MacBook verdicts Are the new MacBook Pros too hot to handle?
Stupendous power at a stupendous price. The 15in MacBook Pro is an exceptional slice of premium technology
I’ve reviewed many expensive laptops over the years. Some have been MacBooks, some have been workstations running Windows, but none have been quite as costly as the machine sitting in front of me. It’s the top specification of the 2018 15in MacBook Pro and, no, I haven’t got the 2 and 6 mixed up in the £6,209 price. But before you grab the reins of outrage and get on your high horse over Apple’s inflated prices, consider what this buys you.
At the heart of the machine, there’s the six-core 2.9GHz Intel Core i9 CPU, 32GB of DDR4 RAM and a discrete Radeon Pro 560X graphics card with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM. And it’s partnered with an immense 4TB SSD, which adds around £3,000 to the base price all on its own.
Plus, while the design and look of the 2018 MacBook Pro is no different from last year’s, a handful of subtle improvements have been made. The machine’s low-travel butterfly switch keyboard is now quieter and more reliable. And Apple has brought over its innovative True Tone technology from the iPad Pro, which matches the white point of the screen to the environment you’re working in at the time. This is no minor upgrade.
Price choices
The highest specification 15in MacBook Pro is clearly outside the purview of regular laptop purchasers. Even the cheapest model costs £2,349, and this is no featherweight: it includes a 2.2GHz quad-core, eighth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, a discrete Radeon Pro 555X graphics chip and 256GB of SSD storage. The table overleaf shows exactly how the various base specifications break down and the cost of upgrades.
Of the laptops we’ve tested recently, nothing matches the top-end 15in MacBook in terms of raw power and features, but the Razer Blade 15 ( see p63), Surface Book 2 15in ( see issue 283, p60) and Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 ( see issue 287, p54) all offer specifications that are competitive or better than the cheaper MacBooks and are also squeezed into similarly slim and lightweight packages.
Take the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1, for instance. You can pick up one of these excellent laptops with a quad-core 3.1GHz eighth-generation Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for £2,499. Alternatively, for even more power, the Razer Blade 15 comes with a six-core 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16GB of RAM, an Nvidia GTX 1070 and a 512GB SSD for £2,149. Both Windows machines are, ostensibly, better value than the equivalent 15-inch MacBook Pro when you look at the hardware you’re getting for the money. Why pay more?
Design and features
Despite the improvements, one thing that hasn’t changed in the 2018 MacBook Pro is its overall physical design. It’s available in two colours – silver and “Space Grey” – and while that may seem boring in the context of the headline-making changes, don’t be put off: this laptop is just as beautifully put together as ever.
Other manufacturers have caught up with Apple, but there’s still something special about the 15in MacBook Pro and its vast expanses of plain, grey matte aluminium, its minimalist collection of ports and its vast glass-topped touchpad. It’s a lovely thing and, for a powerful 15in laptop, its 1.83kg weight and 15.5mm thickness are impressive.
The new keyboard is a big improvement over the previous one, too, but Apple hasn’t changed the mechanics. Instead, it has added a silicone rubber membrane between the keys and the aluminium base beneath them.
It’s a process that achieves a couple of important effects. First, the keyboard is less rattly and clacky than before. It has a more damped, deadened sound to it than before, meaning you should feel less self-conscious when you’re rattling out your notes in a quiet meeting room.
Second, it prevents dust and grit from getting under the keys and into the switch mechanisms (according to the folk over at iFixit, at least), which is something that a lot of people have reported as a problem with the previous model.
Below the keyboard, the 15in MacBook’s touchpad hasn’t changed, but then it didn’t need to. Its huge surface dwarfs the touchpad on pretty much every other laptop on the market and its clever multi-stage haptic click mechanism means the mouse click is perfectly responsive, wherever you happen to press it.
Above the keyboard, the Touch Bar remains in place, with the dual purpose power/Touch ID button built into its right-hand side. You can use this to unlock the laptop and pay for items via Apple Pay; the latter is a useful inclusion, but I’m yet to be convinced about the Touch Bar. It’s undoubtedly clever but surely it’s time Apple dumped it and went full touchscreen instead.
Physical connectivity is the same as before too, but it’s still impressive. You get four 40Gbits/sec Thunderbolt 3-enabled ports, two on either side, offering the ability to charge from any port or connect any peripheral that you care to think of – from 4K displays to external GPUs. Moreover, thanks to the genius of Thunderbolt 3 it’s also possible to daisychain up to six devices from each port and even connect two MacBooks directly together for fast file transfer.
Gorgeous display
As always, the display is simply brilliant. It’s a Retina-class display with a resolution of 2,880 x 1,800. It measures 15.6in from corner to corner and uses IPS technology, meaning viewing angles are excellent. Colours are super-accurate too. MacBook displays have always been
“The Core i9 processor in our machine is partnered with an immense 4TB SSD, which adds around £3,000 to the base price alone”
calibrated in the factory and this one ships with a huge selection of professional calibrations to choose from. That means, whatever your workflow, you should be able to tweak the colour output to suit – as long as the application you’re working in is colour-aware, of course.
