I've been sort of abusing it since it became available to the point that I won't even consider buying any electronics over 200$ that I can not return or atleast test in advance until I'm sure I'll be satisfied with the purchase.
But you are right, where I'm from (Romania) people look at me in disbelief when I suggest it, thinking that the companies will punish them if they do it when that's not really true.
I have used it many times over the years. Never abused it though. I only buy things that I plan to keep, and do my research prior to ordering. Nevertheless, I still had to use it occasionally.
Currently I literally only buy electronics from stores that I know deal fast with returns, either via returning the money or replacement.
Edit:
In fact, I had way better experiences with this law, in comparison to warranty claims.
There is (at least in Spain) something similar for offline purchases; I have been returning stuff that was just not satisfactory fo a while and no-one bats an eye.
The problem is that there isn't anything better. The author said that he hates using Windows and his experimentation with Linux wasn't an entire success. That limits him to Macs. The 2016-2018 models were a disaster. The only reasonable choice left is the choice he made.
Well, questioning about Linux depends really on what kind of distribution the author used previously. Some are less efficient than others.
Considering hardware, the whole set of AMD Ryzen3 and Ryzen4 based laptops are much better than a MacBook, in computing power, flexibility, energy efficiency and lately also in price, plus they have the advantage that you can later upgrade SSD or RAM, while on MBP everything is soldered and you're out of luck later on.
The day MacOS will be fully virtualized, it might be the doom of the MBP and iMac.
I should note that most of this is rather subjective. It's a personal blog so that's totally fine, but I don't think it should sway you doing your own analysis. I've owned nearly every MBP release/bump since 2007 and the 16" MBP is by far the best IMHO and certainly a huge jump up from the 2016-2018 era disasters. Also as a touch typist, I was worried the huge trackpad might be an impediment, but it hasn't turned out to be so I can only assume we have different hand posture.
Yup, owning the 16", I also have the same experience; the huge trackpad is fine. The blog writer bought the 13" though, maybe that is one part of his problem.
Ah, maybe! I tried a 13" once and gave it to an employee after a few weeks as it was infuriatingly small. If the 13" has the same trackpad size as the 16", that would probably be a real impediment.
I've used two of the disaster-era 15" MBPs (one I'm still using). The trackpad makes it impossible for me to use it for any serious writing, even ignoring the terrible keyboard itself. I just can't write for more than a paragraph until it decides to hit something with the trackpad and in the worst case my keystrokes are now interpreted as shortcuts. I have no such issues with my 2014 model that has a smaller trackpad.
Maybe it's my hand positioning, but it just doesn't work for me.
Wsl 2 is incredible. Got a 1000 dollars dell desktop and it is insanely faster than my Mac. Windows has improved a lot, and Linux based development on windows is a lot easier now.
5 years ago I would have quit a job if they asked me to use windows.
Macos is still marginally better but not worth the cost IMHO.
+1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux. I have noticed a few issues with it that don't make sense seeing as it's meant to have a full Linux Kernel (such as sockets not appearing) but that could be Ubuntu-20.04 being the one at fault to be fair :)
That's harsh but I agree with those points, Windows is still a consumer oriented operating system at its core, which has a lot of undesirable features for a developer.
Until a feature update ago, I was quite disappointed with Win10 as a dev platform. I'm running Win 10 Pro. Especially Windows Update was just plain intolerable.
However some time the past months I realized I don't think about Windows much... which means it's no longer constantly annoying me.
There are still stupid things, like Apps display language not being tied to the OS display language setting (wtf?!), but I can live with that. On a day to day basis my machine stays on, is performant, and does what I ask it to.
* shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc
* stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive
* bad fs performance in general
I'll add a couple of my own (and be a more restrained in my opinions)
* Windows + WSL is a hybrid environment. Files are on different places depending on from where you are looking. It feels like developing within Docker containers, without the power and flexibility.
* Low observability: very few programs log things and, while there is excellent system wide plumbing for that, very few programs are using it.
* PowerShell makes some questionable choices. For instance, "curl" is a built-in command that has different switches from its Unix homonym. It'd cost absolutely nothing to have a different name for that.
I'm wondering is there a Live Tile use-case that improving developer productivity?
I usually Win+Q or pin to taskbar to run program, almost never look at the default Live Tile.
PowerShell's syntax make me mad too, some Office 365 enterprise management tools is only available in Windows PowerShell only (You cannot run it in PowerShell of MacOS or Linux), so wired.
I was considering moving back to Windows since the new MBP lineup is so disappointing, but no TimeMachine, too many useless feature (Live Tile and so on) made me stick on MacOS.
Is macOS so different? You have to disable notifications manually every day to not have your developer workflow interrupted. The login screen is a 3D cube (weird, random and ugly). Icons in the dock wiggle. You delete applications by dragging them to trash bin. Maximizing Safari is impossible. The list goes on and on.
Why was Solitaire bundled even with the NT (i.e. enterprise/business) versions of Windows? No one ever questioned that, but everybody takes issue with Candy Crush? Weird...
And why is that? I never even once played Solitaire and uninstalled Candy Crush without even looking at it.
What's the deal with this sudden hatred towards nonsense that was installed 35 years ago as well and had a way bigger impact on system resources (in terms of disk space and screen real-estate) than Candy Crush?
Is it because it's a mobile port - too colourful and too in-your-face about it being a mindless pastime than a boomer-style virtual card game that even came with a "boss-key"?
If you leave some task processing overnight, that's probably not your 'core hours', unless you set it that way and not in the day. But then what if all your work is lost when an update is installed in your lunch break? It's ridiculous that there is (or was? Not sure if it's changed) no way to never automatically install an update.
Remember when Windows 10 was released and there were reports that Windows 8 would literally automatically update to Windows 10 without user intervention [1]. My mother's laptop did that and it bricked her install.
The OS taking over control of updates is totally user-hostile. 'Core hours' is just giving a little bit of that control back, it's not a solution.
Yes of course - saving work regularly is good. However apart from long-running tasks you can still lose things like the current state of your desktop and applications. Consider if you were working on something involved and had many applications running all with some complex state set up. You might not lose any data but you have lost the 'working memory' of what you were doing.
There is a problem on Linux with some software not being available or not being as well tested. Despite all the problems with Windows this means that sometimes having it is helpful.
WSL2 is a Linux VM, what's your use-case for native over that?
- You can disable updates
- I'm on the insider version and this has never happened to me, let alone for 'normal' users.
- You can uninstall all of that stuff
- It's not that bad, I work on a decentralised database and we have similar performance across Windows and Linux. Windows was a bit tougher to do but it got there :)
I'm honestly baffled that you've never experienced an update that bricked your system - how long have you been using Windows?
Two years ago Microsoft released an update that killed Windows on my brand new (at the time) desktop (i7-8700k, gtx 1080). I thought "no big deal, I'll boot up my old desktop and deal with it later" but when I turned on that machine (i5-2500k, rx480), it applied the same update and also killed the Windows install. At that point I gave up on using a desktop for the day and booted up Windows on my laptop (i7-7700HQ, gtx 1050m), only to have that also install the update and kill the install.
I'd had Windows updates break before that, but always on one machine so it was easy to write off as some driver quirk or something weird I had installed.
Not the parent, but I've been running Windows for decades on multiple machines (4 different ones at this time) - never once had an update brick a system.
You seem to be assuming everyone else is frequently having a problem because you have had it. In reality, these events are rare, which the overwhelming majority of people not having any issue.
I’ve only worked in tech for six years but I started as a sysadmin and managed a network of ~50 windows computers for two years, and then worked in a windows dev shop for three years, and I’ve never once seen an update brick Windows.
I’ve bricked windows by being dumb but I’ve also bricked Linux by being dumb. Sometimes I feel like it’s cool to hate Windows, like it’s cool to hate Java.
Sometimes i read thing like this and I feel they are from a different universe.
I am the first port of call for IT issues of the whole family, including grandma. Like 10 people, and the last time we had issue caused by windows update was like 5 years ago when a laptop was trying to update to W10 from W8. That required a bit of manual intervention.
Game icons certainly arent there for me any more.
Whats the issue with Onedrive? I mean, its preinstalled, but you dont have to run it.
Lucky you! In the last 6 months Windows tried to install an upgrade, failing endlessly, on both my mother's and sister's laptops.
It just tried to upgrade, failed during the reboot, reverted back and booted on the old version, just to start the whole process again after a few hours. And all the Microsoft Windows Update Assistant tools or whatever didn't work at all, so I just clean installed in frustration.
TBF though, my 2013 desktop never gave me a single issue on Windows..
Paradoxically, driver issues and update issues never show up on any desktops I had, they only show up on laptops with carefully selected and entirely manufacturer-controlled supply chain and parts.
It's really amazing. I don't know much about Linux, but whenever I need to use some Linux only tool(or works best on linux tool), I just use wsl. Tried using a couple of linux desktops but the user experience is just terrible compared to windows for day to day work and there aren't many softwares available.
> +1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux
So your co-workers already use Linux (for free, I guess), but now you're trying to convince them to use a restricted Linux version that also costs money. How's that?
We develop cross-platform projects in an environment where Windows is a second-class citizen but accounts for the vast majority of our user base. WSL2 is a really nice stepping stone towards having both operating systems treated equally.
A huge number of small annoyances during "normal" usage of a computer. Issues with sleep, displays, hi DPI, even my wallpaper and fonts don't always display correctly...
