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Comment by unknownsavage | Hacker News Reader

I recently upgraded from the 2015 to the current gen.

2015 pros: * Better battery life * Way better keyboard * More robust * More useful port selection * Trackpad is a more reasonable size

2018 pros: * Way better speakers * Slightly better screen * Lighter * Faster * Trackpad is not mechanical * Finger print login is useful

I'd really love a proper "pro" macbook pro, that sacrificed a bit of the thin-and-lightness for an actual professional level of stuff (better cooling, more ports, bigger battery, no touchbar)

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I updated from 2012 to 2016, hated and sold it after a couple of keyboard fails, and bought a 2015. My next Macbook will probably be a Thinkpad way things are going.

The better speakers I'd like. I still need to use USB sticks and SD pretty frequently and have always hated bags of adaptors. They always seem to break or get lost at the moment you're sitting with the important client.

The rest seems to come with a cost far worse than the benefit (for me anyway).

Larger trackpad was so large I would constantly get false activations when typing. Perhaps I have the wrong sort of fingers.

The touchbar was constantly activating when I typed on the top row of physical keys. Perhaps I have the wrong sort of fingers again. :)

The newer thinner keyboard was both horrible and horribly unreliable. Dust sensitive? LOL I think back to when the kids were little and throwing rusks, or putting toast in the VCR the moment we blinked. Then the amount of dog and cat hair (that magically gets everywhere) that's been removed from our keyboards over the years.

Lighter is OK, but not at a huge battery life cost compared to the 2015.

Well, don't get the Thinkpad for better speakers. Speaking as an owner of a new t480s, whose dumb idea was to put speakers on the bottom of the case? My lap don't have ears. Of course the battery life is even worse than the bad 2016 Macbook, not by much though. But it's not whatever double digit hours they claim. If you think apple makes nonsensical design decisions, try any windows laptop, apple is still miles ahead in certain areas. Windows is so bad it's not even funny anymore (for example cortana guided setup is disturbing) and don't get me started about linux.

What's wrong with Linux? Its support for Thinkpad hardware is pretty exceptional, it just isn't great at holding your hand.

If by holding your hand you mean stuff works out of the box, then yes it isn't great. I did manage to get hidpi working in just 1-2 days (not with wayland, nothing works on wayland, let's give it just 5 more years and I'm sure it will happen), and it also goes to sleep fine, trackpad is not as bad as I expected it to be. All perfectly great achievements for 2018.

xubuntu versions running perfectly on my Thinkpad E550 (and Desktop) for many years already. Raspbian on my PI's and ubuntu on my beaglebone black. Don't settle for the provided software configuration. Settle for the open tool that is made for support.

Not sure why a laptop really needs better speakers (or even any speakers) both of mine are permanently hooked up to headphones.

Because some people dont like to use headphones. Some couples prefer watching a movie in bed.

Easily solved with a Bluetooth speaker, unlike say dust-vulnerable KBs...

What if you dont carry your speaker everywhere?

your scenario was about a couple watching movies in bed, though...

To be honest, I really love my rMBP 2014 hardware, it was basically perfect. Great speaker, as you say, good enough keyboard, BEST display, etc.

If Apple releases another MBP based on 2015 I'll take a quite good look again.

I only use my laptop when I am traveling. At home, I have no need for it. I am not traveling with speakers. I doubt I am alone.

Are you really going to carry around a bluetooth speaker in everyroom though, if someone wants to watch it on the couch?

How many rooms in a house do people really watch movies in? A couple of bluetooth speakers covers the 95% case, and just using the crappy laptop speakers or use earbuds or headphones for the 5% case.

Of course it would be nicer if the laptop had better speakers in it, but there are always trade-offs to be made on cost vs benefit, and fairly cheap bluetooth speakers are a pretty good workaround for a lot of people.

Not sure why you call the macbooks speakers crappy, i would imagine most people would consider them good enough and be happy with then instead of dealing with external Bluetooth speakers and carrying them around with the laptop.

