Lol yeah. That is literally the worst thing about MacBooks. It's hard enough getting it to work properly in a dual monitor setup, but I can reproducibly generate forced power cycles by plugging into a dock when the lid is closed due to a kernel panic bug that still hasn't been solved despite numerous reports from users suffering the same fate on Catalina.

I also just had to reboot my MBP 16 because every so often when the VPN connection drops, there is no way to resuscitate the WiFi network connection without a full reboot :-/

As someone who moved from an XPS to MBP to have a smoother experience with less hardware glitches, I have been sorely disappointed. Once WSL gets full support for running GUI apps and CUDA support, I will almost certainly be moving away from the MBP. The direction of OSX is concerning, and I find it insane that their sandboxing results in a 5 second wait to open a simple Word or CSV file. I booted up my 5 year old XPS a few weeks back and it felt so much snappier than my fully loaded MBP 16!

My previous MBP and 4k monitor would, on every other connection, not recognize the USB devices. So every other time I plugged into the monitor, I had to un-plug & re-plug to get the peripherals.

I also have a Linux Thinkpad. It's not perfect either, but it is definitely better.

The Linux Thinkpad also more reliably associates with my Bose headphones. It was hard to pair them the first time around, but after that, they've auto-connected. The MBP will occasionally get into states where it won't find the headphones or the headphones don't find it, and I have to request they manually connect. The MBP does this with my old phone, too…

I do have to agree with the article on the points about the touchpad (MBP's is superior) and on the emoji support. (It's getting there in Linux… but slowly.)

I'd recommend Terminator over gnome-terminal, though.

Yes, totally the opposite to my own experience with mac. Getting external displays to work properly has often required nasty EDID hacks and disabling SIP on the machine.

The OP review is very patronizing of MBP but I could not take it after this. Colleagues at our lab meetings have been harassed by external display issue week after week at lab meetings. Some of them reported external display failing immediately after Catalina upgrade.

I have a recent macbook for work. The only way I managed to get my 4k external monitor to run at >24 Hz—such a slow refresh rate it was painful to use—was with a $15 3rd-party utility[1]. And that was after failing to fix the problem with hours of debugging and switching from HDMI to DisplayPort.

The same monitor worked perfectly without any configuration on both Windows and Linux.

[1]: https://www.madrau.com/

one of the most infuriating phrases in tech is the mac "just works" one

One USB-C cable into an LG USB-C monitor. I'm not saying there aren't issues with MacOS and external displays but my experience on a daily basis is consistently good.

The same cannot be said for my experience docking and undocking the T480s with the same monitor and cable.

I got the ivanky dock[1] for dual display and works like a charm. I have a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro and I haven't had any issues with any of them so far. It's really just plug-and-play. I have a couple of other docks and connectors and I had issues with all of them.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089GKTC5B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...