I came across this photo (potential casing for new MBP): http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2016/05/macbook_pro_2016_case_top.jpg<p>Notice the missing top row of function keys. People have speculated that this top row may be replaced by an OLED touch screen.<p>Comparing the above photo to the Macbook keyboard, it would seem that the top row includes the escape key: http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2014/11/retinamacbookkeyboard-800x484.jpg<p>If this is the case, any software developer that uses the escape key a lot may not be very happy.
I'm in the market for the new MacBok Pro and the OLED row makes me excited, but as a Vim user the lack of an physical escape key would be problem for me.<p>I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl and I'm glad that MacOS provides this option out of the box, but Caps Lock as Esc is not an option for me. I hope there will be an out of the box way to map Escape to something sensible.
I'd trade ~ for Esc anytime, as long as ~ and ` are accessible via the OLED strip.
Back when the iPad was released, I ran a 6 month experiment to see if I could live as a developer using only the iPad and the cloud. My initial findings were quite positive, and the first few weeks were exciting and new.<p>As time progressed, task switching and copy/paste were obvious shortcomings due to limitations with iOS, but the experience was mostly bearable but not awful.<p>Towards the end it became unbearable as the escape key was so engrossed with all things unix/linux that i gave up a month early.<p>If the escape key is actually vanishing, I am completely confused. macOS is a unix derivative and apple has a boatload of developers. Why would they want to alienate us?
I ended up with a ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen 2 -- it has a five row physical keyboard, with the top row as a virtual keyboard.<p>It was constantly registering touches on the top row when I didn't want them. With a laptop, I commonly rest my hand on the keyboard and touch -- but don't depress -- keys.<p>Today it's only used in a desktop configuration with an external keyboard.<p>I'm not the only one who felt this way -- see, for example, this Ars review of the gen 3, which said of the gen 2 keyboard:<p>"...the keyboard shed its top row of function keys, replacing them with a software-controlled touchable strip, and used a peculiar arrangement for buttons including home, insert, backspace, and delete. The result wasn't better; it was awkward."<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/thinkpad-x1-carbon-review-a-fine-heir-to-the-thinkpad-name/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/thinkpad-x1-carbon-re...</a>
I've been using an external keyboard (Realforce 87U at work. A 104 w/ Cherry Blues at home).<p>Other than the coffee-shop crowd, how many of you would say you're exclusively a laptop-keyboard user? Not a dig, just wondering.<p>If Apple offered an iPad Pro, running OSX with USB ports (or a thunderbolt port usb hub) for a physical keyboard, I would switch over in a heartbeat.
It's really hard not to see this as just a continuous and perpetual dumbing-down by Apple of all its products, to the point of uselessness for essentially anyone who isn't an 80 year old grandmother who's never used a computer before and needs to use skype.
I think they'll just replace the tilde key with the escape key if the photo is a new MBP.<p>I press escape OFTEN, but tildes rarely. For the most part its to get into consoles in games or other dev functions - I could see myself losing it and not being too sad.
If there's no hackable non-Retina-like model with user-upgradable to 16 GiB of memory and dual SSDs, the MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) MD101LL/A will be the last MBP I buy. Overpriced, soldered-on memory is BS.