MacBook Pro 13-inch
The smaller MacBook Pro got a big update for 2020 but is a new keyboard enough?
The display is both 20% brighter and offers a wider colour gamut than the MacBook Air
£1,799 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES 13.3in Retina display (2560x1600), True Tone, 2.0GHz quad-core 10th gen Intel Core i5; Intel Iris Plus graphics, 16GB memory, 512GB SSD, Magic Keyboard, Touch Bar, Touch ID, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, 4x Thunderbolt 3 ports, 720p FaceTime camera
This is Apple’s new 13in MacBook Pro. The higher-end version. As there are, in fact, two new 13in MacBook Pros. The low-end two-port model is pretty much the old 13in but with the new Magic Keyboard and double the storage; the new, high-end four-port model also has newer and optionally much bigger specs. Here, we’re reviewing the higher-end 13-inch MacBook Pro which has four USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 speed Thunderbolt 3 ports, which we vastly prefer.
The speakers on both sides are good if not 16in MacBook great. The speakers have HDR (high dynamic range), spatial audio and Dolby Atmos. The sound stage is in front of you though, not all around like it is with the 16in MBP. There’s still a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a three-mic array. It’s not ‘studio quality’, but it’s fine for most uses. Which is more than can be said for the 720p webcam. We get that better cameras require depth and the MacBook lids have none to offer but, given how good iPhone, even iPad selfie cameras are, these cameras just aren’t keeping up.
Panel show
The panel is 13.3 inches diagonally and 500 nits. It’s a Retina display with P3 wide gamut, which means reds look richer and greens deeper. And True Tone, which adjusts the colour temperature of the display.
So… 13 inches, not 14 inches. Apple didn’t continue its war on bezels here like they did on the 16in MacBook Pro – keeping almost the same chassis size but pushing the screen out further towards the edges.
It’s also still not OLED, which we’re fine with. OLED seems to work better on small phone-sized displays and big TV-sized displays than it does on tablet and laptopsized displays, especially when it comes to things like consistent brightness levels. miniLED and microLED should offer the best of both worlds… at least eventually. Our guess is that that kind of redesign is still on the way, it’s just either late thanks to everything that’s happening in the world right now, or the next-generation externals are waiting on some next-gen internals to go with them. The display still looks great and is both 20% brighter and offers a wider colour gamut than the MacBook Air, which is something to consider if you do a lot of imaging work.
Unfortunately, there’s no 802.11ax Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6), which we were hoping to get with this update. Since none of the recent Macs do, we’re guessing they’re deliberately choosing to sit this one out on the Mac, stick with the very mature 802.11ac for the time being.
Processing power
There’s still an Apple T2 ARM-based co-processor riding shotgun. Similar to the A-series found in previous gen iPhones, it handles everything from Touch ID and Apple Pay authentication, to securing the camera and microphone, to real-time encryption, to acceleration blocks for things like H.265 encode and decode, to custom controllers for the various other components. It adds some expense to the MacBook lineup, but it also differentiates it in terms of technology and capabilities from everything else on the market. We’re okay with it being the same T2 we’ve had for a few years now, and expect we’ll only see a T3 when Apple is ready to move the Mac to Face ID.
The 13-inch MBP also retains Intel’s eighth generation processors and Iris 645 graphics on the lower-end models. The higher-end model, like the one we’re reviewing, comes with Intel’s latest 10th generation processors and new Iris Plus graphics; offering far more execution units and the ability to do display stream compression, should you want to connect up to Apple’s 6K Pro Display XDR. You know, as one does.
There’s no discreet GPU option like there is on the 16in MBP, likely because of the size and thermal differences, but you can add an external eGPU over Thunderbolt.
In terms of battery life, Apple promises 10 hours of very light workloads, which is slightly less than the 11 hours they promise for the MacBook Air. But the MacBook Pro uses Intel’s more powerful U-series processors, while the MacBook Air uses the more efficient Y-series processors. Apple’s also fine running processors at thermal max, so once you ramp them up, not only will you need to either cool them or your lap, that battery life will burn down much, master faster.
