If they are, it's still incredibly terrible. An enormous list of common glitches could be written about it, that just never get patched
For one, it tends to split group convos into random tabs at random intervals, black hole messages, crash randomly and silently and you don't notice until someone says you're offline(the window will still open! it's just hung), etc etc.
I've been sitting on my 2012 original retina waiting for them to sort this out. I've heard of the 15in 2016 model getting as little as 3 hours of relatively idle use(ie liveblogging), and my 2012 still lasts 5~ with a bajillion cycles.
I really wanna see some benchmarks/real world tests of this new version. it's starting to look like the semi-serious tiny machine i wanted it to be all along.
Another obnoxious one: Employee purchased devices will be denied warranty if you aren't that employee. I'm assuming this is to prevent people from "trading" devices or something. I got one from a friend who worked there, and they refused to even provide with an OS image much less do any repairs. The serial number was just blocked.
This is categorically not true of apple or several other brands i've gotten gear this way from.
Honestly this is the number one reason i quit using my SP. I know a lot of people here love them, but it was just too obnoxious to use on my legs, soft surfaces, and lots of other places.
I will agree it was awesome on plane tray tables, but that was about the only "oh cool! obvious advantage!" location.
i found myself wanting a normal laptop that could hold itself up repeatedly, and kept switching back to my macbook pro
Unfortunately, it's saddled with probably the worst series of atom intel made, the original Z(with the awful powerVR gpu).
They still go for quite a bit on ebay, because people love the 1600x768 form factor. I had one for a while, but ended up selling it because i couldn't get over how bad the performance was(720p youtube was a no go, for example). The GPD is sort of a replacement in spirit, but i liked that form factor a lot.
They removed these settings. That's exactly the point at which i just started losing interest. I still have a huge pile of stuff i meant to list years ago that i just don't have the motivation too now.
Too many crap bidders, no way to block them. Ebays logic was that they "didn't want to discourage new users" or some nonsense.
I kept mine going for as long as i could until it was just blatantly too underpowered. I upgraded to the 15in retina(magsafe style, not the new one) and i'm still grumpy about the screen size downgrade.
Where is the 4k 17in MBP? The old one was 1920x1200, it would be a perfectly obvious upgrade
Another thing worth noting is that they still support basically every piece of hardware they ever did. Think built in apps on old smart TVs or early blu-ray decks that haven't been patched in YEARS, devices from before 2009~ even.
You can still watch netflix on an original Wii. That hasn't gotten any OS or software patches since like 2011. That's a long tail of legacy clients to have to deal with.
I have such a passionate hate for S4B. This also happens to me, and the logging options mentioned below being enabled don't make a reliable difference: the logs don't always save!
Additionally, group chats often split in to two windows where the conversation suddenly continues in a second thread even when no one joined/left... and then you try and reply and it jumps to another conversation on its own.
People in my office have recorded this because it's so obtuse and unbelievable.
Are there even any other "pixel alternatives" out there now that that's dead? By which i mean 3:2 or 4:3 display rather than 16:9/10, relatively small, not a tablet, etc. I'm not really interested in the surface pro, and was excited to see this until i saw it had an atom CPU.
I hear this point all the time, but it's starting to feel like it's just the cool thing to say. Can you quantify this? What do you feel has gotten worse besides "grr some stuff looks iOS-y!"
For what it's worth, this is the exact reason i stopped using my surface pro 2(and tried and didn't buy a SP3/4).
I've had more than one surface, and quit using them every time because of how crappy they are to use on anything but a table. I've almost gone back a number of times for the reasons you mention, but know i would regret it at this point.
I find myself wishing the "book" and the "pro" were the same machine. Sometimes i just want a laptop, and sometimes the SP form factor is pretty awesome with how much thinner/lighter it is. It's never enough to get me back off of my MBP though.
I don't understand how this wasn't the bigger news. Touch bar, meh, most people don't care either way. Price increase? it's apple.
Everyone i've talked to who got one laments the loss of magsafe, though. I've also heard at least one person offline say they were less interested in buying one because of that
Every MVNO has QOS working against them and caveats, like throttled speeds, no roaming, and basically always soft-caps. Most of the postpaid official carrier plans have soft caps too, but these are often MUCH lower(like 5gb instead of 25)
For one, it tends to split group convos into random tabs at random intervals, black hole messages, crash randomly and silently and you don't notice until someone says you're offline(the window will still open! it's just hung), etc etc.