Submitting this re: the recent discussion about PGP alternatives. It seems right in line with the types of tools that were being suggested for replacing specific use cases of PGP. Written by Tony Arcieri, who is well-regarded in the cryptography community.

I've been using that for years after I switched to Vim from sublime. It has worked just fine for me.

I'd also be interested to hear Thomas clarify this. I saw a recent thread on Twitter where he and bascule were talking about it and it still wasn't super clear, but one specific point I recall is that Matrix has a significant amount of metadata stored on the server side which constructs a social graph. As opposed to something like Signal which has close to nothing stored on the server.

To me this seems like an issue of use case. If my goal is to be able to talk to my family and friends, and I don't care that it's known that I'm talking to them as long as the contents of the messages are private, that is fine for me. For a case with more stringent requirements, I can see Matrix not being a good recommendation in its current design.

I guess one difference here is that often major implementations of HTTPS make the best choices (like operating systems, major browsers, major web server software, etc.), whereas with something like PGP, everyone is using GPG which has only one implementation which is known to be terrible.

I don't know how I never heard about 1Password X. The last time I attempted to switch from macOS to Linux, the lack of 1Pasword was one of the biggest things that made it hard for me.

That said, a browser-based 1Password is really not what I want. I just really don't try web technologies for keeping my passwords safe. If I really was going to use it, this might be the only instance in which I'd actually prefer an Electron version to using it my main browser, just for the additional isolation.

Ben from 1Password here. We offer a couple options for Linux: https://support.1password.com/explore/linux/ Hopefully we can continue to expand upon these offerings. Our ops people are primarily Linux users, so we are aware of the challenges.

What 1PW recommends for people feeling unsure is a separate browser profile [1] just for 1PX. An Electron-based thing isn’t a bad idea tho.

[1]: https://support.1password.com/1password-x-security/

At least when I tried 1PX earlier this year, there was no data export options, which is only on native desktop (ie, OSX & Windows) apps.

This article by the same author is perhaps not comprehensive, but a good place to start: https://blog.filippo.io/giving-up-on-long-term-pgp/

Except that the article is only about one particular reason the author finds PGP use uncomfortable. It doesn't deal with any "brokenness of PGP" at all.

I'd never heard of Boxcryptor. Does anyone else use this? I'm not sure I understand why I need to sign up for an account to use it if its entire purpose is to do client-side encryption.

Also, it's not quite the same functionality, but this also reminds me: For a long time I've used Knox (by AgileBits, the same company that makes 1Password) for encrypted disk images, but they no longer sell or maintain it. It works just fine, but I should probably find a replacement that's still maintained, at least for security updates. Anyone know a good alternative? VeraCrypt (mentioned in the article) seems like one possibility.

Veracrypt is a great piece of software, but it isn't as easy to integrate across various platforms. Boxcryptor is great because they have iOS/Android/etc. apps.

Try Cryptomator instead! It's free and open source and does essentially the same thing (no account required)

You must sign up for an account to use Boxcryptor because it is paid software. That is the only reason as far as I can tell. As far as I know their servers do nothing for you once you have installed the software on your devices.

Boxcryptor[1] started out as an EncFS[2] implementation. At the time, EncFS was the only real good solution for file-based encryption. Solutions like TrueCrypt are disk-based, which means for cloud syncing solutions like Dropbox, one file -- the entire disk volume -- gets synced, and every time a file changes, the entire disk gets synced again. EncFS encrypts individual files, which works great for file-based syncing services.

Boxcryptor offered a client for macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS that worked really well, and if you needed Linux support, one could install EncFS and use it transparently on that platform. Boxcryptor charged for a creating volumes with more advanced EncFS settings, but if you created the EncFS volume with those advanced settings using EncFS itself (e.g. on a Linux machine), the free version of Boxcryptor could read and write those volumes with those settings.

In 2013, the people who ran Boxcryptor wrote a second version that implemented a proprietary, unpublished encryption and/or file management scheme. They relegated the previous version to an unmaintained Boxcryptor Classic product and eventually removed it.[3] The proprietary version is what is offered today.

IF you want Boxcryptor-like functionality today, the EncFS4win project[4] is a good solution for Windows. EncFS can be installed via Homebrew[5] on macOS and its volumes mounted via a shell script or some FUSE GUI managers. You can install EncFS on Linux and use gencfsm[6] for a GUI manager. The Windows, macOS, and Linux implementations all use FUSE for exposing the encrypted files via a native filesystem interface. For Android, Encdroid provides an application browser for volumes. I am unaware of an iOS solution. I use the FUSE systems to keep certain sensitive cloud documents synced between my Windows, macOS and Linux machines while still being able to edit and use them like normal files on those systems.

EncFS does have a few attack vectors they have been slowly addressing. It also suffers from the same problem that all cloud-synced file-based encryption systems suffer; someone could restore your cloud files to a previous known version without your knowledge. The file-based encryption does not prevent what is in effect a replay attack. A research paper proposed a solution -- CryFS[7] -- with some solutions for this problem, but the implementation is immature.

(edited for formatting)

1. https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/

2. https://vgough.github.io/encfs/

3. https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/6-years-of-boxcrypto...

