The ifixit battery kit comes with a solvent to remove the battery. There’s an interesting wired article about how it took them supposedly years to figure out

Previously on DN: https://www.designernews.co/stories/21633

Still using the goruck 5+ years later ( http://vivekgani.com/articles/backpack-comparison-goruck-gr1-vs-5-11-rush-12/ ), it's been my daily carry, grocery getter, and travel luggage the whole time. Still impressed that you can just hang the bag by the zipper while loaded with things and it handles it fine.

Trying to open my mind to find something a bit more ergonomic/lighter if I switch to a smaller laptop. Maybe a Minaal, or get a cycling bag like a north st., or maybe a smaller goruck with some field pockets to strap outside when travelling.

I believe that's why they've been evangelizing eGPUs for over a year - which seems reasonable given the size/thermal constraints of a laptop.

Last year at WWDC they sold a sonnet eGPU kit for developers, eGPU support became official in public releases earlier this year, and they partnered with blackmagic to introduce the blackmagic eGPU https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HM8Y2VC/A/blackmagic-egpu .

eGPU vendors have also been trying to make slightly more portable solutions, like the Sonnet eGFX breakaway puck.

Haven't dug in, but my thought was it was a form of 'headless ghost' - something that just spits out EDID data so the macbook thinks an external display was plugged in.

see headless ghost: https://www.headlessghost.com , and google around for earlier DIY efforts.

A few I haven't seen mentioned yet:

General tools:

Yoink - Had serious withdrawal when the deprecated dragondrop stopped working on Sierra. I've tried the alternatives (dropzone, sorta-using quicksilver's drag-drop, etc) and yoink's the best so far.

homebrew - mentioning again

Ninjakit - greasemonkey scripts for safari.

Code/text tools:

Jumpcut - older clipboard history manager, though after reading comments I may try ClipMenu

FormatMatch - basically strip text decorations when pasting text to make it plaintext - occasionally useful.

Dash - despite all the recent issues with kapeli and the mac app store, Dash has paid for itself over and over.

Macdown - free markdown editor/viewer. Also use Marked on occasion for markdown -> pdf conversion.

NValt - Oldie but a goodie, can't wait for bitwriter. sync it with simplenote.

Atlassian Sourcetree - still prefer this over the other git graphical interfaces, this maybe out of habit though.

Design-specific

licecap - old gif-making tool.

LiveReload - nobody mentioned it but it's still useful for front-end webdev.

Also, as a shameless plug, I make Thimble as a PS/Sketch/SketchUp gesture plugin, and am looking forward to hearing feedback and doing some more updates in 2017.

Agree - that fits in well with the touchbar idea making more sense within 'fullscreen mode' experiences.

Processors with an ARM instruction set architecture aren't necessarily expensive - and they come in a huuuge variety of flavors depending on just how much computing you need. Volume BOM cost of just the chip range from pennies to a few bucks. Apple probably also pays a smaller ARM licensing fee due to the sheer volume/negotiating they do.

My speculation would be we see touchbar keyboard for ~200 alongside the imac refresh in Q1 2017. The cheaper "Magic Keyboard" will still be sold for the budget-conscious/those that don't want the touchbar.

Had a crazy thought that just the touchbar itself could be sold as a passthrough added to the magic keyboard, but that's too awkward of a solution.

There's been a lot of exciting announcements with the Surface Dial and Touch Bar this week! So I'd like to present another solution I've been working on to the DN community - shortcuts by using a single touch gesture paired with a quazimode.

I've been working on Thimble as a side project for about three years, and have been emailing beta invites the past couple weeks. More on the design process is at http://www.vivekgani.com/making-thimble .

What do you think? Would you consider using Thimble for the scenarios where you don't have a touch bar yet? If you'd like to try it, definately leave a comment AND sign up and I'll send you a preview copy today.

Thanks,

Vivek

I use a kinesis freestyle 2 with the force touch trackpad in the middle. Felt like it's closer feeling to my macbook setup with less travel from my finger to the trackpad.

The siggraph video on this is worth the watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk1_CugdytI