First up, full disclosure. I work at Apple, have done for what is now approaching decades. Judge any bias as thou wilt.
The pursuit of razor-thin-laptops-über-alles is over, folks, it left the building together with a certain Mr. Ive. I have one of the new (well, ish) M1-Max MBP’s and it’s a chunky boy. The keyboard is, not un-coincidentally, rather nice too, and doesn’t suffer from the above-discussed scissor mechanism, AFAIK.
The screen “notch” is not a notch out of the usual visible screen at all, BTW. There are more pixels, over and above the normal resolution, to each side of the camera. This gives extra screen real-estate to either side of the camera, and the menu-bar generally fits to the left. I get that it’s a visual look that may take some getting used to, and that the UX for extra-long menu-bars could probably be improved, but personally it took me hours to accept it as the new norm. I don’t even notice it now.
As for battery life, I recently took that laptop on a 2-week vacation traveling down the California coast to Disneyland and back (kids, watchyagonnado…) and forgot the charging cable in the packing debacle. I used the laptop pretty much every night, we streamed a movie on one night. By the end of the two weeks it had lost 50% or so of its battery… Now clearly it wasn’t in use all day, every day, but I’ve done that before as well, the thing *sips* battery like it’s never going to be charged again.
I won’t go into cameras apart from to say that the vast majority of people use the cameras (both front and back) on their cellphones, they’re an ever-increasing part of the cellphone “must have” criteria. I use the front camera on mine at least once per week to face-time my parents who live 6000 miles away. They get to see their grandkids, I get to see my niece, and that’s awesome.
I will agree that the port situation on an MBP isn’t optimal for engineers, especially mobile ones. I don’t take a slew of dongles or adapters with me, though, I take a thunderbolt hub - it has everything you’d find on any other laptop and more besides, is bus-powered so there’s no external PSU, is relatively compact, and since I usually carry my laptop in a bag when I go anywhere, it isn’t any less convenient to take. In fact it stays in the bag because that’s the only time I need it.
None of which is to say that any of this means “you ought to like it too”, everyone is different, everyone has opinions, and for each individual, they are perfectly entitled to dislike X or Y about something they’ve bought. Manufacturers, however, have to choose ahead of time - engineering is the art of compromise and different people will have different reactions to the trade-offs made; a long and roundabout way of saying YMMV
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