4. https://encfs.win/

5. https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/encfs

6. https://moritzmolch.com/apps/gencfsm/

7. https://www.cryfs.org/

I desperately hope this is true. I have the first MacBook Pro that came with the Touch Bar, and it's the worst computer I've ever owned. The keyboard has failed twice, and the Touch Bar is inferior to the old hardware keys in every way. I hate it. The only reason I got it is because the MacBook Air it replaced was dying and I couldn't wait any more. Assuming this report is true, my only remaining worry is that they won't offer a version of this new Pro without a Touch Bar, or that only a model with a smaller display will offer hardware function keys, like they've done in the past.

You could buy a 2015 MacBook Pro and upgrade to rock solid keyboard, sane-sized trackpad, MagSafe, hdmi, USB ports and an SD card port.

It’s not thin enough to slice salami but I am a vegetarian so that’s not a big deal.

I did exactly this a year ago but one caveat to note is that if you're using an external monitor, the video card in this one doesn't support a good resolution. I'm stuck with 1080p.

"With OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 and later, most SST 4K (3840 x 2160) displays are supported at 60Hz on these Mac computers:

    MacBook Air (Early 2015) and later
    MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) and later
    MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) and later"

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206587

Earlier years will only do 30Hz, which is fully usable for development/office work.

Anecdote: I find 30 Hz to be totally unusable for development/office work. The jerky movement of the mouse cursor, jerky scrolling, etc, is all painful to my eyes. So, I think very much, YMMV, but 60 Hz is safe.

Agreed, so much so that I gave up on 4K, scaled it to 1440p just to get 60hz on my (now-dead) 2013 rMBP with my external monitor.

Recently bought a second-hand perfect condition 2016 MBP with function-keys, and it's been brilliant so far, and I get proper 4K :)

Yeah me too. It feels like the mouse is lagging.

Note the "SST 4K" criteria. I have a late 2013 15" MBP that drives 4K at 60 Hz, but it is an MST "multi-screen transport" display (which requires enabling on the monitor menu). Don't know if they're made anymore. Mine is a Dell UP2414Q.

I have a 13" 2015 MacBook Pro and it drives a 4k monitor at 60hz over displayport.

I think it supports 4K but not at 60 fps. You are stuck at 30 fps.

I have a 2015 and a 4K monitor and can confirm that this is the case. 30fps isn't great but it is usable for most day-to-day computer work.

However there is a workaround if you are willing to disable SIP and play around with a program called SwitchResX. You can customize the display timings in such a way that allows 4K60 video to just sneak in under the bandwidth limits of the Thunderbolt ports. It also requires a Thunderbolt to HDMI 2.0 adapter, and a compatible monitor. If you like fiddling around this is one way to do it, but I have found it finicky and not really worth it.

4k60hz is also possible over displayport, on my Late 2013 mbp I need to use switchresx to get it going (but I've found that pretty set-and-forget), but on the newer ones than that it works without any hacks AFAIK

Could you share some details about how you do this? Do you need displayport on both ends, and is it a monitor or TV? I have the same machine and a 4K TV with only HDMI-inputs and am curious if I can achieve this is in some way. Switchresx looks really useful anyway, so thank you for that. :)

If you have a Displayport display, you can use a displayport to mini displayport cable, use switchresx, should work good.

If it's HDMI only, as the sibling pointed out the HDMI port won't work. However, Startech makes a displayport to HDMI adapter which works ( https://www.amazon.com/DisplayPort-HDMI-Adapter-Converter-60... ) (just make sure you get one which supports 4k60hz, most DP -> HDMI adapters don't).

I'll consider this though I it would be probably be sitting unused after trying it anyway as I really have no need for it. Thank you for the information. Just to clarify, we're both talking about a late 2013 macbook pro retina? The other helpful commenter mentions the 2015.

Yeah, this is all on the late 2013 15" with the nvidia dgpu - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206587 has the official details on this BTW - they state that SST Displayport 3840 x 2160 displays are only supported at 60hz on the 15" from Mid 2014 on, but it actually works on the Late 2013 also with Switchresx.

There's no HDMI 2.0 support in 2015 MBPr AFAIK. So no 4k@60Hz over HDMI. You must get DP.

2015 can drive 4k at 60hz over displayport if the monitor supports displayport. HDMI output is limited 30hz afaik.

also got a 2015 and 4k @60hz is possible plug and play with a thunderbolt to displayport cable. anything other than default scaling gets a bit choppy though

Even very old Macs can handle 1440p, which is a great non-Retina resolution at 27".

I have got the 2015 15" model with Radeon R9 M370X and it supports 4k@60Hz over DP.

It even supports 5K if you can find one of the dual-DisplayPort screens. (I'm not sure if there's an adapter for the TB3 screens.)

1080p is not fine enough? How much information are you used to having on screen at a time? How much text, for example?

It's not about real estate, but rather about sharpness. At 3820x2160 ("4K") you can double every pixel, when compared to 1080p. That means that text at the exact same "size" is twice as sharp, producing less visual strain and improving readability (especially for fonts with complex strokes)

The difference is absolutely striking: I will never go back to a non "retina" display if given the choice.

