News + Trends

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is here - without butterfly keyboard, but with Esc key

14.11.2019

Translation: machine translated

Apple unveiled a new MacBook Pro on Wednesday. It comes with new processors, better speakers, a new keyboard, a new thermal design and a 16-inch display.

According to Apple, it is "the world's best pro notebook". We don't know exactly what that means. At least it has a chance of becoming one of the best MacBook Pros - because the butterfly keyboard debacle is finally a thing of the past.

The new 16-inch device is the successor to the previous 15-inch MacBook Pro. In addition to one inch more screen diagonal, the best new feature is probably the keyboard, also known as the "Magic Keyboard". Apple is finally moving away from the butterfly mechanism and back to scissor switches. This means that the extended keyboard repair programme will soon become obsolete. The new keyboard should have less bounce, be slightly quieter and have a slightly shorter key travel of around one millimetre. The Touch Bar is still there, but in a shortened version. On the other hand, Apple has managed to give the notebook a real Esc key again. There is also a fingerprint sensor to the right of the touch bar.

Apple has also improved the battery life and the thermal design, which was not quite perfect in last year's version and caused the power to be throttled too early in some situations. The new heat sink is said to have 35 per cent more surface area and be able to feed 28 per cent more air through. Further significant adjustments are said to have been made to the sound output. The "sound system" consisting of six speakers should now be able to deliver more bass. We will find out whether this is really the case and how the improvements work in reality in a future review.

The equipment of the basic version includes a 9th generation Intel Core i7 (6 cores, 2.6 GHz, Turbo Boost up to 4.5 GHz) 16 GB DDR4 RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4 GB GDDR6 memory and a 512 GB onboard SSD. The display has a resolution of 3072 x 1920 pixels and should deliver up to 500 cd/m². Compared to last year's 15-inch version, it has become 0.7 mm thicker.