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I spent an embarrassing amount on a lackluster early 2019 MBP. It's fine as a general purpose laptop but is just a little too slow for serious dev work, a little too heavy as the main travel laptop, battery life a little too short for my liking.

I got an M1 for my work laptop maybe 4 months ago and it might honestly be the best laptop I've ever used.

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In a somewhat similar situation with the 2019 16 inch Intel MBP. I wouldn't say it's too slow, but it does get embarrassingly hot during regular use. Enabling low power mode disables turbo boost and keeps it much, much cooler, but plugging into an external monitor enables the discrete graphics card and the laptop gets hot again.

Going to try to get a few more years out of it hopefully until Imagination Tech's hardware accelerated ray tracing solutions can make it to Apple's GPUs.

Yeah I ditched my 2019 16" for an M1 Max. Was an expensive move but honestly, I couldn't bear to use that thing as a laptop, especially once I knew there was an alternative which doesn't get hot enough to fry eggs on.

For me it was worth it, because I now enjoy using my laptop as a laptop on the sofa or whatever, and do a lot more creative stuff on it than I did with the old one. But definitely not a cheap move!

I use these with few or no problems. The heat dissipation is pretty much solved by charging on the right side. My life is full of usability hacks, I don't mind one more.

The biggest frustration for me with a mac now is that it's becoming a toy OS like windows. It becomes more and more cumbersome to run programs that aren't in the app store. As a result I've been cultivating an ubuntu/plasma(kde) practice on a gaming desktop outside of working hours.

The 16" MBP would have been a much better machine for most people if it didn't have a dedicated GPU. The CPU got pretty toasty as-is, but adding a dGPU into the mix just turned it into a furnace.

The way the thing was wired up also meant that connecting to an external display engaged the GPU, and some unacknowledged hardware or software flaw set the power/heat floor to about 20W (it's not just the minimum draw of the chip—you can have the GPU active without an external display and it uses a fraction of that). The end result: if you have it plugged into a monitor, you're almost constantly hearing a fan, even when idle.

Mine replaced a 2015 entry-level MacBook Pro which, while it served me well, had long since fallen behind what I needed. I was so excited to have the 16" for about a week, until I realised that I was never going to not be hearing fans screaming. I know laptops (especially big laptops) aren't actually meant to be used on laps for extended periods, but I genuinely couldn't with that thing. Even mild load would make it uncomfortable to be in physical contact with. I don't understand how none of the reviews seemed to pick up on it—perhaps everyone was too distracted by finally having a functional keyboard again to notice.

The sad irony of it all is that I bet the vast majority of purchasers were developers like myself, who have absolutely no need for a dedicated GPU.

In any case I sold mine and bought an M1 Air, which I've been very happy with ever since. As nice as these new ones look (and as great as the new 14" and 16" M1 Pros are), I don't think I could justify it. This thing handles everything I throw at it (though my wife has the 8GB model and it really doesn't seem to be enough with how much RAM stuff guzzles these days).

> The sad irony of it all is that I bet the vast majority of purchasers were developers like myself, who have absolutely no need for a dedicated GPU.

I would seriously doubt that. Mac sales are huge and developers must be a relatively small segment of computer users.

Yeah but how many of those people are buying computers that start at over two grand? The 16” MBP is firmly a power user machine, and I would bet a lot more power users still don’t need a GPU than do.

Especially when you consider many of the people that do need a GPU surely need more than was ever offered in Intel MacBooks, considering they were never particularly good chips even by laptop standards.

The base config 2015 15” didn’t have a GPU, seems silly that they removed that option for the 16”.

My response was to the claim that the majority of the customers of that product was developers. It seems unlikely that the majority of the customers of that to be developers simply because of the numbers. Whether they need dGPU or not I don’t know, but I won’t be surprised that the expectation for a 16” Apple customer that doesn’t know much is to have bought a machine capable of video/photo editing and not be surprised by its mediocre performance.

They should have at least put it as an option to not have it. It would be even be cheaper.

That’s why many folks bought a MacBook and maxed it out. You’d get most of the way there firepower wise, just no dGPU/not quite as good of a screen if memory serves (could be missing something though).

The 16 inch Intel MBP was a machine I wanted to love. Big lovely screen, should be fast and capable, I was stoked to get it. But on the occasion where I have to take it off the charger and attend a zoom call, it gives me maybe 90 minutes of battery life, fan going full speed the whole time, trying to melt the desktop.

Fortunately I also have a 13 inch M1 MBP that has no such problem, and is easily my favorite MBP in many years.

I remember having to close down every app before starting a video call in an attempt to keep the fans under control.

The new 16" just does not care! I've owned it since March and haven't heard the fans once. Runs smoothly whatever I try and throw at it.

I had the same issues with a 2019 16" MBP. Annoying fans as soon as I connected an external display, getting very hot, okay performance. Switched to a M1 Pro 14" and couldn't be happier, as far as work laptops go it's the best I ever used since switching to macs in 2009.

