UPDATE: Well... I give up on Apple, sort of.

[NJRonbo]

After several decades I gave up on Apple both profehinally and privately, sick and tired of the mistakes, errors & excuses, mostly the lack of any serious delivery...

In my realm the customer "speaks volumes" something Apple has long since forgotten, as a paying client I don't expect such nonsense as keyboards failing due to poor design or excessive throttling again due to poor design and or populous usage....

Done & Dusted, revenue you wont be making, spin that how you will...

Q-6

What did you switch to? What hardware are you using now?

 

[Mike Boreham]

Got it directly from the relationship specialist. Cant buy it after plus anymore. Sucks...

So nothing in writing then? no links ? and no-one else here seems to have heard about this very significant change?

Doesn't sound like a good reason for giving up on Apple...at least at this point.

 

[vemac575]

So nothing in writing then? no links ? and no-one else here seems to have heard about this very significant change?

Doesn't sound like a good reason for giving up on Apple...at least at this point.

Dude, it’s in the keynote. I’m just saying, even the relationshit specialists are stuck with no options.

 

[BeatWilson]

ive been an ableton user on and off for years. i know someone that uses logic but its just like every other daw. it doesnt offer anything special. id say buy a pc desktop with ableton and call it a day. if you absolutly need portability and you dont use it for Serato or to DJ then you should be fine with a PC Laptop

The only reason i use a mac is because i use serato and i take djing serious sometimes. thats about it. otherwise its not worth the price. the gpu's and thermals are usually garbage.

 

[Queen6]

What did you switch to? What hardware are you using now?

Switched professionally in 2016, went through several brands including Microsoft. Right now have an ASUS 17" ROG notebook as it offers performance & usability without excessive compromise.

Have a UMPC 2in1 for on the go when I'm in the field, as for Apple once 100% today zero as their ecosystem fails if the notebooks are little more than lifestyle products with depreciated reliability, usability & performance...

Generally the hardware reflects my current project and the associated mobility need.

Q-6

 

[Jimmy James]

AppleCare is just like any other insurance and it is priced such that Apple will not lose money.

The main thing that the high cost of AppleCare shows is that many people are using their AppleCare (i.e. the laptops are not reliable).

This is true. I work in insurance. Pricing and terms are adjusted according to risk. If one has changed it means there is also a change in the frequency and/or severity of claims.

 

[OxCxDx]

Switched professionally in 2016, went through several brands including Microsoft. Right now have an ASUS 17" ROG notebook as it offers performance & usability without excessive compromise.

Also, assuming some upgradability as well?

 

[Mike Boreham]

Dude, it’s in the keynote. I’m just saying, even the relationshit specialists are stuck with no options.

I must be misunderstanding you. I can't find any mention of Applecare being axed anywhere except in this thread. Perhaps someone else can clarify?

 

[vemac575]

Yeah i'm hoping the same. Equally guilty of buying the products while being pissed off at a large number of ridiculous decisions. Apple seems to think we buy Macbook Pro-s to look at them. We actually need to work on those things Apple. 4 ports (well, actually JUST 3 since we also have a power cable) for everything. So we need to buy hundreds of dollars worth of dongles and extra cables.

Thinking of buying the new Macbook pro 15 inch as well. But what is the best option to make sure i don't get heat issues and blowing fans?

And Apple care?.. 450,-- is a ridiculous amount of money for **** that just needs to work. And then you even have an own risk of 259,-. I don't know. Some of this stuff is infuriating. But i also use Logic Pro X and so does the rest of my band.

Well, I would get the new ones. They are 8 cores with a lower clock speed so they wont over heat. They came out just 3 months after I bought mine... SO PISSED.

Personally, I not only don't mind the 4 TB three ports, I actually prefer them. I only had to buy one do all dongle and the rest was just cables. I don't know about hundreds of dollars, I probably only spent a couple hundred and also bought the OWC TB3 dock.
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If your MBP developed this problem less than one year after you purchased it, whether you had AppleCare or not, one would expect a big company to stand behind its products and replace or repair it. To have an expensive item exhibit a defect and to have the company basically say "well, that's the length of time our crappy machines stay defect-free, so tough luck" is a sad indication of how low Apple has fallen. Disgusting, immoral but will have little to no impact on the sheep who continue to worship at the Cupertino altar.