It’s also real estate. I have the LG 5K 27” monitor—which I like, by the way, I don’t know why people give it crap—and routinely wish it was just a touch larger.

My screen is filled with Excel and some sort of online database, usually. I’m also using my 13” MBP screen below this one for chat windows, email etc.

I would hate to go back to the lo-res 1080 days.

You quadruple each pixel...

When doing photography work, you can look at image thumbnails and actually judge sharpness and colour directly off them. And when filling the screen, you can have a much better idea of how they will look in print.

As for text, I've been able to use tiny font sizes and increase the information density since hi-DPI screens— my eyes are good for it. Ahh, iPhone 4 and retina MBP... they were astounding tech at that time.

I cant deal with 1080p anymore, and large (27"+) 1080p monitors make no sense to me. Maybe they're good for people who need to have physically large text etc. but I find it useless for fitting information densely on the screen. I for one would rather use my 13" MacBook pro laptop screen than a large 1080p display. (I use a 24 inch 4k monitor and it's pretty great.)

I have a 4K display. Mac OS scales things to look nice. 1080p looks like garbage in comparison.

But the bulblet and bought a used 2013 15” MBP after a year in Lenovo exile. Cost me $600 for a six year old computer, but it feels great.

Man you guys really have Stockholm syndrome.

I use both a 12” MacBook (for Go and JS), and a Dell XPS13 with Ubuntu (for Rust). The UX on the MacBook is better in every way. Gestures, the window and desktop management, touchpad, Bluetooth, WiFi and printer drivers, etc. The screen, speakers, and other hardware components are much better as well.

The fast XPS 13 with Ubuntu also seems to really be taxed pretty heavily by electron apps, while the MacBook that is 8 times slower does just fine. When I switched, I finally understood why so many people on hacker news complain about electron.

Everything on the Mac feels like someone thought really hard about how to make it as good as possible, even if they were wrong in the end (like the keyboard). Everything in Linux always feels like someone said “ehhh... good enough!”.

I gave it a serious go for a year. Spent $1,600 on a Lenovo X1 Carbon. Wiped the disk and installed LTSC. The one feature it had that Apple didn’t (the built-in LTE) never worked properly. Stability was good, but lots of odd nits. (Auto-hiding taskbar would sometimes stop hiding.) Battery life was a crap-shoot. Rage quit and ordered the MacBook when it went from estimated 30 minutes remaining to dead in 5 minutes.

Speaking of which: Do you want to buy an X1 Carbon 6th gen? i7 8650U with 16Gb RAM and 256GB SSD.

I've got a late 2013 15" MBP with a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB of ram, 512GB SSD, and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, and have been using it for 5 years now it and it is a great laptop. Can run chrome, mysql server, web servers, and personal programs without breaking a sweat. The only thing it cannot run are new video games or if you are deep into ML but old games still work great (I played GTA V on it ok when that came out).

Only downside that happened is part of the trackpad stopped clicking and one of the fans starting running crazy loud. Took it in to the apple store and they diagnosed it as a swelling battery (seems like a problem for macs so if it looks like your case is fat, get it checked out). Ended up getting the battery, keyboard, trackpad, case, fans, and potentially the monitor (it looked new or was cleaned extremely well) for $300 which isn't too bad to make it feel like new. I'm probably going to keep this computer for another 5+ years unless it dies.

Would totally recommend and I would definitely not sell it for $600.

Just add eGPU to it and it will be more or less capable of modern ML and games

MacOS is amazing in many ways, and is spyware-free, which makes it the only choice for privacy-savvy users who also want to use adobe products.

Unless you go the Hackintosh route, you’re locked into Apple hardware.

Could say that just as well for people who willingly put up with Microsoft.

For many of us, Apple is an escape from that hell.

What's wrong with the large trackpad?

I personally find it unnecessarily large. My thumbs/palms are constantly touching the corners.

The 2015 touchpad is plenty large enough to accomodate my needs.

Not OP but my problem with larger trackpad was unwanted mouse movements. Maybe it was the way I rest my palms while typing but I never had this issue with previous mbp models.

Yep, the large trackpad is another design blunder. The heels of your hands are resting on it much of the time, resulting in the cursor suddenly jumping off to another part of the screen while you're typing.

Even dumber: Apple didn't make it work with the Pencil. WTF? Now THAT would be far more useful than the emoji bar.

Pencil does work with iPad and sidecar which is a much better experience for editing vs what would amount to a very small Wacom tablet on the trackpad (vs effectively an iPad sized Cintiq).

Yeah I dislike the bigger trackpad. There’s nowhere to comfortable rest my hands on it. At work they gave me a 2018 MBP and after 2 weeks of suffering I returned it for a 2015 version.

I prefer to rest my hands on either side of it, simply to prevent ulnar deviation style wrist angle.

In the meantime I regretted so much that I bought my 2015 model with 8GB of RAM, which seemed like a reasonable decision back then. Everything else is still great and better than the newer model I got from work - but nowadays I seem to run out of memory all the time.

Buy a 16gb board off eBay and do a board swap? Or buy a 16gb and sell the 8gb?

The former shouldn’t set you back much. The biggest cost on the latter would be the commissions, but you may be able to find a forum with a decent buy/sell section.

