I never know what I’m doing with my life ever, so sometimes I read books to help with that—like this new book about work from The School of Life. Like their other works (and the works of one of the founders, Alain de Botton) it isn’t so much a self-help book as a book on applied philosophy.
Many of the book’s more practical solutions to finding fulfilling work didn’t quite click with me (for various reasons), but some of the points focused on context and perspective concerning our working lives hit home. Some personal take-aways:
I should probably be nicer to myself.
Life is objectively terrible, and that’s okay.
Sometimes maybe your job is fine and you just need a glass of water.
You can get a hardcover directly from The School of Life or grab a digital copy from Amazon (which is what I did). There is a pretty generous free sample, so you can see if this is your kind of thing.
I still haven’t found any great uses for the Touch Bar on my new MacBook Pro—at least nothing that really justifies the loss of a physical escape key. I do recommend customizing the Control Strip and replacing Siri with something helpful like Screen Lock or Do Not Disturb, though, so it isn’t totally useless.
So I have a 13” MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and enough people have asked me about it that I decided to collect my thoughts in one place. As a qualifier, my previous machine was a 13” MacBook Air from the middle of 2011 that was on its last legs.
TL;DR
I generally don’t buy first-generation Apple products, but decided to hold out as long as I could with my MacBook Air and go for a big upgrade. This is a nice machine, but it was too expensive and there are too many steps backward for me to really recommend it unless you’re seriously in need of a new computer. I’m certain the next revision will be very nice, so hold off if you can. I’m not sure at all of the Touch Bar was worth the expense—we’ll have to wait and see.
Touch ID
Having the ability to unlock my computer with a quick touch is great. It’s an obvious step forward, though it makes it feel that much more awkward when I do have to enter my password for whatever reason. It’s kind of a bummer, though, that you’re forced to go with the Touch Bar if you want Touch ID.
Touch Bar
Between ordering and receiving my computer, I dropped by an Apple store while traveling and realized that I’d probably hate the Touch Bar. As a touch typist, looking down at the keyboard from the screen is the last thing I want to do and keyboard shortcuts are way faster than fussing with fake buttons. That said, it hasn’t bothered me all that much after mapping the escape key to caps lock and I’m holding out hope that someday, someone will find a way to make it useful. While I do like the design motivations that led to the Touch Bar, I find myself mostly ignoring it for now and I absolutely miss having physical buttons for volume and brightness. I’ll classify this as standing still? I will also add that some of Apple’s default choices for the Touch Bar look absolutely terrible. In Safari, for example, they show tiny, muddy thumbnails of the pages you have open that look like garbage.
Force Touch Trackpad
I don’t need a trackpad this big. I sometimes lose clicks, presumably due to palm recognition problems, and I actually miss having a bit more metal to rest my fingers on between the trackpad and keyboard when I’m not actively using either one. Again, I like the idea behind a solid state trackpad with haptic feedback, but in practice the click sounds and feels pretty cheap. I have also found zero reason so far to use Force Touch for anything. I’m getting used to the trackpad, but it feels like a step backward.
Butterfly Keyboard
I didn’t like this keyboard from the start and I still feel like it’s slowing me down. It’s difficult to put my finger on exactly what the problem is, but the best explanation I can come up with is that the short travel distance of the keys (they don’t go down very far at all) is somehow really messing with my standard typing rhythm. Maybe I’ll get back up to full speed at some point, but for now I’m thinking it’s a step backward.
Retina Display
The display is just stunning, especially after my old, low-res MacBook Air display. I’m not super crazy about the glass bezel with very little metal around the edges, though, since it’s a magnet for fingerprints. When I first got the machine, I also felt like it was thin to the point of seeming fragile, but I’ve grown accustomed to it. For beauty and brightness, I’ll call this a step forward.
Speakers
I guess I’ve never thought of sound quality as an important factor in laptop design because it’s always been so mediocre, but I’m still frequently surprised how much better the sound is on this computer. I get more in the low end than I’ve ever encountered on a little device before, so this is a step forward.
Battery Life
According to pretty much every source (save Apple itself) the ten-hour battery life claims appear to be greatly exaggerated if you actually try to get any work done. I seem to land at about half that or worse, which is a definite step backward. Disappointing.
Ports
I’ve always admired Apple’s willingness to choose progress over compatibility (if that’s the way to put it), so I don’t mind the port situation all that much. Would it have killed them to include one USB-A adapter in the box, though? No. Something also feels very wrong when you can buy Apple’s latest laptop and Apple’s latest cell phone and can’t connect them without an adapter. There’s a definite tension between forward-looking design and the convenience of convention, so I’ll call this neutral.
Power Brick
I like the idea of USB-C for power and the flexibility that comes with it, though I miss the cleverness of MagSafe. I like that the cable is separate from the power brick—not because it will be useful as a standalone cable (Apple cheaped out and included a USB 2.0 cable instead of USB 3.0), but because Apple makes trash cables that always fall apart and it will be cheaper to replace the cable rather than the whole brick. The most obnoxious thing, though, is the poorer design of the whole experience. There are no nice little tabs on the brick for cable management, nor a clip on the cable to keep it wound. What was once a clever and compact object that was easy to transport is now two objects, one of which is yet another coiled cable to be stuffed in a bag. Overall this is a step backward.
Body Design
This is a very nicely crafted machine and it rates well in that special Apple category of “Makes Last Generation Of Devices Look Like Caveman Tools”. It’s so light and compact (an accomplishment for which they clearly made huge tradeoffs) and streamlined, but I have to say that there’s something about my old MacBook Air’s wedge shape that still feels a bit more futuristic. I’ll call it a step forward overall, though, because opting for either an older MacBook Pro or MacBook Air would feel like a major compromise at this point.
Performance
This is pretty subjective—especially since my previous laptop was so old—but for the most part this machine performs well. I still run into some unusual glitches now and then, but it’s difficult to know if I should blame the new hardware, the relatively new OS (macOS Sierra) or some combination of the two that just hasn’t been ironed out yet. I will say that I wasn’t happy to see the maximum memory capped at 16GB and getting a Skylake processor at this point with Kaby Lake rolling out is disappointing. While not exactly a step backward, I’d at least say Apple is dragging its feet here.
Looking Forward
I think if I get a nice USB-C monitor that can act as a dock, display and power source over one cable, I’ll like this machine more. I’m also hopeful that someone will come up with some reason for the Touch Bar to exist, but I’m not really counting on that. Touching real buttons will always feel better to me than slapping a piece of glass.
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