| Devils Advocate Response to this: If the keyboard is failing on a 2016, take advantage of Apple's stores and get it replaced under warranty and with far less hassle than say, Dell with an XPS 15 and failed motherboard. (From experience with both.) Battery life is typically quoted at 5 hours doing something relatively intensive, and 6-7 in general for the 15 inch. 4 hours must be heavy, high CPU and GPU use. I'm not sure what other pro laptops achieve in this area, but I doubt it's much higher unless they use the absolute newest GPUs and CPUs. It is a step back from the 2015 Gen, at least with the 2016s. I think this is actually partly Intel's fault for not supporting LPDDR4. Touch bar is eh, maybe not a pro feature, although it seems like it would be nice for sliders when editing photos? No ESC key can be an issue, although many "pros" apparently map this to caps lock anyway. I agree on the trackpad, it's too large. Ports is a tricky one. No normal USB or Display ports is a giant pain, but 4 Thunderbolt/charging ports is super nice and will attach to some really high speed, expensive pro stuff. No SD card is perhaps, a missing pro feature. Then again, the very highest end cameras now use XQD or CFast. And the built in card reader has never been fast compared to a good external reader. Would a real pro machine have this port? Probably. Does it make the macbook pro not a pro machine? Doubtful. The charging light and other power supply issues are USB-C trade-offs. People yelled at apple for using a custom, non-accessible port, then got angry when they used a standard port. I love my magsafe port, but I also like the idea that I no longer have to but expensive apple power supplies to replace a failed one. And on the display and no glowing apple logo, I think they removed the logo because they couldn't make the display thin enough with it and not comprise the displays uniformity. And 4k OLED would result in a 3800$ machine with worst battery life, that's a lot of light to power and pixels to drive... |
I agree with you here. I looked around at PC laptops and all of them had a combination of ports that felt like a compromise.
> The charging light and other power supply issues are USB-C trade-offs.
Personally, I'm bummed the battery indicator lights are gone as well as the charging indicator. I don't think they had to ditch the charging light because of USB-C because third parties are doing it[1]. The charging USB-C that ships with MacBook Pros is already a beefier, more expensive USB-C cable than the data-only ones.
[1] https://www.moshi.com/usb-c-charge-cable