Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch

amazon Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch reviews

The story isn’t just new screen sizes. From small changes like the ability to adjust the display’s refresh rate to major overhauls like the upcoming keyboard redesign and new AMD Radeon graphics processors, Apple has made its flagship laptop I’m even better. The substantial cost of the 16-inch MacBook Pro — it starts at $2,399 and $3,899 in our test configuration — means it’s mostly suited to the types of work that composing, music producer, software developers, and those with similar demanding mobile computing needs. However, if you can afford it, this is one of the most powerful, capable, and feature-rich large-screen laptops you can buy.

Bigger screen, same starting price

For the same price as the older 15-inch MacBook Pro that Apple discontinued, you’re now getting the significantly upgraded 16-inch model. The two laptops look very similar, as the overall design language of the MacBook Pro hasn’t changed much since 2016. That means the new MacBook Pro is a Space Gray metal plate just like its predecessor. But there are some key differences if you examine closely.

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 now a physical space between it and the Touch ID sensor to its right. (This sensor allows you to use your fingerprint to sign in to your macOS account, authenticate Apple Pay purchases, and do other similar tasks.) The 13-inch MacBook Pro has a Touch ID sensor as part of the Touch Bar.

Is it simply a little extra screen?

Aside from the keyboard, the other significant physical change to the MacBook Pro is the new, larger 16-inch display. However, the difference in size sounds more than it is.

The MacBook Pro is generally classified as a “15-inch” laptop. Most such machines have 15.6-inch screens on the diagonal, but the older 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 the new screen feels noticeably larger when you’re sitting in front of it. I discovered there was enough room to display a full-width Microsoft Word document and web page side by side, which I didn’t find to be doable on a 15-inch MacBook Pro comfortably. 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 larger and heavier than its predecessor, though not by much. The new laptop measures 0.64 x 14.1 x 9.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.3 pounds, compared to 0.61 x 13.75 x 9.5 inches and 4 pounds of its 15-inch predecessor. 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 hold down the Option key while clicking the Scaled option in the Display pane of the System Preferences app. (Options range from 47.95Hz 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 nature of these tweeters also helps with sound quality, compared to the downward-mounted speakers on the bottoms of many other competing laptops, including the Dell XPS 15. The MacBook Pro’s speaker placement is unlucky, which means there’s no room for a dedicated numeric keypad next to the keyboard.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro’s port selection, touchpad, and webcam are the same as previous versions. That’s a good thing in the case of the touchpad, with its spacious glass surface providing consistent haptic feedback no matter where you click. 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.

Most of these specs are overkill for normal use, such as checking email and browsing the web. It’s a pity that Apple doesn’t offer a 16-inch version of the MacBook Pro with cheaper, less powerful computing components. If you want a big-screen laptop and don’t need professional-grade computing performance, you’re stuck paying too much for a MacBook Pro or choosing a Windows laptop instead.

The CPU options are the same as those on the previous 15-inch MacBook Pro. While Apple doesn’t reveal the exact CPU models it uses in its computers, we know that the processor in our review unit is a 9th-generation, eight-core Core i9, running at a base clock speed of 2.4 GHz. Those specs suggest it’s a “Coffee Lake” class Intel Core i9-9980HK or something similar. (At the time of this writing, Intel has yet to release the equivalent 10th Gen versions of its high-powered laptop CPUs, only chips for ultraportable and mainstream systems.)

Memory speeds have increased slightly, to 2,666MHz, but the biggest performance improvement is adopting the new Radeon Pro 5000M-series graphics chip, based on AMD’s latest 7-nanometer microarchitecture.

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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-powered Cinebench R15 test, which draws on workflows from the company’s Cinema 4D editing suite and is fully threaded to take advantage of all available cores and threads. Cinebench emphasizes CPU rather than GPU to render a 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. In the case of the MacBook Pro, we used the latest version of Photoshop for macOS, as the older versions are 32-bit and therefore incompatible with the alternatives, with macOS Catalina only 64-bit. We calculate the time for each operation and, in the end, add up 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 undisputed. It achieved an average frame rate of 47 fps (fps) on the Unigine Heaven gaming emulation at the Retina Display’s native resolution (3,072 x 1,920 pixels) and 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 achieve an excellent nearly 19 hours of battery life in our brief video test. That is especially impressive considering the laptop’s powerful CPU and GPU combined with the 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.