While it's nice to see an opinionated company like Apple admit fault and revert to what people want, I wonder if this move is too late for many of those that decided to move away from Apple?
Years ago, I switched to a Surface Book, and while I'm tempted to go back for this MBP I reckon that a Surface Book update would be enough to kill any desire for the Mac range. While Apple stagnated, many of the high-end manufacturers caught up.
MacOS. These points have been made a million times, but I'll make them again.
Windows is fine for day to day casual use, but the moment you attempt to peek under the hood you encounter a hostile and alien landscape.
Linux is usually consistent, well organized, and highly configurable when you are under the hood, but is a pain in the ass for day to day use. Edit: Illustrator and Photoshop still aren't available for Linux as I just discovered.
MacOS is Unix under the hood, but it has software support near that of Windows, and it also adds a layer of convenience and thoughtfulness on top that isn't matched elsewhere. Ffs, It is still the only OS that recovers basically flawlessly from running out of batteries.
I waited a couple of years to replace my MBP. I will never switch back to Windows. I hate Windows more than I hate the butterfly keyboard and I knew Apple would have to come up with a better MBP at some point.
Doubt it. For devs there still isn't a great alternative. No one has the build quality of Apple and the XPS has been disappointing. Can't speak much for other pros but I'd imagine that they held off on an upgrade rather than switch to a new manufacturer. Apple's branding helps here.
Apple did have impressive build quality, but those days are long gone. I can run happily on a MBP from a few years ago, whereas the newer ones have had numerous issues.
In terms of overall quality, I'd say that MBP is now behind some of the other high-end devices. The Surface Book knocks the latest MBP versions out of the water in every department, except for the track pad. It's not difficult to argue that the keyboard, screen, durability, or even the OS is superior to Apple's (current) offering.
My Surface Book 2 with a GTX 1060 can’t drive two 4K monitors at 60Hz using the Surface Dock 2 unless you purchase DisplayLink adapters. That laptop retails for $3,200 in that configuration before taxes and the Surface Dock itself. Fortunately, it’s a corporate device so I can’t complain. Had it have been a personal purchase it would have found its way back to the store.
There are absolutely better alternatives. Ubuntu 18 with Gnome (or any other modern Linux) + modern laptops with intel/nvidia work fantastic. Plenty of good aluminum chassi out there.
Apple build quality isn't even close to being good. Hardware failures are common, they had the shitty keyboards in previous gens that started failing after dust got stuck in them, e.t.c.
Keep in mind that on something like a Lenovo, if a keyboard fails, it takes 2 days to order a new one from amazon for a very cheap price, and 10 minutes to swap it.
Of course not. The people who complain on HN and switch to the “windows subsystem for linux” are a fringe minority. The rest of the industry is still jamming on a Mac.
The whole "developers use Mac" thing is not because Macs are better, its because when companies need to give their devs hardware, Macs are the least shitty alternatives.
For example, Amazon gives most of the devs Macs. However, they still use Amazon Linux (RHEL based) VMs for building and testing services, because the EC2s that run these services in prod are all RHEL based. Half of my time is spent in an ssh shell, because either half the shit doesn't work on Mac because of some native dependency, or because I don't want to run into some weird bug like I had due to the case insesitivity of the MacOs system where the code reads a file, but the same code doesn't work when its deployed to EC2.
And as such, there are issues galore with the computers. External display over usbc for presentations sometimes don't work and require a restart of the laptops, which takes 2 minutes for some reason even with ssds. Some USBc hubs fuck up SMC controllers, which then requires a reset, and others straight up fry computers. Copy and Paste on websites often doesn't work as intended. Wifi randomly drops out.
I dunno how the old Macbooks held up, but modern ones are a complete ripoff for what you get if you are spending your own money on one.None of these issues are present on my personal $300 laptop running Linux Mint with minimal customization.
The biggest group that I've seen move away from the MBP range aren't developers, but are creatives - either in design or in sound/music. I know a few DJ's in my local area that have largely switched to Windows laptops because they feel tools like Ableton work better, and because they feel that for the price they're paying they're not getting value for money from the MBP range.
For what industry? You're on HN not SAP daily. The rest of the world definitely runs on Windows but if you’re building software and reading HN you’re probably on macOS.
I don't know if that's true. Software devs in consulting shops (especially the megacorps - Accenture, TCS, Infosys, Cap Gemini) are probably the bulk of workers that write software. Most of them are likely not on HN but they do build software and they do it on Windows.
I bought a 17" Dell laptop with Ubuntu and have no plans to go back after 10 years on OSX. It's got everything I need and I can open it up to improve it more.
It's also huge, which I kinda like now...but that huge comes with the ability to have 3 disks, a huge replaceable battery, 8 cores and 64gb of RAM.
There's a slight learning curve to using Linux as your daily driver but it's hard to go back once you figure it out.
They certainly missed out on one sale of a MBP from me about a year ago, but after experiencing the competition (I settled on a high-end Gigabyte laptop) I'm eager to go back.
Even just little things like being able to charge USB devices while the laptop is closed make a real difference in my life.
I already moved my workstation work to windows after waiting years and years for a Mac Pro. Seems like it was definitely the right thing to do because even though I do VFX work the Mac Pro they've created isn't suitable at all for it.
Although I'm in the market for a new laptop this isn't an instant buy for me, starting to feel I should move all my computing away from Apple because although this is a step in the right direction, we've had years of them not caring about computers.
Years ago, I switched to a Surface Book, and while I'm tempted to go back for this MBP I reckon that a Surface Book update would be enough to kill any desire for the Mac range. While Apple stagnated, many of the high-end manufacturers caught up.