Two Days With the MacBook Pro: A Big Upgrade, but You May Not Care About That Bar

The hardest part of this review was finding a simple way, in writing, to tell the 13-inch MacBook Pro 2016 without Touch Bar apart from the 13-inch MacBook Pro 2016 with Touch Bar.

Today is the day the MacBook Pro (Touch Bar version) ships. The first customers to pre-order have started receiving their new computers.

We got hold of the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro early and spent two days with them.

By any measure, this is the biggest change to the MacBook Pro in years.

For the first time, Apple has put a touchscreen on a computer — even if it is only a strip above the keyboard.

It is also the first change to the shape of the Pro since 2013: more compact, and lighter.

At the same time, the new MacBook Pro brings the performance upgrade users have waited a long time for. Its CPU, for one, had not changed generation since 2013.

But it is also the most argued-over release in the MacBook family's history. No earlier launch drew this many negative comments — some about the ports, some saying the Touch Bar is useless, some complaining that Apple's new machine breaks no ground the way the Surface Studio does.

If we had to sum up our time with it in one sentence: this is a better MacBook, but you will not like all of its changes.

Design: the New Pro Is Thinner and Lighter

Both the 13-inch and the 15-inch are lighter, thinner and more compact. The two 13-inch Pros (the difference being with or without a Touch Bar) now weigh about the same as a MacBook Air — both under 1.4 kilograms — so there is little difference in how they feel in a bag or in your hand.

More important, the new Pro's bezels are narrower, which makes it a size smaller than the already compact old Pro and easier to carry or hold. Since the Pro's performance was already far above the Air's, and its Retina display is better too, a Mac this size makes a good upgrade for Air owners — leaving the price difference aside.

The new Pro is also lighter than the old one: it has shed the thickness of a screen, and the narrower bezels have slimmed the whole body. That goes for both the 13-inch and the 15-inch.

On paper, 250 grams does not sound like much, but carry it out the door every day and you feel it.

The new Pro's design mostly follows last year's 12-inch MacBook. The glowing white Apple logo on the lid has been replaced by a black mirror finish that does not light up, a little like the one on the back of an iPhone.

The casing is made the same way — to the touch it is much like the old Pro — but the new model adds a Space Gray.

We had already spent three weeks with a Touch Bar-free new Pro in that color, and found it does not wear well. A single day in a bag alongside hard objects left visible scratches and marks on the surface, and one edge had picked up a dent from nowhere we could identify. That is not what people who work their computers hard want to see; the old MacBook's aluminum shell had a reputation for lasting.

The bottom and the hinge have changed a little too. The old Pro's vents came in three segments; on the new machine they are a single thinner, longer strip down each side. The vents that used to sit at the hinge are gone.

The keyboard is a welcome upgrade. It looks identical to earlier MacBook keyboards — bigger keycaps, less space between them — but typing on it is far more comfortable.

The MacBook's very short key travel made for a poor experience: too stiff, and tiring on the fingers. The new Pro lengthens the travel, and with the butterfly mechanism underneath, the feedback as you type is more solid.

So the new keyboard sounds more mechanical, and louder. If you have long used the looser chiclet keyboard, it takes a while to get used to.

Apple has also designed a keyboard for the Chinese market, which in practice means adding Chinese punctuation such as 《》 and ……. That is a small convenience for Chinese buyers using a Mac for the first time and of little use to anyone already used to one. If you don't want it, you can choose the layout freely when you buy.

Finally, the 13-inch Pro now has speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard, a design that used to belong to the 15-inch alone. But according to iFixit's teardown, the speakers are not there at all — they sit under the palm rest, and the sound travels through the body and out of the grilles above.

In use, the sound is better too: louder, with a clearer stereo effect, good enough to replace a basic external Bluetooth speaker.

For the Next Year or Two, You'll Be Carrying Adapters

Ports are the most argued-over part of the new Pro. Both the 13-inch and the 15-inch have one 3.5mm headphone jack and four USB-C ports, which handle charging, data transfer and peripherals all at once.

