Courage (I am building up the courage to switch and buy a Dell)

[itsamacthing]

Courage, I am building up the courage to switch and buy a Dell. Nearly 20 years of only buying Apple products for my personal life. 20 years of dealing with work arounds for this and that. Cannot even express how much I loved my MacBook Pro. It was the center of digital world, felt like it was a part of me. Have the MacBook now, it's fantastic, but the single port is terrible and using dongles is so unreliable and creates issues while I am importing photos, external drives, etc. Just have to sneeze and the drive becomes disconnected.. While I am traveling, the iPad Pro will become my first point of contact with RAW images, using Adobe CC to send them back to my main PC.

Main PC, that was always my MacBook Pro but now...will that continue? I already purchased the dongles, am ready to buy the Mac but starting to see a real movement away from the Mac, am I imagining this? Did Apple really push it's base too far? Is it only me and a few others? I have 5K to spend, not worried about the price but I am concerned about user experience.

I do not care about the OS anymore, Windows is just as stable or more than MacOS which has become less stable and update are far more intrusive than they used to be. Remember when OS X updates didn't even require a reboot?

Since most services are cloud based these days and Adobe products are nearly the same across platforms, the OS is becoming less and less important and more of a background thing.

The File System on the Mac is terrible..slow..and LEGACY FROM OS 9. Love when Apple gets snobby about legacy (USB-A) and they are still using a file system that is ancient and not modern.

A lot has been said here in this forum. A lot of enthusiast are still backing the Apple train...and I want to but it's really hard right now. I had been waiting a long time and it's far from the hardware I want. It's like Apple is putting lipstick on a pig and telling me she's a pro.

As I lay on my back right now, on a trip, dumping my photos into my MacBook via dongle. I am frozen and cannot move for fear that the hard drive or sd card reader will fail via dongle hell. It happened earlier and I had to repair my drive. This would be so easy with an SD card reader and bigger internal storage. I can only imagine efverytime I want to import to my rMBP without SD card reader. Oh .. my 5D4 has WIFI, let me send 256GB of files wirelessly to my Mac, haha haha Phil, you are too funny.

The Dell Precision line is calling my name... do I have the courage? Am I alone?

 

[Bryan Bowler]

I am right there with you. I've been using Apple products exclusively since 2006 and I've noticed a tremendous change in the last 2-3 years.

I'm constantly running updates.

I'm constantly troubleshooting software issues (where as I never had to do that with Apple.)

I can't even hook up my brand new iPhone 7+ to a brand new MBP that was released one month later.

Out of nowhere, Apple abandoned Aperture, sending a huge slap to the creative community.

Emojis take up a huge part of Apple's focus instead of creative tools.

iTunes is a disaster and I have no idea how to use it anymore.

I could go on and on. Bottom line is I feel exactly as you do and I'm weighing my options. It's been a great ride that I thought would never end, but things have definitely changed...

 

[raqball]

I am debating ditching Mac as well... I'm one of the few that still has a @mac.com email address.... LOL

They might have pushed me to far.. I am still deciding but at this point I think I am a gonner and Windows bound..

 

[tambur123]

No, I’m in the same boat as you. Disregarding the outrageous price (in EU is around 5500usd) the tb3 only ports are the worst decision Apple has made. They might be the future, but the future is not now. By the time they will become the standard, your preciuos overpriced laptop will be obsolete anyway.

 

[GBlansten]

I'm right there with you. I am a huge iPhone fan. I was looking to upgrade my 2012 MB Air soon. I was so happy with the MBA that I was naturally leaning towards a MBP. Apple has screwed up with this update though.

 

[nomoresecrets]

I am right there with you. I've been using Apple products exclusively since 2006 and I've noticed a tremendous change in the last 2-3 years.

I'm constantly running updates.

I'm constantly troubleshooting software issues (where as I never had to do that with Apple.)

I can't even hook up my brand new iPhone 7+ to a brand new MBP that was released one month later.

Out of nowhere, Apple abandoned Aperture, sending a huge slap to the creative community.

Emojis take up a huge part of Apple's focus instead of creative tools.

iTunes is a disaster and I have no idea how to use it anymore.

