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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

The 2016 MacBook Pro was a turd. The butterfly keyboard would inevitably break. I went through several of these laptops. To add insult to the injury, this model's unique innovations were "Touch Bar" and "no ports"...

I've been buying Macs since 2000, and the 2016 MBP is definitely the worst Mac I ever had. It was enough to drive me to purchase a Surface Book as an alternative.

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Sheesh, did you skip the MBP 2015? That's the best one they ever made, even to this day. I've been using MBP 2015 since then and just recently "upgraded" to M1. The MBP 2015 is still a better machine, better screen and keyboard.

I can type waayy faster on the 2015 with less errors and the screen is better on the eye strain. The whites on the M1 are BRIGHT. I don't need a flash light shining at my face. Turning down the "brightness" doesn't address the problem. That just makes the whole screen darker or but the whites are still as bright. I'm still learning the laptop, maybe there is a contrast setting.

Oh, and the trackpad on the 2015 doesn't feel like sandpaper. On the M1, the tip of my finger is numb most of the day.

Anyway, for such a fanboi and you skipped the best MBP. Bummer for you. I can't imagine going from 2015 to 2016 and being satisfied with that. I'd have returned it the same day.

You'll definitely want to enable warmer colors

I use that. Been toying with night mode, color filters, and even flux. It's still too extreme, though it helps with the whites the other colors look atrocious.

I have just about identical settings on both models and comparing the two laptops side-by-side, the 2015 looks much better. I still have "vivid" colors but the whites are more grey.

Must be a screen thing, some new IPS technology. I don't know. It's terrible.

I feel like you might be noticing HDR. HDR supersedes your brightness settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlAsAuBtmps

I'm not really that picky about era of MBP, honestly I'd be happy with any of them save for the era with the bad keyboards. But the 2015 vintage was certainly a good one.

I have a late-2015 rMBP as my daily driver. I'm only now starting to run up against its limitations. USB-C, better 4K support, form factor, battery life, overall speed are things I'm looking forward to when I finally upgrade.

I was hitting memory limits and the disk was starting to fill up. I could have worked around the issues but the M1 marketing got me excited and they fixed the blatant faults introduced in the previous generation. If I were to do it again, I'd hold off another two generations, maybe get M3 or M4. The 2015 is that good.

I swapped the battery on my 2015 for like $150 at local computer repair shop. I was starting to hit memory limits but could have held off by using bare-metal dev box for heavy loads.

I refuse to buy a touchbar mac although some have been issued to me by employers. I remember when they came out they raised the price of the MBP for this "feature" that just kinda sucked.

Ended up leaving my MBP closed 95% of the time and using a separate keyboard.

This is why I bought a M1 Air instead of a Pro when it first launched. I don't know how some people can stand the touchbar. "But it can do so much!" Isn't the point of touch typing to never look at the keyboard? It never made sense to me.

I'm grateful for the 'no ports' move. It really helped jump start moving everything on to USB-C. Yes, the implementation details are still being worked out. particularly how the mass manufacturers can cut cost while still the most wanted subset of supported features.

> Yes, the implementation details are still being worked out

We're about 7 years into USB-C and I still had to do a ton of searching to find a dongle that does HDMI at 60 Hz, USB-A and charging (how crazy to want all that, right?!). I also had to buy a shady (AFAIK it violates the spec) extension cable to build a dock setup ("real" docks are in the hundreds of Euros). It cost me about 40€ to get back features I used to get for free and has reliability issues.

USB-C is a blessing for charging, but I'm a bit disappointed by the ecosystem for the rest.

The 16" Macbook pro I bought in 2019 has been a source of constant irritation to me - unexpected fan thrashing, overheating, the usual stuff - and the performance and low cost of the new M1-based MacBooks has done nothing to improve my mood.

I don't blame you. That "pinnacle" of hardware design is an Apple poop-bomb.

I have one with 32GB that was provided by my employer. It is bad. I hate using it. The keyboard on it is bad, the performance is bad, and the glitchiness is deeply frustrating.

I loved my 2015 Macbook Pro 15" that it replaced and wondered why I thought it would be any better.

My M1 Macbook Pro 16 is a joy to me.

I put an order in for a 14" one last night to replace my 2019 MBP, this makes me feel better about the price.

Try customizing the fan curves to spin up at lower temps. Not much more noise over all if at all, but much more responsiveness.

> The 16" Macbook pro I bought in 2019 has been a source of constant irritation to me

This. Worst Mac I've ever had to use.

Same situation with mine. Even had to have the battery replaced after showing errors, after a whole ordeal to have it covered under warranty. I suspect this was related to the constant overheating.

I have one of these for work (employer-provided) and it is the worst machine I have ever used. The touchbar is useless. It's heavy and bulky as hell. Just watching a Youtube video or opening a page with some gifs causes the fan to spin up and sound like a jet engine. The dual fan situation was supposed to improve cooling, but it only made it LOUDER.

Incredibly embarrassing to be in a quiet meeting room and accidentally open a slide deck with a gif for 2 minutes and have the machine ramp up its fans to maximum speed. Why?? Meanwhile on my M1 Air I can have the same content open + some Twitch stream + 3D map view open with no fan, no sound at all, and it runs great.

I am not generally an Apple user, but I had a 2012 MacBook pro for work for a few years, and it seemed pretty nice. I can't remember any complaints. That's while I was working at Google, though, so all I used it for was a web browser and SSH terminal.

Oh my, the 2018 one I have is a terrible piece of junk, notably the USB subsystem (overheats on one side, prone to interference, regularly resets which kills and connects to some device, may it be mouse, keyboard, or external display) and although I liked the touch of the butterfly keyboard, the arrow keys still trip me up (and of course the reliability)

> "Touch Bar"

The default touch bar UI is terrible, except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs). I did see and try some hacks to customise it but they were quite brittle so I dropped off that train, but it kind of proved to me that there was something to it that could have been really great were it fully programmable for real, and that the actual execution was extremely subpar.

> "no ports"

If by "no ports" you mean USB-C only, I am really enjoying the 4x C port machines, and would rather not go back to mixed ports unless forced to. USB-A/B sockets just need to die.

> except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs).

yeah that .. I enjoy it for quickly setting/sliding brightness and volume. And you can add a screenshot button to it which does not break focus so it allows me to screenshot things the keyboard cmd+shift+3/4 UI can't (ie context menus)

In addition they made the battery smaller despite the CPU not really getting any more efficient so it got less battery life unless literally all you were doing was watching iTunes movies.

Hmm I did exactly the same thing. Apple refreshed my whole laptop after a keyboard break, and I have the Surface to my wife. I think we are both going to get these M2 MBAs next.

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