Getting rid of the Touch Bar might be realistic. If only it were realistic that they would add a USB-A and HDMI port back to it too...
Or 4:3 screen, but we can keep dreaming there...
My hope is that they offer the touchbar as a configurable option on all MacBooks going forward, at least until they realize no one is buying the ones with the touchbar included. Maybe some video editors like it? It's a failed experiment from where I'm sitting.
The ironic thing is that I would use it a lot, if, and only if, there were any browser which displays tabs as favicons on the touch bar.
But there just... isn't. It's completely baffling, the Safari preview is useless and Firefox has a 'touch to select address bar' button which I always forget is there.
But I also wouldn't be particularly sad if it disappeared.
But many little things, like the smoothness of the OS, or the way that the screen wakes from sleep instantly are just superior to my much more expensive, and power hungry desktop. Of course, my desktop can still cream it in a GPU workload but for programming, it's amazing.
You see it in the iPhones and the variant SKUs, and Canon and Nikon also had been doing this when there wasn't competition eating their lunch.
Of course the problem is whether they can cut the line ...
The only complaint I have is that you can't run two external monitors off of it, but I have no doubt that the next generation will address that.
A single ultrawide would be way better, if I could count on having 2 virtual displays within.
https://github.com/scottwhudson/Lunette
These bindings match Spectacle but you can map to Rectangle's instead.
For a 21:9 screen, the max grid size of 25 isn't good enough for me, I specifically wanted 36 so that I could make three 'panels' at 11-13-11 resolution.
Found out with a bit of emailing back and forth that you can by pasting this into a terminal:
defaults write com.manytricks.Moom "Grid: Maximum Dimension Size" -int 36
* Edit* Apparently Spectacle has been discontinued.
I found the default shortcuts to be the wrong way around for my cognition so I swapped them but otherwise it's been good. I mostly use the fullscreen (usually for the laptop's screen) and "3-column with main in the middle" layouts.
Compared to my coworker's 10 core i9 build with over 64GB of ram, my base model Macbook Air builds our node app in half the time.
> I'm yet to find something I could possibly gripe about.
I can. It does not much like my Philips 328E1 monitor. When it wakes up the display, sometimes it renders all the colors as sorta-inverted. Like, not actually inverted, but maybe just one color channel is inverted. Repeatedly sleeping & waking the display sometimes fixes after a few tries. Rebooting always fixes it.
Also, on a fresh login, after I reach the desktop it will sleep the display maybe 5 seconds later for unknown reasons. Usually it wakes up okay after a few more seconds, and then things are fine from then on.
I tried all sorts of things, then gave up. Now I don't let the display sleep, so I manually turn it off when I walk away from my desk. It makes switching to my other MacBook a little more hassle because I have to do it manually, but I can live with it.
And before you ask if there's something wrong with my display... it works great, 100% of the time, never a single glitch on my work computer, which is a 16 inch MacBook Pro.
Sometimes I regret getting the M1 and not waiting for them to work out the bugs.
Remote development is the name of the game for the backend, for frontend the M1 chips seem capable enough and can fit the form factor easily.
When I'm doing focused work I use an external screen/keyboard/mouse, the only times I use laptop ones are when I'm trying to get work done in a coffee shop or something like that - I even travel with BT keyboard/mouse because the laptop ones make me unproductive.
And for media consumption and casual browsing, couch surfing, travel, bed shopping - the laptop form factor is clunky, a tablet is a much better device.
Maybe I should just give up and buy both, but I wish I could have one device for everything (even if it costs as much as both of those combined)
I do like the iPad Pro a lot though.
Have you experienced the accelerated hd degradation? An odd story that popped up recently.
(Not the greatest link....https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/02/24/apple-m1-mac-users-fac...)
1. https://linustechtips.com/topic/1306757-m1-mac-owners-are-ex...
In practice, I can't imagine the SSD load to be particularly worse than what the iPhones endure, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about their iPhone dying from their flash storage being overused.
MacOS is heavily rely on swap at least on M1 hardware for absolutely no reason.
For example, in two days of uptime it says the SafariBookmarksSyncAgent has written 1.94 GB to disk. I haven't added any bookmarks to my machine in those two days and I haven't used Reading List, so how is that even possible?
With that being said, I'm an old-school curmudgeon when it comes to computers. I'm hard to please, and I don't necessarily hold it against Apple that they didn't make "the perfect computer".
As an aside, is anyone interested in an $850 8gb Macbook Air? Lightly used with only 70tb written to the drive.
I'm asking because I'm assuming your real issues are with your stated reasons, since MacPorts is a "proper package manager" (being ported from one of the BSDs) and if you don't like that one, Brew is certainly popular. And I've never directly benefited from Linux being an "open operating system", since I don't write code that interacts with anything lower-level than the C API, but macOS' Darwin kernel and many of the binaries are open source.
