Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Andrew Wilshere

Last November I got one of the new 15″ MacBook Pros, and wrote about a few obvious, but largely non-serious, UX flaws.

Four UX Flaws In The New MacBook Pro

Over the past 6 months, I’ve been using the machine daily for about 10 hours a day, for all of my design, illustration, and writing work. Here’s a summary of how it’s been.

First, here are the top five things I love

> It was super fast when I first got it, and it’s still super fast now.

Initial fears about the battery life have largely proven to be unfounded. I have Activity Monitor open most of the time, to check if Google Drive or Chrome start going crazy. But if I run the display at a sensible brightness, it’s quite easy to get 8 or 9 hours of use from a single charge.

> The screen is great.

It’s bright enough that I can turn it up and use it in full, direct sunlight. Also, having Retina resolution at this size (I’ve got the 15″ model) is a huge advantage. I’ve now stopped using an external monitor entirely, because 1920*1080 feels icky by comparison.

> The Touch Bar is more useful than I thought it would be.

I like being able to control brightness and volume using a scrubber rather than just up-and-down keys. Also, the fact that Escape is no longer a physical key hasn’t really been an issue. I’ve found the Touch Bar most useful in random apps — in Grab, it allows me to choose where to saved the screengrab I’m about to take. Without the Touch Bar, I would have to either know a keyboard shortcut, or abandon my current screengrab and go looking in on-screen menus.

> For such a fast machine, it’s incredibly slim and light.

I used to struggle carrying around my old 13″ MacBook Pro because it was soooo heavy. The reduced weight and form factor of the new model have made a huge difference to portability.

> The speakers.

On the 15″ model at least, they’re good enough that I can listen to music on them for several hours without starting to think “this is too trebly” or “this is too rattly”. Actually, quite a few times I’ve been playing music and not even noticed that it’s not coming out of my nice proper special lovely Denon external speakers.

And here are the top 5 things I don’t love

> Touch ID.

In principle, Touch ID is a great addition, although its arrival was embarrassingly far behind both PC laptops and Apple’s other products (iPhone and iPad). But the execution of this feature is very poor. There is no rhyme or reason to when you can and can’t use Touch ID to authenticate updates, changes to settings, and even screen unlocks. To make matters worse, the sensor itself frequently fails to recognise that a finger is present. I reluctantly compare this to my Huawei P9, where the fingerprint sensor is over 99% reliable and extremely fast. I expected updates to MacOS by now, to at least improve the consistency of this feature, but that hasn’t happened yet (time of writing: 2 June 2017).

> The trackpad.

Whyyy is it so huge? I have still not found a satisfactory answer to this question. Other than being literally a physical obstacle to using the keyboard, it also looks oversized — almost like it’s a mistake.

> The keyboard.

It’s not that I hate it. In fact, I do kind of love it. But the butterfly mechanism needs some more refinement. A few times I’ve had keys get stuck down; so far, they’ve fixed themselves without too much jiggery-pokery, but I still have a fear (expectation) that I’ll end up at a Genius Bar within the next year, pointing at the shift key with a sad face.

> The bottom of the laptop is still ridiculously slippery-slidey.

It’s fine when you’ve got your laptop on a table, because it has the nice little feet on each corner. But if you’re working with the machine on your knees on a sofa, or slouching in bed, it will often slide sideways off your legs. Or even forwards off your legs, if you’re in some awkward confined space like a train carriage or airport departure lounge. I miss the rubberised base of my old white MacBook. I’ve not had any disasters yet, but the lack of grip on the base also means your MacBook Pro is liable to slide off of any upholstered or non-level surface, like a chair, or a footstool, or whatever, where you might absentmindedly leave it while making a cup of coffee.

> MacOS should be better than this

The overall MacOS experience is great. But there are some glitches that should really have been fixed by now. Little things like the menu bar failing to render properly after connecting an external display. Or the fact that the App Store still goes through periods of requiring you to log in fifteen times and/or not recognising your credentials and/or thinking you’ve installed/not installed updates that you already haven’t/have. Oh, and why can’t I use the calculator directly in the Spotlight bar any more? It’s little things like this. But, as design great Charles Eames said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.”

P.S. In case you’re wondering, I did eventually get the piece of glitter out of the speaker grille. But it took 4 months. First I tried a needle, then I tried some of that weird cleaning goo stuff, and eventually I realised a piece of blu-tac would work. And so it did. Actually, I now use blu-tac to clean the speaker grilles routinely.

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My new MacBook Pro — 6 month review was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My new MacBook Pro — 6 month review

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