Using the 2016 MacBook Pro as a development machine

I have a thunderbolt monitor that I bought 1 month before this was released. With that I only plug in the power and thunderbolt cable (thunderbolt disk and USB keyboard and mouse and Ethernet are on the monitor). When I travel I need the HDMI for presentation. I tried the new keyboard (my friend has one). Hate it.<p>In my family we have 3 iPhones, 4 iPads, MacBook and MacBook Pro. Heck we still have 2 iPods connected in the car. I have 2 old time capsules (turned off now).<p>I will be looking at a Windows or Linux laptop to replace my MacBook Pro when it dies.<p>Apple, your new MacBook Pro is pushing an all Apple house out of your eco system. Once I change the laptop, maybe I should look at an android phone?

&gt; A significant source of consternation, amongst software engineers at least was the confiscation of the function and escape keys. Well I didn’t much miss them. Every time I went for the escape key, it’s graphical facsimile was there and did the job.<p>My feelings as well, after playing with a store demo machine for ~30 minutes, mostly in Terminal.app&#x2F;vim. There were&#x2F;are so many people complaining about the lack of an escape key, making silly memes to that effect, etc. Yet, in practice, it works just fine. Terminal.app has been updated to take advantage of the touch bar too, both allowing you to quickly assign a new background color to the window, and to take the currently-typed command and open up a man page for it in a new window. Not essential functionality by any means, but little things which you might actually integrate into your workflow.

I&#x27;m a &quot;developer&quot; in the sense that I have developed things but I better not leave my day job.<p>For me, at least, I thought the touchbar represented a HUGE boost to productivity WHEN I coupled it with BetterTouchTool. Whenever I would use atom&#x2F;sublime, there were lots of handy key bindings that I could either not remember for the life of me or which were kinda annoying to press. Well, I decided to take a couple hours and dedicate that time to putting those on the touchbar with BTT. For me at least, it has been glorious. Now really handy options for code traversal are RIGHT THERE as buttons on the screen, and now I use them constantly. I understand that for real power users they would have already memorize the key bindings or would have re-mapped them, but for me this was a crucial feature to actually getting me to use them regularly.

The biggest issue I see with the new MBP is that the iPhone 7 (released only a couple months prior) is essentially incompatible out of the box. The connectors are incompatible, and the headphones are not interchangeable without a dongle.<p>Apple used to go to great lengths to make their devices work great together, so it boggles the mind that the iPhone and Mac teams didn&#x27;t coordinate the switch to USB-C.<p>The article even links to another post which makes it seem like Google&#x27;s Nexus works better with the MBP than the iPhone - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@ageitgey&#x2F;the-new-macbook-pro-is-kind-of-great-for-hackers-64c1c577a4d2#.gylkf1thi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@ageitgey&#x2F;the-new-macbook-pro-is-kind-of-...</a>

I agree with this, but I also feel like there are better options out there right now. I don&#x27;t feel super compelled to throw $2k to a company that wants to treat their customers with contempt and call it courageous.

This discounts the ulterior motives I believe Apple has, but:<p>1. Shrink the trackpad back to the size it was in 2015 and prior.<p>2. Leave the Touchbar where it is and move the keyboard down to where it was in 2015 and prior.<p>3. Add back the Esc&#x2F;Fn key row.

So it&#x27;s not really as good as the old one, except for the nice screen and it hasn&#x27;t been dropped on the floor yet. I&#x27;ll at least wait until the reports of logic board failure to see whether it also takes down the soldered-on SSD.

Can anybody share their experience of using the new Macbook Pro with Xcode? How&#x27;s the performance? Touch bar any useful?

Every time I hear about the touch bar and how it&#x27;s just as good if not better than having real escape and function keys, I think of the MacBook Wheel from that Onion video fake-news piece (in which the entire keyboard and trackpad were replaced wih a giant iPod wheel), and wonder if in five years Apple actually did ship a MacBook Wheel, Apple diehards will reassure us that it&#x27;s just as powerful a machine to use for development, if not more so, than a laptop with a real keyboard.<p>My fingers just can&#x27;t get used to touch gadgets. For keyboard input I need real keys.

For god&#x27;s sake, please, some company make a quality developer laptop with a retina-like screen.

I actually enjoyed the article he linked to just as much:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@ageitgey&#x2F;the-new-macbook-pro-is-kind-of-great-for-hackers-64c1c577a4d2#.jmrjrr872" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@ageitgey&#x2F;the-new-macbook-pro-is-kind-of-...</a>

Somebody I know has one and the hinge felt loose from the moment it was opened. The screen wobbles back and forth like a worn out old Macbook Pro. I haven&#x27;t seen this mentioned in any reviews -- can anybody comment?

I also bought the new macbook pro 2016 (15&quot; base), I&#x27;ve been a linux user for 10 years (xUbuntu) and have been liking it quite a lot. The build quality really is spectacular. The speaker are MILES ahead of any laptop speaker I have, my favorite feature of the new MBP. I also have a 2 year old MSI GS60 with a 970m for games. I with they kept the escape key though, the function keys, while used, I can live without. I&#x27;ve had to remap some keys in sublime, which took me a few days to get used to, but that&#x27;s all. I use VI bindings but have been using CAPS(remapped)+F as escape since forever (I know it&#x27;s bad, and it sucks when I don&#x27;t&#x2F;can&#x27;t update my vimrc in new servers but it so easy I can&#x27;t go back).<p>The dongles I don&#x27;t care much about, it&#x27;s a hassle but not that bad. I bought an AUKEY 4 usb hub plus hdmi which takes care of usb and video for work (I only have a 1080p monitor at work so the crappy hdmi is enough).<p>One thing that does bug me is the soldered on SSD. It&#x27;s great and really fast but was, IMHO, a horrible design decison. Not being able to pop out the drive of a dead or old computer is rediculous. I actually had an SSD die on me a month ago and lost a week of work I hadn&#x27;t pushed (I know I&#x27;m wrong but it&#x27;s been so many years since an HDD failure I got sloppy). If this happens with the MBP it&#x27;ll probably render it unusable or will probably be a VERY expensive repair. Forget about planned obsolescence, this is planned BUTTF<i></i>*ING, no vaseline. Given that I know one day I&#x27;ll be royally screwed, now I push to git more often.<p>Also, I depended on co-workers to build iOS apps, which was the main reason I got an apple, don&#x27;t think I would have gotten one if apple let me build in linux though just because of the price. Screw xcode.<p>All in all, is it worth it? Don&#x27;t know, as a developement machine for work it&#x27;s great. Speakers, like I said and also touchid are great. Touchbar is only really good for changing volume or brightness with a slider, which I enjoy but is not really worth it. For everything else, as a developer, if I&#x27;m looking down at my keyboard or touchbar while programming I consider I&#x27;m &#x27;doing it wrong&#x27;. Finally, this isn&#x27;t new to mac developers except for the size but the trackpad is great! I&#x27;ve always hated trackpads and carried my much beloved logitech marathon mouse. For the first time I actually don&#x27;t feel the need for a mouse. The gestures, palm recognition, etc. is very well sorted out. Occasionally I get some palm rejection problems because of the side of the trackpad but it&#x27;s rare.<p>my 2 cents.<p>Cheers

No word about the ability to connect to 2x 5K monitors at full 60hz (no other notebook can do this).<p>Or 4x 4K @60Hz again: (no other notebook can do this).