I pre-ordered the new Macbook Pro 2016 when it originally came out. Here's my take after using it for more than 6-7? months (no clue, time goes by):
1) I am extremely happy with the butterfly keyboard. There is absolutely no issues with it for me and it's my ideal keyboard. I honestly do not understand people who say the accuracy is bad on it - perfectly fine for me. Use it for long enough and you'll get used to it. The only thing it is guilty of is being different.
2) I enjoy the Touchbar and TouchID, it genuinely feels nice to use it. ESC key being on the touch bar is something you get used to, but understandably if I was a huge user of VIM it would probably make me extremely upset. Thankfully I'm not and it works fine for me. I genuinely do not notice it anymore.
3) I ran out of USB-C ports on my laptop (4 total). I have pretty much all of them in use, so I now need to resort to USB-C <-> USB A hubs. For some reason, USB-C <-> USB-C hubs don't exist, so that honestly sucks considering I completely switched to USB-C plugs before I ran out.
4) Touchpad size is much better than 2015 MBP. After using this so much I could never go back to a smaller touchpad, and using my old 2015 MBP just honestly feels bad. It might be due to my sensitivity? I have no clue why people say their hands hit the touchpad since I have never had that issue in my entire time owning it.
5) CPU and memory is great. I can run multiple virtual machines in Parallels no issue. I develop games and constantly test them in the background. I really see absolutely zero drawback from the 2015 MBP, and even though on a spec-sheet the hardware /looks/ worse, in my experience it performs much better.
Take what you will from my experiences.
Agree.
So much so, that I ordered the new Magic Keyboard for desktop use (which uses similar switches) to replace the previous-generation Apple Wireless Keyboard.
The new MacBook Pro keyboard is the best I've ever used. My fingers feel like they're flying over the keys. And I've owned all sorts of mechanical keyboards, ThinkPads, and odd devices like the DataHand.
I really don't understand all the hate for the new keyboard. Or USB-C. Or the Touch Bar.
I think the issue is that the scissors switch encourages typing using the tips of the fingers (deeper key travel) whereas the butterfly keys encourage using the pads of the fingers which reduces exertion and fatigue.
My understanding is that the failure rate for the butterfly keys is "significant [...] but 'less than 5% for sure.'" [0] Marco Ament (thread OP) and John Gruber (Daring Fireball) are proponents of keyboards that take more effort to use, Gruber's favorite keyboard being the Apple Extended Keyboard II. [1][2]
Some aficionados' opinions about keyboards reach heights usually reserved for out-of-production American muscle-car transmissions. [3] Reading the tenor of some descriptions of the action of these old-timey keyboards, e.g.
> tank but with a more metallic, punchy feel, and an audible note to its
> astoundingly loud typing sound, [3]
I personally prefer subtlety and finesse when I interaction with peripheral devices, so I welcome the move toward shallower key travel.
YMMV
[0] https://theoutline.com/post/2402/the-new-macbook-keyboard-is-ruining-my-life
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/04/16/my-favorite-keyboard
[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/gruber/sets/72157604797968156/
[3] http://www.penmachine.com/2008/04/keyboard-nerdery-apple-extended
Actually, the Magic Keyboard uses scissor switches. I don't blame you for not noticing, but it does demonstrate that Apple can make scissor switches that appeal to butterfly switch fans.
In the article Marco suggests that Apple replace the problematic butterfly switch keyboard on the MacBook Pro with the keyboard from the Magic Keyboard. Since you like the Magic Keyboard, I assume this would be fine with you?
What I have noticed with the MacBook Pro 2016 and beyond is that they are way more polarising than previous generations. Sure, there were issues with the older Retina models, but nothing nearly as controversial as the keyboard, touch bar and ports on the latest models. I can understand that not everyone liked the old keyboard either, but I can't recall large numbers of people hating it to such degree as to call it a show stopper for purchasing a new portable Mac.
I briefly replaced my 2014 MBP with a 2017 iMac, citing the 16GB ram ceiling as my primary issue. I ordered the iMac from Apple with 8GB of ram and ordered an additional 16GB from OWC b/c it was way cheaper.
