Apple introduces 8-core MacBook Pro
apple.com
apple.com
iFixit detailed the issues with the screens, which (in Apple's unending quest for "thinness") use a thinner flex cable to connect the display to the rest of the laptop. This thinner cable is prone to breakage, and we are already seeing 2016-2017 MacBook Pros in our shop regularly for this issue.
Since Apple built the flex cable into the display, the only solution (even from third parties like us) is a new display. At $600-$700 each, this is unacceptable.
And, like the keyboards, this is a part that's pretty much guaranteed to fail (unless you basically never open your laptop.)
Apple hasn't announced a fix yet, even with a petition with over 11,000 signatures, and more screens failing by the day.
From the time the keyboard issues happened, I made a strong recommendation to avoid buying these. If you can do your work on a PC, do so. (Personally, I now use a Dell XPS 15 as a "desktop replacement", and kept my old 2013 MacBook Pro around too.) If you need a Mac, consider a desktop version (with a SSD!), or stick with the 2015 or older MacBooks.
Even if you think the keyboard issues are fixed, consider too that this is the 4th generation of these keyboards--and Apple promised that the 2nd and 3rd generation would fix these as well. This plus the screen issues means switching to PC if you need speed should be a serious consideration.
iFixit article on "stage light" display issues/"flexgate": https://ifixit.org/blog/12903/flexgate/
Brought it in under Apple care and it was replaced (along with the keyboard, rolls eyes) no questions.
MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports) MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Two Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
>Note: No other Mac notebook models are part of this program.
Sigh.
Are there any reliable ~$1000 laptops to host linux?
... what? That's simply not true.
Dell also has an upcoming Memorial Day sale where they will discount certain models, and the new XPS 15 is due out next month.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-15/spd/xps-...
The storage in the MBP is wicked fast even in the base configuration.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Huawei-MateBook-13-i7-8565U-Ge...
Samsung PM981s (and really Samsung SSDs in general) tend to trounce the competition, but IIRC the XPS 13 uses some mediocre SK Hynix SKU.
It's massive, needlessly so in my opinion.
SSD is undoubtedly the single biggest system performance upgrade in the past 10 years.
And we will soon past the halfway point of 2019, Apple is still selling an iMac with 1TB 5400 RPM HDD by default.
Apart from AirPod and Apple Watch, there is nothing on the current Apple's product line I am satisfy with.
[1] https://www.thedailyzen.org/2015/05/27/the-empty-boat-by-chu...
Personally, I think it makes no sense to complain that some large company is selling an option that you don't want.
I don't think is true is it? I think this was just an assumption people made.
Despite the constant outrage on HN, I have a 2018 15" MBP and have had zero issues with the keyboard breaking or screen failing.
(The only complaint I have with the ThinkPad is the fan is super aggressive and very loud. It usually doesn't run for long, but it spins up with a whirring noise pretty often for 1-5 seconds before slowing down.)
[0]: https://i3wm.org/
I'll echo my disappointment in battery life, although admittedly i3 and xfce defaults are probably not doing me any favors here...
You can even turn the fan higher than Lenovo lets it (but it might fuck your fan over... Oops)
I have a 2016 MacBook "Pro", and every single part has been replaced (thanks, Apple Care) except the bottom plate.
It seems to me they are not really designed to be moved, or used in an environment with, you know, particles and such. Plug it in once, put a transparent dome over it, look at it, and you'll be just fine.
And you know what I'd totally pay $3k for a full on desktop replacement that does what I do with it. Fatten it up, give it better thermals, removable batteries, make it MORE durable, etc. I remember using 12lb Dell laptops. We're past the point of diminishing returns on portability now.
My personal 2013 has led a pretty rough life (including a couple of drops), and the sum total of damage over time is... one plastic foot missing.
This model came out three hours ago, it looks like.
How can you claim this? Are you making the assumption that they have made no changes whatsoever to the keyboard or hinge?
I feel this comment is very misleading, since it looks like you are describing these new 8-core machines, which have been announced literally today and you cannot possibly have any experience of.
This is what I did.
I bought a 15'' 2015 model the day after the 2016 models were announced. I didn't even know about the keyboard problems, but the touchbar, the lack of ports, the price, and the shallow key travel were deal breakers for me.
I used it for about a year but the integrated GPU and the 4th gen CPU ran too hot. At the time I lived in Cancún so quite hot, and the fan noise was becoming annoying even when doing skype calls and such. Also running it on my lap was uncomfortable.
So at the start of 2018 I sold the MBP and got a 5K iMac with SSD since I really didn't need the portability anymore. Best Mac I've ever owned.
I have an old 2014 13'' MBP laying around which I use in the rare occasions I'm away from my iMac.
I've had the top case replaced for free two times under warranty, and the extended 4-year warranty does make me slighty less worried. The battery is also replaced as part of the top case which is a pretty nice bonus.
Though it is still a major inconvenience to be without my main computer for a week while it's being repaired.
https://www.apple.com/support/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-ba...
And a free fix for keyboard issues on all butterfly keyboard laptops:
https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...
For now the display fix is only for 2016 displays; though I suspect with more bad press they’ll extend to 2017 and 2018 models too.
I have a 2016 model which is starting to get the stage light problem. I wonder if it’s worth getting it fixed now or if I should wait until it gets worse before taking it in for servicing.
Don't know about the very latest one (assuming there is 4th gen) but so far this has been more like a workaround that breaks down again at some point since the design is not solid. Getting an inherently flawed replacement for free isn't worth celebrating IMHO especially considering how expensive these things are.
Contrast this with every other PC manufacturer where they require me to ship the item to them, wait for weeks. Apple gives it back to me within a couple of days.
They have also never said that 2 and 3 keyboard were fixes for the keyboard issue.
I am surprised someone in the business can be so far behind the news.
The Macbook pro 2018 was the worst laptop experience I've had in at least 15+ years. So disappointing, but maybe this will let Unix laptops finally start taking real market share.
I'd buy something different if there was a real alternative OS-wise (I feel too old to compile my own kernel for a glitchy wifi driver, and Windows? Nah, get away...)
There should really be a huge multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit for their keyboards and fixability to wake them up. I'm so angry.
> Gone is the gimmicky TouchBar, gone are the four USB-C ports that forced power users to carry a suitcase full of dongles. In their place we get a cornucopia of developer-friendly ports: two USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 ports, a redesigned power connector, and a long-awaited HDMI port.
I did it last year on my 2012 rMBpro after it have been complaining about servicing the battery for about a year, and while it wasn't a walk in the park, it all worked out great.
Tip: there are 2 ways to replace the battery.
One is by following the official iFixit etc instructions where you remove absolutely everything before you peel off the battery with acetone.
The other is by immediately peeling off the battery right away. In that case, you have to be careful that the acetone doesn't flow onto the speakers (because they'd melt.) That's the way I, and many other with me, did it. It still only took me about 1 hour to get everything back up and running.
Replacing a Macbook battery should be a routine task for any of them.
* Advice from the internet: procede with caution.
Last time I looked I was quoted somewhere in the neighbourhood of $600 for a rMBP battery replacement - but that was just the battery. Even that IMO is not a reasonable cost for what it is - the only reason it costs that much is the fact that it's glued in, and the fact that Apple charge so much for the part.
They did say that they might need to replace the shell (battery was slightly swollen in both machines) and that I'd be responsible for that cost, but that didn't happen for either box. I don't think they replace the shell unless it's really, really deformed. Neither of my machines would sit flat and both were obviously swollen. One I could practically spin like a top (and the trackpad was screwed).
I got both back with no deformities, a new battery, keyboard, and trackpad, and a 199 bill (plus tax).
I wouldn't rule out getting it fixed. If you do end up paying a little more, then you can probably sell it for more than the price it cost to fix.
i bought an $80 battery (ifixit? i can't remember now) and took it to a local shop and had it back in 3 hours. they charged $120. So... ~$200 but I had same day replacement.
You can also replace the thermal paste, although now that it's not overheating all the time, I won't have that done until next time it overheats and slows down and I need to have it vacuumed out again.
http://www.mackungfu.org/TheonethingtodotomakeyourMacBookPro...
Unfortunately it's not at all normal, it's swollen to the extent that the bottom of the case is slightly warped and the macbook will no longer sit flat. It's also affected the trackpad which doesn't click very well any more. I noticed these things a while back but didn't realise that the battery was the cause until I opened it up a couple of days ago to clean it out (something I do once or twice a year).
Now awaiting a battery replacement kit from iFixit and not looking forward to removing the old one. Probably going to try the dental floss method someone mentioned above (very, very carefully and far away from anything flammable).
Do you mean "not having anything other than USB C is lame", or "I dislike USB C and wished Apple had gone with something else"?
I really don't care about the "charge from either side" benefit of USB Type C. I do appreciate the fact that you can use aftermarket cables though - especially considering how poorly constructed Apple's are.
What do you dislike about the OS? Presumably it's running macOS Mojave?
I am sure I will think of some other annoyances. I've kept a 2012 MBP on Sierra, and love that machine far more, eg. keyboard is actually good and is quiet, real function keys, real ports as found on every other device in the universe, ability to use my audio interface, network ports etc etc
http://osxdaily.com/2018/10/15/dark-menu-dock-light-theme-ma...
Edit. It does to a degree. Firefox takes on the dark theme but everything else seems fine so far.
Have tried everything short of a complete reformat - NVRAM, SMC reset. Nothing in activity monitor gives me any clues either.
I even rolled back to High Sierra to check my sanity. No crazy fan spin. Reinstalled Mojave --> crazy fan spin.
I can see the Touch Bar probably makes sense for people who look at the keyboard while they type, which might be a majority for all I know, but for touch typists it's at best worthless, and the accidentally triggering is terrible.
WRT to an external keyboard with it - in addition to making keyboards more expensive and proprietary, the Touch Bar is powered by the T2 chip, which is not just used to power the Touch Bar and TouchID, but for system functions like boot-up.
Even with these features removed, dynamically paired TouchID sensors would be a change to Apple's security model (which requires a hardware/data reset to pair a new TouchID sensor for security reasons).
Courage.
While I personally wouldn't buy it (I'm kind of picky about the tactile feel of the keyboard), you can get this fully functional Bluetooth keyboard for $20.
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Bluetooth-Ultra-Slim-Keyboard-D...
My only complaints with the A1243 are that the top row is half-sized, and that it has a useless eject button between F12 and F13 which can't be remapped.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Keyboard#/media/File:App...
Plus, I actually use the "Windows" key now, so its absence would be missed.
I don't use tilde much.
There is no absence of a super key. Its on the spot where alt often is, and alt is on the spot super often is. It shares key with shift.
The ctrl is where caps lock is on today's keyboards. If I have caps lock I rebind it anyway. So ctrl and super are easiest to reach, whereas the spot where ctrl often is is difficult to reach (there is nothing there on the HHKB).
So in short this keyboard assumes you normally rebind caps lock to ctrl, it assumes you never use the ctrl elsewhere. It assumes you use super more than alt. It is pretty close to a traditional Sun keyboard.
Funny thing is also, you can buy the keyboard without print on the keys, so that you can rebind it in any way you prefer.
What?? I use it all the time: Tilde in vim for upper/downcase and bash for home and backtick for jumping to marks and in JS for template strings. Great key.
Have to give them credit for that.
One can only hope.
force touch -> force touchbar
;)
The touch mbp should've been a macbook air-like spin off, used to demonstrate the viability of the tech by letting people who want it choose it... instead of forcing everyone who wants a high end laptop to pick that model.
But yes, it's not even close to the retina IPS displays.
All of the non-iOS displays are calibrated via a munki.
The MBA display from this generation (my kids have the 11” MBAs with basically the same crap display) is the worst I’ve used by far. So bad it’s basically useless for photo editing. The contrast stinks. The color gamut stinks. You can’t look at it off-axis at all.
No no, I’ve looked at a lot of displays in my life. It’s my least favorite. The 2009 13” MBP display was better.
That there are non-Apple laptop displays that are even worse is cold comfort.
I measured the contrast of my 2013 MBA at ~800:1 with my Spyder3 back in the day, which is pretty OK for TN. It got somewhat close to 60% sRGB coverage.
For reference, my ThinkPad X230's TN display measured ~180:1 and couldn't even get to 50% sRGB.
No it isn't suitable for photo editing, but then no TN display really is due to the viewing angle colour and contrast shift. I haven't measured the 2015+ models but understand that the actual panel panel is meant to be the same. It's not what I would personally choose, but I thought it was acceptable at the time, even next to the TN MBP displays.
Every time I get out my 2013 MBP (not for the day job) I remember what a computer could be.
Docker - I don’t use it, but if it’s anything like the VMs I use to run, it also kill batteries.
I’m better off provisioning all of that on our DEV AWS Account and just connecting via my phone’s hotspot if I don’t have a reliable network connection and running very few things locally.
I used to use Outlook Web and might go back. The native client is a nightmare but does some useful things the web one doesn’t.
Docker has been a huge boon to my dev efforts, usually much lighter weight than an old school VM, so I’m no hater but if I had to work on battery more often I’d probably do the same thing, spend a few bucks on AWS and only work online but with better battery life.
All that still won’t get me more than 6h though.... :-(
Is Mail.app, or some other mail client, an option for you?
I do not mean officially, just get one in there, unofficially.
It had bad battery bloat but when I got it back from apple care everything looked new.
Ultimately if you want the longest battery longevity, keep it between 50% and 85% charged, and keep the machine cool.
Windows is perfectly viable for doing development, so is Linux. You can easily get a laptop that is cheaper and more reliable than a Macbook. About the only thing you'll be missing is a cool Apple sticker, but you can get those on eBay. Your wallet will thank you, and so will your fingers.
A Macbook was a reasonable, even logical choice in 2012. Now, not so much.
Apple can have me back if they want -- hey, take my money! -- but they have to stop fucking up. I don't know why the Apple board isn't simply pounding the hell out of the management that's been allowing the poor quality and user-hostile decisions of the past several years.
[Hmmm, I just looked at their board members. That would explain a lot...]
Admittedly the current MacBook trackpad is too big - but is otherwise functionally perfect in terms of its multi-touch and haptic feedback.
Also, you can use the external Apple trackpad they sell with any OS.
For you. I do all my development on a 13" laptop.
> Also, you can use the external Apple trackpad they sell with any OS.
I think the problem isn't the hardware, but the software (or more likely a combination of both). The MBP touchpad under Windows with Bootcamp is also quite terrible.
The Surface line trackpads are extremely close and their keyboards actually surpass current Apple boards.
It gets you pretty far, but not all the way. I guess for most people in most cases its fine.
Viable, yes. I've spent the last year (since replacing a 2013 MB Pro) with a Dell 15 XPS, roughly 50/50 Windows & Linux (Ubuntu then Fedora). Both work. They each run everything I need a laptop for.
