Review on (Renewed) Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch Core 🖥️ i5 Retina 2.7GHz (MF840LL/A), 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD by Micha Skolimowski ᠌

After the death of the Sony Vaio Z13, which served me faithfully for 5 years, I started looking for an alternative. I wanted decent performance, 1 Tb on disk, long autonomy, reasonable dimensions, and the ability to connect a docking station. It is clear that this does not happen cheaply, but I didn’t want to overpay too much, because. the purchase was unplanned. I was surprised to find that among the top Windows laptops, there was almost no choice left. Or big complaints about the quality, or more than 200 thousand (top-end Fujitsu U904 configurations), or something was missing to my requirements. But the top-end (16 Gb / 1 Tb) macbooks of the penultimate generation answered most of the requests for hardware, and at the same time they were sold for +/- 130 thousand, which is quite reasonable for such hardware. For the last generation, I considered it completely pointless to overpay - the price is one and a half times higher, the performance is less than 10%, there are no radically new features. At first I tried to stay on OS X. The native Office 2022 (then still beta) for Mac disappointed: Outlook doesn’t even have task delegation, but I have all the work built on them. Parallels, of course, does wonders, but with a combination of a Retina display on a laptop and two non-Retina external displays, it was not possible to make friends with both Mac and Windows applications with this situation. In general, rolled back to Boot Camp. OS X was very nice to me, but when 90% of the software is Windows (and you can’t change it either for external reasons, or there’s simply nothing), Boot Camp turned out to be the most problem-free way out. In the end, everything works magically, just flies. I bought additional docking stations from Henge Docks for work and home, each connected to 2 external monitors and a handful of USB peripherals through a hub. It's inconvenient that the cellular modem has to be plugged in separately, I'm already used to the built-in modem. From the real disadvantages of using a macbook with Windows: 1) Keyboard. I have not yet found solutions to swap Command and Opt on the built-in keyboard, but not change Win and Alt on the external one. 2) Boot Camp drivers for Thunderbolt are extremely limited, no hot plug, no daisy chaining. To connect peripherals to the docking station is not an option, only as a Mini Display Port for monitors. Otherwise, surprisingly, the Macbook Pro Retina Late 2022 is currently the most attractive Windows laptop in terms of price / configuration / quality ratio.