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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I care a lot about the Mac, and I'm not sure what to think about the fact that Mac unit sales are down again.

Well, what do you expect people to buy? I'm sitting on a six year old MBP, having gotten rid of my 2009 iMac. New iMac? Meh, it might come to that, but I already have enough displays. Mac Mini to go with the display I already have? Surely you jest to suggest a four-year old model. Mac Pro? See: Mac Mini. Current laptops aren't an option unless I get desperate (i. e., current MBP dies tomorrow). I mean, I want a new Mac, there just isn't anything out there that makes me feel like I'd be getting an upgrade.

So my theory is that a lot of people are in the cycle I've been in for the last three years: "Meh, I'll wait to see what they have next year...<year passes>...Meh, I'll wait until...holy shit, is this thing really six years old?...<year passes>"

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My Macbook is 4.5 years old by now. But why should I upgrade when their lineup is just plain bad? I've always loved their design and features. But they've stripped all of the good stuff from their lineup except for the design and OS. I want my port selection back, a proper keyboard, and a normal price tag again. I thought the original price was expensive, but it was worth it. It has only gone up because the cheaper models just aren't viable anymore, it's a complete rip-off imo.

I don’t get all the hate on the new MacBook Pros. I have a 2016 with TouchBar. It’s not a beast but it’s definitely faster compared to the 2015 model I replaced.

You haven’t had any issues come up with the keyboard? I’m honestly surprised.

I've had two of the new pros for the last ~year (one for work and one at home) and haven't had any keyboard issues on either. I don't doubt that it's a problem but it probably gets blown a little bit out of proportion

Mine's a year and a half old now, no problems here. Works like a charm.

I should note that roughly 25% of that time has been on an external keyboard (Apple display, MBP lid closed), so it might not see as much use as others.

I dn't knw what yu're talking abut. My Macbk Pr keybard is wrking fine.

The keyboard fails are double the rate of the old model, which elevates it from "very rare" to "rare." The problem is that the repair was $700, so the folks to whom it happened (including myself) were very, very vocal.

I’ve had a 2017 MacBook Pro in daily heavy use for a year now - no keyboard troubles.

Our IT Department anecdotally reports that about 15% of the 2016 models had issues, and fewer of the 2017 models. Nearly all of our 2500 employees have MBPs or iMacs of some sort.

I've heard similar reports from the IT department at my employer as well. However, on my personal computer (and I've seen similar with a few friends), I've had to have the keyboard repaired 3 times. This makes me suspect there's something that aggravates the issue, or that a lot of people use external keyboards (which a glance around the office suggests is true). The majority of the keys that have failed on my computer have been in the areas that get hot when the processor is under load.

Our sample size is smaller but we are closer to 40% with models needing multiple fixes. It doesn't help that most of our people are traveling with them and working in various environments. The few that uses them as desktop workstations (with external keyboard constantly plugged in) have a lot less issues.

The MacBook Pro gets all the hate because is the only model even worth talking about...at this point if you buy a MacBook Air with its 4yo internals and 8yo screen you end up feeling they took you for a chump, so you buy a $2000 machine when you only needed a $1000 one but then the keyboard breaks.

hahaha my exact experience. 5 trips to the apple store and finally my 2017 13 inch pro is usable. I've had the battery, screen, and keyboard all replaced under warrantee. Easily the worst experience Ive had with an Apple product.

You're mad that Apple replaced those under warranty, rather than, say, the issue happening past the warranty period or not being covered?

Maybe the issue is that it required that many repairs in the first place.

I do get angry when something breaks and I need to pay for a fix, obviously, but generally I'm a lot less annoyed when the company offers to fix something at no cost/under warranty/free replacement/whatever. Forgive and forget?

How about it not breaking in the first place? When people talk about their Macs with pride, the first thing you'll probably hear is "Apple has the best build quality".

