[quote=463005:@Thom McGrath]Oh and this MBP is a good stepping stone, addressing a number of serious criticisms… it has not improved in some areas I would have expected it to. The front camera is still 720p, it doesnt support WiFi6, and still uses the last models processors.
Its good. If I were in the market for a MacBook, Id be satisfied with it. But I think this is more evolution than revolution. The next generation is probably still coming in a year or two.[/quote]
You can thank Intel for “last model’s processors” because what they’ve got is the best Intel has available.
They’re hamstrung, essentially, in being tied to Intel’s glacially slow processor updates with diminishing returns (compared to A-series processors, yearly with huge increases, in Apple mobile devices).
This is similar to what happened with IBM and PPC, 15 years ago. And the same thing will happen in the end - they’ll gradually start ditching Intel with A-series chips in MacOS computers. It’s the only way for them to have any kind of significant gains in processing power and speed and thermal characteristics going forward.
That would be my main complaint about Apple. The repair process is slow and very unprofessional. Prior to this MBP (Retina, 15", Mid 2014) I had a string of Dell Latitudes and always opted for their full 3 year NBD warranty. It was simply amazing. If you had a problem you called and gave your magic number and your call was routed to a knowledgeable person with a procedure. If they determined it to be a hardware issue a tech would meet me anywhere in town and fix my computer in less than a hour. Even replacing rubber bumpers and missing screws. Displays, motherboards… over the years I had a few. Always top notch, hand you your hard drive first, and made sure it was working to my satisfaction before departing.
Compare that to when my MBP had frightening battery swelling one day. It went from the trackpad messing up to where it rocked on the table due to the huge bulge in the back. I go to the local Apple store where everyone is nice and no magic numbers are required. The first “genius” tells me the batteries are designed to swell so the acid won’t leak out. I get a bit indignant and “genius” #2 says I’m out of Apple Care and it will be $600. I leave in a huff and before I get home the store manager calls with a $160 price. I say yes and it’s weeks before the service can be arraigned and my MBP is back in my hands.
Go forward a year and I can’t turn the MBP on. This time I open the thing for the first time ever and the keyboard connector is lying loose in the case. Funny thing, the KB connector also has the power switch! I have a 3rd party person look at it and they have the same conclusion, the connector on the MB is broken. Back to the Apple Store since it was obviously damaged when they did the battery repair. $600 firm. So I say OK. It takes 10 days to get it back! I will say Time Machine is impressive!
To me it seems Apple hires children to run the store. Ones that have no idea of what service looks like. Sad.
OTOH I’m really looking forward to the new 16" in the next month or so. There is NO COMPARISON between how macOS and HW run and Windows and “IBM compatible” (PC) HW run many applications. Lightroom is a drag on PC. VMware is a drag on a PC. Xojo is a drag on a PC. Connecting to a lot of networks is a drag on Windows (on of my W7 VMs is at over 500 networks). I’ve spen t a lot of time with both and still do. My laptop is my main machine and it going to be a MBP.
Yes, Apple is shockingly expensive but in my mind worth it, even with the children in charge.
Yes, there is no denying that Intel is simply not able to deliver the performance increases that they used too.
No it’s not entirely Intel’s fault. The first generation of the TouchBar MacBook Pro, Apple choose to use the Low Power version of the chip. This enabled them to promote equal battery life than the previous generation, whilst making the battery physically smaller (and the entire machine physically smaller), but this causes the performance of a MacBook Pro to stagnate, especially when compared to PC laptops that used the normal chip. It was also the reason why it took longer to support 32GB of RAM.
The problems continued when enough people complained and Apple added normal chips to their line up. As the 2016 “Pro” model was designed for Low Power chips and simply couldn’t handle the thermals of a regular chip. So Apple enforced throttling, on their Pro machine, but it allowed Apple to support 32GB of RAM, sadly it came just as Windows machines started to support 64GB of RAM.
This was evident by looking at RAW power scores of Mac v.s. PC laptops, where the same bench marking software that simply does number crunching.
