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Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

These used to excite me because I've desperately needed 32gb and faster procs and used to upgrade every 2-3 years but now I just yawn at MBP releases. I'm so unexcited by everything about this form factor other than the fact that it has OSX. I'm guessing I'll be on my 2016 until I finally bite the bullet and quit using OSX if they don't make a more compelling package to spend my $3k on in the next few years.

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.

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> 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).

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!

"I don't want thinner" is really what apple needs to hear.

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.

> Thinner means you take away my ports so I have to carry dongles.

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.

People have complained about Apple removing things since they first removed floppy drives. They remove them not because of some misguided belief, but because it’s old tech. I have a MBP from 2012 still going strong. When laptops last that long a bit of future proofing is a bonus. If you swap laptops every other year then you obviously miss out on this benefit. PC manufacturers will start removing USB ports and if history is any judge we’ll see zero complaints about them doing it, just like with the floppy

There are two reasons the floppy drive isn't a very good comparison, in my opinion. The first is that floppy drive usage had already dropped dramatically because software was distributed on CDs and macs had been networked for years. So the use cases for floppies were a lot fewer and farther between, meaning it was less upsetting to people that Apple made the bold move of just dropping them. Also keep in mind that by this point, the Zip drive had absolutely taken over as the sneakernet of this era, and those were 100% aftermarket add-ons. The second reason the floppy is very different is that if you consider the tree of all the devices that are plugged into your mac, floppy drives are leaf nodes. Nothing else plugs into them, so removing them impacts nothing but floppy usage. Every day I plug in a DisplayPort monitor, an HDMI monitor, USB 2.0 yubikey, and USB 2.0 keyboard+mouse via a USB 2.0 hub. That's a lot of perfectly functional stuff to replace just because Apple jumped the gun on deciding USB-C had taken over.

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?"

> > Thinner means you take away my ports so I have to carry dongles.

> 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.

>and I hit ESC 1000 times a day because I'm a vim user

Do yourself a favour:

https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_macOS

1) I have an escape key because I'm clinging to my 2015 MBP

2) I already have capslock remapped to "hyper" aka ctrl+alt+shift+command and use it heavily.

Agreed, the keyboard is awful. I just want a decent/good keyboard, an HDMI port, and just 1 USB A port, I'll definitely take 0.5mm thicker for those. Well, at least they kept the headphone jack...

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.

> an 8 core processor is awesome

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.

> and it certainly doesn't look like Apple did anything to improve thermal capacity in this refresh

Well, it says they did, but I guess you know better.

> 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?

> Agreed, the keyboard is awful.

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...

They are loud, to the point of being annoying during a meeting / conference call and the travel distance is a bit too short for some people, making typing unpleasant. If you use a Lenovo or even a dell of equal body thickness for a bit and then get back to a modern Mac, the difference is huge.

Failure rate, not typing speed, is the crux of the concern. Additionally, at least for me, is the volume of the keypresses - much louder.

The two main issues for me are failure rates and key travel. My fingers literally hurt when I use it. The 2012-2015 form was probably less beautiful to look at (and slightly thicker), but it was much better to type with.

I'm glad someone else mentioned their fingers physically hurting when using it. I haven't seen many other complaints round this online and its shocking - This made me stop using the device completely - I was in pain just by typing normally!

I didn’t get it until I bought a new keyboard and starting working on it. You quickly realize how uncomfortable this keyboard is.

I love the keyboard.

I don't mind it (though as I commented elsewhere, the volume of the keypresses is a bit louder). I think most of the complaints are aimed at reliability however, which is a bit scary on a $2000+ machine (even though I had to replace the SSD, the keys on my 2013 MBP are still as good as day 1)

Have you found it?

2018 Macbook Pro is 3mm thinner than 2015 MBP.

0.5mm for all the things you asked for sounds really hard.

I'd take 3mm thicker than the 2015 without suffering much. These things go into backpacks that have much more space anyways.

I thought the same thing. Now I'm stuck with a $1500 Asus laptop that barely plays Netflix a year and a half later. despite an 7th gen i7 and 16gb of DDR4. Now I'm saving up for a Macbook Pro again, despite my hatred for the keyboard and touchbar.