I had Lenovo T530 and it worked OK, but with half the battery life. Then I had XPS 15 and I got it working after a lot of fiddling, but with a third of battery life and with hidpi issues on wake up.
All x86 servers, PCs, and laptops are designed to run Windows by adhering to a specification issued by Microsoft and certified by running a suite of compatibility tests provided by Microsoft (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/hlk/). The free OSes are piggybacking on that; there is no independent, neutral standard for the architecture of x86 PCs.
> "My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux."
I have issues with Sleep and Displays on my macbook, and I had to pay extra for the privilege of having windows snap to the sides, easily the best innovation in window managers since being able to put them over one another.
I made the jump and it's been mostly smooth (7th gen X1 Carbon with Fedora).
The one thing that is annoying is when using multiple monitors of different resolutions, Wayland doesn't seem to scale resolution on a per-monitor basis. With the laptop being 4k this is an issue when working anywhere but at home, I tend to just use the laptop screen (which is excellent btw).
Stuff that worked without any extra config that in the past might not have been so smooth: wifi, fingerprint reader, thunderbolt dock with keyboard, mouse, monitor, external USB soundblaster and network cable plugged in), sleep, hibernate.
Any other laptop will boot linux, but you'll end up with a lot of rough edges...
For example, on the laptop I'm typing this on (latest Ubuntu, old Acer 511G):
* Random hangs every few days - some unpatched processor bug related to sleep states.
* Wifi diconnects randomly.
* Hotkeys don't work
* Screen sometimes dims itself to zero, and since the hotkeys don't work, it's rather tricky to fix.
* Bluetooth doesn't work
* Hibernate and sleep are disabled by default and you have to go into a config file to enable them. SD card doesn't work after sleeping more than 3 times.
* Fans don't work at all. System throttles almost immediately under any load.
* There must be some issue with the SSD losing writes because even journaled ext4 seems to get data corruption after an unclean poweroff.
* External monitors don't support hdmi audio.
* of the 3 USB ports, 2 don't work for anything more than charging devices.
* webcam LED state seems random, and does not correlate to webcam usage at all.
All on one device!
Linux on Thinkpad is great. Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.
From personal experience, I've only had that many issues once on a bleeding edge MSI. It took about a month to work out the issues. Every other system I've used has had a much smaller subset of those issues (I'm not using a Thinkpad). Namely Bluetooth or the fans not working, and individually resolvable.
> Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.
Running on 2 old Dells and an Asus with no problems (Ubuntu 18.04, upgraded in place from 16.04). Your statement is absurd on its face just based on its generality.
Of the things you've listed, I can't say anything about external HDMI audio because I don't have one, and the default hibernate thing I can confirm. Every other one I've never had, much less daily.
Because the experience is terrible for the uninitiated. And this is coming from someone who ran Arch as their primary OS since I was 10. Laptop Linux on the whole is not a fun experience for those who just want a machine to work (which was what MacBooks were supposed to be about).
I just bought a Surface Laptop 3, and the machine is great. The hardware is nice, Windows on a laptop has improved tenfold since I've last used it. WSL2 means Linux isn't left out.
It's one machine/OS combo that does everything for me, including light gaming, whereas Linux and macOS both have significant compromises when using them.
I must disagree with you.
I have been installing Linux for people who barely know how to use a mouse and the experience was always successful.
Of course, I choose a distro with simple UI and software with GUI every time.
I don't want to get into the typical "if my mom gets it everyone can" (also because she is a power user) but trust me, the people I installed it for had the same problems they would have had with any OS (some quite funny).
It's been Xubuntu for almost a decade, I think.
I tried Lubuntu but, at least at the time, it had no pulse audio which wasn't great.
I tried Budgie but it has some paper cut bugs that I couldn't live with (some might).
I run Ubuntu on my work Dell Latitude (i3wm), Debian on my personal System 76 (Mate) and both work more or less flawlessly, although I do agree with the guy who said Battery is not great.
I also have a Desktop with Windows and Linux dual booting, and while I agree Windows is quite polished when it works, I also find a million little annoyances.
With laptops, you need to buy hardware designed for Linux if you want a good experience with it. System76 and Purism make great machines. With Proton, Windows games run effortlessly from Steam on Linux.
It's simply not true. Install Ubuntu or Fedora, run Gnome 3 and everything "just works". You can't use Arch as an example here - it is intentionally very basic, and takes a lot of effort to learn as you do almost everything from scratch. While many people appreciate that level of control, it is unnecessary if you're just trying to get work done.
> that simply don't occur on Windows, mostly because of MS superior QA
You're comparing an OS that hasn't had a major release in almost 5 years to a bleeding edge Linux distribution. Install an older LTS version of Ubuntu or Debian and things will be quite stable.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on a built-for-it new Intel-based machine. The amount of "just works" is surprisingly good. But when it goes downhill, it goes downhill steeply. Took me a day to figure out why it wasn't connecting to my Exchange server (TLS 1.3). No screen sharing on Wayland. Etc.
I use both extensively but settled for windows + WSL2 for now. In the end it's the little things:
- (fractional) scaling actually works quite well.
- the shell works a big better. Feels like a good compromise between gnomes simplicity and KDEs over the top customisability to me. KDE has actually been the most stable out of the three though.
- (Nvidia) driver support. Using Manjaro I had to reinstall the Nvidia driver every couple of months because a kernel update broke things. Again, not huge but annoying.
- Working hardware video decoding in firefox. On Linux playing videos results in significantly higher CPU load, noise, slowed down browser, etc. Even on a fast machine.
With wsl2 I can now do all my development in that environment and don't need to live with windows slow file system, missing package manager, etc. The remote development features of VSCode with wsl (and other ssh hosts) are also simply amazing.
For me, it limits the laptops available, with Windows I am pretty confident that any reasonable config laptop from Dell or Lenovo will not give me any issues. With Linux I have to be extra cautious while buying it. Also I am used to MS Office and occasionally play Age of Empires and Minecraft.
I moved to Windows after 5 years of Mac this month. Because I knew I will be working from home, decided to build a good workstation (Thank you Ryzen ) and I Couldn't agree more WSL is very helpful for people who like windows UI and functionalities of Linux. There are few quirks but it works great.
My Linux setup is usually like this, but inside out. When I need Windows functions (which is not often), I fire up a VM (either with VirtualBox or KVM). WSL makes Windows useful for Linux development (my software will run on Linux, not Windows), but the rest of Windows is usually a bit of a pain.
I usually find the text less readable on Windows than it's on Linux or a Mac. Not sure it's an issue with Edge, my monitor's Gamma or what, but it just looks better on Linux (and perfect on a Mac).
I've tried both ways there too; at least a few years ago (may be different now) running windows as a HOST worked way better for me since Linux in a VM was way more well behaved than Windows would be.
Curious what kinds of problems you used to run into here that made you give up on Windows guest/Linux host. I've been running my daily driver that way for the past 3 months and haven't hit any issues aside from 2 nits:
- Windows 10 basically requires an SSD to get reasonable responsiveness. You could maybe get away with putting a disk image on an SSD, but for serious use it's best to dedicate a whole disk or partition to it.
- QEMU's default display adapter started "leaking" pending IO requests at one point, which grinds the VM from full speed to a halt over the course of an hour or so. I ended up disabling the display adapter and moving to just RDP, which is basically an even trade since the RDP client can do everything the SPICE client can.
It was probably closer to 8 years ago, so SSD's weren't really available. Given the time I really don't remember the specifics but it was a work-from-home job so we did a lot of video conferencing pre-Zoom, and used Skype and other tools a lot. IIRC, the windows apps we used didn't like not being close to the video hardware.
Running a Linux VM was pretty friction-free, and I could use all the company mandated tools that had to be run in Windows simultaneously without performance issues. WIth a windows guest, I wouldn't run it unless I needed one of those tools, but that required a fairly long spin-up time.
Like I said... almost a decade ago so they probably aren't problems now. I'm running Linux native right now, but again for the ease of corporate support, I may go with Windows + WSL2 for my next refresh.
> and used Skype and other tools a lot. IIRC, the windows apps we used didn't like not being close to the video hardware.
Indeed. I used to keep a Windows box for the smartcard reader bureaucratic obligations with the Brazilian government that I never managed to accurately emulate on VMs.
This is true. I have found text not so "crisp" and readable on windows compared to MAC. I have an LG Ultrawide monitor and used both Mac and Windows with it, there is a difference in the sharpness.
Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless.
And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks? They get live notifications when you add or remove hardware, software, when an application has crashed (even when error reporting is off), …. The data contains unique identifiers for your system and user. I don’t even want to know what’s sent when you select full diagnostics.
Windows is a privacy and performance nightmare. It’s good for two things only: corporate environments (manageability) and games.
---
Well, sorry about that. Just had to get this off my chest.
>Everything is slow even though the specs are good
Have you tried running without antivirus? Some parts of Windosw are still slow eg the filesystem, but the main thing making everything slow is antivirus software IME, including Defender.
From own experience this is 99% corporate shenanigans.
You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory.
In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.
For the IT department it's a tradeoff though; they'd rather have everyone be inconvenienced or their hardware not working at 100% than to risk a virus wreaking havoc on their networks, or ransomware crippling their whole organization. Even without the restricted Windows machines they struggle with enough shit already, because people can't behave on company hardware on the one hand, and every employee is a target.
