[magoon]

I use a 12” MacBook and find it almost fully suitable for all development. Even with VMs and Docker containers, it’s great, but if anything misbehaves and gets it running too hot it can get sluggish. It’s unable to recover on its own because it has no fan.

MacBook Pros can keep going even with CPU-abusive software. I don’t want to carry the extra weight so I choose the trade-off.

But a Chromebook? I don’t understand the fascination with trying to develop on a more challenging dev platform that offers seemingly no advantage in terms of performance, mobility, price, or ergonomics.

[yani]

Escape key, siri button, densed keyboard keys, and unreasonably huge trackpad are the things that made me switch. I am in a meeting or listen to a youtube video... I press backspace ... Oh my bad I pressed siri button - everything goes silent for 30 seconds.

I disabled siri button... a few weeks later apple released an update and siri is back ... just before my important call. My anxienty level is to the roof.

[bengale]

If you don't use capslock you can set the keyboard to map that to escape.

[PascLeRasc]

I think that's the de facto control key on Macbooks since they aren't in the bottom left corner. It'd be cool if we could configure a single caps lock keypress to Esc and holding it down to Control.

[raihansaputra]

That is possible using Karabiner/Karabiner-Elements. I currently have Caps Lock mapped to Escape and Hyper (for vi like arrows)

[brazzledazzle]

I use mine for escape and hadn’t considered using it for control. Is it more comfortable?

[copperx]

It's indispensable because OS X has Emacs bindings in all standard controls. Control A, E, K, P, N, C, D.

These keybindings are one of the only reasons I have stayed with OS X. I'm surprised that others use Cmd-arrow combinations instead.

[PascLeRasc]

Since I'm just using it for ctrl+c in a terminal, it's much more comfortable.

[copperx]

Anyone sane has already remapped it to control.

[oellegaard]

How about you just disable Siri like everyone else? :-) I work with my macbook 12+ hours a day and this never, ever, happened to me.

[yani]

Yes, read the last sentence of my comment. Updates might re enable it. If your battery runs out, the same happens.

[zeitg3ist]

I've removed the Siri button from the touchbar the day I got my MacBook, more than a year ago, and it never appeared again. Might be a problem on your system? Usually resetting the NVRAM/PRAM solves this kind of problems, but it's basically black magic.

[jonhendry18]

Did you remove the Siri button from the touch bar, or disable Siri altogether? Maybe try doing both.

[tedmiston]

I removed it once. I may be mistaken here, but if I recall, removing it slightly shifted the layout of the other keys throwing off my muscle memory for the f keys.

I'm interested in a solution. I probably hit that key unintentionally 10 times a day.

[brazzledazzle]

Check out this post about customizing the touchbar that was on HN a little while ago: http://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/

[jonhendry18]

Perhaps you could replace the Siri button with a similar sized button if one is available, in order to keep the spacing. (I don't have a touchbar Macbook, so I don't really know what's available.)

[_asummers]

Counter-anecdote to OSX Docker: My OSX Docker experience was nothing short of painful. Anything CPU intensive brought the entire laptop to a crawl. When I went down to metal noticed at least a 10-15x performance improvement, due to the way XHyve does things with the disk (I think?). This may have changed recently, but I won't run Docker on OSX anymore unless I have to.

[brazzledazzle]

I’m not sure how long ago that was but there has been at least one update over the last few months that change how they use storage. It had to wipe the VM (subsequently deleting containers) so warned me about it first.

[_asummers]

It's been a while. Good to hear that's improved. If I need to retool local again, I'll give it another shot.

[NiveaGeForce]

ChromeOS is actually well designed and secure, has pen & touch support for 2-in-1s, and is going in the right direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813796