Recently traded my corporate 2015 MBP 13 for a 2017 non-touchbar MBP 13. In short - it's terrible. The keyboard is extremely loud and I personally don't like the tactile feel. Battery life seems worse than my 2015 model. Bluetooth is sketchy, and it seems to take very little load before the fan ramps up for takeoff. Combine that with only 2 USB-C ports, so I need to carry port replicators and converters for travel.
Anecdotally, I know of at least 3 people on my team that have had keyboard issues with this model, generally in the first year of deployment.
I'm not a Mac fan in general, I use Android phones and run Linux at home. I chose the MBP in lieu of an even worse Windows experience. I really think my employer is trying to influence us all to BYOD. As my role requires software that is not supported on Linux, I'm stuck choosing between two undesirable options, but right now I'm leaning towards buying a Dell and dealing with Windows as the Mac hardware is just infuriating.
I'm a developer and one of my work laptops is a MBP 13 inch w/ touchbar. I wasn't a huge Apple fan to begin with, but I used one of the last gen 17 inch MBP's for work, for about 2 years and liked it mostly because of the excellent hardware, specifically the keyboard and trackpad.
The new keyboard is absolutely terrible though. Genuinely the second worst keyboard I've ever used. The new switches have caused dramatically more typing errors for me. I thought it might decrease over time, but after 60 days with it as my daily driver I've seen no improvement. It's an odd feeling when I'd rather use a generic HP desktop keyboard over the Apple keyboard.
I tried to keep an open mind with respect to the touchbar, but so far I haven't found a reason to like it. I will say that trying to use Vi is an exercise in futility if you don't remap the ESC key. It probably wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't feel like it's just sitting there using battery power unnecessarily.
My employer has a shiny new 2017 MBP for me that I have yet to touch because there are SO MANY issues with both the hardware (the need for four different dongles and no escape key) to the security issues to the fact a lot of core software still doesn't work solidly. I'm sticking with the 2015 MBP they gave me before.
I was issued a new gen MBP at work and have been supremely disappointed. The touch bar is (to me) a useless anti-feature, and am also completely dissatisfied with the new keyboard (reduced tactility across the board, varying tactility from key to key, a loud static noise emitted from the keys when the machine heats up, etc).
I went so far as to try to return this thing, but my employer wasn't willing to indulge me. The GPU upgrade and smaller form factor, to me, aren't worth the sub-par keyboard. If they allowed for more than 16GB of RAM the new models might be worthwhile, but as it stands I definitely do not recommend it as a work machine.
I recently switched from a 2014 edition MBP to a 2017, and the experience has been terrible. I had to make the switch b/c the battery on the 2014 machine was starting to die and my work had an extra 2017 model.
- popping sounds coming from the chassis that drive me crazy
- bunched up arrow keys that are occasionally unresponsive at least in X11 emacs
- it seems like the touchbar has potential but is difficult to customize
- I find it lame you need an adapter for USB or HDMI.
After much deliberation, I bought a 2017 13" MBP, upspecced to 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM. While I've not had a complete failure from the keyboard, it did need looking at at the Apple Store when it also had the entire display assembly replaced because the keyboard had damaged the screen - despite me looking after it well, always putting it in a soft slip case and then a laptop bag.
While I've liked some elements of the design, it's not (to me) a Pro piece of kit, and I've sine replaced it with a 2016 15" MBP which is much better built and doesn't need extra dongles to connect to everyday devices (and has magsafe, which is the best piece of design I've seen in many years).
Given this performance, I'll never buy a new Macbook again - particularly given all the issues about thermal throttling, battery life and indeed the way that macOS seems now to be going.
Don't get me wrong, there are elements of the 2017 MBP that I love - it looks amazing, the screen is fantastic and it's just so precisely made. But the lack of ports, the lack of ruggedness, the keyboard and the performance outweigh any 'look, shiny!' feeling I have about it - so much so that I've not sold it because I feel like I'm stitching the buyer up - even though they've not held their price compared to previous models, which shows that people know this to be the case, and the keyboard still has the 4 year warranty in place.
Now, I like macOS but this generation of hardware is shit. I had a 2016 model and the keyboard failed twice. Replaced it and got tired of constant problems with the keyboard.
Got a Dell XPS 13", decided I was gonna ditch macOS due to hardware issues and switch to Linux. After fiddling forever with the trackpad and the fact that sometimes closing the lid did not sleep the machine. It became clear that I was too old for that stuff. Tried Windows with WSL as I need a Unix environment. It works but the IO is too slow. It's just a toy at this point to show people linux binaries working on windows.
Went ahead and bought a 2018 MBP. The 2018 keyboard were supposed to be fixed.
Guess what, my up arrow key just started failing. I'm thinking about moving to a farm.
