[webbrahmin]

I used to love my mac book pro. Sadly, it is not the same device which it used to be. The quest to make it thinner has actually made it a substandard machine. I feel Apple has lost a lot of developer love and brand capital since Jobs. I am hoping things would improve on the product front. Not all devs live in the US. For devs in developing countries, a mac book pro is a serious investment. We want a machine which is robust and long-lasting. If things continue they way they have in last few years my next machine will not be a mac book.

[bayareanative]

Everyone should watch the Louis Rossmann channel before lionizing, much less even saying anything good about modern MBP's they don't seem to understand what's been lost and what sucks. It's not been a long-lasting product for at least 5 years:

- the batteries are glued in, making them very difficult to change

- there's no locking slot

- GPU goes out

- the unencapsulated (motherboard) is very susceptible to any humidity, which leads to corrosion

- the JTAG shorts out traces

- the keyboards are crap: noisy, fragile and have to be ripped out violently with pliers

- display cable goes out

- no availability of official replacement parts

- no official component-level repair leading to unnecessary e-waste and unnecessary charges

- no longer has MagSafe

- thin, bendable and fragile

- extremely overpriced

- overcharged for repairs

- denied data recovery when it's possible

- community of unrealistic, brainwashed, tribalist fans who lack perspective and criticism

I have a Lenovo T480 which is 10x better than a T490. Snag one while you can, because it's totally ruined in the name of drinking Johnny's brand of Jonestown KoolAid.

[sb636]

I was part of that unrealistic, brainwashed, tribalist community for many years. Except not for apple. For PC. I switched over to a mbp this past year after having used countless different PC laptops over the past ten years, and my god, my mbp just feels so much better than my previous laptops in so many ways. Yes there are shortcomings, but the overall user experience is nothing to gloss over.

[mjhagen]

The thing is though, that it used to be even better.

[hevi_jos]

"- community of unrealistic, brainwashed, tribalist fans who lack perspective and criticism"

Why do you feel the urge to insult those that do not see the world like you do?

You call them "unrealistic", so it makes you fell realistic. "brainwashed" so it makes you feel clear minded. "tribalist" so it makes you feel individually intelligent. "lack perspective", so you believe you have perspective.

The fact is that some of these people are really smarter than you are and happier and more fulfilled than you are. And have way more money than you have. Some of them will be stupid, but not all like you believe.

These people have real reasons to choose an Apple product and they are as valid as your reasons.

While everything you say is true, the fact is that these people give them a different value that you do. I have a friend that has a company and earns 2000 dollars everyday, does he cares about an overprice laptop? Not really, he cares about time, and interruptions(he had a Windows laptop that used to interrupt him for hours at the worst possible time), he cares about weight, and malware installed by default that you could not uninstall.

Right now I am criticizing your attitude. How do you respond to it is a way to measure your level of "handling criticism ability" that you implicitly presume of.

But it does feels different, doen't it? Criticize others is so easy.

[tetraca]

Why are people so worked up over choice of a product? I don't really particularly care for Macbooks, but it's just a manufactured laptop. There is no real identity or pride to be derived from these sorts of consumerist choices. You have a need for a tool that does x, y, and z. You pick one you like that does what you need out a lineup of a dozen that mostly do x, y, and z. Pride is in the productive work you do with a tool, not having a tool in itself. Pride in simply having a thing is just marketing department garbage.

[AimForTheBushes]

He made a lot of good points and then his entire argument went out the window in the last sentence.

[richrichardsson]

So because you don't agree with 1 out of the 15 points, suddenly those other 14 are null and void? Pffff.

You just have to look at all the "No, it's really not that bad a price" comments re the upcoming Mac Pro to see he does have a point there.

[chipotle_coyote]

But does he really have a point about the Mac Pro, though? "This computer is ridiculously priced for my use case" != "this computer is ridiculously priced for the use case it was intended." The 2019 Mac Pro is going after the workstation market that SGI in particular was in a quarter-century ago, whose "entry-level" machines started at $10K.

I get why people are salty about the 2019 Mac Pro not being the Mac Pro they wanted. It's not the Mac Pro I wanted -- it's not the Mac Pro I owned, although back then it was called the PowerMac G5. But the PowerMac and original tower Mac Pros were always a bit of an anomaly in the Mac timeline, anyway; most of their flagships trended toward "holy hand grenades that's expensive" rather than "that's a little expensive but I bet I could swing it." The Macintosh IIfx started at $9000 in 1990; it was replaced by Apple's first tower, a Quadra 900, for a mere $7200 a year later, this at a time when an average PC was under $2K.

If someone wanted to make a serious critique of Apple's pricing, they'd be far better off starting with "look at how expensive their most expensive stuff is," it'd be "look at how expensive their least expensive stuff is." You could certainly build that case for Macs, where the cheapest option is $799 and the cheapest (modern) notebook is $1199.

[AimForTheBushes]

It's just off-putting.

