Tech —

Review: The $1,499 2016 MacBook Pro is an expensive MacBook Air on the inside

Touch Bar tests must wait, but this MBP is neither high-end nor entry-level.

Keyboard, trackpad, and palm rejection

The base of the laptop is dominated by its keyboard and trackpad, the latter of which has been expanded to take up more room than ever—the size of the trackpad in the 15-inch model is twice as large as before, and the one in the 13-inch model is close.

Apple says that the size of the new trackpad is made possible in part by the move to Force Touch trackpads—a conventional trackpad this large would need to move quite a bit to achieve a clicky feel throughout, but since the “click” in a Force Touch pad is entirely simulated it feels the same no matter how you click it. This saves a fair bit of room inside the laptop (Apple also says it has made the whole Force Touch assembly thinner than the one used in older MacBooks and Pros and the Magic Trackpad 2, but we’ll need to wait for an iFixit teardown to see how things have changed). Under the “firm” settings in System Preferences, I’m still pleasantly surprised by how well it approximates a physical clicking sensation. It’s not the same, but it’s close, and you rapidly get used to it. The only thing I miss is the “silent clicking” option that the older models had, which kept the same feel but mostly eliminated noise.

The larger trackpad surface feels great if you’re a heavy user of macOS’ trackpad gestures, which I am. Your hands need to move around less, and you don’t need to worry about being precise, since the new trackpad is pretty hard to miss. The only thing I occasionally had trouble with was palm rejection.

I normally use my left thumb to tap the spacebar as I type, which means that the base of my palm is almost always touching or threatening to touch the trackpad. If you have one or both of your palms solidly on the trackpad, it actually does a pretty good job not just ignoring your palm but also tracking the presence of your fingers if you touch the trackpad at the same time. If, like me, part of your palm occasionally brushes the trackpad but your hands and wrists aren’t actually rested on it, the laptop can sometimes misinterpret that as input, which can make the cursor jump around onscreen a little.

I’m definitely noticing this phenomenon less after a few days with the laptop. I imagine that most people will intentionally or subconsciously adjust their typing habits enough to avoid major problems. But it’s also pretty much the only problem I’ve had with a trackpad in the half-decade since I made the jump from a PC laptop to some flavor of MacBook, so it’s something you should keep in mind as you begin using the new Pros.

If the trackpad is different but still pretty familiar to anyone who has ever used a Mac trackpad, the keyboard is a more drastic departure. The new Pros use a second-generation of the same low-travel chiclet keyboard that the company introduced in the MacBook last year. This is the first major change Apple has made to the look and feel of its laptop keyboards since the aluminum unibody models came out in late 2008, and the look and feel are much different.

Here are the basic facts for anyone who hasn’t tried the MacBook keyboard yet: the keys are very slightly larger than they were before, but they move much less. The butterfly switch mechanism only allows for 0.5mm of travel, a change Apple has made primarily to make the keyboard (and, by extension, the laptop) slightly thinner. To offset this, the keys are much firmer—it takes a slightly greater amount of force to press a key down, and they wiggle very little, which helps protect from accidental key presses. A low-travel keyboard with mushy keys is the worst possible combination, so Apple has tried to firm up the keys to compensate for the low travel.

The Pros use a “second-generation” version of the MacBook’s butterfly switch mechanism, which has, according to Phil Schiller, “an even greater sense of keyboard travel.” Note the carefully chosen words: it gives a greater sense of keyboard travel than the MacBook, but the actual keyboard travel is the same. Going forward, it looks like Apple is going to continue refining its new switch mechanism to address user complaints, but it’s only willing to do that if it doesn’t have to make the keyboard thicker.

Among MacBook users in the Ars Slack channel, the general consensus is that you can mostly get used to the new keyboard, though some individuals maintain that it is “garbage,” and that’s a completely understandable opinion. The new keyboard does feel noticeably better than the old one when you use them side-by-side—it combines the keys’ pleasant firmness and larger size with a greater feeling of travel and a more satisfying clicky sound. But I suspect that most people who view this keyboard as an improvement will be the ones who have already made peace with the MacBook’s keyboard. It may be able to convince some people who were on the fence, but I don’t think it’s going to win over many people who have decided they absolutely hate the MacBook’s keyboard.


