Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

Posting this from my six month old Macbook Pro 15" on which the spacebar has just started doing double spaces. Going to try and clean it with compressed air, but even if that works, it's unacceptable in my opinion that such a key piece of hardware on such an expensive machine should be so fragile.

The fact that at some point I'll have to take it back to Apple and probably be without it for several days due to the complexity of the repair makes this 10x worse - I am freelance so need this machine for work, so being without it (especially for such a seemingly trivial reason) is unacceptable and absolutely not what I expect when I buy Apple (previous Macbooks have worked for years without a single issue).

If they release a redesign, I'd swap it in a flash (I do actually quite like the keyboard to type on otherwise, but seems like the quest for thinness has gone too far this time!), but if this problem is as widespread as it seems who knows what it will do to resale values.

Would be great to get talk of this spreading as far and wide as possible, as judging by anecdata on Twitter and elsewhere, I am far from the only one with these kind of issues, and to me that implies a fairly major design flaw.

It's just incomprehensible (and an unfortunate indictment of Jony Ive's design leadership) that the 2016 MacBook Pro has continued to prove such a regression from the 2012 design.

Professionals demand good design: tools that meet our needs in efficient, reliable, and even elegant ways. Apple's line of professional laptops has traditionally delivered this by and large, but the problem with the 2016 platform is that vanity finally overtook good design.

Good design weighs the trade-offs inherent in any design decision and decides based on the greatest benefit to the user. Vanity design decides based on the greatest benefit to the designer. And based on the dongles I've seen co-workers cart all over the office because Apple abandoned HDMI, based on the keyboard reliability issues that have affected the same co-workers, and based on the dearth of compelling Touch Bar applications that have sprung up in the past year and a half, I don't think there's any question that vanity has taken over.

Honestly, I think it's time for Ive to take more of an advisory role at Apple and let some of the many talented industrial designers in his org take Apple's hardware design back to fundamentals.

Tangential rant ahead:

I've been pretty disappointed in the latest MacBooks as well (mostly just the keyboard and mediocre performance improvements over previous generations), so as a hedge I thought I should give Linux another try, hoping in the ~5 years since I last attempted it one of the more user-friendly distributions would have figured out how to make installation painless.

Nope. It's easy enough to get a basic installation of Ubuntu or elementary OS working, but you still have to muck around with things like wireless drivers, graphics drivers, multitouch support, etc to get everything working as well as macOS. After half a day of trying to tweak kernel parameters and other things I gave up. Sometimes I enjoy that sort of challenge, but not right now.

I understand it's difficult to support a wide variety of hardware without the support of a company like Apple/Microsoft/Google, and supporting proprietary drivers is controversial and not the community's top priority. It's just a bit disappointing desktop Linux still isn't ready for the mainstream, despite multiple commercial companies working on it.

Ah, a MBP complaint thread. Here are mine (Maxed out 15):

1. New keyboard is painful to type on. I use it 99% of the time with external trackpad / keyboard / monitors but that other 1% pisses me off.

2. Battery life is mediocre. I don't keep track but I'm always surprised how quickly it goes when I'm unplugged. How about stop trying to make them thinner?

3. The touchbar is f*cking horrible. It's a bad solution to a nonexistent problem. My fingers touch it by mistake often, finding ESC is awful, and worst of all, it sleeps! Give me back my ESC and media keys.

4. A computer with two GPUs SHOULD NOT CRASH when plugging in external monitors. It should also wake from sleep properly in clamshell mode. A lot of the time I actually have to unplug one monitor to get either to turn on.

5. Support for external retina monitors is terrible. I spent the better part of a day getting two Dells to be readable / look good.

6. Xcode. A medium sized project compiling now hits all 8 cores so hard music will actually stop playing (I use Roon with a pretty heavy CPU load).

Unless things turn around, this will definitely be my last MBP, maybe leaving the dev ecosystem altogether.

