For my tests of the late 2016 MBP 13" (2.9Ghz i5, Iris 550) I pit it against a mid 2014 MBP 15" (2.8Ghz i7, GT750M).
Design
Great design, solid engineering. but what's with the massive trackpad? When comparing the two machines I can't figure out the benefit of the size increase here unless a user has hands the size of a polar bear's.
First time I completed the set up process the keyboard froze and died. Rebooting fixed it.
Screen
The older machine's screen would have faded slightly but nevertheless, the new 2016 MBP 13" clearly wins this. Colours are clearly richer and images pop from the screen. One thing to note : the Intel 550 is still driven by an 8 bit graphics driver and does not support 10 bit output. So pick how you want to define wide gamut. It's definitely not by industry standards.
Sound
I played the movie Inception, noted for its loud epic Hans Zimmer soundtrack, and the latest Metallica tracks on their YouTube channel. Again, the newer machine wins clearly. Sound is richer, deeper and makes the older machine sound tinny.
SSD performance
Using AJA System Test with the 2160p 4GB test I recorded 2743MB/s reads and 1285MB/s writes on the new machine. The older machine is based on an older SSD that reads in the mid 700s and less than that for writes. Nevertheless, real world performance won't utilise the bandwidth of either SSD. You won't notice any difference in booting or launching applications. You will notice a difference if you unzip very large files or copy multi-gigabyte files from folder to folder.
The keyboard
I have berated the new keyboards but after spending half a day with the new one (I am using it to type this) I have gotten used to it. It's almost as good as the previous generation MBP keyboard and definitely better than the MB keyboard.
Touch bar
This has potential but right now it has a major issue that can be fixed with a software update. The most important keys you have on there for Mission Control or quickly adjusting brightness or volume are not always on display. The icons collapse and the touch bar has to be expanded to view these most common controls. This makes sense if you're using the Touch Bar with other applications but it doesn't make sense at other times to be presented with 12cm of blank space.
Even when trying to edit text for this review in Chrome, there are no short cuts available on the Touch Bar for font formatting. Surely Apple could have programmed it to detect when we are using text in any application.
I really like waking the machine up with Touch ID.
Graphics performance
I tested this with Unigene Valley.
The Intel 550 scored a total of 398 points. The GT 750M scored 648. A clear win for the older machine.
But things took a strange turn when I ran the OpenCL test in Geekbench.
The GT 750M scored a very weak 13760 points. The Iris Pro in the older machine scored a higher mark than the discreet GPU : 29135!
The Iris 550 in the new machine scored 30410. So in real world terms the 550 and the previous generation's Iris Pro are equally matched.
I stay with Geekbench for CPU testing and here there is no surprise.
The 4980HQ in the older machine scores 4479 and 14603 for single core and multi core respectively. The i5 6267U scores 3807 and 7500.
Photoshop and Bridge worked well. However Bridge's icon in the Dock was broken on the new machine, but not on the old machine. In the Finder it was fine and no matter what I did I coudn't get the icon to show correctly in the Dock.
Ports
I didn't buy any dongles but I do already have two devices I could test with USB-C.
My iPhone already had a Lightning to USB-C cable I used with a high power adapter. This appears to work fine although I don't sync my phone with a computer so I didn't test sync speeds.
My Samsung T3 is a USB-C device that supports SATA-3 transfer speeds of around 450MB/s. It came with a USB-C to USB-A cable so I have to use the USB-C charger cable that comes with the new machine for testing.
Again, I used AJA System Test to benchmark the read and writes. I got...38MB/s reads and 39MB/s writes. What's going on here? I tried with different benchmark settings and different ports. I got the same terrible performance every time.
Is the cable to blame for this or an incompatibility issue? Nevertheless, this makes the T3 completely useless with the MBP 2016's included cable.
Also useless is my Logitech Performance MX mouse. This fantastic mouse works flawlessly on my PC and the older Mac. It has a tiny little adapter that plugs into any standard USB-A port and barely protrudes. But now, if I want to use it with a new MBP I would have to buy a dangling dongle or extra adapter on top of the adapter. This makes the configuration really ugly, distracting and unfriendly.
I also really do not like not having Magsafe. The Thunderbolt 3 ports are very stiff and cables do not detach easily. If you decide to use the new machines wired then you have to be extremely sure that nothing can trip up a cable.
Conclusion
So there we are. The predictable conclusion that this is a mixed bag. The keyboard isn't as bad as some say. Wear and tear should make it softer and less noisy. The Touch Bar needs a software update. Graphics and CPU performance is tolerable. But those damn ports - they belong in the future. Today they will cause you pain.
