It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s to the late 2000s, I used a variety of PC laptops and this was the only laptop that survived a huge amount of abuse from travel and daily usage (obviously, YMMV).
I'd love to upgrade to a new MBP, but I truly don't understand what they were thinking with this current iteration. The touchbar feels gimmicky and over the top. Call me old school, but give me physical buttons any day of the week and keep the keyboard simple. Most importantly, give me a keyboard that has more room to press so that random dust getting in there isn't going to screw shit up.
The worrying part is that in order to keep using the good MacBooks from the past, you need to keep them on the OS version that they shipped with.
I have a 2012 MacBook Air that was crazy fast, weighed four grams, and even ran windows 7. Sure, the drive was small, but it was perfect.
But some time in 2015 or so I made the terrible strategic blunder of upgrading to the latest OS version. Performance immediately dropped to zero, and now when I open it up for any reason, I just spend my whole time watching it spin uselessly trying to idle along with one browser tab open. It's sad to see it so reduced.
I've had the same experience with every iPad I've ever owned. Delightful, responsive machines that get auto-updated to brick status over the course of about three years. (I have every model up to air 3, and the only one still working perfectly is the old 1st gen air that I've kept on iOS 8 and spend a minute every day carefully dismissing the auto update prompt).
I have one of the sacred 2015 MacBook Pros, which now can't edit videos using the new format exported from my wife's iPhone x. An OS upgrade would solve that. But the machine is too precious to risk it.
For that air you need to upgrade the hardware to modern specs. My 2012 mbp shipped with 4gb ram and currently flies on mojave as if it was shipped with it, because I replaced the hdd with an ssd and gave it 16gb of ram. The processor in this computer isn’t all that far off from the one in the brand new air, 7 years later.
One interesting thing with the Airs is if you format the SSD or install a new one, slightly to my surprise the thing boots up and say 'OS missing would you like to download it' and it then downloads and installs the original OS the machine came with when new. At least that's what happened to me, 2014 model I think.
By the way I use a 2013 with High Sierra and it's not that bad - sometimes they are slow at first while they index everything and then speed up again when done. I get more beach balls than before upgrading but some other stuff works better, especially charging the iphone which used to drive me nuts with the old os.
For other HNers, Apple intentionally slows down their older versions via updates. They've been fined for this in a variety of countries and courts in the last few years.
At least with the MacBooks, you do have the option to downgrade back to a previous version of the OS, if you find the performance of the new one not up to par. So why not go back to the version of the OS on your Air that you were once happy with?
For the record, I have the same rMBP 2012 model that the person you're replying to talked about, and it still runs great. But I'm typing this reply to you on a MacBook Air from 2010, running macOS 10.12 Sierra, in Chrome. Still works surprisingly well...
I have seen that with my Late 2013 MBP (dgpu) as well - for some reason on High Sierra and Mojave the performance is significantly worse than Sierra (seems to be related to WindowServer process leaking memory).
Haven't seen any issues with the latest OSX for the 2015 MBPs though, and unlike with iOS you can easily downgrade to an older OS if you do see issues.
The oled touchpad is ridiculous. I never use it “as intended” and it wrecks my function key muscle memory. My laptop is actually expanding because of the battery. I’d like at least a dock that does decent, active cooling.
Do you have an online source backing this up? Because people report Apple does't care, at least in some cases:
> Apple support have refused to provide any assistance, simply stating that the MacBookAir is out of warranty. They just said this behaviour (rapid expansion of a battery) "can be expected" in some cases.
If it's an expanded battery and you are out of warranty, they should only charge the cost of the battery to get that fixed up, so you wouldn't be out of pocket for the top case part (which is much more expensive) nor any other components that may have been damaged by the expansion.
As a vi user, I hate the touchbar and its escape "key". I sometimes find myself turning down the brightness instead of getting into command mode which is irritating.
I hear this specific complaint often; I wonder if people don't realize the hit area of the escape key is much larger than the key itself. On my 2016 MBP I can fire it from almost a centimeter from its left edge
I do wish there was some haptic feedback, and all my issues would go.
Touchbar has been great for scrubbing, provides much finder-grained control of both brightness and volume than the keys did (fine-grained sliders for both the laptop display and attached thunderbolt display).
