The story isn’t just new screen sizes. It’s, you know, those smaller tweaks too, like the ability to adjust the display refresh rate, mixed with bigger stuff—major overhauls such as the upcoming keyboard redesign and new AMD Radeon graphics processors. Apple has made its flagship laptop feel way more refined , and in practice it comes across as genuinely better.
The big price tag on the 16-inch MacBook Pro— it starts at $2,399 and hits $3,899 in our test setup— means it’s mainly for the kinds of jobs where composing, being a music producer, software development and basically other demanding mobile chores come into the picture. Still, if you can swing the cost, it’s one of those most powerful, capable, and packed-with-features big-screen laptops you can get.
Larger display, same starting price
For the same amount of money as the older 15-inch MacBook Pro that Apple retired, you’re now getting the refreshed 16-inch model. The two devices feel fairly near, because the overall design language of the MacBook Pro really hasn’t moved that much since 2016, honestly. So, the new MacBook Pro is still a Space Gray metal slab, pretty much like its predecessor too. Even so there are a few key differences once you take a closer look… and it’s not just tiny stuff either, more like noticeable changes.
You can tell the first difference and the highest configuration with your feelings, not your eyes: the keyboard is proof. After years of using a unique and unmistakable keyboard with “butterfly”-style switches and extremely shallow key travel in its laptops, Apple has returned to the traditional scissor-style switches that many desks use. Laptop keys have been used for a long time. Scissor switches are inherently less stable than Apple’s butterfly switches, but these switches here solve that problem and offer much greater vertical travel. (That said, it would be hard to find a key design that offers less travel than a butterfly switch.)
By stability, we refer to the tendency of the scissor and other keys to wobble a bit if hit off-center. The new MacBook Pro keyboard design features a scissor mechanism that locks into the keycap while the keys are not pressed, eliminating stability issues. The result is a very good key feel, at least as good as one would expect from a laptop keyboard. The keys feel solid, the vertical travel distance is just enough at 1mm, and the typing is much quieter than previous 15-inch MacBook Pro models.
However, the new keyboard puts the MacBook Pro back to normal typing rather than leaping to the top of the class. After typing this entire review on the keyboard, I found the experience more unsatisfactory than using the Lenovo ThinkPad, whose keyboard has long been the gold standard in mobile typing, mainly because of the extensive movement and fine-tuned response.
I appreciate the small changes to the new MacBook Pro’s keyboard, the addition of a physical Escape key and the rearranged arrow keys in an inverted “T” layout, just as much as I appreciate the key’s new conversion. The Escape key and the directional arrow keys are keys I use for everything from selecting a line of text to dismissing a Siri window. The 13-inch MacBook Pro doesn’t have a physical Escape key, instead of displaying a virtual key in the Touch Bar.
The Touch Bar itself is largely unchanged on the new MacBook Pro. It’s Apple’s answer to the full-touch screen capabilities that have been on Windows laptops for years. Depending on the app you’re using, the Touch Bar displays many additional controls, such as buttons for fast-forwarding through videos in Preview or switching between tabs in the Safari web browser.
The only small change to the Touch Bar is that now there is a physical space between it and the Touch ID sensor to its right, (that sensor lets you use your finger print to sign in to your macOS account, confirm Apple Pay buys, and do other related things.) The 13-inch MacBook Pro includes a Touch ID sensor as part of the Touch Bar.
So is it just a little extra screen ?
Aside from the keyboard , the other noticeable physical change is the new 16-inch display, which is larger. Still , the difference in size sounds way more dramatic than it really is.
The MacBook Pro is usually considered a “15-inch” laptop. Most of those units have 15.6-inch screens measured diagonally , but the earlier 15.4-inch MacBook Pro is smaller. While a full extra inch between 15 and 16 sounds substantial in absolute terms, it’s not a full gain in practice; That’s a 0.6-inch increase from the previous MacBook Pro’s display to the new one.
But it feels like the new screen is noticeably bigger when you are sitting right in front of it. I noticed, there’s enough room to show a full width Microsoft Word doc and a web page side by side, and I honestly couldn’t do that as comfortably on a 15-inch MacBook Pro, or at least I did n’t find it possible. Narrower bezels around the screen also contribute to a larger feel.
