Long-term test Apple Macbook Pro (2017) Is an internal makeover enough for the Pro?
Apple’s most muscular laptop gets a performance boost for no extra cash, but is there a catch? Tom Morgan spends a fortnight with the 2017 Pro trying to find one…
DAY 01
Deja vu, anyone? This Macbook Pro doesn’t look any different to last year’s model. It’s got the same svelte all-aluminium chassis, the same space grey or silver colour options, and the same shiny Apple logo etched into the lid. The light-up logo of old is dead and buried.
At a little under 1.4kg, it’s not so light that I don’t notice it sitting in my bag, but it doesn’t give me back strain just lifting the thing either. It’s only 15mm thick, which is significantly skinnier than the previous generation.
DAY 03
I’m loving the 13in panel. It’s absolutely bursting with detail, and even the macos desktop looks pin-sharp. OK, so it might not take the overall resolution crown, but the Macbook Pro’s 2560x1600 pixels are plenty, thank you very much.
Photos and videos are dense with detail, but it’s in vibrancy and accuracy that the screen really stands out. It covers the DCI-P3 wide colour gamut, y’see – the same colour space that all of today’s blockbuster films are mastered in.
It shows, with brilliantly bright hues, pure whites and deep blacks all sharing screen time – and graphics pros will be very happy with complete SRGB coverage. If there’s a better-quality laptop screen, I haven’t seen it.
DAY 06
It’s time to dig out some dongles, as there are only two USB-C ports on this thing. They double up as Thunderbolt 3, so they’re super-quick when I plug in a compatible bit of hardware, but all my old gear is worthless without some kind of adaptor.
Thankfully the good ol’ 3.5mm port is still present and correct, so I can hook up a pair of normal headphones… even if, from time to time, I do like to blare my music out of the speakers that Apple has managed to squeeze into the sides of the keyboards. They can
really pump out sound, with ample volume and clear vocals. They’re decent enough for just about anything other than critical listening or audio production.
DAY 07
A week in and I’m tempted to crack open the 2017 Macbook Pro to see what really separates it from last year’s model… or I could just look in System Preferences, since Apple will be wanting this back.
It’s made the jump to Intel’s seventh-generation Kaby Lake processors, which squeeze a little more performance out of the silicon than last year’s Skylake CPUS without sapping any extra juice from the battery.
Even with a gaggle of Mac apps running, plus multiple Safari tabs and a Youtube video streaming at 1080p, everything feels supersmooth. There’s no slowdown, even when I chop up multiple 4K videos in Final Cut.
DAY 11
When it comes to getting work done, there’s nothing quite like the Macbook Pro. It’s all down to the fantastic backlit keyboard.
Each key has a minuscule 0.7mm of travel, but it needs more force than a regular keyboard to activate, which means careless typos are rare. This second-gen version of the new ’board has slightly more travel than last year’s Macbook Pro, so is even more comfortable to type on. I’ve been bashing out stories for days, without once thinking about plugging in an external keyboard.
The absolutely giant Force Touch trackpad has taken a while to get used to, though. You’ve got to half-press to drag and drop, relying on haptic feedback to let you know when you’ve applied enough pressure. But it’s worth sticking with – it stomps all over anything you’ll find on a Windows machine for accuracy.
DAY 14
With massive amounts of power, a gorgeous display and one of the best keyboard/touchpad combinations in the business, the Macbook Pro is an absolute joy to use – even more so than last year’s model, thanks to that new CPU.
With macos High Sierra set to arrive later in the year and streamline performance even further, this absolute beast of a laptop will be able to handle anything you can throw at it today, and should still be ticking over many years down the line.