This is such a huge pain, I keep having to turn off the antivirus because it will often slow "npm i" so much that it'll just fall over and report a crash. I shouldn't have to disable my built-in antivirus just to do basic development!
No, I specifically looked to remove any crapware and was surprised that there wasn't anything. I also just did a search for candy crush and I only got the website.
I'm on Pro and while Candy Crush was removed, I now have Farm Hero's Saga and something called "Groove Music". Netflix also somehow made its way there even though I've never once tried to watch it on this PC.
They are less brazen about it, I had to look in my Applications list.
I think it depends on the region or maybe even the time period (maybe those promotional deals only run for a certain period of time and eventually get renewed, if you're unlucky enough to reinstall while in the correct region/period you get it).
I don't know about Server but my fresh Home edition installed a few months ago doesn't have Candy Crush or anything similar pre-installed. And same for my corporate laptop with LTSB - no pre-installed stuff.
Would it be feasible to run a Windows Pro or Server version in a laptop?
Pro runs just fine on a laptop.
When people talk about Candy Crush they mean they see it first thing when they start Windows Store as a recommendation. It is definitely not pre-installed on Pro, if it is I haven’t found it in 4 years...
I use a Mac. I spun up a windows server image on AWS and I've been doing all of my development on that. It's cheap if you turn it off and it has snapshots. And it's available from any machine with remote desktop.
I'm surprised that you're having performance issues, since for me it's the complete opposite. I assume it's driver issues, but on my comparatively powerful machine linux still feels laggy.
> Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless.
It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.
> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?
I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.
1) it hardly matters since the point is that excessive disk access by an OS when, essentially, "nothing is happening" (opening the start menu, say) is a bad sign for generally giving-a-shit about performance and spinning rust just exposes the error,
2) they pushed Win10 upgrades on a bunch of well-performing spinning rust Win7 machines back in the middle of 2015, not 2020, immediately making them much worse,
3) most normal home users don't replace hard drives, don't replace their computer very often, buy the cheapest thing they can aside from that they think higher number = better and are often up-sold a large (=spinning rust) drive they don't need and can be up-sold because they buy them at real stores (yes, really), and only very recently did SSDs mostly displace magnetic platters on base configurations of cheap mass-market desktops. I guarantee a high percentage of home users are still booting off traditional HDDs, yes, even in 2020, and they're exactly the same sort not to have been able to figure out how to not upgrade to Win10.
My experience shows WSL is passable, but it often feels "hacky" and incoherent. For professional work it just doesn't feel right to me. Plus the usability of Windows OS itself is just a complete mess... Honestly, I'd rather just run a regular VM with linux and full-screen that, rather than deal with Windows with Linux bolted on to the side.
If work is paying, I'm still going macbook, as I don't really care about the reliability aspect of the machine nor the insane cost of peripherals/the laptop itself. If I'm paying, I'll probably go for a Dell or Lenovo machine and install Linux. I just can't stand using windows any more.
I do wonder why they don't put more effort into the camera on the MBP. Of course it's not going to get used as a camera like a phone but with the economies of scale they have with the cameras going into iPhones you would think they could at least be on par with their own phone cameras from years ago.
Many more people are using the camera on their computers now for videoconferencing. Of course the decision was made long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, but it turned out to be a bad one.
Yeah I get their reasoning. It seems to still go against their brand positioning to have such a glaring omission of quality though. I remember when they would spend money figuring out how to poke tiny holes into the side of their laptops so they could have almost invisible battery charge indicators (now gone). You're not really supposed to consider if the quality of a feature on a Mac is good enough for something, it just should be. Hopefully they will sort it out.
Seems like something @dang could fix if the original user can't edit the comment anymore - hopefully mentioning his name summons him. If not I think you might want to flag the comment.
Having never owned a Mac, and only rarely used them, I had no frame of reference for many of the claims. The pictures were incontrovertible though. The camera is horrible. What really is the marginal cost of upgrading to whatever camera they use in a modern iPhone?
I'm typing this on a Surface Laptop 2 (and have a 2016 MacBook Pro), and the cover is nowhere as thick as a phone.
It's not sharp enough to cut bread, but those 2-3mm of thickness have zero impact on perceived laptop thinness while affording enough room for a spectacular webcam (by current Apple standards) and its companion Windows Hello counterpart.
A lot of it has to do with how laptop web cams work in general and it is not only Apple's problem [1].
A way to improve this situation a bit would be to be able to use the camera of an iPhone as a web cam, either over USB or wifi. You still have the compression and USB transfer, but at least you use the better optics of the phone. There are third party tools, such as EpocCam, that can do it, but require the installation of drivers. This should be a first party solution, in the same fashion as the "take photo" option from the right click menu on Mac OS, which uses an iPhone to take a photo and paste it directly on the open application of the computer.
Microsoft solved the laptop camera problem just fine in their $399 Surface Go model [0]. Just takes a team that cares about the product enough to solve these tech issues I guess.
Unfortunately, a lot of this comes down to "no-one wants a laptop lid as thick as a phone". Without major technology changes, laptop webcams are never going to be good; there's just no room for the optics.
I have the new 16 MBP and love the touch bar. I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag); I find it much easier to control apps, like music, safari, and all, and the habituation period was shorter than with the keys back in the day (when i started using macs).
I would love to be able to easily customize the touch bar though, the author mentions BetterTouchTool, looks good, might be worth it.
Like the author I also have some problems with Catalina: the subtle hangs drive me nuts, the bugs with the True Tone going pale, the gpu's going crazy just because they want
PS: Apple - please consider improving your AirPlay video support or doing some other protocol for it. It sucks having to use cables for even HDMI video playback on a secondary screen. (or place back the display port / HDMI entrance)
BetterTouchTool is amazing. Here's how I've got my touch bar set up (from left to right):
- a dock for quick task switching (as well as seeing what apps are running that I can shutdown when I'm on battery)
- a music/spotify widget that can play/pause, go back/forward and that shows me the track and artist as well as the album arg.
- a date/time widget that I've customized so it shows me the week number too. This one has been surprisingly useful, as I'll regularly walk over to my macbook and tap on the touchbar to see the time or date.
- a battery percentage and time remaining widget
- a mute/unmute widget
But what I perhaps like best is the swipe gestures. If I swipe anywhere along the bar with two fingers, it adjusts the volume, and with three fingers I can change the brightness.
I don't currently make much use of app-specific touch bars, and there are a ton of other features I might use eventually. But even just with this I've come to really like the touch bar, where before I much preferred the function keys.
Can't do without an escape key though, but thankfully they put that one back :).
Get BetterTouchTool is totally worth it if you want to customise the touchbar. Also a decent window placement tool, shortcut manager and a bunch of other things.
Changing music on Spotify doesn't work for me 80% of the time. Physical keyboard worked 100% of the time.
I hate the touchpad greatly. 0 benefits to me but tons of annoyances. I keep touching random buttons I never intended. I cannot press the correct button without looking (used to put volume to really low in bed)
> I cannot press the correct button without looking
does this seem like a really really minor problem to anyone else? I can’t imagine using function keys often enough that this would actually become annoying.
Debugger commands in IntelliJ are tied to F7 (step inside), F8 (step over), F9 (run) and looking down to figure out where to press again and again is a big hassle.
I could, but then I'd possibly have to unbind other shortcuts, I couldn't use another person's workstation and I'd have to also remap on other sane systems I use or learn two sets of shortcuts.
If Apple had two versions of their laptops, one with the touch bar and one without, I feel pretty confident that the version with the standard F-keys would outsell the touch bar.
I mentioned this before, but the real proof that the touch bar isn't for professionals is that you can't buy an Apple keyboard with the touch bar. Local labor laws require that I have a "external" keyboard when working at my desk, so the touch bar is pretty worthless, unless it was available on the standard alone keyboards as well, and it's not.
Personally I prefer the old keyboard because I find it easier to change volume and brightness using a key and not a slider, but that's personal preference.
Denmark, among others I assume. Using your laptop, without external monitor and keyboard is only allowed as an exception, even when working from home, and only for a short period of time.
You can use the laptop monitor as a secondary display. It's a pretty good law, which forces employers to provide you with an ergonomically sound work environment. You're also required to have a height adjustable desk and chair... and a window.
One option was to ban working from home, which was my employer's official stance.
On 13 March, we took from the office anything we needed (monitors, keyboards, mice, desk chairs). No-one said they didn't have a desk, so I don't know how we would have handled that.
Your employer is legally required to provide you with chair, desk, keyboard, monitor and mouse if you work from home and don’t have these things already.
During the corona lock down my boss told us to get anything we required from the office. If you couldn’t pick it up, an intern would take the company van and deliver anything you’d need.
A window is amazing! My first 3 jobs were window free as were jobs 7 and 8.
I've had 9 jobs total in the 25 years I've been working professionally and those 5 windowless jobs, account for about 5 of those years. I burn out pretty fast in the dark.
When one of my colleagues insisted on using the laptop keyboard, we made him sign in writing that he'd been offered a wide selection of keyboards and didn't want one, and understood he could take a keyboard at any time.
I'm guessing that in the countries that have such laws, nobody is going around and enforcing that people are working with external keyboards in their homes, but instead, employers are probably required to provide this equipment if an employee must work from home.
Among workers, I imagine such laws raise awareness of the risks of working for too many hours on a laptop keyboard. I wish I had such awareness before I developed bad RSI pain after working on a laptop too much during previous WFH stints. Now I'm much more careful about my home work setup.