The iMac arrived over two weeks before the OWC ram arrived, so I had 2 weeks using the 8GB iMac in it's ram-starved state. In short: I never once noticed the new iMac with just 8GB to be memory-starved. Never.
I don't really know what this is owing to — I assume Kaby Lake has a lot to do with it. I feel like if they could just update the 2015 MBP to the new chips, we'd be all set again for many years. That's my wish anyway.
For clarity: I returned the iMac after the 15 day trial period b/c I still use a laptop a lot of the time and didn't want to be managing two computers. I think I could have used this iMac with just 8GB of ram indefinitely. It was literally a non-issue for two full weeks of normal, daily working use.
There’s huge performance gap between desktops and laptops though. If the trend wasn’t so heavily inclined towards laptops as corporate machines I’d prefer a high end iMac to be sitting on my desk at work instead of an MBP.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/4929790 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/4929982
Pro :
- it is lighter. I don't really find it is a very relevant pro, the previous one is already a light device so this isn't really relevant but it would not be fair to do not list it.
- touch id is very convenient. It has one huge caveat : it is very capricious. For example each time the mbp crashes, fingerprints are automatically deleted. I guess it is a security measure, but it makes it a pain to register my fingers again since the machine is not that stable.
Meh :
- the touchpad is extremely large, I am not sure why. I had no problem with the old one. I sometimes tap on the pad by mistake but that does not happen often.
Cons :
-Touchbar : I can't wrap my mind around it. It is just bad. This is such a gimmick, and a badly implemented one. I can't count the number of times I mistyped on this band. Accessing a feature almost always take more time than with the old regular keyboard. On top of that, I really miss the tactility of a simple button. I am used to type without looking at the keyboard and with buttons you can't press it is far from comfortable to do so.
I am on the verge of just using a dedicated keyboard and touchpad just to do not have to use this touchbar.
It makes me very uncomfortable, but the high end machine my company bought for me is objectively less suited to my use case than the 2 years old one I have at home.
It is the first time that even after a couple of months, I can't get used to a new machine and long to go back to the last one.
> For example each time the mbp crashes, fingerprints are automatically deleted.
What kind of crash are you referring to? I've had my 2016 MBP for about a year now, with a couple of freezes/black screens, but I haven't had to re-register my fingerprints at all. I assume you're not just referring to the mandatory password entry after reboot?
Maybe it only erases prints recorded since the last restart ? I googled a bit when it happened and it was explained as a security feature.
It was pretty useful but Apple has discarded them..
That's too bad, even something really discrete like a line or even a point would be great.
Lastly : magsafe was great. I am all for a future where we use USB-c but is it impossible to have a magnetic adapter on the powerplug cable ?
> Another minor cons is that just came to mind is that there is no longer
> an indicator on the keyboard's bezel giving you the position of the
> ports.
To my eyes, this "line" seems characteristic of Apple engineering.
It was fine when it was just the R key. Sort of. I set up bash scripts to copy-paste "r" to my clipboard, and just pressed command-V instead of "r". But then the T key went out.
The other day, I was using my MacBook with an external keyboard sitting on top, and then the whole thing shut off. The keyboard had been pressing the power button.
Also ran across someone with a similar story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15701331 MBP rendered unusable by faulty X key. Apple wanted $400, he paid, then the G key went out. They wanted another $400.
I really wish that the 5 year "reklamasjon" (roughly translated to claims) period we have in Norway for things that are supposed to last more than two years, caught on globally. It can sort of be explained as a warranty mandated by law, which means we can usually ignore the usual warranties from the vendor unless they give better terms or last longer than 5 years. I have had computer equipment that broke down after four and a half years, that I got either replaced or repaired for free because we have these laws.
I think one of the largest benefits of having such a system world wide, would be less waste. Producers would have to make more durable products that lasted longer, not laptops, cellphones etc. that are basically treated as consumables with only a few years of life expectancy.
