Comment by kaypro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaypro | Hacker News Reader

I just got back from returning my 15" 2.6 i7 with Radeon 450. First time I've returned an Apple product ever. The build quality of the machine is superb. TouchID, display, keyboard and SSD are fantastic. There's something going on with the GPU's... I'm putting my money on the Intel HD but the framerate is extremely slow. Just scrolling a simple web page in Safari stutters considerably. I tried using gfxCardStatus to just use the Radeon with the same results. My 2013 MBP feels considerably faster. The trackpad misses clicks just often enough to be frustrating. The touch bar is annoying. I don't get it. Moving my fingers up to tap a button takes more effort than simply doing the same function from the trackpad. Not being able to have a volume down button in the control strip makes reducing the volume more time consuming. I actually like the new keyboard but the clicks are very loud... annoyingly so. Very jarring. It's really too bad since it's a well built machine. The form factor is perfect. I think software updates will fix a lot of these issues but all at once it's counter productive for me. I'll probably wait till a rev 2 model and update to a 2015 model for now. It's too bad you can't get a non touchbar model with the faster CPU's as well. If you're on the fence I'd wait a few months at least or grab a 2015 model.

Excellent, concise review. Thank you. There are so many compromises with this machine, I am going to skip this generation.

> It's too bad you can't get a non touchbar model with the faster CPU's as well.

You can actually get the top-tier CPU in mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15" (i7-4980HQ @ 2.8 GHz) for less than the current base model 15" (i7-6700HQ @ 2.6 GHz). And have it be ~16% faster for multi-core tasks, and some 9% for single-core.

2015 multi-core: 13945, 2016 multi-core: 12006

2015 single-core: 4292, 2016 single-core: 3926

http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks/

Admittedly, those are synthetic benchmarks, but my performance concerns are primarily related to CPU-bound tasks that should be well-captured in these benchmarks.

That plus the freedom from a dedicated GPU – I am strongly against having one in my laptop –, and I would very strongly consider the mid-2015 one.

The stuttering that you describe when scrolling sounds very similar to an issue I discovered recently where the automatic brightness adjustment feature occasionally causes all multitouch gestures to be very choppy (including scrolling, but also swiping between desktops, activating mission control, etc. -- all of it).

I understand you returned it so you can't exactly test this, but it would've been interesting to see if that particular issue was fixed by just disabling automatic brightness adjustment.

I actually did hear about this tip prior to returning it and tried it out with no luck :(

> Not being able to have a volume down button in the control strip makes reducing the volume more time consuming.

Do you routinely change your volume by only one increment? Whenever I change my volume I have to tap up and down a few times to figure out the exact volume I want, and with the Touch Bar that's just one extra tap (tapping the < button gets you the volume up/down buttons).

No. I may be an outlier but for me its more fluid and faster to hit a physical tactile always visible down button 3-4 times then to tap and hold a non tactile icon and slide my finger down. I'd imagine I'd eventually get used to this if I really had to. It's arguable as to what makes more sense and I'm really not one to be set in my ways and consider myself easily adaptable but my gut tells me that a physical volume button that has to be tapped repeatedly requires less mental effort than what the current touchbar iteration offers.

If you tap the < button to expand the control strip, you get the classic volume up / volume down buttons. Also, as I just discovered, if you tap the volume button to get the slider, you can actually tap the icons on either end of the slider which will act like the classic volume up / down buttons too (even though they don't look like buttons).

Good tip... thanks.

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