A 2017 13" Macbook Pro should not require 5 service trips in its first year. Warranty or not, we're not talking about some $200 piece of crap that's made in China, we're talking about a premium laptop at a premium price.

I guess I’ve just never had to deal with, or see anyone else have to deal with repeated repairs. And yes, I agree that this isn’t a great look for Apple. But it’s better that everything’s fixed for free than the alternative.

after the second or third trip, they should have just given a new replacement one. 5 replacements (if I read that right) would be classified as a 'lemon' under car laws in many cases.

I think the individual components were replaced, not the device itself.

When it's getting repaired, you don't have access to that same laptop. For professionals, it's a waste of time and an interruption to our ability to output.

Some people won't care about that. Some do.

I just run a restore from a Time Machine Backup and wipe it before giving it back.

I bout a full spec XPS 9560, the second time my '16 MBP went in for repairs. The same generation CPU, the same storage (2TB) and double the RAM... and it's $1000 less than the full spec MBP.

I wonder how long before a lot more folks come to the conclusion that Apple premiums aren't worth paying anymore.

Doh. I can't type. "bout" should clearly say "bought" <nerdface emoji>

Just exactly how longsuffering are we supposed to be? My '16 MBP has been in for repairs 3 times SO FAR.

This was also my most expensive Apple purchase ever.

Usually, the trend goes the other way. I don't know about other folks, but I'm less inclined to forget after dropping $4300 on that unit.

You're paying in time. Depending on what you're hourly rate is at the 5th replacement you could have just bought a new one.

> Forgive and forget?

I have a 10yo Acer laptop that at the time cost me about 500$ which up to this day required no fix or trip to the repair shop.

If I had spent 4x the cash and still was forced to take the laptop to the shop 5 times to fix a myriad of design and production problems for a product that is marketed as high-end and professional-grade, I can assure you I wouldn't forgive, much less forget.

I guess it's strange to assume that nagging hardware failures will just disappear when the warranty does run out

I guess I’ve just never experienced the kind of hardware failures that everyone else is mentioning, so I don’t have a lot of experience with how they actually occur. I’m not saying that they don’t happen, but I have no idea if these are early failures or the middle of the bathtub curve.

They are not building what people actually want. A modern macbook pro with F keys and a physical escape key instead of a Touchbar and ports that actually get used in addition to USB-c (USB, HDMI, maybe a memory card reader). They are so out of touch it's a joke. I'm not sure how they are managing to make each iteration of the Macbook Pro worse except for the actual specs.

Is that what people want, or is that what you want? I couldn't care less about a row of keys I never use, so I'm not sure you speak for everyone when you say what "people" actually want.

What this person wants is a home, end, forward delete, pgup and pgdn key on the keyboard, which the touchbar lets me have. Funny how what "the people" want manages to line up exactly with your expectations and doesn't match mine at all.

Exactly right. And I made the jump and bought a USB-C monitor which plugs right into the MBP and charges and connects video in the same connector (which is awesome). Then I bought the USB C to Lightning cable, which fast charges my iPhone. I wish Apple had gone with USB C for the iPhone instead of Lightning, but I think they are too deep in with Lightning at this point.

I have the HDMI/old-USB to USB C dongle, but I hardly ever use it these days.

I'd gladly support an all USB C future.

The full size SD card slot is important to photo/videographers, a market that Apple seems to be taking for granted recently. The range of "professional" users that the Macbook Pro is actually appealing to seems to be getting narrower and narrower over time.

Can attest as a non-pro photographer (but as someone who cares a lot about photography), that the SD card built in is not that important. I tend to use a dock/reader anyway because most of my cameras use CF or mini SD. True, full sized SD cards are actually not used in any equipment I have now.

CF has always been used in high end bodies, but most of them still have a secondary SD card slot. And these days SD is fast enough to be used as the primary card and there are flagships like the Sony A9 that only take dual SD cards.