My comment wasn't meant to be macbook specific. Most laptop speakers don't sound as nice as a reasonable set of bluetooth speakers or headphones. The main point of my comment was to counter the (strawman) idea that the only option for someone who didn't like the laptop speaker was to carry around a bluetooth speaker with them from room to room, which is of course not very practical. But having a couple of them strategically placed in the house is affordable and practical for most cases.

Now instead of a room think about a house or a office, is your idea of carrying a speaker everywhere still practical or do you think adding a speakers on laptop is more practical?

I think you've misread/misunderstood my comment. I'm trying to say that carrying around a bluetooth speaker IS impractical (and the initial criticism of it a type of strawman argument because it's obviously impractical). I'm not suggesting in any way that carrying around a speaker everywhere is a good idea (it's not).

What I'm trying to say is that if really good audio quality is important to you, then having a couple of sets of bluetooth speakers in your house strategically placed in the places where you'd regularly watch movies or consume other high-quality audio is a reasonable workaround for a lot of people. OF COURSE having better speakers (equivalent in sound quality to the bluetooth workaround) in your laptop would be better if you care a lot about audio quality. But that would add to the cost of the laptop for every user, even the ones that don't care about having really high-quality audio on their laptop. I'm saying that it's not unreasonable for a manufacturer to make some tradeoffs like that when there are workarounds that work fairly well.

Over time the costs of adding higher-end features like this drop, and things like audio quality improve to the point that the workarounds aren't needed (the audio quality of my phone speaker is actually pretty amazing).

Do people not have TVs?

By a strange coincidence I'm also in the group of people using their Macbook Pro while sitting on the sofa, due to not having a tv. I wouldn't use a dedicated TV enough to justify having one.

I dont know about others but I dont have a TV.

Ah like the annoying teenagers on the bus sodcasting

Why would you even argue for bad speakers for laptops? Of course a laptop should have good speakers..

I was checking Yoga from Lenovo and or Matebook X

https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-x-pro/

I have the 2015 and the 2017 (without touch bar).

I agree to most things, with the minor correction that the trackpad on the 2015 is also not mechanical (and works fine, I also like the size better).

Regarding the screen I observed: The 2017 has better colors. However it is far more of a dust and dirt magnet, and harder to clean. It seems like the coating or glass might be different, which allows more dust and grease to stick. As a result the display of my 2015 looks mostly clean, the 2017 is messed up as soon as I use it for two hours and have it in my backpack.

All in all I like the 2015 more. They should have just replaced the DisplayPort/TB2 connector with USB-C/TB3 and it would have been fine. The extra lightness of the 2017 is nice to have, but from a practical standpoint the form factor of the 2015 was already great.

To clarify, are you saying that your 3 year old 2015 laptop has, today, better battery life than your new 2018 laptop? That's mad...

To those of you that complain about battery life. I noticed that using Safari as my browser gives me almost an hour extra compared to Firefox. To me it seems that newer CPU may be more efficient overall, but they seem to consume more power under medium to heavy load.

My front-end dev colleague used to tell me to use a "proper" browser (i.e. Chrome) because I favoured Safari and even with DevTools. I said it gives me more battery life on a MacBook!

The 2015 15" had a 100Wh battery, the 2018 has an 83Wh battery. The 2015 gets better battery life because it has 20% more battery capacity.

I wonder if the touchbar is also doing significant drains on the battery.

That would make sense if they had the same hardware. Different hardware absorbs different current. You cannot deduce anything from battery size.

I've had the pleasure of upgrading from a 2015 to a 2017. The battery life on the latter is definitely worse, no matter what the official specs say.

Yeah I went from 2014 to 2017, and went from broadly not worrying about doing 6 hours of solid dev work without thinking about battery to essentially never feeling comfortable away from a plug.

I'd guesstimate I get at most 3 hours on the 2017 before the battery level gets low enough I have to start planning where I'll next plug in. Not ideal.

part of the issue is if you have anything other than textedit open, the discrete GPU is on hoovering up all your watt-hours.

It is, but I haven't found it to be significantly worse. About an hour less.

Many people would describe an hour's difference to be a "significant" change, especially when a scale of around 10 hours total battery life is being considered.