My Samsung TV I bought in 2012 died this year under normal use, and they replaced it with a new model. The "warranty" was only 12 month. I'm 100% this law is partly responsible for the "Australia tax" but it also means manufacturers can't take shortcuts.
(Apple tried to claim the "reasonable time" an iPhone should last is 12 months, which didn't stand up in court given you could buy them on 2 year contracts)
I admire your adaptability; I certainly wouldn't be able to call it "sort of fine" if I had use a shortcut just to type a letter.
Act today and buy the entire alphabet for just $8000. That's a $2400 savings!
It’s probably never gonna happen because they are a mobile device company now and that is where the money is.
And make it shut the hell up, or let me offload compute to something that has big fans.
This one puzzles me. Back when I used a MacBook the fact that it was mostly silent was one of the biggest advantages.
Also, somewhat honestly: I don’t see any reason why Mac users can't offload to AWS, Azure or Google Cloud?
I like the idea of the touch bar, but I don't actually want it for keys. I think it'd be handy as a ticker for notifications, macros, etc, but not common keys.
Having a bar for macros / shortcut keys for Illustrator (etc) would be extremely useful for designers, and I don't doubt that there are hundreds of other applications for other industries. Sort of like those LED keyboards that were kicking around a few years back.
The requirement for dongles is just silly. I actually purchased this late-2013 MBP refurbished specifically because I didn't like the new GPU and read some other complaints about the current systems of the day. Having an SD slot, HDMI, 2x USB, etc is excellent and can easily handle most of my needs when I'm on-the-go. At home I have my laptop on a VESA mounted tray with a second monitor.
All in all, there isn't a lot that Apple needs to improve with the MBP -- they just need to dial it back a few generations and retool the touchbar so its not mandatory.
Lastly, bring back magsafe! Maybe there are some people who hated it, but I've never had any issues with it. There have been a few times where the cable has been kicked (often at a coffee shop by someone else.) Its a fantastic design, even if the magnets could be the tiniest bit stronger.
quick edit: I hope things don't go the way of using the camera for quick unlocking. I always keep my cameras covered, even if makes me look like I'm paranoid. Using touch ID on the touch bar would definitely be ideal.
I agree that the new machine is lacking in terms of Battery and Memory (only 16GB!). I'm waiting for the next release.
The target market is upper-middle class/upper class people who want a really attractive, designer laptop.
Developers have got to be such a tiny niche of Apple's customer base now that they don't care anymore. Go into an apple store sometime. Try to guess how many of the people there buying macbook "pros" are software developers.
Walk into any engineering class at a university and you'll likely see the same ratio, perhaps even further skewed towards macs.
Disclaimer: I own a mac and a pc
I'm saying that apple doesn't care about those people anymore, because they've found a new, bigger market segment.
I also dislike the keyboard, but I rarely use it as an actual laptop so it's fine I guess
I have a 2017 MBP and their BT external keyboard (provided by work) and it is noisy, it's like having a mechanical keyboard...clack....clack....clack...
Its just so difficult to type silently, unlike their previous keyboards.
The problems are:
(1) Screen came with a bad pixel which Apple was like "oh just leave it with us 1-2 weeks and we can swap that out for you" ... totally unreasonable after dropping USD$5K, because I need my system daily.
(2) Screen has an imprint of the edge of the keys on it because it is designed to be too thin/bendy, and when in a full bag receives some squash pressure.
(3) Touching the lower right part of the trackpad began to reset the computer, sometimes, a couple of years ago. When it happens it happens over and over. Apple wanted $new-computer-money to fix it. I now use a Wacom tablet and stylus in most cases.
(4) Some crap driver I installed (Huawei mobile data dongle for India) broke my OS in some fundamental way that was impossible to fix, and I had to re-install everything which was a nightmare waste of a weekend.
To be fair I do use it daily and it is sort of surviving, but the cost is far too high. Of course "I am never buying another Mac!" ... except that I have been looking at alternatives, and none of them really appeal, except in the desktop range, which is a big leap backward in mobility. Perhaps I will just buy a cheap PC laptop with Linux or a dumb terminal at work to log in to a desktop at my house and be done with it.
