The new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar looks identical to its predecessor, but once you start using it, you'll feel the difference in multiple ways. Apple has upgraded its 2018 laptop with serious power, promising up to twice the performance of the 2017 model. It also offers new features that seem subtle on the surface (like Hey Siri and a True Tone display) but, surprisingly, make a big difference in everyday use. Add in an improved keyboard, and you have what looks like a winner. But starting at $1,799, this premium machine isn't for everyone, and not just because of its price. Here are the pros and cons of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Amazing speed Armed with a quad-core 8th Gen Core i5 or Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, the 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro is a certified screamer based on our benchmarking. We reviewed a Core i7 model with 16GB of RAM, and it left Windows laptops in the dust on several tests. This includes Geekbench 4, which measures overall performance, and our 4K video editing test. And the SSD is absolutely blazing, as it turned in a write speed of 2,682 megabytes per second. The Dell XPS 13, for comparison, hit 1,208.8 MBps. Quieter, more durable keyboard Apple isn't advertising this, but compared with previous Apple laptops, there's a much lower chance that this MacBook Pro will suffer from stuck keys. That's because the third-generation butterfly keyboard has a silicone layer underneath each key, which should help prevent debris from entering. The keyboard is also a bit quieter than before and offers a slightly softer feel based on our testing. Some don't like it, but I do. True Tone display The 13-inch screen on this MacBook Pro is just as bright and colorful as before, and its resolution is just as sharp, at 2560 x 1600 pixels. What's different now is the addition of True Tone technology, which changes the white balance of the panel based on the color temperature of ambient lighting. That translates to a more comfortable viewing experience, especially when you stare at a screen all day long for your job. T2 chip and Hey Siri Apple has integrated a new dedicated T2 chip of its own in the MacBook Pro, and it enables some pretty helpful features. These include full disk encryption for data stored on the SSD and a secure boot process. But that's boring. The more exciting feature is Hey Siri, which lets you use your voice to do everything from change settings on the laptop to launch websites with just your voice. Great speakers For most laptop makers, audio quality is an afterthought, but the two speakers that flank the MacBook Pro's keyboard deliver rich and balanced audio. You'll appreciate the volume and clarity when making video calls but also when streaming music, as I did when using the Spotify app. And, unlike on many Windows notebooks, the sound doesn't distort at max volume. Mediocre battery life The 13-inch MacBook Pro packs a pretty beefy 58-watt-hour battery, which is actually a jump up from the 54.5-watt-hour battery on the 2017 model. But we didn't see great results on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which simulates web surfing on 150 nits of screen brightness. The MacBook Pro lasted only 8 hours and 23 minutes. That was after performing Apple's software update designed to prevent performance throttling. Prior to the update, we saw a runtime of 8:43. The average for premium laptops is 8:03, so the 13-inch MacBook Pro's battery life is above average. However, other systems last considerably longer. For example, the Core i5-powered Dell XPS 13 lasted 12 and a half hours on the same test, and the Huawei MateBook X Pro endured for 9:55. Just-OK graphics performance The Intel Iris 655 Plus graphics chip inside the 13-inch MacBook Pro should prove more than capable for photo and video editing, but it doesn't have the horsepower to handle mainstream games. For example, on the Dirt 3 racing game, the system delivered a frame rate of 46.9 frames per second. That's playable but nowhere near what the cheaper Huawei MateBook X Pro and the Asus ZenBook 13 achieved with their Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPUs. We're talking more than double the frame rate: over 110 fps. No legacy ports I get it. Apple is trying to look ahead, which is why the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar ditches a full-size USB port and SD card slot in favor of four Thunderbolt 3 ports. These ports provide serious bandwidth, but you'll still need an adapter to plug in various peripherals and your iPhone. High price tag Even if you accept that Apple's laptops command a premium versus the Windows competition, the starting configuration of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar runs a fairly steep $1,799. That price gets you a quad-core 8th Gen Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. For comparison, a MateBook X Pro with a 3K, 13.9-inch, touch-screen display; 8GB of RAM; and a 256GB SSD costs just $1,199. Jumping up to a Core i7 chip, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD will run you $1,599, which is still $200 less than the MacBook Pro's starting price. Bottom line If you're a Mac devotee, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar will satisfy you with its blazing performance, improved