I have an pre-touchbar macbook pro on my desk that I've been using as an in-place workstation. For some reason, I pulled it out of its place and opened it up this past week, and I was blown away by the improved typing experience.

I think that I'll be upgrading back to the old one going forward.

And I promise that the next laptop I buy (or my company buys for me) won't have a touch bar or a butterfly keyboard.

I used a 2017 at work for a year and eventually decided to move back to a 2015 -- I just couldn't do the keyboard any more.

I also recently purchased a refurbished 2015 with top tier specs as a personal laptop.

Apple has definitely lost out on thousands of dollars of revenue from just me due to the touchbar/butterfly keyboard feel/butterfly keyboard reliability/usb-c only decisions. And don't even get me started on my inability to replace my iPhone SE with a decent, small phone.

Devs at our company are starting to flee to Dell/Linux. Nice keyboards, screens and 64GB of RAM.

It's bizarre to me that Apple has never understood that computers are a highly recommended product. The reason that Apple laptops are popular is that the tech crowd is highly loyal and recommends macs to all their friends, parents, grandparents, when asked. And the tech crowd provides every hardware forum in existence with lots and lots of free Apple advertising.

It was never about Apple having better marketing. It was about Apple owning tech loyalty.

When the macbook is no longer the favored dev machine, Apple is going to lose a lot of market share.

This was an early harbinger of Apple's return to prominence:

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

We’ve gone dell and lenovo - not amazing but the gap is much smaller I think

I don’t even mind the touchbar. Just give me back the Escape key!

I thought this was a joke as I haven’t used a recent Mac in a while but apparently it’s not. There really isn’t an escape key!

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207358

It's extra fun when touchbaragent hangs and you can't force quit anything

Personally, I just remapped capslock to esc, since I never use capslock. The touchbar does seem to hang more often nowadays, though. Especially when I'm trying to adjust the volume.

I remapped capslock to escape, which simultaneously gives me back a useful key and gets rid of a useless one :P

They are basically telling us "You can't escape our future"

Not a physical one, but the hit area on the TouchBar for Esc is actually larger than the physical key was. As much as people like to complain, in my experience the Esc key is extremely easy to hit.

And take the escape key off the TouchBar. I hit it all the time by accident. I really wanted to give the TouchBar a fair shake but after two months I still think it’s beyond useless.

I feel your pain, it's my number one problem with the Touch Bar, the second being that it's almost entirely useless in its default mode.

I have two solutions for you, though: firstly, download BetterTouchTool[1] and install the GoldenChaosBTT[2] preset. It's the killer app for the Touch Bar, it turns it into a genuinely useful feature that you'll find yourself using all the time, and BTT in general is an incredibly powerful tool for customising the way you interact with your Mac.

Secondly, switching Caps Lock to the Esc key[3] has been one of the biggest productivity improvements I've made in the last decade, seriously. I wish I'd done it sooner. I've made the switch on every machine I use, even the ones without a Touch Bar.

Hope that helps!

[1] https://folivora.ai

[2] https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-a-complete-t...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127591/using-caps-lock-a...

Thanks for the tip. I got BTT and now I only have brightness and volume sliders on the Touch Bar and no escape. Much better. Will probably do some customization but it’s already a big improvement.

And in the default configuration I often hit the Siri button when wanting to press Touch ID or (sometimes) backspace.

The TouchBar is nice on paper, actually adds to some applications, but the current implementation is a world of hurt.

At the minimum I’d like to be able to disable the touch bar. I only ever activate it accidentally and there is zero feedback. I never look at my keys. I really like the fingerprint scanner but it’s not worth the disruption in productivity.

At least that, and the idea of making the touchbar an actual tray is a great idea, would like this to be natively done and keep the screen as free as possible for the actual apps.

As long as it's optional, I could see people not liking this.

They removed the escape key? What the.....

I'm never going to retire my 2013 MBP at this rate.

I have an esc key...?

It's very easy to remap caps lock to escape.

That's not the point. You shouldn't have to map caps lock to escape.

There will always be other potential physical keys that aren't on your laptop keyboard. You could just as easily say that you shouldn't have to use modifier keys to trigger Page Down on a Macbook Pro keyboard. Where's my Print Screen SysRq key?

Ok so why isn't the 2012 mbp hated because it doesn't have that key?

2012 MBP has the escape key.

It doesn't have print screen / sysreq, why is that OK?

