This is not a review, just my impressions on using a new 2018 MacBook Pro over the course of the past 8 months
Last summer I bought a new MacBook Pro. Not because I particularly liked it, but because my old MacBook Air had run its course and I really needed a new Mac to work.
Overall it has been ok, it is not a great Mac at all, but it’s not too bad.
The bads:
- The touch bar Where to start? The touch bar is a total mess. The lack of physical buttons is a huge problem. You can’t automatically press buttons cause you can’t feel the keys so you need to stop what you’re doing and look down to press the Esc button. Hoping that it would work… Because when the mac is frozen (spinning ball) the touch bar is also frozen and you are forced to shut it down and reboot when with all of the other Macs you could have just closed the problematic app using a keyboard shortcut. It is a nice thought that you can have the content of the touch bar being related to the app you’re using at the time, but I don’t find it useful. The nice thing about a keyboard is that you don’t need to look down to type, but with the touch bar you need to look at the buttons making it pointless. And why do I need to have a Siri button always present on my keyboard? Who thought that it was a good idea? It happens all the times that instead of pressing delete I press it and the blocking all screen alert to set up Siri pops up.
I didn’t want it, but Apple doesn’t give me the options of buying a Mac without one.
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The keyboard The return and the shift key have the same shape so it happens a lot that I accidentally press the wrong key. I didn’t have any problems with the butterfly keyboard, the buttons feel different, but you get used to them really quickly and during day to day use you don’t feel any difference.
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The ports This mac has no ports! After spending from 1500 to 7000 Euro you have to fork another 100 for a disgustingly looking dongle just to be able to attach an external monitor or a USB cable. I was surprised when I saw that it had at least a headphone port… I’m all for USB-C support, but we’re not there yet. This would be fine on a MacBook or on an Air, it is totally unacceptable to have such a limited amount of port on a product that had the ‘Pro’ name on it.
The good:
- Everything else
I got the 32gb (RAM) version and it’s great, the SSD is super fast and as usual Mac OSX can handle so many open apps at the same time that you wouldn’t believe. Windows would have frozen at 1/10th of the apps I’ve opened right now for this stress test. The battery life is great (especially when using Safari), way better than expected. It is way better than my old Mac, definitely.
I needed to change my Mac so I’m happy with the new one, it is so much better than my old Air and I like it. If I had a relatively newer Mac and didn’t need to change it right away I would have waited for something better.