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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

#311
post #45

These days owning a MacBook feels like being in an abusive relationship. The sex is still great but price you pay for being slowly distanced from your friends, family and peripherals is high.

This does not feel representative of how people describe abusive relationships to me.

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

#312

Totally agree. After reading so many reviews panning the new MBPs, I ended up replacing my ancient 2011 MBP with a 2015 model. You can still find new/unopened or relatively unused models on eBay. I love this laptop. i7, 16GB memory, AMD Radeon R9, great keyboard with F-keys... plus, it has all the standard ports I need: USB, HDMI, Thunderbolt. All for much less money than a new machine from Apple. No complaints at al…

Exactly what I did. I loved my used 2015 but I ordered a 16" 2019 on day one. While I like it and it's my "daily driver", it was surprisingly low on wow factor.

The biggest win on the 16" are the speakers. I didn't consider them at all but they've basically eliminated my use of external speakers. Touchbar is very underwhelming. USB-C is a tossup. I got to buy new dongles, chargers, cables, etc. which I actually enjoy but in the end I'm mostly plugging USB-A devices in with adapters.

I really miss having a big microSD in a flush adapter as spare space. I miss having tiny USB 3 flash drives nearly flush in USB-A ports.

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

#313

My biggest concern/blocker is the soldered storage. 1st - if it fails during warranty, how do I send it for repair safely (as in my data be safe)? 2nd - it decreases its value imho. I mean how many people buy/trust used storage? I wouldn't.

> how do I send it for repair safely (as in my data be safe)? You have backups, right? (That is, unfortunately, the legit answer to this question.)

The question is ambiguous but I interpreted it as if the laptop fails and I need to have it repaired how do I keep my data safe because I can't just pull the hard drive out before sending it for repair.

The T2 chip already encrypts the SSD using a unique identifier generated and known only by that host's T2, so it's sort of a non-issue imo

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

#314
post #217

I did switch from 2012 Macbook Air to 2019 Macbook Pro a few weeks ago and I can't agree more with the article. One of the reasons I'm using Mac instead of Linux is that I make music. And the new Macbook sucks for this purpose: the same recording settings I used on my old laptop are not usable on the new one. 90% of time things work fine, but sometimes I get glitches and pops in the middle of the recording. Why? Who…

I make music on a 2018 iPad Pro and now I can never upgrade that because they've removed the headphone jack on the new ones. What's "Pro" about an iPad without a headphone jack?

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

#315
post #217

I did switch from 2012 Macbook Air to 2019 Macbook Pro a few weeks ago and I can't agree more with the article. One of the reasons I'm using Mac instead of Linux is that I make music. And the new Macbook sucks for this purpose: the same recording settings I used on my old laptop are not usable on the new one. 90% of time things work fine, but sometimes I get glitches and pops in the middle of the recording. Why? Who…

That's weird, reliable low latency audio is one of the few things where I still find the Mac to be pretty solid. I've got a 2015 15" and I've used several times a 2018 13", on both Mojave and Catalina and I have to say that it outperforms my 2015 (it can easily manage a 32 buffer with some plugins loaded, while my 15" starts to struggle under 64). This was using Reaper with an Apple USB-A to USB-C adapter and a UMC204HD interface

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

#316
post #294

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…

I hope you like high heat, high fan noise, and thermal throttling issues (common XPS issues that myself and others have experienced). I hope you also like random Wifi failures, random freeze-the-world-while-some-app-is-having-a-network-timeout issues. macOS is getting worse, no doubt. But Windows still has multiple unacceptable problems (ungodly slow unzipping, still!, random heavy lag or freezing, surprise 30 minute…

I do agree with you on thermal management on Windows 'ultra'books. I've had two now with crazy bad thermal throttling. Often fans going when very little CPU load, and then when I do use the CPU/GPU hard, it pegs it back so much that it is unusable. I've seen it pegging a Ryzen CPU down to 0.5GHz which makes the whole system unusable. The laptop doesn't feel ridiculously hot to touch, so no idea what is going on.

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

#317

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…

The 2020 XPS line is drop dead gorgeous.

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

#318
post #9
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.

+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 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux

So your co-workers already use Linux (for free, I guess), but now you're trying to convince them to use a restricted Linux version that also costs money. How's that?

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

#319
post #294

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…

I hope you like high heat, high fan noise, and thermal throttling issues (common XPS issues that myself and others have experienced). I hope you also like random Wifi failures, random freeze-the-world-while-some-app-is-having-a-network-timeout issues. macOS is getting worse, no doubt. But Windows still has multiple unacceptable problems (ungodly slow unzipping, still!, random heavy lag or freezing, surprise 30 minute…

I use a XPS13 from 2019? with KUbuntu running Plasma, it's really good. Had hardly any issues and runs great. Main issue with XPS13 is that the RAM is soldered on. Great unit otherwise. Screen is great.
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