A few months ago our house got burgled. Luckily it was just “stuff” that was taken and the insurance companies sorted everything out with remarkably little fuss and bother.
One bit of “stuff” that went was my work laptop, so I immediately got a new MacBook Pro 15″, restored my backup and was able to carry on working.
The problem is that I’m still not feeling like I’m able to work as well as I was on the old machine. Now, admittedly that old machine had had the same design for several years, but everything about it was just good, the keyboard, the ports, everything really.
Not so much with the new design. The first, and still most notably annoying thing to me is the keyboard. I simply cannot type with the same speed and reliability as I can on other keyboards, I don’t know what it is about it; maybe the lack of travel on the keys, or that they’re bigger than before, or that aesthetically they show every bit of human contact in the form of fingerprints, or that it seems to be incredibly noisy when I’m bashing out long form text. I’m getting to the point where I’m considering getting an external keyboard and carrying that around with me, which would be insane.
The trackpad is also too big. Until using this laptop, I had never encountered the situation where, by resting my hands below the keyboard I’d mistakenly move the mouse while typing, but now it happens regularly.
Likewise with the silly gimmick that is the touchbar where there should be function keys. It’s very much a case of “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”. Apparently I used the F keys more often than I realised and swapping them out for typeahead suggestions that would take me longer to touch than simply typing the word feels like a step back to me.
It’s not all bad, the screen is lovely and larger than before, but still no touch? Seems like a missed opportunity to me when compared to Windows 10. And the battery life is pretty amazing, I actually have travel days where I don’t plug into the mains the whole day and still have 20% battery left, and that’s without dialling down any settings or using it any less hard than I normally would.
All in all, if I were to buy a new laptop today I would end up buying a Windows machine; a Lenovo or a Surface over a MacBook Pro. I’ve not really been able to say that for well over ten years and it makes me sad.
Matt, I have exactly the same keyboard issue! I type a lot more errors than before. I’m pretty sure it’s due to the keys being a bit bigger and thus further apart. And like you, it has only improved slightly over the past months.
Otherwise (except for needing a dongle for everything you want to connect), it’s a lovely machine.