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I recently upgraded from the 2015 to the current gen. 2015 pros: * Better battery life * Way better keyboard * More robust * More useful port selection * Track
by unknownsavage 8y ago
I recently upgraded from the 2015 to the current gen.
2015 pros:
* Better battery life
* Way better keyboard
* More robust
* More useful port selection
* Trackpad is a more reasonable size
2018 pros:
* Way better speakers
* Slightly better screen
* Lighter
* Faster
* Trackpad is not mechanical
* Finger print login is useful
I'd really love a proper "pro" macbook pro, that sacrificed a bit of the thin-and-lightness for an actual professional level of stuff (better cooling, more ports, bigger battery, no touchbar)
- SCdF 8y agoTo clarify, are you saying that your 3 year old 2015 laptop has, today, better battery life than your new 2018 laptop? That's mad...
- kylec 8y agoThe 2015 15" had a 100Wh battery, the 2018 has an 83Wh battery. The 2015 gets better battery life because it has 20% more battery capacity.
- giovannibajo1 8y agoThat would make sense if they had the same hardware. Different hardware absorbs different current. You cannot deduce anything from battery size.
- nikanj 8y agoI've had the pleasure of upgrading from a 2015 to a 2017. The battery life on the latter is definitely worse, no matter what the official specs say.
- thebooktocome 8y agoI concur.
- saagarjha 8y agoIt is, but I haven't found it to be significantly worse. About an hour less.
- reversengineer 8y agoMany people would describe an hour's difference to be a "significant" change, especially when a scale of around 10 hours total battery life is being considered.
- saagarjha 8y agoSure, but considering the "fudge factor" that Apple often applies for their battery life estimates ("casual browsing", etc.) an hour isn't all that much.
- davnicwil 8y agoYeah I went from 2014 to 2017, and went from broadly not worrying about doing 6 hours of solid dev work without thinking about battery to essentially never feeling comfortable away from a plug. I'd guesstimate I get at most 3 hours on the 2017 before the battery level gets low enough I have to start planning where I'll next plug in. Not ideal.
- blueboo 8y agopart of the issue is if you have anything other than textedit open, the discrete GPU is on hoovering up all your watt-hours.
- jammygit 8y agoI think decaying batteries might drive people to get new machines? Just a suspicion. They do it with iphones :p
- bluescrn 8y agoIt’s certainly an incentive to upgrade, but only if the newer model is a clear upgrade... I suspect that Apple will be seeing a lot of 2015 MBPs brought in for battery replacements...
- wild_preference 8y agoAll batteries decay.
- hamstergene 8y agoThat's kinda the point... Instead of using more energy efficient new gen CPU to add ~3 hours of life, Apple used it to make the already perfect laptop insignificantly thinner and lighter by reducing the battery size.
- kowdermeister 8y ago> You cannot deduce anything from battery size. physics might have a word with you :)
- arvinsim 8y agoI wonder if the touchbar is also doing significant drains on the battery.
- dbuder 8y agoCapacitive touch is very cheap on power, I don't know anything about mac touchbars so I don't know what else they're doing with them.
- lowercased 8y agoi had a 2016 mbp, and it had (IIRC) ~7000mAh battery. My 2015 mbp had ~8800mAh. The battery itself was smaller in the 2016 model, presumably for thin/weight.
- TylerE 8y agoThose numbers can't be right. That's only double what an iphone has.
- coin 8y agoDifferent voltages
- icebraining 8y agomAh is not a measure of energy; Apple says the Macbooks have about 54 watt-hours, whereas an iPhone has between 6 and 10.
- n1000 8y agoTo those of you that complain about battery life. I noticed that using Safari as my browser gives me almost an hour extra compared to Firefox. To me it seems that newer CPU may be more efficient overall, but they seem to consume more power under medium to heavy load.
- theriddlr 8y agoMy front-end dev colleague used to tell me to use a "proper" browser (i.e. Chrome) because I favoured Safari and even with DevTools. I said it gives me more battery life on a MacBook!
- 8fingerlouie 8y agoI just replaced the battery in my Early 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 13. When it was new i would regularly get ~12 hours of light usage from it (safari, email, terminal, VPN, citrix, remote desktop). It has been providing around 8-9 hours steadily for the past year or so. I finally noticed when placed flat on a table it wasn't sitting flat, and the battery was swollen. Now with a new battery we're back to 12+ hours of light usage.