> Now I'm stuck with a $1500 Asus laptop that barely plays Netflix a year and a half later. despite an 7th gen i7 and 16gb of DDR4.

Any idea what's wrong with it?

Maybe he has a spinning disk in it? I see lots of laptops in that price range that go for the 1TB HDD instead of the 256GB SSD. Windows 10 on a 5400RPM HDD is pretty miserable these days, the OS just can't stop touching the disk and it's forever IO bound.

I've had the same problem. I had a i7 T420 with 16GB of RAM that was lightning quick when I got it and over a few years became completely unusable even for basic tasks. When I hit the Windows key to open the start menu, I could turn and take a sip of coffee before it opened. Reformatting and reinstalling from scratch did nothing to improve the speed.

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.

Still doesn't seem right. with an SSD it's only as fast as Windows 7 on a rotating HDD?

Hitting the Windows key on Windows 7 even with an HDD was instant. Hitting the Windows key on Windows 10 with an HDD tok seconds. Installing an SSD brought it back to being instant.

Hard to get much faster than instant.

Does it have anything to do with Win10 start menu want's to download an ad to show you?

It's no longer bottlenecked on the disk IO presumably.

Yeah I mean a machine like that should be able to run web apps with no problems...

Does it have a SSD in it? Unfortunately some manufacturers like to spec out everything except a SSD. If it doesn’t, and especially if they stuck you with a hybrid drive (ugh), upgrade to a SSD and it should perform well again. It will certainly be an order of magnitude cheaper than a new laptop, too.

Check for thermal throttling. Dust can severely slow down a laptop, even though task manager says that it is only using 10% of the CPU.

Why does it barely play Netflix? Why would a Macbook be better?

If they're using Chrome rather than Edge or the native app then the video is rendered in software, which will quite possibly result in a poor experience on an underpowered machine.

(TBH the same issue happens on a Mac though, except Safari instead of Edge).

That makes sense, I guess Netflix won't choose a video quality/resolution to play back based on your processing power but rather just on your network bandwidth

Netflix's determination is made primarily on the basis of DRM security levels in this case.

Like others said, what?

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.)

I guess "hacker" doesn't really mean what it used to mean. I thought it used to mean people who are curious and like to tinker. Maybe it now means "busy people who have no time to actually tinker but like the idea of tinkering".

From this long discussion a couple of months ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415185 ), this comment is about fans spinning up:

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.

Same here. Replaced my MacBook Pro with an X1 Carbon last summer. Short circuiting my usual 2-year upgrade cycle and buying whatever Apple releases this fall.

Sorry to say, but you should have bought a Dell or Lenovo. -- On the other hand I think something is wrong with your Asus, this can't be.

Bizzare, my $800 Asus from 2013 still plays Netflix just fine. But I did swap in an SSD and replaced the battery once.

I'd have tried a Dell XPS or Surface Pro.

I don’t get the touch pad complaint (I don’t agree with the others either but that’s a boring worn out argument) - macOS has had excellent “accidental touch” detection in my experience.

So I come from the weird world of Thinkpad point-stick users so take my ergo desires with a grain of salt if you hate that thing. I don't like having to use a buttonless touchpad to begin with and while the MBP touchpad is the best I've ever used I loved it on my 2015 and despise how large it is on the 2016 I've got now. I do EVERYTHING I can to not use this laptop as a laptop. It's keyboard and touchpad experience are just awful, well, the keyboards awful, the touchpad size is just an annoyance.

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.

Meanwhile my palm can literally rest on the touchpad while typing and I don’t trigger it. Are you in a particularly dry area or something? This is completely the opposite of my experience and I’ve used every MBP since they changed the name from PowerBook. I agree on the keyboard though, but then again I dislike any laptop keyboard due to the short key travel and lack of a mechanical option

But is it because it is triggered or you think it will be triggered? I don’t know that I’ve ever accidentally triggered the trackpad in 12 years of MBPs

Completely agreed. I’m on my 2016 max spec. Need to take it in for keyboard repair at some point and I’ve barely used the keyboard as I’m using external keyboard and monitors 99% of the time. If they offered the new one with an option to get it without the Touch Bar and old style keyboard that alone would be an instant buy for me.

Have you considered just getting a workstation and doing everything on it via ssh?

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.

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