Ben Lovejoy’s diary series are an attempt to provide a real-life review of Apple devices. Not just first impressions of them as gadgets, but the role they perform in everyday use, and an evolving view over time.
Read the diary entries from the bottom up to read them in date order.
My tango addiction means I’m spending a month in Buenos Aires. The first week was a holiday, but the remaining three weeks involve working in the morning, dancing in the afternoons and evenings. I’m using a three-screen mobile workspace that emulates as closely as possible the ultrawide monitor I use at home.
It’s not the first time I’ve worked while out of the country. Indeed, it’s not the first time I’ve done so in Argentina – but it is the first time I’ve done it for more than a week, hence my opting for a somewhat more sophisticated setup…
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I continue to love my M1 Max MacBook Pro in the main – especially the cool and silent running, and the impressive real-world battery-life – but three (or possibly four) annoying macOS Monterey bugs are somewhat spoiling the experience.
Two of the issues have been ongoing almost from the start, and they are now getting old.
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My shiny new 16-inch Apple Silicon MacBook Pro claims two big advantages over its Intel predecessor. First, the performance of the M1 Max. Second, power efficiency, aka battery life.
For my personal usage patterns, the two are quite distinct. The time when I want power is for video editing, when I’ll almost always be sat at my desk hooked up to a large monitor. When I want battery life, my typical usage is very different…
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I described the Apple Mail bug I experienced with my new MacBook Pro, which I was relieved to find was not a hardware fault but rather a macOS bug affecting both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
It has rendered Mail unusable for now, which led to me trying – and really liking – the Spark email client.
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I said last time that I hadn’t used my new MacBook Pro for anything too taxing in the first couple of days, but I did have the chance to try some M1 Max video editing last night. Nothing extensive – just a short casual video – but it provided my first opportunity to see the machine in action while performing the kind of task it was designed for.
I was very happy indeed with the performance – but actually, the everyday use impresses me just as much.
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My shiny new Mac arrived on Friday, so after a couple of days of fairly extensive use, it’s time to give my M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro first impressions.
I haven’t used it for anything too taxing as yet, so this piece covers what I think of the design, the screen – including that infamous notch – the heat management, and an early look at real-world battery life …
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It’s felt like a long wait from the M1 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, but the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro models are finally here. The predictions I made back in May were both correct: I was indeed unable to resist the 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro, and the price did indeed hurt!
Most of the rumors turned out to be correct – including the late one of a display notch to house an improved camera within much smaller bezels …
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I’ve been waiting impatiently for the M1X 16-inch MacBook Pro ever since we got to see just how stunning the 13-inch machine is, in terms of both performance and battery life. If the latest rumor is correct, and it is launched at WWDC, I may not have too much longer to wait.
I am, however, expecting it to be a very expensive upgrade, for three reasons…
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One thing that was immediately clear to me when I got my 49-inch monitor was that it was going to be a joy when video editing. But I didn’t appreciate at the time just what a massive difference it was going to make.
I should say that I’m no pro video editor. I occasionally create short clips for inclusion in reviews, but most of my videos are basic ones designed to relive memories of fun experiences. I created three short videos this month, and working on such a wide monitor truly was a delight…
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Ten days later, it’s time for my Dell UltraSharp 49 verdict – which will come as no surprise to anyone, I think.
When I decided to try Dell’s 49-inch monitor, I said that I’d lusted after it ever since it was announced, but all the same, it did feel a little bit crazy …
My ‘first impressions‘ piece yesterday was rather longer than I expected, so I don’t yet have much to add – but while my Dell UltraSharp 49 photos don’t show it well, the monitor makes a pretty decent movie screen.
No prizes for guessing the first search I tried on YouTube …
After explaining my thinking last time, it’s time for my Dell UltraSharp 49 review to begin in earnest.
I’ve been wanting a new monitor ever since I got my 15-inch MacBook Pro way back in 2016. The problem was, my perfect monitor didn’t exist then and – one Mac later – it still doesn’t.
But the Dell UltraSharp 49 looked like it would tick a lot of boxes. Thin bezels, single-cable connection, and the ultra-wide format I fell in love with a couple of years ago.
And, at four feet wide and 49 inches of diagonal screen, I was certainly expecting to be wowed by it …
The Dell UltraSharp 49 is, by any standard, a fairly ridiculously-sized monitor. With a diagonal size of 49 inches, and a side-to-side width of four feet, it’s huge!
But … I’ve lusted after it ever since it was first announced. Today, I finally decided to press the button despite the fact that it doesn’t tick all of my boxes – but we’ll get to that …
If I were writing a conventional review, my 16-inch MacBook Pro review would be a little late to the party. But my Diary pieces are all about how my impressions build over time with real-life use, so it’s less important in this case that I took delivery of mine exactly a month after it first went on sale.
