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 knows. I did everything I could like closing other apps, disabling ton of things running in background; I freeze tracks in my DAW but things still break sometimes. I really hope some update from Ableton/Apple fixes things soon; if not I'm considering downgrade from Catalina.
But wait, there's more! Sometimes I got glitches even when I'm not recording but playing tracks. I have this problem on literally the same Ableton projects that used to "just work" on the old machine (same number of tracks/plugins). The workaround is to restart the laptop. Seriously, it feels like Windows XP all over. I can't imagine playing live shows with such unreliable setup - fortunately I just make tracks for my own, but if I were to go out for some kind of jam session or open mic I'd consider switching to Windows.
EDIT: One more thing that sucks about new MacOS: dropping 32 bit compatibility. RIP all 32 bit VSTs. Fortunately I don't use that many plugins and it turned out everything I really care about has 64 bit version. But if it didn't, then I'd hold on to the old OS as long as possible.
My wife's been having repeated AV glitches on her '19 Macbook Air. Video audio cuts out after a few minutes very frequently, across browsers and even on local players and for audio on locally-downloaded podcasts. Video calls do similar things, which has, you know, been a problem. Best I can figure is there are some bad software + hardware glitches with some of the Siri-related stuff and maybe the fingerprint chip. Disabled Siri but it still happens. Apple store's seen it and reset it and been like, meh, it's fine, but it's very much not.
Never seen this kind of flakey-out-of-the-box bullshit from Apple. I really need a new machine but I'm holding out for a better run than what they have now. And maybe some undoing of their recent price hikes (they used to drop prices, substantially, with some frequency, in the distant past of a few years ago and earlier). Plus all the damn dongles. My '14 has lots of ports and zero USB-C and those ports are great, and I still don't have anything that's USB-C aside from adapters for work laptops, so... why do I want only USB-C again, and no other ports at all? Maybe in another 5-7 years it'll make sense. Give them time to switch all their iDevices to USB-C and for me to replace all those (they last many years, that's why we buy them). Then at least my laptop and iPads and iPhones and such can share peripherals, which is moving toward some kind of benefit to offset the loss of ports.
> I still don't have anything that's USB-C aside from adapters for work laptop
The USB-C thing is culturally a bit curious. It's been three or four years since reviewers of laptops and the like started complaining if they didn't have USB-C ports - but there still seems to be very little need for them. The few devices I've acquired that have a USB-C socket on the device have all come with a cable having a USB3 type A plug on the other end, never a C to C cable.
(I see the article mentions this, but I found it striking because to facilitate home working I've just bought two new devices with USB-C at the device end, and both came with cables to an A socket)
I don't get why they didn't do a transitional design for a few years. Replace the Thunderbolt ports with USB-C but leave the rest the same. It takes me probably damn near a decade to cycle even half my peripherals to a new interface, and I bet that's closer to the norm than people going out and replacing 100% of their stuff with USB-C and Bluetooth within a year, so going to using a port that I had not even actually seen yet in the wild when they switched cold-turkey was a baffling decision.
Hell, to this day the only actual USB-C devices I've seen in person are Apple peripherals and monitors catering to Macbook users, which almost all include other ports anyway. I'd add Android phones but those mostly have USB-A connectors on the other end of the cable (like the iPhones that were shipping for a while after the USB-C Macbooks came out—there's another giant WTF). USB-C market for flash drives seems to suck (form factor's worse, price is higher).
[EDIT] oh and when the new port is intended to replace all other ports the half-life on "legacy" devices for me probably goes from ~10 years to ~20. Seriously. WTF Apple.
Going USB-C on their phones and tablets while also swapping the Thunderbolt ports and maybe the power ports on their computers for USB-C, then leaving it that way for three years or so before removing the other ports, seems like it would have been a much better lead-in if they really had to do it. At least then we'd have been able to slowly accumulate USB-C dongles without feeling bitter about it, since they'd work on i-devices too so feel like they're providing some kind of benefit or future-proofness. As it is it's 2020 and I still feel like I'm wasting money buying either USB-C or Lightning dongles—the former because I don't need them for anything but very new Macbooks, and the latter because surely they're going to switch those to USB-C eventually (surely... right?) so those thunderbolt cables and adapters will become junk long before they should.
[EDIT] go figure, my wife just today bought a new iphone, wants to put some music from her 2019 Macbook Air onto it, needs to plug it in at least once in order to do that (have to plug in first to enable wifi sync), and can't because the phone shipped with a fucking USB-A cable and the single lightning-to-usb cable we have in our house is missing. This is going down right now. So much for not needing USB-A ports on a laptop in 2020 even if you're fully in the Apple ecosystem. She's so annoyed I wouldn't be surprised if she returns the phone. I mean granted the phone isn't the latest model but it came out way after they made the all-USB-C switch on their laptops.
What is concerning that is that other laptop makers are following Apple like lemmings. My current favorite laptop is the Dell Precision 55xx series, the business version of the XPS 15. The newest models of this line, the 15" 5550 and the 17" 5750, are USB-C only. Couldn't they have kept just one USB-A port? I have dozens of peripherals, and I literally have nothing that uses USB-C.
One of the main reasons that I left the Apple laptops after using 3-4 of them over 10 years was because of the removal of the USB-A ports. Adding new USB-C, great. But removing all of the older ones? A big middle finger to the users. Then there's the removal of the ESC key, the butterfly keyboard debacle, the touchbar that removes the function keys, etc. Sorry Apple, you are going off in a direction that I cannot follow.
User friendliness is a problem. There's no easy way to tell what protocols a USB-C device actually supports, whether it's USB 2, USB 3, DisplayPort, etc.
USB-C hubs are not possible like you could do with USB 2 or 3, so you're always limited to the number of USB-C ports on your machine. The only possible hubs are those that give out USB-A ports, which is fine now because most peripherals are still USB-A, but will become a problem when peripherals start using USB-C themselves.
USB4 will in theory fix most of this by setting minimum required capability at 20 Gbit/s with DisplayPort Alt Mode, and laying out support for hubs from the start. It still has a painful number of 'optional' alt modes depending on device type, though.
Just because USB4 becomes a thing doesn't mean people will support it. 20Gbit/s and the DisplayPort Alt Mode means people definitely will choose to go with USB3 or USB2 USB Type-C.
Remember, all USB Type-A ports aren't USB3. Likewise, all USB Type-C ports won't become USB4.
You'd probably find a more authoritative source and better documentation by searching, but here's my understanding of it:
USB-C can be used with alternate modes like DisplayPort or Thunderbolt, where the wires are no longer transmitting USB data but are used as a dumb pipe for the underlying protocol.
If you get a hub it can choose to either operate in the following conditions (depending on its type and capabilities):
* Upstream port is in USB mode, it can provide USB 2 and 3 to downstream ports, however the downstream device can no longer use DisplayPort or Thunderbolt.
* Upstream port is divided into USB 3 lanes and DisplayPort lanes. The DisplayPort side can be mapped to a single downstream port, but there is less USB 3 bandwidth available to share across the remaining ports. Still no luck if a downstream device wants to use Thunderbolt.
* Upstream port is Thunderbolt. Since TB is essentially PCI Express the hub could pass through some TB lanes to a single downstream port while having its own USB 3 controller to provide the USB side of things. Still no luck for DisplayPort downstream devices.
This doesn't even address the issue that not all devices can do Thunderbolt (my 12-inch Macbook can't) and it becomes very hard to find a hub that will actually work and do what you want. It took quite a bit of research for me to understand the specs so I could find a solution to do both 4K 60Hz video and USB (2 only, not enough bandwidth for 3) on my MacBook with a single USB-C port.
I won't even get into the bullshit naming conventions they use that they decided to apply retroactively. WTF is USB 3.1 Gen 1? Is the next one gonna be called USB 10 X Pro Max?
But I don't need or care about all that, what I need is a hub just like we had all those years that gives usb3 connectivity in a c form factor to 5 devices or more. If I need more there are plenty docking stations available.
edit: I also looked for a usb A hub with usb-c upstream, still no luck and stuck with a hub+power adapter and dinky otg a-to-c.
As far as I know the spec doesn't allow it for some reason. I guess one reason could be the power side (which I haven't mentioned and I am not familiar with it)?
Let's assume the hub requests 19V from the upstream port. Unless it has built-in, variable, per-port voltage regulation, it will not be able to respond to power requests from the downstream devices if they differ from what is coming from the upstream port.
This isn't a problem when providing USB-A ports because you either request 5V from upstream and pass it through or request a higher voltage and have a single 5V regulator and pass its output to the downstream ports.
See, you could technically design something that does that. Per-port up to 100W charging it definitely possible. Basically you have a USB PD controller on every port with dynamic voltage control.
This is all possible, it's just a HUGE pain in the ass (and costs a lot) to design that way. The problem is you essentially end up with potentially a giant, VERY expensive USB hub. And no one wants to spend $400 on a USB hub.
Which is why USB-C is bad, nobody asked for a protocol where the benefits are marginal but the downside (one of many) is that a proper hub that replicates the behavior of previous generations now costs more, and since nobody would pay that much, economies of scale don't apply and thus it doesn't exist at all or is available as very niche specialized units (kinda like opto-isolated USB hubs which go for $200.
You could also theoretically use 10Gbit Ethernet to transfer data from your phone but we don't go around putting SFP slots on phones because we don't want every single cable or charger to cost $100 and be more complex (thus more prone to failure) than needed.
The thing is, you're not replacing it with something identical. If you want to replicate the behavior of a previous generation USB2 hub, I don't think it would even be that expensive. You just need a USB port controller on each port and negotiate 5V, 1.5A on each of them in addition to the standard USB hub. It would be a bit more expensive, but not terribly so. USB3 may be similar but require some extra switches...
The ask for the 'really expensive' $400 one has vastly more options and capabilities than the traditional USB hub. It's basically a Thunderbolt hub with even more complexity, so it's not unreasonable to think those would be damn expensive.
I'm honestly not sure why no one has made a standard USB2.0 Type-C hub. There's really nothing stopping you from doing it. I guess maybe because it could be confusing for a consumer? I agree, that's a huge issue with Type-C right now. It's very unclear by looking at the port (or the cable) what it's actually capable of. If you're lucky there will be a tiny symbol indicating some subset of functionality, but often times there isn't.
Oh that's interesting. That might be an extra reason why devices are still preferentially coming with USB3 type A plugs on the other end - it's actually more flexible that way? I am in fact plugging both of my new USB-C devices into a USB3 hub, and had no idea I wouldn't have been able to do the same with USB-C cables and hub.
(I assume you can still have a USB3 hub with type A sockets on it, plugged in to a USB-C port? - edit: oh, just noticed a sibling comment says this doesn't seem to exist either. Now that is very odd.)
Usb 3 hubs with a USB-C upstream certainly exist, all the docks out there are functionally that, and there are also dedicated hubs as well.
Here’s the one i use:
Anker USB C Hub, Aluminum USB C Adapter with 4 USB 3.0 Ports, for MacBook Pro 2018/2017, ChromeBook, XPS, Galaxy S9/S8, and More https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DFYQXY7
It's definitely possible, it's just a bit expensive. There's nothing in the USB-C spec that disallows you from doing this. Also if you're trying to do the thing where you have charging input but data output on one port, it gets complicated.
That said, I see no reason why you couldn't design a basic USB-C USB2 or USB3 hub. Hell, it could have 5 ports with no defined 'input' port (just 5 USB C jacks), and you could have that work properly with some pain.
If it has a captive USB-C cable and 4 USB-C outputs, that would be even easier to program. Again, it's just expensive. You need a lot of active circuitry to make it work.
Yeah, all my audio equipment (keyboards, controllers, interface) is USB A and I don't see producers switching en masse (and even if they do, do I really want to throw away my favorite keytar?). The only exception is Roli block but Roli is kinda meh - fun to play every once in a while but not something I'd like to use every day to lay bass track or piano chords. I've disabled a ton of various background stuff like Siri but this setup is still flakey. If I were trying to make money on my music I'd be really pissed now.
I think all my musical equipment has a USB-B port on them, work over USB 2.0, and I've got like a dozen USB-A/USB-B cables around. Those plug into every other computing device in my house except new Macbooks (and iPads, but, Lightning to USB-A adapter, so, still USB-A, and notably I can't share that adapter with a Macbook because Apple's approach to this has been a bizarre mix of foot-dragging and waffling on the iDevice side while running way ahead of the pack on the other). My enthusiasm level for buying new cables or adapters only for fairly new Macbooks when any other new computing device I buy would still have USB-A ports, and then have them maybe not work anyway because USB-C compatibility and cable/adapter quality is a shit-show, is exactly zero.
And I'm not made of money and I have other hobbies that require cash so I buy used musical equipment so I can get low-end pro gear a generation or two old for at or under new prices for amateur/crappy gear. There's little chance I'll buy any USB-C native musical equipment of any kind before 2030 or so. Who's cycling out all their gear—musical or otherwise—so fast that dropping USB-A and HDMI entirely in 2016, on a "pro" laptop, made any damn sense?
You do know that all you have to do is buy a USB-B to USB-C cable and you can connect your existing equipment to your Macbook, right? I mean it sucks that the new Macbooks have so few USB-C ports, but there's nothing preventing you from plugging in all of the older USB-A/B/micro/etc equipment directly into it as long as you buy the correct $5 cable with a USB-C connector on the other end. No dongles necessary.
As a former long-time Ableton user, just want to recommend Bitwig Studio[1] as a viable (improved?) alternative that runs natively on Linux. I've used it for live performances and label-released music for over four years now and other than the typical setup issues related to Jack (one time thing resolved in an hour or so) I couldn't be happier.
>>other than the typical setup issues related to Jack (one time thing resolved in an hour or so)
I was never able to get Jack up and running on my MBP. I tried both Jack and Jack2, compiling from source, using their prepackaged binaries, using the cli vs the GUI, etc, .. nothing doing. Do you have any resources you can share detailing how you resolved the issue or how you configure it? Feel free to PM, emails in profile.
I'm really tempted here. I've got a paid Ableton license, and I absolutely love Ableton, but it's the main thing keeping me from dumping Windows 10 for Linux.
Transitioning between Ableton and Bitwig is seamless from a UI standpoint. They have essentially the same controls.
The only thing that isn't great moving from Windows to Linux for production is your VST ecosystem becomes much more limited. Running plugins under WINE is alright, but if they're heavy you'll run into latency issues. There's a sizable collection of plugins that are native under Linux though[0]. I've used many of these with great success.
You can get pretty far with the built in instruments and effects in Bitwig, especially with the new modular grid. I haven't felt much need for third party stuff.
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?
* 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)
Shit, seriously? We use a first-gen big pro on our (electric) piano at home and being able to run midi into the iPad while also using headphone-out on the iPad is key for our use. I guess at least the new ones use USB-C so there are more adapter options so maybe there's a USB + headphone jack adapter out there, but 1) it's entirely stupid that we'd need one, and 2) if it's not a first-party Apple adapter we'd be rolling the dice that it works at all, let alone that it'll still work in six months—which is a big part of the problem with this dumbassed dongle-verse they've created, that most of the dongles on the market are awful so you can't always count on finding a version of the thing you need that actually works with your hardware.
Or I guess they expect me to buy Bluetooth heaphones, but... why? We have like three sets of corded ones two of which are quite good, and about a dozen pairs of ear buds. We don't need new headphones. We need a headphone jack.
> Or I guess they expect me to buy Bluetooth heaphones
...which adds another source of frustration to the setup - bluetooth latency. At some point I've tried setup like this: midi keyboard -> USB dongle -> iPad -> bluetooth speaker; the latency sucked. Not something you observe when you listen to music on Youtube, so not something that 99% users will notice, which means it will never get fixed.
Finding a usb-c adapter which has a good DAC may be a process in itself. I got several $20-$40 adapters from China, and they all have a very tinny, absolutely atrocious sound on their headphone jack.
I play at a local church sometimes, and they use ableton for their click tracks and loops.
They've had SO many issues with it. It has randomly died mid-performance, the tempo click has completely gone off the rails mid-performance, and the loops got transposed once into a completely different key mid-performance.
I use a 2012 MBP stuck on High Sierra. It has occasional issues when I record, but nowhere near the amount of issues that we experience at the church. I want to upgrade badly, but I really don't want to deal with those kind of issues.
Experiencing audio glitches all the time on my Mac. Never had any issues at all before installing Catalina.
After a recent Catalina update all the streaming video / audio stutters stopped only to be replaced with random dots appearing over my display - almost like my graphics card was dying. That’s now disappeared (after the most recent update) but the stuttering has restarted.
