I feel it’s wholly appropriate to recount a much older story for the benefit of other readers that may be going through a similar corundum.

About a year ago, I needed a new laptop to replace my existing 15” Macbook Pro Retina (2014).

I looked at non-Apple products first as it was a good time jump, (if there was/is such a thing) off of the Apple ecosystem. To make a long story short, I discovered there's gaming laptops that have some decent specs (CPU/GPU/SSD/RAM/battery), but are lacking in screen performance or ergonomics (decent trackpad/keyboard/light/thin), or both. And the latter, business laptops with excellent screens and ergonomics, but not so good specs. I prefer to have both coming from a Macbook Pro; apparently the PC world still hasn't figured that out yet but the HP Envy and Microsoft Surface Pro come pretty close.

Anyhow, back to the Mac because after discovering the “equivalent” PCs actually were about the same price or even more than a Macbook Pro (must be the market price, so much for the thought that PCs are cheaper) but didn't tick the boxes I wanted, I had a look at the then new 2016 Macbook Pro 15" refurbished as I've had many excellent experiences with Apple refurbished products and they offer a significant discount for being practically new in most cases.

I chose the "stock" 512GB SSD model as Apple stores carry two base 15" models, the 256GB model and the 512GB model, as do Apple authorized resellers. Anything else if it has a larger SSD, faster CPU or GPU is known as CTO, or custom to order, which usually command a substantial premium while offering little benefit in most cases IE $300+ more for a part that's less than 10% faster, etc.

It arrived quickly and in pristine condition from all I could tell. The screen was a very nice upgrade, the new speakers were really nice, the new cooling fans ran quiet under load which was very nice, it's lighter and thinner which was really nice and I actually really love the keyboard, I actually can type faster and more accurately on it, and it's quieter.

But that's where nice stopped. You have of course those USB-C ports... There's plenty of talk of dongles on the web, I've found it's more practical just to buy replacement cords that are native, that is rather then get a USB-C to whatever dongle, buy a USB-C to whatever cable, leave that cable plugged into your external USB drive or SD card reader, etc; you're thus in the same boat you were before in terms of number and complexity of widgets, and it's native support, not hit and miss at the mercy of your dongle. Of course, like dongles, those aren't free, but if you're going to drop a couple bucks, do it right. This part never bugged me as such.

Loosing the magsafe adapter on the other hand, that bugged me as now you have the threat of your toddler taking your laptop down with it when they accidentally kick the cord running around the house or the stray Starbucks patron taking your laptop down with a wrong step. Problem-problem.

The next thing I took note of was the battery life wasn't as good oddly. After some web research I concluded like a few others the brighter (thus drawing more power) screen being the culprit, and sure enough, dialing it down to 75% solved that problem. Hmph.

Then there was the fact that I had this much more powerful AMD dedicated GPU, but my workflow (Canon DPP4) couldn't use it. Thus my integrated graphics, which are inferior to the 2014 model became the bottleneck. Ditto for my Safari web browser, it too wasn't optimized for discrete GPU acceleration, either, falling back on the inferior iGPU thus browsing the web was slower too. Why couldn't Apple use a Crystalwell / Iris Pro / eDRAM equipped CPU on their 15" model, too?

And then finally, there was the trackpad...

After 3 weeks of adoption time and much fiddling with the settings on feedback I was able to improve it's responsiveness, but, I was getting maybe 93% compliance vs 99.9% compliance on my old 2014 trackpad as the new haptic feedback vs the actual hinge design made a huge difference. This drove me bats when editing batches of photos where I'd click something and sometimes it’s register and other times it wouldn’t causing me to have to repeat the action.

At first I thought this was a copy issue, that is perhaps my refurb was refurb because of the trackpad was repaired. But, after calling Apple's tech support, the agent mentioned she didn't think it was the copy I had as I wanted to exchange it for another, but didn't elaborate further and suggested I can always return it if I wasn't happy for any reason (sounds like this isn't the first complaint about that trackpad to me). Well I read between the lines as I just did and figured I'd try a 2016 model in store. And sure enough, same issue of non-responsiveness. Wasn't just my copy obviously.

That did it in for me. You shouldn't ever pay more and get less. I returned it in store with a return authorization I got from Apple's tech support shortly after coming to this conclusion.

I bought another used 2014 15" Macbook Pro retina to replace it. Been happy ever since.

Sometimes newer isn't always better. Seems to be a reoccurring theme these days more and more.

I do suspect Apple will revamp the MacBook Pro and fix their problems with their iGPU, trackpad and MagSafe adapter. Moreover, I suspect Apple will probably make good on that rumor and eventually adopt a desktop/laptop appropriate Apple-designed ARM processor that has desktop/laptop grade performance, with much less power and thermal requirements... Those USB-C ports are likely here to stay though. I actually have high hopes Apple may make some pretty substantial breakthroughs with their rumored ARM CPUs for computer use this upcoming round as that gets them off of being Intel-dependent and they've been having problems moving off 14nm of late but ARM CPUs can be offloaded to other fabs with more advanced lithography. Chances are it’ll hit the MacBook (non-pro) and/or Mac Mini first though, but, I can always hope…