NVMe SSDs sitting on 4x PCIe lanes, having 2GBytes/s write and 6 GBytes/s read speeds.
I would not call it failing ;)
The MacBook line has regressed in quite many ways the last few years. The 'current' Mac Mini and Mac Pro are from the stone age. Heck, the current Mac Mini was a downgrade in many respects compared to the Mac Mini 2012.
I have been a Mac user since 2007. But frankly, the whole line has gone down the drain, unless you can drop a few thousand Euros on a 27" iMac with an SSD and a reasonable amount of memory or the iMac Pro.
The Dell Precision workstation that I bought 3-4 years ago second hand for ~400 Euro is more than twice as fast as my 1700 Euro MacBook Pro, has three times as much memory, and is expandable (added a 512GB SSD harvested from my 2012 Mac Mini).
Can be configured with more memory, a better display, better port selection, is user upgradable and is still very light and compact...
Interestingly though, I did see XPS line being supported in this hackintosh guide as well as the Xiaomi Notebook Pro.
I was under the impression the reason not to get a butterfly keyboard was because they are prone to failure due to dust and crumbs?
I'm not even sure what you mean by the brightness cannot be manually adjusted? The screen brightness obviously can be manually adjusted, and every XPS laptop I've owned has at least 3 levels of keyboard brightness controllable via F10, software, and can even be set in the BIOS.
Precision isn't really better, just different, since you can get one with (older) Quadro GPU rather than a GTX card, and a Xeon rather than Core CPU. The chassis, display, support, build quality is otherwise identical.
I also use a 2017 MacBook Pro with touchbar for iOS development. And while I've long recommended the MacBook Pro to others without hesitation, that began to change sometime in the past 2-3 years.
The MacBook Pro screen actually looks blurry by comparison to the XPS 4k. Text isn't as sharp, and the colors are less vibrant (although the P3 color space is a nice improvement). It's a bit disappointing that Apple has yet to fundamentally improve upon the once unbeatable 2013 MacBook Pro "retina" screen, despite a few tweaks along the way.
However, the XPS 9550 definitely suffered from the annoying coil whine. Moreover, I was never satisfied with the touchpad, especially the palm rejection. There was even a slight delay after tapping, which was just enough to be frustrating during daily use. The fans also came on more than expected, likely due to lackluster power management support for the novel Skylake architecture.
And perhaps strangest of all was the repeating "W" key issue. Without rhyme or reason, the "W" key would sometimes repeat, as if being held down (despite not being stuck). Interestingly, there were BIOS updates to address this issue, and based on the Dell's forums, the "W" key issue has affected numerous laptop models over the years.
Fortunately, it seems that Dell has finally managed to iron out these growing pains with the 9560. After purchasing it, I quickly upgraded to 32GB of memory, installed a Samsung 960 Pro SSD, and swapped out the Wifi chip for a better performing Intel model. You'd be hard pressed to find a better spec'd machine for linux / software development.
I'll be curious to see if Apple can up their game with the 2018 MacBook Pro.
It's not about performance, which in the terms of Apple's latest hardware (that is, only part of their product line) is perfectly fine. Yes, a specced Macbook is fast, but that does not relate to anything by OP.
My criticism was that MacBooks have become bad laptops for their price. They have a limited number of ports with USB-C, which is not well-supported yet. They keyboard has serious problems, which I don't assume to be a fluke, since I know multiple persons with stuck keys. They are not expandable. And macOS has regressed quite a bit in the last few years. Some of these problems are acceptable in isolation, but regressions are piling up.
Then there is crap like that the first generation of Apple's USB-C multi port adapters didn't actually support USB-3.0 transfer speeds, but contain a USB 2.0 hub. Back then I dropped 160 Euro on two adapters (this was before the MBP 2016-related price drop) to use my MacBook with existing screens, projectors, and USB devices. They give you a whole lot of crap about the transfer speeds, but sell you USB 2.0 adapters (!).
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Again, I have been a Mac user for 10 years. In that time I probably bought 5 or 6 Macs, since for some time I used both a Mac Mini and a MacBook. For may years, they were so far ahead of the competition, it was not even funny (excellent suspend support in 2007, MagSafe, battery indicator LEDs, OS X was simply better). I was a strongly advocating Macs among friends and family. Unfortunately, I just can't do that anymore. The risk is too big that they get a flawed keyboard or that they are too frustrated with the 1/2/4 USB-C ports.
I careful with my stuff. Whats the price of changing keyboard by apple?
I would not buy a 2016/2017 MacBook out of warranty. When the keyboard eventually goes bad, you're looking at a $700 repair
Curious what was the regression, honestly
- Location services steals focus from XQuartz.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7964085
- Emacs (non-X11 version) regularly triggers a bug in the display server that freezes it hard. Haven't been able to debug it further. I have mostly stopped using Emacs on macOS because of this bug.
- Every few reboots, my Mac freezes and I have to do a hard reboot.
- Every few days or so, sound stops working. I have to do a sudo killall coreaudiod and then everything is fine again. Well, except the volume control in the system tray, that comes back after a couple of hours.
- Some monitoring tools, like htop freeze macOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16082861
- Keynote doesn't open some older Keynote presentations correctly anymore (e.g. things converted with PDF2Keynote).
Also, longer-term: Spaces was much nicer for power users than Mission Control. The Mac App Store seems to become slower all the time. Airport Utility is pretty limited compared to the older version. The killed genuinely useful Pages features like linked text boxes when they rebased on iOS iWork (they are finally back after years). Etc.
I guess I don't have to mention the embarrassing security bugs that we had since the High Sierra release.
> my Mac freezes ... sound stops working
reinstall Mac OS fresh, erasing the drive. 99% you hacked your OS badly.
But these bugs are in macOS. An unprivileged program should not be able to crash the display server.
reinstall Mac OS fresh, erasing the drive. 99% you hacked your OS badly.
No, I recently did a fresh install (along with the usual NVRAM, PRAM reset, etc.)
would you argue that Windows is More secure? Yeah, there is Gnome and plethora of Linux desktops, but we're talking mass market. And I Am interested in enumerating the disasters, is there any not patched yet? Genuinely interested, as I'm a user :))
I can accept that the location services bug is not fixed, since it primarily affect XQuartz. But an application should not be able to crash the display server.
These days I'm one of those who uses MacBook because they have to, not because they love to. I remember getting my first MacBook ~12 years ago and being really happy while using it.
Now, it's rarely pleasant; to repeat what countless others have said:
a) This is my third MBP since 2016, other 2 died with keyboard issues (and I could not afford waiting for repairs). This third laptop already has "right arrow" and "C" keys skipping 20% presses.
b) Dongle hell: heck, I have to get a dongle to connect the latest iPhone X.
They have thunderbolt 3 lightning cables available.
even then, you need some good luck if you want the machine to last. if one of the HW components goes bad it will cost a lot of time and money to repair. iMac parts can be quite scarce and expensive. and working on an iMac requires more patience and skill than working on a typical home-built PC.