2019 16" Macbook Pro buyers and owners thread (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

Backed:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hypershop/hyperjuice-worlds-first-and-smallest-100w-gan-charger

Me too!

Question: With the 16" MBP taking up nearly 100w, will there still be enough juice left to charge other Apple devices simultaneously?

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I also funded some new 100w magsafe cables that are through a kickstarter clone project due out in Feb. of next year

 

[Sam Posten]

Me too!

Question: With the 16" MBP taking up nearly 100w, will there still be enough juice left to charge other Apple devices simultaneously?

Not at full juice, it will cut them to 50w each.

 

[DaveF]

FYI for Mac users: Black Friday sales on third party software.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/11/26/black-friday-2019/

 

[Sam Posten]

External SSDs on sale too

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B078T9SZ3K/ref=tsm_1_tp_tc

 

[Carlo_M]

So this finally happened, courtesy of work. Just a base 16" model (which still came in at over $2.5K with AppleCare, tax and an educational discount.

I've only used it for a couple of days so these are only my initial impressions. Recall I'm coming from a mid-tier 2015 15" MBP.

• The screen quality is by far the biggest improvement over the 15".
• The new keyboard is way better than the one it replaced, though I may still slightly prefer the one on my 15".
• It's going to take me a while to get used to the Touch Bar.
• Every time I hold down the power button to shut down, when I start it up again it says it was inappropriately shut down. Is elegantly shutting down from the power button no longer a thing? When I held the 15" power button down for a few seconds I got the shutdown prompt and then if you held it longer you got a hard power down. This one, I never get the shutdown prompt it only goes to hard power down which is probably why I'm getting the error. It's going to be annoying if I have to choose shutdown from the Apple menu all the time.
• Witch panel (3rd party) is misbehaving, it won't autolaunch like it does on the 15". Might be something with the way it's set up.
• Startup and app launch is not significantly faster than my 15". Yes it's faster, but with 4 years in between, I was hoping it would be significant...it's not. I guess that speaks to how fast Apple made the SSD in the 2015 model and later.
• I just installed Logic Pro but haven't had a chance to use it. But for all other things I use it for (Office Suite, web browsing, media playback, etc.) sure it feels a little faster, but the gap is not as noticeable as when I went from a 2011 MBP (with aftermarket SSD) to a 2015 MBP.
• Despite USB-C now being a candidate for "trip hazard and dump your laptop on the floor" vs. MagSafe...I do like now that you can power your MBP from either side of the computer. Since I sometimes work while in bed (yep, I wrote that) it's nice to be able to have the cable switch from one side to the other.
• Still not sold on the oversize trackpad. I have a few accidental activations, which has never happened on my old 15".

Initial impressions: very well built. Love the new dark grey color (all my previous Macs were silver). Screen is great but everything else is just a small bump above my 2015 MBP. Because this is my work machine, and work purchased it, I don't regret buying it. But if I shelled out my own $2500...I'd probably be a little buyers-remorse-y right now. Not that it's a bad laptop, but rather I think it speaks highly of how well they have been making laptops for a while now. The fit-n-finish does seem a little bit more exemplary. The 2015 was a well built machine, but this one feels like it's just got more...polish for lack of a better word.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Carlo,

Congrats on your new 16" MBP.

Though this model is very much like the 15", it is the best MacBook Pro Apple has put out in a long time.

I love the new keyboard and the ability to add all this extra memory and storage space.

They finally got it right!


Enjoy!

 

[Carlo_M]

Thanks! Though my personal feeling is that they've had it right for quite a while (even the 2011 MBP I had, when I upgraded it's spinning HDD was a beast compared to its competitors). Hence why I think it's only incrementally better hardware-wise than my 2015 model. Except for the screen, which is heads-and-shoulders better.

I wonder what the rumored switch to AMD may bring. Apparently some code hackers saw references to AMD CPUs in the newest Mac OS beta. Not sure about AMD's laptop offerings, but surprisingly on the desktop front their CPUs are outpacing Intel's, and several respected gaming PC building sites actually prefer AMD to Intel. Maybe part of why it feels incremental is that there isn't too much difference between the 2015 and 2019 Intel CPUs. I know the benchmarks say there is, but for now, in real world use, the improvement is relatively modest at best.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Carlo,

I always thought Apple Macbook Pros were the best in their class.

The only problem for me was the keyboards in the prior models.

However, the 13" I bought last year had a new iteration of the old keyboard and it was great.

Of course, this 16" Macbook Pro keyboard is just perfect.

Read about Apple possibly going with AMD.

But I thought Apple was making its own chips. Or, are the chips only the A chips for iOS devices?