The second problem that Apple designed into the later generations is the T2 chip. Supposedly this one chip was designed to replace a bunch of other chips. It’s now been documented as causing at least the Boot process to take longer, as well as causing issues with certain Thunderbolt 3 accessories.
I am hopeful that this modified enclosure will help alleviate the performance gap that Apple created, hopefully the keyboard redesign is reliable enough that it’s unlikely to fail, because it appears that if it fails, you’ll still be looking at least a week without the machine and all your data gone when you get it back.
I need a new machine and this one is better than the 2016; but I’m going to give 6 months to see how the new issues rattle out.
Interesting, I’ve had the literal opposite experience with Dell. I will never recommend them to anybody after my experience. When I was with Subway, a couple of our computers were based on their Optiplex small form factor computers. Their motherboards would die after a year like clockwork. The first time, the computer was in warranty so they sent a new one out. But the next time, it wasn’t under warranty, and they couldn’t care less. They wouldn’t sell us the motherboard at any price because we didn’t have a service plan. And we couldn’t get a service plan because the computer was already broken and wouldn’t pass inspection. Their response was basically “tough luck, buy a new computer.”
So I ordered a motherboard from eBay, installed it myself. Then we went to work replacing both our Dell registers.
In my opinion, to hell with Dell. From bad hardware to bad support, I have no interest in ever dealing with them again.
That was HP for me
We ordered 3000 “identical” machines - to find that some had one vendors CD drives, some another
NO! WE SAID “identical”
They tried to weasel out of that but the contract literally said “identical” in lawyerese that meant down to the last screw
Imagine our surprise when we started getting different on board video and sound on the remainder of the order
Lawyers talking to lawyers finally solved that one
I love my 13" 2015 MBP. Before that, I had a 13" 2009 MBP that still runs my CNC machine in my basement. I keep looking at each new release seeing them distance from my ideal machine. This is the first step back in the right direction for me, the touch bar is useless for my needs and the fact it took away the ESC key was a non-starter. I know I won’t be going to windows anytime soon and I don’t feel like running Linux as a desktop every day, therefore I am stuck with Mac. I hope the 2020 MBP keeps with this trend, maybe we will see FaceID or even a 13" frame with a 14" display.
Personally I always had great luck with Dell machines, like @Lewis Gardner described. I would always buy the extended service plans and top-of-the-line components and those laptops lasted me years. The one Dell desktop tower I had was 12 years old last year and still ran great as a server. I hated letting it go when I moved across country last year. Dell customer service was great, even when my plan had expired in a couple of cases.
Because I’ve wanted to do cross-platform Desktop development for years, I started buying Macs. My main machine now is a Macbook Pro 15" (mid-2015), with Windows running in Bootcamp. It works great, but because 2015 MacBook Pros are banned on flights due to fire risk, even though my battery has been replaced twice, I knew I needed a new machine at some point.
I was interested at first when I heard about the 16" MBP, but in reality, because I’m mainly a stay & work from home developer, who only travels occasionally, I decided I’ll pass and get a new Mac Mini (fully loaded of course, plus Apple Care) to potentially avoid any future MBP hassles (and gain some performance too). I still have a 2012 Mac Mini that works great, no issues, so hopefully I’m making a wise choice(?)
I’m even going to use the Apple Trade-in program on my mid-2015 MBP to help finance the new Mac Mini.
And if I need to travel, well I recently picked up a refurbished 2015 MacBook Air 11" in A1 condition with top specs and it runs Xojo quite well.
I just tried it with my 2015 MacBook and they’d offer $340 if it’s in good condition, it has a faulty keyboard and the coating has worn off on the wrist rests. I mean it’s better than a kick in the naggers. However I’m concerned because there isn’t a field faulty butterfly keyboard and I’m pretty sure once they receive it, they won’t want to give me the $340 for it.
Give it a shot with yours and let us know what they offer you.
Just submitted my mid-2015 MBP to the Trade In program. Given that I recently had the battery replaced (which is glued to the underside of the keyboard panel, so they had to replace the whole top part of the case and keyboard & trackpad too), because of the recall - now the machine looks brand new again. Plus it has 16Gb RAM, the top CPU at the time and 1TB SSD, my quote came back at $1,170 Canadian dollars. As far as the Trade In program goes, I think I got lucky.
