I had a friend in uni that was blind. He used a Mac for all of his work because he said, and I quote "It's the most beautiful OS I have seen".
He wasn't just legally blind, he had absolutely no vision what so ever... but with the voiceover technology and the accessibility built in to OS X 10.4 at the time it was already amazing to him. Apple has worked very hard to make iOS and OS X accessible to not just those with perfect vision or perfect control, but also those with various disabilities.
And now, they make a huge step back by launching an unaccessible touchbar that removes real keys, hence removing options for your friend. Yay, progress.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's more accessible. I would think it has voice over like the iPhone which is supposedly one of the smart phones for visually impaired people.
Unfortunately Chrome is absolutely terrible not just for power usage but also for RAM usage. For some reason Chrome loves memory, it gobbles it up. Safari is much better about it.
I switched from Chrome back to Safari recently and while it took some time adjusting, I have been seeing almost 2 - 3 hours longer battery life, and I have had way less issues with "beachballing".
I can't believe I have to repeat this, in 2016: software workload naturally expands to use all available resources. Period. Nobody likes doing "memory optimization" work when developing.
I regularly have 50 tabs open on Chrome. Switched to Safari a month ago hoping it would leave me more memory.
Turns out my machine suddenly started beachballing, swapping like mad (battery usage up) and crashing. Switching back to Chrome completely fixed that problem.
So, all the tech we use that uses USB A will disappear in the next year? It's ok, I can just spend more money so my keyboard and mouse can work with my $2400 machine.
Get a USB-C to USB A adapter for the keyboard ($19 from Apple, less than $10 from others). My stuff is all plugged into a relatively new Thunderbolt dock, I'll get a $49 Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter.
USB-C is a better connector that can sweep away all the USB connector types that have come before. Products can't switch fast enough. I wish the iPhone 7 used it instead of Lightning but Lightning is thinner so they probably never will.
I can now bring a single charger that can charge my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. I just need a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-C to Lightning cable.
Charge my laptop or charge my iPhone or charge both (use the laptop as a passthrough).
It will reduce the amount of stuff I carry, I tend to carry just an iPhone charger while traveling in case I want to bring it with me where I don't bring my laptop, extra space in luggage and weight.
Increases utility over what? If the ports all match, you can choose to carry 1 or 2 cables depending on whether you want to make 1 or 2 connections. Since the ports don't match, you need a cable for each type of connection you might want to make.
Can you plug this particular cable into a wall adapter iOS charger? If not, then you still need two different cables depending on whether you want to charge from the wall or the mac.
As a professional software dev/system architect using MacBook Pro's, I am excited about the new MacBook Pro. I'll miss the SD card for my amateur photography, but I'll live.
It's still got the 3.5mm for my headphones, with USB-C hopefully daisy chaining non Apple displays will finally become a reality, and thankfully my work has upgraded to using wireless technology for displaying screens in conference rooms (which works from OS X and Windows).
The new context sensitive function bar is going to take some getting used to, but I have been using Caps lock for escape for years now and OS X just got native support for mapping that.
Grabbed a USB-C to lightning cable while I was at it. Now I can just bring a single charger and charge either my Mac or my iPhone or both at the same time. I rarely use USB drives, so unfortunately I'll need a dongle for that, but it's not that big of a deal.
---
I am more sad that there was no announcement for the Mac Pro/Mac Mini. Also no Apple display, instead handing that to LG, so it looks like Apple is pulling out of the desktop market (I wonder how long the iMac will last).
---
Edit: There is one thing I will miss, and that is MagSafe. It has saved my laptop many a time in it's lifetime. I am hoping Apple builds a USB-C to MagSafe cable that provides the same functionality to save laptops from a tripping hazard.
Very strange. What are Vim users going to do without the ESC key? Ctrl-c and ctrl-[ don't work in some Vim emulation tools or for browser extensions that provide Vim keybindings.
Function keys are important for some things. F1 (help), F5 (reload page), F11 (full screen), F12 (browser dev tools), shift-F2 (Firefox terminal), alt-F4 (close window), etc..