Because those keys are not used nearly as often as escape. And because osx has a different keyboard shortcut for screenshots so the print screen key is largely irrelevant.

The reasons you listed are largely why I don't care that the escape key is gone from where it was.

Why not, it's better anyway?

Because caps lock is already remapped to ctrl. :p

You are entitled to your opinion. Don't thrust it onto others.

If only it were so easy to remap my hand! Caps lock is already dedicated to control and most apps don’t support ^[.

Check out Karabiner Elements (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/).

You can create a rule to change caps lock to control if pressed with other keys, else escape if pressed alone.

I have no affiliation with it, just ran into this issue myself and it solved it for me.

That kind of highlights an issue for me though. If Apple were really on the ball with macOS they would have a better remap utility built in.

Instead we have Karabiner Elements which has been of mixed stability in my experience.

Many times I've had it completely disable the internal keyboard on my late 2013 MBP to the point where I have to plug in a USB keyboard to recover or if on the road do a force power reset.

Ok then it you have caps remapped to ctrl, remap ctrl to escape.

There are many valid criticisms of the touch bar macs, losing one key in particular is pretty low on the list.

> i[f] you have caps remapped to ctrl, remap ctrl to escape

The whole reason to remap caps lock to ctrl is that ctrl is in a terrible location.

Escape is in a relatively terrible location as well, the default ctrl location is just as bad, hence remapping escape there isn't really worse than escape in the top left.

Not so much when you already remap the Caps lock key to Ctrl though.

“You are holding it wrong”?

They didn't remove it, at least not functionally. There's still an ESC, it's just on the Touch Bar now.

That's not an escape key. Please don't apologize for this.

I use vim and switch between a butterfly/touchbar Mac (work machine) and a Thinkpad (personal machine). Using the Mac keyboard has actually negatively impacted my typing speed when I use other systems! I remapped my vim keybindings, and now my muscle memory has atrophied.

This dumb machine has actually made me a worse typist. I am so frustrated.

That sucks for you. I'm able to use it just fine and the Touch Bar is way more functional for me both as a developer and for editing digital media.

Remap caps lock to escape. I use vim and I can't stand the "standard" esc key position anymore.

MacOS supports remapping caps lock to escape. No hacks needed!

Same here. If they make a better 2015 MBP I will upgrade my company computer, which will probably be $3500+.

If they make a one-handed iPhone again, they will also get money from me.

For now, I'm sticking with the 2015 MBP and the SE.

I could not care less about touch bar either way, but I would not willingly go back to touch id from face id.

What's wrong with touch id? I never used face id, but fingerprint sensor on iPhone 8 is good. It unlocks at the same time I'm pressing on button, so most of the time I don't notice it at all. And I almost never getting false negatives. I can't imagine how face id might be better, but I can imagine how it can be worse.

In my experience, Face ID is much faster and more seamless. Basically it's like my phone isn't locked because before I'd even have a chance to think about it, it's unlocked. I was VERY resistant to losing the home button, but I find that the new gestures are much more natural for me. Obviously this is a personal preference thing, but for quite a while I had a touch ID iPad and a Face ID iPhone, and it was really night and day how much nicer Face ID felt to me, and how nice it is to not have a home button wasting space on the phone. If they found a way to suppport Touch ID in addition to Face ID, without stealing space from the screen, I'm all for it, but I can't imagine going back to the old style of phone with no Face ID and a home button.

I really disagree. With TouchID my phone was unlocked before it even got to my face. With my iPhone X (which I've had since launch) I get lots of false positives. It also means I have to raise it, swipe as I raise it, phone gets in front of my face, small pause, faceid success, phone unlocks and displays home screen. This takes probably 1/4 to 1/5 of a second longer than TouchID where the device is already unlocked and at the home by the time I get it in my field of view.

Personally I would like to see an iPhone X with TouchID under the display WITH FaceID. So if I have gloves on or my finger is wet, no problem, FaceID takes over. If I'm laying in bed and holding my phone to close to my face, no problem, TouchID authenticates. It also means I can unlock my phone without picking it up off my desk with my finger.

You would get the best of both worlds and none of the drawbacks.

I'm the same way. I was an iPhone 7 hold out for a long time because I didn't see the value in Face ID or any of the other stuff and now I really regret holding out as long as I did. Face ID is so seamless and it's just so much smoother to do everything. Going back to my work phone is more than a bit awkward trying to remember how many times to tap or double press to do whatever. On the iPhone XS I have the gestures really make a lot of sense to me.

