I don't know why people love this brand so much. My work-mandated MacBooks have been the worst machines I've ever used.<p>Shitty Bluetooth, terrible keyboard, unreadable glossy screen, accidentally active trackpad, slow and heavy, cold metal feel.<p>Finder is the worst navigation experience in the world. Windows 95 and the first version of Nautilus were better. Why does it try to pretend like there is no filesystem?<p>My Thinkpad is much better and hasn't needed a refresh.
Looks like the author has been using mac since 2014.<p>Pretty sure he will come back to MacBooks after using something else for a while.<p>MacBooks are considered one of the best not because they don't have any problems, but because they have the least amount of them.<p>I switched to Mac 2 years ago and not looking back. Even though I am using 2017MBP with garbage keyboard, I replaced it for free and can replace again for few more years so it's not even a problem.
I've had a 2017 TouchBar 15" model since it was brand new. Almost all of the issues listed in the article annoy me (particularly Bluetooth...)<p>Problems with the hardware:
- When I use any of the USB-C ports on the <i>left</i> to charge it, performance tanks... why? because for some reason it overheats when you do this and the CPU gets throttled.<p>- When I use a high-speed USB-C device (USB 3.1, Displayport, etc) in the ports on the left, the WiFi stops working. This always seems to get blamed on cheap cables, but this answer does not satisfy me.<p>- The TouchBar is awful in many ways, but the most fundemental failure is that it regularly doesn't detect key presses! I tap a key, I can see the "highlight" effect, but nothing happens.<p>My gripes with macOS:<p>- Performance when using an external monitor is pretty poor. When I have my Dell U2720Q connected, WindowServer starts using more CPU and the interface gets noticably sluggish.<p>- With the macbook having "the fastest SSD on a laptop" and APFS being "designed for SSDs", I expect some decent performance when dealing with disk IO. But particularly Archive utility is always very slow to extract files, and Finder always has a (small, but annoying) delay when listing folder contents.<p>- Updates take ages and are MASSIVE.
- The XCode 12 update, which I had to rush to download after apple released iOS 14 with no warning, was 11GB and took ages to download, and ages to extract and install.
- macOS minor updates also have large downloads and take between 30-60 minutes to install
<i>“It’s still the best general-purpose computer user experience available from anyone, but I see little evidence that anyone with their hands on the steering wheel understands why the good parts are good.“</i><p>I like the Mac platform and still prefer it over the alternatives, but this sentence really sums up my thoughts about the development of macOS.
Ok you dropped $8k or something on a new MacBook and now feel it should be perfect - most of that was the 4tb SSD anyway. Yeah the processor is the same as before. Intel has made basically no real cpu progress since the last MacBook. Before spending that much money maybe check some benchmarks?
> Bluetooth · It’s lame<p>If you think Bluetooth is lame on MacBooks try even activating BT on Intel NUC, Dell Latitude, etc.<p>If I had to pick few strong arguments against MacBooks these would be miserable memory options for both RAM and hard drive, and overall extortionist prices in Europe.
Almost exactly a year ago I got a brand new Mac Book Pro 13" from my company (everyone else has it, so why not). It's unix, so better to use that than Windows (Linux was not really an option). For the price, performance and reliability are laughable. It was already in repair for the peeling keys issue - the warranty process was nothing to gloat about (no Apple Stores around here, just some official repair partners it seems). Not what I expected from an expensive piece of hardware, thank god I did not pay for it.<p>Regarding the general software experience, even after a year of constant use, I can say that for me personally, a half-decent Linux distro has a lot better usability. I still don't exactly get how Finder works (when does it show me the list view, when the broken folder view with a unnecessary scrollbar - as there is enough space to show all of the icons), the whole app ecosystem is a shock, where it's normal that basic tools (like FTP Client) cost 50EUR or come crippled (Like FileZilla). It's a horrible feeling coming from OSS world.<p>One UX example I like to show to people is, that on my Ubuntu based home laptop, after connecting Logitech mouse, I get it's battery indicator automatically integrated in the same place with my laptop (and other) batteries. Smooth, no-frills. Something that "the most user friendly system in the world" lacks. And I could go on and on and on... At first I was thinking that it's just the change and I will get used to OS X, but looks like this ain't happening.<p>I like the touchpad and screen, but I mostly use external screen and mouse anyway.
