Hacker News Reader

>> - less precise trackpad than my 3 year old rMBP >> - palm-sensitive trackpad

This! I sound like a broken record, but what is wrong with the PC manufacturers not getting the trackpad right/close(r) to how (well) Apple MBP trackpads operate?

Yes, they may have been improving, but going back from MBP to PC laptop is simply infuriating as a result of lack of accuracy of their trackpads. And to back up my subjective assessment of the situation, I have been making a point to make a walk through of the Microsoft store about every 6 months to test out (the trackpads) of all the shiniest PC laptops on display. </rant>

Couldn't agree more. Whenever a friend picks up a new non-Apple machine that's the first thing I try out. It's almost always bad enough for me stop there.

I've always found that Dell ships rock solid H/W, but does a piss poor job of systems integration. The best way to get "OSX Level" reliability that I've found is to clean-install Windows, or remove all their shitty Dell applications and tools. Their track-pad 'helper' tool is particularly quite terrible. Windows 10 too is its own beast. I disable all that update shit because like you I don't want any unplanned reboots. Its ridiculous that you have to do all this shit, but you will be rewarded in the end. I regularly get 40-50 days of up-time before manually rebooting for updates. YMMV !

"Thankfully this old rMBP I use is still running well (despite the screen covering deterioration in weird spotty ways)."

Does it look similar to this - http://www.staingate.org/ https://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/17/apple-mbp-ar-coating-qu... . My rMBP had the same problem and I got the screen replaced for free (outside warranty).

Yes, staingate.

> - less precise trackpad than my 3 year old rMBP

Literally the only reason I continue to buy MBP's. If PC manufacturers could give me a trackpad which was even close to as good as Apple's I would hop the fence tomorrow.

Recently picked up one of these as well.

Regarding the fans, highly recommend using an overclocking tool to undervolt the CPU and iGPU -- reduced temp under load for me by nearly 15C, runs stable with cpu at -130mV. Stops the fans from turning on as often or running as aggressively.

I too was unlucky in receiving a Toshiba as the vendor of my 1TB SSD. There is a reddit thread out there about switching from Intel RST to AHCI with OCZ drivers -- this improved my random write performance significantly.

The most annoying part of the system to me is the "coil whine" coming from the internal DC/DC converters. Lots of different pitch and erratic high frequency noises come from the laptop. My colleagues can confirm that my ears are not particularly sensitive to high frequency noise but this laptop is very audible. Just do not feel like it should have this kind of defect on such a high end machine.

> despite the screen covering deterioration in weird spotty ways

If it's like images at [1] you may be eligible for a free screen replacement. I got Apple to change mine after it started showing the defect (granted, I went to an Apple Store mere weeks before the Apple Care+ coverage ended). Mine is a late 2013 rMBP. The new screen, however, is starting to show the same kind of damage around the edges.

[1] http://www.staingate.org/#gallery

Yes, this is my problem. It's slightly unpleasant to look at, but at the moment I depend on the laptop too much to be without it for even a day.

I may just go into the store and ask them what the situation is for me.

I had the exact opposite experience. I cant fault my XPS15 9560. No issues, very fast, no crashes.

> - less precise trackpad than my 3 year old rMBP > > - palm-sensitive trackpad

Sadly this seems to be par for the course for non-Apple laptops. I will say that the Asus ZenBook seems to get pretty close though.

> Thankfully this old rMBP I use is still running well (despite the screen covering deterioration in weird spotty ways).

I'm using a mid-2010 MBP (upgraded the RAM and replaced the drive with an SSD) and it's awesome. Still very usable, runs the latest MacOS, and still gets really good battery life. The Apples of that era seem shockingly well built.

You just about summed up my experience with my 9560.

I bought the laptop because I didn't want a new Macbook. I ended up regretting it a little bit since I don't love the trackpad.

Same here with a new XPS 13, the trackpad is awful for 2017. My 2012 MacBook Pro trackpad is working perfectly, responsive and precise as hell.