I use both the F-keys and Home, End, Insert, Delete, PgUp, and PgDown on my laptop. The two use cases can co-exist, but it seems Apple doesn't want to bother appealing to those who want both.

well... sprite wants it and I want it. and some colleagues want it too. So... "people" - yeah - "people" want it. Not just sprite.

There's not a lot I can do to register dissatisfaction with Apple's direction. I bought a 2016 mbp, then returned it (for a variety of reasons) - many of which have been beaten to death here in the last 18 months.

I think that's what a lot of people want, at least in my circle of friends who have the Touchbar and they absolutely hate it, mainly because of the escape key, accidental touches of the touch bar being annoying, and it being a visual distraction (minor issue IMO, unless you work in lowlight conditions a lot).

I wish Apple would go back to the 2012 models and just refresh the internals.

I don’t get all the hate on the new MacBook Pros

I'm a heavy tmux/vim user.

Apple replaced the best programmer's laptop on the market (their previous-gen MBP) with the MBP model that they sell now. It's not a bad laptop per se, it's just that it's not a programmer's laptop.

Apple sells the MBA which doesn't have enough pixel density to support tmux with multiple panes.

Apple sells the MB and the MBP with that execrable butterfly keyboard which is terrible for touch-typing for long periods.

There's nothing else anymore. They stopped selling that Ivy-bridge-era MBP model they were keeping around for serious touch-typists. Everyone I know who has one of these turkeys defends the keyboard, but then admits that, "anyways, I usually use an external keyboard anyhow." I need the built-in keyboard to be useable and Apple has given up on making those.

I'd buy a new programmer's laptop from Apple, but they just don't make those anymore. Apple took something we loved away from us - that's why the new MBP gets so much hate.

> Apple sells the MB and the MBP with that execrable butterfly keyboard which is terrible for touch-typing for long periods.

The MacBook and MacBook Pro's keyboards are markedly different. Sure, they're both butterfly, but MacBook Pro's keyboard is a lot more clickly/springy than MacBook's, which I can only describe as mushy. Have you tried using them for an extended period of time?

God I love my MacBook Air 2013 keyboard. I still think it’s tons better than the 2018 MacBook Pro crap. The MBP was given to me my the employer but I don’t quite enjoy typing. It’s like walking on grass vs walking on tarmac. One just makes your fingers so goddamn happy when you type. The MBP keyboard keys get stuck all the time. The spacebar get stuck at times! WTF! That’s just terrible engineering.

Steve jobs or whoever it was doing QA, I gotta say really had a knack for what is usable and makes the evokes a feel good emotion. The new macs nowadays look beautiful but horribly lack in usability in many ways. Steve Apple was very focused on usability. Aesthetics came later, now it’s the reverse.

Agreed, and there's a name for this. It's 'bullshit'.

Making a laptop with a terrible keyboard to save 2-3mm of thickness when no one really cares about such extremes of thinness. That's bullshit.

Making a laptop with largely unsupported USB-C ports and nothing else. No transition-year with both new and old ports, just tossing the old ports out abruptly and making customers buy fucking dongles. That's bullshit.

Eliminating function keys for a gimmicky touch screen which almost no one will use on a day-to-day basis a month after buying the laptop. That's bullshit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

I'm not an expert in keyboard, I'm just a software developer that spends a bunch of time in front of a computer: I had some adjustment period to the new keyboard but now I'm used to it and it feels perfectly fine.

What is the problem with "touch-typists" and the new keyboard? Is the layout different in such a way that confuses you? Is it the lack of feedback from the touchbar?

If you're a vim user the touch bar mbp is pretty much a no-go. Most users just map capslock to escape and they're mostly okay, but if you're like me and like to map capslock to delete, then having to press escape on the touchbar just doesn't work. (i've tried to map some other key to escape, but haven't found anything that feels natural)

I am a regular vim user (every day) and I really just got used to using ESC on the touchbar. It’s not a big deal.

Mis-taps on the touchbar are my main annoyance.