Been there and jumped ship. The last “MacBook” I owned was the 2018 MacBook Air of the high end variety. The thing gave me a serious rash on my arms and they keyboardd keeepppttt ddooiinngg thhiiiss. So it was returned after two weeks. I flirted with the Mac mini as a desktop this year with an iPad Pro as a portable computer. Both are gone now as well. This is the first time I’ve not had an apple computer since 2004. The next upgrade cycle gouging and the ARM uncertainty buried it for me finally.<p>My conclusions are that the entire brand lacks substance and the productivity gains are marketing. The prices are quite frankly ridiculous especially here in the UK. The cloud offering is buggy, unreliable and inferior to just about everyone else. The things are an administrative and tooling nightmare. The software is mostly inferior and suffers from terribly discoverability problems and it’s really difficult to drive from a keyboard. I think a lot of it is running a hype train. Look at iOS 14. I can’t actually think of a single new feature or function that actually made any difference to me. But oh so much marketing.<p>When I sold my Apple kit recently I replaced it with a custom build Ryzen 3700X, 64Gb RAM, 1Tb NVMe SSD, GeForce 1660, 27” 4K display, Cherry MX keyboard. The iPad was replaced with a Lenovo T495s. I had change left after selling the Apple stuff. If I wanted to buy that sort of power in the Apple ecosystem I’d be down an additional £2000. I use Office 365 personal for cloud stuff. It just works.<p>Edit: when I look back I don’t look back fondly at my previous MacBooks. They were universally trouble in some way or another from thermal issues to fragility and unreliability. What was I thinking.
I do feel like things have gone downhill. I bought a mid-2009 13” MacBook Pro which easily lasted 9 years (with an ssd upgrade and more ram added at some point) and was honestly the best laptop I’ve owned.<p>I was hooked and hyped to get the new 2016 MacBook Pro. Talk about polar opposite experience:<p>* The keyboard is terrible (replaced 3 times already),<p>* Touchbar is meh (if you touchtype when do ever look at it - this feels like a thing that’d be more useful for entry level machines where you are likely to find hunt-and-peck typists) and it now flickers in the corner occasionally.<p>* The fan is noisy<p>* I can no longer upgrade the ram or internal storage<p>* I’ve gone almost completely usb-c but the lack of usb-a and hdmi is still annoying on occasions - especially on a pro machine<p>On the good side<p>* the speakers are amazing<p>* the “retina” display is crisp and bright<p>* it’s amazingly small and light<p>What’s really killing Macs right now is the software-side “it just works” seems like a thing of the past e.g.<p>* I used to chuckle at people on windows when waking from sleep but Macs (possibly because of FileVault) feel just as slow now<p>* As mentioned in the post general Bluetooth flakiness (tbf it does seem like the latest patch release or two of Catalina seems to have got on top of this now)<p>* Using spaces (inc animation) for full-screen and making that what happens for the maximise button - just weird and clunky<p>* General system responsiveness - it just feels sluggish<p>I really can’t believe the turn around - they’ve managed to turn a customer-for-life to now I’m seriously considering getting a Linux-based laptop instead.
The Bluetooth unpairing is a frequent annoyance, Apple denied it was a problem when I called them about it. Losing audio and mouse for 30 seconds during conference calls is very annoying.
I’ve used windows for years, got fed up of having to reset windows every few months because of crap every app installs and it doesn’t take long for the is to be slow and things start to go wrong.<p>I tried using linux for a few years but it never quite worked as I wanted, I’d have to run VMware for all the apps I wanted and that wasn’t a great experience and I ended up just booting linux to start windows and use that with the same problems I always had (needed to keep resetting windows).<p>I switched to mac last year and haven’t had any trouble, finder is a bit odd and not great but everything else works well. For the few apps I really need windows for parallels works but I only neee like two apps in it so it is much cleaner and I don’t have to keep resetting it.
My work laptop is a 2019 Mac with 32GB of RAM and a 6-core Intel chip. My home machine is a mid 2015 with 4 cores and 16gb ram.<p>For the life of me, I cannot discern any performance difference between the two. One thing I can discern is that the screen on the newer one has a big yellowish blob all around the edges of it, its left command key works half the time and it crashes constantly. I am so happy when I get to return to working on my home machine and god forbid it finally shits the bed on me because I have no idea what I would get next.
