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Cheapest 13" MacBook Pro Review (After 1 Year of Use)

2018-05-26
master off is hosting a multi Gaming Mouse sale with Rockette for one week beginning May 25th my recommendation is the cone IMO sporting a whopping 12,000 dpi option which I doubt anyone will actually use with the ally sensor well renowned and german-engineered in case an independent RGB zones and wrapped at the wire and a durable braid the cone IMO will be sure to thank you a one click at a time catch this week-long mass drop sale via the link in this video's description you know there's a long history of hate between diehard Apple fans and computer building enthusiasts like ourselves you see we take pride in the fact that we can customize we have the freedom to choose components and upgrade freely we aren't bound by proprietary hardware and restricted designs we can fix things without worry and we don't typically pay premiums but Apple on the other hand is the exact opposite of a product breaks you're almost forced to stay within the ecosystem that's ecosystem that the bad side of the ecosystem take it to a genius assuming you live next to an Apple Store or ship it directly to Apple HQ where you'll pay in excess of a hundred USD just to fix a screen you can buy off eBay for 30 bucks and back it's gonna cost a lot more than a hundred bucks to fix any of the newer screens out there especially the iPhone 10 screen look repairing these products yourself is usually within the realm of possibility but hours of intense labor are almost certainly required ask Linus how that's going so Apple products boast proprietary screws proprietary drives proprietary software and to make things worse premium prices so unless you're literally made of money or have parents literally made of money your tendency is to choose a cheaper alternative it just makes more sense for the person who's a bit more budget conscious at least you would think because Apple is actually doing really well right now they're dominating a solid chunk of the mobile tech market despite the lukewarm iPhone 10 sales closing 2017 there's still the second largest smartphone manufacturer if I total market share and they started with just one phone what like 10 or so years ago so limited to only a few models per cycle the company still trades blows with corporate giants like Samsung which mind you offer a plethora of smartphones ranging from cheap $50 invitations to the flagship s9 and Samsung's case so it makes sense that they have a huge grip on the market moreover Apple's market share hit double digits beginning in 2018 surpassing lifelong competitor a sues for the fourth-largest notebook manufacturer on the planet those three still above Dell Lenovo and HP with the crown at least for now I've personally dabbled in multiple company product lines over the years the Dell XPS 13 was an excellent Ultrabook save the coil line discussed in this video here and the Lenovo yoga 9 10 surprised me with its premium hinge and glass construction it really was a well-made laptop I had a lead a few cheaper variants as well from companies like a soos and HP but my favorite Ultrabook by far has to be the 13-inch MacBook Pro and I know you're thinking are you serious Greg and this is actually the cheapest model you could possibly buy from the 13-inch MacBook lineup but it's still my favorite laptop to date and here's why so this very basic MacBook Pro is in fact the cheapest you could possibly buy sporting a 7 gen Intel Core i5 ultra-low power processor with a base frequency of 2.3 gigahertz a single core will occasionally turbo up to 3.6 gigahertz under especially intense single-threaded workloads though I should point out that this is very rare and if it does happen it will almost immediately thermal throttle packing only 8 gigs of low-power ddr3 is a letdown but it's enough for most of what I do in Mac OS it's a pretty lightweight operating system to begin with an important note though regarding the 13 inch MacBook Pros is that 8 gigabytes as of May 2018 is the maximum amount of RAM that this model boasts any 13-inch MacBook will not go higher than 8 gigs and because it's soldered on you're kind of screwed you can't update or you know add additional RAM modules to the board if the chips are actually you know soldered into the motherboard the screen is a beautiful 2560 by 1600 IPS retina panel for approximately 227 PPI with decent color accuracy it's a little low by today's standards but it's enough to get the point across and at 500 nits it's extremely bright assume you are too concerned with battery life you'll have a very beautiful looking display the slightly stretched aspect ratio though will result in small black bars on top and on the bottom of your screen when viewing fullscreen videos the panel though has surprisingly good contrast ratios despite not being AMOLED more on the differences between various screen technologies in or right here the speakers in these laptops are next to none producing solid actually detectable low tones and remaining clear all the way up to max volume they're loud clear as crystal which is kind of a weird way to say it crystal clear and hidden behind mostly cosmetic front grilles the microphones are in here as well battery life is also incredible I'm easily hitting six to eight hours on heavy use and that's my version of heavy use which is pretty dense you know a Skype call for example will push this thing down to maybe six hours which is still really good that's using the video camera and if you're just doing some lightweight web browsing or typing up documents easily eight to ten hours easy and the quick charge capabilities of the included power brick and thunderbolt three ports only two on one side for the base model I should say take the edge off when working with heavy files and CPU intensive programs because it charges so quick you won't be bound to the cable all the time even under those intense workloads it's a win-win either way in my book and speaking of wins all these MacBook Pro Sport PCIe based SSD starting as low as 128 gigs available in the base model which I have here and despite the storage space issues I frequently experience because 128 gigs is nowhere near enough for me the drive speeds are actually excellent and this tends to scale according to the drive size right the bigger the drive the faster the drive usually is but with these MacBooks even the the cheapest SSD that is PCIe based is lightning fast this was certainly an area in which they could have cheaped out but they didn't that's surprising for Apple and the build quality is another thing but we expect a decent build quality at least now be baked in iris plus 640 graphics aren't sufficient for gaming really of any kind even though they touted it is like a huge improvement over the standard I think it was Intel graphics 620 yeah there's not much of a difference there at all don't buy this thing expecting to game in any sense of the word I mean maybe minecraft and like ultralight dota or leek but that's about it now you can connect a portable discrete graphics box to this laptop something like the Razer core and a few companies claim to support MacBooks natively but I don't recommend such a combination