I had been using a MacBook Air for over 4 years, and it had really started to show signs of getting old. My usual routine of opening multiple browser windows along with Photoshop and Ulysses was really pushing it to the limits. So yeah, I took the plunge and bought myself the all new, sleek and sexy MacBook Pro 2017.
I went with the 13-inch variant without the Touch Bar, because while I do appreciate what the Touch Bar offers, I don’t think it makes that much of a difference to my workflow, and while I love using it, I did realise that there’s one crucial issue with the new MacBook Pro that Apple is selling.
The New MacBook Pro is a Beast in Every Sense of the Word
Look, I get it, you can get more hardware in the price range of a MacBook Pro. What you can’t possibly get is the perfectly tuned experience that Apple offers — the kind it used to offer on the iPhone, and has sadly screwed up lately.
I have already made my point about loving the new keyboard; it’s clicky, feels tactile and even though it has minimal travel, it’s easier (and better) to type on than the keyboard on my Air. However, in my usage of the MacBook Pro as a daily driver for over a week now, I’m loving it to bits. It came with macOS Sierra out of the box, and I’m not yet upgrading to High Sierra because I like using Apple’s built-in FTP service for transferring files over my home network — something that is sadly unavailable in High Sierra for reasons unknown to me, but I digress.
Here’s what I usually do on my laptop — on a work day, I have multiple Firefox Quantum windows open, each running over 20-30 tabs. I have Photoshop running for editing featured images (like the one you see on this post), along with Ulysses (my writing software of choice right alongside iA Writer). Let me put it this way, the Pro doesn’t even break a sweat while handling all of these things at the same time. I’m not even telling you about the background apps I have running, like ChatMate for WhatsApp, BetterTouchTool (which I must have recommended to every Mac user at work at least twice), Alfred and Itsycal among other things.
On a day like Sunday, I’m usually binge watching Netflix, or streaming on Prime Video — both of which are decidedly non-demanding tasks anyway.
I have never had to kill processes on the Pro, and I have never felt it struggling to keep up with my pace of doing things. In short, I love it way more than I had even expected to.
MacBook Pro’s One True Con
However, it seems that Apple, for some reason, has an allergy against the perfection it used to have a few years back. I mean, USB-C style ports are all good, and I truly understand that they’re the future, but damn it Apple, there are things you shouldn’t let go of. MagSafe for one. It was one of the best things about Apple’s technology; a charging cable that would simply split away from your laptop instead of bringing over a lakh rupees worth of anodised aluminium crashing to the ground if you tripped over it.
Charging the new MacBook is a comedy of errors, in my opinion — a cable that is universal, sure, but ends up making it extremely dangerous to charge a laptop that should, for its price, last you a very very long time, but probably won’t because you’ll trip on the charging cable and bring it crashing to the ground. Believe me.
Not to nitpick, but the cable attaches so damn tightly to the MacBook Pro that it’s a whole other task to just remove it. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s things like these that Apple always paid attention to, and what made Apple, well, Apple.
SEE ALSO: 12 USB Type-C Accessories for the New MacBook Pro
Buying the New MacBook Pro — No Regrets
All that said, I don’t have any regrets buying this laptop. The dongle life is difficult to adjust to for sure, but it’s not a deal breaker to me. After all, I did consider switching to Windows, but I just can’t wrap my head around using that OS anymore; it’s not as easy as macOS has been, still is, and will hopefully continue to be.
If I were to write a love-hate letter to Apple, it’d go something like this:
“Dear Apple, I’m all for universal ports, and I appreciate the switch to Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C Style) ports on the latest MacBook Pros, but damn it you messed that up too. I still love the laptop though.”