I couldn’t use it long enough to unlearn using the trackpad as a crutch. Thinkpad trackpads are pretty terrible by comparison. I also hated trying to use windows and didn’t want to keep maintaining a Linux install, though that might have gotten better lately.
I am going to ride out my personal 2013 mbp until they fix the keyboards on the new machines. I have a new one at work, and each incremental fix still breaks after a while and I don’t think they have ironed it out. It’s a beautiful feeling machine and I want to love it. However, you can get everything else perfect and screw up the keyboard, and it doesn’t matter because I can’t get work done.
If they don’t get it right by the time my current MBP dies completely I guess I’ll see how far Linux has come. I’d suggest the same for you - even as an apple shareholder and former employee I can’t recommend a programmer buy a laptop with such an unreliable keyboard. But if they nail the keyboard in the next generation, absolutely hop aboard the bandwagon.
Pretty much it comes down to the flaky keyboards for me. USBC support is just getting better, the displays and trackpad are still best in class, and a lightweight aluminum unibody design is something I didn’t think I would miss but you absolutely do. The OS is widely supported by a community of other developers, and it is super easy to set up a productive development environment. And the OS is widely supported by hardware and software vendors too, so you don’t have to fight compatibility issues nearly as much as Linux.
I tried to make this switch because I bought into all the online criticism of the new MBP.
The build quality was very lacking compared to the new MBP.
The screen wobbled like crazy even when just typing on it.
The model I was using had a really horrible display with active ghosting (not sure if that's the correct term -- it appeared that the refresh rate was just very low, so moving the cursor around or dragging a window would leave a sort of "ghost trail" behind). It's possible this was just a defective display.
The trackpad was nowhere near as good as I was led to believe from online comments. It wasn't horrible, but multitouch gesture recognition felt years behind Apple's. Leaving a finger resting on the trackpad would break all kinds of gestures, but Apple's trackpads handle that just fine. I also didn't realize how nice the Force Touch trackpads are until I went back to a hinge-based trackpad where you can't even click everywhere.
Windows 10 is a big advance over previous versions, and I use it extensively on my desktop at home. However, the experience with a touchpad didn't feel anywhere nearly as polished as on my MacBook. Using trackpad gestures to slide between virtual desktops for instance had a very janky and obviously buggy animation.
Windows now has the Ubuntu subsystem, but I immediately ran into serious dealbreaker issues. I couldn't get Haskell or Elm to run on it because a core system call hadn't been implemented yet. The team is aware of it and I'm sure it's slated to be fixed soon, but I still couldn't do my work on the laptop without firing up a VM or dual booting.
I never used the touch screen and never felt the need to detach the screen and use it as a tablet. The aspect ratio of the screen also bothered me.
I'm now using the much hated 2016 MBP with Touch Bar and am extremely happy with the purchase.
Honestly this whole situation is so frustrating as a user.
I now have a 2017 MBP and every day I try to hate it a little less but it's hard work. I miss the old keyboard. Touch Bar is gimmicky and I'd be happier without it. Only USB-C is idiotic. No more Magsafe stil kills me. The old trackpad was better.
For years I just wanted a better Macbook Air (ie upgraded display and specs). The 13" MBA was about perfect IMHO. Reasonably cheap and a great form factor. Yet even Apple succumbed to the fatal disease of "adding value" by changing a winning formula. Force Touch lack discovery and is terrible (this is particularly the case for the phones).
Sadly, the alternative (non-Apple laptops) is just so much worse. I have a Dell XPS 15 and it's fine I guess but it's STILL much worse than MBP/OSX.
Aside from being much better to develop in than Windows (iTerm2 is a dream, even compared to CygWin/ConEmu) a few things seem really shitty;
1) The keyboard. It's bad. Really bad. The space key on mine is starting to stick already and its only been a few months. I'm using a cheap Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard with the keys remapped to OS X defaults.
2) Mouse handling. I have no idea what is going on over at Apple but mouse code has been awful for as long as I can remember and the Magic Mouse we were given with these laptops are probably the most unergonomic device I've ever used. They are really terrible.
I'm using a wireless Logitech mouse which is much better, but there are crasy OS issues with sensitivity/acceleration that no matter how much configuring and tweakingf I do, never feels right.
3) The last OS X update seems to have caused a LOT of issues for people using certain models of external display adapters. I've basically lost a 1/3 of my screen space because I can only get one external monitor to work at a time since the machine updated to 10.13.4.
I bought a new 13" MBP with touchbar and I'm returning it on Monday. I don't like the keyboard and I _really_ don't like the touch bar, and I seem to only get about 3 hours of battery life. I'm going to stick with my early 2014 MacBook Air until Apple figures their stuff out.