Have you tried mapping caps lock to escape?

Yeah. But I found it didn’t make sense to me, my muscle memory is for my pinky to reach up. Hitting a flat surface was less weird than hitting caps lock.

I have a 2016 touchbar MacBook Pro. I’ve been learning vim, but I agree using escape is hard with the touchbar. I ended up mapping “jj” to escape. Seems to work well and keeps my fingers on the home row.

I have remapped Caps Lock to Ctrl and Escape to Ctrl + ].

US users can map caps lock to esc an be fine with it, but pretty much the rest of the world uses more characters than english does. Many people use caps lock as a switch to the local keyboard layout. This way you can get the best of both worlds.

You know Ctrl + [ is bound to escape doesn't even re-bind. I use a Thinkpad but I won't reach all the way for escape. Ctrl + [ is way easier.

I’m a heavy vim user and have not had an issue hitting the escape key past the first couple days as long as I don’t look down.

The keys don't have enough tactile feedback. That tricks (my) brain into hitting the keys harder because they instill less confidence. That's exhausting when typing for a few hours.

The ESC key issue isn't as bad - I have 'jk' remapped to ESC anyways. But the lack of feedback with the butterfly keys makes my hands feel like I'm setting myself up for repetitive stress injury.

The keyboard is just awful. Can anyone honestly say that they prefer the feel of the butterfly keys?

Yes. Typing for a whole day on my 2013 MBP would give serious wrist pains. This is not the case on my 2016 MBP.

HDMI isn't dead and it pisses me off that they sacrificed it in exchange for any amount of thinness. I don't notice how things my laptop is day to day, but I definitely notice when I can't plug into a projector.

> HDMI isn't dead

People said the same things about floppy drives and cd roms.

I'm pretty sure HDMI will support 8k and resolutions beyond that.

Great but USB C can do that as well and much more. There is no need for both.

I'm yet to see a TV with USB C inputs. Unless of course , if you're suggesting dongle-hell as an alternative for all missing ports, in which case, whatever few mm you save in thin laptops are gained back and more by much fatter dongles you have to carry around (or forget).

> I'm yet to see a TV with USB C inputs.

That is not how Apple works, the reason they do such drastic changes like dropping support for floppy/cd drives, usb A ports is because they want to move the industry forward.

As a professional I encounter still too many VGA only projectors in clients offices, but HDMI is the dominating standard by far. So many people use TV in their conference room and that is not going to change any time soon. Getting rid of the HDMI port to save a few mm of thickness is just plain stupid.

I watched my boss buying a new MBP on day one. Months later I still laugh when I see him fiddling with adapters that never work reliably.

This is precisely why I like Apple. The fact that I got 5 years out of my last MBP was totally amazing. I used that computer at least 10 hours a day, every single day!

I don't care about saving $1k or $2k when it comes to a device I use that much. We're talking about a dollar an hour here. I've literally spent more money on coffee over that time.

I'm typing this post on an 11 year old Dell Latitude D830 running Ubuntu. 5 years is not some amazing lifespan for a laptop, especially these days with such incremental improvements in processors year over year.

Unless you're gaming on your laptop your requirements probably aren't that much higher than they were half a decade ago.

It's an amazing lifespan for anybody who has ever operated a windows laptop.

I have a 10 year old Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz running Windows 10 being used as a Plex Server. It’s only slow when overtaxed because I haven’t bothered upgrading to 8GB of RAM or replace the hard drive with an SSD.

Luckily it has a gigabit Ethernet port so it can take full advantage of my gig internet.

That’s an issue with windows, not the laptop. I’m happy enough with the Dell XPS and Linux that I have bought 3.

My Asus UX31A is six years old and still going strong. It's a pity the RAM is soldered in at 4GB but certainly not worth replacing the entire laptop for it. And it wasn't top of the line - about $1300 as I remember.

