Surviving the New MacBook Pro
bradfrost.com
bradfrost.com
The biggest annoyance, to me, is the placement of a touch bar hotspot above the delete key. I hit it all the time. At first, by default, Siri was there. I switched it to be the "show desktop" button, but what I really want to do is to shift everything to the left so that nothing is above the delete key.
Even with that, however, I've adjusted my typing so that I rarely hit the touch bar above the delete key.
I've never had battery problems, the USB-C ports don't bother me because I rarely have anything plugged into the laptop other than the power cable, and in my work environments, we use Apple TVs for conference room televisions, so I can just connect wirelessly to show presentations.
I was skeptical when I bought it, due to all of the moaning that shows up here on HN, but all in all, I'm really enjoying this computer and I'm glad that I replaced my old MBP with it.
The totally irrational hate this MBP has received is really funny to me. It turns out nerds are super conservative. Change anything and they act like it's the end of the world.
And God forbid you should say you actually like the change and then you get people popping up telling you that you're wrong, you can't trust your own preferences, and you actually don't like it.
It's a slightly modified laptop with a few changes that most people don't care about or prefer. Get over it.
People are showing all the traits related to resistance to change. Seeing this whole thing through the ADKAR model, Apple misses the Awareness and Desire part by "surprising" current customers on the release happenings.
There seems to be an inherent problem with this way of rolling out changes that conflicts with taking care of existing customers. Perhaps treating current and potential customers differently would be an idea.
It is clear that other people don't like it. I hope they are able to find machines that works better for them. I posted my original comment just to give a counterpoint from the perspective of somebody thrilled with the purchase.
I actually quite like typing on this keyboard, although it was weird at first, but I wonder how these things are going to hold up.
USB-C doesn't bother me, and I guess that in the near future it will be the standard. I just had to buy a new Ethernet adaptor.
I agree that the touchbar is annoying. I summon Siri way too often, but it's not the end of the world. The keyboard is good.
I just think that it is a bit too expensive for what it is, but I didn't pay for it.
When I first purchased it, (when it was released in store), I had problems with graphical artifacts, but than a new update was released for MacOSX and it's been fine since.
it is seriously bug-ridden. For instance, at times the Finder won't allow any drag and drop operation (you need to kill it). Access to network shares is hit and miss. Globally the OS X Finder has been a pretty poor piece of essential software since... Developer Preview? :/
The absence of at least one standard USB port is really annoying, you need an adapter to plug in just about anything, a thumb drive, a phone, a mouse... any of the bazillions of USB gizmos and cables everyone has lying around in his house or at work. Wherever you are, you need to have this stupid adapter at hand. It's incredibly annoying; in practice you have to carry your nice, sleek laptop with a constantly dangling white protrusion on a side.
I want a Finder that's keyboard-accessible, that lets me easily restart it when it crashes, that doesn't frustrate my efforts to view certain hidden files. I'd still take it over windows explorer, on balance, but only barely, and that's pretty damning.
I've recently started using fman [0] which seems a promising alternative.
[0] https://fman.io
Forklift 3 would also meet those criteria.
defaults write com.apple.Finder QuitMenuItem -bool trueAgreed. I am not the owner of any new mac laptop for this specific reason.
My current 11" MBA is has a lot of utility with a standard USB port on each side and it's not that uncommon that I need both of them simultaneously. For instance, I get a very large file on a USB attached device and need to move it up to the network and my ethernet dongle would be 10x faster than wifi ...
1 new MBP, 1 MB 12"
2 iPhones
1 iPad
1 Micro-USB device (Neo Smartpen)
We could charge either of the laptops, any of the devices directly or any of the devices via the charging MBP (or from the battery of either non-connected laptop).
On all our previous/recent trips, keeping devices charged was always a problem, this time it was completely effortless.
While I don't have the problems with the TouchBar the author describes, so far it has been largely uneventful for me (and yes, TouchID is great!). However, I think the potential is fantastic for integrating textual input with controls in ways that just hasn't been possible before.
I implemented a very preliminary version of scrubbing inline numbers in my CodeDraw live coding/graphics environment and it makes a huge difference. Before, you had to select the number, then either (a) fiddle with some gestures combining modifier keys and the mouse or (b) move the mouse to a separate on-screen widget. With the TouchBar, just select and scrub. Yes, it seems like a subtle difference when described in text, but the difference in actual interaction is YUGE :-)
Of course you can use command/option or some such, maybe with arrows, but still the problem is that it's incredibly cumbersome compared to scrubbing using a slider. Much greater range and finer control when you have visual feedback.
