The 15-inch MacBook Pro has always been the go-to computer for creatives and media enthusiasts. Need quad-core processors, dedicated graphics and a big old screen that's only slightly smaller than your monitor? If so, Apple’s 13-inch laptops probably haven’t cut the proverbial mustard for you in the past.
Like the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, Apple has given its larger model a complete redesign. Not only has the company shaved thickness from the last-generation Pro’s sizable chassis, this new model also gets a fancy tactile Touch Bar strip in place of the function key row.
It also benefits from an upgrade to Intel’s sixth-generation Skylake processors, versatile USB-C ports with speedy transfer rates, a brighter and more color saturated display, faster graphics and booming speakers.
However, as Apple aficionados are used to by now (and not just in the computing space either), when the Cupertino company giveth, it usually taketh something away. Traditional USB ports? A built-in SD card reader? A glowing logo on your lid? That startup chime that wakes everybody around you when you thought you'd muted your Mac? For better or worse, they're all gone.
So, who might want to this new 15-inch MacBook Pro? Anybody considering an upgrade from a MacBook Air, or the older 13-inch MacBook Pro to the equivalent model, perhaps has an easier decision to make than more cautious last-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro owners looking to make the leap.
In addition to the disruption posed by a move to USB-C, the 15-inch MacBook Pro remains the most expensive laptop in Apple’s line-up. It now starts at £2,349 ($2,249 or AUS$3,140), rising to £2,699 ($2,599 or AUS$3,481) for the high-end version.
Both models can be further configured with faster processors, additional memory and beefier graphics cards for extra cost.
Dazzling display
One of the brightest points about the new MacBook Pro (quite literally) is its new Retina display. Rated at 500 nits brightness, it’s one of the most luminous and color-saturated displays we’ve seen on a laptop, and the best we’ve seen since first laying eyes on the Dell XPS 15.
With a pixel-resolution of 2,880 x 1,800, it's not the most pixel-packed display out there. In fact, the resolution is the same as the previous 15-inch MacBook Pro.
However, like Apple's Retina 5K iMac, it has received a vibrancy boost and now supports the P3 color space. That's a boon for photographers who shoot in RAW format and need to view files shot in the widest possible color gamut available.
In one sense, that means that unless you're a pro who shoots on the regular, you don't need the new display in your life. But, even so, there is a tangible difference between the screen quality on this year's 15-inch MacBook and the last-gen model.
It's simply brighter, more color saturated and pleasing to the eyes. Even wallpapers take on a new vibrancy, and once you've clasped eyes on it, it's hard to go back.
Magic touch
From Retina displays to Force Touch trackpads, new features provide talking points for successive generations of MacBooks. This time around, it’s the Touch Bar – an OLED strip located above the keyboard, which provides a long, thin touchscreen used for tactile input.
It’s a move that makes sense for several reasons. While laptop displays used as touchscreens can prove practical on machines running Windows 10, which has been sculpted into a touch-friendly operating system since Windows 8, macOS is far from optimized for touch input.
Moreover, pawing at the screen leaves fingerprints, and doing so for long periods of time makes your arm ache. Interacting with the Touch Bar, on the other hand, can be done while your hands are closer to their natural resting position on the keyboard.
The obvious limitation here is that, while sufficiently long enough to cram in various icons and buttons, which change depending on the app that’s open on the screen, the Touch Bar lacks vertical space.
As a result, even with the ability to interact with all 10 fingers, interaction is limited to tapping and dragging in the space the size of a tape measure.
There is, at least, a good level of customization when it comes to which icons are displayed on the Touch Bar. By delving into System Preferences, you can drag and drop system functions onto the bar in any order required for fast access.
Its usefulness is going to be entirely dependent on the creativity of developers who can maximize the use of space. After turning the MacBook on, the Touch Bar displays system icons such as brightness, volume and an escape key.
Loading up an app shifts those icons to the right-hand side of the Touch Bar, making room for contextual commands specific to the app you’re currently using.
In Safari, for example, a row of bookmark icons appears, allowing you to load various websites with a tap. Tapping an arrow on the right-hand side brings the system icons back.
