I have had my late-2016 15 inch MacBook Pro w/ TouchBar for 1 month and 1 week now. Due to all the negative reviews I wanted to share my thoughts briefly. Note: My previous laptop was a maxed out late-2013 MBP retina.
Machine specs: 2.9Ghz, 16GB RAM, Radeon 460, 1TB SSD
Performance: Good enough, though I would have expected slightly more from a brand new "Pro" laptop. 32 GB RAM would have been nice especially since 16GB is what my 3 year old laptop had. That said, there are good reasons for Apple's chosen compromises. The speed of the new SSD is phenomenal, and in many ways makes up for other component/performance shortcomings.
Display and TouchBar: Excellent color on the main display and acceptable black levels. Power consumption seemingly rises rapidly with brightness increases. TouchBar is more useful than F keys to me, so I am happy with this feature.
Comfort: Light enough, cool enough, and quiet enough. Being able to plug power in on either side of the device is nice. I bought the smaller and lighter 29W power adapter for charging during travel. The addition of TouchID eases authentication and fast user switching. I did have to purchase a number of dongles but that was not a major complaint for me. As more USB-C devices come available I will need to carry them less often. The minimalist in me is actually bothered by the remaining analog headphone jack that can't accept the headphones included with my iPhone 7.
Build quality: Excellent. No issues. Space grey aluminum looks amazing. Hopefully Apple offers a matte black model in the future.
Overall summary: The hardware build quality is near flawless. Battery life is acceptable but could be better (lots of unused space inside that case), although I do appreciate the thinness and lower weight. The price is high, but I would rather pay a premium for this than use a poorly built Windows machine and all it's included software spam. The version of Sierra that shipped with this MBP did have a number of graphics software bugs that were partially fixed in the latest .2 update. Favorite features? TouchID and Space Gray.
Cheers.
Machine specs: 2.9Ghz, 16GB RAM, Radeon 460, 1TB SSD
Performance: Good enough, though I would have expected slightly more from a brand new "Pro" laptop. 32 GB RAM would have been nice especially since 16GB is what my 3 year old laptop had. That said, there are good reasons for Apple's chosen compromises. The speed of the new SSD is phenomenal, and in many ways makes up for other component/performance shortcomings.
Display and TouchBar: Excellent color on the main display and acceptable black levels. Power consumption seemingly rises rapidly with brightness increases. TouchBar is more useful than F keys to me, so I am happy with this feature.
Comfort: Light enough, cool enough, and quiet enough. Being able to plug power in on either side of the device is nice. I bought the smaller and lighter 29W power adapter for charging during travel. The addition of TouchID eases authentication and fast user switching. I did have to purchase a number of dongles but that was not a major complaint for me. As more USB-C devices come available I will need to carry them less often. The minimalist in me is actually bothered by the remaining analog headphone jack that can't accept the headphones included with my iPhone 7.
Build quality: Excellent. No issues. Space grey aluminum looks amazing. Hopefully Apple offers a matte black model in the future.
Overall summary: The hardware build quality is near flawless. Battery life is acceptable but could be better (lots of unused space inside that case), although I do appreciate the thinness and lower weight. The price is high, but I would rather pay a premium for this than use a poorly built Windows machine and all it's included software spam. The version of Sierra that shipped with this MBP did have a number of graphics software bugs that were partially fixed in the latest .2 update. Favorite features? TouchID and Space Gray.
Cheers.
