More Than Just Code podcast - iOS, visionOS and Swift development, news and advice · Tim Mitra, Jaime Lopez Jr, Mark Rubin

MacBook Neo & the Right Tool For the Job

·1 hr 21 min·4 clips

A pain doctor breaks into tears on the procedure table - not from pain, but from finally being free of it.

Tim and Jaime keep the tone loose and conversational from the start. They begin by revisiting the earlier Sparky discussion, including the running claw and the idea of giving an AI more access to physical stuff. The octopus explanation comes back too, mostly as a way to explain why the system is still text based under the hood. Tim notes that the AI seemed to catch Toronto weather almost immediately, which gives the whole thing a slightly uncanny feel. The show does not stay in theory for long. It moves into the touch bar discussion and the broader question of whether Apple has really pushed this kind of hardware design in a useful direction. The touch bar becomes the main example. Jaime likes the idea of a touch bar more than Tim does, but even that disagreement stays practical rather than ideological. Tim wants fast access to volume and brightness because those are the controls he reaches for without thinking. He is less bothered by losing function keys than by losing the simple muscle memory of pressing a button. Jaime walks through the touch bar gesture for sliding volume and brightness, and Tim keeps comparing it with the speed of physical controls. The conversation lands on one of those small truths about laptop design: if something gets used constantly, it needs to be obvious right away. Jaime brings up a neat workplace use case where the lock button was added to the touch bar at a bank because locking your machine was policy. Tim answers with his own habit of using hot corners, especially the upper left corner, to lock the screen quickly. That turns the chat into a quiet comparison of office culture and personal workflow. Both of them have lived with the rule that you do not leave a desk without locking the computer. The episode keeps coming back to the same practical idea in different forms. Elegant is nice, but fast and reliable usually win. The closing stretch loosens up again and drifts into what they have been watching, including season counts, a few movie rentals, and a quick look at the Letterboxd pile. The whole thing ends the way this show often does, with a friendly sign off and another tomorrow hanging in the air.

As heard by us

A practical debate about when clever controls help and when direct buttons still feel faster.

This episode keeps its focus on a simple Apple-controls question: when does a clever control surface actually help, and when does it become one more thing to manage? Tim Mitra and Jaime Lopez Jr.

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Why you'd press play

You want a straight answer on whether the touch bar beats real buttons for everyday Mac controls.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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