Kernel Panics on waking from sleep almost every day, bluetooth chip crashes and requires restarts to get working again.
Not to mention the disgustingly low storage in the base model that my company thinks is fine makes the thing almost unusable for any semblance of "Professional" work other than being a journalist.
The design doesn't even feel modern and the bezels are janky compared to whats normal now on the windows side. I understand the new model fixes some of this, but they still thought this thing was absolutely fine to ship for several years now speaks volumes to me.
This is something I've had a problem with as well on my late 2016 13" MBP, 2 usb-c port model. I have two external drives that I sync via rsync occasionally (1 local, 1 offsite). No matter what type of dongle I use, one of the disks always ejects shortly after beginning the rsync. Even with the Apple dongle, when I plug in one of the external disks via usb-a, and plug my usb-c power to the dongle, then plug in the 2nd external disk directly to the only other usb-c on the mac, it fails every time.
What I have been doing instead is unplugging the power cord and syncing the disks while running on battery. This seems to work, but the odd thing here is that about 50% of the time when I do this I lose my wifi connection as soon as I begin the rsync from disk to disk. Nothing I can do makes the network work again until after I unmount the external disks.
Having only two ports on the computer, one of which is also used for power, has turned out to be far more annoying than I imagined.
I hope other manufacturers don't start removing ports just because Apple does. Really annoying - why not just copy the good stuff from Apple, instead of their arrogant choices...
With the bluetooth chip, do you get an error when it crashes? Airdrop basically never works on mine and I was wondering if it might be a related problem.
But yeah AirDrop wont work in the state so it's likely the same issue because on a long enough uptime the chip crashes without fail.
I've been buying Macs for 20+ years, let's be honest... I'm not rage quitting and moving platforms. The productivity hit would be too much. So now the game becomes: waiting until the next full redesign to see if they fixed everything. The 2015 era was great.
For anyone on the fence, avoid all of these.
And then there's the degradation of reliability software wise. Way more regular crashes, bugs etc. Dodgy Bluetooth issues, WiFi issues, a bricked iMac after a software update, and way more (including the MacBook keyboard issue, which I'll need repairing).
And the support. I've had good experiences with Apple in the past, but a recent issue with my iMac has led to it being repaired twice, and still it's broken. I've been dealing with this since January. I've experienced faulty diagnoses, lies about consumer law rights for replacement (which they've since confirmed was incorrect on multiple occasions), they forgot to put my RAM back in, they scratched my screen, and now it clearly hasn't been assembled correctly as the speaker causes something to reverberate in the case, as if a screw's lose. My most recent interaction with a senior support advisor was the most awful of my life, and I've never dealt with such a confrontational customer support person. After finally getting a replacement machine authorised (for the second time in 2 weeks), it's been cancelled a further 2 times for "unknown reasons", leading to more delays. It's been a real nightmare.
Purely anecdotal of course, but I've had that many negative experiences with my Mac's in general recently, both hardware and software, that I feel it is not coincidental. The MacBook and Mac lineup in general is moving towards being too expensive for the joy and stability it gives me, and I'm very close to moving back to Linux after what has up until relatively recently been a very positive experience for almost a decade for me.
I really hope that the new keyboards are a sign of better things to come, but I'm not holding my breath.
Heating/fan issues, double typing keys, too many "-gates" to count. I never had so much buyers regret.
Mine in particular: bright white splotches. There are 12 of them at random locations. I get a new one every couple of months.
If you were to press your fingernail forcefully into the LCD, to purposely damage it, that's what it looks like. But I obviously don't do that... gentle circular patterns with a clean eyeglasses cloth, dampened with water.
Same with external displays. People have wanted standalone retina displays for what, 5 years? Then 4 years later, we get a $5,000 display made only for a single market. All anyone wanted was the iMac sans computer.
Just, like... why? I don't understand their product choices. On any level.