When your machine gets battery problems, take it in ASAP, and get it repaired. I probably got 3-4 more years of life out of this machine with that repair.
I see just 10% gain, and I don't see any reason to upgrade unless the logic board fails on my 3.5 years old laptop.
The touch bar is just now a volume and brightness slider control!
* Ditch the keyboard and expand the Touch Bar to become a touchpad: an entire customizable keyboard / input pad
I'm writing to you on a 6.5lb laptop with FireWire, VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort, two 3.5mm audio jacks, SD 5 USB-A and 3 USB-C. And in all honesty, I sort of miss having a 9 pin serial port.
Which is a shame. I thought the keyboard was fine and lots of other things are great.
Here is a list of my gripes: 1. I would like the ability to move the siri button over a bit so I don't accidentally touch it. (I should probably just remap this to something else.)
2. Some issues connecting to my hdmi monitor is slightly unreliable.
Here are the things I like about it. 1. TouchId is awesome. I use it more than the Apple Watch unlock feature.
2. I have never had an issue with missing the esc key. I love the touch bar because it allows me to dismiss alerts without moving my fingers so much.
3. I bought some usb-c adaptors for a ergonomic keyboard and tracball mouse. Logitech came out with a new trackball that is bluetooth so I will probably switch to that.
4. Touchpad is amazing I have never had an issue with palm rejection.
5. I only feel a slowdown when I have an insane amount of tabs open. When that occurs I'm probably saving too much information in that tab and it should be closed.
Am I happy with my purchase? Yes.
I love the color. The butterfly switches with less travel allows me to type faster. The screen is gorgeous.
I prefer the butterfly switches to the previous chick-let.
What if I don't want to go all USB-C, especially since USB-C is a disaster? https://marco.org/2017/10/14/impossible-dream-of-usb-c A "Pro" computer should serve my needs, not the other way around. I'm sick of Apple breaking things for no damn reason and then acting like I'm the problem for not just going along with it.
> I think the primary argument is that Touch Bar sucks
That's not the primary argument. Most people who dislike this machine think the touch bar is at least inoffensive, if not particularly useful. The primary arguments are:
1. If you get so much as a speck of dust in the keyboard, it bricks the machine and requires a >$500 repair, with no guarantees that it won't happen again the very next day.
2. The lack of useful ports means you have to carry dongles (at $80 a pop) everywhere.
3. They made a perfectly thin-enough and light-enough machine thinner and lighter, giving it worse battery life for no good reason.
4. They made a perfectly big-enough trackpad bigger, increasing the spurious input rate for no good reason.
= More ports
No. This should be a strict no. Not including Flash on the iPhone has pushed the community to adapt. If Apple wasn't blunt, we'll be still stack with these "plugins". Not that I hate flash but it isn't the right way to do it even if it is more performant right now.
There is no reason to have multiple different confusing ports. And different kind of cables. Let's stop this and have the whole industry work on a single type of Port.
= Back away from the Touch Bar
That's highly subjective. Especially that you can opt-out by choosing the model without the Touch Bar.
I personally like the Touch bar.
* Trackpad is too big. What was the point, honestly? Nobody said, "My use case is I want a trackpad that's impossible not to bump when I type."
* MagSafe was great, bring it back. Every Apple product from now until the end of time should use a MagSafe power connector.
* TouchBar sucks. End of story. I miss the ESC key. I've literally never been like, "Oh gosh, I'm glad I have a TouchBar to change the volume... what a great feature!" It' just inflates production cost without adding value.
* Machines lack power... CPU and RAM. Old MBPs felt like they were amazing machines that would stand up over time. 16 GB RAM has been the cap for how many years now? Like a decade? Yeah...
* USB-C... other than dongles, I don't know a single accessory that uses a USB-C. Everything is Thunderbolt or USB-3. So... yeah let's have at least one USB-3 plug. I've got a USB and HDMI adapter that I use every day. Anyway nothing is built using a USB-C... I get pushing for new tech, but it seems more just like a way to add $250 in dongle sales to every new laptop sold.