Running console.app As these issues occurred showed a number of errors that came up time and again. Bluetooth seemingly interrupting the audio, graphics drivers failing, disk access halting the system. Catalina is a poor product - probably the version of MacOS where I’ve experienced the most issues.
I've been getting playback glitches in Logic* with a 2020 MPB 16" running (as shipped) with Catalina.
It seems to only happen when using the built-in speakers. I never hear glitches using headphones (which is what I have as the default audio interface for Logic).
So I just use headphones all the time, but it's an incredibly negative experience to pop open one of your projects on your new laptop and hear this rhythmic popping. If it had also glitched in the headphones I might literally have thrown the laptop out the window.
* This isn't my post, but it's exactly the glitch I get in the built-in speakers: https://imgur.com/a/YPCmyiV
Catalina is such a tire fire. (Although, the Touch Bar helpfully suggested the emoji when I typed that.) It crashed multiple times a day hooked up to my external monitor. I was on the verge of returning it until 10.15.5 came out and seems to have fixed it (though it hasn't for everyone suffering from GPU-related kernel panics).
I've seen reports of pops/crackles in digital audio mixing/synthesis applications being fixed by disabling hyperthreading. This makes some sense if hyperthreading can sometimes cause extra latency for some threads to get real CPU work done, which is hard for the OS to strictly control. There have been a few different ways to disable hyperthreading on macbooks over the years, but recently Apple offers a good way (to mitigate recent Intel CPU vulnerability corner-cases for the paranoid): https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210108
> This makes some sense if hyperthreading can sometimes cause extra latency for some threads to get real CPU work done, which is hard for the OS to strictly control.
Threads requiring hard real-time responsiveness can (and do) request to be marked as such by the scheduler. And the OS is certainly aware of what hyperthreads-presenting-as-cores belong to which physical cores, and uses this information in scheduling. So I'd find it implausible that any modern OS (esp. one that already had good DAW support) doesn't already have logic to try to keep the other hyperthreads of a core on which a hard-realtime thread is running, as uncontended as possible, by either not scheduling, or very conservatively scheduling (i.e. "early" pre-empting) anything on that hyperthread.
I have a feeling it's something much more arcane. Maybe a hitch generated by the core switching "licenses" due to an AVX512 instruction.
That's weird, reliable low latency audio is one of the few things where I still find the Mac to be pretty solid.
I've got a 2015 15" and I've used several times a 2018 13", on both Mojave and Catalina and I have to say that it outperforms my 2015 (it can easily manage a 32 buffer with some plugins loaded, while my 15" starts to struggle under 64).
This was using Reaper with an Apple USB-A to USB-C adapter and a UMC204HD interface
I use Ableton with Focusrite Scarlett 2nd gen. I'm currently using 256 buffer. I've tried using 128 but it screwed up some vocal takes I did the other day (there are 5-10 seconds of cracks in the middle of each 4 minute long complete song take). Also I froze the other tracks (eight of them, so not that many) before starting recording. No FX on master track.
Maybe I should've bought 2015 MBP then. Or maybe I should downgrade to Mojave? Or buy the Apple adapter? Or a different interface? No idea; both Focusrite and Ableton say they are compatible with Catalina.
As I've said, the 13" 2018 I use from time to time can easily manage a 32 buffer, even on Catalina, so your device should be just as good..
My suggestion is to try with a different adapter and maybe with a different DAW such as Reaper, just to double-check (although I don't really think the DAW is the issue here).
It may also be related to the plugins you're using, maybe they're just heavier than mine..
Realistically how long can one expect to keep using a retina Macbook pro? I've had my mid 2015 since.. Mid 2015 and now I'm getting paranoid it'll up and explode on me out of the blue
I have a new OWC SSD upgrade so that should be alright.. Trying to keep it running cool without heavy software but the battery is at like 500 charge cycles and 70% capacity man it feels so scary getting old
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 did their live shows with it unchecked and didn't have a problem.
Thanks for the update - typed from my 2013 air with 32 bit ok os(10.13). Think I'll hold on.
One fun benefit of 2013 tech is you can by a bunch and give them to your friends for the same price as a 2020 model. I've now bought 4 and given away 3. It's good that they are reliable - many other laptops don't really last 7 years.
Could this all be dongle related? So much bad seems to get introduced by dongles and I have spent so much time debugging crazy issues that have been due to USB C dongles. Mine have almost all been monitor related, but at this stage there is almost nothing that I would be surprised to see fixed by switching/removing a dongle.
By dongles you mean just hubs or also adapters? Unfortunately, I also want to record vocals or external instruments for which I need a MIDI interface (which uses USB A); and I don't think you can buy USB C midi keyboard yet (actually Roli Block has USB C but I don't like it much and 95% of time I'd rather use normal keyboard). Is there particular dongle you can recommend? (By the way, my Focursite interface does not work with "quality" Aukey hub that I bought, I'm using some noname dongle for that).
You don't need a dongle to use regular old USB-A devices with a USB-C computer. All you need to do is replace the cable which is usually like $5. So if your MIDI keyboard or audio interface has a USB-B connector on the hardware side (like the Scarlett do), just buy a USB-B to USB-C cable. I don't know why the myth of needing a USB-C-to-A dongle has persisted for so long.
I think I am lumping them all together, but my bad experiences are all with adaptors (Eg USB C to HDMI and similar). At least half the problem for me is the USB C cable and the variety of things that can be plugged into the port that look the same but are not.
I have been scarred by a target-disk-mode recovery which required a new, non-Apple cable to work. It’s crazy that we have ended up here.
Audio is not something I know well, but I have yet to have problems with Belkin adaptors.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macworld.com/article/291181...
Is it possible that a memory upgrade might fix the issue, assuming each new OS consumes more base memory and that the stutters are the side effect of VM pageouts or pageins to or from disk?
I record via interface (Focusrite Scarlett 2nd gen) and also have pop issues with it; when I used it with my old laptop it worked much, much better (on the same settings).
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).
I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a second-hand XPS 15) and — unlike the author here — I'm surprised how much better it has gotten.
Having fully expected to buy a Windows laptop and just run Linux on it, I'm happy enough with the general Windows experience and the new WSL2/Windows Terminal/VS Code improvements that switching full-time makes sense for me.
The perks for me over macOS are the widely increased hardware choice, improved repairability/upgradeability, access to Windows-only software/games, better default desktop environment (window snapping/management, keyboard shortcuts for apps in the taskbar), and being able to boot real Linux images within ~1 second and work out of them comfortably.
The perks for me over Linux are the ability to run Adobe and other Windows apps, lower manual maintenance, fewer rabbit holes (I used Arch for about a year and found I was personally prone to exploring Arch instead of doing pet projects), better general integration with video cards, authentication hardware (fingerprint sensors/Windows Hello), projectors/external monitors, as well as a generally better experience with power management, wake-from-sleep, and connecting/reconnecting to Wi-Fi.
On paper Windows is good. In practice the telemetry and the story behind its introduction and how they handled communication means that I won't consider Windows as a primary OS candidate until there's a CEO change at least.
It's disappointing to see so many being ignorant about this topic.
I set telemetry to 'basic' which means I'm comfortable with essential system data being sent in return for my system gaining updates and security patches.
Microsoft does a better job than many about explaining what data it collects, why it collects it, and how to disable collection where possible across its products:
Last year it started explaining which telemetry in Windows 10 is required (system data for updates/security) and which is optional (usage data to shape product direction) in a way that's largely free from legalese:
There are definitely Windows users who are “being ignorant about this topic” but that's not true of everyone. For me it's a combination of understanding what is sent, why it's sent, and how to control what's sent. That info used to be a lot harder to find so I'd say things are improving.
Reflecting on my own risk profile, seeing first-hand how much telemetry can benefit product teams, and learning about how the Windows update process works at a global scale (the “essential” telemetry class informs partial/phased roll-outs) also helped temper my initial reaction against telemetry being included at all.
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 never interact with their servers at all; which means never receiving updates; which makes any OS into a lame-duck product vulnerable to all manner of exploits; which probably means you should just never touch a computer in the first place, "to be sure."
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.
One thing that unique IDs are necessary for, is deduplication. Without a unique ID when talking to e.g. the update server, then their statistics (used to determine which updates should be e.g. CDN prioritized) will be heavily skewed in favor of anyone who has configured their system to poll the server more often.
(Yes, they can partially resolve this problem by looking at the request IPs—but, well, NAT. Sometimes even entire countries are behind a small set of IP addresses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT).
The ideal thing here would be for everyone to have a public IPv6 address, and then that address could be your "unique ID" without really uniquely identifying you or your device, but rather just uniquely identifying "a place to deliver updates to", like a mailing address uniquely identifies a place to deliver parcels to.
(This might not seem so relevant for updates, but a clearer example is in crashes. All OS vendors prioritize the issues in their issue-trackers by their prevalence among users, counted as the number of times a Crash Report has been [voluntarily] submitted that seems to be "about" that issue. Crash reports need to be deduplicated by installation to be useful for prioritization; a piece of software that happens to get into a super-edge-case crash loop and so crash a million times for one user, should not be prioritized over a piece of software that crashes once for a million users. Just the opposite, really.)
> hardware info
If we're talking about software updates, then this is part of the "inescapable metadata." Yes, the OS vendor can stuff each update full of all possible updates for all possible drivers released in the interrim—and that's a workable idea, if you're Linux. It's not workable in the Windows/macOS ecosystems, where "drivers" are third-party bloatware blobs that ship with their own GUI control panels et al. Such a monolithic update, covering all possible bloatware driver blobs, would be hundreds of GiB. It makes far more sense in Windows/macOS to just have the client retrieve the GPU/RAID/printer/camera/etc. drivers (and updates for said drivers) they need, as separate packages, from the server. And that separate retrieval essentially describes, piece by piece, your hardware profile.
> require them to keep logs
I never said it was (or should be) required; only that, if you're paranoid, you should have no reason to believe that they're not doing that, even without any client-side telemetry being pushed. A paranoid person would expect that even Linux distributions keep the access logs for their package servers (incl. gathering them from mirrors), and act accordingly.
Let's say Microsoft adds one. You tick it and what MS currently considers “essential telemetry” is turned off completely, instantly, and for real.
The risk seems to be that people who don't understand the implications of not sharing basic telemetry, when faced with a box that says “share nothing”, “share essential“, and “share essential and optional” would choose “share nothing” every time, because it just _feels_ better, right? Why would I choose to share anything at all? But they might be angry or surprised when:
- The OS and apps can't tell if you're eligible for an update because they don't know if your hardware/drivers will run the new version, because you won't tell them what hardware/drivers you're running now.
- Updates that affect performance or stability just continue to affect performance and stability because there's no data about the impact of an update, apart from what's provided by angry customers in support channels.
- Bugs and application crashes are not addressed ever or in good time because they are either never known about or not captured in sufficient detail to reproduce.
So, sure, maybe it should be an option. But there are certainly many who overestimate the risk and underestimate the value of basic telemetry (like sharing system info) for them as a user.
> The OS and apps can't tell if you're eligible for an update because they don't know if your hardware/drivers will run the new version, because you won't tell them what hardware/drivers you're running now.
Why do you need to give Microsoft a bunch of details about your hardware for this? Why can’t Microsoft publish info about which hardware/drivers are supported in the new update, and then your machine determines whether or not it’s compatible?
Windows uses delta/differential updates for monthly “quality” updates[1] because it uses less bandwidth than big-blob updates.
For diffed updates to work efficiently Windows first works out what hardware/software you have. Then it can either:
1. Send info about the system to an update server and let the server decide what updates it needs.
2. Download a big manifest of all available updates (as you describe) and calculate locally what updates it needs.
Either way, Windows then has to make a request for updates specific to the system, at which point you reveal info about your software and hardware that you were attempting to hide in (2) anyway.
For the semi-annual feature updates, the process is more like you describe where there's a compatibility check then a large download (~3-6GB) containing all new features, even if your system won't be able to make use of all of them.
I get where you're coming from, but I think it's indicative of exactly what I don't like about Microsoft's attitude, and part of why I don't use their software.
At the end of the day, it's my computer. Not theirs.
Regardless of how much it's "For my own good", that's not their decision to make.
It's my hardware, that I'm paying for.
Ultimately, I need to have the final decision on what it does.
I understand and agree with this perspective. I should be able to decide what my device does. (And I can do pretty much equally with Windows/macOS, and more so with Linux.)
But I don't know that, “I own this computer and therefore understand what user defaults will make it most stable and usable for me” scales beyond the informed user to general users, if that's what you were suggesting.
“For your own good” preferences exist to try to make the default experience better for users who don't care enough to understand the tool they're using 10 hours a day. Is choosing defaults that seek to benefit most users really not a decision that software developers should be making?
I understand those and I still don't want to share any telemetry. I'm just asking for freedom to be able to select this option.
Btw, what you're saying is 100% bullshit. There is an obvious trivial way of doing all what you suggested, properly & legitimately: paid software testers. Or, alternatively, actually pay users for telemetry (I love it when companies say "we value your feedback" you value it at $0 all right!)
Software testing only helps if you're an average user. Most of us here are guilty of doing stupid edge-case bullshit at least occasionally.
The well-known quip of "search for an answer to your problem, find a forum post from ten years ago resolved with an 'I figured it out, thanks'" only happens when you're far outside the idiomatic usage of the system.
Sometimes it's necessary; sometimes long-chosen buisness constraints force down the bad arm of an X-Y problem. But that doesn't make it any more likely that anyone other than you (especially the software vendor's QA dept.) will ever independently encounter your problem.
Agree about paying for QA. Users shouldn't be glorified beta testers.
I don't think “just hire QA” or “just pay for the telemetry” solves the issues of how you reliably deliver updates, bug fixes, and asses performance issues at the scale of a company like Microsoft, though. Even the best-funded QA department and millions spent incentivizing data sharing could struggle to achieve a fraction of the coverage that metrics baked into the OS achieves.
> Or, alternatively, actually pay users for telemetry
At a _minimum_, people should at least get free software updates based on findings from the metrics they share. By opting out I'm relying on others to provide that data instead, or for the company to spend more to get it from me or someone else like me, or for them to somehow improve the experience for me without knowing what my experience is.
I recognize that some feel very strongly that software should be possible to improve without any form of automated telemetry, though, and I respect the desire for an off switch and the continued drive for opt-out being the default.
> Make it opt-in for submissive persons who want to please MSFT.
Users don't read. Anything that's opt-in will never be opted into, because users won't even look at what the dialog says. (See also: organ donation.)
Most of UX design isn't targeted at people with opinions; it's targeted at the 99% of users who want to never make any decisions at all, because they don't see the system they're interacting with as their responsibility to dictate the policy of. They treat even their own computer—at least in the software sense—as "somebody else's computer."
They're used to interacting with the literal "somebody else's computer" at work, and at informational kiosks; and with the non-literal "somebody else's computer" in the form of the game-console walled-gardens, and the cloud-managed IoT devices. So it's no surprise that they think that "somebody else's computer" rules apply to their PC, too.
The shorter version is that opt-out exists so the people that care don't get angry. If the percent of people who opt-out becomes non-negligible it will cease to be opt-out.
It is not at all simple to "opt-out" (i.e. remove malicious software).
I checked the box "no telemetry" on install, yet I still had to disable dozes of spyware "options" manually later. One of them was a keylogger! Microsoft is in the black hat business.
> telemetry can benefit product teams
Pure marketing. If product teams what to know about issues, how about setting up decent bug-trackers like everyone else?
Reporting issues is a convoluted, humiliating and mostly futile process.
Thanks for sharing the link. However, it doesn’t change my point of view about Windows telemetry.
As I read that page, I see a lot of BS justifying why the only way to improve the product is to have telemetry.
The reason why I call it BS is because they use phrases like “we hear your feedback to improve the product”... that’s lie. I work in UX, and I’ve been involved in user research many times. The data that you get from event logs is related to measuring adoption and engagement. You get better UX feedback from traditional research methods. Telemetry is good for fast market analysis, rather than UX... but that doesn’t sound good when you try to justify it to end users.
Take for example the design of the Office ribbon (there is an excellent video explaining the process). After analyzing the data from usage logs (this was in the pre-telemetry era), and doing interviews they concluded that the main issue was that many features were hard to find (is interesting to note that the conclusion came from user testing, not event logs). The solution: a UI showing all the operations (the ribbon). And because they found that paste was the most used action, they put a big paste button first (this came from event analysis).
