Apple MacBook Pro: Review

   

       Apple MacBook Pro: Review

Is it good for such an expensive price?

When news first dropped that Apple was launching a 16in MacBook Pro, I must admit my heart skipped a beat. After years of testing and reviewing pretty much exclusively 13in, 14in and 15in machines, here was something different. Something with a bigger screen but without the bulk traditionally associated with a big laptop. A laptop with plenty of power and storage, but with good enough battery life to be carted around.

The Apple MacBook Pro 16in is Apple’s flagship laptop and, as such, it’s a pretty aspirational thing. However, it’s not a laptop for everyone. It’s a laptop designed principally for budding film-makers, developers, music producers and photographers – people who need the extra screen real estate and the power to render video projects, compile software and edit the biggest RAW image files without having to wait.

If you want a laptop much more powerful than this, though, in a slim and portable chassis, the MacBook Pro 16in is your only choice. Even Dell’s range of workstation laptops can’t match the top-spec MacBook when it comes to outright power.

And the MacBook Pro 16in is certainly among the most portable and compact high-power laptops money can buy. It’s a mere 16mm thick, 246mm deep and 358mm wide. It’s no featherweight, at 2kg, but considering what you can squeeze into this thing, I think that’s a hit many potential customers would be willing to take.

Open the lid and you’re faced with a standard-sized keyboard flanked by a pair of broad speaker grilles, topped with our old friend the TouchBar and an enormous Force Touch glass-topped touchpad immediately underneath. The TouchBar is one of the areas that Apple has improved subtly this time around.

Like the touchpad, not much has changed when it comes to the screen, aside from a slight bump in resolution up to 3,072 and size, and a small reduction in the width of the surrounding black borders. It’s a wide-gamut LCD using an IPS panel and has a P3 colour gamut.

You can specify the MacBook Pro 16in with one of three ninth-gen Intel CPUs: a six-core 2.6GHz Core i7, a 2.3GHz eight-core Intel Core i9 or a 2.4GHz eight-core Core i9-9980HK. Memory starts at 16GB and that’s configurable up to 32GB or 64GB. Storage starts at 512GB, configurable to 1TB, 2TB, 4TB or 8TB. And you can choose between either the AMD Radeon Pro 5300M or the Radeon Pro 5500M with either 4GB or 8GB of DDR6 memory.

The new keyboard is great, the display is a fabulous thing, and the audio systems are out-of-this-world good for a laptop of any calibre. Some might bemoan that Apple hasn’t seen fit to reintroduce the SD slot and, yes, it would be nice to have one or two regular USB Type-A ports around the edges, if only to make older peripherals easier to connect.

Objectively, the Dell XPS 15 2019 makes more financial sense: if you buy one with a similar spec to my review model, in fact, you’ll be saving around £1,000. But there’s no denying the quality of the MacBook Pro 16in. It’s a mighty fine machine, especially for the most demanding of users.