Lots of Apple products are launched stage-lit, introduced to millions by the company’s top executives. The MacBook Pro 16 was not. Tim Cook announced it on Twitter. Interested in selling Macbook Pro 16? Tradelectronics offer high value for Macbook trade in, or sell old laptop to us for cash!
There are millions of eyes there, of course, but it avoided Cook having to admit what the MacBook Pro 16 is. It is something of an apology for Apple’s recent MacBook strategy.
Its keyboards were not just bad for serious work, according to many at least, but had a habit of falling apart. And in recent years some MacBooks have often had to make do with CPUs so old you might find them in a bargain bin at a PC fair next to dusty ball mice and copies of Windows Vista.
Apple quietly dropping a major new product onto the Apple Store is like a too-proud friend apologising for a major bust up with a note slipped under your door. But the good news is this note is a heartfelt one.
There are four interesting parts to the MacBook Pro 16. These are the speakers, the keyboard, its huge battery and the screen, including its effect on the wider design.
The speakers are easily the most dynamic part in the wider world of laptops. A laptop maker trying to make its speakers seem good usually boils down to paying an audio brand to use their name and, it would seem, little more.
Apple has offered the best laptop speakers for years now, but the MacBook Pro 16’s are in a different league to anything released yet. Six drivers are present, including paired force-cancelling bass units. This means the bass drivers dance in polarised harmony, reducing vibration and stopping the drivers from distorting sonically by straining against their moorings.
The same concept has been used for years in small wireless speakers that use passive radiators, to great effect. And it’s just as effective here. The MacBook Pro 16 has the richest sound system ever put into a laptop.
It’s very loud, has far better mid-range detail and presence than any rival and has greater spatial information than any of them, too. We dare you not to be impressed.
Apple has used some outright tricks to make the MacBook Pro 16 sound as full as it does, though. Subjecting the speakers to a tone generator, they appear to recreate sound in the 30-70Hz range using sound in the 75Hz-plus range, which the drivers can actually output. Some of the bass notes you hear in music are actually an octave (or two) higher than they should be, but most other laptops and small wireless speakers simply leave this low-frequency bass out. They pretend it doesn’t exist.
Treble can sound sightly brittle at times, with your head in certain positions, there seems to be mild phasing issues. But still these are the best laptop speakers to date, and that’s the main takeaway.
The MacBook Pro 16 keyboard is just as important a change, but this is one of regression rather than evolution. Apple introduced its butterfly keyboard design in 2015. After five years of making us type on keys with all the depth and tone of a piece of eggshell cracked against a kitchen worktop, it has returned to a more traditional scissor design.
It turns a thin key “click” into a more satisfying “clonk” and roughly doubles the travel to 1mm.
This is still a fairly shallow keyboard. Lots of Acer and Asus laptops have around 1.4mm travel and feel more substantial still. Apple’s pre-Butterfly MacBook Pro 2013 keyboard was much deeper, too. But this will be a very welcome shift back for anyone who loves everything about MacBooks apart from the keys (and the price, as no-one loves MacBook prices apart from Apple shareholders).
Other parts of the control interface are superb as usual. The MacBook Pro 16 has the best white LED keyboard backlight in the business. The touchpad is gigantic and, unlike the keyboard, Apple’s proprietary click feedback tech is better than what is on offer elsewhere.
The Touch Bar has not changed significantly, but our view of it has improved since its early days. Asus’s attempts at creating something similar with a screen under the touchpad pale in comparison, not least because Apple’s control over hardware and OS allow for much wider utility. The shortcuts that appear on the Touch Bar change with virtually every app used. Or you can switch it to a function key bar. Also, space has been made for the escape key to make a welcome return.
The display has changed as well, but not in a particularly dramatic way. Naming makes us think the MacBook Pro 16 has a screen one inch larger than the old version, but it’s only 0.4 inches larger. 15-inch laptops have 15.6-inch screens, remember?
We are not complaining, though. Stylish and fairly portable large-screen laptops are fairly rare today, and this one instantly heads to the top of the list.
