It was largely anticipated that Apple would announce new MacBook Pros at their Unleashed event and the company certainly did not disappoint. As per the rumors, it looks like the new MacBook Pros will be coming in 14-inch and 16-inch options, and both of which will sport brand new designs.
This new design wasn’t as drastic as we had imagined and it feels like any changes Apple made were kind of subtle, but that’s only on the surface. Once the laptop’s lid has been opened, the design changes are more apparent. Apple has given both laptops an edge-to-edge display, thus eliminating as many bezels as possible. The downside to this is that Apple was forced to use a notch that can be currently found on the iPhone and iPad.
The notch is where Apple is housing a new 1080p webcam, a welcome upgrade over the potato 720p webcam that users have been complaining about for years. While this isn’t the 4K webcam that some of you might have been hoping for, the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chipsets feature a 16-core Neural Engine that is supposed to help with the camera’s quality and capabilities.
In addition to the display, Apple has also kind of revamped the keyboard where they have removed Touch Bar and brought back physical function keys. Touch Bar was an interesting and fun experiment but it is clear that it wasn’t as useful as Apple would have liked it to be.
Under the hood, the new MacBook Pros are powered by the M1 Pro and M1 Max chipsets that Apple claims is faster in both CPU and GPU performance compared to the base M1, and in tests against other PC laptops, the new chipsets either outperform or perform on similar levels, but are more energy efficient.
Speaking of energy, it seems that the new chipsets are more energy efficient than ever, with Apple claiming that the 14-inch model is capable of up to 17 hours of battery life while watching videos, while the 16-inch model will get up to 21 hours of battery life while watching videos.
That being said, these improvements are much welcome and on paper, they certainly do feel rather “Pro”, but they won’t come cheap. The 14-inch MacBook Pro will be priced starting at $1,999 while the 16-inch MacBook Pro will start at $2,499.
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