Or could it be that it just pulls too much power for a cordless keyboard? There can't be much room for batteries in those keyboards.
If the non-TouchBar one was cheaper then I guess you'd be right. But all else equal I imagine people would want it. I quite like it, of all the things that have been wrong with the previous lineup of Macbooks, the TouchBar really isn't one of them.
However - the way Apple implemented the TouchBar leaves much to be desired. You need something like BetterTouchTool or MTMR in order to make it usable.
Another appreciation for BetterTouchTool. That app change the way you use macOS and open up some new way of interaction you didn't think it's possible, all in a well- designed app.
Also it made the touchbar usefulness rating goes from "yeah, that's...okay?" to "I LOVE IT!" instantly. Apple seems didn't really care about the touchbar much, which is a pity.
> I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag)
Right? It's such a pity that Pock messed that one up. I added Pock to have the same thing in the same position all of the time and I really like how it gave me more screen real estate but it's those little details that they missed.
I got a new MBP earlier this year, and while I personally did not care about the touch bar, it's amazing what you can do with BetterTouchTool if you're an emacs user. For a long time I was evaluating getting some additional keys (like an xkeys stick) for shortcuts, but was put off because apparently you can only configure those in Windows. With the touch bar and BTT I've got that and more. I'd have a hard time going back to a machine without this now.
I agree. I upgraded from a 2013 15" to the new 16" as soon as it came out. I expected the Touch Bar to be worthless based on everything I had heard. Over the months I've found myself using it more and more. It isn't nearly critical, but as I come to discover certain uses they get added to my rotation. As many have pointed out, there is a discoverability problem with this feature and I don't see how that is fixable.
When I first got the touch bar, I hated it with a passion. Now I actually like it, and in some apps it's better.
I think the biggest issue is the mis-aligned defaults and lack of training on it. Things like knowing you can slide to adjust volume and brightness from the buttons (which is entirely non-obvious) and the ability to control it a bit better were big game changers for me.
He just explained all those reasons? He doesn't want RSI, he doesn't want to be distracted while he's typing, he doesn't want dongles, etc etc. What is this comment for?
I bought the 2018 air. I loathe it. What a waste of money and junk keyboard.
That said my new job gave me a System 76 laptop and I’ve been delighted all week with it. I don’t care for the offset keyboard but at least it actually works correctly. If it had better palm detection on the trackpad it would be the best laptop I’ve owned since my 2013 MBP (which is still goin strong).
I hear you, trackpads have kept me in Mac camp for awhile. I loathe the glass ones Apple switched to though.
I bought the 13 inch with emjoi bar when it came out.
Returned it.
Recently bought the 16inch when it came out. Like the new keyboard but ended up returning it as it got insanely loud when plugging in external display.
Hard to beat my 2013 mbp retina I guess I’ll stay with it for now.
My previous job gave me a 2019 MBP and it was always whirring away. It would have spells where nothing would be stable. IntelliJ (Ruby mine) would hang for a couple seconds every 20-30 seconds, zoom would crash repeatedly and say there was an error with the system audio and if it would start back up with out restarting the system everyone would sound like they were a robot. I installed boom audio (which is one step away from adware / malware these days) and it surprisingly got more stable.
I’m excited to try windows with WSL2 soon. I don’t see going back to a new Mac any time soon based on how easy PopOS / Ubuntu has been.
Based on my experience with PopOS on my desktop system, I've been eyeing the System76 laptops. I think they are re-badged Cleo laptops presently, but they have plans for their own hardware. Assuming the hardware is as thoughtful as the distro, I'll be ordering one.
Had a meeting yesterday, 5 minutes before the scheduled time (which is normally plenty of time when your tools work as expected) I start up Zoom and create the meeting. Guess what? The thing now just freezes completely and it's not just Zoom, the system UI (dock, menu bar, etc) becomes sluggish. This used to work fine before upgrading to Catalina. Force-quitting Zoom fixed it, so I'm assuming something Zoom is doing (that used to work fine) is enough to completely freeze the system UI.
Eventually gave up on Zoom and used FaceTime. In the middle of the call the UI froze for ~10 seconds - no video, no mouse, but audio was still working. I assumed it would crash but thankfully it recovered.
Finally after the call I left the machine unattended for a minute and when I got back it was on the full disk encryption password screen so it had rebooted. Turns out it crashed because WindowServer stopped responding. I heard about those issues but always though it's related to the newer models with discrete GPUs and I didn't have to worry about it with my low-end Macbook with Intel graphics. I guess I was wrong.
Mail is still playing the new mail sound randomly when archiving/moving read messages, and I ended up disabling the sound completely. I didn't know it was possible to screw up something so simple.
I am now thinking of downgrading and using Catalina (for Xcode) on a separate machine. I am not sure what to do when it goes out of support though, seems like nowadays every OS became equally shit.
Have you figured it out? It sounds like a hard drive issue and you have some important system file or swap located on a part of the solid state that locks up, but not enough for the hardware to mark it as bad.
If you format there is a chance the issue will go away. I had similar symptoms even after formatting on a 2015 MBP, so I formatted, wrote a 4GB file to the HDD, then after that everything worked fine. Amusingly if I tried to copy the file to a thumb drive it would time out trying to copy it. I couldn't figure out how to mark the bad sectors, so hacky solution, but it worked for me.
Disk IO is working fine, if not I'd experience these issues all the time.
The issue is that a combination of camera access, hardware video encoding/decoding (for video conferencing) and bluetooth earphones (AirPods) is now able to crash WindowServer.
This used to work totally fine on a previous version so it's clearly a solved problem. Maybe Apple should stop "fixing" things that ain't broke?
But hey, there is a silver lining to this, at least now I can enjoy Apple TV+ on my work machine. That's exactly what I always wanted. /s
My main issue with the new MacBook pros is they are slow. They overheat and then throttle the CPU regularly. Too much was sacrificed to make them so slim. (I got the 2019 13 inch top spec)
I built a small form factor hackintosh with an i5 9600K + 32GB RAM and it's a completely different experience. Smooth as butter, never throttles. iOS apps compile in a third of the time and my IDE doesn't grind to a halt while I'm compiling. Doing work on my MacBook now feels like a chore in comparison. Not to mention the hackintosh cost less than half what the MacBook cost.
I am coming from an T440p (Ubuntu 18.04) to an MacBook Pro 16 and i feel all his points.
I want to add how bad some parts of the Mac UX are. GNOME surely has some really really bad UX decisions but overall I think (hold on tight) GNOME is better than Mac in terms of UX. My MacBook is simply not designed for pro users.
I might add that the Mac is far more stable than Ubuntu and looks better but in the end as far as I am concerned the t440p is just the better option for pro users.
You are not alone.
My work machine is Mac and after Fedora with GNOME on personal laptop I feel constantly annoyed by basic UX stuff like window and workspace management.
Just got my new MBP 16 inch yesterday, a replacement for my 2015 MBP 15 inch.
It's been pretty smooth sailing thus far, no big disappointments. My main reason for replacing the 2015 was to get more CPU power and memory, but the 2015 was actually doing ok, not insanely slow yet.
In terms of power I can now have all my tabs open, including heavy ones like Facebook, while running several different IDEs, and changing between things takes no time at all. Compiling is measurably faster.
The migration tool seems to work, it moved everything including stuff you might forget like your ssh config file. Even the bash history is there, and all the apps are in the dock in the order they were in on the old machine. Homebrew seemed to need a bundle command, but that fixed itself easily.
Touch bar is weird. I've basically set it to display F keys, because I can't figure out how to get iTerm2's hotkey to replace the Siri icon. If I could do that, I might not mind, but I go to terminal so often I need it to be a single key. So for now, Touch Bar is a small minus for me. The ESC key is still there so that's fine.
The screen is nicer than the 2015 one, marginally. Something about the colors and the size, I guess the bezel is now pretty much where it can be aesthetically. I wouldn't want it closer to the edge.
The keyboard is good. I tried my wife's butterfly type keyboard and thought it was terrible, luckily she likes it. This keyboard has slightly less travel than the old one, but somehow it feels like I can type faster without it feeling weird.
Main thing is there's been no terrible surprises in moving the stuff over to a new machine. Back in the day when I was a kid it would take a whole day to install software, you would always forget to move something, and there would always be some unexpected hitch.
I haven't run into Catalina slowness issues that people have mentioned, only things like the removal of kexts, which wasn't huge for me.
I moved my dock to the bar with Pock and I have some of the most used buttons (brightness, volume, mute and night mode) right there. I also added a negative spacing between the icons so they're really close now. Now every time I can expect the same thing to be in the same place on the Touch Bar. And together with the slightly increased resolution and size the screen feels a lot bigger than the 15".
The only thing that doesn't work is tap-and-slide on the volume slider.
"8-9 hours with all apps closed except Safari. Browsing lightly, with an occasional video, and brightness at the literal minimum. This brightness level is only realistic if it's night time. In a normally lit environment you need to set the brightness level at around 50%."
"When I push the laptop a bit more, with a few Docker containers, Pycharm running, Google Chrome with some Docs opened, and brightness near the maximum, I get around 4 hours."
Honest question for those of you who have Dell XPS 13s, ThinkPad X1 Carbons and so on, what battery life are you getting? Dell for example advertises 12 hours. Are these figures realistic?
I have an xps 13 bought 5 years ago.
I'm getting also around 8-9 hours of browsing time if I occasionally open YouTube. Quite more if I only code and don't spawn docker apps like databases.
