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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

#471

Post by CydeWeys »

karatestomp wrote: post #260
fuzzy2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hid…

What's the use case for still running an OS off spinning rust in 2020?

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

#472

Post by kakuri »

What is the obsession with laptops? While I fully understand they have their uses, I don't understand why someone who is employed full-time doing programming would cripple their own work environment by using a laptop. I've been hearing and reading about laptop complaints for years from "professional" programmers. It's very easy to avoid so many problems by building your own desktop. If money isn't an issue then just buy one prebuilt.

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

#473

Post by SahAssar »

derefr wrote: post #441
SahAssar wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as essential telemetry. There should be an option to turn it off completely.

There's unavoidable telemetry. I.e., there's metadata about your interactions with Microsoft's servers that Microsoft inescapably derives from those interactions. You can certainly ask them to throw that metadata away; but—if you're paranoid enough to be worried what they'll do with it in the first place—then why are you trusting them at their word? It would seem the only route to privacy, in such a world, is to neve…

Sure, but none of that requires there to be unique IDs or hardware info sent to their servers. Let's not pretend that Microsoft enabled us to make that choice for ourselves.

Requesting software packages from a server should not require them to keep logs or send uniquely identifiable info.

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

#474

Post by karatestomp »

CydeWeys wrote: post #471
karatestomp wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hid…

What's the use case for still running an OS off spinning rust in 2020?

Well,

1) it hardly matters since the point is that excessive disk access by an OS when, essentially, "nothing is happening" (opening the start menu, say) is a bad sign for generally giving-a-shit about performance and spinning rust just exposes the error,

2) they pushed Win10 upgrades on a bunch of well-performing spinning rust Win7 machines back in the middle of 2015, not 2020, immediately making them much worse,

3) most normal home users don't replace hard drives, don't replace their computer very often, buy the cheapest thing they can aside from that they think higher number = better and are often up-sold a large (=spinning rust) drive they don't need and can be up-sold because they buy them at real stores (yes, really), and only very recently did SSDs mostly displace magnetic platters on base configurations of cheap mass-market desktops. I guarantee a high percentage of home users are still booting off traditional HDDs, yes, even in 2020, and they're exactly the same sort not to have been able to figure out how to not upgrade to Win10.

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

#475

Post by mstudio »

SkyBelow wrote: post #391
mstudio wrote: post #283

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…

Do you have any recommendations on what to look for and how to avoid laptops with issues? I have a family member who is going to college and insistent on getting an Apple laptop. This will be her only machine and so my concern is that if anything happens, she won't have a fall back, while when I buy laptops for myself I'm fine taking a gamble as I have other options.

I suggest that you buy on eBay and filter by "New", which is what I did with mine. I verified that it was unused by going to Apple > About This Mac > System Report. Then select "Power" and look for the "Cycle Count" under "Battery information". This will tell you how many times the battery has been recharged. It should be a very low number. I think mine was 0 or 1 when I bought it. eBay is also pretty good about returns if anything is wrong with the laptop. Good luck!

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

#476

Post by rednum »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #454
rednum wrote: 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…

Can you start playing audio, go to System Preferences -> Date and Time -> Unlock the panel -> repeatedly uncheck and re-check "Set date and time automatically" and see if that causes audio glitches? There's a known problem with that series of MBPs, I believe with the T2 chip. I'm still on the 2015 Macbook so I can't test it, but another audio pro I know says some recent Catalina update fixed it, and before that they…

I've tried that, recording is still broken sadly.

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

#477

Post by JohnClark1337 »

modernerd wrote: post #123

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…

Personally I've found that Windows, and even many Linux distros handle multi-monitor far better than Mac OS does.

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

#478

Post by wwweston »

drcongo wrote: post #314
rednum wrote: 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?

Remember:

* Apple knows best

* this is a totally legitimate product decision because no one likes wires on their headphones since like 2016

* what you really want is bluetooth, especially airpods -- have you bought your airpods yet? Ecosystem FTW!!1! -- even though they introduce latency that's unacceptable in some situations

* Apple knows best, and look, you don't get a career as a bold product thinker by caring about some kind of insignificant minority of niche creators who care about latency in music making

* Besides, why are you such a whiner? Just buy a $35 dongle that takes up your only port like everyone else (at least, until we finally succeed in our quest to remove that port too and achieve seamless invulnerable portless design, a rock, and island, and an island never cries)

* Apple knows best

* Look, why are you such a hater?

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

#479

Post by EForEndeavour »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #255
modernerd wrote: post #123

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…

Once there's a terminal emulator for Windows that works as seamlessly as iterm and there's no more weird hacks required like Cygwin / minTTY (I believe the windows subsystem for linux does that) I might start to consider moving; most software I use for development is cross-platform anyway (vs code, intellij, nodejs, go). But for now my 2017 macbook works well enough. I do think it's overpaid though; outside of the oc…

The Magic Keyboard 2 is great, but their mouse has given me nothing but wrist pain and infuriating muscle-memory issues. I still believe its flaw was being designed for appearance first and ergonomics/usability second, but no doubt I didn't give it enough time. Do you recall how long it took you to get used to it?

(For about 10 years, I've been using a bog-standard, symmetrical, 2-button scroll-wheel mouse by Logitech, and am looking to transition to a finger-operated trackball to save desk space, and just to see what the fuss is about.)

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

#480

Post by garmaine »

stevewodil wrote: post #313
garmaine wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If you use FileVault encryption with a secure password.
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