My 2015 era MBA was great. They just screwed up, and told us they fixed it so many times it doesn&#x27;t matter if they&#x27;ve actually fixed it this time (which they may have - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marco.org&#x2F;media&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;mbp16-graph.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marco.org&#x2F;media&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;mbp16-graph.png</a> - we&#x27;ll see in a few months) because we don&#x27;t believe them. Typing this on a Surface with WSL2.

Maybe because they started out so low, and there was a long way to go with improvements.

Scissor keys are the old ones that everyone likes. It was butterfly keys that people have the problem with. Apple is going back to the good ones.

Many people find the old keyboard to be mushy after using the butterfly for a while

This one is 2% thicker to accommodate the mechanism changes and a bigger battery.But, sure, let&#x27;s kneejerk yell about their engineering decisions.

This model is actually 7 mm thicker than the 2019 15&quot;.

And it&#x27;s never true (or hasn&#x27;t been for awhile at least). It&#x27;s clear they&#x27;re engineering for thinness above all else, usability be damned.I&#x27;m typing on a 2014-era Macbook Pro right now and I doubt any new scissor keys are gonna feel better than this. All of the newer Macbook Pros I&#x27;ve typed on have been terrible.

They&#x27;re running out of ways to word their puffery.

Yeah... at this point I half expect to read from Apple:“When we changed the key travel from 1.0mm to 0.5mm, it was so much better that it became the best keyboard in the world. And now, with the change from 0.5mm to 1.0mm, we’ve made it even better than ever: Welcome to the world’s best typing experience.”

And for a good while they could actually have made a believable claim for itNow, it&#x27;s just pure marketing speak

Yes.Because logically you improve everytime, primarily why Cook 
comes onto stage every year saying:&quot;This is our best iPhone yet&quot;or insert whatever apple product you want.

&gt; Ladies and Gentleman, for the 17th year in a row, the future of robotics has arrived.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;comb.io&#x2F;8ajSgE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;comb.io&#x2F;8ajSgE</a>

Don&#x27;t the claim the best everything everytime they release a new anything?

They used the phrase &quot;world&#x27;s best pro notebook&quot; three times in the first 200 words! How could they be wrong?

Katie Cotton retired in 2014!Now they have nobody to make new words.

It feels like a single child is in charge of directing, writing, editing these marketing materials. It’s the “best”? Surely that alone will convince your customers who saw how you made the worst laptop keyboard ever when you shrank the depth. Surely you want to convince them you fixed that issue. Oh? You’re just going to ignore it and say its the best? The baseline price is $2400? In the highly competitive $1500+ laptop space? Bold move, Cotton.

The standard for releasing new software is that it should be better than its own previous self, in some way. It doesn&#x27;t have to be better in all ways, or best in the world in any way, so long as the overall value proposition has improved. What rubs many people the wrong way about Apple is that they always claim to be the absolute best in all dimensions, as though engineering tradeoffs or accommodation to users&#x27; priorities and preferences are only for lesser companies. &quot;Our car is the fastest and the most comfortable and the most fuel efficient, so you&#x27;d have to be an idiot to want anything else.&quot; It&#x27;s the computing equivalent of snake oil, and people react to that.

If you didn&#x27;t think you had improved on the last version why would you release it?When you write software presumably you think each release is the best experience each time?

Their 2018 MacBook is by far the best typing experience I had on a laptop. Other laptop keyboards would be happy with just writing down what I just typed, the MacBook goes one step further and doubles many letters. That&#x27;s after 6 months of use and 95% of the time using an external keyboard.Meanwhile, every time I take out my 6 years old Thinkpad T440s the keyboard feels nice instantly.

&gt; they claim &quot;best typing experience&quot; every time they release a new laptopWhat do you expect them to say?

How does 1mm travel distance compare to the external magic keyboard for iMac?I REALLY loved the short travel distance of .55mm :( I could type so much faster, bordering on 160wpm

&gt; Featuring a new Magic Keyboard with a redesigned scissor mechanism and 1mm travel for a more satisfying key feel, the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers the best typing experience ever in a Mac notebook.Feels like they claim &quot;best typing experience&quot; every time they release a new laptop.

I have a Pro at work and dislike its keyboard so much that I still have a 2013 Air at home. This is the first Pro I’ll consider in a long time because of the Esc key.

Looks like you get your escape key back, that&#x27;s nice.

Too little, too late. If it weren&#x27;t for the OS, which they are also butchering, I would&#x27;ve moved away from Apple sooner.

Marco posted an update earlier - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marco.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;13&#x2F;mbp16" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marco.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;13&#x2F;mbp16</a>

I just find uneven bezels ugly. And I think symmetry as a beauty factor is quite widespread :)

&gt; Most devices (phones, tablets, TVs, laptops) don&#x27;t have constant bezel width.Some phones and tablets have varied bezel width because they are touch-screen devices that need to be held by their screens.In my experience, most TVs and laptops have uniform bezel widths. Especially TVs since they are so commonly treated as furniture, and therefore receive a great deal of design attention. On laptops, an exception is often the bottom bezel, where you often will see some additional surface material.I agree with GP that laptops should have uniform bezel widths to look their best. It&#x27;s not a must-have, but a uniform narrow bezel is optimal for laptop aesthetics.

Can you elaborate on why constant bezel width is so important? Most devices (phones, tablets, TVs, laptops) don&#x27;t have constant bezel width.

better than having a cutout from the screen...

I was so hoping for a constant bezel width. Unfortunately the top bezel is still a lot larger than the side ones. I know it&#x27;s because of the camera, but that makes for an awkward looking device…

It&#x27;s really something that one of the first promotional photos on the page is a macbook hooked up to audio gear through daisy-chained dongles and adapters instead of just a regular USB or ethernet cable like it would&#x27;ve been in the old days. The price of thin.

