It's not that the new MBP isn't "fine" - it's just that the gap with competitors has closed a lot. People asking me which laptop to buy used always be a very simple answer ("Buy a Macbook"). They were head and shoulders better than anything else. But it's down to mere inches now and the additional drawbacks which I won't go into here since as you rightly say they've been covered ad nauseum - are far more glaring now than they would have been a few years ago.

Yeah, PC laptops have much better touchpads than they used to and even often use better materials than plastic. That while still offering often far better connectivity and repairability and better prices. I'm sure Apple can remain competitive but it may take a more aggressive trajectory and more innovative features than watching this happen and introduce a touch bar for shortcut keys as response.

That's Apples problem. Hopefully Apple gets the message that consumers want actual pro laptops. What I'm suggesting is let's discuss something more important on HN at this point.

Well with respect, you brought it up ...

Then why did you click to come to this discussion thread instead of ignoring it like you doubtlessly do for 90%+ of all topics that come up on HN?

How about this: You don't upvote stories you don't like, and every person has (only) one vote to upvote what they do like to be seen and/or discussed. Incidentally, that's exactly how it already works... If you want to be the one with veto power there also is a way: You can create your own subreddit on reddit.

Consumers don't want actual pro laptops. Hacker News wants actual pro laptops.

The problem is more the "Pro" label, which has become dated and inappropriate, than anything else.

We've come full circle to where like the SoundBlaster Pro, the "Pro" term has become so meaningless you ended up with things like the SoundBlaster Pro Gold.

Just want something that does the work with a minimum of fuss. For a while Apple was the best for that. Now there's plenty of other options. Thanks!

Options aren't a bad thing, and an abundance of options can't be construed as Apple's fault here.

Back when the first Mac Pro launched there wasn't a huge difference between their machine and the theoretical best machine. A quad core Xeon system was pretty good by the standards of the time, and if you needed more horsepower you didn't have many options.

Now you can get a workstation with 36 physical cores if you can afford it. Apple cannot possibly hope to cater to that extreme end of the market, very few vendors even try. Dell only seems to offer dual 8-core workstations, HP offers dual 18-core...if you have $12K sitting around to buy one and the patience to configure the system properly.

As the theoretical high end keeps getting higher and completely detaching from what everyday professionals need, the most demanding of that group will find more and more reasons to complain about Apple's line-up.

Whilst this is all true, the current thread and article are about the laptop Macbook Pro and not the Desktop Mac Pro.

Laptop theoretical maximums haven't changed too much since 2006 when the Macbook Pro was first introduced. I know of many people who have 6 year old Macbook pro's and are still happy with the performance.

To me the real issue is a death by a hundred cuts because:

1. The hardware is not improving at a steady clip; nor is it simply 'the best' in any category

2. OSX hasn't seen enough improvement to continue justifying the Mac premium

3. Other manufactures have caught up as the hardware market stabilised, and Windows is tugging on developer heart strings with its Linux subsystem layer.

If Windows supports Linux in a reasonable performant way, I'd switch immediately. I'm waiting a year to see how the wind blows.

1. Intel's focusing more on power efficiency than they are brute power, especially for notebook chips. They're also struggling with their 10nm process, so everything is in severe disarray. Apart from a few vendors wrangling high-end GPUs into laptops, the rest of the market is pretty much spinning its wheels. Maybe now that AMD's back in the game they'll shake things up and give Intel a reason to knuckle down and make some progress here rather than continue to focus on squeezing money out of the enterprise market.

2. macOS has improved substantially over the last six years even though most of those changes haven't been earth-shattering or visible. HFS+ is finally going away, the scheduler is more battery friendly, API improvements continue that make writing apps easier. It's a mature operating system, though, and like Windows, which basically slapped on a new coat of paint and threw in a new version of DirectX, and decided to get crazy and bundle Linux support, it's hard to make exponential leaps forward. What is macOS crying out for these days?

3. Windows is still extremely hostile to developers even with the Linux subsystem. That's a massive improvement over Cygwin, but it's still a veneer on top of what's an extraordinarily ugly OS when it comes to internals. Drive letters, the Registry, entire continents of compatibility junk. If you're not writing games, you probably never write apps for Windows native. It's just not worth it.

Now it's nice that Microsoft is at least trying to give Windows some decent tools, the Linux/GNU suite is vastly better than the feeble garbage that comes with Windows, but it's still the first step in a long road towards being as POSIX friendly as a true Linux or BSD system actually is.

If you're explaining you're loosing.

I agree, especially for development.

If you want to do non-Microsoft development, your main choices are buy a Macbook or buy another laptop and put Linux on it.

Personally I still prefer macOS to any other desktop OS out there by a very long way. It makes my life so much easier and more productive.

It's in this light that WSL is particularly interesting ... it's like Microsoft asked a few people why they liked MacOS and they answered "Unix" ... so they've come up with an answer to that. It may be limited at the moment but it's not hard to see where it's going. Add to that it's an up-to-date version of Linux, vs Apple's ageing BSD fork ...