All the new Pros have the same screen sizes, resolutions, and pixel densities as the old ones. For the 13-inch models, that means a 13.3-inch 2560×1600 227 PPI screen. The panel is the same size, but the bezels around it have been drastically reduced, not quite to the point of the XPS 13 (Apple wanted to keep the webcam above the display panel and centered, a quibble we have with Dell’s design) but pretty close. Attentive buyers will also notice that the MacBook Pro branding is back on the bezel instead of on the underside of the laptop.

Apple has made three major improvements to the display aside from the thinness of the display assembly and the smaller bezels. First, its maximum brightness has increased from 300 nits to 500 nits, which, when paired with the anti-reflective screen coating, makes the laptop a bit more usable in bright light. Second, its contrast ratio improves by quite a bit—it's 1500:1 in the new Pros, compared to 900:1 in the previous models. Finally, it supports the DCI-P3 color space, which Apple has also added to the 4K and 5K iMacs, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, and the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus in the last year. Apple calls this “wide color” in most of its documentation and marketing.

The DCI-P3 color space contains around 25 percent more colors than the sRGB space that Apple used previously, and it’s mostly noticeable when viewing more vivid shades of red and green (the blue end of the DCI P3 gamut is pretty similar to sRGB). Sierra provides updates to system frameworks like Core Graphics, Core Image, Metal, and AVFoundation that make it relatively simple for apps to support the wider color gamut. If you work with photos and video and you want to support the wider gamut, you’ll have to make sure you’re shooting with a camera that supports it (or you’ll want to shoot in RAW mode and process the images in an app that supports wide color). The iPhone 7 and 9.7-inch iPad Pro cameras all shoot in wide color, and more recent DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are introducing support for wider-than-sRGB color spaces, too.

The 13-inch Pros have always supported four Retina “scaling” modes—1024×640, 1280×800, 1440×900, and 1680×1050. Of those, only 1280×800 mode actually uses the panel’s native 2560×1600 resolution. The others all use the GPU to draw a larger (or smaller) image and then resize it to the panel’s native resolution, and Retina screens are sharp enough to mask the fuzziness that normally results from resizing images. Apple has used this trick to avoid shipping multiple display panel configurations in the Retina Pros.

All the old Retina Pros used the 1280×800 mode as their default, but the new ones use 1440×900 mode by default; Apple does something similar with the Retina MacBook, which uses 1280×800 mode by default even though the 1152×720 mode actually reflects the panel’s native resolution. It’s a way to make the panels look higher-resolution than they are without increasing costs or wearing down the battery more quickly.

All of these improvements are unquestionably nice to have, though for me personally none of them rise to the “need to have” level if you’ve already got a Retina MacBook Pro of some stripe. On the other hand, if you’re coming from a non-Retina laptop like an Air or an older Pro, it’s a huge leap forward. It’s bright and sharp and gorgeous, and it has the added crispness for text and thumbnails. If you’ve already got a Retina MacBook, you’ll have a hard time telling the two displays apart without looking at the right kind of images on both screens at the same time. DCI-P3 screens are great, and I’m glad Apple is using more of them, but they aren’t a major functional leap forward like Retina screens can be.


Speakers aren’t usually much of a selling point for phones, tablets, or laptops—they range from poor to unexceptional in the vast majority of cases, Apple included. But the speakers in the Pros definitely sound nicer than the ones in most laptops.

There are now two stereo speaker grilles, one on either side of the keyboard, and Apple told us that the laptops also route some sound through the heatsink and vents (if you cover both grilles there’s still sound coming out from around the hinge where the air vents are located). True to Apple’s marketing, the new speakers boast higher dynamic range than the old ones—bass is more audible, and treble is clearer and cleaner than before. The speakers also do a pretty nice job with stereo separation. Despite the laptop’s relatively small size, it’s clear which sounds are coming out of the left speaker and which sounds are coming out of the right. You’re not going to want to use this thing to get your next dance party started, but it’s great for listening to music or podcasts, and it’s totally usable if you want to play some background music for a small get-together.

Apple says that the speakers in the 15-inch version of the Pro should be even better because there’s more room to work with in a larger laptop. We’ll give it a listen when we have a 15-inch model available to test with.

You must to comment.

Channel Ars Technica