Some of us HAVE to use Macs...
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ive been an ableton user on and off for years. i know someone that uses logic but its just like every other daw. it doesnt offer anything special. id say buy a pc desktop with ableton and call it a day. if you absolutly need portability and you dont use it for Serato or to DJ then you should be fine with a PC Laptop

The only reason i use a mac is because i use serato and i take djing serious sometimes. thats about it. otherwise its not worth the price. the gpu's and thermals are usually garbage.

I appreciate it but I use Ableton too and it's way different than logic. I don't have time to be learning a new DAW when I am so fast in logic from using it for over a decade, that it is second nature to do everything. Has to be Logic. Plus there are some things logic offers that other DAWs don't. Some DAWs are definitely more special than others.

 

[throAU]

BUY THE NEW ONE. Yep, and that's where the "sort of" comes in. I have been using Logic Pro X for years and it is not on a PC. So I will just take it in the rear and buy another Mac WITH the Applecare +, and deal with whatever issues arise from these machines that are now supposed to be fancy, at all cost to quality.

Anyway... I just needed to rant. The day Jobs died, I knew this was coming. I hoped these days wouldn't, but they have and I think all of us knew that the honest and customer considerate soul of Apple was Steve, and now that he's gone, it's just another business that cares more about money than it does it's products or customers.

Damn shame...

Dude.

I feel your pain. I feel it is time to try and abandon the Macbook platform though. I pretty much have. So has Apple it would appear.

iPad for personal stuff on a portable, and use a desktop for everything that the iPad can't do. At least you can replace input peripherals on them.

You can replace an ipad keyboard too, ironically enough. Who would have thought.... buying an iPad so you can have an Apple portable with a keyboard that isn't complete trash? But this is where we are at in 2019.

Notebooks from ALL vendors pretty much suck these days.

Unless Apple really pull their finger out with the next Macbook Air/Pro i just don't know if i can convince myself to buy one. Because i have no confidence it won't just be another 2016/2017/2018/2019 pile of garbage. We've heard "oh things are fixed now!" for the past 4 years.

The first year of course was just total radio silence on the problem....

 

[vemac575]

Dude.

I feel your pain. I feel it is time to try and abandon the Macbook platform though. I pretty much have. So has Apple it would appear.

iPad for personal stuff on a portable, and use a desktop for everything that the iPad can't do. At least you can replace input peripherals on them. You can replace an ipad keyboard too, ironically enough.

Notebooks from ALL vendors pretty much suck these days.

Unless Apple really pull their finger out with the next Macbook Air/Pro i just don't know if i can convince myself to buy one. Because i have no confidence it won't just be another 2016/2017/2018/2019 pile of garbage. We've heard "oh things are fixed now!" for the past 4 years.

Trust me I want to abandon Apple so bad. I've been with em so long that at this point it feels like I caught my best friend of 30 years banging my hot wife. That's how betrayed I feel. BUT they have always made things right, so I'm giving these relationship specialists a chance. Right now, they are going to take my mac and repair everything. I told the guy I still will be plagued with the inherent problems of throttling and he seemed open to replacing it with a newer one, we just have to get it in for repairs to start the process.

So this no more warranty up to a year business may not even be relevant to me in the long run, but I'm not the "it's not effecting me so it's ok" type of person. The move to NOT grandfather people in to be able to get a warranty is deeply immoral and unethical, in my opinion and I am about as disgusted with that as I can be.

I'll keep updating the thread as the process goes.

Worse case scenario is they repair the bottom case and internals and it goes to my wife and I get the 8 CORE. I am totally happy with this computer, and it's really only 3 issues, 2 of which directly inhibit my ability to work, that I am worried about.

1. The throttling. Impossible to run projects when they're freezing constantly because of the heat and throttling.

2. The T2 chip is plaguing musicians by not connecting with out usb/midi controllers.

3. Repeating keys. It's not really THAT bad but it's irritating and usually only happens when I'm using it as a laptop and it get real hot.

Other than that, the 8 CORE will solve the first and last issue. The T2 chip is still in that one but I just open the MIDI Setup app and they connect.

 

[throAU]

Trust me I want to abandon Apple so bad. I've been with em so long that at this point it feels like I caught my best friend of 30 years banging my hot wife. That's how betrayed I feel. BUT they have always made things right, so I'm giving these relationship specialists a chance. Right now, they are going to take my mac and repair everything. I told the guy I still will be plagued with the inherent problems of throttling and he seemed open to replacing it with a newer one, we just have to get it in for repairs to start the process.