Spoiler, I use Xubuntu with CPU frequency set to power save but again, I've used this laptop massively during around 5 years already.
Sad to hear that. But yes, once the battery is replaced you'll get again a more than decent laptop.
Mine has 8gb of ram, which is still enough for most of what I do, including running VMs and docker compose intensively.
I get 5 - 6 hours of real work out of it, 8 when doing nothing major using Ubuntu 20.04, but I have the 4k screen I hear it is a lot better if you have the 1080p screen.
I've been using ThinkPads X1 for 5+ years, company provided, so I have no real attachment to the device, which is something which is hard to account for when doing reviews of items you buy.
Currently on a X1 Yoga 3rd gen, I could run the laptop for 10 hours for normal usage brand new, unplugged, on _linux_. I'm a programmer, so this involves mostly editors and a few instances of a browser running, compiler building stuff in bursts, generally an mp3 player running in the background too. Brightness is set around 180-200cd (pretty bright, but still around 45-50% of the total brightness).
I can comparatively run a video player like mpv for about 4-4.5 hours in fullscreen (which in this model is 2k). If I'm using blender I can get anywhere between 4 and 6 hours.
I don't run GNOME or KDE though, and this does make a big difference (esp GNOME is far from being lightweight). Comparatively, my colleagues running windows 10 get 1-2 hours less runtime, and I attribute that mostly to the different tools we use, not due to difference in power management (I do not use IDEs, most of my colleagues do).
After one year I can still expect the laptop to last 8 hours unplugged with the same workflow. I generally do not bring a charger with me when going around.
I could be laving the company shortly and I've been thinking about a laptop for personal use and I was seriously considering the X1 Carbon or the Yoga again. They're not perfect laptops, but the 2k screen is a perfect resolution for a 14" to balance battery, there's a good selection of ports (better than several 15" competitors), good keyboard, good battery, extremely well built. I've abused this laptop with very little care and it did withstand much more than what I would have expected. Small drops, pressed along with groceries, pen straight on the dusty screen... it took it all and still looks as new when I wipe it.
If you want some of the negative sides, since I saw batches of these laptops among my colleagues, most of the screens since the first X1 carbon did develop some bright spots in the backlight after 1-2 years. We saw a couple laptops with dead pixels in batches of 15, which got exchanged under warranty, but yeah, QC was lacking for a laptop of this cost. Many of the yoga 1st gen we got had issues with the arrow keys requiring too much force. This got fixed in r2/r3, but the r3 buttons on the trackpad (the phisical ones) are so flimsy that often "click" without performing the electrical contact unless you hit them roughly in the center. A bit weak, and it annoying the hell out of me, since I much prefer these buttons to the trackpad mushy click action.
Putting the laptop in tent mode is nice occasionally, but I admit I did it 2-3 times tops in 2 years. Despite loving the pen for note taking, I'd rather get a dedicated (lighter!) note-taking tablet than folding the laptop. It just doesn't make sense after you try that. Same for writing on the screen in clamshell mode (feels idiotic and unconfortable).
I'd rather get a matte screen and no touch, if I could.
This laptop bumped at 400 nits is still basically unusable outside.
Whenever I see people saying that it's possible, I have to laugh. It's not even acceptable on the superior coating of the macbook, it's definitely not possible with this one :(. Only in the shade.
But despite all that, these laptops are worth their beefy price. Very solid, and we didn't many returns due to components failing. Nothing related to keyboards, screen, hinges, etc.
I'm really thorn, because I know I could depend on the X1, but I'm really attracted by the size/form-factor of the new XPS 15. Almost the same as this 14", but it's 16:10. For coding, that little extra vertical size, combined with superior form factor, has me hooked. I do use ultrasharp dell 4k screens and they're a step up even from this excellent screen mounted on the yoga. Being able to bump up the ram to 32gb is also a big ...
My Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Generation with a FHD screen lasts about 3.5-4 hours under heavy load and about 10-11 hours doing casual web-browsing etc on Ubuntu 20.04. On Windows, it should be better. But if you go with the 4K screen, you'll only get half the battery life.
I agree with the author. I never used all the space dedicated to this trackpad, seems like a waste. That and I cannot get used to this "3D Touch" trackpad compared to the older clicky ones. 99% of the time I'm going along just fine and randomly I cannot seem to select a line or something and it infuriates me when that dictionary lookup thing pops up instead.
These days owning a MacBook feels like being in an abusive relationship. The sex is still great but price you pay for being slowly distanced from your friends, family and peripherals is high.
The question is ambiguous but I interpreted it as if the laptop fails and I need to have it repaired how do I keep my data safe because I can't just pull the hard drive out before sending it for repair.
The T2 chip already encrypts the SSD using a unique identifier generated and known only by that host's T2, so it's sort of a non-issue imo
You should have disk encryption turned on. I would not worry unless you think there is someone who is willing to spend an enormous amount of time and effort to access your data.
I'm still using a 2012 Lenovo laptop because I could upgrade its disk and RAM, and replace its battery. Otherwise I'd have had to buy a new laptop years ago.
Disappointing that most Lenovo laptops now have soldered RAM but you can only get up to 16 GiB.
>it's impossible to get a terminal screen without anti-aliasing. My favorite font, IBM VGA8, is unreadable when anti aliased
You could try scaling your favourite bitmap font 2-3x up - I did this with mine when switching to a 4k laptop. Unless this means that terminals no longer support bitmap fonts at all.
Not a laptop but I just wanted to add that the latest Mac Mini does a decent job. Also, not being a laptop forces me to avoid work while sitting in a cafe or when going out on a short trip. I mostly do backend work with some front-end work mixed in lately, but no graphical-intensive stuff.
Found problems with USB devices on day 1 with USB 2.0 devices intermittently freezing.
Documented https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/gp5b1z/usb_20_issues_o... , and there is a workaround... do not use any hub that shows a USB 2.0 device to the Mac, find and use a USB-C hub that presents everything as USB 3.0 to the Mac even if it's USB 2.0
I believe that this is a Catalina software bug, and now I have a workaround I am happy. Sucks for those who can't figure out the debugging though.
I might be missing something here: CalDigit TS3+ costs £230 -- that is a fuck-tonne of money, to solve a problem that should not exist in the first place.
I just got through researching this issue for a client. Apparently it is at least somewhat common, and appears to be caused by RF interference/noise radiating from USB 3.0 ports and cables, which stomps over 2.4 GHz band.
Popular solutions seem to involve applying custom shielding to dongles/cables/adaptors, trying different models of these, or experimenting with their physical proximity and layout. Sigh.
Yes. Best fix (when possible): switch to 5 GHz WiFi.
When the MBP with USB-C first came out in late 2016, I noticed this issue and documented it and brought the machine to Apple, and they offered to exchange the motherboard. However, work and travel prevented me from bringing the machine in, and when I brought it to the shop next time to have it fixed months later they said it’s a known issue that can’t be fixed. Use WiFi, plug in an external HD - choose one.
Edit to add: I even asked HN, but it didn’t get answers:
I go between last years Pro for work and this years Air for all things personal and I loathe the Pro. This years keyboard on the Air is by far the best typing experience I’ve ever had on a laptop. I have no idea why they are leaning so hard into the Touchbar, it is the most frustrating “innovation”. I frequently accidentally perform actions and need to break flow to look at it to do actions as simple as changing the volume.
One other quirk with the touchbar I've noticed is when the machine starts overheating, the touchbar feels noticeably hotter... sometimes to the point of becoming painful to touch.
> This situation is very annoying, especially for a touch typist as my fingers are always on hjkl and my thumb on the spacebar. This makes my thumb knuckle constantly brush the trackpad and activate it.
I thought standard touch typing position was index fingers on the notches (f & j in US QWERTY). With that & some fairly large hands, the trackpad rests comfortably outside of my palm area? the trackpad seems pretty well-designed to just miss the palm in standard position.
Why didn't you get a 2017 Air? It sounds like that would have been exactly what you're looking for--a performance boost but with the old build quality.
I love my 2013 rMBP, it's still plenty fast enough but it really needs a new battery. As long as the board is fine I'll do whatever is needed to keep it going.
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[ 565 ms ] story [ 6143 ms ] threadAlso, somehow, the "buy-test-return" mentality simply isn't present around Europe, at least never seen it as anything other than exceptional.
But you are right, where I'm from (Romania) people look at me in disbelief when I suggest it, thinking that the companies will punish them if they do it when that's not really true.
Currently I literally only buy electronics from stores that I know deal fast with returns, either via returning the money or replacement.
Edit: In fact, I had way better experiences with this law, in comparison to warranty claims.
Well, questioning about Linux depends really on what kind of distribution the author used previously. Some are less efficient than others.
Considering hardware, the whole set of AMD Ryzen3 and Ryzen4 based laptops are much better than a MacBook, in computing power, flexibility, energy efficiency and lately also in price, plus they have the advantage that you can later upgrade SSD or RAM, while on MBP everything is soldered and you're out of luck later on.
The day MacOS will be fully virtualized, it might be the doom of the MBP and iMac.
Maybe it's my hand positioning, but it just doesn't work for me.
So some awkwardness is to be expected.
Also WSL doesn't solve:
* forced Windows updates when you don't need them
* shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc
* stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive
* bad fs performance in general
You probably should be using a windows pro install and not one with crapware from the manufacturer
However some time the past months I realized I don't think about Windows much... which means it's no longer constantly annoying me.