One thing is certain: USB-C, being faster, will eventually replace traditional USB as the standard. Apple has always been good at forcing a standard through — think of the optical drive and the Ethernet port, both controversial at the time, neither missed now.

But until USB-C and wireless connections are everywhere, the new Pro will still need adapters of every kind. How much of a nuisance that is depends on how you use your Mac. We ran into the following situations.

File transfer was not much affected: AirDrop between Apple devices is good enough, and Apple users know it well. But the moment you need to plug in an external drive or a USB stick, you find you cannot move without an adapter.

Nearly every external device raises the same problem. Monitors, microphones, drawing tablets — the gear professional work depends on — cannot be plugged straight into the new Pro for now. A USB-C-to-USB adapter (68 yuan at the discounted price) solves it.

You need that adapter to connect an iPhone to the Mac as well, or a USB-C-to-Lightning cable (138 yuan discounted) — which we strongly recommend, since it lets you charge an iPhone or an iPad from the Mac's charger.

Dropping the SD card slot is nothing short of a disaster for Mac users who shoot with a camera. Plenty of cameras support Wi-Fi transfer now, but the experience is bad across the board; putting the card straight in is still the easier way.

Apple has responded to the complaints since the launch — by cutting the prices of its adapters and cables.

You won't need them every hour of the day, but landing in one of the situations above with no adapter at hand is an unsettling experience. Better safe than sorry: carrying these small things with you is now a must.

The magnetic charging port, used for years, has been taken away. The upside is that the small, light USB-C port makes charging feel tidier. Any of the ports will charge the machine, and you can plug in on either side.

But what made the magnetic connector good — easy to plug and unplug, and pulling free instead of dragging the computer off the desk when someone trips over the cable — has not been carried over. So charging feels a little awkward; most of the time it takes two hands to pull the power cable out.

The New Touch Bar Is Part of the Keyboard, Not Part of the Screen

The Touch Bar is the new Pro's biggest draw. This strip of touchscreen gives the computer a new way to interact — but can it really raise productivity the way the launch event showed?

The truth is more complicated. The Touch Bar throws up buttons depending on the app you are in, moving what used to live in shortcuts and toolbars up to the top of the keyboard. In other words, it creates no new function of its own; it is an extension of the display, and doing without it would not affect normal use. Which functions appear, and when, is entirely for the app's developer to decide.

Because of that, the Touch Bar is not a feature you reach for; if anything, it takes some learning. For users fluent in keyboard shortcuts, its benefits are not obvious.

That leaves the Touch Bar in an awkward place. It looks good, but the situations where it actually saves time are few, and most of the time you could take it or leave it.

At times it even pulls your attention away, sending your eyes up and down in search of a button.

But once you can work it comfortably, there are still pleasant surprises. Almost all of the Mac's native apps support the Touch Bar now, and third-party apps such as Photoshop are adding support. We tried the dozen-odd apps below; what each does with the Touch Bar varies widely — some are genuinely convenient, some get in the way. We'll use these examples to show where the problems lie.

First, though, the basic logic of how the Touch Bar works.

The Touch Bar is a strip of OLED screen driven by its own chip, the T1. Its brightness cannot be adjusted by hand and does not adapt to ambient light, but it does switch itself off to save power, like the main screen.

That does not hurt it in use. The display is steady, easy to read in bright light, and wide enough in viewing angle. Beyond what OLED gives it, this may also be because Apple put something like a matte finish on the surface, which feels less slippery than a phone screen.

The result is that the Touch Bar feels like part of the keyboard. It does not look out of place, does not grab at you, does not feel unnatural.

Apple's app design guidelines also stress that the Touch Bar is an "input device" and should not be used for display alone — scrolling messages across it, for example.

By those guidelines the Touch Bar has three zones: the system button, the app region and the Control Strip.

