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Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

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Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#31

Post by mercer »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #17

I have the new 16 MBP and love the touch bar. I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag); I find it much easier to control apps, like music, safari, and all, and the habituation period was shorter than with the keys back in the day (when i started using macs). I would love to be able to easily customize the touch bar though, the author mentions BetterTouchTool, looks good, might be w…

BetterTouchTool is amazing. Here's how I've got my touch bar set up (from left to right):

- a dock for quick task switching (as well as seeing what apps are running that I can shutdown when I'm on battery) - a music/spotify widget that can play/pause, go back/forward and that shows me the track and artist as well as the album arg. - a date/time widget that I've customized so it shows me the week number too. This one has been surprisingly useful, as I'll regularly walk over to my macbook and tap on the touchbar to see the time or date. - a battery percentage and time remaining widget - a mute/unmute widget

But what I perhaps like best is the swipe gestures. If I swipe anywhere along the bar with two fingers, it adjusts the volume, and with three fingers I can change the brightness.

I don't currently make much use of app-specific touch bars, and there are a ton of other features I might use eventually. But even just with this I've come to really like the touch bar, where before I much preferred the function keys.

Can't do without an escape key though, but thankfully they put that one back :).

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#32

Post by lordnacho »

Just got my new MBP 16 inch yesterday, a replacement for my 2015 MBP 15 inch.

It's been pretty smooth sailing thus far, no big disappointments. My main reason for replacing the 2015 was to get more CPU power and memory, but the 2015 was actually doing ok, not insanely slow yet.

In terms of power I can now have all my tabs open, including heavy ones like Facebook, while running several different IDEs, and changing between things takes no time at all. Compiling is measurably faster.

The migration tool seems to work, it moved everything including stuff you might forget like your ssh config file. Even the bash history is there, and all the apps are in the dock in the order they were in on the old machine. Homebrew seemed to need a bundle command, but that fixed itself easily.

Touch bar is weird. I've basically set it to display F keys, because I can't figure out how to get iTerm2's hotkey to replace the Siri icon. If I could do that, I might not mind, but I go to terminal so often I need it to be a single key. So for now, Touch Bar is a small minus for me. The ESC key is still there so that's fine.

The screen is nicer than the 2015 one, marginally. Something about the colors and the size, I guess the bezel is now pretty much where it can be aesthetically. I wouldn't want it closer to the edge.

The keyboard is good. I tried my wife's butterfly type keyboard and thought it was terrible, luckily she likes it. This keyboard has slightly less travel than the old one, but somehow it feels like I can type faster without it feeling weird.

Main thing is there's been no terrible surprises in moving the stuff over to a new machine. Back in the day when I was a kid it would take a whole day to install software, you would always forget to move something, and there would always be some unexpected hitch.

I haven't run into Catalina slowness issues that people have mentioned, only things like the removal of kexts, which wasn't huge for me.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#33

Post by morelikeborelax »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #17

I have the new 16 MBP and love the touch bar. I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag); I find it much easier to control apps, like music, safari, and all, and the habituation period was shorter than with the keys back in the day (when i started using macs). I would love to be able to easily customize the touch bar though, the author mentions BetterTouchTool, looks good, might be w…

Get BetterTouchTool is totally worth it if you want to customise the touchbar. Also a decent window placement tool, shortcut manager and a bunch of other things.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#34

Post by disposedtrolley »

paulcarroty wrote: post #20
exdsq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux. I have noticed a few issues with it that don't make sense seeing as it's meant to have a full Linux Kernel (such as sockets not appearing) but that could be Ubuntu-20.04 being the one at fault to be fair :)

-1 for WSL. If I need Linux, it will be obviously native. Also WSL doesn't solve: * forced Windows updates when you don't need them * shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc * stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive * bad fs performance in general

> stupid non-uninstallable games icons in start menu

You can remove them now. At least I was able to in the Windows 10 v.2004 update. Why Candy Crush is included with Windows 10 Pro however is beyond me.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#35

Post by have_faith »

paulcarroty wrote: post #12

mbp2020 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mbp.jpg air2013 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mba.jpg iphonese2016 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg Perfect illustration of "Apple is iphone-first company".

