Apple, at its “Unleashed” event, launched the latest generation of MacBook Pro devices which are meant for professionals whereas the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are meant for students and casual users.
As the name suggests, Apple talked a lot about the “Pro” features that they have added to these laptops but the first thing they talked about were the new chips that are inside these laptops.
Since last year, Apple has been talking a lot about the 2-year transitional period from their partnership with Intel to making their own chips. With the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, we saw the first glimpses of the Apple M1 chip.
They were so powerful compared to the Intel chips that they literally blew the competition away in its segment. Now, Apple is trying to do the same with their latest M1 chips which are unveiled as the “M1 Pro” and the “M1 Max”.
It is also worth noting that Apple has never talked so much about the chipset on their laptops so much prior to the M1 launch. The reason being that they want to let the world know how powerful their chips are compared to Intel and AMD.
Apple’s M1 Pro chip comes with a 16-core GPU and its M1 Max chip comes with a 32-core GPU. However, we would like to tell you that nowhere in the launch event did Apple mention the gaming capabilities of their latest “Pro” laptops.
So it is safe to assume that the cooling capabilities of these new laptops would not be as good as the Windows “gaming” laptops.
With the M1 chips, we also know that Apple’s own software works really really well so if you are using Apple’s software with Apple’s hardware, you have no reason why not to upgrade to this laptop.
Talking about the other things about the Apple MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch laptops, both devices come with a notch. Yes, a notch that we have seen so far on the iPhones and other Android phones but never on any laptop.
Weirdly enough, even though Apple put a notch on their laptop, they didn’t put FaceID which is a miss in our opinion. The webcam of this laptop is upgraded to 1080p resolution for magnificent video call quality and we believe it is the same camera as you see on the iPhone front camera.
Apple also mentioned that the keyboards have now been upgraded to match the Magic keyboard that they sell separately with their iMac so they say that the keyboard experience will be upgraded.
But we would like to mention the best part which is that the Touch Bar has been removed. The Touch Bar is hated by almost everyone who uses a MacBook Pro because of the lack of physical functions keys and even the Escape key was not present earlier but it was introduced last year.
Apart from the chip and the notch, Apple also showed that they made the display edge-to-edge which looks really good, and also the menu bar sits at the top on both sides of the notch so you actually great more screen real estate.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro has a 16.2-inch display whereas the 14-inch model has a 14.2-inch display and Apple did mention that the 14-inch model has even more pixels than the 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro.
Coming to the display, there is indeed a mini-LED panel on both the devices so the reports were true and Apple calls it the Liquid Retina XDR display same as what we saw on the iPad Pro. Also, ProMotion is available on these panels which means the refresh rate goes all the way up to 120Hz.
But we will have to wait and watch how this goes because there were reports that Apple limited the 120Hz functionality to their own apps on the iPad Pro so we hope they don’t do the same for the MacBook Pro.
The best part of the launch event, however, was that Apple admitted their mistake, sort of. They said that they have now added more ports for connectivity and these are not only Thunderbolt 4 ports.
The MagSafe Port has also made a return with the introduction of MagSafe 3 along with a headphone jack, an SD card reader as well as an HDMI port for connecting displays. Apple says that you can connect up to 3 Pro Display XDR as well as a TV with this laptop and that too, “without a single dongle”.
I must admit, I giggled a bit when I heard them say you don’t need a dongle because they forced the “Pro” users earlier to live the dongle life. Anyways, all’s well that ends well as they say and I am so glad that the dongle life is coming to an end for MacBook Pro users.
Coming to the final part of the MacBook Pro launch which was its pricing, we all expected them to bump up the pricing as they naturally would, and they did.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1999 with the M1 Pro chip whereas the 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2499. The laptops equipped with M1 Max chips go even higher and the fully bumped-up MacBook Pro 16” with M1 Max chip costs a whopping $6000.
So this was all about the latest MacBook Pro devices launched by Apple, it is worth noting that we will come out with a review of both these devices at some point so stay tuned for that as well.
