Apple MacBook Review: The Laptop of the Future Isn’t Ready for the Present

I care a lot about battery life benchmarks because, well, that&#x27;s what a laptop is for: not being constantly plugged.<p>I&#x27;m always disappointed when I see <i>&quot;with all the laptops set to comparable brightness (around 75 percent)&quot;</i> instead of all laptops set to the same luminance. It&#x27;s like comparing mileage for cars while pressing the accelerator pedal at 75%.

For those worried by the lack of ports, check around a university or coffee shop and nobody is using multiple ports at once. They are using<p>1. Maybe headphones 2. Maybe charging (but usually not as battery life has increased so much)<p>An engineer or pro-sumer might be sad they can&#x27;t have 3 items plugged in at once, but I think Apple sees what I see in that weight and battery life are more important than number of ports.

I just bought a new MBP at the same time that these came out and I couldn&#x27;t think of a single reason other than &quot;it&#x27;s shiny&quot; to even consider getting the new MacBook. The 13&quot; MBP is still plenty light, but is a lot more powerful.

Charging and mouse for me. I suppose I can use a wireless mouse but all the ones I&#x27;ve tried that don&#x27;t have a usb dongle seem so jumpy. Bluetooth doesn&#x27;t seem ready for that frequency yet.

I just can&#x27;t understand the reasoning behind only one USB Type C port.

The most disappointing thing to be is they used a lower quality 480p webcam. So many people use Skype or Google Hangouts that a high resolution webcam is a must.

The lack of ports don&#x27;t bother me. Yet another cable incompatible cable bothers me. Yet another dongle bothers me. Lack of magsafe is <i>really</i> bothers me.<p>Magsafe was a step forward. Why go back?

I&#x27;m considering getting the Macbook 2015 as a travel complement to my 15.6&quot; i5 Thinkpad, which runs Ubuntu. I need to do a bit of Apple testing so it would fulfill two uses. But would it be too frustrating for occasional Web-focused software dev? I generally have Chrome loaded with a few tabs, a terminal or two, a database, and the Atom editor, working with a Node stack. I&#x27;ve never really used a Mac before so it&#x27;s not clear how much overhead the OS has and how it will perform with this CPU.

I agree that it looks somewhat underpowered currently. Worth remembering that this was also the case with the Macbook Air when it launched.

Where can I plug in my ADB keyboard and SCSI drives?

I welcome the port situation (Apple has rarely been wrong on this front). But the battery life and performance sound like concerns.

&quot;No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.&quot;<p>Edit: added quotes.

Core-M&#x2F;Broadwell-Y is a dud, just like all previous Y-series chips before it. Intel is trying <i>too hard</i> to get the ultra-low power. And because of that it ends up with chips that are less powerful than what is needed for mainstream tasks, as well as too expensive (even compared to a Core i5). You&#x27;re much better off with a 15W Core i5 than a 5W Core-M, no matter the scenario - with one possible exception: if you really, really want a $1,000 slim &quot;tablet&quot;. But you better not want it for something like Photoshop or anything heavy like that. Just for other mobile tasks that you could just as well use your $500 iPad for.