Ben Lovejoy’s diary series are an attempt to provide a real-life review of Apple devices. Not just first impressions of them as gadgets, but the role they perform in everyday use, and an evolving view over time.
Read the diary entries from the bottom up to read them in date order.
The main reason I’ve adopted this Diary format for reviewing Apple kit is that first impressions can be misleading. The iPad, for example, launched to very mixed reviews. I won’t embarrass my fellow tech writers by naming names, but the Guardian did a round-up at the time.
Then there’s my own Apple Watch experience. Going from clear smartwatch skeptic – wondering why anyone would want one – to a complete convert. With the new MacBook Pro, my impressions from the keynote were that I would like it but not love it.
It looks like a very nice machine. I’m fully expecting to enjoy the smaller form factor and the new features – even if I will really miss the larger screen – but I’m not expecting to love it. It doesn’t excite me the way I feel that a new generation ought to after four years of more-or-less stagnation.
It turns out I was wrong …
Having got my maxed-out 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro set up yesterday, I’ve now been using it for a total of around 12 hours – so I’m calling this one my first real-life usage impressions.
Impressions of the form factor will obviously vary depending on whether you’re coming from a pre-Retina machine – as I was – or a later one. The new machine is smaller, slimmer and sleeker either way, but the difference is of course much more dramatic from a pre-2012 model. And in my case, I’m also moving from a 17-inch machine to a 15-inch one.
For me, then, the form factor is in a completely different league. The base unit is much thinner, and the lid is almost unbelievably so. It’s also significantly lighter. I said before that I think I may be able to switch from two Macs to just one. This one feels portable enough that having a separate MacBook Air now feels like overkill …
My shiny new maxed-out 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar finally arrived yesterday, and it was time to migrate everything from my old Mac.
I wrote in the first piece that I was wasn’t overly concerned about the port situation, though did recognize that it wouldn’t be an entirely painless transition.
I’m pretty relaxed about the all-USB-C ports. Leaving older standards behind always involves a certain amount of pain, but I’m a pragmatist and a gadget guy. When a better standard comes along, it makes sense to use it, and as Apple isn’t the only company going all-in on USB-C, there’s no shortage of accessories for the new standard.
You could argue that a mix of ports would be useful, but that would be true for maybe the first year of ownership. After that, we’d be moaning about the fact that we have only two USB-C ports because there’s space taken up with those huge, ugly, old-fashioned USB-A ones. I think Apple made the right call here.
That pain did kick it on day one, however, when I attempted to migrate my data, apps and settings from my old MacBook Pro …
While some in the U.S. have been fortunate enough to take delivery of their shiny new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar models, those of us in the UK are getting a rather more gradual unveiling. Most Apple Stores don’t even have display models yet, and even in the Regent Street store they only had one of each model, tucked away inside a perspex tube running demo loops.
My MacBook Pro Diary series is, then, getting a rather more drawn-out ‘first impressions’ treatment than usual. But there is an upside to that: there’s actually quite a lot to discuss with this new machine, and so far the focus has been very much on the specs. The loss of ports, whether Apple should have waited for Kaby Lake, whether the Touch Bar is a useful innovation or a gimmick … plus the ‘has Apple lost touch with its professional user roots?’ debate.
Those are all issues worthy of discussion, but I do feel the machine has perhaps missed out a little on the more usual (admittedly superficial) first impressions of its design …
I don’t generally bother with AppleCare. My usual view is that, like any other extended warranty, it offers poor value for money. You’re paying a lot of money upfront for coverage you’ll likely never need.
Most Mac faults are going to make themselves known well inside the first year of standard Apple warranty coverage. The likelihood of a major fault occurring in the interval between the standard warranty expiring and AppleCare doing the same is very low. (There’s an additional factor at play in the EU, which I’ll get to later as it won’t be relevant to U.S. readers.)
But I am opting for it this time. Because the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is not only non-upgradable, but also pretty much non-repairable …
I’ve always upgraded my MacBooks. Usually, I would spec out my machine with the best processor and GPU, and couple that to the bare-bones RAM and drive, then upgrade those components myself to avoid the Apple premium. Sometimes I’d upgrade more than once during a machine’s lifetime.
My Late 2011 17-inch MacBook Pro, for example, was bought with 8GB RAM and a 750GB hard drive. I immediately upgraded the RAM to 16GB – a ten-minute task – and swapped out both the hard drive and optical drive for two 1TB hard drives. Later on, when SSD prices fell to more sensible levels, I swapped out the spinning metal drives for a couple of 1TB SSDs. In this way, the 17-inch machine I was reluctant to give up has remained remarkably usable even five years on.
That approach is no longer an option. The RAM has long been soldered on in MacBooks, and the past couple of days confirmed what I suspected about the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar when I maxed-out my order: the SSD, too, is soldered on and thus non-upgradable …
The new MacBook Pro models have been coming under a fair amount of criticism on the Internet. Many are saying that the new machines just aren’t wowing them, especially just after Microsoft demonstrated that it is still possible to do so even in the boring old desktop PC market with the new Surface Studio.
That criticism is absolutely fair enough, and echoes my own views when I said that I was buying it despite not being excited by it.
But some criticisms being directed at the machines seem to me to be misplaced …
So, the wait is over and the new MacBook Pro is official. I said yesterday that what we knew then didn’t seem quite enough to justify the ‘hello again’ hype, and I hoped there might be a ‘one more thing’ feature we hadn’t heard about. Alas, there wasn’t.
I also held out just a tiny hope that perhaps the leaked image was a placeholder, and the bezels would be thinner in the real thing. That too wasn’t to be.
However, my late-2011 17-inch MacBook Pro was looking a little long in the tooth despite all its upgrades. The lack of Bluetooth LE, for example, meant no AirDrop and no Apple Watch unlock. Nothing major, and if I didn’t write about Apple stuff for a living I might have held out another year, but I decided I really ought to have the latest and greatest machine even if if didn’t wow me.
And, to be honest, the new MacBook Pro doesn’t …