Louis Rossmann has examined these issues in detail on his electronics repair YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KuVvb9DTaU

(I disagree with the level of his vitriol against Apple, but I appreciate his deep teardowns and clear explanations. He just doesn't seem to understand how valuable the Apple software is vs. Windows to those who need or appreciate osx.)

Just in case anybody thinks this thing is overblown:

- On my 2016 MBP the left alt key only registers about 30% of the time now. It seriously hampers my workflow.

- On my SO's MBP (slightly newer make but same keyboard type) the "H" key stopped working, now it's registering double (she's happy: "At least I can type, I just need to use the backspace key.")

- At work two people have the same type of machine and both have had keyboard issues.

In short, I know four people who own this machine (including myhself) and all four have had issues.

Needless to say, this is a serious let-down and makes me think my next machine will be the first non-Apple in 15 years. Sad, really.

The Board Of Directors has structured Tim Cook's pay so his pay is dependent on shipping specific amounts of iPhones. This would be a good plan if the goal was to boost the stock price for the few years that iPhone seems innovative, compared to anything that Samsung can come up with. This strategy did work for several years, look at 2013 and 2014 and 2015 and 2016. But the same strategy amounts to a plan for allowing the company to collapse in the long-term. Where are the new products? Where are the new ideas? Some people point to the vast cash reserve that Apple has and they view this as a source of strength: "Apple must be doing something right to have that much cash on hand!" But a large pile of cash can also be read as a weakness; in particular, it can be seen as a lack of ideas. For comparison, consider the last time Apple had super fat margins and a product that was light-years ahead of the competition: the 1980s. Apple did not pile up cash at that time, because it was still investing in the future. Profits were reinvested in new products. The leadership could see where the future was going, and they chased after it aggressively. The difference between then and now is obvious. Apple has a huge amount of cash, but they have no ideas about how to invest it. Tim Cook is a good operations guy, he has some talent for optimizing the supply lines between China and the West. But he has no ideas. And nowadays, given the growing number of problems, I think we have to wonder if he fully deserves his reputation for being a good operations guy.

> neither Apple nor its Geniuses would acknowledge that this was actually a problem [...] Apple Geniuses installed, with its pristine keyboard and maybe-different key switches. The answer is that after a couple of months, I started to get temporarily dead keys for seemingly no reason. Again.

This is the exact same behaviour that drove me away from Apple 10 years ago: First deny existance of issue, second place blame on customer, third force customer into a generic replacement script of parts in accending order of price. Repeat until customer does not return out of frustration, accepts the broken product or is pushed out of warrantee.

I think this strategy worked for them on average when hardware design flaws were less frequent, it maintained their facade of absolute perfection at the cost of a few lucid customers... but it leaves a particularly sour taste for those whom it does affect, and I think they are fast approaching the threshold where it will backfire and destroy their image.

At this stage denying the existence of these types of problems is an insult to anyones intelligence, deep technical literacy is not required - Anyone who buys Apple products for more than beholding their aesthetic beauty can see the simple truth in this case: that it is broken.

Concur. I liked the new keyboard when it worked. But after two week-long service appointments to deal with dead keys, I've given up on it. Those laptops are defective. I'm using a 2015 15" for now.

This appears to have been aggressively flagged since it's suddenly dropped from the front page to the 6th page in a matter of minutes and has a better point to age ratio than most all above it...

Could anyone explain why? it looks highly suspicious to me. I understand that many are protective over Apple products but putting that asside, this an objective and valid warning to people looking to buy this otherwise popular computer.

My plan is to wait until there's a new model out, and then take it in for AppleCare warranty repairs once a month until I hit their lemon limit and they give me a new machine.

The durability of this keyboard is a joke. I even bought one of those rubber keyboard condoms that makes the keyboard suck to type on and the H key still got dust under it somehow and started typing hh.

This isn't a "build quality" problem, it's a design quality problem. The quest for thinness has taken precedence over reliable functioning. If they added a millimeter or two they could put in a proper keyboard, but I fear they never will. We see a similar problem with the "trashcan" Mac Pro, where they backed themselves into a corner with a design that could not be upgraded. This is just bad engineering. Form follows function, not vice versa.