Touch Bar support is mainly limited to Apple’s own, rather than third-party apps.
Beyond Apple's library, apps that currently support the Touch Bar include djay Pro, Pixelmator, 1Password and OmniGraffle. Those with support in the works include Photoshop (by the end of the year), Microsoft Office/Outlook/Skype, Affinity Designer, Day One, Coda and Blogo.
Keyboard and trackpad
Both the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models use Apple's second-generation Butterfly key switches. Apple claims that it's four times more stable than traditional scissor mechanisms, and prolonged typing sessions certainly prove that to be true.
The new keys have a larger surface area than those on the previous generation MacBook Pro and Air models, and at 0.5mm key travel, are much reduced in comparison. The new Butterfly switch makes for a curiously satisfying typing experience, with each key eliciting a sharp "snap" under the fingers.
They do not, however, aid typing speed. We found ourselves typing slower overall on the new keyboard than the one on Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air, which remains the gold standard for typing, thanks to its deeper travel keys.
The 15-inch MacBook's keyboard is superior to the one found on the 12-inch MacBook, which possesses first-generation Butterfly keys and lacks the satisfying snappiness of the larger model.
The biggest problem the 15-inch model faces, which was curiously absent on the 13-inch model, is that its massive trackpad causes the cursor to glide across the screen when you're typing more often than we would like. On the 13-inch MacBook, palm rejection kicks in effectively, but the sheer size of the trackpad on its larger cousin means that we often found ourselves having to manually position the cursor back into the sentence we were typing.
On the plus side, the trackpad's roomy surface area makes it perfect for executing swipes and gestures to navigate around macOS.
The new MacBook makes big changes on the connectivity front compared to the previous generation. All of the ports on the old model – including traditional USB Type-A, mini DisplayPort and HDMI – have been replaced with four USB-C ports that support the transfer of data and video while charging the machine.
MagSafe, Apple's popular connection type for power, is no more – so you'll need to be especially careful not to wrap your leg around its charging cable.
The number of USB-C ports here isn't the issue. Having four of them alleviates some of the issues faced by the new 13-inch MacBook Pro sans-Touch Bar, which only has two. You can use two monitors with this MacBook while charging the machine, for example, without requiring a USB-C hub.
There's also less of a need to use USB-C dongles and adapters, and if you do, then having ports on both sides of the machine means there's less chance of them getting in each other's way. Still, you're going to need at least a couple of USB-C to USB-A adapters to hook up any legacy peripherals such as wired keyboards or mice.
The move to USB-C has been criticized by more vocal members of the Apple community as being too forward-thinking. There’s a certain irony in that, considering that Apple was accused of not innovating enough with its previous generation MacBooks, which placed a Force Touch trackpad at center stage.
In terms of dimensions, the new 15-inch MacBook is slimmer and more bag-friendly than ever before. It now measures 15.5mm (0.61 inches) in thickness compared to the previous generation model's 18mm (0.71 inches) – and you can you feel the difference most when clasping it in a single hand.
It's shed pounds too, dropping from 2.04kg (4.49 pounds) to 1.83kg (4.03 pounds), making it half a pound lighter than the XPS 15 with discrete graphics. It's nowhere near as weightless as the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, which is lighter still at 3 pounds, but the larger model's weight is much more palatable when you're carting it from A to B five times a week.
If you're a video editor, one of the huge reasons for buying the new MacBook is that you can hook it up to two 5K monitors at the same time to facilitate editing 4K video with timelines in full view.
The 15-inch MacBook, like the 13-inch model, has been equipped with excellent speakers, and it’s something that you’re going to notice the difference in when using the model in day-to-day use. Located to the left and right hand sides of the keyboard, they're louder than the ones on the 12-inch MacBook and provide full-bodied sound.
Performance and battery life
Apple is known for putting some of the fastest SSDs around into its MacBooks, and this year’s 15-inch model and 13-inch models are no exception. Here we have SSDs that can reach sequential read speeds of up to 1.8Gbps. Its speed can be felt during day-to-day tasks: booting is fast, as is opening and closing apps.
