The New 16-Inch MacBook Pro

Updated 19 April 2020

#UserExperience  •  #ProductOwnership  •  #CustomerExperience  •  #BadInformation  •  #FirstWorldProblems  •  #Cybersecurity

Having come off a pricey extended vacation that included the pre-trip procurement of the exquisite 61-megapixel Sony A7R4 to document it, the last thing I wanted to do was shell out funds for a new MacBook. Nonetheless, it had to be done.

The old 2015 model (with a 13-inch screen) was struggling to process the new camera's RAW photos (each photo around 100 MB). The battery was in need of replacement. And it had started shutting down unexpectedly with alarming frequency. Chalk it all up as collateral damage from a highly successful trip.

As it happens, the newest MacBook Pro was released right as I was taking off on the APAC adventure.

Screenshot courtesy of Apple (taken on the MacBook Pro)

Sticker Shock

After checking out the latest lineup, I almost went for an earlier, 13-inch model. I specced it out and came up with the expected price tag. But then I went back and checked out the brand-new 16-inch model. For a pittance more (a mere $100), the solid state drive space doubled from 256 GB to 512 GB, the screen grew three inches, the processor went from four cores to six. Plus all kinds of other fringe benefits, including an impressive sound system.

I needed the extra screen space. A lot of split-screen work would benefit from the extra real estate. Plus, all those glorious photos would look great on the bigger screen. And the extra processing capacity would surely come into play while editing 4k videos.

It was a bit pricey ($ - cough -). But, it occurred to me Amazon sells a small selection of Apple products, so I checked 'em out and — boom — there it was, the 16-inch base model I had my eyes on, for $300 off the list price.

In Mattopia, that's called "a sign."

Here's the kicker: I could also leverage funds from trading in my two old MacBook Pros, the 2015 model and a 2010 15-inch model that had been a utility resource for transferring SD card files to mechancial hard drives. Thankfully, all those drives were rendered obsolete last summer as all those files were moved over to portable solid-state drives.

I dug out the original 2010 box and within it was the original receipt and shipping information direct from Apple. I paid ($ - hack - ) for it 10 years ago. That was a custom-specced 15-inch model with wiz-bang specs: a DVD-ROM drive, a whopping 128-gig solid-state drive, a high-res screen and loads of ports to connect all kinds of devices. At the time, it was state-of-the-art and better than anything I ever received from Dell.

Here's the thing: the latest 16-inch base model MacBook Pro with a retina display, quadruple the disk space, triple the processing power, a larger screen and a simplified port structure supporting four USB-C drives has a list price only $54 more than what I paid 10 years ago. All in a package slightly smaller and 1.1 pounds lighter than that 10-year-old model. Throw in the $300 taken right off the top from Amazon and I paid less while receiving a whole lot more in return.

That is the market economy at work.

So, while some would argue Apple is expensive, the reality is the prices hold steady — but even that's misleading. The same price today yields a tremendous amount of increased technology buying power. Plus, there's the trade-in factor. While the 2010 model pocketed only $75, the 2015 model had the potential for $470 had it not suffered some casing damage during a freak backpack accident (a strap broke and the pack fell right off my back).

The Competition

Let's compare this to pricing for Microsoft's Surface Pro, which recently had a string of commercials starring a guy named "Mac Book." Functionality wise, the Surface doesn't hold a candle to the MacBook. Sorry, Microsoft. It's a flimsy piece of junk — perhaps the best call Bill Belichick ever made was when the Patriots coach threw his Surface down on the field, disgusted with its lack of usability.

Anyway, I was appalled to see the Surface Pro falls along the same price points as the MacBook Pro. That is expensive. The cost needs to be framed against what it provides in return.

Go to the Source

My new MacBook Pro is magnificent.

But two hiccups were encountered while moving in.

One was a problem with Wi-Fi connectivity. I noticed an alarming drop in page-load performance after surfing through a few sites. Since I still had my 2015 model on-hand, I could see it wasn't my Wi-Fi network. The 2015 model loaded pages with no problem time and time again. But the 2019 model struggled to even load speedtest.net.

So I surfed the web to try to troubleshoot the problem. The results were enlightening, for many of the wrong reasons.

Sure enough, I found other people having problems with Wi-Fi performance on the newest model. It sure sounded like they were having the same problem, anyway. But the chat rooms quickly devolved from amateur-hour problem solving to blaming Apple and suggesting the Wi-Fi chip set was incompatible with the new magic band (a spiffy replacament to the old row of "F" function keys; I've very quickly grown to love the new magic band).

Such a situation seemed so un-Apple (and keep in mind, years ago, I hated Apple and thought the company was remarkably arrogant).

So I did the unthinkable: I contacted Apple support.

