Apple looks ahead with the new MacBook Pro inovation

Finally, the time has come. A full four years after the last major upgrade, the new MacBook Pro is finally here. It’s slimmer and lighter than its predecessor, while maintaining a majority of its iconic aluminum design language. The internals have been souped up, along with the keyboard, touchpad and speakers. There’s a lot to like here.
The ports have been — well, they’ve been changed, in typical Apple fashion, a move toward future-proofing with a fair bit of growing pains, like the SCSI and Ethernet ports, optical drive and headphone jack before it. Courage. In a few years, perhaps we’ll laugh about all of this, wondering what we were so up in arms about, content with the uniformity and ability to charge from each and load up our desks with giant 5K monitors. The road to transition, however, will be paved with adapters.
And then, of course, there’s the Touch Bar. Far and away the most compelling addition to the system, the skinny touchscreen Retina display offers a new input paradigm. It’s a way for the company to continue to avoid the Windows 10 route, eschewing full touchscreen functionality while still offering the ability for users to touch-poke a swipe at a proxy.
It’s a sort of halfway point between a touchpad and touchscreen that lets Apple have its cake and eat it too. It also opens up the system to some compelling new workflow and computing possibilities as more parties develop for the feature.

After four years without a fundamental refresh, Apple has returned with a system that builds up some of the system’s strongest selling points, while introducing some tricks, and a few pain points along the way.
The MacBook Pro has been a lot of things to a lot of people over the years, but the word “sleek” has never really applied. That was never really the point. The MacBook Pro has always been about being a powerhouse. It’s right there in the name, a product targeted toward the company’s base of creative professionals looking for something more portable than a desktop. Of course, that appeal has spilled over into other users simply looking for something with a little more under the hood than an Air.
The latest upgrade maintains much of the design language of its predecessor, while taking a few cues from the standard MacBook, with smoothed out lines and even fewer parts making up its unibody exterior. That long black plastic strip on the rear of the computer is gone. So too, interestingly, is the iconic glowing Apple on the lid, replaced, for better or worse, with a mirror version.

At 14.9 mm, the 13-inch version is 17 percent thinner than its predecessor. The 15-inch version is down 14 percent from the previous version, at 15.5 mm. The system volume is noticeably streamlined as well, down 23 and 20 percent, respectively, along with a half-pound weight drop for both laptops, down to three and four pounds apiece. It’s not exactly night and day — and the 15-inch version will still feel pretty massive for those who have been carrying around an Air for all this time, but as someone who’s schlepped the previous system around for hundreds of miles on convention center floors, it’s undoubtedly an upgrade.
And the build quality here is undeniable. The new MacBook Pro is a beautifully designed piece of machinery, enhanced by the edition of the MacBook’s Space Gray coloring, a dark, almost gun-metal shading that plays well into the overall sleekness of the machine. The more traditional silver coloring has survived the upgrade, as well, so if you’re partial to a light shade, you can tick off that option during the check-out process.