They're ignoring the giant behemoth that is ....Vim users..? What?

Wait till the EMACS crowd gets a whiff of how Apple refuses to sell pedals for their keybindings, then Apple is truly in trouble.

Look, I know VIM is popular, but so is XCode, so is Sublime, so is Atom, so is TextMate, so is a multitude of other text editors for God's sake, that to claim that Apple is somehow "abandoning the entire software development community", as if VIM users somehow speak for all of them, is pretty whiny and unrealistic.

Do you think Apple really worries that a bunch of what, Open Source "hackers" producing yet another Ruby testing framework are now going to abandon their platform? Seriously? Get off your high horse, man.

There's thousands of Visual Studio developers in the Windows world and thousands of XCode developers in the OS X world who don't give two shits about your 1970's vintage terminal mode text editor. Apple will be fine. Software developers (again, a much larger group than you obviously think) are also going to be fine.

And aren't you guys always bragging what power users you are? So now that one (remappable!!!!) key is gone your entire world is crashing around you?

If you're such a fossil that you can't adapt to the absence of this one key, that already is of extremely limited use for 99.9% of people, how did you cope with the disappearance of the floppy disk, the caps lock key, the parallel port, VGA, optical disc drives? How did you ever adjust from storing backups of your code on floppy disks once that went away?

What happens when Windows laptops one day follow suit and remove the Escape key and the (just as useless) Caps Lock key? If VIM users can't adapt to a simple change such as this, maybe you deserve to fade to irrelevancy? Just keep buying 2008-era laptops off Ebay well into the 2030's, I guess?

Truly pathetic rants, truly.

So basically what you are saying is that Devs need to adapt to apple products not the other way around, because apple knows best.

IMO what is really pathetic is people tying the hardware to the software, I don't buy "Windows Laptop", I buy a Laptop with the hardware that suits my needs and install Linux on it if it's not already installed, but I guess my opinion is irrelevant as I'm an emacs core user and use VIM as a text editor. Let me give you a tip here, If you buy a Laptop and chose to have it without Windows pre installed you will get a discount ( The windows License fees)

And guess What I will never pay a license fee for an IDE (from M$ or Apple) that do not match half what I get from my open source "vintage editor", but that just only me!!!

Anybody that's trying to use Visual Studio on one of these is going to be cursing the lack of F-buttons.

I hardly ever used them when I used VS, so I don't see why I would be cursing their lack now.

Were you clicking around the menus all the time or using a heavily modded keymap? Building, running, almost all of the debugger commands, viewing property pages, switching between code and designers, all make heavy use of the function keys out of the box. Those are pretty common tasks.

VS would probably repurpose the ribbon to provide debugging keys at that point.