Review of the Apple 16 ″ MacBook Pro with a new keyboard

It is no secret that the famous Apple brand is distinguished by the age-old pursuit of excellence and expansion of the customer base. Unfortunately, leading manufacturers also have solutions that do not bring the desired success. It happened with MacBook. The keyboard's flawed design has been criticized by laptop owners, and the manufacturer has gone to great lengths to demonstrate its willingness to take consumer opinion into account with the launch of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with a new keyboard. The presentation of the device took place without too much hype online. Why a potential user may like the new model will be discussed in the article below.

Features of the appearance and keyboard

The use of a 16 ″ display has led to a slight increase in overall dimensions. So, the dimensions of the MacBook Pro under consideration correspond to the parameters of 357.9 * 246 * 16.2 mm with a weight of 2 kg. Considering the size of the diagonal, the overall dimensions and weight of the laptop could have been larger, but the savings of these indicators became possible due to the rather thin bezels of the screen. There are two color solutions for the body of the product to choose from: silver and metallic.

Particular attention in the 16-inch Mac should be paid to the keyboard, which has undergone a slight counter-revolution. The old mechanism of key travel, known as the "butterfly" (the brand has been promoting it since 2016) turned out to be a failure and did not live up to the hopes placed on it: consumers noted the short travel of the buttons, their noise when typing, and most importantly, the low level of reliability (keys seized by crumbs and dust).

The new MacBook Pro scissor keyboard offers extended durability and improved maintainability. In essence, the new keyboard is a well-forgotten old Magic Keyboard, made according to the well-proven scissor pattern. The key travel of this design is 0.1 cm. Otherwise, this is a classic 65-key keyboard for Macs.

The developers returned the "escape" button, which was replaced by the touch bar on the predecessor models, and they also retained the touch panel located above the keyboard, just like the fingerprint sensor.

Specifications and capabilities

Display

Retina screen with a resolution of 1.920 * 3.072 pixels and a density of 226 dpi, characterized by a 16-inch diagonal. This is one of the main features of the new mobile device: such a diagonal parameter has been used for the first time in a model range. In other respects, the display is similar to its predecessor: the IPS-matrix implements a decent level of color gamut rendering - the manufacturer promises 500 nits of brightness and support for True Tone technology, designed to more realistically reproduce shades and cover the entire spectrum of the color space.

Platform

The base of the device is a ninth generation Intel Core processor. All markets (including the Russian one) will have 2 configurations available:

• basic - characterized by the presence of a 6-core Intel Core i7 processor, its clock speed reaches 4.5 GHz in Turbo mode;
• top - equipped with an 8-core Intel Core i9 with a maximum possible frequency of up to 4.8 GHz.

It should be noted that the eight-core processor is twice as fast as the fastest quad-core chip in the MacBook Pro 15 ″.

The CPU works in conjunction with the integrated Intel UHD Graphics and AMD Radeon Pro discrete video system. This laptop model was the first to include the specified graphics processor based on 7 nanometer technology in its equipment.
The AMD Radeon Pro 5300M comes with 4GB of RAM by default, upgradeable to 8GB.

The advanced variant offers an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M graphics card with 4GB GDDR6.
The upper limit of the GPU, in comparison with the previous versions, is characterized by a high performance indicator when editing video with DaVinci resolution by 80%, while implementing game processes - by 60%. The manufacturer focuses on the fact that this video accelerator is able to provide greater smoothness of games and accelerate rendering in applications related to graphics.

In addition, Apple specialists have worked to improve the flow of air masses (according to their assurances, the parameter is optimized by 28%), while the radiator has also increased (by 35%). The redesigned fan has a sophisticated design that includes, among other things, elongated blades and wide vents. The new ventilation will help regulate the larger TDP of 12 W, which in turn will help adapt to the new CPU and GPU. According to the manufacturer, he managed to eliminate the shortcomings of the previous Mac Pro, in which the cooling system could not cope with the load of processor devices of considerable power.

Memory options

The base memory configuration starts with 16 GB DDR4 RAM and 512 GB SSD storage, while the top configuration with the same RAM parameter is one terabyte of SSD.

With the increased demands of the potential owner (professional activities of video editors, scientific developments and other demanding tasks), it is possible to increase the storage resources to the highest capacity possible in such electronic devices: the value of the RAM is up to 64 GB, and the parameter of the SSD drive is up to 8 TB. Of course, you will have to fork out extra for such a luxury.

Battery

The device is equipped with the largest 100 W * h battery in MacBooks. The manufacturer claims that such a device will be able to provide continuous surfing on the Internet for 11 hours, and in the off state the charge will be saved for a month. The brand packed the laptop with a 96W adapter and a 2M usb-c-c cable.

Connections

The increase in the overall dimensions of the unit in no way affected the addition of interfaces on the side faces of the unit. There is the same set of Thunderbolt 3 connectors of four units, each of the ports can be used to establish contact with both an external video card and a charger.

The manufacturer did not abandon the usual 3.5 mm audio jack for connecting a wired headset, which took into account the interests of not only those who like to listen to musical compositions in their free time, but also the needs of professional musicians and video makers (after all, in the presentation video, the mobile unit is positioned as their working tool).

Wireless connections include 2-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 versions.
The sound has undergone a serious study: an upgraded hi-fi system of 6 speakers is used, among which there are 2 low-frequency speakers that suppress resonance. There is also a block of 3 studio-level microphones with noise suppression effect.

The cost

The base model Apple MacBook Pro 16 ″ is priced at around $ 2,400. The predecessor of the 15 ″ pro on the eve of the announcement of the 16-inch newcomer is also characterized by this cost. Taking into account the wishes of the consumer regarding the parameters of the CPU, random access memory, SSD storage, the final price of the unit can almost triple (approximately up to $ 610). For example, the maximum possible SSD upgrade will cost no less than two thousand dollars.

For the Russian consumer, the basic version will cost approximately 200,000 rubles, the extended version will cost 233,000 rubles. However, this price is also not the limit due to the presence of memory configuration variations.

Summarizing

A laptop with an optimized keyboard offers good performance and battery life. The buyer will be able to choose those options for the CPU and GPU, as well as the parameters of the data storage, which are more interesting to him in view of the tasks facing him. An important point is the cost, which has not changed upward compared to its closest 15-inch brother.

• improved ergonomic keyboard with quiet key travel;
• high performance;
• the ability to select the version of the processor, graphics system, RAM and ROM, depending on the individual requests of a potential consumer;
• improved ventilation system;
• decent quality of the picture displayed by the 16-inch display;
• superior sound quality from the upgraded speakers.

• at the stage of preliminary consideration, critical shortcomings could not be identified.