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Comment by andrei_says_ | Hacker News Reader

You could buy a 2015 MacBook Pro and upgrade to rock solid keyboard, sane-sized trackpad, MagSafe, hdmi, USB ports and an SD card port.

It’s not thin enough to slice salami but I am a vegetarian so that’s not a big deal.

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I did exactly this a year ago but one caveat to note is that if you're using an external monitor, the video card in this one doesn't support a good resolution. I'm stuck with 1080p.

I think it supports 4K but not at 60 fps. You are stuck at 30 fps.

I have a 2015 and a 4K monitor and can confirm that this is the case. 30fps isn't great but it is usable for most day-to-day computer work.

However there is a workaround if you are willing to disable SIP and play around with a program called SwitchResX. You can customize the display timings in such a way that allows 4K60 video to just sneak in under the bandwidth limits of the Thunderbolt ports. It also requires a Thunderbolt to HDMI 2.0 adapter, and a compatible monitor. If you like fiddling around this is one way to do it, but I have found it finicky and not really worth it.

4k60hz is also possible over displayport, on my Late 2013 mbp I need to use switchresx to get it going (but I've found that pretty set-and-forget), but on the newer ones than that it works without any hacks AFAIK

Could you share some details about how you do this? Do you need displayport on both ends, and is it a monitor or TV? I have the same machine and a 4K TV with only HDMI-inputs and am curious if I can achieve this is in some way. Switchresx looks really useful anyway, so thank you for that. :)

There's no HDMI 2.0 support in 2015 MBPr AFAIK. So no 4k@60Hz over HDMI. You must get DP.

If you have a Displayport display, you can use a displayport to mini displayport cable, use switchresx, should work good.

If it's HDMI only, as the sibling pointed out the HDMI port won't work. However, Startech makes a displayport to HDMI adapter which works ( https://www.amazon.com/DisplayPort-HDMI-Adapter-Converter-60... ) (just make sure you get one which supports 4k60hz, most DP -> HDMI adapters don't).

I'll consider this though I it would be probably be sitting unused after trying it anyway as I really have no need for it. Thank you for the information. Just to clarify, we're both talking about a late 2013 macbook pro retina? The other helpful commenter mentions the 2015.

Yeah, this is all on the late 2013 15" with the nvidia dgpu - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206587 has the official details on this BTW - they state that SST Displayport 3840 x 2160 displays are only supported at 60hz on the 15" from Mid 2014 on, but it actually works on the Late 2013 also with Switchresx.

also got a 2015 and 4k @60hz is possible plug and play with a thunderbolt to displayport cable. anything other than default scaling gets a bit choppy though

2015 can drive 4k at 60hz over displayport if the monitor supports displayport. HDMI output is limited 30hz afaik.

1080p is not fine enough? How much information are you used to having on screen at a time? How much text, for example?

I have a 4K display. Mac OS scales things to look nice. 1080p looks like garbage in comparison.

It's not about real estate, but rather about sharpness. At 3820x2160 ("4K") you can double every pixel, when compared to 1080p. That means that text at the exact same "size" is twice as sharp, producing less visual strain and improving readability (especially for fonts with complex strokes)

The difference is absolutely striking: I will never go back to a non "retina" display if given the choice.

It’s also real estate. I have the LG 5K 27” monitor—which I like, by the way, I don’t know why people give it crap—and routinely wish it was just a touch larger.

My screen is filled with Excel and some sort of online database, usually. I’m also using my 13” MBP screen below this one for chat windows, email etc.

I would hate to go back to the lo-res 1080 days.

You quadruple each pixel...

I cant deal with 1080p anymore, and large (27"+) 1080p monitors make no sense to me. Maybe they're good for people who need to have physically large text etc. but I find it useless for fitting information densely on the screen. I for one would rather use my 13" MacBook pro laptop screen than a large 1080p display. (I use a 24 inch 4k monitor and it's pretty great.)

When doing photography work, you can look at image thumbnails and actually judge sharpness and colour directly off them. And when filling the screen, you can have a much better idea of how they will look in print.

As for text, I've been able to use tiny font sizes and increase the information density since hi-DPI screens— my eyes are good for it. Ahh, iPhone 4 and retina MBP... they were astounding tech at that time.

I have got the 2015 15" model with Radeon R9 M370X and it supports 4k@60Hz over DP.

It even supports 5K if you can find one of the dual-DisplayPort screens. (I'm not sure if there's an adapter for the TB3 screens.)

"With OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 and later, most SST 4K (3840 x 2160) displays are supported at 60Hz on these Mac computers:

    MacBook Air (Early 2015) and later
    MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) and later
    MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) and later"

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206587

Earlier years will only do 30Hz, which is fully usable for development/office work.

Anecdote: I find 30 Hz to be totally unusable for development/office work. The jerky movement of the mouse cursor, jerky scrolling, etc, is all painful to my eyes. So, I think very much, YMMV, but 60 Hz is safe.