- bengale 8y agoThis isn't my experience at all, I have a 2015, a 2017 and 2018 MacBook pros. The 17 isn't all that tbh and I only have it because they replaced my 16 model. The battery isn't all that and the keyboard is a big dodgy. The 2018 though is absolutely fine, the battery is great and the keyboard has been fine the whole time. I have to use the 2015 for one of my contracts and Im always glad to get back to the 2018.
- dguaraglia 8y agoMy old 2015 MacBook Pro without a discrete GPU had amazing battery life. I'd get at least 8 hours, and over 10 if I wanted to sacrifice some of the brightness and turn bluetooth off. I got upgraded to the discrete GPU model and I could get at most 6 to 7 hours for the same workload. Nowadays, you can't even get a 15 inch MacBook Pro without a discreet GPU.
- kalleboo 8y agoYou can stop the OS from switching to the discrete GPU using an app like gfxCardStatus
- jamiepenney 8y agoBetter cooling, definitely. My machine gets quite hot on my lap unless I have it turn on the fans earlier using Macs Fan Control. I'm using it as a pro machine, so it's running a bunch of docker containers, Slack, VS Code, a million tabs across Firefox and Chrome. It's a busy machine and it doesn't need to be silent if that means it's hot enough to be uncomfortable on my legs and hands.
- zepolen 8y agoMBP heating issues are from the fact that the dedicated GPU doesn't get enough cooling, the frame is too small. Add https://github.com/0xbb/gpu-switch https://github.com/0xbb/gpu-switch - run the integrated gpu only - and you will never listen to a fan again, and prolong the life of your MPB.
- dwighttk 8y agoChrome is probably the biggest culprit. It is awfuly inefficient on macOS
- bluescrn 8y agoFirefox burns through battery rapidly too. Seems that you have to stick with Safari to get good battery life out of an MBP - it makes a very real difference
- wild_preference 8y ago
- crazysim 8y agoI thought the 2015 had a force touch and non mechanical touchpad too.
- abrowne 8y agoCorrect, the 2015 has force touch, which is how they fit the 99.5 Wh battery.
- mygo 8y agoexactly ;) so well-designed that you can't even tell it's non mechanical (unless you turn the clicky sound and vibrations off) I still prefer the 2015 Macbook Pros to the current release and that's just sad. How is it so easy for Apple to throw away so much good design research and implementation? They don't even have the mag-safe chargers, nor the the battery indicator lights on the chargers, what a step backwards on such simple but great functionality!
- modzu 8y agoit couldnt be so you'll jump at the chance to upgrade again in 2019? no, no, thats tinfoil hat crazytalk in capitalist society then again theres hanlons razor
- WildGreenLeave 8y agoI own a 2015 Macbook since the launch in 2015 (duh), and I remember letting people use my force touch trackpad saying that it doesn't 'click'. Took almost everyone at least several minutes to convince them that the trackpad doesn't actually click. :-) Furthermore I do agree with you on pretty much every point. I don't like my 2017 Macbook and I most certainly won't upgrade my 2015 to any new pro laptop.
- techstrategist 8y agoWhoa, I switched to a 2015 MBP last year and didn't know about force touch yet. Time to repeat the onboarding I guess, there is some incredibly useful hidden UI.
- tobyhinloopen 8y ago
- dep_b 8y ago2015 trackpad isn’t mechanical either
- Matthias247 8y agoI have the 2015 and the 2017 (without touch bar). I agree to most things, with the minor correction that the trackpad on the 2015 is also not mechanical (and works fine, I also like the size better). Regarding the screen I observed: The 2017 has better colors. However it is far more of a dust and dirt magnet, and harder to clean. It seems like the coating or glass might be different, which allows more dust and grease to stick. As a result the display of my 2015 looks mostly clean, the 2017 is messed up as soon as I use it for two hours and have it in my backpack. All in all I like the 2015 more. They should have just replaced the DisplayPort/TB2 connector with USB-C/TB3 and it would have been fine. The extra lightness of the 2017 is nice to have, but from a practical standpoint the form factor of the 2015 was already great.