There are still stupid things, like Apps display language not being tied to the OS display language setting (wtf?!), but I can live with that. On a day to day basis my machine stays on, is performant, and does what I ask it to.
The domain admin could too, but they're mostly just there to get their paycheck, not to improve your experience so they won't bother.
* forced Windows updates when you don't need them
* shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc
* stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive
* bad fs performance in general
I'll add a couple of my own (and be a more restrained in my opinions)
* Windows + WSL is a hybrid environment. Files are on different places depending on from where you are looking. It feels like developing within Docker containers, without the power and flexibility.
* Low observability: very few programs log things and, while there is excellent system wide plumbing for that, very few programs are using it.
* PowerShell makes some questionable choices. For instance, "curl" is a built-in command that has different switches from its Unix homonym. It'd cost absolutely nothing to have a different name for that.
I usually Win+Q or pin to taskbar to run program, almost never look at the default Live Tile.
PowerShell's syntax make me mad too, some Office 365 enterprise management tools is only available in Windows PowerShell only (You cannot run it in PowerShell of MacOS or Linux), so wired.
I was considering moving back to Windows since the new MBP lineup is so disappointing, but no TimeMachine, too many useless feature (Live Tile and so on) made me stick on MacOS.
That was, of course, a really terrible idea considering how differently they worked so fortunately they’ve killed that in the latest versions of PoSH.
It was always possible to change those aliases in the old version of PoSH as well though.
You can remove them now. At least I was able to in the Windows 10 v.2004 update. Why Candy Crush is included with Windows 10 Pro however is beyond me.
What's the deal with this sudden hatred towards nonsense that was installed 35 years ago as well and had a way bigger impact on system resources (in terms of disk space and screen real-estate) than Candy Crush?
Is it because it's a mobile port - too colourful and too in-your-face about it being a mindless pastime than a boomer-style virtual card game that even came with a "boss-key"?
Candy Crush is given prime real estate in the start menu, and is a highly commercial game with in-app-purchases. It's a straight-up advert.
I mean, everybody knows you’re supposed to sneak in a game or two in between spreadsheets.
I have never had a bricked OS from an windows update
You know you can unpin stuff from the start menu to get rid of clutter.
Remember when Windows 10 was released and there were reports that Windows 8 would literally automatically update to Windows 10 without user intervention [1]. My mother's laptop did that and it bricked her install.
The OS taking over control of updates is totally user-hostile. 'Core hours' is just giving a little bit of that control back, it's not a solution.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/15/windows-1...
If you do have some long task like rendering that takes hours, thats of-course trickier.
- You can disable updates
- I'm on the insider version and this has never happened to me, let alone for 'normal' users.
- You can uninstall all of that stuff
- It's not that bad, I work on a decentralised database and we have similar performance across Windows and Linux. Windows was a bit tougher to do but it got there :)
Two years ago Microsoft released an update that killed Windows on my brand new (at the time) desktop (i7-8700k, gtx 1080). I thought "no big deal, I'll boot up my old desktop and deal with it later" but when I turned on that machine (i5-2500k, rx480), it applied the same update and also killed the Windows install. At that point I gave up on using a desktop for the day and booted up Windows on my laptop (i7-7700HQ, gtx 1050m), only to have that also install the update and kill the install.
I'd had Windows updates break before that, but always on one machine so it was easy to write off as some driver quirk or something weird I had installed.
You seem to be assuming everyone else is frequently having a problem because you have had it. In reality, these events are rare, which the overwhelming majority of people not having any issue.
I’ve bricked windows by being dumb but I’ve also bricked Linux by being dumb. Sometimes I feel like it’s cool to hate Windows, like it’s cool to hate Java.
I am the first port of call for IT issues of the whole family, including grandma. Like 10 people, and the last time we had issue caused by windows update was like 5 years ago when a laptop was trying to update to W10 from W8. That required a bit of manual intervention.
Game icons certainly arent there for me any more.
Whats the issue with Onedrive? I mean, its preinstalled, but you dont have to run it.
TBF though, my 2013 desktop never gave me a single issue on Windows..
So your co-workers already use Linux (for free, I guess), but now you're trying to convince them to use a restricted Linux version that also costs money. How's that?
Upd: why downvotes? My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux.
The battery thing is really a killer for me.
All x86 servers, PCs, and laptops are designed to run Windows by adhering to a specification issued by Microsoft and certified by running a suite of compatibility tests provided by Microsoft (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/hlk/). The free OSes are piggybacking on that; there is no independent, neutral standard for the architecture of x86 PCs.
> "My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux."
Linux isn't even listed as a supported OS for the T400 on Lenovo's support site: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd005598
The one thing that is annoying is when using multiple monitors of different resolutions, Wayland doesn't seem to scale resolution on a per-monitor basis. With the laptop being 4k this is an issue when working anywhere but at home, I tend to just use the laptop screen (which is excellent btw).
Stuff that worked without any extra config that in the past might not have been so smooth: wifi, fingerprint reader, thunderbolt dock with keyboard, mouse, monitor, external USB soundblaster and network cable plugged in), sleep, hibernate.
Any other laptop will boot linux, but you'll end up with a lot of rough edges...
For example, on the laptop I'm typing this on (latest Ubuntu, old Acer 511G):
* Random hangs every few days - some unpatched processor bug related to sleep states.
* Wifi diconnects randomly.
* Hotkeys don't work
* Screen sometimes dims itself to zero, and since the hotkeys don't work, it's rather tricky to fix.
* Bluetooth doesn't work
* Hibernate and sleep are disabled by default and you have to go into a config file to enable them. SD card doesn't work after sleeping more than 3 times.
* Fans don't work at all. System throttles almost immediately under any load.
* There must be some issue with the SSD losing writes because even journaled ext4 seems to get data corruption after an unclean poweroff.
* External monitors don't support hdmi audio.
* of the 3 USB ports, 2 don't work for anything more than charging devices.
* webcam LED state seems random, and does not correlate to webcam usage at all.
All on one device!
Linux on Thinkpad is great. Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.
Running on 2 old Dells and an Asus with no problems (Ubuntu 18.04, upgraded in place from 16.04). Your statement is absurd on its face just based on its generality.
Of the things you've listed, I can't say anything about external HDMI audio because I don't have one, and the default hibernate thing I can confirm. Every other one I've never had, much less daily.
Fedora's compositor is Mutter/Gnome Shell, which the above critique seems to be about.
I just bought a Surface Laptop 3, and the machine is great. The hardware is nice, Windows on a laptop has improved tenfold since I've last used it. WSL2 means Linux isn't left out.
It's one machine/OS combo that does everything for me, including light gaming, whereas Linux and macOS both have significant compromises when using them.
WSL2 works fine and it also means that when I want to game I have a wider selection of games to play.
Anyhow, my target initiating Linux to wasn't precisely gamers either.
I run Ubuntu on my work Dell Latitude (i3wm), Debian on my personal System 76 (Mate) and both work more or less flawlessly, although I do agree with the guy who said Battery is not great.
I also have a Desktop with Windows and Linux dual booting, and while I agree Windows is quite polished when it works, I also find a million little annoyances.
e.g. I don't have working VNC server at all on latest Fedora, with either X11 or Wayland, and no sign of it being fixed anytime soon.
And that is just one of many irritations with desktop linux, that simply don't occur on Windows, mostly because of MS superior QA
You're comparing an OS that hasn't had a major release in almost 5 years to a bleeding edge Linux distribution. Install an older LTS version of Ubuntu or Debian and things will be quite stable.
Every single one of them has had various annoying bugs that would not have survived decent QA.
But your point is partially correct - at least the LTS releases had workarounds for the problems, whereas with Fedora I am SOL
- (fractional) scaling actually works quite well. - the shell works a big better. Feels like a good compromise between gnomes simplicity and KDEs over the top customisability to me. KDE has actually been the most stable out of the three though. - (Nvidia) driver support. Using Manjaro I had to reinstall the Nvidia driver every couple of months because a kernel update broke things. Again, not huge but annoying. - Working hardware video decoding in firefox. On Linux playing videos results in significantly higher CPU load, noise, slowed down browser, etc. Even on a fast machine.
With wsl2 I can now do all my development in that environment and don't need to live with windows slow file system, missing package manager, etc. The remote development features of VSCode with wsl (and other ssh hosts) are also simply amazing.
I usually find the text less readable on Windows than it's on Linux or a Mac. Not sure it's an issue with Edge, my monitor's Gamma or what, but it just looks better on Linux (and perfect on a Mac).
- Windows 10 basically requires an SSD to get reasonable responsiveness. You could maybe get away with putting a disk image on an SSD, but for serious use it's best to dedicate a whole disk or partition to it.
- QEMU's default display adapter started "leaking" pending IO requests at one point, which grinds the VM from full speed to a halt over the course of an hour or so. I ended up disabling the display adapter and moving to just RDP, which is basically an even trade since the RDP client can do everything the SPICE client can.
You can preallocate the disk image for the VM. It's reasonable. YMMV and I don't do anything resembling heavy lifting on the Windows machines.
Running a Linux VM was pretty friction-free, and I could use all the company mandated tools that had to be run in Windows simultaneously without performance issues. WIth a windows guest, I wouldn't run it unless I needed one of those tools, but that required a fairly long spin-up time.
Like I said... almost a decade ago so they probably aren't problems now. I'm running Linux native right now, but again for the ease of corporate support, I may go with Windows + WSL2 for my next refresh.