Honestly neither is quite as good a desktop for me as macOS, but they are near enough that even if I liked the current generation of MacBooks (which I don't), I wouldn't consider it worth paying the premium.
There isn't a single solution I'm truly happy with. Windows 10 is yucky but for me fairly practical (meaning mainly it doesn't waste my time). Linux is more appealing and almost worth it for the speedy file access, but is too time-consuming for me to to commit to. MacOS is my favourite all-round OS, but (Hackintoshes aside) only runs on hardware I don't want (and certainly not at the price). I guess the only thing I haven't tried is ChromeOS. Maybe next time. 2019 desktop OS's are a sorry scene.
I hear a variation of this semi-often and I never quite get what that's supposed to mean. Maybe being a full-time Linux user for a decade has made me used to whatever people are complaining about, but I don't think so, people are complaining about having to fix broken HW/SW occasionally, however as someone who:
- Picks Linux-supported hardware specifically, as opposed to a random, generic PC, (something you wouldn't do with macOS either, btw).
- Runs a rolling release distro, so if anything should experience more breakage than the regular Ubuntu LTS/Fedora user.
I can honestly say that my workflow is basically:
-> Turn the laptop on, (or wake from sleep, yes that works well on solid HW)
-> Get my work done
-> Update the system every couple of days, (rolling release updates)
-> Repeat
Now does occasionally some package update their config that I'll have to merge or something like that? Sure, maybe once or twice a year.
When I do have to use macOS for builds, I experience glitches, (like the login bar loading and never finishing), various annoying updates, (& update prompts), apps, (like Duet Display), randomly breaking when you need them, occasional kernel panics, (but more frequent than I ever had on Linux, in fact I had one on Linux maybe once), choppy performance even on a top spec 2016 MBP due to poor thermals, video rendering issues when switchable graphics is enabled etc.
All in all, my macOS experience is actually somewhat worse than on Linux. It's nothing I can't deal with, but it's nowhere near as trouble free as people make it seem.
I honestly think it comes down to things like macOS being more animated by default, having 3D shadows under every window, the dock enlarging the icons as you scroll pass them, your coworkers having a Mac as a status symbol etc. rather than some big technical hurdle.
And I read that cookie-cutter response almost every time. Fine. Whatever. We have different experiences. I accept yours (because I think most people are more-or-less truthful). You don't accept mine (because ?).
> I honestly think it comes down to things like macOS being more animated by default, having 3D shadows under every window, the dock enlarging the icons as you scroll pass them, your coworkers having a Mac as a status symbol etc. rather than some big technical hurdle
Feel free. "Honestly think" any invented story you wish.
Linux use for me isn't so much a matter of large technical hurdles, but the death of a thousand cuts. By the time of my last f/t Linux use round (just a couple of weeks ago) I didn't have any outstanding tech issues. There was nonessential hardware I couldn't get working at all or well (fingerprint scanner, SD card reader, gpu switching), but I could live with that.
It's more a matter of having a constant barrage of small issues, often with new software I install, each of which is quite soluble, but only after reading documentation (often poor). That's just not how I want to spend my time. I'm not going to enumerate the issues because, as I say, by and large I solved them. They are mostly trivial but constant. I would rather have spent that time listening to music, or learning Mandarin.
I keep logs of all my computer admin & troubleshooting in markdown files. I've been roughly 50/50 linux and windows over the last year. Eyeballing the logs, it's clearly true for me - Windows gives me hardly any issues to solve at all. I install stuff. It works. I get on with my work and the rest of my life. In contrast I have vast reams of notes about the various little niggles I had with Ubuntu and then Fedora.
[Edit: sorry - I forgot your I just find it somewhat hard to wrap my mind around the specifics. So just one example. Nothing big, but bear in mind I'd have something like this at least 3 or 4 times a week. I want to be able to dial down power use sometimes - if I'm low on battery, doing undemanding stuff and won't be near an outlet for a while. Windows: I didn't have to read any docs. Click on battery icon, and slide left on the popup control. Fedora: click around in gnome and find nothing. Search for info on how the Gnome power management interacts with whatever service is started by systemd. Find nothing up to date (Fedora doc on the topic was from version 14 or 17 and bore no resemblance to my version 30). Read up a bit on tlp and powertop, but still unclear on their relationship to whatever Gnome does. Find broken links to relevant AskFedora posts because they've deleted all the old pages moving to Discourse. Ask a question. Get no answer. I could have solved it eventually with a bit more reading, sure. But like most things I wanted to do, it would take orders of magnitude more time to figure out than on macOS or Windows.]
It's nothing to do with 3D shadows under windows, the dock enlarging when I roll over it or my co-workers being impressed because I've got a Mac, because they all have Macs too.
That last point is the least of it - honestly, I have no desire to impress anyone with what technology I happen to use and find it quite extraordinary that anyone thinks owning a Mac is some kind of status symbol.
It's not as if Apple product ownership is a rare thing, people from all walks of life own Macbooks or iPhones or whatever, yet this falacy that Mac/iPhone owners buy these products to impress people still somehow persists.
No, it's the fundamental user experience on various desktop managers I've tried on Linux that while it clearly works for other people, it simply doesn't for me.
There's nothing wrong with that, and I'm sure if I persisted with it for longer then I'd perhaps be happy enough using Linux on the desktop but to be honest it's time I'm not that interested in investing, when I'm immediately productive on OSX, and was when I first started using OSX back in 2004.
My OSX experience is wholly different to yours - I get rare update notifications, possibly because of the software products I use? and performance on my 2018 MBP is as quick as I've ever experienced, but then it should be for a modern computer.
For me, OSX/macOS simply stays out of the way and lets me get on with doing work. I'm sure Linux does the same for you but be assured, the reason I use OSX is not a single one of those reasons you've suggested.
- Hit space to instantly quick-look almost any file, in the finder, in my torrent client, etc.
- Global menu bar doesn't waste space.
- Time Machine provides revision control for your entire drive, integrated into apps, where you can browse and revert to old versions. Even works when you only occasionally hook up your backup drive as it syncs.
- Window/desktop management with real multitouch gestures (not triggers that only kick in after you complete a gesture).
- Smooth font rendering without gamma or hinting errors. Smart kerning adjustment for long labels in tight spaces. Smart ellipsis that displays the start and end of long filenames.
- Icons represent files and can be dragged e.g. from document window titlebars. Right click to get a breadcrumb of all the directories the file sits in, so you can trivially open a finder window for what you're looking at.
- Half downloaded files are resumable bundles that keep the source URL inside. Can even copy to a different machine and resume there just by double clicking.
- Integrated disk, partition and image management, including creating encrypted disk images through the UI, and restoring images to drives.
Just a few things keeping me on this platform.
Oh also, when I upgraded my 2013 mbp to a 2015, migrating was trivial, as both laptops set up an adhoc wifi and transferred everything 1-to-1 without having to do anything. My customized Unix environment that lived though 3 or 4 major OS upgrades transplanted as if nothing changed.
Linux doesn't want to provide that level of convenience because it requires too much cat herding and agreement, while Microsoft can't without breaking years of legacy crap.
I also bought a Surface Go recently and this has convinced me I could move away from Mac completely (To a Surface Pro) if need be, the industrial design is excellent, the keyboard is an absolute joy to type on and it's so versatile, like a "Pro" machine should be.
Hi there. You can buy a sintech adapter on amazon that will let you put a standard NVME SSD into a macbook air/retina 2013-2015 model (and maybe some others).
It costs about $20.
With that, you can choose some of the cheap, new, fast, 2TB disks and get a massive improvement in speed and storage capacity for relatively little money. Google around; there are some recommended drives.
From what I've read the 'long' version of the sintech is the best one to buy. The upgrade process is on ifixit; it's super easy. You will also need a torx screwdriver; again you can buy a 'mac fixing kit' for $5-10 on amazon etc.
Although I had switched over to Windows by the time of the Pismo G3/500 (voted the best ever), I had my 540c upgraded with a PowerPC, and got many years of delightful service out of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_500_series
I had a 5300 for a while and it was a piece of crap compared to the sturdy souped-up 540c.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_5300
It had two big symmetrical removable battery compartments, so you could switch out one at a time and keep running on as many batteries as you have pre-charged without interruption! Plus there was an external dual battery charger.
And you could swap a hard disk drive or CDROM into one of those bays.
Plus it was fat enough that it was able to cool so it didn't overheat all the time like an MBP.
Anorexic thinness isn't a thing for me: I'd trade a lot of thinness for huge removable batteries and great ventilation.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060324140419/http://www.insane...
* Original white and black MacBooks had sharp edges and cracking wrist rests
* 2nd Gen MBP had 8600GT chip death issues
* First Unibody MB/MBP had glossy screen not suitable for indoor lighting
* First Polycarbonate Unibody had chassis cracking and rubber base warping issues (but was otherwise an excellent machine, too bad they didn't resolve those issues and keep selling it...)
* 2011 15" will all eventually fail due to faulty GPUs
* 2012 Retina MBs had underpowered GPUs
* Retina MBPs had soldered RAM and proprietary SSDs (10.13's NVMe support for those older machines with a simple adaptor has made a complete mockery of anyone defending Apple's stupid proprietary pinout, too), glued batteries and display coating problems
In saying that, the original aluminium unibody was a spectacular design. It felt so much more premium than any other machine of the time it was absurd.
I personally think absolute peak Apple notebook was the 2012 MacBook Pro 15" with the Anti-Glare display. All the best things about the pre-retina Unibody design, but serviceable, with USB3, no known serious GPU or CPU flaws, and none of the retina issues such as staingate or glued battery.
Had they made a Haswell revision of that to get the better battery life I'm reasonably convinced it would still be a seriously popular machine today.
This didn't affect me (and it didn't change until Retina, I think), but EM209 <https://randyzwitch.com/broken-macbook-pro-hinge-fixed-free/... hit me twice, the second time not covered by Apple.
Yes, glossy screen had an anti-reflection coating added for Retina models that then proceeded into staingate. To make matters worse they took away the matte anti-glare option entirely because they thought their new compromise was best. Yelp.
My favorite problem is activating Siri when I use Touch ID (yes, I know you can remove Siri from the Touch Bar). I miss the physical escape key. But the Touch Bar is great for volume control and scrobbling. Touch ID is awesome though (if I manager to hit the right area), I really miss Touch ID on my Linux machine.
I need a dongle for _everything and their mother_
Don't get me started on the dongles. I was a fairly early adopter (had the first generation 12" MacBook). They actually sold USB-C adapters initially where the USB-A port only supports USB 2.0. Yep 80 Euro for an adapter that only does USB 2.0.
Then their USB-C HDMI adapter only support HiDPI at 30Hz (due to supporting an older HMDI version). Again, unbelievable for an adapter that was initially 80 Euro.
So, I had to buy a USB-C <-> DisplayPort adapter to hook up a HiDPI screen at 60Hz (third-party USB-C <-> HDMI adapters universally had bad reviews). The adapter works fine on the MacBook Pro 2016. I updated later to the MacBook Pro 2018, and for some mysterious reason the adapter does not work on the MacBook Pro 2018, no output at all (still works fine with my wife's 2016). So I had to buy yet another adapter... (What's the point of USB-C as a universal interface if it is not universal?)
Using Windows 10 forces one to either use a low resolution screen, or deal with the consequences (most non-flagship software fails at scaling).
And that's not even getting into font rendering issues. Windows 10 can't render don't properly, except in design apps such as InDesign, for some reason. As for Linux compatibility, Win10 does a semi-decent job emulating Linux system calls with WSL.
This is not true.
Linux hasn't had issues with the major wifi chipsets in ages. It's as plug and play as Mac and Windows are. There are plenty of reasons people might choose to avoid Linux, but drivers (outside of specialty, niche or obscure hardware) aren't really a reason anymore.
… except (ironically) if you use Linux on a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. In this case there are severe issues with the wifi firmware making wifi completely unusable: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux#wi-fi
“Install Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp Assistant”
Also, if the system isn't shut down cleanly, it will never just boot up again in spite of supposedly using a journaling file system. She always has to run e2fsck in manual mode (i.e confirming every single repair), specifying the address of a backup superblock.
Printing and scanning is broken as well. Not for some niche hardware but for one of the most widely deployed HP printer/scanners.
So on her particular laptop, Linux is anything but plug and play. If you're saying that Linux works well on your laptop I will believe you. It has never worked well an any laptop I owned and drivers have always been the main reason for that.
I believe you cannot simply run Linux any laptop. You have to buy a laptop specifically for Linux.
For reference, it's recommended you use the open source drivers for Intel and AMD, and the proprietary drivers for NVIDIA. No PPAs required.
That said, avoiding that mess is fine for a non-gaming laptop. And I've had no trouble installing Linux on Dell, Asus, or Lenovo. Many configurations specifically listed Ununtu as an OS option (but why bother getting it preinstalled), so sure any of those would be fine. They're not especially rare anymore.
No you don't. Ive had debian on a lenovo laptop for five years with none of the issues you speak of. Printing and scanning work great (dell and brother printers). It boots fine after a hard power off. No update has ever fubard anything. I have no more trouble hooking up to a projector than anybody else (my boss has a mac and complains about hooking up to projectors).
I've also run linux without issue on prior laptops from toshiba, acer and sony and some off brand thing from 10 years ago. I have a brother who runs linux on a dell laptop just fine (and has for years). A co-worker runs linux on a newish sony laptop. I guess I'm just living in the perfect intersection of hardware that just magically always works with linux. Or maybe, linux just works.
https://pop.system76.com/docs/difference-between-pop-ubuntu/
https://www.osboxes.org/pop_os-19-04-and-18-04-vm-images-ava...
It only reinforces the idea that PopOS is little more than a reskinned Ubuntu (which is not a bad thing!). The only non different default setting is the availability of a recovery partition, while the other features mentioned are basically just different defaults.
For us who don't prefer Mac OS:
It copied way to much from Apple.
The alt-tab is in particular has been a usability disaster for some of us I think.
For a while I'd install Ubuntu and try from time to time but now I've given up on them.
As of 2019, I'm fairly happy with Linux on the desktop; usability is really solid, WINE is significantly better than years before, and many games will play perfectly fine with basically no manual configuration thanks to projects like DXVK.
I'm running KDE on Arch. And, I'm definitely happier than I was on Windows.
There's a number of people who can't stand KDE because of lack of consistency in padding etc (I have to take their word for it because I cannot see such things).
Often such people seem to enjoy using Macs and I defend that choice.
Personally I prefer Linux or even Windows to Macs because of (drumroll) consistency.
I want my keyboard to look mostly the same year in and year out. I want the layout to be roughly similar either I sit on my laptop keyboard or an external keyboard. I want modifier keys to work the same between apps. As a heavy multitasker I want my alt-tab to work the way it used when I learned it.