I almost bought a Macbook in August, but I decided to get a Thinkpad 460 instead. I deleted Windows 10 and installed Ubuntu 16.04. The Thinkpad was $1,000 cheaper than the Macbook and has better specs (24 Gb RAM), except for the screen. The screen on the Thinkpad is better in one way though: it has a matte finish, so there is less glare. There is also a middle button on the touchpad, which is great for copy/paste in Linux.
Hearing about the missing ESC key makes me very happy that I didn't switch to Mac.
Edit: I see that there is a touchbar, but I have a fully touchscreen keyboard, and it's impossible to type without looking at it. A touchbar seems like it would be less efficient than keys. Keys are programmable too, while still providing reference for your fingers.
They are all important. Backticks for things like markdown, reStructuredText, ES6, and shell scripting. Tildes for file paths and regex. ESC for Vim keybinding emulation in many programs.
The ESC key on the touchbar doesn't look like it's in the right position, but maybe people will be able to retrain themselves to feel for the left edge of the touchbar with the little finger and then tap with the ring finger.
It doesn't seem ideal, but I'll try it at a store before making a final opinion. I'm still relieved that I didn't switch from Linux to Mac though. :)
I was also scared about the removal of MagSafe when I first got my Macbook 12", but in reality what happens when you trip on your power cable is that it will come out from the plug in the wall since the cable is not attached to the transformer.
Detaching easily from the wall socket is a peculiarly US phenomenon. In the UK for example it takes considerable force exactly perpendicular to the socket to remove a plug, and all retail cables are moulded to the plug. So one end is anchored to the wall ans the other is connected to a €3500 laptop...
It would have made more sense to move the Magsafe connector onto the PSU DC output.
That would have been nice. I was hoping for Mac mini update too. I still have mine from 2012, and the newer versions don't really offer much over that version.
Just upgraded the SSD in it from the fusion drive to a full on SSD, and it is incredibly fast now.
One reason might be that, if you buy a Macbook with a touchscreen, there is less reason to buy an iPad in addition to the Macbook.
I had one laptop with a touchscreen and it was so annoying that I disabled it. Every time I would brush something off of the screen, or someone would point at my screen and touch it, unexpected things would happen. Keyboards are much more efficient than touchscreens, so there didn't seem to be any point.
They're probably right about that. But they could put the pin sensor technology from the iPad Pro into an iMac and get a pretty good product. They did a fantastic job with it.
I think the real "killer feature" of this screen will be distracting the user. I already experience this with my phone lighting up when it's lying at the bottom of my screen.
Control is an actually useful key, in Emacs specifically but also in OSX in general as all OSX controls have emacs-ish chords support (e.g. C-a C-e for start and end of line). Having Control on a large well-placed key is more convenient than have it on a small key in the corner, and I've literally no use for capslock.
> how do you turn on caps?
I don't think I've ever wanted that in the last 20 years or so, every single toggling of capslock has been by mistake. In fact one of my issues with windows is there still isn't a way to easily remap capslock, it takes 3 clicks in OSX (or ChromeOS), it takes installing third-party software or hand-rolling custom keyboard layouts on windows.
All the time I see people saying they never want caps lock. I develop in Java and it's convention to have constants be caps lock; other languages do something similar too. In that case what would be the solution without caps lock, typing each character holding shift? I think I'll try it to see how it goes but sounds weird to me.
> In that case what would be the solution without caps lock, typing each character holding shift?
Yes, what little you need to type before autocompletion kicks in anyway, and code is mostly not constants, writing constants is a much rarer case than chording Control in emacs, terminal or cocoa text control.
Mostly when doing finances with stock trading tickers. Tickers are almost always presented and handled in upper case. So when I'm doing work in the trading space, caps lock goes on and stays on.
Game servers that are hosted on OVH get DDOSed daily and they drop like flies.
Myself and a lot of friends had servers killed both when renting VPS/Dedicated server or a dedicated "Game Server".
And all and all with considerably smaller botnets like the ones you rent for a few $ per hour.
If you are running a public server you learn quite quickly that if you permaban a cheater or just some annoying kid you should expect to be DDoSed these days.
That could be a jet plane from Lockheed Martin or a Thinkpad...