Indeed. I used to keep a Windows box for the smartcard reader bureaucratic obligations with the Brazilian government that I never managed to accurately emulate on VMs.
I'm happy things are much better now.
And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks? They get live notifications when you add or remove hardware, software, when an application has crashed (even when error reporting is off), …. The data contains unique identifiers for your system and user. I don’t even want to know what’s sent when you select full diagnostics.
Windows is a privacy and performance nightmare. It’s good for two things only: corporate environments (manageability) and games.
---
Well, sorry about that. Just had to get this off my chest.
Have you tried running without antivirus? Some parts of Windosw are still slow eg the filesystem, but the main thing making everything slow is antivirus software IME, including Defender.
I don’t know what’s wrong with my work PC. Home PC also has Windows (because games) and is super fast (even with Defender, but without ATP).
You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory.
In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.
Also, in my experience, many people just don’t care. I understand, too. It’s just easier this way. Not caring is great for your mental health.
If most of your colleagues feel the state of things is tolerable, nothing will change.
Or just BYOD :)
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
https://pi-hole.net/
(or at least shut all the "windows 10" stuff and return to something that look like Windows 2000?)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-steer-clear-of-windows-...
They are less brazen about it, I had to look in my Applications list.
https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...
Pro runs just fine on a laptop.
When people talk about Candy Crush they mean they see it first thing when they start Windows Store as a recommendation. It is definitely not pre-installed on Pro, if it is I haven’t found it in 4 years...
It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.
> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?
I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.
1) it hardly matters since the point is that excessive disk access by an OS when, essentially, "nothing is happening" (opening the start menu, say) is a bad sign for generally giving-a-shit about performance and spinning rust just exposes the error,
2) they pushed Win10 upgrades on a bunch of well-performing spinning rust Win7 machines back in the middle of 2015, not 2020, immediately making them much worse,
3) most normal home users don't replace hard drives, don't replace their computer very often, buy the cheapest thing they can aside from that they think higher number = better and are often up-sold a large (=spinning rust) drive they don't need and can be up-sold because they buy them at real stores (yes, really), and only very recently did SSDs mostly displace magnetic platters on base configurations of cheap mass-market desktops. I guarantee a high percentage of home users are still booting off traditional HDDs, yes, even in 2020, and they're exactly the same sort not to have been able to figure out how to not upgrade to Win10.
My next machine will probably be windows, even though I dislike Microsoft and everything they're about.
My experience shows WSL is passable, but it often feels "hacky" and incoherent. For professional work it just doesn't feel right to me. Plus the usability of Windows OS itself is just a complete mess... Honestly, I'd rather just run a regular VM with linux and full-screen that, rather than deal with Windows with Linux bolted on to the side.
If work is paying, I'm still going macbook, as I don't really care about the reliability aspect of the machine nor the insane cost of peripherals/the laptop itself. If I'm paying, I'll probably go for a Dell or Lenovo machine and install Linux. I just can't stand using windows any more.
air2013 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mba.jpg
iphonese2016 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg
Perfect illustration of "Apple is iphone-first company".
Can you please remove the imgur post?
Fixed the broken link: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg
It's not sharp enough to cut bread, but those 2-3mm of thickness have zero impact on perceived laptop thinness while affording enough room for a spectacular webcam (by current Apple standards) and its companion Windows Hello counterpart.
A way to improve this situation a bit would be to be able to use the camera of an iPhone as a web cam, either over USB or wifi. You still have the compression and USB transfer, but at least you use the better optics of the phone. There are third party tools, such as EpocCam, that can do it, but require the installation of drivers. This should be a first party solution, in the same fashion as the "take photo" option from the right click menu on Mac OS, which uses an iPhone to take a photo and paste it directly on the open application of the computer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BLgS7m0W94
[0] https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2020/05/lenovo-thin...
Image on the right is from the Go.
I would love to be able to easily customize the touch bar though, the author mentions BetterTouchTool, looks good, might be worth it.
Like the author I also have some problems with Catalina: the subtle hangs drive me nuts, the bugs with the True Tone going pale, the gpu's going crazy just because they want
PS: Apple - please consider improving your AirPlay video support or doing some other protocol for it. It sucks having to use cables for even HDMI video playback on a secondary screen. (or place back the display port / HDMI entrance)
- a dock for quick task switching (as well as seeing what apps are running that I can shutdown when I'm on battery) - a music/spotify widget that can play/pause, go back/forward and that shows me the track and artist as well as the album arg. - a date/time widget that I've customized so it shows me the week number too. This one has been surprisingly useful, as I'll regularly walk over to my macbook and tap on the touchbar to see the time or date. - a battery percentage and time remaining widget - a mute/unmute widget
But what I perhaps like best is the swipe gestures. If I swipe anywhere along the bar with two fingers, it adjusts the volume, and with three fingers I can change the brightness.
I don't currently make much use of app-specific touch bars, and there are a ton of other features I might use eventually. But even just with this I've come to really like the touch bar, where before I much preferred the function keys.
Can't do without an escape key though, but thankfully they put that one back :).
I hate the touchpad greatly. 0 benefits to me but tons of annoyances. I keep touching random buttons I never intended. I cannot press the correct button without looking (used to put volume to really low in bed)
> I cannot press the correct button without looking
does this seem like a really really minor problem to anyone else? I can’t imagine using function keys often enough that this would actually become annoying.
(Yes, I use a Windows keyboard with my work Mac.)
Adding something that changes the ergonomics of that should be treated as being a high price, so the benefits should be huge.
I mentioned this before, but the real proof that the touch bar isn't for professionals is that you can't buy an Apple keyboard with the touch bar. Local labor laws require that I have a "external" keyboard when working at my desk, so the touch bar is pretty worthless, unless it was available on the standard alone keyboards as well, and it's not.
Personally I prefer the old keyboard because I find it easier to change volume and brightness using a key and not a slider, but that's personal preference.
Whaaa? Why? Where?
You can use the laptop monitor as a secondary display. It's a pretty good law, which forces employers to provide you with an ergonomically sound work environment. You're also required to have a height adjustable desk and chair... and a window.
On 13 March, we took from the office anything we needed (monitors, keyboards, mice, desk chairs). No-one said they didn't have a desk, so I don't know how we would have handled that.
During the corona lock down my boss told us to get anything we required from the office. If you couldn’t pick it up, an intern would take the company van and deliver anything you’d need.
I've had 9 jobs total in the 25 years I've been working professionally and those 5 windowless jobs, account for about 5 of those years. I burn out pretty fast in the dark.
> Whenever possible, users should be encouraged to use a docking station or firm surface and a full-sized keyboard and mouse
From https://www.hse.gov.uk/msd/dse/ and the resources linked from it.
When one of my colleagues insisted on using the laptop keyboard, we made him sign in writing that he'd been offered a wide selection of keyboards and didn't want one, and understood he could take a keyboard at any time.
Among workers, I imagine such laws raise awareness of the risks of working for too many hours on a laptop keyboard. I wish I had such awareness before I developed bad RSI pain after working on a laptop too much during previous WFH stints. Now I'm much more careful about my home work setup.
If the non-TouchBar one was cheaper then I guess you'd be right. But all else equal I imagine people would want it. I quite like it, of all the things that have been wrong with the previous lineup of Macbooks, the TouchBar really isn't one of them.
However - the way Apple implemented the TouchBar leaves much to be desired. You need something like BetterTouchTool or MTMR in order to make it usable.
Also it made the touchbar usefulness rating goes from "yeah, that's...okay?" to "I LOVE IT!" instantly. Apple seems didn't really care about the touchbar much, which is a pity.
Right? It's such a pity that Pock messed that one up. I added Pock to have the same thing in the same position all of the time and I really like how it gave me more screen real estate but it's those little details that they missed.
I think the biggest issue is the mis-aligned defaults and lack of training on it. Things like knowing you can slide to adjust volume and brightness from the buttons (which is entirely non-obvious) and the ability to control it a bit better were big game changers for me.
If you're constantly fighting against a jammed keyboard, that affects your productivity, which most likely affects your happiness.
That said my new job gave me a System 76 laptop and I’ve been delighted all week with it. I don’t care for the offset keyboard but at least it actually works correctly. If it had better palm detection on the trackpad it would be the best laptop I’ve owned since my 2013 MBP (which is still goin strong).
Hard to beat my 2013 mbp retina I guess I’ll stay with it for now.
I’m excited to try windows with WSL2 soon. I don’t see going back to a new Mac any time soon based on how easy PopOS / Ubuntu has been.
Since then there have been new developments:
Had a meeting yesterday, 5 minutes before the scheduled time (which is normally plenty of time when your tools work as expected) I start up Zoom and create the meeting. Guess what? The thing now just freezes completely and it's not just Zoom, the system UI (dock, menu bar, etc) becomes sluggish. This used to work fine before upgrading to Catalina. Force-quitting Zoom fixed it, so I'm assuming something Zoom is doing (that used to work fine) is enough to completely freeze the system UI.
Eventually gave up on Zoom and used FaceTime. In the middle of the call the UI froze for ~10 seconds - no video, no mouse, but audio was still working. I assumed it would crash but thankfully it recovered.
Finally after the call I left the machine unattended for a minute and when I got back it was on the full disk encryption password screen so it had rebooted. Turns out it crashed because WindowServer stopped responding. I heard about those issues but always though it's related to the newer models with discrete GPUs and I didn't have to worry about it with my low-end Macbook with Intel graphics. I guess I was wrong.