I hadn’t initially planned to buy it because, on paper, it simply didn’t seem to be enough of an upgrade:
Playing with it for about half an hour in an Apple Store hadn’t really changed my mind: this was still something of a distress purchase for me…
My MacBook Pro problems had one more episode in store for me: after getting the repaired machine back from Apple, there was a glitch after restoring it from a clone.
I cloned the original SSD to an external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. When I got the repaired machine back, it was effectively a brand new one, as it had a new logic board with new SSD.
I plugged in the clone drive and used a CMD-R startup to boot from the clone, which worked fine…
I wasn’t expecting to be buying the 16-inch MacBook Pro this year. To me, it seemed too small an upgrade to justify replacing a three-year-old machine, so I’d planned to stick to my usual 4-5 year upgrade cycle for Macs.
That was before experiencing three separate failures in my 15-inch MacBook Pro:
I did, incidentally, manage to deduce exactly what the logic board fault was…
To add to the faulty keyboard and swollen battery, it turns out my MacBook Pro has a third failure: a logic board fault.
There was some good news when I went to collect my MacBook Pro today: the top-case replacement had been done. It had a shiny new keyboard, and non-swollen battery.
The bad news, however, was that the machine still immediately shutdown when run on battery power…
I’ve finally been forced into arranging the keyboard replacement I’ve been deferring forever, and that has led me to think about my next Mac. But let’s start at the beginning…
My 2016 MacBook Pro has long been suffering from the infamous butterfly keyboard glitches. I get double-characters for B and P, and both spacebar and CMD keys are unreliable.
These things would have long since driven me nuts but for two factors…
If I didn’t write about Apple-related tech for a living, I’m honestly not sure whether I’d upgrade to macOS Catalina. For me, the loss of 32-bit app compatibility could potentially be both a major hassle and a significant expense.
A hassle in part because there are several small utility apps I use which are 32-bit only. All are old, and the developers have long since lost interest in updating them, so I’m going to need to find suitable alternatives…
The rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro could be the one thing that would have me change my usual upgrade cycle for Macs.
My MacBook Pro is my most important Apple device, and I normally work on the basis of keeping them for five years. I max them out with that kind of longevity in mind.
Five years suits me well for several reasons. First, they remain extremely usable for that length of time, even for demanding work. I configured this one with 4K video editing in mind even though I did very little of it at the time, as that was a good benchmark for a machine capable of keeping up for years to come …
I haven’t had the best of times of it lately with Apple kit. I managed to leave my iPhone out in the rain – something it thankfully survived. A couple of days ago, I knocked my Apple Watch off a bathroom cabinet onto the tiled floor, badly smashing the screen. And now the sticky keyboard problem with my MacBook Pro is getting worse.
I first experienced a sticky spacebar almost a year ago. At the time, I viewed it as an embarrassing quality control failure by Apple, but thought demands for the machine to be recalled were over the top. Reader comments did, however, convince me the problem was greater than I’d appreciated …
Back when I bought my 2016 MacBook Pro, I was kind of tempted to get all the expense out of the way in one hit and upgrade my monitor at the same time. The problem, as I wrote later, was finding someone to take my money.
What I really want now is to replace my existing two-screen setup – 15-inch MacBook Pro on the left, 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display on the right – with a single monitor.
That means I need something substantially wider than 27 inches and 2560 pixels. My colleague Jeff tested one candidate back in 2016, LG’s 34-inch UltraWide. But that didn’t tick all of my boxes, so I held out …
As someone who prefers to travel handbaggage-only, gadgets can often prove a challenge. As I like to keep up with photo editing as I go, I generally travel with my MacBook Pro as well as iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and a compact camera. Not only do I need space for the gadgets themselves, but also the associated cables and chargers.
But for a trip to Havana last week – a destination I finally managed to check off from my bucket list – I decided that I could get by with two camera batteries and use my MacBook Pro to charge everything else …
The main reason I’ve adopted this Diary format for reviewing Apple kit is that first impressions can be misleading. The iPad, for example, launched to very mixed reviews. I won’t embarrass my fellow tech writers by naming names, but the Guardian did a round-up at the time.
Then there’s my own Apple Watch experience. Going from clear smartwatch skeptic – wondering why anyone would want one – to a complete convert. With the new MacBook Pro, my impressions from the keynote were that I would like it but not love it.
It looks like a very nice machine. I’m fully expecting to enjoy the smaller form factor and the new features – even if I will really miss the larger screen – but I’m not expecting to love it. It doesn’t excite me the way I feel that a new generation ought to after four years of more-or-less stagnation.
It turns out I was wrong …