Id happily agree that comfort-wise, I still prefer the longer-travel keys of the 2012-2015 era.
As a Vim user who occasionally uses a touchbar MacBook, I don't even think about the touchbar. Mainly because I don't use it for anything. Let me repeat that: nothing. It does not enter my mind. Until I hit escape and I'm still in text entry mode. Because the escape key didn't fire.
I appreciate the collaborator who sent this thing to me, so I have excellent field experience on which to base my decision to "nope, never" buy one of these.
I'm now using an early 2017 MacBook Pro 13" "Escape" (14,1 sans Touch Bar), with the 2nd-gen butterfly keyboard. My main workflow revolves around iTerm2, zsh, tmux, and NeoVim. Even though I have a real Esc key, I usually use Ctrl-[ as it's closer to the home row and faster for me.
Far more worrying to me is the butterfly keyboard in this scenario (for dev). The Ctrl, Tab, Return, and especially the A, J, K, D, and T keys get a lot of use and currently aren't tough enough to withstand constant usage. I've already had to replace the butterfly switch under the J key because one of the tiny clips that hold the switch in place in the corners snapped off. Fortunately I was able to blow the broken off piece out and prevent the key from going catatonic until I could replace it, but my left Shift key got a tiny speck of something underneath of it and is now refusing to register `:` half the time, which is incredibly frustrating for a heavy Vim user.
The non-user-replaceable battery is another annoyance. We all know that heat is the enemy of Li-ion batteries. I'm working remote in SE Asia, and even with office A/C it's very hot here. This laptop is a little over a year old, has never been used outdoors or outside an office, and it's already in "Service Battery" mode and shutting down at around 70% charge. This is completely unacceptable. I'm going to have to take it to the Genius Bar and be without my work rig for about 2 weeks if I'm lucky, and it goes without saying that I have a lot of user-centric settings and config enabled that would take me hours to replicate on a borrowed rig (even though I can clone my dotfiles and part of the config).
As Marco says in the article, developers are the biggest cohort of Apple's "pro" users. Apple needs to go back to the drawing board and make a truly pro keyboard that can withstand the rigours of touch typing and massive amounts of key entry, and can resist a very modest amount of dust.
We all know that heat is the enemy of Li-ion batteries. I'm working remote in SE Asia, and even with office A/C it's very hot here. This laptop is a little over a year old, has never been used outdoors or outside an office, and it's already in "Service Battery" mode and shutting down at around 70% charge.
Something sounds very wrong there. Unless you are regularly using it in areas above 35° C it shouldn't really matter.
Clarification: I have used this in rooms with no A/C, but to my knowledge it's never been in a room with temperatures above what Apple recommends as above normal range.
You could start using Ctrl-[ instead of the Esc key and see if that works better for you. The [ key is easier to reach, it's closer to the center of the keyboard. But sometimes using a different key is tricky, as we get our muscle memory used to a particular key position and after some point it's difficult to change that.
I personally also tend to use Ctrl-M instead of Enter and Ctrl-H instead of Backspace, for the same reasons. And some people map Ctrl to Caps Lock as it's also easier to find with your finger than the Ctrl key - it's a big key. I usually do this too.
That was my problem too but I discovered the Karabiner Elements app which lets you map caps lock to escape when pressed alone and to control when held down.
I'm with all the people who remap Caps Lock to be the Escape key. Works fine.
(Although when I have to use other people's Macs or my Win PC at home it's often hard to remember to use the Escape key instead - at least toggling Caps Lock isn't destructive.)
Speaking of vi and the touchbar, it took me an inappropriate amount of time to figure out why my terminal was sometimes changing colors while occasionally using vi..
My wife needed a MBP so I've bought a 2019 to replace my 2013 13" model.
The i7 2.8GHz dual core is now an i5 2.4GHz quad core.
The RAM is still 16GB.
To keep the price roughly the same the 2019 is a fixed 512GB instead of an upgradeable 1TB.
And of course, no escape or function keys but touch bar. And no SD card slot. And a keyboard replacement programme - I've replaced a few keys myself on the 2013 that wore out, I can't see me doing that one the 2019.
