Would you feel comfortable buying a new MBP today?

[bill-p]

Yeah, for those who have never seen any issue, it's probably hard for you to imagine.

But 3 years later, I have lived with all 3 generations of the butterfly keyboard, and a MacBook 12" alongside a MacBook Pro 15" at work.

I will only buy a MacBook Pro 2019 model if Apple can turn around and do the following:

1) Make the MacBook Pro as quiet as the 12" MacBook at simple tasks like browsing the web and watching videos. It's clear the 12" is very capable and we don't need max speed on all 4 CPU cores when typing documents. I mean... seriously. My current MBP 2018 sounds like a jet engine when I'm preparing documentation. The 12" is dead quiet. Both allow me to type 90WPM (with an external keyboard).

2) Fire the guy who designed the butterfly keyboard, even if it's Jony Ive himself, and move back to the old but reliable keyboard mechanism. Yes, it's that bad. Yours will fail eventually. I am not kidding. If you have not seen a failure yet, it will come for sure. My 2018 MBP from work just came back from AppleCare with a brand new bottom casing with a brand new keyboard. And I know for sure I will go through AppleCare again in 6 months or so. It's a time bomb.

3) Have thicker display glass. Both my 12" and the work-issued 15" have developed "dents" on the display due to having particles stuck on the bottom case when the lid was closed. The display glass is simply too thin and fragile. Hell, my 12" got small cracks along the edges, even. Apple just replaced the display too under AppleCare so it's pristine for now but I know it'll get dented again eventually.

4) On that note, with the 12", the clearance between the screen and bottom casing is almost non-existent. As a result, the whole keyboard plus trackpad were imprinted on the display and yes, it damaged it. This is poor design simply to save a bit of thickness. On the MBP, there are some signs of the keyboard rubbing on the display but the trackpad remains okay. If paying close to $2K for a computer gets me this, then Apple as a company has gone downhill by quite a lot.

Been thinking of picking up an old MBP from mid 2015 to get over the build quality and keyboard issues. But Mojave 10.14.4 still doesn't support hardware encoding of 4K 10-bit videos, nor does it support hardware decoding of Youtube videos past 1080p.

So what's even the point of having a retina display?

The cat and mouse game between Google and Apple have taken its toll, and now I'm >this< close to moving to Windows for my personal computer over the 12" MacBook. The work-issued MBP will be just... whatever. It's for work.

But lack of support and polish to both the OS and hardware have made me very wary of purchasing another Apple computer.

Meanwhile, even my Android phone can do 4K with Youtube.

 

[pshufd]

My 2010 MB PRO -- when "pro" actually meant something -- is still running like a champ. I wish I could just upgrade the processor, graphics and add some TB ports and it would be good to go for lots while longer.

You could get a MacMini and just VNC into it from your laptop and use it as a cloud server.

 

[Lee_Bo]

2016 15" MBP with Touch Bar, purchased in October 2017. Been used daily since I got it with no keyboard issues, dents on the display, clearance issues, noise / overheating issues, etc.

On the other side of the fence, I also have a Dell Latitude E5440 (since release) that has also given me 0 issues. Only mods there are SSD, maxed memory and backlit keyboard.

 

[michaelsviews]

Down to the nitty gritty. I'm looking at refurbs and was going to go with the 2017 2.8 16GB & 256SSD. Usage medium usage of programming nothing intense at this time. Would it be better or "suggested" to go with the 2018 base model? I figured a quad core over 6 core because I may never use it for what its designed for which IMHO is graphics and sound. In speaking with Apples senior engineers on a problem with a 2017 iMac they did say that they still get MBP Pro's with keyboard problems. I think that once the 2019's come out the 2015's will disappear from the refurbished area.

 

[aajeevlin]

You could get a MacMini and just VNC into it from your laptop and use it as a cloud server.

Have you personally tried something like this? I thought about it for a while. Wasn’t too sure what would be the best laptop to use to VNC into the mini. Any advice? Thanks.

 

[pshufd]

Have you personally tried something like this? I thought about it for a while. Wasn’t too sure what would be the best laptop to use to VNC into the mini. Any advice? Thanks.

This is our work model. We have MacBook Pros for administrative stuff and we VNC to Cloud development servers to do our development work. I have used VNC at home to connect to another system to do something but I don't really have heavy lifting to do at home. The most compute-intensive thing at home is editing videos and I don't do it often and my existing hardware is fine for that. It's easy to do on a LAN. It's some work to set it up on a WAN as you have to open ports and manage security.

I do have a webhost system from DreamHost and I can SSH into that system for Linux work if I want to. There's a place that leases Mac cloud servers too. But I'd rather just do it on my own equipment.

 

[aajeevlin]

This is our work model. We have MacBook Pros for administrative stuff and we VNC to Cloud development servers to do our development work. I have used VNC at home to connect to another system to do something but I don't really have heavy lifting to do at home. The most compute-intensive thing at home is editing videos and I don't do it often and my existing hardware is fine for that. It's easy to do on a LAN. It's some work to set it up on a WAN as you have to open ports and manage security.

I do have a webhost system from DreamHost and I can SSH into that system for Linux work if I want to. There's a place that leases Mac cloud servers too. But I'd rather just do it on my own equipment.

Thanks. I was thinking to not have to deal with the MacBook Pro due to their pricing and the keyboard issue. I was thinking a new Mac mini and some windows based laptop to remote into it?

 

[pshufd]

Thanks. I was thinking to not have to deal with the MacBook Pro due to their pricing and the keyboard issue. I was thinking a new Mac mini and some windows based laptop to remote into it?

There is a third-party that makes software so that the Mac can become a Remote Desktop server for Windows clients. You can also just run a VNC server - I think that the Mac comes with one on the Mac side and use a Windows VNC client.