[foldr]

>community of unrealistic, brainwashed, tribalist fans who lack perspective and criticism

Shrug. I prefer MacBooks because the trackpads are better, and trackpad usability is more important to me than the other stuff.

[Tepix]

When was the last time you tried the trackpads on different brand notebooks? They've gotten better. For me the Dell XPS 13 9350's trackpad was good enough that getting all the goodies (USB A and USB C, a repair guide, changeable standard M.2 SSD, SD slot, non crappy keyboard, a lot cheaper) compared to the MacBook Pro made me switch to the Dell notebook.

[zapzupnz]

It doesn't matter how good the other trackpads are if they don't have the software driving it. Even with Microsoft standardising the trackpad interface for drivers in Windows 10, that doesn't matter when plenty of non-Metro applications don't support multi-touch gestures or, if they do, inconsistently.

The MacBook story isn't components. When people compare a MacBook to a PC laptop, that's about where the comparison ends. Nobody wants to admit that the marriage of hardware and software does make a difference; this denial always comes from people who don't know what that difference is or never bothered to appreciate it and thus can't understand why others do.

[foldr]

I try them out in stores pretty regularly. The macbook is still way ahead.

[H1Supreme]

I went from a MBP to a Dell Inspiron 7370 I installed Ubuntu on. I've found the trackpad to be just fine. I'm not doing any advanced multi finger gestures, but regular scrolling and two finger movements are good. Plus, I haven't ran into any palm rejection issues.

[slantyyz]

I'm a mouse user (who actually really liked both the much maligned mighty mouse and magic mouse), but when it came to track pads, I hated that Apple didn't have physical buttons for the trackpad.

My hand eye coordination on trackpads has never been great (and I'm not getting any younger), and I've always had issues with taps as clicks.

I've since switched back to Windows, and it drives me nuts that all the PC laptops that follow Apple's design lead that have dropped the physical trackpad buttons. Thankfully most of the business and "pro" laptops still have them.

[foldr]

The haptic trackpads on the newer macbooks are perfect for this. You can click anywhere on the pad and the amount of pressure required is exactly the same. It's not tap to click, because you need to actually press down for a click to register.

[slantyyz]

They aren't for me.

While I would say Macs have always had excellent pads, I still hated them.

I want to be able to have a finger on a physical button that doesn't detect any touch movements when dragging something.

[foldr]

>I want to be able to have a finger on a physical button that doesn't detect any touch movements when dragging something.

But dragging works exactly the same as it does when you have a physical button. You press down with one finger and make the dragging motion with another. You can click and drag with a single finger if you want to (as I've just discovered - never occurred to me to do it that way), but you don't have to.

[__david__]

You have to turn off "Tap to click" in the touchpad preferences. I can't remember if it is on by default or not, but it's the one thing I can't deal with. Any sort of accidental brush acts like a click and that's annoying, which sounds like what you are complaining about.

[creaghpatr]

Or if you're not a developer and don't need to do the proverbial heavy lifting, MacBooks are just nicer in general.

[LeifCarrotson]

> I have a Lenovo T480 which is 10x better than a T490. Snag one while you can...

The T490 is a regression, I agree, but the upcoming Lenovo P53 looks to be a great machine. It has almost same chassis (just a couple improved ports) as the P52, which is (IMO) superior to the T480. And you can get it with Linux installed at the factory!

There seems to be a consistent slide, where once-venerable machines like the Macbook "Pro", Lenovo T-series, HP Elitebook etc. get slimmed and down-spec'ed to expand the market to more buyers.

Hopefully the Apple can now produce a new top-end product line, the "Macbook Actually For Professionals Again" or something like that. Then they could continue marketing to and designing for students and media consumers with the MBP, and release better hardware for those who need it.

[behnamoh]

> The T490 is a regression...

What about T490s? My university offers one but we can also receive the same amount of money as research funding. Do you think it'd be wise to choose the T490s over money? I mean, has this model improved things in the Lenovo series?

[LeifCarrotson]

Depends on your research. Is your use case primarily/frequently walking around to various conference rooms, working at a table or in a lab, or are you running intense programs at a dedicated desk? For the first, the 490s and other new thin-and-light laptops are great, for the second, everyone's trying to sell you laptops designed for the first use case, and for the third, a desktop will blow every equally-priced laptop out of the water.

The 's' is the "slim" thinner and lighter version in the T-series. They do use better components (Carbon/magnesium instead of glass-fiber-reinforced nylon) to built the S, and it costs a little more as a result and is easier to tote around. But it will be harder to repair and upgrade than the standard model, and have poorer thermal performance . It also lacks the discrete GPU, has soldered-on RAM vs. the T490's one DIMM slot, and technically lacks an RJ45 Ethernet port.

The T490s does have a proprietary micro-RJ45 port that's thin enough to fit in the laptop and can convert to RJ45 with a special dongle, which to me is the epitome of everything wrong with modern laptops.

