Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is my review of the 2015 13 inch retina MacBook Pro and like every other year Apple just did a speck bump this year just to refresh it but they also added a trackpad to it a new force touch trackpad so we'll get into that so I actually have two of them here the base model which comes in at 1300 bucks and the fastest one that they offer which comes in at 2000 bucks and yeah let's get right to the review Apple always packs up their stuff nicely when you open the lid the notebook is sitting there and underneath is the AC adapter so the two models I have are the base model which is a 2.7 gigahertz i5 eight gigs of RAM and 128 gig SSD and their second notebook which is their top-end one is a 3.1 gigahertz i-5 16 gigs of ram and a 512 gigas SD both of these are Broadwell CPUs and they're both 2 core the top of the notebook is aluminum and as always that Apple logo lights up when you lift up the screen the bottom of the notebook is the same aluminum finish intake vents on the left and right and the speaker's also project sound through these and there's rubber feet that aren't very grippy but they just kind of protect the bottom from being scratched on the left side we have a spot for the MagSafe 2 - Thunderbolt 2 ports that can be used for menu display a USB 3 a headphone jack and two microphone holes and on the right side we have an SD card slot an HDMI jack and another USB 3 and if you've never owned a macbook before just keep in mind that your SD cards are going to jut out quite a bit when you put them in so you don't want to leave them in there during transportation so you can connect up to 2 4k displays but if you want to get 60 Hertz you got to use the mini DisplayPort if you use the HDMI you're only going to get 30 Hertz for 4k the keyboards and MacBooks are always great and this one's no exception backlighting is good the travel is good and it always feel spacious I've always been very partial to their keyboards and new for this year is the force touch trackpad so instead of a button underneath their traditional and glass trackpad the forced touch uses pressure sensors underneath the glass that detects how hard you're pressing and when you've press hard enough there's a tiny little motor there that vibrates to let you know that you've clicked Apple has done a great job with this because the vibration actually feels just like a regular click so there's no button that you're actually clicking it just simulates what it feels like when a button is clicked and the forced touch also gives you a whole bunch of options and feature so the first thing I noticed on our traditional trackpad when you press near the top of the trackpad like close to the keyboard it becomes harder to press just because of the way that's mounted it's kind of like a hinge there right but on the new force touch trackpad you can click anywhere you want on the trackpad and I'll always register a click you can also hear the difference in sound or traditional trackpad is a little bit louder but in terms of how it feels it's actually really similar so on the old trackpad when you press it down it squishes down a little bit to hit a button underneath but on the new force touch trackpad it doesn't press down nearly as much but it does still move just to measure how hard you're pressing in case you were wondering like I was the new force touch trackpad can detect clicks just as quickly as the old one I don't know when you would ever want to click this fast but just know that you can so in the settings you can adjust the amount of pressure you need to activate a click so when you have a higher setting for click pressure you actually have a ladder click as well as a more tactile click so if you press enough that'll register as a click but if you press even harder and a register as something called a force click so there are a lot of things you can do with the force click such as renaming things previewing things finding definitions for words you can even force click dates or times and set up an event in the calendar and because this new trackpad has pressure sensitivity and some apps you can do some really primitive drawings and your signature can now have some stroke thickness I think over time developers will be able to make better use of the force clicking and pressure sensitivity but all of these things could be done with keyboard shortcuts which I think was even faster than using a force click but there are some things like previewing websites in Safari you would have to have gone to an addon like hover see or hover zoom but in general I don't think it's that useful I definitely prefer it over a regular trackpad but the user experience remains pretty similar it has the same IPS displays before 2560 by 1600 good contrast it has accurate colors it's always a good time with these MacBook screens and you can dim it down completely if you need to hide what you're doing and if you notice there's a reflection there I think it's a combination of the anti-reflective coating as well as the screen brightness so even though these are glossy screens the reflections aren't as noticeable speakers are unchanged they're pretty loud this is what they sounded okay fan noise when this thing's idle it's silent Tony decibels standard stuff now remember I have two of them here the 2.7 gigahertz has a reasonably loud fan when it kicks in 35 decibels but the 3.1 gigahertz model is significantly louder it comes in at almost 40 decibels when you hear them side by side the difference is