deskthority

vivalarevolución wrote:

matt3o wrote:
they don't even have a right mouse button!

that probably is the number two reason people don't switch from Windows to Mac

Those little annoyances really add up. I would probably be willing to give up the right mouse button before I gave up the scroll wheel. And that Backspace/Delete thing is incredibly frustrating.

I thought this was a joke. Can anyone tell me why exactly this is a thing? Macs have right clicks like every other OS and if you don't like the Magic Mouse (like me), get a Logitech one, which has a right button.

If there is seriously someone who thinks Macs don't have a right mouse click or you couldn't program the trackpad like a trackpad on any windows machine (which would be a downgrade always btw), that's huuuuge bullshit.

There are enough real points to argue with. More than enough.

... jeez I hate the internet it was a joke.

"it doesn't even have a right mouse button" was the go-to argument when talking to apple fanboys but you guys are probably too young to remember

Yeah that's how I thought you meant it, now I am relieved! After fohat I wasn't so sure if you were still joking or not...

that very back mouse the one with one from early macpros is amazing quality , i dont know what switch it uses or who made it but mmmm clicky and smooth , insane thick plastic and perfect weight, apple made things properly back then

True story, the reason I didn't like Apple when I was a kid was the lack of [my ability to figure out] the right click.

Been playing around the touch bar some on my brother's new MacBook Pro. The greatest potential I see for this thing is replacing the menu bar at the top of the screen. You could have all those menus on the touch bar and have easier access to them rather than having to move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen (are there shortcut keys to access the top menu bar?).

A side effect of the touch bar is that when I use the touch bar, my hands then gravitate towards the screen want to use it as a touch screen. Obviously, I can't do that. The normal, most common adjustments, like screen brightness, key backlighting, and volume, require a couple clicks to adjust and then you have to close them out. That's kinda annoying. You can make the typical top row functions permanent, if you want. But keeping those permanent kinda ruins the point of the touch bar.

The keyboard is very good for having such short key travel, although I am fluctuating between typing too hard to make sure that I hit all the right keys and too softly and missing some keys. With increased usage, I imagine that my typing accuracy would improve. Obviously, I would appreciate more tactile feedback, but it's not bad.

That's all I got for now.

I played with it too.

The keyboard is pretty bad, but we are very much spoiled by our $200+ mechanical keyboard, so I'd say that it's totally fine for a laptop.

The touchbar is nice but I don't really like the fact that you have to constantly look down to use it. Maybe I'd need more time to get used to it, I'll consider it if they'll lower the price, possibly with the next generation.

matt3o wrote: I played with it too.

The keyboard is pretty bad, but we are very much spoiled by our $200+ mechanical keyboard, so I'd say that it's totally fine for a laptop.

The touchbar is nice but I don't really like the fact that you have to constantly look down to use it. Maybe I'd need more time to get used to it, I'll consider it if they'll lower the price, possibly with the next generation.

I think that I have said this before, but for a keyboard with almost no key travel, it is decent. Apple had to do something untraditional to fit a keyboard into such a thin form factor, and they did a better job with low key travel than anything else I have tried.

vivalarevolución wrote: The greatest potential I see for this thing is replacing the menu bar at the top of the screen.

You mean toolbar, don't you?

matt3o wrote: The keyboard is pretty bad, but we are very much spoiled by our $200+ mechanical keyboard, so I'd say that it's totally fine for a laptop.

Pretty good for an average laptop in 2016 ... because MacBooks are the leader, the standard to which other laptops compare these days.

But IMHO, it does not even play in the same league as a ThinkPad keyboard from 2009.

I like the Apple laptop keyboards from ~2004 better than the ThinkPad keyboards from ~2009. Really all laptop keyboards are crap though.

Would love to see what Apple could do with switches similar to the new metal clicky ones, but with a space budget comparable to mid-2000s laptops, or even slightly taller.

jacobolus wrote: I like the Apple laptop keyboards from ~2004 better than the ThinkPad keyboards from ~2009. Really all laptop keyboards are crap though.

I agree. Typing this on a Thinkpad T420 laptop from 2011/2012 with the old-style Thinkpad keyboard. Even though the keyboard is luxurious and satisfying, by laptop standards, it's still just a scissor switch, rubber dome keyboard that has some flex, probably is a little heavy on the force and requires me to pound the keys a bit to make sure I don't miss a key. Using one of my fancy external keyboards makes a world of difference in typing quality.

X61s with a new old stock ANSI keyboard , mmmm loverly. It may be scissor rubber dome but its fantastic compared to the rest of the laptop world.

So in conclusion regarding the new macbook , i think we are all in agreement when we say

" The new MBP, its a bit wank."

andrewjoy wrote: X61s with a new old stock ANSI keyboard , mmmm loverly. It may be scissor rubber dome but its fantastic compared to the rest of the laptop world.

So in conclusion regarding the new macbook , i think we are all in agreement when we say

" The new MBP, its a bit wank."

Case closed.

just found out that to install macos from scratch you need an internet connection... madness.

AHAHAHAHA

This made me physically laugh out loud in work

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/12/13/mac ... indicator/

Solve battery problems by removing the time remaining indicator !

It reminds me of when they fixed the iphone 4 signal problems by just telling the UI to always show better signal

The time estimate thing has always been horribly inaccurate. Total power usage can easily vary by a factor of 3–4 between mostly idle vs. heavy use. I have gotten battery life anywhere from 3 to >10 hours on the same laptop on successive days, by carefully managing CPU, wifi/bluetooth, and display brightness

I just walked into a local Apple Store and boy, the Touch Bar is pretty cool but what the hell is wrong with the keyboard?! It's too flat. It's loud (and I love a buckling spring keyboard but it's loud even in the Store with so much noise) and it feels cheap! Seriously if I pay for that price, I do expect a much better experience on the keyboard. I prefer my 2013 MacBook Air keyboard. Ugh.

