Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jagira 2457 days ago
> IMO the 2015 MacBook Pro is the best Mac out there, mainly because of its beautiful retina display, perfect weight, and most importantly, a good keyboard.

Yep. 2015 Macbook Pro is the last best mac. Probably this is why refurbished 2015 MBP commands premium over other models.

4 comments

That's funny, because I call the Late 2013 MBP the last best one :) Among other things, it was the last one to feature a physical trackpad click, as opposed to the fake "taptic engine" all-glass trackpad of the 2014 and newer which doesn't physically move when you click (similar to newer iPhones).
To be honest, I actually prefer the fake click of the new trackpads. It feels very real, it's not at all comparable to the taptic feedback on the buttonless iPhones.

The fake click feels so real that people don't even realise it's a fake click if you don't tell them.

The mechanical trackpads only allowed clicking in the bottom half (since it was a hinge), and in my experience it was unreliable. After a few years, clicks started registering twice, or not at all, etc.

The fake click track pad allows clicking everywhere, it lets you configure activation force, and for me it has been working flawlessly every day for years.

My trackpad stopped clicking one morning and I was worried that maybe battery expansion was keeping it from being pressed down.

Then I finally remembered it was haptic feedback and a reboot fixed it. I had completely forgotten it was not a real click.

I can confirm this, as I am an owner of two 2018 Macbook Pros for 7 months and I did not even realize that the click was fake !
The haptic trackpad works beautifully imo, you can click anywhere, there is force click, the clicky sound can be turned on or off, the feedback can be adjusted. And to me it feels real.
I honestly thought I wouldn't like the fake clicking, but I ended up liking it after I used it for a day!
I can never sent to click and drag successfully with the new track pad. Plus it is needlessly big
Don't know where you got this idea. My mid-2014 MBP has a physical click, where the trackpad actually sinks when I press on it.
Ah right, it turns out I misunderstood the EveryMac page about the Mid-2014 [0], with the wording 'a "no button" glass "inertial" multi-touch trackpad'. Thought that was their wording for the non-moving trackpad! haha :) It's the 2015 that had the taptic engine trackpad first, I think.

[0] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...

Does it click when the power is off?
Yep! And I can see it physically depressing when applying pressure.
Oh, turns out I was one model off, the next model afterward ("Mid 2014"[0]) still had the physical trackpad click, while they introduced the taptic engine with the Early 2015 model[1]. I misunderstood the EveryMac description of the features!

[0] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...

[1] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...

My 2012 one jammed up one day and the glass actually shattered upon a click. Still works and somehow I'm not getting splinters, but that's definitely an inherent flaw in the physical keyboards as batteries expand over time.
I don't think this is accurate, the 2015 MBP I am using now has a physical click (pad has vertical travel).
Is it definitely 2015? Starting "Early 2015" they had the taptic trackpad https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...
Pardon the wild analogy but I think it says something about this era. Star Wars 7 and 8 were already sold cheaper than the original movies on Youtube movies.

Why so much "new" is actually worse these days..

Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of movies from 1977 were crap, but we only remember the ones that weren't, like the original Star Wars. Comparing all movies of today to the best movies of the past is unfair.
It's not really the same here. Both SW trilogies made rounds of moneys worldwide (ep 7 is in the top 10 I think). But the latest movies, which are brand new, and were somehow successful are already deprecated. It's like processed food, taste doesn't last.
I think they discount the newest movies so they can get as many people to watch them as they can in order to sell them related merchandise. It is Disney Star Wars after all.
Most merchandise I've seen in stores (e.g. LEGO) is from the old trilogy, though.
honestly I don't buy it (sic)

even with plausible disney merch. strategy, to me it's a clear and sad sign of some issue in entertainment production

It's part of getting older.

Not many things quit at their peak. You tend to notice less things which were past their peak when you were growing up and remember things which peaked while you were around.

It might have something to do with why people get more conservative as they get older. There's a bias towards thinking things were better before than they are now when people just don't remember the crap from when they were younger and things actually are pretty much the same (or really are generally getting better by most metrics)

Nono it's not my tastes. I'm speaking about youtube pricing. Even they realize that new sequels don't hold much value, even though to most of their audience (new generations using youtube often) has no reference to favor the past movies from the new.
Oh I meant it in a different way, maybe I could rephrase:

You have a tendency to notice things getting worse that you personally experience. When you're younger you have had less time to experience something you care about declining than when you're older which leads to a cognitive bias where it seems that things were generally better when you were young.

However old you are, there were plenty of things in decline when you were young that you just didn't notice or care about because you never experienced them at their best and are much less likely to experience them. So many people have experienced Star Wars because it's super culturally relevant, but slide down that scale and there will be tons of things your parents saw the decline of that you might not even know existed.

> Why so much "new" is actually worse these days..

New stuff in general is not worse. New versions of old things quite often are! So upgrade your taste and try new things instead of newer versions of the old things you know you like, because with these you're very likely to be disappointed.

In this context maybe the answer would be to try something else than a macbook. Tbh, and iPad pro capable of running Xcode and docker would rock for me.

Indeed. I have an iPad Pro that admittedly doesn't see much use because I'm very much tied to my MacBook, but having played with iPadOS I'm blown away by it and I had a very sudden realisation of "So this is where Apple's development efforts have gone!".

I can't wait until the day where I can genuinely do some development on an iPad.

Regression to the mean may be part of it. Even for a master of their craft success and quality will depend on random factors beyond skill, so pieces of work following a great one are more likely to be worse than better, assuming skill remains constant.
I wonder if people at apple know this and what they think on the matter.
:waits patiently for input from throw_away6747357:

c'mon we won't tell

I actually think it was the fully loaded 11” 2015 MBA. But. Regardless, they don’t make em like they used to.