Maybe by a millimeter or so.
There is absolutely no way in hell a keyboard like this should be found on a laptop favored by software engineers.
I'm not sure if Apple is seeing the writing on the wall here, but why not just launch a developer line? Make it thicker, heavier, give it more battery, a keyboard with a proper amount of travel, larger keys, more keys, whatever. Ditch the retarded touch bar. More ram. More config options. More ports.
If they want to keep topping themselves on largely meaningless metrics and/or aesthetic self indulgence then by all means do so -- sell those to the rest of the market. The bulk of the market will buy the pretty ones.
Give me an uglier one that isn't so awful to actually use.
Or, seriously, start dying the death of a thousand cuts. I'm really close to pulling out of the Apple ecosystem and retooling for other work. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
What? Don't care about the people who work on iOS/macOS software professionally? Don't need us? Why don't you go talk to Microsoft about that.
I don't quite get it. Why are software engineers favoring such a laptop? Shouldn't this be worded the other way around? "There is no way a laptop with a keyboard like this should be favored by software engineers"...?
My last MacBook was a 2013. It has 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD and I still use it. I'm somewhat desensitised to the price creep because I buy on the business but it just doesn't seem like I'm in the target market anymore.
I really like the aesthetic of a case that isn't a wedge shaped lump of plastic but that only gets you so far. I've bought an Intel Hades Canyon, put Linux on it and moved most of my development over to it. I'll probably get an XPS to put Linux on for when I'm on the move.
I am baffled though; the issues seem to be so widely felt I don't understand why a company with such wealth can't throw us a bone like the slightly thicker dev oriented machine suggested above. I'd have thought it in their interest but I guess not.
Even if they were interested, are we sure apple can still operate efficiently? A lot of large companies, including HP and Microsoft, hit a point where they have trouble getting even relatively simple things done (like replacing a keyboard).
Meeting with a team this month from Apple on a product purchased from the company I work for that (to my knowledge) had far fewer engineers—or at least engineers who would work with external engineers to the project.
Not that I'm directly comparing it to the xps, since the macbook pro is probably more closely related to the xps, but still there's no other device with 16gb RAM in that segment. In terms of CPU the performance is pretty much on par with the Macbook air although it's CPU was last updated in 2015
I don't have one. I still use my 4 year old Macbook air. The only thing that bothers me is that I usually dual boot with linux and the newer macbooks are getting worse to run linux on.
Is this a polite way of saying they're ugly?
Creating a new line probably costs Apple hundreds of millions in R&D costs, to say nothing of the opportunity costs from putting some of their best hardware engineers on this project. I would imagine that Tim Cook looks at the dev market, compares to the cost, and says “no fucking way”.
Of course add to that the fact that “heavy and thick” is not a plus to most software devs either. The real market is probably much smaller than you’d like to believe.
I sincerely doubt a model variant costs hundreds of millions either, or the majority of the laptop market would be unsustainable.
Dell, HP, and Lenovo also do not do what Apple is asked to do here. You can buy a thick heavy laptop from Dell. You cannot, however, buy a slightly thicker, slightly heavier XPS 13. If you want the flagship “ultra book”, you buy the one they sell. Otherwise you buy the plastic Inspiron or whatever which is an entirely different class of product and does not feel particularly premium.
Aluminium body is now premium? How about not sacrificing cpu life for fan noise? Or repairability. Or non-soldiered on ssd? Working keyboard? Why's that not premium?
Yes. I’m not sure what it accomplishes for you to feign ignorance here. When Apple started selling aluminum laptops, it was a big deal because it made everything on the market look low quality in comparison.
> How about not sacrificing cpu life for fan noise? Or repairability. Or non-soldiered on ssd? Working keyboard? Why's that not premium?
Because it’s not. Noisy fan to protect the CPU seems like the opposite of premium. Putting seat covers over the leather in a Mercedes is similarly not premium, because the experience suffers, even if the end result is better durability.