keyboard and little touches like Hey Siri and the True Tone display. But if you're not wedded to macOS, you can get a Windows Ultrabook with comparable performance for considerably less money. Overall, this MacBook is worth the splurge, but I wish the battery lasted longer on a charge. Credit: Tom's Guide, Shutterstock<doc-sep>The i9 MacBook Pro is a feat of engineering and design that Apple has carried forward for the last three models, but choices made at the inception of the line are echoing forward to today, cutting back a very little bit on what the computer could be. The latest MacBook Pro retains the fourth major body redesign that the product line has seen. The new design leans heavily on techniques used for the Retina MacBook, MacBook Air, and iPad, with the design still 0.61 inches (15.5 mm) thick — making it thinner than the MacBook Air. Apple's high end 15-inch MacBook Pro is still available in standard Silver and a darker Space Gray finish, and is sold alongside a smaller 13-inch version — but that model is a different review. As before, the Touch ID button is still a physical one, and it serves as an emergency way to force a shut down in the case of a nasty Kernel Panic, as well as a power-on switch. Other power functions are handled automatically by default, with the user opening and closing the lid to respectively wake or sleep the machine. Touch ID isn't universal, though. If you log out of your account, you'll need to supply a password to log back in; Touch ID only works if your account is active. You also need to log in manually after a power cycle, just as with iOS devices. The Touch Bar is still intended to appear and function as a dynamic strip of virtual keyboard keys, unconfined by the physical structure of mechanical keys. When you hold down the FN key, the Touch Bar reverts to a standard strip of 12 function keys and the escape key. If you boot into Windows, the Touch Bar still reverts to displaying virtual function keys. But — you're probably not reading to hear about the Touch Bar again. By the numbers The whole point of the 2017 MacBook Pro refresh was the addition of Kaby Lake. The 2018 has taken that a bit farther with Coffee Lake, and DDR4 RAM in the 15-inch model. There are two main configurations of the 15-inch MacBook Pro. We covered the i7 15-inch model at some length on Saturday, and it is a very solid machine. And, that one is probably the machine of choice for most looking at a MacBook Pro. For this review, we're examining the 2.9GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro, with 512GB of flash storage, and 32GB of RAM. The retail price on this configuration is $3499. Keyboard, again and still We've already spoken at length about the keyboard in both the 13-inch MacBook Pro review, and the 15-inch i7 one. We aren't going to delve too deeply into it here. Yes, it's a lot quieter. Yes, there's a new silicone gasket. No, we don't know yet if it will help reliability — but we're pretty sure that there were improvements in that regard in the 2017 keyboard. Testing the silicon Our model's i9 CPU has base clock speed of 2.9GHz and a maximum boost clock of 4.8GHz. Geekbench 4 isn't the entire tale, but results for this i9 Macbook Pro are an impressive improvement from the top spec 2017 model. Single-core performance hit 5582 on the Geekbench testing, with the machine hitting 24,226 for multi-core performance. This makes the machine the second fastest performer Apple has ever made for single-core burst performance, and the seventh for multi-core behind only the iMac Pro, and two high-end 2013 Mac Pro configurations. Geekbench results test a wide variety of processor tasks, most that don't max out your CPU allowing the i9 to run at impressive clock speeds. For tasks like video editing, rendering tests are much more definitive. As we discussed after Apple's patch for the thermal throttling situation was rolled out, the 2018 i9 15-inch MacBook Pro is 30 percent faster in Cinebench R15, hitting 1056, versus the 2017 peak of 805. The 2018 i7 configuration that we examined on Saturday returned a score of 991. We ran a series of video editing tests starting with the Bruce X test in Final Cut Pro. This 5K render uses tasks mainly the graphics and our top spec 2018 Macbook Pro was only two seconds faster. Next we rendered a 5 minute 4K project with effects that taxes the CPU and GPU more evenly but doesn't max them out. Our top spec 2018 model was 9 percent faster. The job took 3 minutes and 29 seconds to complete on the i7, versus 2 minus and 47 seconds on the i9. Taking this a step further we wanted to see how this machine fares under the most difficult loads which will max out both the graphics and cpu, using 4.5K RED RAW footage with effects. Our 5 min project rendered 18 percent faster with our new i9 model. The render took 14 minutes and 25 seconds to render on the 2017 15-inch i7 MacBook Pro, compared to 12 minutes and 15 sec on the i9 — about 18 percent faster. Amplifying previous tests, we rendered another 5 min 4K project with effects but this time using HEVC footage and exporting to HEVC. Apple requires use of this more efficient codec if you want to shoot 4K 60 or 1080P 240FPS. Apple's 2017 Macbook took an even 10 minutes to render the file, with the new i9 taking just 3 minutes and 51 seconds. This difference isn't just