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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely not. I have the top of the range 15" MacBook Pro and I despise it, it's without question the worst computer I've ever owned.

1. The Touch Bar is appalling if you're at all a touch typist. It puts destructive actions just an accidental brush of the finger tip away. 2. The keyboard is failing all over the place. My left command key has fallen off, and three keys occasionally stick resulting in double entries. 3. The trackpad is so big that there's nowhere to rest one hand while you scroll with the other, resulting in exposé happening when you're just trying to scroll a web page. 4. It crashes a LOT. I reckon roughly one kernel panic a week since I've owned it.

It's absolutely killed my confidence in Apple hardware and after owning Macs for over 20 years I doubt I'll ever buy a Mac again. It's made me a permanently angry person.

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If you feel your laptop has made you a permanently angry person, why not sell it and cut your loses?

After spending a decade optimizing your workflow to work with Apple's operating system, and after investing tons of money into software and peripherals designed for this ecosystem, it isn't so easy to just give up on it all, even if it is pissing you off and making your life miserable: you essentially just sit around having regrets and building up anger at the idiots who screwed it all up.

No, really, you have to leave.

If you don't switch, are you going to use only Apple products your entire life from now? Seriously?

There are many, many devs right now who is switching from MacBooks to Linux machines because Linux on the desktop is really nice (just not perfect), and you suddenly feel very much alive again when you don't sit and wait for Apple to fix your problems. You fix them yourself, and you no longer care for the next version of IOS or the next MacBook etc.

t's freedom, honestly, truly. You are single again. You have left the bad relationship. You are free and happy. So much choice all of a sudden. It's great!

I don't want to spend the time to fix them myself.

There is very little to fix anymore unless you go for exotic hardware. Granted I went very safe with an XPS and Xubuntu, but I don't think I've had a single "how do I make this work" moment.

Ah yes wait one, I had to activate the keyboard switch for the webcam to be detected, but that would have been the same on another os.

https://github.com/wmchris/DellXPS15-9550-OSX

You could always get a second hand one from before the recent 'improvements'. (Typed from a well functioning second hand macbook)

I would also say no, absolutely not. It's not worth it in the least.

I have been a Mac user for less time (~16 years for me) than the previous commenter. I have lost confidence in Apple's ability to deliver:

a. a quality laptop that can get the job done, and

b. a quality OS that I can trust to just work.

I am typing this to you from a Dell XPS 9560 because the 2016 MBP w/Touch Bar has been such a shitshow.

It's been in for repairs THREE TIMES. Between the 2nd and 3rd trip, I switched back to Windows and installed WSL (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10)

Windows, VERY ironically, has proven WAY more stable and reliable than macOS. <-- that blows my mind.

I HAVE tried to sell my MBP even at a significant discount over the purchase price. (bought for $4300, I'm asking $3000 and even lowered to $2500) NO BITES. The machine is in immaculate condition, too.

I would be surprised if the other commenter has not had a similar experience.

If Apple is going to be as mediocre as everyone else, then there's absolutely NO POINT to the price premium, and they won't hold their value like they used to.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Windows 10 is a surprisingly awesome OS, once you remove the thin layer of crap they spray on it (Google "O&O ShutUp10" for a 20 second fix) and learn to ignore their store. The whole thing is clean, efficient, runs well and freaking works. And like you said, WSL moved it into actually usable territory for developers.

"I HAVE tried to sell my MBP even at a significant discount over the purchase price. (bought for $4300, I'm asking $3000 and even lowered to $2500) NO BITES. The machine is in immaculate condition, too."

I think that your problem is that the secondary market doesn't care about specs. They care about the Apple logo on the back, for the most part. So your extra RAM and bigger SSD aren't features to them. They just see the cost is $1000-$1500 more than they could buy a new one for.

Couldn't agree with you more. The new MacBooks are lemons.

The giant trackpad is a huge complaint of mine I don't hear a lot. Why on Earth would apple make it so big??

People who like trackpads seem to enjoy it bigger. Personally I'm not in the camp, and bring a USB mouse with me anywhere I'm using my work Mac to avoid it.

We definitely seem to be in the minority though, I've heard more complaints that the XPS 15 trackpad is too small than complaints that the Mac trackpad is too large.

I like trackpads, I use the native trackpad and keyboard exclusively in the mac and almost never external.

What's wrong with it? The only thing I could imagine is maybe accidentally touching it?

It happens maybe once a month for me, not nearly enough complain for me. Personally I love the size of it.

Are you running Docker by any chance? I have seen that if I have Docker running and I close the lid of the machine, next time I want to use it, it reboots from a crash.

But if I remember to quit Docker ok once I am done with it, I don't see this problem.

Bruv, look into BetterTouchTool to only enable the touchbar input by using a modification key like fn being pressed first. Still displays info but doesn’t respond without the modifier. It’ll remove at least some if your frustration.

I wonder how many people in the world outside the London UK area know what Bruv means.

Unless you live under a rock, I'd say everyone in the UK understands what that means, otherwise it's no great leap of the imagination to hazard a guess, or there's always that new-fangled search thingamy that can help ;-)

If you don't understand what it means it is confusing, if you do understand it is disrespectful. In either case they shouldn't be starting out posts to strangers with "Bruv, look..."

Disrespectful? It’s short for “brother” and is used the same way as “mate” in those parts.

Could have been worse with an Australian, then it might have been c... :)

cute

75% of those letters were correct.

I live in the US but I have seen kingsmen

Exactly! I wonder why it is some people are utterly clueless about popular culture from other countries, I find it fascinating. Probably the same people who are clueless about even their own popular culture.

As a 2012 iMac user, I'm saddened that every macOS upgrade slows down the computer even more...

If you’re crashing once a week you’re definitely doing something incorrect on your end. Apple may have poor QA, but there’s no way it’s _that_ poor.

I don't see how you can blame a user for repeated kernel panic issues.

You are user spacing it wrong.

Isn't the point of a user space to protect the kernel and keep the OS from crashing?

No.

What userspace is is where you work happens. It has no universal obligation to protect the kernel.

You could possibly say that the point of working in userspace (instead of in kernel space) is to protect the kernel.

Seems I'm either wrong or I'm punished for being rude.

In the latter case, sorry. I honestly agree I should have caught that.

In the first case my thought process goes as follows (hoping someone knowledgeable will correct me):

- user space may very well contain hostile processes (trojans, rootkits, - even intentionally in the case where a user inspects malware in some kind of container or chroot environment.

- user space may contain mechanisms that attempts to protect the kernel, but a typical kernel (linux, and I guess most other free kernels) cannot rely on it.

- I tried searching for userspace protect kernel and the closest thing I found was the act of separating userspace from kernel space protects the kernel which is what I tried to point out in my post above.

Apple fan logic in a nut-shell.

My MacBook Air is also crashing weekly and I don't even do anything demanding (no VMs or video editing or the like).

I had very frequent cornel panics on my MBP, but running diagnostics (hold “D” during startup) revealed a hardware issue. After the Apple shop replaced the motherboard, the crashes are gone.

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