The MacBook Pro is one of the most popular laptops for creative professionals and the 16” MacBook is the newest addition to the line-up. The improvements in this year MacBook pro 16 include the 9th gen intel chips, the new 16” display, the scissors mechanism switches in the keyboard and new graphics.
Build & Design
The build and design of the new Macbook is really good as per expectations. The overall footprint of the device has slightly increased as it is bigger, thicker and heavier but it’s all thanks to the arger 16” display and the higher capacity battery. The unibody Aluminum body is well built and the bezels are slim which makes this device really beautiful. The one hand openable hinge returns with colour options including the silver and the space grey.
Ports and I/O
This is the area where the macbook has not much to offer with its 4 thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone jack which means you have to live the dongle life.
Maintenance
MacBooks are quite easy to maintain. The build quality is great and Apples customer care, support and offline service is one of the best. Talking about upgrades, unfortunately you cant upgrade anything yourself in these machines so make sure you have the right specification at the time of purchase.
Input Devices
Keyboard
The keyboard is one of the biggest improvements in this year’s macbook air as Apple put the much better Magic keyboard. The keyboard is silent and more responsive with its scissor mechanism than last year’s model. The key-strokes are stable and have decent key travel. Overall it’s a great keyboard to type on.
Touchpad
This is a no brainer since macbooks have got some of the best trackpads in the industry. The touchpad is huge with good accuracy and clicky buttons. It does suffer from some accidental touches during typing.
Display
The display on these new laptops are great. The resolution is at 3072 x 1920 covering 16” screen space with tiny bezels with a peak brightness of 500 nits. Now the display supports the P3 colour gamut and is highly colour accuracy which is great for photo or video production. The display aso has Apple’s True Tone technology which sets the temperature of the display according to the surroundings.
Performance
The Macbook’s main improvement is in this department. The base model has a core i7 6-core with 16 GB RAM and you can spec it upto core i9 8-core and 64 GB RAM. So, on paper the specs seem great, but what about real life use case scenarios?
Well, the answer is great. The new slightly bigger chassis with the improved fans and thermal design helps the machine keep higher clock speeds for longer periods of time. The fans can sometimes get loud but they are a welcome change for any one doing some heavy lifting on this device. This device can easily handle 4k video edits and even hold its own editing 6k footage.
The new AMD graphics are also amazing and can handle graphically intense loads with ease like rendering heavy files.These are the most powerful graphics you can put in a laptop and still charge them with a sub 100 watt brick which makes heavy lifting in a plane a viable option.
Overall the machine is a great creative professional’s workstation,especially the i9 model.
Storage
The base model comes with 512 GB SSD and there are options of having up to a whopping 8 TB of SSD storage which is truly insane and all of them are really fast with no complaints.
Speakers
Okay the speakers on the new MacBook are the best in the Industry. Its too good for any laptop. Insanely loud, great base, crisp highs, basically everything about the 6 speaker setup of the new Macbook Pro is amazing.
Battery Life
Battery life in the new MacBook Pro is great which is not expected given its internals but its the Apple’s optimization that comes into play here. The new MacBook Pro has slightly increased battery at 100 Wh which is the limit you can get into an airplane. You can get a consistent 10 hours of battery life and a full day juice out of you Pro with moderate usage.
- Pros
- Amazing unibody aluminium build
- Powerful i7 and i9 processors
- Great battery life
- Great keyboard and touchpad
- Great front firing speakers
- Great display
- Cons
- Gaming is still not that strong because of Mac OS
- Lack of essential ports
- Expensive
Apple MacBook Pro 16
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