Is A Maxed-Out New MacBook Pro Worth $6,699?
I ordered the new MacBook Pro 2018 edition the day it was announced (actually, minutes after I heard the news it was out).
I got a maxed-out version that cost me $6,699 (phew!).
It arrived today.
So, is it worth that kind of money? Or, likely more importantly, should you drop that kind of money to upgrade?
Short answer: Probably not.
There were two fundamental reasons I bought it.
- I was desperate to get a MacBook Pro with a keyboard I didn’t despise.
- I wanted a larger SSD (this one is 4TB).
The good news is that the keyboard is better. The bad news is it’s not that much better.
It’s certainly nowhere near the joy that was the 2016 MacBook Pro.
If Apple had put the old 2016 keyboard on this new model, I think there would have been dancing in the streets and more credit cards being pulled out.
But, alas, that’s not what they did. They still have the shallow key travel, makes your wrists hurt, design. Which, for a person that spends a lot of time on a keyboard is really a problem. The one improvement is that the new keyboard will not drive people around you quite as crazy. It’s not as loud as the prior one.
The 4TB SSD is a welcome upgrade (now I don’t have to do selective sync in Dropbox).
The 32GB (vs. 16GB) is useful, but not life-changing for me. I spend most of my time in Chrome, PowerPoint and PyCharm.
So, in short, I don’t regret the purchase, but not sure it’s worth it for most people.
And, my life is a bit sadder today because now I know that a MacBook with a non-crappy keyboard is not entering my life anytime soon.