Perhaps you just haven't really used a windows laptop recently and only remember the old days when Windows laptops really did only have a life span of about 3 years.

Not really, Thinkpads are known for being built like trucks since the 90s.

My Windows laptops had a average of 5 years, minimum.

Maybe one should take care about where to service them from?

My Thinkpad x201 from 2011 is doing just fine. Java dev, webdev, IntelliJ Idea and VSCode just flies on it. Yeah, no 4k for you though.

Not only do I occasionally game, I also have a DSLR that generates quite the stream of photos and videos to edit. I also run a bunch of VMs (including one of Ubuntu, my favourite dev environment), and I use photoshop and illustrator for the occasional design thing.

Me too.. but mostly just personal stuff. I use DarkTable and Gimp for that. I did this on a 13 year old machine running Linux. It is still running but I got my hands on a cheap NUC that I use nowadays. My machines are pretty much running 24/7 all year around..

My impression when it comes to Mac is that people don't want to pay ludicrous prices for repairs e.t.c.. anymore. Also that they can not upgrade because their current machine can't handle the new OS e.t.c..

The only stumbling block for old laptops is bad display quality. Switching from classic ThinkPad to MacBook really save my eyes.

The trick to avoiding this is to buy laptops with good displays in the first place. The D830 has a 1920x1200 display that is a little bit dimmer but just as readable today. It's not a retina display, but it looks just fine to me.

I was looking at laptops about 3 years ago and it was extremely hard to find ones that didn't use that cursed 1366x768 resolution.

Is 5 years really that amazing? I had 7-8 years on an Asus laptop I just recently replaced that I traveled with and used all the time.

My parents are still using the absolute garbage quality Acer gaming laptop I bought in 2009. The durability is awful, the design is not very pragmatic, the less said about software and drivers the better... But it's still working.

I have loved some of the Macs I owned, but I don't think that comment was meant as a compliment. It is unfortunate that so many people would rather limp by on 3-5 year old machines rather than paying for what Apple is selling new. The fact that they are able to limp by is better than the alternative — but I count myself among those who couldn't. My MBA gave out last year and I bought an MBP with a compromised keyboard. I wish it weren't so.

Getting 5 years out of a laptop isn’t particularly impressive, especially if your laptop can be upgraded. Perhaps it’s remarkable that a laptop that can’t be upgraded lasts that long, so congrats I guess.

My Windows PC is from 2012, works great.

$1200 in parts total. When (if) GPU prices go down I'll throw a new one and be good for another few years.

I expect hardware failure of the CPU or Motherboard to do the machine in before it becomes obsolete.

Put all my money into RAM and SSD, upper mid range CPU, mid range GPU, life is good.

I don't care about saving $1k or $2k when it comes to a device I use that much.

I said nothing about price. You don’t want to know the eye-watering numbers attached to that iMac I sold. And it’s great that you and I can get such life out of our machines. But in the context of the topic at hand, its not great that you and I sit on five year old machines because Apple makes nothing so compelling so as to make me say, “Shut up and take my money.” Because I own shares of AAPL, too.

I agree. I used my 2013 MBP heavily for compiled programming and music production. Just upgraded to the 2018 MBP and am very happy with it.

Five years for a Mac isn't all that long. You're still getting software support!

>> The fact that I got 5 years out of my last MBP was totally amazing.

No, it's not.

A 15" _2011_ Macbook Pro with a quad core i7 is still more than usable today.

If you bought a Macbook Pro with a powerful CPU (i.e., CPU model not ending with a U), you should easily get 10 years out of it.*

[edit] * At least until Apple decides not to support it with OS upgrades, but you can always run the latest Windows on it. And Windows generally runs faster in Boot Camp on Macbook Pros than OSX does natively.

"you can always run the latest Windows on it. And Windows generally runs faster in Boot Camp on Macbook Pros than OSX does natively."

