[szggzs27]

Had a 2015 MBP. Loved it. But had to part ways with it half a year ago.

I bought a 2018 15' MBP last week. I wanted the 2018 model for the 6 core CPU, so did not have a choice regarding the TouchBar.

Here are some of the issues I've experienced since the purchase:

1. I keep on hitting escape multiple times because I don't know if I've touched it or not. More often than not, I will press it one time too many or not trigger it at all. I don't look down at the keyboard when I type.

2. I switched the TouchBar to show function keys (f1, f2, etc) by default. I plugged in an external monitor and was prompted if I want to extend the screen or mirror it. After selecting one of the options, there is NO WAY to change your external display settings using any keyboard shortcuts.

3. Every time I want to change volume or brightness, I have to look down at the TouchBar. It gets annoying, it is unnecessary, and again I have to look at the damn TouchBar to be sure how much I've lowered/increased the volume/brightness.

4. I use vim. It is a nuance.

I bought this to do development work, mainly because I highly value the trackpad and OSX user experience. But to be honest, I am contemplating returning it within the 14 day window because how fucking annoying the TouchBar is. Knowing that without this gimmick, the device would have more battery, more space to accommodate a proper keyboard mechanism, just makes me wonder how much out of touch with the users must the designer or product manager at Apple be? Not to mention that without it, MBP would probably cost around $150-$200 less.

The TouchBar is utter garbage. Why slap it on a $2,000+ "pro" machine? It makes the MBP line up an expensive gimmick toy for rich kids. Total cashgrab and disdain towards their customer segment who rely on these machines for actual work.

I won't go into details about the butterfly keyboard and magsafe. While those decisions are unpopular, they aren't as debilitating as the TouchBar.

I remember Steve Jobs talking about the downfall of Xerox being caused by marketing people taking over control of sales and product development. Now Apple is following the same footsteps. They're abandoning good and sound designs which got them to where they are now.

Sorry, but I had to rant. The TouchBar is utter garbage.

[ericabiz]

Given the reports from Twitter, WSJ, etc. that the 2018 keyboard isn't much better than the 2016 and 2017, in your shoes, I would return the MBP.

I was ready for an upgrade from my 2013 MBP, so I went with a Dell XPS 15. Really no complaints about it, although it is heavy/large for lugging around to a quick coffee shop jaunt. I picked up a refurb Surface Pro i5 for those, which I am just now getting around to setting up.

The XPS 15 trackpad is slightly worse than my 2013 MacBook's, but I use it mainly as a desktop replacement (it literally replaced a Skylake i7 Hackintosh I was using as my desktop.) Everything else works well.

I have WSL set up on Windows 10, which is really, really neat. It's a full Ubuntu instance in a window, without the overhead of a standard virtual machine. I had an entire LAMP development set up on it in under an hour (and most of that time was just waiting for it to run updates.)

I mainly use the Adobe suite, a web browser, and now that I'm writing software again, a LAMP stack. The XPS 15 is a perfect fit for this. I did turn automatic updates off when I first got the computer, so it prompts me to run the "seasonal" updates, not unlike macOS. Everything else was super easy to get used to.

[sbr464]

I agree it’s garbage, but wanted to add what kind of helped me. I removed all of the default buttons/siri until there were only the volume and brightness, then I put some space between the two. That helped enough to work 60-70% of the time without looking.

[meestaahjoshee]

Get a used or refurb'd mbp without touchbar - what do you really need 6 cores for

also fyi you can map caps lock to esc so that resolves your esc issue at the least

I'm holding onto my 2015 for dear life but it's still going very strong, i imagine i can keep using it a few more years at least

[jtreminio]

> what do you really need 6 cores for

People kept saying the same thing about wanting 32GB memory in a laptop. Look what happened.

szggzs27's workflow could be vastly different than yours, and in no way invalidates either, but assuming that there's no need for a 6 core in a laptop is profoundly judgmental and ignorant.

[szggzs27]

I got a refurbished machine. The thing is, I wanted the 8th gen cpu with 6 cores, and for me it wasn't worth dropping slightly less on a 2015/2016/2017 MBP with old hardware.

Well maintained 2015 MBP on ebay are too expensive for the kind of hardware that they have. In my opinion, at least.