The scissor and the butterfly
I
T’S AMAZING HOW a small thing
can make such a big difference to
your experience of a laptop, but the
return of tiny scissor switch mechanisms
under each key in the Magic Keyboard is
very welcome and long overdue — and
follows years of complaints from usersabout the butterly switches used in recent
Apple laptops.
Chief among the complaints were a lack
of key travel, making them less satisfying to
type on, but also reliability — the keys could
jam up thanks to ingress from dust, dirt and
other detritus.
Apple met this challenge by making
a series of changes to the butterfly
mechanism: improving key travel, adding
a silicone membrane, and more. It also
instituted the Keyboard Service Program,
in which you can return your laptop to
Apple for free repairs, provided your
MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro
meet certain criteria. More details can be
found here: bit.ly/mbkeyrep.shallower butterfly version of the
fourth. The keys are individually backlit
and use scissor switch mechanisms
that afford them up to 1mm of travel.
The keys are also spaced further apart,
and are now further away from the
Touch Bar. Apple’s also made the Touch
Bar shorter, separating it from the
Touch ID/Power button, while also
reintroducing a physical Esc key.
Finally, it’s also replaced the horrible,
blocky cursor keys of the previous
generation with a more traditional
inverted–T design.
The result is a revelation. The
keyboard feels “right” again, making
the 2019 version much more pleasant
to type on, with a suitably firm but
springy (and less cramp–inducing)
action. Shortening the Touch Bar and
shifting it further away from the
keyboard also makes you a lot less
likely to hit it during fast ’n’ furious
typing sessions. The return of a real
Esc key is also very welcome.
At 3072x1920 pixels, the True Tone
Retina display is not in 4K territory
(3840x2160), but its narrower bezelsmake it feel less old–fashioned than
the 15.4–inch display. And it feels
bigger and more immersive too, even if
that extra 1.5cm (measured diagonally)
isn’t that much larger. However, the
display delivers where it counts — like
the previous generation it offers 500
nits brightness and the P3 wide color
gamut to deliver bold, bright colors. It’s
still the best display in any laptop.
But as George Lucas once said,
sound is half the experience, and the
16–inch Pro delivers here too, with a
new six–speaker sound system with
dual force–cancelling woofers that
deliver an extra half–octave of bass,
while also minimizing vibration. The
result is some of the best stereo sound
you’ll have heard from laptop speakers.
Sure, they’re never going to replace an
AirPlay 2 speaker, but they’re good
enough for casual listening.
Then there’s the performance. We
put this model through a series of
tests, then compared its benchmarks
with previous MacBook Pros. The
results are surprising. In Geekbench 4,
it scored an average of 5209 in single–
core performance compared to 5764
for the 15–inch mid–2019 MacBook Pro,
although that machine had 32GB of
RAM and a 2.4GHz i9 compared to the
16GB of RAM and 2.3GHz of the 16–inch
Pro on test.GAME POWER
In our Handbrake video conversion
test, the 16–inch Pro absolutely
spanked its 15–inch predecessor, taking
seven minutes 31 seconds to transcode
a 20–minute MKV video to MP4,
whereas the 15–inch took 13 minutes. It
was a similar story in our DaVinci
Resolve rendering test, where we
converted an effects–laden video.
Whereas the 15–inch Pro did the job in
18 minutes 32 seconds, the 16–inch Pro
took just 11 minutes, 27 seconds. In
both tests, it’s clear that the improved
thermodynamics of the 16–inch Pro
have a big impact on its performance,
despite the fact that the 16–inch Pro on
test has a slower processor and 16GBFor now, there are two stock models
to choose from: a $2,399 model
equipped with a ninth–generation
six–core Core i7, 16GB of 2666MHz
memory, 512GB of SSD storage, and
a discrete AMD Radeon 5330M
graphics card with 4GB of GDDR6
memory. The step–up $2,799 model
(on test here) is equipped with a
ninth–gen 8–core 2.3GHz Intel Core i9,
16GB of 2666MHz memory, 1TB of SSD
storage and a discrete AMD Radeon
Pro 5500M graphics card, also with
4GB of GDDR6 memory. There’s a long
list of build–to–order options too: you
can fit up to 64GB of memory (for
$800), add a powerful AMD Radeon
Pro 5500M with 8GB of graphics
memory ($100) and a phenomenal 8TB
of SSD storage (a snip at $2,200). You
can also plump for a more powerful
2.4GHz Intel Core i9 at $200.IN USE
The keyboard, then. The one in the
16–inch Pro now looks and feels like
a cross between the “island” keyboard
of the third–gen MacBook Pro and the42 FEB 2020 maclife.com