To show how confident Apple is with its new keyboard, it’s not including the 16-inch MacBook Pro in the keyboard repair program (which it did for its MacBook Pro refreshes earlier this year). Time will tell if mere dust particles will cripple the Magic Keyboard as well, but considering the scissor mechanism is one that’s widely used in the industry, hopefully this design won’t be plagued by the same issues as the butterfly design.
There are other small changes too. The physical Escape key has returned, and the arrow keys have a more traditional layout, updates that make them easier to find without looking at the keyboard. The same rings true for the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, which sits separately next to the Touch Bar. Apple hasn’t made any dramatic changes to that TouchBar (the context-sensitive OLED strip still sits above the keyboard), except there’s supposedly a little more room between it and the number row to lessen the chance of accidental taps.
The new keyboard with the updated layout is only available on the new 16-inch model. So unless you can pay the $2,399 starting price to buy a big new MacBook, you won’t benefit from these improvements. There’s a standard Mac trade-in program you can use to lower the cost of the new 16-inch Pro, but that’s about it. It’s an especially odd time for the change, considering that Apple refreshed its 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro line earlier this year, and the MacBook Air late last year—all with the butterfly keys. The 16-inch Pro will replace the short-lived 15-inch model.
Thick and Thin
Keyboard aside, the new MacBook Pro is very much like its predecessors, except in one particularly important way: It’s heavier and thicker. This marks a stark contrast from the past, where every new Apple product seemed to get sleeker and lighter with each update.
Apple has already applied the bigger-is-better philosophy to its latest iPhones, which have been made thicker to accommodate beefier batteries. By thickening the MacBook Pro, the company was able to add that scissor keyboard, a bigger battery, and improve the heat management system.
The 16-inch Pro is slightly bigger than the now-canceled 15-inch Pro, and about the same weight. Apple has shaved down the bezels around the display to squeeze in an extra inch of pixels, which helps the MacBook Pro look a little more modern next to thinly bezeled laptops like the Dell XPS 13. The MacBook Pro is still an IPS LCD display with 500 nits of brightness, but Apple has bumped up the screen resolution to 3,072 by 1,920 pixels—just a little crisper than the 2,560 by 1,600 resolution on the 15-inch.
