This time is the first I ever hear about the SSDs commonly breaking on these. Does anyone have a quoted repair cost from Apple? Thinking, without any or expired applecare+.
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2019 16” Intel MacBook Pro is one of the best value laptops currently available.
- Thread starter memento mori
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About $800.
You can find plenty of threads about it here and elsewhere.
Thread '2019 MBP 16" - logic board failure rate?'
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2019-mbp-16-logic-board-failure-rate.2355168/
Mine still works perfectly, except for a bright spot on the screen for which it's getting replaced as we speak via AC+ that I renewed in May for a further year.
I'll keep it, and pay yearly AC+ until it can't get any new OS updates either legitimately, or via OCLP. I assume this will be when Apple stop shipping Intel code in their OS distributions. However I remain hopeful that that will continue for several years as the Intel Mac Pro was still shipping until June this year.
I'll keep it, and pay yearly AC+ until it can't get any new OS updates either legitimately, or via OCLP. I assume this will be when Apple stop shipping Intel code in their OS distributions. However I remain hopeful that that will continue for several years as the Intel Mac Pro was still shipping until June this year.
Owned one of those... I'm sorry, I strongly disagree.
Touch bar used to crash and stayed that way until the system rebooted.
The whole thermals aspect was just straight out of a nightmare.
I couldn't justify that on any kind/brand of computer.
If you need Windows you can score better deals overall.
If you want to stick by Apple's side, the whole M1 lineup makes way more sense, from the Air to the 16" Pro.
If you just want a big screen you could wait for lower prices for the 15" Airs on the used marketplace.
For that generation of MacBook Pro, I think only the big display and perhaps able to do BootCamp (Windows) are the advantages. Intel-based MacBook Pro and Air just don't last after a few years, either failing batteries or other components due to heat.
As an owner of an Intel Mac mini and an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, I would advise against buying any Intel Mac at this point. You're much better off buying a refurbished Apple Silicon computer (preferably with 16 GB of RAM) of any sort than purchasing an Intel machine. Just the battery life and performance gains alone make it worth the switch, let alone considering the fact that support for Intel Macs will probably end with macOS 15 (2024) or macOS 16 (2025).
Indeed. Intel Macs were mostly (except for some notorious cases like the 2011-era MBPs and iMacs, and the 2016-2018 MBPs) good machines, but in terms of heat generation and battery life, Apple Silicon was just made for the machines it was put into in a way that Intel could not rival, at least until they got the 10 nm node right.
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And will probably perform better too. In my experience even the i7/i9 16” we had at the office can’t compare to a base model M1 MacBook Air because they get hot and throttle so much that the performance suffers a lot.
Super common on them because of bad Apple engineering. It suddenly decides to feed big voltage to the SSD and it’s over. and unfortunately it completely kills the SSD so you can’t recover data. It doesn’t enter a read-only mode as usually SSDs will do when they fail, it just zaps it 😕
I had this model and sent it back to Apple 3 times due logic board and SSD failures. The third time it came back, I sold it ASAP and bought a 2015 instead. I'm planning on making the jump to AS when the M4's are released.
100% this. I got the M3 Max by trading in an M2 Air and keeping my 16" 2019 as my road machine. MacOS + PC Gaming while I travel is the best of both worlds..
'Best value'? Yeah, only because former owners like me had to suddenly get rid of them quickly and at a loss compared to other Apple products. It was 'great value' for the buyer of my i9 16" MBP, not great value for me!
In retrospect it was a weird beast, the first machine to rectify all the butterfly keyboard problems, remove the screen bezel, and had a fantastic sound system. I was wowed in the showroom. But every time I plugged it into a monitor and closed it up to use it as a desktop machine there were thermal problems. With Bootcamp the fans were out of control and I seriously worried about the longevity of the logic board because of the sustained high temps. Which meant gaming was in short fits and starts. A headache. The battery was huge and was simply a brute-force solution to CPU inefficiencies.
With my M2Pro MBP it is like night and day. Fans come on but gently, temps remain manageable, and I don't fear components will get fried.
In retrospect it was a weird beast, the first machine to rectify all the butterfly keyboard problems, remove the screen bezel, and had a fantastic sound system. I was wowed in the showroom. But every time I plugged it into a monitor and closed it up to use it as a desktop machine there were thermal problems. With Bootcamp the fans were out of control and I seriously worried about the longevity of the logic board because of the sustained high temps. Which meant gaming was in short fits and starts. A headache. The battery was huge and was simply a brute-force solution to CPU inefficiencies.