because of faster performance, but mostly because of much more efficient HEVC encoding and decoding hardware in the 8th generation intel CPU. Finishing off with Photoshop and Lightroom, The latest 15-inch Macbook was only about 4 percent faster converting 50 edited raw photos to JPEG, and we saw no smoothness differences when using the programs. True Tone display There's a lot to say about True Tone. In short, Apple's True Tone technology takes input from a pair of sensors in the screen, and will alter the settings of the internal display and compatible external ones to account for the lighting condition in the room. This is another feature that you already know if you want it or not. Opinions are split amongst the video and photo editors about the utility of the feature. The feature isn't bad, but it's not necessarily great in all conditions and for all users. Since you can turn it off at will, you're not stuck with it if you don't need it. At this point, we're not sure if its just a checkbox in a spec list, or something more useful long term for most users. We'll let you know in a few months. That X in the GPU is nice, with variable improvement The Radeon Pro 555 and 560 ship in the 2017 model. The 2018 model has "X" versions of same, with slightly better performance and more video RAM. Like previous models, macOS can automatically activate and switch to the dedicated GPU when necessary and fall back to integrated graphics to save energy. In these cases, the on-board graphics are a hair faster than the previous generation's integrated chipset, but nothing notable. The OpenCL graphics test in Geekbench 4 gave us an improvement with the added X, going from 42,990 to 52,499 in OpenCL. Metal was dramatically improved, hitting 60,149 with the 560X, versus 38,701 with the 560 — but a fair amount of this gain is from software improvement. RAM The RAM has been updated in the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro from 16GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 to 16GB of 2400MHZ DDR4 soldered onto the motherboard. For an additional $400, you can get 32GB in total — which is what this configuration as reviewed has. Like we said before, you already know if you need it. If you don't know if you do, you probably don't — but it's not a bad addition if you're looking to keep the machine for four years or more. Apple has shifted to DDR4 RAM to get the 32GB option, as it literally couldn't get there with LPDDR3 RAM. The inclusion is both faster than LPDDR3, and more power-hungry. And, it's also hotter, further complicating an already tight thermal situation. Related to all this... Thermals The 15-inch i9 MacBook Pro is a hot machine. While it is pretty great, that's not the hot we're referring to. It runs warm in every regard, in a very small chassis. We've said it before — we think Apple got hosed by Intel, when they were gearing up for the 2016 MacBook Pro enclosure in 2015. We know that in 2015, Intel was promising delivery of 10nm process Core chips well before now, and even smaller by 2018. Coffee Lake is unapologetically still 14nm. Intel hasn't set a delivery target in seven years that it hasn't broken by months or years. This, plus DDR4 RAM, plus the 555X or 560X GPU, coupled with a thin design all still leads to a machine that isn't quite what it could be because of heat — although it is far better than it was before the patch that was issued on July 24. In our use, when the machine was under load, the keyboard's metal surface routinely hit 107F around the G H, and J keys. That's still usable, but it is very, very warm. This might not be bad in the winter, but in a Virginian summer, it isn't that great. There are still a large number of picky details to examine with the 15-inch MacBook Pro in regards to the thermal environment. We'll be looking a lot more at varying work environments including ambient temperature effects, and machine orientations as the weeks and months wear on to see if they make any difference at all to performance. Flash speeds are blistering The drive is absolutely no slouch. Running the BlackMagic disk speed test after the machine had been indexing for three days, we saw a write speed of 2790 megabytes per second. Other venues have claimed that this is because of APFS cloning, but after consultation with BlackMagic, we have confirmed that is not the case, and the speeds are genuine. Thunderbolt 3 There remains a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth about Thunderbolt 3 and by association, the USB-C connector. Two years on, users are still complaining about the expense of dongles to adapt, and Apple's lack of consideration for users in moving to the new connector. In the user's defense, they're not entirely wrong, but the further we get from release, the less valid the complaints are. USB-C-to-whatever connectors are cheap, and plentiful. You can get there from here, and it isn't expensive to do so. In Apple's defense, Thunderbolt 3 with the USB-C connector is more future-proof and far faster than USB 3.0, and is a game-changer for use cases, if you let it help you and fight it less. It's here, and it's staying. It's past time to come to terms and deal with it. A solution that may keep costs down is a Thunderbolt dock. While Thunderbolt 3 docks start at $199 retail, the $49 Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter