Apple MacBook Pro, 15″ Retina 16GB
Last updated: August 5, 2023
If you're looking for quality and reliability, you can't go wrong with the Apple MacBook Pro, 15" Retina 16GB. You'll get peak processing power and the great user experience that defines Apple products. We love how easy this MacBook is to use.
We looked at the top Laptops and dug through the reviews from some of the most popular review sites. Through this analysis, we've determined the best Laptop you should buy.
Expert Reviews
What reviewers liked
Touch ID makes logins zippy. High-quality build as always.
- Wired
While it still keeps its 2,880 x 1,800 resolution and 220 ppi of pixel density, it now also features Apple’s True Tone display tech, which debuted on the iPad Pro.
The most Pro thing about this MacBook Pro is how wildly fast it can be configured. Take, for example, our test unit, which features an Intel Core i9-8950HK CPU and 32GB of RAM, which combine for blindingly fast performance.
The MacBook Pro’s SSDs are blazingly fast compared to the competition. The Mac copied 4.97GB of data at 877.5MBps. The average premium laptop completed the test at a rate of 474.7MBps.
The latest 15-inch MacBook Pro offers major internal upgrades to the CPU, RAM, storage and display.
It’s also thinner than most “pro” Windows laptops with powerful processors.
Beautiful display with automatic color-temperature adjustment.
Impressive CPU and GPU performance
- ZD Net
The 15-inch MacBook Pro is equipped with Intel's 8th-generation 14-nanometer Coffee Lake chips.
Six processing cores boost multi-core app performance
- Macworld
The new MacBook Pro is the first Apple laptop with a TrueTone display, a technology that automatically adjusts the color temperature of the screen based on the ambient light.
- Mashable
Its six-core Intel Core processor can give it a speed boost of around 30 percent over the 13-inch Pro when rendering video or compiling code, and its discrete AMD Radeon GPUs provide better performance when running 3D drafting programs or games.
Apple did include True Tone for the first time on a Mac. What it does is adjust the display's white balance depending on the ambient lighting in the room. Florescent lighting vs warmer incandescent bulbs can have different tints of white, leaning bluer or yellower. By adjusting the display to match the lighting, it makes it easier on your eyes.
What reviewers didn't like
Touch Bar and True Tone features are of dubious value to pro users.
- Wired
some people will say that the lack of ports is a price to pay for the thin and light design, if you’re after a workstation that handles everything you need with a minimum of fuss, then you’ll soon get frustrated with the MacBook Pro.
The MacBook Pro gets a little warm, though we're not surprised since it's both thin and light and super-speedy.
The port situation will be an issue for some professionals that use lots of external hard drives and other peripherals.
The basic design hasn't been updated, keeping the same advantages and flaws. Adding the new high-end options drives the cost way up.
Polarizing keyboard design
High starting price, and painfully expensive as configured.
Apple has modified the keyboard, claiming that it's now quieter -- and, hopefully, less prone to the problems that have affected the 'butterfly' mechanism used in the MacBook keyboards in the last couple of years. Unfortunately, I still find that the thin keyboard panel feels rather lifeless and unresponsive, especially when typing at speed.
- ZD Net
At launch, 2018 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pros were affected by a throttling issue that caused downgraded performance during CPU-intensive tasks.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro still relies on four full speed (40Gbps )Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports for connectivity. This “limitation” is the one point of contention that I’ve heard most frequently about the MacBook Pro, and it means that you either have to buy hubs and adapters in order to connect USB-A devices, or find another way to perform a task like transfer a file.
- Macworld
One thing that failed to impress was the battery. Apple was careful to point out that this MacBook Pro has the exact same battery life as the previous one, which is up to 10 hours of "wireless web."
- Mashable
It costs at least twice as much as the MacBook Air, and its battery life is relatively mediocre, so it’s worth considering only if you know you’ll use all that extra power.
The built-in microphones pick up voices a bit better, though there is a bit more background noise.
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