I have been using the 14-inch M3 Pro MacBook Pro for school for a few years now, and it's pretty good, particularly in its balance of outstanding battery life and strong performance. However, there are some weak points in the laptop that you should know before you choose to buy a MacBook Pro.

The I/O ports are good

The MacBook comes equipped with a MagSafe charging port, a headset jack, a full-size HDMI port, an SD card slot, and three USB-C 4.0 ports. Two on the left side and one on the right. It's a considerable upgrade over the USB-C only designs of the late 2010s, but the lack of USB-A is still a problem today. Many of my accessories are USB-C, but external mice and keyboards in particular are dominantly USB-A only. You'll probably want to get an adapter.

However, all of the USB-C ports allows you to charge the laptop and all of them are USB 4.0 capable with the ability to output to monitors, so you probably won't run into any issues with compatibility with any USB-C devices on any of the ports.

Magsafe is a welcome inclusion, but I haven't found myself using it often. The included cable is a nice-feeling and beautiful-looking woven cable, but, as with all of Apple's cables, it has no strain relief and therefore is more susceptible to damage. I also tend to use the laptop using a powered Thunderbolt 3 dock, which works wonderfully. I keep the Magsafe cable in my backpack and use it mostly when I'm out of town. More on that later.

The HDMI port is a very welcome inclusion and is probably the number one port I wished I had on my previous 2019 MacBook Pro, even more than USB-A. I don't keep a monitor attached (more on that later) but it's nice to be able to easily connect the laptop to a display.

The headset jack is also a strong feature. When docked, I use the headset output to feed the audio into my desktop PC and combine the outputs, so most of the audio I hear from the MacBook comes from that output and I've never had any issues with its quality or volume. It's amazing.

Finally, the SD card slot isn't used much by me, but it's nice to have. There's no mechanism to pop the card in and out. You just push it in and pull it out. Which solution is better is up to you, but I find that less mechanical parts makes for better reliability.

The battery life is awesome

If you've heard anything good about Apple laptops, it's probably the battery life. I have almost never had to worry about battery life with this laptop. With regular browser use, I sometimes went multiple days without charging. There really isn't much else I can say because it's just so amazing.

Interacting with the laptop is a mixed bag

Firstly, the MacBook Pro is heavy. It is very much designed to be a mobile workstation, not a notebook. That said, it has a comparatively slim profile compared to other mobile workstations and has no problem fitting in a bag's laptop sleeve.

When you open the laptop, there's a nice indent that allows you to get a grip on the top of the screen and push it open. The screen is easy to rotate, but is quite stable and holds in any position you might want with very little bounce back when you remove the pressure. The only caveat is that it doesn't open as far as I would want it to.

The display itself, however, is wonderful. It's a little taller than a typical 16:9 widescreen display, which is great for most task you do on a computer and I wish this kind of thing was more prevalent in desktop monitors. The pixel dimensions are an insane 3024 pixels horizontally by 1964 pixels vertically, but by default, the system is configured to scale everything up so that it looks extremely sharp. At normal viewing distances, it is extremely difficult to make out individual pixels, which is good. I've never had brightness issues, but it may be a bit hard to see in direct sunlight. However, it came well-calibrated and the HDR experience is great. It is not a touchscreen display, though, keeps it from being perfection. It also has an odd cut in the top center for the camera. It's mostly not a problem because it gives you more space to work with and it's just the menu bar up there anyway, but it is odd that they allocated such space and didn't include facial recognition for authentication.

The keyboard is not a standout feature. It feels fine enough, but the nice finish on the keys wears out quickly with use and the often-used keys will turn from flat to slightly concave with use. This is not ideal. It does have an adjustable white backlight, though, and there's a fingerprint reader for authentication in the top right. It looks like a key, but no backlight leaks from underneath it and pressing down reveals that it has much shorter travel and a much clickier feel. You're not supposed to press down on it to authenticate. It takes just a light touch for it to read. It's a button because it acts as the power button for the machine. Though, you probably won't be using it often.

The Apple-intended way to shut down is to click the Shut Down option in the macOS menu. Then, the laptop boots up again when you open the lid or press any button. This is usually convenient, but it's super annoying when you just want the laptop to stay powered off while you're trying to clean it.

This laptop is impossible to keep clean. The glossy screen holds dust and fingerprints extremely well and I've given up on removing the tiny particles from the speaker grills.

The touch pad, though, is incredible. It's a large, smooth, touch surface that always feels great to use. The touch pad doesn't actually move. It uses a vibrator to simulate a click feel, but it feels impressively natural. In addition, macOS is built with smooth velocity scrolling everywhere, and I desperately wish this was standard everywhere. More on this later.

The whole thing feels very solid because it's made of aluminum. Despite that, I always feel like if I were to drop it, the thing would shatter and snap in awful ways. I hate carrying this thing around because I'm always afraid I'm going to drop it and it won't turn on again. I could probably drop my ThinkPad T450 fifteen feet onto concrete and it would be nearly unscathed, but the weight and material of the MacBook make me fear that it wouldn't survive a drop.

macOS is just meh

macOS was my first personal computing experience, years before I would daily Windows and then Linux Mint, so I feel I have a strong idea on what is great about it and what isn't.