will work nicely if you want to use an older dock with the newer gear, possibly making the prospect of a Thunderbolt 2 (or even original Thunderbolt) dock cheaper than a bag full of adapters. Furthermore, if you're considering an external GPU, many of the enclosures have USB-A and Ethernet ports, in an accessory that costs not much more than a dock does. If all you need are a few USB-A ports, get a USB 3.0 dock, along with a USB-C to USB-B cable for around $8. Problem solved. Regarding MagSafe, we've been testing USB-C for a very long time at this point. On a melamine, Corian, or finished wood desk surface, the force required to pull out Apple's USB-C charging cable is about three-quarters of what it takes to break a MagSafe 2 connection, when the cable is pulled from less than a 40-degree angle from center on the horizontal plane, and less than 30 degrees from center on the vertical. USB-C isn't even close to the 45W barrel-connector that Apple migrated away from to MagSafe.<doc-sep>
Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar gets some pretty substantial improvements for 2018, with a beefier processor, faster GPU and new True Tone display. The upgrades bring the small form factor Pro on par with Dell's XPS 13, our all-time favorite Windows laptop. But which one is right for you? In an earlier comparison of the previous generation 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar and a comparable XPS 13-inch, Apple's notebook edged out the Dell in a few key categories. The base 13-inch MacBook Pro is completely unchanged from last year, so if you're in the market for a computer in the $1300 price range, it's worth a look. The 13-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro for $1,799 has seen some massive updates, so this time it will be compared to the $1,799 version of Dell's XPS 13. As Dell is constantly having sales on their laptops, you can probably find the 9370 on offer at a much lower price. Big differences The main differences between both computers is that the Dell comes with double the SSD storage and a 4K-resolution display instead of a 2.5K display on the MacBook Pro.The XPS is also smaller and lighter than the MacBook, even though it has the same 13-inch screen, thanks to the infinity edge design Most would agree that the XPS's design isn't as nice as the MacBook's beautiful all aluminum build, but it still looks and feels great. The MacBook has a larger 58 Watt-hour battery, compared to 52 on the Dell. It also includes a higher-wattage USB-C charger. Either way, battery life is great on both laptops. The XPS has three USB-C ports, two of which support Thunderbolt 3, and a microSD card slot, along with a USB-A adapter that ships with it in the box. The MacBook Pro has four Thunderbolt 3 ports, meaning you can connect more demanding devices like eGPUs or 5K displays. Performance Both machines come with 8 gigabytes of RAM, but the MacBook's memory is clocked slightly faster. The new Touch Bar 13-inch MacBook Pro is now powered by Intel's 8th generation i5 quad-core processor, comparable to the XPS's quad-core i7. The base clock speed is quite a bit higher on the Mac, but the XPS boosts to a slightly higher 4.0GHz. In the first benchmark, Geekbench 4's CPU test, both laptops turned in nearly the exact same single-core score, However, the MacBook Pro completely destroyed the XPS in multi-core tests. Taking a look at Cinebench R15, the MacBook Pro scored 621 points, compared to 598 on the XPS. It's close, but there's no doubt that the MacBook Pro has a faster CPU. Testing graphics performance, the MacBook Pro again defeats the XPS with a score of 32,831 against 22,008. The MacBook Pro is the obvious choice for performance. In everything from light gaming to video editing, it comes out on top. It then becomes a case of looking at the rest of the MacBook Pro's features to see if it's worth the extra cash. Keyboards and Trackpad Apple has updated the keyboard to include silicone barriers under each key, potentially protecting the key switches from dust. While Apple has not officially confirmed the purpose of the barriers, they could address keyboard issues that popped up in older butterfly key MacBooks. The XPS keys are fairly quiet with good travel and a quality feel resulting in a keyboard we think most will prefer compared to Apple's minimal-travel butterfly keys. The XPS's trackpad is likely one of the best for Windows laptops, but it's a huge step behind Apple's Force Touch trackpad, one that's twice as large and has perfectly even input no matter where you press. Feedback can also be adjusted to a user's preference, and honestly, nothing else compares. Audio, Touch Bar, and T2 In our previous comparison, the 13-inch base MacBook Pro's speakers blew the XPS out of the water. For 2018, the MacBook Pro's speakers have been updated with great improvements in the bass and mids. Volume on the XPS is good enough for most situations but the sound quality is subpar and the speakers fire to the sides. The MacBook speakers face the user and are louder with much more bass, clean mids and crisper highs. The Touch Bar MacBook Pro obviously comes with the Touch Bar, but without wide third-party app support, its utility is very limited. MacBook also boasts a fingerprint scanner in Touch ID, a function mirrored by a generic scanner on the XPS.