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Force Touch is also open to developers, which means you can do things like add pressure sensitive drawing capabilities to Photoshop using only the trackpad and a standard stylus. But the big advantage here is that it makes it possible to use pressure to determine the speed of scrubbing when navigating through video and audio content. The advantages, which include the ability to click everywhere including at the very edges of the trackpad , make it more than worthwhile to take the few hours to a day you might need to adjust.
Another new feature is limited to the top-end model, which we reviewed here: Thanks to its beefed up GPU, it can now power an external 5K display at 60Hz via two DisplayPort cables. Better performance on the new inch Retina MacBook Pro comes primarily from that new PCIe-based flash storage which is also on the new inch model.
That new graphics processor also helps considerably. The Force Touch trackpad support should bear more fruit for future applications and possibly OS X On the other hand, it's so seamlessly done, you might never notice the difference.
The inch Retina Display was forward-looking when first introduced, but now better-than-HD screen resolutions are common in laptops across many sizes and prices. Still, it remains a main selling point here, and it looks as clear, bright and sharp as any high-end laptop.
The Retina screen has a 2,x1,pixel resolution, and is best demonstrated when displaying text or professional high-res photography. In , every Apple laptop, save for the two Air models and the lone "classic" MacBook Pro that is surprisingly still available, has a better-thanp display.
Here, you get two USB 3. You won't find an optical drive or Ethernet jack, but both of those are increasingly rare, even in inch laptops. This is a premium laptop, and you can rightly expect premium performance scores from it. That said, this model does not upgrade its CPU from the previous fourth-generation Intel Core i-series to the current fifth-generation chips as seen in the inch Pro and Air , so the year-over-year gain is minimal.
It's also difficult to directly compare the the and configurations we tested, as our inch MacBook Pro had only Intel's integrated Iris graphics, while our configuration has a discrete graphics card from AMD, the Radeon R9 MX. Compared with premium midsize Windows laptops running Core i7 processors, both the and inch MacBook Pros were closely matched with the Razer Blade , and a bit faster than a new Dell XPS 15 with Nvidia graphics and a 4K display.
The AMD graphics card included in the more expensive MacBook Pro configuration is helpful for high-end photo and video editing. When it comes to gaming, it's perhaps less so. Gaming on OS X is still anemic at best, with even high-end games such as BioShock: Infinite and Metro: Last Light only available for Macs in crippled forms that lack some high-end resolution and detail settings.
Apple claims tweaks to the operating system and battery chemistry should give you about an hour of extra battery life in this MacBook Pro, versus a comparable model. Again, perhaps because this year's test unit has to support a separate graphics card while the one we tested last year did not, the battery life we saw in the inch MacBook Pro versus the model was nearly identical. This system ran for in our video playback battery test, about 15 minutes longer than the configuration we tested.
The inch MacBook Pro is a powerful, but still portable, laptop that feels more at home on a desk perhaps tethered to external hard drives and docking stations than in your travel bag. But it's also slim and light enough to make an occasional trip without being a burden, which is why Apple feels free to charge such a premium for it above both other high-end inch laptops and the rest of the MacBook line.
It's the biggest and most powerful laptop Apple makes, and unless you're moving up to a 5K iMac or the Mac Pro desktop, it's going to be on the wish lists of photographers, designers, video makers and others. But for everyone else, there may be a better choice in the MacBook lineup. The inch Pro is the current champ for combining price, performance and features, while the inch Air is, while a bit dated in its design, still a tremendously useful laptop available at a very accessible price.
Dan Ackerman. The Good The inch MacBook Pro has a brilliant Retina Display, powerful processor and new graphics card options, plus faster flash storage and a new Force Touch trackpad. It offers only the most minimal upgrades over last year's version, despite a very high starting price. The new AMD graphics don't do much for gamers. Current inch MacBook Pro owners won't feel the need to upgrade, but the handful of tweaks included here keep this expensive system at the top of the list for powerful midsize laptops.
Watch this: Apple's MacBook Pro gets an early upgrade. Dell XPS 15 4K, See full specs See all prices.
Apart from those changes, you're getting the same speedy Core i7 processor, slim and sturdy design, and gorgeous Retina Display that come standard with Apple's professionally minded laptop. Second verse, same as the first: The latest inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display is identical in design to last year's model, packing the same slim aluminum chassis and black-bordered display that have defined Apple's highest-end notebook for years.