* They are more expensive than the old ones. =(
* Office, Steam, other things... still don't run as well on Mac as they do on PC. If Apple isn't for Gamers, it has to be for people who do work? Or... look, who are the "Pro" lines for these days?
Finding ESC without any physical affordance is a pain in the ass. Normal things like cancelling a dialog become a hurdle. I haven’t used the middle section of the touchbar in weeks - nothing really useful there. I hate the way the volume slider works. A few days back almost hurt my ears when accidentally maxed out the volume while swiping off a bit of dust from the metal right above it.
I’ve had the standard dead key issue but it fixed itself. The keyboard actually feels nice, but a key gets a bit sticky every other day.
What made my experience better is fully embracing USB-C. I have a hub connected to a 4K monitor, headphones and power, so I can sit down and plug in a single cable that does everything - this feels magical. [To be fair, sometimes two cables since the hub can’t keep up with charging under heavy load.]
Take SD Card as Example. To me they are going to the way of CD/DVD. I am not a professional photographer, so it is a little hard for me to understand what specific workflow that SD Card is mandatory. We have 802.11ax and 802.11ay, First being a much improved 802.11ac that should finally mean WiFi doesn't suck ( as much ) and the latter brings 60Ghz direct line of sight transfer and 100s of Gbps. While we are unlikely to see those speed, it is no argument that we are capable of doing 5-10 Gbps wireless transfer now, and even better in the future. So why the need for an SD Card? Your Camera should wirelessly connect to your Computer.
Then there is the Keyboard, I loved the Magic Keyboard. But even then it is not perfect. So not only should Apple NOT try to put scissors back to MBP, they should make something that is better then Magic Keyboard, give the sense of depth, using more or less the height of Butterfly, while being super reliable. The problem with only 5% of MBP have keyboard issues is that the previous MBP had 1%, that is 5X more! They should aim high and have a failure rate of less then 0.5%.
Again it is the same with trackpad. Let as avoid all the discussion of why such a large trackpad. But if they are going to make it stay there, may be an hands on keyboard sensor, we want palm rejection to be 99.999% accurate! Not 98 or 99%.
The list goes on. But Apple is known to be the master of iteration. Or more like Steve Jobs's Apple was known for it. So the next MBP is going to be critical.
Mac is still a 25M unit/ year business. 5th Largest PC Vendor by Unit, likely higher on revenue, possibly the number 1 in profits since Apple make 10x more profits then other PC vendor. ( Doesn't mean Apple is making a lot, it is just other PC vendor are cut throat competition going down to 5% Gross Profit ) So Mac still matters, and will continue to matter for the coming 10 years, despite the Post PC era, and going in a full circle, It is Apple's best chance to take over some PC Market.
It seems clear that we are heading to a USB-C world but we are not there yet. There are too many existing devices to which we need connections to just abandon them. When you reduce both the type and number of ports, you make the device less versatile. The availability of USB-C is still in transition and this generation of mackbook should reflect that. include at least one USB-A port and one display-port or hdmi port. Adding USB-C ports does move things forward but dropping the others too soon just impedes the function of these laptops.
If you're accustomed to trackpad scrolling on the mac using a native editor (TextMate) you are spoiled for life. Everything else feels wrong.
Are keyboards a big problem on macbooks? I've never heard of anybody having any problems with the keys.
> Great first-party USB-C hubs
Or just include enough ports on the laptop itself. In my entire life I've never needed to use a hub for anything.
> More ports
Couldn't agree more. SD card slot, 3x USB-A, 2x USB-C, Displayport, headphone port, Ethernet port, sim card slot.
> Back away from the Touch Bar
Yeah the touch bar is kind of useless and fucks up the already limited keyboard. Touch screens are the way to go for the occasional touch usage.
> Nicer charger
Apple's never been great at charging. Iphones have always charged slower than every other phone on the market. Even their wired charging is slower than my 2 year old Samsung's wireless charging. So yeah, much improvement needed.