> I have the first MacBook Pro that came with the Touch Bar, and it's the worst computer I've ever owned.

Same here (well, I have the "cheap" one without the Touch Bar). Everything has been replaced at least once (on Apple Care, fortunately) except the bottom plate.

> The only reason I got it is because the MacBook Air it replaced was dying

Same here. That MBA was a fine machine.

I'm still using my MBA from mid 2013. It's a wonderful thing. Battery is "replace soon" but it's mostly plugged in. It's battered and bruised, but still fast enough. I've been debating a change for a while and figured at the start of the year I'd wait to see if they were going to ditch the bf keyboard if they release a new MBA. Super glad I waited, fingers crossed I get the same life out of the next one!

Say what you want about Apple and price, but I've had PCs since 1994 and the two Macs I've had have (usefully) outlasted every other machine by quite some margin - this one in particular. 6 years without formatting a Windows machine (I can't talk for now, but especially back then) would be crazy.

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (Core2Duo + 4GB of ram), I've added an SSD years ago, and it runs absolutely fine, I use it almost daily to browse the web. Even the battery still works(only for about an hour, but it does).

> I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (Core2Duo + 4GB of ram), I've added an SSD years ago, and it runs absolutely fine, I use it almost daily to browse the web. ... the updates stopped at El Capitan unfortunately. ... I'm not that bothered.

You might want to consider running Manjaro[0] or Haiku[1] instead (I've had great luck with both on older MacBooks [2,3]).

Nessus reports El Capitan as a "Critical" vulnerability due to lack of security updates:

According to its self-reported version number, the Unix operating system running on the remote host is no longer supported.

Lack of support implies that no new security patches for the product will be released by the vendor. As a result, it is likely to contain security vulnerabilities.

...

Mac OS X 10.11.6 (intel) support ended.

Upgrade to Mac OS X 10.14 / 10.13 / 10.12.

[0] https://manjaro.org

[1] https://www.haiku-os.org

[2] https://tinyapps.org/blog/201811010700_linux_for_2009_macboo...

[3] https://tinyapps.org/docs/haiku/

Sure, but it's a laptop to look up some kitchen recipes, watch YouTube and use facetime occasionally. If it has security vulnerabilities I'm genuinely not bothered - any minute spent installing another system is a minute just not worth it for me.

Which is fine if you keep that laptop in its own isolated network. Otherwise it might end up being used for gaining access to other machines in your network.

i've got a 2008 MBP, these are great Linux machines unlike the latest macs. Very well supported hardware. Only issue I had was the custom gmux chip but it only takes a few lines of c to make a switch.

I gave my old Core Duo Mac Mini - circa 2006 to my mom after putting Windows 7 and Office 2010 on it. She uses it when she tutors and doesn’t want anyone on her main computer. That computer don’t die.

Can you still get OS updates? I thought mid-2010+ was needed.

No, the updates stopped at El Capitan unfortunately. There is a way to force it to update to Mojave but I think couple hardware bits stop working(....camera?) and I'm not that bothered.

Staying at latest patch levels are more about security vs features.

Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree. I just don't think it's worth my time to update it to watch YouTube and open BBC Good Food from time to time. The laptop never leaves the house, my assumption is that the attack surface for it is literally zero.

Best era ever, have the same one. For ~120 bucks you can get a fresh battery, too.

If I could upgrade the SSD for about the same, I'd probably just keep using this until it died. Alas, upgrading that is a bit of a faff.

I have a mid 2013 Air as well (and I recently replaced the battery for $100, it’s great and you should too), but I’d attribute the long life to simply the SSD and the software rather than anything else.

I think not having a dedicated GPU helps a lot too. Less heat, and one major component less that can break. In my small set of anecdata, consumer Macs outlive their Pro counterparts.

FWIW, you can get a replacement battery for these for under $100. https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac

It's not super easy to replace, but if you're comfortable with a screw driver, it shouldn't pose much of a challenge, and the instruction from ifixit are great.

I'm still holding tight to my 2012 MBP, but it's got a replacement battery, and a roomier SSD to breathe some new life into it.

If you're not comfortable doing it yourself, the Batteries + Bulbs stores have computer services & will do it for you (for a fee of course)

I am in a similar situation as you. Have a Mid 2012 MBA. Works fantastic. Also Catalina beta seems to have sped the system performance immensely. Always plugged in because of the battery.

Recently replaced my 2012 MBA battery, the batteries are quite cheap and the replacement is surprisingly quick and easy on this model. About a five minute job, you can buy the battery with the needed tools here: https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Air-13-Inch-Late-20...

Sweet. Thanks for the tip.

I'm still rocking my MBA form 2010, it wasn't even top spec at the time, but the keyboard, size, weight and battery are all great. The screen is pretty terrible I'll be honest, but if I'm working on it it doesn't bother me much. Plus it has one of those ever so rare HDMI out ports (no accessories necessary). I just replace the battery every so often.

I'm currently weighing up the option of installing Linux onto it as I'm more inclined to move away from the Apple ecosystem, but I have reservations on what that will do the battery life :/

Consider reading this reddit thread regarding Linux on a 2010 MBA, https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/9rnyw4/linux_on_...

