Apple's New MacBooks Make Me Sad

I would have purchased my first MacBook Pro back in 2006. In that time, I’ve gone ahead and purchased two more, and each time I’ve been happy with them, despite whatever hardware gremlins popped up from time to time. I’m by no means an Apple fanboy - I regard myself as platform-agnostic, willing to work with whatever tools best suit my needs at a given time and make me most productive - and for a long time, that’s been a solid unix-based laptop that has come with Apple and Intel-based hardware and OS X. Unfortunately, now that it’s 2020, I’ve hit a bit of a problem.

My current laptop is a MacBook Pro 11,3 - Late 2013 15-inch, Core i7, 16GB - and I’ll tell you now, it’s been a great workhorse. Gaming, work, side projects - it’s done it all, and with a minimum of complaints. It also still has those rarest of things on a laptop - ports! - which leave me with no need for endless dongles. Unfortunately some six or so years in it’s now starting to show wear and tear. The power connector has taken a beating from a dog-induced fall, the screen has a couple of little dings, and on more recent versions of OS X the area of the case directly below the monitor seems to now be running as hot as the surface of the sun. So, I’ve been considering a replacement - but alas, I have been left disappointed.

Let’s put the obvious out of the way first - I am not a fan of the industry-wide move to one or two USB-C ports on a laptop which forces you into dock/dongle hell. In fact, this annoys the absolute crap out of me. The idea that you would spend upwards of 2-3 grand on a 13-inch laptop, only to then have to fork out an additional 150 to 300 bucks on peripherals to make it functional in your home or office is as insane as it is cynical. That said, it’s not like this is an Apple-only thing; providers like Dell and HP are very much going the same way. What is different from Apple’s perspective is they seem to show no inclination to include any extra ports or dongles, period; whereas the aforementioned PC manufacturers will happily throw some sort of extras your way in the base price, be it SD card slots, an additional port or two, or a bundled dock or adapter(s). The 13-inch Pro I purchased for a team member at work recently had two USB-C slots - only a slight step above the ludicrous sole USB-C slot that came with the Retina MacBook.

Then there’s the keyboard. Oh boy, the keyboard - the keyboard with the many, many complaints. I have watched developers sit down and start coding on their newly purchased MacBooks/MacBook Pros, and struggle and curse for a couple of hours before inevitably finding whatever dusty external keyboard they can find and plugging it in through a dongle or dock. Using it in coding interviews is painful, especially for the unaware, and my own side-by-side comparison with one of the new laptops vs. my trusty 2013 era Pro left me with a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction. In fairness, Apple have acknowledged the issue and are trying to fix it, but the apology seemed to come too late - and frankly, it’s difficult to see how people product testing these internally at Apple could have been happy with them.

Another problem that seems to have occurred of late at Apple with regards to their laptops is a misfiring of their innovation engine. Back in the day, I genuinely loved the MagSafe power connector. People thought it was gimmicky as hell, but I could honestly tell you that the amount of times an expensive accident was avoided due to a family member, pet, or klutzy owner more than made up for the novelty factor and justified it’s inclusion. Retina screens were again something that looked absolutely gorgeous. Sure, I probably could have kept going with what I used to have, but boy was it hard to switch from using a MacBook Pro that had one to using a laptop that did not. These days, we’re being told about the wonders of the Touch Bar… and I’m very much unimpressed. I’ve played with it a little, and frankly I’m not seeing what I’m missing. I figured that maybe it’s just something I’d have to use to appreciate, but that doesn’t seem to be the case either. Besides, given I have to connect my laptop to a dock to make it halfway useful with other peripherals, and to get a keyboard that doesn’t suck, why would I be using the Touch Bar anyway?

The thing that really puts a nail in the coffin of the current MacBook Pros for me though is how far everything else has come along to being the complete package that I always had to go to a MacBook Pro to achieve. It was never about having the best-in-class tech specs; although I often maxed out what I could for longevity anyway. It wasn’t just the fact that it ran a *nix variant - I could have always just dual-booted or fresh installed Ubuntu onto a PC laptop. It was just the hard-to-pinpoint overall experience that made you feel incredibly productive and able to get shit done, with a minimum of fuss along the way. To quote The Castle; “It’s just the vibe of the thing”.

Now though, I’ve been running a Dell XPS 13 on first Ubuntu, now Mint, for an extended period of time as my primary work machine. It’s performed admirably - at home or at work, writing code or writing papers, streaming media or coordinating meetings. There are downsides - this particular generation of XPS 13s has an insanely placed webcam which gives a great view of either my hands or my nostrils to fellow meeting attendees, and it only has the 8GB of RAM compared to my current MacBook Pro’s 16GB. That said, this isn’t really comparing apples with apples - my MBP is 15 inch, it cost a hell of a lot more money, and it’s a lot less sleek and portable (seems hilarious to write that when I think back to my first generation MBP!).

The point is, it has allowed me to do all that I need and more, and it’s done so in a largely enjoyable way. If I was to look at a purchase of a new laptop, a comparison between a XPS 13 and a comparable MacBook Pro 13 looks as follows:

To get the MacBook Pro spec’d to the same levels of the XPS, you’re looking at a final price of $3,399. Even if you argue that the Dell website includes a direct-from-Dell discount, that machine is still costing only $2,799 fully priced. Now back in the day, I’d have argued that I would have been fine to pay the ‘Apple Tax’ because I knew I was going to get a machine that would make me both productive and happy, and I’d be able to use it for many years - just look at my incumbent model. Unfortunately for Apple, the sheen of “It Just Works” wore off a long time ago - and the rest of the field very much seems to have caught up.

A combination of much better hardware - even the Microsoft Surface looks to be a decent machine, and that’s something that I was definitely skeptical of when it came out - and a slowly improved Linux desktop experience has left me with the overwhelming impression that when I finally do bite the bullet and upgrade this MacBook Pro, I will likely be opting for a different platform entirely - and I find that more than a little sad, seeing how well they’ve served me.