[alcimedes]

So, the other day our office got burglarized. Someone threw a rock through the window and stole a bunch of hardware, including my laptop.

So, work offered to get me a replacement machine.

Went to the store, and the only models that had the upgraded RAM also had the higher end video card and HD, so ended up getting one of the faster models.

Impressions so far.

Not a fan of the keyboard. The travel is too low, and I find I'm making a ton of typing errors that I didn't used to. I'm hoping as I get used to the new keyboard this will fade as an issue.

The power brick came with just the 2 prong adaptor instead of the grounded, 3 prong, longer version. Seems kind of stupid/cheap to skimp on, but I had a bunch of 3 prongs floating around so fixed that quickly enough.

Ended up dropping almost $200 on stupid dongles and adaptors in order to connect my laptop to the various items I need to connect it to. The most useful of which is probably the belkin connector with HDMI, USB (old school) and another USBC port on it. that might be enough to keep me from losing my mind.

Battery life is pretty pathetic so far. Not sure what all I was expecting but I wanted to put it through it's paces to see how it would perform.

Fired up Civ 6, figuring that's about as CPU/GPU intensive as I can get. Laptop ran approx. 45 min. to an hour and then was 100% dead. I'll have to repeat this test as it seems short, even under heavy load.

I haven't had a chance to just walk around with the laptop to test battery life, but should over the course of this week.

The screen is great, and I like the resized track pad.

I really like the touch ID in order to install etc. items on the machine. I hadn't realized how often I was having to type in an admin password until I didn't have to any more, and that has been nice.

The touch bar is pretty 'meh' so far. There are a few instances where it has been pretty slick (like in Mail.app it will remember the last folder you moved an email to and allow you to move others there with a single touch, or in calculator it keeps the math function buttons right there) but for every time it seems to offer a nice change to your work flow, there are three or four other times that it's just dumb with what is being shown there. (trying to show me tabs on my browser in the touch bar? defaulting to the top three email folders when going to move an email, various other times where the info being displayed is just cycling through what appears to be borderline random, OS chosen options)

The unit I have after 24 hours has started to make a consistent, low grinding sound from the fan, even when the machine is under 2% load or less. That worries me. Looking online it seems to be a somewhat common issue.

For every day use, this machine feels exactly the same as the 2013 model that I had been using. I haven't noticed any significant speed increases over what was there before. This machine still beachballs pretty regularly when trying to do basic office tasks, either local machine based or network based.

This is probably the first time I've gotten a new Mac and it hasn't seemed significantly faster than my older hardware. This is a totally pristine install too, since my laptop was stolen and I'm still working on the cloud restore, I've only added a handful of programs to this machine's default config.

I'd have been happy with the machine at about half the price. As it stands, the jury is still out as to whether or not I want to keep using this machine or sell it to someone and go back to the previous model.