Adding my gripe to the cacophony: I upgraded my 2012 MacBook Pro to the 2017 model because I wanted a bigger SSD and one more monitor than the old machine supported.
Much of the time it's fine because I have it docked, giving me access to a regular external keyboard. But when I travel or use my treadmill desk, forcing me to use the built-in keyboard...ugh. The key travel distance provides poor tactile feedback, making it feel like I haven't pressed hard enough. And my typo rate goes through the roof. I didn't have those problems with my 2012. And Apple's decision to go with only USB-C is a constant source of inconvenience; I wrongly expected it would pass over time. All this, and no noticeable performance improvement.
I still have the 2012, I haven't had time to prep it to sell. I'm seriously considering finding other ways to deal with its limitations so I can ditch this awful 2017 instead. What an expensive mistake.
The keyboard is terrible, IMO, compared to prior models. The keys are shallower, and give less; compared to e.g., a Lenovo Thinkpad (I also bought recently), it's like typing on the desk itself. No give. My "a" key gets stuck, and it's not two weeks old. Before you buy one, go by an Apple store and type on one for yourself.
The adapter situation is nuts. the MBP 13" w/o touchbar has two USB-C ports — that's it. You're effectively using one for power, leaving you with a single port that basically won't plug into anything you have. If you have a pre-existing dual monitor setup, AFAICT you're expected to sink ~$200 into adapters and hubs. (Note that most hubs seem to come with a USB-C port, so you can get a USB-C hub that will add several USB-A ports, w/o losing any USB-C ports.)
Otherwise, it seems like a MBP. Apple did finally start putting a decent amount of RAM in them. This one has 16GB compared to my last MBP's 8GB (which Chrome just devours…)
I bought and returned a 2017 MBP just last week. It is a pretty awful experience when compared to the old model. The keyboard is truly awful. As you said the TouchBar is annoying and adds nothing positive to the experience. I think Apple could have left at least one USB Type-A port just to make life a little bit easier but nope. I feel the touchpad has got a little worse as well although maybe that is just due to the size of it. It is annoyingly large.
However the biggest issue was that when playing a video on Netflix or YouTube (both in Chrome) I would get dropped frames when switching around programs. That doesn't even happen on my 2011 ThinkPad so it sure as hell shouldn't happen on a 2017 high-end MBP!
So yeah £3k on a MBP and it went back after a week as it was just a pain in the ass to use.
I work at a company where most of us use Macs. Everyone that has upgraded from a 2013-2015 MBP to the touchbar model absolutely hates it, including me. There's gotta be someone around here that actually likes it, but I haven't met them yet.
Its OK if you like it. I'm sure lots of people do, but you know damn well significantly more people have had issues with this laptop than normal, so I'm not sure why you're implying otherwise.
The keyboard is by far the worst I've ever used, and I've owned a variety of $200 Wal-Mart black friday laptops and a couple of netbooks, in addition to some high end stuff. I had a friend with an older MBP attempt to show me something using my computer and he could barely type on it without frequent mistakes. Within a minute he was getting frustrated. It just feels terrible. I never thought anything would be worse than typing on a touch-screen but Apple's engineers have accomplished a horrifying miracle. Its like they intentionally tried to design something that's as loud as a mechanical keyboard while still having worse tactile feedback than a $5.00 rubber dome keyboard.
On top of that, its not noticeably faster, after 4.5 years it still maxed out @ 16GB Ram (They fixed this in 2018 but its too late), which is not enough for my use case + it died after 3 months (Not the keyboard, it was a power issue).
This is both the most expensive and the worst computer I've ever owned. The 2013 MBP I'm using now as a loaner while I get my new one fixed is, to quote Steve Jobs "Like getting a glass of ice water in hell." It just works.
I’m at the point where I still greatly prefer MacOS, but Windows hardware.
Unless things have changed dramatically, my 2017 MBP will be my last when it’s time for a replacement. Hundreds of dollars in add-ons to make it functional and a terrible keyboard are too much to live with.
I do 100% on my development work on a 2015 MacBook Pro. I work remotely from different places so I value the consistency in my work flow (same keyboard, same trackpad). I would've normally already purchased a new MBP this year but I'm actively considering alternatives for the first time in 8 years due to these keyboard issues and the idiotic touchbar issue. Currently looking at Surface Pro and Thinkpad X1.
Anecdotally, I know of at least 3 people on my team that have had keyboard issues with this model, generally in the first year of deployment.
I'm not a Mac fan in general, I use Android phones and run Linux at home. I chose the MBP in lieu of an even worse Windows experience. I really think my employer is trying to influence us all to BYOD. As my role requires software that is not supported on Linux, I'm stuck choosing between two undesirable options, but right now I'm leaning towards buying a Dell and dealing with Windows as the Mac hardware is just infuriating.
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