“I had the chance to spend a few days with the new and very premium 15-inch MacBook Pro,” Patrick Moorhead writes for Forbes. “The new MacBook Pro is made from all CNC’d aluminum, not a stamped or plastic chassis that absolutely looks and feels premium and high-end. You will be proud to show this off at the coffee shop or the boardroom as executive jewelry. For a 15-inch notebook with discrete graphics and high-end, 35-watt processor, with very long battery life, it is very thin at 15.5 mm, very narrow at 34.93 cm and light at 4 lbs. It’s the thinnest and narrowest 15-inch performance laptop I’m aware of.”
“Also of note, I got monster battery life out of it, so it’s not like they removed too much battery to get thin,” Moorhead writes. “I absolutely love the zero light leakage illuminated keys and wished everyone did this. It’s really the pinnacle of keyboards.”
“The new Touch bar was the biggest new thing Apple brought to the table with the new MacBook. Any time Apple brings something new to the UI table, it’s only after huge deliberation, debate and testing. I mean this is the company that first popularized the mouse and trackpad and brought high quality, capacitive touch with the iPhone,” Moorhead writes. “The new MacBook Pro is an incredible laptop.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, it is.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro (non-Touch Bar) is the new MacBook Air and should be judged as such – November 13, 2016
Pro video editor uses Apple’s new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar: ‘I love it’ – November 11, 2016
Early adopters appreciate the Touch Bar on Apple’s MacBook Pro – November 11, 2016
Why Apple’s new MacBook Pros don’t need 32GB of RAM – November 10, 2016
Apple’s MacBook Pro can easily run a ridiculous number of ‘pro’ apps simultaneously with 16GB RAM – November 5, 2016
Hands on with Apple new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar: Huge trackpad offers great palm rejection – November 2, 2016
Apple does touch right and, as usual, Microsoft does it wrong – October 28, 2016
IBT: Apple’s MacBook Pro Touch Bar is the coolest thing ever; will change the way we use laptops – October 28, 2016
Wired hands on with Apple’s New MacBook Pro: It’s a whole new kind of laptop – October 27, 2016
CNET on the new MacBook Pro: Apple’s amazing strip show reinvents the notebook – October 27, 2016
Hands on with Apple’s new MacBook Pro: Looks and feels so good it’s unreal – October 27, 2016
The debate is over: IBM confirms that Apple Macs are $535 less expensive than Windows PCs – October 20, 2016
So basically he used it to copy/paste the specs and that’s about it.
Yeah. Real serious review of a laptop aimed at professionals.
It’s not “aimed at professionals”. It’s the best notebook Apple knows how to make and it’s “aimed” at people who want a well-made, powerful, reliable, solid, good-looking, macOS machine with ultimate connectivity and an outstanding display, UI, and battery life. Anyone can buy it and appreciate it, “pro” or not.
Especially those who are particularly excited about selecting emoji from the touch bar. Although, most 13-y.o. girls probably couldn’t afford one.
Nonsense.
Many professionals are finding the Touch Bar to be extremely useful. To wit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-grove-carter/one-professionals-look-at_b_12894856.html
Try reading clearly. The professionals who find the Touch Bar to be extremely useful most likely aren’t the ones excited about emojis. I was referring to Apple wasting time on such trivial sh¡t at the announcement of a supposedly Pro device.
@chrish1961: If it’s not aimed at professionals why do they call it Pro?
“It’s not “aimed at professionals”. It’s the best notebook Apple knows how to make and it’s “aimed” at people who want a well-made, powerful, reliable, solid, good-looking,..”
I don’t blame your reasoning as Apple is creating a great confusion prioritizing consumer optimizations on their “Pro” level mobile Macs.
Actually professionals have reviewed it and to their surprise it turns out to be fine for “professionals”.
Case in point, “professionals” have been using 16GB of memory before now, so what’s new? AND apple uses memory in many different ways to make page swapping unnoticeable by compressing memory. On top of that we have SSD to help out too. The spinning platters don’t exist anymore. Combine this further with the way Apple integrates software and hardware like no one else on this planet. Result is a surprise to so called “professionals”.
Professionals who think it is not for professionals might not be “professional” at all.
You must have a very different interpretation of the word “professional”. The professionals I have met are not enraptured by a teensy OLED strip that distracts them from the screen where they want to focus.
