37 ms·

Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

• mister_hn 6y ago
  why don't you return it back then and buy something better? Isn't there a money-back guarantee for the first X days?
  • kranner 6y ago
    Isn't the money-back/satisfaction guarantee primarily a US thing? (OP is in Barcelona.)
    • jack_pp 6y ago
      EU requires a mandatory return policy of atleast 14 days for online purchases afaik
      • p_l 6y ago
        Devil is in the details. Also, somehow, the "buy-test-return" mentality simply isn't present around Europe, at least never seen it as anything other than exceptional.
        • jack_pp 6y ago
          I've been sort of abusing it since it became available to the point that I won't even consider buying any electronics over 200$ that I can not return or atleast test in advance until I'm sure I'll be satisfied with the purchase. But you are right, where I'm from (Romania) people look at me in disbelief when I suggest it, thinking that the companies will punish them if they do it when that's not really true.
        • drclau 6y ago
          I have used it many times over the years. Never abused it though. I only buy things that I plan to keep, and do my research prior to ordering. Nevertheless, I still had to use it occasionally. Currently I literally only buy electronics from stores that I know deal fast with returns, either via returning the money or replacement. Edit: In fact, I had way better experiences with this law, in comparison to warranty claims.
      • tluyben2 6y ago
        There is (at least in Spain) something similar for offline purchases; I have been returning stuff that was just not satisfactory fo a while and no-one bats an eye.
  • GolDDranks 6y ago
    The problem is that there isn't anything better. The author said that he hates using Windows and his experimentation with Linux wasn't an entire success. That limits him to Macs. The 2016-2018 models were a disaster. The only reasonable choice left is the choice he made.
    • cerberusss 6y ago
      He could've gone for the 16", but coming from the Air, that's probably not an option.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • garmaine 6y ago
      Coming from a 2013 Air, he probably should have picked up a 2017 Air, the latest "old-style" MacBook made by Apple.
    • mister_hn 6y ago
      nothing better? Well, questioning about Linux depends really on what kind of distribution the author used previously. Some are less efficient than others. Considering hardware, the whole set of AMD Ryzen3 and Ryzen4 based laptops are much better than a MacBook, in computing power, flexibility, energy efficiency and lately also in price, plus they have the advantage that you can later upgrade SSD or RAM, while on MBP everything is soldered and you're out of luck later on. The day MacOS will be fully virtualized, it might be the doom of the MBP and iMac.
• maxbaines 6y ago
  Thank you this confirms my moving away from MBP because of touch-bar, perhaps somewhat easier as I love Windows so the Surface range was perfect.
• sandy_mdez 6y ago
  Oh God.. First time I was hearing someone doesnt like mac book pro.
• petercooper 6y ago
  I should note that most of this is rather subjective. It's a personal blog so that's totally fine, but I don't think it should sway you doing your own analysis. I've owned nearly every MBP release/bump since 2007 and the 16" MBP is by far the best IMHO and certainly a huge jump up from the 2016-2018 era disasters. Also as a touch typist, I was worried the huge trackpad might be an impediment, but it hasn't turned out to be so I can only assume we have different hand posture.
  • cerberusss 6y ago
    Yup, owning the 16", I also have the same experience; the huge trackpad is fine. The blog writer bought the 13" though, maybe that is one part of his problem.
    • petercooper 6y ago
      Ah, maybe! I tried a 13" once and gave it to an employee after a few weeks as it was infuriatingly small. If the 13" has the same trackpad size as the 16", that would probably be a real impediment.
  • Ndymium 6y ago
    I've used two of the disaster-era 15" MBPs (one I'm still using). The trackpad makes it impossible for me to use it for any serious writing, even ignoring the terrible keyboard itself. I just can't write for more than a paragraph until it decides to hit something with the trackpad and in the worst case my keystrokes are now interpreted as shortcuts. I have no such issues with my 2014 model that has a smaller trackpad. Maybe it's my hand positioning, but it just doesn't work for me.
• rafamvc 6y ago
  Wsl 2 is incredible. Got a 1000 dollars dell desktop and it is insanely faster than my Mac. Windows has improved a lot, and Linux based development on windows is a lot easier now. 5 years ago I would have quit a job if they asked me to use windows. Macos is still marginally better but not worth the cost IMHO.
  • exdsq 6y ago
    +1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux. I have noticed a few issues with it that don't make sense seeing as it's meant to have a full Linux Kernel (such as sockets not appearing) but that could be Ubuntu-20.04 being the one at fault to be fair :)
    • the_duke 6y ago
      In contrast to WSL1, WSL2 is a full-blown Linux virtual machine. It "just" has some tooling to make integration nicer. So some awkwardness is to be expected.
    • paulcarroty 6y ago
      -1 for WSL. If I need Linux, it will be obviously native. Also WSL doesn't solve: * forced Windows updates when you don't need them * shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc * stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive * bad fs performance in general
      • realusername 6y ago
        That's harsh but I agree with those points, Windows is still a consumer oriented operating system at its core, which has a lot of undesirable features for a developer.
        • C1sc0cat 6y ago
          Like ? You probably should be using a windows pro install and not one with crapware from the manufacturer
• paulcarroty 6y ago
  mbp2020 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mbp.jpg https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mbp.jpg air2013 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mba.jpg https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mba.jpg iphonese2016 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg Perfect illustration of "Apple is iphone-first company".
  • leereeves 6y ago
    The third URL doesn't work.
    • paulcarroty 6y ago
      fixed, thx.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • have_faith 6y ago
    I do wonder why they don't put more effort into the camera on the MBP. Of course it's not going to get used as a camera like a phone but with the economies of scale they have with the cameras going into iPhones you would think they could at least be on par with their own phone cameras from years ago.
    • leereeves 6y ago
      Many more people are using the camera on their computers now for videoconferencing. Of course the decision was made long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, but it turned out to be a bad one.
      • have_faith 6y ago
        Yeah I get their reasoning. It seems to still go against their brand positioning to have such a glaring omission of quality though. I remember when they would spend money figuring out how to poke tiny holes into the side of their laptops so they could have almost invisible battery charge indicators (now gone). You're not really supposed to consider if the quality of a feature on a Mac is good enough for something, it just should be. Hopefully they will sort it out.
• HugoDaniel 6y ago
  I have the new 16 MBP and love the touch bar. I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag); I find it much easier to control apps, like music, safari, and all, and the habituation period was shorter than with the keys back in the day (when i started using macs). I would love to be able to easily customize the touch bar though, the author mentions BetterTouchTool, looks good, might be worth it. Like the author I also have some problems with Catalina: the subtle hangs drive me nuts, the bugs with the True Tone going pale, the gpu's going crazy just because they want PS: Apple - please consider improving your AirPlay video support or doing some other protocol for it. It sucks having to use cables for even HDMI video playback on a secondary screen. (or place back the display port / HDMI entrance)
  • mercer 6y ago
    BetterTouchTool is amazing. Here's how I've got my touch bar set up (from left to right): - a dock for quick task switching (as well as seeing what apps are running that I can shutdown when I'm on battery) - a music/spotify widget that can play/pause, go back/forward and that shows me the track and artist as well as the album arg. - a date/time widget that I've customized so it shows me the week number too. This one has been surprisingly useful, as I'll regularly walk over to my macbook and tap on the touchbar to see the time or date. - a battery percentage and time remaining widget - a mute/unmute widget But what I perhaps like best is the swipe gestures. If I swipe anywhere along the bar with two fingers, it adjusts the volume, and with three fingers I can change the brightness. I don't currently make much use of app-specific touch bars, and there are a ton of other features I might use eventually. But even just with this I've come to really like the touch bar, where before I much preferred the function keys. Can't do without an escape key though, but thankfully they put that one back :).
  • morelikeborelax 6y ago
    Get BetterTouchTool is totally worth it if you want to customise the touchbar. Also a decent window placement tool, shortcut manager and a bunch of other things.
  • ponyous 6y ago
    Changing music on Spotify doesn't work for me 80% of the time. Physical keyboard worked 100% of the time. I hate the touchpad greatly. 0 benefits to me but tons of annoyances. I keep touching random buttons I never intended. I cannot press the correct button without looking (used to put volume to really low in bed)
• Asuchug4 6y ago
  Why would you need to love a computer? It is just a tool. I don't except a new model to change my life.
  • mprev 6y ago
    If you spend hours upon hours each day using that tool to be productive, then the quality of experience it delivers does change your life. If you're constantly fighting against a jammed keyboard, that affects your productivity, which most likely affects your happiness.
  • chacha2 6y ago
    He just explained all those reasons? He doesn't want RSI, he doesn't want to be distracted while he's typing, he doesn't want dongles, etc etc. What is this comment for?
• leetrout 6y ago
  I bought the 2018 air. I loathe it. What a waste of money and junk keyboard. That said my new job gave me a System 76 laptop and I’ve been delighted all week with it. I don’t care for the offset keyboard but at least it actually works correctly. If it had better palm detection on the trackpad it would be the best laptop I’ve owned since my 2013 MBP (which is still goin strong).
  • ct520 6y ago
    I hear you, trackpads have kept me in Mac camp for awhile. I loathe the glass ones Apple switched to though. I bought the 13 inch with emjoi bar when it came out. Returned it. Recently bought the 16inch when it came out. Like the new keyboard but ended up returning it as it got insanely loud when plugging in external display. Hard to beat my 2013 mbp retina I guess I’ll stay with it for now.
