We’re rather in love with the 2016 MacBook Pro, but as with many love affairs there are irritations.The trackpad is huge and wonderful to use; but it’s so big that the keyboard has been pushed up to make room, as well as flattened down to make the laptop slimmer. These factors together mean typing on the new Pro is a little harder – especially for touch typists, who will struggle to locate keys at first – than on on previous models. And those arrow keys are a nightmare.The Touch Bar is lovely to look at and fun to use. It’s early days, both for us – we’re only beginning to grasp its capabilities – and for app developers, who will surely come up with reams of clever Touch Bar features. Right now it’s fun, but we’re reasonably confident that it will become essential; the key will be getting lots of users on machines with Touch Bars. The tech is in this respect a little further back along the track that 3D Touch is following.This is a fast machine, of course, but maybe not quite fast enough for some tastes; it’s worth reflecting on that maximum spec of 16GB of RAM, which may hold this machine back from a role in genuine pro settings.All in all, this is a fast and beautiful laptop but one with some flaws to consider. And ouch, that price tag is steep.
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Welcome to our MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (2016) review. Apple has since launched new models for 2017 – see our MacBook Pro 13in (2017) review and MacBook Pro 15in (2017) review for more details– but the older 2016 models are still available from the Refurbished Store.
Apple’s 2016MacBook Pro update was unveiled at a dedicated press event on 27 October. The new MacBook Pro was launchedin 13- and 15-inch screen sizes, and featuredsixth-gen Intel Skylake processors, a slim new design and a cool customisable Touch Bar above the keyboard. It also cost a bit of a fortune.
Our MacBook Pro 2016 review evaluates the machine’s looks, design, features and value for money.
Broadly speaking there are three models of the new MacBook Pro: a comparatively budget-focused 13-inch model without the new Touch Bar, and a 13-inch and 15-inch model with it. This review looks at all three models together, but we will make it clear when comments apply only to certain models.
Read more:MacBook Pro reviews | Mac buying guide
Externally the design is similar to last year’s, albeit on a slimmer scale, but there are numerous physical changes under the lid. The most obvious, and the flagship feature that occupied much of the unveiling event, is a touchscreen bar above the keyboard that Apple calls the Touch Bar, which we discuss in the next section.
One more thing before we move on: as expected, Apple has removed the traditional USB ports on the MacBook Pro, and the MagSafe charging port, and replaced them all with USB-C/Thunderbolt ports: four of them on the Touch Bar models and two on the 13-inch model without a Touch Bar. And you get a 3.5mm headphone jack too: phew!
Read more: MacBook Pro 2016 not working: How to fix MacBook Pro hardware problems
The one aspect of the Touch Bar that’s had most effect on our day-to-day MacBooking so far has been the little Touch ID sensor on the righthand edge. Not for Apple Pay, which we still rarely use even on iPhone – although yes, this feature means you can make Apple Pay payments online, on your Mac, without having to use a linked iPhone – but for unlocking the device.
Open the lid and as soon as the screen lights up, the Touch Bar does too, with a rather endearing bouncing arrow pointing to the fingerprint sensor and an instruction: ‘Unlock with Touch ID’. Place your fingertip on the sensor for the merest fraction of a second and the MacBook will unlock: there’s a tiny delay (of perhaps two seconds), but you don’t need to have your finger on the scanner for anything more than the very beginning of this period.
In terms of speed and reliability, we’re definitely in the realms of the second-gen Touch ID on the iPhone 6s and later, rather than the creakier first-gen Touch ID used in the iPhone 6 and earlier.
(Bear in mind, however, that as with the Touch ID feature on iPhones and iPads, there will be times when you will have to enter your password – after logging out of your account, for instance. And when you try to make certain changes in System Preferences.)
Fingerprint login is very convenient. But it becomes more convenient still when you factor in multiple user accounts. If you’re on the login window and multiple accounts are logged in, touching your finger to the scanner will automatically select and unlock your account and ignore the others, reducing what would ordinarily be a multi-step job into literally a single tap.
Furthermore, if you place your finger on the scanner and the account it’s connected to isn’t currently logged in and requires a password to unlock, the Touch ID scanner does at least recognise who is trying to log in and jumps to the appropriate password entry field.
Of course, if you’ve got an Apple Watch then you can unlock any Mac with macOS Sierra even more easily than this, thanks to the new proximity unlock feature. But not everyone has an Apple Watch.
QuickType is supposed to be all about saving time. When you start pecking out an octosyllabic word on an iPhone SE’s little portrait keyboard, and QuickType cleverly works out what you’re going for and gives you a shortcut to complete it and sticks that shortcut right in your eye line, that’s handy and a time saver. But when the same thing happens on a MacBook, which has a full-size (if imperfect) keyboard and places the suggestions well below your eye line, it’s saving you quite a bit less time.
And while colleagues have noted that when typing at a good lick, the QuickType suggestions lag behind their fingers and they have to consciously slow down, we’ve never found that a problem – because we’re already having to slow down in order to look down at the Touch Bar. Sound touch-typing practice stipulates that you look at the screen and not at your fingers. But the QuickType element on the Touch Bar encourages and requires precisely the opposite.