Sure, but considering the "fudge factor" that Apple often applies for their battery life estimates ("casual browsing", etc.) an hour isn't all that much.

I think decaying batteries might drive people to get new machines? Just a suspicion. They do it with iphones :p

It’s certainly an incentive to upgrade, but only if the newer model is a clear upgrade...

I suspect that Apple will be seeing a lot of 2015 MBPs brought in for battery replacements...

All batteries decay.

I concur.

That's kinda the point... Instead of using more energy efficient new gen CPU to add ~3 hours of life, Apple used it to make the already perfect laptop insignificantly thinner and lighter by reducing the battery size.

> You cannot deduce anything from battery size.

physics might have a word with you :)

This isn't my experience at all, I have a 2015, a 2017 and 2018 MacBook pros. The 17 isn't all that tbh and I only have it because they replaced my 16 model. The battery isn't all that and the keyboard is a big dodgy. The 2018 though is absolutely fine, the battery is great and the keyboard has been fine the whole time. I have to use the 2015 for one of my contracts and Im always glad to get back to the 2018.

I just replaced the battery in my Early 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 13.

When it was new i would regularly get ~12 hours of light usage from it (safari, email, terminal, VPN, citrix, remote desktop). It has been providing around 8-9 hours steadily for the past year or so. I finally noticed when placed flat on a table it wasn't sitting flat, and the battery was swollen.

Now with a new battery we're back to 12+ hours of light usage.

i had a 2016 mbp, and it had (IIRC) ~7000mAh battery. My 2015 mbp had ~8800mAh. The battery itself was smaller in the 2016 model, presumably for thin/weight.

Those numbers can't be right. That's only double what an iphone has.

Different voltages

mAh is not a measure of energy; Apple says the Macbooks have about 54 watt-hours, whereas an iPhone has between 6 and 10.

My old 2015 MacBook Pro without a discrete GPU had amazing battery life. I'd get at least 8 hours, and over 10 if I wanted to sacrifice some of the brightness and turn bluetooth off. I got upgraded to the discrete GPU model and I could get at most 6 to 7 hours for the same workload.

Nowadays, you can't even get a 15 inch MacBook Pro without a discreet GPU.

You can stop the OS from switching to the discrete GPU using an app like gfxCardStatus

I thought the 2015 had a force touch and non mechanical touchpad too.

exactly ;) so well-designed that you can't even tell it's non mechanical (unless you turn the clicky sound and vibrations off)

I still prefer the 2015 Macbook Pros to the current release and that's just sad. How is it so easy for Apple to throw away so much good design research and implementation? They don't even have the mag-safe chargers, nor the the battery indicator lights on the chargers, what a step backwards on such simple but great functionality!

I own a 2015 Macbook since the launch in 2015 (duh), and I remember letting people use my force touch trackpad saying that it doesn't 'click'. Took almost everyone at least several minutes to convince them that the trackpad doesn't actually click. :-)

Furthermore I do agree with you on pretty much every point. I don't like my 2017 Macbook and I most certainly won't upgrade my 2015 to any new pro laptop.

Correct, the 2015 has force touch, which is how they fit the 99.5 Wh battery.

Whoa, I switched to a 2015 MBP last year and didn't know about force touch yet. Time to repeat the onboarding I guess, there is some incredibly useful hidden UI.

Yes it has force touch trackpad

Better cooling, definitely. My machine gets quite hot on my lap unless I have it turn on the fans earlier using Macs Fan Control. I'm using it as a pro machine, so it's running a bunch of docker containers, Slack, VS Code, a million tabs across Firefox and Chrome. It's a busy machine and it doesn't need to be silent if that means it's hot enough to be uncomfortable on my legs and hands.

MBP heating issues are from the fact that the dedicated GPU doesn't get enough cooling, the frame is too small.

Add https://github.com/0xbb/gpu-switch - run the integrated gpu only - and you will never listen to a fan again, and prolong the life of your MPB.