After the success of the ribbon, MS adopted it in many Windows UIs (even if they don’t have the same issues as Office). So as you can see the main product design decisions had nothing to do with usage data analysis. The same applies to other big product design decisions (the back and forward with the Metro UI, Cortana... etc). The use of telemetry is marginal to many product design decisions, so there is no reason to force it to every user... other than doing market research.
Sure, telemetry won't inform every product decision and user testing is still valuable.
It does provide insights you won't get from user testing and direct observation, though, as you point out with the usage logs that informed the ribbon design.
> The use of telemetry is marginal to many product design decisions, so there is no reason to force it to every user
If the benefits were purely limited to the design phase, I can see your point for many teams, particularly small ones with niche products where they're less likely to get enough data for it to have much meaning.
But telemetry also has increased value over user testing at different stages of the product lifecycle, like when analyzing what features or products to deprecate or replace.
It also helps for peripheral things like working out what languages localization and documentation efforts should be prioritized for. This year I was asked what five languages a product we make should be translated to. They wanted to start with locales that have the biggest impact and expand to more later. The team who approached me made a list based on support requests and another product in our sector. But our install data showed usage was completely different. We even had two locales that hadn't made the top-10 shortlist. Their guess about the second-most popular language after English was also wrong. By using telemetry we made sure work and funding was focussed where it helps the most users.
Telemetry can definitely be abused or underused, but being on the other side and doing data-driven design and development over the course of a product lifecycle has shown that it has real value.
I completely agree. Also the automatic updates which potentially just close an open session including unsaved files is not something that helps trust. Windows has become less transparent and much more controlling, actively ignoring or overriding user preferences, and I don't know why I should use a software like that, not to mention pay for the "privilege" of being messed with.
I run Arch for most of my dev work so maybe I'm just missing it, but I do a fair bit of dev/testing on windows machines and I don't EVER have this happen.
Like - Literally never in the past two years have I lost work due to auto updates.
It definitely got a lot better over the years, but it still happens sometimes. I don't know the criteria, but it is basically having some update pending install.
Last time I used the OS disabling updates just didn't work reliably, at least not with a clear and simple setting(let's be honest, this helping link you posted should not need to exist). Deferring updates will only work for some time, until Windows 10 will just update it without warning the next time you wake it up from suspend, resetting your session with multiple reboots. This behaviour alone is inexcusable, no matter how the settings look.
Automatic updates are unacceptable for me, and that's not because I don't do updates(quite the opposite), it's just that I expect the behaviour to be predictable without nasty surprises, and with Windows 10 that became a gamble. I never knew if an update could suddenly run without my permission and wreck the OS(which happened multiple times to me, leading to some stressful weekends).
Maybe not everyone shares that opinion, but I rarely get annoyed by something more than software that tries to be smarter than the user, and automatic updates are just one part of that.
Does this actually work? I tried (permanently) disabling updates on my Surface Go (running Windows 10) a few months ago but kept failing. The worst thing is, you don't know if what you did works or not, because you need to wait until the next update :D
I've also seen user experience reports in the wild that say, “I tried those settings but I still had a forced update halfway through my Big Important Presentation”.
I haven't had that myself so far. Hate to say it works on my machine but that's been my experience to date.
A work mandates machines with locked down control is always going to be awful. The machine in my house that is in this category gets opened every week or two for it’s mega updates, then closed until the next batch.
Agreed, the update experience for anything used occasionally or when someone else controls the update cycle is going to be miserable.
I've experienced the same with work-issued laptops, and also have an iMac I boot once every few months to be met with 20 software update nags from the OS and various apps. Probably means I should sell the iMac.
I wish Windows 10 LTSC was the base for all other Windows 10 OS versions. An expensive version that is easy to use with few distractions, does not need a full-time system administrator to run and just works.
I installed the Enterprise LTSC version on my new gaming machine and saw all the usual bullshit you'd expect from consumer-grade Windows 10.
A deceptive setup screen that asks you to create a Microsoft account (you need to use the "Domain join" button to be able to create a local admin account, there is no "local account" button by itself).
Spyware features like "personalization", advertising identifier, etc that I needed to uncheck (during the initial setup process there are at least 10 things I had to disable or say no to), also there's a subtle dark pattern going on with the button to go to the next screen, it's no longer called "Next" but "Accept" instead (even if you disable all the proposed options).
Despite the watermark on the wallpaper correctly saying "Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC" I can still only select "Basic" telemetry in the settings. I am not sure whether it's a quirk of the evaluation version or if I need to use a group policy to disable it.
You can sent your Internet connection to "metered" to stop this. I hate that you can't just outright disable forced updates, but this is the working solution that MS offers.
the automatic updates which potentially just close an open session including unsaved files is not something that helps trust
This is literally a preference setting. There are cases where you want to force it e.g. a sysadmin pushing security patches over the weekend but other than that you set the time window, or no window and it just gives a notification that patches are available and you reboot whenever you want to.
Admittedly it's been a couple of years since I've used Windows 10, but at that time there was no way to disable the automatic updates. Even the registry hacks didn't work for me.
But Nadella's a great CEO compared to his predecessors. D:
But, yeah, that + stuff like your OS restarting behind your back whenever you lock your screen and walk away keeps me on Linux despite the very tantalizing promises of WSL2.
No. Sooner or later, you will have to let it update. Updates are important, and Microsoft doesn't want the service calls they're going to get if you don't update and something breaks or you get hacked.
So just like "your contract with the [TV] network is you're going to watch the spots", your contract with Microsoft is you're going to install the updates, and you consent to be spied on, and...
It's a shame that anti-Microsoft zealots use Hacker News to spread lies. I don't know what trying to restrict people's choices is supposed to accomplish for our industry.
You are laying it on a bit thick there. How can you justify the next stage of the embrace-extend-extinguish cycle and spying on users as enabling more choice?
See, this is why Linux zealots don't effect any change in others. When OP wrote something incorrect about Windows, in my perception, I gave him the benefit of doubt ("Maybe you haven't been using Windows in recent years"). But when I wrote something incorrect, in your perception, you straightaway jumped to "lying".
And it's not as if you don't know that the possibility exists. You wrote, "just google for 'windows 10 ignores active hours'", which shows that you know that I possibly do not know about this.
And yes, I have no idea if this is truly the case. I suppose Microsoft determines that some updates are critical security patches and will push them through despite attempts to postpone indefinitely.
Of course, if they allowed you to postpone critical updates and you got hacked, then it's, "OMG!! This evil corporation WANTED me to get hacked, that's why I use Linux", right? You're hopeless, and I will not be wasting further time replying to you.
Edit: I did that Google search and found that Windows ignores Active Hours in the sense that it still downloads the updates. But it does not Restart the PC. I could be wrong, but I'd appreciate if you can state it politely.
> But when I wrote something incorrect, in your perception, you straightaway jumped to "lying".
Because the entire tone of your original post was written in a way to imply that the OP hadn't done the due diligence. The end of your post was quite telling in "It's quite straightforward."
I just don't understand how come there are so many pro-Microsoft comments lately justifying everything bad that they are doing. It feels like arguing with a pure-Microsoft IT department, everything good that happens in Windows is good and everything bad is user mistake and could have never happened.
> Edit: I did that Google search and found that Windows ignores Active Hours in the sense that it still downloads the updates. But it does not Restart the PC. I could be wrong, but I'd appreciate if you can state it politely.
And this same google search shows that this does happen:
> Because the entire tone of your original post was written in a way to imply that the OP hadn't done the due diligence.
You have a problem. The lenses you are wearing make everything look negative.
> It's quite straightforward
In my mind, this was a statement assuring him that it is not complicated; Windows settings can sometimes be complicated, such as involving Registry hacks.
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 occasional nyan cat gimmick, I've NEVER used the touch pad. At the moment it's closed and to the side while I work on my external screens and the pretty decent Apple keyboard + mouse.
Windows Terminal is really good. I'm still a dedicated Mac user but the Microsoft team has advanced exponentially in their support of common, very good ideas.
Could you explain what's so good about the Windows Terminal? I've tried it multiple times and been disgusted every time. The grayscale smoothing looks ugly as hell, the font is large as if I'm elderly, you can't even right-click to get a menu in the window, and opening Settings fires up Visual Studio of all things with GUIDs that I have no idea what to do with. All I see is it has tabs which I've lived without in every single terminal. What exactly are people loving so much about it? What brilliance am I missing?
It seems to have been specifically designed for developers who enjoy a difficult UX because anything not up to that standard that is childish to them, which in my experience is the same thing Linux tools optimize for. I guess Windows has been very much trying to cater to that sector, so maybe now I can understand its appeal.
The main advantages of config as JSON for me as a developer are:
- Settings become more portable.
- Settings become more shareable.
That said, VS Code started with JSONC-based configs and now presents a UI by default (still editable directly as JSONC for those who prefer). It seems possible JSONC could be used to bootstrap a UI for Windows Terminal too if there's demand.
The fact that it's JSON rather than a nice little window isn't the main issue. That's not great UI, but it's not the biggest pain point of the UX. For comparison, Sublime uses JSON settings too, but it doesn't require a PhD in Sublime Text to figure out what you can actually configure in that file. I seem to recall VSCode had JSON at some point for some things too (though not sure where it is now, I don't see it). It wasn't exactly fantastic, which I assume is why they've provided a better UI for the settings now, but it was usable. They actually described the options available to you right there. And of course they have their own benefits with regards to portability and shareability like you said. Those are all fine. The problem is Windows Terminal on the other hand seems to go out of its way to make your life hard for no reason, in a manner I have never seen another terminal emulator do. For the life of me I don't get what people like about it. It seems terrible on every axis I can measure on.
My reading had been that they plan to build a nice configuration UI on top of the JSON eventually, but the focus right now is on the core functionality (and letting the settings stabilize first).
>> and opening Settings fires up Visual Studio of all things
> Settings opens what ever editor is your default for .json files.
And one can also point out that macOS opens XCode for (even XML-based) .plist files.
It's getting to be a standard convention, now that IDEs are almost "ships with the OS" kind of software, that the OS thinks configuration files should be opened in the IDE, rather than the system GUI text editor (Notepad; TextEdit.) Because, I guess, the system text editors were never really made to edit code, and make no guarantee that they won't break the formatting of code, while IDEs do make that guarantee.
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.)
The XPS 17 isn't out yet so I can't offer a personal comparison. Dell increased the size of the trackpad in the 2020 XPS 15/17, but otherwise it seems similar to previous ones.
YouTube reviews of engineering samples of the 2020 XPS line say they are best-in-class for Windows, which usually means they're not quite as good as Macs (same as laptop speakers, where the MBP also leads).
I find even Mac trackpads slow/frustrating after using a Logitech MX Ergo for a while, so trackpad experience is less of a factor for me.
> Personally I always use a Magic Trackpad 2 so I no longer have to take this into consideration.
I never got it to work with Windows except for just pointer motion and left clicking. No multi-touch, gestures, etc. Not even right clicking. Does it work properly now?
I went with the 13 inch, but basically my approach. I still have a mac kicking around for work, but for my personal stuff I switched to xps laptops around 2017. Honestly, I like them a lot more than the new mac 16 my office has given me.
OSX is getting a lot less friendly for any non-consumption based activity. While I still prefer Linux by a mile, I'm at the point where I'd take Win10 with WSL over OSX.
I've had an XPS 13 and XPS 15 and both suffered from coil whine, bad graphics and overheating. I would steer clear if I was you.
My current dev laptop is a Razor which has been a much better experience than the XPS.
I have the 2020 XPS 13, no coil whine. I'm hearing that no one is getting coil whine in this year's model. It's my first XPS, and it's amazing, I highly recommend it.
We use Dell Precisions at work and just a fair warning: Dell is completely clueless when it comes to software/firmware. We had stability issues for months with our laptops, which were fixed for the most part by firmware updates. A good amount of the laptops never came round, even though they are identical models and now have the same firmware running on them.
I have considered BYOD a Gigabyte Aero. I will personally never purchase a Dell for myself.
It has an anti-reflective coating but it's not matte. The screens are 500 nits (same as MBP). Not sure about Linux driver support yet. The Arch Wiki is normally my go-to for that but the laptop is very new. https://wiki.archlinux.org/
Is it different to the existing XPSs? I've had an XPS 13 and now precision 5520, and am totally happy with the keyboard. Sure it's low travel but it's not typical of most laptops, not as low as recent macbooks
The Precision laptops use the Intel Wi-Fi chips. They're in the same shells as the XPS, and have some extra configuration and aftercare options, as well as more intelligent charging software.
I hope you like high heat, high fan noise, and thermal throttling issues (common XPS issues that myself and others have experienced). I hope you also like random Wifi failures, random freeze-the-world-while-some-app-is-having-a-network-timeout issues.
macOS is getting worse, no doubt. But Windows still has multiple unacceptable problems (ungodly slow unzipping, still!, random heavy lag or freezing, surprise 30 minute Windows Update installations happening during a reboot you had to do during important work, etc. etc.)
Plus, the day to day file management story is still sub-par in Windows. If you've gotten used to Quicklook on a Mac (because it's so handy), you're SOL on Windows. How hard is it to provide a spacebar activated preview popup?
PDF reading and printing is still a nightmare on Windows compared to macOS. Again I refer to Quicklook, whereby you can open and scan/read a PDF near instantaneously; in Windows it's slow and clumsy. Saving (printing) anything as a PDF on a Mac is fast and easy. In Windows it's a slow, multi-click process.
And Linux... on the desktop... still not there. Yes with the right hardware and the right drivers and config, distros like Fedora can be pretty close to perfect. But you still have HiDPI problems sometimes (Windows does as well), random UI-related service crashes, app/package-system conflicts (since there is no one standard package management system that all apps agree upon), and more.
Sadly, the entire computing experience has peaked and declined in the last few years. That said, macOS is still the best desktop OS for everything but gaming.
Your comment reads as someone who has an axe to grind with windows since you just trash it without explaining why and just saying that 'X is so much better on Mac, why can't windows be like that' is hardly an impartial argument and more you being more familiar with the Mac platform and less with windows.
Assuming everyone has all the problems you claim to have with Windows or XPSs and that MacOS is 'the best operating system' is anecdotal at best.
We've definitely had some issues with some XPSs at work but Dell's service was great, and I can't remember the last time someone got annoyed by windows or had any issues like you described without the fault coming from poor choices from our corporate IT or buggy apps.
I use a XPS13 from 2019? with KUbuntu running Plasma, it's really good. Had hardly any issues and runs great. Main issue with XPS13 is that the RAM is soldered on. Great unit otherwise. Screen is great.
I was going to shrug off this comment as someone trying to hate, but there is a lot of truth to it.
I prefer Windows to IoS and the XPS to MBP, but the XPS has problems - it does overheat like hell (but Dell's gaming laptops don't, so there is that). But more importantly, the screen randomly dies on random updates for me and a lot of my co-workers. So does the WiFi.
Nonetheless, we had entire teams convert to the XPS after they saw mine.
None of them regretted it...though they all installed Linux and stopped having the screen going dead problems.
I'm sure the bugs you mention about Windows exist and are terrible, but I made the switch to Windows after converting to Mac ~9 years ago and I haven't experienced anything but very minor annoyances.
I still prefer the Mac OS experience, design, and usability, but the price premium for Apple products is not worth this modest improvement. I still have and enjoy my Iphone Xs but might consider switching to Android in a couple years whenever I need to upgrade.
I switched to Windows 10 about 3 years ago. Absolutely no problems. I'm careful to stay on the "happy path", but my Lenovo laptop works fine out of the box, and my Supermicro based desktop dual-Xeon workstation works great, too. Speedy and reliable.
I do agree with you on thermal management on Windows 'ultra'books. I've had two now with crazy bad thermal throttling. Often fans going when very little CPU load, and then when I do use the CPU/GPU hard, it pegs it back so much that it is unusable. I've seen it pegging a Ryzen CPU down to 0.5GHz which makes the whole system unusable. The laptop doesn't feel ridiculously hot to touch, so no idea what is going on.
Being a lifelong Windows users I am always baffled at comments such as these because I have never experienced any of those issues except for maybe the Windows update happening for a couple minutes when I shut down. I'm no gamer, but I am usually cramming my computers with high CPU IDEs, VMs, crypto mining software, and anything else I can fart around with. Am I doing it wrong? How can I have this terrible experience?
I've generally had your experience but I've had a few instances where third parties failed to play nice. HP puts weird bloatware and recovery partitions that do some naughty things in their laptops. I had one relatively recent hp workstation laptop that HP messed up so bad it wouldn't update. I just run Arch on it now.
In general though, I've not had those kind of hardware/driver issues ever.
