Want a 15 inch version? You will pay at least £2,349.
But there’s a price to pay, and it’s a big one: the cheapest Touch Bar-equipped 13-inch MacBook Pro will set you back £1,749. Oh the priceĮven with a short period of use, it’s easy to see what a good machine the new MacBook Pro is. It makes it easier to find by touch, but it feels a bit un-Appleish. However – and this may just be a problem with the model I used, which was (obviously) a pre-production machine – the Touch ID sensor doesn’t quite line up with the rest of the bar.
As with the iPhone and iPad, you just put your finger on it and it unlocks the Mac – plus you can set it to fingerprint different users to log them into their account without having to log out. One thing that was immediately useful is the inclusion of a Touch ID sensor on the right side of the Touch Bar. I can’t wait to see what the developers do with it. Going back to my old MacBook Pro, I thought “I’d love to use the Touch Bar for this” – and that was after a short time with the new MacBook Pro. It doesn’t seem like such an essential feature, but even in the short time I used it, I could see how good it was and how quickly I would miss it. For example, Safari might display a set of “keys” for your open tabs, allowing you to quickly switch between them. What appears on the Touch Bar is programmable, so different apps have different “keys” that appear. It’s an OLED touch strip above the keyboard, replacing the function keys. The standout feature, however, is the Touch Bar. Given that Apple has always led the way when it comes to making trackpads bigger, that’s no surprise, and as always, it’s a great trackpad. That’s twice as big on the 15-inch MacBook Pro and 46 percent bigger on the 13-inch. I suspect most users will get used to the shallower trip within a few days. One difference however is that on the 15 inch model the keys are BIG. Personally, I like the shorter travel – and of course what you get in return is a thinner machine. The MacBook’s butterfly-switch keyboard isn’t to everyone’s taste, so Apple’s adoption of the same switches on the MacBook Pro is likely to be controversial in some quarters. You would have thought they would have done 67% more colors just to keep a nice balance, but either way, it looks amazing.
It’s 67% brighter, has a 67% better contrast ratio, and displays 25% more colors. What I can say, however, is that the screen is stunningly beautiful. I haven’t reviewed the machine yet, but after brief use, the MacBook Pro feels really, really fast. Sure, it doesn’t shrink like a MacBook Air, but it’s still a very thin machine.Īnd of course, that doesn’t mean sacrificing speed. If you think that’s impressive, consider that it’s also thinner than a MacBook Air, at least at the thick end. It’s the thinnest and lightest MacBook Pro ever, with the 13-inch version weighing just 3 pounds, the same as a 13-inch MacBook Air.
Instead, there are four areas that really define it: thinness the keyboard and trackpad the screen and the all-new Touch Bar. The speakers have been updated, although in the crowded demo room I could barely hear them, so we’ll have to take Apple’s word for it for now.īut the internals aren’t what really make the MacBook Pro “new”. The 15-inch model comes with 16GB of RAM as standard. There’s a sixth-generation Core i7 processor, an ATI Radeon Pro graphics card with up to 4GB of RAM and up to 2TB SDD which Apple says is “up to” 50% faster. The new MacBook Pro gets all the internal upgrades you’d expect, plus a few more surprising ones. My quick verdict: it’s an amazing machine, but you’ll pay a high price for it. At his event in Cupertino today, I was lucky enough to get my hands on the new MacBook Pro, which comes in 13-inch and 15-inch versions.