These thinner bezels also allow Apple to increase the screen size without adding many volumes — and thus weight — to the laptop. That is a tried and true strategy, and many manufacturers have used it to fit larger screens into existing laptop designs without increasing their footprint. Apple hasn’t quite accomplished that feat. The new MacBook Pro is a bit larger and heavier than its predecessor , though not by much. This updated laptop comes in at about 0.64 x 14.1 x 9.7 inches (HWD) and tips the scale at 4.3 pounds, compared with 0.61 x 13.75 x 9.5 inches and 4 pounds for the 15-inch version before it. Both models feel heavy, dense, and substantial — they may look sleek and modern, but they’re not ultraportables. (We define a laptop as weighing 3 pounds or less and less than half an inch thick.)
Aside from the trimmer bezels, larger size and slightly higher pixel density of 226 pixels per inch, the screen’s features are mostly the same as the Retina Display that appeared on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models before. Rated for a peak brightness of 500 nits, the panel can easily be viewed in a well-lit room. It can also display the full P3 color gamut, useful for photographers and video editors doing color correction work.
Video editors can also appreciate that Apple has added a tool to adjust the monitor’s refresh rate in System Preferences. The use case here is to better match the refresh rate to the frame rate of the video footage. However, it is a bit complicated to activate. You will need to keep holding down the Option key while clicking the Scaled item inside the Display section of the System Preferences app. (The options move from 47.95Hz all the way to the full 60Hz the monitor can.)
Bass punch
Aside from the slightly better screen and keyboard, the 16-inch MacBook Pro’s audio quality improvement is significant. I’ve never heard such powerful sound quality from a laptop, even from the already excellent speakers on the 15-inch MacBook Pro. The improvement comes almost entirely from adding two subwoofers on the bottom left and right edges of the new MacBook Pro chassis. They deliver incredible bass levels, even on our incredible test tracks, including Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild” and The Knife’s “Silent Shout.”
In addition to the new subwoofers, two tweeters are housed in each generously sized speaker grille next to the keyboard. The upward-facing setup of these tweeters also seems to help the sound quality a bit, versus the downward-mounted speakers on the bottoms of a lot of other laptops, say the Dell XPS 15. The MacBook Pro’s speaker placement feels kind of unlucky, so there’s no real space for a dedicated numeric keypad sitting next to the keyboard.
On the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the port selection, touchpad, and webcam are basically the same as the previous versions. And that’s a good thing for the touchpad too, because its spacious glass surface gives steady haptic feedback wherever you click, no matter the spot. That’s simply fine in the case of the webcam, which offers decent 720p video quality. However, it can’t match the superior quality of some laptops and all-in-one PCs — including the Apple iMac — has a 1080p camera. That’s a bad thing in the case of port selection. It’s nice to have four USB Type-C ports, all of which support Thunderbolt 3 speeds, but those ports and headphone jack are all you get. Professional media editors will almost certainly need to purchase special adapters for their SD cards, external hard drives, mice, external monitors, and other peripherals.
Wireless connectivity includes Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5.0. Not supporting next-generation 802.11ax Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6).
Powerful CPU, optional graphics
Featuring an Intel Core i9 processor, an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M graphics chip with 8GB of video memory, and 32GB of system RAM, our MacBook Pro review unit is a performance powerhouse. The main configuration option that our review unit lacks that can further boost performance is up to 64GB of system RAM. The lowest-end version of the machine has an Intel Core i7, 16GB of memory and an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4GB of video memory. Storage options range from a 512GB SSD to a massive 8TB SSD, the widest SSD on any laptop we’ve seen to date, Apple or otherwise. (Our review unit has a 2TB SSD.) The previous model topped out with a 4TB drive.
Honestly, most of these specs feel a bit overkill for, like, normal use, you know checking email, browsing the web, all that stuff. It’s kinda a bummer Apple doesn’t put out a 16-inch MacBook Pro with cheaper, less powerful computing parts. If you want the big-screen experience but you don’t really need pro grade performance, then you end up paying way too much for a MacBook Pro, or you switch to a Windows laptop instead.
The CPU choices are pretty much the same as what showed up on the prior 15-inch MacBook Pro. Apple won’t spell out the precise CPU models it uses in its machines, but we can still infer quite a lot. In our review unit, the processor is a 9th-generation, eight-core Core i9, running at a base clock speed of 2.4 GHz. In other words those numbers point to a “Coffee Lake” class Intel Core i9-9980HK or maybe something in that neighborhood. (As of now, Intel still hasn’t released the matching 10th Gen high-power laptop chips, just parts aimed at ultraportable and mainstream rigs.)