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 all.
This. Funny last time I wrote about the same large trackpad issue on HN I was heavily downvoted.
And despite how many have said this new magic keyboard is better. I still dont get it. It felt exactly the same as the previous butterfly keyboard, and to me it felt awful. The 2015 scissors keyboard is still million times better. 1.5mm of Key Travel, 60g grams of actuation force was the perfect combination. The newer Keyboard is meshy. I haven't heard anyone that hate the older one, so switching back wouldn't actually cause any issues. And I cant be the only one who dislike the new keyboard.
I wish Apple just make a MacBook Pro Classic. Remake the 2015 MacBook Pro with a faster processor. That's it. Nothing more. Dont touch anything else. Same Screen, MagSafe, No Touch Bar, Perfect Keyboard and TouchPad. While I would love to have the new speaker I could do without it incase Apple mess things up again. And if even a new CPU is too much to ask, just give me the old 2015 MacBook Pro with Maxed out Config for the same price.
At the moment I am worried once I have to replace my 2015 MacBook Pro I would left with no choice.
And for what is worth, Apple stop mentioning their Mac user satisfaction in their Investor meeting.
Honestly, compared to the 2007(?) 17" macbook pro and especially to the pismo... I find that my 2015 15" Macbook Pro already had an unpleasant keyboard, with wobbly keys and too little travel.
I think the pismo and the 17" where the only macs that I have ever owned that I really liked...
Definitely agree on wobbly keys and that is something better on the newer Butterfly / Magic Keyboard. I just wouldn't trade it with Key travel though.
I think the pre 2015 / 17" Macbook Keyboard had 1.8mm Key Travel. And 1.5mm felt different but not bad. I tried the Surface Pro which said it had 1.3mm Key Travel. And to me that is about as low as it can go before the typing experience deteriorate rapidly. I remember reading somewhere there are certain laptop with 1.1mm Key travel but they compensate it with higher actuation force, so instead of 60g it was something like 70g to make up for the difference.
Exactly what I did. I loved my used 2015 but I ordered a 16" 2019 on day one. While I like it and it's my "daily driver", it was surprisingly low on wow factor.
The biggest win on the 16" are the speakers. I didn't consider them at all but they've basically eliminated my use of external speakers. Touchbar is very underwhelming. USB-C is a tossup. I got to buy new dongles, chargers, cables, etc. which I actually enjoy but in the end I'm mostly plugging USB-A devices in with adapters.
I really miss having a big microSD in a flush adapter as spare space. I miss having tiny USB 3 flash drives nearly flush in USB-A ports.
I bought the 2015 MBP back when it came out and basically maxed out all the specs, it was very expensive for me at the time but in hindsight it was the best purchase ever...
I think there are 2 versions of the 2015 model, the Mid-2015 one has a trackpad with 'force click/touch' which is a minor plus, so make sure you buy that one if you have the choice :)
I bought one of these as well, it got me through university and was a terrific development machine for side projects as well. It survived having water and coffee spilled on it, which is incredible.
My brother just started college a year ago, and is now using it with no issues. If it lasts another 3-4 years I'll be seriously impressed, and it'll go to show how great those machines truly are.
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!
The 2015 maxed out model was my first MacBook and it's served very well so far. Lately, it does slows to a crawl when running docker, VSCode, and half a dozen electron apps :(, but after reading about the latest builds I'm honestly not sure whether to upgrade or go back to running ubuntu or elementary.
Ahh man that's a tough call! My personal laptop is a 2014 that I bought in 2015 (or was it 2016?) for dirt cheap because it was on clearance. So I totally agree with you there! On the other hand, my biggest issue with the 2016-18 keyboard is the lack of inverted T arrow keys. It drives me nuts!
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.
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 notifications when you add or remove hardware, software, when an application has crashed (even when error reporting is off), …. The data contains unique identifiers for your system and user. I don’t even want to know what’s sent when you select full diagnostics.
Windows is a privacy and performance nightmare. It’s good for two things only: corporate environments (manageability) and games.
---
Well, sorry about that. Just had to get this off my chest.
> 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 hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.
> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?
I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.
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.
>Everything is slow even though the specs are good
Have you tried running without antivirus? Some parts of Windosw are still slow eg the filesystem, but the main thing making everything slow is antivirus software IME, including Defender.
From own experience this is 99% corporate shenanigans.
You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory.
In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.
For the IT department it's a tradeoff though; they'd rather have everyone be inconvenienced or their hardware not working at 100% than to risk a virus wreaking havoc on their networks, or ransomware crippling their whole organization. Even without the restricted Windows machines they struggle with enough shit already, because people can't behave on company hardware on the one hand, and every employee is a target.
This is such a huge pain, I keep having to turn off the antivirus because it will often slow "npm i" so much that it'll just fall over and report a crash. I shouldn't have to disable my built-in antivirus just to do basic development!
I'm surprised that you're having performance issues, since for me it's the complete opposite. I assume it's driver issues, but on my comparatively powerful machine linux still feels laggy.
Would it be feasible to run a Windows Pro or Server version in a laptop?
Pro runs just fine on a laptop.
When people talk about Candy Crush they mean they see it first thing when they start Windows Store as a recommendation. It is definitely not pre-installed on Pro, if it is I haven’t found it in 4 years...
I use a Mac. I spun up a windows server image on AWS and I've been doing all of my development on that. It's cheap if you turn it off and it has snapshots. And it's available from any machine with remote desktop.
I think it depends on the region or maybe even the time period (maybe those promotional deals only run for a certain period of time and eventually get renewed, if you're unlucky enough to reinstall while in the correct region/period you get it).
No, I specifically looked to remove any crapware and was surprised that there wasn't anything. I also just did a search for candy crush and I only got the website.
I'm on Pro and while Candy Crush was removed, I now have Farm Hero's Saga and something called "Groove Music". Netflix also somehow made its way there even though I've never once tried to watch it on this PC.
They are less brazen about it, I had to look in my Applications list.
I don't know about Server but my fresh Home edition installed a few months ago doesn't have Candy Crush or anything similar pre-installed. And same for my corporate laptop with LTSB - no pre-installed stuff.
I moved to Windows after 5 years of Mac this month. Because I knew I will be working from home, decided to build a good workstation (Thank you Ryzen ) and I Couldn't agree more WSL is very helpful for people who like windows UI and functionalities of Linux. There are few quirks but it works great.
My Linux setup is usually like this, but inside out. When I need Windows functions (which is not often), I fire up a VM (either with VirtualBox or KVM). WSL makes Windows useful for Linux development (my software will run on Linux, not Windows), but the rest of Windows is usually a bit of a pain.
I usually find the text less readable on Windows than it's on Linux or a Mac. Not sure it's an issue with Edge, my monitor's Gamma or what, but it just looks better on Linux (and perfect on a Mac).
I've tried both ways there too; at least a few years ago (may be different now) running windows as a HOST worked way better for me since Linux in a VM was way more well behaved than Windows would be.
Curious what kinds of problems you used to run into here that made you give up on Windows guest/Linux host. I've been running my daily driver that way for the past 3 months and haven't hit any issues aside from 2 nits:
- Windows 10 basically requires an SSD to get reasonable responsiveness. You could maybe get away with putting a disk image on an SSD, but for serious use it's best to dedicate a whole disk or partition to it.
- QEMU's default display adapter started "leaking" pending IO requests at one point, which grinds the VM from full speed to a halt over the course of an hour or so. I ended up disabling the display adapter and moving to just RDP, which is basically an even trade since the RDP client can do everything the SPICE client can.
It was probably closer to 8 years ago, so SSD's weren't really available. Given the time I really don't remember the specifics but it was a work-from-home job so we did a lot of video conferencing pre-Zoom, and used Skype and other tools a lot. IIRC, the windows apps we used didn't like not being close to the video hardware.
Running a Linux VM was pretty friction-free, and I could use all the company mandated tools that had to be run in Windows simultaneously without performance issues. WIth a windows guest, I wouldn't run it unless I needed one of those tools, but that required a fairly long spin-up time.
Like I said... almost a decade ago so they probably aren't problems now. I'm running Linux native right now, but again for the ease of corporate support, I may go with Windows + WSL2 for my next refresh.
> and used Skype and other tools a lot. IIRC, the windows apps we used didn't like not being close to the video hardware.
Indeed. I used to keep a Windows box for the smartcard reader bureaucratic obligations with the Brazilian government that I never managed to accurately emulate on VMs.
This is true. I have found text not so "crisp" and readable on windows compared to MAC. I have an LG Ultrawide monitor and used both Mac and Windows with it, there is a difference in the sharpness.
+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 :)
Sometimes i read thing like this and I feel they are from a different universe.
I am the first port of call for IT issues of the whole family, including grandma. Like 10 people, and the last time we had issue caused by windows update was like 5 years ago when a laptop was trying to update to W10 from W8. That required a bit of manual intervention.
Game icons certainly arent there for me any more.
Whats the issue with Onedrive? I mean, its preinstalled, but you dont have to run it.
Lucky you! In the last 6 months Windows tried to install an upgrade, failing endlessly, on both my mother's and sister's laptops.
It just tried to upgrade, failed during the reboot, reverted back and booted on the old version, just to start the whole process again after a few hours. And all the Microsoft Windows Update Assistant tools or whatever didn't work at all, so I just clean installed in frustration.
TBF though, my 2013 desktop never gave me a single issue on Windows..
Paradoxically, driver issues and update issues never show up on any desktops I had, they only show up on laptops with carefully selected and entirely manufacturer-controlled supply chain and parts.
WSL2 is a Linux VM, what's your use-case for native over that?
- You can disable updates
- I'm on the insider version and this has never happened to me, let alone for 'normal' users.
- You can uninstall all of that stuff
- It's not that bad, I work on a decentralised database and we have similar performance across Windows and Linux. Windows was a bit tougher to do but it got there :)
I'm honestly baffled that you've never experienced an update that bricked your system - how long have you been using Windows?
Two years ago Microsoft released an update that killed Windows on my brand new (at the time) desktop (i7-8700k, gtx 1080). I thought "no big deal, I'll boot up my old desktop and deal with it later" but when I turned on that machine (i5-2500k, rx480), it applied the same update and also killed the Windows install. At that point I gave up on using a desktop for the day and booted up Windows on my laptop (i7-7700HQ, gtx 1050m), only to have that also install the update and kill the install.
I'd had Windows updates break before that, but always on one machine so it was easy to write off as some driver quirk or something weird I had installed.
Not the parent, but I've been running Windows for decades on multiple machines (4 different ones at this time) - never once had an update brick a system.
You seem to be assuming everyone else is frequently having a problem because you have had it. In reality, these events are rare, which the overwhelming majority of people not having any issue.
I’ve only worked in tech for six years but I started as a sysadmin and managed a network of ~50 windows computers for two years, and then worked in a windows dev shop for three years, and I’ve never once seen an update brick Windows.
I’ve bricked windows by being dumb but I’ve also bricked Linux by being dumb. Sometimes I feel like it’s cool to hate Windows, like it’s cool to hate Java.
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.
Is macOS so different? You have to disable notifications manually every day to not have your developer workflow interrupted. The login screen is a 3D cube (weird, random and ugly). Icons in the dock wiggle. You delete applications by dragging them to trash bin. Maximizing Safari is impossible. The list goes on and on.
* 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
I'll add a couple of my own (and be a more restrained in my opinions)
* Windows + WSL is a hybrid environment. Files are on different places depending on from where you are looking. It feels like developing within Docker containers, without the power and flexibility.
* Low observability: very few programs log things and, while there is excellent system wide plumbing for that, very few programs are using it.
* PowerShell makes some questionable choices. For instance, "curl" is a built-in command that has different switches from its Unix homonym. It'd cost absolutely nothing to have a different name for that.
I'm wondering is there a Live Tile use-case that improving developer productivity?
I usually Win+Q or pin to taskbar to run program, almost never look at the default Live Tile.
PowerShell's syntax make me mad too, some Office 365 enterprise management tools is only available in Windows PowerShell only (You cannot run it in PowerShell of MacOS or Linux), so wired.
I was considering moving back to Windows since the new MBP lineup is so disappointing, but no TimeMachine, too many useless feature (Live Tile and so on) made me stick on MacOS.
Until a feature update ago, I was quite disappointed with Win10 as a dev platform. I'm running Win 10 Pro. Especially Windows Update was just plain intolerable.
However some time the past months I realized I don't think about Windows much... which means it's no longer constantly annoying me.
There are still stupid things, like Apps display language not being tied to the OS display language setting (wtf?!), but I can live with that. On a day to day basis my machine stays on, is performant, and does what I ask it to.
Why was Solitaire bundled even with the NT (i.e. enterprise/business) versions of Windows? No one ever questioned that, but everybody takes issue with Candy Crush? Weird...
And why is that? I never even once played Solitaire and uninstalled Candy Crush without even looking at it.
What's the deal with this sudden hatred towards nonsense that was installed 35 years ago as well and had a way bigger impact on system resources (in terms of disk space and screen real-estate) than Candy Crush?
Is it because it's a mobile port - too colourful and too in-your-face about it being a mindless pastime than a boomer-style virtual card game that even came with a "boss-key"?
If you leave some task processing overnight, that's probably not your 'core hours', unless you set it that way and not in the day. But then what if all your work is lost when an update is installed in your lunch break? It's ridiculous that there is (or was? Not sure if it's changed) no way to never automatically install an update.
Remember when Windows 10 was released and there were reports that Windows 8 would literally automatically update to Windows 10 without user intervention [1]. My mother's laptop did that and it bricked her install.
The OS taking over control of updates is totally user-hostile. 'Core hours' is just giving a little bit of that control back, it's not a solution.
Yes of course - saving work regularly is good. However apart from long-running tasks you can still lose things like the current state of your desktop and applications. Consider if you were working on something involved and had many applications running all with some complex state set up. You might not lose any data but you have lost the 'working memory' of what you were doing.
There is a problem on Linux with some software not being available or not being as well tested. Despite all the problems with Windows this means that sometimes having it is helpful.
It's really amazing. I don't know much about Linux, but whenever I need to use some Linux only tool(or works best on linux tool), I just use wsl. Tried using a couple of linux desktops but the user experience is just terrible compared to windows for day to day work and there aren't many softwares available.
> +1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux
So your co-workers already use Linux (for free, I guess), but now you're trying to convince them to use a restricted Linux version that also costs money. How's that?
We develop cross-platform projects in an environment where Windows is a second-class citizen but accounts for the vast majority of our user base. WSL2 is a really nice stepping stone towards having both operating systems treated equally.
I use both extensively but settled for windows + WSL2 for now. In the end it's the little things:
- (fractional) scaling actually works quite well.
- the shell works a big better. Feels like a good compromise between gnomes simplicity and KDEs over the top customisability to me. KDE has actually been the most stable out of the three though.
- (Nvidia) driver support. Using Manjaro I had to reinstall the Nvidia driver every couple of months because a kernel update broke things. Again, not huge but annoying.
- Working hardware video decoding in firefox. On Linux playing videos results in significantly higher CPU load, noise, slowed down browser, etc. Even on a fast machine.
With wsl2 I can now do all my development in that environment and don't need to live with windows slow file system, missing package manager, etc. The remote development features of VSCode with wsl (and other ssh hosts) are also simply amazing.
Because the experience is terrible for the uninitiated. And this is coming from someone who ran Arch as their primary OS since I was 10. Laptop Linux on the whole is not a fun experience for those who just want a machine to work (which was what MacBooks were supposed to be about).
I just bought a Surface Laptop 3, and the machine is great. The hardware is nice, Windows on a laptop has improved tenfold since I've last used it. WSL2 means Linux isn't left out.
It's one machine/OS combo that does everything for me, including light gaming, whereas Linux and macOS both have significant compromises when using them.
It's simply not true. Install Ubuntu or Fedora, run Gnome 3 and everything "just works". You can't use Arch as an example here - it is intentionally very basic, and takes a lot of effort to learn as you do almost everything from scratch. While many people appreciate that level of control, it is unnecessary if you're just trying to get work done.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on a built-for-it new Intel-based machine. The amount of "just works" is surprisingly good. But when it goes downhill, it goes downhill steeply. Took me a day to figure out why it wasn't connecting to my Exchange server (TLS 1.3). No screen sharing on Wayland. Etc.
> that simply don't occur on Windows, mostly because of MS superior QA
You're comparing an OS that hasn't had a major release in almost 5 years to a bleeding edge Linux distribution. Install an older LTS version of Ubuntu or Debian and things will be quite stable.
