- Some of you may know that I'm a Mac user.
At least my laptop is a Mac.
I've got a 2011 MacBook Pro 15-inch at home.
It's showing its age now, as I've said before,
but I haven't really had much love
for the Apple replacements over the years.
The 16-inch here is actually pretty nice
except for the fact that it costs a lot of money.
Today, I'm looking at the 13-inch,
which is Apple's brand-new 10th gen-equipped
version of the MacBook Pro,
which promises to bring a lot of the features
and functionality of the 16-inch
down to the 13-inch form factor.
A lot of people seem to be saying right now
that the CPU isn't as powerful as last gen,
or it's just as powerful, so there's no real improvement,
but that's not entirely true.
The CPU actually has AVX 512 support
and Intel's Deep Learning Boost.
Those two things can and will
improve performance dramatically over the
traditional Coffee Lake Refresh type of CPUs
that we've been seeing over the past however many years.
I mean, they're all Skylake, but this is Ice Lake,
and with it comes not only those new features
but also a new Gen11 GPU,
the Iris Plus G7?
Yeah, G7.
It promises double the performance
over Intel's UHD Graphics, or better.
You know what?
This is a little bit too complex.
Let's just get into it, shall we?
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As I understand it we've already opened this up,
unfortunately, the shrink wrap is off,
but this should all be pretty virgin.
So let's pop the lid here.
Ah, there we go.
The Apple's upside down.
Well, whoever put it in did a poor job.
Spoilers: It was me.
The fact that the outer wrapping has been taken off
means that I cannot, I can't, I just can't.
So I'm just going to have to do this number.
Which is just the most (sighs) unsatisfying unboxing.
We've got this little "Designed by Apple in California"
booklet and I think there's some stickers in here, too.
Yeah, there they are.
Ooh, they're silver.
We also have a nice, chonky USB Type-C cable.
That's a little bit messier than I anticipated it would be.
Yeah, it should handle the job of the
included 61-watt power adapter.
The CPU in this new generation of MacBook
is actually a fair bit more power hungry.
Okay, oh no, there's some scuffs on it already!
(sighs) Guys!
Oh.
We just bought this.
This wasn't sent to us or anything, we bought this.
Hopefully they'll buff out.
Let's see what's inside here.
Pretty standard stuff, got this little screen protector.
Oh, it's actually already on.
That's cool.
Actually, let's quickly compare.
I might be imagining it, but I feel like
there's a shorter throw on the 13-inch.
Could also be that it's not as broken in yet
and this is a little bit more used.
It's a little bit annoying that Apple
requires two-factor authentication,
but it's pretty nice that they have it
and pretty nice that it works.
You have an Apple device?
Oh, you're setting up a new one?
Well, your Apple device is your authenticator.
You don't have any special app or anything.
It's just, "Oh, hey, you've logged in somewhere.
"Do you want to approve this?"
"Yes," there it is.
While we're waiting for this to set up,
it's worth noting that there's actually two different models
of the 13-inch MacBook Pro in 2020 right now.
There is this newer model with Ice Lake CPU,
which is a little bit more expensive,
and there's also the refreshed model from mid-2019.
It's still, on the inside, just the same laptop
as the previous gen MacBook Pro.
Don't wanna set up Touch ID right now.
Maybe later, or never.
If I didn't set up Touch ID,
why do I want to set up Apple Pay?
True Tone Display.
Always glad that it doesn't allow you to change that
from there, they just say, "Hey!
"Check out this whiz-bang feature we have!
"Isn't that great?"
A lot of things about Apple setup I really like.
There's a lot of painless stuff, and then there's also
a lot of really stupid stuff like that.
Some of the things that Linus and I
actually agree about with the Mac experience.
I dunno, let's start with the speakers.
I'll just play some "Supernova" here.
(upbeat electronic music)
That's actually pretty good.
All right, let's try it on this here.
(upbeat electronic music)
Okay, first impressions, this sounds deeper
and the stereo imaging is more natural.
This feels like it's got more of a fake surround effect,
but it still sounds pretty good.
It's still got a pretty deep sound, too,
but it sounds more processed, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, there's more mids and stuff on this one, as well,
whereas this is more skewed towards bass and treble.
Let's check out the webcam.
So I'm doing a recording right now.
Obviously, we're in a brightly lit environment.
Everything is basically as ideal as it can be
for a webcam, but there is still
a lot of noise in this image.
If I tilt it down a little bit so that it's not
looking directly into the light you can still see noise.
I think this is the same webcam, literally,
that is in my 2011.
It's the FaceTime HD webcam, 720p, it's nothing special.
We'll see how the audio sounds, though.
From what I understand, the audio setup
with the three microphones should be very good.
So I don't now if you wanna try and make
some background noise.
(crew stomping)
Yeah, a little bit of that's coming through.
But let's see if it actually...
(hands thumping)
See if that causes any kind of distortion
in my voice or anything like that,
if you can still hear my voice or not.
As far as the screen goes,
you can't really make it out very well here.
So the screen is what we expect.
Its an Apple Retina display.
It's 2560 x 1600, which is that 16:10 aspect ratio
that Apple has thankfully continued to embrace.
The build's inflexible.
There are a couple of things that I can say
about the exterior, though.
There is a little bit of flex in the screen,
as one might expect of a screen this thin,
but it's nothing to worry about.
I don't think there's any deck flex in the keyboard.
Oh, there's a little bit.
So compared to the 16-inch
the trackpad size is a little bit smaller,
but you'd expect that of something with a keyboard
that is the same size, as you can see.
The Escape key is physical.
Wonderful, love it, just like the 16-inch.
And we also have that separated Touch ID sensor, as well,
which makes it a lot easier to fumble for in the dark
if you're making purchases late at night, for reasons.
The Touch Bar is the same hit or miss
I guess a lot of people are kinda polarized on.
I think it's okay.
One thing that is very interesting
between these two machines is that
on previous gen 13-inch MacBook Pros
we had two Thunderbolt ports on the side here.
TL;DR, the new one has four.
The 2020 refresh of the old version still only has two.
That's a thing that's exclusive to
the Ice Lake version of the machine right now.
Hopefully, in the next year we won't
have any of those legacy machines anymore,
which will mean that for everybody at every price point
you'll have those four Thunderbolt ports.
As an Apple user, it is certainly something
that feels a lot better to me than recent iterations,
just like the 16-inch over here.
It doesn't offend me in the same way
that some of the other ones did with their
soft Escape key and butterfly switches.
It's got quite a bit more power under the hood
as far as that goes.
It also comes standard with 16 gigs of RAM
and a 512-gigabyte SSD.
These are things that cost money, obviously,
and this is why this is the more expensive model.
With that being said, the RAM is actually
a lot faster than previous gen.
Previous gen used 2133 megahertz DDR3 memory.
This is 3733 megahertz DDR4.
It is significantly faster than most people
actually have on their desktops right now,
while actually guzzling quite a bit less power.
I'm really excited to take a look at this in more detail.
If you guys want to see that as well,
maybe see a bit of a head-to-head between this
and the 16-inch, or perhaps the XPS 13.
Let's give it a challenge and put it up
against a desktop, as well.
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Thanks for watching, and take care.