Since many times, I was considering buying a new macbook pro for my usages, particularly for stuffs where the macbook excells : video editing, web creation etc... Basically anything creative : using Pages to write a book for example, using Numbers as an Excel to calculate budgets, using Imovie and Final Cut Pro for video editing, and this was really the best part of Mac OS. However these last years, I have been strongly hesitating before making any purchase. There is always one little thing keeping me from buying : first I know this is a computer and with my recent experience with computers : I really don't want anything that is going to make me suffer : Youtube negative videos, news, insults in the internet etc... I want something that gives me happiness in exchange of money. Also I am very concerneed about being a needy addict to my screen, I don't want at all to be addicted to screens, just because they emit light. Then if we strictly focus on the product, here are some elements that still prevent me from buying a new macbook pro.
I really don't know what occurred after Johny Yve left Apple, but a lot of things became terrible in terms of design : first the computer looks extremely thick and this is not impressive at all, Apple might believe that people would think that it means that the laptop is much more powerful. I think they would be able to create a thinner laptop without that much sacrifying the performance because they already did it in the past with the touchbar macbook pro.
Then, they decreased the size of the force touch trackpad, which is now smaller than its competitors but also and foremost much less comfortable. This is a multi touch keyboard and the space seems way too little.
The keyboard is the only thing better with the battery life however even if this is intended to be a pro laptop, I was using a macbook pro when I was a student, and this was working quite well, especially for administrative stuffs to do at university and presentations using keynote that I would convert into ppt. Also the ability for mac os to read other files such as word and excel documents. And the only reason why I was bringing this touchbar macbook pro at university in my backpack was because it totally fits in a normal bacpack, this 2017 edition was as thick as a notebook and reasonably heavy. But now this looks like you are packing a war machine with you.
So the macbook pro is too thick to fit in a backpack but the Pro-Motion feature of 120Hz is incredibly great. So I thought : "why not simply buying a macbook air", but guess what, the Macbook Air has no Pro-Motion, therefore you will be blocked at a refresh rate of 60Hz, and personnally I really don't want to go below 120Hz now. Then the display of the Macbook Air is much less good compared to the Macbook Pro's, colours are less good, everything seems less vibrant. Apart from that the Macbook Air would have been better than the Pro, especially because it is really lightweight and can fit in almost every medium sized backpack.
Since the end of Mac OSX and the beginning of Mac OS I have witnessed the change in the operating system's policy : each version became more and more locked. Each version became heavier and slower compared to the previous ones. Great features such as the Launchpad disappeared, and the OS became very annoying : giving popup alerts every 30 seconds, endless notifications, I felt I was not controlling the OS, I felt that the OS was controlling me. I could not do anything without connecting to Apple's Icloud. And this was really terrible, bootcamp was removed. Actually Macbooks became more like Iphones : locked, full of telemetry, and annoying. Therefore it was obvious for me I would need an other operating system : an operating system providing me full control and freedom, letting me decide which tasks run in background and how to organize them. Obviously I was not interested in Windows Operating system as it was much worse : the start bar is full of advertisements and the OS is clearly not pleasant to use. One day I made a discovery : Ubuntu and Linux based operating systems, this was the beginning of a new story : for the first time I discovered an Os obeying totally to the user, providing modern things such as notifications without compromising on the control : everything can be set, and if you want to shut down all notifications : you can. What is great in Ubuntu is that I can start my system very easily without being annoyed with 10 popups asking me to connect to an other service, or an other update to do urgently.
These last years Ubuntu considerably improved becoming really excellent at many tasks: surfing the web, reading and programming. It also gives you a strong package manager that works perfectly : apt. Apt is a package manager allowing to install any application you want from the command line. The terminal is great, you have gedit, vim and so many great and free softwares, requiring no subscription, no fee, nothing. And this is why often, Open Source softwares and solutions are way better than commercial ones, because people who make these softwares are often if not always passionate about their field, they don't work they create, and this is why vim is still there, because it is a great software, this is why gimp, inkscape and nautilus exist, because they are free. But obviously, Ubuntu can seem a little bit less user friendly, and have sometimes an unexpected behaviour in your machine, especially if you are running Ubuntu on devices like Surface Pro where many things remain to be corrected or improved.
With their latest Noble Numbat release I am currently testing, I think that many of the issues Ubuntu had is going to be corrected, we don't know if battery life will be improved because it is one of the major drawbacks still existing in Ubuntu : energy management, especially on Intel and proprietary chips, apparently AMD seems to be better for Linux. But for now not a lot of things motivate me to buy a macbook pro and here they are : Pages, Imovie, Final Cut Pro and Motion. I won't include Xcode because it became really a locked IDE, where even adding an external lib is a nightmare. In Ubuntu this is much simpler.
If my tests with Noble Numbat are really good, I will definitely not buy a Macbook Pro now, because it would mean that I could do 80% of my day to day tasks easily without a mac. I still believe that, for video editing, Macbooks are way better and easy to use. In a Mac, editing a video is like playing to a game: enjoyable. But honestly I think that Macbooks are great products running a bad operating system, also the lack of standardization between cpu manufacturers and operating systems is also negatively affecting the market. Personnally I woudl defend a model in which hardware would be chosen by the User as wall as software. See you in the next one...