I switched from windows/dell to a 2019 16inch MBP Intel for work as I wanted everything MBPs promised, especially battery life. I was very dissapointed that I get about 2 hours on battery, but I suspect its mostly due to the MS office apps. Is this improved on the M1 versions? Surely high cpu usage there will still waste battery pretty quickly?

Mine's gone in the cupboard and never been used since the M1 Pro arrived.

I got the M1 iMac with only 16gb RAM when it came out and it's incredible how fast it is. My previous machines were top-of-the-line intel Macs and the M1 blows them out of the water, performance-wise.

I can buy the lowest-end M-series models from now on and feel confident I'll have more than enough power. Gonna save a lot of money going forward.

Yeah, basically same here. My work M1 is 16GB and the '19 Intel is basically maxed out, and I'd take the M1 any day.

I'm still stuck on a 2019 MBP from work. What garbage hardware. Up for a refresh in December.

Just to put things into perspective, the 2019 MBP might be worse than M1 Macs, but it's still way better than anything I've seen in the PC world (which is why Macs have been able to coast through bad decisions regarding keyboard, ports, and touchbar for so many years). That said, I'm very excited for these new ARM devices.

I don’t believe it’s better than non-mac products.

Curious what you'd buy instead?

I had a Lenovo P15 before my current M1Pro. That thing was a machine. I got roughly the same battery life through day of dev work, got to choose my OS, it did everything perfectly. Only thing it lacked on imo was looks.

So yeah, in my experience, there are other laptops out there that are as good.

I used to work on the similar P51, definitely a nice device for Unix work. I also keep a maxed-out T460s around as a handy little notebook for programming and photo editing. Not as powerful as the P51, but the design feels like a refinement of the "manila envelope" Macbook Airs. Lenovo hardware is starting to find it's footing again, though there's still a number of really Lovecraftian devices they made in the early 2010s (T440p, anyone? How about an X240?).

Thanks - my experience with laptop workstations has pretty much universally been huge bulky machines with horrific cooling that is heavily throttled and the battery only lasts 2-4 hours under load. My M1 Mac lasts all day even when compiling which is night and day.

The OS option isn't a problem for me - I'm content running windows/Mac regardles!

The XPS9575 was great (with linux). I still use it for laptop tasks despite having a 16 inch m1 mbp and a 13 inch m1 mba.

Last I heard a Mac is a PC. Hey even phones are PCs. They're all personal computers. In fact I would say mac's are more often PC then windows machines. Windows machines are often not personal and are used my many people in big orgs in a shared corporate fashion.

Oh man it's been a while since I've seen this particular flavor of needless pedantry. What a blast from the past!

Lol. I haven't heard someone define mac's and PCs as different like that in a long time.

Apple did an amazing job to market it as such and create an us and them division. Imagine Tesla started marketing themselves as 'we're not a car, were a Tesla'

Although true, it was some what meant in jest

That may all well be true, but nevertheless, virtually everyone understands and uses the “Mac vs PC” distinction.

Doesn't mean they should never be put right either. Just because something has been called something that it should always be called that. That's seems to be big thing in western society at the moment.

I disagree. Pedantry adds no value, and moralizing semantics seems silly at best. What counts is that people understand clearly, and in this case everyone did.

What's a computer?

> it's still way better than anything I've seen in the PC world

Man, if the 2019 16" Macbook is better than anything in the PC world, I feel like you don't try many laptops. That 16" laptop is one of the most comically terrible laptops I've ever seen. Nevermind the Touch Bar, the performance envelope on these devices is way off (and probably boils down to the terrible chassis design and logic board layout). I have a friend with the i7 model, and it would regularly hit 90c on completely benign workloads like watching YouTube or browsing through her calendar. The battery life is distinctly worse than most laptops I've seen at that size too, which really left me scratching my head over these machines. Even the 2019 13" model wasn't that bad.

With all fairness though, I've never owned one or driven it full-time. I just remember balking at how poorly thought-out the hardware was at the time, and feeling pretty good about my choice to abandon Macbooks altogether.

I have the 13” model at home and the 16” at work. My work computer runs hot and slow, but that seems to be attributable largely to (or at least confounded by) corporate malware (falcond in particular IIRC).

I have a 2019 pro and my wife got an M1 air and every time I use her computer for anything I kick myself for not waiting a year and getting an M1 for myself.

The resale value of that 2019 will be high. I don’t know the safest place to sell them though. Recommendations welcome! EBay just fills me with dread.

I sold mine at 60%. That's how fed up I was with my 2019 16" MBP after having the M1 Air for about 3 months.

2016 MBP gang rise up! I switched over to the Air M1 a year ago (I think?) and it's faster, lighter and smaller. Best laptop ever.

My M1 Mac mini is, hands down, the greatest computer deal I’ve ever nabbed. 1TB SSD, 16tb memory (I do media production 8gb is a non-starter), all for $1450.00. It’s even a solid gaming machine which I wasn’t expecting.

No complaints at all except the 2 monitor cap.

you just gave me flashbacks :( worst purchase ever!

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