Let me count the way my latest MacBook Pro is not suitable for professional use, but before I do that, you should know that I’ve been buying and recommending Macs since 2001. I’ve spent a fortune on them. I love them, but I only like my latest MacBook Pro (a 2016 model with the Radeon Pro 460). I write this with a heavy heart and a malfunctioning keyboard.  This is a story about unrequited hardware love.

Typing

The keyboard on my MBP has begun to fail, with the ‘b’ key sometimes giving me doubled characters and sometimes none.

The cursor keys are in that awful cluster configuration where the up and down arrow keys, the ones I use the most, have half the space they should have and consequently make it next to impossible to navigate using them. Not so much cluster as clusterfuck.

They also feel different to the other keys, less responsive, if that were possible.

This £2800 laptop has a distinctly unprofessional keyboard. It’s not a whole lot better than the membrane keyboard on the first computer I owned, the Atari 400 back in 1982. I wouldn’t be surprised if the travel was shorter than that on the rubber keyboard of the ZX Spectrum. I don’t mind the feel, but that’s not good enough for a £2800 laptop. I should adore the keyboard. It doesn’t need much more travel, but it does need it. I don’t expect a Matias Tactile Pro, but I could do with a Magic Keyboard and I’ll take the extra thickness in return for a usable primary input method.

Finally, where’s my damned Esc key? I go for that so often, and miss. Putting it on the Touch Bar was a stupid idea.

Touch Bar

Why? The only thing of any use is the TouchID sensor, but you don’t need a whole keyboard-level touch screen for that!

For a touch typist, if you’re going to have a touchable surface, it might as well be the screen. I don’t want to look at the keyboard, ever; I want to look at the screen. Looking down at that pointless strip that offers me no feedback when I interact with it and which has no delineated edges is an extra cognitive burden that I just don’t need and therefore, as a professional, never use, unless I’m forced to. You know that a design has failed when you’re forced into using it. The Touch Bar is Apple’s Clippy. An embarrassment.

Track Pad

It’s too big. I never use all of that space, and I keep accidentally triggering it with my wrists when I don’t want to. Why not give the keyboard some extra height so I can have some proper cursor keys and while you’re at it, make those keys tactile and replaceable? It’s not a Wacom for crying out loud.

Ports

I like USB Type C, I really do, but like many people with a MacBook Pro, I have a camera and like most decent cameras, it has an SD card slot, except that Apple saw fit to remove this slot. Professional photographers have used the MacBook Pro for as long as they’ve been made. Only now, they need an accursed dongle.

I’d understand and forgive this on a lesser machine, like one without the “Pro” moniker, but not having an SD card on this £2800 machine strikes me as totally stupid. Rather than use another expensive adapter, I just use the iMac, which makes that the professional machine, and this one just a designer’s wet dream.

Power supply

I have a professional laptop, but I can’t tell it’s charging unless I open the lid, gain entry and look at the tiny power indicator in the menu bar. Which genius thought this would be a Pro touch? I know it makes a sound when you plug it in; fine, genius, but what if I didn’t hear the sound? How do I tell when it’s fully charged? You took off the MagSafe, which was a genuinely useful innovation and gave us USB C charging — fine, but add a little adapter that has a charge indicator, and yes, if you must, charge for it, though you really shouldn’t if you want to call this a “Pro”.

While we’re on the subject of lights, I miss the glowing Apple logo at the back of the machine. Bring that back please. Why are you cutting costs on a £2800 machine?

Also, why don’t we get a power extension cable like we used to? Don’t know about you, but I find it hard to find power sockets near me all the time and this is just another tight move.

Battery Life

You claim five hours. I can offer you some more realistic benchmarks. Not five. Sometimes not four. It’s a Pro machine, right? Don’t go backwards then. Give me 8 hours or give me death.

Conclusion

If Apple wants to make a MacBook Pro, they should quit with the design fundamentalism on a machine costing £2800 (£2800 is a ton of money for an ordinary laptop, which apart from the display, this is) and quit with what seem like cost-cutting measures in the name of power efficiency. This machine is no doubt powerful. It never struggles with software, everything runs at a decent clip (when the power is plugged in) and it’s stable, but it’s not a Pro machine — just about any decent PC laptop at not much more than half the price of my MacBook Pro will give me “Pro” functionality.

I say make it faster, make the battery bigger, make the laptop slightly thicker, make the keyboard decent (heck just make it like the Magic Keyboard), get rid of the Touch Bar, make the display a 16” 4K HDR OLED, bring back some kind of MagSafe, bring the lit Apple logo back, bring back the SD card slot, add three USB 3 slots, make the trackpad smaller, beef up the GPU so that it can handle VR and games, and make it £4000. I’ll buy it. In the meantime, drop the price on this experiment and stop calling it a Pro. It doesn’t feel any more Pro than the standard MacBook.

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