    • leetrout 6y ago
      My previous job gave me a 2019 MBP and it was always whirring away. It would have spells where nothing would be stable. IntelliJ (Ruby mine) would hang for a couple seconds every 20-30 seconds, zoom would crash repeatedly and say there was an error with the system audio and if it would start back up with out restarting the system everyone would sound like they were a robot. I installed boom audio (which is one step away from adware / malware these days) and it surprisingly got more stable. I’m excited to try windows with WSL2 soon. I don’t see going back to a new Mac any time soon based on how easy PopOS / Ubuntu has been.
  • bcrosby95 6y ago
    Curious - which System 76 laptop is it?
    • leetrout 6y ago
      It’s the 16” oryx pro. 16gb ram.
  • phren0logy 6y ago
• Nextgrid 6y ago
  I've written about my experience with macOS Catalina on an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273467 Since then there have been new developments: Had a meeting yesterday, 5 minutes before the scheduled time (which is normally plenty of time when your tools work as expected) I start up Zoom and create the meeting. Guess what? The thing now just freezes completely and it's not just Zoom, the system UI (dock, menu bar, etc) becomes sluggish. This used to work fine before upgrading to Catalina. Force-quitting Zoom fixed it, so I'm assuming something Zoom is doing (that used to work fine) is enough to completely freeze the system UI. Eventually gave up on Zoom and used FaceTime. In the middle of the call the UI froze for ~10 seconds - no video, no mouse, but audio was still working. I assumed it would crash but thankfully it recovered. Finally after the call I left the machine unattended for a minute and when I got back it was on the full disk encryption password screen so it had rebooted. Turns out it crashed because WindowServer stopped responding. I heard about those issues but always though it's related to the newer models with discrete GPUs and I didn't have to worry about it with my low-end Macbook with Intel graphics. I guess I was wrong. Mail is still playing the new mail sound randomly when archiving/moving read messages, and I ended up disabling the sound completely. I didn't know it was possible to screw up something so simple. I am now thinking of downgrading and using Catalina (for Xcode) on a separate machine. I am not sure what to do when it goes out of support though, seems like nowadays every OS became equally shit.
  • proverbialbunny 6y ago
    Have you figured it out? It sounds like a hard drive issue and you have some important system file or swap located on a part of the solid state that locks up, but not enough for the hardware to mark it as bad. If you format there is a chance the issue will go away. I had similar symptoms even after formatting on a 2015 MBP, so I formatted, wrote a 4GB file to the HDD, then after that everything worked fine. Amusingly if I tried to copy the file to a thumb drive it would time out trying to copy it. I couldn't figure out how to mark the bad sectors, so hacky solution, but it worked for me.
    • Nextgrid 6y ago
• partyboat1586 6y ago
  My main issue with the new MacBook pros is they are slow. They overheat and then throttle the CPU regularly. Too much was sacrificed to make them so slim. (I got the 2019 13 inch top spec) I built a small form factor hackintosh with an i5 9600K + 32GB RAM and it's a completely different experience. Smooth as butter, never throttles. iOS apps compile in a third of the time and my IDE doesn't grind to a halt while I'm compiling. Doing work on my MacBook now feels like a chore in comparison. Not to mention the hackintosh cost less than half what the MacBook cost.
• unbendable 6y ago
  I am coming from an T440p (Ubuntu 18.04) to an MacBook Pro 16 and i feel all his points. I want to add how bad some parts of the Mac UX are. GNOME surely has some really really bad UX decisions but overall I think (hold on tight) GNOME is better than Mac in terms of UX. My MacBook is simply not designed for pro users. I might add that the Mac is far more stable than Ubuntu and looks better but in the end as far as I am concerned the t440p is just the better option for pro users.
  • soal 6y ago
    You are not alone. My work machine is Mac and after Fedora with GNOME on personal laptop I feel constantly annoyed by basic UX stuff like window and workspace management.
• lordnacho 6y ago
  Just got my new MBP 16 inch yesterday, a replacement for my 2015 MBP 15 inch. It's been pretty smooth sailing thus far, no big disappointments. My main reason for replacing the 2015 was to get more CPU power and memory, but the 2015 was actually doing ok, not insanely slow yet. In terms of power I can now have all my tabs open, including heavy ones like Facebook, while running several different IDEs, and changing between things takes no time at all. Compiling is measurably faster. The migration tool seems to work, it moved everything including stuff you might forget like your ssh config file. Even the bash history is there, and all the apps are in the dock in the order they were in on the old machine. Homebrew seemed to need a bundle command, but that fixed itself easily. Touch bar is weird. I've basically set it to display F keys, because I can't figure out how to get iTerm2's hotkey to replace the Siri icon. If I could do that, I might not mind, but I go to terminal so often I need it to be a single key. So for now, Touch Bar is a small minus for me. The ESC key is still there so that's fine. The screen is nicer than the 2015 one, marginally. Something about the colors and the size, I guess the bezel is now pretty much where it can be aesthetically. I wouldn't want it closer to the edge. The keyboard is good. I tried my wife's butterfly type keyboard and thought it was terrible, luckily she likes it. This keyboard has slightly less travel than the old one, but somehow it feels like I can type faster without it feeling weird. Main thing is there's been no terrible surprises in moving the stuff over to a new machine. Back in the day when I was a kid it would take a whole day to install software, you would always forget to move something, and there would always be some unexpected hitch. I haven't run into Catalina slowness issues that people have mentioned, only things like the removal of kexts, which wasn't huge for me.
  • dep_b 6y ago
    I moved my dock to the bar with Pock and I have some of the most used buttons (brightness, volume, mute and night mode) right there. I also added a negative spacing between the icons so they're really close now. Now every time I can expect the same thing to be in the same place on the Touch Bar. And together with the slightly increased resolution and size the screen feels a lot bigger than the 15". The only thing that doesn't work is tap-and-slide on the volume slider.
• tpush 6y ago
  "8-9 hours with all apps closed except Safari. Browsing lightly, with an occasional video, and brightness at the literal minimum. This brightness level is only realistic if it's night time. In a normally lit environment you need to set the brightness level at around 50%." "When I push the laptop a bit more, with a few Docker containers, Pycharm running, Google Chrome with some Docs opened, and brightness near the maximum, I get around 4 hours." Honest question for those of you who have Dell XPS 13s, ThinkPad X1 Carbons and so on, what battery life are you getting? Dell for example advertises 12 hours. Are these figures realistic? Are MacBooks not the battery champs anymore?
  • zhdc1 6y ago
    My older X1 gets about 4-5 hours under relatively heavy use. It has an OLED screen though, which is part of the reason for the not so great battery life.
  • pachico 6y ago
    I have an xps 13 bought 5 years ago. I'm getting also around 8-9 hours of browsing time if I occasionally open YouTube. Quite more if I only code and don't spawn docker apps like databases. Spoiler, I use Xubuntu with CPU frequency set to power save but again, I've used this laptop massively during around 5 years already.
    • georgyo 6y ago
      My four year old XPS lasts an entire 10 minutes on battery doing nothing at all. Though when I got it, it very easily lasted the entire day, even if watching videos and such.
      • LUmBULtERA 6y ago
        Replace that battery, it's an easy process!
      • pachico 6y ago
        Sad to hear that. But yes, once the battery is replaced you'll get again a more than decent laptop. Mine has 8gb of ram, which is still enough for most of what I do, including running VMs and docker compose intensively.
• joeberon 6y ago
  Honestly the first time I've ever heard someone complain about a macbook trackpad
  • harpratap 6y ago
    I agree with the author. I never used all the space dedicated to this trackpad, seems like a waste. That and I cannot get used to this "3D Touch" trackpad compared to the older clicky ones. 99% of the time I'm going along just fine and randomly I cannot seem to select a line or something and it infuriates me when that dictionary lookup thing pops up instead.
• dariosalvi78 6y ago
  wait until the keyboard becomes useless as it happened to the 4 MacBook Pros I have owned in the last 5 years.
  • Xenoamorphous 6y ago
    They’ve switched back to the previous mechanism and ditched the butterfly one for the latest models AFAIK.
• harryf 6y ago
  These days owning a MacBook feels like being in an abusive relationship. The sex is still great but price you pay for being slowly distanced from your friends, family and peripherals is high.
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    This does not feel representative of how people describe abusive relationships to me.
    • whycombagator 6y ago
      Me either, but maybe it's a description from the other side than what you are assuming.
• rooam-dev 6y ago
  My biggest concern/blocker is the soldered storage. 1st - if it fails during warranty, how do I send it for repair safely (as in my data be safe)? 2nd - it decreases its value imho. I mean how many people buy/trust used storage? I wouldn't.
  • garmaine 6y ago
    > how do I send it for repair safely (as in my data be safe)? You have backups, right? (That is, unfortunately, the legit answer to this question.)
    • stevewodil 6y ago
      The question is ambiguous but I interpreted it as if the laptop fails and I need to have it repaired how do I keep my data safe because I can't just pull the hard drive out before sending it for repair. The T2 chip already encrypts the SSD using a unique identifier generated and known only by that host's T2, so it's sort of a non-issue imo
      • garmaine 6y ago
        If you use FileVault encryption with a secure password.