It's discouraging to hear the 15" MBP GPU's still have heating/failure issues, I toasted a few 15" MBP GPU's in 2006-2009. Not sure what the point is to have a GPU in a laptop I don't use.

The project readme warns it's broken on recent macos versions.

Chrome is probably the biggest culprit. It is awfuly inefficient on macOS

Firefox burns through battery rapidly too. Seems that you have to stick with Safari to get good battery life out of an MBP - it makes a very real difference

I switched to Safari when it added favicons to browser tabs the other month. The CPU-usage/battery difference is huge. I also like the new Safari extension paradigm and have ported some extensions of my own that could be improved by moving CPU-bound work to Swift.

I only use Chrome for development now.

I have Chrome only for the built in Flash. I don’t play many flash games these days, but I don’t know what I’m going to do when Google finally strips that out. Seems like Kongregate has drifted towards Unity but there are a few classics, and I have an old game that a friend and I made a long time ago that I like to play from time to time.

Am I misunderstanding something, or you just said Safari added favicon support in 2018?

You did not misunderstand: that is a new thing in Safari

I upgraded from a 2017 13" MacBook Pro touch bar to 2018 15" MacBook Pro touch bar, and noticed a huge improvement.

  - 6 cores (12 threads) was absolutely noticeable
  - NVme disk performance is much faster
  - 2nd generation butterfly keyboard is much improved
  - Speakers are way louder, bassy, and crisp
  - 15" screen is much better in terms of real-estate than 13"

I upgraded from a top-end 2017 15" to a top-end 2018 15", and even that was very noticeable. I was quite surprised at how much better the 2018 was.

I really liked the 2017 to begin with.

You actually have the 3rd gen butterfly keyboard. The first gen was only on the 12“ MacBook series. And that one was really bad (have zero feedback). The 2nd gen on the 2017 is bearable, but doesn’t seem to be long term reliable

2015 trackpad isn’t mechanical either

> I'd really love a proper "pro" macbook pro

More like MacBook Dev, imagine:

- Good keyboard, with Lenovo-like mouse clitoris

- Edges that aren't cutting your wrists off

- No touch bar and regular size trackpad (heck, I'll pay extra for this)

- 15" OLED screen for outdoors

- Figure out GPU. I do not want annoying GPU switching and beast of graphics card - I just enough to drive 5K screen.

- A USB port

- MacBook Air weight/size or insane battery life

- CPU with best single thread performance

- RAM up to 128GB or more

It's never been clear to me why people want a mouse clitoris on a computer with a real trackpad.

I've seen plenty of windows laptops with awful trackpads where I get it, but aren't they just a huge step back compared to a macbook trackpad?

My ideal laptop would be a 2015 Macbook Pro with Thinkpad keyboard (the older one before Lenovo moved all the keys around) and trackpoint. Preferably without the trackpad at all like was an option on older Thinkpads. On my last Thinkpad you could customise the trackpad to activate differently and do entirely different things to the trackpoint. Useful for a select few apps. I ultimately disabled the trackpad as I didn't use those few often enough.

Middle click scroll whilst still typing, as your fingers stay on the home keys. Precision and acceleration that's leagues ahead of every trackpad, including Apple, and faster than moving hand to a mouse. OK, I know quite a few seem to struggle with a trackpoint when first using by using actions that worked on their trackpad and other oddities. It's so long ago I forget my first encounters and learning curve.

I carry a small mouse around with the Macbook. When I have used Thinkpads I never carried a mouse and often didn't use the mouse at my desk either.

Mine would be a new X220 form factor thinkpad with modern battery tech and... any linux OS. It's OK though; I've got enough X220s and batteries to last me the rest of my career.

And a better screen. The X220 is really let down by that horrible panel.

The TFT isn't totally horrible, but there aren't enough of them.

I've never developed the muscle memory to be effective with the trackpoint, but it does have the distinct advantage of being usable without taking your hands off the keyboard.

I can use it without moving my hands away from home-row position, I can drag-n-drop much more easily than a trackpad, middle-clicking and right-clicking are both more consistent, and I can scroll indefinitely in any direction without picking up my hands.

