The mid-level 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro ($1,799) gives you better connectivity and a faster 2.9GHz Core i5 processor than you get from the $1,499 base model. But the big draw here is Apple's new Touch Bar with Touch ID, which gives you an adaptable row of function keys, as well as an extra way to interact with your programs and data. The new MacBook Pro delivers the polished levels of build quality and performance you've come to expect, with added interoperability with Apple's other devices thrown into the mix. The main sticking points here are the new shallow keyboard, which takes some getting used to, and the need to either switch over to the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 infrastructure or carry a selection of adapters in your laptop bag. If you can roll with the changes, though, it's a thinner, lighter, more powerful MacBook Pro and among the best ultraportable laptops you can buy.
Design and Features
The all-new design of the MacBook Pro is the first major revamp since 2012, and overall, that's a good thing. Like the entry-level non–Touch Bar model, which uses the same basic chassis, the system measures 0.59 by 11.97 by 8.36 inches (HWD), and this version weighs 2.98 pounds (0.01 pound less than its brother). It's about half a pound lighter than the 2015 model, enough to make a difference if you carry it around with you all the time. It's a smidgen deeper than the Dell XPS 13 Touch (Rose Gold Edition) ($1,999.11 at Amazon), our top pick for high-end ultraportables, but not enough that you'd say it's bulkier. The all-aluminum laptop comes in Space Gray (like our test unit) or silver if you prefer a traditional Mac aesthetic.
The keys have very shallow travel, but they feel better than those on the Apple MacBook( at Amazon). The new trackpad is 46 percent larger than the one on last year's model, and it also uses Force Touch. It's easy to use wih good palm rejection, which is a concern with so much surface area. The speakers flank the keyboard, and produce clear sound with no distortion that can fill a small- to medium-size room easily.
The 13.3-inch, 2,560-by-1,600 Retina display is rated for 500 nits, which can help drown out the reflections if you work in a sun-drenched office or outdoors. Like the other 2016 MacBook Pros, the display has a DCI-P3 color gamut, to match the wider range of colors that you can capture with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, the iPad Pro, or an actual camera.
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For more on the design, check out our review of the base model 13-inch MacBook Pro sans Touch Bar, which shares many physical characteristics.
This MacBook Pro is equipped with four USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, two more than the $1,499 MacBook Pro. There are two on each side (and you can charge the laptop from any of them), along with the standard headphone jack on the right. While we applaud Apple for including four ports, we would have preferred at least one USB 3.0 (Type-A) port for connecting older peripherals. You'll need a $9 USB-C–to–USB adapter if you want to connect a USB thumb drive, a $19 USB-C–to–Lightning cable for your iPhone, and a $29 Thunderbolt 3–to–Thunderbolt 2 adapter to connect a Thunderbolt hard drive.
You're in the same boat with competitors like the HP Spectre 13($1,499.77 at Amazon) and the Asus ZenBook 3($999.00 at Amazon), but the Dell XPS 13 Touch has USB 3.0 and USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports. Sure, you can use a third-party docking station or a monitor with a Thunderbolt 3 cable, but you'll probably need to either buy a bag full of dongles or upgrade your peripherals. Yes, we all will eventually adjust, but for now it's an inconvenient, potentially costly annoyance.
This configuration comes with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), though you can opt for as much as 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD space. You can't upgrade RAM later, though, so keep that in mind before you purchase. As on all Macs, several apps come preinstalled, including iTunes, iBooks, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, and Photos, so you're all set to use the system as a home base for your Apple TV, Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad. The one-year warranty includes 90 days of technical support by phone, though you can purchase AppleCare+ ($249) for three years of extended warranty coverage. You can also receive Genius Bar support at an Apple Store for free after the warranty ends, but you will likely have to pay for repairs.
Using the Touch Bar
The most interesting new feature, the Touch Bar, has an active area that's about 10 inches wide and just under a half-inch tall, encompassing the space at the top of the keyboard that has traditionally held the row of Function keys. It's essentially an auxiliary touch screen that app developers can populate with contextual command buttons. Since it's an actual glass display, it's a lot more effective and useful than the function bar and adaptive keys on the 2014 version of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which simply cycled through backlit stencils to facilitate sharing buttons in four modes on the same physical surface. The Touch Bar works more like the Apple Watch, in that the tactile surface can change and display graphics or text, so app developers can display anything they want you to interact with (buttons, sliders, thumbnails, and so on). It's not a substitute for a touch screen, but more of a workflow enhancer, since it will show you commands you'd otherwise have to dig for in menus or activate with tough-to-remember key combinations.
For example, in Numbers (Apple's spreadsheet program), selecting a cell with the cursor brings up buttons for entering formulas, formatting text, or running an autofill command. The same Touch Bar displays hundreds of thumbnails while watching a video in QuickTime, and you can drag your finger across them to scrub backward and forward in the timeline. If you select a picture in Photos, the Touch Bar displays sliders so you can apply filters, edit the photo, rotate the picture, or adjust the color saturation. And the Touch Bar displays logical commands based on your previous action; it knows that you've selected text with the trackpad, say, and shows command buttons for changing the font's style (bold, italic, or underlined) or color, adding bullet points, and justifying to the left, right, or center. All in all, the Touch Bar works well, and once you get used to the new functionality, it can speed repetitive actions and help you avoid searching the menus and on-screen toolbars for commands you don't use all the time.