There's nothing _wrong_ with touch ID. It's just that FaceID is way better. It is faster and more seamless, it can work even if you are wearing gloves.

Plus, it lets the phone not display sensitive notification details until you are the one looking at the screen(with attention detection on, the default, you have to be really looking at it), only then it will display the details(including actual messages, depending on how it's configured). This is great in many scenarios.

> it can work even if you are wearing gloves

This is a tradeoff though, as FaceID doesn't work if you're wearing sunglasses.

Twins I know can unlock each other’s phone. Also, little kids can unlock parents phones for some reason. Would love to see internal presentations on the math behind this reason. Did they accidentally make a genetic discovery algorithm?

It doesn't work when wearing a balaclava, motorcycle helmet or ski googles, which is slightly annoying, but in those cases you'll likely wear gloves anyway. Sunglasses work fine for me.

I have an iPhone X and have no problem unlocking my phone when wearing sunglasses.

Yes, all this. And also face id does not care which finger you use to slide and if any of them is sweaty or wet.

Adding touch id doesn't require the removal of face id.

I like to be able to unlock my phone when it's flat on my desk without picking it up.

Takes all kinds - I would actually pay extra to have the thumbprint reader back.

I do not think they will be getting any money from you!

The entire Mac platform is less than 10% of their revenue, for what it's worth.

Reducing from the 10% because of broken keyboards etc. is still not OK. I bet wallstreet would react if Apple lost 5% of revenue.

Alternatively, maybe Macs would increase from 10% to 15% if the product wasn't broken and over-priced. Maybe it would be 20% or 25% if Apple could cross-sell/convert those iPhone sales to Mac sales.

Looking at Mac revenue for the past 5 years, it hasn’t exactly been falling....

https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...

There is no world where any computer manufacturing is seeing a large growth in PCs in the last 5 years.

That's always the argument from the business standpoint. How much of their ecosystem is on a foundation of professional Mac users? A majority of the professionals I know won't buy the current touchbar model MacBook Pro. Does that market even matter anymore?

I would think a company with the resources Apple has would be willing to invest more in loss leaders that keep users fully in the Apple ecosystem, or in products which may contribute in small ways to their bottom line, like Macs. They can afford to make their primary metric market share, rather than profit.

iOS can't replace Mac OS (yet) for serious work. So instead of letting Macs atrophy, they should invest in making Macs the best possible desktop and laptop computers for serious work. Own whatever amount of that market they can. Keep those users in the Apple ecosystem.

So who do you think is buying them for Mac revenue to be stable/growing? Who should we believe your anecdote or Apple’s reported numbers?

https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...

If they could make an iPhone X-like phone with a headphone jack, then I'll buy it. I have zero interest in airpods or other wireless earphones though, so its a hard pass from me as long as that's the route they're going.

I also loved home button finger print reader - why can’t they have at least one model w it and let market vote

They do it's called the iPhone 8, it was introduced alongside the FaceID iPhone X.

Yes, and iPhone 8 and 8 Plus combined sell 3 times the units as X.

I hope we'll see it soon.

Based on everything else they've done, I figure it will be $3500+ build though and push into the $5k range.

Have you considered that your question is a non-sequitur? Short of quitting my job and becoming a subsistence farmer, my company is going to supply me with a computer and a phone for the foreseeable future. The exact nature of those devices isn't really important. They're going to exist and they're going to cost the same order of magnitude as a Macbook Pro and an iPhone.

Yes, I thought about possible reasons why it might be meaningless to ask the question. (Maybe gonational already has billions invested in green tech, or maybe they consider Apple a more responsible GHG emitter than any of the other phone manufacturers even if he/she buys a phone for $400 and plants trees for $600.)

But I was interested in his/her reasons.

A false dilemma is not how you make a constructive pro-environment argument. It is unnecessary, and won't convince anyone. You could've asked what else they do for or against the environment, but that'd be off-topic in this thread I suppose.

It's not a dilemma, it's a sincere question of consideration.

The contrast between some HN comments on the "Wetbulb heatwave omg it's the end" thread and this one was pretty striking.

As a shareholder, thank god you are not a decision maker.

Hilarious to see you wispering this comment into the hurricane force winds of techies leaving Mac for these very reasons.