You should wait until next Fall if you don't really need to replace your M1 Max. Rumors say that Apple's going to redesign the Macbook Pros next year with an OLED screen.
I would rather buy the last refresh of the old design. Waiting for a redesign is risky, as some redesings are just bad (like the touchbar MBP). And Apple is opinionated enough that it often refuses to admit its mistakes and sticks to them for years.
The butterfly switches break easily and replacing the entire keyboard because of it is a pain. I held on to my 2015 intel MBP for ages waiting for them to address that.
I had one for a few years. The keyboard was bad, and there was no physical escape key. There were lot of accidental clicks with the touchbar, as it had a different logic (touch to use rather than press to use) than the other keys, or the function keys on every other keyboard. And I was using USB-A and HDMI adapters all the time, as the laptop lacked essential ports.
The first M1 MacBook Pros had both the touchbar and a decent keyboard. I love mine so long as the driver running the touchbar doesn't crash, which it does sometimes necessitating a reboot. My main problem is how few programs actually ever made good use (not just some use) of the touchbar.
As for the dongle issue, that went away when I upgraded to a USB-C monitor at home and USB-C equipment at work. I can dock to a monitor or plug into a projector to give a presentation and charge with the same cable. At this point I don't want an HDMI port, and I'm kind of sad that the next laptop will probably have a dedicated charging cable.
I travel quite a bit. HDMI remains useful, as most monitors / TVs / projectors I encounter still don't have USB-C input. USB-A is also somewhat useful, as I charge various devices from my laptop to avoid dealing with too many international power adapters.
The most common ports I need are roughly: 1. USB-C; 2. HDMI; 3. USB-A; 4. second USB-C; 5. third USB-C; 6. second USB-A; 7. DisplayPort; 8. fourth USB-C.
I still have both 13" and 15" Touch Bar MacBook Pros from 2016, and the keyboard is hands down my favorite laptop keyboard to type on since the Lenovo X220. The new ones aren't _bad_ but not as nice. The physical escape key doesn't matter to me, I have had it mapped to caps lock forever.
I also used to use the Touch Bar for a status display for things like tests, it was honestly great. Do not miss the battery life and performance compared to my subsequent Apple Silicon laptops, but definitely miss the keyboard.
I think it’s because of the non optionality of it. If you could have gotten every but sans/includes the touch bar people could have simply made their choices based on preference.
In the end they reverted because they were not willing to make it optional. They also never released a touch bar keyboard for desktop, which would have made it more useful perhaps
My 2019 MBP has a touch bar and a physical escape key, so at least some models did have one. I agree not having it would make the touch bar way worse. As it is I don't mind it.
i also found that weird when I got it but I got used to it quickly. It's not my main work machine but I use it for a couple of hours every evening and stopped thinking about it. I do sometimes accidentally bring up Siri when I mean to hit the backspace key.
As someone who went all in on the 2019 i9 Intel MBP months before Apple announced the M1 MBP, I can tell you this strategy is not always optimal. Years of managing overheating and underperformance due to said overheating has not been fun. Especially when I found out about the benchmarks showing those M1s were running circles around the laptop I purchased, for a fraction of the price
I grabbed a broken 2019 i9 and repaired it. I thought I had fucked up the repair because it kept thermal throttling but after researching a bit and eventually comparing to a known good machine it appears that I did fine and no, it just does that
Apple has had missteps of course, but you can usually buy last year’s model, right?
OLED is much better than other display technology, and they’ve done other OLED screen devices. It would be quite surprising to see them screw this up—not impossible, sure. They could screw up some other design element for example. But, it would be somewhat surprising, right? And OLED is a big change so maybe they won’t also feel the need to mess with other stuff.
Everything I recently researched about display technologies, mini LED has no image retention/burn-in issues, and renders fonts better compared to OLED. It seems you want OLED for media (and mobile, since you often alternate entire screens), IPS for work, and mini LED as a more expensive compromise without burn-in, that does text as well as IPS, and media almost as well as OLED. I wonder why would they even want to use OLED on work screens with lots of static content, did something major change about the tech such that it doesn't suffer these issues anymore?
I think OLED burn in has been mitigated fairly well recently. At least, I have a Linux laptop from 2021 that I use for work as well as fun, no particular care taken to avoid it, but no burn-in so far.
Font rendering, hard to say, I think it’s just preference.
Terminals look very nice with actual-black backgrounds.
I have a Samsung QD-OLED monitor from 2023 which has very noticeable burn-in at low brightness levels. This is from the era of "OLED burn-in has been solved," and it's soured me on OLED monitors since I do photography as a hobby and don't want burn-in affecting how I see images on my screen. I think it's fine for televisions, but I don't like it for PC use where I have static windows on my screen for a long time. I even used dark mode and still got burn-in pretty quickly, for example where it draws the border between side-by-side windows (so, a vertical line down the middle of my screen). Once I noticed that, I started resizing my side-by-side windows so their border isn't in the same place every day, but the damage is done.
Comments like yours make me feel justified that potential burn-in issues were why I stuck with an IPS panel when I purchased a new monitor earlier this year.
My past monitors have lasted me 5-7 years in the past, and I only upgraded for size (once) and gsync (also once).
I don't want to be forced to buy another one just because of burn-in.
Interesting. Since I use the pretty barebones Linux config (i3wm) and haven’t tried to avoid static elements, I have a lot on my screen. But, I tend to keep my screen fairly dark just for comfort. It is also 1080p, and not super high dpi, I wonder if bigger pixels are less fragile.
The notch is bigger than it should be for sure, I would've loved for it to be narrower. But I don't really mind the trade-off it represents.
You could add half an inch of screen bezel and make the machine bigger, just to fit the web cam. Or you could remove half an inch of screen , essentially making the "notch" stretch across the whole top of the laptop. Or you could find some compromised place to put the camera, like those Dell laptops which put the camera near the hinge. Or you can let the screen fill the whole lid of the laptop, with a cut-out for the camera, and design the GUI such that the menu bar fills the part of the screen that's interrupted by the notch.
I personally don't mind that last option. For my needs, it might very well be the best alternative. If I needed a bigger below-the-notch area, I could get the 16" option instead of the 14" option.
I don't have a problem with the notch, I have a problem with the icons not showing in the status bar and there isn't a *** way to show them. It's so difficult to add a overflow button that shows the hidden icons?
My REDMAGIC Android phone is like this too and I love not having a stupid notch cut out of the screen. I've hated them since the very first time I saw a iPhone X. Can't believe such a ridiculous design defect infected Macbooks too :/
It's not visible at all. The camera is just placed behind the screen.
OLED screens are inherently transparent, there is just a light-emitting layer in them. You put your camera behind the screen, and either make the few pixels on top of the lens go black when it's on, or you use a lot of software to remove the light that comes from the screen and clean up the picture.
They have the solution with the web cam near the hinge that I mentioned. I had a couple of Dell XPS laptops like that. It's fine if the webcam is really just an afterthought for you, but it does mean the webcam has a very unflattering angle that's looking up your nostrils.
I use my webcam enough these days to take part in video meetings that it'd be a pretty big problem for me.
Checkout the Dell XPS 13 9345, webcam is on top but with thinner bezels than a Macbook, it's got a Snapdragon ARM processor for good battery life, OLED screen, upto 64GB RAM, and is smaller and lighter than a Macbook Air
Snapdragon X Elite 2 processor will be out next year for the refreshed model