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And typing on Dell is only slightly better than typing on pizza.

To me, typing on the new MBP felt like typing on a slate. My fingers hurt after using it for a while.

Also, yesterday I tried quite a few mechanical keyboards. They are cool - they combine the long travel with that clicky sound, but not for me. However, I noticed how loud they all are. Not a problem with me, but it did occur to me that no one ever complained how mechanical keyboards are loud, but I've read dozens of cries how the MBP keyboard is somehow "loud".
Mechanical keyboards are mostly loud. Even the brown key ones. But I think I missed why you are bringing that up?
There are very few laptops that have a mechanical keyboard. Mechanical keyboards are mostly standalone. They are meant to be loud (clicky)..they are meant to provide pure bliss :) On a laptop, the new MBPs keyboards are loud compared to the others...even compared to previous generation MBPs.

On the other hand, Apple is doing a second and improved generation of a completely new design, paying attention to it, trying something new (and making what is, in my opinion, the most pleasurable typing experience on a laptop, ever) - and people are crying about it.
Just because Apple tried to something new does not mean that its customers are obliged to like it. It is something new but it does not mean that customers are obliged to like it. IMO, the keyboard on the new MBP sux but it has to be the way it is cause Apple is obsessed with making their laptops thin. They obviously can't admit to the crap they call the keyboard. So they wrapped it in a marketing blitz and left it out as fodder for us sheeple to consume.

It would have been awesome if they could put in the gold standard of keyboards in the MBP - spill resistant Thinkpad-like keyboards. Now these have been thought through well by IBM and it is easy for most customers to like them. Customers dont like them because IBM developed them, customers like them because it is a damn good keyboard! Period!
 
To be honest I have been a PC guy since 2009. Before that I was on a Macbook. The white model with an Intel Core 2 duo. It was a damn nice machine. Never made any noise when I was doing work on it, or when i was surfing the web. It got warm, and the fans would kick in when it was rendering out a video. But that is it. I needed a PC the following year and went with this Sager and that thing was a beast for a 15 inch notebook. After that I have owned some large gaming desktops and they have all performed wonderfully. I am currently using an Origin PC that has some fancy lights, an intel core i7, 970gtx and 16 gigs of ram. It runs great obviously but its loud, and to be honest, the older I got the busier i am getting and moving away from PC gaming.

This past fall I got the 13 inch non touch bar MBP and I really like this machine. I didnt really use it as my main machine as I thought it would be slower. Before this i had a Surface pro 4, however, as a web designer i think I should try and be in 2 ecosystems if i can. I had to use the surface last year as my main device for a few weeks because my origin pc's motherboard went. It wasnt all that great. Outputting the image to an external monitor didnt look that great, the fans turned on a lot. It was a bit slow sometimes loading or playing a youtube video.

Yesterday it was really hot in Jersey, and my Origin PC's fans were loud as ****. It does this when the room temperature gets to about 80. Well I decided to not let my room get to hot and opted to use the MBP as my main machine for the day. I was cautious at first. Didnt really want to do it, but the fans in my PC were driving me nuts and i wanted to learn some coding and didnt feel like sweating my balls off to do it. I turned it off and started using the macbook pro and the more I used it I started to like it more and more. I wasnt slowing down the machine, it didnt run too hot if at all, and the memory usage never got that high even though i am only on 8 gig. I was impressed so last minute, I went to best buy and bought the HDMI media adapter for the macbook pro from Apple, plugged it into my 2k monitor and it outputted the image really well. Again no fan noise, and memory usage was about half according to istat.

Right now I have Chrome open with over 30 tabs, Safari with 3, outlook, tweetdeck, calendar, messages, lastpass, kindle reader, photoshop, dreamweaver, both with files open, and itunes. No fans noise, no heat or signs of it getting too slow. I even have 6 tabs open with 1080p youtube videos about to play. Also it is much cooler today and i decided to keep using this as my main the whole day. Might even do it for longer. I would like to see if the Dell can handle all this without boosting a fan, or consuming the same amount of power.

Point is for this articles use case isnt all that great. Most of this is even subjective about the keyboard, as I am using it and really dont mind it at all. Its really nice. The benchmarks are what they are, however i never used a mac for gaming and never will, so the gpu scores are not relevant for me at all. I think by fall 2018 I will ditch the desktop in favor of a MBP 15 inch with a gpu. Hopefully Apple will drop the prices a bit and the specs will obviously be higher. This year i have a few purchases that I need to make.
 
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Macs are PCs too. Even if you get rid of the subjective stuff (which a LOT of people would agree with based on what I've seen here and elsewhere), the MBP is weaker in nearly every measurable performance metric. Sure it has faster Thunderbolt 3, but since that's all it has you have to carry around dongles to do anything with it. The CPU is slower and older, it can't handle as much memory, it has a terrible graphics card, an old processor and it has less storage. It's smaller and lighter at the expense of repairability and upgradability.

