I'm a heavy tmux/vim user.

Apple replaced the best programmer's laptop on the market (their previous-gen MBP) with the MBP model that they sell now. It's not a bad laptop per se, it's just that it's not a programmer's laptop.

Apple sells the MBA which doesn't have enough pixel density to support tmux with multiple panes.

Apple sells the MB and the MBP with that execrable butterfly keyboard which is terrible for touch-typing for long periods.

There's nothing else anymore. They stopped selling that Ivy-bridge-era MBP model they were keeping around for serious touch-typists. Everyone I know who has one of these turkeys defends the keyboard, but then admits that, "anyways, I usually use an external keyboard anyhow." I need the built-in keyboard to be useable and Apple has given up on making those.

I'd buy a new programmer's laptop from Apple, but they just don't make those anymore. Apple took something we loved away from us - that's why the new MBP gets so much hate.

What is the problem with "touch-typists" and the new keyboard? Is the layout different in such a way that confuses you? Is it the lack of feedback from the touchbar?

Mis-taps on the touchbar are my main annoyance.

The ESC key issue isn't as bad - I have 'jk' remapped to ESC anyways. But the lack of feedback with the butterfly keys makes my hands feel like I'm setting myself up for repetitive stress injury.

The keyboard is just awful. Can anyone honestly say that they prefer the feel of the butterfly keys?

The MacBook and MacBook Pro's keyboards are markedly different. Sure, they're both butterfly, but MacBook Pro's keyboard is a lot more clickly/springy than MacBook's, which I can only describe as mushy. Have you tried using them for an extended period of time?

Steve jobs or whoever it was doing QA, I gotta say really had a knack for what is usable and makes the evokes a feel good emotion. The new macs nowadays look beautiful but horribly lack in usability in many ways. Steve Apple was very focused on usability. Aesthetics came later, now it’s the reverse.

Agreed, and there's a name for this. It's 'bullshit'.

Making a laptop with a terrible keyboard to save 2-3mm of thickness when no one really cares about such extremes of thinness. That's bullshit.

Making a laptop with largely unsupported USB-C ports and nothing else. No transition-year with both new and old ports, just tossing the old ports out abruptly and making customers buy fucking dongles. That's bullshit.

Eliminating function keys for a gimmicky touch screen which almost no one will use on a day-to-day basis a month after buying the laptop. That's bullshit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

A 2017 13" Macbook Pro should not require 5 service trips in its first year. Warranty or not, we're not talking about some $200 piece of crap that's made in China, we're talking about a premium laptop at a premium price.

Some people won't care about that. Some do.

I wonder how long before a lot more folks come to the conclusion that Apple premiums aren't worth paying anymore.

I have a 10yo Acer laptop that at the time cost me about 500$ which up to this day required no fix or trip to the repair shop.

If I had spent 4x the cash and still was forced to take the laptop to the shop 5 times to fix a myriad of design and production problems for a product that is marketed as high-end and professional-grade, I can assure you I wouldn't forgive, much less forget.

This was also my most expensive Apple purchase ever.

Usually, the trend goes the other way. I don't know about other folks, but I'm less inclined to forget after dropping $4300 on that unit.

What this person wants is a home, end, forward delete, pgup and pgdn key on the keyboard, which the touchbar lets me have. Funny how what "the people" want manages to line up exactly with your expectations and doesn't match mine at all.

I have the HDMI/old-USB to USB C dongle, but I hardly ever use it these days.

I'd gladly support an all USB C future.

I wish Apple would go back to the 2012 models and just refresh the internals.

There's not a lot I can do to register dissatisfaction with Apple's direction. I bought a 2016 mbp, then returned it (for a variety of reasons) - many of which have been beaten to death here in the last 18 months.

I watched my boss buying a new MBP on day one. Months later I still laugh when I see him fiddling with adapters that never work reliably.

People said the same things about floppy drives and cd roms.

That is not how Apple works, the reason they do such drastic changes like dropping support for floppy/cd drives, usb A ports is because they want to move the industry forward.

Our IT Department anecdotally reports that about 15% of the 2016 models had issues, and fewer of the 2017 models. Nearly all of our 2500 employees have MBPs or iMacs of some sort.

I should note that roughly 25% of that time has been on an external keyboard (Apple display, MBP lid closed), so it might not see as much use as others.

I don't care about saving $1k or $2k when it comes to a device I use that much. We're talking about a dollar an hour here. I've literally spent more money on coffee over that time.

Unless you're gaming on your laptop your requirements probably aren't that much higher than they were half a decade ago.

Luckily it has a gigabit Ethernet port so it can take full advantage of my gig internet.

Perhaps you just haven't really used a windows laptop recently and only remember the old days when Windows laptops really did only have a life span of about 3 years.

Maybe one should take care about where to service them from?

My impression when it comes to Mac is that people don't want to pay ludicrous prices for repairs e.t.c.. anymore. Also that they can not upgrade because their current machine can't handle the new OS e.t.c..

I was looking at laptops about 3 years ago and it was extremely hard to find ones that didn't use that cursed 1366x768 resolution.

No, it's not.

A 15" _2011_ Macbook Pro with a quad core i7 is still more than usable today.

If you bought a Macbook Pro with a powerful CPU (i.e., CPU model not ending with a U), you should easily get 10 years out of it.*

[edit] * At least until Apple decides not to support it with OS upgrades, but you can always run the latest Windows on it. And Windows generally runs faster in Boot Camp on Macbook Pros than OSX does natively.

When did this happen? The last time I used Bootcamp, it seemed almost specifically designed to make Windows feel like a sub-par experience compared to OS X

Using a then-brand-new 2012 MBP with the latest version of OS X at the time (I believe Lion?) with Bootcamp. Some of the bizarre omissions I witnessed were

- A buggy BIOS implementation instead of EFI (rEFInd at least let me try and boot Linux under EFI)

- SSD set to run in IDE mode, instead of AHCI, resulting in utterly crippled performance (required issuing dd commands to the disk from within OS X to fix)

- No GPU switching. Only the Radeon card was enabled, leaving the system running insanely hot and guzzling battery

The final straw was when I ran some test VM's on it, and under a sustained load, had the CPU hit an eye watering 117 degrees celsius. Shutting it down almost immediately and then asking on tech oriented IRC channels I was in if this was a bug simply yielded dismissal from Apple acolytes at the time

"Oh it's DESIGNED to do that, the whole system is a huge heatsink!"

"Just make sure it's getting plenty of airflow, it's fine"

$1200 in parts total. When (if) GPU prices go down I'll throw a new one and be good for another few years.

I expect hardware failure of the CPU or Motherboard to do the machine in before it becomes obsolete.

Put all my money into RAM and SSD, upper mid range CPU, mid range GPU, life is good.

I said nothing about price. You don’t want to know the eye-watering numbers attached to that iMac I sold. And it’s great that you and I can get such life out of our machines. But in the context of the topic at hand, its not great that you and I sit on five year old machines because Apple makes nothing so compelling so as to make me say, “Shut up and take my money.” Because I own shares of AAPL, too.

The GPU is a GT200M with 1GB dedicated RAM, still pretty much in shape versus the toy Intel GPUs.

In those 10 years extended it to 8GB and replaced the HD with a SSD.

Original sales price, 1 000 euros.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...

i wonder if they think, unlike the SE, that it would actually vampire off too many sales from the high ticket models. what i wouldn't give for a 2015 style 8th gen CPU machine.

They do need to update the Mac Mini.