The performance issue feels a lot like it's the result of Apple's approach to CPU performance. There's a short boost in clock speed, after which the processor almost immediately overloads the power delivery and cooling system and clocks down to base clock.<p>This means the laptop feels incredibly quick for launching programs and doing short intensive tasks without turning on the fan because the processor unleashes hidden performance when you do something that you'd expect to be slow. It looks and feels like magic to people coming from other platforms, which is probably what Apple is going for with their designs.<p>However, this also artificially limits the CPU performance because of aesthetics and form over function. Long-duration workloads like games suffer from substandard processor performance at the cost of the device, which is multiplied by the stupidly high resolution requiring more rendering power. It's even worse in bootcamp because Windows can't use many of the sensors and power features because of a lack of drivers.<p>Perhaps Apple knows their own chips will net about the same performance as their current limited CPUs for a lower cost and it doesn't want to redesign the experience to make effective use of Intel's turbo frequencies. Even though AMD is surpassing Intel as we speak, their high-end processors are incredibly fast if you just give them some space. They suck in a lot more power that way, but giving people the option to choose performance over battery life would probably solve a lot of grips for Apple users who only use the laptop at work or at home, near a wall plug where they can recharge whenever.<p>I am really impressed with Apple's speakers though, I don't think there's anything that comes close to their laptop speakers.
This is like the complete opposite of every comment I see here, which is quite interesting! Touch Bar is great, Safari is meh, doesn’t feel faster than a fairly old machine, likes a hub. I’m curious if the author could take a look at Activity Monitor and see if there’s any obvious culprits there.
It’s interesting, I think I have exactly the opposite experiences here on a 2018 15” (personally owned) and a 2019 16” (work laptop).<p>For Bluetooth, I flat never have problems. I use Bluetooth headphones (Sony) and a Mac keyboard and touchpad, and they genuinely do just work - I don’t get spurious disconnects and everything sounds just fine. I have far more problems with BT on Windows 10 than on Mac - with devices failing to connect after the laptop is turned on and off, etc. Mac supports both AAC and aptX for audio codecs, too - so it works with pretty much any audio gear just fine.<p>It’s not going to feel faster on a single thread - because intel are not really any faster on a single thread. Having six cores is nice though!<p>The rest is all very subjective and it’s fair to have a difference of opinion there, though.
Is there a laptop comparably silent, though? I have a corporate Lenovo X1 Carbon (6th gen) which feels like having a vacuum cleaner on all the time. In comparison my private 13" MacBook Pro (2018) is absolutely silent unless running some simulation.
I went from an iMac 2011 to a Lenovo i5 USFF device w/ NVME drive, at work with Ubuntu 18 + Gnome 3 and never looked back. Even the desktop experience is more pleasant. Needless to say anything about the speed, feels like a roadbike compared to a beach cruiser. Installing dev tools is a breeze compared to the Mac. Instead of Homebrew installing N^e deps with unstandard config and symlinks I just apt install and everything us fetched and installed quickly without wasting my time and patience. Still remember the 2000's when we used to praise the Mac GUI and every second WM would copy its looks. Those days are over. I wish we had something similar for mobile.
"Performance · It just doesn’t feel any faster than the 2014 15" MBP it replaced."<p>I have a new 13inch MacBook that does indeed feel quite fast. I suspect this is because I havent turned on harddisk encryption (despite being regularly nagged to do so)
My 2017 13" is riddled with hardware issues all of which are due to the subpar thermals:<p>1. The haptic feedback on the trackpad stops working when the machine gets hot.<p>2. Once the upper part of the chassis becomes hot enough, part of the screen gets black lines and ghosting which gets worse as I continue to use it until it goes completely black (this is because the T-CON board is very close to the heatsink).<p>3. The SSD conveniently failed 1 month after the warranty ended. The official repair cost was about 50% of the cost of the machine. Luckily this was the last Macbook to have non-soldered SSD, and I got a replacement from AliExpress for $50.<p>Oddly, I've never run into the infamous keyboard issue.