It wouldn&#x27;t be pointless for me. I quite often use my iPhone to provide an Internet connection for my MacBook Pro. I wish it were more reliable and didn&#x27;t consume so much battery. Dell and other laptop vendors have been embedding cellular modems in laptops for a long time. Apple manages to put one in a watch and every other device.It appears that the Qualcomm license problems are the only impediment to Apple putting an LTE modem into a bigger device.

What if you want to save battery life on your phone while you&#x27;re on the go? I imagine having LTE modem in the machine must be a less laggy experience as well.

They pretty much only exist in business laptops because in that context it can be useful to issue someone a field laptop with a SIM in it, and it doesn&#x27;t really mean much for cost on a large corporate data plan.

I feel like LTE modems in laptops are pointless since virtually every smartphone is capable of creating private hotspot to share LTE connection.

All of my other devices have LTE modems.That mobile carriers have not caught up with a better pricing model is not as important to me as having fewer failure points when traveling.

To be fair in some countries providers give data SIM pretty much for free. Here where I am, my provider gives one SIM with data plan for free every other normal SIM, so in my mini company I have 2 company phone numbers and I got SIM card with data plan for free and there was literally no way to opt out of that SIM without paying more.

You like paying for one extra mobile subscription?

We devs are so conservative. It&#x27;s ridiculous. Nobody allows Apple to innovate.

It may be &quot;flexible&quot; or their hand was forced. I know, personally, at least half a dozen people who have either delayed a Macbook purchased or outright moved to PC alternatives (e.g. XPS 13, Surface Laptop) because of the poor keyboard (both reliability and touchbar).Now six people isn&#x27;t statistically significant, but if that trend mirrors a wider one it could be costing Apple a measurable amount. The real question is will this be enough to satisfy e.g. programmers that actually want to bind the F keys to build&#x2F;clean&#x2F;run&#x2F;step over&#x2F;etc?

It takes a long time to get a design through the point of manufacture... especially at that scale. And even before that happens, an organization needs to admit that it has to happen in the first place.  For everybody saying the keyboard sucked and needed improvement, there were at least a few people within Apple that had staked something on the design as it was.

Follow the money. It was cheaper to stick with that design for 3 iterations than it was to change it.

I feel the same. The stubbornness of Apple that was so frustrating is a bit more flexible now, paying attention to &quot;subtle&quot; feedback like the arrow key&#x27;s sizes.

I remapped `jj` to escape (shortly before the touchbar was announced), because I disliked either having to move my hand or use both hands to get out of insert mode.map! jj &lt;Esc&gt;

I remapped caps lock to escape and it&#x27;s been wonderful.  The oversized caps lock key on keyboards is an inexplicably bad UI choice anyway.

there are great alternatives to reaching up for ‘esc’ in vim. ctrl-[ is my favorite. the ol double-pinkie

Personally an Emacs user---I use the esc key loads too. Best thing I ever did was install Karabiner to remap capslock to esc when tapped, and to ctrl when held down. (One meta key to rule them all!) Have you tried anything like that? Just curious.

I was listening to the Upgrade podcast (from relayfm), the episode that was just released includes an interview with someone from Apple (I think she&#x27;s the PM for the MBP?)She specifically mentioned vim users as one of the reasons for bringing back the escape key

The tough thing about the touch bar is how often it freezes. It&#x27;s hard to get used to it when all that is noticeable is the few times a week it does it.

I started using Ctrl-C instead of Escape in Vim years ago (long before the Touchbar) as it means I don&#x27;t have to move my hands from the home position.

you can map tab to esc inside vim so you dont need to type esc<pre><code> :imap &lt;tab&gt; &lt;esc&gt;</code></pre>

Use Ctrl-[ for ESC.Not only is [ always in the same spot, but you don&#x27;t have to move your fingers off the normal keys or stretch. I was fortunate that a friend told me about that early on, otherwise I couldn&#x27;t have handled VI, the stretching is so inconvenient (especially so on those old IBM PS&#x2F;2 keyboards with cubic keys).

I have always used ctr-c.  I didn&#x27;t even really know escape was an option, so I never had to adapt.

The escape key will be especially welcome by me, as I found the touchbar exceptionally hard to deal with, and I would often have to hit it three or four times to get vim to exit insert mode. I actually didn&#x27;t have much trouble with the arrow keys, despite all the negative feedback I saw for them online.Hopefully this trend continues and they can iterate on this model even further.

Who cares about Watt-hours? What matters is how long it runs - I&#x27;d be perfectly happy with a laptop that runs a month on a 1.5 Watt-hour AAA battery. Kinda like Amps for vacuum cleaners, this can actually be a measure of INefficiency.

They also brought back the 100 watt-hour battery

They&#x27;re hard to locate by touch. Seems counter-intuitive, maybe, but I&#x27;m sure I won&#x27;t be alone in attesting from experience that it does make a difference.

It&#x27;s much harder to blindly tell where in the arrow key cluster your finger has landed without the blank spaces of the inverted T layout.

I have never used them, but what is wrong with the full-sized left and right arrow keys?

&gt;WHen it comes to function keys, you either use them lots or rarely and for the former, yes - a physical key is prefered by far.Yeah, I used function keys all the time back in the DOS days. These days, it&#x27;s mostly to change sound volume.To your broader point though, modularity can be tough. It inherently adds bulk and cost. And, now, you have connectors that can&#x2F;will fail.

We have a modular laptop in our office-- it&#x27;s a Dell Precision, and practically everything in the machine&#x27;s serviceable and replaceable (complete with a detailed service manual, provided by Dell). Replaceable, externally accessible disk drives, replaceable RAM, replaceable modular keyboard, even (IIRC) a socketed processor.The catch is that all that modularity makes the thing massive-- the thing&#x27;s a good 2-3 inches thick (with lid closed) and weighs nearly 8 pounds. It looks like what you&#x27;d get if you took a &#x27;90s-era laptop chassis, stretched it to modern screen proportions, and stuck modern innards inside. It&#x27;s just not practical unless it&#x27;s going to spend all its time sitting on a desk, and that begs the question of why you wouldn&#x27;t just buy a desktop in the first place.

