Apple’s new MacBook Pros are a bite of trouble

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For a very long time, many professionals in a myriad of sectors swore by Apple’s famed MacBook Pros as their preferred weapon of choice. And indeed, their virtues were manifold in nature. Despite their exorbitant price tags, MacBook Pros were incredibly robust, with a rock-solid UNIX-based operating system that was specifically optimized for the hardware it was running on, offering what appeared to be unrivaled stability.

The hardware on the svelte laptops was nothing to sneeze at either, with premium-grade components resting inside a sleek chassis hewn from a single block of aluminum, giving it a distinctive appearance without going for the garish aesthetics established by high-end ‘gaming-grade’ hardware. However, over the last four years, MacBook Pros have undergone a series of changes which have not done the laptops any favors, to the chagrin of many a diehard Apple devotees.

It began in 2015, with Apple’s switch fully to AMD-built GPUs for the MacBook Pros, moving away from Nvidia GPUs completely. Not only was AMD’s GPUs inferior to Nvidia GPUs in terms of raw performance, but they also prevented Mac OS X (the now-macOS) from utilizing Nvidia’s excellent CUDA processing cores which are required by a great many kinds of professional software to facilitate processing. AMD GPUs have also run hotter on average than their Nvidia counterparts, which, combined with the all-metal body of MacBooks, is far from ideal for extended use, especially when placed on laps.

 


Things got even stranger in 2016, with Apple having no substantial new features of significance to offer, and overcompensating for the lack of novelty through an extremely controversial decision to eradicate the entire row of function keys from the keyboard and replacing it with a narrow touchscreen that ran the width of the entire keyboard. Dubbed the Touch Bar, the new addition would probably have been received much better if it had not arrived at the expense of the function keys, and while some users found a limited degree of utility in the device, most people found it to be what it truly was – a gimmick designed to wow people at first glance in the name of originality, without really having a great deal to offer.

Despite their exorbitant price tags, MacBook Pros were incredibly robust, with a rock-solid UNIX-based operating system that was specifically optimized for the hardware it was running on, offering what appeared to be unrivaled stability. 

The main drawback of the Touch Bar is its utter lack of tactile feedback, thus rendering muscle memory useless and forcing users to look away from the monitor and at the Touch Bar whenever it needed to be touched. The experience was not helped by the fact that the visual layout of the Touch Bar constantly changes from program to program in an attempt to make it more appealing and useful, but it only ended up adding a level of complexity to the interface that no one really needed. Its location also ensures that hitting it by mistake when aiming for the top row of what remained of the physical keyboard was now only too easy.

The problems did not end there. Apple ended up eliminating the option for users to upgrade the laptop’s storage by soldering its main storage device – a high-end SSD – to the motherboard of the computer, rendering it incapable of removal or replacement without esoteric means. The nature of the hot mess was intensified further by Apple’s replacement of all the connectivity ports on the MacBook Pro with new reversible USB-C-based Thunderbolt ports, forcing users to buy and use expensive converter dongles to connect their legacy USB (otherwise known as USB Type-A) hardware, a change which was universally loathed, because while USB-C is amazing, it is still a long way from becoming mainstream on computers, and a staggering amount of general and specialized peripherals still use old-style USB connectors, and leaving not even a single classic USB port indicated a level of insensitivity and callousness toward the users’ requirements that can only be described at ‘distinctly Apple’.

However, the stinking cherry on top of Apple’s cake of terrible design decisions for the MacBook Pro in 2016 was the removal of the dearly beloved MagSafe charging port. The MagSafe port was one of the best features of the MacBook range, with its magnetic connector snapping on and off easily and preventing many a charging cable from being torn apart by someone stepping on it by mistake. Taking it out meant that the MacBook Pro would now need to be charged through one of its new USB-C ports, adding yet another lack of backward compatibility with old-style MacBook chargers, and completely eliminating the advantages of the magnetic charging port.

Over the next two years, the MacBook Pro went on a diet, becoming even slimmer. While this sounds like a good thing, this brought along a sizeable host of new challenges. In 2017, this meant that the keyboard needed to be made even more low-profile, something that not only reduced the tactile feedback of the keys but also ended up making them much more prone to failure, with the keyboard being damaged irrevocably by as little as a single speck of dust getting under a key. With the keyboard unit soldered to several other key components of the laptop, even a basic keyboard failure would essentially require nearly half the parts of the laptop to be replaced.

The thinner chassis also naturally translated into a lack of internal space, which made adding an adequately powerful cooling system for its components markedly more difficult. Miniaturization of components such as processors has become considerably simpler, but that has not prevented thick, heavy laptops from existing, simply because they allow for the inclusion of superior thermal management systems that can take full advantage of the additional internal space, not to mention offering superior expansion options.

The overheating problem reached its pinnacle in 2018 with the release of the latest MacBook Pro, which utilizes Intel’s latest and greatest 8th-generation processors. With more cores than the chips from the previous generations, the new CPUs ran significantly hotter, which ended up being disastrous when combined with the handicapped cooling capacity of the overly-slimmed laptop. In order to prevent catastrophic damage from occurring to itself, the laptop’s CPU constantly keeps throttling down its speeds, resulting in drastically reduced processing power despite the additional number of available cores. In a practical benchmark, where three laptops were pitted against each other to render a high-resolution video file, it was discovered that the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro 2018 – a laptop that costs $2,800 – performed worse than even last year’s MacBook Pro 2017. The 2018 model took nearly 40 minutes to perform the task, while the 2017 model managed to do it in a little over 35 minutes, despite having two fewer cores. However, a considerably lower-specced Windows laptop – the Gigabyte Aero 15x – thoroughly trounced both machines by blazing through the same task in a mere 7 minutes.

If you are a professional, there is no worse time than the present to buy a MacBook Pro. With Apple’s transition from a technology brand to a fashion brand seemingly having reached a substantial degree of completion, it’s safe to say that the MacBook Pro now has nothing even remotely ‘pro’ about it. While it still has a good screen and a beautiful external appearance, its ill-designed innards, combined with its crippled and underpowered hardware, renders its purchase utterly pointless.

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