The system button is esc. It does not always stay at the far left, and sometimes it disappears. The app region is where developers do as they like; it runs two or three levels deep, and is empty on the desktop. The Control Strip has four fixed slots: brightness, volume, mute and Siri. Tap to expand it and you get the top row of a traditional keyboard — play/pause, Launchpad, switching desktops and so on.

Oddly, the Touch Bar is not as wide as the keyboard. At its right end sits the square Touch ID power button, and for symmetry Apple has left about two centimeters blank at the left as well. So the esc key never reaches the far left, where it belongs, and at first you may have to glance down to be sure you are hitting a key you press as often as esc. (As readers pointed out in the comments, tapping the blank area to the left of esc does the same thing.)

We used the apps and system features below. Whether the Touch Bar makes you any faster depends on the case.

Finder: Click any file or folder and the Touch Bar shows Arrange, View, Share and Tag. Tapping a button opens the next level of commands — Share → AirDrop → nearby contacts; Arrange → by name, by date, and so on. When you open the second level or lower, the esc key turns into an X, which is in fact more intuitive.

Honestly, the Touch Bar does not feel especially convenient here. Take sharing: a few swipes with the mouse or the trackpad is not hard either.

Pages: The text editor Pages has moved its toolbar onto the Touch Bar — text style, color, bold and the rest. Predictive words appear under any text field.

These buttons used to sit to the right of the document, and moving them up does not save much time either.

Messages: Messages on macOS is not as elaborate as on the phone, and it does not do much with the Touch Bar — for now all you get is emoji. But it may be the best-looking use of the Touch Bar of any app.

The emoji sit in a single row across the narrow screen; swipe left or right to pick one. It looks good at a glance, but it does not actually make anything faster — the time goes into hunting for the right one.

Photos: When you are going through several images, the Touch Bar gives you a timeline to scrub, like the one in the iOS Photos app. This is genuinely handy, especially when a photo is full screen.

With any photo open, the Touch Bar also shows editing tools — rotate, crop and so on.

Safari: The Touch Bar is more obviously useful in Safari. With several tabs open it lays out a thumbnail of every page, and you can swipe to switch and preview. That really does speed switching up, if you are not already used to shortcuts like Command plus a number.

When you open a new tab, the Touch Bar brings up your bookmarks to swipe through. There is a small problem here, though: bookmarks like Yahoo, Baidu and Bing come in colors jarring enough to be uncomfortable to look at.

If the page you are reading has a video on it, the Touch Bar shows a progress bar and a play/pause button. Move to another page and the bar shrinks into the Control Strip on the right; tap it open and you can stop the video at any time.

QuickTime, Music: Much like Safari — a progress bar during playback, easy to drag.

Final Cut Pro: A professional video editor, where the Touch Bar's job is to show every kind of tool: select, cut, pick a clip, import footage and so on.

A short try was enough to show that most of this is already handled by keyboard shortcuts; the Touch Bar does not make editing any faster.

Pixelmator: A photo editor. As in Final Cut, the Touch Bar here only shows the toolbar — something you can perfectly well do on screen.

More third-party apps are adapting to the Touch Bar now, among them Office, Adobe Photoshop, Skype, QQ and even a mahjong game, Thirteen-Tile Mahjong.

If You Don't Wear an Apple Watch, Fingerprint Unlocking Is Handy

Apple has used Touch ID across four generations of iPhone; it is about as familiar a piece of infrastructure as users have. On the Mac, though, it turns out to matter less.

The new Pro's Touch ID is a square at the right end of the Touch Bar, where the power button used to sit. It is a physical button and still works as the power button — hold it down and the computer restarts.

Enrolling a fingerprint works as it does on the phone: System Preferences now has a Touch ID panel, and you follow the prompts and press down. You can store up to three prints.

After that you unlock with a finger. It is a real convenience — typing a password is replaced by a single press of Touch ID, and getting into the computer is much quicker.

There were already ways into macOS without typing a password: pairing an Apple Watch, for one. The watch on your wrist unlocks the computer as you come near it, faster even than Touch ID.