As for why KDE/Linux instead of Windows I just really like it for some reason. On top of that I prefer the Linux ecosystem, the reduced build times I get when I compile, the snappier git etc etc.
Fwiw, it's my current setup - I'm currently trying to decide between installing it outside the VM, or migrating to a cloud desktop.
Unix still isn't a great desktop, but, as the alternatives get worse, it's coming into its own.
You can buy hardware that comes with Linux support including drivers. Changing your workflow is always a pain though, so Linux with a decent DE like KDE could be a suitable alternative for you but because of the big change you could get frustrated and hate the experience.
I am also at that period in life where I don't get pleasure from tinkering with compiling custom kernels, making the PC boot 10% faster, use the latest and greatest... so for me Kubuntu LTS fits perfectly it may be a good option for you too.
Here where I live they would have to refund you the machine, if they weren't capable to repair it within 30 days (while under warranty, which I assume X1 Extreme was). The only manufacturer, whose service is able to achieve 30 days here is Apple ;).
With Lenovo, and previously IBM, I've had experience to have issues fixed NBD, even when I was retail customer.
I just got it back and as much as I want to use it I'm trying to return it still...
I love those guys.
You'll be happy to hear about dkms then. Just install the driver, let your package manager update it and it will recompile on its own for whatever kernel you're using.
This is if you even need such a thing.
Guy spent a year trying to build a better slack, but then finds out people love to complain about slack, but will not make any steps to actually try any alternatives.
The usb-c transition happened too early, it’s annoying that you can’t even plug in an usb if you forgot to bring the dongle. The nice thing about it is being able to plug the charger at any port, but that’s no reason to have only the usb-c ports.
Agree on the OS, I’ve probably bought into their ecosystem way too much to make a smooth transition away. Also the trackpad experience is still superior. But the list of reasons why I would buy a macbook after this one bites the big one is getting shorter.
You can buy laptops with various flavours of Linux pre-installed from a number of different manufacturers right now, you know that right? In the distant past I used to regularly compile my kernels out of necessity and also out of curiosity and trying to eke every last drop of performance from my systems. Now? No way. Have not done that in ages. And you never need to compile a kernel to get a driver working these days, every now and again what you might find is that you have to blacklist a driver or drop a manufacturers firmware into place. In truth, I had to do the exact same on a Macbook to get a non Apple blessed SSD running at full tilt many years ago.
Linux, by any reasonable metric, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with MacOS and Windows today. I can't believe in 2019 with Chromebooks, Lenovo, Dell, Purism, System76 (and those are the ones that I know off the top of my head) you still think compiling kernel drivers is a thing. Even Microsoft makes Linux apps these days: VS Code, Skype, SQL Server, … so that's got to tell you something. The real hold-out is Adobe. I'd love if IBM bought Adobe (after their Redhat purchase) and made all Adobe's apps cross-platform.
I have a 2013 MBP at home that I still use every night, the worst thing that has happened to it in all those years of daily usage is 3 of the feet have fallen off. The thing has been an absolute champ and I would have dropped serious money on another by now if they hadn't changed it.
I've yet to have to replace my battery. I'm hoping that the 2019 edition is worth buying, e.g. this stuff built in: * Escape key * SD card reader * Older USB and new USB C sockets * HDMI out * >1TB SSD * magnetic power adapter
I'd also like to see touch screen but let's see. I'd give that up for all the above.
I really don't see the point in making the macbook pro an ipad with a keyboard and some extra umpf. They're totally missing the target audience.
Took it in for an official check up to double-check it as i was thinking about ordering fan parts to repair it myself. They said the battery looked to be swelling which they thought was causing the insane fan noise and quoted me $200 for the battery replacement. I thought I could buy the battery cheaper but grudgingly accepted as they said it would cover all the repairs with that fee. They shipped it to a repair center and then upped the fees by $100 for labor. I again grungendly accepted it as I just wanted it fixed, I could mess up the personal repair, and having them do it saves me time.
After getting the laptop back that looked brand new with all the replacements, I remembered why I love Apple. I'm just surprised they didn't tell me all the parts they were going to replace for the $300 as that would have sold me instantly especially considering my trackpad had been half broken but I did not associate it with the swelling battery at the time.
Not if Windows 10 detected that you have "major" hardware changes. In which case, your new installation won't be activated (granted, Microsoft doesn't enforce activation on). You may need to extract the license key from UEFI and type it in manually to get activation to work. It's a hassle.
Unlike in the past, when all you had to do was call in and recite your license key, these days their policy is to accept nothing else but a proof of purchase, which in my case was from almost 10 years prior. Luckily enough, I had it archived.
The newer version (version 1511 and above) of Windows 10's digital licenses are essential a private key (as in asymmetric cryptography, called digital entitlement[1], stored in UEFI), as opposed to the a 25-character product key we used before. If for whatever reason the activation program cannot find that key, it won't be activated.
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12440/windows-10-ac...
> which in my case was from almost 10 years prior. Luckily enough, I had it archived.
If you bought your Windows license online with a Gmail address, Google has you covered. https://myaccount.google.com/purchases
The NUC has the same quad core Intel i5-8259U, with double the RAM and double the SSD size at approximately a quarter of the price of MacBook Pro. If you don't have an existing screen, you can buy a good Dell HiDPI screen for ~500 Euros.
The Linux NUC feels much faster than the MacBook Pro, probably because of faster syscalls on Linux, and generally better optimizations in Linux. But for me the killer feature is NixOS. NixOS has a steep learning curve, but with atomic updates/rollbacks, declarative system configuration, and the ability to have virtualenvs with any package, it is hard to go back to a system that does not have these features. (I use Nix on macOS, but it is more of a gateway drug than the whole experience.)
Of course, there are some sharp edges, Bluetooth headset (including Airpods) support is better on macOS, you can't beat Microsoft Office for Office compatibility (duh), and Skype works better on macOS.
Cloud apps like Google Docs, Hangouts, Slack etc.. were supposed to make the OS less important. It's too bad we're not there yet.
* your documents cannot leave your company network,
* you need features not supported by gdocs,
* you need to work offline,
* you need 100% compatibility for produced files,
* (fill in your favorites)
Lack of MS Office (non-365) availability for Linux is quite a barrier to Linux adoption in more places.
Recently I purchased an HP Envy with and AMD chip for $550 USD and got myself used to sway + i3statusbar-rust. Everything is simple, can be backed up using git and I use at most 300mb of ram after boot. Computer startup is less than 10 seconds and shutdown is less than 3.
I think this is the third time I feel this way about computers. First one was when someone told me about Apache and Linux in 2000, second when I discovered postgis + geodjango in 2007.
I use Kubuntu, since I've been using KDE for 15 years. I use 5% of the configuration options — just by looking, you'd think it was a default install — but I really miss that 5% if I'm on a Mac or Windows.
Freedom to choose good components, a fanless case, and a functional OS like NixOS.
If I need a laptop for a meeting or to travel, I can either use "my" 5-year-old one, or the spare new one. Or the conference room desktop, which has a real keyboard and mouse.
The XPS 13 has an edge-to-edge display/small footprint, the top of the line whiskey lake processor, 16GB of RAM, and a crazy-good battery life. (I opted for 1080p screen instead of 4k to get that 10+ hr battery life.) All of this for <$1200 with my employer's discount. The equivalent would be 2k+ on a Mac.
There have been one or two hiccups worth mentioning: 1) the trackpad, while not terrible, isn't as good as Mac's. 2) Multi-monitor support on Ubuntu hasn't been perfect. I couldn't get 18.04 to work out of the box with my three monitors; however, once I upgraded to Ubuntu 19.04, it worked out of the box. Phew.
Pretty happy with this setup!
I occasionally try switching but always get frustrated with the amount of time I have to spend fussing with graphics drivers, multitouch drivers, keyboard shortcuts, etc, but it's possible that's because I've only really attempted it on Apple hardware.
I'm in the google ecosystem, so life was crazy easy.
I guess the one exception (other than gaming?) is if you need to run any MacOS only software. (I can't even name any, other than that written by Apple, off the top of my head.) I have Mojave running in Virtualbox, but it's noticeably slower than both Linux natively and Windows 10. That could be the 8 year old laptop thing again.
For example, I tried a smartcard reader inside VM (host: macOS, hypervisor Virtualbox, guest: Windows) and it worked.
We're still a way off passing through graphics cards etc in a 'just works' sort of way (yes there's hugely involved ways to get it done) so it's going to be a short while before I could agree with you that Windows VM's are fully ready to replace native installs for situations like mine.
If you want a desktop experience that comes close to MacOS on Ubuntu, give Budgie Desktop a try; it's developed for Solus:
https://github.com/solus-project/budgie-desktop
...but is available for Ubuntu - you can install it separately, or as it's own distro:
Note that the 18.04 LTS will have the older version of Budgie and not the latest; the latest version is available with 19.04, but won't be available for LTS until 20.04 - though I am sure there's ways of getting it installed if you really wanted to.
I switched to Budgie Ubuntu 18.04 LTS after my super-long-in-the-tooth-modified-to-hell-and-back Ubuntu 14.04 LTS install face-planted after I tried to install a new version of the NVidia proprietary driver using a very hacked and patched together gcc setup (something I did for an online MOOC where I needed a greater version of C++ than 14.04 supported - not the smartest thing I ever did, but it worked well for a while, and long enough to complete the MOOC).
My 14.04 install started with a Minimal version, then I built it up from there to a look-and-workalike Crunchbang (#!) system. This was done just after #! ceased being supported (after I had played with it and liked it), but before the community picked up the pieces (ultimately resulting in Bunsen Labs distro).
It worked well, but after it finally fell over, I decided I wanted to go a different route on a new install - and Budgie Linux with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is where I ended up. I couldn't be happier; it allows me a desktop experience that I swear is very close to what I have on the MBP I use at my employer, but I have customized my own way (though I did grab a set of SVGs for a better looking trashcan for Plank). I also had to write a new wallpaper switcher (in python) as I didn't like anything as well that exists. Minor things, though. Overall, it's a great desktop - gives me some freedom to play, but is still beautiful and highly functional.
One thing I'll never do again, though, is install anything that isn't "standalone" in /home or a "deb" package (or something like AppImages); anything that must be compiled from source will either be made into a package to install, or I'll put it on a VM (that's what ultimately led to my old system falling over - too much crap in too many places without any kind of tracking, etc - my fault, ultimately).
Always had Windows available in Virtualbox, but its definitely slower & had endless audio issues with conferencing (you don't want to be the guy who always has sound problems)
Now switched to Windows 10 on a dual boot - which is much easier on the fan, laptop not running nearly as hot as switching between the GPU & onboard graphics is seamless. Despite decades of Linux experience (servers & desktop) I could never get Prime working properly to switch to onboard graphics when needed...wasted days of my life on this.
Despite this Ubuntu 19.04 has big improvements in driver support & if it wasn't for Office, I would have gladly stayed on Linux.
Now its Kali in Virtualbox for me which is almost as good as running natively.
Windows has better toolbar management, mouseovers & switching between apps. Also since Ubuntu moved back to Gnome, switching between Virtualbox VMs has been buggy (display driver issues no doubt)
Linux has a better file browsers (windows explorer hasn't changed in a decade, no tabs & looks terrible) & much better terminal options.
I'll miss Linux as my daily OS, but I guess MS has its grip tightly on most organizations balls these days.
I find both Mac and Windows' window managers much less pleasant than one of the many tiling window managers on Linux, since they automate away a ton of manual window management. That being said, I invested an unreasonable amount of time into configuring xmonad to behave in the way I want to, and the default window manager on, say, Ubuntu, is indeed pretty bad compared to Windows / Mac.
Amethyst, an xmonad-clone for Mac, works well enough, but still has bugs and is nowhere near as configurable as tiling WMs on Linux.
The XPS is probably the most positive experience thus far, it'ss a 9550 with i7/16GB RAM/1TB NVMe/GTX 960/4K. It's currently running Mojave 10.14.3, everything except the SD Card reader and Nvidia GPU work (including the touchscreen, WiFi OOTB, Bluetooth, etc.). The GPU really isn't a problem, Intel graphics work with full acceleration and anything GPU-heavy gets done on the desktop. Helps with battery life too; my system's battery health is down to ~45% but I can still squeeze out a good 4 hours from it. It's not very well supported, you really gotta stay on top of updates and be ready to fix what breaks, but when it's running it's a dream to use.
The desktop on the other hand is a completely different beast. It's got an i3-4150/8GB RAM/GTX 980 and currently running High Sierra 10.13.6 (because of a lack on Nvidia drivers in Mojave). Getting it setup was a little bit of work, the WiFi/Bluetooth card needed an enabler kext and audio needs a bootloader tweak to work, otherwise it's functionally indestinguishable to a legitimate Mac; It can even be updated through the Mac App Store, iCloud/iMessage works, Handoff works.
It'll run great (NOT problem free) for 6 months; just enough time to forget everything you learned over the entire weekend you dedicated to initially getting it working, then update or something will break and you have to dive back into the tonyx86/etc rabbit hole for another entire day or an entire weekend.
Look at what he said, it's great when it works. That's the problem.
Stuff will usually still "work" but your video drivers will drop your resolution to 640 and you have to fight with that and try new kexts, sometimes your sound will flake and you'll research how to fix it, etc.
If your time is remotely valuable and you want your personal equipment to just "work" and not have to be tinkered with it's unpleasant.
That's why I was so excited the Mini finally got updates, but that doesn't really work with egpus so I wound up just going back to my MBP.
Full disclosure: I am a Dell employee and obviously these views are my own and not that of Dell.
After that, it's been awesome. While inch-for-inch I like Mac trackpads the best, I hated the giant trackpad on the current macbook line, and the Dell trackpad is the right size and probably 95% as good. I don't care too much about not having all of the swipe shortcuts Mac has, so I didn't try to get more working on Ubuntu, but that could be a pain if you are into them. (Ubuntu has two-finger support out of the box that works great).
I was really pleased that closing the screen and opening it works just as well as Macs for suspending and resuming. Win10 does subpar at that.
The UI isn't quite as smooth as Mac, but it is still very smooth and easy. Just like the Dell 5530 isn't as thin as the current Mac, it is totally thin enough. Apple is just polishing for the sake of polishing at this point.
Plus, I have Ubuntu underneath, which makes it awesome for more line of work (software guy, call it "full stack", I do all kinds of stuff, but all Linux-based).
The battery is nearly dead. Maybe worth it for me to have it serviced and just keep using it for some more time.
https://medium.com/@agathver/nvidia-gpu-optimus-prime-and-ub...