I could go on and on. Bottom line is I feel exactly as you do and I'm weighing my options. It's been a great ride that I thought would never end, but things have definitely changed...

I agree that the focus on emjois is annoying. It's definitely their strategy to court younger users to lock them into the Apple ecosystem.

Just curious, what kind of updates are you constantly running and troubleshooting software issues?

 

[Yr Blues]

Windows 10 sucks. It's so unintuitive. Whenever my dad needs help, I have to figure that mess out.

 

[jjlannoo]

Bye guys. Maybe you could form a support group to ease your transition. You will always have a home here if you want to come back. We won't judge you.

 

[tubeexperience]

Windows 10 sucks. It's so unintuitive. Whenever my dad needs help, I have to figure that mess out.

Each OS has its own quirks.

Obviously, you are used to macOS so you don't notice them.

Likewise, Windows has quirks that you just need to get used to.

 

[richpjr]

Windows 10 sucks. It's so unintuitive. Whenever my dad needs help, I have to figure that mess out.

I don't think it is un-intuitive, it's just different than OS X. I use both extensively and honestly, it's as stable as OS X is these days - something I could not have said a few years ago.

 

[Bryan Bowler]

I agree that the focus on emjois is annoying. It's definitely their strategy to court younger users to lock them into the Apple ecosystem.

Just curious, what kind of updates are you constantly running and troubleshooting software issues?

Just today, I upgraded my parent's 2011 iMac to Sierra. As I logged in after the update, the iMac started freaking out about a Keychain issue. I couldn't access Keychain because I was stuck in the login process. After an hour and a half trying to figure out a work-around, I finally had to wipe and reload the machine from scratch and then restore from a Time Machine backup. 6 hours of my day wasted.

Almost every time a OS update comes out, I have to answer a flurry of set-up questions. Why can't the Mac or device pick up where it left off? This may not sounds like a big deal, but it chews up time and grates on my nerves considering there are 9 devices in my house.

Back when I upgraded to El Capitan, my backups to my Time Capsule stopped working. Troubleshot it for days. Apple troubleshot it like crazy too. I finally gave up and just threw it in the garbage and found a different solution.

I'm constantly having syncing issues between a few of my devices. Have spent hours troubleshooting that.

Has AirDrop ever been reliable for anyone? It sure as heck has not been for me.

Unfortunately I could go on and on. I never ever had a single problem with any of my Apple products from 2006-2012. Now there's always something to fix.

 

[AdonisSMU]

Bye guys. Maybe you could form a support group to ease your transition. You will always have a home here if you want to come back. We won't judge you.

Speak for yourself. Im judging. LOL!!!

Sometimes you have to go somewhere else to realize what you really want.

 

[raqball]

Or you reluctantly go somewhere else and realize you should have done it sooner... It goes both ways..

 

[AdonisSMU]

I don't think it is un-intuitive, it's just different than OS X. I use both extensively and honestly, it's as stable as OS X is these days - something I could not have said a few years ago.

I have a Surface and the updates are painful. Really painful. However, it's good for people to try out other things so they can remember why they like what they like in the first place. Nothing is forever. People's tastes change over time.

 

[richpjr]

I have a Surface and the updates are painful. Really painful. However, it's good for people to try out other things so they can remember why they like what they like in the first place. Nothing is forever. People's tastes change over time.

While I still prefer OS X, I can't remember the last time I had an issue with an update.. I occasionally see that updates were applied in the middle of the night with a reboot now and then. What is painful about Surface updates?

 

[AdonisSMU]

While I still prefer OS X, I can't remember the last time I had an issue with an update.. I occasionally see that updates were applied in the middle of the night with a reboot now and then. What is painful about Surface updates?

Besides the fact that they take forever and they don't just happen overnight. You get surprised when you login to do work. So that thing you were going to do just took double the amount of time. That drives me up the wall. That and the fact that it feels small and is annoying to use for real work. Dare I say I prefer Windows 7 to Windows 10....but I'm not on the MSFT Windows forum complaining about it.

 

[Pootmatoot]

Windows 10 sucks. It's so unintuitive. Whenever my dad needs help, I have to figure that mess out.