Besides unlocking, Touch ID on the iPhone pays for apps, authorizes Apple Pay and logs you into apps.

On the Mac, that comes down to confirming system permissions when you install certain apps, and Apple Pay.

System Preferences now includes Wallet; link a bank card and you can pay with Apple Pay on websites. But most payments on Chinese sites go through Alipay, and the sites would rather you placed the order on your phone.

Until more apps and sites accept a fingerprint login, the most useful thing Touch ID does is open the computer.

The Biggest Improvements Are Still the Most Basic Things

The Touch Bar is an innovation in interaction, and now and then it shows a thoughtful detail — the progress bar that appears during video playback, which you can drag on the bar itself.

But the MacBook Pro is a computer for getting work done. If you spend ten hours a day in front of one and already know the shortcuts, it will not do much for you.

If anything, it works the other way: screen brightness, keyboard brightness and volume, which you used to adjust by muscle memory without looking, now need a glance down. (Apple has clearly thought this through — press the volume button on the Touch Bar and you can swipe left or right to set the level, instead of having to tap the volume slider that appears on the left.)

For users who don't know the shortcuts and aren't chasing every last second, the Touch Bar is a good deal more convenient than the old function keys. But they may not be the people a high-priced Pro most needs to please.

On the other hand, the new MacBook Pro is better made, easier to carry, and brings the performance upgrade longtime owners waited far too long for. Those are improvements traditional Pro users will feel as well.

Despite the name "Pro," the line's chips have gone a long time without a real upgrade. As late as 2015 their CPUs were still Intel's 2013 Haswell chips — and Intel puts out a new generation every year. The only thing that changed about the 15-inch model's discrete graphics between 2012 and 2014 was the name, and the new card in the 2015 version was no great improvement either.

Both new MacBook Pros use the Skylake chips Intel launched in 2015. Intel shipped its Kaby Lake processors in the second half of this year, but the quad-core version has not arrived, so the MacBook Pro uses high-voltage Skylake instead.

The test results: 13-inch or 15-inch, the CPU gain over the 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pro is negligible. That probably says something about the trouble Intel is in.

The bigger change is graphics. The 15-inch MacBook Pro comes with one of three GPUs: the Radeon Pro 450, 455 or 460. In Geekbench 4 COMPUTE, the 450 and the 460 scored 41,766 and 59,249; the 2014 Pro with an Nvidia 750M scored 13,800.

A Mac is not the first choice for games, but for the occasional one — the new Civilization VI, say — the 15-inch MacBook Pro has finally become playable. In our tests the 2016 MacBook Pro with the 450 averaged just over 20 frames per second in Civilization VI's built-in benchmark, against about 10 for the 2014 version.

The MacBook Pro still cannot match a PC at the same price, but the upgrade has narrowed the gap.

Along with the extra performance, the MacBook Pro runs much cooler when it is working hard:

You will also barely hear the fan any more. It still spins up for a game, or for a few dozen Chrome tabs. But in a normal office you have to get your ear within 10 centimeters of the Mac to make it out at all. The old 15-inch, by contrast, would howl loud enough to hear from two meters away the moment a game started; headphones were the only way to stay in it.

The screen has changed too, and that makes the machine nicer to use. This generation of MacBook Pro uses a display with richer color. Open the same photograph of a face lit by a sunset and the 2014 MacBook Pro looks noticeably less true to life — and before the comparison, it was considered one of the best laptop screens there was.

Writing this, I close the new Mac and pick up my two-year-old 2014 MacBook Pro, and it already feels strangely heavy. Use it a while and the warm body and the fan noise I faced every day no longer feel like something I am used to. Only when I pull out an SD card do I remember what it is good for.

That is what the new MacBook Pro is: a better Mac, though some of its changes will take you a while to get used to.

And of course, the new Pro's starting price has been pushed above 10,000 yuan. Time is not the only thing you will be spending extra.