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New 13-inch MacBook Pro

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Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#421

Post by microtonal »

jaybeeayyy wrote: post #385
RedneckBob wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just purged Apple from my life largely because the touchbar continues to live on. Love my new Lenovo, btw. As a workaround for the touchbar that worked pretty well, I bought a silicon keyboard protector for the Apple Magic Keyboard, cut out the area for the function keys, and used hot glue to glue it over the touch bar. Prevented the touchbar from activating at the slightest touch and did return some of the feel of…

So many homemade tweaks to fix glaring issues in expensive, premium products... Remember the iPhone 4 where you had to hold your phone in a certain way so it wouldn't block the antenna? It's amazing that Apple can pump out products with issues like this year after year and still be a top dog.

Signal strength would be better if you hold it in a certain way and this was true for some other phones as well. I had an iPhone 4 and never paid attention to how I held it, and it always worked perfectly fine. Maybe it's because I used a bumper most of the time (like most people, at least here in Europe).

The return rate of the iPhone 4 was much lower than that of the 3GS [1], so apparently it did not affect many users in practice.

It's still bad design, but when I compare it to widespread issues I had with other tech devices relatively minor (e.g. spontaneously resetting Moto X 2013, self-destructing Moto 360 smartwatch back, etc., constant BlueTooth headphone drops on the Nokia 7 or 7.1).

The (by far) worst Apple design issue that affected me and people I know was the butterfly keyboard. It has left me sour for years and I considered to stop using Macs. I am very happy they have finally resolved that now. But many of the butterfly MacBooks were simply defective products. Only the later generations with seals hold up pretty well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#422

Post by dewey »

deepGem wrote: post #346
tw04 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After several years I can unequivocally say I still hate the touch bar. I love touch ID, but the bar needs to go. USB-C was all about standardizing. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, I did love magsafe, but I also love that in theory someday I'll have one cable to rule them all. And I'll be able to charge my headphones/laptop/phone/random device with a usb-c cable instead of needing 8 of them.

My gripe with the touch bar is that for every IDE you have to customise it to see the function keys by default. It's so damn annoying. Why can't the default layout be just the Fn keys ?

Because 95% of the people don't use them and for them having an emoji picker, a volume, brightness control is more useful. The small group of people who actively use the Fn keys can just enable this checkbox at the settings.

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#423

Post by ProZsolt »

cactus2093 wrote: post #336
alexggordon wrote: post #125

I was curious how the 13 inch was priced so I compared it to a new Dell XPS 13. Dell has a better processor (maybe, [2]) , but I couldn't find the option to upgrade the Dell to 4TB internal SSD, so I compared both with the 2 TB option. Ram is the same at 32GB. Dell came out to $2399[0] USD and Apple came out to $2999[1] USD. Dell Pros: * Row of function buttons (I've used BTT to customize my touch-bar to the point wh…

Genuinely curious, have you had your MacBook Pro knocked over from the power cord since switching away from MagSafe? Lots of people complain about missing MagSafe but I’ve never seen or heard of this actually happening. I’m sure it has happened but it just doesn’t seem like a big problem. For me, just in the past month I’ve had the usb charger yanked out by the cord multiple times by people and pets tripping over it…

MagSafe was great when the average battery life was under four hours. You have to be plugged-in in weird places. It saved my laptop a couple of times when I was at University. The problem is not just knocking over the whole laptop, but you can damage the port as well.

With the current 8+ hours battery life, I only have it plugged in when I'm at my desk, so no risk of tripping over.

For me, the standard port overweights any other downside.

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#424

Post by dewey »

saddlerustle wrote: post #349
fluffything wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~~2399$~~ 2999$ (EDIT: see replies) in the US, and.... 3924$ for the same model if you buy it in Europe (3629 EUR). That's a bit outrageous. I still have a Macbook Air 2013, and have been looking for an upgrade for like 5 years, but I was not willing to pay 4k for a laptop with a worse keyboard, a worse power plug, an OS that in 2020 still doesn't have any kind of windows tiling capabilities and quite poor virtual de…

The price $2999 in the US. There's no markup here, Apple's EU pricing just includes 20% VAT ($600) and implicit AppleCare (~$300) as required by EU consumer law.