GP and I were griping that the T490, like the Macbook Pro, is trending toward the thin-and-light form factor. They dropped the RJ45 port so they could make the T490s 16.7mm thin, and the T490 is 17.9mm thick. My current upgrade plan is aimed at the P53, which is 25.8mm thick, supports 170W of thermal dissipation and processing power instead of 60W, has replaceable/upgradeable RAM, storage, batteries, more ports...and still weighs less than 6 lbs.

That machine can be trivially carried on the brief 2x/day walk from my desk to the lab, and I would't find it worthwhile to cut that weight in half if it means a poorer experience the other 7.9 hours of the day.

[Order]

>Denied data recovery when it’s possible

This one hits close to home.

I brought in my phone for a warranty exchange when the charging port was damaged. Phone at 7% without the ability to charge, I was told emailing photos to myself was the only option and was prodded to use the cloud storage in the future.

It’s unfortunate I wasn’t in the position to leave without a new phone. Years of photos were lost that day due to this lack of option and my own failure to back up locally.

[kolinko]

I’d say - only your own failure to back up locally.

If you don’t do backups, it’s just a matter of time before you lose data one way or another.

[Dylan16807]

No way. If the device got lost or crushed then it's all user fault. But with the device completely intact, just needing to be charged (you could even swap the battery if you actually wanted to help the customer), lack of backups gets much less than half the blame here.

[Order]

Totally agree with you, this was my own doing. Though I would have been more than willing to pay extra for data recovery if it were an option.

[spectramax]

Louis Rossmann and his cult followers - they seem to feed on the righteousness cause that Rossmann has cultivated over the years. His rants do have truth but the way he conveys is emotion driven and designed to lure people into this cult of Apple haters.

There is one thing to criticize Apple on objective basis and another to develop a deep sense of hatred, vulgar insults, angry rants, personal attacks and fostering despicable contemptful culture with an emotional agenda. He has built a huge community of people that love watching him rant just about anything.

May be its just me but I don't enjoy this type of content even if I agree with their general assessment or opinions.

That said, I do like what he is doing for Right-To-Repair movement along with folks from iFixit and EFF.

[alluro2]

Surely risking to sound just like one (not a fan, btw, just watched a couple of videos) but I think his opinion of Apple in terms of hadware quality and attitude towards customers in need of service has more merit than most people's - given that he's dealing with it all day, every day.

On top of the quality getting worse, so has the repairability too - but not only that - customer's ability to have the device repaired anywhere else except by Apple directly (difficulty for independent repair businesses to order parts, obtain service manuals, renew licences etc...) has taken a big hit in the last few years. And Apple's suggested course of action has increasingly been very costly replacements of half of the laptop for even the smallest issues...

Since it's hard to spread that to the broader public, and people notoriously love to see other people ranting and throwing rocks at stuff, he seems to have taken that approach - and earn some additional money from YT along the way...So, yeah, partially agree with you, but I think the intentions are more good than bad, and more people need to be talking about it in any case, if something is to be improved.

[ksec]

That is not entirely true, he does commend Apple when appreciate, such as display quality compared to all other Laptop. The thing is, some of the stuff he mentioned has been there since 2016 MacBook Pro, like the Thunderbolt High Voltage pin issues that has been there for 3 years now.

[FireBeyond]

There's a certain irony or je ne sais quoi that Apple themselves try very hard (desperately?) to have truth conveyed in a way that is emotion driven and designed to lure people in.

[AimForTheBushes]

My MBP is the best machine I've ever owned. I bought it brand new in 2015 and it is still just as good as the day I got it. Your comparison is unfair given that there have been excellent machines in the past 5 years but they lost focus in the past 3 years.

[freeplay]

Ahh the last great MBP

[asadkn]

Maybe relatively, but not really. Wouldn't call a device with poor thermals, and a throttling device "great". Nor do the constantly swelling low quality batteries make it great.

[rezeroed]

Unfortunately, I can't use a laptop which has a joystick in the middle of the keyboard. Until they stop that I'll have to go dell xps13 when my mbp-2014 dies.

[ode]

Can you explain why the T490 is a regression? Thanks

[Foobar8568]

If I remember correctly when I bought my X1C 6th gen recently, mainly : one ram slot is soldered and lose of the secondary/optional battery to have crazy autonomy.

[OldSchoolJohnny]

MBP was rarely the best option for most developers, just the coolest one or they were succumbing to peer pressure, any other explanation has always been inexplicable.

[setr]

Its unix with a generally nicer/hassle-free ux and better arbitrary device support... its utility for development seems fairly obvious to me. The only major factors are price and recently ports and physical reliability.

Hell, what are your alternatives? Linux on laptops is broadly a mess until fairly recently... and Windows is Windows.

[ladberg]

So far it's been the best option for me when it comes to getting work done efficiently without banging my head against a wall. What would you recommend?

Most of the developers I know have no shame and can't be peer pressured, and still often use MacBooks.