The MacBook Pro continues to be one of the most seamless-looking notebooks in its category, with two subtle stereo speakers flanking the laptop's signature black chiclet keyboard. The MacBook's underside sports a set of barely noticeable vents on either side, with the iconic glowing Apple logo adorning the lid. Measuring Dell's latest XPS 15 The laptop's gorgeous The MacBook Pro's display registered a satisfying nits on our brightness test, outshining the MSI WS60 nits and our nit mainstream notebook average.
Still, Apple's notebook exhibited strong color accuracy, with a Delta E score of 2. That's far more accurate than the MSI The MacBook's speakers are crisp, clear and loud enough to fill a small meeting room. The rocking bass, thumping horns and soaring vocals of Fall Out Boy's "Irresistible" came through cleanly, as did the iconic orchestral score that played during the Star Wars trailer.
This new 4 x 3-inch trackpad doesn't actually physically click, instead using force sensors and haptic feedback to simulate the sensation. One of Force Touch's main benefits is the ability to perform a Force click, which activates special functions when you press extra-hard on the pad. For example, Force clicking a link on a website lets you preview that page in a small window, while doing so on highlighted text will pop up a dictionary definition or Wikipedia entry.
Force click also allows for pressure-sensitive commands; you can fast-forward through iMovie or QuickTime videos at different speeds based on how hard you're pressing the pad. This also applies to pressing the touchpad to zoom in and out of maps.
Overall, I found the Force Touch functions handy and responsive. Performing a standard click felt a little too resistant to me at first, but I was able to adjust that easily by switching the click sensitivity from Firm to Light in the Trackpad settings menu. After a while, it was easy to forget that the trackpad lacked a traditional click button. The newest MacBook Pro retains its predecessors' satisfyingly snappy island keys, complete with a handy function row with keys for adjusting brightness and volume, toggling music playback and pulling up Mission Control to view all open apps.
As a longtime Mac user, chopping away on the new MacBook Pro was like riding a bike. Thanks to the keys' fluid 1. Apple's newest MacBook Pro retains the company's dependable p FaceTime webcam, which captured my skin tone and the strands of my scraggly beard with accuracy. If you want to spice up your photos, the notebook's Photo Booth app offers a handful of filters, silly effects and custom backgrounds. That aside, there is not much criticism and the keyboard is impressive with its well-defined stroke, generous travel as well as a background illumination that can be adjusted.
The TrackPad is still The pad now also includes the eponymous Force Click, a kind of two-stage triggering that provides practical features such as a quick search in the browser under OS X. Nothing has changed in terms of the excellent gliding capabilities and the very sensitive response during multi-touch gestures — Windows users can be envious of this touchpad. More information about the technology and additional features are available in our review of the MacBook Pro Usually this procedure is pretty fast and simple, thanks to the automatic hard drive partitioning and driver installation — unfortunately not in this case.
After an unusually long time, the installation of the Boot Camp support software stopped with an error resulting in a partially functional operating system. While we were able to install the drivers for WLAN, sound and the webcam later, we could not use the right-click functionality of the touchpad or the function keys of the keyboard brightness, keyboard illumination, sound.
We can only hope that Apple will solve these software problems quickly — but potential buyers should note that every MacBook was primarily designed for OS X and that a smooth operation is only guaranteed with this operating system. One interesting aspect is that the The picture appears to be very even with high brightness settings and we could not notice any problems such as screen bleeding or clouding.
Another advantage: The MacBook Pro is one of the few available notebooks without any PWM flickering is created by periodical activation and deactivation of the LED illumination to influence the brightness via duty cycle. At least the black value 0. They manage similar results, only the Asus GJW falls behind in a direct comparison.
However, significantly higher contrasts would only be possible with other display technologies such as VA and higher or OLED almost infinite, thanks to perfect blacks , but they have other issues or the manufacturing would not be very economical.
Traditionally, Apple puts a lot of emphasis on an accurate color reproduction and the new MacBook Pro 15 is no exception. The deviations of the colors DeltaE 2. The color space coverage is slightly smaller compared to the last generation only Considering the size, weight and the glossy display surface, there are certainly better notebooks for outdoor use than Apple's inch notebook.
However, thanks to the high luminance that is not reduced on battery power, the MacBook also masters this scenario and there will be no problems when you use it in the shade. Not all IPS displays are the same: The technology is often used as a synonym for wide viewing angles, but there can actually be pretty big differences between different manufacturers and models. While the picture of the ZenBook Pro noticeably loses contrast and saturation when you look from an angle above or below, the picture of the MacBook does not change — these details are some of the reasons why Apple charges much higher prices than some other manufacturers.