The screen is a 16.0-inch IPS LCD screen of 3072 x 1920 pixels. This may not be 4K, but it is sharp.
Apple’s big claim is that the MacBook Pro 16 screen tracks 100 per cent with DCI-P3, the colour standard used in the film industry. WIRED dug out a colorimeter to test this. According to our equipment, the screen can display even deeper greens than DCI-P3, but misses out fractionally on the deepest red, magenta and blues. However, these are fractional gamut differences. The screen’s colour is superb for an LCD, and its calibration is excellent.
The MacBook Pro 16’s specs suggest it can reach 500cd/m, very bright for a screen this size. It won’t get anywhere near this without bright ambient light. Using an LED torch we tricked it to pushing up to 482cd/m. Close enough, and very bright indeed.
Nothing much else has changed. The MacBook Pro 16 still does not have a touchscreen and the hinge only tilts back a fairly conventional 140 degrees. It’s enough for normal use, though.
Apple has received a lot of criticism for its laptop designs over the last couple of years, but it has a solid argument that it does try to design them for their real-world use. For better or worse.
The MacBook Pro 16 battery is one of the best cases of this in action. This is a 100Wh unit, significantly larger than the MacBook Pro 15’s 83Wh.
Apple claims it will last 11 hours, which is terrific for a laptop with a Core i9 processor. The last Windows laptop tested with this CPU managed 3.5 hours.
A few half work days of light use suggested we’d see 11-12 hours off one charge. It’s not unusual for Apple to exceed its claimed figures in certain contexts. We then played five hours of YouTube: HD videos of an aquarium’s creatures slowly ambling across the 16-inch screen. Riveting stuff. After those five hours it had lost 46 per cent charge, suggesting it would be able to last 10 hours 52 minutes off a full battery. That’s a lot of aquarium time.
The MacBook Pro 16’s battery life is clearly excellent, and is only seems more impressive when you consider its CPU is one made for performance, not ultra-low power consumption.
Other areas of the MacBook Pro 16 are not hugely interesting. Apple talked up how smaller screen borders let it put a bigger screen in this laptop without increasing the size too much. But there is a footprint increase since the MacBook Pro 15, the borders are still larger than some Windows laptops and — again — let’s remember the screen size increase is 0.4 inches, not a whole one inch.
Processor options have been boosted to the 9th Gen Intel Core i7 and i9 lines, but if Apple had done anything less it might as well have given up the laptop game entirely. Both of these are extremely powerful.
As ever, for a host of historical political and practical reasons the MacBook Pro 16 uses AMD Radeon graphics hardware rather than the more popular Nvidia RTX kind. Its AMD Radeon Pro 5500M can play fairly advanced games like Alien: Isolation and Subnautica well, the latter at middling settings.
However, big gamers probably should not buy this laptop. You can get a Windows model with an Nvidia RTX 2060/2070/2080 at this price, they are radically more powerful, and MacOS still only sees a fraction of the games released on Windows.
The upper part of the keyboard also gets hot during play, although Apple’s pimped thermal management is otherwise great. This laptop is silent during light work, and the speed at which it disperses heat after periods of severe load is excellent. If you’ve bought one of these and have encountered fan issues, it’s probably down to an OS update.
Such problems can come and go, but connectivity is here to stay. The MacBook Pro 16 has four of the fastest connectors around, Thunderbolt 3. However, this does mean those who need adapters for memory cards or USB peripherals will continue to have to carry them around. There is, thank God, still a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Verdict
Apple has made some interesting steps forward (and back) with the MacBook Pro 16. Its return to comfortably traditional scissor mechanism keys improves the keyboard feel, and hopefully reliability. It won’t impress ThinkPad X1 Carbon fans, but key response is better.
Battery life and speaker quality are superb. Add this to the performance of Intel’s Core i7 and Core i9 processors and you get one of the best large-but-portable laptops for creatives in the world. But, as ever, starving artists need not apply.
Source: Wired