Belfong wrote: I just walked into a local Apple Store and boy, the Touch Bar is pretty cool but what the hell is wrong with the keyboard?! It's too flat. It's loud (and I love a buckling spring keyboard but it's loud even in the Store with so much noise) and it feels cheap! Seriously if I pay for that price, I do expect a much better experience on the keyboard. I prefer my 2013 MacBook Air keyboard. Ugh.

Simply put, that keyboard is the price of thinness.

With any of these ultrathin laptops these days, thr quality of something has to be sacrificed, whether it is the keyboard, repairability, or something else.

That would make sense if there was actually something gained with all that thinness. However, comparing my 2013 13-inch MBP and 2015 15-inch retina MBP, I must say I prefer form-factor of the former in spite of (or maybe because of) it being a bit more thick. It may as well have to do more with 13 vs 15 inch size difference, but I'm not so sure. So, you have this form-over-function desire to thin everything down and on the way you loose not only room for the keyboard, but repairability, upgradability, and practicality (ports) of the whole machine.

Don't forget I'm comparing the MacBook Pro (touch bar) with my MacBook Air and the Air is thinner. So I don't understand why the Pro's keyboard has to be thinner!

I don't know why the keyboard has to be so shallow ether, its not as if they filled that extra space with battery is it ?

If they took the old ( and superior) 2015 mac , put the thinner keyboard in it and filled every single extra µm with battery then i would be fine with it.

But why have it thinner for thinner sake?

Its like when you have a phone with a camera bump , when you could just make the phone thicker and fill the space with battery .... pointless.

alh84001: Likely 13 vs. 15 inches is what you prefer. I hate 15" laptops.

The new laptops are actually a bit smaller in length/width as well (e.g. 11.97 x 8.36 vs. 12.35 x 8.62 inches), with less bezel around the display and a redesigned hinge. Weight on the 13" model has gone down to 3.02 pounds from 3.48 pounds.

The new 15 inch model is 13.75 x 9.48 inches and 4.02 pounds. So you are getting something an inch longer, almost an inch wider, and more than half a pound heavier than your previous laptop, whereas if you’d gone for the 13 inch model, you’d instead be getting a third of an inch smaller in length/width, and almost half a pound lighter.

Very interesting article from Bloomberg here regarding some internal reorganization and reprioritization of the Mac line and MacOS. As many of us have suspected, these products have become a lower priority for Apple because they don't generate a lot of revenue for the company.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... -loyalists

Another interesting tidbit is that the Mac Pro is made in the USA, and it was a much bigger hassle to do so rather than utilizing their manufacturing facilities in China. It could be part of the reason that the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in so long.

The Mac has been a total shitshow this year. Either Apple's management and engineers wasted all their time watching the reality TV horror porn that was the election, or they're up to something. But what?

I've been looking forward to the Mac's switch to Apple designed ARM processors for years. Get on with it already! Then we'll know for sure who screwed the pooch: Apple or Intel, because one of them drop permanently out of the picture.

the lack of innovation in the mac/desktop line has very little to do with intel

But the horrible 16 gig memory limit on the MacBook Pro does. (2014 called and wants its ram back…) As does the miserable lack of any meaningful performance increase in the processors available. Intel's sleeping at the wheel, too.

Meanwhile Apple's ARM processors are far from standing still. Apple, make the jump! The Mac still matters to us users. How about you guys in Cupertino? It's dying right now. On a fading architecture well on its way to retirement.

Apple ARM processors

The ARM is designed by ARM not apple , they just put it into an SoC a skilled job to be sure, but its not designing a processor.

For the record the processing core on apples A10 is a ARMv8-A.

Even the most powerfull ARM cores are many orders of magnitude less powerful than even mid tier intel processors , then again apple does not put even mid range chips in there desktops / laptops anymore, beacuse they would require cooling and that would make the imac thicker ! Beacuse we all need a super thin desktop right ? .... right ?

lets list the macs

MacBook Pro = A joke
Macbook = Pointless and overpriced
Macbook Air = a good ultra(ish) book , go buy one before apple ruin it
Mac mini = old but makes an ok web / office desktop.
mac pro = a mac mini with a shit GPU in it.
iMac = higher end macmini with a built in screen , a decent web / office machine for people who have to have cool looking tech
MacBook Pro 2015 = Buy one before it too gets discontinued.
Xserve = hahahaha i wish, fuck you apple ESXi can now run OSX your done in the server space

andrewjoy wrote: The ARM is designed by ARM not apple , they just put it into an SoC a skilled job to be sure, but its not designing a processor.

No, the CPU in the A10 is made by a part of Apple. It is compatible with the ARM V8-A microarchitecture.

Years ago, Apple bought up a company that was designing their own PowerPC chips. The Apple ARM chips are the legacy of that company.
The CPU is only at most dual-core, however, and with no symmetric multithreading, so there can only be two threads active at one time. The A10 has two high-performance cores and two low-power cores but only one pair of cores can be active at once.

Edit:
Geekbench (single-core / multi-core)
iPhone 7/7 Plus, 2.3 GHz: 3261 / 5285 (source)
Intel Core i3 6100U, 2.3 GHz, : 2819 / 5833 (source)

ah! the good about benchmarks is that there's one that makes any device shine