Does anyone care about my review of the 2016 MacBook Pro 13"? I thought I'd post it here.
I'm typing this on the brand spanking new MacBook Pro 13". I'm getting to test it out for work. One of the things I do is support JAMF, and we'll be prepping it for Sierra imaging/upgrading throughout the organization. We ordered a couple of the new MBPros to have a native Sierra build to test off. We have several engineers, and especially some executives, who are fans of Mac. So even though some of the back-end IT guys roll their eyes and wish we wouldn't have to support Macs, it's still a going concern and my job.
The machine is a joy to hold and look at. The metal is perfectly balanced, and ergonomically a joy to put on a surface and use as a work device. The screen is not as dense in pixels as the new Windows QHD screens, but it somehow looks absolutely perfect to my eyes. The nice Dell XPS and Lenovo machines have great screens, but somehow looking at them I feel like I see those QHD screens are palpably behind glass, and reflect light as such. The highest compliment I can give to Apple is that this screen is the most beautiful I've ever seen.
The new flatter, spread-out keyboard is perfectly comfortable to me. If this a design which they believe will reduce typos, I can get behind it. I know it has annoyed some people. I really don't have a strong opinion beyond that.
I was excited to try out the larger trackpad. I don't feel much difference. I was also interested in trying out the touchbar. In both cases, my thoughts were immediately, oh, that's neat… and now I'm over it.
We already had the VP of the company—and a die-hard Mac lover who insists on using Apple stuff himself—come over and look and say "nope, we're not ordering those. They're too expensive for what they are. The number of dongles we'd have to order is too much, and they aren't plentiful enough."
I'm glad. I hope there is the back-end push against Apple to get a few things in line.
We ordered USB-C dongles, but they're few and far between, and other than the Apple stuff, much of the real solutions are back-ordered or still vapor-ware. So this machine has four USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, but I am using an Apple dongle with USB-C / USB-A / HDMI ports on it.
So to connect this up to the work ethernet (it's not on the domain, so I can't download a certificate for WiFi to it), I have to attach a USB-A -> Ethernet adapter to the USB-C adapter. If I needed to use another USB device, I'd either need more dongles, or to daisy-chain a USB hub to existing dongle, and maybe then put the USB-A ethernet dongle to that dongled hub.
The amount of daisy-chaining is kind of ridiculous. I thought we didn't think we'd have to do this any more after SCSI went away.
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I'm not enthusiastic about touch-screens. I hate touching my screen, or anyone touching my screen. I also happen to be a snob about the fact that a screen with an interface for touching, like the iOS home screen, is configured differently than a desktop metaphor, in which tiny things for artwork or copy are much too precise to be manipulated by fat fingers. But I've used touchscreens on Windows machines, and moving windows around or scrolling, I'll admit, is not merely a gimmick, but useful.
I'm thinking with the touchbar that Apple is going out of their way to not be a touch-OS. I am holding judgement on it for now. I used the fingerprint ID and I agree it's a necessary addition to the line-up. But the fact that things like my ESC key go away at times? That worries me a little.
Apple opted for the software keyboard on iOS to allow it to be changed dynamically with the needs of the software. I was thinking that in a similar way, a "touchbar" could just be a floating palette on the bottom of a touchscreen application, anyway, and essentially be just as configurable as this implementation.
If the touchbar were truly more economical, I'd understand it. But it already adds $300 to the base price, which is around what the extra price for a QHD touchscreen is for PC models. It may be that Apple still finds this economical, and their mark-up is just very high. That's all very well, but they'll be judged on their output here, not their internal margins.
I'm not saying it's a bust. I got into the terminal, and it actually has instant access to man pages from the touchbar as I type, which is kind of interesting. I can see that this has potential. And they did think this through, because the touchbar is at a great angle just between my fingers and the screen, where it is intuitive to choose some useful shortcut commands. I'm just saying that for everything about it that seems cool, I could imagine it could easily have been implemented with a touchscreen, anyway. I'm not saying I want them to do it that way, either, but it might have been a "good enough" solution that will be implemented by touch-screen PCs in imitation that could more widely adopted. Even if I loved the touchbar, if it were just a software implementation on the bottom of a touchscreen, I think I'd be fine with it.
Obviously, if this is now a thing, Apple would have to face continuing to implement this across the line, or make a decision to fragment their interface. Unless we consistently see the touchbar in external keyboards or third-party keyboards. And that seems like a lot to expect.
As configured, this laptop is at least $2100 with 16GB of memory. (That's the cost without counting applecare or fistfulls of dongles.) Lenovo's X1 Carbon and Dell's XPS both are expensive, but awesome machines that still come just under that. So good equipment is competitive, and the Mac is still a premium cost.
So the Macs are still Skylake, but have a max of 16GB of DDR3. The new Dells are Kaby Lake, but max out at 8GB. Between the two, I'd still rather have more memory than the newer chip based on how I work.
The key thing is, I don't think Windows and MacOS have ever both been as close in user experience. They both have similar "flat" interfaces. They both incorporate touch, exposé, app stores, spoken assistants, recovery partitions, the same Intel chips, integrate the same cloud apps, run most of the same important third-party apps, mainly are trying to route their customer base to service/subscription models for their soft products, and both are converging on using things like USB-C on the hardware side.
MacOS has ****** window snapping, and Windows still doesn't have a tiled file explorer. But both of them are only an update (or third-party utility) from having them and converging even more so.
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I like the direction of where USB-C is going. I even am fine with it only being USB-C to keep it thin and consistent. I hate seeing mag-safe go. (I'm fine with the smug, glowing Apple logo going away.) If they're serious about one port to rule them all, I'm snorting the dry kool-aid powder and I'd say it's worth it to make a push for USB-C. However, at the cost that it is, I wish that Apple would at least have included, say, a pass-through USB-C hub with two USB-A ports and a TB2/MDP port with the pro machine, just to say to the user base, "hey, we understand you probably invested heavily in these form factors we adopted for many years." My dongle with one USB-A port feels a little bit like holding back just enough to frustrate me.
Hell, they kept Firewire 400 and 800 ports on their machines for several iterations. And it made sense. Lots of good audio gear was FireWire 400. And I knew photographers who said they might be the only people who use FW 800, but they depended on it. Apple stopped putting Firewire on their machines in 2012 as they adopted USB-3 as I recall.
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And in the course of typing this email, my palm has gone over the trackpad and flung my cursor far and wide. Three times by my count. Not perfect. I have to say I love, love, love, my Magic Trackpad 2, but this larger trackpad makes me shrug. If they lost a few centimeters on it to keep the physical function keys along with the touchbar, I would prefer it.
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I'm thinking about purchasing computers for home use for music and video editing. I'm naturally inclined toward a Mac. I also like development, and I'm always going to be running virtual machines in VMWare or VirtualBox. (Or HyperV. Ugh) I am wary of the touchbar and wonder what Apple's plan is, here. As ever, I'm a little wary of what exactly Apple is doing with their Mac line-up.
I haven't run a VM on it, yet, but when the keys are captured by, say, CentOS, will I continue to have my ESC and F2 keys in Linux, which are absolutely necessary? That alone could certainly be a dealbreaker for a dedicated developer.
Like my organization, which ordinarily spends millions on Apple gear every year, I want to see a little more out of Apple before I would spend my own money. The USB-C works really well, and, while I sigh a little forlorn, I will say: no mag-safe, no cry.
