Ask HN: Should I wait to get a new MacBook Pro? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I wait to get a new MacBook Pro?

26 points_bxg137 comments

My late 2013 MBP is aging, and I've been considering an upgrade. Rumors initially slated a major redesign of the lineup for 2020, but I've started to hear that it may be pushed back to 2021.

Unlike others here, I'm not particularly offended by the touch bar or the current keyboard design. The keyboard reliability is definitely an issue, but given how readily they're repairing them, a failure would probably end up being an annoyance rather than a catastrophe. That said, there would undoubtedly still be things to look forward to in a major redesign.

Would you personally hold out for the unknown, upcoming redesign, or just go for it now?

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My personal anecdote. So my trusty rMBP turned 5 years old on June 15. Happy Birthday. As I'm a solo developer for a number of companies, I decided it's a good time to get a spare "just in case".

I am "particularly offended" by the touch bar, because the way I type my fingers rest closer to the top, and on my mate's X1 3rd Gen I always turn sound on and off... :-) So touch bar = no go.

I got an 4k touchscreen Dell XPS 15 9570 from an OEM channel (no CPU, GPU, HDD, RAM, battery), put in a real 6-core i7-8750h, 32G DDR4-3200, mobile 1050Ti, 2T Intel's T660 SSD, and a 94Wh battery. Switched Wifi to the new Intel AX200. Repasted with Kryonaut paste, added some 3M heat pads. All in all cost me ~$1800.

A week ago my MBP finally stopped working, main board failure. Over the course of 5 years I changed screen twice (first the horrible staingate, then water damage), battery twice (first one popped within 1.5 years), repasted, and changed the little charging board. It's time for it to retire.

Migrating to Windows 10 turned out to be much less pain than I expected. A few tweaks for the horrible font rendering, install GlassWire (like Little Snitch), Wox (like Spotlight), Seer (preview on Space bar), Chocolatey (like Homebrew), ThrottleStop (easy performance boost), SpeedFan (for fan control), and it feels pretty much like a Macbook. I'm pretty amazed on how easy it was to just swap parts inside - unscrew the lid, pop out the old one, insert the new one. Keyboard is great. Touchpad is okay, though I miss that three-finger dragging.

For the folks asking about font tweaks, two main tweaks that helped me tolerate Windows font rendering:

1. Used Winaero Tweaker to change all the system fonts to Source Sans Pro Medium / Bold.

2. Used Stylus in Brave (Chrome fork) to add a global stylesheet with: body { -webkit-text-stroke: 0.3px; } - this makes web browsing very close to Mac experience.

It’s easy. It’s just a tool. If you need it now, go get it. If you don’t need it now, don’t get it. Don’t overthink it.

Pretty much this. But, for a lot of people, I think there's something in between... "It'd be nice, but I can do with the old one I have".

I personally opted for the last 2015 good-keyboard model. Not sure if that's still an option nowadays. If not, though I'll be hated, I'd recommend a non-Apple option, because the keyboard failure rate is simply unforgivable for the price.

Well the other thing is this is a personal machine. I do programming work on it, but not as a job. I also have a perfectly capable desktop. I just enjoy the portability, and also MacOS. And as another commenter said, "It'd be nice, but I can do with the old one I have". Although it's getting to a point where I'm not sure how much longer I can "do with the old one I have". I basically never do anything serious on it anymore because it's too painful.

Then maybe just get an air instead of a pro?

It's not that I won't use the power; it's just that my income isn't being hampered by not having it for a while longer.

Then it’s clear: wait for the new model.

I have an ageing MBPr 2012. I have been to the Apple store and tried every iteration from 2016 and up.

I won't upgrade. With mojave, I have noticed a slower machine with my dev workload than with El Capitan. Despite this, I'm happy and can report no problems at all.

The touchbar is completely useless. I don't like it. I am hoping that they see some sanity and offer models with and without. But I doubt it.

The over sized touch pad is ludicrous as well. My palms were always resting on it. I couldn't imagine using this 2016 to 2019 model. I hope the 16" comes back to the 2012-2015 sized touchpad.

If anything Apple should have retained the original F1 function keys and then offered the touchbar between the keyboard and the smaller touch pad.

Finally, it's not just the keyboard, they are loud and do not travel well. How is the thermal throttling? They say it's fixed. But in the UK it's summer now and it just throttles by existing!

Also don't forget stage light, is it fixed in the 2019 models?