How is it unintuitive? For 99% of normal uses, you just type the first few letters into the search bar and it'll pop up.

From a logical perspective... I don't think OSX is intuitive at all... I can only leap around in it because I've used it for 15 years. It's about what you're used to.

Finder and contextual menus? The behaviour of the toolbar? These things aren't intuitive to a new user... you're just used to them.

 

[tubeexperience]

I have a Surface and the updates are painful. Really painful. However, it's good for people to try out other things so they can remember why they like what they like in the first place. Nothing is forever. People's tastes change over time.

I have a Surface. What do you mean by the updates are "painful"?

Are you talking about the time it takes to install updates?

 

[nomoresecrets]

Just today, I upgraded my parent's 2011 iMac to Sierra. As I logged in after the update, the iMac started freaking out about a Keychain issue. I couldn't access Keychain because I was stuck in the login process. After an hour and a half trying to figure out a work-around, I finally had to wipe and reload the machine from scratch and then restore from a Time Machine backup. 6 hours of my day wasted.

Almost every time a OS update comes out, I have to answer a flurry of set-up questions. Why can't the Mac or device pick up where it left off? This may not sounds like a big deal, but it chews up time and grates on my nerves considering there are 9 devices in my house.

Back when I upgraded to El Capitan, my backups to my Time Capsule stopped working. Troubleshot it for days. Apple troubleshot it like crazy too. I finally gave up and just threw it in the garbage and found a different solution.

I'm constantly having syncing issues between a few of my devices. Have spent hours troubleshooting that.

Has AirDrop ever been reliable for anyone? It sure as heck has not been for me.

Unfortunately I could go on and on. I never ever had a single problem with any of my Apple products from 2006-2012. Now there's always something to fix.

I can't say that I've encountered those issues but I don't have as many devices and don't use keychain or Time Capsule. I agree the set-up questions are not that big of a deal but it is annoying. I've heard Windows 10 is much more stable but I haven't used a Windows machine as my main home computer in years so I don't know how it would stack up with similar updating/synching issues.

 

[Queen6]

Courage, I am building up the courage to switch and buy a Dell. Nearly 20 years of only buying Apple products for my personal life. 20 years of dealing with work arounds for this and that. Cannot even express how much I loved my MacBook Pro. It was the center of digital world, felt like it was a part of me. Have the MacBook now, it's fantastic, but the single port is terrible and using dongles is so unreliable and creates issues while I am importing photos, external drives, etc. Just have to sneeze and the drive becomes disconnected.. While I am traveling, the iPad Pro will become my first point of contact with RAW images, using Adobe CC to send them back to my main PC.

Main PC, that was always my MacBook Pro but now...will that continue? I already purchased the dongles, am ready to buy the Mac but starting to see a real movement away from the Mac, am I imagining this? Did Apple really push it's base too far? Is it only me and a few others? I have 5K to spend, not worried about the price but I am concerned about user experience.

I do not care about the OS anymore, Windows is just as stable or more than MacOS which has become less stable and update are far more intrusive than they used to be. Remember when OS X updates didn't even require a reboot?

Since most services are cloud based these days and Adobe products are nearly the same across platforms, the OS is becoming less and less important and more of a background thing.

The File System on the Mac is terrible..slow..and LEGACY FROM OS 9. Love when Apple gets snobby about legacy (USB-A) and they are still using a file system that is ancient and not modern.

A lot has been said here in this forum. A lot of enthusiast are still backing the Apple train...and I want to but it's really hard right now. I had been waiting a long time and it's far from the hardware I want. It's like Apple is putting lipstick on a pig and telling me she's a pro.

As I lay on my back right now, on a trip, dumping my photos into my MacBook via dongle. I am frozen and cannot move for fear that the hard drive or sd card reader will fail via dongle hell. It happened earlier and I had to repair my drive. This would be so easy with an SD card reader and bigger internal storage. I can only imagine efverytime I want to import to my rMBP without SD card reader. Oh .. my 5D4 has WIFI, let me send 256GB of files wirelessly to my Mac, haha haha Phil, you are too funny.

The Dell Precision line is calling my name... do I have the courage? Am I alone?