I might be able to get more if I sell it locally, but I’d rather not have strangers coming to my place and ogling all my computer gear.
Anyway, we’ll see how the final inspection goes, but I’m hopeful the price won’t change much.
Gonna get me a new Mac Mini now, fully loaded, which specs out at about twice the performance as my MBP. Hopefully they get those pesky bugs worked out of Catalina soon…
eBay with COD? I’ve bought second hand computers this way before, this one time at band camp I was in town when the delivery guy tried to deliver, so he met me at 7-11, I checked the machine, it worked, everything was as described, gave him the cash and that was that.
Thank you @Emile Schwarz and @Sam Rowlands for your suggestions.
There is actually a Police detachment office near by. Which is a thing people say to do when you buy or sell on like craigslist or something. I’ve sold on eBay before years ago, but it turned into quite a hassle in the end.
I’ve got some other things I should sell, including a pile of woodworking tools, so I’ll probably go the Police office route. But I guess I have to admit I really like the convenience factor of the Trade in program on this one item.
Can a new MBP that comes with Catalina be down-graded to Mojave? When I called Apple, they said “no”. When I talked to a “Genius” at the Apple Store, he said if I buy the computer, I can have them downgrade it there.
In the past, upgrading and downgrading hasn’t been a problem, just reformat and go.
[quote=464486:@Andy Broughton]Can a new MBP that comes with Catalina be down-graded to Mojave? When I called Apple, they said “no”. When I talked to a “Genius” at the Apple Store, he said if I buy the computer, I can have them downgrade it there.
In the past, upgrading and downgrading hasn’t been a problem, just reformat and go.
Is there anything different about these new MBPs?[/quote]
Not definitive of course, but its possible that an older version does not have the drivers necessary for the new model. For example, the Touch Bar is narrower so it has a physical escape key. 10.14 had no reason to expect that sort of thing, so you may wind up with both a physical and virtual escape key.
Purely speculation of my part, but updates to 10.15 were issued to add support for the new model. So theres probably something in 10.15 that it needs.
Gotcha.
I think if the “Genius” guarantees that he can downgrade it, I’d consider buying it, just for the new keyboard. If it won’r work with Mojave then it’ll be a (long) while until I upgrade.
I wonder if I can run Mojave in a VM (like VirtualBox) on a Catalina MBP?
[quote=464491:@Thom McGrath]Absolutely. I use VMware and it works fine. Not exactly convenient, but it works in a pinch when I need to do 32-bit Mac stuff.[/quote]That’s good to know. There’s some talk that Macs can’t run earlier versions of their OS than they were shipped with because the earlier versions would be missing drivers for the new hardware. I guess that wouldn’t be an issue with a VM as the hardware it’s emulating would be fairly generic.
The 16" MBP uses the newer AMD GPUs, which were not present before, makes me question how well this would actually work down the road. If there are issues, I don’t imagine that Apple would issue any fixes for an OS that they don’t support on that hardware.
My honest advice is if you want a 16" MacBook Pro now, (as much as it pains me to say this) I beleive it would be most reliable running Catalina. Under normal circumstance I would never recommend Catalina to anyone, heck I find it very hard to recommend any of the recent 5 macOS releases to anyone, and I can’t recommend older OSes, because of compatibility issues.
I will be purchasing one because my current machine is really too old, the projects I’m working on can now take a long time to “Run”, however I will be fully utilizing the return window period here, if the 16" MBP running Catalina, is as bad a experience I had with a 2017 MacBook Pro running High Sierra, it will be the second Mac that I’ve returned for my money back.
If you can wait, there’s rumors floating around that this 16" MacBook Pro is temporary, with the actual 16" shipping some time next year. A return to “Desktop replacement” class laptop, instead of an iOS accessory. I don’t know how much hope I have left in Apple back tracking on all their “Advances” in the last 4 years, but the rumors make it seem it’s possible they might.
There’s a return period? CR …P
I bought a 2017 MBP and hated it so much I resold it at a big loss, then bought a new (ie still boxed) 2015 MBP instead.