&gt; How hard would it be to have the touchbar in a modular design form that was user changeable and they could fit a row of keys instead?Pretty hard, I&#x27;d think. It would probably make the computer thicker and&#x2F;or clunkier.

Heck, I wonder why they don&#x27;t have BOTH function keys AND a touch bar. It looks like they could shrink the oversized touchpad slightly to recover enough space. Is it because the cost would be too high? Is it because it would ruin their design? Or is there some other reason?

There is plenty of room to do both if they insist upon the stupid touch bar.

About the touchbar, I don&#x27;t like it, for me it&#x27;s not what the mediocre features it brought somewhat irrelevant most time, probably it can be a useful feature if it was designed better.By nature, touchbar is a partial display and partial input device, blend it in with keyboard(a purely input) on the same flat surface angle, doesn&#x27;t feel right. Currently, the only time I look at touchbar is when I need to click on touchbar, 50% of functionality just wasted in this sense.If Apple kept the hinge design in pre butterfly keyboard macbook pro, that would be good place for touchbar. The location is more close to display, touchbar can act properly as a small assist display, also kept the keyboard part a pure mechanical input. The 45 degree elevation angle is also nicer.If you still have pre butterfly retina macbook pro, just touch that hinge part, you may like what I said.I did a quick low res mockup here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lostylogic&#x2F;status&#x2F;1194875389165760512&#x2F;photo&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lostylogic&#x2F;status&#x2F;1194875389165760512&#x2F;ph...</a>

When it comes to function keys, you either use them lots or rarely and for the former, yes - a physical key is prefered by far. However I see the advantages in other situations with the touchbar, however it would be great if the users had a choice. How hard would it be to have the touchbar in a modular design form that was user changeable and they could fit a row of keys instead?However, there is always the option of an external keyboard. But then you end up carrying even more peripherals that you end up with a really thin light laptop and a second bag with all the adapters to enable to you to use the laptop in the way you want. For some it does feel like you got sold an electric sports car, yet end up having to tow a caravan about to carry all the spare batteries and other accessories you had in your previous car.But certainly an opportunity to embrace modular design and allow the end user to customize in a way that has benefits and would win over pundits.EDIT [spelling and fat finger W&#x27;s]

I&#x27;m curious, do you usually blind type? If so, what advantage does it bring to you to look down on your keys? Also, in an optimal seating position (elbows at 90 degrees), do your fingers obscure the visibility of the touch bar?

Has the Touch Bar been reliable for you?From very early on, the one on mine has been very flakey, often going blank until a reboot. A few of my colleagues have had the same problem.

I like the Touch Bar a lot. Not having esc was the only gripe I had with it but I personally much prefer the multifunctional bar over some static f keys

Or even both the touchbar and the physical keys on the pro models? 7-row keyboards are a thing.

How about e-ink instead? Having 100 individual LCDs seems like it&#x27;s be energy expensive.The problem with both of these is they&#x27;d just be expensive, period. And solving a problem I don&#x27;t often have.

Reminds me of a phone I used to have: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;samsung-alias-2-e-ink-flip-phone-review-5251232" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;samsung-alias-2-e-ink-flip-phone-review-...</a>The keyboard was fully E-ink, so it changed based on the app or orientation of your phone. It was pretty awesome!

Because it’s expensive, bulky, and unnecessary. Something like this already exists: the Optimus Maximus keyboard. And while it’s a cool concept, it’s not without its rough edges. [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artlebedev.com&#x2F;optimus&#x2F;maximus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artlebedev.com&#x2F;optimus&#x2F;maximus&#x2F;</a>

&quot;Keys&quot; on the touch bar are more dynamic. Buttons can have different width, you can show text, sliders for e.g. volume. It&#x27;s not a 1-to-1 mapping.

I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s a prototype of this sitting around somewhere in Apple headquarters, either waiting for some patent to expire, or some key component to become cheap&#x2F;thin&#x2F;reliable enough.

Fixed, inflexible keys defeat the purpose of a screen that can show anything.

You can&#x27;t put a big control on a single key.

I’m sure someone has suggested this at some point but why not physical keys with an lcd underneath each key? This would allow those keys to be fully customizable and be worthy of the “Pro” designation.

For shuffling VMs it&#x27;s really helpful.

Forget being forced to use it, I&#x27;d like to not be forced to pay for it. How much does the price of the MBP go up because of all of the parts required for the touch bar?

Agreed, as long as I am forced to use the TouchBar, it personally for me is not &quot;the world’s best pro notebook&quot;.

So the keyboard guaranteed to break within the first 6 months on a 3k laptop is not among the worst two things?

But when not looking at the keyboard, having full height left and right arrow keys makes them feel just like the nearby Option and ? keys. Having a distinct arrow-key-group shape makes them easier to locate by touch.

I hate the full-size left and right arrow keys because it means I can&#x27;t easily use my sense of touch to find the arrow keys. I mistype them all the time now, even after months of use. That was never a problem with the previous inverted-T design.

The &quot;butterfly mechanism&quot; keyboards never bothered me. I actually like the feel of my MBP&#x27;s keyboard. Likewise the software Escape key never bothered me.But honestly, the design of the arrow keys is super important. With the full-height left&#x2F;right keys it&#x27;s hard to quickly find the arrow keys by feel. The new (old) arrow key design is honestly what I&#x27;m most interested in with this computer after the 16&quot; screen.

are you a touch typist? because lifting your hand, and repositioning it onto a grid of undifferentiated keys is MUCH harder when you can&#x27;t feel the shape of the inverted T and can&#x27;t see it (because you&#x27;re not looking at the keyboard or because you&#x27;re visually impaired).