It is not just Unix.

Although I really love that part of OsX, this is not the only reason why I prefer it to windows.

Last time I tried windows 10, it took me 2 minutes before stumbling on an icon right out of Windows Vista (or at least it really looked disjointed with the rest of the OS).

Install/Uninstall an app on Osx ? Use the same metaphor than for a file and put it in Applications or Trash. Contrast this with the clutter in windows menu ..

OsX is really far from perfect and in fact I feel it regress each year but it is still better than the competition.

Yes it certainly is. But it used to be so much better. Snow Leopard was a high point. I can't really say I like much of what they've done in the last few releases.

Does it strike anybody as strange that an operating system is getting worse over time rather than better?

> Does it strike anybody as strange that an operating system is getting worse over time rather than better?

I somewhat expect it, as we've seen desktop OSes come to be influenced by mobile OSes, or worse, as we've seen desktop OSes modified to also act as mobile OSes.

Trying to combine these two very different types of usage into one product, like we've seen with recent versions of Windows and open source desktop environments (like GNOME 3), results in the worst of both worlds.

Even in the case of macOS, where there's at least some separation, the influence from the mobile side can still harm the desktop experience.

"Worse" is highly subjective. It's gotten cheaper, which I don't mind, it's maintained a reasonable degree of hardware support, like my 2010 iMac still runs current releases just fine, and I've never had any major issues with software after the 32-bit to 64-bit transition where a lot of compiled Ruby extensions were busted.

What do you think they should be doing to make it "better"? Steering an operating system is not easy.

They're rolling out their new filesystem. They're adjusting the way it can schedule things to improve battery life. Things like that may not sound profound but they're important.

Yeah fair enough maybe there are a few interesting things going on in the background ... I am speaking more from a user experience point of view - I got used to things "just working" and I suppose I've been spoiled. Back to reality!

I'm with you there - 10.6.8 was the best Mac OS ever released. I've grown steadily more irritated with it since then, to the point that I'm mostly using Linux these days, for both work and play.

I hear this point all the time, but it's starting to feel like it's just the cool thing to say. Can you quantify this? What do you feel has gotten worse besides "grr some stuff looks iOS-y!"

I never said "grr some stuff looks iOS-y!"

That doesn't even bother me as long as things work properly.

You can accept my unqualified opinion or not as is your wont. The failings of recent releases of MacOS are well documented online if you do a search for them.

Pizza Comet being used as some kind of underground sex ring is "well documented online if you do a search". That phrase is devoid of meaning in this day and age.

Oh come on. That is a terrible argument. I meant of course in respectable web sites not the kind of nutty place that trolls use to derail perfectly valid opinions.

Your reason for giving up on windows is that they used a 5 year old icon?

I'm not a windows fan, but you are hardly being fair.

That's not the only reason I give.

Again, unix based system, good ux, better consistency.

Windows has also crashed a lot under me when I tried it. It was on a bootcamp partition of a mbp, I expect that a surface laptop might have better QA but I am not going to buy out to make sure.

The system also has the despicable habbit of starting updating itself while you are busy doing something else. Several of the people I know (inluding myself) had a gaming session interrupted by a windows update.

I don't know if user complaints about the TouchBar on the MBP will be enough for Apple to abandon it, but I can dream.

If nobody had complained, Apple probably would have waited even longer (or even discontinued) the Mac Pro.

    > The anti-MBP threads in HN is tiring. 
    > How many threads have we had on this?

It's important to me that Apple keep Mac healthy, so I can't get enough.

You're overestimating the effects of your whining. It's definitely not the reason Apple brought out an update about the Mac Pro; you are never going to buy one anyway. The reason they had an update was that they couldn't deliver the upgrades they need.

It also won't be a reason to abandon the Touch Bar because despite the vocal minority of whiners it is selling like hot cakes and more importantly it's a way Apple can differentiate its laptops from other manufacturers.

Ultimately money talks and bullshit walks.

You might be right. I haven't been following Apple too closely.

At least it isn't another post about Uber's internal politics.

Yup. Some people will latch onto any reason to hate on a successful company that makes a superior product.

At this point the only conclusion I can make is that that are a fair number of employees that work for the competitors of such successful companies that drive the conversation far enough along that they make the front page and get the momentum for active discussion. If it's not employees it's fanboys (and girls) of the competitors. I just discount opinions on such threads entirely and others do the same. That said, it's still entertaining to read.

Amen.

For over a decade, I've owned almost 10 Apple devices (tablets, laptops, phones).

I've noticed a decline over the past 3+.

Feels like the "move fast and break things" mantra has been adopted. This works for Facebook... but it doesn't for Apple.

Shipping new features seems to take precedent over fixing bugs.

Some of us just want the Apple quality back.

It's really not too much to ask.