Originally Posted: January 25th, 2020

16-Inch MacBook Pro Review

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro has no asterisks or qualifications. It’s a great laptop, period.

Compared to the previous 15-inch, the screen and battery are bigger, but the size and weight barely increased. The CPUs are the same, but the improved thermal system can dissipate an additional 12 watts of heat, resulting in increased performance, less fan noise, and less throttling. The GPU options are updated to AMD’s 7nm Radeon Pro 5300m or 5500m, increasing performance while lowering power consumption. The speakers and microphone got huge, unexpected improvements. The keyboard doesn’t suck. It’s very similar to the desktop Magic Keyboard — and nothing like the butterfly keyboard. Hallelujah.

Apple just needs to make this in a smaller size.

Price: From $2,399
CPU: 9th gen Core i7 or Core i9
RAM: 16GB to 64GB
Storage: 512GB to 8TB
GPU: AMD Radeon Pro 5300M or 5500M
Display: 16 inches (3072 x 1920 pixels)
Battery: 100-wh, up to 11 hours
Size: 14.1 x 9.7 x 0.64 inches
Weight: 4.3 pounds

The 16-inch MacBook Pro has the keyboard every Apple laptop should have

Apple did not simply go back to the old keyboards from 2015. It’s a new design, with the best attributes of the old MacBook keyboards, the desktop Magic keyboard, and the recent MacBook’s butterfly switches. The new keyboard is not covered by Apple’s keyboard service program, because it apparently doesn’t need to be.

We got almost everything we wanted: scissor switches, inverted-T arrow keys, and a hardware Escape key. There’s a full 1mm of key travel, closer to the Magic keyboard’s 1.2mm than the butterfly’s 0.5mm. There’s also more space between keys, about 0.5mm, making it easier to feel the gaps between keys. They also kept the good parts of the butterfly keyboard — mainly the increased stability, where keys go down flat even when pressed off-center. The keys don’t wobble like the keys on pre-2016 keyboards do. There’s none of the feeling of typing on marshmallows that the old keyboards give you when you go back to them. It really is the best of both worlds.

Like the 15-inch MacBook Pro, all 16-inch models come with the Touch Bar. In the 16-Inch it’s been put slightly further away from the top row of keys, to help avoid accidental input. No functional changes to the Touch Bar, though. It’s still there, love it or hate it.

I hope that Apple brings this keyboard to the 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air soon. A reliable keyboard should not be a premium feature, but that's the way it is for now.

Audio

The new speakers and microphones are amazing. It’s not simply about being louder, although they are, they just sound impossibly better. They don’t sound like good laptop speakers — they just sound like good speakers, period. In a small room, you can use the 16-inch MacBook Pro to play music as though it’s a normal speaker system. At maximum volume they really are a lot louder, without the distortion you expect from laptop speakers at high volume.

The microphones were also improved, enough for Apple to label them as “studio quality”. That may be the marketing department getting a little overzealous, but I can confirm that they sound really good. Not as good as a dedicated microphone will sound, but enough to make your Skype calls that much clearer. Better is better.

The New Display

The new 16” display has a native resolution of 3072 × 1920 pixels, with a density of 226 pixels per inch. The old 15.4” display was 2880 × 1800 pixels at 220 PPI. Apple didn’t just stretch out the existing resolution or cut the same panel to be a bigger size, they made the screen slightly more dense and slightly bigger. This results in more screen real estate than before. Compared to the 15-inch, it’s hard to notice unless they are side by side, but it makes the gulf between the small and the big MacBook Pro’s screen that much bigger. Brightness and color are unchanged, and still excellent, going up to 500 nits of accurate, P3 wide color gamut goodness.

The Computer Bits

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is the new “big” MacBook Pro — it replaced the previous 15-inch MacBook Pro in the lineup at the same prices: $2400 for a 6-core base model and $2800 for the base 8-core. The Intel CPUs are the same as the ones from the 2019 15-inch MacBook Pro, they were still the best laptop chips Intel made for this size laptop at the time. It’s a bit unusual that a major update to the flagship MacBook uses the same CPUs as the generation it’s replacing. Blame Intel.

There are performance improvements, however. An all-new thermal system means the chips can run at peak performance longer thanks to larger heat pipes and more air flow. Graphics are faster, with the debut of AMD’s Radeon Pro 5000M series GPUs. The base models come with 16 GB of faster DDR4 RAM, and can now be configured with up to 64 GB. Apple also now offers up to 8 TB of SSD storage, which is a $2400 upgrade for the 6 core, or $2200 for the base 8 core. That option being available helps show the type of user (and wallet) this computer is made for. It’s a serious machine for serious work.

The ports are unchanged: four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports, two on each side, and a headphone jack. The 16-inch MacBook Pro does have a slightly larger footprint than the old 15-inch models. It’s slightly heavier too (4.3 vs. 4.02 pounds) and slightly thicker (1.62 vs. 1.55 cm). But in hand and in use, it effectively feels the same size as the 15-inch MacBook Pro.

Who’s This For?

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is for serious creative pros with more demanding needs, like coders, video editors and game developers. That’s why it has up to an 8-core Core i9 processor, up to 64GB of RAM and up to 8TB of storage. You also get a huge 16-inch Retina display with slimmer bezels and that great 6-speaker audio system. This machine is overkill for my modest needs, but it’s an absolute beast for power users and one of the best laptops you can buy. That’s partly why it’s so frustrating, too.

Looking ahead: 14-Inch MacBook Pro?

It’s hard to know if the 16-inch is part of a new generation of MacBooks, since so much of the design is the same as the outgoing 15-inch. It does feel like enough was changed to deserve that distinction, though. Whether it’s a new generation or not isn’t important, I just want to see this same formula applied to the current 13-inch. Replacing the keyboard, stretching the screen and reducing the bezels, improving thermal performance, raising RAM and SSD limits — all would be welcome. I doubt it will see all the improvements that the 16-inch received, but the keyboard is the most important one.

Apple tends to roll out new MacBook Pro generations with the larger size first. It can take months for the new design to make it into the smaller size, and we’re currently in that gap right now. The 13-inch MacBook Pro for sale right now is still the one they released in the summer of 2019, which is the 4th revision of the design they released back in 2016. A few years of the same design is expected, but the 2016-2019 MacBooks have had a few issues which make the next update worth waiting for. I wouldn’t recommend anyone buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro right now.

Rumors have pointed to a low cost iPhone being announced this spring, and if we’re lucky an updated 13-inch could sneak into that event. Worst case scenario would be waiting until WWDC in June. Apple has made us wait 9 months for the small MacBook Pro before, so it’s not without precedent. Until then we have the 16-inch, which gives us a good look into the future of the MacBook lineup. For the first time in a while, the future looks good.