I love the non-touchbar version of the MacBook Pro. Looking down at a keyboard to find buttons doesn't make sense to me so went with the non-touchbar model. I could also complain about the price and battery life (which you can do every time) but the specs and design are solid. There seems to be quite a few lukewarm reviews out there but that's mostly because people are in need of ad/page views.
The MacBook Pro is still the best laptop in the market by a wide margin from a quality, design, and spec perspective. The Dell XPS laptops and Razer Blade laptops (stealth version) are also ones I'd consider.
Specs:
- 2.4GHz Intel Core i7
- 16GB RAM
- 512GB SSD
- 2k display, although I'm hooking up to a Dell P2415Q 4k external display
- weighs 3 lbs. and effectively has a 4 hour battery life (this does need to be way better)
- USB C and the headphone port are great as the only ports
The sad thing about the MacBook Pro is that it's pretty close to complete as a product (which is what you would expect after 25 years!). You can certainly improve on the internals but this thing can't really get any thinner, lighter, louder, or brighter and no more ports to remove.
Of course a laptop can always get faster but this thing is already pretty fast and the bottleneck is on the connectivity and the server side. The real innovation is happening w/ the iPad and iPhone, still quite a few things that can be done there.
So yet again, this particular MacBook Pro defines laptop because there's really very little left to do to make this an even better product. However, I'm curious to see how Chromebooks continue to evolve (especially versus tablet improvements) since a browser based OS or just a web based experience is what most folks use and need, and a significantly cheaper price point gets the Web out there to more people.