I'm not saying the Dell is perfect... i'm saying this iteration of the MBP is a weak effort put out by an arrogant company that doesn't have a hell of a lot of respect for it's users. I remember when the MBP was so good that PC publications were saying it was a better Windows notebook than anything else on the market.
Have fun with that windows machine :)
[doublepost=1493646009][/doublepost]
To me, typing on the new MBP felt like typing on a slate. My fingers hurt after using it for a while.


Mechanical keyboards are mostly loud. Even the brown key ones. But I think I missed why you are bringing that up?
There are very few laptops that have a mechanical keyboard. Mechanical keyboards are mostly standalone. They are meant to be loud (clicky)..they are meant to provide pure bliss :) On a laptop, the new MBPs keyboards are loud compared to the others...even compared to previous generation MBPs.


Just because Apple tried to something new does not mean that its customers are obliged to like it. It is something new but it does not mean that customers are obliged to like it. IMO, the keyboard on the new MBP sux but it has to be the way it is cause Apple is obsessed with making their laptops thin. They obviously can't admit to the crap they call the keyboard. So they wrapped it in a marketing blitz and left it out as fodder for us sheeple to consume.

It would have been awesome if they could put in the gold standard of keyboards in the MBP - spill resistant Thinkpad-like keyboards. Now these have been thought through well by IBM and it is easy for most customers to like them. Customers dont like them because IBM developed them, customers like them because it is a damn good keyboard! Period!

The keyboard on the new MBP is the best keyboard I've ever used in my life. Maybe the MacBook keyboard is like slate, but the Butterfly 2 is perfection. But to each his own
 
I am not going to argue with the review. It actually read like it was unbiased. The only area where I find hard to believe is the track pad. I like the new size, and it feels as good as ever on the 2016, so might be personal preference. But I think most of us know the Dell XPS is a heck of a machine. This is good for the MacBook Pro crowd. Without good competition what is going to push Apple to do better.
 
Mechanical keyboards are mostly loud. Even the brown key ones. But I think I missed why you are bringing that up?
There are very few laptops that have a mechanical keyboard. Mechanical keyboards are mostly standalone. They are meant to be loud (clicky)..they are meant to provide pure bliss :) On a laptop, the new MBPs keyboards are loud compared to the others...even compared to previous generation MBPs.

So, you decided that it's - for some reason - ok for mechanical keyboards to be loud, but not for laptop ones? Because "they are meant to be loud" and that is bliss?

Ok, so MBP keyboards are louder than most laptops. So? The sound is satisfying and the keyboard feels great. Nothing wrong with that.
[doublepost=1493661486][/doublepost]
Started with a comparison of the ports was the the killer blow already. Yes  are dicks for not including more ports.

How many ports do you want? 6 TB ports? Sure, if they manage to put as many PCIe lanes for that.

Oh, you meant legacy ports? No, it's the correct move. The only way to advance the tech. Add just one USB-A port to Macs, and you'll postpone the whole transition by at least 10 years. I only hope PC world catches on, and that the 2018 XPS comes with just USB-C, also the next Surface, etc. The sooner, the better.
 
Have fun with that windows machine :)
[doublepost=1493646009][/doublepost]

The keyboard on the new MBP is the best keyboard I've ever used in my life. Maybe the MacBook keyboard is like slate, but the Butterfly 2 is perfection. But to each his own

You think you're joking, but I've left Apple before when they weren't building a machine I wanted. I bought a top of the line Vaio which was 3lbs with a bluray drive, a 1080p 13" screen, quad core processor and everything else the 15" MacBook pro had at the time. OS X is great, but Windows 7 and now 10 aren't far behind, and are actually ahead in some areas. A big part of why I came back was the iPhone integration with iMessage and the fact that iTunes on windows makes me want to punch someone.
 
lots of stuff

This is the thing a lot of people don't get.

If you aren't gaming, for a PORTABLE machine, benchmarks are mostly irrelevant. They all use the same or similar CPUs, same/similar RAM, etc.

The big differences to look for are:
- trackpad
- keyboard
- wifi support (dual band? how many antennas?)
- display quality (not just res, but contrast, brightness, colour accuracy, viewing angles, etc.)
- battery life
- software

In all of those factors, IMHO the mac lineup is difficult to beat. Some PC hardware gets close, but then the Windows platform lets it down.

Judging from my experience ** - if you remove gaming from the equation (and again, i'm talking portables here)...
99% of people do not need anything more than a quad core machine.
90% of people will be fine with a dual core
80% of people would have enough power in something like an iPad, if the software support was there

Sure, buying the big clunky machine that wins all the benchmarks might look impressive, but in the real world they have crap battery life, weigh heaps, generate huge amounts of heat, can't be used in aircraft, on public transport, etc.; and unless you have some specific work load that requires that power whilst on the move, you're better of getting a portable machine for your on the go computer (or an iPad) and leaving the massive GPUs and other stuff in a desktop at home.

And for the cost of some of those massive gaming/desktop class GPU machines - you could buy both a desktop and a laptop for similar money to the single machine.


edit:
** Oh, and my experience = 20 years dealing with desktops/laptops/servers and their users in a business environment for a living...
 
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