- Ditching MagSafe
- Touch Bar (at first without a dedicated escape key)
- Butterfly Keyboard
- Uncomfortably hot to the touch
- Full-sized left and right arrow keys which made it harder to find without looking
- Only USB-C ports
Whoever had the reigns when Apple finally reversed these decisions and made the M1 MBP -- this is the best laptop I've ever owned.
The 2015 and 2014 models weren't that great either since they were using old 4th gen Haswell Intel CPUs which ran super hot.
I didn’t find it to run that hot and generally found it to be the best windows laptop (via vm) money could buy at the time.
My only complaint is that Apple’s keyboards have become significantly less resistant to finger oils and staying on top of cleaning them is much more demanding than it used to be.
The rest of the computer was great though (display, keyboard, trackpad, ssd).
...and I excitedly bought one. And then a year later the M1 came out, and I was kicking myself
They didn't. The new keyboard is still not old scissors keyboard with 1.5mm Key travel. If I remember correctly it is 1mm or 1.2mm. And it is still a huge difference for me.
My 12” G4 PowerBook has the best keyboard of any laptop in my house.
The 2016-2019 Pros on the other hand replaced a machine that was universally loved. there were entire podcasts dedicated to complaining about them for four years.
Then I switched jobs, got a butterfly MBP and the laptop was honestly one of the worst I've had. After 2 years, I had lost a number of keys (i simply never used the built in keyboard when possible) and the battery started expanding. I couldn't even make it to the normal refresh cycle. Maybe bad luck, but such a POS. Apple phoned it in the generation prior to M1.
They shoulda kept the touchbar and restored the functions keys (including restoring volume controls etc to function keys). That would have been amazing. There was so much opportunity for cool custom functionality with touchbar, but it needs to be dedicated to that, not doing double-duty as physical keys.
I bought an M1 Air, base model, at launch, and was blown away. For once, a manufacturer wasn’t lying about battery life. What Apple has achieved with their SoC is nothing short of revolutionary. They make the best laptops by any conceivable metric, and it isn’t even close.
… shivers
It's sad to see all that work going to bin.
Did you know that you can get touchbar on ipad that you connect as a second monitor? Excellent way to keep it alive, except, oh, it does not work, unless you drag the window to the ipad first... I mean... Somebody went and designed it to work like that, on purpose...
From the security perspective, having some UI that cannot be controlled by apps (a led, a touchbar, whatever) is very important for signalling app privilege levels. oh well