To test the MacBook's battery life, we downloaded a 1080p movie and played it on loop in VLC player until the battery has depleted. We kept the MacBook screen brightness and audio on 50%.
At 7 hours and 45 minutes, the MacBook easily has enough juice to get you through a couple of movies on a long trip.
As far as gaming is concerned, even the inclusion of AMD's Radeon 460 doesn't make it a more viable option than a gaming laptop with any of Nvidia's GTX Series 10 graphics chips.
That said, with 4GB of video memory, there's more than enough power to handle even modern titles with relative ease. We were able to play Tomb Raider and Batman: Arkham City well above that at the 900p resolution mark, so expect games to hover around that at golden 60 frames per second standard at 1080p depending on the game, obviously.
For better or worse, Apple's new 15-inch MacBook brings the innovation that many said was lacking from the previous generation model. If you're thinking of upgrading, the changes will force you to take action in ways that you might not be ready for – whether that's something as simple as ending a reliance on MagSafe to keep your laptop safe – to purchasing adapters for hooking up legacy peripherals.
We liked
In many ways, this 15-inch MacBook Pro is Apple's best big MacBook yet. Its display is now on a par with Apple's 5K Retina iMac, thanks to P3 color support, so professionals can edit on the move with confidence.
For pros and everyone else, that bright display almost makes it feel like Apple's put a whole new screen on its latest MacBook – everything looks that good on it.
And then there's that Touch Bar, which feels like it could prove mighty useful down the line with sufficient developer support. We saw the value it can bring after rewiring our brains in a few short weeks, by which time we were firing open tabs in Safari, lowering volume in a snap and correcting our typos without a grammar bar in sight.
The new MacBook improves in many other areas in small doses. Its speakers sound fuller, richer and louder; and an upgrade to Skylake processors gives you more than enough battery life to sit through a movie or two away from the outlet.
While its new Radeon 460 graphics chip may not trouble Nvidia's newer Pascal laptops retailing at similar price points, it means that you should be able to run modern games with fluid frame rates without any trouble.
The inclusion of four USB-C ports is a move that, although requiring a few changes here and there when it comes to hooking up legacy devices, provides four speedy connectivity options that would even let you hook up two 5K monitors if you wanted to.
We disliked
Are the new 15-inch MacBook Pro's benefits worth changing your entire workflow? The question is especially pertinent for creative professionals who may require a permanent SD card slot and USB-A ports more than a slighter and lighter chassis, improved display and row of touch-sensitive shortcuts above their keyboard.
Speaking of which, we would advise anybody who writes for a living to give the 15-inch model a spin before splashing their cash. It's hard to see the benefit of that massive trackpad when its palm detection fails every-freaking-three seconds while typing. The trackpad feels just the right size compared to the keyboard on the 13-inch model; on the 15-inch it feels excessive.
And there's no two ways around it: as the flagship model in Apple's MacBook Pro line-up, the 15-inch MacBook is expensive, which doesn't soften the blow when you have to shell out further for USB-C to USB-A converters and SD card adapters to plug in your old kit.
Final verdict
Like always, the 2016 version of the 15-inch MacBook Pro is a true desktop replacement. (So long as you bring along a few adapters this time around.)
You can rely on its big and gorgeous screen more than any other MacBook in history. The ability to hook up three 4K monitors or two 5K panels feels like a bonus more than anything – and even if you did that, you would still want to use the MacBook's screen for its incredible luminosity.
Should you upgrade from last year's MacBook Pro? If you're dead set against carrying around adapters, write constantly, can't abide by shallow keyboards and don't like retraining your brain to new function key layouts, then the answer is likely "no".
For everybody else, the new model is better-looking, more powerful, slimmer, richer-sounding, faster and more capable of gaming than ever before. It's just not the revolutionary model it could be down the line, once that huge trackpad has been reined in, the keyboard has plumped up a little and the TouchBar has reached its full potential. Oh, and once your collection of accessories graduates to USB-C.
