I just can’t see any sane person buying these machines with their own money. I am still on my 2015 13” rMBP, but boy if I had to upgrade to a new machine, I would probably look elsewhere. And mostly because of the hardware, what an irony...
Biggest features that I would miss from my macbook:
--Touchpad with BetterTouchTool - I heavily use custom gestures and it’s insane how much this drives my daily work flow and speed
--Unix environment is super nice
--Reliable and quick resume from hibernate or suspend
--Never really lags at the OS level .. but individual apps might get a little bogged
I would use a windows notebook as my daily driver if the experience were close and it had a solid build (weight and slimness is not a huge deal to me). Laptop + linux would be fine as well but I don’t know about the user experience with the newer touchpads in linux.
Does anyone have any success stories with notebooks that mirror my experience and isn’t OSX?
You should be able to put 16GB in it. Apple doesn't say so, but I ran that much with 0 issues for years in machines from that time.
A quick peek at https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2010.h... suggests that the Core 2 Duo systems (13" MBP) could handle 16gb, but the i5/i7 models (15"/17") couldn't. This Stack Exchange answer confirms: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/105036
Haven’t been able to pull the trigger after the price increase for Retina display and Touch Bar. Didn’t want to after the new keyboard issues and now after these display issue I’ll pass again.
I can’t spend $2-3k on a laptop and get less than 4 years out of it. If my 2011 MBP was still running I would still be using it. I built a $700 desktop that crushes most Macs and I can remote into when I need power.
I used to think there should be a law requiring a three year warranty standard. It probably would alter the calculus. But at this point I'm so burned by Apple I don't care.
From the early 2011 MBP 15 inch spec:
“AMD Radeon HD 6490M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory on 2.0GHz configuration; or AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on 2.2GHz configuration”
I have a TB Mac, but the late 2013 machine I have still works great. (It does have the screen coating issues that plagued that generation have, and I missed the window to get it fixed ... I may try throwing a tantrum at a local Apple store however and see it that works)
Absolutely no regrets. I replaced the battery myself last week.
Crazy that we're now 7 years later and nobody has been able to come close to this kind of laptop perfection.
Things have moved on, it's been 5 years, but not that much. And my MBP still works. I only intended on having it for 2-3 years before upgrading - it's paid for by my business and is critical to my work.
And yet what's putting me off a new purchase is that the new models are vastly less attractive propositions than they would have been had they just followed pace without touchbars, butterfly keyboards, T2 chips and thin wires you can't replace.
Apple today seem lost with respect to Macbooks and I can't see things improving. I fear I'm going Linux on a Dell XPS at some point this year and I hated the last Dell I had.
Why not something like a ThinkPad?
It's a direct result of their form factor.
Is an 8% drop really significant? Further all modern Intel processors aside from a few low clocked Xeons throttle. That's the whole point of the "turbo" speeds -- they utilize what they can within the thermal threshold.