With my M2Pro MBP it is like night and day. Fans come on but gently, temps remain manageable, and I don't fear components will get fried.
Just read all this. Wow. I had no idea the 2019 was like this.
And here I was bummed out that I upgraded a year earlier with the 2018 model and missed my chance at having the "best" MacBook Pro for an Intel Mac abandonware toy machine down the road. Sounds like I wasn't as unlucky as I thought... unless the 2018 I'm stuck with is somehow even worse than this.
I feel like they'll kill the 2018 and 2019 models with the same OS release, whenever that is. It would be silly for them to have a whole separate Intel build of macOS just for one MacBook and one Mac Pro. But if that's how Intel Macs ultimately go out I guess there's always OCLP for the last Intel build of macOS on my 2018. I actually wondered if it would be worth trying to find a used 2019 model. There goes that line of thinking.
Apple's MacBooks near the end of the Intel era all seemed to be complete garbage.
And here I was bummed out that I upgraded a year earlier with the 2018 model and missed my chance at having the "best" MacBook Pro for an Intel Mac abandonware toy machine down the road. Sounds like I wasn't as unlucky as I thought... unless the 2018 I'm stuck with is somehow even worse than this.
I feel like they'll kill the 2018 and 2019 models with the same OS release, whenever that is. It would be silly for them to have a whole separate Intel build of macOS just for one MacBook and one Mac Pro. But if that's how Intel Macs ultimately go out I guess there's always OCLP for the last Intel build of macOS on my 2018. I actually wondered if it would be worth trying to find a used 2019 model. There goes that line of thinking.
Apple's MacBooks near the end of the Intel era all seemed to be complete garbage.
no it's not. your M1 and M2 cannot do everything that my i9 does but my i9 does everything your M1 and M2 can do.
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You say "I don’t think longevity is a good argument when choosing a M-series MacBook vs. Intel if the M-series is base configuration."
We agree, but only a limited cohort of folks should buy base configuration. For all the rest of us in Apple world the longevity of Intel boxes sucks. Those poor folks running Windows are of course the exception.
The alternative is to properly size RAM and SSD from the beginning.
My touchbar 2016 MBP with max RAM and 2 TB SSD has never had any issues, and I actually like the touchbar. I replaced it with an M2 MBP because the 16 GB RAM became too limiting, but otherwise the 2016 box still works fine. I have never heard "Intel-based MacBook Pro and Air just don't last."
My partner had the same 2016 MBP and her box too is still going strong, now in a new home.
Wintel folks aside, the M2 Max with 96 GB RAM like mine has far outperforms i9 laptops. And Intel boxes will age out as the Mac OS shifts away from optimizing for Intel.
Last all day (or two?) of heavy work on a full charge? I think not.
The only thing the Intel MBP can do that the M1 and M2 cannot is boot Windows. Otherwise, it's slower at literally everything with half the battery life.
Interesting post and viewpoint… kind of unclear whether you’re speaking from experience on this, and if so how long have you had the machine? What kinds of Windows tasks, programs, have you used and how was the battery drain and heat during that?
Thanks for the price-quote!
Thanks! Though I did some digging and found comparatively few threads about this. Just Louis Rossman saying this is the most common point of failure for the Intel 16".
I won't dispute that because what do I know, but compared to other issues that have popped up through the years for macbooks it doesn't look all too common in the absolute sense.
It was a great machine when it got released, but unless you have the latest top of the line 5600m dedicated graphics it will sound like a jet engine as soon as you connect an external display to it (unless you tinker for ages with a piece of software that sets a weird resolution and refresh rate) or launch some buggy programs such as Microsoft Teams.
Apart from the ability to run Windows natively for game (and maybe some very old software ?) I don't regret it at all. If you never use a second display, don't mind the noise and can find it cheap then yes I can see the point.
Apart from the ability to run Windows natively for game (and maybe some very old software ?) I don't regret it at all. If you never use a second display, don't mind the noise and can find it cheap then yes I can see the point.
Boot it natively. Apple Silicon runs Windows just fine for most tasks via Parallels, even gaming in more than a few cases.