft Ergonomic series are very nice and comfortable keyboards in my opinion too. However today's mechanical keyboards are a bit different when compared to older ones.
First of all, the new switches are way too lighter than an old buckling spring or Cherry Blue equivalents. Also the ones I use (Cherry MX Brown) are way lighter than any moderately worn membrane keyboard.
The new keys are also more silent when compared to older buckling ones. If you want noise, you can use Cherry MX Blue. If you want absolute silence with no feedback whatsoever, you can use Cherry MX RED (and its friends). I personally prefer Cherry MX Brown, which is a good compromise between noise and feedback. My office friends are using Sun's old mechanical keyboards, and it doesn't bother any of us noise-wise.
Also, the mechanical keyboards give a much consistent feedback and their key weight doesn't change with age. I've used a Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 for ~10 years and its weight changes over the years.
Last but not least, nearly all of them are backlit. This is a huge plus for me.
I'm not after customization or anything in my devices (which is hugely useful for some), but its comfort benefits and consistency both reduced the fatigue and increased my writing speed and accuracy at the same time.
They're infinitely more customizable, by not being (as) mass-produced, for one. I prefer keyswitches that have a lower weight and more travel than membrane switches, but if you legitimately prefer low-travel switches, those certainly exist in the mechanical realm too.
The RSI point is significantly more controversial. Practically any type of laptop keyboard or non-split desktop keyboard puts your arms and wrists at unnatural angles and encourages poor posture. I'm not going to argue that my non-split mechanical keyboard is any better for my health than a membrane keyboard, but mechanical keyboards give you enough customization that you can choose between hundreds of split designs or build your own to suit your specific tastes.
Besides, I've noticed that mechanical keyboard users rarely use the entire length of their switch travel; the entire point of tactile or clicky switches is to be able to actuate them without bottoming out. Typing on a MacBook keyboard (even the nicer scissor-switch kinds) feels almost like typing on a glass screen because you're forced to have each keystroke bottom out on the hard surface underneath.
I'll just throw in one more anecdote, but I've never felt any pain whatsoever and used laptop keyboards my whole life (30 now), whereas whenever I've tried mechanical, and I've tried at least 5 now, I always revert within a few days due to discomfort/soreness. Even with a large wrist rest your hands are doing so much more work moving around.
I just don't find the idea that split keyboards are more "natural" to be true either. I've never felt a lack of comfort with the standard setup. Are there any well-done studies published on this?
Funnily enough, I've used Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 for a decade, and its split design forced me to learn touch typing because I've always tried to cross that gap and landed in the split.
Also after getting used to it, it was one of the most reliable and comfortable keyboards that I've ever used. However, I've eventually wore it down and its keys started to get heavier. So, I moved to G710+, and I'm very happy now.
I'm surprised you say this. I was having issues with wrist pain at work from typing so bought myself a keyboard with cherry mx browns - has done wonders for me.
Same here. It's an unpopular opinion because you lose nerd cred but I remember the din of a cube farm full of people banging away on mechanical keyboards, and I have no desire to repeat the experience in an open plan office. I'm glad the things are expensive.
I my eye nobody uses nerd cred for not liking mechanical keyboards. Its noise footprint is bigger than a good membrane keyboard in most circumstances, but it provides other benefits. It's a matter of trade-off. If one size have fit to all of us, we were be still using buckling spring keyboards. :)
Although I agree with you I wonder if it’s just an artifact of how we were trained to type. When I see kids type on glass they don’t seem to require this tactile feedback. In 5-10 years, basically when today’s 10 year olds are of working age, I wonder what we will see.
When I'm looking to the keyboard of my phone or tablet, I also don't need feedback, however while writing on a desktop PC or workstation and writing code full speed, physical keyboard gives my brain hints for alignment and takes another concentration task from my consciousness.
Another effect is the screen size. You can see the keyboard and text area in your vision on a phone or tablet, but it's not possible in a desktop or laptop.
Looks like it boils down to the information that we can gather about our fingers and hitting targets with the vision and other senses during writing.
Funny thing is, I can write faster while I'm listening to music and cannot hear the keys' sounds.
Definitely. It’s interesting how personal it all is. I guess I’m just theorizing how long until we are the modern equivalent of a writer who can only write with a typewriter.
When I was a kid writers would discuss typewriters very similar to how we discuss keyboards. I haven't seen a typewriter in years. ;)
I like the flat style of Apple scissor keyboards, but I won’t discount what could be done with a touch surface “keyboard”. Why worry about emulating the feel of a mechanical keyboard? I love swipe keyboards on phones; removing physical keys makes that frictionless on computer keyboards. (Though predictive text may not be as fun for terminal flags.) And there are probably other gains to be made if you can unlearn what you learned from Mavis Beacon.
For that matter, why emulate a mechanical keyboard at all? If we unlearn the whole ”static” key concepts maybe there is even more to gain. Probably too late for me though. ;)
But imagine trying to use it without looking if it was completely flat. Keys without edges won't work well unless you're looking like on a mobile. There is tech for a display that can render relief.
