New MacBook Pro design shows up a day early

Aside from the ludicrous cost, I quite liked the idea of Art Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards…

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Hey, you young 'uns! You seem to have forgotten the original Mac keyboard, the best keyboard! We didn’t have no fancy ESC key, no function keys. Not even arrow keys!! And you UNIX people, no CTRL key either!!

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Except apparently for homeopathy / alternative medicine mumbo-jumbo.
(Sorry, too soon?)

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Exactly-- a context sensitive touch-sensitive OLED strip could be super helpful with Adobe suite tasks, for example.

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agreed, this would be sweet.

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I for one anticipate the fun times we’ll have when the Magic TouchMe Strip driver goes down or locks up or garbles itself, then we’ll just reach for the escape key and… oh crap! It says it is reformatting the storage! or when some russian hacker puts pr0n on it just like those swell IoT refrigerators down at BestBuy! Man, I can’t wait! Take that Steve Snobs!

And I’ll get to start a whole new dongle collection!

Hopefully we’ll also get more sweet emojis and some watch bands on Thursday. Can’t get enuf of those! mm mm mmmmmm!

Say how IS that ‘new’ Mac Pro doing btw? /bitter rant

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We put $160 into 8GB RAM and 500GB SSD for a 2011 MBP after installing ElCap on the original 160GB spinner slowed everything to worse than a crawl. Now it boots in under 20 seconds. Don’t postpone joy – get that SSD ordered tonight!

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I second this. Ram for your machine is probably now $70 for 16GB (check if your exact model can handle this). You can get a 500GB SSD for $120. It will be a totally new machine! ( – 2011 MBP17" user here)

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You got it backwards. The touchpad was the useless addition.

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So, Microsoft is having their Surface event Wednesday morning, the day before Apple’s shindig.

I’d snicker if some of their lineup had contextual key boards the day before apple officially announced it.

But, instead, I’ll be rolling my eyes at the surface all-in-ones and hoping no one in management actually wants to demo them.

It has both a Return and an Enter key - is there a difference between the two historically?

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Well I’m down with this idea. Static, undefined function keys are a programmer nerd joke from the 1970s and completely unintuitive to normal people. Maybe it’s time to let go? I mean, where’s the people on here upset about the Mac’s lack of Scroll Lock or PrntScrn keys? Why isn’t that a crime against humanity?

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On the other hand, I care deeply on how thin and light things are. I’m always having to go around with not one, but two MBPs in my laptop bag, one for work and one personal (I’m an oncall engineer for my job and I have to have separation of work and personal projects; so if I ever want to be able to work on a project away from home I must have my personal laptop with me). I’m often launching all sorts of things out of my bag on oncall days, usually it’s just my laptops, power adapter (only one between the two computers) and that’s about it. It’s been made worse since I had to go from a 13" MBP to a 15" MBP for my personal stuff (the 13" just could not cut it when it came to what I needed, no GPU, not enough screen real estate) and oof, that made it even worse.

I’m extremely happy whenever I see that I have options to get lighter and thinner machines, every single ounce matters to me.

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So if it costs the same and gets better battery life than the currently shipping one, you’ll be back on board?

I’m just guessing here, but I think return was for carriage return, ie move to the beginning of the next line. Enter was for telling the system to interpret something as input.

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I can let scroll lock go. A fine key to swap between the PCs on the KVM, but even that hasn’t been used in years in my home.

But Print Screen is used by countless screen cap programs. Think of them.

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No. I’m too unhappy with the direction of OSX.
Maybe if they reverted to a version without I cloud/iTunes/siri/locked platform/appstore

There is simply no way in the current osx to avoid being bothered by two of the above at least once a day. I don’t buy things that bother me.

I’m not sure what all is specifically bothering you. I don’t have iCloud enabled, so it’s not a thing for me. Same with Siri. iTunes has always been a bit crappy, but I just deal with it. Appstore I barely have time for anyway. Most of my code is development stuff.

As far as locked platform, I disabled SIP, so I can basically run roughshod over the OS and do whatever I want. It’s not like IOS where you are completely locked down. I wouldn’t recommend going that route for everyone, but OsX is still a solid *nix based OS under the hood, and Apple stays on top of a lot of patching.

Getting back to the hardware, I’m glad I got a mid 2014 MacBook Pro and hope there is a decent version when I need a replacement.

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specifically.

On some keyboard layouts, the return and enter key are two different keys, an artifact of the differing handling of newlines by different operating systems. As an example, on the Macintosh, the return key is the usual key, while the enter key is positioned at the lower right of the numeric key pad. While using the type tool in Adobe Photoshop, the return key produces a new line while the enter key ends editing mode.
On IBM’s 3270 and 5250 line of terminals, the Enter key was located to the right of the space bar and was used to send the contents of the terminal’s buffer to the host computer. The Return key was located in a more standard location and was used to generate a new line.
Apple also took advantage of this situation to create an editable command line environment called a “Worksheet” in the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop, where return was used strictly as a formatting key while enter was used to execute a shell command or series of commands in direct mode.
In technical terms, the Macintosh keyboard maps the return key to a carriage return, while the enter key maps to a newline.
Historically, many computer models did not have a separate keypad, and only had one button to ru as Enter or Return. For example, the Commodore 64 (manufactured from 1982) had only the “Return” key.
In Mathematica, the Return key creates a new line, whereas the Enter key (or Shift-Return) submits the current command for execution.

Another “fun” distinction is rubout vs delete.

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