MacBook Pro (2016)

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It’s thinner, lighter and smaller all around, but the new MacBook Pro makes a big impression. The trackpad on the 15in version is downright ridiculous – twice as large as the trackpad on the previous generation – but we didn’t look down and

say, “Wow, that is a seriously huge trackpad”. That is until we’d been using it for a couple of minutes because it’s all about that gorgeous Touch Bar.

Apple doesn’t do touchscreen Macs, but the Touch Bar adds a strip of ultra-handy iOS-style contextual controls right where you need them, and the rest of the MacBook Pro got great updates, too. After our limited hands-on time, we think it’s got the right mix of power, portability, and ports to satisfy users of previous MacBook Pro and Air models. Let’s dive right into our first impressions – we’ll follow up with a full review next month.

Touch Bar

The Touch Bar, which replaces the row of Fn keys on top of the MacBook Pro’s keyboard, enables new functionality like Touch ID to unlock the Mac and make Apple Pay purchases in Safari without

needing to authenticate with an iPhone or Apple Watch. It’s made of smooth glass, so it feels great under your fingers, just like the trackpad itself.

The Touch Bar supports multi-touch, in case you need to tap or slide on more than one control at once. This would come in handy in some apps, such as djay Pro, but since the bar isn’t tall enough for common multi-finger gestures like pinch-tozoom, we were content to poke at with one finger.

We love how you can customise the Touch Bar’s default controls. Just pick View > Customize Touch Bar from the Finder menu, and you get a full suite of buttons you can drag right down to the Touch Bar. The options are similar to what you see when customizing the toolbar in your Finder windows.

But the best part of the Touch Bar is how quickly it changes as you switch apps. We used it to scroll through a full-screen album in Photos, as well as for scrubbing through the timeline in Final Cut Pro. Both were fast and responsive.

However, when we opened a new Mail message and started typing, the QuickType suggestions shown in the Touch Bar lagged behind our fingers. We had to consciously slow down to be able to see the predictions and select them from the Touch Bar, so it was faster to just type the entire word with our fingers. Happily, pulling up the scrolling emoji menu in Messages and choosing an emoji from the Touch Bar is a lot times faster than pressing Cmd-Ctrl-Space and using the Characters menu, like we have to do on our MacBook Air.

The other killer Touch Bar feature might be predictive suggestions in Mail. When you’re looking at a list of messages in your Inbox, you’ll

see a button on the Touch Bar that says ‘Move to Vacations’ or the name of another folder the app thinks is suitable. Mail seems to be guessing based on context, such as the sender and content of the message, and we can’t wait to see how well it does with the volume of email we get every day.

The new keyboard

The new MacBook Pro models have a low-travel keyboard similar to that used on the 12in MacBook, but Apple says it uses a second-generation butterfly mechanism to give the keys a better feel. The firm has also used slightly different materials for a different feel under your fingers. No haptics in the keyboard.

The keys feel about the same to us as on the MacBook. They don’t wiggle back and forth if you happen to strike one off-centre, and they make a deep clicking sound when you pound on them. But when we switched back to our trusty 2013 MacBook Air to write this hands-on, our fingers immediately preferred the bouncier mechanism of Apple’s old laptop keys. We’ve never had trouble

with the MacBook keyboard, and we’re sure we’ll get used to this one too, but we prefer the old kind.

Ports on both sides

If you were worried Apple would ditch the headphone jack on the MacBook Pro, you can exhale now. Every model has a headphone jack on the righthand edge. You also get four Thunderbolt 3 ports on the 13- and 15in models (only two on the lower-end 13in MacBook Pro with Function Keys, but we’re discussing the Touch Bar models here). Apple put two on each side, and it’s handy how all the ports can charge the laptop or connect to Thunderbolt, DisplayPort 1.2 and USB-C devices.

We’re used to having dedicated ports for each IO method, so the flexibility is appreciated, and it’s a relief Apple went with four instead of, say, two. You’ll still need adaptors for some things, such as peripherals that use USB-A or Thunderbolt 2 ports, or an SD card reader, since that slot is gone. But having multiple ports might let you avoid picking up one of the USB-C docks that MacBook owners need if they want to connect more than one device at a time.

First impressions

The beautiful Retina screen is unchanged from previous generations, and with the new Mac lineup, every notebook Apple sells is now Retina. In our full review we’ll dive more deeply into the performance of the updated processors and GPU, as well as Apple’s promised 10-hour battery life. But from what we’ve seen so far, the updated MacBook Pro is going to be worth the wait.