Plenty of rumors have pointed to a new, redesigned 16-inch MacBook Pro launching sometime before 2019. And it turns out that was the plan after all, as Apple has just announced its new, 16-inch MacBook Pro. The new laptop arrives in stores later this week starting at $2,399.
The company’s newest laptop features a redesigned bezel around the (slightly) larger display, along with a brand new keyboard design — finally doing away with the butterfly switch and moving back to a scissor design for the new keyboard.
The 16-inch display features a native 3072 x 1920 pixel resolution, 500 nit brightness and P3 color gamut. The new keyboard sports a physical Escape key, and the redesigned scissor mechanism delivers 1mm of key travel. Other features include an “Apple-designed rubber dome that stores more potential energy for a responsive key press,” inverted T-arrangement for arrow keys, and Touch Bar and Touch ID.
It’s telling that the company calls the 16-inch laptop’s keyboard a “Magic Keyboard,” invoking the same nomenclature it uses for the desktop keyboards it includes with the iMac, forthcoming Mac Pro and makes available as an optional accessory for other Macs. The Magic Keyboard uses a different key switching mechanism than laptop keyboards. Apple wants to distance the new 16-inch MacBook Pro from previous models with the much-reviled butterfly keyboards as much as it can.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro sports a more advanced thermal design that Apple says enables it to handle higher peak power loads than previous MacBook Pros – it sports better airflow with bigger vents and more efficient fans designed to cool the 6- and 8-core Intel 9th-generation processors and AMD Radeon Pro 5000M series graphics. It comes equipped with a 100Wh battery, which provides up to 11 hours of web browsing or video playback.
Internal storage has been beefed up from 512MB to 1 TB, with configure-to-order options supporting up to 8 TB. The system can also be configured with up to 64 GB RAM.
These two elements are the main draw for Apple’s newest member of its MacBook Pro family, while the rest of the device is exactly what you’d expect: plenty of power in a sleek design, that familiar Apple logo, and macOS Catalina on board right out of the box.