Overview of the Macbook pro 2016:

The grudge has been held against apple recently twice with their iPhone 7 and the newly released Macbok Pro 2016 edition. Looking at the price tags and specs, it’s completely out of competition of you were to compare it with a laptop within the same price tag. The available specs for both the 13 and 15 inch are on the apple website for a more in depth details, click here.

Build quality and design:

By far, Apple has always been the best in the business when it comes to build quality. The finishing and the aluminum chassis are amazing well crafted. The tolerances and the hinges are perfect. You can open the screen with one hand yet it’s not flimsy. It’s also thinner than the previous generations. However at this steep 1500$ base model, you’re asking for a heck of a lot more than just craftsmanship.

I/O:

It’s a lot less impressive in this area. The base models only come with 2 USB type C ports on the left side supporting thunderbolt 3 which hypothetically means that you can hook up an external GPU like a Razer core although reports about it haven’t been completely clear of it performing and working well. It also means that you have only one port left if you’re charging.

Following the Apple trend now of removing ports everywhere, the fact that you have to buy external adapters for literally everything might not bode well for the consumers because having to carry around a bunch of expensive adapters is quite annoying and never practical to always keep swapping in between. It certainly is a great benefit for Apple sales though.

Oh, it also has a combo headphone/microphone jack on the right side. How hypocritical!

Keyboard and touch pad/bar. 

It’s using a second generation of butterfly keys. The key travel distance is 0.5 mm. The touch pad has also been updated in terms of size. It’s HUGE enough to gesture with 8 fingers and the balm rejection is good. The touch bar is a good edition. It changes functions according to the application opened like different emojis in Facebook and changing colors in adobe.

The screen:

It’s still the same 2560 by 1600 pixel native resolution Retina display as last year’s 13-inch Pro but with some tweaking. It’s now more brighter 76% to be exact. It also has a wider color gamut.

The speakers: 

They’re the best on the market right now. They’re loud and clear and very defined. Also placing them on the edge of the frame sandwiching the keyboard only increased receiving this high quality sound.

Gaming:

Apple computers haven’t been known for their gaming capabilities since the internal components don’t match a gaming laptop with all the bells and whistles at the same price. They’ve been known for the productivity which is by apple’s perspective, giving you 2 ports and try to be productive with them.

Putting that aside, the Macbook 2016 comes with the Iris 540 which is almost the same performance as the 930m so you’ll be 30 fps on very low settings in lighter games. You can connect to 4k screen so at least that’s a good thing.

In terms of upgradeability, There’s a whole lot that you can do. The RAM is soldered leaving the only thing you can upgrade is the m.2 drive which has relatively good read and write speeds (2500 mb /s – 1400 mb /s).

Cooling: 

The fans on idle aren’t audible but they are under full load and sometimes it thermal throttle in heavy tasks like rendering.

Battery:

It lasts for up to 9 hours in regular use so overall the power efficiency is really good.

Conclusion:

The build quality, screen, keyboard, touch pad and speakers are amazing. The bad side though is that it’s not exactly the price per dollar ratio because that’s Apple’s pricing that has always been too steep, it’s that you have to buy and carry around other adapters for different uses which aren’t  cheap either.

Would I recommend this laptop for the average user?

No and if you’re looking for a 13 inch Mac, look at last year’s model. It’ll be at least 30% cheaper and the processor’s performance is almost the same.