To test one of the heavier potential workloads, we imported five minutes of 12-bit 4K Canon RAW Lite footage into Final Cut Pro X, applied a lookup table, or LUT, added a basic colour grade, and then rendered it out on this machine as well as the Intel Core i5-equipped MacBook Air and the Intel Core i9-equipped 16in MacBook Pro.
It took the 16in MacBook Pro less than 10 minutes. The 13in MacBook Pro took just over 16 minutes. And the MacBook Air almost 50 minutes. None of this is scientific, there are way too many variables and it’s totally not a realistic workload for the MacBook Air, but you can see how they all play out. So, as usual, the 13in MacBook Pro, especially on the higher end, is really about choosing as much portability as you can get while retaining as much performance as possible.
Storage and memory
The key to Apple’s update strategy in the mid-range, for a long time now, has been
giving you a fair bit more bang for your buck. It’s what you paid yesterday, only better. And that’s absolutely true for the new 13in MacBook Pro. Now, you start off with double the storage and a 256GB SSD at the entrylevel, but can push that up to 2TB. At the high-end, you start with 512GB but can then push that up to 4TB.
It’s finally affordable to have enough storage to keep more than a few big pro app projects on your internal drive, so you can move around without a bunch of SSDs and card dongles dangling around you. The sweet spot for most people is probably around 1TB for the SSD, but if you do a lot of video work, it’s great that you can go higher.
The low-end memory options still start at 8GB and can go to 16GB. The high-end starts at 16GB now and can go to 32GB because that’s possible with the new, 10th-gen Intel chips. 16GB is good for most people, unless you’ll be running a bunch of virtual machines or simulators or other memory-intensive tasks.
Keyboard
For a while now, ever since Apple introduced the new scissor-switch style Magic Keyboard on the 16in MacBook Pro, people have been waiting for it to spread meme-like across Apple’s MacBook lineup. And, with this 13in MacBook Pro, it finally has. The failure of butterfly is now complete, and the Magic Keyboard future is fully operational, to totally mix our Star Wars metaphors.
These new Magic Keyboards really are the best of both keyboard worlds. They have a bit more travel at the cost of a bit more thickness,
which is fine, and maintain a lot of the stability at the expense of some of the clickety-clack.
It also has a proper oe key, which will delight developers and traditionalists everywhere, and a proper set of inverted-T arrow keys. It also still has the Touch Bar between the oe key and the Touch ID-enabled power button. We know some people hate it and would rather have traditional function and media keys there. We don’t mind it in theory, like it even for the shortcuts it exposes and the ease of scrubbing between browser tabs and through the timelines it enables. But it’s going on four years old and Apple hasn’t expanded it to any other Macs, hasn’t evolved the technology in any significant way, and hasn’t added anything by way of haptics. So, maybe it’s time to go all-in on making the Touch Bar better and more ubiquitous, or just to get out and give people their function and media keys back.
The new, low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro starts at £1,299. That’s for the two-port, eighth-generation model, which can be build-to-order optioned all the way up to £2,499. For that, you get pretty much the previous MacBook Pro with double the storage and the Magic Keyboard. That’s really for anyone who might otherwise go for a MacBook Air but either wants the MacBook Pro design, the MacBook Pro brand, or does something like photography that’ll benefit from the brighter, wider gamut pro display.
The new high-end starts at £1,799. That’s for the four-port, 10th-generation model, which can go all the way up to £3,599 with all the bells and whistles. That’s for anyone who either has an iMac, iMac Pro, or Mac Pro, maybe even a 16in MacBook Pro but needs a lighter, still as powerful-as-possible Mac to travel with. Or for people who just want as pro a Mac as possible but don’t want anything even a couple of inches bigger or that’s bound to a desktop.
So this isn’t the MacBook Pro update of anyone’s rumour-filled dreams. It certainly isn’t ours. And we’re still missing things like a more expansive display, a better camera, 16-inch quality mics and speakers, and ARM inside. That’s the update everyone really wanted. But getting Intel 10th-gen, Iris Plus graphics, and most importantly, the new Magic Keyboard. Well, that’s the update everyone really needed. At least for now.