Yeah me too. It feels like the mouse is lagging.

Agreed, so much so that I gave up on 4K, scaled it to 1440p just to get 60hz on my (now-dead) 2013 rMBP with my external monitor.

Recently bought a second-hand perfect condition 2016 MBP with function-keys, and it's been brilliant so far, and I get proper 4K :)

Note the "SST 4K" criteria. I have a late 2013 15" MBP that drives 4K at 60 Hz, but it is an MST "multi-screen transport" display (which requires enabling on the monitor menu). Don't know if they're made anymore. Mine is a Dell UP2414Q.

I have a 13" 2015 MacBook Pro and it drives a 4k monitor at 60hz over displayport.

Even very old Macs can handle 1440p, which is a great non-Retina resolution at 27".

But the bulblet and bought a used 2013 15” MBP after a year in Lenovo exile. Cost me $600 for a six year old computer, but it feels great.

Man you guys really have Stockholm syndrome.

I gave it a serious go for a year. Spent $1,600 on a Lenovo X1 Carbon. Wiped the disk and installed LTSC. The one feature it had that Apple didn’t (the built-in LTE) never worked properly. Stability was good, but lots of odd nits. (Auto-hiding taskbar would sometimes stop hiding.) Battery life was a crap-shoot. Rage quit and ordered the MacBook when it went from estimated 30 minutes remaining to dead in 5 minutes.

Speaking of which: Do you want to buy an X1 Carbon 6th gen? i7 8650U with 16Gb RAM and 256GB SSD.

I use both a 12” MacBook (for Go and JS), and a Dell XPS13 with Ubuntu (for Rust). The UX on the MacBook is better in every way. Gestures, the window and desktop management, touchpad, Bluetooth, WiFi and printer drivers, etc. The screen, speakers, and other hardware components are much better as well.

The fast XPS 13 with Ubuntu also seems to really be taxed pretty heavily by electron apps, while the MacBook that is 8 times slower does just fine. When I switched, I finally understood why so many people on hacker news complain about electron.

Everything on the Mac feels like someone thought really hard about how to make it as good as possible, even if they were wrong in the end (like the keyboard). Everything in Linux always feels like someone said “ehhh... good enough!”.

I've got a late 2013 15" MBP with a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB of ram, 512GB SSD, and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, and have been using it for 5 years now it and it is a great laptop. Can run chrome, mysql server, web servers, and personal programs without breaking a sweat. The only thing it cannot run are new video games or if you are deep into ML but old games still work great (I played GTA V on it ok when that came out).

Only downside that happened is part of the trackpad stopped clicking and one of the fans starting running crazy loud. Took it in to the apple store and they diagnosed it as a swelling battery (seems like a problem for macs so if it looks like your case is fat, get it checked out). Ended up getting the battery, keyboard, trackpad, case, fans, and potentially the monitor (it looked new or was cleaned extremely well) for $300 which isn't too bad to make it feel like new. I'm probably going to keep this computer for another 5+ years unless it dies.

Would totally recommend and I would definitely not sell it for $600.

Just add eGPU to it and it will be more or less capable of modern ML and games

MacOS is amazing in many ways, and is spyware-free, which makes it the only choice for privacy-savvy users who also want to use adobe products.

Unless you go the Hackintosh route, you’re locked into Apple hardware.

Could say that just as well for people who willingly put up with Microsoft.

For many of us, Apple is an escape from that hell.

What's wrong with the large trackpad?

Not OP but my problem with larger trackpad was unwanted mouse movements. Maybe it was the way I rest my palms while typing but I never had this issue with previous mbp models.

Yeah I dislike the bigger trackpad. There’s nowhere to comfortable rest my hands on it. At work they gave me a 2018 MBP and after 2 weeks of suffering I returned it for a 2015 version.

I prefer to rest my hands on either side of it, simply to prevent ulnar deviation style wrist angle.

I personally find it unnecessarily large. My thumbs/palms are constantly touching the corners.

The 2015 touchpad is plenty large enough to accomodate my needs.

Yep, the large trackpad is another design blunder. The heels of your hands are resting on it much of the time, resulting in the cursor suddenly jumping off to another part of the screen while you're typing.

Even dumber: Apple didn't make it work with the Pencil. WTF? Now THAT would be far more useful than the emoji bar.

Pencil does work with iPad and sidecar which is a much better experience for editing vs what would amount to a very small Wacom tablet on the trackpad (vs effectively an iPad sized Cintiq).

In the meantime I regretted so much that I bought my 2015 model with 8GB of RAM, which seemed like a reasonable decision back then. Everything else is still great and better than the newer model I got from work - but nowadays I seem to run out of memory all the time.

Buy a 16gb board off eBay and do a board swap? Or buy a 16gb and sell the 8gb?

The former shouldn’t set you back much. The biggest cost on the latter would be the commissions, but you may be able to find a forum with a decent buy/sell section.

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