No problems with the nvme ssd that I've noticed. I went with Ubuntu because Dell ships with Ubuntu as an option, so I figured they worked the kinks out :)
What version of Ubuntu are you running? Is it produced by Dell or the generic release?
edit nevermind I found a fix: in the BIOS (F2 while booting), I needed to set System Config -> SATA Operation -> AHCI. With that, the nvme is found just fine.
I've not had a single issue with the MacBook Pro yet. Not a single crash/kernel panic, no keyboard issues, no T2 or TouchBar issues. I open the laptop in the morning and it wakes from sleep and works all day. I almost only ever reboot it for system updates that require it so usually every 4-6 weeks.
I'm not super keen on the keyboard but it honestly isn't horrible to type on. I do worry about reliability though. However I am at almost 300 days of zero problems where I had issues with my XPS out of the box that seems are still not fixed having looked at /r/Dell on reddit recently. Shocking that Dell have taken close to a year and things like speaker pops are not resolved.
I also had a ThinkPad but sadly Lenovos quality control isn't what it used to be and the two units I received had hardware defects. And with modern ThinkPads being less serviceable (the new T series has soldered RAM, CPU and WiFi?!) I can see even Lenovo starting to go the Apple way with soldered storage within two years.
Also while I do no deny Apple screwed up with the butterfly keyboard I do feel all the attention being on Apple is a little unfair and can lead people to think Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft are much more reliable which just isn't true in my experience. In the past few years Microsoft's Surface line has without question been the worst laptop experience I have ever had with software and hardware issues not to mention even less repairability than Apple laptops!
For example:
* The trackpad on 2016+ models is too large for many users who experience palm rejection issues. * The display cable on 2016 and 2017 machines was too short, and is now starting to cause the issue known as "flexgate". It's almost a given that with enough use, every one of these machines will suffer this failure. To make matters worse, unlike the 2015 machines where the display cable could be replaced on its own, the entire display assembly is glued together on 2016+ machines and has to be replaced as a whole unit. * Stupid electrical decisions such as putting pins for high voltage backlight power and low voltage data signalling right next to eachother mean that there's a good chance the machine will fry itself if it gets at all humid inside (most machines do at some stage, especially if used on a lap). Most other notebooks do not do this and are much more durable in this regard. * The storage being soldered is fucking braindead. Apart from being planned obsolescence due to NAND flash's finite lifespan and macOS's increasing hunger for storage space, data recovery is not possible without a proprietary system to connect to a lifeboat port on 2016-2017 machines. 2018 machines have no such port and at this stage, there is no known way to recover data from working flash chips on a dead logic board without board-level repair.
Apple made far better computers in 2015. The competition also being shit doesn't excuse Apple's regressions.
Totally agree with you there.
My opinion on it being "unfair" on Apple is more to do with the fact that such things are not unique to Apple yet they are the only ones who get pulled up in the tech and even media.
I had two Surface devices from Microsoft; a Surface Book 2 and a Surface Laptop and both were pieces of crap yet cost the same (or there abouts) as an Apple laptop. Sure I see people complain about it here and there but no way near the level you see complaints about Apple products.
One area that bugs me quite a bit is YouTube and tech website "reviewers" such as The Verge et al. Right out the gate the 2018 15" model was ripped apart for the thermal throttling (and it should have been, it was a problem that Apple mostly fixed within a week to be fair) but the same people never mention the same or worse throttling from an XPS or Surface. Or any other long term issues those product lines have had and never been properly addressed. The XPS 15 coil whine, DPC latency, colour saturation issues, speaker crackle, squeaky spacebar, etc. All have been issues on the XPS 15 for several revisions and Dell have still hardly even acknowledged such problems.
So while I think Apple did fuck up with several design decisions on the current MBP I feel it is only fair to point out that the alternatives people often recommend come with their own set of issues as well. My Surface Laptop had a fan issue after just two days. The solution? Total unit replacement because the whole thing is glued together and you can't open it without damaging the alcantara keyboard fabric! So that meant a full system backup and restore which brought along another issue as the machine had been upgraded to Windows 10 Pro via the Windows Store but that is locked to the motherboard and ARRRRRRGH it was such a pain in the ass.
The sad truth is Dell, Apple, Lenovo, Microsoft, Asus, etc. all make shitty hardware decisions in the name of appearance and/or thinness. It sucks but it is reality. I just wish people would bitch about Dell, etc. as much as they do Apple. Maybe then they would fix things rather than deflect to Apple for being "worse" (which is false but believed to be true because of reporting).
I've also defended Apple a lot in the past for usually "getting most things right" where other manufacturers just don't. And you're right, they deserve to be cut down for stupid solved-problems-a-decade-ago like coil whine and rattling fans.
My viewpoint comes from expecting better from Apple because they've been better in the past, and only have a small number of SKUs to deal with. 2006-2012 saw Apple introduce new generations that solved problems and almost unilaterally improved upon their predecessors. They made a few hiccups (such as 2008's glass displays), and 2009's non-removable batteries, but they were reasonable well-thought compromises. Apart from serviceability, the 2012-2015 Retina era did the same.
On the other hand, Dell/Lenovo/HP etc vomit product lines all over the place and have done for as long as I can remember. Seldom do they keep the same basic chassis for more than 2 releases, and even when they do they don't seem to learn lessons and iterate to improve.
In saying that, comparing 2019 XPS, Latitude, Inspiron, and ThinkPads to their 2012 counterparts show marked improvement in many aspects, and few regressions. I guess that's a sorry indictment of PC notebooks at the start of the decade more than anything else...
I guess you could call that unfair on Apple, but then you look at the price they ask for their machines and quickly forget about fairness...
- Keyboards with much worse action that are more prone to failure (from dust no less) and require replacing the motherboard to fix... all for a Touchbar no one wants and 0.5mm cut in thickness.
- Loss (over the years) of the ability to upgrade the CPU, SSD or memory;
- Display failures due to broken ribbon cables;
- The USB-C clusterF; and
- Loss of MagSafe (this one still hurts).
All for a premium price.
Go back 5 years and you have two great choices:
1. The 13" Macbook Air for under $1500, which was a great compromise of power, portability and affordability; or
2. The 15" Retina Macbook Pro, which was more upgradeable, less failure prone and had a better keyboard.
I bought a 2017 MBP and I deeply regret it. Luckily it hasn't failed yet. If and when it does I may be better off just throwing it away.
How did Apple lose its way so badly here? Serviceability matters. It's too expensive to be a throwaway device.
So who really cares if your throwaway $44k device can now have 8 instead of 6 cores? Really?
The keyboard replacement replaces the top-case, your motherboard and everything else is transplanted over to the new top-case.
I don't think dust is the cause of all the keyboard failures. I had been using it as a desktop computer for over a year. It isn't in a dusty room, and the computer still spends months without being opened. Furthermore, sometimes on waking a key will be stuck in a pressed condition, such that I can't successfully enter a password to log in. Pressing all of the keys doesn't reset the state, but force rebooting does.
If I do use the MacBook Pro's keyboard some of the keys intermittently fail to detect presses, but because there are both problems with keys being stuck engaged, and keys failing to detect presses, I suspect that the switches have some flaw where they can generally degrade due to heat rather than only dust fouling the contacts.
Anyway, I haven't yet had the keyboard replaced, because the failure is still intermittent, and I'd like to get a fresh keyboard right before selling it, sometime after a teardown confirms whether this new model is really likely to be less error prone, or maybe after a more thorough redesign for Ice Lake chips in the 13" model later this year or early next year.
well, this is known to be the cause
There's probably not a single cause. And indeed, some of the fixes are probably making some of the other issues worse (I would not be at all surprised if the dust membrane is exacerbating the heat issues, and that's why the issues with the MacBook Air are just as bad if not worse than the other machines).
People always forget the flaws of the past.
I will NEVER forgive them for this.
Jobs was RIGHT when he said this was a major innovation over everyone else.
Now Apple is either saying he was wrong or THEY are wrong. They're not BOTH right.
My 2015 is the last MBP I will ever buy and it's aging fast...
I think it's hackingtosh from here on out.
I primarily use Ubuntu but I have to have a Mac as our app runs cross platform and I need somethign to test with.
Either way I think these are still the best notebooks you can buy.
Ubuntu doesn’t even work right on my dell desktop - it never remembers dual monitor settings, even with Nvidia official drivers installed.
When I open my MacBook Air I can just use it without waiting or worrying. That much is still the same; except now you have to worry about someone tripping over your power cord
Five years ago you could make that statement and not have to think twice about it. However now there is too much competition.
1. Dell XPS
2. Matebook X Pro
3. Asus Zenbook Pro
These are just 3 laptops off the top of my head that can compete with the latest and greatest Macbook Pro and come out arguably better. The keyboard, thermal issues and touchbar have really hurt the latest macbook pro. Apple needs to admit they are wrong, ditch the shitty butterfly keyboard and fix the random issues that have started plaguing the Macbook in Apple's quest for thinness.
They don’t hold up well at all. Trackpad feels crap compared to my 5 year old mb air, screens suck, keyboard feels meh. They might start out nice but they deteriorate really quickly from my firsthand sampling
The old MacBooks I’ve used from IT, however, still function like original except for the visual wear and tear you see and the ugh of using something all scratched up
I agree older macbooks were simply amazing and definitely a cut above the rest. But my point is that compared to the latest macbook pro, the 3 laptops I mentioned are very good competitors. It didn't used to be like this. Apple may have produced very reliable laptops many years ago, but that's no longer the case.
I was looking at 13" models. Comparable PCs were very similar in form factor--non-replacable RAM and a 1tb SSD option (either included or added later myself) took the cost very close to each other. I know Apple laptops have a decent resale value and I'm familiar and comfortable with Apple's warranty and service (others might be great, too, but that'd be an unknown for me).
I needed a webcam for work and having it by the keyboard was a no-go. I know this recently changed and I was very disappointed a brand new Macbook Pro has the exact same camera a 2009 model had. They all had a similarly poor situation with USB-C, too. Either none, 1 for charging and like 1 USB-A port, or only 2-4 USB-C ports.
Looking at the failure rates and support for each brand, a trackpad and keyboard that wasn't as good, having to use Linux (I wasn't planning on using Windows), none of them looked any better.
I wish there was better competition (at least for what I'm looking for) and I wish Apple would fix the things everyone liked about the 2015. Not all of it is thinness...I miss a charging light and battery meter, give better non-touchbar options (I'd like touch ID and more USB-C ports), upgrade your camera for Pete's sake.
Which is silly, because after using one for a year and then going back to my Air, that keyboard feels mushy and unresponsive. The original 12" MacBook keyboard had actual issues with ergonomics and usability - successive versions did not.
The biggest win is that now I can use a single dongle for power, displayport to my monitor, and connection to a USB hub. So if I take my laptop home or into a meeting room, when I get back to my desk it's just a single thing to plug in now instead of 3+ separate cables. And since this stuff is all standardized now and there's no longer anything Apple proprietary like Thunderbolt 1, I would guess other makers will follow suit eventually and most monitors will support it directly without even needing a dongle.
Plus the MagSafe port was not without problems - every few months I would get like a little magnetic pebble or something stuck in there, and then it's plugged in but not charging charging and usually I'd realize when my laptop is almost dead and then have to find something small to try to pluck it out of there. The USB-C port doesn't have this issue and it's still a relatively small port with very low resistance to being pulled out. Tripping over the power cord just has never really been an issue for me, it kinda seems overblown (knock on wood though, I guess).
I do miss the external LED that showed whether you were connected to power or not and whether it was fully charged, it would be nice if they found a way to add that back on the side of the laptop or something since it can no longer be on the cable itself with a standard USB-C cable.
I don’t get the whining about lack of USB type-a ports or the sd card slot and hdmi port. One, ONE $30 adapter gives you all of those and you have 3 TB3 ports still to use, AND it will read more memory card formats. Edit: AND it will have more USB-A ports than the old MBP had!
I saw a manufacturer a while ago had a little magnetic adapter for a USB-c power port, too.
Oh and the common complaint about flash drives - I bought one with type a one end, and type-c the other for about $12 I think.
The added functionality of TB3 far outweighs any of the small losses IMO.
Edit2: sd card not ssd card.
That's not how TB3 works though. Those cheap dongles don't necessarily pass through correctly, and this can lead to all manner of problems when you have sensitive equipment connected. Lots of reports of audio issues on USB C Macs when using external dongles, for example.
The actual TB3 hubs cost $150 minimum iirc.
This may not cause trouble in your own use case, but it's definitely potential cause for concern for people that need a lot of I/O
The USB/hdmi/memory card adapters for $30 aren’t TB3, they’re USB-C.
If you want “a lot of I/O” then going back to 2 usb3 ports isn’t going to help you.
A single TB3 port will handle the same external I/O the previous MBPs had across all ports barring TB2.
I don't believe that's how TB3 works, either. I might be mistaken or out of date, but I've looked. At any price I haven't seen an actual TB3 hub that gives you more ports than you start with. The ones that do aren't TB3, they're extra power-only or USB-only USB-C ports. Everything I've seen is just a passthrough TB3 port with additional accessories that are generally USB or HDMI tunneled through.
> Lots of reports of audio issues on USB C Macs when using external dongles, for example.
If you're talking about audio production...that tends to go with everything computer related for 30+ years. Which port you plug in, the brand of cable you use, the minor software release--all are potential problems. Everyone tends to have a unique setup, too.
I do miss the external LED that
showed whether you were
connected to power or not and
whether it was fully charged
Seems like Apple could have kept MagSafe and added the usb-c ports w/ option to charge through usb-c or MagSafe. it probably wouldn’t have been a very Apple-like thing to do and then you don’t have nice clean symmetric ports, but that little cable definitely saved lots of repair dollars over the years for me
I just don't see USB-C ever replacing a proper charging cable if it can't even supply enough power to run the computer! The computer you leave to render overnight will drain the battery to flat and subsequently shut down/throttle. How is that in any way acceptable?
You’re going to need to qualify what you mean by “high performance”.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-560-4gb,5...
They run on an 87W charger fine.
[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/259744/what-happen...
There are USB-C cables with a charging light on them. I'm a little dumbfounded why Apple doesn't offer this--their USB-C cables already come in one flavor for charging and another for high speed data. It's made worse because Apple also took off the white LED /and/ battery charging indicator on the case.
https://www.amazon.com/Moshi-Integra-USB-C-Charging-Cable/dp...
I haven't used them (there might be other brands), I hear they can be slightly weird depending on the computer+power brick because they seem to observe the power draw for the LED color.
Seriously a "PC" and Mac sharing all the same chargers and docking solutions. This is incredible. I never had a Mac with mag safe so maybe I just don't know what I'm missing, but the practicality of plugging in ONE cable and that same cable works between both machines and I can bring both with me places without fretting about chargers.
At least this seems to have changed a bit. Like you said, it's so nice to charge non-Apple headphones or my Switch without hunting for extra cables.
