The MacBook Pro 13-inch, Late 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports finally landed on my desk at work yesterday. 24 hours in, I think I have it imaged and sorted more or less the way I want it. Close enough for not-for-profit enterprise IT work, anyway. Thoughts so far:
* My previous laptop was a 13-inch MacBook Air from 2012, which was STRUGGLING to the point I had left it permanently parked on my desk and replaced with a first-gen MacBook (12”, Core M) – which is the blogger’s delight but is useless for actually doing enterprise IT work of any kind. This is basically the scale of the 13” MacBook Pro Retina which I should have been using all along.
* The battery life thing may really be a problem. But in fairness, the first 24 hours are no time to gauge the battery life of a new device. There are backups restoring, files transferring, setups executing in the background – best to wait two or three days before you judge.
* My wife, who would rather sing Trumpets of Troy than take her hands off the keyboard, is the perfect use case for the TouchBar. It gives you the power to switch between tabs or pick between multiple dialog box buttons with a single tap. Me, with my four-finger typing style and left hand riding high on the keyboard? I keep hitting the ESC key by accident. And not even hitting the ESC key, hitting the TouchBar to the left of it, which nevertheless registers as an ESC touch. NOT COOL.
* The keyboard in general seems better than the one on the MacBook, which was shallow and weird. I like having the larger keys much better than the high separated chiclets on the MacBook Air. I still feel like it misses keystrokes if you go too fast, though – I’ve had to retype my password more than once on several occasions.
* It didn’t pick up on the Apple Watch despite my setting up iCloud, so I will probably be relying on the TouchID button for fast login. This is not a problem for now, but could be one once it’s running closed with an external KVM setup (I have a Magic Touchpad and wireless keyboard on order, along with the string of adapters necessary to get my 30” Apple Cinema Display working on it). The login shibboleth of the Apple Watch is one of the few things usefully separating it from a Fitbit Charge, so I kind of need that functionality.
* I haven’t owned or used a personal laptop in I don’t know how long. I took everything off my work laptop long ago and staffed the iTunes syncing out to the home desktop machine, and have used an iPad as my home “laptop” for the last four and a half years (amazing to think we are almost seven years out from the original iPad launch). I’ll be interested to see the extent to which I find myself doing things on here instead – but other than blogging, I don’t know what that would be.