I do feel like things have gone downhill. I bought a mid-2009 13” MacBook Pro which easily lasted 9 years (with an ssd upgrade and more ram added at some point) and was honestly the best laptop I’ve owned.
I was hooked and hyped to get the new 2016 MacBook Pro. Talk about polar opposite experience:
* The keyboard is terrible (replaced 3 times already),
* Touchbar is meh (if you touchtype when do ever look at it - this feels like a thing that’d be more useful for entry level machines where you are likely to find hunt-and-peck typists) and it now flickers in the corner occasionally.
* The fan is noisy
* I can no longer upgrade the ram or internal storage
* I’ve gone almost completely usb-c but the lack of usb-a and hdmi is still annoying on occasions - especially on a pro machine
On the good side
* the speakers are amazing
* the “retina” display is crisp and bright
* it’s amazingly small and light
What’s really killing Macs right now is the software-side “it just works” seems like a thing of the past e.g.
* I used to chuckle at people on windows when waking from sleep but Macs (possibly because of FileVault) feel just as slow now
* As mentioned in the post general Bluetooth flakiness (tbf it does seem like the latest patch release or two of Catalina seems to have got on top of this now)
* Using spaces (inc animation) for full-screen and making that what happens for the maximise button - just weird and clunky
* General system responsiveness - it just feels sluggish
I really can’t believe the turn around - they’ve managed to turn a customer-for-life to now I’m seriously considering getting a Linux-based laptop instead.
I was hooked and hyped to get the new 2016 MacBook Pro. Talk about polar opposite experience:
* The keyboard is terrible (replaced 3 times already),
* Touchbar is meh (if you touchtype when do ever look at it - this feels like a thing that’d be more useful for entry level machines where you are likely to find hunt-and-peck typists) and it now flickers in the corner occasionally.
* The fan is noisy
* I can no longer upgrade the ram or internal storage
* I’ve gone almost completely usb-c but the lack of usb-a and hdmi is still annoying on occasions - especially on a pro machine
On the good side
* the speakers are amazing
* the “retina” display is crisp and bright
* it’s amazingly small and light
What’s really killing Macs right now is the software-side “it just works” seems like a thing of the past e.g.
* I used to chuckle at people on windows when waking from sleep but Macs (possibly because of FileVault) feel just as slow now
* As mentioned in the post general Bluetooth flakiness (tbf it does seem like the latest patch release or two of Catalina seems to have got on top of this now)
* Using spaces (inc animation) for full-screen and making that what happens for the maximise button - just weird and clunky
* General system responsiveness - it just feels sluggish
I really can’t believe the turn around - they’ve managed to turn a customer-for-life to now I’m seriously considering getting a Linux-based laptop instead.