The Unboxing
The experience of unboxing the new MacBook Pro is similar to any other MacBook unboxing experience. The familiar white hard cardboard box with every year a new design of the wallpaper on the front of the box, vacuum tight lid slowly releasing from the bottom when opening, plastic wrapped laptop sitting on top the charger and pamphlet with Apple logo stickers tucked inside. You know, the norm.
What's new with this year's MacBook Pro?
Screen
Apple has made the screen larger while keeping the same size footprint. Stretching out the screen closer to the edges allowed this great change to happen. It's not exactly an "infinity" display, but it's really close. Immersive as ever and makes the MacOS experience very enjoyable.
I upgraded from my 2017 13" MacBook Pro base model and although this one is a lot more expensive, I see this as a machine I'll be using for many years to come.
Keyboard
OK. Listen up. If you've been waiting for the whole butterfly keyboard to disappear because of those darn things are just so uncomfortable to type on and always gets stuck, the time has come! Apple updated the keyboard to have more key travel! I'm typing this review on the brand new keyboard and boy does it feel so good. This upgraded keyboard is a middle ground of the old scissors switch keys and the now discontinued butterfly keyboard.
Using my 2017 MacBook Pro with the scissor switch gave me so much anxiety using it because I was always afraid it would get stuck. The fear was so high that I even bought a silicone cover to prevent any dust or debris from entering in the keyboard. The down side of using the silicone cover was that it didn't allow any of the backlighting from the keys to go through, so it was always a pain to use the laptop in dimmer settings. Now, I feel free and not too worried about eating around my current MacBook Pro.
Speakers
You've never heard better speakers in a laptop than the 16" MacBook Pro. Trust me. The highs, mids, and lows sounds noticeably fuller and there's no need to put on a set of headphones to enjoy rich music listening. It's about 50 times better sounding than on the base 13" MacBook pro -- that's how good it is!
Battery Life
An increase in battery size, up to the maximum allowable 100 Watt hours to fly with, in the new 2020 16" MacBook Pro is enough to give you the endurance you need when going unplugged. For normal tasks without taxing the processor, you'll get a full work day worth for sure. For Netflix, I watched a 1.5 hour movie on high volume with about 60% brightness and it went from 100% to 78%.
Lapability
A laptop should feel comfortable on your lap when you use it and the larger size compared to my 13" feels a lot more comfortable to use. Being able to adjust my legs while still having enough surface area to keep the laptop stable is one of those small things that adds happy usage points for me.
Speed
Without a doubt, the 16" blazes through almost anything you throw at it, even at the base configuration level. The main reason why I upgraded is because I needed something more powerful to edit videos. I finally threw in the towel with the 13" because it would take too long to render videos, playback was awful and choppy unless I set the quality to 1/4 of the original, and the time it takes to juggle different peripherals with only two USB-C ports got really old.
Storage
I like that the 16" starts at 512GB which is plenty of on board storage for me. I used to have a 128GB on my base model MacBook pro and that felt extremely limiting since there are so many apps I need to have installed. 512GB is perfect for all my apps and if I need any more storage for photos and videos, I'll just place them on an external hard drive.
Touch ID
Logging in with Touch ID is very fast and works even after I get out of the shower. This is now my preferred way to login since typing in a password each time seems outdated and slow.
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