It's all these things that make me wish they go back to the 2012-2015 sanity and make another really good machine.

To be honest with you. I'm going to hold off on the upgrade and I'm waiting until the 16" comes out. But ultimately, I want to see an ARM capable MBP. One that doesn't throttle. That would be really nice!

I’ve never seen someone complain about the touch pad. I like it, makes my older MacBook Pro’a touchpad feel so restricting.

Indeed. Palm rejection is perfect. No need to worry or complain about the size of the touchpad. I know I would never go back.

Definitely agree about the touch bar. I’m glad that some people find it useful, but I am not one of those people! The function keys are deeply embedded into my workflow, and no physical keys/tactile feedback is worse in every way.

I wish Apple would stop being so stubborn about it and offer SKUs with and without, and every spec point.

What is stage fright?

> What is stage fright?

Thanks, going off memory. It's stage light. Here is an example [0] and explanation [1].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE9fxxMkqqU

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLALpD004Gk

First: if you can afford to upgrade, just do so: you've already mentioned on another thread that your current machine is failing. If you don't like your choice you can return it to Apple no questions asked within two weeks.

FWIW: I've done a lot of C++ development on first a MacBook retina (2016), then a 15" MBP (2018) and now a 2018 MacBook Air. Because my work is in C++ the Touch Bar doesn't affect me (never used F keys) though it was too sensitive so I completely disabled it on the MBP and mapped escape to caps lock.

I am perfectly happy with the butterfly keyboard, though the first one (on the MBr) did fail twice and would have been replaced yet again if the machine had not been destroyed in an accident.

But the MBP keyboard didn't fail for me. What failed was that the machine was simply too heavy (which is a hilarious statement when I pick up an old 17" like I used to carry around) after I'd gotten used to something tiny. The Air was a good compromise. I rarely rebuild the entire system, so compile speed was not a huge difference in practice compared to the MBP.

Good luck

I actually had to make the exact same jump a couple months ago. My 2013 MBP wasn't really slowing me down but I was giving it away to my family instead. I had a lot of hesitation when it came to touch bar but the that was way too much easier to get used to than what I thought.

The keyboard I'd say is a lot better than the 2018 versions. I've used a friends 2018 MBP where I had issue with repetitive keystrokes or no keystrokes at all, it's been two months I'm using mine and haven't had a single issue yet.

I think if you need it now you should go for it. There are always gonna be changes, updates, redesigns just like how it has been since 2013. If you're in need it of the tool now it's less like that the next update will have a meaningful impact on your work that's worth to wait.

I recently sold my MacBook Pro 13” late 2018 edition. I got tired of the touch-bar, the keyboard and frankly OS/X (finder, docker, running local servers, outdated unix cli, iCloud and a range of other annoyances).

I replaced it with a Surface Pro 6 i5 edition and setup my development environment in WSL. This is the first device I’ve genuinely loved since my iBook G4 and it honestly feels like something Apple should have build.

I don’t actually like Windows 10 that much, but it works as well as OS/X for daily usage and WSL is just so amazingly good for isolating your dev environment in actual Linux.

It’s also cheaper than a MacBook, will work as a tablet and is great for taking hand written notes.

Worth considering, at least while you wait for the next MacBook keyboard.

I currently end up doing most things on my Windows desktop. Developing on Windows is... not terrible, but not great. I don't do a lot of funky Linux-y stuff so I don't have much use for isolating my dev environment. It also doesn't sound like the things that annoyed you about your MacBook are things that annoy me.

I also just really want a real laptop. I've heard good things about the Surface, in general, but a) I have virtually zero use for a tablet, and b) I like to put my laptop in my actual lap sometimes, which tablets-with-keyboards don't do a great job at. I've considered the XPS 13, but I know the trackpad won't be as good and of course it's Windows.

I use my surface on my lap quite a lot, and it works fine, a lot less wobbly and no heat on thighs (or calves, not sure what your upper legs is called in English). It can’t be used on stomach in bed though, like at all. So there are certainly limitations a laptop doesn’t have.

You gave up a Mac because you didn’t like the keyboard and touchbar for a device without a keyboard?

Depending on one's tech stack, it can be a lot of work to make a Windows machine work for development. With quite a lot of research and effort, I did it (and without WSL, because in the past WSL had abysmally slow disk IO).

Even so, at least a year or two ago, having Docker and VirtualBox work at the same time was not possible.