Unlike MagSafe, the higher-end ones aren't limited to just power.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/11/thundermag-magsafe-thund...
There are a lot of things to complain about with the newer MacBook Pros (like not offering a hardware function row without hobbling the machine). I think the MagSafe removal is one of the least strong of them.
It was revolutionary, and they removed it.
I second this. It's been years now, and I still don't really see TouchBar as indispensable. Not enough apps make special use of it yet.
I don't care as much about thinness either. I just want something that works where I can replace or add RAM and storage myself.
As for magsafe, you can get a 3rd party replacement if you're willing to spend $50.
The only reason I stayed is because of MacOS, but current Apple hardware has gone into a weird direction. It's harder and harder to stay when Windows now ships with Linux.
I've been wondering for a while now why USB-IF hasn't defined a standard magnetic connector. I'm surprised none of the flagship smartphones or laptops have tried to push their own magnetic connector. They're desperate to differentiate themselves in the current market and wireless charging is falling behind quickly due to physical constraints.
I use a volta cable for my phone and it is wonderful. It handles power and data just fine. My only issue is that I have to use a dongle.
There's clearly demand for it. Magsafe and volta have proven its effectiveness. It would be a great solution for portable consumer electronics like laptops, cameras, tablets, and phones.
What's holding it back?
I don't want thinner. I don't want a touchbar. I don't want this oversized touchpad I touch constantly when it's on my lap. I don't want this terrible keyboard solution required due to the desire for thinness. I don't want to carry 3 USBC dongles or to buy a $350 USBC hub at every single desk I have with monitors (home, work). I want a bigger battery. I want more ports. I want less bezel. I want a chassis that doesn't scratch and dent.
Any idea what's wrong with it?
I switched to a Macbook soon after and it is just as fast today as it was when I got it four years ago. I recently fired up that old T420 and popped an older, unused SSD into it. Instant game-changer. It is unbelievable how much faster it is with an SSD, the same speed it was with Windows 7 when I first got it.
Seriously, get an SSD.
Hard to get much faster than instant.
(TBH the same issue happens on a Mac though, except Safari instead of Edge).
Anything unique about it? Are you running Windows 10? Latest updates? Need any driver updates? (Most drivers are updated by Windows but a few, like graphics/network sometimes benefit from checking yourself.)
Are you running a (really) resource intensive anti-virus program?
I own an $800 Asus gaming laptop and a $700 Asus ultrabook. One with 7th gen i7 and 16GB DDR. The other with 8th gen i7 and 16GB DDR. One has SATA SSD and other NVMe SSD. One is 1 year old. The other is 2 years old.
Both of them can run Visual Studio Professional, VS Code, Netflix, Hulu, StarCraft 2. Both are very fast and a joy to use. One is heavy; the other is light!
If it has a 5400 rpm hard drive, consider getting a 2.5" SSD to replace it, and use software to clone the drive. (Although it kind of sounds like you could use a fresh install.)
in order to eek out a tenth of a gigahertz for their marketing materials (with rapidly diminishing returns because physics), manufacturers usually set Turbo Boost Power Limits 5-10 (or more) watts too high. Since Turbo Boost usually maximizes a single core's frequency and the heat generated increases exponentially, it creates a very concentrated heat spike in the silicon. Even if the CPU heat sink is good enough to passively dissipate that much heat from all of the cores, the turbo boost hot spot forces the fans to spin up early before the CPU knows how long the boost will be needed (otherwise Turbo boost would significantly reduce the lifetime of the CPU). Combined with random scheduled OS tasks that take a split second of turbo to run a process [..]
This could also apply to thermal throttling of the CPU. Imagine if your laptop is on that edge, with some dust in the heatsinks and fans, then a can of compressed air and an install of ThrottleStop (or other software) to underclock a little and reduce the maximum boost frequency, and thereby reduce thermal throttling, might make it run smoother and faster-on-average.
Or another possibility:
If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.
If you NetFlix from Chrome, that might be worth a try, or upgrade/downgrade display drivers for testing. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415775 )
An i7 that could stream video, should still be able to stream video. If it can't, something has gone wrong, and should be traceable and fixable.
Thinner means you take away my ports so I have to carry dongles. Yes, I'd actually love to have at least one old-fashioned USB2 port. I know, I'm insane, but USB2 devices didn't exactly disappear just because USB-C is great. I still have a lot of them.
Thinner means you take away magsafe, which is one of those great "gosh, apple is so clever" features that's very, very useful.
Thinner means you give me a keyboard which, at best, completely sucks (layout, feel) and at worst, can't actually do its job because of reliability problems.
Thinner means I could have more battery life.
I'm literally carrying around TWO 2015 MBPs on a daily basis right now and it's TOTALLY FINE, APPLE. I'm not dying over the weight or amount of space they take up. I hardly even notice. For what developers do with laptops, thinner is way down on the priority list. I wish you'd listen to us.
Also: I literally have no use for the touchbar that isn't perfectly handled by function keys, and I hit ESC 1000 times a day because I'm a vim user. Why do you hate me?
Please just release a mac that looks exactly like a 2015 MBP with an i9 and some USB-C ports, and I will be lining up to throw $3k at you. As is, I'm getting as much life out of my 2015's as I possibly can (they're running great, btw, but I doubt they'll make it to your next refresh if it's 3 years away). When they finally die, if the only MBPs available have garbage keyboards and touchbars, I will grudgingly stop being a Mac user.
I'm not sure it does really. The modern MacBook Air chassis is the same size as the old one. But it's lost Magsafe, a useful keyboard, USB-A, it's lost a port on the 13 inch, and no SD card slot.
Apple hasn't got rid of these things for thinness. It's gotten rid of them because of a misguided belief that the replacements are better than the loss of flexibility, or just plain working.
Apple are wrong about these things. But the problem is much more fundamentally that Apple seems to have lost it's ability to engineer well and it's judgement about how to please it's Mac customers. Thinness is just a symptom.
Evidence that it hasn't: the hundreds of people walking around my workplace with gigantic USB 2.0 + HDMI + displayport dongles dangling from their laptops all the time, or starting meetings by saying "oh shit, i left my dongle in the other building. Can I borrow someone's so I can use the projector?"
> I'm not sure it does really.
Not 100% true, you're right, but the thinness is definitely the reason ethernet went. My 2010 had an RJ45 on it, and there's just no room for it on the 2015 or the later ones. However, I do think the design aesthetic that calls for thinness is related to the design aesthetic that fetishizes the simplicity of having as few blemishes on the case as possible. Floppy eject button? We can do it in software. Mouse buttons? Reduce it to one. No wait, reduce it to zero (magic mouse). Trackpad buttons? Remove them. Ports? As few as possible. Sleek. I feel like putting on a black turtleneck.
Do yourself a favour:
https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_macOS
2) I already have capslock remapped to "hyper" aka ctrl+alt+shift+command and use it heavily.
32gb ram and an 8 core processor is awesome, but all the downsides have turned me away from getting the next gen unless they fix those things.
I don't really get the hate for these keyboards. I benchmarked my typing speed on my 2019 MBP and a few other keyboards, I didn't notice any significant difference. Just a keyboard...
Yeah but there's no way this thing has the thermal or power capacity to actually run that 8-core CPU at its rated specs. This already happened with the 6-core in the previous gen, and it certainly doesn't look like Apple did anything to improve thermal capacity in this refresh. Hopefully they at least addressed the lack of VRM power delivery, but that doesn't seem likely.
So you're taking a platform that was already pushed past its thermal & power capacities, and increased the thermal & power load by another 30% (keep in mind these are all still on Intel's 14nm that hasn't really changed, so no efficiency improvements here). Maybe the reviews will be surprising, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Well, it says they did, but I guess you know better.
I don't see any comments from Apple talking about improving the cooling. What are you referring to? And what did they change? It still looks like the same tiny opening in the hinge, with no additional venting anywhere?
2018 Macbook Pro is 3mm thinner than 2015 MBP.
0.5mm for all the things you asked for sounds really hard.
When I sit with the laptop on my lap, like on the couch, I find that I'm constantly adjusting things to not touch it. Whether it's my jacket or a blanket or my phone cable or my own hand. I just constantly trigger it and I'm sure I have it on the lowest sensitivity with palm rejection. I'm pretty sure even when I'm on a desk I'm constantly adjusting where my arms are because it's getting triggered (or I just feel like I have to pay attention to it).
FWIW, I dislike every single Apple keyboard, mouse and touchpad ever created and refuse to use them to the point that I bring my own kb/mouse to work because every job hands me those. I have tried them, at times, for months.
You may not realize it yet, but you are no longer Apple's market. Do your future self a favor and figure out how to transition to something sustainable.
Apple used to make computers that were both elegant and practical... But the iphone taught execs that there is a much more profitable market willing to pay through the roof for extremely stylish looking computers at the cost of _everything_ else, they will keep going further down this road because there is plenty of demand. Apple now sell gorgeous Ferraris, but the kind that will drive you insane and are not actually useful or comfortable for anything other than showing off.
The good news is that sexy PC laptops now exist, and some of them are still actually practical too! better yet some of those sexy practical laptops run Linux! Well!
Guess it depends on what kind of stuff you do. I adopted that workflow years ago out of necessity (need to routinely do some heavy lifting) and will never go back.
"Today, however, [Apple] told me that they’re taking three explicit steps to help with the keyboard situation. 1. The MacBook Pro keyboard mechanism has had a materials change in the mechanism. [...]"
The 2017 does have changes vs the 2016 to make it quieter and less clicky.
These shitty keyboards cast a shadow over the whole product line. If they didn't fix it the third time around, it's time to abandon the damn mechanism and accept that thicc computers can be beautiful, too.
The crazy thing is that it was/is. Who didn’t love it?
It still looks to have the same camera I had in my 2009 MBP...this can't be a cost/space/engineering thing since iPhones exist. I don't care if it's higher res. Make it higher quality and less noisy. I genuinely miss charging and battery LEDs they removed from the case (and magsafe). I've plugged in my laptop overnight only to find it never charged once or twice. I see the touchbar causing more problems than it solves.
I'm actually disappointed. I was hoping whatever next Macbook Pro they released would be a significant update or offer more compelling things.
It's like they're trying to be as stupid as possible.
I mainly use the Mac. It's much quieter, has an amazingly vivid and bright retina display, extremely good battery life, best track pad in the industry and the best speakers on any laptop I've ever had. I like the keyboard, I even game on it. I don't get the whole dongle issue but I'm not a heavy user of peripherals. I have two USB-C port extender dongles should I ever need anything from ethernet to firewire 800. I've used them like twice in the last two years.
The Dell is fine, but I'm just not a big Windows fan. The keyboard is kinda meh, the bluetooth is poor, the screen isn't as bright or vivid and has some light bleed and the build has that cheap plastic feel about it. If it was any more reliable than the Macbook, I think I would be persuaded by the argument about the hardware, but both have had problems, both required lengthy repairs, etc. I have extended warranty on Dell and Applecare for the Mac and I needed them for both.
Laptops fail. My PC motherboard with ultra durable components also failed after two years. Heat and dust and micro-imperfections in silicon will do their thing. Sure, Apple made some questionable design choices. It's still a great machine.
Now that I think of it, you can boot with the LiveCD to see if it will help before trying this.
If the random freezes continue you may have bad ram or other components need to be replaced.
A few months after I got it the touch screen failed. Dell put some effort into repairing it (about an hour of remote support for updating the BIOS and afterward a technician visited me twice to replace the display (the first time he didn't have the correct replacement screen at hand)).
However, a while later the screen started to flicker sometimes. At first, I took it for a software issue and since I didn't use the laptop that often I didn't really care. When I realized that it was, in fact, a hardware defect (again), the warranty had expired.
So good Linux support is one (very valuable) thing, but if the build quality is that bad (I mean, even my 300€ first gen Eeepc still runs with fewer problems), I am not willing to pay the XPS premium again.
After the quick replacement I even told him it was probably my fault but he replied saying it doesn't matter because on average customers don't abuse and I was just a number to them.
(At work I have a 15" MBP with the 2013 body. I'm eligible for upgrading it, but what would I replace it with that could possibly be better? Literally the only downside that I care about is the fact that most conference rooms at work no longer have magsafes lying around.)
The MacBook touch pads are leagues above all the competition. It’s the number one thing that keeps me away from my think pads.
On the other hand, Apple's touchpads have to be configured to even enable tap-to-click(?!), and click-and-drag doesn't even work with it... On pretty much any non-Apple touchpad and OS combination, double-tapping on a draggable object enables dragging mode, where you can move the object around the screen with one finger.
If Apple seriously got its software story together, it would at least support better configurability for its touchpads. But even then, it wouldn't have physical buttons, which I prefer.
But I don't miss the keyboard. Or the touchbar. Or the hotkey layout. Or the operating system. Or not being able to upgrade my hard drive when I needed to.
I would love to see real data about the Touch Bar, but sadly it’ll never get released. So we are all left to private theories and speculation and anecdotes.
Just this month I got matching external keyboards for all, and it's been much easier having one set of muscle memory no matter what I'm doing.
My problem is that due to wrist injury I angle my left hand enough that my pinky finger sometimes touches esc or other areas. I have remapped the touch bar but not having esc where I want it also sucks. Mechanical keys don't actuate merely on touch, so this is only a problem on apple.
I'm considering remapping caps lock to esc and then putting tape over the touchbar, at least on the left side, to reduce sensitivity
WTF, honestly.
I don't believe the non-touchbar model has received a single spec update since it was announced (though I am having difficulty determining that for sure)
Well it's all 14nm Skylake, so that really doesn't matter at all.
I also suspect today's bump is kind of a "holding pattern" update and Apple is working on a more significant redesign of their laptop line that's going to try and address the criticism they've been receiving over the last couple of years. (While it's possible we'll see the first sign of that at WWDC, seeing this press release just a couple weeks before WWDC makes me suspect that we won't see truly new laptops until 2020.)
Not perfect, but at least sort of helpful.
The main point, let me have a nice version without the touchbar is shared.
This makes me confident they'll add haptic feedback in the next Macbook.
I mean, look at the Dell XPS 15 keyboard. All that space on both sides of the keyboard, and yet they make us chord to do something as simple as Page Down.
That would consume room for the touchpad.
Here's the keyboard in all its glory (if you're curious): https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standard/M...
I never use Caps Lock anyway.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> the fact that it crashes every time the battery runs out.
This. Mine crashed with caffeinate on and would boot into state where display is off. Took me an hour and bunch of stress reset SMC/NVRAM/etc that brought it back to life.
The only thing I'm missing in my mac -> linux conversion, is lightroom (it seems to process raw files better). I'm getting better at the linux equivalent "darktable". I sometimes feel I would pay for software on linux to get a polished experience.