        • stevewodil 6y ago
          No, it's encrypted either way. With FileVault enabled it just won't automatically mount and decrypt when connected to the T2 chip
          • garmaine 6y ago
            That doesn’t matter if the password is known, guessable, or nonexistent.
      • rooam-dev 6y ago
        Thank you for your input, that's exactly what I meant.
• ubercow13 6y ago
  >it's impossible to get a terminal screen without anti-aliasing. My favorite font, IBM VGA8, is unreadable when anti aliased You could try scaling your favourite bitmap font 2-3x up - I did this with mine when switching to a 4k laptop. Unless this means that terminals no longer support bitmap fonts at all.
• paganel 6y ago
  Not a laptop but I just wanted to add that the latest Mac Mini does a decent job. Also, not being a laptop forces me to avoid work while sitting in a cafe or when going out on a short trip. I mostly do backend work with some front-end work mixed in lately, but no graphical-intensive stuff.
• buro9 6y ago
  Just got my first MBP. Found problems with USB devices on day 1 with USB 2.0 devices intermittently freezing. Documented https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/gp5b1z/usb_20_issues_on_new_macbook_pro_13_2020/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/gp5b1z/usb_20_issues_o... , and there is a workaround... do not use any hub that shows a USB 2.0 device to the Mac, find and use a USB-C hub that presents everything as USB 3.0 to the Mac even if it's USB 2.0 I believe that this is a Catalina software bug, and now I have a workaround I am happy. Sucks for those who can't figure out the debugging though.
  • carlesfe 6y ago
    THANKS so much! I was experiencing this same issue!
  • dustingetz 6y ago
    literally the reason to drop $3k on a mac is to never have to debug
    • MikeTaylor 6y ago
      Exactly! Exactly!
  • x3haloed 6y ago
    Anyone know of a good hub that works that way?
    • buro9 6y ago
      CalDigit TS3+ is the one that solved my issue.
      • johnnycab 6y ago
        I might be missing something here: CalDigit TS3+ costs £230 -- that is a fuck-tonne of money, to solve a problem that should not exist in the first place. https://www.amazon.co.uk/CalDigit-TS3-Plus-Thunderbolt-Dock-Space-Grey/dp/B07CVMV8VC https://www.amazon.co.uk/CalDigit-TS3-Plus-Thunderbolt-Dock-...
• werber 6y ago
  I go between last years Pro for work and this years Air for all things personal and I loathe the Pro. This years keyboard on the Air is by far the best typing experience I’ve ever had on a laptop. I have no idea why they are leaning so hard into the Touchbar, it is the most frustrating “innovation”. I frequently accidentally perform actions and need to break flow to look at it to do actions as simple as changing the volume.
  • jamesu 6y ago
    One other quirk with the touchbar I've noticed is when the machine starts overheating, the touchbar feels noticeably hotter... sometimes to the point of becoming painful to touch. They should probably rename it to the torturebar.
• qfwfq_ 6y ago
  > This situation is very annoying, especially for a touch typist as my fingers are always on hjkl and my thumb on the spacebar. This makes my thumb knuckle constantly brush the trackpad and activate it. I thought standard touch typing position was index fingers on the notches (f & j in US QWERTY). With that & some fairly large hands, the trackpad rests comfortably outside of my palm area? the trackpad seems pretty well-designed to just miss the palm in standard position.
• garmaine 6y ago
  Why didn't you get a 2017 Air? It sounds like that would have been exactly what you're looking for--a performance boost but with the old build quality.
• radicalbyte 6y ago
  I love my 2013 rMBP, it's still plenty fast enough but it really needs a new battery. As long as the board is fine I'll do whatever is needed to keep it going.
• SCdF 6y ago
  > By the way, not including the extension cord is unacceptable. This cord is not only a convenience, but it increases safety, because it's the only way to have earth grounding for the laptop. Without it, rubbing your fingers on the surface of the computer generates this weird vibration due to static. .... THAT'S WHAT THAT IS? I have wondered for _years_ why my laptop sometimes feels that way. Another mystery solved!
  • GekkePrutser 6y ago
    It's not really static. It's actually induction of the transformer (probably to parts of its shielding) that can't be released to ground. You can tell because it immediately disappears when you unplug it. Static electricity would take longer to build up. And generally will not build up in metal objects but rather in insulators.
    • huffmsa 6y ago
      You are the ground in this case.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • xuki 6y ago
    I’m not sure if it’s solved. I used to use the UK plug which always has 3 pins, short or long, and I still get that sometimes.
    • narrowtux 6y ago
      Any clue if there's a version for german plugs with ground pins (schutzkontaktstecker) for the duckhead? I like not having an additional cable going from the AC to the outlet, but not having the computer connected to ground means that there are some problems, including static noise on headphones, and this "rubbing" sensation.
      • Symbiote 6y ago
• GekkePrutser 6y ago
  This blog seems to be down. Yeah I can't deal with the new keyboards myself. Especially the butterfly ones, but even the new redesigned ones are too thin for me. Edit: Lol, the page works again and the keyboard is the one thing he does like :) I can't imagine this but I did notice the new keyboards are highly polarising. Some people love them, some hate them (like me). I really love the keyboards on the thicker thinkpad laptops I use in work as well (I use many computers in work ;) ) In addition you now have to pay full price for upgrades as everything is soldered, and the platform is being dumbed down to the level of iPad Plus. I'm just not really interested anymore. I still use them for work (with external keyboard) but the attraction of a great strong POSIX compliant platform with a good user interface is long gone.
  • bootlooped 6y ago
    I have always been in disbelief of people who have to type for a living and also like Mac keyboards. It's like somebody told the designers "make it as close to a flat sheet of aluminum as you possibly can". I'll give it that it looks clean and elegant, but the actual tactile experience is garbage.
    • slantyyz 6y ago
      > I have always been in disbelief of people who have to type for a living and also like Mac keyboards. Why the disbelief? I'm not necessarily a fan of Macs or their keyboards, but generally speaking, I've been able to adapt to almost all types of physical keyboards without issue. They did not affect my speeds on Typeracer, and while I preferred some key types over others, no physical keyboard switches were never deal breakers for me, whether they were mechanical or domes or whatever. I've been typing going back to the 80s, so I've lived through the great IBM and Apple mechanical keyboards of the time. The only keyboards I could never get used to are the pure touch keyboards like ones on the original Surface covers.
    • dnh44 6y ago
      I’ve been using a 12 inch MacBook for the last four years and it’s got one of the keyboards that no one seems to like. However if I hadn’t read it here I wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with it and most of my job involves typing. In fact I think the keyboard is quite great. I do type quite softly and quietly though. For me using other keyboards feels like walking in sand and that my fingers have to work a lot harder.
• thedanbob 6y ago
  I completely agree with the author in that my 2013 MBA is the best laptop I've ever used. It's not my daily driver so I should be able to get quite a few more years of life out of it. And I also agree that for the brief period when macOS had Continuity but wasn't intolerably bad in other areas, it really was a magical experience. That's the one thing I really miss from going all Linux.
• nakodari 6y ago
  Great writeup! I am still on Macbook Pro 2013, the best 13” laptop ever build by Apple. I refuse to upgrade. All new Macbooks have disappointed me. I hope the upcoming 14” Macbook Pro will be better and without the touchbar so I can finally upgrade.
  • benologist 6y ago
    I have the 2013 13" too and it's been such a great computer but two things stifle its longevity - two cores and no upgrades. The 14" is going to have ample cores for years to come and with upgradable ram and storage it could easily serve for over a decade. But while everything is soldered on the only upgrade option is to sell the laptop back to Apple at a massive discount. I don't know if it's just resentment but it feels like a dark pattern to fuel Apple with spare parts and refurbished machines to resell. The model to buy, for me, is the one after the EU forces Apple to use socketed components.
• pritovido 6y ago
  "Apple engineers, do you know who is the target audience for these machines?" I believe Apple knows who is the target audience for those machines better than this man. Pro means "Professional" and that includes Graphic and sound designers, web programmers and (specially if you spend a little time in Apple Store and just observe) entrepreneurs that need (or want and could pay for it) powerful portable machines. Not being able to display "IBM VGA8" being a screen "drawback" is like calling a drawback of mother cars that you could not pick cherries like with old cars, too fast and too low roof. Most people prefer antialiased fonts instead of blocky, so his drawback is a feature for most people. https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
  • ZanyProgrammer 6y ago
    "I believe Apple knows who is the target audience for those machines better than this man" There's a substantial number of Mac users who are devs who seem like they are in an abusive relationship with Apple, and will put up with all sorts of changes that are looked at negatively by developers.
• sylens 6y ago
  This is a really solid, nuanced review that I felt was pretty fair given my experience with this latest crop of Macbooks. I've posted in the past that I feel like Surface Book is a device that is not aimed at me. Sadly, I am starting to feel the same about Macbooks. The touchbar is an active hindrance to me and them replacing core macOS applications with Catalyst alternatives (like Apple Music replacing iTunes) makes the experience more frustrating and less useful.
• fxtentacle 6y ago
  I had problems opening the page from Germany. Here's an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200602104512/https://cfenollosa.com/blog/seven-years-later-i-bought-a-new-macbook-for-the-first-time-i-dont-love-it.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200602104512/https://cfenollos...