From the keyboard control panel you can replace any of the Touch Bar's default functions with commands to turn on the screen saver, take a screen shot, put the MacBook Pro to sleep, activate the screen lock, or enable dictation, among others. If you use these functions a lot, you can have the Touch Bar present them constantly for convenience. I replaced the default Siri key with the screen lock command, because I get up from my desk several times an hour.
If you still need traditional function keys (and the Esc key), just tap and hold the Fn key on the bottom row of the keyboard to bring them up on the Touch Bar. The bar supports 10-finger touch input, so you can hit multiple buttons simultaneously or use other multitouch gestures as an app requires. Programs like Adobe Photoshop, djay Pro, OmniPlan, and Microsoft Office are expected to have Touch Bar support integrated by the end of this year, hopefully by the time you read this. And more apps are sure to follow.
To the right of the Touch Bar there's a combination Power button and Touch ID sensor. It lets you unlock your laptop in one step after you've signed in for the first time (though as on the Apple Watch, iPhones, and iPads you'll have to enter your password after a reboot). After you train the laptop to recognize one fingerprint, you can enter up to four others, so you can use either hand or support up to five different users. You can use Touch ID to unlock your Mac, authorize e-commerce transactions using Apple Pay, and speed up iTunes purchases. As on the iPhone 7, Touch ID only takes a second to register and unlock the MacBook Pro, and it works even if you line up your finger a little askew.
Performance
The mid-tier MacBook Pro comes with an Intel Core i5-6267U processor with Intel Iris 550 graphics—improvements on the Core i5-6360U processor with Intel Iris 540 graphics found in the base model. It topped all competitors on the HandBrake test with a time of 2 minutes, 1 second, no doubt due to the combination of the speedy processor and the PCIe-based SSD. It was competitive on the CineBench test (338 points) and the Photoshop test (4:16), though the Dell XPS 13 Touch and the New Razer Blade Stealth($999.99 at Razer) each fared a bit better on these two multimedia tests. This MacBook Pro is ready for day-to-day graphics work, a mainstay of the Mac Faithful.
All of the recent high-end and midrange ultraportables we've tested lately have come with integrated Intel HD Graphics, rather than the more powerful Intel Iris graphics we see here. The difference was apparent on our 3D performance tests. The MacBook Pro returned playable scores on the Heaven (34 frames per second, or fps) and Valley (39fps) tests at 1,366-by-768 resolution with the graphics quality set to Medium. At native resolution and with the graphics settings turned up, frame rates were not quite good enough to be called playable. In other words, you should be able to play 3D games at a casual level, or view 3D interfaces for architectural drawings smoothly, but look elsewhere if you're heavy into CAD/CAM or want to play graphic-intensive games.
Battery life on the MacBook Pro is very good at 9 hours, 28 minutes, on our battery rundown test. That's more enough juice for all-day computing, and a bit better than the New Razer Blade Stealth (9:20) or the HP Spectre 13 (8:36). It certainly outlasts the Dell XPS 13 (Gold Edition)($1,699.99 at Dell) (7:07), but not the newer Rose Gold model (10:42). That said, the base model of the MacBook Pro endured a bit longer (11:53), as did the Asus ZenBook 3 (12:07), and the ultraportable leader is still the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air($999.00 at Amazon) (17:36). While Apple is still selling that model, the company has not announced plans to update the MacBook Air line.
Conclusion
The redesigned 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro is sleek and capable with excellent interoperability (with iOS, Apple TV, and watchOS) thanks to the Touch Bar. And it has the power and battery life to keep you working all day. You'll have to adjust to the new keyboard, though, and you'll likely need to buy some adapters to get that work done. When USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 are as ubiquitous as USB 3.0 is now, we won't have any reservations, but until that time, our Editors' Choice honors go to a system that has both USB-C/Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports. Because of its ports, along with a $150 lower price tag, higher-resolution screen, and competitive performance, the Dell XPS 13 Touch remains our top pick for high-end ultraportable laptops.
For the Mac faithful: Should you upgrade from an older MacBook Pro? Yes, provided you're willing to move from USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 devices to USB-C–Thunderbolt 3. If you have a 2014 or 2015 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, you should probably hold off, unless you really, really want the Touch Bar. The benefits of the new processor and screen alone aren't worth the trouble of getting used to the new keyboard and USB-C interface. If you're considering the base-level MacBook Pro, we think it's worth the extra $300 for this model, for its faster processor and the Touch Bar's potential utility. And if you need a larger screen, the 15-inch MacBook Pro might be the right choice, since it delivers more memory, a powerful Core i7 processor, and discrete AMD Radeon graphics, but it will cost you at least $2,499.
The sleek new Touch Bar adds some genuine innovation to the well-designed and powerful 13-inch MacBook Pro, but as with all new Apple laptops, you'll need to carry lots of adapters or buy all-new peripherals.
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