No you far from being alone, I switched from a 2014, 13" rMBP to a Microsoft i7 Surface Book, literally with a few days the 2016 MBP announcement. My comments on the Surface Book are mostly here, as are several others. So far the Surface Book has yet to disappoint. Likely My 15" Retina will also be replaced by Windows based hardware, unless Apple sorts itself out.

FWIW I also have a 2015 1.2 rMB, I agree after over a year of use the muti-port adaptor can and does disconnect very easily. My last business trip was especially frustrating as the only effective connectivity was via ethernet, requiring Apple`s muti-port adaptor and a USB A to RJ45, lost count how many times I was cut from the network. None of my USB A machines or my Samsung TabPro S (USB C only) exhibit the same behaviour, nor do I consider the usage of the rMBP`s port excessive, just as and when required.

Dongles requiring "logic""are the very last thing you want, as people are already finding that "all dongles are not equal"; with absolute certainty my 2015 rMB & 2016 Samsung TabPro s muti-port adaptors are not interchangeable, yet both are USB C. This now represents a nightmare for the consumer with the only certain path being to buy directly from the manufacturer of the device, at whatever the price. Dongles & adaptors are little more than another revenue stream for Apple; being now near mandatory, lost requires replacement, coupled with very significant margins and we will be stuck with them for years to come, unless you have the luxury of 100% control of your computing environment.

I depend on my hardware for my living, therefore it "must" be relevant & current, in many serious engineering streams Apple`s Wireless & USB C only world is little more than a pipe dream. As for comparing a touch enabled dynamic hot key bar to displays that are fully Touch & Pen enabled, no just no, even Steve Job`s famous Reality Distortion Field fails miserably to generate one iota of the suspension of disbelief required to think this paradigm is remotely believable...

What Apple has forgotten is that frequently the professional user is frequently the catalyst for many other sales; bottom line is if I don't "buy" into the Mac, nor will my business, family & some friends. I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who is a professional designer, her first words were expressing interest in the upcoming Studio and she has used Mac`s exclusively for years, and so it spreads Core Rot...

Q-6

 

[flo_west]

Well I decided also this year to never buy a Dell in my life anymore.
In my office we all have Dell xps 13 inch models and a lot of them trouble at different areas. Mine is now 3 years old but the touch pad is just bad (even though it should be better now). A lot have also coil whining or very loud fan wheels. They have a trick to push hardly on the back of the laptop to skip the loud fan noise. I also got issues with my WiFi in which I got ping peaks.
So what is Dell saying to this? (this is the reason I avoid them)
'Well you upgraded to Windows 10 which is not supported. Please go back to Windows 8 - not even Windows 8.1 and then we can give you support. The company which provides us the drivers for the WiFi chip has not officially released Windows 10 drivers for that model '

So that's the point where I said bye bye

 

[hj576]

And here I am doing the exact opposite. I have always used windows based machines (Desktops, Laptops), and The New Macbook Pro 13 inch w/o Touchbar will be my first Mac OS and Apple product.

Now the story is different for me though, I have never used a flagship/higher end Laptop, my current Laptop is a HP Probook 450 G0 and the one before this was a Probook 4520s.

I wanted to move to a higher end laptop this time, preferably something small, durable and with excellent battery life. I have been saving money since the start of the year and have pushed my update back since march waiting for the new Macbook Pro.
My choice was between Macbook Pro and Dell XPS 13 as both seemed to perfectly fit my demands
I wont lie, seeing the keynote I was quite disappointed due to the high price. And the first thing i did was head over to Dell's website. I decided to check out the prices of XPS 13 inch , Windows 10, Kaby Lake i5, 8GB RAM and 256 GB SSD. What i found was surprising, that after tax, the machine cost me 1500 Euro here in Netherlands. while The New Macbook Pro 13 inc w/o touch bar with educational discount costs me 1590 Euro.