Then again, few people nowadays have perfect typing form, and most of us will find our own best way of working with Touch Bar QuickType after a little practice: that may just mean waiting for the very biggest words and saving yourself the trouble then. And we do like watching colourful emoji appearing and disappearing while we type.
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Oh, and one thing we do love about the Touch Bar when typing out documents: formatting. Having Notes’ basic formatting palette at our fingertips is a small but crucial convenience – write a subhead, tap the B and it’s bolded up. Features like this are all about finding the little things that work for you, and there’s already deep enough support that you’re bound to find a few.
Desktop Luddites that we are, we continue to maintain that trackpads are an inferior choice to a decent mouse (your reviewer’s office 2015 MacBook Pro has a USB mouse attached), but the glorious trackpad in the 15in MacBook Pro is almost enough to make us doubt that.
It’s a Force Touch trackpad too, of course: once Apple commits to a new tech it really commits to it, and you can expect all new MacBooks for the next few years to boast Force Touch compatibility. For the uninitiated, Force Touch is different to traditional trackpad tech in both mechanism (when you click the trackpad it doesn’t actually move, instead simulating the feel of a click, more convincingly than the solid-state Home button on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, with a small haptic buzz) and function (it’s sensitive to two different degrees of touch pressure, which means you can either click things normally, or force-click them to invoke secondary controls that vary from application to application).
Like the 12-inch MacBook models released last year and this year, andlast year’sMacBook Pro, these laptops get Apple’s Force Touch trackpad, which is sensitive to varying degrees of touch pressure and uses harder presses to activate ancillary functions depending on the application. You can do a Force-click on a word in Safari to pull up a dictionary definition, for instance.
The keys are lower to the bed of the keyboard than on last year’s MBP, with a shallower typing action. To aid in the quest for slimness, and like the 12-inch MacBook, the new MacBook Pro features a low-travel keyboard using one of Apple’s ‘butterfly’ key mechanism designs. In this case it’s a second-gen design intended to provide a better feel, but we found itharder for our fingers to find the right keys when touch-typing and preferred the bouncier mechanism of Apple’s old laptop keys.
We experienced a slight loss of typing speed and accuracy, then (most pronounced at first, as is generally the case with these things – you largely get used to the tighter layout). But this is somewhat offset by the QuickType text predictions that you get thanks to the Touch Bar, and the more pervasive auto-corrections that arrived with macOS Sierra.
Other reviewers have observed a lag between even average-speed typing and the predictions appearing/updating on the Touch Bar, and this is fair comment; it is on the slow side. But for the auto-correct element of this equation speed is less of an issue. Indeed, we find it oddlysatisfying when wemistype a word in Notes, for example, thensee the red underline appear a couple of words later and the auto-correct kick in a couple of words after that, like the OS is dutifully working its way through your errorswhile you carryon.
eshopdaroana.com US also testedthe new MacBook Pro models’ graphics capabilities with the Geekbench OpenCL and Cinebench OpenGL benchmarks.
In Geekbench,the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (equipped with Intel Iris Graphics 550) scored 30,826, which is59 percent better than the last generation and 8.6 percent better than this year’s 13-inch MacBook Pro with function keys (with Intel Graphics 540).
The new 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (withAMD Radeon Pro 450 graphics and 2GB of dedicated graphics memory) scored 42,827, up38.7 percent onlast year.
Cinebench R15, OpenGL test. Longer bars are better. Top three are this year’s Macs; bottom three are last year’s
Let’s look at those tech specs in a bit more depth.
The 2016 MacBook Pro models are no longer available direct from Apple (brand-new, at any rate: there are some on the refurbished store at time of writing) because they’ve been replaced by the 2017 Kaby Lake models. But for the sake of comparisons, here’s what the2016 models cost at launch:
Remember that these werejust the base prices; if you configured higher specs than the standard, you paid more. You can buy all of the current models of the MacBook Pro direct from Apple here: MacBook Pro on Apple Store. You can also buy MacBook Pro from John Lewis. For our pick of the best deals out there, see Best MacBook Pro deals UK.
Apple issued its usual statement about international prices being affected by “currency exchange rates, local import laws, business practices, taxes, and the cost of doing business”, and although it didn’t mention Brexit by name that appears to be the cause of these prices. But it should be said that while potentially Brexit-related price rises are becoming more and more common in the tech sector, no other tech company has cranked up the prices post-Brexit quite as brutally as this.
We’ve teamed up with KRCS to offer 7% offany MacBook Pro or MacBook Pro Touch Baruntil 16 April using the code eshopdaroana.comMARCH7. That means you could save as much as £277 off a fully kitted out 15in MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, or £87 off the more reasonable 13in base model– but you can check out the full range of MacBook Pro or MacBook Pro Touch Barmodels over at KRCS, making this the cheapest way to buy any new MacBook Pro right now.
The MacBook Pro 2016 camein two colour finishes: silver and Space Grey. It looks pretty great in Space Grey, we reckon.