&gt; &quot;the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPs - the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.&quot;The &quot;butterfly mechanism&quot; keyboards are awful, unreliable, and get worse with time, so I&#x27;m very glad to see them go. Likewise, the return of the physical Escape key is very welcome.But honestly, the design of the arrow keys has never bothered me in the slightest. If anything, the present configuration is slightly better because it&#x27;s aesthetically cleaner and gives you a larger surface to hit the left and right arrows.

To be fair, mapping caps to escape has been a thing for years and years. I started doing that once I learned vim about five years back, when I still had an older MacBook Air with a physical escape key.

Escape key issue was so bad that a lot of my devs mapped caps lock to the escape key.  Butterfly keyboard also has some weird workarounds with people carrying around mechanical keyboard.

The touchbar has a lot of uses for many people. Developers may not see that much benefit from it (unless they use a native IDE or text editor), but for people who use native apps, the touchbar can be really useful.Getting a physical escape key back and going with a more reliable keyboard design are big wins.

This seems highly anecdotal. I have a launch 2012 retina still with no peeling.

There was a recall for this delamination issue in earlier MBPs. I think even the last generation didn&#x27;t have this problem anymore.

Does anyone else remember when the macbooks came with two options for screen coating? The original anti-glare coating cost a few nits of brightness and some people had Feelings about this.  I can&#x27;t even recall now when they got rid of the option.  Probably when the backlight got more powerful?

I wonder if the screen reflective coating is better too. AFAIK, since introduction of retina screens of MacBooks (2012) it&#x27;s a matter of time that the reflective coating will start to peel off and will leave ugly blotches.

&gt; perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer baseWhat makes you think they stopped? You know it takes a couple years to design and ship hardware at this level (as well as to design the production lines to be able to build a few million more copies), yes?It’s not like a web app where they can change, test, PR, and deploy in a few days or weeks or months. There is a lot of preproduction work that goes into building the kind of objects Apple is now famous for and are almost taken for granted.

I&#x27;d want the touch bar to sit on top of the function keys, but I agree.I also would be much happier if it was just easier to turn it off or if it at least made each touch action take 200ms or so so that I don&#x27;t accidentally hit it all the time.

What I really don’t get is the Touch Bar could just sit in between the number keys and function keys. Even on 13” models there is space for both and a giant touch pad.They have been forced to add it to just about every model to keep people from downgrading to avoid the thing. Which ok saved me money, but I would expect this to get the point across.

The touch pad is ridiculously huge now, going by my greasy finger smears I maybe use only 50% of the total area. They could easy sacrifice some of that real estate to put the touchbar as row above the function keys and feature a full size set of offset arrow keys.

How &#x27;bout a full-size up and down key? I use those all the time and those scrunched keys are easy to make mistakes on.

I like it. It helps me control my music, volume and VMs all at once without having to bother with windows or holding down key modifiers

I predict that from now on the touch bar will slowly become smaller and smaller until it disappears completely. It would have been better if they&#x27;d gotten rid of it entirely in one iteration though.

I was sorta kinda OK with the missing escape key.  For me the biggest keyboard improvement is a return to the inverted-T arrow layout.

&gt; ... the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.Seems that if you scream hard enough AAPL listens:&gt; What Apple emphasized is simply that they listened to the complaints from professional MacBook users. They recognized how important the Escape key is to developers — they even mentioned Vim by name during a developer tool demo.* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;16-inch_macbook_pro_first_impressions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;16-inch_macbook_pro_first...</a>

Do you debug and use the keys to control it? This is my biggest gripe, since most IDEs (and browsers if web dev) map debugging to the Fn keys, so I end up using them a LOT. I hate clicking the debugging icons, particularly since I tend to use a few different editors&#x2F;browsers and they are all in different spots.

I almost never use the function keys and I am a programmer. They made the right call on that one. Just because you use an editor that makes use of rarely used keys doesn’t mean that they are a universal truth.

Jony Ive leaving the company a few months ago is not a coincidence.

It took 3 years for Apple to quietly acknowledge those mistakes.

&gt; where does my sd card go? i cant plugin to the hdmi tv at a friends or a board room?Apple has a long and storied history of removing drives and ports that it considers obsolete. No one should be surprised at this point.

those were not the worst things. a keyboard that breaks a week after you get it was the worst thing. the second worse thing is this redefinition of a computer into a big ipad. where does my sd card go? i cant plugin to the hdmi tv at a friends or a board room? why does it have a headphone jack? if we dont need it on our phone why do we need it on a laptop (lol)? oh yeah because inch by inch... apple is the epitome of capitalism, good and bad, and lately more bad than good.

I believe that is not correct, you can still run unsigned apps, you just have to enable them in System Preferences &gt;&gt; Security and Privacy.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;443611&#x2F;how-macos-catalinas-new-security-features-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;443611&#x2F;how-macos-catalinas-new-sec...</a> (middle of page)

Worst is certainly removal of 32-bit support. I&#x27;ll personally never be using anything past Mojave. It would literally cost me from purchased software that is now incompatible and will not be updated.To say Apple has lost its way would be an understatement. Apple is actively detrimenting those who have stayed in its ecosystem for decades. As a professional audio engineer, I refuse to lose several of my plugins to a quote-unquote &#x27;upgrade.&#x27;If I lose access to my software, you are not &#x27;upgrading&#x27; my OS, you are removing access to what worked perfectly before.I also refuse to lose Adobe CS6, by which I&#x27;ve paid a full license for. No, I have no interest in updates. I had no interest in updates post-CS3, to be honest.There is no benefit to the lack of 32-bit support that could be worth losing it. If they did this because they&#x27;re moving to ARM, fuck them. Don&#x27;t let your behind the scenes process fuck with my day-to-day ability to work.I&#x27;m literally going to have to leave behind my career as an iOS developer - I refuse by principle to purchase new Apple products (&#x27;vote with your money&#x27;) - and I certainly refuse to accept an &#x27;upgrade&#x27; that annihilates the usability of some of my most important software, in the name of...what? What possible benefit does removing 32-bit support lend to the customer? None. It&#x27;s literally just a fuck you to me for supporting them for years. What a damn shame.

