Hi it's been almost two weeks now with my new 13" MBP 10th gen i7, 32 gb RAM, 4 tb SSD and these are my impressions.
The first few days were terrible because the machine was seriously always making super loud fan noise. Keep in mind that I didn't make an automatic migration but I transferred my data manually because my iMac was acting strange and didn't want to risk ruining a new machine with migrating malware from my previous machine.
I bought the 4tb version for a reason, it's I have a lot of data (mostly photographs), therefore it's to be expected a lot of background indexing activity, time machine automated backup on, dropbox (huge one) sync.
On top of that I was installing all the applications, virtual machines, etc.
Therefore this part of my usage was somehow to be excused for being "noisy".
After that was over, I noticed a lot of seemingly random noise from the fans. Keep in mind that this machine has two fans that run from 1300 rpm to 6300 rpm. When they are at 1300 up to 2500 they are virtually inaudible. When they are up to 3.800 they are audible but completely bearable. When they are from 4k upwards they are always on your mind and when they peak at 6300 it's really intrusive and difficult to ignore.
80% of my time on the Mac is spent working with an external 5k display (the excellent LG 5k Ultrafine) with multiple desktops, multiple mail clients open, a windows 10 pro virtual machine running outlook, many documents in preview, many documents in word, many browser windows, all open at the same time. Everything runs beautifully and quite smoothly even with this kind of load. Just some of the coherence interface on windows 10 is laggy, but usable.
Well, when I do this, as I'm doing this right now, the fans are at 1400 rpm and it's really a joy to work with this machine.
20% of my time I do something that makes the fans speed up: watch a 4k video on YouTube, adding to the situation above other processes (such as editing raw files, even light editing, in Lightroom), using badly written apps (such as certain table top games on Steam, or running through the browser).
These use cases, depending on how strong the requests on the machine, on my discipline in closing other processes etc. might ramp up the fans up to full speed. For example, 4k videos on YouTube, regardless if it's the only process running, always make the fans ramp up A LOT. The same with badly written apps I mentioned before.
When this happens, I really understand why Apple chose to switch to Apple Silicon. I mean: we have been watching hi res video on iPhones and iPads for years now, and they have much less space to dissipate heat than a laptop. It is simply inconceivable that watching a YouTube video today should make you want to change your laptop due to the noise it makes with the fans.
Yesteday, watching the WWDC keynote through apple's own streaming system netted my a 4800 rpm fan noise: loud but still not I want to get out of the room loud. But still it felt unnecessarily loud for what it was.
Now that the elephant in the room has been acknowledged, let's talk about the rest of the laptop.
keyboard is ok. better than latest versions but still significantly worse than, say, Lenovo thinkpad keyboards which are really a golden standard for laptop keyboards.
touchpad is magnificent, way ahead of pc touchpad and sometimes even better than a mouse.
Touch Bar is useless when not disturbing, as when you touch it by accident.
battery life I still have not had time to test seriously, although from a first exam it seems around 5 hours even with light usage. This is something that should be kept in mind. For me, not a problem as most of the time I work plugged in.
performance: my previous iMac was a 2015 retina 27" 5k with a four core 3,5 ghz processor, 24gb ram and a (terrible) 3tb fusion drive. This machine feels about 30-40% faster than that machine. It's really a very fast machine for my kind of work. (office, web, photo editing). I don't do video, nor do I play games (except for table top games) so don't need a dedicated video card.
When working in Lightroom this machine is a beast: even batch photo editing of medium raw files (24megapixels) happens super fast and it's really really nice to work with.
When dealing with a lot of multitasking this machine keeps up with a lot of stuff going on at the same time. Ok once I tried to push it doing medium heavy photo editing, multiple desktops (with lg 5k as external monitor but with the laptop screen as second display), office work, a 5k YouTube video and windows 10 pro in parallels. The fans were screaming but the machine was still usable, although I felt this to be like the most the machine can handle. I tried opening an 8k video and it couldn't even load it (even though I'm not sure if I have a slow connection problem because maybe it wasn't buffering quickly enough).
What else? Oh yes, the infamous usb 2.0 problem. Well I have no usb 2.0 peripherals nor do I plan to buy any so this issue does not affect me.
Style? This laptop must be the most beautiful portable computer I have ever owned. And I had the (infamous) Apple Powerbook G4 Titanium.
Let me know if you have any specific questions.
EDIT: sometimes I get situations where an app (word or safari) stops working. I force quit and then try to reopen it but it just bounces on the dock without reopening. Shortly after the problem becomes a spinning beachball system-wise and I'm forced to restart. I think it's software related.
My history: my first Macintosh was a Macintosh II, then I some Motorola 68k series powerbooks, power Mac g3 Yosemite, powerbook g3, powerbook g4 titanium, powerbook g4 aluminum 12", a lot of colored iMac g3s, powermac g4 cube, etc etc. until the newest hardware...
My favorite laptop of all time? The powerbook g4 aluminum 12", a perfect mix of power and portability with ZERO problems, still perfectly working today, never failed me.
