The price you pay for upgrades

No one has ever uttered the words, “Goodness, isn’t the MacBook Pro cheap?” The same is true of this 16in iteration, with prices starting at £2,399 inc VAT for the lowest spec. For once, though, this base spec will be fine for many people: it buys you a six-core Intel Core i7 with 16GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M and 512GB of PCIe SSD storage. The most expensive model is £5,769, which includes a juicy 2.4GHz Intel Core i9, 64GB of RAM, the 8GB AMD Radeon Pro 5500M and 8TB of PCIe SSD storage.

For the record, the £3,789 version I was sent for this review sits somewhere below that top-spec machine, with the same

CPU and graphics, but with 16GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD.

That sounds like a lot of money initially, so how does it stack up against rivals? This is trickier than it sounds as it’s difficult to find Windows laptops that go head to head against the Pro.

Take the Dell XPS 15 ( see issue 289, p62). For the equivalent spec to our review machine, this comes in at around £2,700 – that buys the same eight-core Intel Core i9 CPU with 32GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU with 4GB video memory and a 2TB SSD. Plus the display is a touchscreen OLED unit, where the MacBook employs a wide-gamut IPS LCD panel. However, it’s not a workstation-class graphics chip and the screen is smaller.

For workstation power, you’re looking at something such as the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 ( not reviewed). Choosing as close a spec to our review unit as possible – same processor, RAM and storage, but with a 15.6in 4K touchscreen, extra 1TB hard disk and 4GB Quadro T2000 graphics – it has a list price of £3,331. With discounts at time of going to press, this dropped to £2,831. And an upgrade to 64GB of RAM costs a more palatable £397.