When did this happen? The last time I used Bootcamp, it seemed almost specifically designed to make Windows feel like a sub-par experience compared to OS X

Using a then-brand-new 2012 MBP with the latest version of OS X at the time (I believe Lion?) with Bootcamp. Some of the bizarre omissions I witnessed were

- A buggy BIOS implementation instead of EFI (rEFInd at least let me try and boot Linux under EFI)

- SSD set to run in IDE mode, instead of AHCI, resulting in utterly crippled performance (required issuing dd commands to the disk from within OS X to fix)

- No GPU switching. Only the Radeon card was enabled, leaving the system running insanely hot and guzzling battery

The final straw was when I ran some test VM's on it, and under a sustained load, had the CPU hit an eye watering 117 degrees celsius. Shutting it down almost immediately and then asking on tech oriented IRC channels I was in if this was a bug simply yielded dismissal from Apple acolytes at the time

"Oh it's DESIGNED to do that, the whole system is a huge heatsink!"

"Just make sure it's getting plenty of airflow, it's fine"

This is anecdotal - on my 2008 Macbook (not Pro) and on my 2011 MBP, Windows 8+ always felt snappier than the latest version of OSX (ymmv based on what you do). I have seen other people on HN report similar.

My thinkpad x220 is my work laptop since 2011, with a few upgrades (ssd, 16gb ram, battery, because you can actually upgrade it) it performs quite well to this day.

My 10 year old Asus is still working quite well, already went through Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and all releases of 10.

The GPU is a GT200M with 1GB dedicated RAM, still pretty much in shape versus the toy Intel GPUs.

In those 10 years extended it to 8GB and replaced the HD with a SSD.

Original sales price, 1 000 euros.

What I wouldn’t give for a ‘Macbook SE’- just like the iPhone SE, same model as a proven favourite, no touch bar, with new innards and lower price (I don’t even need the lower price actually) I would buy THAT in a heartbeat.

it befuddles me that they didn't do this after the success of the 2012 13in macbook, which soldiered on for YEARS of the retina models. They kept the 2015 15in pro for a year or two, but i really wish they'd actually just UPDATE the old style of machines and keep one around as a basic model.

i wonder if they think, unlike the SE, that it would actually vampire off too many sales from the high ticket models. what i wouldn't give for a 2015 style 8th gen CPU machine.

If that’s what you want, the 13” MacBook Pro for $1299 should fit the bill.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...

But why not 15”?! :(

The iPhone SE doesn't have the 5.5" screen either.

True, but the iPhone SE copies an existing model. The existing models of Macbook came in both sizes (and 17", but that one was discontinued).

This model only has two Thunderbolt ports, both on one side, and severely gimped internals.

The SE is not the top end iPhone either. He asked for the “iPhone SE” of MacBooks.

When it was released, it kind of was–it had essentially the internals of the flagship iPhone at the time (iPhone 6s), just in a smaller form factor. So think of it as what would be a 11" Retina MacBook Pro that was a clone of the early 2015 13" one internally, if one ever existed?

Macs used to be cool. The magnifying effect on the Dock was one of the coolest things when I first saw it a few years ago. Windows has completely caught up and I am happy using a PC with Windows Linux Subsystem. I still like shiny new things, but Mac isn't it anymore. I think Apple needs to put more shiny and new in their OS like the magnifying effect used to be. Spice things up a bit.

What could Apple possibly do to make a really compelling MacBook - except drop the price? Intel hasn’t exactly been delivering on its chipsets lately.

They do need to update the Mac Mini.

Yes, though I would like to buy their newest 15”. A better Air model would be more my style. Their prices are just way too steep. I’d rather have an ultraportable with just enough power for UI and a Linux box somewhere for my projects.

I hope they come out with a Mac Mini with similar CPU/memory options to the 13" MBP, like they used to (generation before the one they're currently selling). Using that with either duet display or the new Luna Display and one of the new iPad Pros would be great. And it would be almost as portable as the 15" MBP.

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