I have a 2010 and 2015 MBP, both going strong.

SNAP!! although my MBP is tucked under my TV and being used to keep my smart TV dumb.

Same here. Everything in my 2016 MBP (with touchbar) has been replaced : keyboard twice, full motherboard, screen and one fan recently.

I still own a MBA from 2011 in its original state (0 repair).

I have the 13" late 2013 Macbook Pro i7, 8GB. It is working perfectly fine, and as fast as it was on day one. Never replaced a single thing, and never had to do hard-drive wipe. The only problem I have is that, it is a 512GB SSD, and I have no free space left.

Sintech sell adapters via amazon US/UK etc for about $15 that allow you to take a regular NVME drive (which are VERY cheap just now) and adapt it to the apple SSD hardware interface. You can have up to 2TB of faster-than-ever storage. You'll also need torx screwdrivers to open the case.

If you do some googling you will see there are two versions, and depending on the size/shape of SSD you are buying it may be better to buy one rather than the other.

If you do more googling, people have tried various drives and report on performance/compatibility etc but generally compatibility is good except with some samsung drives.

I have an i5 version of this. Bought it from the refurb store in 2014 and it is the best computer I have ever owned. Unfortunately the keyboard is getting a little finicky, presumably from dust. In any case 6-7 years is a pretty impressive life span for a notebook in my opinion.

I have the same model, except the even smaller SSD. I’m always having to clear out packages for old projects, but the computer is still a stud.

see my comment above about sintech...

Did this one come with a DVD drive? You can swap out that for a secondary SSD

I got a maxed out MBA in 2016 after going with my gut and thinking that year’s MBP keyboard felt like a step down. My MBA is still going strong and I love this machine. I was worried I was going to have to switch in a few years to the worse new line, so if this is true I’m very excited.

I also have the first (13") MBP model to ship with a touchbar, which is also the only Mac I've ever had.

TBH, I think it's put me off Macs for life. While I haven't had a hardware failure, the keyboard is simply horrible - there isn't nearly enough key travel or feedback, and swapping useful physical keys for a useless touchpad is completely pointless - I have a cheap 13" netbook kicking around which has a far superior keyboard!

After having Macbook aficionados harp on for yeara about how wonderful Macbook keyboards are, I feel cheated.

I wish Apple would stop valuing thinness above all else - it's important, but there are diminishing returns. We've got the point where I don't want it to be any thinner - I want ports, good battery life and good heat dissipation (my MBP is quiet, but it gets bloody hot!)

I made a custom plate that sits over the default keyboard and I put my own better keyboard on top. I've been kinda curious if anyone else would buy one if I produced them for a nominal fee.

I've love to see some pictures of this setup?

Also, what's the plate made from and what alt keyboard do you use?

do you have pictures to see how it looks? I'm not sure exactly what you mean, why do you need the plate? for extra stability ?

I've seen a colleague carrying a wireless keyboard with the macbook >2016, and putting it on top of the macbook directly, no plate.

Hm, I have the new MacBook Pro 15in and if I don't use the plate my own keyboard presses buttons on the default keyboard.

If Apple gets rid of the TouchBar + fixes the keyboard that'd eliminate 90% of the complaints against Macbook Pros.

Well, not really 90%. The trackpad is too big and introduce false positive that to some user is above threshold. I don't need such a large track pad for christ sake.

The Display cable, while Apple making is 1cm longer, will only make it last a year or two more. That is 3 - 4 years of Display Lifespan. I hardly call this durable.

The Thunderbolt and USB-C design is a bag of hurt, the amount of short circuit , logic board failure due to it is unacceptable.

I've not had a laptop with Touch Bar, but I can imagine making the trackpad smaller, then having the Touch Bar and the F-keys would be amazing. What do you think?

IMO the Touch Bar is pretty useless for serious work. The thing is, you have to look at the Touch Bar to use it! I don't know how you type, but I never look at the keyboard when I'm typing. Plus where I rest my hands on the machine, they tend to touch the Touch Bar, and you can't feel when you are actually touching it and mucking things up.

(Disclaimer: I have a MBP with Touch Bar, but I do 95% of my interacting with it with an external keyboard and mouse because I hate the keyboard / Touch Bar so much.)

I too, would love to have both Touch Bar and Function Keys. I don't hate Touch Bar per se, I just don't like it replacing my F-Keys buttons. Pretty much like All Cars are going to Touch Screen interface, I mean UX designer will need to learn and understand, not everything requires software and touch screen.

The problem is though, Touch Bar and buttons would not work on 13" Macbook, the touch pad would be too small for some of the macOS gestures.

The Touchbar is a source of many complaints? Or just a small slice of people who complain loudly? Anecdotally, I have many relatives with touchbar MacBook Pros and they haven’t complained about it. Is it possible that many people actually like the touchbar but they don’t spend their time on specialized forums singing its praises? It just seems like the assumption that people hate the touchbar is selection bias. Aside from the aforementioned relatives, I have a few friends in the pro video/audio/photo world who love the touchbar.

I would caution Apple against placing too much weight on any particular opinion. Pleasing the curmudgeonly neckbeards might mean that you piss off the creatives, or vice versa.

