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Comment by neural_thing | Hacker News Reader

I just want a MBP that is a late 2013 body with modern hardware inside it. I know there are many others like me.

Are you sure you wouldn't rather have the 2008-2012 body? It's a bit easier to upgrade or repair.

(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 big improvement in the 2012-2015 body is that getting rid of upgradability and the optical drive allowed putting in a huge battery (basically the max allowed on airplanes). It also cut the weight by more than a pound.

Most of that is the optical drive, right?

There's a lot to love in the 2013-2015 line, but the 2008-2012 series will always have my heart. I've never had a laptop so easy to work on, and being able to put two drives in a portable is icing on the cake.

They keyboard on the '08-'12's noticeably better than in the '13-'15. Either is way better than the current version.

Yup, I'm on an old top-of-the-line 2011 that I swapped out the DVD for an extra SSD. It's spoiled me — such that to replace it I want 16-32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD.

I preferred the 2007 body (the one before the chicklet keys.)

I'd shelve another k for 17"...

It's probably time to start banging the ThinkPad drum again, but first they need to put their RAM back in sockets.

I think it's time to make peace with changes like this, proportionate to their importance to overall impact on functionality. One free slot (with a maximum amount of RAM determined by Intel, not soldering) is probably good enough. Same with removable batteries (the need for which is obviated by USB charging). Indicator LEDs, probably not worth it. Screen aspect ratio, and so on, are probably worth complaining about though.

Disclaimer: work for Apple but about 1000 miles away from hardware

The MacBook touch pads are leagues above all the competition. It’s the number one thing that keeps me away from my think pads.

And a $20 mouse is leagues above any touchpad.

not for me, my hand kill me with any mouse, vertical included. Cannot leave the mac's touchpad

Maybe you don't want to comment, but are people inside Apple that use a MacBook all day generally happy with the keyboards? I know there's going to be a mix of opinions, but here and on sites like Reddit, it feels like there's a majority opinion that the new keyboards are worse.

Sometimes I just smash the keys till they get unstuck.

Why do you say that? Isn't that entirely a personal preference thing? I have preferred any good non-Apple touchpad I have tried to Apple's. (To be fair, 90% of laptops sold ship with cheap, terrible touchpads.) The touchpad on my Dell XPS is a good example; zero finger friction, physical left/right buttons at the bottom of the touchpad, and perfect sensitivity / detection of tap to click and two finger scroll. The drivers support "natural" scrolling too.

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.

After I got the haptic touch trackpad, I can’t go back to physical buttons. Ability to click anywhere on a trackpad with a click like feedback is one of the best things Apple ever did.

Maybe if they reduced the force required to click the button by about 75% I could get used to it. It's so hard to push from my normal typing position that I feel like I have to use leverage from my arm instead of just a finger. Plus it's not comfortable to click and drag when you have to continually push down - I'd still want tap to click available even if they improved it.

Yep. I switched from a Macbook Pro and I definitely miss the touch pad.

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.

This so much. I would have upgraded at least twice already if that was an option. Sadly, it isn't and that's why I still use a pretty old model hoping it doesn't get too obsolete soon.

GPD Pocket Max.

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