I got upgraded at work from a late-2011 MacBook Pro to a late-2016 MacBook Pro—the kind with Touch Bar. I’m learning and relearning a lot of things that I had figured out how to do on the old machine as I set things up. Observations:
- The thing is fast. (Probably mostly because of the SSD drive, though the 3.3GHz vs. 2.4GHz processor may have something to do with it.)
- And so much more reliable. I was kernel panicking all over the place in the old machine.
- I hadn’t tweaked the old machine as much as I was afraid I had. After moving my home directory over, there were only a handful of apps I had to reinstall from scratch. I had also been smart enough to do most of my custom fonts in my user/Library/Fonts directory rather than in System, which made migration much easier.
- Speaking of migration, Thunderbolt really did the trick. I think moving all 300+ GB of stuff took about six hours, much faster than I remember when I used Firewire or Ethernet in the past.
- The keyboard is a non-issue. Feels great. Maybe a little loud but very easy to type on.
There are some things I’m still getting used to:
- I hit the Siri key by accident a fair amount.
- I really should have registered my index finger rather than my thumb on the fingerprint sensor.
- The touch bar is pretty cool, but not much uses it yet. I spend most of my day in Chrome and it’s got nothing there.
And the big thing I’m waiting for: better USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) docks. While I’d love something like the OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock, which has pretty much every port you’d ever need, they don’t ship until sometime in March, presumably thanks to the TI chipset issue. In the meantime, the only thing I’m really missing is an Ethernet adapter, and that’s just because it’s back-ordered.
(Also, it’d be great if I could get SheepShaver working, but that’s not required for work, obviously.)