The Core iHQ 2. The new quad-core CPUs from the Broadwell generation are only available from the beginning of June, and are supposed to be much faster with comparable power consumption TDP of 47 watts thanks to the nm manufacturing process Haswell: nm. However, it seems that Apple has skipped this generation completely and there will only be a complete refresh with Skylake at the earliest opportunity.
This memory, which acts as a L4 cache and can also be used by the CPU cores, reduces the dependency from the memory bandwidth and therefore improves the performance. The notebook switches to the more frugal graphics processor while idling, but unfortunately, this only works with OS X. The manufacturer is very proud of the fact that the transfer rates of the new drives are supposedly twice as fast as before — a promise that we will check later.
According to the specifications, the Core iHQ reaches impressive maximum clocks of 3. And this is actually a problem: The CPU does at least start at 3. As a result, the clock drops to around 2. This means that unfortunately, the iHQ is not any faster than the old iHQ ; the iHQ and the iHQ should be on par under sustained load as well, which means the performance differences between the different models will be limited to short peak load or poorly parallelized software.
Single thread benchmarks are executed with around 3. Overall, we can say that the MacBook Pro can convince with a lot of performance reserves, but it cannot really take advantage of the CPUs that are very costly compared to the rivals. The advertised doubling of the SSD performance is therefore true, although in practice, this will only be a benefit when you copy large files. Unlike the recently reviewed inch MacBook , the drive in our current review unit, SMG, is not from Apple, but provided by Samsung.
Unfortunately, the SSD does not support the modern NVMe standard, which includes a more efficient administration of parallel accesses, but only uses the conventional AHCI protocol to communicate with the system. However, we have to be fair and say that the predecessors from , and even were not much slower — all generations are basically on par in PCMark 7. A switch to the current generation can still pay off thanks to longer battery runtimes and faster GPUs.
This brings us to the next important aspect, the new Radeon R9 MX. The term "new" should however, be used very carefully, because the underlying Cape-Verde chip is actually more than three years old announcement: February on the desktop Radeon HD The powerful quad-core manages even 4K videos smoothly depending on the bitrate, but this solution is certainly not very efficient and can also result in a very audible fan noise.
Ordinary H. Unfortunately, the MX is not powerful enough for the native display resolution, so it is recommended that you reduce the resolution to x in combination with medium graphics settings. Unfortunately, the MacBook Pro is affected by a very annoying problem when you use Windows, which results in frame rate drops during prolonged gaming sessions: The Radeon GPU cannot maintain its core clock of MHz. The clock often fluctuates between and MHz, but occasionally drops to MHz.
Even though the two chassis fans already run at rpm while idling, our review unit is almost silent. Even moderate workloads like browsing the web, picture editing or light multitasking do not really increase the noise levels — a very remarkable performance for such a slim quad-core notebook, which is mainly a result of the defensive fan curve. Apple cannot beat the physics under sustained CPU and GPU load, either: The fan speed and noise level will continuously rise up to rpm and 46 dB A , respectively, in 3DMark 06 or in our stress test.
This might be quite loud on paper, but the low frequency and consistent murmur is subjectively much quieter than it really is. The fan characteristics have not changed compared to the predecessor, so we took the following frequency response for different fan speeds from our previous review. Thanks to the slow but continuous spinning of the fans, the manufacturer does not have a problem with the temperature development in everyday use. The chassis never gets inconveniently warm or even hot, and it is no problem to use the device on your lap.
Once we had noticed some occasional GPU throttling, it is hardly surprising that the losses in the stress test are even more dramatic. As you would expect from a very expensive multimedia notebook, the MacBook is equipped with two decent stereo speakers that are more than sufficient for occasional video or music playback. The maximum volume and the bass are slightly above average, the speakers are very clear and there are no distortions at the highest volume.
Once again, there is no noticeable difference compared to the previous generation , so we show the frequency responses from the model. While the inch device is quite frugal with 6. This is also the reason for the previously mentioned differences in terms of system noise and temperature development. The watt power adaptor is hardly adequate and limits the consumption to around 90 watts — which means that the MacBook cannot maintain the maximum clock for the CPU and the GPU simultaneously, even when the temperatures are very low.