With laptops, you need to buy hardware designed for Linux if you want a good experience with it. System76 and Purism make great machines. With Proton, Windows games run effortlessly from Steam on Linux.
I must disagree with you.
I have been installing Linux for people who barely know how to use a mouse and the experience was always successful.
Of course, I choose a distro with simple UI and software with GUI every time.
I don't want to get into the typical "if my mom gets it everyone can" (also because she is a power user) but trust me, the people I installed it for had the same problems they would have had with any OS (some quite funny).
It's been Xubuntu for almost a decade, I think.
I tried Lubuntu but, at least at the time, it had no pulse audio which wasn't great.
I tried Budgie but it has some paper cut bugs that I couldn't live with (some might).
I run Ubuntu on my work Dell Latitude (i3wm), Debian on my personal System 76 (Mate) and both work more or less flawlessly, although I do agree with the guy who said Battery is not great.
I also have a Desktop with Windows and Linux dual booting, and while I agree Windows is quite polished when it works, I also find a million little annoyances.
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.
Any other laptop will boot linux, but you'll end up with a lot of rough edges...
For example, on the laptop I'm typing this on (latest Ubuntu, old Acer 511G):
* Random hangs every few days - some unpatched processor bug related to sleep states.
* Wifi diconnects randomly.
* Hotkeys don't work
* Screen sometimes dims itself to zero, and since the hotkeys don't work, it's rather tricky to fix.
* Bluetooth doesn't work
* Hibernate and sleep are disabled by default and you have to go into a config file to enable them. SD card doesn't work after sleeping more than 3 times.
* Fans don't work at all. System throttles almost immediately under any load.
* There must be some issue with the SSD losing writes because even journaled ext4 seems to get data corruption after an unclean poweroff.
* External monitors don't support hdmi audio.
* of the 3 USB ports, 2 don't work for anything more than charging devices.
* webcam LED state seems random, and does not correlate to webcam usage at all.
All on one device!
Linux on Thinkpad is great. Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.
> Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.
Running on 2 old Dells and an Asus with no problems (Ubuntu 18.04, upgraded in place from 16.04). Your statement is absurd on its face just based on its generality.
Of the things you've listed, I can't say anything about external HDMI audio because I don't have one, and the default hibernate thing I can confirm. Every other one I've never had, much less daily.
From personal experience, I've only had that many issues once on a bleeding edge MSI. It took about a month to work out the issues. Every other system I've used has had a much smaller subset of those issues (I'm not using a Thinkpad). Namely Bluetooth or the fans not working, and individually resolvable.
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...
I have issues with Sleep and Displays on my macbook, and I had to pay extra for the privilege of having windows snap to the sides, easily the best innovation in window managers since being able to put them over one another.
All x86 servers, PCs, and laptops are designed to run Windows by adhering to a specification issued by Microsoft and certified by running a suite of compatibility tests provided by Microsoft (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/hlk/). The free OSes are piggybacking on that; there is no independent, neutral standard for the architecture of x86 PCs.
> "My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux."
I had Lenovo T530 and it worked OK, but with half the battery life. Then I had XPS 15 and I got it working after a lot of fiddling, but with a third of battery life and with hidpi issues on wake up.
For me, it limits the laptops available, with Windows I am pretty confident that any reasonable config laptop from Dell or Lenovo will not give me any issues. With Linux I have to be extra cautious while buying it. Also I am used to MS Office and occasionally play Age of Empires and Minecraft.
My experience shows WSL is passable, but it often feels "hacky" and incoherent. For professional work it just doesn't feel right to me. Plus the usability of Windows OS itself is just a complete mess... Honestly, I'd rather just run a regular VM with linux and full-screen that, rather than deal with Windows with Linux bolted on to the side.
If work is paying, I'm still going macbook, as I don't really care about the reliability aspect of the machine nor the insane cost of peripherals/the laptop itself. If I'm paying, I'll probably go for a Dell or Lenovo machine and install Linux. I just can't stand using windows any more.
This is a good overview and I agree with almost all of the points. For the last 20 years I have owned nothing but Mac computers (going back to OS 9 days).
I have a MacBook Pro for work so 5 years ago I bought myself a $750 Asus Zenbook and installed Windows and Ubuntu on it, expecting to just use the Ubuntu partition.
With the release of WSL, suddenly my Windows laptop is my favorite machine for both personal use and for development. It's just so nice to have all the Linux developer tools side-by-side with every major desktop app/game on the Windows side.
I will likely never buy another Mac computer with my own money, Windows + WSL has won me over.
(Aside: I recently switched from Android to iOS after 10 years. If you had told me back then I'd be an iPhone / Windows user I'd be stunned)
Found problems with USB devices on day 1 with USB 2.0 devices intermittently freezing.
Documented https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/gp5b1z/usb_20_issues_o... , and there is a workaround... do not use any hub that shows a USB 2.0 device to the Mac, find and use a USB-C hub that presents everything as USB 3.0 to the Mac even if it's USB 2.0
I believe that this is a Catalina software bug, and now I have a workaround I am happy. Sucks for those who can't figure out the debugging though.
I just got through researching this issue for a client. Apparently it is at least somewhat common, and appears to be caused by RF interference/noise radiating from USB 3.0 ports and cables, which stomps over 2.4 GHz band.
Popular solutions seem to involve applying custom shielding to dongles/cables/adaptors, trying different models of these, or experimenting with their physical proximity and layout. Sigh.
Yes. Best fix (when possible): switch to 5 GHz WiFi.
When the MBP with USB-C first came out in late 2016, I noticed this issue and documented it and brought the machine to Apple, and they offered to exchange the motherboard. However, work and travel prevented me from bringing the machine in, and when I brought it to the shop next time to have it fixed months later they said it’s a known issue that can’t be fixed. Use WiFi, plug in an external HD - choose one.
Edit to add: I even asked HN, but it didn’t get answers:
I might be missing something here: CalDigit TS3+ costs £230 -- that is a fuck-tonne of money, to solve a problem that should not exist in the first place.
I also still have the same MacBook air as the author and have been wanting to upgrade for... 2 years or so.
Not only the Webcam is a downgrade. You also loose Magsafe. Not a big loss, but a downgrade none the less.
> The touchbar. [...] Regular users probably find it useful and cute.
No they don't. My GF bought herself a new Macbook because... she has an iPhone and thought "For what I use the computer, any computer suffices". She just needs a laptop for browsing the web and replying to emails, and got a 2k$ machine for it...
Anyways, it turns out she is super annoyed at the Touchbar because it registers accidental presses when she press a number key... so her windows will just scramble around in the middle of a sentence, and she hates that.
I'm trying to convince her to sell it used, take a couple of hundred dollars price hit, and buy something that would make her happier. For her needs, literally any laptop would do.
Any laptop but Apple's. I also thought that the Touchbar was only a "show" gimmick to get non-pro users buy pro laptops, but for users that can't figure out how to turn it off, its something that makes them regret buying an Apple product, which at least with my GF, its a first.
I'm either in the minority of people who aren't going to miss MagSafe, or there's a minority of people supporting it who happen to be particularly vocal. Here's why I think USB-C is an upgrade to MagSafe:
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.
I just had to send my macbook into repair and get a full logicboard replacement, because the USB-C cable fried my mac. So much for an upgrade that costs almost 1k in repair. I hope you have high quality USB-C cables everywhere.
Conversely, I know someone who fried their Macbook by using a counterfeit MagSafe charging cable. The charging cable was sold through Amazon (!!) and claimed to be genuine, but it was not.
So the advice to use only good cables is universal. With USB-C at least you can get a good cable for a lot less than $79.
I was sceptical about the Touchbar at first, but then when I got my hand on it to test and really do some actual work, the usefulness of the contextual actions really grew on me.
Then it dawned that I would only be using the Touchbar half of the time, since the other half I have my Macbook "docked" and am using an external keyboard. So I can probably never adapt the Touchbar into an daily workflow. Unless Apple releases an external keyboard with Touchbar, I wouldn't mind the cable, but the price will probably be a no-go.
I have the ‘17 MacbookPro and detest the touchbar, especially for programming since I use the ESC key quite a bit. Changing the volume is a ridiculous 2-step process, and I never use any
of the dynamic shortcut buttons. The butterfly keyboard is also obnoxious. I’d gladly forgo the gimmicks in exchange for more RAM or other hardware upgrades.
I've offered to help, but she doesn't want to mess with configuration. I've posted in other threads how she "fixed" it.
She actually bought one of those keyboard covers, cut off the touchbar part, and fixed it with tape.
She literally has a crappy piece of plastic on top of her keyboard that physically prevents here from accidentally touching the touchbar. A 10 dollar hack on a 2k$ machine.
I don't think she will buy an expensive Apple product, ever.
The problem with disabling the Touch Bar is that it becomes difficult to adjust volume, brightness, and other things that were once easily accessible and addressable by muscle memory. Personally, I have encouraged those affected to return these machines and email Tim Cook (Apple) to let them know they refuse to pay extra money for something that makes the computer harder to use.
The touchbar is super useless unless you install something like MTMR[1] to customize it. The downside of course is that you need to be comfortable with some code to modify it outside of any pre-defined profiles. But even then I don't find myself using it much.
Also while Mac's aren't meant for gaming, when I do game I find the touchbar to be a poor replacement for the F keys. I play WoW and have F1-F5 bound to certain abilities and having zero tactile feedback during something as fast-paced as combat is frustrating.
Additionally, totally agree with the webcam complaint. I don't use it very often, but I was definitely expecting more from it when I first used it. A $2k laptop should have a better camera than my ~$600 laptop from a few years ago.
All that being said, I do also agree with the praise-worthy part of the post. I've really enjoyed how intertwined my iPhone and Mac experience are. Being able to effortlessly take/make calls and texts from my laptop without having to install an app on the phone or waste a bunch of time configuring things is really wonderful.
The speakers are also wonderful and the laptop itself runs surprisingly silently, even under high-load.
Looks like MTMR supports it as well, but I didn't have any luck getting it to work. HapticKey is working great though. For as good a job as Apple did with making the iPhone's button and the touchpad feel really responsive, I'm amazed they didn't bother doing the same with the touchbar.
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).
Based on my experience with PopOS on my desktop system, I've been eyeing the System76 laptops. I think they are re-badged Cleo laptops presently, but they have plans for their own hardware. Assuming the hardware is as thoughtful as the distro, I'll be ordering one.
I hear you, trackpads have kept me in Mac camp for awhile. I loathe the glass ones Apple switched to though.
I bought the 13 inch with emjoi bar when it came out.
Returned it.
Recently bought the 16inch when it came out. Like the new keyboard but ended up returning it as it got insanely loud when plugging in external display.
Hard to beat my 2013 mbp retina I guess I’ll stay with it for now.
My previous job gave me a 2019 MBP and it was always whirring away. It would have spells where nothing would be stable. IntelliJ (Ruby mine) would hang for a couple seconds every 20-30 seconds, zoom would crash repeatedly and say there was an error with the system audio and if it would start back up with out restarting the system everyone would sound like they were a robot. I installed boom audio (which is one step away from adware / malware these days) and it surprisingly got more stable.
I’m excited to try windows with WSL2 soon. I don’t see going back to a new Mac any time soon based on how easy PopOS / Ubuntu has been.
> By the way, not including the extension cord is unacceptable. This cord is not only a convenience, but it increases safety, because it's the only way to have earth grounding for the laptop. Without it, rubbing your fingers on the surface of the computer generates this weird vibration due to static.
.... THAT'S WHAT THAT IS?
I have wondered for _years_ why my laptop sometimes feels that way. Another mystery solved!
It's not really static. It's actually induction of the transformer (probably to parts of its shielding) that can't be released to ground.
You can tell because it immediately disappears when you unplug it. Static electricity would take longer to build up. And generally will not build up in metal objects but rather in insulators.
As others have said, that's not it. It's the line filter capacitors in the power supply. There's two types: X capacitors which filter differential noise (between line and neutral) and Y capacitors which filter common mode noise (between line and chassis.) Some small AC current (microamps) will pass through the Y capacitor to the chassis. If the chassis is ungrounded, you may be able to feel the current when you touch it.
I don't have a macbook so I can't comment on it, but I have a touhgbook with thinkpad power supply, and I feel it only on my wrists when I'm well grounded. Can't feel it on my fingers or palms.
IEC/UL 60950-1 allows for up to 3.5mA of leakage current to be "accessible" to the user. There are a lot of variations and factors that affect how you feel the sensation of current through your body (how moist your skin is matters a lot), but even microamps can be painful in the right situation.
I love a lot of things about macbooks, but I don't love the non-coated metal for this reason. In addition to the (for me) unpleasant feeling of current, the bottom feels hotter than a coated surface.
As others have said, it’s due to a little bit of current passed through to the outside of the laptop which would otherwise have been passed through ground, not static.
I had a (US) 2015 model that did that, but only in France when I used an adapter that didn't use the third prong.
My family had a faulty refrigerator as a kid with a conductive shell; if you ran your finger down the front if it really quickly (or maybe and/or wet/damp), you'd get more than the "tickle" level of electricity. Scared me. Still does. When my MB did it, I got pretty nervous.
Whats (not) fun is having two laptops and not being able to touch them both at the same time because of some grounding difference. With just one, sometimes I feel the electrical vibration. With two, sometimes there is a very uncomfortable zapping sensation in both hands as they each touch a different laptop. It's a bit like if you've ever touched a 9v battery to your tongue, but much stronger.
Any clue if there's a version for german plugs with ground pins (schutzkontaktstecker) for the duckhead? I like not having an additional cable going from the AC to the outlet, but not having the computer connected to ground means that there are some problems, including static noise on headphones, and this "rubbing" sensation.
The transformer end is a standard IEC connector (C5 I think, I don't have a Mac). You can use any appropriate cable, e.g. a 30cm one if you can find it.
I doubt there's one that fits on the transformer. The UK socket will only accept a plug with an earth pin as one of the safety features, so there's no opportunity to cut cost here.
Does the current MacBook come with 3 prong plug with ground pin? My iPad Air 2 doesn't and it does have this issue when touching the aluminium when charging.
Using the grounded extension cord finally connects the HiFi USB sound card without static noise! Wow, this is so great, I have totally overlooked this!
"8-9 hours with all apps closed except Safari. Browsing lightly, with an occasional video, and brightness at the literal minimum. This brightness level is only realistic if it's night time. In a normally lit environment you need to set the brightness level at around 50%."
"When I push the laptop a bit more, with a few Docker containers, Pycharm running, Google Chrome with some Docs opened, and brightness near the maximum, I get around 4 hours."
Honest question for those of you who have Dell XPS 13s, ThinkPad X1 Carbons and so on, what battery life are you getting? Dell for example advertises 12 hours. Are these figures realistic?
I have an xps 13 bought 5 years ago.
I'm getting also around 8-9 hours of browsing time if I occasionally open YouTube. Quite more if I only code and don't spawn docker apps like databases.
Spoiler, I use Xubuntu with CPU frequency set to power save but again, I've used this laptop massively during around 5 years already.
Sad to hear that. But yes, once the battery is replaced you'll get again a more than decent laptop.
Mine has 8gb of ram, which is still enough for most of what I do, including running VMs and docker compose intensively.
My Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Generation with a FHD screen lasts about 3.5-4 hours under heavy load and about 10-11 hours doing casual web-browsing etc on Ubuntu 20.04. On Windows, it should be better. But if you go with the 4K screen, you'll only get half the battery life.
I get 5 - 6 hours of real work out of it, 8 when doing nothing major using Ubuntu 20.04, but I have the 4k screen I hear it is a lot better if you have the 1080p screen.
I've been using ThinkPads X1 for 5+ years, company provided, so I have no real attachment to the device, which is something which is hard to account for when doing reviews of items you buy.
Currently on a X1 Yoga 3rd gen, I could run the laptop for 10 hours for normal usage brand new, unplugged, on _linux_. I'm a programmer, so this involves mostly editors and a few instances of a browser running, compiler building stuff in bursts, generally an mp3 player running in the background too. Brightness is set around 180-200cd (pretty bright, but still around 45-50% of the total brightness).
I can comparatively run a video player like mpv for about 4-4.5 hours in fullscreen (which in this model is 2k). If I'm using blender I can get anywhere between 4 and 6 hours.
I don't run GNOME or KDE though, and this does make a big difference (esp GNOME is far from being lightweight). Comparatively, my colleagues running windows 10 get 1-2 hours less runtime, and I attribute that mostly to the different tools we use, not due to difference in power management (I do not use IDEs, most of my colleagues do).
