Chris Maunder3-Jan-18 9:39

3-Jan-18 9:39

I bought a Macbook Pro to replace my beloved Macbook Air. I loved that Air, but it was getting a little long in the tooth. I had huge expectations that the Pro would be bigger, badder, faster, and just plain better.

It's not. It's absolute crap if you want to use Bootcamp / win10.

It's USB C only, meaning connecting it to an external display only works reliably if you reboot before you plug in. The trackpad constantly thinks left click is right click. The screen brightness constantly osculates as it tries to auto-adjust and I get about 3-4hrs max on battery when using Visual Studio.

I use *exactly* the same setup on the Air and had insane battery life and no problems whatsoever with displays or the trackpad.

So I disable auto-brightness, I bring a mouse with me if I can, plus a charger. Plus all the dongles, of course. And I shut down everything when I need to switch displays (ie each time I switch from home office to Office office).

It does, however, work brilliantly when in macOS. You get the lovely double-click pressure on the trackpad, USB-C hot swaps nicely. Font sizes just work on HiDPI screens.

So I decided maybe I should just stay in macOS and use Parallels. All the marketing material says Parallels works fast. It's super easy to install. You can even use VS, ISS and SQL on a low-end laptop with 2 cores and barely enough RAM to remember its own name.

I dutifully downloaded Parallels. Within minutes I had my Bootcamp partition running in a window. A really, really tiny window. Making that window full screen gives you a big black window with a tiny Windows window in the middle. Must be a driver issue. Maybe that explains why I have no network, either.

I install the Parallel tools and reboot. Tiny window still there. Still no network connectivity. I try every option I can find. I try every network option. Every display option. I google and bing and duckduck and disable the folder sharing and tweak this and that and basically do all the simple, obvious things that the interwebz says you must to with Parallels. Still not really functioning properly. I go into coherence mode (Parallels, not me. I was not coherent at this point) so at least I can run and view apps.

My goal was to see how Visual Studio would behave. I had a stopwatch ready and had a coffee. I was assuming I'd need razor sharp reflexes to spot the change in app performance given what I'd read. I fire up Visual Studio. I load up our solution. And wait. And wait. And it loads. I open some files...slowly. And ... try ... and edit ... some code...

This isn't boding well. Maybe it's a mouse driver UI thingy. Raw compilation will let it shine.

So I hit the rebuild button.

And wait.

wait..

wait....

and wait......

A full build in Bootcamp takes about 45s. The build process in Parallels was slow enough that I actually stopped it halfway through and gave up.

My conclusions is: No, parallels will not let you run Visual Studio in a usable manner.

The corollary is, of course, that Bootcamp won't let you run Windows 10 reliably on the a Macbook Pro, either.

This stuff shouldn't be this painful. There are tens of thousands of people using these devices in a vaguely similar way and yet these big, blinding, out-of-the-box issues are there, and the companies involved have the resources to deal with it.

But they don't.

If anyone else had experience with Bootcamp on a Macbook Pro or Parallels and VS I'd love to hear about it. I am truly hoping it's just me, that I've done something bone-headed or forgot to set "run_fast=true" in a config file or something.

cheers
Chris Maunder

Welcome to the Lounge

This was NOT an accident, and reeks of the same thing Apple got caught doing!