The TouchBar is fine and looks nice. The problem is not the TouchBar itself, but how Apple decided to not care about many usability details complementary to the TouchBar (besides the ESC key).

Something really stupid (related to TouchBar design) happened to me about 2 weeks ago.

I watched a movie using an external TV, and I set the laptop screen brightness to zero. The movie ended, so I shut down the machine using the TV as a monitor.

Next day, when I turned on the laptop (without the TV). Zero! No sound, nothing, only the artificial "ESC" key in the TouchBar. My first reaction... "ohh the brightness", it happened before with older MBP models.

But... Where are my brightness keys!? For some reason, there were not displayed. (after a little bit of search in support forums, I found that some users were not seeing TouchBar keys during login too).

I connected the TV again... nothing. I tried to login... but since I couldn't see the login screen, I ended in the password recovery mode. In total desperation (that included trying to reboot in recovery or to do a SMC reset without any visual and auditive feedback), I found by chance that the screen displayed the right brightness if I open/close the lid.

When I saw the password reset mode screen, I was happy. But if I restarted the brightness remained in zero! and no TouchBar... After another trial & error of open closing the lid, I saw the pass recovery screen again. Then I deactivated FileVault to reboot in recovery mode, and finally, I saw the brightness keys in the TouchBar!!! (it was a WTF moment).

I searched in a lot of forums if it was possible to change the brightness with another key combination, but it wasn't possible. My secondary keyboard is a MagicKeyboard that is Bluetooth only... so I almost have to contact support for a very stupid design decision to not give the users a secondary method to control brightness when the TouchBar fails.

BTW previous Mac models emitted a sound during power on... that would have been helpful. It's very hard to know if your computer is working without any feedback. And it's also very hard to hit the recovery key combination without auditive feedback.

I like the aesthetics of Apple design, but as an Apple user for many years... the change of priorities in the hardware user experience is noticeable.

Guaranteed anyone who doesn’t mind just doesn’t need to use escape very much.

The problem with touchbar is it’s hard to use without looking at it - like most professionals do because it’s just muscle memory.

Give me a real escape and I won’t mind the rest being a touch Bar.

But I hope they make it like gaming keyboards that have real keys with tiny lcd displays on so you can customise the function but still have a real key to press.

I am a heavy programmer, and I do not mind the touch Esc key. It’s a bigger hit box. Though it does not offer tactile feedback, I find that just something to get used to as you don’t really need to locate it through tactile feedback.

It very much is a small set of people who complain loudly about the touchbar, and many of whom have not even used it that just think they won’t like it.

You can map your Caps Lock key to Esc.

Caps lock is where God wanted Control to be.

You can map it so that tapping caps lock is escape and holding it down is control.

Then you have to set a timeout, which introduces lag in your typing.

Only for the escape key. I don't find that there's any noticeable lag in practice.

It can be both. I know people who have it configured to be escape when it's pressed and released, but control when it's held down in combination with another key.

How do you do that? I normally use the keyboard preferences to change the capslock on my MBP to control. I'd like escape there too, but I'd like to avoid running additional software to enable it.

I use Karabiner and it's truly a wonderful piece of software. I'm super sensitive to any lag or missent keys, but this actually works very well and I don't even think about it anymore.

Here's the modification I use: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/#caps_l...

"Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone."

I'm not sure. I think on linux/X11 it's just xmodmap wizardry, any maybe on macos you need third party software, but don't take my word for it. It's not something I've really investigated since I'm personally satisfied with capslock=escape.

Which just means you then rewrite your muscle memory to hit caps lock on all your colleagues computers by accident.

No thank you.

I use Ctrl+[ instead of escape a lot of the times. Granted this is with mapping caps lock to control.

I’m afraid of mapping the caps lock to escape as a holdover from flash games where escape quit your game and so I fear destructive actions if I accidentally press escape instead of the “a” key, whereas if I accidentally press control nothing happens.

Am I the only one who actually uses the caps lock daily in this era? I see people remapping it all the time, and wonder.

Would it be that hard to just have both a Touch Bar and a row of keys? At this point the Touch Bar component can’t add that much in terms of manufacturing cost. An entire A10 iPod Touch is only $199.

Would those people that like the TB actually prefer paying (hypothetically) $200 less for their MBPs without it?

To me it adds zero value so whatever it adds to the cost of the product is an extra I don't want to pay.

I think if Apple had given the option to get their MBPs without the TB I doubt very few people would have bought it.

actual macbook pro problems to be solved:

problem: flat keys suck

- the force of a keypress is concentrated on one point of fingertip

- finding the edge/center of a key is very hard

solution: concave keys

the keyboard on the first generation macbook pro were SIGNIFICANTLY better:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#/media/File:MacBoo...

it was more comfortable - even luxurious - to type on, and your fingers could find keys and center themselves.

problem: dongles

- people will never have USB-C flash drives

- people will not have USB-C televisions

- people will never have USB-C ethernet

solution: ask people and give them back a few dedicated ports

problem: touchbar

- people actually touch-type

- some keys like escape are frequently used

solution: restore regular keys PLUS a touchbar above

Have the same MBP as you, and haven’t really had any issues.