Well, you can put some borders between buttons. I'm not suggesting on fully reconfigurable keyboard, while that would be interesting, I don't think that it's strictly needed. Physical keyboard layouts are static and that's OK. But the ability to display different labels on buttons might be handly. For example every Russian uses two layouts: English and Russian layout. Russian keyboards have both letters printed, usually with different colour. Now displaying correct letter on each key when user switches layouts, would be an improvement over current situation.
I'm still not used to the missing gaps between function keys on my newer Windows laptop. That and the up and down arrow keys squished to fit between the right and left arrows.
It's like the people who design these never used arrow or function keys. Did they think the gaps and positioning were arbitrary and useless?
What's wrong with just going back to plain-old keyboards that work? Why do we need this 'innovation' in the keyboard space?
'My keyboard broke' has never been a problem. I used the same laptop for just shy of 12 years. No keyboard problems. I'm typing on a 10+ year old keyboard right now. The only 'problem' is that some of the letters are partially worn away. Why not just use what works instead of inventing something new, probably more expensive, with new and different failure modes?
Let's start with the zero moving parts and completely impervious to liquid spills or crumbs. Obviously it has to be, first and foremost, a great keyboard. To be determined whether it's possible to achieve, but it's certainly a worthwhile goal.
The trackpad on macbook pros work the same. There's a big issue there though: on a keyboard you want and expect travel at the physical level, that travel is a significant part of the feedback. One of the issues in the butterfly is many people hurt after typing for some time, the lack of resistance before smashing into the hard stop is a source of physical trauma.
I've got to say I'm surprised that anyone would really be fooled by the 8 home button. The haptic feedback is nice, but it still doesn't feel "real", at least not to me.
Apple got their multitouch capacitive screen technology from a company called FingerWorks that used to produce keyboards. The keyboards were apparently popular with some people with RSI.
After the sale to Apple, they stopped producing keyboards and prices for anything that remained skyrocketed to $1500.
Maybe that’s an idea, simply get 2 iPad Minis and display keys on them for a full keyboard. You could angle them and redraw the keys however you want. If you really need tactile feedback, just place the keys on top. No need to wire them up.
I actually think that ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is now much more innovative than recent MacBooks and I'll likely get one next year for a "travel Deep Learning" workstation with a great design (resembles classic 8-bit computers a bit).
Apple needs to invest in force field research to ship a flat keyboard with keys simulated by force field, keeping fingers away! That will be the realization of Jony Ive's modernist aluminium/glass plate dreams. No more moving parts!
The complexity and cost of butterfly keyboards comparatively to traditional keyboards, reliables and cheaps just reminds me a bit an article I read on the development of Electromagnetic Catapults in US Navy (hard to build, astronomical costs).
I wonder how much this will affect sales between now and the 2020 model. As a 2018 owner, I strongly recommend everyone who can to hold out until they change the keyboard...
Shout out for the current generation Surface keyboard (both full size, and, surprisingly also the Go). A thin and light keyboard that is almost pleasing to use.
Are the butterflies justifiably thinner than the older chicklet keyboard? I feel like there is no way they made a measurable difference... But maybe it did.
There was (in my filter bubble) a pretty big wave of people moving away (or at least looking) after Apple introduced their touchbar models; I wouldn't be surprised if they felt that in their numbers. Or if they didn't because lower volume but higher price can even one another out, I guess.
the keyboard is actually awesome, when it works properly. I really love it. The short key travel is great, and using older macbook keyboards now feels like going back to a typewriter.
However, I am also one of those who's taking his 2 months old macbook to repair shop, coz one of the keys just stops clicking and becomes rubbery.
Given that I am not a vi user, ESC being there doesn't matter to me.
There are the F keys when debugging, but I tend to jump between them and mouse anyway.
Since I only use Mac devices occasionally at work, I guess all in all it doesn't make that bad impression on me, versus fighting single keys for input.
As a vim user, I always use Ctrl-[ anyway instead of escape. So I map my capslock to control.
(Although nowadays I mainly use a kinesis advantage keyboard so non of that matters much anymore. Hell, many of vi's features like hjkl movement don't matter anymore either as all the modifier keys are all easily reachable now)
I've got [capslock] mapped to [control] via system prefs already, and I'm not willing to give that up. As a Vim user, that puts me in a quandary for how to deal with the [escape] key should I ever move to a touchbar MBP, and is one of the reasons I'm still typing this on a 2012 MBPr. I live inside Vim all day every day.
jesus christ, don't let apple bring that evil into the world on a macbook. on an ipad maybe but if it's on a mac i'll have to carry around my bt keyboard everywhere and that's no bueno
I took multiple days to get my hackintosh running. The only reason I kept going was because I didn’t want to buy a MB that could break down anytime and take days to repair. I am glad they are finally switching the keyboard.
This is good news! Sad to say I can’t buy another Mac laptop until the Touch Bar is gone, too. Sad, too, because that means I’m stuck with Linux, which is much higher maintenance than Mac OS. ;-)
The hand-wringing and breathless condemnation around this keyboard borders on hysterics, so I will be glad when a new design shifts the criticism to something more interesting.