Out of the box, though, as has been the case for some time, the MacBook is set to DCI-P3 and it’s pretty much bang on. Our measurements show that, with the default profile selected, it covers 99% of the DCI-P3 colour space, reaches a searing 445cd/m2 maximum brightness and hits a stunning contrast ratio of 1,409:1.
For colour-critical work, it’s a magnificent display, but it’s also good to see Apple improving things for everyday use too, with True Tone adopted for this generation of MacBook Pro laptops – both on the main display and the Touch Bar. Essentially, this matches the white point of the screen to that of the ambient light so that your brain isn’t constantly adjusting whenever you look away from the display. This works well but is, Apple confirms, merely a tool to reduce eye strain. If you’re working on colour-critical graphics, video or photo-editing jobs, you’ll need to disable it.
The only problem is that there’s no simple toggle switch for this and no keyboard shortcut – you have to delve into the System Preferences and click on Displays to disable it.
Speed and more speed
The big question, given this is the first MacBook Pro ever to offer a six-core CPU, is how fast does it go? Initially, things didn’t look good. The Core i9 MacBook Pro had been reported to be throttling to an unacceptable level by various websites, to the point that it was slower than the cheaper Core i7 model below it.
Apple has since issued a fix, though, which seems to have sorted out the problem. In my testing, I’ve seen steady clock speeds at or above the base clock of 2.9GHz in every test I’ve run – and raw performance beats every other laptop we’ve tested.
Our overall benchmarks show the Core i9 is clearly the fastest of all the big, beefy laptops we’ve reviewed in our media-focused benchmarks. It’s faster than the Razer Blade 15, the Acer Predator Triton, Asus ROG Zephyrus and Dell XPS 2-in-1. None of those laptops, as tested, had Intel’s Core i9-8590HK CPUs on board, of course, instead running a variety of seventh-generation and eighth-generation Core processors. It’s worth noting that it would have been pushing 200, had it not been for the slow image-editing score – this is a bug we’ve seen with iMac Pros before, and doesn’t reflect its capability in the real world.
Storage is searingly quick, too, achieving an impressive 2.6GB/sec and 2.7GB/sec in sequential transfers (read and write respectively), beating most other rivals by a significant margin. Should you need to write large amounts of data to the drive, you won’t be held up by the MacBook Pro.
Graphics performance is less impressive, however, with a 118fps result in Manhattan 3 offscreen that is just a third of what we’ve seen from the Razer Blade 15 and Acer Predator Triton. Although this is clearly not a machine aimed at gamers, it would be nice to see a little more GPU horsepower, as there are plenty of creative applications that take advantage of the GPU.
For example, I ran the same 4K to 1080p down conversion using Adobe Premiere Pro as I did on the iMac Pro earlier this year. It took the iMac seven minutes to encode my 12-minute video clip, while the MacBook Pro managed it in 13 minutes. That’s still a great time, but back in the office you can hook up an external GPU such as the BlackMagic Designs eGPU, which houses a full blown Radeon Pro 560, to cut it down further.
What’s special about the 15in MacBook Pro is that you can carry all this power around in your bag and work on the go – and despite all that power, battery life is excellent. In our video rundown test, it lasted 8hrs 1min, which is twice the amount I’ve come to expect from big and powerful Windows laptops
Beyond the niche
The MacBook Pro, in the specification I’m reviewing here, is undoubtedly a niche machine. But it’s important to look behind the £6,209 price at the top of this review for a moment. Most of that money goes towards the huge 4TB SSD, which adds an enormous £3,060 to the price of the base, £2,969 Core i9 machine. And “base” isn’t really an appropriate word: it comes with a generous 512GB SSD and the same Radeon Pro 560X graphics chip. At that price, it looks surprisingly reasonable – it’s not quite as good value as the best 15in Windows 10 laptops, perhaps, but it’s not much more expensive and you get the bonus of exceptional display quality and superb battery life, plus a greatly improved keyboard. In truth, though, if you’re interested in buying a MacBook Pro, it’s because you’ve been using Macs for years and you’ll be used to paying a premium. And the fact is that the 15in MacBook Pro, especially in its Core i9 variant, is probably the most powerful 15in laptop money can currently buy. SPECIFICATIONS Six-core 2.9GHz Core i9-8950HK processor
4GB AMD Radeon Pro 560X graphics 32GB RAM 15in IPS display, 2,880 x 1800 resolution 4TB M.2 PCIe SSD 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 4 x Thunderbolt 3 83.6Wh battery macOS High Sierra 349 x 241 x 15.5mm (WDH) 1.83kg 1yr limited warranty