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

Anyway, Catalina upset me so much (I had no idea how much 32 bit stuff I still wanted to work!) that instead of downgrading my main machine to Mojave, I'm going with a Linux system from System76. My Macs that have not been upgraded to Catalina will remain at Mojave, or, should they be old enough to not make it to Mojave, I will be installing a compatible Linux distro on them to keep up to date with security issues.

The only gripes I have with the 2017 machine are the butterfly keyboard (which never broke, but just doesn't feel good), the lack of an ESC key, and the "space grey" color.

From trying out a 2020 13", the new keyboard actually feels like an improvement over the 2013 one, so I guess that's fixed. It has a physical ESC key, so that's fixed too, and ... there's always the silver model, but my employer couldn't procure that at the time, and I guess it's not such a big deal really; I just like shiny things I guess.

On the upside: I can get a tiny machine with 32GB RAM now with a UNIX on it that doesn't require me to be my own Linux sysadmin, which is something I know fairly well how to do (I do admin a number of servers, and have had at least a dozen forays into Linux on desktops) but absolutely don't enjoy to the point where I'd rather use Windows 8.

Besides, Touch ID is something I've grown to miss on the 2013 one, since I hate typing long passwords over and over again, and it even works for 1Password and apparently is reasonably safe at that.

I have a 34" USB-C screen, which makes USB-C a really nice experience; single wire and I get display, a couple of USB devices (including my mechanical keyboard), LAN access, sound and power. Everything works out of the box, no issues so far with the 2017 Macbook. On the 2013 one, I had to use three cables for that (those Thunderbolt 2 docks never felt like good value for the money) and it turns out USB 3.0 does have its limitations.

I even like the touchbar. I'm fairly disinterested in peak keyboard speed and efficiency, I don't need a debugger that often really, and I'm bad at memorizing keyboard shortcuts anyway, so I like being able to get a discoverable set of shortcuts on the touchbar. Setting brightness and volume has a lot more granularity, that's nice too. I have a button to mute my microphone on there as well that shows the current muteness state, useful for conference calls in Teams (its mute shortcut is weird, plus this way I don't show up as muted, which is better sometimes) and I look forward to trying out BetterTouchTool. I've seen other people use theirs as some kind of makeshift faders and fairly precise "analog" sliders for image processing and the like – not quite as nice as having dedicated devices for it, sure, but it's always there. I thought I'd hate it since the overall tone in the developer community towards the touchbar is incredibly negative, but I'm fine with it and I would pick the touchbar version over a F-key one any day even at modest cost (but I need the ESC key; leaving that out actually did make a difference for me.)

Haven't tried Catalina yet myself, but most of an office full of devs seemingly didn't have much trouble with it (the rest has yet to switch), so I guess I'll see what I find when I upgrade; I'm backing up my email just in case. But in the end it's probably still a UNIX that doesn't require me to become a hobby sysadmin and reboot after using the wrong projector, so I'll probably still be happier than with Linux, and somehow I just can't grow to like Windows.

That's just my personal experience, n=1 and all, and I don't use my machines to make music or develop in emacs all day at maximum keystroke throughput and so on, and I might hate the experience if I did, but as things stand, I'm currently still feel kinda positive towards Macbooks.

https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...

1. Apple doesn't do cables well; they've always been bad at it. I'm on my third Macbook Pro power cable in 6 years (and this one is now fraying too). Their attempt at strain relief is a good case study of form over function and the plastic along the entire length of the cable seems to deteriorate/yellow/become gummy/separate over time as well. The cynic in me makes me think that Apple is purposely making these a disposable wear part so that you have to keep buying replacements, and man are those replacements expensive because the part that frays the most (right near the MagSafe connector) is attached to the entire power brick! So now you're looking at a $79 replacement part!! Contrast with a good USB-C cable, which is superior in almost every way: It lasts longer, has better strain relief, is sturdier and won't come apart with age, and most importantly, it's not attached to the power brick itself so a replacement is much cheaper.

2. USB-C is way more useful and can do a lot more than just charge your computer. My phone is USB-C so when I travel with a laptop and a phone I can either bring just a single charger, or bring two and have a backup in case I lose one. MagSafe simply doesn't do anything else, but USB-C does a lot else.

So yeah, I'm not sad to see MagSafe go. All these other complaints I agree with in spades, but not this particular one.