Edit: As I was composing this, I did some video editing in FCPX. Since then, my Mac has been throttled to hell. I closed out FCPX, it’s under 60C, why am I stuck at 800Mhz!?
So I’ve been using this for a little over a day now and wanted to give my initial impressions. I think I’m leaning towards keeping this, even despite the annoyances I’ll mention below. Because at the end of the day, all I really care about is performance and this performs spectacularly.
I picked up the mid-2018 15” MBP with an 8th generation 2.2Ghz I7 processor (Coffee Lake), 256GB SSD, and 16GB of RAM. I am exchanging this tomorrow when the refurb I ordered arrives. I ordered a mid-2018 15” refurb MBP through Apple with an 8th generation 2.6Ghz i7 processor (Coffee Lake), 512GB SSD, and 16GB of RAM. And the 560X.
First off, let me mention my old computer, a 2015 15” MBP with a 4th generation 2.2Ghz i7 (Haswell), 512GB SSD, and 16GB of RAM. It’s a great machine. But I just find that it chokes with multitasking. Like if I have Final Cut up, everything else is slowed to a crawl.
This computer is more than 50% more powerful than my 2015, which is no slouch either. The extra 2 cores make multitasking much quicker. It’s weird, I thought my bottleneck was RAM, even though my RAM usage rarely went above 70% of 16GB. I never once considered that the CPU was my bottleneck because it’s an extremely powerful CPU with 4 cores, that would be ridiculous. But it’s true.
USB-c. I don’t mind it as much as I thought I would. I think having a USB-C to USB-A dongle alway attached to my computer will solve what I jokingly call the “slutty computer problem.” How after a while, your USB ports don’t grip as well as they used to so even bumping your machine could cause a disconnect. Not fun while transferring data!
I will say that I am going to see if I can get one of those magnetic USB-c adapters because the lack of a magnetic Magsafe connector worries me. I am ALWAYS tripping over the AC adapter.
The touch bar. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I thought it would be entirely useless. It’s alright but I just find myself asking why? Apple didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. My big issue with it is that I keep accidentally hitting Touch Bar buttons while typing. Anyone know if there are any 3rd party tools to disable the Touch Bar while typing? Or even a script. The basic logic being
if (key.pressed_In_Last_250ms) //250ms is an example, could be anything.
{ touchBar.disable();}
else
{touchBar.enable();}
I ended up “disabling” the touch bar so that it only displays the old keys. And I swapped out Siri for Spotlight because Siri has been neglected since 2011 and I think she might have dementia.
The butterfly keys. This is the 3rd gen, right? I actually don’t hate it. I tried the butterfly keyboard in the apple store for the 1st and 2nd gens and hated them. It reminded me almost of those Surface keyboards that are entirely electronic. There was very little give to the keys when pressed. This keyboard is better. I still prefer the old keyboard (from 2008-2015), but this isn’t that bad.
Touch ID. I actually did not even realize it had Touch ID until after I had bought the MacBook Pro. It works well, on par with the last/current gens prior to getting rid of it for Face ID. I can’t help but feel like this is a lame duck model prior to getting Face ID. Because while I’m sure the current models could support Face ID, you KNOW they will make it a new model exclusive.
