Fixing the MacBook Pro

Pro :

- it is lighter. I don't really find it is a very relevant pro, the previous one is already a light device so this isn't really relevant but it would not be fair to do not list it.

- touch id is very convenient. It has one huge caveat : it is very capricious. For example each time the mbp crashes, fingerprints are automatically deleted. I guess it is a security measure, but it makes it a pain to register my fingers again since the machine is not that stable.

Meh :

- the touchpad is extremely large, I am not sure why. I had no problem with the old one. I sometimes tap on the pad by mistake but that does not happen often.

Cons :

-Touchbar : I can't wrap my mind around it. It is just bad. This is such a gimmick, and a badly implemented one. I can't count the number of times I mistyped on this band. Accessing a feature almost always take more time than with the old regular keyboard. On top of that, I really miss the tactility of a simple button. I am used to type without looking at the keyboard and with buttons you can't press it is far from comfortable to do so.

I am on the verge of just using a dedicated keyboard and touchpad just to do not have to use this touchbar.

It makes me very uncomfortable, but the high end machine my company bought for me is objectively less suited to my use case than the 2 years old one I have at home.

It is the first time that even after a couple of months, I can't get used to a new machine and long to go back to the last one.

What if I don't want to go all USB-C, especially since USB-C is a disaster? https://marco.org/2017/10/14/impossible-dream-of-usb-c A "Pro" computer should serve my needs, not the other way around. I'm sick of Apple breaking things for no damn reason and then acting like I'm the problem for not just going along with it.

> I think the primary argument is that Touch Bar sucks

That's not the primary argument. Most people who dislike this machine think the touch bar is at least inoffensive, if not particularly useful. The primary arguments are:

1. If you get so much as a speck of dust in the keyboard, it bricks the machine and requires a >$500 repair, with no guarantees that it won't happen again the very next day.

2. The lack of useful ports means you have to carry dongles (at $80 a pop) everywhere.

3. They made a perfectly thin-enough and light-enough machine thinner and lighter, giving it worse battery life for no good reason.

4. They made a perfectly big-enough trackpad bigger, increasing the spurious input rate for no good reason.

Finding ESC without any physical affordance is a pain in the ass. Normal things like cancelling a dialog become a hurdle. I haven’t used the middle section of the touchbar in weeks - nothing really useful there. I hate the way the volume slider works. A few days back almost hurt my ears when accidentally maxed out the volume while swiping off a bit of dust from the metal right above it.

I’ve had the standard dead key issue but it fixed itself. The keyboard actually feels nice, but a key gets a bit sticky every other day.

What made my experience better is fully embracing USB-C. I have a hub connected to a 4K monitor, headphones and power, so I can sit down and plug in a single cable that does everything - this feels magical. [To be fair, sometimes two cables since the hub can’t keep up with charging under heavy load.]

It was pretty useful but Apple has discarded them..

That's too bad, even something really discrete like a line or even a point would be great.

Lastly : magsafe was great. I am all for a future where we use USB-c but is it impossible to have a magnetic adapter on the powerplug cable ?