After one year I can still expect the laptop to last 8 hours unplugged with the same workflow. I generally do not bring a charger with me when going around.
I could be laving the company shortly and I've been thinking about a laptop for personal use and I was seriously considering the X1 Carbon or the Yoga again. They're not perfect laptops, but the 2k screen is a perfect resolution for a 14" to balance battery, there's a good selection of ports (better than several 15" competitors), good keyboard, good battery, extremely well built. I've abused this laptop with very little care and it did withstand much more than what I would have expected. Small drops, pressed along with groceries, pen straight on the dusty screen... it took it all and still looks as new when I wipe it.
If you want some of the negative sides, since I saw batches of these laptops among my colleagues, most of the screens since the first X1 carbon did develop some bright spots in the backlight after 1-2 years. We saw a couple laptops with dead pixels in batches of 15, which got exchanged under warranty, but yeah, QC was lacking for a laptop of this cost. Many of the yoga 1st gen we got had issues with the arrow keys requiring too much force. This got fixed in r2/r3, but the r3 buttons on the trackpad (the phisical ones) are so flimsy that often "click" without performing the electrical contact unless you hit them roughly in the center. A bit weak, and it annoying the hell out of me, since I much prefer these buttons to the trackpad mushy click action.
Putting the laptop in tent mode is nice occasionally, but I admit I did it 2-3 times tops in 2 years. Despite loving the pen for note taking, I'd rather get a dedicated (lighter!) note-taking tablet than folding the laptop. It just doesn't make sense after you try that. Same for writing on the screen in clamshell mode (feels idiotic and unconfortable).
I'd rather get a matte screen and no touch, if I could.
This laptop bumped at 400 nits is still basically unusable outside.
Whenever I see people saying that it's possible, I have to laugh. It's not even acceptable on the superior coating of the macbook, it's definitely not possible with this one :(. Only in the shade.
But despite all that, these laptops are worth their beefy price. Very solid, and we didn't many returns due to components failing. Nothing related to keyboards, screen, hinges, etc.
I'm really thorn, because I know I could depend on the X1, but I'm really attracted by the size/form-factor of the new XPS 15. Almost the same as this 14", but it's 16:10. For coding, that little extra vertical size, combined with superior form factor, has me hooked. I do use ultrasharp dell 4k screens and they're a step up even from this excellent screen mounted on the yoga. Being able to bump up the ram to 32gb is also a big plus.
But will the XPS 15 take the same abuse I've given to the yoga?
I'd like to hear comments from old XPS owners and tell me how much did they abuse their laptops.
I used to keep mine in pristine state as if they were jewels, but having a company-provided laptop has made me change all that. Laptops need to have a certain ruggedness.
I should note that most of this is rather subjective. It's a personal blog so that's totally fine, but I don't think it should sway you doing your own analysis. I've owned nearly every MBP release/bump since 2007 and the 16" MBP is by far the best IMHO and certainly a huge jump up from the 2016-2018 era disasters. Also as a touch typist, I was worried the huge trackpad might be an impediment, but it hasn't turned out to be so I can only assume we have different hand posture.
I've used two of the disaster-era 15" MBPs (one I'm still using). The trackpad makes it impossible for me to use it for any serious writing, even ignoring the terrible keyboard itself. I just can't write for more than a paragraph until it decides to hit something with the trackpad and in the worst case my keystrokes are now interpreted as shortcuts. I have no such issues with my 2014 model that has a smaller trackpad.
Maybe it's my hand positioning, but it just doesn't work for me.
Yup, owning the 16", I also have the same experience; the huge trackpad is fine. The blog writer bought the 13" though, maybe that is one part of his problem.
Ah, maybe! I tried a 13" once and gave it to an employee after a few weeks as it was infuriatingly small. If the 13" has the same trackpad size as the 16", that would probably be a real impediment.
Very interesting post. I actually have been feeling almost the opposite lately.
My work laptop is a 2017 MacBook Pro, and a couple months ago I dusted off my old personal laptop, a Mid-2013 MacBook Air to work on a side project.
The thing that blew me away is the Air feels a lot snappier! I honestly don't know what it is, and think I must have done something to my work laptop. I notice it most with VSCode, which seems to respond with less latency to interactions than on the Air.
I was idly thinking about upgrading the machine to the newest Air, but I'm sort of worried that whatever slowness is infecting my 2017 Pro might also apply to the new Airs. I'm not really a hardware guy but could it be, like, a different sort of SSD or RAM or something?
Even though the Code team has gone to excruciating lengths to reduce input latency, there is a lot of cruft in any OS. I have noticed that Windows and Linux have, in general, quicker _perceived_ response time than macOS, which I partially attributed to smoother animations and an overall sense that the machine is doing a _lot_ in the background (Spotlight, for instance, has been a constant pain.)
I have the new 16 MBP and love the touch bar. I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag); I find it much easier to control apps, like music, safari, and all, and the habituation period was shorter than with the keys back in the day (when i started using macs).
I would love to be able to easily customize the touch bar though, the author mentions BetterTouchTool, looks good, might be worth it.
Like the author I also have some problems with Catalina: the subtle hangs drive me nuts, the bugs with the True Tone going pale, the gpu's going crazy just because they want
PS: Apple - please consider improving your AirPlay video support or doing some other protocol for it. It sucks having to use cables for even HDMI video playback on a secondary screen. (or place back the display port / HDMI entrance)
BetterTouchTool is amazing. Here's how I've got my touch bar set up (from left to right):
- a dock for quick task switching (as well as seeing what apps are running that I can shutdown when I'm on battery)
- a music/spotify widget that can play/pause, go back/forward and that shows me the track and artist as well as the album arg.
- a date/time widget that I've customized so it shows me the week number too. This one has been surprisingly useful, as I'll regularly walk over to my macbook and tap on the touchbar to see the time or date.
- a battery percentage and time remaining widget
- a mute/unmute widget
But what I perhaps like best is the swipe gestures. If I swipe anywhere along the bar with two fingers, it adjusts the volume, and with three fingers I can change the brightness.
I don't currently make much use of app-specific touch bars, and there are a ton of other features I might use eventually. But even just with this I've come to really like the touch bar, where before I much preferred the function keys.
Can't do without an escape key though, but thankfully they put that one back :).
If Apple had two versions of their laptops, one with the touch bar and one without, I feel pretty confident that the version with the standard F-keys would outsell the touch bar.
I mentioned this before, but the real proof that the touch bar isn't for professionals is that you can't buy an Apple keyboard with the touch bar. Local labor laws require that I have a "external" keyboard when working at my desk, so the touch bar is pretty worthless, unless it was available on the standard alone keyboards as well, and it's not.
Personally I prefer the old keyboard because I find it easier to change volume and brightness using a key and not a slider, but that's personal preference.
Or could it be that it just pulls too much power for a cordless keyboard? There can't be much room for batteries in those keyboards.
If the non-TouchBar one was cheaper then I guess you'd be right. But all else equal I imagine people would want it. I quite like it, of all the things that have been wrong with the previous lineup of Macbooks, the TouchBar really isn't one of them.
However - the way Apple implemented the TouchBar leaves much to be desired. You need something like BetterTouchTool or MTMR in order to make it usable.
Denmark, among others I assume. Using your laptop, without external monitor and keyboard is only allowed as an exception, even when working from home, and only for a short period of time.
You can use the laptop monitor as a secondary display. It's a pretty good law, which forces employers to provide you with an ergonomically sound work environment. You're also required to have a height adjustable desk and chair... and a window.
A window is amazing! My first 3 jobs were window free as were jobs 7 and 8.
I've had 9 jobs total in the 25 years I've been working professionally and those 5 windowless jobs, account for about 5 of those years. I burn out pretty fast in the dark.
Your employer is legally required to provide you with chair, desk, keyboard, monitor and mouse if you work from home and don’t have these things already.
During the corona lock down my boss told us to get anything we required from the office. If you couldn’t pick it up, an intern would take the company van and deliver anything you’d need.
One option was to ban working from home, which was my employer's official stance.
On 13 March, we took from the office anything we needed (monitors, keyboards, mice, desk chairs). No-one said they didn't have a desk, so I don't know how we would have handled that.
I'm guessing that in the countries that have such laws, nobody is going around and enforcing that people are working with external keyboards in their homes, but instead, employers are probably required to provide this equipment if an employee must work from home.
Among workers, I imagine such laws raise awareness of the risks of working for too many hours on a laptop keyboard. I wish I had such awareness before I developed bad RSI pain after working on a laptop too much during previous WFH stints. Now I'm much more careful about my home work setup.
When one of my colleagues insisted on using the laptop keyboard, we made him sign in writing that he'd been offered a wide selection of keyboards and didn't want one, and understood he could take a keyboard at any time.
Changing music on Spotify doesn't work for me 80% of the time. Physical keyboard worked 100% of the time.
I hate the touchpad greatly. 0 benefits to me but tons of annoyances. I keep touching random buttons I never intended. I cannot press the correct button without looking (used to put volume to really low in bed)
> I cannot press the correct button without looking
does this seem like a really really minor problem to anyone else? I can’t imagine using function keys often enough that this would actually become annoying.
Debugger commands in IntelliJ are tied to F7 (step inside), F8 (step over), F9 (run) and looking down to figure out where to press again and again is a big hassle.
I could, but then I'd possibly have to unbind other shortcuts, I couldn't use another person's workstation and I'd have to also remap on other sane systems I use or learn two sets of shortcuts.
I got a new MBP earlier this year, and while I personally did not care about the touch bar, it's amazing what you can do with BetterTouchTool if you're an emacs user. For a long time I was evaluating getting some additional keys (like an xkeys stick) for shortcuts, but was put off because apparently you can only configure those in Windows. With the touch bar and BTT I've got that and more. I'd have a hard time going back to a machine without this now.
I agree. I upgraded from a 2013 15" to the new 16" as soon as it came out. I expected the Touch Bar to be worthless based on everything I had heard. Over the months I've found myself using it more and more. It isn't nearly critical, but as I come to discover certain uses they get added to my rotation. As many have pointed out, there is a discoverability problem with this feature and I don't see how that is fixable.
When I first got the touch bar, I hated it with a passion. Now I actually like it, and in some apps it's better.
I think the biggest issue is the mis-aligned defaults and lack of training on it. Things like knowing you can slide to adjust volume and brightness from the buttons (which is entirely non-obvious) and the ability to control it a bit better were big game changers for me.
Another appreciation for BetterTouchTool. That app change the way you use macOS and open up some new way of interaction you didn't think it's possible, all in a well- designed app.
Also it made the touchbar usefulness rating goes from "yeah, that's...okay?" to "I LOVE IT!" instantly. Apple seems didn't really care about the touchbar much, which is a pity.
> I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag)
Right? It's such a pity that Pock messed that one up. I added Pock to have the same thing in the same position all of the time and I really like how it gave me more screen real estate but it's those little details that they missed.
Get BetterTouchTool is totally worth it if you want to customise the touchbar. Also a decent window placement tool, shortcut manager and a bunch of other things.
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.
Have you figured it out? It sounds like a hard drive issue and you have some important system file or swap located on a part of the solid state that locks up, but not enough for the hardware to mark it as bad.
If you format there is a chance the issue will go away. I had similar symptoms even after formatting on a 2015 MBP, so I formatted, wrote a 4GB file to the HDD, then after that everything worked fine. Amusingly if I tried to copy the file to a thumb drive it would time out trying to copy it. I couldn't figure out how to mark the bad sectors, so hacky solution, but it worked for me.
Disk IO is working fine, if not I'd experience these issues all the time.
The issue is that a combination of camera access, hardware video encoding/decoding (for video conferencing) and bluetooth earphones (AirPods) is now able to crash WindowServer.
This used to work totally fine on a previous version so it's clearly a solved problem. Maybe Apple should stop "fixing" things that ain't broke?
But hey, there is a silver lining to this, at least now I can enjoy Apple TV+ on my work machine. That's exactly what I always wanted. /s
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.
You are not alone.
My work machine is Mac and after Fedora with GNOME on personal laptop I feel constantly annoyed by basic UX stuff like window and workspace management.
> First, it's impossible to get a terminal screen without anti-aliasing. My favorite font, IBM VGA8, is unreadable when anti aliased, which is a real shame, because I've been using it since the 90s, and I prefer non-anti-aliased fonts on terminals.
That's a great font, but unless you're using it at 15 (16?) point exactly, it's a mess. For those places, I use Nouveau IBM instead. It tries to recreate the shapes with nice vectors (like someone used one of those pixel art upscalers), instead of emulating pixels in the font.
These days owning a MacBook feels like being in an abusive relationship. The sex is still great but price you pay for being slowly distanced from your friends, family and peripherals is high.
I bought a 2012 MacBook Air when it was new with the 8GB RAM upgrade, and it's the best computer hardware I've ever purchased. The 2013 Macbook Air the author uses was only an upgrade in CPU and Wifi. I still use mine almost daily, although I only do hobby projects on it. Upgraded the SSD last year and replaced battery a few times, and it's really still an extremely capable thing while being thin, light, with a great keyboard and trackpad.
But I'm afraid Catalina is the end of the line for its major updates. This was the most expensive computer I've ever bought with my own money, and I've learned the lesson that it pays off to spend money on good hardware. But I can't seem to find to find a great true successor yet.
I understand that Windows can service me just fine, but I really want to avoid paying money/time/attention/dependance into fixing its user privacy hostility. I use Linux on the desktop, but on the desktop I can tolerate its papercuts - coming from a seamless touchpad/software/wifi/battery life/display scaling experience on a Mac is hard sell to spend more time being a sysadmin (I know it's gotten better - but I think it would still require too much of my time). This year's MacBook Air looks actually great, but Apple looks to be replacing it with an ARM laptop next year. I'm actually excited for that change, but I'm not really super enthusiastic about being early adopter or the implications for the support lifecycle of their Intel Macs. In any case, being able to replace the battery or SSD is a big question mark (or just a big 'no') in any Apple hardware now.
When I bought my Macbook in 2012 I never expected 1) to have it last for eight years and 2) that finding a replacement would be such a game of tradeoffs.
Same. Best personal computer ever made, my 2012 11” MacBook Air is the last computer I ever want to own.
I dropped it on a concrete floor my first day of class, at the prototyping lab. The impact bent the corner of the screen chassis near the hinge. I bent it back with pliers and filed away what metal prevented it shutting.
I still use this laptop daily. Not for work, obviously. But that’s not it’s role.
It is my personal computer. There are others like it, but it is mine.
I bought a top spec Air just after it came out a few months back to replace my 2013 Air that I loved but was finally dying (seven years with the same computer!). I kind of love it, but it's not the same as my love for the 2013 one. I have 16gb of RAM and an I7 and I have to deal with the fan every time I'm on a video call, never mind using a "powerful" app. It's incredibly frustrating, because some of those apps didn't start on the fan on the 2013 one.
Unfortunately, a lot of this comes down to "no-one wants a laptop lid as thick as a phone". Without major technology changes, laptop webcams are never going to be good; there's just no room for the optics.
A lot of it has to do with how laptop web cams work in general and it is not only Apple's problem [1].
A way to improve this situation a bit would be to be able to use the camera of an iPhone as a web cam, either over USB or wifi. You still have the compression and USB transfer, but at least you use the better optics of the phone. There are third party tools, such as EpocCam, that can do it, but require the installation of drivers. This should be a first party solution, in the same fashion as the "take photo" option from the right click menu on Mac OS, which uses an iPhone to take a photo and paste it directly on the open application of the computer.
Microsoft solved the laptop camera problem just fine in their $399 Surface Go model [0]. Just takes a team that cares about the product enough to solve these tech issues I guess.
Having never owned a Mac, and only rarely used them, I had no frame of reference for many of the claims. The pictures were incontrovertible though. The camera is horrible. What really is the marginal cost of upgrading to whatever camera they use in a modern iPhone?
I'm typing this on a Surface Laptop 2 (and have a 2016 MacBook Pro), and the cover is nowhere as thick as a phone.
It's not sharp enough to cut bread, but those 2-3mm of thickness have zero impact on perceived laptop thinness while affording enough room for a spectacular webcam (by current Apple standards) and its companion Windows Hello counterpart.
I do wonder why they don't put more effort into the camera on the MBP. Of course it's not going to get used as a camera like a phone but with the economies of scale they have with the cameras going into iPhones you would think they could at least be on par with their own phone cameras from years ago.
Many more people are using the camera on their computers now for videoconferencing. Of course the decision was made long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, but it turned out to be a bad one.
