It's thicker than I expected! Feels huge compared to my 2015 15" or my 2019 15".
The hardware design actually seems like a throwback to the original PowerBook G4 Titanium:
You have the same, flat top edge on the screen and flat edges on main body. I had to do a double-take to make sure they didn't go back to the same bad hinge as the original, but fortunately, they didn't.
They also have a mushy black keyboard like the original, albiet with opaque black keys instead of translucent. And the font is different.
Now I know a lot of you hated the touchbar and skinny keyboard of the previous MacBook Pros, but I actually really liked those. I love the touchbar, in fact. I love being able to see at a glance if volume is muted, or stop/start zoom screen sharing withut having to find which of 15 workspaces the damn on-screen control bar is hidden in.
Don't get me wrong: I also like return physical F-keys, but given the size of the machine, I feel like we should be able to have both physical f-keys *and* a touchbar:
Maybe next year.
Screen
The screen is nice.
Rather than have a 1cm black strip at the top, they expanded the display area up to fill all available area. So you're not losing anything from the prior model, and the front camera is wayyy better than before.
That said, I wish there was an option for no front camera. I never use my Mac's camera, ever. I have a phone with four cameras and a closet of professional photo gear. Just give me a clip to use my iPhone as the camera and call it good. I hate the notch, especially since they didn't even give us FaceId.
Aside from the notch, the screen looks pretty good, but I wish it was an OLED. It's not.
Speaking of OLED, I tried connecting to my LG C9 over HDMI, but this top-end computer can somehow only manage 60hz at 4k. What the actual **** Apple? HDMI 2.0...?! Sure hope they fix that with a firmware patch. I paid $6k and got HDMI 2.0. Unusable.
Sound
Much ballyhoo was said about the six-speaker sound system, but it just sounds like a laptop to me.
The built-in headphone jack is a welcome return, but they chose to omit an input port for a mic or optical source like my 2015 MBP has. I haven't checked yet whether the 3.5mm jack on the new MBP supports optical in/out, but will update this post once I know more.
Omitting a dedicated analog/optical input from a laptop that sells for up to $6000 is kind of sad, but at least we got a built-in SD reader and a headphone port this time.
Performance
I'm a developer of iOS apps, so, software development will be a primary use case.
The Intel i9 on my 2019 MBP throttles down to as low as 800MHz during Xcode builds, making the damn thing basically unusable for 5-10 minutes.
I have not had a chance to test build times yet however on the new machine because I'm still waiting for Xcode 13 to un-zip and verify. After 30 minutes, it's still going. Note: Xcode 13 is a 10gb xip file. Why the **** does it take 30 goddamn minutes to un-zip? If this is going faster than my prior machine, I can't tell.
The hardware design actually seems like a throwback to the original PowerBook G4 Titanium:
You have the same, flat top edge on the screen and flat edges on main body. I had to do a double-take to make sure they didn't go back to the same bad hinge as the original, but fortunately, they didn't.
They also have a mushy black keyboard like the original, albiet with opaque black keys instead of translucent. And the font is different.
Now I know a lot of you hated the touchbar and skinny keyboard of the previous MacBook Pros, but I actually really liked those. I love the touchbar, in fact. I love being able to see at a glance if volume is muted, or stop/start zoom screen sharing withut having to find which of 15 workspaces the damn on-screen control bar is hidden in.
Don't get me wrong: I also like return physical F-keys, but given the size of the machine, I feel like we should be able to have both physical f-keys *and* a touchbar:
Maybe next year.
Screen
The screen is nice.
Rather than have a 1cm black strip at the top, they expanded the display area up to fill all available area. So you're not losing anything from the prior model, and the front camera is wayyy better than before.
That said, I wish there was an option for no front camera. I never use my Mac's camera, ever. I have a phone with four cameras and a closet of professional photo gear. Just give me a clip to use my iPhone as the camera and call it good. I hate the notch, especially since they didn't even give us FaceId.
Aside from the notch, the screen looks pretty good, but I wish it was an OLED. It's not.
Speaking of OLED, I tried connecting to my LG C9 over HDMI, but this top-end computer can somehow only manage 60hz at 4k. What the actual **** Apple? HDMI 2.0...?! Sure hope they fix that with a firmware patch. I paid $6k and got HDMI 2.0. Unusable.
Sound
Much ballyhoo was said about the six-speaker sound system, but it just sounds like a laptop to me.
The built-in headphone jack is a welcome return, but they chose to omit an input port for a mic or optical source like my 2015 MBP has. I haven't checked yet whether the 3.5mm jack on the new MBP supports optical in/out, but will update this post once I know more.
Omitting a dedicated analog/optical input from a laptop that sells for up to $6000 is kind of sad, but at least we got a built-in SD reader and a headphone port this time.
Performance
I'm a developer of iOS apps, so, software development will be a primary use case.
The Intel i9 on my 2019 MBP throttles down to as low as 800MHz during Xcode builds, making the damn thing basically unusable for 5-10 minutes.
I have not had a chance to test build times yet however on the new machine because I'm still waiting for Xcode 13 to un-zip and verify. After 30 minutes, it's still going. Note: Xcode 13 is a 10gb xip file. Why the **** does it take 30 goddamn minutes to un-zip? If this is going faster than my prior machine, I can't tell.