Edit: not sure why this is being downvoted, this is literally the source URL quoted in the Verge article and Vox sites (including this one) are frequently filled with clickbait.
I’m a tiny bit upset. I really liked the keys becoming lower profile. I don’t get any joy out of expending extra energy depressing buttons. For example, mechanical keyboards give me extreme RSI wrist pain from straining to push down all of the switches. Secretly I was hoping Apple would create a haptic capacitive touch keyboard with a display behind it.
Is it possible you were thinking you had to bottom out the keys on a mechanical keyboard? Good switches have a fairly long travel, but it's important to note they're not designed to be bottomed out, they're designed to be pushed to the activation point and then released. Where that activation point is may be harder to detect on some switches, but "clicky" switches like Cherry Blues have a strong tactile indicator.
I totally agree about bottoming out. It's more about the amount of force needed to trigger the switch, which on a capactive touch would be 0. I use o-rings too to decrease the length of the throw and to make bottoming out quieter and less impactful if it happens on accident. Mechanical keyboards just don't agree with my hands and wrists sadly.
Anybody still buying MacBooks doesn't know what they are doing... A Lenovo Thinkpad would destroy it in every way imaginable, but marketing is more important that real world function
Some people (like me) still prefer MacBooks due to software rather than hardware. Building a Hackintosh is not pain-free and, although the Linux experience has improved a lot, is still not at the same level.
The comments in this thread are hilarious. I guess some of you all have forgotten about that can of duster you’ve relied on for the last 30+ years to clean the muck from just about every keyboard. I don’t understand the rage...
I use my MBP just as much as anyone, the butterfly keys feel so much better than the old clickity keys and I’ve gotten use to the TouchBar. F Keys we’re useless to me unless they were remapped, and now the TouchBar gives me a lot of options for customizations.
Been kind of my experience too. Bought my wife a rose gold entry level MacBook a couple of years back and, it’s one of the nicest laptops I’ve ever had. I have a MacBook Pro for work and the touchbar doesn’t bother me. Screen is beautiful, plenty powerful.
I’ll throw one crit out there though: the wireless mouse on my iMac Pro. When it runs out of batteries you have to plug it in, but it plugs in on the bottom. Wired mice have existed since the invention of the mouse, so it’s pretty frustrating that you can’t just plug it in to the front and have it act like a wired mouse while charging. This was clearly done so that the mouse could have its svelte shape. Sigh.
I personally love the Touch Bar and I really like the quiet, soft, short-travel keys on the 2015+ MacBooks. Other than a "rigid" cursor key on the first-generation 12" MacBook, I haven't experienced any unresponsive keys, definitely not on the Pros, yet (though that may be because I always use a protector or "keyboard condom" to prevent finger stains and smudges.)
I do not miss MagSafe or the headphone jack either. I prefer thinness and lightness. I'm one of the people who have been satisfied with Macs for a long time and haven't considered switching to anything else, and despite what the loud minority may make it seem like, I'm clearly not alone:
Give me at least the option to get rid of the touch bar. I want physical keys, the touch bar has zero advantages for me but a lot disadvantages. It's not really an innovation that needs to be pushed like for example USB C, it's just an annoying accessory that they forced on us to raise prices.
In fairness, the news story you linked about outsized MBP sales was before the keyboard scandal hit the press. And much of that demand was a result of Apple’s failure to spec bump their pro machines. Lots of us were waiting for the next generation.
> the news story you linked about outsized MBP sales was before the keyboard scandal hit the press.
Even then, there was similar snarfle about Apple "failing" when the new Touch Bar redesign was first revealed, where a few handful of people were opting to speak on everyone's behalf, saying that the new MBPs will flop and nobody will buy them.
Then again, this has been going on for over 20 years:
I think you are confusing sales with people liking the new design. People that have bought into the ecosystem may buy the new design even though they prefer the previous iteration.
If sales are not the most direct indicator of whether people like something or not, what is?
Apple has released many MacBooks with essentially the same keyboard design since 2015. If people really hated them, sales should have tanked in subsequent years, and Apple would have something different by now, 4 years later. The people who keep posting that they'll switch to PCs, would all have switched by now.
Do you suppose the number of people complaining here represent a significant percentage of the millions who have purchased MacBooks with the butterfly keyboards?
People who are satisfied with them aren't going to flock to every post to balance out the complaints. Those who do post in favor of the new MBPs get downvoted into grayness. There may be issues, but the incessant negativity feels bizarrely overblown and seems memetic at this point, if not outright paid for by rival companies.
One, you can buy something and not enjoy it. Two, you can be given the computer by your employer and not like it. Three, you can not like the current model but buy it anyway because you want to stick with the Mac ecosystem.
I’ve been in numerous meetings where everyone is complaining about their new mpb while others in the meeting saying they are going to hold onto their older models as long as they can.
Finally, they are moving away from this design which indicates they too see a problem with the keyboard.