Yeah I get their reasoning. It seems to still go against their brand positioning to have such a glaring omission of quality though. I remember when they would spend money figuring out how to poke tiny holes into the side of their laptops so they could have almost invisible battery charge indicators (now gone). You're not really supposed to consider if the quality of a feature on a Mac is good enough for something, it just should be. Hopefully they will sort it out.
Seems like something @dang could fix if the original user can't edit the comment anymore - hopefully mentioning his name summons him. If not I think you might want to flag the comment.
100000% on the size of the trackpad. It's comically, needlessly large. The size of the 2012 generation's trackpad is the perfect size — big enough for your fingers to find it, small enough to barely even need palm rejection.
My 2017 MBP 15 has a major issue with my LG HDR monitor since a recent Catalina update. The Mac will output an HDR signal on wake up which causes the monitor to go to full brightness and turn on the quasi HDR feature. The HDR checkbox in Display settings says it’s off. I have to check and uncheck the checkbox 5 or 6 times to get it to turn off.
Quite many people are unhappy with their newer Macbook experiences! Sad to see the quality drop in Apple products.
I'll add mine to the list:
My 2012 MacBook Air has been my favourite laptop I used it for five years and my parents two after that. One of the best 700 hundred euros (student discount) I've spent.
Then for my work I got previously used ~2014 MBP it worked well. Solid "Apple quality". Then I got an "upgrade" (i think it was 2018 MBP) and it was the most unpleasant experience I have yet to have with computers. Luckily I didn't have to pay for it, but still - so many problems that are unacceptable for any laptop. It really got me out of the Apple fanboy train.
- Keyboard didn't work if the computer got too hot (which it did)
- Some buttons didn't properly as dust or some particles got under them
- Same problems with the trackpad than the article writer
- Don't even get me started with the touchbar (why?!)
- Battery life disappointed as I was expecting it to atleast compare with the 2020 Air's (of course my expectations might have been the problem here)
- If external monitors were hooked up and you woke up the laptop there as 25% that it froze completely and you had to reboot
The laptop got sent to maintenance - they dusted the keyboard but other problems persisted. After one year of that pain I went back to studying and bought used Thinkpad X220 and installed Arch. That is now my favourite computer!
Last month I bought XPS 13 for programming since x220's CPU doesn't support virtualization. It runs manjaro and is like 2014 MBP was - does the job really well. After finally going full into Linux world I wonder if I'll ever come back.
I mostly agree with this analysis. As far as the webcam goes: you can use your iphone (just select it as a video camera) and get a really good webcam image. It also eliminates the issue where the other person on the call appears to be looking down all the time -- they are always looking away from the camera anyway(unless you print something to hold your phone in place) so you don't think they're not paying attention.
It was a good insight that the Touch Bar is a feature designed for non-pro users!
There are a few things I disagree with but they are all in the matters of taste. I don't have any problems with the big touchpad, but that could be related to the fact that I don't care about the "wrist rests" -- if my hands were to contact the cover anyway I think they'd be misaligned and at risk of carpal tunnel syndrome (piano teachers and typing teachers -- back when they existed -- taught you to maintain a straight line from top of hand to top of forearm for this very reason.
I do have a problem with the common refrain of "this is not a pro machine". It's just a name for differentiating their product line. I'm a pro -- full-time software developer -- and the feature sets seem designed for me precisely (almost never plug anything into my machine for example). Other people are also pros but use their machines in different ways and probably considered my use case absurd. I have assumed Apple collected info on how people use their machines to figure out, for example, whether the SD slot was worth it (I talked about a card slot with Steve Jobs 20 years ago and he was very dismissive, on some grounds that were reasonable for the time).
I always enable telemetry on my Macs and on most apps, as I figure the developers might use the info to improve the product the way I use it (I'd like to know that info for my code!). I know a lot of people do not do so from privacy concerns. I wonder if my feeling that "this machine is right for me" is because those of us willing to enable telemetry are overweighted in Apple's beliefs of use patterns. I'm not aware that they survey users in the traditional way, though probably they do do that as well.
The webcam is inexcusable, if Microsoft can put such a high quality webcam in their $399 Surface Go then what on earth is Apple's excuse in their $2000 laptops?
We've actually started using a Surface Go for all our video tutorial recording in my work just because it looks more professional than MacBook Pro webcam footage.
I agree with the author. I never used all the space dedicated to this trackpad, seems like a waste. That and I cannot get used to this "3D Touch" trackpad compared to the older clicky ones. 99% of the time I'm going along just fine and randomly I cannot seem to select a line or something and it infuriates me when that dictionary lookup thing pops up instead.
Just got my new MBP 16 inch yesterday, a replacement for my 2015 MBP 15 inch.
It's been pretty smooth sailing thus far, no big disappointments. My main reason for replacing the 2015 was to get more CPU power and memory, but the 2015 was actually doing ok, not insanely slow yet.
In terms of power I can now have all my tabs open, including heavy ones like Facebook, while running several different IDEs, and changing between things takes no time at all. Compiling is measurably faster.
The migration tool seems to work, it moved everything including stuff you might forget like your ssh config file. Even the bash history is there, and all the apps are in the dock in the order they were in on the old machine. Homebrew seemed to need a bundle command, but that fixed itself easily.
Touch bar is weird. I've basically set it to display F keys, because I can't figure out how to get iTerm2's hotkey to replace the Siri icon. If I could do that, I might not mind, but I go to terminal so often I need it to be a single key. So for now, Touch Bar is a small minus for me. The ESC key is still there so that's fine.
The screen is nicer than the 2015 one, marginally. Something about the colors and the size, I guess the bezel is now pretty much where it can be aesthetically. I wouldn't want it closer to the edge.
The keyboard is good. I tried my wife's butterfly type keyboard and thought it was terrible, luckily she likes it. This keyboard has slightly less travel than the old one, but somehow it feels like I can type faster without it feeling weird.
Main thing is there's been no terrible surprises in moving the stuff over to a new machine. Back in the day when I was a kid it would take a whole day to install software, you would always forget to move something, and there would always be some unexpected hitch.
I haven't run into Catalina slowness issues that people have mentioned, only things like the removal of kexts, which wasn't huge for me.
I moved my dock to the bar with Pock and I have some of the most used buttons (brightness, volume, mute and night mode) right there. I also added a negative spacing between the icons so they're really close now. Now every time I can expect the same thing to be in the same place on the Touch Bar. And together with the slightly increased resolution and size the screen feels a lot bigger than the 15".
The only thing that doesn't work is tap-and-slide on the volume slider.
Don’t buy an older model with the butterfly keyboard and avoid touchbar where possible. Problem solved. I actually disagree with the trackpad complaints. I’ve never used a better trackpad in my life. It’s really a joy, and palm rejection is not perfect, but close enough that it doesn’t bother me.
Not a laptop but I just wanted to add that the latest Mac Mini does a decent job. Also, not being a laptop forces me to avoid work while sitting in a cafe or when going out on a short trip. I mostly do backend work with some front-end work mixed in lately, but no graphical-intensive stuff.
I find USB-C to an almost scandalous regression in technology. Few people seem to be talking about it given how much frustration I would think there is over it.
My MBP has 2 USB-C ports. That’s all. Of these ports, the options to expand off of them are slim to nil. I have not encountered a single hub or multi port adapter, including Apple’s that works properly or reliably.
Essentially it is a situation where I cannot use more than two of my USB-C ports at once, which usually means I can only use one, as the other is always reserved for charging.
The hubs are trash. The adapters are trash. Near all of them are from brands I have never heard of.
The whole thing just seems broken. But notebook manufacturers, especially Apple, have now been doubling down on it for years now.
My work laptop is one of the 2 port Pros too. To make matters worse it's the lowest space spec too.
Total nightmare using this for video work, not enough space to store the video files so have to use an external drive, dongles are not reliable enough to keep a drive mounted so have to dedicate one port to that, second port has my screen but when my battery goes low I have to go back to editing just on the laptop screen because I have to plug the power back in.
It's just compromise after compromise and for what? What did I as a user as a customer gain here?
CalDigit TB3 docks work perfectly in my experience across Macs, ThinkPads and the occasional oddball machine. This has been the case for several years now.
Likewise, I regularly present using the Apple adapter with HDMI, USB-A (for a remote) and power input without issue.
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.
I don't understand how people don't go crazy from the the MBP overheating issues. It's gotten to the point where I've broken out my 2012 ThinkPad to offload anything CPU-intensive. If I have high-compute stuff running in the background, I can barely type, the keyboard gets so uncomfortably hot! (not to mention the loud, ineffective fan)
(and let's not even talk about how useless it is as a laptop)
I would pay an extra $200 just to get a MBP which was 50% THICKER, if it got proper airflow to the internals and cooled down properly.
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.
The author pretty much proves why Apple doesn't listen to any of the ranty feedback from Apple lovers (not to be confused with Apple users)
The author time and again says he'd pay for this feature or pay to not have the touchbar, whereas he could have put his money where his mouth is and bought a Thinkpad or XPS or Latitude etc.
He's doing himself a disservice by continuing to buy Macs and we're doing ourselves a disservice by up voting articles like this one.
Yeah. To each of their own, but I was actually surprised that the verdict in the end was "When combined with an iPhone it makes for an unbeatable user experience."
I loved Macs after using my 2012 Air for five years (my parents used it until last year) and MBP 2015 for work. Then they got me MPB 2018 and that was enough Apple for me. It was absolutely terrible. I don't care how many times I have to reinstall Arch to my Dell XPS 13, it's still a better experience.
I still roll an old Macbook Air for my primary computer. It really sucks under Catalina. I used to run two browsers, one for work and one for personal. Now I just run the work one. I often find myself evicting things from RAM so I can get my job done. Nerfing the ram slots was the first unforgivable sin. Don't get me started on usb-c and the thrice damned touchbar. At least they gave us the escape key back.
I'm tempted to upgrade, but this article is not helping. Maybe I'll get an Air with 16gb and call it good.
My favorite recent machine purchase was a Chromebook Pixel i7 with 16GB of ram. The only problems are the locked rom and the nerfed storage. Both of which I've worked around. It's my primary pen-test machine and the most capable machine in my fleet. If only the Linux trackpad drivers were better. (fingers crossed https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...)
If I could buy a machine like the Chromebook (that I was allowed to install linux on) I'd drop Apple in a heartbeat.
This is a really solid, nuanced review that I felt was pretty fair given my experience with this latest crop of Macbooks.
I've posted in the past that I feel like Surface Book is a device that is not aimed at me. Sadly, I am starting to feel the same about Macbooks. The touchbar is an active hindrance to me and them replacing core macOS applications with Catalyst alternatives (like Apple Music replacing iTunes) makes the experience more frustrating and less useful.
I have a 2013 macbook. But I think I will update to a hackintosh, and an ipad as my next two computers.
I never built a hackintosh, but saw some guides on youtube. Seems simple enough. I do occasional video editing in final cut, and programming.
The 2013 13 inch macbook, has been good so far.
But 98% of the time its connected to an external monitor and mouse and keyboard. The 13 inch macbook is still too big to use on an airplane seat. For the occasional travel, I think an ipad will work better for that and in bed.
The biggest gripes for me are with the macbook/os
1. It came with 128 GB, which I partitioned to use half with windows. I'm running out of space all the time.
2. It came with 2 usb ports and 2 lightning ports. I have never used a lighting port, but I'm always short a usb port. I use a dongle for external mouse and keyboard, so it takes up one usb port. But if I want to edit a movie, or files. I hook up an external drive and then I'm short a USB port. I wish there was a lightning 2 port to USB cable.
I use a USB hub, but it craps out eventually.
3. I dread updating, because recreating my python and windows programming environments would take a month.
4. I hate "Finder". It does weird things all the time. Takes 3 seconds to create a folder. Moving files requires a holding down a key. Windows explorer was much more snappier and useful.
5. My trash bin accumulates things which it won't let me delete.
I'm budgeting $750 hackintosh and $300 ipad. I think will give me more power and portability. Plush I'll still have my old macbook.
Maybe I'll budget $200 for a good mechanical keyboard and mouse this time.
I think it’s a list of many valid criticisms, but it’s just so tiring at this point. We’ve been talking about the Touch Bar and the ports for almost 5 years now.
I hate to be that person saying “if you don’t like it, don’t buy it” but that’s absolutely the case here. People are handcuffing themselves to macOS for no reason even though they admit they don’t love it like they did 6-8 years ago.
The integration is nice but there are alternatives. You can integrate Android with Windows or Linux, often with more freedom. You can use platform agnostic apps and services for your workflows. What Apple offers with continuity is great but not worth living with a machine that doesn’t work with your other needs.
Personally, I still have a Mac and iPhone, and I don’t really have the same issues as the author (I think palm rejection works fine, I think the touch bar is fine - and Apple’s most popular laptop doesn’t even have it) but you can be certain that when their time is up I’m not going to keep a closed mind to other options.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty happy with the laptop I bought from system76 and am eagerly waiting for the one they're building themselves. I was assigned a mac for my most recent job and I barely touch it.
Many people are mentioning wsl in the comments and not only that really doesn't make up for all of windows's shortcomings, I still think it's a new first step in MS's traditional EEE ("look, developers! You don't need to use linux anymore, you can run your setup directly from windows now!"). Not coincidentally, wsl2 seems like a slow move into the "extend" step.
I don't think they'll ever manage to extinguish Linux, but it certainly won't be thanks to the developers who are doing microsoft's job of pretending that wsl is the ideal and giving it free publicity. If one needs Linux tools that much, one should just use it.
I have a MacBook Pro from work, and a Lenovo X1E Gen2 with Linux (Fedora KDE spin) at home. The Lenovo is slightly newer, but the two are roughly equivalent.
The Linux machine needs work for setup. The laptop shipped with Windows, so installing Linux is on you - but Levono started shipping some of their laptops with Linux.
I pretty much just installed Fedora from a live CD.
Once setup, it is faster, KDE is easier to use - I realize that is subjective, has better heat management, lighter, an even better keyboard - Lenovo is known for that, and is more reliable.
With a good deal the X1E also costs 30-40% less than the equivalent MacBook Pro.
I like the MacBook as well, I just think it does not justify the price and if you are a little bit tech-savvy there are better or at least equivalent options out there.
Edit: I also have a 2013 Lenovo T440p that I gave to my son, it's still a strong and fast laptop - and the improvements in Fedora/Linux made is _faster_ over time, not slower!
Yeah I can't deal with the new keyboards myself. Especially the butterfly ones, but even the new redesigned ones are too thin for me. Edit: Lol, the page works again and the keyboard is the one thing he does like :) I can't imagine this but I did notice the new keyboards are highly polarising. Some people love them, some hate them (like me). I really love the keyboards on the thicker thinkpad laptops I use in work as well (I use many computers in work ;) )
In addition you now have to pay full price for upgrades as everything is soldered, and the platform is being dumbed down to the level of iPad Plus. I'm just not really interested anymore. I still use them for work (with external keyboard) but the attraction of a great strong POSIX compliant platform with a good user interface is long gone.
I have always been in disbelief of people who have to type for a living and also like Mac keyboards. It's like somebody told the designers "make it as close to a flat sheet of aluminum as you possibly can". I'll give it that it looks clean and elegant, but the actual tactile experience is garbage.
I’ve been using a 12 inch MacBook for the last four years and it’s got one of the keyboards that no one seems to like.
However if I hadn’t read it here I wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with it and most of my job involves typing.
In fact I think the keyboard is quite great. I do type quite softly and quietly though. For me using other keyboards feels like walking in sand and that my fingers have to work a lot harder.
> I have always been in disbelief of people who have to type for a living and also like Mac keyboards.
Why the disbelief?
I'm not necessarily a fan of Macs or their keyboards, but generally speaking, I've been able to adapt to almost all types of physical keyboards without issue. They did not affect my speeds on Typeracer, and while I preferred some key types over others, no physical keyboard switches were never deal breakers for me, whether they were mechanical or domes or whatever. I've been typing going back to the 80s, so I've lived through the great IBM and Apple mechanical keyboards of the time.
The only keyboards I could never get used to are the pure touch keyboards like ones on the original Surface covers.
I've only ever owned iMacs when it comes to Apple. Recently, after a little research, I decided to spring for a used 2015 MacBook Pro 15''. Though there are conflicting opinions among Apple fans, many fondly remember this model as one of the last great models. With a quad-core i7 CPU, 1TB SSD drive and 16 GB of RAM, it still runs like a dream. The Retina screen makes everything look colorful and glossy. The keyboard predates the butterfly, so it is a joy to type on. Not to mention this model comes with an HDMI port, 2 USB-A ports, and an SD card reader.
