Showing posts with label Gadgets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gadgets. Show all posts

Friday 23 December 2016

5 things that suck about Apple’s new MacBook Pro


While mostly I’ve liked the new MacBook Pro in the weekend I’ve used it there are some glaring issues that I need to point out which make me question the use of the Pro nomenclature on these notebooks. Apple is obviously arguing otherwise, and there is some logic to what it is suggesting but some of the things with these notebooks are going to be deal-breakers for people. Even, I, someone who doesn’t really push the limits of the new Macs to their fullest has found some of the design decisions to be limiting. Let me elaborate.
1. The biggest issue is the absence of the standard USB ports. There really is not getting around the fact that at the moment you can’t plug in even a pen drive to this laptop leave alone a memory card or an HDMI cable. The only route is a dongle for one thing or the other. If you end up with Apple’s dongles, you will pay a lot of money and have ugly dongles hang out of the sides of this beautiful machine. I haven’t been able to hook up my camera, nor can I charge my iPhone on this machine. Ironically, the charger of this machine has come in handy in charging my Google Pixel, which is all kinds of strange.
2. The new keyboard is very shallow and people who like clattering the keyboard will find it hard to adapt quickly. Only after 4 days of heavy duty usage, I’ve become used to this keyboard. I can imagine people who are used long key travel will not like this keyboard. It really is a keyboard that’s likely to appeal to touch typists more than anyone else.
3. The battery life isn’t as good as the MacBook Air which will be a deal breaker for someone upgrading from an Air. The bigger issue is that it isn’t even as good as a 13-inch MacBook Pro from last year. Apple could perhaps make some improvements to the operating system with a software update, but until that happens, I am not getting more than 5 hours with the screen brightness at full and no more than 7.5 with it lowered to usable levels.
4. Apple reportedly made the display assembly so thin that it didn’t have any room left to add the backlit Apple logo on the top of the notebook. Instead, like the retina MacBook, the new Pro models get this machined Apple logo, which looks quite nice, but it doesn’t exude that level of coolness in the dark as the older MacBooks.
5. The touch bar, so far, it hasn’t proven to be life changing. Perhaps, that speaks of the amount of apps that are leveraging it or perhaps it also speaks about a pro user who has had years of training of Mac keyboard shortcuts would probably find it quite pointless. So far, the touch bar seems like something designed for a dummy, but not a pro user, which is the target audience of the MacBook Pro.