> implicit AppleCare (~$300) as required by EU consumer law

I wouldn't say AppleCare is the same as having the extended warrenty to obey the EU consumer law. AppleCare includes a bunch of things that are outside of normal "warrenty" coverage.

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#425

Post by lobotryas »

alexggordon wrote: post #125

I was curious how the 13 inch was priced so I compared it to a new Dell XPS 13. Dell has a better processor (maybe, [2]) , but I couldn't find the option to upgrade the Dell to 4TB internal SSD, so I compared both with the 2 TB option. Ram is the same at 32GB. Dell came out to $2399[0] USD and Apple came out to $2999[1] USD. Dell Pros: * Row of function buttons (I've used BTT to customize my touch-bar to the point wh…

The other important differentiator is the OS. I can’t (reliably) get MacOS on a Dell laptop so my choice is clear: either keep using the MBP I have or upgrade. At this point I don’t want to go back and try re-learning Windows.

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#426

Post by vehemenz »

FillardMillmore wrote: post #216

What's the real value in paying more for this compared to getting a new MacBook Air?

The big thing is thermal design. In the new MBA, a moderate load spins up the fans really loud, whereas in the MBPs, it takes a pegged CPU/GPU to even turn the fans on.

Honorable mention: better screen in terms of colors and brightness. Probably a faster SSD. More TB3 ports.

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#427

Post by thethethethe »

curiousgal wrote: post #13

Another year, another laughable release with the same BS language trying to dazzle "Pro" wanna-be's. There is nothing Pro about these machines.

Have you ever been to a FAANG campus? There are thousands of engineers walking around with MacBooks. I’m pretty sure those engineers would be considered to be professional

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#428

Post by nakodari »

I have Macbook Pro 13 inch model from 2013 and was really looking forward to upgrading to this year's rumored Macbook Pro 14 inch laptop. Sigh! Now I will wait another year. I don't see anything in this refreshed Macbook Pro 13 inch model that is worth upgrading from my current Macbook.

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#429

Post by corywright »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #169
hidiegomariani wrote: post #149

I've a macbook pro 13' 2017 - It's the worst laptop I've used in the past 10 years. It continuously gets smoking hot lot of fan noise and very often kernel panics. I have lost faith in apple macbook especially when price to hardware ratio is higher than anyone else in the industry I expect the machine to just work seamlessly. I'm very soon disposing the laptop and buy a dell or a thinkpad. I'm not looking at apple ag…

I have same model at work and even ignoring the keyboard the thing has been awful to use. The two ports are a complete nightmare making you have to juggle between power/screen and reliable storage (Tried 5 dongles, none can hold a drive reliably under heavy use). Kernel Panics on waking from sleep almost every day, bluetooth chip crashes and requires restarts to get working again. Not to mention the disgustingly low…

> Tried 5 dongles, none can hold a drive reliably under heavy use

This is something I've had a problem with as well on my late 2016 13" MBP, 2 usb-c port model. I have two external drives that I sync via rsync occasionally (1 local, 1 offsite). No matter what type of dongle I use, one of the disks always ejects shortly after beginning the rsync. Even with the Apple dongle, when I plug in one of the external disks via usb-a, and plug my usb-c power to the dongle, then plug in the 2nd external disk directly to the only other usb-c on the mac, it fails every time.

What I have been doing instead is unplugging the power cord and syncing the disks while running on battery. This seems to work, but the odd thing here is that about 50% of the time when I do this I lose my wifi connection as soon as I begin the rsync from disk to disk. Nothing I can do makes the network work again until after I unmount the external disks.

Having only two ports on the computer, one of which is also used for power, has turned out to be far more annoying than I imagined.

Re: New 13-inch MacBook Pro

#430

Post by whywhywhywhy »

dubcanada wrote: post #207
shawndellysse wrote: post #8

So glad they finally got rid of the butterfly keyboard! That said, I cannot wait until they retire the Touch Bar.

What's your problem with the touch bar? My biggest was the lack of esc key, but they adjusted that. I actually really like the touch bar. I don't use it very often, but I never used function keys.

Can't change the laptop volume with your eyes closed, I use my MBP to listen to podcasts in bed sometimes so like to alter the volume just by knowing where the keys are, not having to sit up and fumble with some touch screen widget.
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