I thought the ESC key was going to be annoying, but it has ended up being everything else.
also the huge trackpad is annoying. at home with the laptop on my lap I hit the edges all the time and send the mouse flying. had to turn off "hot corners" because I kept locking my laptop randomly.
I actually wish they had a touch id sensor on the back of the display like some Android phones so it is accessible when I have the machine plugged into a display.
I really, really don't want thinner. I want the glued in battery banned, and a replaceable keyboard with ability to clean and replace the keys. I guess I just want a different definition of Pro.
How about this apple. "macbook util". The pro line can keep the thin delicate stuff. Give me the 2015 case, screen, keyboard, and magsafe, with some new internals and a usb-c. I'd happily hand over my money.
</dreamsequence>
I've been using this machine for 6 months now, and as an iOS dev I'm locked in. But I don't love it, even if they thought I was gonna.
Consider the large touch pad a gift from Apple in this regard :-)...
If you look at the anatomy of the wrist you’ll see the problem. It’s worse for woman who have been pregnant (the lining sells for some reason and stays that way)
Sign me up.
Take my money!
there is no technical reason (that i know of) stopping apple from selling a 15 inch laptop as thin as the macbook air (and still even get a low-clocked 4 core cpu in there)... i for one would buy that up in a heartbeat
for those that really need power, they can have a much thicker 6 or 8 or higher core cpu + discrete gpu and it would be fine (for that target) i would imagine...
but maybe apples marketing dept knows more than i do (not being sarcastic)
Hacker News has been whinging about this Apple dilemma for years. I'm sorry to say that I just don't think there will ever be the golden age of MacBooks again. The "Pro" ideas coming from Cupertino are gimmicky at best for developers, and we will be stuck working on various Linux machines and leave the MBP problems to designers. The hacker-type software engineer is not Apple's target market for the MBP, and I think even before it was likely coincidence.
If you look at the pro target even in this post, the majority of Mac "pro" use cases being displayed here are creative in nature. Devs generally aren't spending their days editing video or sitting in Maya and they are targeting those markets - people who need power but don't wrench into their OS internals or open a debugger when something goes wrong. Those customers are also a lot less flighty as long as their creative tools work.
As for me, I stopped complaining and wishing for a pony, accepted that the MacBook is dead, and moved to a ThinkPad for daily use. My 2015 MBP will stick around when I need macOS, but it's best to start converting my workflow to a different platform where I see a future for development work.
The prices for the high-performance models are almost as high as Apple and the power bricks are actually bricks.
I'm the biggest critic of modern Apple notebooks there is, but I can't fault the quality of the MacBook Pro displays. They are, and have been for a long time, the best displays on notebooks.
The T490 does 100% Adobe RGB? I'm impressed. Seems like Lenovo has been really listening to people complain about the horrendous gamut ThinkPads have been afflicted with for some time.
Speaker quality is a lottery with every model, and none of them are as good as the 2013+ MacBook Pro. Coil whine and electrical noise is almost a given from either the machine itself or Lenovo's chargers. The quality of the audio output on the machine is almost certainly not as good as that on the MacBook Pro.
Oh, and I can all but guarantee that the battery in a MacBook Pro will have better longevity than that of the ThinkPad.
You also have to pay almost MacBook Pro prices to get decent specs out of the Lenovo machines.
But their requirements aren't much different to developers in terms of the machines. They need reliability most of all - a MacBook failing in a production location you've had to shift kit to or have performers at can be a huge concern. Dongle life makes everything harder for no benefit. They still need to type sometimes, even spaces or the letter 'e'! MacOS's development on emerging creative technologies like HDR is not exactly setting the world on fire.
I can assure you, there are a lot of creative professionals in outright dismay at the state of Apple's current laptop line.
I would like to imagine there's space in the market for a "pro" model that would feel markedly worse for the average consumer, and shouldn't be mistakable in its name for something that would serve them better.
"Pro" means professional. The vast majority of working professionals, in the vast majority of professional fields, run Office, a mail client, a browser, and maybe a line-of-business app. Professionals regularly attend meetings, and like to be able to carry their laptop around without breaking their backs.
The needs of professionals are generally largely in line with the needs of the average consumer.
You can come up with 'professional' jobs that need more horsepower (people like traders who want to run 6 monitors, and software devs (although personally I don't understand why software devs really need more horsepower)) but those are most definitely the exception.
When i build test and lint the smallish piece of software i work on it can take quite a while. More horsepower means quick turn around cycle from "make change see result". Also sometimes i am running multiple VM or containers.
It really helps some developers out.
Yes, the keyboards have high failure rate. But I mean Apple is not known for its conservative design. If I compare my new MacBook Air with most other laptops, especially old ones, those look like teleported from 30 years ago. The new keyboard is far better to type on and my latent RSI highly appreciates less motion necessary - slow SSH sessions punish me with double types but there are solutions, maybe Mosh (mobile shell) works.
People should also consider that progress means regress in some way. Most technologies advertised on HN have some serious flaws compared to the old school alternatives. But who seriously wants to go back to 90s computing?
I'm quite happy with the new laptop, it's perfect for development, it can be used anywhere, it can be charged with my phone charger (!) and the case is made of iPad Pro scrap, I couldn't be happier.
Loads of ultra-portable PC laptops are perfect for development, can be used anywhere whatever that means, and charge with USB type-C making them compatible with a proper universal power standard.
Progress is not regress. Regress is regress, progress is progress. I'm sorry for saying this but it sounds like you're only convincing yourself that black is white in order to justify your purchase to yourself.
On a more positive note, Mosh was a game changer for me, integrate it into your toolchain, you won't be disappointed.
> Progress is not regress. Regress is regress, progress is progress.
When I switched from Windows to Linux on the Desktop it was progress in terms of stability but regress in terms of application and driver support. macOS is for me better application and driver support but the choice of hardware is more limited. After all it's not just the laptop you buy but all the components, the components' abilities/driver support, the cases. I think the perfect computer only exists in the product owner's mind ;)
And the butterfly mechanism is unproven and untrustworthy, I don't care how many times they update it.
They need to go back to using the same keyboard mechanisms for both their desktops and laptops, and they need to go back to the old arrow key layout.
I will wait another year until 2020.
Aside from that, across 2 MacBook Pro's and a MacBook Air, I've had 0 keyboard issues. I don't know if I've just gotten lucky, kept my keyboard clean, or what, but it just has never been a problem for me.
I'm fed up and switching to a different brand.
Really wish Apple would start offering touch bar as an option when you purchase!
It's by far the most infuriating aspect of this new keyboard.
Another thing that I have a hard time explaining is my inability to orientate myself on this keyboard; several times a day I have to move the laptop around, look at the keys and "reset" myself to the keyboard. I don't know what that's about but I've only ever experienced it on this keyboard.
My personal machine is a 2014 MBP which will be replaced with something other than a mac once the time comes.
I'm probably not buying a new macbook pro for a long time... it's just not worth it to have such a high end machine that I use as a glorified traveling mac mini.
For my next work upgrade I am requesting a linux laptop.
I guess there's a reason it's "Pro".
The issue last year was because Apple was applying the thermal throttling in such a way as to make the average performance of the CPU significantly lower than it needed to be by throttling too much, too quickly then recovering to too high of a clock speed too quickly thus ping-ponging between a very fast/high/hot state and a very low/cool state. In many cases the CPU would drop down below 600mhz for me for periods of time.
A proper setup will have a graph with a brief (~30s) burst to turbo max followed by a thermal throttle slightly below what the system can sustain followed by a recovery to the max sustained clock speed at just below the thermal limit.
e.g. 4.2ghz for 30s to 2.2ghz recovering to 2.6ghz sustained.
The exact profile is highly workload dependent but a properly designed system invariably follows that general profile.
... unless the system was designed to handle the thermal load, in which case it would not thermal-throttle and you'd see a sustained clock speed.
Really wish both Google and Mozilla would press pause on feature development for a couple of years and make efficiency the top priority.
Another nice bonus to content blocker extensions like these is that they’re just JSON rule lists that Safari compiles into bytecode and runs against pages as they load. The extensions are barred from access to everything, meaning they can’t be bought up and turned into Trojan horses.
No better display like oled. Looks like the same keyboard to me. Oh the material has changed? Who cares, it's the same failing mechanism. More CPU eh? Means it'll just get hotter much quicker and there will be more throttling to be fixed via software.
At this rate, for Apple to get my $$$ again they'll have to release a 16" [oled] macbook pro, with a redesigned keyboard and arm chipset so that the body is entirely cool even under load.
Maybe in 2022 I can see myself buying another macbook pro. Man, I can't wait till Tim Cook gets replaced. We need another visionary at he helm of Apple. Someone who will push the envelope again!
It's just that they keep introducing stupid, useless gimmicks.
I've only ever had a 2016+ MBP as a work computer so I didn't mind the USB-C stuff too much (especially with a dock that I didn't have to pay for). The lack of dedicated ethernet port and SD card reader is vexxing though (on my personal 2015 MBP).
The disadvantage is that one of those USB-C ports will be your charging port when there is only 4 on the 15" and 2 on the 13".
I don't mind USB-C/Thunderbolt so much, I think it's great we'll get products that will be forced to adopt it (looking at you, audio interfaces/DACs). The MBP has been a port desert for a long time and dongles are awful UX - and they just keep removing more and more of them.
It baffles me when they try and do things that seem to improve UI/UX, like the touchbar (which I hate, but I get it), the move to Retina displays, high quality dual-front facing speakers on all models now, etc... but then they turn around and remove IO options and roll out a terrible keyboard. It seems like they have warped priorities for the mac line.
Personally if the move to ARM and don't offer MacOS as a standalone product, the pro-media world will probably abandon Macs altogether. And I don't really want to develop for another OS, I love mac. The machines are just awful.
Such an unnecessary ‘enhancement’, and reminds me of the old HP Pavilion laptops, touting Altec Lansing speakers, which I thought was asinine.
Even with pixel shifting you can still get retention too, so that's not really an option right now. I'm hopeful some company in the future will come up with a way to prevent it altogether - but it's going to have to be some kind of new screen tech.
The vast majority of users choose Macs because of the great OS and the hardware specs. The "thinness" or "sleekness" is only a nice-to-have, and only if it doesn't require compromise elsewhere.
I have a newer Thinkpad for work, and it feels cheap and plastic compared to my MBP. The Lenovo creaks when I pick it up with one hand, and just feels flimsy. The MBP feels solid and integrated.
I'd love a 2013 MBP with modern components.
The fact that it matters is part of the problem. All of the Apple laptops feel solid and well put together.
> Or do you think people shouldn't be given cheaper options?
This is a cheap rhetorical tactic.
When ye say "great", I think ye mean "the one I am familiar with".
(A) Operating systems that major desktop apps support
(B) Developer-friendly operating systems (Unix/Linux at the core, default shell is bash or similar, etc.)
Windows is in (A). Linux is in (B). But macOS is in the overlapping area between (A) and (B). It's the best of both worlds.
Source: myself, a gamedev for AAA titles.
Its very common here in comments (and articles) for the two to be synonymous.
And Apple has had the mindshare of that crowd for quite some time now. But...
---
Personally, I despise working with both Windows and current generation of Linux desktops. They are clunky, inconsistent, cluttered etc. However, they are improving (albeit slowly sometimes) while Apple's "pro" offerings are degrading at an alarming rate. And with the impending advent of Marzipan we might see an exodus of pro users from MacOS.
In case of Linux and Windows you can see their effort to improve things. Their failures and shortcomings stem from either decades of legacy (Windows) or lack of overarching vision and resources (Linux).
Whereas MacOS... It has always been billed (and billed itself) as the UI/UX front runner. It was (or was trying to be) polished, consistent, good.
Apple had Human Interface Guidelines in as early as 1987[1]. Apple was the definitive yardstick interfaces would be measured by.
But in the recent year(s)... Apple has been consistently dropping the ball themselves. When their own first-party apps break almost every single HIG [2], how can one expect third-party developers to create quality apps. When their own third-party apps are locked in to landscape mode (iOS dashboard and iOS books interface), how can one expect third-party developers spend any significant amount of time creating seamless experiences across multiple screen sizes (and Apple’s own Marzipan apps like Newsstand and Home are barely ok at best).
When your OS is no better than the competition, what’s to stop people from using the competition (which actually shows willingness to improve).
[1] https://blog.prototypr.io/rediscovering-apples-human-interfa...
Since web development doesn't require a proprietary dev toolkit, it gravitated towards the platform that most naturally supports software development in general. And that happened to be Unix/Linux.
Otherwise it's the same git, cmake, etc I use everywhere, just a different language.
Plus I feel if I really needed a Linux environment, the Linux subsystem would fill that need.
I also told myself I needed a Windows laptop for hobby projects outside of work. A few things happened to make me think about getting another Mac within the next 18 months.
- All of my work now is cross platform .Net Core, JavaScript, and Python.
- I don’t have any plans on doing any Windows specific development.
- In the unlikely event that I need to do anything on Windows, I’ll spin up an EC2 instance in my hobby AWS account.
- the chances of any company I work for not giving me a Windows laptop is slim.
But honestly, I don’t do side projects that aren’t work related and I hardly ever use my computer at home besides as a Plex server. I use my iPad at home mostly with a Bluetooth keyboard for the rare personal MS Office work
Have you actually used it? A bunch of devs I work with continually have issues relating to WSL so i'm not sure if its comparable to macOS.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/
EDIT: VS Code is the main place I run into this
And all this is available to developers out of the box. Very few "cross-platform UI toolkits" can come even close.
That said, a fully native app would be a better option, but Electron apps are ok (unless devs go out of their way to make them bad)
Additionally, browsers are one of the most out-of-place feeling applications because the look and feel is controlled by the website, not by your operating system.
Note that Chromium (and hence Electron) reimplements many of these things.
Also as someone who only knows Linux and Windows and is not familiar with Mac OS, anytime I have to use it, it is a baffling experience, common things are done with gestures and keyboard shortcuts that one would never be able to intuit or discover. I find some random completely new Linux windows manager that Ive never seen before much easier to get to grips with than Mac OS.
I've been using LTSC on my work / gaming desktop for about 6 months and its been the best OS experience ive had since DOS. Everything works perfectly, and otherwise it just stays out of my way.
I'm conflicted about all this myself because I have a good experience with Win10 once I get all the extra nonsense removed, the settings changed, and my shell setup working. I feel like Windows rewards people who are willing to put the time into it now, but its not as easy as dealing with Mac OS where you basically just clear off the toolbar, put the shell and whatever dev apps onto it, and maybe tweak a few settings and you're okay to go.
Kinda like how iTunes was brushed metal forever while the Finder was Aqua and some apps roll their own UI to mimic Aqua? It's not like either Apple or Microsoft produce consistent applications, let alone the lack of control they have over third party developers. There is also Carbon vs. Cocoa, where different programs get different services "for free" from the operating system (e.g. spell check). Apple is just as guilty as Microsoft.
