Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave - Dee and this is my review of the 2016 13 inch MacBook Pro so when they first announced this thing I had mixed feelings one I was excited because it's the new MacBook Pro but then I looked at the paper specs and the price tag and it was a little less appealing $1500 with no OLED strip but I've had it for a week these are my thoughts okay right off the RIP the build quality on this thing is the best in the business I've handled a couple hop tops on this channel and no one makes a laptop that has better craftsmanship than this MacBook the tolerances of all the machining is very tight the hinge is perfectly tuned and there's next to no flex despite being super thin but for $1,500 you're going to have to bring more to the table than just build quality and that's where things get a little less awesome this specific model has two ports both USB see both supporting Thunderbolt 3 the fact that they're all UVC bugs me a bit that means adaptors for a lot of stuff that people do right now in a couple years that'll be different but right now you'll probably need some adapters in regards to the missing SD card slot I think a lot of reviewers and journalists are going to be bummed by this because well we depended on this port for video and camera work but a big chunk of MacBook owners just never use that port and same with the HDMI port so yeah it's easy for camera users to be super annoyed by this but for the average MacBook Pro user it's not a big deal but what does bug me a professional laptop or a laptop with productivity in mind shouldn't have two ports Ashley if you're plugged into power you're looking at one port the MacBook Air had more ports than this one was plugged in now I use this adapter it's my favorite because it spreads Heat well I'll link it below but the fact that owners need to purchase an adapter or two or five is pretty disappointing the keyboard uses second generation butterfly switches it's improved a bit it's still a half millimeter of key travel but it feels slightly more responsive than the 12-inch MacBook keyboard some people love these butterfly switches and actually prefer them I still prefer the older generation of keyboards but this is a personal preference thing and I think most people can learn to like this keyboard over time the display is amazing the resolution hasn't changed it's much brighter with a wider color gamut the image is a little cool prior to calibration but once you've calibrated it's perfect it has wide viewing angles and the bezels are relatively thin they're not the thinnest the XPS 13 is thinner but in terms of overall display quality this is arguably the best-looking 13 inch screen on the market right now the webcam up top looks like this it's better than the 12 inch macbook but it's still not very good I found the trackpad on the 12-inch MacBook pretty big already this is bigger and if you use a lot of gestures you'll probably like this I only use a few of the full hand gestures and I actually find this trackpad a little too big it's a personal thing I get the occasional failed palm rejection because of its size but it's still the best trackpad I've used the speakers are also ridiculously good once again best-in-class put it this way these speakers have set the bar so high it kind of annoys me that I have to review other laptop speakers some of the bigger gaming laptops are louder and have stronger bass but these MacBook Pro speakers sound incredibly clean with almost no distortion even at maximum volume under the hood there's nothing we can really upgrade by ourselves the RAM is soldered on and the storage drives yeah they're removable but they're proprietary so you probably won't be upgrading those any time soon fortunately the drive is fast which helps to make the system feel really snappy the base processor is a skylake core i5 6360 u it has a slower clock speed than almost every Windows ultrabook at this price point it's kind of disappointing to look at this chip and then realize that it came out in September of 2015 is over a year old and performance is similar to the base model 13-inch MacBook Pro from last year it's just a lot more power efficient but the truth is it's more than fast enough for what most people would do on this machine and because of the faster drive this year the whole system does feel quicker the integrated GPU is a nice step up from last year's model it's now running an iris 540 it's similar in graphical compute to like a 930 m or 940 m you can play some games nothing super crazy but if you want to see a dedicated video on gaming with this system let me in the comments below the graphics chip also has connectivity to 4k and 5k screens as for external GPUs the razor core doesn't connect right now at least not well enough for me to do a video but it's a work in progress and there are some other external GPUs coming down the pipe I'll be doing a dedicated piece on that so subscribe if you want to see that video when it goes up the fans are silent on idle and unload it's audible but not too loud it throttles when it's under heavy load like rendering a video now I'm an Adobe user so I can only speak about video editing with premiere and it's pretty good for 1080p edits but 4k edits are pretty choppy the battery life is good the battery has been shrunk down a lot it's now only 55 watt hours but because of the more efficient CPU I'm still getting over nine hours of regular use with the screen at around 250 nits and because you can use any of the USBC ports for charging we've lost the MagSafe connection ok this device costs $1500 and despite the paper specs looking a little lame it's actually a very solid device great build quality fantastic screen speakers and trackpad but what isn't great is obviously the price tag and for $1,500 it's not that it's an overpriced machine it's kind of Apple or premium pricing but you're forced to purchase things in this system that you normally may not want to purchase or you may not need so like the super wide gamut screen and the fantastic speakers you're forced to buy into this system just because it has the pro moniker now dongles adapters proprietary storage drives these are all kind of designed to generate revenue for Apple I get that but as a consumer we kind of get screwed for it now what I recommend this laptop to the average person obviously not there are a few people I would recommend this to so people that really don't want the OLED strip this is obviously the only other option but for the average person that's looking for a 13-inch MacBook that's kind of above a MacBook Air look at last year's model it's going to be like thirty or forty percent cheaper than this like the refurb model and it's going to have very similar performance of this maybe not in the GPU element but the processor is going to be very similar to this that's seen in this video hope you guys liked it thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it it's been nice see you guys next time