MACBOOK PRO 16-INCH
Apple fixed the keyboard! What else lurks within that space-grey shell?
From £2,399 apple.com/uk
This is kind of a banner occasion. There hasn’t been a new size of Apple pro laptop since 2009 – before the iPad even existed. And with 17-inch screens now more the preserve of unwieldy gaming devices than sleek pro machines, the idea of 16 inches of working space is a damn tempting one.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro is actually only around two percent larger than the 15-inch MacBook Pro that it has replaced in Apple’s line-up – Apple has finally got with the times to slim down the bezels, affording an extra inch of screen space.
The display is 3072x1920, and while it’s a bit of a shame not to get a full 4K panel for this price, that’s the only complaint we have about it. It’s sharp, it’s vibrant, it has good viewing angles, and it comes with Apple’s True Tone tech, which makes it more comfortable on the eyes than your standard blue-tinted screen. The support for the wide-colour P3 gamut, plus 500 nits of brightness,
give colours lots of vibrancy, and everything is supremely accurate out of the box. It’s a great screen, and while 16 inches isn’t a revelation over 15, there’s no doubt that you just feel like you have a little bit more space for windows and tools.
Speakers won’t be a priority for a lot of laptop buyers, but Apple has still put the best-sounding drivers we’ve ever heard into here – they’re powerful, crystal clear, and provide stereo sound that feels like it’s coming from head height either side, not blasting up from your keyboard. It’s no reason to buy on its own, but it’s genuinely impressive and we count ourselves big fans.
Inside, you get the biggest battery you’ll find on any laptop for the foreseeable future: 100Wh is the limit the FAA places on battery size that’s allowed on a plane, so that’s what Apple has included here. It gives a battery life of around 10 hours of light browsing or movie playback, which is strong for something with such a big screen (though Apple’s other laptops beat it for overall longevity). Of course, editing 8K video will cut that down slightly…
And yes, as a reminder that this really is a pro machine, its fast storage and six-core processor can handle 8K video no problem, or advanced image processing, or giant music projects… though you may need to upgrade from its 16GB of RAM for real pro stuff.
Its AMD Radeon 5500M GPU is even decent, scoring similarly to the (admittedly older) Nvidia GTX 1060 for compute power in benchmarks, and with 4GB of VRAM for solid 3D and even gaming performance.
Just your type
And then there’s the keyboard. After years of a low-travel keyboard that was at best divisive (we quite liked it, many did not), and at worst proved unreliable (not good for a pro laptop), Apple has returned to using a keyboard with more travel, and it feels great. It’s one of the nicest we’ve used, in fact. It still has the Touch Bar at the top – a thin screen that regularly threatens to feel useful, but never quite follows through – plus fingerprint security, which is nice.
Small details: its webcam is still a crappy 720p affair that’s kind of embarrassing, but its microphones have been given a big upgrade, and do a great job. And it still has four Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports, one 3.5mm jack, and nothing else.
All told, it is an extremely slick and powerful machine that’s hard to resist. In terms of specs, it falls short of Dell’s XPS 15, which offers a 4K OLED screen, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, eight-core processor and slightly more powerful Nvidia graphics for £2,499. (A £2,799 version of the MacBook Pro matches this for CPU and storage.)
But specs aren’t everything – the accurate, big screen is a draw, macOS and its apps are a big deal for many, and it’s sturdy, reliable and portable. It’s an excellent work machine.