As an owner of a small company who buys a few macs a year and uses one almost solely, I fully agree with this. I’ve had to replace my latest mbp computer two times now based on keyboard issues (the second time was power and keyboard issues). The keyboard is a disaster. If you have kids, forget about it.

Was given one of these at work, the keyboard started failing within a week of taking it out of the box, some of my keys click much louder than others. My - key has been stuck twice while editing this comment, my ISO enter key has a dead zone and has failed to click once while typing this comment.

This machine isn't even 6 months old and it feels rickety and unreliable because of this design disaster of a keyboard, I wish I was over-reacting.

I will not be buying another Apple machine until this keyboard is reverted, I can't imagine dropping thousands of my own money and having such an unreliable janky input device.

I can't recommend Apple anymore. With the recent trend of tech companies towards walled gardens, the things that made Apple's walled garden great are getting eroded by other companies. Their hardware really is subpar, they're spending all this money on design and virtually none on maintenance, because repair is a profit center for them rather than a cost center.

Apple software looks and feels great, and I used to believe their hardware was just as good, but it turns out that their manufacturing processes are really crappy. Remember the first unibody aluminum Mac? Wasn't a unibody. They glued two pieces of aluminum together instead.

Look, I get it, you have to deal with the manufacturers you have. But Apple's amassed a gigantic pile of cash, and they really should be using it to improve their hardware. But they haven't been. And now, there's never been a better time to switch platforms.

I was singing their praises 2 years ago. But the beauty was only skin-deep.

This happened to my wife's macbook pro spacebar, $600 fix. It happens with mine every so often too, but fingers crossed it has 'fixed' itself each time.

The last great Macbook Pro was:

> MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)

The new models are subpar in build quality imho and the touch bar is completely useless tech.

My spacebar locked up on me briefly a week after purchase - calling it dust would be BS. Doesn't bode well for the future.

Even when brand-new, and working properly, these keyboards are a disaster. IT has been rolling upgrading people to them at work, and the number of external keyboards has skyrocketed.

So has the number of new lenovos.

I can relate to what the article says, and yet find it hard to break away from the ecosystem given the tools I've come to use every day runs so well on the Mac. Muscle memory with shortcuts and all.

I've found a quick workaround to simply let the machine cool down. Eg. When running Docker previously and when the machine got heated, I found keyboard problems keep cropping up consistently. Letting it cool for about 20 minutes with a laptop cooler seemed to help.

I have one of these provided by my employer - spacebar broke within a couple of months.

Also, I kid you not, the 'H' key was not functioning on one in the Regent Street Apple store I was using while waiting for an iPhone battery replacement.

Essentially, you have to avoid getting any detritus on the keyboard of any kind. I no longer eat any snacks or sandwiches at the computer, which is probably a good thing anyway.

Doesn't Apple have a ton of in-house engineers that use their hardware every day and therefore must have these problems as well? Shouldn't they fix them if only to keep their engineers from the pain?

Fits with my experience.

Aside from hating the feel of the new keyboard in my 6 months ownership of the new Macbook Pro it went back for warranty keyboard repair twice.

I sold it and bought a second hand 2015

Damn, my Macbook Air 2013 logic board just gave out, and was considering the upgrade to Macbook Pro 2017 as logic board is running at £450 replacement cost.

After reading other's thoughts here, I think I have to avoid Macbook Pro for now, I hope they change this in the next release.

Annoying as I need a machine with Xcode.

I use a keyboard cover and it helps reduce this issue. When you do get a crumb under a key and it stops working, the solution is to keep hitting the key hard until you dislodge/break the crumb. Low tech, but it works.

Been using a 2010 15" Macbook Pro since i found it in the dumpster in 2014 (yup...), it was my first ever time owning a macbook and using OSX (outside of some time on friends computers, etc) and i love that thing. I used linux before but wasn't so hot on the grueling labor of repairing simple stuff, and so i was stuck on windows coming from a windows-fanboy past - now i am a huge OSX fan for its combination of ease of use and POSIX compliance; but i refuse to buy any new macbook pro.