• dep_b 6y ago
  I don't have palm rejection problems at all, touch typist since forever.
• losvedir 6y ago
  Very interesting post. I actually have been feeling almost the opposite lately. My work laptop is a 2017 MacBook Pro, and a couple months ago I dusted off my old personal laptop, a Mid-2013 MacBook Air to work on a side project. The thing that blew me away is the Air feels a lot snappier! I honestly don't know what it is, and think I must have done something to my work laptop. I notice it most with VSCode, which seems to respond with less latency to interactions than on the Air. I was idly thinking about upgrading the machine to the newest Air, but I'm sort of worried that whatever slowness is infecting my 2017 Pro might also apply to the new Airs. I'm not really a hardware guy but could it be, like, a different sort of SSD or RAM or something?
  • abellerose 6y ago
    What version of macOS are you running on the mid-2013 macbook air?
  • rcarmo 6y ago
    Even though the Code team has gone to excruciating lengths to reduce input latency, there is a lot of cruft in any OS. I have noticed that Windows and Linux have, in general, quicker _perceived_ response time than macOS, which I partially attributed to smoother animations and an overall sense that the machine is doing a _lot_ in the background (Spotlight, for instance, has been a constant pain.)
• modernerd 6y ago
  The XPS 17 will be my next “MacBook”. It should be out this month and it ticks all the boxes for me (great screen, supposedly good cooling, user-replaceable SSD/RAM, acceptable weight and size for a 17" laptop). https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-redesign-specs-features-update-2020 https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a second-hand XPS 15) and — unlike the author here — I'm surprised how much better it has gotten. Having fully expected to buy a Windows laptop and just run Linux on it, I'm happy enough with the general Windows experience and the new WSL2/Windows Terminal/VS Code improvements that switching full-time makes sense for me. The perks for me over macOS are the widely increased hardware choice, improved repairability/upgradeability, access to Windows-only software/games, better default desktop environment (window snapping/management, keyboard shortcuts for apps in the taskbar), and being able to boot real Linux images within ~1 second and work out of them comfortably. The perks for me over Linux are the ability to run Adobe and other Windows apps, lower manual maintenance, fewer rabbit holes (I used Arch for about a year and found I was personally prone to exploring Arch instead of doing pet projects), better general integration with video cards, authentication hardware (fingerprint sensors/Windows Hello), projectors/external monitors, as well as a generally better experience with power management, wake-from-sleep, and connecting/reconnecting to Wi-Fi.
  • blub 6y ago
    On paper Windows is good. In practice the telemetry and the story behind its introduction and how they handled communication means that I won't consider Windows as a primary OS candidate until there's a CEO change at least. It's disappointing to see so many being ignorant about this topic.
    • nitinreddy88 6y ago
      How replacing CEO helps. Really?!
      • mattblalock 6y ago
• MattyMc 6y ago
  Outstanding review.
• panpanna 6y ago
  > When I push the laptop a bit more ... I get around 4 hours. In comparison, that figure is reasonable. Overall, it's not bad, but I expected more. How can this be "reasonable" from a new laptop? Maybe that's typo because I can get more from a five years old laptop under similar load. (Although to be fair, my containers are first class citizens)
  • slantyyz 6y ago
    I don't think I've ever gotten close to the advertised battery life from any new laptop, Mac or Windows, but I probably use a lot of apps and settings that aren't battery friendly (e.g., I prefer a brighter than average display). So when I do get 4h of battery life, I'm pretty happy.
    • panpanna 6y ago
      Well, I have had _some_ laptops even exceededing their advertised 10+ hrs battery life but only under a _specific_ configuration (basically the one it came with. An OS reinstall would kill the battery life). Also, things have improved significantly in linux-land. Someone finally had time to turn off unused peripherals in the kernel and battery life doubled over night
  • harpratap 6y ago
    > Although to be fair, my containers are first class citizens It's a Linux Machine? Because on OSX it's a well known issue that Docker sucks up your CPU and thus battery - https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499 https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499 I get a similar 2-3 Hour battery life on my older 2017 model
• technotarek 6y ago
  “Sometimes, after resuming from sleep, the laptop doesn't detect its own keyboard. I can assure you, the keyboard was there indeed, and note how the dock is still the default one. This happened to me minutes after setting up the computer for the first time, before I had any chance to install software or change any settings.” Glad to hear it’s not just me. I think I solved this by re-enabling Bluetooth (2020 MBA). The OP says he hadn’t changed any settings yet though.
  • technotarek 6y ago
    Darn. Happened again with Bluetooth enabled. Pretty bad bug Apple. I've had my brand new 2020 MBA for ~4 weeks and this has happened probably 10-15 times now.
  • technotarek 6y ago
    For anyone else that stumbles upon this post because of this issue -- please upvote the issue on Apple Communities: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251455368 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251455368
• snarfy 6y ago
  You're holding it wrong.
• glennos 6y ago
  Couldn’t agree more about the Touch bar, it makes my MacBook worse.
• theandrewbailey 6y ago
  > First, it's impossible to get a terminal screen without anti-aliasing. My favorite font, IBM VGA8, is unreadable when anti aliased, which is a real shame, because I've been using it since the 90s, and I prefer non-anti-aliased fonts on terminals. That's a great font, but unless you're using it at 15 (16?) point exactly, it's a mess. For those places, I use Nouveau IBM instead. It tries to recreate the shapes with nice vectors (like someone used one of those pixel art upscalers), instead of emulating pixels in the font. https://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font https://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font
  • carlesfe 6y ago
    Thank you! I will give it a try
• ap46 6y ago
  They need to get Nvidia GPUs, AMD/ARM CPUs & a 1080p camera FFS
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• coronadisaster 6y ago
  The last one you bought was desinged by Steve Jobs
• bromonkey 6y ago
  Arch Linux still runs great on the 2013 MacBooks (if you don't need any Mac only software.)
• iamben 6y ago
  I bought a top spec Air just after it came out a few months back to replace my 2013 Air that I loved but was finally dying (seven years with the same computer!). I kind of love it, but it's not the same as my love for the 2013 one. I have 16gb of RAM and an I7 and I have to deal with the fan every time I'm on a video call, never mind using a "powerful" app. It's incredibly frustrating, because some of those apps didn't start on the fan on the 2013 one.
• wil421 6y ago
  My 2017 MBP 15 has a major issue with my LG HDR monitor since a recent Catalina update. The Mac will output an HDR signal on wake up which causes the monitor to go to full brightness and turn on the quasi HDR feature. The HDR checkbox in Display settings says it’s off. I have to check and uncheck the checkbox 5 or 6 times to get it to turn off. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/catalinas-hdr-bug-with-external-display.2228052/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/catalinas-hdr-bug-with-...
• habosa 6y ago
  This is a good overview and I agree with almost all of the points. For the last 20 years I have owned nothing but Mac computers (going back to OS 9 days). I have a MacBook Pro for work so 5 years ago I bought myself a $750 Asus Zenbook and installed Windows and Ubuntu on it, expecting to just use the Ubuntu partition. With the release of WSL, suddenly my Windows laptop is my favorite machine for both personal use and for development. It's just so nice to have all the Linux developer tools side-by-side with every major desktop app/game on the Windows side. I will likely never buy another Mac computer with my own money, Windows + WSL has won me over. (Aside: I recently switched from Android to iOS after 10 years. If you had told me back then I'd be an iPhone / Windows user I'd be stunned)
  • hcurtiss 6y ago
    As an iPhone user, I really do appreciate the integration with MacOS. Mostly iMessage and FaceTime.
• Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  At least half of the author's issues, and basically all of the bigger ones—come back to the trackpad's palm rejection not working for him. I wonder why that is. It works perfectly for me.
• rednum 6y ago
  I did switch from 2012 Macbook Air to 2019 Macbook Pro a few weeks ago and I can't agree more with the article. One of the reasons I'm using Mac instead of Linux is that I make music. And the new Macbook sucks for this purpose: the same recording settings I used on my old laptop are not usable on the new one. 90% of time things work fine, but sometimes I get glitches and pops in the middle of the recording. Why? Who knows. I did everything I could like closing other apps, disabling ton of things running in background; I freeze tracks in my DAW but things still break sometimes. I really hope some update from Ableton/Apple fixes things soon; if not I'm considering downgrade from Catalina. But wait, there's more! Sometimes I got glitches even when I'm not recording but playing tracks. I have this problem on literally the same Ableton projects that used to "just work" on the old machine (same number of tracks/plugins). The workaround is to restart the laptop. Seriously, it feels like Windows XP all over. I can't imagine playing live shows with such unreliable setup - fortunately I just make tracks for my own, but if I were to go out for some kind of jam session or open mic I'd consider switching to Windows. EDIT: One more thing that sucks about new MacOS: dropping 32 bit compatibility. RIP all 32 bit VSTs. Fortunately I don't use that many plugins and it turned out everything I really care about has 64 bit version. But if it didn't, then I'd hold on to the old OS as long as possible.
  • vmception 6y ago
    Macs and OSX were only interesting because they "just worked", and now they don't and are simply not that interesting.