&gt; I&#x27;m astonished and pleased to see they walked back the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPsApple still hasn&#x27;t walked back on mandatory notarization on Catalina.In January 2020, they&#x27;re removing the option to run software that isn&#x27;t locally compiled or notarized[1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;?id=09032019a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;?id=09032019a</a>

I was skeptical too, but some apps have found really great ways to use it:- Mute&#x2F;unmute on skype- Preview and switcher for a number of slides at a time in powerpoint- Mirror displays &#x2F; extend desktop when connected to an external display

Touchbar doesn’t make sense until you install something like Pock.Dev. After doing that, it’s useful.

Maybe somebody at Apple got the idea that telling more users &quot;Sorry, your data is gone forever, no way to get it back.&quot; increases user perception of device security (that it&#x27;s hard to get your data off your device; if Apple can&#x27;t do it then criminals can&#x27;t either.)I&#x27;d rather have FDE on a removable drive, but perhaps the typical user doesn&#x27;t really have a clear mental picture of what&#x27;s going on.

Companies do not act according to their morals: they act according to their incentives. And there is an incentive to sell more iCloud storage if SSDs are hard to swap.

The paradoxical thing with recent Apple laptop keyboards is that their Magic Keyboard 2 is pretty darn good. I haven&#x27;t bought any Apple products for more than a decade, but I keep recommending and buying their Magic Keyboard 2 for Linux workstations.It has a very good mechanical feel, and it reduces latency perhaps due to shallow action point and&#x2F;or firmware tweaks [1]. Also, it&#x27;s really easy to source ANSI layouts outside the US.I do in fact prefer it to my blue ALPS keyboard for long typing sessions.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;keyboard-latency&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;keyboard-latency&#x2F;</a>

If you&#x27;re dealing with Apple&#x2F;an Authorized Service Provider, there is a replacement method available to them to get data off of a failing system. (Uses the USB-C ports and DFU mode).Anecdotally, it does work on some boards that are otherwise hosed, but may be less frequently successful than with the prior data connector, as there&#x27;s more pieces that do have to be still functional for it to work.

&gt;It increases risk of data loss.I realize that this is idealistic of me but data loss should never be an issue. This is 2019 and backups have been drilled into everyone&#x27;s heads for years and years and years. You can still access the drives in these via Target Disk mode (and I&#x27;ve had to do a few recoveries through that so I know it works) and it&#x27;s likely that the pros outweigh the cons.

What&#x27;s more likely--logic board failure, or the loss or theft of your entire laptop? If you&#x27;re not backing up your data, your risk of data loss is unacceptably high. Worrying about whether the SSD is soldered to the logic board is like walking outside in the cold without a coat and worrying about whether you&#x27;re wearing a long sleeve or short sleeve t-shirt.

It’s getting better now that USB3.1 SSD cases are dirt cheap.

I feel like laptop keyboards continue to get worse. I mean, they&#x27;re usable, but there are better key designs out there.

I ran into this issue with 2015 MBP. I incorrectly assumed SSD where still removable and connectable to a USB adapter. When my display started failing I took it to Apple. They advised that data loss is possible. I had an old backup and figured I could just use the SSD via USB for more recent stuff.Sure enough all data is lost. I ask them why they removed such a feature. They said they replaced it will a special port on logic board for accessing the SSD the same way. They tried that though and it failed. LOL at the nonsensical design decisions.If Apple does a removable SSD again, it would go a long way to restoring faith in them.

&gt; I&#x27;d concluded that Apple didn&#x27;t really think much of laptops anymore, and had simply moved on to caring more about other form factors: it seemed a logical conclusion if one assumed that people at Apple were in fact competent.Counterpoint, I love the new keyboards and hate using anything else. Amazing how far people go in assuming their opinion is correct, and then just keep going from there.

I replaced my MBP 2018 with a surface pro 6, and the surface has a much better keyboard even though it’s a clip-on mat. I think that says it all.

&gt; soldering it to the board AND making it so that there&#x27;s no way to access it in the event of a logic board failureI prefer this, considering how encryption works with the T2 chip. I&#x27;m probably in a minority of general users, but probably in the majority of HN users when I say that nothing on my laptop is important. I don&#x27;t even have backups per-se. Code is in git and mirrored to multiple remote backups. Documents and similar exist solely in the cloud. If for some reason my laptop was stolen I want there to be an as close to 0% chance of an enemy retrieving data from my laptop as possible.(Yes, I know SSD encryption exists, I think the T2 thing takes things a step further)

Not just the risk of data loss, but the inconvenience of restoring the machine is much higher. This means the only solution to restoring a modern Mac notebook is to replace the entire logic board - everything else may be functional except the storage, which is a consumable by most considerations, but now the entire board must be swapped. And if it&#x27;s out of warranty, which let&#x27;s face it, it&#x27;s extremely likely to be, then you are completely and utterly stuck. You either have an enormous bill from Apple or an authorised repair shop (and Apple is notoriously cagey about allowing third parties access to their replacement parts) or you have to hunt down a machine for spares to do the swap yourself, and now with Apple&#x27;s invasive security measures requiring communication with Apple&#x27;s diagnostic tools to perform certain swaps, storage failure can render the machine entirely useless for months, if not permanently. Whereas if the disk was replaceable, just order one from the most convenient store, swap it in, restore from Time Machine.The Function Key MBPs have a problem with their flash storage where they may randomly and unpredictably die, taking all the data with them. The fix is a firmware update, which also takes all the data with it. Fantastic, Apple, we bought six of those machines, and because the users are actively, y&#x27;know, using the damned things, it&#x27;s not really convenient to tell them they&#x27;ll be without their machine for a week while the service centre gets around to it, and then multiple hours of restoring their Time Machine backups. On the plus side, the SSDs in those machines are not soldered. Yes, they&#x27;re proprietary, but it&#x27;s something - if those machines suffer failure, I could grab an SSD on eBay and get them running again. It&#x27;s almost worth the risk.