Win32 and WPF are both more than "decade-old," so really you're down to two. I'm not sure that 3 toolkits in 24 years is "every other year."
Cocoa is more like targeting an evergreen browser. Just target the version that is just old enough to support enough users and you’re good (and users are happy). Unlike evergreen browsers, though, you do hit hard cutoffs once every few years, but I suspect navigating those means updating the compilation/signing process more than rewriting anything (correct me if I’m wrong).
Microsoft is the same as its always been but acting like Apple has a clear, unified, and sane design doesn't reflect the evidence.
That being said, I have high hopes considering their latest efforts, the new terminal looks cool, powershell is useful and WSL2 looks to bridge the gap. I'm a die hard macOS user that requires Windows for a variety of work tasks, i'm glad to see the effort and competition.
I need a Unix-like command line environment and Windows is inferior there. Otherwise it's fine (I use it on my gaming machine), but if you look closely you can see it's a huge mess (e.g. the insane state of the control panel(s)) in ways Mac OS just isn't.
Linux is too much work. I say this as someone who has used it for years, still uses it every day, I've compiled my own kernels, etc., but it's just too much work to get everything working perfectly on my personal machine, especially on a laptop.
Mac OS doesn't have many of these problems. I am old, I have too much real work to do, and I need a machine that works and gets the fuck out of my way. I am past the point where I consider fiddling with the guts of my OS a badge of honor and think having a bunch of code up on my screen makes me look super cool like Neo from The Matrix. For people like me who don't need things it doesn't have and like what it does have, it's a good choice.
Now if only Apple would stop making so many dumb hardware choices...
Overall polish is not to Mac level, but it's a smidge above Windows 10. Which is about 100x better than my prior experiences with desktop linux.
> The vast majority of users choose Macs because of the great OS and the hardware specs
Very wrong. Your average consumer can barely differentiate between MacOS/Windows. The vast majority choose it because it's the best social-status-wise. Which it became because of form. Everybody knows that only poor people have Androids/PCs.
Having worked on several university campuses, I agree with you about Apple promoting themselves as a status symbol, but - I think you might have to run in upper-class or at least urban circles to even notice this difference. I grew up in small town America, where nobody was buying laptop computers the price of a used car. Doctors, lawyers, pretty much everybody I knew as a kid ran Windows. Most people had a traditional desktop tower, whether or not they had a laptop.
The few exceptions tended to be geeks, or people who were devoted to the Apple ecosystem because they had been using Macs since at least the early '90s.
Now that I'm in urban university circles, I'm the only person using Androids / non-Apple PC hardware. Apple really seems to be the "default", and people using other things are doing so for pretty solid technical reasons.
Now that they're $1400 w/ 16g ram / $1500 out the door, I recommend them to no one. $1.5k is just too much money for a basic laptop.
> “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
– Steve Jobs
Both ran perfectly silent.
Having pulled a //e out of storage, that's all still true, FWIW. (I need to recap that machine one day soon.)
> The first production Apple IIs had hand-molded cases; these had visible bubbles and other lumps in them from the imperfect plastic molding process, which was soon switched to machine molding. In addition, the initial case design had no vent openings, causing high heat buildup from the PCB and resulting in the plastic softening and sagging. Apple added vent holes to the case within three months of production; customers with the original case could have them replaced at no charge.
Aside what was mentioned in your other replies, I think the biggest piece of evidence is the fact that they stuck with their one-button mouse for such a long time even after multi-button mice became a very common third-party hardware purchase alongside a new Mac.
Another commenter mentioned a famous Steve Jobs quote where he said something along the lines of "the form is the function" but I'm absolutely positive that's part of an overall sales-pitch and not a description of reality.
That is untrue. You might get away with arguing that it's the case now to an extent, and you could've argued that with the famously dysfunctional hockey-puck-mouse that shipped with the first iMacs, but to adduce the one-button mouse as evidence for said hypothesis betrays your ignorance of UI research and Apple's good old Human Interface Guidelines.
Here's all the desktop UI research you need to know: Apple has the worst UI of any desktop OS by far. It's full of undiscoverable functionality, icon-only buttons that you have to click first to find out what they do and lacking many features for basic things like window management... But it certainly is hilarious watching people operate it, swiping furiously to find that full-screen app that they lost because there's no real maximize button and the dock is now hidden or having to use the mouse pointer to do just every operation because the keyboard acceleration sucks.
Their mobile OS UI is very similarly meh, lacking options, hiding things and so-forth...the only thing really good about it is that it's more stable than Android.
And actually your own ignorance has been displayed here. There's nothing about the alleged superiority of one-button mice in the HIG. Look it up.
Source: Work at a phone/computer repair store. Mess ups happen but even the technician might not know if they broke the camera, if it was working before, etc. They may just be too low to make exceptions for you and have to assume it was already broken.
Am I the only one that feels this way?
I think this is the root of most of these Apple design faux pas... he goes back to the Steve Jobs Era and was definitely blessed.
With Steve gone there is probably no one at the company who can actually say "This is the worst !@#$%^& thing ever!" like Steve Jobs liked to say. Tim Cook doesn't seem to be a product guy or something and trusts Ive too much.
Ive's ideas were good back in the day when everything was huge and clunky but he seems to look at everything and try to think it is still not sleek & minimalist enough and he's just gone too far at some point. It's a wonder we still have keyboards at all on these laptops!
I have a 2018 MBP and I am lucky.. I use it 99% of the time plugged in at my desk at work. They provided us all with $400 OWC USB-3 docks so I mostly dodge the dongle thing. I have some cheaper dongles at home that live permanently on my desk. So I also don't run into too many touchbar issues since I rarely do anything serious on the internal keyboard.
For some reason my usage I don't have battery issues. A lot of my co-workers do. Ad blockers don't help with Docker & Eclipse hogging CPU.
I wish for 32GB of ram every day, we got our 2018 laptops < 6 months before they added the 32GB option.
Linux is much better, I tried a pilot System 76 laptop our IT let us try. It was great for development, hugely better than the Mac. But it was horrible as a laptop, horrible for going to meetings. Drained the battery in 1 hour if you had to do a WebEx. Constant WiFi & VPN issues. Having to reboot the machine sometimes to clear up issues with external displays and internal displays. I gave it back after a month when I admitted I was wasting 40% of my work time chasing linux issues.
I feel like this isn't spoken about enough. Or that I'm doing something wrong which most people who say how their lives have changed for the better by switching to Dell+Ubuntu don't experience.
I really liked MacOS for development. It gave me a familiar Unix-like environment that didn't require me to screw around trying to fix trivial things over and over again. I didn't have to screw around with kernel updates or try to troubleshoot anything. I only ever needed to set things up once, I didn't have to worry that the next time I reboot I might lose configurations.
I've been using Elementary OS/Ubuntu on a Surface Book now for a while and dealing with it is ongoing frustration. At some point my top bar just disappeared and never came back. Trying to add any sort of modification that tries to make using the OS more intuitive leads to all sorts of unexpected issues.
I want to love GNU/Linux. I really do. But I can't even remotely understand how anyone could love it more than MacOS. GNU/Linux feels like it's always in Beta.
In truth, using GNU/Linux gives me a feeling of imposter syndrome. I feel like the reason why I can't stand it even though so many people love it isn't because the operating systems are bad, but because I'm just incompetent and don't know what I'm doing. It's frustrating.
Personally I use Ubuntu Mate and couldn't be much happier. There is no real learning curve if you've used a traditional desktop.
I too wish they would make a better computer, but for now I continue to use them because they are the only machine that I can work on with little fuss of setup and go.
I have the 2018 model with the "Keyboard" which has been fine because I use a Bluetooth Mechanical keyboard anyway and a BT Mouse. I have a single cable or "Dongle" that supplies power, 3 displays, 5 USB 3.0 type A, 2 USB Type C, a SD Card Reader and Ethernet. Its also Daisy-Chained to an External GPU and temps stay good. When I need to go portable I just unplug a single cable and go.
Switching from 512MB to 1TB SSD: +$400
WHY? This is literally the only thing that bothers me about Apple pricing. I get that you pay for the design, I get the quirks like introducing touch bar, everything. But I don't get why upgrading from a $50 to a $100 SSD adds 400 dollars.
If you have criticism, price isn't a valid one.
But you can definitely argue that they should have cheaper/slower options so that consumers who don't need blazing fast SSDs can still benefit from increased storage.
Here's how the 2018 Macbook's SSD stacks up against the competition: https://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2018/07/macbookprossdt...
That's why there's such a huge price difference. Not because they're randomly picking high upgrade prices to screw customers.
I'm extremely skeptical that Apple has some magic SSD with 6.5x read/write speed of everyone else.
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st...
Apple doesn't manufacture SSDs, they buy them from the same companies that Dell, HP, Asus, etc... do. There isn't special Mac only models of those drives, it's all the same hardware in the end. The only advantage I see is that Apple was quick to switch to M.2 and macrumors cherry picked their competition to avoid PCs with M.2 SSDs.
The read / write speeds on the SSD in the Macbook Pro are insane.
see: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/13/2018-macbook-pro-fastes...
we are talking at least 6x what other laptops use.
It's the difference between cheap SATA SSDs and expensive NVMe PCIe SSDs.
Search for comps on any online retailer and you'll see how expensive and fast those are.
> Search for comps on any online retailer and you'll see how expensive and fast those are.
$250 for a 1TB 970 EVO Plus. Which has better write throughput.
That 250$ more to upgrade to the 1tb from the 512gb.
the retail price of the upgrade is 450$
OP said it's a 50$ upgrade.
It is not.
It's a 450$ retail price and 250$ sale price for a slightly slower SSD.
Yes, companies make money when they do things for you.
And OP was wrong, that doesn't make you right:
> They are not 'suspicious' they really are that fast compared to the standard cheap SSDs.
They're not that fast compared to SSDs retailing for half the price of the upgrade.
> Search for comps on any online retailer and you'll see how expensive and fast those are.
I did and they're not.
> It's a 450$ retail price and 250$ sale price for a slightly slower SSD.
No matter how much you hate it, it's still a $250 retail price: https://www.newegg.com/samsung-970-evo-plus-1tb/p/N82E168201... And a $125 upgrade: https://www.newegg.com/samsung-970-evo-plus-500gb/p/N82E1682...
On the original article[1] the table also shows results from a synthetic benchmark. This shows 2.6GB/s for Macbook and 1.2GB/s for Dell XPS. They also mention that it's a bit apple vs oranges, since different tools were used for the benchmark.
[1] https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/2018-macbook-pro-benchmar...
More problematically, it also has serious latency degradation issues when working outside the SLC cache: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-...
No one is saying those SSDs are Apple exclusive, they are however expensive.
They charge 450$ retail and 250$ on special for a slightly slower SSD
The 1TB EVO Plus is $250 on newegg. Not as replacement for an existing 500GB, just retail price for the drive. The 2TB EVO is listed at $550, the 2TB EVO Plus is listed at $650.
Edit: I don’t really understand downvotes. SSD on recent Macbook Pros does connect to the northbridge via 4 PCIe lanes. And this is not what “but look I can the same for £50” SSD does.
If you want to install Debian on the X1 it’s pretty easy. Just make sure to fix some of the sleep issues using the (easy) instructions on this page, which in my experience still apply to Debian: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...
A great example of why people buy Macs, though. Most people don't want to faff around with hackery getting Linux to work properly. And with Windows 10's horrible privacy issues, Macs are still the best choice. They're buying them for the software, not the hardware.
However people always say this as if Linux is at fault. Well, mostly the sleep issues exist because the laptop ships with windows, and windows has some fancy sleep mode that involves a specific bios setting.
Linux uses more traditional sleep settings, so when installing Linux one must change that bios setting and then run a command to tell the OS that setting has been changed.
So you didn’t say Linux is at fault, but just to be clear: this is just what you get when the manufacturer doesn’t support your preferred OS.
However as a robotics engineer, I prefer open source over ease of use. I’m not suggesting regular people do this, but sharing the tips with the Hacker News crowd who may also be fine with running a few terminal commands to get a great OS experience on hardware which may be a better value than a MacBook today given their issues discussed in this thread.
My 2016 MacBook Pro has display issues, keyboard issues, the USB c power cable falls out sometimes. When I first got it, the machine sometimes crashed when connecting an external display. They fixed that, and then the machine would just not see the display sometimes until I reboot. I use an EGPU now - which performs better but the machine ends up needing a reboot (or just hard crashing) every week or two. It’s abysmal. Oh, and I’m starting to get the stage light effect on the display now. I’m relieved I’ll be able to get that fixed for free now, since I imagine it’s only going to get worse as the cable degrades. I feel like Apple snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
I’ll probably replace this machine in a year or two. I don’t want to run Linux or windows on my work laptop but I’ll do what I need to do in order to have a reliable computing environment. Since they’re near the end of this design cycle I’m hoping this 2019 edition or the one after have most of the design problems fixed. If not, Linux for windows is looking mighty fine these days.
Problems with sleep/resume were what ultimately convinced me to switch from Linux to Mac 12 years ago. It's insane to see there are still issues with it today.
It’s not a problem with Linux, it’s just due to the fact that Linux and windows are different and the laptop is configured for windows. Once you make the change the sleep behavior is wonderful and I keep the laptop in my bag for days at a time on sleep.
The top-of-the-line option, a Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2, doesn't seems like it's going to perform much better than an NVidia Geforce GTX 1050[0], and at $350 extra it's twice the cost of a standalone NVidia Geforce GTX 1050.
[0]: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-vega-20.c32...
Well there's an absolute ton of issues with external GPUs in bootcamped Windows.
So.. that's not even an option.
- getting a console, which probably offers the best price/performance ratio
- using something like ASRock's Deskmini A300 which is really affordable and features a GPU capable of light to medium gaming
- or use a proper desktop setup if you don't want to cut any corners
In any case stick to a proper Windows environment for gaming. My daily driver is a Mac Mini, but for gaming I boot up a dedicated Windows box.
So now instead I've got a "gaming" desktop that sits pretty idle and a MBP again.. like usual.
None of that outweighs the conveniences of OS X.
I’ve been reading about how Apple screwed the pooch for almost forty years now, and yet they just keep taking over the world...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/17/apple-plans-new-1...
- It runs really, really hot. It cannot be used on your lap. I cannot imagine how hot a faster model would be.
- The keyboard is unreliable. I have not had the stuck key problem (yet!), but I do notice occasional crunching like something is stuck in the keys. I do not eat around this machine on purpose.
- The Touchbar is really bad. I wanted to like it. But, it is annoying more times than it is helpful.