  • karatestomp 6y ago
    My wife's been having repeated AV glitches on her '19 Macbook Air. Video audio cuts out after a few minutes very frequently, across browsers and even on local players and for audio on locally-downloaded podcasts. Video calls do similar things, which has, you know, been a problem. Best I can figure is there are some bad software + hardware glitches with some of the Siri-related stuff and maybe the fingerprint chip. Disabled Siri but it still happens. Apple store's seen it and reset it and been like, meh, it's fine, but it's very much not. Never seen this kind of flakey-out-of-the-box bullshit from Apple. I really need a new machine but I'm holding out for a better run than what they have now. And maybe some undoing of their recent price hikes (they used to drop prices, substantially, with some frequency, in the distant past of a few years ago and earlier). Plus all the damn dongles. My '14 has lots of ports and zero USB-C and those ports are great, and I still don't have anything that's USB-C aside from adapters for work laptops, so... why do I want only USB-C again, and no other ports at all? Maybe in another 5-7 years it'll make sense. Give them time to switch all their iDevices to USB-C and for me to replace all those (they last many years, that's why we buy them). Then at least my laptop and iPads and iPhones and such can share peripherals, which is moving toward some kind of benefit to offset the loss of ports.
• m4tthumphrey 6y ago
  I am not looking forward to the day my 2015 MBP dies :(
• modzu 6y ago
  this review nails it. 2015 mbp in my case. all it needs is a faster cpu and a couple of usb3 ports to replace the thunderbolt and it would be money. well at least we had a golden age
• brandon272 6y ago
  I find USB-C to an almost scandalous regression in technology. Few people seem to be talking about it given how much frustration I would think there is over it. My MBP has 2 USB-C ports. That’s all. Of these ports, the options to expand off of them are slim to nil. I have not encountered a single hub or multi port adapter, including Apple’s that works properly or reliably. Essentially it is a situation where I cannot use more than two of my USB-C ports at once, which usually means I can only use one, as the other is always reserved for charging. The hubs are trash. The adapters are trash. Near all of them are from brands I have never heard of. The whole thing just seems broken. But notebook manufacturers, especially Apple, have now been doubling down on it for years now.
  • horsawlarway 6y ago
    I don't love having to drag dongles with me, but for docks - This works for basically everything I've plugged into it https://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Thunderbolt-Dock-Ethernet-aluminum/dp/B01MZ2ATGK https://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Thunderbolt-Dock-Ethernet-alum... It's not cheap, by any means, but it gives me two external monitors, keyboard/mouse, webcam, speakers, and a spare usb-c port through a single plug. Works with my xps machine on linux and my work macbook.
  • jen20 6y ago
    CalDigit TB3 docks work perfectly in my experience across Macs, ThinkPads and the occasional oddball machine. This has been the case for several years now. Likewise, I regularly present using the Apple adapter with HDMI, USB-A (for a remote) and power input without issue.
  • whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    My work laptop is one of the 2 port Pros too. To make matters worse it's the lowest space spec too. Total nightmare using this for video work, not enough space to store the video files so have to use an external drive, dongles are not reliable enough to keep a drive mounted so have to dedicate one port to that, second port has my screen but when my battery goes low I have to go back to editing just on the laptop screen because I have to plug the power back in. It's just compromise after compromise and for what? What did I as a user as a customer gain here?
• toxican 6y ago
  The touchbar is super useless unless you install something like MTMR[1] to customize it. The downside of course is that you need to be comfortable with some code to modify it outside of any pre-defined profiles. But even then I don't find myself using it much. Also while Mac's aren't meant for gaming, when I do game I find the touchbar to be a poor replacement for the F keys. I play WoW and have F1-F5 bound to certain abilities and having zero tactile feedback during something as fast-paced as combat is frustrating. Additionally, totally agree with the webcam complaint. I don't use it very often, but I was definitely expecting more from it when I first used it. A $2k laptop should have a better camera than my ~$600 laptop from a few years ago. All that being said, I do also agree with the praise-worthy part of the post. I've really enjoyed how intertwined my iPhone and Mac experience are. Being able to effortlessly take/make calls and texts from my laptop without having to install an app on the phone or waste a bunch of time configuring things is really wonderful. The speakers are also wonderful and the laptop itself runs surprisingly silently, even under high-load. [1] - https://github.com/Toxblh/MTMR https://github.com/Toxblh/MTMR
  • mthoms 6y ago
    I've found this tiny utility a great help. It provides haptic feedback for all touch bar presses (BetterTouchTool also has this feature). https://github.com/niw/HapticKey https://github.com/niw/HapticKey
    • toxican 6y ago
      Looks like MTMR supports it as well, but I didn't have any luck getting it to work. HapticKey is working great though. For as good a job as Apple did with making the iPhone's button and the touchpad feel really responsive, I'm amazed they didn't bother doing the same with the touchbar.
• DCKing 6y ago
  I bought a 2012 MacBook Air when it was new with the 8GB RAM upgrade, and it's the best computer hardware I've ever purchased. The 2013 Macbook Air the author uses was only an upgrade in CPU and Wifi. I still use mine almost daily, although I only do hobby projects on it. Upgraded the SSD last year and replaced battery a few times, and it's really still an extremely capable thing while being thin, light, with a great keyboard and trackpad. But I'm afraid Catalina is the end of the line for its major updates. This was the most expensive computer I've ever bought with my own money, and I've learned the lesson that it pays off to spend money on good hardware. But I can't seem to find to find a great true successor yet. I understand that Windows can service me just fine, but I really want to avoid paying money/time/attention/dependance into fixing its user privacy hostility. I use Linux on the desktop, but on the desktop I can tolerate its papercuts - coming from a seamless touchpad/software/wifi/battery life/display scaling experience on a Mac is hard sell to spend more time being a sysadmin (I know it's gotten better - but I think it would still require too much of my time). This year's MacBook Air looks actually great, but Apple looks to be replacing it with an ARM laptop next year. I'm actually excited for that change, but I'm not really super enthusiastic about being early adopter or the implications for the support lifecycle of their Intel Macs. In any case, being able to replace the battery or SSD is a big question mark (or just a big 'no') in any Apple hardware now. When I bought my Macbook in 2012 I never expected 1) to have it last for eight years and 2) that finding a replacement would be such a game of tradeoffs.
  • anddyyyu 6y ago
    Same. Best personal computer ever made, my 2012 11” MacBook Air is the last computer I ever want to own. I dropped it on a concrete floor my first day of class, at the prototyping lab. The impact bent the corner of the screen chassis near the hinge. I bent it back with pliers and filed away what metal prevented it shutting. I still use this laptop daily. Not for work, obviously. But that’s not it’s role. It is my personal computer. There are others like it, but it is mine.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  Out of curiosity I rebooted my Ubuntu partition for the first time in a while. I run NixOS and Windows 10 on the same box, so this gives me a good performance baseline. The experience was awful. Ubuntu is so. fricking. slow. And when upgrading from 18.04 (it’s been a while) to something newer, it locked me out of my account. I can’t login now, which is less than great. I’ve come to appreciate the overall experience with OSX. Are there warts? Sure. But on the whole it’s worth the premium, IMO.
• lm2s 6y ago
  >When video conferencing or under high stress like running multiple VMs the system would miss key presses or mouse clicks. I'm not saying that the system was laggy, which it was, and it is expected. Rather, that I would type the word "macbook" and the system would register "mok", for example. To the key missing part, my hunch is that this is happening because of software workarounds that Apple did on macOS to reduce the problems in their previous keyboards clusterf*ck.
• saltcod 6y ago
  100000% on the size of the trackpad. It's comically, needlessly large. The size of the 2012 generation's trackpad is the perfect size — big enough for your fingers to find it, small enough to barely even need palm rejection.
• ben7799 6y ago
  I've always been more of a desktop user myself. My first computer I bought with my own money was a Windows laptop in 1995 when I went to college. Mac really wasn't an option then, Classic Mac OS was terrible for a CS student, didn't run any of the required software I needed, and were super expensive. That was pretty much Apple's darkest hour. Laptops were stupid expensive back then, so 1997, 2000, 2003, etc.. I built/rebuilt my own homebuilt desktops on the cheap. 2004 I got a Mac Mini. 2006 I got a Mac Pro. 2012 Apple pissed me off dropping support for the Mac Pro, so I went back to a homebuilt windows desktop. Actually used a case I had laying around from 2004-2005 as well. Less than 1/3 the investment of the Mac Pro. That machine is still in service now with just a better video card + SSD. Great machine, still very snappy, but I am getting tempted to rebuild it. Also grabbed a Surface Pro i5 for $800 in 2017. Very happy with that machine, but it gets used for home consumer type stuff and not development work. In the meantime I've had a whole bunch of Macbook Pros for work from 2012-2020. The 2018 15" MBP I have right now is by far the most disappointing Mac experience.. A lot of my issue is that I work on a product that runs in Docker... docker sucks on Mac IMO, and most of my issues are around needing more RAM & CPU for hyperkit & docker to suck down.. but the Mac is rampant with high latency in the UI and other issues that drive me nuts. - Keyboard is starting to fail, and it sucks, not even comfortable. I'm stuck at home so it's trickier for IT to give me a new MBP. When I was going to the office I could mostly ignore the KB and use external, circumstances around lockdown have meant more use of the internal KB issues. - Hate the touchbar, never gotten any decent use out of it. And I use vi plenty of course. - I have some of the palm rejection issues the blogger mentions but that's not so bad. - OSX seems to be bottom of the barrel when it goes into swap, linux and windows both seem to handle high memory usage better. - USB-C has been nothing but a PITA. Didn't need so many dongles with the older Macbook Pro and the USB-C doesn't buy me much. I have yet to have any device with a USB-C plug that can plug right into the MBP 2 years later. - Quality of audio on the headphone jack is horrific on my 2018 MBP... it has the most noise of any PC I've ever had, not even in the same ballparks as my previous MBP which was great. Not sure what's going on here. - Battery life on MBP is fine except when using docker or running builds. Then it's like an hour or two.