Memory speeds are up a bit , like 2,666MHz, though honestly the really noticeable lift is switching to the new Radeon Pro 5000M-series graphics chip, powered by AMD’s most recent 7-nanometer microarchitecture.
2019 Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage, 2.6GHz Intel Core i7) – Space Gray: Buy it now
Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, 16GB RAM, 1TB Storage, 2.3GHz Intel Core i9) – Space Gray (Renewed): Buy it now
Test: Solid multimedia performance
While that new GPU is likely not weak, as we’ll see below, the MacBook Pro is said not to be marketed as a gaming laptop. You can certainly play games on it, but this machine is all about power for creative jobs.
I then compared its benchmark performance in our multimedia tests with other similarly priced, professional machines, including the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo, Dell XPS 15, and Lenovo ThinkPad P53. I also added a gaming laptop, the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model, because we reviewed the Blade configuration very appealing to gamers and content creators.
The most common media manipulation tasks are image editing, video transcoding, and 3D rendering and animation. We test these using a variety of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. In each case, the MacBook Pro competed, though it performed best in only one of our three multimedia tests.
The first is Maxon’s CPU driven Cinebench R15 test, it borrows ideas from the company’s Cinema 4D editing suite , and it’s fully threaded so it can use all the cores and threads you have on hand. In other words Cinebench leans into CPU work rather than GPU tasks when it renders a more complex image. The result is an exclusive score that shows the PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is usually a good predictor for our Handbrake video editing test, another complex workout that is highly CPU dependent and scales well with more cores and threads. In it, we put stopwatches on test systems as they transcoded a 12-minute standard 4K video (the open-source demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a test of time, and lower results are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing standard. We typically use the early 2018 version of Photoshop Creative Cloud to apply a complex series of 10 filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. For the MacBook Pro, we went with the newest Photoshop for macOS , since the older releases are 32-bit and so they don’t play well with the available options. On macOS Catalina it’s only 64-bit anyway. We then figure out how long each action takes and in the end we just sum up the whole duration that was used, to get the total time taken. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here, and differences in Photoshop versions won’t seriously affect the results.
The Photoshop test emphasizes the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM. Still, it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the filter application process, so systems with powerful chips or graphics cards strength can be enhanced. In this case, the Radeon Pro 5500M didn’t help the MacBook Pro achieve the fastest times.
However, the raw power of this GPU is pretty much undisputed. It managed to reach an average frame rate of 47 fps (fps) while running Unigine Heaven gaming emulation on the Retina Display’s native resolution, 3,072 x 1,920 pixels, with Ultra graphics quality settings. That is lower than the 60fps or higher than high-end gaming laptops can display, but still better than its predecessor’s 38fps results.
The performance of the 2TB SSD is also formidable. It recorded an average read speed of 2,489MBps and write speed of 2,725MBps on the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, which measures the suitability of subsystem storage for handling large, high-resolution video files. That largely matches the performance of the 4TB SSD we tested on the 15-inch MacBook Pro, which achieved read and wrote speeds of around 2,600 MBps.
Then there’s the runtime of the battery. The MacBook Pro’s 100-watt-hour battery helped it land an excellent, nearly 19 hours of battery life in our kind of quick video test. Its pretty impressive too, especially since the laptop is running a powerful CPU and GPU together, plus that bright high resolution panel.
Of course, most users will use their MacBook Pro for active pursuits rather than passive video watching. The MacBook Pro is rated for up to 11 hours of continuous web browsing based on Apple’s testing.
The ultimate MacBook Pro of 2019
Some of the improvements Apple made to its latest MacBook Pro are minor, but the most consequential is to address one of our (and many users’) main problems with its predecessor: the shallow keyboard. Aside from the board, the other big improvements, especially the sound quality, are impressive, and they make what is already an excellent laptop even better.
In the past, we were slightly disgruntled with recommending the MacBook Pro due to keyboard issues and Apple’s increased response to it. The butterfly keyboard has been popular on the fronts of comfort and, in its first iterations, durability, and Apple has refined it by half as many generations after generation. This model shows that Apple is finally listening to its loyal users.
With that change and advancements on the component and display fronts, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is easily recommended for fine content creators, whether they’re editing 8K video footage or composing Important code updates.
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Tech Reviewer & Product Analyst
Định Bia has spent over 10 years testing consumer electronics with a focus on smart technology. He work as a product advisor at Biareview where he helped customers find the right devices for their needs. He personally tests every product featured on this site using a consistent evaluation framework covering quality, durability, and value. All reviews are based on experience, not influenced by the manufacturer.