I don't get why it is so hard to make a decent trackpad today when Apple did it more than 5 years ago :(

> And you can't play on an external monitor... too laggy and limited to 30Hz refresh.

Did you use an HDMI cable or USB-C to HDMI adapter? Since the spec says the HDMI port is 1.4 only, I'd like to know if using a USB-C to HDMI 2.0 adapter will give you more bandwidth, allowing you to do 4k at 60hz with 4:4:4 chroma support.

> Too bad Apple no longer caters to my crowd

What is "your crowd"? Only thing I wish my rMBP had was more than 16GB of RAM for some of the dev I do. Other than that, I can't see switching anytime soon.

Since we're on HN, I'll assume 'his crowd' is software development.

How has apple stopped catering this crowd? Let me give you my opinion.

The new macbook pro's main feature is one that is totally useless to professionals. The touch bar is an interesting idea for the casual user, but for anyone who uses any software professionally, it provides no value as it is much slower than keyboard shortcuts. Not to mention that the lack of tactile feedback means you need to look away from the monitor to use it.

The new design has force a redesign in the keyboard, giving it much lower travel, and it is now a lot more uncomfortable to use (this one in particular is quite subjective)

16GB is just not enough in the era of containers.

The price. It's just absurd and some of the most expensive features (TB) are just useless as I stated above.

meanwhile, game and graphics developers are dying due to lack of modern opengl or, god forbid, opencl or vulkan.

Agree 99% on this. My 2012 rMBP (i7 quad core, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and NVidia discrete graphics) still runs like a champ with VMWare running in the background supporting a docker swarm nonetheless). The only upgradable part in this system was the SSD and I upgraded that from the original 256 to the one that's in there now. The keyboard is actually starting to wear out with the 'S' having all but disappeared from the 'S' key.

All I was hoping for was this exact form factor with upgraded internals (faster CPU, faster GPU, 32GB), swapping the two existing Thunderbolt 2 ports for Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports. But no, apparently we all wanted lighter and thinner, no function keys and only poorly supported (so far) USB-C ports. Who knew?

By the way... TB is not useless. I use it everyday. I plug my rMBP into power and then plug a TB cable in from my computer to my LG Thunderbolt display with builtin USB-3 hub and TB passthrough.

Switching to the 9560 (from a MBP) wouldn't be as easy as one would hope. WSL is very very slow and awkward to use compared to the macOS terminal. Part of the performance problems are related to forking: on *nix forking is a lightweight operation and used a lot, especially in all of those convenient BASH tools that we use (like RVM) but on Windows it's a very expensive process--I'm rewriting GVM2 to speed it up for Go development on WSL. Then there's the whole deal of having to double up on your installs (e.g. installing ruby dependencies on both Windows and within WSL for code completion support, etc., from within VSCode) and not editing WSL files within Windows or risk corruption.

Then there's that single 2-lane Thunderbolt/USB-C port and the 9560's 130W power requirements...sadness. While an HP Zbook Studio G4 (also quad core i7, all the way up to Xeon) includes two 4-lane TB3 ports, it has older Quadro 1200m graphics and comes with a 150W power adapter (!): way way out of the max 100W USB-C spec. And yet the new rMBP still only draws something like 87W. In short, you can't charge any of these machines over USB-C unless they're idling.

It's like being stuck between a rock and hard place right now: Apple caters only to the mass consumer while everyone else is spread so thinly across all markets that they can't seem to focus and make a truly awesome MBP replacement for power users (engineers, creatives, scientists, gamers, etc). And I look at this 5-year old rMBP with its totally smooth underside, still incredible display, properly placed speakers and webcam, and wonder why Windows notebooks still can't compete with this Jobs-era design.

I used to manage with VMs on 8gb, 16 should be enough for most people using containers. Believe the laptop in this review can be upgraded to 32 for the heavy-hitters.

I've read it will be able to support up to 64GB when 32GB sticks become available.

I don't know about the GP, but my crowd is upgradable RAM.

Same here. At least let me upgrade RAM and disk. I don't want to have to buy a 1TB disk now just in case I may need one later.

People who want to keep their computer longer than the warranty period?