I do think that the common use of the TouchBar as a set of function keys is not particularly useful.
You had one. You gave it to your brother.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/24/14074654/apple-consumer-r...
My desktop system is the early-2009 mac pro.
It still only has the original 6 GB of ram.
20+ chrome tabs at all times and at least two vmware fusion guests running ... and I have never once though the machine was lagging or was slow.
My laptop is a 11" macbook air and I fully expect to run it as my daily driver for 6-7 years when all is said and done.
But as someone who uses both 2012 MBP and new HP Win10 laptops every day for work and play, let me say this: the Windows world might seem suddenly enticing, but you will NOT find greener pastures there, on average. That ecosystem is still a mess.
One thing that's definitely terrible on windows 10 are the updates. Stuff breaking after forced updates is normal now. This week a whole bunch of colleagues got a forced update at 10 am which broke their laptop keyboard. Apparently our IT dept is to blame for the unlucky timing, but microsoft are the ones that broke the keyboard. Every win10 device I have has had something break after a forced update. I can always fix it, but I don't know how non-technical people deal with this.
Also, the start menu is all fubared. I end up using search from the start menu, which works but is really slow. I'll get the search box and type something into it and it's 30 seconds to a minute before my text shows up there, usually missing the first 2-3 characters I typed... but not always.
Microsoft needs to have a good hard look at why they had so much trouble moving people off of XP. It's like they hit an inflection point there with the least amount of suckage.
I think you'd find plenty willing to debate you on that one!
No, pretty sure any reasonable person would call this a fumble. Even if it's unwarranted, it's still a fumble. The roll out has been plagued with bad press and very real technical problems.
Even I was considering a new one since my 2013's batteries are starting to give out, and was immediately told by people who own them "Are you sure? There are a lot of problems with the new MacBooks. You might get lucky and get a good one."
This from non-tech people.
Does this mean they lost the game? No. But Apple fumbled here. Clear and simple.
Luckily this only happens to me in the morning while working from home. But it could happen before a big presentation, meeting, etc. It's terrible.
I'm wondering why there isn't a linux on laptop combo thats just great. Lack of resources? Demand? Is linux so fragmented that it can't martial the dev effort on laptops?
EDIT That's not to say that there aren't options that aren't great for given use-cases. E.g. as a developer I'm very happy with my linux-on-laptop. But if someone sends me an Office doc I am in a position to tell them to send me plain text or pdf or I won't be reading it. Not everyone is.
But yeah apps can be tricky. I am happy with my laptop as well (Linux).
I had a 32GB Dell i7 XPS15 with 4K display previously and this slightly old MBP runs Linux much better. As a bonus I can dual boot into MacOS too when I want to use Photoshop or whatever, but I very rarely do.
That being said, anyone running intel graphics for the last ~5-10 years has enjoyed much better driver support.
Edit: Why the downvote?
Because Apple-bashing is all the rage right now on HN. Even if Apple were to achieve "five nines" glitch-free manufacturing, which is very hard to do, there'd still be problems with 1 in 10,000 units sold. And that's considered excellent quality. I used to work in the hardware space. Software people don't often appreciate you can't simply crank out perfect replicas of a design.
More like <insert anything here>-bashing has been and always will be all the rage on any internet forum? At least to me HN looks quite diverse and I don't have the impression there is a big undeniable bias towards a single platform/tool/... and all seems fair. Which of course might mean in some cases where some product is actually not top notch the 'average' of the comments will be towards the negative side but that is exactly what should happen and the opposite should be true as well.
"So you must like your iPhone then?"
Yes, but let me tell you about the things I don't like about it...
I'd also be interested to know whether the folks experiencing these bugs imported the apps and settings from their old system. In my experience, it's fairly common to see glitches resulting from corrupt drivers or configuration after setting up a new machine by transferring from an old.
These described MBP glitches sound bad but don't sound like a trip to the neighborhood Apple Store couldn't fix.
I'll happily wait out this first generation while they iron out the problems until the next iteration of it. Seems like my maxed out 2015 was a great buy after all.
No, hackintoshes require a lot of effort.
You will not die. You will live to gripe about another non-issue next year.
Not if the lid is closed.
Audio feedback isn't too useful either
I can't count the number of times my Mac wasn't charging because the USB-C cable was detached only half a millimeter.
I can also confirm the super buggy touch bar (missing buttons, non-responsive buttons) and many graphic glitches (esp. in combination with Flux). Still hoping an OS X update will fix this.