The first thing I like about macOS is that it doesn't get in the way nearly as much as Windows. The operating system still strongly pushes you toward connecting an Apple Account when you set it up and within Settings, but not nearly as much as Windows. You can actually choose to create a local account on macOS without any scripts or tricks.

Whether the menu bar is good or not is very much subjective, but I personally don't find that much difference between it and a normal panel or task bar. The one sort of weird thing about macOS is that the apps are in the launchpad rather than a more traditional menu. But I like the full screen app selection. If I'm browsing my apps, I would like to use all the screen space I have.

If I'm not browsing and I have a specific one in mind, there's Spotlight! I love Spotlight so much. It's an application launcher that also does file search, web search, and can even perform specific actions. It's miles ahead of Windows search and many other desktop search systems.

The dock is another really neat feature because it doesn't just hold apps. You can put folders, files, and web links here too. So you could, for example, put a YouTube web link in the dock to quickly open YouTube. Or perhaps add the printers folder for quick access to printer statuses. It's awesome.

Finder

Finder, the default file manager, is not so awesome. For some reason, the default behavior in Finder is to store the positions of every file and folder in the window. So instead of arranging items by criteria like name or date or size, you can move them wherever you want. This sounds cool, but it's actually pretty annoying when items can overlap or I have to scroll horizontally to see everything. There's not even any snapping. And most of all, I don't care. There is no instance in which I want to place my folders and files manually.

Finder has a whole bunch of weird stuff like this. Did you know you can set the background of a folder to a specific color or image? Why? I have no idea.

I also have no idea why Finder can't cut and paste to move. You can copy and paste to duplicate, but cutting doesn't exist here.

I do really like Finder's Quick Look feature. Select a file, then press the space bar to preview it. This allows you to quickly look through, for example, text files to find the one you want by its contents rather than its name. It works for text, images, video, PDFs, and even 3D models!

Safari

I used Safari as my main browser for some time, but eventually switched to Firefox. Safari is not the most fast, private, or capable browser. It pretty much just exists to be an Apple default app rather than bundling third-party software. It's not bad, but it's not really that great either. Try Firefox or LibreWolf.

Activity Monitor

The Activity Monitor (like Windows Task Manager) is just sorta fine. I'm not sure how the CPU usage is calculated because it can sometime exceed 100%. I've seen one application reach as high as 160% CPU. Whatever that means.

Preview

Now this is a good macOS app. Preview is an image and document viewer, and it's awesome. It can annotate, crop, and rearrange images and PDFs with intuitive controls and a beautiful interface. Great utility here.

TextEdit

TextEdit is the included text editor and it's a bit weird. When you open it, it default to RTF instead of plain text. This gives you the ability to change fonts and colors and sizes and all that, but I'm just not sure why you would need that in this app specifically. There's a notes app for notes and a pages app for documents, so I'm not sure what the idea behind this is.

Display Management

I am torn about the display management on macOS.

On one hand, it's amazing. Displays connect and disconnect without any screen flashing, and scaling is great. On the other hand, macOS doesn't give you a lot of options on how you want to configure your displays. I would like to have one of my desktop monitors to be shared with the MacBook, but I can't disable a display on the MacBook side. I would have to completely disconnect when using it with my PC.

It's frustrating for anything more than a static configuration or a quick presentation on a standard screen.

App Management

Installing and removing apps on macOS is weird. Obviously, Apple want you to get all your apps through the built-in App Store, but most developers choose to distribute macOS apps as a DMG file.

This DMG file is an Apple Disk Image that, when opened, mounts a virtual drive in Finder. Inside is the application as a single bundled file alongside a shortcut to your applications folder. To install, you simply drag the app into the applications folder.

From here, you can then "eject" the virtual drive, delete the DMG file, and launch the app. When you first launch it, macOS will warn you that you downloaded it from the internet. Thanks. I knew that already.

This is a very odd way of handling apps and I can't decide whether I like it or not. Sometimes I wonder why developers choose to ship a DMG file with the app inside rather than the app file itself, but I suspect that is to ensure that users know they have to move the app to the applications folder. For system utilities and more complicated apps like Final Cut Pro, you might get a PKG file, which is more like a Windows EXE or MSI installer where you click through an install wizard.

macOS is very picky about what you run on it. If an app isn't notarized by Apple, (which costs a significant amount of money) macOS doesn't let you open the app and you have to click an override button in the settings app to open it for the first time.

I've even had an instance where macOS simply did not provide that option and I had to use the terminal to create a security exception for the app.

Uninstalling apps is worse. The official way to remove an app not downloaded from the App Store is to drag it to the trash. The problem is that none of the other stuff is uninstalled from the system, which results in residue that will inevitably fill up your disk with stuff you don't even use anymore. I had to install a third party application called AppCleaner to fully uninstall apps.

Overview

The MacBook hardware is great. It's blazing fast, has excellent battery life, and is pretty good to use. However, the laptop is difficult to keep in new condition and macOS, although less intrusive than Windows, is a huge control freak about how you use the operating system and what you install on it.