• mstudio 6y ago
  Totally agree. After reading so many reviews panning the new MBPs, I ended up replacing my ancient 2011 MBP with a 2015 model. You can still find new/unopened or relatively unused models on eBay. I love this laptop. i7, 16GB memory, AMD Radeon R9, great keyboard with F-keys... plus, it has all the standard ports I need: USB, HDMI, Thunderbolt. All for much less money than a new machine from Apple. No complaints at all.
  • auggierose 6y ago
    Doesn't have thunderbolt 3 though.
  • ja27 6y ago
    Exactly what I did. I loved my used 2015 but I ordered a 16" 2019 on day one. While I like it and it's my "daily driver", it was surprisingly low on wow factor. The biggest win on the 16" are the speakers. I didn't consider them at all but they've basically eliminated my use of external speakers. Touchbar is very underwhelming. USB-C is a tossup. I got to buy new dongles, chargers, cables, etc. which I actually enjoy but in the end I'm mostly plugging USB-A devices in with adapters. I really miss having a big microSD in a flush adapter as spare space. I miss having tiny USB 3 flash drives nearly flush in USB-A ports.
    • dreamcompiler 6y ago
      The speakers really are amazing. They're good enough that the MBP can be used as a standalone cordless TV without headphones.
  • vmchale 6y ago
    > 16GB memory Nice for a laptop but I wouldn't mind 32GB+... guess that's gonna be expensive though :p
  • DavideNL 6y ago
    I bought the 2015 MBP back when it came out and basically maxed out all the specs, it was very expensive for me at the time but in hindsight it was the best purchase ever... I think there are 2 versions of the 2015 model, the Mid-2015 one has a trackpad with 'force click/touch' which is a minor plus, so make sure you buy that one if you have the choice :)
• whalesalad 6y ago
  My mid-2012 air was also the best machine I’ve ever owned. The chassis and portability could not be beat. I have a well equipped 2018 Pro now, but it’s not the same. I like having a serious H series processor and 32GB of ram, but the 15” chassis is just too big.
• p0nce 6y ago
  Quality doesn't really matter for status objects, they just have to be the most expensive.
• g_delgado14 6y ago
  I was in the market recently for a new laptop after owning 2 different MB pros since 2011. I ended up buying a System76 linux laptop and couldn't be happier. It's cheaper and it's built for software devs. The keyboard is amazing. Only real downside is the trackpad isn't as good. But I use a mouse anyways.
• x3haloed 6y ago
  Don’t buy an older model with the butterfly keyboard and avoid touchbar where possible. Problem solved. I actually disagree with the trackpad complaints. I’ve never used a better trackpad in my life. It’s really a joy, and palm rejection is not perfect, but close enough that it doesn’t bother me.
• whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  The webcam is inexcusable, if Microsoft can put such a high quality webcam in their $399 Surface Go then what on earth is Apple's excuse in their $2000 laptops? We've actually started using a Surface Go for all our video tutorial recording in my work just because it looks more professional than MacBook Pro webcam footage.
• cargoshipit 6y ago
  I have a 16" mbp and enjoy it quite a lot. I don't put my fingers in dumb places and I don't have any problems with the OS. Astounding.
• rb808 6y ago
  I am actually thinking of buying MBP for the first time ever. I just want a good screen, good keyboard and unix like os. Lower models are actually relatively good value now compared to X1/XPS. I still dont like the company or design though.
• tln 6y ago
  I can't believe the screen wasn't seen as an upgrade. Going from non-retina 300 nits to retina 500 nits with crazy good color?
• fluffything 6y ago
  I also still have the same MacBook air as the author and have been wanting to upgrade for... 2 years or so. Not only the Webcam is a downgrade. You also loose Magsafe. Not a big loss, but a downgrade none the less. > The touchbar. [...] Regular users probably find it useful and cute. No they don't. My GF bought herself a new Macbook because... she has an iPhone and thought "For what I use the computer, any computer suffices". She just needs a laptop for browsing the web and replying to emails, and got a 2k$ machine for it... Anyways, it turns out she is super annoyed at the Touchbar because it registers accidental presses when she press a number key... so her windows will just scramble around in the middle of a sentence, and she hates that. I'm trying to convince her to sell it used, take a couple of hundred dollars price hit, and buy something that would make her happier. For her needs, literally any laptop would do. Any laptop but Apple's. I also thought that the Touchbar was only a "show" gimmick to get non-pro users buy pro laptops, but for users that can't figure out how to turn it off, its something that makes them regret buying an Apple product, which at least with my GF, its a first.
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    Can she disable the touchbar?
    • fluffything 6y ago
      I've offered to help, but she doesn't want to mess with configuration. I've posted in other threads how she "fixed" it. She actually bought one of those keyboard covers, cut off the touchbar part, and fixed it with tape. She literally has a crappy piece of plastic on top of her keyboard that physically prevents here from accidentally touching the touchbar. A 10 dollar hack on a 2k$ machine. I don't think she will buy an expensive Apple product, ever.
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        Agreed, it's terrible that that's required. At least it works for now, hopefully she can sell it and buy something much cheaper.
• Helloworldboy 6y ago
  Another day another hate circlejerk post about MacBooks. There’s no good alternatives, I promise. The XPS looks good on the surface, but wait until you experience the massive touchpad downgrade.
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  I don't understand how people don't go crazy from the the MBP overheating issues. It's gotten to the point where I've broken out my 2012 ThinkPad to offload anything CPU-intensive. If I have high-compute stuff running in the background, I can barely type, the keyboard gets so uncomfortably hot! (not to mention the loud, ineffective fan) (and let's not even talk about how useless it is as a laptop) I would pay an extra $200 just to get a MBP which was 50% THICKER, if it got proper airflow to the internals and cooled down properly.
• lolcopterpilot 6y ago
  I have a work Macbook Pro that I requested in anticipation of better quality compared to others. Ended up being disappointed, it's just as crap as my other laptops. Build quality is iffy, it has heat problems comparable to the lowest quality gaming laptops, the keyboard is garbage and the touchbar is the most useless piece of tech I've used in a long time. And this is probably even more subjective but OSX Catalina is quite slow and the free tooling I am used to now costs money. I also heard bad things about Applecare in my country but I have no personal experience. Since I have other issues also with not having Nvidia GPU, I can't wait to dump this hardware.
• inieves 6y ago
  get the 2015 mba, you would have been happier stay 1 minor release behind major releases of apple hardware, you will be happiest
• gjmacd 6y ago
  When Pro tools, Reason and all the major "creative" apps decide to port over to Linux (remember, Microsoft's desktop is moving in this direction), I think the macbook's days will be numbered when you can get a similar device in formfactor and quality for 1/3 of the price running Linux... I actually think Apple doesn't care. They want people to buy iPad's and iPhones and get out of the laptop and desktop business.
  • jshen 6y ago
    Where can you get a similar device and form factor for 1/3 the price?
• devmunchies 6y ago
  > became unusable due to macOS, not hardware, issues I'm on a 2013 iMac and i was 2.5 years behind on OS upgrading. I just upgraded last week and now i get the beach ball spinner when opening a directory in the finder. It is absolutely OS related.
• jungletime 6y ago
  I have a 2013 macbook. But I think I will update to a hackintosh, and an ipad as my next two computers. I never built a hackintosh, but saw some guides on youtube. Seems simple enough. I do occasional video editing in final cut, and programming. The 2013 13 inch macbook, has been good so far. But 98% of the time its connected to an external monitor and mouse and keyboard. The 13 inch macbook is still too big to use on an airplane seat. For the occasional travel, I think an ipad will work better for that and in bed. The biggest gripes for me are with the macbook/os 1. It came with 128 GB, which I partitioned to use half with windows. I'm running out of space all the time. 2. It came with 2 usb ports and 2 lightning ports. I have never used a lighting port, but I'm always short a usb port. I use a dongle for external mouse and keyboard, so it takes up one usb port. But if I want to edit a movie, or files. I hook up an external drive and then I'm short a USB port. I wish there was a lightning 2 port to USB cable. I use a USB hub, but it craps out eventually. 3. I dread updating, because recreating my python and windows programming environments would take a month. 4. I hate "Finder". It does weird things all the time. Takes 3 seconds to create a folder. Moving files requires a holding down a key. Windows explorer was much more snappier and useful. 5. My trash bin accumulates things which it won't let me delete. I'm budgeting $750 hackintosh and $300 ipad. I think will give me more power and portability. Plush I'll still have my old macbook. Maybe I'll budget $200 for a good mechanical keyboard and mouse this time.