- dzhiurgis 8y ago> I'd really love a proper "pro" macbook pro More like MacBook Dev, imagine: - Good keyboard, with Lenovo-like mouse clitoris - Edges that aren't cutting your wrists off - No touch bar and regular size trackpad (heck, I'll pay extra for this) - 15" OLED screen for outdoors - Figure out GPU. I do not want annoying GPU switching and beast of graphics card - I just enough to drive 5K screen. - A USB port - MacBook Air weight/size or insane battery life - CPU with best single thread performance - RAM up to 128GB or more
- Ardon 8y agoIt's never been clear to me why people want a mouse clitoris on a computer with a real trackpad. I've seen plenty of windows laptops with awful trackpads where I get it, but aren't they just a huge step back compared to a macbook trackpad?
- philwelch 8y agoI've never developed the muscle memory to be effective with the trackpoint, but it does have the distinct advantage of being usable without taking your hands off the keyboard.
- binomialxenon 8y agoI can use it without moving my hands away from home-row position, I can drag-n-drop much more easily than a trackpad, middle-clicking and right-clicking are both more consistent, and I can scroll indefinitely in any direction without picking up my hands. This is probably just me, but when using my laptop on my lap, if I were using the trackpad i would have to bring my hands down closer to my body which is less comfortable, or move my laptop further away from me.
- akarambir 8y agoCan you provide some info into how you typically use trackpoint. Which fingers do you use and how do you control the acceleration when going few pixels away or whole screen corner to corner. What about the clicks. I have a thinkpad and am always curious on how to effectively use it. Even a video of someone using it might help.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoI updated from 2012 to 2016, hated and sold it after a couple of keyboard fails, and bought a 2015. My next Macbook will probably be a Thinkpad way things are going. The better speakers I'd like. I still need to use USB sticks and SD pretty frequently and have always hated bags of adaptors. They always seem to break or get lost at the moment you're sitting with the important client. The rest seems to come with a cost far worse than the benefit (for me anyway). Larger trackpad was so large I would constantly get false activations when typing. Perhaps I have the wrong sort of fingers. The touchbar was constantly activating when I typed on the top row of physical keys. Perhaps I have the wrong sort of fingers again. :) The newer thinner keyboard was both horrible and horribly unreliable. Dust sensitive? LOL I think back to when the kids were little and throwing rusks, or putting toast in the VCR the moment we blinked. Then the amount of dog and cat hair (that magically gets everywhere) that's been removed from our keyboards over the years. Lighter is OK, but not at a huge battery life cost compared to the 2015.
- Iwan-Zotow 8y agotentacles, man, tentacles...
- dsego 8y agoWell, don't get the Thinkpad for better speakers. Speaking as an owner of a new t480s, whose dumb idea was to put speakers on the bottom of the case? My lap don't have ears. Of course the battery life is even worse than the bad 2016 Macbook, not by much though. But it's not whatever double digit hours they claim. If you think apple makes nonsensical design decisions, try any windows laptop, apple is still miles ahead in certain areas. Windows is so bad it's not even funny anymore (for example cortana guided setup is disturbing) and don't get me started about linux.
- boomskats 8y agoWhat's wrong with Linux? Its support for Thinkpad hardware is pretty exceptional, it just isn't great at holding your hand.
- 8y ago
- nodesocket 8y agoI upgraded from a 2017 13" MacBook Pro touch bar to 2018 15" MacBook Pro touch bar, and noticed a huge improvement. - 6 cores (12 threads) was absolutely noticeable - NVme disk performance is much faster - 2nd generation butterfly keyboard is much improved - Speakers are way louder, bassy, and crisp - 15" screen is much better in terms of real-estate than 13"
- Matthias247 8y agoYou actually have the 3rd gen butterfly keyboard. The first gen was only on the 12“ MacBook series. And that one was really bad (have zero feedback). The 2nd gen on the 2017 is bearable, but doesn’t seem to be long term reliable
- AnthonBerg 8y agoI upgraded from a top-end 2017 15" to a top-end 2018 15", and even that was very noticeable. I was quite surprised at how much better the 2018 was. I really liked the 2017 to begin with.
- Jmcdd 8y agoHow long have you had it for? I'd be willing to go back to the new models (having returned my 2017) if they truly fix the keyboard issue
- oarsinsync 8y ago> 2018 pros: Trackpad is not mechanical My 2015 MBP has a force-touch trackpad. Is the 2018 one substantially different from that?
- Ndymium 8y agoIt's the same, just a lot bigger.