[josephg]

2016 MBP with touchbar reporting in. I have the 13” model without a dedicated graphics card, and I made the mistake of getting an external 4K display. The laptop can use the display, but everything is remarkably sluggish for a computer I paid $3000aud for. Especially safari with a few tabs open. The most embarrassing part is that I sort of got used to it and stopped noticing, until I spent time on my Windows gaming pc. The difference is night and day.

I’ve recently ordered an external thunderbolt GPU enclosure, and I’m hoping I can solve the performance issue that way. But in the long run ... I’m not really sure what I want to run on my next computer. To be honest all the answers seem a bit bad. Macs are overpriced and underpowered. Linux on a laptop still seems like an endless stupid time hole - I had the Ubuntu installer reliably kernel panic on me the other day. And windows ... does windows support smooth scroll yet? Can you turn off the telemetary and pre-installed games in the start menu? Will I be able to install and try out the database or exotic programming language of the week on Windows, or will it be more fighting?

Is it just me or did computers stop feeling better with each generation? When did we lose our way?

[cdkee]

My work laptop is a 2017 15" MBP. I was able to get a 4k external monitor and it definitely felt sluggish. That's when I realized the $70 multiport dongle that apple sells cannot do 4k at 60hz, and so I was seeing 4k 30hz. Had to get a dedicated Displayport to USB-C cable and now it seems to be fine.

I haven't had too many issues with performance. Few crashes here and there. The keyboard is more of an issue for me when dust gets under the keys. I don't mind the giant trackpad as I feel it gets palm rejection right most of the time.

By far the worst part of this computer is the touchbar. It's useless. I can't fathom what Apple was thinking making this required for all higher end Macbooks. The only thing I use it for is the volume slider, and occasionally buffering songs on Spotify. Other than that the ESC key is horrendous and it has no utility for me over standard keyboard hotkeys/fn buttons.

[cromulent]

A guy at work just got his 2016 13" MBP replaced under warranty due to the slow graphics with an external display. There seems to be some known issue.

He loves his new one.

[sjellis]

"Linux on a laptop still seems like an endless stupid time hole - I had the Ubuntu installer reliably kernel panic on me the other day."

Reading comments like this, I can't help but feeling that somebody is missing a trick here: I don't doubt your experience, and I've seen similar comments, but they don't match my experience at all, which is that Linux works with no tinkering. It would be really interesting to collect experience reports from folks like you, to see why there is such a divergence, and figure out what could be done about it. Back in the day, the worst cause of Windows crashes was basically a single problem: the quality of ATI drivers were bad, and once that was clear, it got fixed.

[josephg]

Thats a great idea. For what its worth, in my case I was using the 16.04.3 LTS installer (17.10 had been pulled at the time due to a bios issue). The kernel was panicking on boot because of issues using the opensource noveau driver for my NVIDIA gtx1080 graphics card. I needed to blacklist the driver to get the installer to boot. (And once I did that it ran fine.)

I ran into exactly the same bug installing ubuntu on my friends' PC a couple of weeks ago. In his case he has an nvidia graphics card from a few generations ago. (8xx series? 7xx? I can't remember.)

Whatever the bug is presumably its been an unfixed problem in the 'LTS' release branch for 2+ years.

[slantyyz]

I think your problem is more related to the fact that your MBP is using a U-class CPU than not having dedicated graphics.

I used the built-in GPU on my desktop with a 4K monitor and outside of gaming, it did not affect the UI snappiness at all. I would suspect that if you had the 15" MBP with the quad core CPU and turned off the discrete graphics that you would notice that the Intel HD graphics 4k performance is pretty good.