It turns out that people who buy laptops -- a mobile-ish form factor differentiated from a tablet by its keyboard -- might really really care about keyboards as the main interface between user and device.I&#x27;d concluded that Apple didn&#x27;t really think much of laptops anymore, and had simply moved on to caring more about other form factors: it seemed a logical conclusion if one assumed that people at Apple were in fact competent.This shows some real care regarding laptops as a form factor and puts them back in the running for a lot of buyers, including me. But there&#x27;s still one major issue that I don&#x27;t see people talking much about -- the way that Apple&#x27;s decisions regarding storage (namely soldering it to the board AND making it so that there&#x27;s no way to access it in the event of a logic board failure) increases consumer risk as well as decreasing consumer choice:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Apple-removes-the-Customer-Data-Migration-Tool-connector-in-the-the-2018-MacBook-Pro-with-Touch-Bar.318186.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Apple-removes-the-Customer-Dat...</a>It increases risk of data loss. That&#x27;s a choice that impacts the day-to-day experience much less than the keyboard, which explains why the keyboard has gotten much more attention, and it really is nice that a company arguably built on attention to experience returned to that aspect of it. But this kind of choice makes a huge difference in a moment of failure, and it&#x27;s at least equally user-hostile, especially in a product bearing the name &quot;pro&quot; where data recovery can be a matter of business continuity.I suppose that one can argue a responsible professional will be using network and external backups (and of course all responsible professionals worth considering or selling anything to will do this, right?), and so this isn&#x27;t necessary, and Apple&#x27;s thing (wise or unwise) is that they frequently reconsider and eliminate things that aren&#x27;t crucial. But redundancy in some areas is wise, and I can&#x27;t see what they think eliminating both removability AND emergency direct access when it come to storage actually buys them. Even if one assumes it&#x27;s a lock-in action for service, it makes the actual service more difficult and costly.I&#x27;m liking the keyboard correction. I just bought a 2014 MBP to replace an older failing MBP, so I&#x27;m not in the market for something else for a year or two, but when that comes up, I&#x27;ll be seriously looking at the 16&quot; as an option. And this will be what I&#x27;m thinking about.

When the touchbar first came out, I thought we&#x27;d see haptics in the second iteration. It seems so obvious that pressure-sensitivity and haptics could mitigate a lot of the weaknesses of the touchbar.What I really miss is upgradeable RAM and SSD. Still using a 2010 MBP because I was able to upgrade it; that&#x27;s no longer possible.

If you look closely, not only is there a physical escape key, there&#x27;s a physical fingerprint key, and the touch bar is also elevated. You still might not to be able to use the touch bar without looking at it, but at least you can find it without looking at it.I was half expecting them to use haptics on the touch bar. Still no luck there.

I just map caps lock to escape, then i need even less finger movement.

&gt; the lack of a physical Escape keyC-[ is the same thing in Unix. I haven&#x27;t tried it on a Mac though. But if you&#x27;re using vim (mostly where I hear this complaint) use C-[ (actually just use it in vim anyways because who wants to lift their hand up to do such a common movement?)

I don&#x27;t get why they couldn&#x27;t fit both a touch bar and the function keys on a 16 inch laptop. Other vendors manage to put a numpad on their notebooks of similar sizes.

Ive is gone, perhaps function over form will be the new aluminium.

coming from ubuntu before mbp(2013)
I anyways found the escape key to inconsistent to appreciate. depending on your state of full screen and what program you are in it will give you different response (exit full screen vs in program functionality) hence tried to disincorporate usage of escapekey from my muscle memory alltogether.

why you consider full size left and right arrow bad?

I must be missing something out, but what&#x27;s wrong with left and right arrow keys? I have 2018 15&#x27;&#x27; mbp and they are just fine. Or you mean up and down arrows?

&gt;The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substituteIf the Touch Bar had been introduced above physical function keys, we&#x27;d consider it yet another Apple UI breakthrough, and other companies would imitate it the way every notebook today looks like the 2001 TiBook.&gt;perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team&#x27;s desiresI don&#x27;t think the fact that Jony Ive left the company a few months ago is a coincidence. Basically, Apple finally got notebook keyboards right ... after three years of worldwide embarrassment, and the departure of the company&#x27;s chief designer!

I&#x27;m astonished and pleased to see they walked back the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPs - the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute, but perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team&#x27;s desires.

&quot;The best keyboard experience just got better.&quot;

I&#x27;m pretty sure at this point if they make a version without the touchbar, they&#x27;ll market it as a premium feature and charge more.  Now with 100% physical function keys!

If they care at all about making the touchbar a thing then the best way to do that is make every mac developer get one on their daily-use laptop. I still think of it as a novelty more than a functional feature, but I don&#x27;t think any third party apps would support it if it didn&#x27;t come on every MBP.

Removing the touchbar has a material financial impact to Apple? We&#x27;re talking about a CNC machine here, that&#x27;s how they carve out the aluminum chassis. It would literally involve them carving out less aluminum from the block, because the touchbar would no longer be needed.Quality problems? You mean like the over-engineered keyboard they&#x27;ve had issues with for three years?Some decades longer design patterns are battle tested&#x2F;aren&#x27;t broken, yet Apple continually tries to break them - thinness to the extent that they now solder memory&#x2F;disk to the board, putting out a keyboard design that isn&#x27;t sufficiently tested, and all sorts of Catalina issues that people have documented online.

