- Here it is.
Apple just released it.
It's a 16 inch MacBook Pro.
No big keynote, no Phil Schiller bestriding the stage
like the colossus of computers that he is.
Nope, just tada!
It's a new MacBook Pro with a 16 inch screen, and actually,
it is designed to replace the old 15 inch MacBook Pro.
This is just now discontinued,
we've only got the 16 inch.
And there've a lot of complaints
about this 15 inch MacBook Pro,
and Apple I think tried to address a bunch of them
but not quite all of them.
The goal I think was to bring back the magic of this guy.
The old MacBook Pro, the one that everybody likes.
The last one that everybody likes, actually.
So, what did Apple do to change the new 16 inch Macbook Pro?
Well, the first thing they did,
the most important thing that they did,
is they updated the keyboard,
actually kind of went backwards.
It is a scissor switch keyboard.
It isn't butterfly, it's way quieter,
it's got more key travel.
It's one millimeter of key travel.
Apple calls it a "Magic Keyboard"
'cause it pulled from the Bluetooth Magic Keyboard,
but whatever, it's a traditional keyboard.
It has a little bit more of a thunk and a clunk
than a spring and a snap,
but at least it's not tick-tick-ticky
like the butterfly keyboards are.
The other great thing about this keyboard:
real, genuine, physical escape key
and inverted T arrow keys, which are way, way easier to hit.
Now, there is a little bit more space between the keys.
That's because the key caps are just a little bit smaller.
Apple also says that the key caps are a little bit stabler,
which, I don't know, whatever.
There's also a little bit more space between the keys
and the touch bar, which is still here
and it's still fine.
The other really, really important thing
that Apple changed on the 16 inch MacBook Pro
compared to the last generation 15 inch
is the thermals on the inside.
So, the heat sink on the processor
is 30-something percent bigger,
the fans have changed so they can blow 28% more air.
They've even moved some stuff around on the logic board
to help with getting the thermals out,
getting the heat out of this thing.
Apple says that all of those changes means
that they can run the processor with 12 more watts
of power at heavy loads than they could
on the last generation, and that's a big, big deal
because there were lots of problems with thermal throttling
on the last generation MacBook Pro.
You could put it in a freezer and it would work better
and hopefully this won't require that.
Obviously, we haven't had a chance to fully test it,
'cause I've only had this thing for a half a day so far,
but we're gonna give that a look during the full review.
So those are the two most important things
that Apple just had to fix on this MacBook Pro,
so I wanted to get them out of the way right away,
but we should talk specs.
So, there's a couple of configurations
that are available at the base
and you can spec it all the way up.
So let's talk about them.
There is a 6-core Core i7 Intel processor
or a 8-core Core i9,
and these are ninth generation Intel processors,
'cause tenth generation isn't available for the wattage
that you want on these machines anyway.
They start at 16 GB of DDR4 RAM,
but you can spec it all the way up to 64 GB of RAM.
It also starts at 512 GB of SSD storage.
You can spec that up to 8 TB of storage,
which the thing would probably cost like, $10,000,
who knows, but if you need all that power
and all that storage, you can go get it on this thing.
As far as graphics, Apple is staying with what it knows.
You can get a Radeon 5300 or a Radeon 5500, sure.
In terms of battery, there's a 100 watt hour battery,
which is exactly the limit that the FAA allows
for regular people like us to take on a laptop on a plane,
and so that's what Apple put in this thing.
And that battery means that thing weighs 4.3 pounds,
which is a little bit heavier.
It also means that it's .07 millimeters thicker
than the last generation,
but you know what, I'm fine with that.
This is the powerhouse MacBook Pro.
It should be allowed to be just a little bit thicker
to get you the better thermals,
get you the better battery life.
Apple says that it should last about an hour longer
than the last generation MacBook Pro,
but obviously we're going to have to test that.
All right, the screen.
We should probably talk about the 16 inch screen
on the 16 inch MacBook Pro. (groans)
So, it's a 3072 by 1920 screen.
It gets up to 500 nits of brightness
and it has a P3 wide color gamut.
It looks pretty great to me.
The bezels are a little bit slimmer on the left
and the right and the top and the bottom,
but not by that much.
You can still see the bezels, and the webcam at the top
by the way, is still the same old webcam.
They didn't really improve that that much.
I think the screen looks great.
I think Mac screens always look pretty great
and I don't think this is gonna be an exception.
The last thing that I wanna talk about
and I did not expect that I would be talking about this
is the quality of the sound coming out of these speakers.
It is incredibly good.
Apple says that it's a six speaker array.
It says that there's woofers, two on each side
that actually cancel out each other's vibrations
so that the thing can get an octave lower,
give you a better bass without kind of
rattling the keyboard or whatever.
And just in a couple of songs that I've listened to,
it seems really good, so I'm really excited
to listen to more music on this thing
and see just how good it is.
Apple also says that there is a three mic array
that is studio-quality and that it could live up to, say,
a Bluetooth microphone for podcasting. (Correction: 'Blue microphone' instead of 'Bluetooth')
I don't know about that,
but we're definitely gonna test that out too.
All right, so that's the main stuff
that you need to know about the brand new
16 inch MacBook Pro.
You could go out and order it right now if you wanted to,
but you shouldn't.
You should wait for reviews.
We've only had this thing for a little while.
So for example, we've run a couple of video export tests
compared to last year's model,
and it seems maybe just a little bit faster,
a little bit less thermally throttled,
but we need to do more testing to know for sure.
My hope is that it could maybe live up
to the last MacBook Pro that everybody loved,
the old 2015 MacBook Pro 15 inch with all the ports.
This doesn't have all the ports.
It's got 4 Thunderbolt and a headphone jack!
Hooray, headphone jack!
But it could bring us back to loving our Macs again.
We'll see in the full review.
And I want to know what you want to know
about the 16 inch MacBook Pro,
'cause that's how I want to run the review.
So let me know down in the comments
and I will see you next week.
(smooth music)
(keyboards clicking)