until I see it fully functioning with my own eyes these MacBooks always have issues with those kinds of little gaming boxes so stay tuned now what people seem to really hate about these MacBooks is the keyboard I didn't like it too much on the 12-inch MacBook but the second version of these butterfly switches which are in the MacBook Pros are surprisingly tactile despite the minimal key travel it's a comfortable keyboard on which to type documents I'm pretty used to it any other altra book feels mushy right those keys have a lot of key travel but they don't feel very clicky not like mechanical switches I actually prefer you know minimal key travel with tactile feedback and that's what these butterfly switches offer it's a comfortable keyboard on which to type I would normally recommend it but there's a big problem with especially the spacebar that you should be aware of before buying one of these especially secondhand and to be fair it isn't just limited to the bar reports of other keys completely crapping out have been cited online including the Alt key Enter key keys you would hit periodically in my case something became lodged under the space key so after fully removing it part of the key stop actuated meaning it wasn't being registered by the operating system so the corners became unresponsive which that's usually what I hit write the corners of the space for not the center and I had to completely take it apart to address the issue I don't recommend doing this unless absolutely necessary by the way because there are tiny spacers and plastic grooves that can easily snap rendering the entire key useless and without a space key your whole keyboard is basically done for at which point you got to ship it back to Apple there of course gonna make you pay tons of dollars to get that thing fixed and you're gonna have a really bad time in short Apple really messed up here my opinions of this keyboard quickly changed once this issue came to light on my personal device this is not something I mentioned in my original MacBook 13-inch review by the way another absolutely ridiculous and inexcusable trait of a 13-inch MacBook the camera it's garbage planning simple Apple claims it's like a 720p capable camera but all videos are gonna look like trash and basically VGA it's so bad I'm almost embarrassed to make calls with it just because it's so grainy it's terrible in anything other than super bright ambient light and the microphone to be honest isn't that great either it is it's a little too aggressive with the background noise suppression and I think that has to do with where exactly the microphones are placed in the laptop this is a test of the MacBook Pros video quality I will say audio is on point pretty good for a 13-inch MacBook but the picture quality is subpar and that's kind of been the trend with Apple's smaller laptops recently even the 12-inch MacBook stuff are the same issue is this mediocre video Paul you expect better from Apple especially when you're paying this much or laptop on a device costing well over $1,000 this game it seriously needs to be stepped up I mean come on a pro laptop with a crap camera like this is unacceptable okay now by this point if you're still wondering why I chose to use the 13-inch base MacBook Pro over all the other models I've ever had on hand including the top-tier i7s with 16 gigs of ram 512 gigs of storage and just as good if not better at displays here's why if you've seen my past MacBook Pro videos the answer really hasn't changed video editing is a dream on this machine with their proprietary applications and to prove the point I went out and purchased the cheapest MacBook Pro I could only eight gigs of RAM the base Core i5 and a hefty screen resolution to drive this laptop still yields beautiful photo and video renders thanks to again that pinpointed optimization with these proprietary applications Final Cut Pro and even iMovie are prime examples of this and I movies free so what you just want to make the point exporting a five-minute 4k video file takes less than 10 minutes that is insane for a ULP based MacBook it blows away the Adobe Premiere Pro competition on the exact same device these are different encoding formats sure but compression differences between the two are near non-existent and if I try to match up the encoding formats as closely as possible Final Cut Pro and iMovie still destroy the competition Final Cut in particular seamlessly renders in the background while editing and that's a stringent hardware acceleration technique related to quick sync and I GPS for the added push and that's why I roll with this thing anywhere I go for business I'm taking it with me to Taiwan for copy text again next month for that very reason I love editing on it I love the screens color reproduction I love the speakers I love the endurance of the battery I love the thin profile and to be completely honest Mac OS isn't all that bad it's kind of growing on ya it's not you know enough for me to want to replace Windows 10 outright gaming is still terrible on OS 10 but I'm still more than willing to give it my time on the go when I'm out of the office and a comparable Ultrabook won't do the MacBook Pro is king of portable video editing thanks to well optimized software and that's enough to make me ditch the windows-based competition Apple products certainly have their drawbacks look they're expensive and I'd be scared as hell to replace anything on this device but willing to take the risks because of how much easier I can content create on this particular machine even the base MacBook Pro will do just make sure you're prepared to constantly delete files 128 gigs is awfully small now with that I know a lot of you are gonna be enraged I've never been afraid though to speak my mind and to give you guys my opinion of a product based on my personal use I know no one is gonna feel exactly the same as me no no two people are alike but with that said I do feel like I've justified it enough in my own mind to continue using this for the foreseeable future there are a few laptops that do you want to try out though the huawei mate book X Pro looks pretty sweet it's very similar in fact in profile to the MacBook Pro 13 inch model I might give that a go it's Windows 10 but it does have a dedicated GPU MX 150 I believe with the quad core KB Lake our i7 CPU for about 1500 bucks so it's a little more than the base macbook pro but it looks like a pretty sweet package and I love that nearly edgeless display so go ahead and blow up the comments if you like that's what you need to do I totally understand you can dislike or liked the video based on your emotions right now I just totally find not gonna take it personally but I think from my initial case scenario here when I'm on the go a lot and I need a video at it fast the MacBook Pro is just a no-brainer at least for now we'll see in the foreseeable future give this video a thumbs up you that as cool a thumbs down for the opposite or if you hate everything about life don't be shy click that red subscribe button stay tuned for more content like this this is science studio I almost said this is MacBook Pro out of an embarrassing thanks for learning with us
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