One of the reasons I love getting second-hand hardware is that it's already been burned in, and if anything was going to go wrong, it already has. Ten years and counting for computers, less than that for mobile devices.
I'm about to upgrade my old 2012 MR Pro this year and with the recent Pro negativity am now unsure if I should go Pro again or just get the latest gen Air - seems that the processor is the same, I'd go 13 inch anyway, memory/hd I can upgrade to levels I'm comfortable with and don't need the Touch Bar. Is the graphics card a lot slower/unusable if I fire up Creative Cloud Apps just every once in a while? I do use it like 10 hours per day - but 0 gaming, just coding/design mostly with an external screen..<p>Anyone else thinking about this? Is the Pro worth it over Air?
the 16" has 3072x1920 whereas the 15" 2014 had 2880x1800 - so maybe driving 23k extra pixels is a problem!<p>Seriously thou, mine does struggle when driving the retina display and a 4k especially with games refreshing at 50+ fps.<p>I have had blutooth struggles too - until I bought a Bose head set, which works perfectly with the macbook all the time and even displays great range and resilience to things like walls. The magic keypad and trackpad have always worked perfectly - conclusion 3rd party protocols and chipsets can be crap.<p>Touchbar/control strip is brilliant, especially for powerpoint, the extra preview is perfect.
2021 is the year of the Windows laptop.<p>Take the new Ryzen 4800 series, bolt it on a sub-1000 dollar Asus laptop and put on Windows-Subsystem-Linux 2 (WSL2), you get native Linux development on a laptop that can play high res games.
A while back I figured out why my AirPods (connected to my Mac) sound bad sometimes: some apps (especially those that use a microphone) force a different codec. If you hold down the option key and click on the Bluetooth menubar icon, then go down to your headphones, you can see the active codec in the pop-out menu. It should be AAC. When some apps are open, the codec switches to SCO and music sounds so much worse... <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208896" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208896</a>
The 2019 Macbook Pro has to be one of the worst macs I've ever used. It feels like a culmination of software and hardware design disasters, as a lot of comments here suggest. But for me, the biggest let down is there's all this fancy hardware: fast ssd, high core count cpu - but it isn't perceptively or objectively (in a real workload) any faster than the half decade old hardware it replaced apart from synthetic hw benchmarks.<p>I'm seriously looking at switching back to either a windows or linux powered machine.
The Bluetooth issue is the one that really bit me. For about six months I thought BT on my 2017 MBP was physically broken. I tried a half dozen fixes, updates, and workarounds but it still couldn't pair to anything. Then, magically, it started working again. Just flaky for no reason.<p>Also, it's ridiculous that a $2800 machine needs an ugly-as-sin $250 extra box to have decent connectivity to monitors etc. The $800 machine I'm using right now has that connectivity out of the box, in a sleeker form factor.
I bought a MacBook for music production and I like it a lot, it's snappier than my dell xps 13. My only gripe is I still cannot get over the lack of delete key. I hate it so much.
We have an entire generation of developers who earnestly believe Apple computers are their only option for a dev machine. I absolutely guarantee that the author of this article will choose another Macbook Pro when it comes time to replace this one he hates.<p>There are other computers out there. Better ones. More interesting ones with funky form factors, if that's what you're into. There are faster ones, lighter ones, ones with touch screens and ones with far, far better keyboards.
I got my first windows laptop in 10 years last April, and I love it more than my last thre MacBooks. Some people will swear windows UX is terrible, but I’m a huge fan of Windows 10. The only thing I miss are a few apps, like OmniFocus and iMessage (since I still use iPhones).<p>It’s funny. At one time, the integration between iOS and OSX was a selling point. Now, with so much cloud support, OSX integration doesn’t matter. In some ways, Apple made decoupling from their ecosystem very easy.
I love the build quality of Lenovo's laptops, but what am I supposed to use, Windows?, nah, you have to jump through hoops to get a decent shell, plus terrible UI inconsistency. A Linux distro would be nice tbh, but the applications I use are not available for that. I honestly don't have any complaints about my macbook pro 2019. I love the build quality, OS, the consistency with the family of products and the app ecosystem.
I wish somebody could sell hackintosh-ready laptops in the form factor of 2012-2015 mbps, just with newer processors and USB-C. That’s it. I would buy 5 tomorrow.
