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Laptops · Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro 2019 i9

8owners with an opinion
29%of verdicts positive
1/4positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for noise and battery.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like it
That was the worst laptop I've ever had. Not only was it turning the jet engines on when you tried to do something more demanding that moving mouse around, it throttled thermally so much that you literally could not move that mouse around.
Doesn’t like it
I had the 2019 i9. The power difference and the cooling difference is astounding from the 2019 to the M1 (and the M1 is faster). I actually use my laptop on my lap commonly and I think the i9 was going to sterilize me.
Doesn’t like it
My 2019 i9 flagship MBP is just so, so terrible, and my wife's M1 MacBook Air is so, so great. I can't get over how much better her computer is than mine.
Likes it
I had a 2019 i9 MacBook Pro, which I actually really liked, but it always had issues with thermal management, and I was afraid that Apple would stop supporting the Intel Macs in the near-ish future, so I wanted to replace it while it still had some eBay value. I bought the Macbook when I was still working at Apple, so I had a considerable discount at the time which I do not have anymore, and so I looked at other computers outside of Apple this time around. I'm really happy with my Thinkpad. It's pretty fast, light, one of the most pain-free Linux installs I've ever had, and reasonably priced. I'm not overly sold on the keyboard nipple but it's easy enough to ignore.
Doesn’t like it
Personal laptop is M1 MBP 14" 16GB/512GB. It's great, the only thing I'm tempted by is the form factor and weight of the M2 Air. My main work laptop is a 2019 16" MBP with an 8 core i9 and it seems like an old piece of shit in comparison. It has serious issues managing heat and power consumption. It actively loses battery when plugged in if I use an external display while being in a video call.
Doesn’t like it
I keep having to unlearn years of "Laptop = hot" and "<2 hours of battery if I'm pushing the laptop". My 2014 got warm but never too hot on my lap but when I got the 2019 i9 it was unbearable to put on my lap without some kind of insulation. Now my M1 Max barely feels warm at all on my lap, often cold and the battery is really something else. Sometimes I play Factorio sitting on my couch and with my 2014/2019 MBP I HAD to have the power cord nearby. Obviously I could go on battery for a while but as a rule I always plugged it in while using (see also: I LOVE having magsafe back, the 2019 always made me super anxious with only having USB-C for charging). Now with my M1 Max I can go for hours playing without thinking about power. Likewise when I go up to see my parents/family I can jump on my laptop a number of times for quick tasks (~2-3 hours over a few days) and I never have to think about plugging it in. Maybe it was something I had installed on my 2014/2019 MBP but I felt like those discharged faster when not in use. My M1 Max feels much closer to an iPad where you can leave it unused for days and come back to still having 80%+ battery.
Likes it
I really still like my iMac and Mac OS as a whole is still very good. However I also experience Windows 10 daily as my work laptop uses that OS. That work laptop also is fully managed by my employer with updates pushed to me weekly mostly to cover the latest security issue. So I have biweekly updates at minimum to my work laptop; a nothing special i5 SSD based Dell; and these annoy me because I have to spend what feels like nearly five minutes between updates applied, boot, and more updates applied, before I can sign on. and there is my Mac. I have a 2019 iMac, i9, SSD, and 40g memory. Twenty five to forty minutes complete with a timer on screen just to rub it in, which doesn't show up for some time into the process just to add some spice. It is as long as the upgrade to Big Sur took or at least it feels that way. I am loathe to let my iMac update and while it claims it can do so overnight it always fails to do so. Apple's patch process even on iPads and to an extent my iPhone are abysmal too. I really don't understand systems that are otherwise fast take so long to do an update. PS: On a side note, Big Sur is the least stable OS from them I can recall in recent years. I have had hard freezes in some apps which they Mac three finger salute could not remedy and a few times I found myself signing back in as it just "rebooted"