The Windows terminal options are nowhere near as good as iTerm or the standard Mac Terminal (which is lower latency than any Windows option).

But even if you get your dev environment working, other daily tasks are more difficult or annoying.

Lack of Preview on Windows is a huge drag. Being able to hit spacebar and near instantly popup a view of images, documents, PDFs, etc. is far far nicer than the options for viewing in Windows.

Finder may not be perfect, but it is more flexible and more capable than Explorer.

Printing a document to PDF is simple and fast in macOS, but it's slow and clunky on Windows.

The same suite of Adobe Creative Cloud tools generally run faster and with less random lag on macOS compared to Windows. And my comparison was between a maxed out Dell XPS 15 of year 2017 vs an early 2014 MBP.

Regarding price, you can't compare a Surface Pro to an MBP on price. The MBP has much higher performance and a more usable format than a tablet with a stand.

If you're happy, that's good for you. But I suspect your use case doesn't subject you to the full chasm of differences between the two devices.

I probably should be noted that my mbp was the 13” i5 version as well, so not exactly one of the high performers.

Your comments below indicate you're doing personal (hobby? Learning and experimentation?) programming on your MBP.

In this case I would suggest buying a modern Linux laptop with some kind of Nvidia GPU from Dell or ThinkPad which gives you the flexibility of a true Linux environment (Linux dominates servers) and an ML environment to learn on the same machine. You could get a lot beefier processor, a lot more RAM and a true GPU for a comparable price that gives you more experimentation options.

It seems like Apple likes to announce things in spring or fall (March, September, October) if you check out their events page: https://www.apple.com/apple-events/

You can see historical events roughly line up with that. If you're not in too much of a rush I would be tempted to wait until November to see what is annouced.

Yeah; I think that's what originally had people saying 2020 would be the major redesign. It's apparently a 4-year cycle. But just today I read that they were possibly delaying it another year.

Why do you want to upgrade?

Absent any specifics, the baseline reason to upgrade is for security updates and compatibility with software you use. If you have that already, I don't see any reason to upgrade. A 2013 MBP is compatible with Mojave and is still receiving security updates.

It's slow. I kind of suspect the graphics chip may be dying; raw compute tasks like compiling code are usable enough (not great, but usable), but browsing the web is just egregiously sluggish, especially when there are images on a page.

Then you've answered your own question. If cost is an issue, get the n-1 model, or a refurbished model.

I have a 2012 MBP running Mojave. I installed a 500GB Samsung EVO SSD and 16GB of RAM from OWC. It runs pretty fast - no speed complaints at all from me. Though I don't use it for any GPU-intensive tasks.

Not sure why another reply here got downvoted into oblivion. I did at one point have an adblocker that was making browsing twice as slow as it is now; had to switch to using the hosts file. I also did do a factory reset at one point, which helped somewhat but not a ton.

I have a same era MBP, and I find it as fast or faster than a much newer, higher speced XPS 15 Windows machine. You must have had some hardware problem or even some rogue software that was killing your system.

I load the hell out of my MBP, and it cruises right along. It's exceedingly rare that I feel a sense of slowness.

Don't discount the upfront benefit you get from upgrading.

Maybe there is a new model coming but if you're using your MBP a lot, don't punish yourself by penny pinching and sitting on a bad experience for a long time.

There's supposedly a 16" coming in the early fall, but rumors are just that. That's the only notable thing I'd consider waiting for.

Rumors say the keyboard will be redesigned, and the screen bezel may be thinner, giving you more screen-size-per-device-size. Also, while I don't loathe the touch bar, I wouldn't be opposed to them reversing course on it.

I've been hearing rumors about 16" the longest time. Don't get your hopes up

No. The keyboard isn't great and the touchbar is worthless for anyone who is reading HN.

Consider getting a Dell XPS, a System76 or a Google Pixelbook for your development unless you're specifically making iOS or macOS stuff.

> the touchbar is worthless for anyone who is reading HN

That seems unfair. I've never really had use for function keys, and while I do enjoy the physical volume and brightness keys, the touch bar can certainly be put to use by power users: https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/customize-and-perso...

I looked into the XPS 13 but the screen is smaller than I'd like, and more importantly Windows and the non-Apple touch pad just generally put a damper on the whole user experience. Which isn't something I want from an expensive new device.

I personally am waiting for redesigned lineup to get 16" version. There is nothing else that interests me in the current lineup, I am happy with my mid 2012 rMBP.

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