I'm kind of old-school (my intro to Unix was a DECStation), and I find macOS to be plenty Unixy. If I'm not using Xcode I'm using Emacs (in VI mode). I've never said "I wish I had <Linux feature>"; actually, it's been rather nice that my Wifi doesn't break, I don't have to deal with PulseAudio, it goes to sleep--and wakes up!--when I open and close the lid, the UI is unified, networking is easy to use, etc. However, if you run the Linux GUI applications on macOS it's a klunky experience, so you benefit from finding native applications. Also, Docker wasn't very pleasant, but that might have just been Docker; fortunately I've only had to use it for one project.
As someone who loves the macOS + Unix experience, I'm just curious what workflow it doesn't work well with.
Maybe it's just different strokes for different folks, but I'd much rather just clone my dotfiles and have a Linux workspace up and running in ~10 minutes tops. Moving my workflow over to MacOS feels like trying to board a plane while it's taking off, and it doesn't bode well for my productivity when I can't rely on my tools even showing up in the first place.
If you really want an apt-get (never used pacman) kind of everything-repository experience, though, you're going to be disappointed on any system that doesn't prioritize a centralized repository of software. In practice, this eliminates a commercial OS, and probably commercial software, since there's no effective way to get a central repository. The App Store is the closest, but then you get people complaining you're the gatekeeper, or you get a free-for-all like Google Play. I think Linux manages only because the number of people that use it are small enough that bad actors go elsewhere.
As a chip, the M1 is an absolutely amazing.
Sure, it is an amazing chip. But the delta is only large compared to the rehashed 14nm Intel chips that Macs shipped with in the last few years. Recent Ryzen-based APUs are in a similar ballpark as M1's performance-wise.
I think that a lot of Mac users overestimate the M1, since their only experience with x86_64 is low-point Intel and not peak AMD.
You know Intel's in hot water when AMD makes a better Intel chip than Intel does, though...
Same here. I used Macs since 2007 and the M1 MacBook Air basically ended my Mac tenure. The M1 felt like yet another step towards making the Mac more closed. The M1 is another case of Apple breaking a lot of backward compatibility and using the community to fix it for free (who needs a working Fortran compiler, to compile their BLAS and other numeric libraries?). Even though the M1 Macs feels a lot faster than the Intel Macs, macOS still feels tediously slow compared to Linux. Then there are a lot of low-level tools on Linux which do not have good equivalents on macOS (e.g. perf). And then there is the issue (unrelated to M1) that every good MacOS application is slowly switching to a subscription model, which only extends the feeling that I don't own my machine anymore.
I returned my M1 Air and bought a Ryzen-based ThinkPad, upgraded it to 32GB RAM, and I am very happy with. I am now selling my old Intel MacBook Air, which was my last Mac.
There's a certain amount of hubris in this, in that (at least until AMD came along), pretty much every single Intel chip has only made Intel money, while ARM is broadly-licensed and is ripe for a surge. All Apple did was create an ARM-compatible chip, which is how someone already got Linux running on it: https://corellium.com/blog/linux-m1
Here's ARM themselves on their licensing model: https://www.arm.com/why-arm/how-licensing-works
Now, which one is more "closed", really? Near-absolute Intel hegemony that only benefits Intel, or ARM, which seems to benefit anyone who wants to tackle creating an ARM chip?
Honestly (disclosing my bias here), I hope IA64 dies in a fire in 5-10 years. It's had enough time in the limelight, Intel has rested on its laurels of late (arguably holding back progress), and its technical flaws run quite deep (another reason why the M1 seems impressive; ARM is simply a better-designed architecture from the ground up)
But seriously, I've had a very poor time getting my mac mini M1 to cooperate with the aging tech stack at work, especially since it involves docker.
I've had to resort to running my old laptop and SSHing in to get things working until I can put our web app onto a modern set of tech...
It really says something that HNers are willing to give up ports and speed (and possibly SD, if rumors are true) just to get away from the TB.
And since I run in clamshell mode, I can't even unplug the power cord temporarily, as the computer will only run in clamshell mode if it is plugged into power.
I do have an Anker mini-dock dongle, but it gets very hot when I use it, so I only use it when necessary. Also, it annoyingly cannot be used to charge any devices, so I can't even plug my iPhone into it to charge. I'm sure there are some other docks out there that are better, but when I was looking in 2017 it wasn't clear which ones those were (aside from the $200+ ones, which I wasn't about to purchase).
This one a bit cheaper: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-thunderbolt-hub
I love the portability, but I just can't work on 13'' anymore.
And I would have gotten away with it too! If it hadn't been for you meddling kids...
That's way less probable than the machines being actually good. Which they are.
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