I do wonder why they don't put more effort into the camera on the MBP. Of course it's not going to get used as a camera like a phone but with the economies of scale they have with the cameras going into iPhones you would think they could at least be on par with their own phone cameras from years ago.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#36

Post by fuzzy2 »

rafamvc wrote: post #6

Wsl 2 is incredible. Got a 1000 dollars dell desktop and it is insanely faster than my Mac. Windows has improved a lot, and Linux based development on windows is a lot easier now. 5 years ago I would have quit a job if they asked me to use windows. Macos is still marginally better but not worth the cost IMHO.

Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless.

And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks? They get live notifications when you add or remove hardware, software, when an application has crashed (even when error reporting is off), …. The data contains unique identifiers for your system and user. I don’t even want to know what’s sent when you select full diagnostics.

Windows is a privacy and performance nightmare. It’s good for two things only: corporate environments (manageability) and games.

---

Well, sorry about that. Just had to get this off my chest.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#37

Post by tpush »

"8-9 hours with all apps closed except Safari. Browsing lightly, with an occasional video, and brightness at the literal minimum. This brightness level is only realistic if it's night time. In a normally lit environment you need to set the brightness level at around 50%."

"When I push the laptop a bit more, with a few Docker containers, Pycharm running, Google Chrome with some Docs opened, and brightness near the maximum, I get around 4 hours."

Honest question for those of you who have Dell XPS 13s, ThinkPad X1 Carbons and so on, what battery life are you getting? Dell for example advertises 12 hours. Are these figures realistic?

Are MacBooks not the battery champs anymore?

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#38

Post by fuzzy2 »

paulcarroty wrote: post #20
exdsq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux. I have noticed a few issues with it that don't make sense seeing as it's meant to have a full Linux Kernel (such as sockets not appearing) but that could be Ubuntu-20.04 being the one at fault to be fair :)

-1 for WSL. If I need Linux, it will be obviously native. Also WSL doesn't solve: * forced Windows updates when you don't need them * shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc * stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive * bad fs performance in general

WSL 2 does indeed solve the FS performance problem because you’d use the Linux VM’s block device, not the host fs (NTFS).

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#39

Post by cameronbrown »

lkramer wrote: post #14
rafamvc wrote: post #6

Wsl 2 is incredible. Got a 1000 dollars dell desktop and it is insanely faster than my Mac. Windows has improved a lot, and Linux based development on windows is a lot easier now. 5 years ago I would have quit a job if they asked me to use windows. Macos is still marginally better but not worth the cost IMHO.

Out of curiosity, why not simply run Linux at that point?

Because the experience is terrible for the uninitiated. And this is coming from someone who ran Arch as their primary OS since I was 10. Laptop Linux on the whole is not a fun experience for those who just want a machine to work (which was what MacBooks were supposed to be about).

I just bought a Surface Laptop 3, and the machine is great. The hardware is nice, Windows on a laptop has improved tenfold since I've last used it. WSL2 means Linux isn't left out.

It's one machine/OS combo that does everything for me, including light gaming, whereas Linux and macOS both have significant compromises when using them.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#40

Post by C1sc0cat »

paulcarroty wrote: post #20
exdsq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux. I have noticed a few issues with it that don't make sense seeing as it's meant to have a full Linux Kernel (such as sockets not appearing) but that could be Ubuntu-20.04 being the one at fault to be fair :)

-1 for WSL. If I need Linux, it will be obviously native. Also WSL doesn't solve: * forced Windows updates when you don't need them * shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc * stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive * bad fs performance in general

You can set windows not to update in core hours and even then you can decline the update.

I have never had a bricked OS from an windows update

You know you can unpin stuff from the start menu to get rid of clutter.

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