I want my magsafe charger, i want my displayport and ethernet port, i want my CD drive, i want to be able to replace the battery myself (done it twice), and to swap hard drives (done it four times) and RAM (once) easily, I want physical keys for escape and media buttons.

I have gone so far as to personally take out the motherboard and replace a single tanatalum capacitor with an aluminum-polymer capacitor (requiring me to scrape off some of the soldermask off so i could solder to the ground plane easier since the Al-Poly cap is much larger) because the tantalum one was causing GPU kernel panic crashes. (Big thanks to Louie Rossman for the tutorial video!)

I've brought this thing back from the brink of death many times and i will continue to do so until Apple cleans up their act and makes a true developers laptop again.

MacBook Pro from late 2013 is just as difficult to repair, only cheaper because they don’t have touch bar. I can’t replace the keys at home (expensive parts, so many things can go wrong), so it’s waiting for pickup to go to a company to stay there.

I’ll probably sell it and replace with another Lenovo, which is one of my machines since 2011 and it’s only two philips screws away to receive maintenance and upgrades.

This tells me theres a worse problem at Apple: Groupthink.

No one was bold enough to call BS on this poorly designed keyboard. Everyone just went along with it.

And the worst part about it is that it's incredibly hard to replace the keyboard on the MBP. For most other laptops it's just a screw or two, a few plastic clips, and a ribbon cable to replace it. They're also super cheap for just about every manufacturer out there other than Apple and you can get a new keyboard delivery included for ~$15-$25. For the MBP you pretty much need to get the whole top case as one assembly because instead of just a few clips Apple rivets the keyboard to the case! And it's not just a couple of rivets either, try a couple dozen.

Absolutely insane how not only does Apple make the keyboard just about impossible to replace, but they also make a keyboard that's simultaneously much much more failure prone than any other keyboard that I know of. Here's a great video of a madman actually replacing the keyboard instead of just replacing the whole assembly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMueATtTcQg

I hope that issues like this further open a two-way channel of communication apple has with "pro"-oriented users. For most of us, computers are tools, which must meet our connectivity and performance needs (encompassing raw compute power and hardware endurance requirements). To continue serving this market well and staying relevant to professionals and power users, Apple needs to take into account our needs and use cases when designing and releasing future products, which was quite evidently an afterthought for the 2016 MacBook models.

If apple tomorrow released an updated 2015 rMBP with a Coffee Lake or Ryzen2 CPU, an optional dGPU, 2 (or better yet 3) full-sized USB type A ports, and (only in my dreams) a full-sized number pad, I would more strongly consider a purchase than migrating back to the PC world for my main PC.

I am hopeful Apple recognizes their shortcomings, learns from them and produces more innovative and powerful hardware that meets the needs of the professional and power-user groups.

I just switched back to Thinkpad X1 w/ Windows. With Linux Subsystem for Windows, it's been roughly working out. though I am currently maintaining two copies of things - one for Linux and one for Windows for lots of tooling. Not sure how to optimize here. Only been a few days. Re-learning keyboard shortcuts.

Only pain: not having iMessage on laptop.

I am a Apple supporter and shareholder, but will admit that I loathe the butterfly keyboard on my MPB with Touchbar. The amount of typos I make (mostly missed key strokes) rivals my iPhone which is impressive. I have also experienced the "dead" key issue when dust or hair get's under a key.

The technological anorexia plaguing Apple is progressing. Disorientation, lethargy, inability to complete simple tasks such as arithmetic, and fragility are all pathological symptoms. Apple employee injuries sustained by walking into walls, slowdowns caused by lack of energy reserves, irreversible damage inflicted by the lightest touch, degradation of capabilities once taken for granted, such as rapidly adding 1+1+1+1, coupled with staunch denials that any problem exists - these are not just warning signs. They are symptoms immediately recognizable to any trained practitioner denoting the sorry fact that, without intervention, Apple will not be getting better. No recovery may be reasonably expected.