This is probably just me, but when using my laptop on my lap, if I were using the trackpad i would have to bring my hands down closer to my body which is less comfortable, or move my laptop further away from me.

Can you provide some info into how you typically use trackpoint. Which fingers do you use and how do you control the acceleration when going few pixels away or whole screen corner to corner. What about the clicks.

I have a thinkpad and am always curious on how to effectively use it. Even a video of someone using it might help.

This will be hard to describe. I'll try.

Treat it as a tiny proportional joystick, which it is. I use index finger of dominant hand. Press hard and it'll fly the cursor across the screen. Press gently and it'll give excellent precision. If you keep overshooting, you haven't adjusted to gently enough. It is less movement and more thought for pixel perfect precision as you can barely feel any feedback but still get movement.

I always have to turn up acceleration, but rarely sensitivity, in Trackpoint settings a notch or two for my own preference. For me, if I turn sensitivity down, it ruins it. YMMV.

I will left, right and middle click with thumbs as they're just below space and land there naturally.

Thumb on middle and drag to scroll at pressure sensitive speed for as long as you press. No need to "reset" when you reach the end of trackpad or finger on scrollwheel. Two thumbs and index finger means select and paste are almost as fast as vi-only approaches, as it's placed so you're essentially still typing. :)

I realize the original poster responded, but I am currently in the process of going through this transition and my experience may be of use to you.

The thinkpad was the latest machine I got, after a string of macbooks and one XPS-15. I made a concerted effort to switch simply because I'm spoiled on OSX trackpads, and the thinkpad trackpad widget just isn't up to par (especially on ThinkPad + Linux). I asked a few colleagues how they got around the trackpad issue and a couple mentioned they just use the nipple cursor.

It's been a few months now. Changing over was really annoying at first. As the other poster mentioned - the key is learning muscle memory for _sensitivity_ to control the speed of the cursor. A light firm touch with a small pressure in the correct direction is all that's necessary for moderate speed.

I use my left index finger to control the cursor, and my left (spacebar) thumb to at the same time to click/drag/etc (as the mouse buttons are right below the spacebar).

Middle-click + drag-down for scrolling is really convenient.

I find myself having just crossed that midway point where the new system is becoming dominant. The trackpads are starting to feel somewhat unwieldy and cumbersome to me now - even the macbook ones when I use my wife's or friends'. It feels like they require too much hand movement, and are far more "gesticulatory" than gentle pushes and pulls on the nipple cursor.

I think I'm faster with the cursor now than with even high-quality trackpads.

If you do end up trying it out, be prepared to tweak settings a bit to get the right ones for you (and as the other replier mentioned - don't skimp on sensitivity), and be prepared to spend a couple weeks feeling like your hands are tied when you want to move the cursor around.

It gets better after that.

Interesting to read as I first used one so long ago most of the learning curve is lost to the mist of time.

> It feels like they require too much hand movement, and are far more "gesticulatory" than gentle pushes

Well put. This encapsulates it well.

> I think I'm faster with the cursor now

When I'd got the hang of never overshooting and changing pressure to vary acceleration as I move around, trackpads, even Apple's, just start to feel cumbersome. Quite apart from the need to move hand away from the keyboard so you can't press keys at the same time. It's the thing I miss most on my Mac.

Oh, and just to address the parent's comment that a video might help. Probably not, as there's not much movement to see. Press an index finger on a desk or table and roll your finger around the pad - that's the extremes of movement you should expect with a trackpoint, assuming your finger didn't move on the table at all. :)

I'm left handed, I use my left index finger to manipulate the trackpoint, and my left thumb for any of the three mouse buttons. Clicking the middle button is a middle click, and holding the middle button makes the trackpoint movements act as scrolling.

My laptop is a T450s, running Debian and KDE Plasma. Acceleration is set to medium, and "Adaptive". The key is tuning your sensitivity/accelaration so you can make very fine/slow movements, but also move the cursor all the way across the screen with stronger/faster ones.

See, it's never been clear to me how anyone would willingly work with a touchpad. My first laptop had one and I used with a mouse whenever I could, even in uni lecture halls where there wasn't really much space.

