Why I Didn’t Buy a MacBook Pro This Time
Apple still has a lot to offer, but it’s not selling what I actually want to buy!
Before I get accused of being only negative (by the, like, three people who are likely to actually read this), let me say that I plan to post a review of the device I did actually buy, separately, after a few more days with it.
I have been a Macintosh fanboy for a long damned time, probably since acquiring my Macintosh SE30 back in 1989. MacOS, especially since OS X came to the fore, is by far my preferred desktop environment for most purposes.
I have deviated in the past, however, when I didn’t think Apple had an offering that fit my current needs, and this was such a case.
You see, when I’m being honest with myself, I realize that my primary use-case for a personal computer of almost any kind is gaming. It’s hardly the only thing I do with them, and I’m hardly a hardcore or competitive gamer, but I still spend more time on my personal laptop playing games than doing just about anything else.
(Why on my laptop at all? Because I work from home. The office is where I work. I play games, for the most part, elsewhere, often in bed!)
So, having reached that conclusion, when I decided it was time to replace my five-year-old top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, I also realized that I would not be doing it with another MacBook Pro!
Now, don’t get me wrong: the newest generation of MBPs are pretty spiffy. Core i7–8750H and i9–8950HK processors make these machines among the fastest you can buy (especially once Apple fixed the thermal-throttling issues on the i9-equipped models) in terms of raw CPU power. They’re thin, they’re light, they’re reasonably well built. If I were buying a machine for professional purposes (e.g. my day-job as a coder), I would strongly consider one, still; although I would also consider the Dell XPS13 Developer Edition or a number of other possibilities, given that gaming capabilities are not the only place I take issue with the current MacBooks.
In fact, the 2018 MacBook Pros contain three specific hardware choices, each of which is easily explained by Apple’s current long-term strategy, but each of which I find annoying, and ultimately ruled the MBP out as my next personal machine, on the grounds that if I’m going to spend upward of $3500 on a laptop, I should not have to make these particular compromises.
That damned keyboard
Before the 2016-era MBP keyboard became a source of scandal because of how easy it was for dust particles to disable it, I hated it with a pretty strong hatred. For my personal ergonomics, it’s actually pretty terrible to type on.
Typing on the 2016-2018 MBP keyboards is just one small step above typing on a flat, unyielding surface, which I’m pretty sure is Apple’s eventual goal — a laptop that’s a touch-screen base (essentially an embedded iPad) and a non-touch-screen display. Their huge trackpad (which I’ve always loved) and the TouchBar (about which more in a moment) are inching in that direction.
By comparison, the iPad Smart Keyboard (which I’m typing this on right now!) is significantly better. It actually has some decent key-travel, which the MBP keyboards really don’t. And because the keys are all kind of blanketed over, there are no gaps at all for dust to get into. So it’s not like Apple is incapable of making a fairly low-profile keyboard that doesn’t suck. Just, the one on the 2016-and-later MBPs aren’t it.
The 2018 version of the keyboard has been improved with a bit of silicone, which was ostensibly to make it quieter (which I don’t care about, having learned to type on mechanical typewriters!) and unofficially less prone to dying from dust particles. None of that changes the basic feel of the keyboard, which is just, for me, irritating.
The TouchBar
It’s not that I really hate the TouchBar — in fact, of the three items on this list, it’s easily the one compromise I would have lived with if it were the only issue.
I just don’t really understand it.
I have one on my employer-provided 2016 MBP and it serves very little unique or useful purpose that wasn’t just as well served by actual keys. Since that machine spends most of its time docked up to a real keyboard, mouse, and two external monitors, and I never really miss not having the TouchBar as part of my external keyboard, clearly, there’s nothing about the TouchBar that’s actually indispensable, at least, to me.
Again, I think it’s part of a long-term evolution toward an entirely touch-surface base for some future (2019, 2020) MacBook offering. So I understand the why and the how of it; I just don’t find it compelling and would just as soon have my function keys back.
The GPU
The 2013 MBP wasn’t marketed as a great games machine — no Mac ever seriously has been. But also, in 2013, no laptop was really a “gaming laptop”. There were no laptop GPUs at all that were significantly better than what the MacBook Pro carried. Gamers, by and large, built or bought desktops and crammed in the necessary cooling to drive the huge, fast, burning-hot GPUs that drove their frame-rates. A gamer who also wanted portability knew they were having to compromise.
By 2018, however, the field has changed. Advances in cooling technology have made it possible to cram some pretty powerful GPUs into laptop form factors, some almost as thin as the MacBook Pro, and not set people’s laps on fire. Alternatively, if one does not need high degrees of portability, there are “desktop replacement” laptops that genuinely have the cooling capacity for such high-powered chips.
However, Apple has never been that interested in the gaming-centric market for the Mac, and it kind of shows, both in their hardware choices and their software choices. On the hardware side, the fastest GPU available in the 2018 MBP is the AMD 560X, which I’ll say more about in a moment. On the software side, they’ve announced the deprecation of OpenGL, which made it easier to port games from Windows, in favour of their proprietary Metal API, which will require ports to rewrite their game engines entirely. There was a long time when hardly any significant titles ever came out for the Mac; then Macs switched to Intel processors, common Intel-universe graphics hardware, and provided OpenGL. Now, while some titles still sometimes come out late for the Mac, there are lots of titles to chose from. But if OpenGL truly does get dropped, that will probably change drastically. Apple is deluding itself if it believes otherwise.
But back to hardware: the AMD 560X in the high-end 2018 MBPs just doesn’t compete with even the lower-end nVidia 1050 GPU available in even some cheap non-gaming laptops, let alone the 1060, 1070, or 1080 that most gaming-oriented laptops — even thin and light ones — are sporting, now. In fact, at the moment AMD does not make a GPU that actually competes with nVidia’s two-year-old Series 10 “Pascal” architecture, which is itself extremely strange. They used to be in real competition. Right now, they kind of aren’t, and nVidia has been free to rest on its laurels a bit while they figure out how to eke out more speed without making their chips run hotter or require more power, because AMD doesn’t seem to even be trying.
Putting it all together…
I want to be clear I’m not telling people, “Never buy a Mac again”. There are other reasons to buy MacBook Pros, and I may one day come back to them myself.
But right now, for what I wanted in a laptop, the MacBook Pro was simply not the right machine, at the right price point, at the right time. I was able to get more GPU power, the same i7–8750H CPU, and a faster, 144Hz display panel (albeit only 1080p), for half the cost, in the Acer Predator 500. It’s a behemoth of a laptop, to be sure, but it does what I actually want it to do extremely well.
I’ll have more to say about that laptop, as I said at the outset, in perhaps a week, when I’ve had some real time playing with it. At that time I’ll also speak more affirmatively about the choices that led me to my new laptop purchase this time, which involved a lot of obsessive comparisons and watching of YouTube reviews!