Non-soldered SSD? A thicker laptop for self-serve SSD swaps does not seem at all premium. Doing physical maintenance on my laptop in general does not feel premium. I expect it to work as I bought it. And yes, I would love it if I could cheap out and buy a basic laptop and upgrade it myself for half the cost, but that’s really not the premium experience. That’s the Honda Civic experience.
Keyboard? Shrug. They fucked up the design. Sucks, but Rolex has probably had to do some repairs in warranty before, too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_process
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument#Aluminum_a...
Yeah, but the majority of the laptop market aren't doing brain-damaged things like removing ESC keys, adding pointless touchbars and designing keyboards which are beautiful to look at but which fail at actual typing. And the majority of the laptop market don't have to pay for Sir Jonathan Ive to remove all colour, ornament, affordance and delight from the design, moving as close to a featureless white rounded-rectangular prism as possible as he can for this iteration.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple have to pay an order of magnitude (or two) per model, just to end up with something which is ultimately sub-par.
If Apple is going to make iOS buggy and second rate, there goes my main reason to use an iPhone. Same with Mac hardware. Those are the parts that are supposed to be the good things about Apple - iOS and MacBook hardware quality were my reasons to buy their products.
Haven't regretted it once.
The machine I built for half the price of the equivalent Mac STILL makes me feel all warm and happy a year later. It feels weird to have more performance than I'd ever need, while spending so little. Windows 10 is perfectly usable, unlike multiple predecessors. WSL is amazing, and basically gives you that *nix-terminal-in-an-instance feel that used to be a unique feature of OSX.
It's easier than ever to switch, and there's less reasons than ever not to. Apple is treading dangerous waters I reckon. I seriously think if more Apple users knew how far Windows PCs had come, they'd be switching now, as I know I myself held off for a fair while just because I was hesitant to believe it had gotten that much better.
Almost every single tool/technology that I've come across in the last couple years has separate laborious and annoying installation instructions for windows. Many don't even support windows at the start.
Unless Microsoft rewrites windows as a *nix OS from scratch (not gonna happen), I don't see myself being willing to go back to it.
You can install Ubuntu from the Windows App Store and it’s the real thing, not an emulation layer like Cygwin. You don’t need separate install instructions — just follow the ones for Ubuntu.
It’s really an underappreciated amazing feature of modern Windows: you can run an entire Linux userland on the same kernel.
Oh well, linux works for me :)
Dell XPS 13 are popular and can be shipped and supported with Linux out of the box as well as Windows. XPS 15 can be an option if you're ok with some added weight and want more power.
Lenovo T-Series have been around for ages and generally have quite robust hardware. There's also the Carbon X1 if you want something lighter, or the Thinkpad P1 if you want more power.
HP Elitebooks - Similar to the other two these have a good range of options and good hardware build generally.
On the Microsoft side there's the Surface Pro's and also the surface book, which is very pricey but again has some nice hardware.
Of course all this depends on what you're looking for from a laptop, what is "worthwhile" is a personal judgement :)
I would celebrate this if not for the fact that they'd find a way charge €3000-5000 for it. RIP if you like to use a MacBook as a university student.
> What? Don't care about the people who work on iOS/macOS software professionally? Don't need us? Why don't you go talk to Microsoft about that.
All the Macs together present about 5-10% of Apple's revenue. On their scale, that's still a big chunk of money, but that figure makes it quite obvious why it takes the bank bench to the iPhone. Hell, I'm surprised they put as much effort in their iPads, considering those also only present ~10% of their revenue. The iPhones are the big money maker with around 70% of their revenue.
In other words, how much of Macbook's trackpad is in it's software?
A tonne. Compare how the trackpad acts in the restore system, and how it acts in MacOS: Two very different realms of quality.
Regardless, lenovo & dell's (x1 & xps) trackpads are on par with the macbook '15's trackpad. Apple has lost that advantage.
There's also long term vs short term effects. Your personal preference might feel great for you right now, but will lead to joint and back pain 5-10 years down the road. While the 'correct' way may feel highly unnatural right now, but may very well save you from much pain and anguish at some point in the future.