Besides the specs, my other reason for moving to Apple was the OS. Now I have used Windows since the days of windows 98, Vista is I guess the only Windows OS I have not used, and I am quite comfortable with it. Yes it has its issues (BSOD !!!! though I have seen it i guess twice on Windows 10 in 2 years I guess) Drivers Crashing (The display drivers on my Probook 4520s crashed all the time) Generally just slowing down after a while being forced to sit through an update when you decided to shut down your PC. But I dont mind it and it serves me quite well beside the mentioned issues, the biggest reason MAC OS sounds appealing to me is because its UNIX Based. I am a computer science student, currently in 2nd year of my Masters. For my assignments/projects I usually need to run my code on clusters, and for that I have to dual boot into a Linux Distro (currently using Elementary OS),and this is what I hate the most. For daily use, elementary OS is not enough for me and for my education/profession Windows does not provide the features (I know BASH is now part of windows with the anniversary update, but its cumbersome to use on Windows). Mac OS at least from my limited experience, seems both powerful enough to be my everyday OS and has enough UNIX support to be useful for my studies. And I came to this conclusion after numerous of my friends made the move to apple products and are super happy with the transition. Now I finally have the $$ to buy an expensive machine, So i am taking the risk

lets see how it turns out.
Would be nice, that if you move to a windows laptop, after sometime we can have a post that discuss how the transition was for both of us

 

[bcave098]

Well I decided also this year to never buy a Dell in my life anymore.
In my office we all have Dell xps 13 inch models and a lot of them trouble at different areas. Mine is now 3 years old but the touch pad is just bad (even though it should be better now). A lot have also coil whining or very loud fan wheels. They have a trick to push hardly on the back of the laptop to skip the loud fan noise. I also got issues with my WiFi in which I got ping peaks.
So what is Dell saying to this? (this is the reason I avoid them)
'Well you upgraded to Windows 10 which is not supported. Please go back to Windows 8 - not even Windows 8.1 and then we can give you support. The company which provides us the drivers for the WiFi chip has not officially released Windows 10 drivers for that model '

So that's the point where I said bye bye

I get that feeling. I had a Dell laptop (don't ask me which one, I never remember the model numbers but it wasn't an XPS) that came with Windows 8. It could never stay connected to Wi-Fi. It would always say it's connected, everything looking good, but no Internet. I eventually had to buy a $7 Wi-Fi dongle from monoprice which let me connect without an issue.

 

[itsamacthing]

So I'm on a trip, took my MacBook with me to download my photos from my 5D4. I actually got the new iPad Pro to take my RAW images from my 5D4 but Apple is not compatible with the new RAW format from the 5D4. So sending photos directly into Lightroom via this dongle... typical dongle hell. First off, cannot charge at the same time.. okay, no big deal. But the drives keeps getting disconnected after a little while, causing directly damage. So much so, that I had to buy Disk Warrior last night and repair my drive. Would feel better if I had a backup, but that has been hard since I can only backup via wifi (which is so great Phil), and after a month, my MacBook and 2TB external drive is still not finished backing up to my Time Capsule.

This is the the kind of situation that Apple is putting pro users into...If my MacBook had an SD card reader, and another port for changing, then I wouldn't be in this situation but again, its about looks, size, and not about performance and utility anymore.

I want to buy the MacBook pro, no joke the money has been in my safe in an envelop for 3 years now.. almost like a personal joke. But is this the kind of experience I am going to have? I already purchased the SD card reader off the Apple site, the TB2 to 3 converter for my OWC TB2 external drive bay, am really ready to buy...but 32gb of ram? no SD card reader? No CUDA nvidia with Adobe? Not sure if you guys know this, but Adobe works MUCH better with NVIDIA graphics.

I use Windows 8.1 next to my iMac all day long... I have been leaning on my Windows machine more and more for work and iMac has become a juke box.. great for iMessage, some email and web. O yea, 1password. Honestly, so nervous to drop 5k on a Dell, not so nervous about doing the same with Apple but this user experience with Dongles is HORRIBLE and unreliable.

To the comment above that I was trolling, you have no idea how wrong you are, but I think there are plenty of genuine people in this forum who will understand me. I have not bought a PC for personal use since around 1999, IBM T23... I am a massive Apple guy, if I got a Dell for personal use, it would really be a shocker to those around me.

 

[hj576]

been in my safe in an envelop for 3 years now.

I love such snippets on this forum. Reading this forum has turned into a hobby for me since I ordered my Macbook Pro 😛