However, the temperature development will result in throttling after a couple of minutes anyway, so it would not make much sense to replace the PSU with a more powerful model. Our measurement device only showed around 72 watts at the end of the stress test. The generously sized battery capacity of the predecessor has been further increased for the new model and is now specified with an enormous However, replacing the glued in batteries is a challenge even for professionals, which is unfortunately typical for Apple, so you will have to use the expensive repair service of the manufacturer if the battery is damaged.
We cannot confirm the advertised runtime of 9 hours, at least in our practical test. Because of the higher power consumption, the battery will only last for less than 5 hours when you use Windows 8. Depending on the load you can realize much longer idling OS X and minimum brightness: more than 17 hours or much shorter runtimes Unigine Heaven at the highest brightness: almost 2 hours. The inch version cannot keep up with the stamina of the smaller MacBook Pro 13 Retina — but the results are more than impressive compared to the Windows competition.
A full recharge of the battery takes about 2. We cannot understand the decision to launch a device with Haswell processors at this time. The new quad-core CPUs from the Broadwell generation are already being shipped and have higher power efficiency, which result in some significant advantages, especially in a thermally limited laptop like the MacBook.
We would also like to see better support for Windows including graphics switching. Apple puts all of this in a flawless aluminum unibody chassis, which is still the quality benchmark even three years after its launch. The familiar Retina display may have fallen behind the rivals in terms of the pixel density, but it can easily compensate this disadvantage with extremely wide viewing angles and a color reproduction that is suitable for professionals.
All things considered, the Apple MacBook Pro Retina is probably still the best multimedia notebook on the market — but the competition is closing the gap pretty quickly. If you are still undecided between the MacBook and the Windows alternatives like the Asus ZenBook Pro , the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro or the Asus GJW , which have been available for quite a while now, you should probably wait a few weeks longer: Dell announced its new XPS 15 with a frameless Infinity display at Computex, which will probably be equipped with Broadwell processors or maybe even Skylake?
The battle for the first spot in our Top 10 ranking remains exciting. Is this enough to compete with the improved rivals? Apple Laptop Haswell. Available configurations excerpt :. Intel Core iHQ 4 x 2. Note: The manufacturer may use components from different suppliers including display panels, drives or memory sticks with similar specifications. Similarities and Differences compared to the Predecessor. Memory, processor and graphics card are soldered source: MBP 15 Late , ifixit. AdobeRGB coverage ColorChecker pre-calibration.
Saturation Sweeps pre-calibration. Grayscale pre-calibration. ColorChecker calibrated. Saturation Sweeps calibrated.
Force Touch is also open to developers, which means you can do things like add pressure sensitive drawing capabilities to Photoshop using only the trackpad and a standard stylus. But the big advantage here is that it makes it possible to use pressure to determine the speed of scrubbing when navigating through video and audio content.
The advantages, which include the ability to click everywhere including at the very edges of the trackpad , make it more than worthwhile to take the few hours to a day you might need to adjust. Another new feature is limited to the top-end model, which we reviewed here: Thanks to its beefed up GPU, it can now power an external 5K display at 60Hz via two DisplayPort cables.
Better performance on the new inch Retina MacBook Pro comes primarily from that new PCIe-based flash storage which is also on the new inch model. That new graphics processor also helps considerably. The Force Touch trackpad support should bear more fruit for future applications and possibly OS X If you are a creative professional that relies heavily on apps that can take advantage of GPU acceleration or the processing power of a quad-core processor, then the inch MacBook Pro makes perfect sense.
It has enough processing power to stay well ahead of the competition, and it boasts first-class manufacturing, picture quality and battery life. It's a good machine for anyone with tall expectations—and a tall budget. But it's also slim and light enough to make an occasional trip without being a burden, which is why Apple feels free to charge such a premium for it above both other high-end inch laptops and the rest of the MacBook line. Both have the same 16 GB memory complement now, and while processor benchmark tests favoured the faster clocked model, the differences are only a few percent in point scores.
A welcome surprise is just how good the Iris Pro graphics chipset can prove to be when playing action games, with this integrated version even playing slightly faster in some titles.
Display. Retina display; inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; by native resolution at pixels per inch. Apple released a brand new version of the inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display just a few weeks prior to its big annual Worldwide. The Apple MacBook Pro inch model offers an equally beautiful Retina display but in a smaller package. It's a bit lighter than the inch MacBook, and it may.