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

cfenollosa.com

21–30 of 567 posts

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

#21
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU requires a mandatory return policy of atleast 14 days for online purchases afaik

Devil is in the details. Also, somehow, the "buy-test-return" mentality simply isn't present around Europe, at least never seen it as anything other than exceptional.

I have used it many times over the years. Never abused it though. I only buy things that I plan to keep, and do my research prior to ordering. Nevertheless, I still had to use it occasionally.

Currently I literally only buy electronics from stores that I know deal fast with returns, either via returning the money or replacement.

Edit: In fact, I had way better experiences with this law, in comparison to warranty claims.

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

#23
I bought the 2018 air. I loathe it. What a waste of money and junk keyboard.

That said my new job gave me a System 76 laptop and I’ve been delighted all week with it. I don’t care for the offset keyboard but at least it actually works correctly. If it had better palm detection on the trackpad it would be the best laptop I’ve owned since my 2013 MBP (which is still goin strong).

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

#24

mbp2020 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mbp.jpg air2013 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mba.jpg iphonese2016 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg Perfect illustration of "Apple is iphone-first company".

The third URL doesn't work.

fixed, thx.

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

#25
post #14
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.

Out of curiosity, why not simply run Linux at that point?

I made the jump and it's been mostly smooth (7th gen X1 Carbon with Fedora).

The one thing that is annoying is when using multiple monitors of different resolutions, Wayland doesn't seem to scale resolution on a per-monitor basis. With the laptop being 4k this is an issue when working anywhere but at home, I tend to just use the laptop screen (which is excellent btw).

Stuff that worked without any extra config that in the past might not have been so smooth: wifi, fingerprint reader, thunderbolt dock with keyboard, mouse, monitor, external USB soundblaster and network cable plugged in), sleep, hibernate.

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

#26
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 UI (dock, menu bar, etc) becomes sluggish. This used to work fine before upgrading to Catalina. Force-quitting Zoom fixed it, so I'm assuming something Zoom is doing (that used to work fine) is enough to completely freeze the system UI.

Eventually gave up on Zoom and used FaceTime. In the middle of the call the UI froze for ~10 seconds - no video, no mouse, but audio was still working. I assumed it would crash but thankfully it recovered.

Finally after the call I left the machine unattended for a minute and when I got back it was on the full disk encryption password screen so it had rebooted. Turns out it crashed because WindowServer stopped responding. I heard about those issues but always though it's related to the newer models with discrete GPUs and I didn't have to worry about it with my low-end Macbook with Intel graphics. I guess I was wrong.

Mail is still playing the new mail sound randomly when archiving/moving read messages, and I ended up disabling the sound completely. I didn't know it was possible to screw up something so simple.

I am now thinking of downgrading and using Catalina (for Xcode) on a separate machine. I am not sure what to do when it goes out of support though, seems like nowadays every OS became equally shit.

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

#27
My main issue with the new MacBook pros is they are slow. They overheat and then throttle the CPU regularly. Too much was sacrificed to make them so slim. (I got the 2019 13 inch top spec)

I built a small form factor hackintosh with an i5 9600K + 32GB RAM and it's a completely different experience. Smooth as butter, never throttles. iOS apps compile in a third of the time and my IDE doesn't grind to a halt while I'm compiling. Doing work on my MacBook now feels like a chore in comparison. Not to mention the hackintosh cost less than half what the MacBook cost.

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

#28
I am coming from an T440p (Ubuntu 18.04) to an MacBook Pro 16 and i feel all his points.

I want to add how bad some parts of the Mac UX are. GNOME surely has some really really bad UX decisions but overall I think (hold on tight) GNOME is better than Mac in terms of UX. My MacBook is simply not designed for pro users.

I might add that the Mac is far more stable than Ubuntu and looks better but in the end as far as I am concerned the t440p is just the better option for pro users.

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

#29
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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. If I need Linux, it will be obviously native. Also WSL doesn't solve: * forced Windows updates when you don't need them * shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc * stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive * bad fs performance in general

That's harsh but I agree with those points, Windows is still a consumer oriented operating system at its core, which has a lot of undesirable features for a developer.

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

#30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why not simply run Linux at that point?

A huge number of small annoyances during "normal" usage of a computer. Issues with sleep, displays, hi DPI, even my wallpaper and fonts don't always display correctly...

Just don't buy "Windows certified" laptops...

Upd: why downvotes? My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux.

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