I get it. I got on board the Apple train quite late (2008), but things were pretty sweet. Even with the 2011 15" macbook issues, it felt like apple actually gave a toss.

The fact you use logic kinda bites a bit - i'd get a mac mini for that (if 6 cores is enough?) and migrate to Linux (or iPad if you want to stay in the apple ecosystem) wholesale for everything else you can.

Unless you have a specific application you need, Linux can do most stuff these days, and then you're not at the mercy of any vendor.

This is what I'm doing. Linux for desktop stuff (including a decent amount of Windows games via steam/proton), iPad for portable stuff.

Mac hardware is pretty dead to me at the moment outside of the Mac Mini. It's either massively overpriced, trash tier (poverty spec GPUs, keyboard issues, amongst others), includes stuff i don't want (a screen on the imac, or a whole bunch of stuff on the Mac Pro) or a combination of all of the above.

Such a shame. For ages my no-brainer suggestion for anyone asking me what laptop to buy was a macbook air or macbook pro (unless they needed some specific windows app). No more.

I think, slowly, Apple is getting their groove back. They improved their 2019 keyboard. They are looking to go back to scissor-keyboards for the upcoming models. They offered more RAM. They know customers were pissed off.

The RAM issue was an intel CPU issue. Intel didn't support LPDDR4 on the CPUs in that class and there was a capacity limit on LPDDR3 DIMMs. I'll give Apple a pass on that - sure it sucked for people but it was mostly intel's fault.

However... the 2019 keyboard still fails.

They may know customers are pissed off, but its been almost 5 years since the start of the butterfly keyboard fiasco and the fact that end users were seeing issues within weeks (a friend jumped on the 12" Macbook week of release and went through three replacement machines inside of 3 months) just says they do not do adequate product testing.

If they don't knock the 2020 lineup out of the park, it will have been 2+ extended-applecare cover model cycles of trash (i.e., end users who buy applecare and upgrade when it runs out will have quite likely gotten two lemons) - and even the most loyal of customers are going to eventually break at that point or shortly thereafter.

 

[SnoFlo]

I used Logic as well. However, after using Apple computers for 13 years I moved on in 2012. Since then I have used Dell and HP mobile workstations. Nothing ever goes wrong with these machines. Also, they come standard with 3-year onsite warranties. My machine has 128GB of RAM (upgraded from 64), has 5 drive bays, and has an upgradeable GPU. Anyway, I switched to Digital Performer and (formerly) Cubase. The switch wasn't easy but it was necessary. Windows 10 is completely fine.

 

[vemac575]

I used Logic as well. However, after using Apple computers for 13 years I moved on in 2012. Since then I have used Dell and HP mobile workstations. Nothing ever goes wrong with these machines. Also, they come standard with 3-year onsite warranties. My machine has 128GB of RAM (upgraded from 64), has 5 drive bays, and has an upgradeable GPU. Anyway, I switched to Digital Performer and (formerly) Cubase. The switch wasn't easy but it was necessary. Windows 10 is completely fine.

So much anxiety even THINKING about doing that. You are very brave. I’m at my wit’s end so the next time Apple decides to give a blatant middle finger to their customers, I may build a hackintosh version of a Mac Mini.

 

[Queen6]

Also, assuming some upgradability as well?

Yep both storage & RAM

Q-6

 

[TohMac]

After reading this thread I better purchase AppleCare. The last mac book pro I had was the 2011 model which I didn't have any problems with. My Dec 2014 iMac is still my work horse. Will ride out this Air and maybe go iMac again next time.

 

[Whackman]

Well, I would get the new ones. They are 8 cores with a lower clock speed so they wont over heat. They came out just 3 months after I bought mine... SO PISSED.

Personally, I not only don't mind the 4 TB three ports, I actually prefer them. I only had to buy one do all dongle and the rest was just cables. I don't know about hundreds of dollars, I probably only spent a couple hundred and also bought the OWC TB3 dock.
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Thanx. A dongle and cables is exactly that: hundreds of dollars, haha. But there are also a lot of Dongle options. Yours seems great buck lacks HDMI, am i correct?

So the more cores will make it less prone to overheating? That's great to hear. So maybe i'm maxing it out.
It's just so much money..