However, at least once a week, when switching between the dock and home, my mac goes into flicker mode, requiring a hard reboot. Insanity.
To make matters worse, the power key (the Touch ID key) is unlabeled and doesn't look like a pressable key. And now that apple has removed its boot up sound, for no good reason, I don't know if I've successfully rebooted until seconds after I press the power button.
The audio occasionally craps out and randomly decides not to select the right output when I plug in to my dock.
I've been a mac guy since college in 1994. This may be my last mac.
Discrete graphics, or Intel?
That touch bar thing has never happened to me. Still hate it, though. :)
This sounds like you should just take it in for a replacement to me.
But whatever, every mac had some problems. Previously I had wifi problems, now I do not have those.
A completely unscientific assessment is that the first login is to authorise restoration of the session. Unfortunately it seems like that authorisation can't be passed onto the session itself, so that also needs unlocking.
Ideally, the computer should be able to know you just woke the computer from hibernation and skip the second lock screen but I don't think the systems are integrated enough to do that right now. :)
Instead, I ordered the Dell P2715Q 27" monitor and then purchased a DisplayPort to USC-C cable. It works perfectly and decently priced at $530.
The battery life on the new MBP is apparently limited because the fitted sealed battery didn't pass testing, so they had to revert to a more standard (smaller) battery. Supposedly they also kept a 16 gig ram limit because they can't get the newest Intel CPUs needed for a better memory controller in enough volume.
Thats been a constant refrain the last 4 years, their volumes are now big enough that they are highly dependent on Intel release cycles and volume ramp, and Intel is always late. So they are always delaying new hardware, and in this case, releasing them in sub-par form because they decided they couldn't wait any longer.
But if you are the worlds most successful maker of laptops, it seems like you can have multiple development teams for your key products. Essentially why wasn't the old MBP being revved every year with faster CPUs so they could wait until everything came together for the new design? Instead they let the lineup get stale and forced out the new one prematurely.
Why can't they rev the Mac Pro with updated GPUS and CPUs at least every 15 months or so? Why can't they rev every product from Mini to iMac like that? What's the point of having the highest margins if you can't keep your offerings up to date? It just doesn't seem that expensive to keep an extra design team working on each multibillion dollar product so you can have more iterations.
Unfortunately Occams Razor is telling me that Apple's Mac margins aren't so good anymore, and that the finance department is tightening the screws in a misguided strategy to try to maintain them at historic levels. Their mac revenues actually declined over 2014-2016 ($24B -> $25B -> $23B) so maybe that's evidence of margin compression as well as the stale products.
It's obviously hell to be a PC maker if you aren't Apple. Margins are almost zero and now your OS maker is competing directly with you. But the downward trend continues there doesn't seem to be any hope of bottoming at any stable reasonable profits/margins, it's worse than the Airline business at this point. Maybe Apple's Mac business just gets dragged farther and farther down as well.
* The math is that Apple has a 6-7% world wide share of PC sales by units, but it's average sales price is around $1200 vs. the rest of the market's $500, so Apple gets around 15% of world PC revenues, making it one of the largest PC vendors by revenues ($23B in 2016). But Apple makes around 15-20% margins while the other PC venders are stuck at 2-3%, so Apple makes as much in profits as the rest of the market combined.
This obviously ignores MSFT's Windows revenues, and whether it includes the Surface business doesn't matter because it's not profitable yet.
I use Linux daily on my desktop. Never really liked Windows because cmd was always a terrible cripple compared to *NIX.
But recently I've heard very good things from people about the new Linux subsystem in Windows 10.
There's still a lot of software that doesn't run on Linux (e.g. management utilities for enterprise systems, old/obscure utilities) even in WINE.
Can anyone who regularly uses Linux comment on how it is to us the Linux subsystem on Windows? It is good enough or still rough on the edges?
My Linux-of-choice remains Ubuntu on a VM on my Surface, but having the subsystem installed as well is nice. If they keep at it, I can see ditching the VM in a few more revs. X doesn't officially work yet, although you can hack around and get it kinda-sorta going.
I know windows have a terminal too, but apart from being black, they are completely different. PowerShell was promising but cannot (IMHO) replace the old fashioned Bourne Again Shell.
All this makes sad, because my MBP is quite old and the prospect of having to deal with windows again just makes me cry.
Because the Win10 environment is pretty shoddy, in general. And it's not a secret, so your question is surprising.
The OP talks about random bits and pieces of non-functional software and hardware, and all I could think of was Win10 on a "nice" laptop. It's pretty regularly an awful, hair-pulling experience, on any average day.