Story
The 13 inch Macbook Pro 2016 was the first of them with the new design & chassis that I owned. Back then when it was still new most of the reviews were around how replacing all those I/O ports with USB-C a headache for the users.
as I remember, I couldn’t care less about any of those issues. All I wanted was to replace a 17 inch brick pro from 2011 with something lighter with a greater battery life, so I pretty much settled on the idea of dongles before even receiving my device.
Due to some changes that I am making to my job, I needed to pick up a new device. Over the past few months I was looking at available Mac options and that is when I was introduced with keyboard problems that a lot of people were facing. Reading all those stories and experiences was kind of worrying and that made me looking forward to the wwdc and hoping that apple drops a new Macbook with a complete new design that possibly fixes the keyboard.
Don’t blame me dreaming about it, its all because I innocently listened to all those Apple Guru’s in Youtube raging and speaking about what to expect on the new coming Macbook Pro.
Well it happened, apple updated their Macbook line quietly with minimal changes. By that time I made my decisions that I am going to pick it up hoping that my new laptop’s keyboard lasts just as well as the old one did.
Review
This is my first experience with Touchbar, I remember when they were first introduced on the 2016 models, I intentionally picked up the base dual core version just to avoid that weird emoji picker on top of my laptop. Even though I prefer it didn’t exist on my new device, but I can say I am more moderate on dealing with it than 3 years ago.
Overal, the Touch Bar is fine, there are some things that I really don’t like about it, but I guess I gotta live with it.
- I really miss the escape button, reaching out to escape is simply a natural movement to a computer user and I wished they would at least respect that single key and would left it physical.
- I don’t really like it that I have to expand the menu to be able to access the keys and options I was looking for. it’s simply slows me down on doing things.
- I don’t like noticing it flashing in my eyes as it shows different options while I’m typing on my keyboard. Specially the autosuggestion is very distracting, to the extend that in the middle of writing this post I Googled out how to disable the Auto Suggestion on Touch bar and luckily I found a way. (Go to System Preferences and Search For Touch bar you will find Auto Suggestion Option.)
The keyboard is definitely an upgrade for me. Using the first generation of butterfly keyboard for years and coming to this gives me a day and night difference. I am not talking much about the tactile difference here, but more about the sound they make while typing. The sound is not as ideal and nice compared to typing on a Think Pad device but I still love how much quieter it is compared to the old one!
I know this is not something new, but I came from the dual core model. Means there were only 2 thunderbolt 3 ports on my machine. Having 4 of them now simply gives me more confidence. Although it doesn’t really happen that I have more than 2 device connected to my machine but its simply a relief to know they are there.
Performance? I can’t really say much about this yet. Definitely the new Quad Core CPU on my 2019 model should have advantages over my older i7 Dual Core but so far I was not able to spot any significant difference on my daily tasks such as running multiple Docker containers and instances of VSCode.
Verditct
Overall, I am happy that I picked up the most recent version Macbook, although I do not see it as much of an upgrade but it fits well my need of a new device.