Posted on 04/20/2018 11:52:18 AM PDT by ImJustAnotherOkie
tech bkmk
Typing this on my 2009 MacBook. It was working great until my kids spilled juice all over the keyboard which I then destroyed trying to take they keys off to clean it. It's still working fine only now I've converted it to a desktop.
I needed a laptop for travel and didn't want to spend the $$$ on another MacBook.
I bought a cheap Lenovo. I love it.
It's actually my first Windows machine in a decade. I'm pretty happy with Windows 10. It kinda works like a Mac!
Lenovo - complete with People’s Liberation Army spyware built right in as a feature?
No thanks. That’s as bad as using Facebook (also Communist Approved.)
Ping
I have a Lenovo. It is the worst piece of computing hardware I have ever owned. It failed while under warranty and Lenovo refused to fix it, even going as far as falsifying the date of purchase by several months. When I produced a receipt proving otherwise they simply stopped all communication. I will never own another Lenovo product again.
Oh, and about that touch function on your Mac... while you were squeezing your forefingers and thumbs together on the touchpad, between my mouse, touchscreen, on-demand speech-to-text, and Cortana, I just did twelve other things.
Sorry, Win 10 light-years ahead.
I’ll never buy a Lenovo, but the interesting part is the realization of what Apple is. 75% of the value for 150% of the cost.
“Big and Ugly too”
not any more. they’ve slimmed the full-size laptops way down, and they’ve always had a line of small handhelds and ultrabook-type lightweights, but these latter two type are VERY expensive, whereas the full-size laptops are only expensive ...
“If you had to go out and drive around Oil Wells, be a Cop, or a Game Warden, it would be tops.”
indeed. or telephone/cable/fiber-optic workers in a ditch, insurance adjusters and the like. that’s what they were intended for, but a laptop is the main tool for my independent support business, so i’ve used toughbooks for many years for my owh laptop.
(Panasonic also makes a line of fully-ruggedized laptops and tables for the military, CIA and the like, but those suckers are EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE!)
No kidding. Substandard hardware at a premium price.
Truth.
Nothing worth flaming over, Apple has lost its way.. its Macbook Pro’s are now anything but PRO. Some of the criticisms of this article are garbage... like not offering a 2 in 1 or touchscreen.. as a professional developer, I don’t care about a touchscreen if I have to move my hands off, or far from the keyboard I am wasting time... So that criticism is pointless.
However, the move to just USBc ports was dump on Apple’s part... and then they compounded it with a touchpad (which BTW the Apple Touchpad interface is a dream... it truly is... any other laptop you need a mouse or trackball to remotely be productive, but the Apple touchpad makes a mouse unnecessary) that you made the size of the titanic for no reason whatsoever, so stray touches by hands register as mouse movements etc... and then added in the “touchbar” gimmick, and yes folks its a pointless gimmick, and you are left wondering WTF Apple?
Compound that with a new keyboard that fails far too often and is unpleasant to use, and well, you have a very expensive product that is of questionable value.
2014 was probably the last great Macbook Pro, other than processor upgrades etc, the negatives for newer models far outway the benefits.
Apple needs to return the magsafe power connector, return the SD card reader, shrink the touchpad, ditch the crap keyboard, forget the touchbar, and ideally at least put an HDMI port on the thing.
Personally I think at least standard HDMI port should be standard, but I doubt they will do that.
I honestly am ready to buy my next machine, but I will not touch windows again, Windows 8 was the last straw.... but with the offerings they currently have, I won’t even think of buying a new Macbook Pro.
The problem is, unless you went out and bought a USBc Monitory you can’t even connect an external monitor to a new Macbook pro without a dongle...... STUPID.
Calling the new macbook pros “PRO” is a joke.
As a professional developer, I can tell you, until Apple undoes some of its stupid decisions with its newer Macbooks, I won’t be upgrading from my 2014 model.
Tried them and find them a complete joke. Faster processors obviously, but the other things they did to them make them far more net negative for me personally.