• ziml77 6y ago
  I don't understand what Apple is doing with the touchbar. Before I used it, I was thinking that the gimmick didn't look as bad as people were making it out to be. After I used it, I returned the laptop. Why does it activate without any haptic feedback just from brushing against it? Obviously they know how to do both of those things; it's how the trackpad on the same device works!
• unixhero 6y ago
  Get the Lenovo Thinkpad 490. It's the laptop of 2019-2020.
  • dzonga 6y ago
    same machine. 2nd best I ever owned after my 2012 13" macbook pro.
• cosmotic 6y ago
  "[bad retina support] is not Apple's fault" Yes it is. Apple chose a resolution that was not 1/nth as dense and thus everything non-retina needs a lot more work to fix. Apple could have implemented and tested it better. This is 100% on them.
• StreamBright 6y ago
  It is kind of sad that Apple lost its way. We used to be excited about new releases, now I only want to make sure auto-update is disabled and the new hardware did not remove half of the ports again. Time to seriously consider an alternative operating system for me after being on MacOS for 10 years. I cannot be put up with it anymore.
• linuxhansl 6y ago
  I have a MacBook Pro from work, and a Lenovo X1E Gen2 with Linux (Fedora KDE spin) at home. The Lenovo is slightly newer, but the two are roughly equivalent. The Linux machine needs work for setup. The laptop shipped with Windows, so installing Linux is on you - but Levono started shipping some of their laptops with Linux. I pretty much just installed Fedora from a live CD. Once setup, it is faster, KDE is easier to use - I realize that is subjective, has better heat management, lighter, an even better keyboard - Lenovo is known for that, and is more reliable. With a good deal the X1E also costs 30-40% less than the equivalent MacBook Pro. I like the MacBook as well, I just think it does not justify the price and if you are a little bit tech-savvy there are better or at least equivalent options out there. Edit: I also have a 2013 Lenovo T440p that I gave to my son, it's still a strong and fast laptop - and the improvements in Fedora/Linux made is _faster_ over time, not slower!
• keepper 6y ago
  So let me get this straight... The complaint is that you've been able to use a laptop, for 7 years, where no other manufacturer has even COME CLOSE to the longevity of apple equipment, even at the same price range. So for SEVEN YEARS, you have not given a CENT to apple. and have gotten free software updates, no pay for new OS's. ( again, no one does this ). ...and the complain is that you don't "love it". are you serious? Well, maybe you should remember that people tended not to love their hardware manufacturers until apple decided to pivot to making great hardware. I would say "vote with your money", but its clearly that you don't do that, since well, you didn't give them a cent for 7 years...
  • ElFitz 6y ago
    It's the new one that he doesn't "love". The one he just bought. Seven years after the previous one.
  • ablp 6y ago
    This message is sponsored by Apple. Really, have you never heard of the IBM/Lenovo T series? T400 is more durable than Apple. The recent T series are garbage as well.
• jimnotgym 6y ago
  I moved from Mac to Windows to Linux to Windows. I wanted things to 'just work' so bought an expensive mac. It was very good at syncing iTunes and stuff like that. I found I kept needing Windows only software... So moved to Windows. It was fine. No problems except iTunes looked weird, but I got my work done easier. Then I started to code more so went to Linux on one computer and Windows with a Linux VM on other. As life developed I used Linux less and MS Office more. I write more reports than code now! Since WSL I dropped Linux on the desktop and went Windows everywhere. I notice now that the only people who complain about Windows are the mac users. I personally find a mac really limiting, and MS Office sucks on a mac. I'm happy with Windows 10, and my users don't suffer many issues compared to my mac users.
• ppeetteerr 6y ago
  Why didn't he get a newer MacBook Air?
• dangus 6y ago
  I think it’s a list of many valid criticisms, but it’s just so tiring at this point. We’ve been talking about the Touch Bar and the ports for almost 5 years now. I hate to be that person saying “if you don’t like it, don’t buy it” but that’s absolutely the case here. People are handcuffing themselves to macOS for no reason even though they admit they don’t love it like they did 6-8 years ago. The integration is nice but there are alternatives. You can integrate Android with Windows or Linux, often with more freedom. You can use platform agnostic apps and services for your workflows. What Apple offers with continuity is great but not worth living with a machine that doesn’t work with your other needs. Personally, I still have a Mac and iPhone, and I don’t really have the same issues as the author (I think palm rejection works fine, I think the touch bar is fine - and Apple’s most popular laptop doesn’t even have it) but you can be certain that when their time is up I’m not going to keep a closed mind to other options.
• pmarreck 6y ago
  I feel like the lack of Jobs' influence is finally making its broad appearance. Anyway, Catalina upset me so much (I had no idea how much 32 bit stuff I still wanted to work!) that instead of downgrading my main machine to Mojave, I'm going with a Linux system from System76. My Macs that have not been upgraded to Catalina will remain at Mojave, or, should they be old enough to not make it to Mojave, I will be installing a compatible Linux distro on them to keep up to date with security issues.
• dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I own a 2013 13" Macbook Pro and currently use a 2017 13" Macbook Pro at work, and I like the 2017 better. The only gripes I have with the 2017 machine are the butterfly keyboard (which never broke, but just doesn't feel good), the lack of an ESC key, and the "space grey" color. From trying out a 2020 13", the new keyboard actually feels like an improvement over the 2013 one, so I guess that's fixed. It has a physical ESC key, so that's fixed too, and ... there's always the silver model, but my employer couldn't procure that at the time, and I guess it's not such a big deal really; I just like shiny things I guess. On the upside: I can get a tiny machine with 32GB RAM now with a UNIX on it that doesn't require me to be my own Linux sysadmin, which is something I know fairly well how to do (I do admin a number of servers, and have had at least a dozen forays into Linux on desktops) but absolutely don't enjoy to the point where I'd rather use Windows 8. Besides, Touch ID is something I've grown to miss on the 2013 one, since I hate typing long passwords over and over again, and it even works for 1Password and apparently is reasonably safe at that. I have a 34" USB-C screen, which makes USB-C a really nice experience; single wire and I get display, a couple of USB devices (including my mechanical keyboard), LAN access, sound and power. Everything works out of the box, no issues so far with the 2017 Macbook. On the 2013 one, I had to use three cables for that (those Thunderbolt 2 docks never felt like good value for the money) and it turns out USB 3.0 does have its limitations. I even like the touchbar. I'm fairly disinterested in peak keyboard speed and efficiency, I don't need a debugger that often really, and I'm bad at memorizing keyboard shortcuts anyway, so I like being able to get a discoverable set of shortcuts on the touchbar. Setting brightness and volume has a lot more granularity, that's nice too. I have a button to mute my microphone on there as well that shows the current muteness state, useful for conference calls in Teams (its mute shortcut is weird, plus this way I don't show up as muted, which is better sometimes) and I look forward to trying out BetterTouchTool. I've seen other people use theirs as some kind of makeshift faders and fairly precise "analog" sliders for image processing and the like – not quite as nice as having dedicated devices for it, sure, but it's always there. I thought I'd hate it since the overall tone in the developer community towards the touchbar is incredibly negative, but I'm fine with it and I would pick the touchbar version over a F-key one any day even at modest cost (but I need the ESC key; leaving that out actually did make a difference for me.) Haven't tried Catalina yet myself, but most of an office full of devs seemingly didn't have much trouble with it (the rest has yet to switch), so I guess I'll see what I find when I upgrade; I'm backing up my email just in case. But in the end it's probably still a UNIX that doesn't require me to become a hobby sysadmin and reboot after using the wrong projector, so I'll probably still be happier than with Linux, and somehow I just can't grow to like Windows. That's just my personal experience, n=1 and all, and I don't use my machines to make music or develop in emacs all day at maximum keystroke throughput and so on, and I might hate the experience if I did, but as things stand, I'm currently still feel kinda positive towards Macbooks.
• FillardMillmore 6y ago
  I've only ever owned iMacs when it comes to Apple. Recently, after a little research, I decided to spring for a used 2015 MacBook Pro 15''. Though there are conflicting opinions among Apple fans, many fondly remember this model as one of the last great models. With a quad-core i7 CPU, 1TB SSD drive and 16 GB of RAM, it still runs like a dream. The Retina screen makes everything look colorful and glossy. The keyboard predates the butterfly, so it is a joy to type on. Not to mention this model comes with an HDMI port, 2 USB-A ports, and an SD card reader. I can probably run this thing for another 3-4 years until support ends - and even after that, I could keep on using it. No regrets so far.
• kakuri 6y ago
  What is the obsession with laptops? While I fully understand they have their uses, I don't understand why someone who is employed full-time doing programming would cripple their own work environment by using a laptop. I've been hearing and reading about laptop complaints for years from "professional" programmers. It's very easy to avoid so many problems by building your own desktop. If money isn't an issue then just buy one prebuilt.
  • jlokier 6y ago
    A lot of people don't do all their work sat in the same spot all day.
• pkz 6y ago
  I have been looking for a replacement 13" laptop and for the first time in many years I am looking at getting a Win 10 laptop (heres hoping WSL2 will be the saviour for decent development setup). But is is hard finding decent 13" hardware that doesn't have annoying drawbacks. Hard to believe but there seems to be a market segment for a new laptop manufacturer that produces three models that are continuously refreshed every second year or so.
