Apple MacBook Pro

Long-term owners

is only 4 years old, has a fairly OK keyboard, and is still in striking distance of current high-end ultrabooks when it comes to performance

Feb 2026 · comment

The two issues I have had in 20 years of Apple laptops is the butterfly keyboard and the GPU causing discoloration of the screen

Oct 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• Apple MacBook NeoAn affordable Mac with snappy performance and better build, display and trackpad than similarly priced Windows laptops, though many say its 8GB of RAM is limiting.707recommend
• MacBook AirA light, silent, fanless laptop with long battery life and enough everyday performance for years, though it throttles under sustained heavy loads and base RAM and storage feel tight.633recommend
• Apple MacBookRecommended for long battery life, excellent trackpad, screen and build quality, and fast, quiet Apple Silicon performance; critics cite soldered, hard-to-repair parts and past keyboard problems.499recommend
• Framework Laptop 12Repairable, upgradeable, Linux-friendly convertible that people choose over Apple laptops for repairability and openness. Critics say the price is hard to justify.83recommend
• Lenovo ThinkPad X1 CarbonOwners praise its light body, comfortable keyboard, trackpoint and strong Linux support; critics say battery life and heat are weak points.77recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 2224 comments. Each links to the original.

1. there is literally no laptop on Earth as nice as the MacBook Pro. Extremely long battery life, insane CPU & GPU performance, unmatched trackpad - but it runs MacOS.

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “New EU-wide product repair rules come into force”

2. The answer is a 16" M5 Max 128GB for $5k. You can run much bigger models than your setup while being an awesome portable machine for everything else.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Tinybox- offline AI device 120B parameters”

3. In the context of an M5 Max with 96GB of VRAM, it's a bargain compared to the price you'd have to pay for an Nvidia GPU with 96GB of VRAM for AI.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “My MacBook Keyboard Is Broken and It's Insanely Expensive to Fix”

4. My machine is aging like a fine wine, I’m acknowledging how resilient their custom silicon is despite the world demanding more and more compute.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Apple Introduces MacBook Pro with All‑New M5 Pro and M5 Max”

5. is only 4 years old, has a fairly OK keyboard, and is still in striking distance of current high-end ultrabooks when it comes to performance

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19”

6. My M-series MacBook pro is fantastic. The battery life, suspend resume, the track pad, the audio quality, it's all really good hardware.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Apple, fix my keyboard before the timer ends or I'm leaving iPhone”

7. my consumer-grade Macbook Pro (M1 Max, 64GB) runs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B fast enough to be very usable for regular interactive coding support

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Local AI needs to be the norm”

8. I'm not even starting to begin to get to the point where I start thinking about replacing this thing which I'm frankly astonished by.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)”

9. I love my M1 16" but it's a giant heavy cinder block that I have dragged with me to more places than I can count, always grudgingly

   Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch”

10. based on their track record of not shipping dud MacBooks (on the thermal and battery life front) since the switch to Apple Silicon

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch”

11. The two issues I have had in 20 years of Apple laptops is the butterfly keyboard and the GPU causing discoloration of the screen

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Apple routed a graphite pipe through the iPhone Duo's hinge to dissipate heat”

12. I can run a lot at useful speed (LLMs run fine, diffusion image models run OK although not as fast as they would on a 3090)

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades”

13. the bargain M1 Max MBP I am using for local LLMs is a fabulous experimentation platform and does loads of other stuff well

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index”

14. HDMI+SDXC+magsafe built-in is more practical than a fourth generic port and fishing around in your laptop bag for dongles.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch”

15. The real improvement was the number of displays supported and, in some cases, removing the Touch Bar and adding HDMI/SD.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Apple Introduces MacBook Pro with All‑New M5 Pro and M5 Max”

16. Apple's approach of supporting Thunderbolt 4/5 on every USB port of the MacBook Pro is the only sustainable way forward.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper”

17. My ageing M1 Pro still has better multicore performance than these new laptops. But far worse single core performance.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Apple Introduces MacBook Neo”

18. An M5 macbook pro running LM studio with Gemam4 or Qwen3.6 is basically the original GPT 3/ gpt3.5 chatgpt experience.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise”

19. My 32gb m1 max was probably the best purchase I've made. Still plenty of headroom in performance left in this beast.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Apple Introduces MacBook Pro with All‑New M5 Pro and M5 Max”

20. The biggest reason is I move around a lot and the 16" MBP has weighed on me. It's a really chunky and heavy laptop.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Apple announces significant price increases for MacBooks, iPads, more”

21. For most users this would be a large upgrade.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Apple Introduces MacBook Neo”

22. It got us ending the incredibly successful Macbook Air for the too-compromised 12" Macbook (1 port, remember?), the pointless Touch Bar and the terrible butterly keyboard

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing”

23. Unfortunately with most monitor settings the GPU power consumption would produce enough heat to run the fans even if the rest of the system was completely idle!

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “How to Quickly Warm Up Your MacBook”

24. macOS is basically discount Linux; it's tolerable, but only if the gulf between a MacBook and the next best hardware is wide enough to justify it.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Framework Laptop 13 Pro”

25. I would still have to be OK using a proprietary OS I can't control, designed by people who just want to keep extracting my money ultimately.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Framework Laptop 13 Pro”

26. a part of the screen dedicated to be the spot to tap to start changing the volume taking away from the other useful parts of the screen

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing”

27. Quite messy and wonky as in Linus Tech Tips testing. Require plugging displays in right order to get desired resolution / refresh rate.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6”

28. The Touch Bar/butterfly keyboard era of MacBooks was a total disaster.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch”

29. I loved my 2006 17-inch MacBook Pro, when I could simply flip the laptop over, unlatch the latches, and replace the battery entirely within seconds.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027 (2023)”

30. Getting rid of the fixed keyboard helps a lot (my preferred form factor), but even in the classic laptop form factor is makes a ton of sense IMHO.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch”

31. I had to upgrade from a late-model i9 MacBook Pro to this M2 MacBook Pro, because the npm + docker setup at work was taking upwards of 20 minutes

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19”

32. I think the touch bar was useful because it showed contextual actions. But not every app used it so it didn't really get a chance to shine.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Apple Introduces MacBook Pro with All‑New M5 Pro and M5 Max”

33. both of my laptops (a 2024 MBP and a ThinkPad P14s) have microphones that can filter out screeching wheels and noisy teenagers quite well

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I program on the subway”

34. there were so many ecosystem, hardware, power management, GPU throughput and compatibility advantages with the Macbook Pro at the moment

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating”

35. my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Can you slim macOS down?”

36. This means you don't need to exponentially crank up the voltage to provide more brightness which also increases lengivity of the panel

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch”

37. Snow Leopard era (unibody) MacBook Pro design was peak Mac. It was really full-featured while also having clean intentional design.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe”

38. The fact you can run software to boost the screen to HDR brightness levels for SDR content is insanely useful for working outside.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft”

39. I'd wager most touch bar users never used the F keys and use the volume, media playback, and screen brightness mapping instead.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Were Touch Bar's problems software rather than hardware?”

40. I personally would rather beef up a machine and then drive it until it dies or can no longer perform the tasks I need it to.

    Recommends · Nov 2025