I actually almost prefer the keyboard, I feel like having less travel means I have to press slightly less and can type marginally faster on my Mac keyboard than a normal one.

I’ve not had to replace anything, I’ve had a key that felt stuck once or twice, but after a good bash it fixed itself. But it is almost 3 years old now!

The Touch Bar is a bit useless I’ll admit, but using BetterTouchTool I’ve made it more useful. Shows me my company share price live, tube status and the time of my next train as well as shortcuts to my most used apps.

> I actually almost prefer the keyboard, I feel like having less travel means I have to press slightly less and can type marginally faster on my Mac keyboard than a normal one.

There are actually mechanical switches, like the Cherry MX Brown, that register the keypress before actuating. They're usually preferred by gamers because you can rapidly tap the keys without fully depressing them.

It's a shame there isn't a convenient way for people test out the variety of switches out there to find the style they prefer. Like Warby Parker for mechanical keyboards.

What will likely happen is Apple will replace Touch Bar with keys, and add OLED / e-ink screens on those keys.

That would have made more sense than the TB. You get a dynamic input method without sacrificing usability.

I imagined they’d expand it with more functionality, but I don’t think it’s getting any update in the new models?

At the minute it doesn’t do much except replace your function keys with a display. If it could render the dock or maybe take over some of notification centre, it might have some novel functionality.

What I’ve been trying to do so far is see if I can integrate it with emacs through a dynamic module, so it could render the modeline.

This would be superb

I bought a maxed out 2013 mbp instead. Was ready to buy a brand new one cash in hand but couldn't bring myself to do it. Still waiting...

I just purchased an Apple-refurbed 2015 MBP. It was a little surreal to be paying almost full price for a 4 year old model. The list of "pros" for the purchase decision was mostly a mirror of the "cons" of the more recent generations.

Overall, the 2015's are reliable machines with only the relatively minor annoyances of the battery recall and the "staingate" anti-glare coating issue.

Really hoping Apple returns to the ethos of their older designs, with serviceability and modularity higher on the list of design goals.

I have the 2015 MBP and I think it's the best laptop they've ever built.

Agreed. Still on a 2013 model at home and every time I use it after the new one I have at work I love it even more. Please please hold out another year so I can upgrade to something that actually works

I have a Macbook Air (2017 version) which I spilled a can of beer into. I thought it was dead but after leaving it to rest for a few days it resurrected from the dead and it works ever since like nothing happened. I love that machine. Indestructible.

While I am happy for you, I am also pretty surprised and would be interested in more details. A full can of beer is 355 mL, so how much beer are we talking about here? Are the keys not sticky at all?

I have a mbp 2018 (with touch bar)

I dropped a full bottle of gin on it last week. The bottle literally broke over my open backpack with the mbp there. It seemed like I threw it on the distillery.

After letting it fully dry, isssues are:

- Couple small spots on the monitor. I think water got inside between the glass and display. They were very big (20% of the screen) and been reducing and now just 2 small spots (maybe 2-3%). These don't seem to reduce anymore but I will try to see if applying some subtle heat over will make them disappear. - At first a couple keys didn't work, but now just the P and S seem to sometimes not register a tap, but when I press again, I get two of them. Not exactly sure what is going on or if it will go away. I would say it happens once every 20 or so taps (funny, writing happens there caused it on both the s and the p :))

Apart from that, all seems to be working fine. I can't say if it will continue, but I was sure it would be 'trash' after I saw what happen. Super happy it is working

80 proof alcohol is one of the better things you can spill on your computer. I spilled a glass of milk on my Titanium G4. Had to replace a bunch of components (back when you could pop out the keyboard) and it smelled bad.

The can wasn't full luckily. It might have been 150 ml or so. It mostly flowed under the keys from the grill right under the screen next to the hinge on the right side. Of course the machine shut off immediately and first I thought I bricked it. But I didn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's actually pretty impressive. Did you wash it with water? Did you do anything special to dry it out?

I totally understand, as do I. If you are trying to make a MacBook Pro more usable than they are currently, you have to get https://pock.dev It has been the best $0 app I have ever downloaded, and has changed my Touch Bar experience completely.

I makes your Touch Bar into your dock, and can include the date time, battery life, a mini Spotify/music controller, and several other useful things.

I'm on the exact same boat (Air then 1st touch bar Mac). I've resigned to using it docked only both at work and home.

I've bought the non Touch Bar model after using 2 months the TB one. I have never regret this decision.

I am sat here trying to work on a computer with about 8 buttons loose and two buttons which double press.

I've had the keyboard replaced once already for exactly the same problem, but I'm a contractor and Apple can take weeks to repair the keyboard so I'm probably going to be stuck working like this for a while longer - at least until I take holiday.

It's far from acceptable for a $2,000 [pro]fessional machine.

When the iPhone was announced and Steve Jobs commented how they were going to replace the keyboards on the screen, it seemed like a great idea. The adaptation was instantaneous. But when they announced this for the Macbook Pro models, the experience was not the same. Not to mention the bugs I had.

Now, if we could get a durable keyboard and two keys at the touchbar row, esc to the left and power/fingerprint to the right and a nice touchbar in the middle with haptic feedback, that would be perfect.

