Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

This is the exact same behaviour that drove me away from Apple 10 years ago: First deny existance of issue, second place blame on customer, third force customer into a generic replacement script of parts in accending order of price. Repeat until customer does not return out of frustration, accepts the broken product or is pushed out of warrantee.

I think this strategy worked for them on average when hardware design flaws were less frequent, it maintained their facade of absolute perfection at the cost of a few lucid customers... but it leaves a particularly sour taste for those whom it does affect, and I think they are fast approaching the threshold where it will backfire and destroy their image.

At this stage denying the existence of these types of problems is an insult to anyones intelligence, deep technical literacy is not required - Anyone who buys Apple products for more than beholding their aesthetic beauty can see the simple truth in this case: that it is broken.

1. New keyboard is painful to type on. I use it 99% of the time with external trackpad / keyboard / monitors but that other 1% pisses me off.

2. Battery life is mediocre. I don't keep track but I'm always surprised how quickly it goes when I'm unplugged. How about stop trying to make them thinner?

3. The touchbar is f*cking horrible. It's a bad solution to a nonexistent problem. My fingers touch it by mistake often, finding ESC is awful, and worst of all, it sleeps! Give me back my ESC and media keys.

4. A computer with two GPUs SHOULD NOT CRASH when plugging in external monitors. It should also wake from sleep properly in clamshell mode. A lot of the time I actually have to unplug one monitor to get either to turn on.

5. Support for external retina monitors is terrible. I spent the better part of a day getting two Dells to be readable / look good.

6. Xcode. A medium sized project compiling now hits all 8 cores so hard music will actually stop playing (I use Roon with a pretty heavy CPU load).

Unless things turn around, this will definitely be my last MBP, maybe leaving the dev ecosystem altogether.

After reading other's thoughts here, I think I have to avoid Macbook Pro for now, I hope they change this in the next release.

Annoying as I need a machine with Xcode.

Apple software looks and feels great, and I used to believe their hardware was just as good, but it turns out that their manufacturing processes are really crappy. Remember the first unibody aluminum Mac? Wasn't a unibody. They glued two pieces of aluminum together instead.

Look, I get it, you have to deal with the manufacturers you have. But Apple's amassed a gigantic pile of cash, and they really should be using it to improve their hardware. But they haven't been. And now, there's never been a better time to switch platforms.

I was singing their praises 2 years ago. But the beauty was only skin-deep.