MacBook Pro (16–inch, late 2019)
Better in every way — this is the MacBook Pro you’ve been waiting for
$2,799 (entry–level model is $2,399) From Apple, apple.com
Features 16–inch Retina display (3072x1920), 2.3GHz 8–core Intel Core i9 processor, 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory,
Intel UHD Graphics 630, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M, 1TB SSD, Touch Bar, Touch ID, 802.11ac Wi–Fi, Bluetooth 5.0,
4x USB–C Thunderbolt 3 portsY
es, it’s finally here! The much–
rumored and utterly beguiling
new MacBook Pro — armed with
a suite of upgrades and improvements
that make it one of the most significant
Apple portable updates in years.
First, the most obvious change. The
15–inch MacBook Pro is dead. It’s been
replaced by a 16–inch version, although
its footprint (35.79x24.79cm when
closed) is the same as the model it
replaces, even if it is a little deeper and
heavier — Apple’s narrowed the bezels
around the screen to fit a 16–inch True
Tone Retina display (3072x1980) in
place of the 15.4–inch one.
Just as welcome is the new Magic
Keyboard. Apple has finally ditched the
butterfly switch keyboard, introduced
in the 12–inch MacBook in 2015, and
replaced it with a new scissor switch
version that promises a better typing
experience. More on this later.
It’s also solved another bugbear of
the fourth–generation MacBook Pro:
heat. Or rather, the throttling that
occurred when the ninth–generation
Intel Core processors inside them were
under heavy load. Again, more on this
later. And the final big change is the
battery: the 16–inch MacBook Pro now
has the largest possible battery
allowable by the US Federal Aviation
Authority. The new 100Whr version notonly has the legs to power that larger
display, it also delivers up to an hour
more battery life, giving you up to 11
hours of wireless web or movie
watching before it shuts down.
Those are the big changes, and
they’re significant. Primarily because
they show that Apple has listened to
its customers and addressed most of
the issues that arose when it last
redesigned the MacBook Pro in 2016.
Then its focus was on making the
laptop as thin as possible, adding a
butterfly switch keyboard and a Touch
Bar (which is just as divisive now as it
was then). The result was the
aforementioned throttling issues, plus
the launch of a butterfly keyboard
repair program which was intended to
address the reliability problems. Now
it’s gone, and it looks like the 13–inch
MacBook Pro and MacBook Air could
be getting scissor switch keyboards in
2020 if the rumors turn out to be true.MORE HEAT THAN LIGHT
The ninth–gen Core i9 Apple fitted to
the 15–inch MacBook Pro looked great
on paper, boasting up to eight cores to
the Core i7’s six, but it ran slower
because the processor throttled back
to stop itself from overheating. This
wasn’t an issue in most everyday tasks,
but for pros who needed that Core i9grunt it was a disaster — especially in a
premium laptop such as the MacBook
Pro. And anecdotal evidence suggests
the Core i7 throttled too.
Apple partially fixed the issue with
a software update in July 2018, but it
was the design of the Pro that caused
the heat issues in the first place. Its
cooling system couldn’t get heat away
from the CPU fast enough. Now Apple
has addressed that too. The 16–inch
MacBook Pro has a redesigned cooling
system with larger impellers (fans) that
have more blades to push air through
up to 28% faster, and a 35% larger
heat sink too. The result, says Apple, is
that the MacBook Pro can now deliver
12W more sustained maximum power,
leading to a lot less throttling.
The rest of the MacBook Pro is
largely unchanged. You get the same
unibody enclosure, four USB–C
(Thunderbolt 3) ports, plus a
headphone jack on the right — and the
same oversized trackpad as the 15–inch
MacBook Pro. Slightly disappointingly,
Apple hasn’t future–proofed the 16–
inch Pro by equipping it with Wi–Fi 6
(aka 802.11ax), sticking with 802.11ac
Wi–Fi instead. It’s also retained the
ninth–gen (Coffee Lake) Intel Core
CPUs of its predecessor, despite the
fact that 10th–gen (Ice Lake and Comet
Lake) mobile CPUs are available.The MacBook Pro 16–inch is marginally deeper
and heavier, but that’s a price worth paying.40 FEB 2020 maclife.com