I can probably run this thing for another 3-4 years until support ends - and even after that, I could keep on using it. No regrets so far.
I have a work Macbook Pro that I requested in anticipation of better quality compared to others. Ended up being disappointed, it's just as crap as my other laptops. Build quality is iffy, it has heat problems comparable to the lowest quality gaming laptops, the keyboard is garbage and the touchbar is the most useless piece of tech I've used in a long time. And this is probably even more subjective but OSX Catalina is quite slow and the free tooling I am used to now costs money. I also heard bad things about Applecare in my country but I have no personal experience.
Since I have other issues also with not having Nvidia GPU, I can't wait to dump this hardware.
> became unusable due to macOS, not hardware, issues
I'm on a 2013 iMac and i was 2.5 years behind on OS upgrading. I just upgraded last week and now i get the beach ball spinner when opening a directory in the finder. It is absolutely OS related.
You should have disk encryption turned on. I would not worry unless you think there is someone who is willing to spend an enormous amount of time and effort to access your data.
I'm still using a 2012 Lenovo laptop because I could upgrade its disk and RAM, and replace its battery. Otherwise I'd have had to buy a new laptop years ago.
Disappointing that most Lenovo laptops now have soldered RAM but you can only get up to 16 GiB.
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
I feel like the lack of Jobs' influence is finally making its broad appearance.
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.
>When video conferencing or under high stress like running multiple VMs the system would miss key presses or mouse clicks. I'm not saying that the system was laggy, which it was, and it is expected. Rather, that I would type the word "macbook" and the system would register "mok", for example.
To the key missing part, my hunch is that this is happening because of software workarounds that Apple did on macOS to reduce the problems in their previous keyboards clusterf*ck.
I have been looking for a replacement 13" laptop and for the first time in many years I am looking at getting a Win 10 laptop (heres hoping WSL2 will be the saviour for decent development setup). But is is hard finding decent 13" hardware that doesn't have annoying drawbacks. Hard to believe but there seems to be a market segment for a new laptop manufacturer that produces three models that are continuously refreshed every second year or so.
> This situation is very annoying, especially for a touch typist as my fingers are always on hjkl and my thumb on the spacebar. This makes my thumb knuckle constantly brush the trackpad and activate it.
I thought standard touch typing position was index fingers on the notches (f & j in US QWERTY). With that & some fairly large hands, the trackpad rests comfortably outside of my palm area? the trackpad seems pretty well-designed to just miss the palm in standard position.
Out of curiosity I rebooted my Ubuntu partition for the first time in a while. I run NixOS and Windows 10 on the same box, so this gives me a good performance baseline.
The experience was awful. Ubuntu is so. fricking. slow. And when upgrading from 18.04 (it’s been a while) to something newer, it locked me out of my account. I can’t login now, which is less than great.
I’ve come to appreciate the overall experience with OSX. Are there warts? Sure. But on the whole it’s worth the premium, IMO.
When Pro tools, Reason and all the major "creative" apps decide to port over to Linux (remember, Microsoft's desktop is moving in this direction), I think the macbook's days will be numbered when you can get a similar device in formfactor and quality for 1/3 of the price running Linux... I actually think Apple doesn't care. They want people to buy iPad's and iPhones and get out of the laptop and desktop business.
“Sometimes, after resuming from sleep, the laptop doesn't detect its own keyboard. I can assure you, the keyboard was there indeed, and note how the dock is still the default one. This happened to me minutes after setting up the computer for the first time, before I had any chance to install software or change any settings.”
Glad to hear it’s not just me. I think I solved this by re-enabling Bluetooth (2020 MBA). The OP says he hadn’t changed any settings yet though.
Darn. Happened again with Bluetooth enabled. Pretty bad bug Apple. I've had my brand new 2020 MBA for ~4 weeks and this has happened probably 10-15 times now.
* Effectively can't play YouTube videos at all if the browser gets even just a wee bit busy (say, 30 tabs or so, including the usual portion of busy news sites). By "not at all" I mean the output starts getting so shoppy (and the controls so unresponsive) that it's just not worth the bother. By contrast my 2013-2016 Airs could do on the order of 50+ fully loaded YT tabs without much sign of strain (beyond starting to get a bit slow at the controls).
* While we're at it -- even standalone audio files are dodgy (if the environment is just a bit loaded). It's like the audio interface itself is perpetually hosed / overloaded.
* This despite a 2x upgrade in ram, and 4x upgrade in SSD space that I thought would take care of most of my performance issues.
* My UX experience was generally consistent on 2010-2016 models. That is, everything you hovered over / clicked / dragged behaved "the way a mac should" -- without having to even think about it. But with the 2019 model (Catalina) it seems they have to "improve" a lot of these default behaviors, which took weeks of trial and error to figure out (some of which I still am figuring out).
* It freezes up (requiring reboot) way more than it should (and correspondingly seems less tolerant of high browser loads). It's never a great experience when a laptop freezes up to to high load (which is of course perfectly avoidable). But I had to push my 2013-2016 really far to get it into the same level of instability. Basically it seems it can take only 1/4 the load of my earlier models.
* USB-C (which is just plain dodgy, and there's only one free slot. Can anyone explain what they were thinking with that?)
* Other stuff I'm probably too burned out by my overall experience with this thing to bring to the foreground of consciousness.
The only problem is - I'm still basically addicted to Macs (and have had consistently less than happy experience with Linux-based desktops over the years). Largely due to the overall UX, screen + audio quality (along with lightness and thinness). And (when the used to be reliable) their stability and low overall maintenance footprint.
With that said - is there any current offering from Apple that's at least reasonably stable (particularly in regard to browser load and audio issues)?
Or if not - what open source notebook offerings are people using these days (that are reasonably decent in terms of screen quality and overall responsiveness)?
I go between last years Pro for work and this years Air for all things personal and I loathe the Pro. This years keyboard on the Air is by far the best typing experience I’ve ever had on a laptop. I have no idea why they are leaning so hard into the Touchbar, it is the most frustrating “innovation”. I frequently accidentally perform actions and need to break flow to look at it to do actions as simple as changing the volume.
One other quirk with the touchbar I've noticed is when the machine starts overheating, the touchbar feels noticeably hotter... sometimes to the point of becoming painful to touch.
I completely agree with the author in that my 2013 MBA is the best laptop I've ever used. It's not my daily driver so I should be able to get quite a few more years of life out of it. And I also agree that for the brief period when macOS had Continuity but wasn't intolerably bad in other areas, it really was a magical experience. That's the one thing I really miss from going all Linux.
Ugh, this is my main complaint about the last edition MacBook Pro - worse than the butterfly keyboard (which I had to replace twice but which currently works.)
It's baffling because palm rejection worked flawlessly for me on the smaller trackpad on the 2012 MacBook Pro as well as the entire screen of the 11" iPad pro.
I don't understand what Apple is doing with the touchbar. Before I used it, I was thinking that the gimmick didn't look as bad as people were making it out to be. After I used it, I returned the laptop.
Why does it activate without any haptic feedback just from brushing against it? Obviously they know how to do both of those things; it's how the trackpad on the same device works!
It is kind of sad that Apple lost its way. We used to be excited about new releases, now I only want to make sure auto-update is disabled and the new hardware did not remove half of the ports again. Time to seriously consider an alternative operating system for me after being on MacOS for 10 years. I cannot be put up with it anymore.
I was in the market recently for a new laptop after owning 2 different MB pros since 2011. I ended up buying a System76 linux laptop and couldn't be happier. It's cheaper and it's built for software devs. The keyboard is amazing. Only real downside is the trackpad isn't as good. But I use a mouse anyways.
I don't think I've ever gotten close to the advertised battery life from any new laptop, Mac or Windows, but I probably use a lot of apps and settings that aren't battery friendly (e.g., I prefer a brighter than average display).
So when I do get 4h of battery life, I'm pretty happy.
Well, I have had _some_ laptops even exceededing their advertised 10+ hrs battery life but only under a _specific_ configuration (basically the one it came with. An OS reinstall would kill the battery life).
Also, things have improved significantly in linux-land. Someone finally had time to turn off unused peripherals in the kernel and battery life doubled over night
Many people have said this many times, but love him or hate him, Steve Jobs did a good job of keeping this kind of stuff from deteriorating. (Sure there was AntennaGate and "You're holding it wrong", that wasn't Apple's or Jobs' best moment for sure...)
My mid-2012 air was also the best machine I’ve ever owned. The chassis and portability could not be beat. I have a well equipped 2018 Pro now, but it’s not the same. I like having a serious H series processor and 32GB of ram, but the 15” chassis is just too big.
Great writeup! I am still on Macbook Pro 2013, the best 13” laptop ever build by Apple. I refuse to upgrade. All new Macbooks have disappointed me. I hope the upcoming 14” Macbook Pro will be better and without the touchbar so I can finally upgrade.
I have the 2013 13" too and it's been such a great computer but two things stifle its longevity - two cores and no upgrades. The 14" is going to have ample cores for years to come and with upgradable ram and storage it could easily serve for over a decade. But while everything is soldered on the only upgrade option is to sell the laptop back to Apple at a massive discount. I don't know if it's just resentment but it feels like a dark pattern to fuel Apple with spare parts and refurbished machines to resell. The model to buy, for me, is the one after the EU forces Apple to use socketed components.
I am actually thinking of buying MBP for the first time ever. I just want a good screen, good keyboard and unix like os. Lower models are actually relatively good value now compared to X1/XPS. I still dont like the company or design though.
Yes it is. Apple chose a resolution that was not 1/nth as dense and thus everything non-retina needs a lot more work to fix. Apple could have implemented and tested it better. This is 100% on them.
> I have found myself unconsciously raising my palms and placing them at a different angle. This may lead to RSI, which I have suffered from in the past.
Probably not.
This position eliminates wrist bending and yaw, which will help you avoid RSI.
I have a new macbook air i5 and the only thing that I can't do on it is use Chrome bc the fan kicks on way too easily when browsing or watching. I was happy that using safari alleviates this issue entirely.
I wanted things to 'just work' so bought an expensive mac. It was very good at syncing iTunes and stuff like that. I found I kept needing Windows only software...
So moved to Windows. It was fine. No problems except iTunes looked weird, but I got my work done easier.
Then I started to code more so went to Linux on one computer and Windows with a Linux VM on other.
As life developed I used Linux less and MS Office more. I write more reports than code now! Since WSL I dropped Linux on the desktop and went Windows everywhere.
I notice now that the only people who complain about Windows are the mac users. I personally find a mac really limiting, and MS Office sucks on a mac. I'm happy with Windows 10, and my users don't suffer many issues compared to my mac users.
I knew I recognized that name... it’s the bashblog guy! I’ve been meaning to try out bashblog for years, and may do so soon for the blog I’ve been dragging my feet on for forever..
The problem is that there isn't anything better. The author said that he hates using Windows and his experimentation with Linux wasn't an entire success. That limits him to Macs. The 2016-2018 models were a disaster. The only reasonable choice left is the choice he made.
Well, questioning about Linux depends really on what kind of distribution the author used previously. Some are less efficient than others.
Considering hardware, the whole set of AMD Ryzen3 and Ryzen4 based laptops are much better than a MacBook, in computing power, flexibility, energy efficiency and lately also in price, plus they have the advantage that you can later upgrade SSD or RAM, while on MBP everything is soldered and you're out of luck later on.
The day MacOS will be fully virtualized, it might be the doom of the MBP and iMac.
I've been sort of abusing it since it became available to the point that I won't even consider buying any electronics over 200$ that I can not return or atleast test in advance until I'm sure I'll be satisfied with the purchase.
But you are right, where I'm from (Romania) people look at me in disbelief when I suggest it, thinking that the companies will punish them if they do it when that's not really true.
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.
There is (at least in Spain) something similar for offline purchases; I have been returning stuff that was just not satisfactory fo a while and no-one bats an eye.
>it's impossible to get a terminal screen without anti-aliasing. My favorite font, IBM VGA8, is unreadable when anti aliased
You could try scaling your favourite bitmap font 2-3x up - I did this with mine when switching to a 4k laptop. Unless this means that terminals no longer support bitmap fonts at all.
this review nails it. 2015 mbp in my case. all it needs is a faster cpu and a couple of usb3 ports to replace the thunderbolt and it would be money. well at least we had a golden age
I love my 2013 rMBP, it's still plenty fast enough but it really needs a new battery. As long as the board is fine I'll do whatever is needed to keep it going.
Why didn't you get a 2017 Air? It sounds like that would have been exactly what you're looking for--a performance boost but with the old build quality.
I've always been more of a desktop user myself. My first computer I bought with my own money was a Windows laptop in 1995 when I went to college. Mac really wasn't an option then, Classic Mac OS was terrible for a CS student, didn't run any of the required software I needed, and were super expensive. That was pretty much Apple's darkest hour. Laptops were stupid expensive back then, so 1997, 2000, 2003, etc.. I built/rebuilt my own homebuilt desktops on the cheap.
2004 I got a Mac Mini.
2006 I got a Mac Pro.
2012 Apple pissed me off dropping support for the Mac Pro, so I went back to a homebuilt windows desktop. Actually used a case I had laying around from 2004-2005 as well. Less than 1/3 the investment of the Mac Pro. That machine is still in service now with just a better video card + SSD. Great machine, still very snappy, but I am getting tempted to rebuild it.
Also grabbed a Surface Pro i5 for $800 in 2017. Very happy with that machine, but it gets used for home consumer type stuff and not development work.
In the meantime I've had a whole bunch of Macbook Pros for work from 2012-2020.
The 2018 15" MBP I have right now is by far the most disappointing Mac experience..
A lot of my issue is that I work on a product that runs in Docker... docker sucks on Mac IMO, and most of my issues are around needing more RAM & CPU for hyperkit & docker to suck down.. but the Mac is rampant with high latency in the UI and other issues that drive me nuts.
- Keyboard is starting to fail, and it sucks, not even comfortable. I'm stuck at home so it's trickier for IT to give me a new MBP. When I was going to the office I could mostly ignore the KB and use external, circumstances around lockdown have meant more use of the internal KB issues.
- Hate the touchbar, never gotten any decent use out of it. And I use vi plenty of course.
- I have some of the palm rejection issues the blogger mentions but that's not so bad.
- OSX seems to be bottom of the barrel when it goes into swap, linux and windows both seem to handle high memory usage better.
- USB-C has been nothing but a PITA. Didn't need so many dongles with the older Macbook Pro and the USB-C doesn't buy me much. I have yet to have any device with a USB-C plug that can plug right into the MBP 2 years later.
- Quality of audio on the headphone jack is horrific on my 2018 MBP... it has the most noise of any PC I've ever had, not even in the same ballparks as my previous MBP which was great. Not sure what's going on here.
- Battery life on MBP is fine except when using docker or running builds. Then it's like an hour or two.
I own a 2013 13" Macbook Pro and currently use a 2017 13" Macbook Pro at work, and I like the 2017 better.
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.
"Apple engineers, do you know who is the target audience for these machines?"
I believe Apple knows who is the target audience for those machines better than this man.
Pro means "Professional" and that includes Graphic and sound designers, web programmers and (specially if you spend a little time in Apple Store and just observe) entrepreneurs that need (or want and could pay for it) powerful portable machines.
Not being able to display "IBM VGA8" being a screen "drawback" is like calling a drawback of mother cars that you could not pick cherries like with old cars, too fast and too low roof.
Most people prefer antialiased fonts instead of blocky, so his drawback is a feature for most people.
"I believe Apple knows who is the target audience for those machines better than this man"
There's a substantial number of Mac users who are devs who seem like they are in an abusive relationship with Apple, and will put up with all sorts of changes that are looked at negatively by developers.
He just explained all those reasons? He doesn't want RSI, he doesn't want to be distracted while he's typing, he doesn't want dongles, etc etc. What is this comment for?
But wait, there's more! Sometimes I got glitches even when I'm not recording but playing tracks. I have this problem on literally the same Ableton projects that used to "just work" on the old machine (same number of tracks/plugins). The workaround is to restart the laptop. Seriously, it feels like Windows XP all over. I can't imagine playing live shows with such unreliable setup - fortunately I just make tracks for my own, but if I were to go out for some kind of jam session or open mic I'd consider switching to Windows.
EDIT: One more thing that sucks about new MacOS: dropping 32 bit compatibility. RIP all 32 bit VSTs. Fortunately I don't use that many plugins and it turned out everything I really care about has 64 bit version. But if it didn't, then I'd hold on to the old OS as long as possible.