On Sunday I found myself working on my 2012 MacBook Pro. The model that still had a CD Drive, no retina display, and rocked a firewire 800 port. It was chugging along and at some point between trying to compile some SASS, run Photoshop, and use developer tools inside of Chrome I’d reached my breaking point. I pondered at the Apple website for a few moments, looked into my budget for the coming year, and headed out to the Apple Store. After over a month of Apple bashing on the internet, I thought I was dead set on purchasing the lesser MacBook model, but within a few minutes of using the Pro model I was hooked.
The good.
The Monitor: Coming from a non-retina display at 1280 by 800 resolution to what is effectively a 3360 by 2100 resolution screen has been game changing. I have more screen real estate, colors are richer, and text is easier to read. Even compared to my works 2012 retina model there is a great improvement.
The Speakers: I don’t remember hearing much about the speaker improvements before purchasing, but I would argue that the MacBook Pro is the best sounding Apple product to date. I did a very unscientific experiment of playing the “The Fate of The Furious” trailer simultaneously between my machines and muting one at a time. The results, a much louder experience, a more distinguishable left/right pan, and a significantly improved sound quality.
The Keyboard: I often hear that coders would not like the new keyboard as it has shallow key travel. It feels more engineered than previous models and I’ve found it to be the most comfortable laptop keyboard I’ve used to date.
The Profile: The new model is impressively light and comes in SpaceGrey, which is so freaking cool. Although the glowing logo will be missed.
The bad.
Charging via Thunderbolt 3: The death of the MagSafe adapter was a crime against humanity and I know there are Kickstarters for a MagSafe like adapter, but I am not going to give them money, wait 6 months, only for them to receive a cease and desist and halt production. Step up your wireless charging game Apple and then I’ll be impressed.
Adapters: Adapters sold by Apple are still laughably expensive and third-party are often unreliable or out of stock. I currently have a two-week wait for an HDMI adapter.
and the meh.
The Touch Bar: I never thought I’d miss the “esc” key until it was slightly relocated into the Touch Bar. When you go into System Preferences and search “Touch Bar” nothing shows up. It’s not until you go into “System Preferences > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip…” you get any editing options. I wish Apple had worked with a few more developers to bring Touch Bar features to the forefront, but I expect those in an update.
At least I get emojis 😎💻
Final thoughts.
I am very happy with the purchase, I feel a slight increase in productivity with the improved features, and I look forward to this being my main computer for the next 5+ years to come.
Update 2019:
This was the worst Macbook I had ever used. Slow, little things just crashed all the time, I ended up giving it away as I found myself never using it. I heard the later models fixed all of these things, but I got screwed.