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Next gen MacBook Pro wishlist:
- Thread starter RyanFlynn
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Agree on the keyboard, although in all likelihood they won't give up on the butterfly switches. I think they will attempt a silent fix on the current design to improve reliability.
As for the rest, I don't really like to say this, but the probability of any of them happening is around 0% (Apple has never reintroduced a port after removing it, and their current relationship with Nvidia is nothing short of terrible).
Why would you want a USB-2 port? That makes no sense, much nicer if all ports are USB-3. Did you mean you want a USB Type-A connector?
[doublepost=1519291700][/doublepost]Let's see, a wishlist...
- 6 Core CPU
- 16-64 GB ECC RAM
- 16" or 17" UHD display with smaller bezels
- Choice glossy / non-glossy
- Great keyboard
- Great thermal management
- Great battery life
- Efficient discrete GPU
- 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports is fine
- But gimme back my MagSafe!
- Choice TouchBar/no TouchBar
- Bring back the power and battery LEDs
- FaceID or not, don't care either way
- Don't care about SD slot
- Thicker than TouchBar models, like the Retinas
Happened once with Firewire port on an older version laptop, if i remembered well. Correct on nVidia though, will never happen.
- Touch Bar with higher resolution, 3D Touch and Taptic Engine
- 6 core 15” MBP, 16/32 GB RAM
- At least 512 GB on all 15” models with 1 TB being a standard configuration among others
- (Stretch goal) Every key on the keyboard has a minimal display that can dynamically change what glyph is displayed. Changing the keyboard layout, or using Emoji keyboard etc. contextually replaces the keyboard display. We call this “Ultimate Keys” and we think you’re going to love it.
- (Stretch goal) ProMotion for Mac.
How in gods name do you expect anyone to actually type on this ? You would be continually looking at the keys and not at the screen.
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If you know the keyboard layout, you don’t look at the keys.
If you are learning DVORAK, you can look at the keyboard and it would help. Or if you are learning Japanese and you’d like to learn how to use the Japanese keyboard, you would look at the keyboard to “learn” it while you are not proficient in it.
For alternative layouts and other languages, it’s a convenience. Also it simplifies the supply chain by just providing one keyboard layout. It improves resale value as well (you probably wouldn’t be able to sell a Chinese keyboard MBP to a non-Chinese user.)
The glyph design would be more minimal as well. For instance, the number keys no longer have to display the modified (e.g. when using Shift) key, but they would dynamically change on a key press to display the alternative keys.
Also, you can remap your keys (for instance, you could use Caps-Lock as ESC and that change would be represented in the keyboard. You could basically invent your own keyboard layout and it’s much better IMO to have the key labels match your layout.
You could use it for some other “gimmicks” as well. Games could display some simple icons for your cooldowns and they could change color and intensity depending on whether you have sufficient resources (health, mana, etc.) to cast a specific skill, for instance.
If a game doesn’t use all of the keys (many of them don’t) those keys can be blacked out; so you will immediately know what keys to use by just looking at the keyboard.
Or when you are learning to use a hotkey-intensive program like Sibelius or Blender, for instance, those programs could display icons on demand (maybe using a modifier key) for assistance (instead of you printing a cheatsheet.)
Some OS-level information could be displayed on the keys, too. Perhaps if you’re using copy & paste, the paste button (no longer really the “V” key with a Cmd modifier can display whether your clipboard is empty.
Overall, these changes are mostly for the convenience of the users when they are learning how to use the keyboard and some programs. Experienced users don’t really need to look at their keyboards; but this change allows the keyboard layout to change contextually so for other functionality that was not allowed in the prior keyboards can be shown so that they can adapt faster.
IRC older MBPs had GeForce GPUs in it (i.e. 8600M GT) and it failed consistently. Apple had to do a huge recall campaign, after that they slowly abandoned nVidia in favour of ATI (later AMD) GPUs...Probably this caused legal issues between the two...
That and also the fact that AFAIK AMD GPUs were generally better in GPGPU OpenCL computing. They also made GPU with lower TDP, more suitable for the anorexic Apple hardware...
Can you touch type? I'm guessing not by all you just said. The only way touch typing works is because the keys don't change. You can't remember 5 different keyboard layouts for different apps, or even for different languages. Have you ever used foreign keyboards with different key layouts? They are hard to use! It would be like that except much worse.
Why would you assume that touch typing won‘t work in the concept he described? If you were to type in an average application while having the keyboard set in your native language, then absolutely nothing would stop you from touch typing. Every key it‘s where it is usually at, you can just blindly type as you usually would.
What would change in his concept isn‘t primarily the bindings of the physical keys themselves, but the symbols on the keycaps. It would be a natural extension of what you‘re already doing software-wise.
For example if you were to switch between different language keyboards which is something many multilingual typists already need to do right now, then the keycaps would be able to show whatever the key is currently mapped to in this language keyboard.
I.e. you switch between an US and EU keyboard? Y and Z could simply switch places, as could everything else; you‘d be instantly able to see where you can find certain characters on a foreign keyboard just by looking down on it like you usually would when you search for a special character in the language of the keyboard. And if you already know where all the special characters are in every language that you‘d need to type in, then you can blissfully ignore it and type blindly, there‘s nothing stopping you from doing that.
Similar with keyboard shortcuts. You want to know what shortcuts a certain app has? You could just look down at the keyboard, hold Command, Shift, Control or combinations of those, and the keycaps for the individual letters could dynamically show you if there‘s a command assigned to them when pressing this combination and if so, which. If you already know the shortcuts of an app, then there‘s once again nothing stopping you from using them and ignoring this feature.
„You can't remember 5 different keyboard layouts for different apps, or even for different languages. Have you ever used foreign keyboards with different key layouts? They are hard to use! It would be like that except much worse.“ No, it would actually make this a lot easier because as you said, most people cannot/don‘t want to remember 5 different keyboard layouts for different languages etc. This would be a blessing for multilingual typists and for people trying to learn a new language, you no longer have to awkwardly open the software keyboard and look up the letter placements there, you could see them right from the keyboard itself.
If they did this with physical keycaps that still felt like the 2015 keyboard I would actually be fine with it.
I’ve been typing since I was 2, man. I am a touch typer, and I average over 130 WPM.
I don’t personally have trouble with the current keyboard design. I just think that it would be very helpful for a lot of users with different backgrounds, and would allow for interesting new features (contextual input is a game-changer IMO.)
And to me this change sounds very Apple-ish. It’s something they would do, because it really fits into their philosophy of innovation. That’s why I included it there. I think they will, if they do not ditch the keyboard or the Mac line, will eventually switch to this keyboard in the next redesign if not in 2018.