Minimizing SKUs was the Jobs way. I’d say Apple has since then taken very different approach. Just check the number of iPad and iPhone variants.

Except they still offered options, but without modularity, so you had more SKUs to track in your logistics - you still need to track the parts you solder down, except now instead of shipping a base system and being able to make a &quot;CTO&quot; version, or just let authorised resellers with authorised service points apply the right parts, you need to wait till a whole extra SKU gets moved through thousands of kilometers of logistic chain for your one tiny order.Maybe the experience in USA with Apple Stores is different, but when forced to buy a Mac by work recently I had to deal with some ridiculous wait times just for asking for 32G ram.

&gt; One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus.One way. The other is, if your computer breaks you either upgrade or spend a lot to have it repaired by Apple.
There&#x27;s no downside in using non soldered down ram and storage, it&#x27;s just the nth lock in strategy.

Apple&#x27;s product line is &quot;simple&quot; for marketing reasons. It&#x27;s easier for customers to understand what product is right for them, then funnel them into configuration option trees. While limiting SKUs is still good retail practice (especially if you primarily sell through indirect channels), the ability for customers to easily understand your product portfolio is what&#x27;s really important.I do agree that they have slipped in this area, though I think it&#x27;s an inevitable consequence of being a trillion dollar company. Apple was only able to become a trillion dollar company because their marketing and operations were easier to manage, and companies in a market-leading position typically grow until the point their size overwhelms their ability to steer the ship.

The thing about that is they could minimize SKUs even more by providing socketed ram and storage. The permutations of that are much more numerous than adding a touch bar vs physical keys option.

One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus.  Options mean inventory, development and test costs etc... and can be sources of quality problems triggering warranty repairs or replacements.  Doing few things allows one to streamline both product development and manufacturing.

That is speculation based off the wording they used in the description. He reached this conclusion because it said RAM&#x2F;SSD were &quot;not user accessible&quot; and they used to say &quot;built into the computer&quot; - no one really knows the answer. I imagine they remain soldered.

One only needs to take a look at the press images to see that they remain soldered on - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;images&#x2F;product&#x2F;mac&#x2F;standard&#x2F;Apple_16-inch-MacBook-Pro_Advanced-Thermal-Design_111319_inline.gif.large_2x.gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;images&#x2F;product&#x2F;mac&#x2F;standard&#x2F;A...</a> for example, there&#x27;s just no space for SODIMM&#x27;s to fit.Really annoying they continue to do this, especially given they charge excessive markup on memory upgrades (2x32GB DDR4 SODIMMS average $250-300, Apple charges you $800 for 64GB of memory).

Apparently RAM and SSD are no longer soldered.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;axi0mX&#x2F;status&#x2F;1194621631856967688" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;axi0mX&#x2F;status&#x2F;1194621631856967688</a>Edit: Tweet deleted, info is most likely wrong.

Yep. This is why I made the linux switch and I&#x27;m a happy Dell customer because of it.

Would it materially harm a company with a trillion dollar market cap to offer a version of this without the touchbar (thus yielding a lower price), so people can afford to upgrade the soldered memory and NVMe drive?Would it also harm them to make a version that didn&#x27;t have soldered memory&#x2F;NVMe drive?Ultimately, this is why I switched to a Dell Latitude. Being user hostile to basic memory&#x2F;disk replacement doesn&#x27;t fly with me when spending $1500+ on a machine.And if replacing either breaks the crypto chain - I don&#x27;t need a black box T2 chip, I&#x27;ll do my own disk encryption.

After much deliberation, I bought a 2017 13&quot; MBP, upspecced to 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM. While I&#x27;ve not had a complete failure from the keyboard, it did need looking at at the Apple Store when it also had the entire display assembly replaced because the keyboard had damaged the screen - despite me looking after it well, always putting it in a soft slip case and then a laptop bag.While I&#x27;ve liked some elements of the design, it&#x27;s not (to me) a Pro piece of kit, and I&#x27;ve sine replaced it with a 2016 15&quot; MBP which is much better built and doesn&#x27;t need extra dongles to connect to everyday devices (and has magsafe, which is the best piece of design I&#x27;ve seen in many years).Given this performance, I&#x27;ll never buy a new Macbook again - particularly given all the issues about thermal throttling, battery life and indeed the way that macOS seems now to be going.Don&#x27;t get me wrong, there are elements of the 2017 MBP that I love - it looks amazing, the screen is fantastic and it&#x27;s just so precisely made. But the lack of ports, the lack of ruggedness, the keyboard and the performance outweigh any &#x27;look, shiny!&#x27; feeling I have about it - so much so that I&#x27;ve not sold it because I feel like I&#x27;m stitching the buyer up - even though they&#x27;ve not held their price compared to previous models, which shows that people know this to be the case, and the keyboard still has the 4 year warranty in place.

Was in certain parts of the Apple website before.

No, it was mentioned during the WWDC introduction.

No, I&#x27;m pretty sure the starting price for Mac Pro was announced when the machine was revealed.

6016 x 3384 @ 32&quot; for that screen, pretty nice. I&#x27;ll take 4!(if I won the lottery)

&gt; Mac Pro starts at $5,999 and Pro Display XDR starts at $4,999.Is this the first time we got a starting price on the Mac Pro?

So basically they made what the 2016 lineup should&#x27;ve been.In November 2019.OK.

I really recommend rebinding caps lock to escape. macOS lets you do that natively in keyboard setting nowadays. Still muscle memory to relearn, of course.

I’ve only been using vim for about 10 years but I’m pretty sure I’ve hit escape less than a few thousand times in those years. One of the first things I did was imap jk &lt;Esc&gt; and it turns out that’s really all I need Escape for (Ctrl-C is goto to return to normal mode)...

I think it&#x27;s more like Excel users have been loud enough. Esc is very important for Excel.