Last May I bought a 2015 Macbook Pro 13" on sale for $1100 from Best Buy. Humorously it had a higher user review score on their website than the 2016 model (4.6/5 vs 4.5/5) and was ~$1300 cheaper.

From everything I've heard, I lucked out on that one!

All you need to know about Apple Engineering by Louis Rossmann https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8

I'm honestly thinking of switching to Thinkpad X1 Carbon now, but I HATE windows. And from what I've heard, Linux doesn't bode well with it. Anybody here Linux running on X1 Carbon?

I recently had one of the new Macbook Pros for work and experienced exactly what the author describes. It happened regularly enough that is was a real issue. I finally got rid of it.

The can of air never resolved the issue either. I had to tap the side of the laptop and press down on the keys.

I honestly wouldn't recommend someone buy one either. They took forever to refresh the MBP and that fact that they released something after all that time with this issue is a joke. I won't be looking at Apple again for my hardware needs.

I haven’t had any issues with the 2016 tb version. But then that’s only 1 data point! Actually it’s the best Mac I’ve owned by far. The keyboard has been a big improvement as has the trackpad, screen, speakers, build quality and switch to USB c, reduced weight and size, etc. I upgraded from the redesigned 2012 which had a lot of glitches. New designs always take a while to work out all of the glitches. But generally I don’t see a lot of threads on bad keyboards. So I suspect this is fairly isolated.

I'm not a huge fan of the keyboard on my late 2016 MBP 15" myself (I would prefer the previous version, the buttons don't have the nice "clicky" sound anymore) but it has been rock solid ever since I got the laptop (November 2016) and has been in constant use since then (8+ hours every day).

I have my MacBook Pro on a stand then use a bluetooth keyboard and external monitor. Rarely do I use the actual keyboard.

If Apple created something similar to a Mac mini with a laptop battery I would buy it immediately. I know it wouldn't work for everyone, but it would suit my needs.

Form exceeded function. This isn't much different from stories of Apple power adapters with strain relief that always broke because the designers/marketers prohibited the engineers from making a proper strain relief.

Just an FYI, Apple still sells the older 2015 model: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-2015/

I moved on to an HP Spectre and Windows 10 from my 2009 MBP...I'm mostly happy with it, but VERY SAD that the MBP era seems to have ended rather than getting better and better. It's a damn shame.

I use a 2012 MBP that’s still going strong. The newer models with irreplaceable (at least by us mere mortals) hard drives, batteries and memory, and permanently pushed me away from buying a Mac again.

Any suggestions for good non-Windows laptops in the $1000 price range? I'm seriously considering just buying a refurbished MacBook Pro from 2013 at this point.

So far I haven't had any problems with mine, purchased 4 months ago... knocks on wood

Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnot sure what you're talking about. It's best keyboard ever.

/sarcasm

What is up with Apple lately. The Homepod is a total train wreck. No mic mute button. No input jack so can not use as a speaker. No stereo. Siri still terrible.

I had an employee provided macbook air which had constant issues with driving an external display. (I think it was firmware problems). When the keyboard broke after 10 months, I was pretty happy to have a solid reason for a replacement.

New macbooks are junk.

> This old MacBook Pro is still fine

Then why did you buy a new one?!? Excess consumerism drives the tech ahead, sure, but I can only have so much sympathy for your buyer’s remorse.

The problem must be environmental or physiological (he presses the keys harder than average, or something) because keyboard malfunction isn’t some recall-level dysfunction as he wants to make it out to be.

That said, the new keyboard is indeed a travesty.

Keyboard working here without issue. Noticed a couple issues earlier on, but discovered was from a couple crumbs. If there were a major issue affecting nearly everyone there would have been a recall or constantly news cycle about it. So I don't think the answer is for others to not buy a MBP because 'you' and some others are experiencing issues. Instead, I'd recommend you and others affected bring it into get fixed.

That being said, I'm sure the keyboards will continue to improve with each generation, albeit with compromises such as to get thinner they change the key styling and eventually will be touch only with haptic feedback (which I'm not excited for) but will be inevitable.