- Not having a touchscreen when every other high end machine does seems more and more like a gap that needs to be resolved.
- Windows management continues to be crap in OSX.
There are a lot of good things. The screen is good. The touchpad is top notch. OSX is reliable and fast. But, yeah, the hardware just sucks right now. No way around it.
I think my main frustration is just that a few things about the trackpad aren't quite right. For example, I can't find a combination of settings under Windows which give the physical right-click behaviour that Mac OS has.
What about the track pad isn’t working? And do you notice any “coil whine” I’ve been reading about?
My other choice may be a Precision but haven’t read enough about it.
Thank you
I love how big the screen is— it's a 15" display in a chassis that's barely bigger than my old 13" MBP. That said, camera below the screen is a definite negative, so that's great if it's been moved back; I've just assumed I'll get a clip-on USB cam and leave it at home for VC use.
For many years I was a very happy Apple customer and even converted several family members to MacBooks. But now that Apple has shown just how little regard they have for their pro customers by trying to sell us this broken keyboard for the fourth time I’m getting off the bus for good. My next laptop will not be a Mac. Thank god I stopped doing iOS development.
Also because I think the market for native apps is shrinking and that the web has more growth potential.
Don't see anything re: keyboard so guessing that there aren't any changes there, unfortunately.
My colleague's Macbook keyboard broke today. Close to 400 quid to diagnose and fix (we declined, its a huge chunk of the original price). Just ofer 4 years old (which is nothing) and juuuuust out of the replacement programme Apple has for keyboards they knew were faulty.
Lifelong Apple suporter until the past few years. Avoid like the plague.
Unpopular opinion, but I continue to believe Apple needs to just walk away from the computer business. It's a negligible part of their core phone business, and it shows. I really wish that they'd license the OS to let people (and OEMs) build quality workstations.
[1] https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...
Problem is, it’s still far superior for anyone who needs to do technical and general office work. Tried Linux, doesn’t cut it for the latter. And the industrial design etc is still much better.
So Apple is on this downward trend in quality, and it worries me because there’s no alternative. Are we just going to see productivity drop across the board as Apple gradually regresses back to the mean?
We need more Apple-like companies designing great products.
I love the unix lineage on Mac OS with a consumer ready GUI.
By far the #1 thing that keeps me from using windows as my main machine is the registry.
I do have an old windows desktop that I upgraded with SSD and maxed out the ram and it runs great with windows 10.
I also run windows 10 in parallels on my Mac (for the office suite and a few windows only programs. Time machine backup works incredibly well and I can 100% rely on it. I can be up and running in minutes even if my windows 10 image gets completely destroyed.
I had a mac stolen, went to the store, bought a new one, restored from time machine almost immediately.
The only thing Ive been disappointed in is that the stability of the last two versions hasnt been great. I used to go months without a reboot, now I crash about once every two weeks.
You can use phrase "the fastest Mac notebook ever" each year when a new notebook released.
And of course the 8 core option, at $2799, only has 512GB of disk space and 16GB RAM. If you want a reasonable 32GB and 1TB disk space (which presumably you would if you have a use for 8 cores), it's a whopping $3,600.
And that is of course before accessories and tax.
I thought that after the overpriced iphone release they would have changed their pricing on everything else, but I guess it's just same old apple.
Well, after they did that other phone manufacturers announced even more expensive phones, so I'm not sure they're stepping back from that so soon.
I've even filled out a survey that apple sent me about macbook pros a while ago. And I explicitly wrote to go back in the design of the keyboards, the ports and the thickness.
I will use this computer until I can't fix it anymore.
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/05/21/apple-backlight-service...
Cost me 2 hrs and some bruised fingers but I'm good for years.
And if Apple hasn't amended this disaster when this battery fails, I'll replace it again.
I use a Dell XPS running Ubuntu with 12 cores and 32GB of ram with a 1050 in a 15 inch. It is a really amazing platform, doesn't have these keyboard or screen issues, and cost less than a MacBook Pro.
I recently switched to a Dell XPS 15 9560 running Pop!_OS. Talk about a simple setup for a Linux system running a HiDPI screen. Before that, I was running Manjaro with i3 and it was fairly easy to set up but took a bit more fiddling.
I'm so sick of these fucking dongles. Thank god it still has the 3.5mm port, because it must have taken an act of divinity to prevent that part of the Apple crazy from reaching the MBP yet.
Lack of speed ceased to by my concern with the 2013 MBP (which I still use today).
Better hurry up, Apple, the mid-2012 is starting to get cranky, and I wouldn't want to have to buy a ThinkPad.
They need to quit being so thin it seems.
How dependent is Apple on the "nerd factor" with its laptops? They definitely got a boost from capturing designers and "hip engineers" a while back; if these folks got disgusted and left, would it matter now?
I love my 2016 MacBook Pro (touchbar is not great but kinda neat, I’ve replaced my usb-b->a to usb b->c cables so only need a dongle to travel, I can fly on the keyboard IFF my fingernails are trimmed very tight (lol), screen is great, sound is great, it’s fast as hell).
However, as you can see in my comment history, I’ve had substantial issues with keyboard and screen outside of warranty. Apple, fortunately and rightfully, has completely taken care of it; but I had several days of consternation while I had to wait and see what Apple decided to do. Makes me really think twice spending a lot on a new one.
I might bite if they've fixed this. Oh and no touch bar.
Not worth buying until we have at LEAST a few months of experience to see if they really did this time.
They say it's improved. But check back in a year or so to see if it works, because the 3rd gen revisions didn't end up fixing it before.
If you have a 3rd gen butterfly keyboard, replacements will now use the 4th gen.
If you have a 1st or 2nd, they'll continue to replace the failing keyboards with more failing keyboards. Lucky me!
In other news for the 2016 MBP, there's a new repair extension program for the "Oops we made the display ribbon cable too short" issue. Haven't had that problem myself, but this was an expensive goddamn laptop and I'm not optimistic about its resale value or lifespan after the 4 year repair window is up. Multiple known design flaws that cost $600-$800, and in the keyboard's case are just putting in more of the same failure-prone parts.
My non-Retina MBP would need to be at 100% for 10-15+ minutes for the fans to kick in at half the volume.
Apple ducked up big time with the post-2015 generation MacBooks, and it was caused by the weird hunt for thinness and gimmicky features which nobody want from a professional portable workstation.
"Thinner than a 2015 MacBook Pro" is last on most people’s wishlists. What good is a thin laptop if the keyboard fails and the performance you pay for can't be used since the operating temperature is too high?
It says a lot about a company when a large amount of customers just don’t care for the new features and they just want the new performance in the old form factor.
It’s like the ones who made the current generation never uses a laptop, and has no idea about how people are actually using the product.
But if you don’t like butterfly keyboards... yep, still butterfly even if it’s reliable now.
If you want a machine that doesn't have ZombieLoad, and is also Intel, you have to wait until they really patch it in new hardware or disable hyperthreading.
"The 40% figure is only with hyperthreading off" source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210107
2. No keyboard fix
3. No thin bezels
4. Still annoying touchbar.
5. $2799 for the 8-core with 16GB RAM and only 512GB SSD.
Hahaha.. No, thanks.
gross.
Edit:
lol, they actually have already included this new laptop in the keyboard replacement program:
https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...
I have no idea which of those is the correct interpretation...
For the record, I have exchanged my 2018 MBP twice (so far) because of multiple different hardware problems. Not inspiring confidence to see the 2019 preemptively listed here.
If they would just go back to the old pricing model and bring back a sane robust keyboard people would be so much happier.
I did this with a top-spec'd 2016 MBP that eventually got replaced with a 2017 due to the frequency of problems. Recently spent too many hours getting my 2017 repaired (& back up to its previous state) for the same issues.
Very disappointing given the price point.
Apple, make it a little thicker to handle a better keyboard and cooling system.
But new MacOS and hardware are frighteningly unstable. I have observed roughly 1 in 5 times that it’ll crash outright with blank screen when attached to external display. Resetting PRAM, & SMC work for a couple of days and then back to same behaviour. Apple Store had a quick look but stupid thing didn’t crash so they blamed it on faulty cables at work and home. How can a cable can cause it to crash even after disconnected?
Unless they up their game I’ll never spend my own money on another Mac.
The 2018 model can't fully use the current hexa-core CPU so slapping another two cores in isn't going to help things. It is going to be basically useless outside of ~5 seconds turbo boost.
While I haven't had a keyboard issue it is a constant source of anxiety which sucks. I was really hoping Apple would go with a redesign this year (as unlikely as it was) and I had planned on selling this 2018 model and upgrade but with the same keyboard and a pointless CPU update in same body I will pass.
Hopefully next year we see a redesign with a decent keyboard. Also got my fingers crossed for a 120Hz ProMotion display.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i9_micropro...
But judging by all the comments out there, it feels now that the only reason people buy mac hardware is because of mac os.
Put another way, having great software enables upselling thriftier consumers on the hardware, which is the thing that actually makes money, especially now that OS upgrades are free and don't make money on their own. As long as both the software and the hardware are indeed great, then people feel good about their purchase.
If it's no longer the best hardware (or the best software), then that positive reinforcement loop goes away, and you end up with users who still like macOS, but not as much as they used to, who are doubly frustrated because they feel like they have to spend even more money on hardware that is no longer best-in-class, and has features that they're paying extra for that they view as negatives (touchbar, butterfly keyboard, unergonomically huge trackpad, minimal ports, dongletown, unasked for levels of thinness that forces so many compromises, greatly diminished resale value, etc.).
Also, you think to mix hardware with hardware power, but you seem to forget design. The mac renaissance of the steve jobs 2 era started with a new line of cute colored imacs, great advertising, and strong brand recognition. Those kind of things you don’t get with software.
Who are their target PRO users then, if not the developers?
I want a system with an octo-core i9, 32GBs of RAM, a metal body, and a large multi-touch trackpad. As much as I hate to say it, if you want a high-end laptop, Apple still has the market. I found some Dells that are close spec wise but not all the way there, or systems which are as thick as a deck of magic cards... They're (apple) are gonna get my $4k whether I like it or not.
And how expensive is it? No thanks, up to today, a Dell/Lenovo+Linux goes way way better than MBP and the heavy OSX.
I have a fairly new MacBook that I still love for its portability and it is great for light weight stuff, but it is not my main driver.
My 2013 is still working, but the screen hinge is loose and it's probably wearing on the display cable. Nothing new there, though. The display cable was the first thing to fail on my white iBook around 2005.
Wish I still had the Macintosh Portable with the built in carrying handle and roller ball I found at a garage sale! Now that would be a neat mod. Talk about a good keyboard.
most useless math ever
I looked at the 4 core i7 configurations and they have Geekbench score of 13k-14k. So, doesn't seem that bad compared to the new processors and should hold up on CPU front for three more years I guess.
I had a question to people who use 15" MBPs. Since I am not able to get 13" ones with 16 GB RAM. Are the 15" noticeably bulky and less mobile than 13" ones?
Since this was an office one, I returned it and continued on my 2014 rMBP. It might have been fixed now btw. I will also try the newer X1s I can before finalizing on one.
Back then, I was smiling at those PC builders with their RGB 'crap' but now I'd love to build my own battlestation with RGB everywhere. The PC ecosystem is more authentic, honest and more about tech.
I think the only thing that might tempt me is if they brought back the 17" form factor, but I don't think they have made those for almost a decade. Those things were monsters, and everyone I know who had one rode it until it wouldn't go anymore.
I've introduced over 5 bugs because of this shite, by randomly deleting one dangling brace...
https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...
How long does it take to get your macbook back?
I'm having this issue and I want to figure out how long i'm going to be out of commission for
"the fastest Mac notebook ever" (x3)
"is more powerful than ever" (x2)
"the best Mac notebook display ever"
"the latest version of the world’s most advanced desktop operating system."So much double typing on 2018, who designed that keyboard? It is not even a Pro laptop for authors anymore, who arguably need the least computing power.
Unfortunately I use external hard disk as boot , and in recent releases of MacOS I think apple started pushing towards fusion drive due to which had to buy a new ssd and move again ( any other alternatives?)
Apple just doesn't want to learn.
Apple's war on repair shops doesn't make me want to spend a lot of money on an Apple laptop. It's just a bad investment.
Until then my 2014 MBP will have to suffice, and if that breaks I'll use Linux.
You can get an 8 Core 27 inch 5K iMac $100 cheaper, with less thermal constraints.
Sure I would take one if my company paid for it.
The situation isn't helped by the GPU inside the same slim mbpro chassis that also gets super hot, it's particularly bad when you run mixed CPU/GPU workloads like rendering. So your desktop ends up being much faster for continuous workloads, even if on paper they both have 8-core 5ghz CPUs.
I had the 2018 6-core i9 mbpro. Got rid of it, if I were to buy a new mbpro again I would get a 4-core one.
Apple has a couple of eGPUs they made with Blackmagic (AMD RX580 - you don't want this one - and Vega 56), very slick looking and silent but unfortunately GPUs not user upgradeable and not great value for money.
You can use most tb3 eGPU enclosures and an AMD GPU of your choice. Vega64 prob the best choice now, Navi around the corner, can't use NVidia at all thanks to Apple. It'll cost you less than the official Apple eGPU and the GPU will be upgradeable
(I had to replace my 2015 MBP13 with the a late 2018 model. I am too mightily disappointed and would not buy a new Apple laptop).
Without meaningfully overhauling the cooling system there is no reason to think that an 8 core on the same process is going to fare well.
Looks like a Matebook X Pro next time for me, or an XPS. Thankfully my '14 MBP runs beautifully still.
I don't think it does.
Somebody might say "Apple continues the war against its own users".
Also in this update: Pro Vega 20 GPU is an option.
Cooled by what? Oh, right, almost nothing. If you actually know enough about computers to know what those numbers mean, you also know that those clock speeds cannot be sustained with this laptop's cooling solution. It is just baffling people who don't know better with numbers.
I jumped ship. Love my System 76 Darter.
* Performance now equivalent to 6 cores due to Intel microcode vulnerabilities
'keyboard' not found
Command-W
Utterly ridiculous they haven’t redone this keyboard yet.
But trust me I've got Amazon open and am ready to swipe right on something new and better whenever it comes along.
9th Generation Intel® Core i9-9880H with vPro (2.30GHz, up to 4.80GHz with Turbo Boost, 8 Cores, 16MB Cache)
However I don’t see Intel switching to AMD. They have all the same problems, more or less. Primarily Apple has little control over their future with an outside supplier.
Well then I won’t be buying one.
Apple knows they will keep selling these things due to the brand image.
A fully specced new macbook pro with the i9 costs 6500 DOLLARS.
i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, 4TB SSD, and Vega Pro GPU.
I have spent, in 15 years of owning/building computers and laptops, around $8000 total. The fact that these numbers are even comparable is insane.