Ahh yeah the display that when you criticize the price people cried it was a great deal because it was up to spec with $30,000 screens. Then when tested it can't actually function where you would use one of those because it's not quite up to spec you get told "What do you expect? It's $5000 not $30,000"
So what do we have? Just an overpriced screen that can't be used for the professional work it was claimed to be for for YouTuber tech reviewers to show off with.
As a long time user of a Dell XPS, I would never go back to that (poor bluetooth and WiFi support after 2-3 years, battery sucks after a while).
After evading all the issues that have plagued the butterfly-switched keyboards, I started seeing my “e” key repeating itself every so often.
I made the relevant changes in settings to minimize this, but I’m now seeing occasional repeats on both the “e” key and the “i” key (maybe once every 30 presses). Livable, but it worries me.
I think I’m going to look into their keyboard repair program later today
This isn't a case where some are faulty some are fine it's a fundamental flaw in the design of the mechanism and it will happen to your laptop some day we know this because it was grandfathered into the replacement scheme.
I've put off buying a new MBP because I just cannot face putting down three grand for something that probably will be even worse than this piece of junk.
I've had an Apple computer since I was 8 years old. I thought I was pretty much in for life but as soon as I can jump ship, I will. :(
With older laptops (PC or mac) if enough parts break I could either go remote headless server or tee-pee it on the ground with an attached and pretend it's a desktop.
Every part of the MBP has some sort of problem so nothing works. I just have to deal with something eventually failing after an hour or so of use.
Sometimes you get a lemon - that's one thing, but this is a whole generation of machines. That seems new... Well, saying that: I had a 2006 iBook - the black one - and the battery ran so hot I still have the scar on my thigh (geek trophy!). Apple denied there was an issue with that machine, too, and the recall came way too late. So I guess it's a pattern and not a new thing, really.
Maybe the new thing is that I am actually genuinely tempted by the Surface. In 2006 there were no contenders.
Sadly I feel pretty invested in Mac OS as an operating system.
Overall, for me there's been no big dramatic declines from the laptops of yore in terms of day to day productivity and reliability.
On the other hand, my personal laptop is an Air (2019, I think) and I have no such complaints—it's very stable and only heats up when I'm putting it under heavy (relative to its power) load. It also lacks the execrable Touch Bar.
I would guess that Apple's drive toward replacing Intel's processors with their own has a lot to do with heat. Will be interesting to see how that goes, but for now it seems like their reach exceeds their grasp.
My Thinkpad is not as fast as the latest and greatest ones, but it's a pretty sweet device and I'm happy with the purchase.
I am honestly astonished at how bad hardware companies are at incrementally improving their products. Every new "improvement" (new CPU) comes with a huge completely-unrelated drawback for no reason (horrible keyboard, touchbar, .......)
And HW is sooo bad in contrast. It looks like a toy. Overheating, it's either too hot (so some had to drill holes at the bottom), or cold to touch if powered off, pain to use due to bad ergonomics, hard corners, stupid ideas like touchbar, too tiny key travel, no upgradabity (RAM soldered), battery glued. Many decisions made just for the "keynote marketing show", to make it thinner again, one or two ports because wireless revution (like XDR monitors over WiFi?!). Overpriced slow and throttling CPU, every model looks almost the same, aluminium casing easy to bend, scratch, make dents.
Are you really purchasing those overpriced SSDs direct from Apple? Do you know you can easily buy and replace SSD? I even replaced the screen on my HP Elitebook G6 easily to get better sRGB coverage.
And then I see people saying "you can get used to it". Get used to dongles and lack of ports. Really, why would I need to get used to some bad design decisions on such an expensive machine, doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe they like CMD+C shortcut in the terminal. Ok... But something like that is possible on Linux too with Autokey and two lines of Python code to detect a terminal window (I use it myself). And I guess similar hotkey app can be set up on Windows.
I am sorry but I can't help myself. I see Macbooks more like a fashion item for not very technical people than the professional hardware.