Mail is still playing the new mail sound randomly when archiving/moving read messages, and I ended up disabling the sound completely. I didn't know it was possible to screw up something so simple.
I am now thinking of downgrading and using Catalina (for Xcode) on a separate machine. I am not sure what to do when it goes out of support though, seems like nowadays every OS became equally shit.
If you format there is a chance the issue will go away. I had similar symptoms even after formatting on a 2015 MBP, so I formatted, wrote a 4GB file to the HDD, then after that everything worked fine. Amusingly if I tried to copy the file to a thumb drive it would time out trying to copy it. I couldn't figure out how to mark the bad sectors, so hacky solution, but it worked for me.
The issue is that a combination of camera access, hardware video encoding/decoding (for video conferencing) and bluetooth earphones (AirPods) is now able to crash WindowServer.
This used to work totally fine on a previous version so it's clearly a solved problem. Maybe Apple should stop "fixing" things that ain't broke?
But hey, there is a silver lining to this, at least now I can enjoy Apple TV+ on my work machine. That's exactly what I always wanted. /s
(Corrupt data, like if windows server has a bad bit, counts as a hardware issue.)
I built a small form factor hackintosh with an i5 9600K + 32GB RAM and it's a completely different experience. Smooth as butter, never throttles. iOS apps compile in a third of the time and my IDE doesn't grind to a halt while I'm compiling. Doing work on my MacBook now feels like a chore in comparison. Not to mention the hackintosh cost less than half what the MacBook cost.
I want to add how bad some parts of the Mac UX are. GNOME surely has some really really bad UX decisions but overall I think (hold on tight) GNOME is better than Mac in terms of UX. My MacBook is simply not designed for pro users.
I might add that the Mac is far more stable than Ubuntu and looks better but in the end as far as I am concerned the t440p is just the better option for pro users.
It's been pretty smooth sailing thus far, no big disappointments. My main reason for replacing the 2015 was to get more CPU power and memory, but the 2015 was actually doing ok, not insanely slow yet.
In terms of power I can now have all my tabs open, including heavy ones like Facebook, while running several different IDEs, and changing between things takes no time at all. Compiling is measurably faster.
The migration tool seems to work, it moved everything including stuff you might forget like your ssh config file. Even the bash history is there, and all the apps are in the dock in the order they were in on the old machine. Homebrew seemed to need a bundle command, but that fixed itself easily.
Touch bar is weird. I've basically set it to display F keys, because I can't figure out how to get iTerm2's hotkey to replace the Siri icon. If I could do that, I might not mind, but I go to terminal so often I need it to be a single key. So for now, Touch Bar is a small minus for me. The ESC key is still there so that's fine.
The screen is nicer than the 2015 one, marginally. Something about the colors and the size, I guess the bezel is now pretty much where it can be aesthetically. I wouldn't want it closer to the edge.
The keyboard is good. I tried my wife's butterfly type keyboard and thought it was terrible, luckily she likes it. This keyboard has slightly less travel than the old one, but somehow it feels like I can type faster without it feeling weird.
Main thing is there's been no terrible surprises in moving the stuff over to a new machine. Back in the day when I was a kid it would take a whole day to install software, you would always forget to move something, and there would always be some unexpected hitch.
I haven't run into Catalina slowness issues that people have mentioned, only things like the removal of kexts, which wasn't huge for me.
The only thing that doesn't work is tap-and-slide on the volume slider.
"When I push the laptop a bit more, with a few Docker containers, Pycharm running, Google Chrome with some Docs opened, and brightness near the maximum, I get around 4 hours."
Honest question for those of you who have Dell XPS 13s, ThinkPad X1 Carbons and so on, what battery life are you getting? Dell for example advertises 12 hours. Are these figures realistic?
Are MacBooks not the battery champs anymore?
It has an OLED screen though, which is part of the reason for the not so great battery life.
Though when I got it, it very easily lasted the entire day, even if watching videos and such.
I get 5 - 6 hours of real work out of it, 8 when doing nothing major using Ubuntu 20.04, but I have the 4k screen I hear it is a lot better if you have the 1080p screen.
Currently on a X1 Yoga 3rd gen, I could run the laptop for 10 hours for normal usage brand new, unplugged, on _linux_. I'm a programmer, so this involves mostly editors and a few instances of a browser running, compiler building stuff in bursts, generally an mp3 player running in the background too. Brightness is set around 180-200cd (pretty bright, but still around 45-50% of the total brightness).
I can comparatively run a video player like mpv for about 4-4.5 hours in fullscreen (which in this model is 2k). If I'm using blender I can get anywhere between 4 and 6 hours.
I don't run GNOME or KDE though, and this does make a big difference (esp GNOME is far from being lightweight). Comparatively, my colleagues running windows 10 get 1-2 hours less runtime, and I attribute that mostly to the different tools we use, not due to difference in power management (I do not use IDEs, most of my colleagues do).
After one year I can still expect the laptop to last 8 hours unplugged with the same workflow. I generally do not bring a charger with me when going around.
I could be laving the company shortly and I've been thinking about a laptop for personal use and I was seriously considering the X1 Carbon or the Yoga again. They're not perfect laptops, but the 2k screen is a perfect resolution for a 14" to balance battery, there's a good selection of ports (better than several 15" competitors), good keyboard, good battery, extremely well built. I've abused this laptop with very little care and it did withstand much more than what I would have expected. Small drops, pressed along with groceries, pen straight on the dusty screen... it took it all and still looks as new when I wipe it.
If you want some of the negative sides, since I saw batches of these laptops among my colleagues, most of the screens since the first X1 carbon did develop some bright spots in the backlight after 1-2 years. We saw a couple laptops with dead pixels in batches of 15, which got exchanged under warranty, but yeah, QC was lacking for a laptop of this cost. Many of the yoga 1st gen we got had issues with the arrow keys requiring too much force. This got fixed in r2/r3, but the r3 buttons on the trackpad (the phisical ones) are so flimsy that often "click" without performing the electrical contact unless you hit them roughly in the center. A bit weak, and it annoying the hell out of me, since I much prefer these buttons to the trackpad mushy click action.
Putting the laptop in tent mode is nice occasionally, but I admit I did it 2-3 times tops in 2 years. Despite loving the pen for note taking, I'd rather get a dedicated (lighter!) note-taking tablet than folding the laptop. It just doesn't make sense after you try that. Same for writing on the screen in clamshell mode (feels idiotic and unconfortable).
I'd rather get a matte screen and no touch, if I could. This laptop bumped at 400 nits is still basically unusable outside. Whenever I see people saying that it's possible, I have to laugh. It's not even acceptable on the superior coating of the macbook, it's definitely not possible with this one :(. Only in the shade.
But despite all that, these laptops are worth their beefy price. Very solid, and we didn't many returns due to components failing. Nothing related to keyboards, screen, hinges, etc.
I'm really thorn, because I know I could depend on the X1, but I'm really attracted by the size/form-factor of the new XPS 15. Almost the same as this 14", but it's 16:10. For coding, that little extra vertical size, combined with superior form factor, has me hooked. I do use ultrasharp dell 4k screens and they're a step up even from this excellent screen mounted on the yoga. Being able to bump up the ram to 32gb is also a big ...
1st - if it fails during warranty, how do I send it for repair safely (as in my data be safe)?
2nd - it decreases its value imho. I mean how many people buy/trust used storage? I wouldn't.
You have backups, right?
(That is, unfortunately, the legit answer to this question.)
The T2 chip already encrypts the SSD using a unique identifier generated and known only by that host's T2, so it's sort of a non-issue imo
You should have disk encryption turned on. I would not worry unless you think there is someone who is willing to spend an enormous amount of time and effort to access your data.
Disappointing that most Lenovo laptops now have soldered RAM but you can only get up to 16 GiB.
You could try scaling your favourite bitmap font 2-3x up - I did this with mine when switching to a 4k laptop. Unless this means that terminals no longer support bitmap fonts at all.
Found problems with USB devices on day 1 with USB 2.0 devices intermittently freezing.
Documented https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/gp5b1z/usb_20_issues_o... , and there is a workaround... do not use any hub that shows a USB 2.0 device to the Mac, find and use a USB-C hub that presents everything as USB 3.0 to the Mac even if it's USB 2.0
I believe that this is a Catalina software bug, and now I have a workaround I am happy. Sucks for those who can't figure out the debugging though.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/CalDigit-TS3-Plus-Thunderbolt-Dock-...
Apple hardware is an expensive hobby it seems.
Popular solutions seem to involve applying custom shielding to dongles/cables/adaptors, trying different models of these, or experimenting with their physical proximity and layout. Sigh.
Discussion, including a link to an Intel whitepaper on the topic, here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/329970/usb-c-dongl...
When the MBP with USB-C first came out in late 2016, I noticed this issue and documented it and brought the machine to Apple, and they offered to exchange the motherboard. However, work and travel prevented me from bringing the machine in, and when I brought it to the shop next time to have it fixed months later they said it’s a known issue that can’t be fixed. Use WiFi, plug in an external HD - choose one.
Edit to add: I even asked HN, but it didn’t get answers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494910
They should probably rename it to the torturebar.
I thought standard touch typing position was index fingers on the notches (f & j in US QWERTY). With that & some fairly large hands, the trackpad rests comfortably outside of my palm area? the trackpad seems pretty well-designed to just miss the palm in standard position.