 

[Ries]

The RAM issue was an intel CPU issue. Intel didn't support LPDDR4 on the CPUs in that class and there was a capacity limit on LPDDR3 DIMMs. I'll give Apple a pass on that - sure it sucked for people but it was mostly intel's fault.

Apple said:

"To put more than 16GB of fast RAM into a notebook design at this time would require a memory system that consumes much more power and wouldn’t be efficient enough for a notebook. I hope you check out this new generation MacBook Pro, it really is an incredible system."

Then they gave up and put 32GB DDR4 into the laptop anyway, like they could have from day one.

 

[vemac575]

Thanx. A dongle and cables is exactly that: hundreds of dollars, haha. But there are also a lot of Dongle options. Yours seems great buck lacks HDMI, am i correct?

So the more cores will make it less prone to overheating? That's great to hear. So maybe i'm maxing it out.
It's just so much money..

No, it’s not that it has more CORES, but a lower clock speed. The additional 2 cores make it even more capable even though it has a lower clock speed. Especially since it won’t be throttling.

Mine has no HDMI port but a usb c to hdmi is just as good.

 

[throAU]

Then they gave up and put 32GB DDR4 into the laptop anyway, like they could have from day one.

After intel dropped power consumption some more. But yes, they did eventually give up waiting on intel. This is a big reason they're going to go ARM. Because intel are failing to execute. And make no doubt, Apple can build a really fast ARM cpu of mac or mac pro standard.

It's kinda moot anyway. the big problem with those machines wasn't so much the RAM. the keyboards are complete trash and can't be repaired in a reasonable time frame or at reasonable cost.

 

[Whackman]

No, it’s not that it has more CORES, but a lower clock speed. The additional 2 cores make it even more capable even though it has a lower clock speed. Especially since it won’t be throttling.

Mine has no HDMI port but a usb c to hdmi is just as good.

Sure, i understood that. But thanks for explaining. Will check out some dongles then . Sounds like that could be the best solution.
Is there any consensus about what dongles are best? Some of them fit on the two ports, some are loose..

 

[stevemiller]

i'm worried i may have to give up on apple next time i upgrade, too.

windows still looks and feels clunky to me (i have a desktop at work and my mbp is bootcamped, so yes i have experience), but in terms of actual productivity, the majority of what i do is increasingly at odds with apple's hardware and software strategy (no nvidia/cuda, only metal support, etc).

and then of course is all the bridgeOS crashing, keyboard concerns, etc. sigh.

 

[smbu2000]

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/21/applecare-plus-mac-iphone-60-day-purchase-limit/

As for the Mac, customers who have had their Macs for longer than 60 days but less than a year are not eligible for AppleCare+ but are still able to purchase a standard AppleCare Protection Plan, MacRumors has learned. Apple is only offering AppleCare+ for Mac on its website, so customers will need to call in to Apple Support to make the standard AppleCare purchase. Standard Mac AppleCare is priced at $149 to $349, depending on the machine.

 

[soulreaver99]

Apple makes great phones, tablets, and I really love the AirPods Pro. Also - Apple Customer service is unbeatable.

What has been seriously lacking lately are their desktop and laptops and MacOS is an embarrassment. I actually prefer using the current iteration of Windows 10 over Catalina 9 times out of 10. My main machine now is an MSI GS65 and the only reason I have my MacBook Pro 13 is for Final Cut Pro, Xcode, and the hope that the next release of Mac OS will be great.

Still no touch screen on a MacBook, no official Nvidia support for gaming, and the OS isn't as solid as it used to be. Not sure what is going on but the fans randomly blow like crazy and battery life has been garbage since Catalina. Really tempted to just revert back to Mojave which I thankfully created and saved on a separate partition!

 

[aakshey]

I wondered about this until I saw the VPN/India thing. Our 2018 MBP 15" has the stagelight problem, and we (wrongly, according to every Apple person on the phone) thought we could get Applecare up to a year after the purchase. So we called with a few weeks to go. No amount of pleading got us Applecare, and now the MBP is pretty much a useless $3000 machine -- unless we spring for a $600 repair. We're still waiting for Apple to do something, but they probably won't.

I think you’re confused. AC doesn’t cover damage. And if it’s a warranty issue it’s covered regardless of AC. If not, AC won’t do anything for you, you’ll need AC+.