The Sans HDMI is what’s keeping me away from a new Dell. I’ve really got a problem with Lenovo itself although every feature I’m looking for. Lots to think about for a 2k+ purchase.
Exactly at 2k for buy in, and that’s where the Macbook Pro’s start, its insane that you need to go out and buy a dozen dongles to do anything useful.
Apple has lost its way on its new laptops IMHO....
USBc is great, but its not been adopted remotely universally, and it is now 3 years or so since Apple went to nothing but that...
The MAGSAFE power connector is a great soft product differentiator... you don’t think about it, until that time you or someone else trips over your power cord, and your laptop doesn’t go flying across the room. No external monitor connector built in??? No SD card reader???? Nothing but some USBc ports? And you have to use at least one of them for your power???
Apple IMHO has truly lost its way on its Macbook Pros... and that was before they made the touchpad gargantuan for no real reason and added the gimmick touchbar.
For 2k or more, buyers deserve better.
I will take a mac over a Windows PC any day... and I’ve been doing professional software development for closing in on 30 years now. but the last 3 or so years of decisions around the macbook pro have been TERRIBLE, and clearly are not anything that remotely had their customers needs or desires in mind.
On the Dell side the touch screen is basically useless. I have a docking station at work and 3k monitor / USB keyboard at home. The Windows 8.1 is subpar but I mostly ignore that using native compilers, bash and the VM. I use Office on both and it is similar on both.
I think the most important distinction is that Apple is native Unix. It can be a little painful using brew, but I have more success than on Windows. Any serious Unix work goes into the VM on either platform. But having native Unix on the Mac means I also get a native shell with color terminal to log into the VM, and into the cloud servers and work seamlessly and natively. Whereas on the PC I pretty much have to open a shell in the VM.
Native Unix is probably the biggest plus for the Mac... Yes I use VM’s and K8s and Docker etc.. but Windows was always painful as a development platform.
Find, sed, awk, etc all built in without any additional installs...
MS showed how completely arrogant and out of touch they were with their userbase when they forced windows 8 on the world... Mac IMHO did the same thing with the 2016 Macbook pro “update”.
Seriously, I have tons of problems with this, but just at a base line, who releases a product calling it pro, that can have its entire keyboard fail by a piece of dust or crumb?
Apple has lost its way.... I remember the days whe Apple as development machine was laughable... and I watched them work their way, deservedly to dominance in the developer space... now I feel I have watched them get so full of themselves, they have shot themselves in the foot.
From what I understand sounds like the 2018 is not a major redesign either, just probably faster processors, meaning they are Tripling down on only USBC, and doubling down on the ridiculous monster touchpad and no external monitor port, sd card, or standard USB....
Apple is like the political establishment, unwilling to listen or understand its base... because its got a lot of folks who will buy their stuff no matter what...
I Hear rumor they are planning on ditching INTEL by 2020 and use their own CPU’s.... this makes sense if the PC and Phones are all sharing the same CPU... however, I hope we aren’t returning to the days where you had to literally compile every damn thing you wanted to run because it because there are no compiled binaries for the non Intel CPU...
Speaking of Magsafe, now that was a great invention. On my 2011 I found the trick to stress relief so I didn’t have to fork over for a new power supplies.
Take a small 5-6” zip tie, wrap it around a small screwdriver and heat it. It becomes a perfect stress relief, just thread it on and you can have 2+” of stress relief for the magsafe end.
Mostly the point is to not hook anything up. I don't feel like I need an external monitor with this 13 inch display unlike my Dell laptop with the 13 inch screen. I am being careful not to eat or drink or sneeze on the macbook. My old one was a mess but I still got some money for it. Hope to keep this one in better shape.
As for new processors, it will be nice to dump Intel and get a super low power ARM. I like compiling my own software and it is getting easier all the time. I'll probably always be a fanboi, but the main reason this time was a super deep discount on any computer so I decided to pay the premium. If I were cost conscious I would make the Dell do everything.
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