really noticeable and so if we look at the thermals we'll see why so I have the floor thermal camera again for this on the left is the 2.7 gigahertz base model and on the right is the 3.1 gigahertz top-end model now I never would have noticed this without a thermal camera but the exhaust vent seems to only be on the right-hand side but as you can see the 3.1 gigahertz model is a bit hotter than the base model which is probably why the fan is so much louder granted these fans don't come on often but it is something to keep in mind if you really don't like fan noise okay so drive speeds both of these are on PCI Express SSDs which are super fast to begin with on the Left we have the 2.7 gigahertz base model and on the right we have the 3.1 gigahertz model with a 512 gig now both of the read speeds are super fast at like 12 1,300 but if you look at the write speeds the 512 gig drive is over double the speed of the base model now both of these are incredibly fast drives it is nice to have fast drives but I'm not sure when you would need drive speeds like this on this notebook because even if your workflow can utilize drive speeds like this the rest of this notebook is going to bottleneck your workflow something fierce so I don't think it's important to upgrade your storage just for the drive speed near some Geekbench benchmarks comparing two notebooks from this generation and the base model from mid 2014 so as expected everything's just a little bit faster let's talk battery life so this year it's running abroad well CPU which is supposed to be a little bit more energy efficient than previous generation but for whatever reason I'm getting almost the exact same battery life as last year's models so the advertised 10 hours for regular use and I mean that's just web use and 12 hours for watching movies off of iTunes and I'm getting eight and a half hours of regular web use and that's with screen at almost full brightness and I'm getting just under nine hours for watching movies off the drive so again I'm not sure if this is just my usage pattern is a little different from it was last year when I was testing this model or maybe I'm just you know doing something wrong but I did run down the battery three times over the past week just to kind of test this out now there is something that's kind of interesting normally when I do gaming performance on a notebook I do it all on battery so I plug charge it up to full I plug in my mouse and I crank up screen brightness and I just go to town on this thing now for whatever reason this notebook both of them have incredibly long battery life when you're playing games and I have my theories but let me just explain so normally on every other notebook I've ever tested I'm normally getting like an hour sometimes a little bit less sometimes slightly more when I'm playing games and that's just the standard because you're running some fairly intensive stuff and battery just drains quickly but I got over two and a half hours on both of these notebooks when I was playing games and the weird thing is okay my theory is that because this thing is relatively underpowered like the GPU the fan never comes on it literally literally never came on once on both of these notebooks when I was playing computer games so I was playing here to the storm and I played a little bit of counter-strike and the fan never came on not even once so maybe that's why the battery life is extended the way it is I'm not sure but in any case that's cool stuff and of course I played a lot of games on this thing because I love video games so these things are running integrated graphics which is the intel 6100 it's better than i expected but it's not great so right off the bat you can't play at native Reds you're going to get like 10 15 frames per second now at 1080p for dota 2 and heroes of the storm you're going to get about 30 frames per second at high settings its playable but it's not buttery so when you drop this down to low graphics settings so you're getting about 40 maybe 50 frames per second I think at that point it's very playable but if you're competitive and you need higher frame rates you're gonna have to go into lower resolutions but I found the gaming to be reasonable at 1080p and I also found gaming performance to be very similar between the two notebooks at best the 3.1 gigahertz model with 16 gigs of ram was only getting about five more frames per second on average nothing crazy okay so some final thoughts I think the best value for this notebook lies in the base model for 1,300 bucks for the tech you're getting for the specs you're getting I think it's a good buy if you're a Mac user if you've never used Mac before I don't think there is any features in this generation that should make you know a non MacBook owner run out immediately to get one I think that everything has been a spec bump it's a vanilla spec bump but vanilla is pretty nice but if you're expecting a really big increase in performance or battery life or if you're hoping that maybe the trackpad is going to give you a brand new user experience I think you might be disappointed it's a very cool trackpad I think it's a step in the right direction but it's definitely not a game changer but yeah I hope you guys liked the review if you liked it give me some thumbs and if you loved it give me some subs and I'm also pretty close to 2,000 subs I will be doing a giveaway when I hit 2000 I'm trying to get some pretty cool stuff for you guys but I'm still working on it but yeah it's been nice I'll see you guys next time