It's light, easy to use, plenty fast for anything I do on a regular basis, and the Retina display is excellent.
Unless I have reason not to trust it, Touch ID is the perfect way to log in when you:
1. want to have your computer lock after a short period of inactivity and
2. tend to use long passwords that you don't want to type in all the time.
The popular dust complaints aside, a brand new machine has immediate problems for someone whose palms tend to touch the newly enlarged Force Touch trackpad during typing, a hand position I got used to with my Macbook Air 2013. Typing on the new design will cause repeated keystrokes, delayed or missing keystrokes, and instant cursor shifts during typing that make it so I need to approach the keyboard in the same way one would properly play a piano in order to get any meaningful work done. Great if you're a trained pianist, terrible if you want to get actual work done from a coffee shop where you don't have a stand or external keyboard on hand.
Apple knows they messed up with the butterfly mechanism and seem to be fixing that in the next design. In the meantime, there are a few things they could do now through software to alleviate these issues:
1. The ability to remap the Force Touch trackpad tracking area in Settings. Being able to remove 10mm from each side would fix my cursor shift issue. People currently use tape to solve this... on a $4000+ machine.
2. Ability to set a numeric value for Force Touch sensitivity as opposed to 3 constant values with a much higher threshold than is currently being used as "high".
I know Apple is all about limiting options for a customer's own good, however, these software changes would go a long way in helping people debrick an expensive laptop who don't happen to fit whatever hand size their QA team of classically trained pianists have.
This has not been my experience. The errant contact dismissal in my 2017 MBP is so good that I never notice that my hands casually drape across swathes of touchpad geography.
I recall spilling coffee in the past and it would completely destroy the keyboard causing the need to replace the logic board. I'm sure if Apple dissembled my keyboard they would notice a gross stain under the plastic membrane now.
Perhaps the purpose of which was to drive Touch ID adoption for those who "tend to use long passwords that you don't want to type in all the time". :-P
Coming from a 2014 MBP 13 I definitely didn't notice the slower SSD speed -- editing raw camera files in Lightroom is really fast and the display is phenomenal.
The only reason they don't is because they want to push their format.
It’s google doing what google always does: pushing a google controlled thing to become a “standard”.
But they don't, so Safari users have to suffer.
On Android, it has been mandated by CTS for several years already.
[1] Except Radeon VII, which is technically Vega.
And as xnyan said, high motion video really destroys video quality on YT, this video really shows how bad it can get: https://youtu.be/r6Rp-uo6HmI
Why can't a $1K general purpose computer efficiently decode a royalty-free codec (hint - it may have something to do with the fact that apple has a major stake in a competing for-pay closed codec). I really do like apple, but I see apple as microsoft 2.0 in this.
Well the Codec is Royalty Free but not Patents Free. You only get to use it as long as you don't engage in patent litigations against Google.
And Apple does not have an major stake in H.265 or H.264 or every H.26x codec. It has a very minor stake, in the an Open Codec, not closed. Comparatively Speaking every H.26x Codec is more open than VPx and even the new AV1 Standard [1] . So this is far from WMV or RMVB.
I wonder if Google will support EVC / MPEG-5 as it is Royalty Free.
[1] https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-abou...
The enrollment process takes forever for each finger too.
Also, it doesn't work in Linux.
I guess apple have improved recent years but previously this was quite apparent. "Wow, new much faster model costs the same as the old one!" Yeah, that's because the old one is insanely overpriced - unless you bought it on launch day. Conveniently that's the only day of the lifetime it is ever compared to the competition.
We even saw priced for old DDR3 chips go up as well as people were trying to reuse older board for non-CPU intensive stuff.
So tech prices don't always go down. They usually do, but sometimes market demands cause shortages and even non-vintage/collectable old tech can go up in price.
It wasn't until Apple started putting PCIe SSDs in their computers that they became performant enough for stress-free everyday use (in my opinion). Just going from a spinning hard drive to a SATA SSD took my 2012 Mac mini from agonizing to acceptable. I've played around with newer Macs with PCIe storage, and the difference is night and day. They finally feel like real Unix workstations with nearly instant response to user input, and almost no spinning beachballs to be found.
For me personally, Touch ID makes sense on a phone, because I can do it with a single hand. For a laptop, I'm going to have my fingers on the home row anyway, and typing in even a complicated password is fast.
Perhaps ironically, I know my laptop/desktop passwords by touch. :)
Better specs for cheaper...
Which is fine for the entry-level model. Is it true for the more expensive model? The article doesn't say.
> With that as the background, Apple was bound to make a sacrifice or two to reached the aggressive price point and it did so with the SSD. Most people will take that over it removing something like Touch ID or another feature they'd use on a daily basis. It's also worth pointing out that given it is an entry-level point product, most users who pick up the new notebook likely won't notice the difference at all.
I'm not sure that most people would, given the choice, have gone that route. There are plenty of Apple features (including Touch ID) that Apple thinks people want, but I'm not convinced that most people definitely want them. The last sentence is the only one that counts: most people won't notice.