The 2019 hasn't arrived yet. I'm genuinely not sure whether to give her the new one and keep the six year old one for myself. That it's even in question seems ridiculous.
My company is a windows shop and around 2013 we wee looking at Macs to replace Windows. Back then Macs were quite competitively priced compared to Windows machines. But that seems over now.
I don't mind the lack of function keys; I've realized to my mild surprise that the only things I tend to use them with have been bits and bobs I remapped myself with Keyboard Maestro (I used to have F13 remapped to...something or other, for instance) and the occasional terminal app that uses function keys. I do use media keys, but I've found the Touch Bar is by and large just fine for that. (I don't really have muscle memory associated with those, and controls like volume and brightness are fine use cases for a surface that can do sliders.)
In practice, my only real complaints with the Touch Bar are (1) not enough things really find ways to take advantage of it, which contributes to its "just a gimmick" feel, and (2) GIVE ME BACK A PHYSICAL ESCAPE KEY.
The lack of a mechanical Escape is nuts, yes. But Apple could and should have dealt with that by moving the Escape to somewhere else on the keyboard. In fact they should have done that anyway, as Escape is too remote on the far left of the far-away function row. Given the the MBP keyboard as it is, most users should probably remap Esc to the Caps Lock key, at least if they don't tend to hit Caps Lock by accident.
I used to remap caps lock as another control key, actually, but sure, they could put the escape key somewhere else. My muscle memory is for where the escape key is now.
(...but I actually remap caps lock to escape in my iPad's terminal client, ironically, because the Brydge hardware keyboard has no escape key at all!)
It allows remapping keys, so you could e.g. remap the whole top row from ~, 1 to 0 to act as ESC, F1 to F10 when needed. Not ideal but better than touch bar.
I used Karabiner for a while, but didn't find a lot of incredible use for it in practice. Some people love it, though.
I'd have liked to have seen more apps try and do something with the touch bar, though. Amusingly, Apple's native Terminal.app does more work with it than many other apps I've seen -- it adds a virtual key that toggles the Option key between Option and Meta, adds a "Man page" button that will bring up the man page for the last-typed command, and lets you quickly change the theme of an existing terminal window.
Are there modifier-key-based alternatives to the F-key shortcuts? If so then one should be using those instead; in fact one should be using those instead of the F keys anyway, since they're (by all accounts; not an expert) faster and more convenient for touch-typing. (They may be slightly less discoverable than the function-key versions, but that's no longer a problem once you've gone ahead and discovered them.) If there's no modifier-based alternative to some important shortcut, then that's certainly pretty dreadful. It is more the ISV's fault than Apple's, but obviously that's cold comfort to users. What Apple should do, though, is map keys on the right-hand side of the mechanical keyboard to the F keys while the Fn button is held down —so, like a typical laptop numlock, only with a momentary rather than a latching modifier —instead of only changing the Touch Bar display.
Real functions keys are excellent for debugging -- single step, step into, etc.
Modifier-based shortcuts are not as good because it usually takes two hands, and maybe I want a hand free to use the mouse to scan values, operate the UI I’m testing, etc.
Also, IDEs have a ton of functions so all the simple modifier combinations are already in use. A complex two-hand combination is good for something you frequently use once while typing (e.g. “show autocomplete”). Debugging, on the other hand, is something you do relatively infrequently (hopefully!) but when you’re in that mode, it’s great to have dedicated single keys, closely clustered together.
Physical keys are much easier to use than touchscreen buttons, especially when not looking at the keyboard.
I avoid the TouchBar like the plague, but I think JetBrains is to blame for that particular problem. macOS apps don't typically use the F keys for shortcuts, and I wish JetBrains would offer an optional, more Mac-like set of hotkeys out of the box. (Their "OS X" scheme is basically just the Windows one with ctrl and cmd exchanged.)
It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s to the late 2000s, I used a variety of PC laptops and this was the only laptop that survived a huge amount of abuse from travel and daily usage (obviously, YMMV).
I'd love to upgrade to a new MBP, but I truly don't understand what they were thinking with this current iteration. The touchbar feels gimmicky and over the top. Call me old school, but give me physical buttons any day of the week and keep the keyboard simple. Most importantly, give me a keyboard that has more room to press so that random dust getting in there isn't going to screw shit up.