Some are not impressed with Apple’s choice to push fashion over performance. This is just Apple continuing to push mutitouch onto the Mac despite the fact that many pros exclusively use high-precision input devices to do what they need to do. Or numeric keyboards to make it faster to specify coordinates in their complex 3D models. Does an eye candy stip make you work faster? Nope. Pros are STILL waiting for Mac desktops and actual professional laptops with cutting edge performance. https://www.slrlounge.com/an-open-letter-to-apple-from-the-actual-working-pros/
Let’s remember: when you go shopping for a new work vehicle, you don’t compare the new model with the worn-out one you’re replacing. You look at all the different manufacturers and see who offers the best deal. On the Mac, Apple’s latest 5 years has been consistently offering less bang for the buck. The fanboy club here apparently never compares other brands, which is about as unprofessional as you can get.
Please, allow me to be informative with my own experience.
There are files I have been working on my iMac with 32GB that simple won’t open on a machine with 16 GB. Physical memory installed on your machine Its not relative specification nor a theory, its a limit, a confinement, a space. Also there are functions you want to apply to heavy 3D models or files that refuse to work if the system don’t have the memory to finish the task.
Picture this. If you are using just one application like Maya and working on a heavy file, then 16 GB may hold open application for a while. But once you open another hungry RAM application like Photoshop or Mary and you get to work on heavy files too the system will soon collapse, you have to be very careful and your stress gets high. Honestly, this is an annoying way to work. So you ask yourself for a practical way to solve this. And the only way to keep your pace is to add more memory.
Also we are not talking about 128 GB on a MBP, but 32 is pretty mundane even on a laptop for high end applications, not something exotic.
What is really Pro on the new MBP is the screen, the fast M.2 hard drives and the quad core i7 processors. But as a top high end mobile workstation the MBP does not have a powerful GPU or the memory amount.
So 16GB somehow define and limits what you may create or even your workflow. Not something productive when you have to finish your work fast.
That sort of response does not surprise me.
I’m a creative pro, my company does corporate/wedding/family video and photography.
The tools of the trade for myself and the vast majority of my peers was a Mac running Final Cut Pro 7, Aperture, Photoshop and so on.
After we’d all waited an age for FCP7 to be updated Apple hit us with the totally unusable version X. A full 100% of my peers spat out their coffee…. and moved to Premier.
Then an Apple exec casually mentioned to a journalist that Aperture was no longer being updated. Everyone had already got on the CC bandwagon so that didn’t matter.
Apple comes out with a Mac ‘Pro’ that looked cool but did NOT fit the actual practical needs of creatives. So most of us took a pass.
Are you getting the picture here?
This is 2016. 32Gb of RAM is not unreasonable.
If you are in my line of work and find the MBP sufficient, good for you, but I don’t find it sufficient, and I don’t need your permission to feel that way. If we were on the Windows side I could move to another brand and get what I need, but we’re not. Apple is the sole supplier of Macs, and to have them release a decidedly lackluster machine like this and call it “Pro” is a sad joke.
All the early reviews from pros seem to indicate the new MBP is totally up tot he task (see above link from Huntington Post). Meanwhile people still review by specs alone and not real life experience…
Many of the folks claiming this MacBook Pro doesn’t meet the needs of professionals seem to be assuming that all professionals are the same; but nothing could be further from the truth. There are many kinds of professionals in many different fields, each with their own computing needs. And for many of them, this machine meets or exceeds their needs.
No way, you don’t need a Pro hardware machine to be a professional in most areas. Your title or your professional experience does not comes with a requirement for a Pro computer. Many times even scientists does not need a Pro level computer and they may be at the top of their fields.
Or, you may need a professional level hardware computer and not be a professional. Like a high level hobbyist.
So most users may be professionals and even an entry level MBP may be all they need on their entire work experiences, but they are not qualified to credit a computer as a “workstation” or as a computer for high level professional use.
The computer used does not qualify a person as a Pro. Neither most users are not qualified to credit a hardware computer as a Pro or as a workstation.
Zed: Professional what?
If you are a dog groomer, you are a professional.
Well, he certainly doesn’t sound like a professional wanker wanting “to show this off at the coffee shop”, which is more than I can say for some.
Excellent point. Most of the time MDN dismisses all things Forbes, but now with the usual lack of principles, MDN goes ahead and pushes the fluff piece as if it was compelling. It isn’t.
Wow tat must of been painful – Forbes never writes anything good about anything Apple – They even tried to make this sound bad but clearly he what impressed. I wish they could actually say honestly what they think and not listen to the top brass at Forbes – Seems to be a pretty biased (against Apple) site.
https://www.google.com/amp/appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/31/intels-chip-design-not-apples-choices-reason-behind-thunderbolt-3-ram-issues-in-new-macbook-pro/amp/?client=safari