 

[Thomas Newton]

View attachment 68352

• Every time I hold down the power button to shut down, when I start it up again it says it was inappropriately shut down. Is elegantly shutting down from the power button no longer a thing? When I held the 15" power button down for a few seconds I got the shutdown prompt and then if you held it longer you got a hard power down. This one, I never get the shutdown prompt it only goes to hard power down which is probably why I'm getting the error. It's going to be annoying if I have to choose shutdown from the Apple menu all the time.

According to Apple, this is normal behavior, and you're not supposed to routinely shut down the machine like this.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201150

However, there is a keyboard shortcut to bring up a restart / sleep / shut down dialog.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236#sleep

 

[Carlo_M]

lol the Ctrl Power combo does not apply to Touch ID sensor. So the other option is Ctrl Eject key. I don't have an eject key. Thx Apple.

 

[Thomas Newton]

But I thought Apple was making its own chips. Or, are the chips only the A chips for iOS devices?

Apple designs CPUs for iOS devices – not Macs. For Macs, they use Intel-designed and Intel-manufactured CPUs.

 

[Carlo_M]

It’s long been speculated that they were working towards MacOS capable CPUs. This code may be them buying more time, maybe their desktop/laptop style processors are a little behind development schedule. But they’re tired of being tied to Intel’s roadmap and timeline, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they went AMD for a generation or two until their ARM chips are ready for laptop/desktop deployment (along with the recompiled OS to run on it).

 

[Thomas Newton]

Note that ARM has a different business model than Intel.

With Intel, the model is "You buy the finished CPUs that we decide to make. As far as the designs of the CPUs, hands-off." Intel is both designer and manufacturer.

With ARM, the model is "We'll sell you the right to use our instruction set and reference designs. You can have your engineers build whatever you need on top of that, such as, say, a system-on-a-chip, or a very-high-performance take like Apple's A9. Once you've finished your design, go and hire someone else to manufacture it for you."

 

[DaveF]

• Witch panel (3rd party) is misbehaving, it won't autolaunch like it does on the 15". Might be something with the way it's set up.

It’s a problem with Catalina’s security system. I have the same issue. There’s an explanation at ManyTricks on how to get it to work. But I couldn’t get it working for me. My solution is to not turn off my computer.

 

[Carlo_M]

What's weird is that I have the same OS version on my 2015 MBP and that does not exhibit the issue at all. I'm trying the workaround for the witchdaemon at the login list, we'll see if it works.

EDIT - adding the witchdaemon to the login items seems to have worked. One successful restart. We'll see how it holds up over time.

 

[Carlo_M]

Additional observations/opinions based on a few more days of intensive usage.

• Even though it's subtle and slight, I can now totally tell the weight and size difference compared to my mid-2015 MBP. The 2019 is 1.8mm thinner, 1mm narrower (despite having a larger screen), 1.2mm less deep, and 0.19lbs lighter. All according to Apple's official site specs. It seems like a small set of differences but it does add up to an overall lighter feeling device despite having a bigger screen.
• That reduction in size and weight is appreciated 95% of the time.
• The 5% of the time it isn't, is when I need a dongle to literally connect anything that isn't USB-C. I have a 3-in-1 dongle for HDMI+USB2.0/3.0, a dongle for Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C), and a dongle for USB-C to Gigabit Ethernet. Like I said, 95% > 5% so I'm happy the vast majority of the time I'm using it. But I now have to either carry the dongles around in my laptop bag, or pre-plan carefully my day to determine whether I'm going to need them or not. Mostly I use the 3-in-one, especially for external display connection when I'm doing presentations, and also when a colleague hands me a USB flash drive, so that one stays in the laptop bag all of the time.

 

[Sam Posten]

You need one of these @Carlo Medina
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SHR5JKR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[Carlo_M]

Lol would have been useful yesterday!

No biggie though. It's a work machine so work paid for all the dongles, and Amazon isn't a vendor I can go through for work purchases. So it's all good in the end.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Carlo, that’s my knock against the current designs. My 2018 MBP refurb is USB-C only. Meanwhile, I don’t own a single device, not a single one, that connects that way, which means that I always have to carry an adapter. And at a certain point, the extra thinness gained from removing certain ports is outweighed by the inconvenience of needing to carry the laptop in a bag with more crap in perpetuity.

Sometimes Apple, in their desire to push forward the simplest/smallest/thinnest design, ends up starting from a position of how they’d like people to interact with their devices rather than considering the way in which they do interact with them.

(Look no further than the pre-USB-C “Thunderbolt” port that was going to be Apple’s next best thing that no one wanted, that’s pretty much useless now.)