You shouldn&#x27;t be happy that they added that back, you should be pissed that they took it out in the first place, well knowing how many developers use Mac.

&gt; physical escape keyI&#x27;m happy we VIM users have been loud enough to get the most important key back. :-)I know there&#x27;s Ctrl-[ but it&#x27;s 20 years of muscle memory to retrain, and I don&#x27;t want to do that.

I can reach it from the starting row (ASDF) of my left hand without moving it. This might be more impactful to people with small hands.

I grew up playing games like StarCraft so I have muscle memory of moving my hand to the top row for control group management. It&#x27;s no big deal.

I&#x27;m old and I&#x27;ve been using vim for decades.  Remapping caps lock on the internal keyboard would just confuse me because I use my external keyboard as much as I use the internal one, and my external keyboard has caps lock remapped to Command.

&gt; Whats with you guys and the ESC key? It&#x27;s so far away do you actually use it?You&#x27;re joking. You realize this forum is filled with programmers and other digital creative professionals, right?

Whats with you guys and the ESC key? It&#x27;s so far away do you actually use it? I map caps-lock to ESC&#x2F;Hyper key which I find pretty useful.

&quot;Holy heck, they re-added a physical escape key. That&#x27;s a huge improvement&quot;Amazing how this can be the first comment. What would be next? USB ports? Even jack ports on the iPhone?! &#x2F;s

&gt; a slight shame they didn&#x27;t just move the touchbar up and re-add the F key row tooyeah, considering the massive 16&quot; size, there&#x27;s definitely room for another row of keys. I could see if a diminuitive air came out with touchbar, you want both weight and space savings so nuke it. but with 16&quot; and six speakers just add the damn keys!

&gt; Although I might be an unusual demographic as I touch typeThis gave me a chuckle since nearly every person I know (90% at least) is a touch typer.

Holy heck, they re-added a physical escape key. That&#x27;s a huge improvement. a slight shame they didn&#x27;t just move the touchbar up and re-add the F key row too, but it is a good compromise and improvement regardless.This could be the one a lot of people have been waiting for if the new switches&#x2F;design pans out.PS - Although I might be an unusual demographic as I touch type and wouldn&#x27;t use the touchbar regardless (since I look at the screen, not the backs of my hands while I interact with a Mac).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro&#x2F;</a> - 13 and 16 inch available

Agreed! I&#x27;m waiting for the rumours for the 13&quot; now.

Couldn’t agree more! It’s so frustrating how the 13” is treated like it doesn’t have to perform.

This is what I am hoping. As a MBP 15&quot; user I don&#x27;t want something any bigger (even just a few mm bigger). I want something in the current 13&quot; models size just with more screen&#x2F;less bezel.

They will probably do the same stuff to the 13inch model turning it into a 14inch.

I too sincerely hope that&#x27;s coming next year

Dear god, if Apple ever made a 14 inch (in 13 inch body) with a dedicated GPU, even if it was thicker to keep the same size battery, take my money.

Great, now I hope they make a 13-inch version. There&#x27;s no reason to sacrifice mobility in a pro laptop.

Will the fan make something this time or will it be a placebo again?

Made a special point to request an Air instead of a Pro when I started my new job recently. Office manager was confused and insisted everyone else was using Pros but I stayed strong. No regrets.

It seems to be a global issue.Edit: Replaced the _ with a - and it works

In the UK and the `Buy` button redirects to a not found page.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;uk&#x2F;shop&#x2F;go&#x2F;macbook_pro&#x2F;select" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;uk&#x2F;shop&#x2F;go&#x2F;macbook_pro&#x2F;select</a> this 404s for me.

I was surprised, and pleased to see this. 512GB as the base SSD as well.I&#x27;d like to see some video card benchmarks.

&gt;It&#x27;s starting at the same price as the previous one, $2399It&#x27;s US$2399 for the 13-inch model.The 16-inch starts at US$2799

It&#x27;s starting at the same price as the previous one, $2399

Anyone has price prediction for this beast ?

Why not both? My QMK mechanical keyboards (and, I just noticed, Karabiner Elements) can support turning Caps Lock into Ctrl+KEY if pressed with something else, and ESC if pressed by itself. Best of all possible worlds.

I have both using Karabiner-Elements. Escape when pressed alone, ctrl if pressed with something else.

Unless that’s where you’ve already remapped ctrl.

I do that on my Macbook Pro. The only drawback is when I go to any other machine that doesn&#x27;t have Caps Lock remapped and I&#x27;m toggling caps lock on&#x2F;off all the time.Particularly annoying when you&#x27;re a vim user :D

For those of you mentioning the esc key, I suggest mapping capslock to esc, I&#x27;ve been doing that for years now (both Linux and Mac) and it&#x27;s awesome. Except when you&#x27;re using someone else&#x27;s computer and constantly turn capslock on and off...Edit: You can do this natively since Mojave(?) in the keyboard settings without having to resort to something like Karabiner.

&gt; The new Magic Keyboard also features a physical Escape keyThank god for the return to sanity

Does this work?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro?product=MVVK2LL&#x2F;A&amp;step=config" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro?product=MVVK2...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro?product=MVVJ2LL&#x2F;A&amp;step=config" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro?product=MVVJ2...</a>

I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;re still rolling this out.. the &quot;buy&quot; button on the MacBook page leads to &quot;Page Not Found&quot;.[0] Unfortunate, because I&#x27;ve been waiting for the 16-inch ever since the first rumor came up..[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;shop&#x2F;go&#x2F;macbook_pro&#x2F;select" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;shop&#x2F;go&#x2F;macbook_pro&#x2F;select</a>

If this holds up, then man... am I happy.I ran the gamut looking for comparable laptops recently in an effort to figure out what I&#x27;d do if they didn&#x27;t get it together, and the options really vary and nothing feels as nice.