I don't use function keys much, and I need to confess the emoji keyboard is pretty neat.

Apple actually still sells the last of the MacBook Air models with the good old keyboards: the 2017 13-inch 2.2 GHz i7.

Whoops – they stopped selling that model today! Glad I got mine...

This isn’t about the Touch Bar, it’s about the butterfly mechanism.

Rereading their comment, I am positive they knows that.

Oh, it's definitely true.

I've just bought one after holding out for 6 years since my last MBP. Everyone's wishes will be granted imminently.

Agreed. The French government did exactly this!

It seems like you want to suggest that Matrix is not secure - as others pointed out already the bug that was reported about has nothing to do with matrix and was fixed quickly.

Also you do not seem to understand that bugs and resulting security problems are something that happen every day - and get fixed quickly, usually, after discovery. This is what they mean when ___domain experts say things like "security is a process".

Also here we see a perfect example of why you want to use open source software for all governmental software: after a bug was found your admins can see the code changes and understand, if the bug still exists or not. Even more, only with open source software your admins and developers can read the code and search for bugs, too! This is what makes open source software a very good idea!

You are welcome to the world of free and open software, and after some reading about the basic principles I am sure you will understand why open source software is used by so many companies and organizations around the world.

BTW re the website you pointed to: I see a very annoying, totally absurd cookie dialog that makes me click at least five times and still does not give me a choice to not accept cookies at all. Please do not link to that website until they wake up and stop insulting visitors with this UI nightmare and learned that nobody needs to set cookies to publish content. Also this is not a website a pro developer would ever read or point to - always prefer to point to the primary source of information.

> Thank the French for that, who are the main reason behind the EU legislation about Cookies.

This again is wrong. The problem originated by publishers who track users and disrespect their privacy for many years.

The regulation that happened after a very long time of people urging governments to do something about that, makes this initial problem better visible.

Still it is important to understand: no cookies are needed at all for publishing content.

The cookie situation has been exacerbated exactly because of the cookie law. Previously I could just block cookies client-side (like any sane user avoiding cookies would) and every site worked just fine. However, after the cookie regulation, numerous sites just straight up started to block access _unless_ you accept their cookies.

Cookie regulation is one of the best examples of how governments meddling into tech has backfired.

It would have been a much better idea to launch a public awareness campaign about cookies and their client-side blocking, or even provide patches to open source browsers to have a better UX for blocking cookies by default. The only regulation that should have been passed (if any), would have been to allow access (to static content) despite blocking of cookies client-side.

This is wrong information.

Publishers can show a cookie-free site to all visitors and offer a cookie opt-in for some kind of added value, e.g. "more information for membership".

There is no governmental force pushing anybody to produce a website that diplays a "cookie dialog" even before you see what that site is about or if you like it. You are producing a false and absurd story of "governments meddling into tech produces cookie dialogs".

What I was getting at was that while yes, publishers can show a cookie-free site, many of them stopped doing exactly that. This started happening around the time the cookie regulation was implemented.

Had the regulation at least forbade this behavior, we most likely wouldn't be in this situation.

However, thinking back, I guess it's fair to say that publishers might have implemented this blocking behavior if the governments would only have done a public awareness campaign. In this case, only a minimum set of regulations (ban force acceptance of cookies for static content) would suffice as well.

This was an issue with Python's email parser. Relevant issue : https://bugs.python.org/issue34155

If WhatsApp had a similar issue because of some 3rd party software they rely on I'm sure nobody would give them a free pass.

WhatsApp probably has bugs like these discovered on a monthly basis, that we never even hear about.

The only time we hear about bugs with non OS software is when there is a masssive breach, FB initially reveals it only affects a small number of people, a few weeks later quietly revised that to a few 10s of million, and then a couple of months later buried somewhere that it was actually hundreds of millions of users affected.

Does not look like it. Looks like they found a flaw and fixed it. And this sort of thing, using open source project and building custom projects for private communication between private entities makes perfect sense. Anyone would be a fool to use Whatsapp for any conversations you don't want private companies and Western governments to have access to.

I have several of them:

* 1 original model that runs pi-hole for the household

* 1 RPi 3 running RetroPie for emulating classic video games

* 1 RPi 3 connected to an official RPi touch screen display that runs a Home Assistant UI

* 4 RPI 3s running as a Kubernetes cluster, mostly just for the fun of setting it up, but I have a few odd jobs that run on them, such as chat bots

I don't have a picture of the cluster all hooked up, but this is what it looks like without any cables attached: https://twitter.com/jimmycuadra/status/846935997619200000

How difficult was to setup the cluster using kubeadmin? did you run into too many issues because memory, cpu, etc?

It's been a while so the details are not fresh in my mind, but it wasn't the easiest thing in the world. I think most of my trouble came from the general lack of polish on Kubernetes (from a cluster operator's perspective) than from the specifics of the Raspberry Pi. One thing I remember clearly is that kubeadm has completely failed to upgrade k8s from one minor version to the next every time I've tried it. I always end up just saving my k8s resources, blowing away the cluster, creating a new one, and resubmitting the resources to the new cluster.