Today, I only charge my Macbook Pro at my desk, where there's no danger of accidental cable-yanking. A full charge easily lasts all day, so when I'm out it's never actually connected to anything.

The aluminium unibody construction and solid state drives also make it a lot more sturdy. So when it does drop, chances are good it wont actually break.

For these reasons, I don't think that Magsafe chargers are necessary anymore. And considering how expensive replacement Apple chargers are, I'm happy they're moving to an open standard!

It killed it. The screen didn't break, not a scratch in sight, but it went dead all the same. The screen would not cut on. Plugging in an external monitor worked with heavy artifacts; I suspect some GPU damage.

I could not log in (it locked up after the fall when logging in with the external screen) and my work replaced it.

Freak accident but falls still kill MacBooks.

EDIT:

Also, without a charger, IntelliJ slurps up enough power I can't last more than a couple hours of dev time. Even that is generous.

As for reliability, I've dropped this same laptop from about 4 feet off the ground on the corner pretty much flattening the rounded edge and it's been fine.

Yet another way that Apple don't care about people that use their stuff, and why i'm buying a Chromebook to replace my Macbook Pro where i'll SSH to servers instead of compiling locally.

This is a good take. I hadn't thought of this argument before. It makes sense.

I know I'm in the habit of keeping my laptop plugged in as much as possible for those times when I do need to rely on the battery. I generally get only half a day with my MBA (13" early 2015) running multiple JVMs, Mail, and Safari with lots of tabs. I do find I get better performance when I turn off WiFi and dim the screen.

According to the tech specs, my laptop should get "Up to 12 hours wireless web". The 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar specs at "Up to 10 hours wireless web". I wonder if this means I'll get less unplugged time with the MBP.

I do this too. But also for another reason, I try to reduce battery usage to increase the lifetime of the battery. I should probably research whether this is something I should actually be concerned about (anyone any ideas?)

Which kinda sucks if you have glued in batteries...

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-recommended-to-unplug-a-MacBook-...

I usually work from a café these days, and I go from 100% to 0% in about 4 hours (15'' Retina, Mid 2015). I mostly run VSCode, Vagrant, Safari, Slack, Spotify and Terminal. Of these, Spotify, Terminal, Slack and Safari are easily the most energy-sucking apps.

I mostly use Safari, Postbox, Sublime Text, Coda, Cathode, Tower, Parallels (rarely on battery) and Xojo. I wonder if Sublime is more power efficient than VS Code.

It's too bad we'll never know what would have happened under Jobs.

What annoys me is that for example Lenovo has 30 notebook models... so how much effort would it have been for Apple to release a laptop that accommodates real professional users a little bit, with, say: a 5th laptop option?

For those exceptions to the "almost" never—mostly IT people doing field support—they make a litany of adapters. Adapters make sense for this use-case: the target type of user already carries many in a "toolbox", and this is just adding on a few more.

And don't forget the Mac Pro. Apple's own internal "real professional users" are, as far as I know, more likely to use a Mac Pro at their desks and then a MacBook for mobile portability—but they won't bother to try to do work with the MacBook that'd be better done on the Mac Pro. Which includes plugging strange peripherals into it.