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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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151–160 of 567 posts

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

#151

wait until the keyboard becomes useless as it happened to the 4 MacBook Pros I have owned in the last 5 years.

They’ve switched back to the previous mechanism and ditched the butterfly one for the latest models AFAIK.

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

#152
post #145

The XPS 17 will be my next “MacBook”. It should be out this month and it ticks all the boxes for me (great screen, supposedly good cooling, user-replaceable SSD/RAM, acceptable weight and size for a 17" laptop). https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a s…

How is the touchpad? Every non-apple touch pad I've ever used has bee terrible.

The XPS 17 isn't out yet so I can't offer a personal comparison. Dell increased the size of the trackpad in the 2020 XPS 15/17, but otherwise it seems similar to previous ones.

YouTube reviews of engineering samples of the 2020 XPS line say they are best-in-class for Windows, which usually means they're not quite as good as Macs (same as laptop speakers, where the MBP also leads).

I find even Mac trackpads slow/frustrating after using a Logitech MX Ergo for a while, so trackpad experience is less of a factor for me.

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

#153
post #141

The XPS 17 will be my next “MacBook”. It should be out this month and it ticks all the boxes for me (great screen, supposedly good cooling, user-replaceable SSD/RAM, acceptable weight and size for a 17" laptop). https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a s…

On paper Windows is good. In practice the telemetry and the story behind its introduction and how they handled communication means that I won't consider Windows as a primary OS candidate until there's a CEO change at least. It's disappointing to see so many being ignorant about this topic.

How replacing CEO helps. Really?!

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

#154
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From own experience this is 99% corporate shenanigans. You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory. In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.

Oh, they do know. And they do dogfood. We only have 70 employees. IT doesn’t program though. Also, in my experience, many people just don’t care. I understand, too. It’s just easier this way. Not caring is great for your mental health. If most of your colleagues feel the state of things is tolerable, nothing will change.

If you like me hate hearing the fan on an idle laptop, you need to learn the subtle art of nagging IT just the right amount to get things done :)

Or just BYOD :)

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

#155
post #36
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 notificat…

Would it be feasible to run a Windows Pro or Server version in a laptop?

(or at least shut all the "windows 10" stuff and return to something that look like Windows 2000?)

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

#156

The XPS 17 will be my next “MacBook”. It should be out this month and it ticks all the boxes for me (great screen, supposedly good cooling, user-replaceable SSD/RAM, acceptable weight and size for a 17" laptop). https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a s…

If the XPS 17 has decent Linux driver support, a high brightness matt display option, I'm all in.

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

#157

I've written about my experience with macOS Catalina on an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273467 Since then there have been new developments: Had a meeting yesterday, 5 minutes before the scheduled time (which is normally plenty of time when your tools work as expected) I start up Zoom and create the meeting. Guess what? The thing now just freezes completely and it's not just Zoom, the system…

Have you figured it out? It sounds like a hard drive issue and you have some important system file or swap located on a part of the solid state that locks up, but not enough for the hardware to mark it as bad. If you format there is a chance the issue will go away. I had similar symptoms even after formatting on a 2015 MBP, so I formatted, wrote a 4GB file to the HDD, then after that everything worked fine. Amusingly…

Disk IO is working fine, if not I'd experience these issues all the time.

The issue is that a combination of camera access, hardware video encoding/decoding (for video conferencing) and bluetooth earphones (AirPods) is now able to crash WindowServer.

This used to work totally fine on a previous version so it's clearly a solved problem. Maybe Apple should stop "fixing" things that ain't broke?

But hey, there is a silver lining to this, at least now I can enjoy Apple TV+ on my work machine. That's exactly what I always wanted. /s

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

#159
post #141

The XPS 17 will be my next “MacBook”. It should be out this month and it ticks all the boxes for me (great screen, supposedly good cooling, user-replaceable SSD/RAM, acceptable weight and size for a 17" laptop). https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a s…

On paper Windows is good. In practice the telemetry and the story behind its introduction and how they handled communication means that I won't consider Windows as a primary OS candidate until there's a CEO change at least. It's disappointing to see so many being ignorant about this topic.

I completely agree. Also the automatic updates which potentially just close an open session including unsaved files is not something that helps trust. Windows has become less transparent and much more controlling, actively ignoring or overriding user preferences, and I don't know why I should use a software like that, not to mention pay for the "privilege" of being messed with.

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

#160
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing music on Spotify doesn't work for me 80% of the time. Physical keyboard worked 100% of the time. I hate the touchpad greatly. 0 benefits to me but tons of annoyances. I keep touching random buttons I never intended. I cannot press the correct button without looking (used to put volume to really low in bed)

I don’t mean to belittle any issues you have, but > I cannot press the correct button without looking does this seem like a really really minor problem to anyone else? I can’t imagine using function keys often enough that this would actually become annoying.

It is a minor problem to me. But it’s a step backwards on a machine that is 5 years newer. It’s enough to add to my annoyance.
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