However, when I switch to my old Macbook Pro 2013, they keyboard feels so much nicer to me that I feel frustrated with my purchase.
Just disable the mouse in your vimrc, you'll be better off for it.
As a disclaimer: I have had at least 4 iterations of MBPs before starting at my current company and getting a 2015.
The previous keyboard wasn't great either, but at least there was a little travel, the layout doesn't suck, and it's not nearly as delicate as the butterfly keyboard.
For what it's worth, I type like anyone else does - but I do it a lot. That keyboard was in terrible shape by year 2. I hope the new keyboards are fixed... I have to use one for work (it's issued by my employer).
It feels weird to not want a brand new Apple laptop. I was just so disappointed by that keyboard and the touch bar though.
Except they don’t?
Or you'll just use a virtual machine?
I work with macOS users (and used to be one, many many years ago). I honestly feel that I'm far more productive with Linux, and that others I see using Linux are far more productive as well.
macOS is very pretty to look at, and it looks great in demos, but I believe it's less productive to actually use. Meanwhile, Linux is like a lever for my mind — or, to steal an old Steve Jobs line, a bicycle for my mind.
"I'm far more productive with Linux". I used to feel that way too, until I wanted to work primarily with laptops, and not have to worry about network drivers, or sleep mode, or worrying that upgrading something would require hours of figuring out what to recompile.
I've absolutely no doubt that some people reading this - perhaps even you - will tell me
* how I was doing something wrong, or * I need to 'research my hardware before I buy it', or that * you never ever have any of these problems, and every linux laptop you've ever had ran perfectly smoothly with no wifi/sleep/printing issues ever, and * it must be my fault because "ubuntu just works" (or fill in whatever the catchphrase of the day is)
I spent 8 years wrestling with Linux on laptops (desktop was generally less of an issue), and don't want to have that be my primary pain point. If I need direct Linux, I have remote servers, or virtual machines (either on macbook or windows).
Yes, I may truly miss the productivity of tiling window managers. And... heavens, yes, my bash is out of date. But somehow I survive.
And that beautiful UX that is the bouncing icons in apple's dock? Oh! New notification from an application, let's have an icon bounce in the dock for a full 45 minutes.
Apple is chock-full full of stupid design decisions, Linux has done surprisingly fine in comparison, particularly given the uneven investment, capital-wise.
Late last year I swapped back to linux, & gave it a firm shake after ~9 years of apple (I abandoned ship due to the lack of ports, + touchbar). My linux distro gave me a hassle just a few weeks ago, so I tried swapping back to my '17 macbook & couldn't stomach it for more than 30 minutes.
Give ubuntu or fedora a try, it's light-years ahead of what it used to be.
> awful UX as a bonus.
Mac shell felt arcane and overly verbose, like a weird powershell clone that doesn't pay the price for its verbosity with typed io, and doesn't have autocompletion like every normal shell on Linux. Out of all file managers I still prefer Explorer.exe but I'd take any manager on any Linux DE over Finder, same with notepad or image preview software. macOS doesn't even come with PC keyboard layout for my country, I had to fish for it on the internet, something so basic I doubt even Linux failed to screw up in the last 20 years.
Considering the price of these machines, I feel they're really playing with fire.
So if a web page is playing a muted ad with sound your media keys wont do anything if you try to pause iTunes.
That aside, the sharpness of the frame actually digs into my wrist - a little rounded would have made such a difference.
If it weren't for the Mac ecosystem and that only Apple can produce hardware, I think they would fix this.
I touch type and want to keep everything symmetrical around a central point.
I avoid using mice or keyboards with numeric keypads because I try to reduce the amount of off one sided movements.
I try to drive everything from the keyboard and from the homerow if I can.
If I really have to use a mouse, moving my right hand a few centimetres to use a trackpad is, for me, much more ergonomic than a larger movement to reach past a numeric keypad for a mouse.