I've had a 2017 TouchBar 15" model since it was brand new. Almost all of the issues listed in the article annoy me (particularly Bluetooth...)
Problems with the hardware:
- When I use any of the USB-C ports on the left to charge it, performance tanks... why? because for some reason it overheats when you do this and the CPU gets throttled.
- When I use a high-speed USB-C device (USB 3.1, Displayport, etc) in the ports on the left, the WiFi stops working. This always seems to get blamed on cheap cables, but this answer does not satisfy me.
- The TouchBar is awful in many ways, but the most fundemental failure is that it regularly doesn't detect key presses! I tap a key, I can see the "highlight" effect, but nothing happens.
My gripes with macOS:
- Performance when using an external monitor is pretty poor. When I have my Dell U2720Q connected, WindowServer starts using more CPU and the interface gets noticably sluggish.
- With the macbook having "the fastest SSD on a laptop" and APFS being "designed for SSDs", I expect some decent performance when dealing with disk IO. But particularly Archive utility is always very slow to extract files, and Finder always has a (small, but annoying) delay when listing folder contents.
- Updates take ages and are MASSIVE.
- The XCode 12 update, which I had to rush to download after apple released iOS 14 with no warning, was 11GB and took ages to download, and ages to extract and install.
- macOS minor updates also have large downloads and take between 30-60 minutes to install
I’ve also had a 15” 2017 MBP since new. I’ve not experienced any of the issues you mention.
However:
* I had to pay to replace the screen when it suffered the well-recognised broken ribbon cable issue. Unfortunately, Apple only offer free replacements for the 13” model, not the 15” - which is just outrageous, given the identical mechanism of failure. (Some weird ‘Fight Club’ calculations on the background there, I suspect.)
* USB-C connections are very unstable (physically) - like, hold your breath and don’t make any sudden moves while you’re copying large files via that route
* For some reason only some of the four USB-C ports work for video. This has changed - pretty sure they all did when it was new.
* My battery is shot and giving me the service message after about 310 cycles. It’s meant to last 1000, apparently. (I should get in touch with Apple, but after the screen debacle I just get a sense of weariness at the thought.)
At some point I’ll need to replace it... and I have no idea what I’ll do. I like MacOS (up to Mojave, at least) and the idea of going back to Windows or struggling with Linux makes me shudder. But likewise I’m not going to buy another Mac laptop, given the huge range of issues they now suffer.
Maybe this is what Jobs meant when (referring to Tim Cook) he shook his head and said he’s “not a product guy”? Apple are ultra-successful, but the essential quality of their products is on a downwards trajectory.
Updates are not incremental. You get the whole new thing, even if the diff would have been 1 character. Combine that with the fact that AIUI, DMGs and XIPs are stuck with deflate/gzip or bzip2, all of which are slow by modern standards, and you're on for some pain. Also, macOS may not have enough entries in its inode cache for the number of files there are in Xcode (although I haven't looked how many there are, maybe it's fine)
I actually had a poke around the XIP format after I was particlarly annoyed after the XCode update.
For XCode: The XIP contained some kind of DEFLATE'd index I didn't bother with. Most of the meat was an uncompressed "PBXZ" stream, which contained various LZMA compressed CPIO chunks.
Problems with the hardware: - When I use any of the USB-C ports on the left to charge it, performance tanks... why? because for some reason it overheats when you do this and the CPU gets throttled.
- When I use a high-speed USB-C device (USB 3.1, Displayport, etc) in the ports on the left, the WiFi stops working. This always seems to get blamed on cheap cables, but this answer does not satisfy me.
- The TouchBar is awful in many ways, but the most fundemental failure is that it regularly doesn't detect key presses! I tap a key, I can see the "highlight" effect, but nothing happens.
My gripes with macOS:
- Performance when using an external monitor is pretty poor. When I have my Dell U2720Q connected, WindowServer starts using more CPU and the interface gets noticably sluggish.
- With the macbook having "the fastest SSD on a laptop" and APFS being "designed for SSDs", I expect some decent performance when dealing with disk IO. But particularly Archive utility is always very slow to extract files, and Finder always has a (small, but annoying) delay when listing folder contents.
- Updates take ages and are MASSIVE. - The XCode 12 update, which I had to rush to download after apple released iOS 14 with no warning, was 11GB and took ages to download, and ages to extract and install. - macOS minor updates also have large downloads and take between 30-60 minutes to install