Screen at least should be decently bright. Make sure you don’t have autobrightness on or “slightly dim when on battery power” checked when outdoors.<p>I use my 2017 air outdoors. It’s not great, wouldn’t want to be using things with black backgrounds, but it’s doable. And pros have a lot more nits than it.<p>If you have those things off and it’s duller than other laptops that aren’t specifically built for outdoor use then yeah you might have a lemon.
Ya I have a 2018 15” and I feel the same way. It’s slow and the fan runs constantly and battery sucks.<p>And so I’ve gone back to Windows. I get devices and an OS that works with everything and WSL2 + Windows Terminal give me a great Linux dev environment (or multiple!) with almost no battery cost.<p>I also run a laptop with Ubuntu, but it’s Linux so still fussy.<p>I can’t believe I’m saying this but Microsoft has got it figured out.
Apple is extremely user hostile and their lobbying efforts are especially disturbing. Their devices can be nice if you want something that's hardware-standardized and you don't care about price-value ratio or ethics or their lobbying or closedness. But you are relying on them being successful in setting the device up exactly how you need it. In OP's case, standardized hardware failed to guarantee good performance and now he's stuck with a high-priced device with poor upgradeablity.<p>Also, the Lightroom subjective experience as a measurement is a bit problematic, because Adobe products are the kind that prioritize featurefulness (aka bling) over performance and stability. I know it's a popular product suite: feel free to express opposite impressions. Adobe's answer to this (and it's not really fair to single Adobe out) is that you just need a beefier machine; that way the performance issues are offloaded to the user. I suspect that they constantly buy the fastest machines for their developers, because that way developers don't notice performance problems, so no time is spent on fixing performance.<p>I wish these developer companies would have a limit on how recent their dev hardware can be (or how powerful). That would cause them to address performance and save users a lot of money on upgrades. There would be other desirable secondary effects because addressing performance might lead to addressing technical debt (Adobe Photoshop has color management bugs dating back decades).
Apple were interested in making sleeker machines not faster machines.<p>They went so overboard that yes while the CPUs, SSDs and RAM are all faster the overall machines don’t feel faster in general use and yes do feel buggy.<p>Apple had to admit an embarrassing mistake with the MacPro fiasco, then another one with the keyboard. Eventually they’ll fess up to screwing up the MBP and MacOS itself.
Still using my mid 2014 Macbook Pro. It's running really smoothly with updated software.<p>The outside is prestine as it always has been. I used it extensively in cafes, but the battery is still fine. I work up to 8hrs a day with it and I love it.<p>Very hesitant to get a new once though. Especially with everyone still complaining!
I Hate Not Having Enough Traffic to My Blog<p><i>Bluetooth · It’s lame</i><p>Yep, bluetooth is lame. The ecosystem could actually be considered defamation against Harald Bluetooth at this point. If he wasn't long dead.<p><i>The place this is killing me is Lightroom.</i><p>Sure. From the Lightroom FAQ: <i>Drawing to the screen can be slow when Lightroom is using the entire screen of a high-resolution display</i>. Also: don't use Lightroom in 2020 if you want to experience a responsive UI.<p><i>To make professional use of a MacBook Pro, you need a CalDigit TS3+</i><p>Wrong. The CalDigit TS3+ lacks a PS/2 port, used by all true professionals. I mean, where would you even plug a mouse in? It's so lame.<p><i>MacOS[...]It’s still the best general-purpose computer user experience available from anyone</i><p>OK. But you still hate it. I guess George Bernard Shaw did say that all progress relies upon the unreasonable person. Actually, he said that all progress relies upon the unreasonable <i>man</i>, and he was opposed to vaccination, so let's not put too much store by his utterances.<p><i>The keyboard is neither better nor worse than my 2014 machine. Shouldn’t I expect progress in five years?</i><p>What progress are you expecting from a machine that converts finger waggles into alphanumeric characters?
I no longer want to buy high end laptop without 4K OLED screen and discrete NVidia 2080 GPU. This allows to use laptop for ray traced gaming as well as deep learning. The VSCode looks beautiful.
I too have fallen out of love with my Mac for similar reasons. However I think once the ARM based platform is properly integrated it will change a lot of this.