The tech support guy was quite genial — at least in the limited context of our text messages. We walked through some things I had already tried (for one, I found some profile files were different between the 2015 and 2019 models, but copying the "working" profile from the 2015 model to the 2019 model didn't resolve the issue).

Then Apple's tech support had me do something I thought was kinda odd. He had me reboot in safe mode. I did and was surprised to see I could surf around with no fall-off in performance. And the speedtest presented comparable results to the 2015 model.

I then rebooted in normal mode and the problem was resolved.

This is where tech support went all kinds of obscure on me. He couldn't explain what we had actually done with this nonintuitive maneuver, other than to say we cleared out a cache that was problematic. No idea what kind of cache would've been in a brand-new, factory-sealed MacBook Pro that had been in use for less than 48 hours. Nonetheless, there was no chatter of incompatible chip sets. The MacBook Pro didn't need to be returned to Apple. The problem was resolved.

The Second Problem

A few days later, I noticed a new problem. The MacBook Pro's fan would turn on and the system would abruptly shut down. The first time was odd. The second time was disturbing.

What's going on in those tech forums? Well, sure enough, other people were reporting the problem. This time, the culprit was a faulty logic board. People were arranging for Apple to send replacements, but the coronavirus (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the Mexican beer) was causing supply chain problems and people were experiencing delays in getting their units fixed.

Sigh. No. Please no. Tell me that's not the problem.

So I started retracing my steps and seeing what was in common with the two shut downs. What did I have going on? What applications were running?

One suspect was Google Chrome. Hmmm... Chrome had been causing problems in other models, which Google actually acknowledged, but I wasn't finding issues directly linked to the newest model. Nonetheless, I stopped using Chrome. Boom. Haven't had an unwanted shut-down since.

UPDATE 11 MARCH 2020:

Okay. It's happened a third time, after a couple weeks of bliss. And this time, Chrome wasn't in use. But I did get an error log this time and there was a familiar suspect: Symantec. Certainly Norton software has caused problems before, including errant populating of Drupal CMS forms when the heinous Norton toolbar is installed on browsers. I'm not surprised it appears to be a culprit in the current problem.

Keeping an eye on this development, but pleased with the overall performance of the new Pro.

UPDATE 14 MARCH 2020:

Since I've been unhappy with Norton for quite some time (I'd been using it only because it comes with Comcast's internet service), I uninstalled Norton and licensed Bitdefender. Let's see how the next year goes on the cybersecurity front. Fingers crossed there will be no more flash shutdowns.

UPDATE 19 APRIL 2020:

It's been several weeks now running on Bitdefender instead of Norton. No flash shutdowns since the swap, so I'm prepared to blame Norton's security solution for the issue.

Overall, I'm pleased with Bitdefender. The updates are automatic and happen silently, behind the scenes. That was one of my peeves with Norton — those alerts that I needed to take action to install the latest definitions and other updates were a frequent nuisance. On the flip side, Bitdefender's Windows solution is much more feature-rich; hopefully the Mac version will catch up soon.

Lessons Learned

More than two weeks into my ownership of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, I'm completely delighted with the user experience and the laptop's performance. It manhandles my 100-megabyte photos. It zips through rendering videos with aplomb.

Now. Stop and think about all that noise in the tech forums and chat rooms. Think about how misleading those conversations were; at the very least, the solutions were faulty or otherwise thoroughly inaccurate. Sure, some were innocent suggestions that helped one individual resolve their problem. But nobody in those forums had made reference to going to Apple support for help, at least in regard to the Wi-Fi issue. The logic boards? I am doubtful of that being a legitimate problem; if so, the number of complaints should be much higher, or at least so it seems to me. Seems to me more due diligence is required on the part of both the customer and Apple support.

Put this in context. Small-scale, closed environment tech issues with definitive methods for identifying and resolving the problems have led to some questionable resolutions, dubious comments and suspect accusations. Granted, there are a number of variables to consider: base model, various processors and disk space considerations. But, still, some comments seemed patently off base.

Extrapolate this out and consider bigger picture issues. How much bad information is circulating out there — regardless of whether it's innocent suggestion, malicious misinformation or some sort of nefarious Russian act of sabotage? How easy is it to mislead somebody? How easy is it to send somebody down the wrong path — with that path leading to a downward spiral of escalating frustration?

It's alarming. People buy into bad information so blindly, without vetting. Without rolling up the sleeves and putting more effort into things than running a simple Google search. On the flip side, I'm convinced people put ideas out there simply to see how many people take the bait and react, potentially with the end result of causing a lot of damage.

Think about complex matters — scientific topics and large-scale political programs with all manner of implications. How well are people truly being served by searching the web? How much frustration is it causing? How much anxiety? And what's the long-term impact of the damage being done?

It's so easy to politicize — or, more dramatically, weaponize — the internet via feeds of bad information and audience manipulation.

It's simple.

Dead simple.

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