Should You Buy The New MacBook Pros? Not Yet…. Perhaps Not At All…..
A couple of days ago, Apple quietly released new MacBook Pros to the world. For those keeping score at home, this is the third update to this line of Macs since last summer. And as a result, I have been bombarded with questions regarding if you should run out and buy one. Thus, here’s my stance on this based on two areas of concern:
- Apple has somehow shoved an 8 core Intel i9 processor into the top spec model. The problem with that is that when Apple shoved a 6 core version of the i9 processor in to last summer’s MacBook Pro, it had major thermal throttling issues. As in the processor would throttle back its performance due to the heat that it generated so that it would not cause the CPU to self destruct. As a result, it had comparable performance to an i7. Which meant that the i9 was a major waste of money. Now to be fair, Apple did push out a software update to fix that, and the i9 that they are using this time around is of a newer generation which may generate less heat. But seeing as they made no design changes to address heat that are visible from the outside of the MacBook Pro, why should anyone believe that the same issues aren’t going to reappear? Apple hasn’t said anything on that front which means we’ll have to wait until reviewers start to look at these new MacBook Pros and iFixit rips one apart to see what, if anything Apple did to address this. But color me extremely skeptical on this one in the absence of objective evidence that says otherwise.
- Then there’s that keyboard. The butterfly keyboard that is the source of #KeyboardGate. This is Apple’s fourth crack at this keyboard, and they swear that they have addressed the issues that have led to many cursing and not praising this keyboard. Not to mention a few lawsuits along the way. The thing is, is the fourth time the charm? Unfortunately we’ll have to wait to see how much static, or not is created by this fourth version of the butterfly keyboard before we know for sure if the fourth try is the charm. You can color me extremely skeptical on this one as well as given that Apple has had three previous cracks at this to get it right, Apple more than likely has a flawed keyboard on its hands.
For those two reasons, I would recommend that you avoid buying these new MacBook Pros for the time being. At least until reviews start to circulate, and the early adopters who push these machines hard start to say things about them. Or you can wait for a Dave2D video as seeing as he discovered the thermal throttling issue last year, he’s likely to be testing this version to see what happens with these new MacBook Pros. Regardless, you should wait. And if the reviews don’t show that Apple has learned from their past mistakes, you should not buy these MacBook Pros at all and wait for Apple to actually redesign the MacBook Pro so that they have a notebook that pro users would actually want to use as opposed to having an notebook that forces users to live with something that is sub-optimal. Or you can leave the Apple ecosystem because Apple will have shown by that point that they have completely lost the plot.
The choice is yours.
May 24, 2019 at 9:04 am
[…] week Apple released new MacBook Pros to the world. And I told you why you might want to hold off buying one, assuming that buying one is even a viable option. But something else happened at the same time […]