The Top 10 Things That Really Piss Me Off About My New MacBook Pro 2019

I was a late adopter on the Apple bandwagon, holding out all through my first career as a computer engineer. I knew that Apple was cooler, but I was a nerd and didn’t want to pay the price of taking the plunge. Plus, I was into esoteric things like Linux and it ran best on an Intel platform, while Macs ran Motorola.

Much has changed since those days. Nowadays as a budding musician, I decided to get a bright shiny new MacBook Pro so that I could run Logic Pro like they do at college, and it isn’t available on Windows.

I paid top dollar and got the fastest model available with the fancy new Touch Bar, since I also want to do video editing in Final Cut Pro and don’t want to have to wait around. I compromised on the screen size because I want it to be easy to take to university with me next year, and to compensate for that I got a massive 32” 4K external screen which is great for working on complex songs with a zillion channels in Logic.

The lack of basic ethernet interface and video connecters is slightly inconvenient, obvious from the product description and relatively easily solved with an external multi-port adapter; so I’m only going to briefly complain about that here. I am going to complain at length about the following things I didn’t know about though:

1. “Upgrading” Reminders On My MacBook Pro Deleted The Reminders From My iPhone 5s

Apple recently upgraded their iCloud Reminder infrastructure, which syncs with the Reminders apps on the iPhone and MacBook. I had both Reminder apps linked to my iCloud account so that I could share reminders between both devices, which I thought would be a nice little advantage of paying extra to have both an Apple phone and laptop.

But the new Reminder infrastructure is only accessible in iOS 13, which won’t install on my old iPhone 5s. In the process of “upgrading” my iCloud reminders after I unwittingly agreed to this in the macOS Catalina Reminders app on the MacBook Pro, all the Reminders I had created and used daily on my iPhone 5s were deleted. Admittedly I did see a warning saying that reminders “wouldn’t be available” on some devices, but I didn’t equate that to having them deleted from the device they were created on. It certainly wasn’t obvious to me, and I was a computer engineer for 20 years.

Apple knew full well this was going to happen too because they went to the trouble of generating these fake reminders on the iPhone in the upgrade/deletion process:

Where The Fuck Are My Reminders, Apple?

For fuck sake Apple, if you can create new reminders as part of the “Upgrade” process, why the fuck can’t you just leave the existing ones there? I use my iPhone to organise my whole life and this was really inconvenient to me. Having reminders shared with my new MacBook was handy, but nowhere near as important as having the reminders available on the iPhone where I created and routinely interacted with them. After multiple calls to Apple support, they were unable to reverse the upgrade on their iCloud server. What the fuck Apple!?!? Bastards.

2. The Fan Runs Much Of The Time

Is there some sort of cooling problem going on here? I know it takes power to make all that high speed creative magic work, and power dissipates as heat, but even when the laptop isn’t doing much the fan often starts running, and it’s loud. Like, too loud to have the laptop on when I’m making a video on my iPhone because of the noise. This makes it a less than useful multimedia platform.

3. The USB-C Ports Are Too Close Together

I got the MacBook Pro with 4 USB-C ports because I have lots of stuff like audio interfaces to plug in and running out of ports is a pain in the ass. Plus with the advent of USB-C, the power cable now takes up one. That sure is one hell of a complicated power socket. I suppose it’s nice not to have to worry about where you plug the power in, but I didn’t think a dedicated power port was a terrible problem given that every externally-powered device ever invented up until now has had one.

However, I can’t for the life of me understand why they put the USB-C ports so damn close together. It’s OK if you’re just plugging in a USB-C cable, but anything wider like a USB-C to USB-A adaptor, which you’re invariably going to need since USB-A is still so ubiquitous, clashes with the port next to it. There is acres of space available on the same side of the laptop for the other port, especially given that the ports that used to be on the side of laptops have all been dropped.

4. Touchpad Drag And Drop Requires Medium Pressure

There are three levels of tapping on the touchpad: light, medium and firm. To drag and drop a file in Finder, you need to medium tap it, and maintain at least medium pressure while moving your finger across the touchpad to get the file to the desired destination. That means holding your finger mid-way between light and firm. Not too firm. Not too light. Just right.

Keeping this much pressure applied while moving on a surface is a pain in the ass. On my Toshiba Windows laptop once the file is selected with a light tap, I can drag it with only light pressure; which is much easier… especially if I have to drag it a long way and need to make a few fast-slow-fast passes. You notice that it’s more difficult the first time you go to drag and drop something. Do Apple actually use the stuff they develop?

5. There Is No Hibernate Option

The Sleep option from the Apple menu appears more like a turn-the-screen-off function. It doesn’t seem to put the machine to sleep at all. The light on my backup drive keeps blinking, and the machine wakes up whenever it has a message for me, including in the middle of the night. It still responds to “Hey Siri” too; which is fine I guess if you want that. However, I want a Hibernate option that actually turns the power off and restarts where I left off within a second or two, like my Toshiba Laptop does. I also want to be able to unplug my backup drive and hit the road fast once the machine has hibernated, without having to unmount it every time first. Come on Apple, if Toshiba can do it, I’m sure you can too. Like I said I paid top dollar, so I wasn’t expecting features like this to be missing.

Sure it’s beautiful, but it pisses me off.

6. Safari Can’t Create Bookmark Folders When Adding A New Bookmark

Call me crazy, but I like to organise my web browser bookmarks into folders when I create the bookmarks. Often this means creating a new folder when I create a bookmark. In Safari 13.0.2, when you add a bookmark there is no way I can find to create a new folder for it. On the iPhone and iPad Safari can do this, but on the Mac I have to go into the bookmarks editor to either create the folder first, or reorganise them later. Someone please tell me I’m wrong. Otherwise, please, please Apple, hear my cry: add an “Add folder” button to the create bookmark dialogue, for fuck’s sake. Every other browser has one. How hard can it be?

7. Safari Password Generator Won’t Let Me Copy And Paste Generated Passwords

Call me archaic, but I like to manage my passwords in a spreadsheet. Passwords saved in the iCloud Keychain aren’t available on all browsers on all the platforms I use, so I keep a copy myself. I like strong passwords because one of my websites got hacked a couple of years ago and it took me months to get it fixed. I’m still paying for it years later in multiple web hosting accounts to prevent cross-contamination ever happening again, so I’m pretty paranoid about security. Safari has a strong password generator built in, but after generating the password you can’t copy and paste it into other applications; you have to look up the password in Safari Passwords preferences. This is a pain in the ass.

8. Safari Can’t Make Facebook Messenger Video Calls

While I’m on the topic of Safari’s limitations: I don’t know whether this is really Apple’s fault or Facebook’s, but in the 21st century you’d think that Apple’s flagship browser would be able to handle video calls. Yet for some reason, Safari and Facebook Messenger won’t play ball. Apple devotees have been complaining about this on Apple forums for years, yet you still need to install Chrome or Firefox to make video calls on Messenger. If only Steve could talk it over with Mark and work out a solution; provided he isn’t running Safari in purgatory.

9. Add to Reading List in Safari Adds To The Top Of The List, Not The Bottom

I generally work through lists from the top to the bottom. It’s just that way my brain works. Yet when I add something to the reading list in Safari, it adds to the top. It’s actually a reading stack rather than a reading list. The Safari developers think different, I guess.

10. The Price

All that other stuff probably wouldn’t bother me so much if I’d bought a cheap piece of shit PC. I could blame myself because you get what you pay for. What did I expect for a few hundred bucks? But I didn’t. I went after what I thought was the best and forked out a truckload of my hard-earned cash on a MacBook Pro 2019… and that really pisses me off.