• 2snakes 6y ago
  I have a new macbook air i5 and the only thing that I can't do on it is use Chrome bc the fan kicks on way too easily when browsing or watching. I was happy that using safari alleviates this issue entirely.
• thr0w__4w4y 6y ago
  Many people have said this many times, but love him or hate him, Steve Jobs did a good job of keeping this kind of stuff from deteriorating. (Sure there was AntennaGate and "You're holding it wrong", that wasn't Apple's or Jobs' best moment for sure...)
• pocw 6y ago
  I still roll an old Macbook Air for my primary computer. It really sucks under Catalina. I used to run two browsers, one for work and one for personal. Now I just run the work one. I often find myself evicting things from RAM so I can get my job done. Nerfing the ram slots was the first unforgivable sin. Don't get me started on usb-c and the thrice damned touchbar. At least they gave us the escape key back. I'm tempted to upgrade, but this article is not helping. Maybe I'll get an Air with 16gb and call it good. My favorite recent machine purchase was a Chromebook Pixel i7 with 16GB of ram. The only problems are the locked rom and the nerfed storage. Both of which I've worked around. It's my primary pen-test machine and the most capable machine in my fleet. If only the Linux trackpad drivers were better. (fingers crossed https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-macbook-pro-may-2020-update/ https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...) If I could buy a machine like the Chromebook (that I was allowed to install linux on) I'd drop Apple in a heartbeat.
• vanusa 6y ago
  Short run-down of issues with my late-2019 Air: * Effectively can't play YouTube videos at all if the browser gets even just a wee bit busy (say, 30 tabs or so, including the usual portion of busy news sites). By "not at all" I mean the output starts getting so shoppy (and the controls so unresponsive) that it's just not worth the bother. By contrast my 2013-2016 Airs could do on the order of 50+ fully loaded YT tabs without much sign of strain (beyond starting to get a bit slow at the controls). * While we're at it -- even standalone audio files are dodgy (if the environment is just a bit loaded). It's like the audio interface itself is perpetually hosed / overloaded. * This despite a 2x upgrade in ram, and 4x upgrade in SSD space that I thought would take care of most of my performance issues. * My UX experience was generally consistent on 2010-2016 models. That is, everything you hovered over / clicked / dragged behaved "the way a mac should" -- without having to even think about it. But with the 2019 model (Catalina) it seems they have to "improve" a lot of these default behaviors, which took weeks of trial and error to figure out (some of which I still am figuring out). * It freezes up (requiring reboot) way more than it should (and correspondingly seems less tolerant of high browser loads). It's never a great experience when a laptop freezes up to to high load (which is of course perfectly avoidable). But I had to push my 2013-2016 really far to get it into the same level of instability. Basically it seems it can take only 1/4 the load of my earlier models. * USB-C (which is just plain dodgy, and there's only one free slot. Can anyone explain what they were thinking with that?) * Other stuff I'm probably too burned out by my overall experience with this thing to bring to the foreground of consciousness. The only problem is - I'm still basically addicted to Macs (and have had consistently less than happy experience with Linux-based desktops over the years). Largely due to the overall UX, screen + audio quality (along with lightness and thinness). And (when the used to be reliable) their stability and low overall maintenance footprint. With that said - is there any current offering from Apple that's at least reasonably stable (particularly in regard to browser load and audio issues)? Or if not - what open source notebook offerings are people using these days (that are reasonably decent in terms of screen quality and overall responsiveness)?
• brandonmenc 6y ago
  > I have found myself unconsciously raising my palms and placing them at a different angle. This may lead to RSI, which I have suffered from in the past. Probably not. This position eliminates wrist bending and yaw, which will help you avoid RSI.
• gumby 6y ago
  I mostly agree with this analysis. As far as the webcam goes: you can use your iphone (just select it as a video camera) and get a really good webcam image. It also eliminates the issue where the other person on the call appears to be looking down all the time -- they are always looking away from the camera anyway(unless you print something to hold your phone in place) so you don't think they're not paying attention. It was a good insight that the Touch Bar is a feature designed for non-pro users! There are a few things I disagree with but they are all in the matters of taste. I don't have any problems with the big touchpad, but that could be related to the fact that I don't care about the "wrist rests" -- if my hands were to contact the cover anyway I think they'd be misaligned and at risk of carpal tunnel syndrome (piano teachers and typing teachers -- back when they existed -- taught you to maintain a straight line from top of hand to top of forearm for this very reason. I do have a problem with the common refrain of "this is not a pro machine". It's just a name for differentiating their product line. I'm a pro -- full-time software developer -- and the feature sets seem designed for me precisely (almost never plug anything into my machine for example). Other people are also pros but use their machines in different ways and probably considered my use case absurd. I have assumed Apple collected info on how people use their machines to figure out, for example, whether the SD slot was worth it (I talked about a card slot with Steve Jobs 20 years ago and he was very dismissive, on some grounds that were reasonable for the time). I always enable telemetry on my Macs and on most apps, as I figure the developers might use the info to improve the product the way I use it (I'd like to know that info for my code!). I know a lot of people do not do so from privacy concerns. I wonder if my feeling that "this machine is right for me" is because those of us willing to enable telemetry are overweighted in Apple's beliefs of use patterns. I'm not aware that they survey users in the traditional way, though probably they do do that as well.
• llampx 6y ago
  The author pretty much proves why Apple doesn't listen to any of the ranty feedback from Apple lovers (not to be confused with Apple users) The author time and again says he'd pay for this feature or pay to not have the touchbar, whereas he could have put his money where his mouth is and bought a Thinkpad or XPS or Latitude etc. He's doing himself a disservice by continuing to buy Macs and we're doing ourselves a disservice by up voting articles like this one.
  • niemenmaa 6y ago
    Yeah. To each of their own, but I was actually surprised that the verdict in the end was "When combined with an iPhone it makes for an unbeatable user experience." I loved Macs after using my 2012 Air for five years (my parents used it until last year) and MBP 2015 for work. Then they got me MPB 2018 and that was enough Apple for me. It was absolutely terrible. I don't care how many times I have to reinstall Arch to my Dell XPS 13, it's still a better experience.
• egberts1 6y ago
  I just sent in my late-2011 MacBook Pro for LCD and keyboard replacement. Still refuse to touch anything that has a glassy surface for a keyboard.
• wdb 6y ago
  I have to admit that the webcam on the MacBook aren't quite for years, don't understand they can't put a better one in.
• niemenmaa 6y ago
  Quite many people are unhappy with their newer Macbook experiences! Sad to see the quality drop in Apple products. I'll add mine to the list: My 2012 MacBook Air has been my favourite laptop I used it for five years and my parents two after that. One of the best 700 hundred euros (student discount) I've spent. Then for my work I got previously used ~2014 MBP it worked well. Solid "Apple quality". Then I got an "upgrade" (i think it was 2018 MBP) and it was the most unpleasant experience I have yet to have with computers. Luckily I didn't have to pay for it, but still - so many problems that are unacceptable for any laptop. It really got me out of the Apple fanboy train. - Keyboard didn't work if the computer got too hot (which it did) - Some buttons didn't properly as dust or some particles got under them - Same problems with the trackpad than the article writer - Don't even get me started with the touchbar (why?!) - Battery life disappointed as I was expecting it to atleast compare with the 2020 Air's (of course my expectations might have been the problem here) - If external monitors were hooked up and you woke up the laptop there as 25% that it froze completely and you had to reboot The laptop got sent to maintenance - they dusted the keyboard but other problems persisted. After one year of that pain I went back to studying and bought used Thinkpad X220 and installed Arch. That is now my favourite computer! Last month I bought XPS 13 for programming since x220's CPU doesn't support virtualization. It runs manjaro and is like 2014 MBP was - does the job really well. After finally going full into Linux world I wonder if I'll ever come back.
• malcolmxtucker 6y ago
  Way opposite experience. I recently switched from manjaro/windows to the new mbp16, and I was surprised by how much I prefer it to windows especially. I'm happy with what MS is doing with wsl/wsl2, but it's not there yet.
• indigodaddy 6y ago
  I knew I recognized that name... it’s the bashblog guy! I’ve been meaning to try out bashblog for years, and may do so soon for the blog I’ve been dragging my feet on for forever..
• luord 6y ago
  Meanwhile, I'm pretty happy with the laptop I bought from system76 and am eagerly waiting for the one they're building themselves. I was assigned a mac for my most recent job and I barely touch it. Many people are mentioning wsl in the comments and not only that really doesn't make up for all of windows's shortcomings, I still think it's a new first step in MS's traditional EEE ("look, developers! You don't need to use linux anymore, you can run your setup directly from windows now!"). Not coincidentally, wsl2 seems like a slow move into the "extend" step. I don't think they'll ever manage to extinguish Linux, but it certainly won't be thanks to the developers who are doing microsoft's job of pretending that wsl is the ideal and giving it free publicity. If one needs Linux tools that much, one should just use it.
• musicale 6y ago
  > the palm rejection algoritm is not good enough Ugh, this is my main complaint about the last edition MacBook Pro - worse than the butterfly keyboard (which I had to replace twice but which currently works.) It's baffling because palm rejection worked flawlessly for me on the smaller trackpad on the 2012 MacBook Pro as well as the entire screen of the 11" iPad pro.