I’d love to hear anyone’s experience who has recently switched away from, or to a Mac.
Nice to see pro class features:
- 32 GB Ram is overdue, nice speed.
- 4 years to get a working keyboard that is reliable.
Missing pro class features:
- Selling a 10th gen CPU 9 months after it’s released at full price is disappointing.
- No 6 core option like Dell or Lenovo.
- The MacBook Pro is the first laptop that has claimed its pro, but has never offered its own docking solution. Surprising for a company that likes proprietary connectors. Professionals quite often dock to a desktop setup.
- Not sure if the battery life can be trusted on the i7. I have yet to own an i7 13” MBP that delivers battery life as advertised.
- Not going to a 14” (or waiting for the last possible moment to switch to 14”) is a potential big miss. Lenovo and others have this figured out.
- Unlike the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro did not evolve its 13” design to offer something. The a Dell XPS 13 seems to have and offers a compelling package.
Having carried a MacBook for the better part of 15 years.. I switched when Windows Vista arrived and destroyed my computing environment with forced upgrades, In terms of performance and reliability, the 2014 13” i7 MacBook Pro could be the peak of Apple laptop quality and performance.
After 2015, the MBP continued its eating disorder obsession with thinness, which invited thermal issues as well as a keyboard that was never really ready for the real or professional world.
Current setup:
I purchased a i9 15” MBP a little over a year ago with 32 GB RAM. The ram has been nice, otherwise its generally been underwhelming and disappointing.
When picking this up, the Apple employee asked if I was excited because he personally hadn’t see many of this spec sold. I mentioned to him after ones 10th or 15th laptop, you are more buying the death of a new device down the road.. than buying a new laptop... and I wasn’t looking forward to migrating.
So far, it has needed a replaced screen, battery, keyboard. It suffers like many from the phantom kernel_task cpu issue if you plug the power and an accessory on the left side of the laptop that instantly goes away if you plug in one on each side. I might tolerate this from an inferiorly priced machine. I carry a large PD battery to top up the 3-4 hour battery life and keep the laptop charged when carrying it between meetings.
I wonder if it’s normal for so many of my MacBooks to have gone in for repair, so many times, even though they remain in flawless condition physically years later.
I don’t buy a laptop, I buy a warranty and a guarantee of a working laptop so my laptop is can become invisible, just work, etc.
All this.. to say I tried out Ubuntu 20 last week on a Lenovo Tiny PC. Which turned into 2 monitors. And multiple days of higher productivity than I may have had in a very long time. No fighting with docker, only using. It feels like the clarity older OS X environments provided.
I expected to try out windows again because I like the Surface Pro so much.
Now I’m only using the MacBook for business/research/communication tasks, no more external screens or keyboard, and no longer development and it’s much more enjoyable to use.
I’m seeing many who were early converts to the Mac moving back to X1 Carbons and XPS 13’s and the comments here are encouraging for me to consider other options.