We all know that Apple products can be overpriced, but that doesn’t stop people from buying them. Why? Because they are excellent devices that are virtually guaranteed to last for a long time. Case in point: The MacBook Pro 15, the company’s most premium laptop offering yet. It is insanely fast, has a beautiful display, and relatively light and thin design. It is also admittedly quite expensive.
Luckily, Amazon is offering this laptop for an incredible $400 off as part of Apple’s September event. Instead of its usual price of $2,799, you can get this powerful portable computer for $2,399.
The MacBook Pro 15 looks almost exactly like its 2017 and 2016 predecessors, save for one significant hardware upgrade: Its keyboard. One of the things we disliked about the older model was its low-travel keyboard, which felt like typing on a block of wood. Thankfully, Apple has mostly fixed this issue. Pressing the keys now feels softer and they’re no longer obnoxiously loud. Overall, typing has become a more pleasurable experience. However, key travel is still frustratingly short and the actuation is still clicky.
As usual, the MacBook Pro 15 offers industry-leading display and sound. The 15-inch screen is still a thing of beauty, with Apple’s tenacious 16:10 aspect ratio (most laptops’ screen is 3:2) that provides more vertical space for a fuller view of your work. Colors are extremely accurate, black levels are great, and images look completely natural which makes this a great laptop for photographers and creative professionals. In fact, the MacBook Pro is our choice for the best laptop for photo editing. The same goes for its up-firing stereo speakers, which offer an incredibly loud room-filling sound that retains dialogue’s richness and music’s subtleties.
Unfortunately, the MacBook Pro 15 still lacks ports. There are four Thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone jack. That’s all. This decision may be forward-thinking as more and more peripheral devices are being outfitted with USB-C, but the lack of an SD card slot is odd since this is being marketed to creatives.
The MacBook Pro 15 now boasts more power courtesy of its Intel core i9 processor. The older Core i7 is still available for those wishing to save money, but you can really feel the difference between the two. With a jump up to eight cores, we saw a huge boost in performance. The improvement is also due to Apple’s MacBook Pro software patch which fixed the throttling issue. You can open multiple heavy programs like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro X simultaneously and it will remain glitch-free.
This laptop’s battery life is decent. Apple claims it can last for 10 hours on a single charge, and we saw close to that in our high-definition video loop test. Web browsing was decidedly less impressive at eight hours. These numbers aren’t terrible, but we’ve seen better.
The MacBook Pro 15 is the most powerful MacBook yet and has been future-proofed through its port selection. It comes at a high cost, but if it’s peerless performance you’re after, it won’t disappoint.
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