First 48 Hours With My New MacBook Pro
Published in
3 min readNov 21, 2016
So, I got my new MacBook Pro. 15", and fully loaded.
Have spent a couple of days with it. Here are my reactions.
Note: I’m an engineer by trade, training and temperament. So, what’s right for me may not be right for you.
- The lack of a DisplayPort or HDMI is super annoying. I walk around with my MacBook all day, and often need to present on a screen or projector. It’s totally non-fun having to pull out a dongle. It’s also non-fun having to remember to unplug my dongle and carry it back out with me.
- The keyboard is annoying with much less “travel”. That’s a big deal for me. I need to not be annoyed by the keyboard. This may be the thing that drives me back to Thinkpad (shudder).
- I don’t care what anybody says, I miss the physical Esc key.
- I don’t understand why they made the Touchpad so big. It’s enormous — but my usage of it is no different than it used to be. Yes, you can do 5 finger gestures now, but the only gesture that comes to mind involves just one finger.
- The TouchBar is OK, but I would have kept the physical function keys from before and just added the TouchBar strip — and reduced the size of the touch pad, because it’s just huge.
- Form factor doesn’t feel different from my prior MBP. About the same size, about the same weight.
- I like the fact that the USB-C port carries both power and other things. So, I can use a docking station and be wired up with just one cable. (Note: In Thinkpad -land, you just slide the laptop on to the docking station so arguable it’s even easier).
- I love the new 2TB SSD. It’s big and it’s fast.
- Haven’t used the TouchBar all that much, other than changing brightness and volume and such.
- The absence of an SD card reader is annoying. I use that when I travel, and when I travel I’m trying to minimize the number of things I carry around.
- I still don’t understand why they kept the headphone jack on this — but lost the USB port. Not complaining about the headphone jack being there, but that’s just strange.