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Fixing the MacBook Pro

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Re: Fixing the MacBook Pro

#21

Post by dbg31415 »

* Keys break. A lot. Probably 1/4th of my friends with this machine have broken keys. Never happened on the old MBPs. (As I type this I'm using a mechanical Razer keyboard plugged into a dongle plugged into a 2016 MBP with a broken G key.)

* Trackpad is too big. What was the point, honestly? Nobody said, "My use case is I want a trackpad that's impossible not to bump when I type."

* MagSafe was great, bring it back. Every Apple product from now until the end of time should use a MagSafe power connector.

* TouchBar sucks. End of story. I miss the ESC key. I've literally never been like, "Oh gosh, I'm glad I have a TouchBar to change the volume... what a great feature!" It' just inflates production cost without adding value.

* Machines lack power... CPU and RAM. Old MBPs felt like they were amazing machines that would stand up over time. 16 GB RAM has been the cap for how many years now? Like a decade? Yeah...

* USB-C... other than dongles, I don't know a single accessory that uses a USB-C. Everything is Thunderbolt or USB-3. So... yeah let's have at least one USB-3 plug. I've got a USB and HDMI adapter that I use every day. Anyway nothing is built using a USB-C... I get pushing for new tech, but it seems more just like a way to add $250 in dongle sales to every new laptop sold.

* They are more expensive than the old ones. =(

* Office, Steam, other things... still don't run as well on Mac as they do on PC. If Apple isn't for Gamers, it has to be for people who do work? Or... look, who are the "Pro" lines for these days?

Re: Fixing the MacBook Pro

#22

Post by chrisbennet »

I think they should show some courage and make a Pro quality laptop again - one that doesn’t require dongles. Make it thicker, maybe even make it black. Developers don’t want the thinnest, we want the best.

It’s probably never gonna happen because they are a mobile device company now and that is where the money is.

Re: Fixing the MacBook Pro

#23

Post by RGS1811 »

saltcod wrote: post #2

Surprises me that a 2015 MBP is still passable for him cpu-wise. I briefly replaced my 2014 MBP with a 2017 iMac, citing the 16GB ram ceiling as my primary issue. I ordered the iMac from Apple with 8GB of ram and ordered an additional 16GB from OWC b/c it was way cheaper. The iMac arrived over two weeks before the OWC ram arrived, so I had 2 weeks using the 8GB iMac in it's ram-starved state. In short: I never once n…

Until this past summer I was doing all of my (design heavy) workload on a 2013 15-inch retina MBP, without any problems. I would still be using it, except that the display died on me and it made more sense to buy a new laptop than replace it. I was irritated at the time, because I'd wanted to wait another year in the hopes that they eliminated the touch-bar from the top-end lineup, but I've been really happy with the Kaby Lake MBP overall. It's quieter (except for the keystrokes), cooler, has a great display, etc. The things that bother me most about it are not the USB-C only thing, but the absence of a traditional power/eject keyboard button, and the relatively high occurrence of phantom keystrokes that result from brushing the touchbar with stray fingers. Otherwise it's a wonderful machine and I'm very pleased with it.

Re: Fixing the MacBook Pro

#25

Post by shurcooL »

twblalock wrote: post #5

I agree that the cable-management flaps on the power bricks need to come back. They were an excellent design and the current bricks could clearly accommodate them.

As someone who currently has those flaps, I look forward to no longer having them when I get a new MBP. I never use them anyway, and wouldn't want to (it'd be bad for the cables to wrap them so tightly).

Re: Fixing the MacBook Pro

#26

Post by contingencies »

I've got a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) with 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 + 16GB + 1TB SSD. It was an upgrade from an earlier 2011 model which started displaying power issues, overheating and quite literally falling apart. It's fine power wise.

The problems are:

(1) Screen came with a bad pixel which Apple was like "oh just leave it with us 1-2 weeks and we can swap that out for you" ... totally unreasonable after dropping USD$5K, because I need my system daily.

(2) Screen has an imprint of the edge of the keys on it because it is designed to be too thin/bendy, and when in a full bag receives some squash pressure.

(3) Touching the lower right part of the trackpad began to reset the computer, sometimes, a couple of years ago. When it happens it happens over and over. Apple wanted $new-computer-money to fix it. I now use a Wacom tablet and stylus in most cases.

(4) Some crap driver I installed (Huawei mobile data dongle for India) broke my OS in some fundamental way that was impossible to fix, and I had to re-install everything which was a nightmare waste of a weekend.

To be fair I do use it daily and it is sort of surviving, but the cost is far too high. Of course "I am never buying another Mac!" ... except that I have been looking at alternatives, and none of them really appeal, except in the desktop range, which is a big leap backward in mobility. Perhaps I will just buy a cheap PC laptop with Linux or a dumb terminal at work to log in to a desktop at my house and be done with it.

Re: Fixing the MacBook Pro

#28

Post by nappy-doo »

contingencies wrote: post #26

I've got a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) with 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 + 16GB + 1TB SSD. It was an upgrade from an earlier 2011 model which started displaying power issues, overheating and quite literally falling apart. It's fine power wise. The problems are: (1) Screen came with a bad pixel which Apple was like "oh just leave it with us 1-2 weeks and we can swap that out for you" ... totally unreasonable aft…

I have a retina late 2013, and I just sent it in for a battery replacement. They swapped my drive out to a new CPU, and put my old screen on the new CPU's body. I think the cost was like 200$, and took 2 days (delivered to my door).

When your machine gets battery problems, take it in ASAP, and get it repaired. I probably got 3-4 more years of life out of this machine with that repair.

Re: Fixing the MacBook Pro

#29

Post by dsr_ »

apricot wrote: post #17
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #3

Got a 2015 Macbook Pro. As of today, the E, R, and T keys have all stopped working. Apple wants $500 for a logic board replacement. It was fine when it was just the R key. Sort of. I set up bash scripts to copy-paste "r" to my clipboard, and just pressed command-V instead of "r". But then the T key went out. The other day, I was using my MacBook with an external keyboard sitting on top, and then the whole thing shut…

> MBP rendered unusable by faulty X key. Apple wanted $400, he paid, then the G key went out. They wanted another $400. Act today and buy the entire alphabet for just $8000. That's a $2400 savings!

Lots of other laptops manage to use $20 or $50 keyboard assemblies. They don't break quite as often, either.
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