If you have a 2013-2015 MBP 15" there is certainly no need to purchase the new 13" models. I would also hold off purchasing a new 15" model until it is clear there are no issues with the new generation.
Design
Great design, solid engineering. but what's with the massive trackpad? When comparing the two machines I can't figure out the benefit of the size increase here unless a user has hands the size of a polar bear's.
First time I completed the set up process the keyboard froze and died. Rebooting fixed it.
Screen
The older machine's screen would have faded slightly but nevertheless, the new 2016 MBP 13" clearly wins this. Colours are clearly richer and images pop from the screen. One thing to note : the Intel 550 is still driven by an 8 bit graphics driver and does not support 10 bit output. So pick how you want to define wide gamut. It's definitely not by industry standards.
Sound
I played the movie Inception, noted for its loud epic Hans Zimmer soundtrack, and the latest Metallica tracks on their YouTube channel. Again, the newer machine wins clearly. Sound is richer, deeper and makes the older machine sound tinny.
SSD performance
Using AJA System Test with the 2160p 4GB test I recorded 2743MB/s reads and 1285MB/s writes on the new machine. The older machine is based on an older SSD that reads in the mid 700s and less than that for writes. Nevertheless, real world performance won't utilise the bandwidth of either SSD. You won't notice any difference in booting or launching applications. You will notice a difference if you unzip very large files or copy multi-gigabyte files from folder to folder.
The keyboard
I have berated the new keyboards but after spending half a day with the new one (I am using it to type this) I have gotten used to it. It's almost as good as the previous generation MBP keyboard and definitely better than the MB keyboard.
Touch bar
This has potential but right now it has a major issue that can be fixed with a software update. The most important keys you have on there for Mission Control or quickly adjusting brightness or volume are not always on display. The icons collapse and the touch bar has to be expanded to view these most common controls. This makes sense if you're using the Touch Bar with other applications but it doesn't make sense at other times to be presented with 12cm of blank space.
Even when trying to edit text for this review in Chrome, there are no short cuts available on the Touch Bar for font formatting. Surely Apple could have programmed it to detect when we are using text in any application.
I really like waking the machine up with Touch ID.
Graphics performance
I tested this with Unigene Valley.
The Intel 550 scored a total of 398 points. The GT 750M scored 648. A clear win for the older machine.
But things took a strange turn when I ran the OpenCL test in Geekbench.
The GT 750M scored a very weak 13760 points. The Iris Pro in the older machine scored a higher mark than the discreet GPU : 29135!
The Iris 550 in the new machine scored 30410. So in real world terms the 550 and the previous generation's Iris Pro are equally matched.
I stay with Geekbench for CPU testing and here there is no surprise.
The 4980HQ in the older machine scores 4479 and 14603 for single core and multi core respectively. The i5 6267U scores 3807 and 7500.
Photoshop and Bridge worked well. However Bridge's icon in the Dock was broken on the new machine, but not on the old machine. In the Finder it was fine and no matter what I did I coudn't get the icon to show correctly in the Dock.
Ports
I didn't buy any dongles but I do already have two devices I could test with USB-C.
My iPhone already had a Lightning to USB-C cable I used with a high power adapter. This appears to work fine although I don't sync my phone with a computer so I didn't test sync speeds.
My Samsung T3 is a USB-C device that supports SATA-3 transfer speeds of around 450MB/s. It came with a USB-C to USB-A cable so I have to use the USB-C charger cable that comes with the new machine for testing.
Again, I used AJA System Test to benchmark the read and writes. I got...38MB/s reads and 39MB/s writes. What's going on here? I tried with different benchmark settings and different ports. I got the same terrible performance every time.
Is the cable to blame for this or an incompatibility issue? Nevertheless, this makes the T3 completely useless with the MBP 2016's included cable.
Also useless is my Logitech Performance MX mouse. This fantastic mouse works flawlessly on my PC and the older Mac. It has a tiny little adapter that plugs into any standard USB-A port and barely protrudes. But now, if I want to use it with a new MBP I would have to buy a dangling dongle or extra adapter on top of the adapter. This makes the configuration really ugly, distracting and unfriendly.
I also really do not like not having Magsafe. The Thunderbolt 3 ports are very stiff and cables do not detach easily. If you decide to use the new machines wired then you have to be extremely sure that nothing can trip up a cable.
Conclusion
So there we are. The predictable conclusion that this is a mixed bag. The keyboard isn't as bad as some say. Wear and tear should make it softer and less noisy. The Touch Bar needs a software update. Graphics and CPU performance is tolerable. But those damn ports - they belong in the future. Today they will cause you pain.
If you have a 2013-2015 MBP 15" there is certainly no need to purchase the new 13" models. I would also hold off purchasing a new 15" model until it is clear there are no issues with the new generation.
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