Only when I got my first thinkpad I could finally work without a mouse and haven't looked back since.

And yes, the mac ones are a bit better than the others, but I still don't like them. At all.

I'd have give a trackpoint on the HP Elitebook I was given to work with by one customer if only there was a way to scroll with it.

Not sure if that's possible on a Thinkpad but there was no obvious way on the HP running Ubuntu to do the equivalent of two finger touchpad scrolling.

I dunno. Most of the windows laptops I've used all had mediocre touchpads, so if I was going to do some serious amount of work on them, always used the mouse. But for my MBPs, the thought never even occurs to me, the touchpad does the job quite well.

I'm a big thinkpad fan, and I prefer the trackpoint to trackpads. You never have to move your hands out of position, and the benefit of that is hard to communicate to someone who is used to trackpads. You can also have better form factors, better keyboards, etc, because you don't need to leave a big chunk of space free for the trackpad.

FWIW I'm ok with trackpads too; I'm an engineer and all my jobs have given me an MBP for work. But like, I'm never pinching and zooming, keyboard shortcuts work just fine for paging and back/forward. Love I know gestures have been successful because keyboard shortcuts aren't intuitive, but to someone like me who uses them, gestures just seem like gimmicks for which we sacrifice smaller laptops and bigger keyboards.

Also FWIW I dislike naming things after genitals. I find it crude and vaguely misogynistic in this case, and wish people would stop.

Put the mouse pad at the top of the keyboard, not under your hands. For most people you only need a 1"x2" pad. Maybe have two for lefties. It makes more ergonomic sense. If you need more than that, you're probably better off with an external mouse.

It's more precise when operated without moving hands away from the keyboard. I can almost play dota or FPS games to the same degree I can with a mouse with the clitmouse, such things can't really be said about the trackpad. There are also 3 distinct buttons which I find handy - I don't recall exactly how trackpads solved the right mouse click or middle click issues - so whilst I miss out on the gestures, I find I can do about the same things with keyboard shortcuts or extra buttons on the mouse (scrolling with the middle click and moving the cursor).

However, extended use does induce tension in my wrist - hence I prefer not to play games on a laptop. The first thing I do when I get a new laptop with a trackpoint and a trackpad is disable the trackpad. If the glorious fruit company offered laptops with trackpoints, I'd do the same. I don't believe that a trackpoint is better than a trackpad in every conceivable way, but it does fit my way of using my devices far better than trackpads do. However, I also don't believe that there will ever be a trackpoint on a glorious fruit device - they don't allow for multiple ways of doing the same thing, and I'm very aware that most people do prefer trackpads to trackpoints. I just hope that my niche will be served by someone until I no longer want to use laptops.

I believe the more usual term is 'trackpoint'.

The only computer Apple sells with 128 GB of RAM is the iMac Pro. There's no way they will sell a laptop with that much in the foreseeable future.

When did we start calling it a clitoris?

Twenty five years ago, when they first came out.

It always was either a clitoris or a nipple.

> RAM up to 128GB or more

Do you know how much physical space that would take? I highly doubt you’ll see it any time soon.

Right now you need 4 SO-DIMMs: 32 GB each. you can get that already in Lenovo's P72. That is a 17" workstation laptop though, so it has more room available than others, but it's not totally crazy, especially if a vendor used a different format instead of bothering with DIMMs. I don't think Apple's gonna do that anytime soon though, it's too niche for what they do.

Hynix has a 32Gb LPDDR4 chip on their catalog, listed as "in production". If a laptop was LPDDR4 compatible, you could fit 128GB in two double-sided SODIMMs.

128GB of RAM and long battery life are mutually exclusive.

Except Intel doesn’t support LPDDR4 ram on most CPUs they ship currently.

How long have you had it for? I'd be willing to go back to the new models (having returned my 2017) if they truly fix the keyboard issue

> 2018 pros: Trackpad is not mechanical

My 2015 MBP has a force-touch trackpad. Is the 2018 one substantially different from that?

It's the same, just a lot bigger.

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