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A great laptop with an incredible screen, long battery life and outstanding performance

With the introduction of the 16-inch (2021) and 14-inch MacBook Pros last month, Apple has almost completely gotten rid of Intel's clutches. The only device in the series that needs to be transitioned is the iMac Pro, but it will also achieve a leap in the near future.

However, for now, Mac power enthusiasts will have to be content with the redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro machines. It's not that I can't imagine anyone would be dissatisfied with any of them.

Thanks to the new Apple M1 Pro and Pro Max processors, luxurious mini-LED displays and expanded physical port arrays, Apple’s new machine should become the laptop of choice for demanding mobile professionals in the foreseeable future computer.

Read next: Our guide to the best laptops

This review will focus on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which is the model Apple sent me for review. It’s right at the top of the MacBook Pro scale, with a 16.2-inch display and M1 Pro processor (with 10 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores) or M1 Max (with 10 CPU cores and 24 cores) options or 32 GPU cores.

These have 16GB or 32GB RAM options (64GB is also available, but only for M1 Max) and SSD storage options, ranging from 512GB to 8TB. The 16-inch MacBook Pro is the real workhorse, ideal for demanding jobs such as 4K or 8K video editing, 3D rendering, and intensive software development.

However, this is not just about the new M1 processor. The new Liquid Retina XDR display itself deserves a lot of headlines. It uses a mini LED panel, just like the panel in the M1 iPad Pro 12.9, but with higher specifications: the peak brightness reaches the quoted 1,600cd/m2, and it is also equipped with Apple's 120Hz ProMotion technology.

Other new features include the return of many missing features. MagSafe is back and now has a full-height function key row. The 16-inch MacBook Pro is also equipped with a series of professional physical ports, including a full-size HDMI output and-yes! Finally-a full-size SD card slot.

Not to mention the large 100Wh battery promised by Apple, which can provide up to 21 hours of video playback and 14 hours of wireless web browsing on a 16-inch MacBook Pro, as well as an improved keyboard and FaceTime HD webcam.

As always, you can choose from many different configurations of the 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro, with prices ranging from £2,399 (M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) to £5,899 (M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 8TB). And other solid state drives).

Although we very much hope that Apple will send us high-end models, the models under test are more representative of the specifications most people would choose, with its M1 Pro processor supplemented by 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD.

If your budget cannot meet the needs of the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 14-inch model starts at £1,899 (M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) and offers a similar level of performance. Note, however, that the basic model is equipped with an M1 Pro version with only eight CPU cores instead of ten.

Next is the less powerful MacBook Pro 13in, which starts at £1,299 (M1, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD), and the MacBook Air starts at £999 (M1, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD). Both are powerful machines.

To be honest, none of the Windows laptops we reviewed recently can match the portability, power supply, and battery life of the MacBook Pro 16-inch. In terms of raw power, the closest thing is the Alienware x15 R1, which provides you with a laptop that offers similar power levels and better gaming performance, but the battery life is much shorter and the display effect is not so impressive. People are impressed.

Buy Alienware x15 R1 from Dell now

If you don't mind missing the powerful features of MacBook, we are also big fans of ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16 G603. You can buy a product with an Intel Core i9-11900H CPU, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU and a huge 2TB SSD for £2,299.

It is light and slim, and the RTX 3070 GPU makes it an excellent portable game console; however, battery life and display are still not the same as those provided by the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch.

Read next: Our guide to the best laptops

For several years, the design of MacBook Pro notebook computers has been using familiar templates, so the 2021 model is full of fresh air, the lid is flatter, less rounded, and the notebook has fewer sharp edges.

Not that this represents a particularly bold style statement. Despite its bullet-proof construction-and accompanied by a weight of 1.6 kg-the new MacBook Pro is still a fairly plain aluminum block, with the Apple logo printed on the lid, a large glass trackpad, and not too many other physical things to pay attention to. feature.

However, the insider will discover some key differences after careful inspection. There are more ports available for beginners, and it is great to see the return of the MagSafe power connector. When you plug a £2,399 laptop into a nearby wall outlet, you no longer need to worry about its safety-compared to the same thing happening, the possibility of tripping over a cable and causing damage to the circuit behind the outlet is more The previous USB-C connector is much smaller. If you forget the MagSafe charger, you can still charge the 16-inch MacBook Pro via USB-C.

Professional and keen amateur photographers will also rejoice at the re-emergence of the full-size SD card slot, and welcome the return of the full-size HDMI output, even though it is only version 2.0 instead of 2.1. Add three Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack, and you can probably forego the USB-C dock and adapter bundle altogether.

Open the lid and more differences will become apparent. The huge Force Touch trackpad still exists, but it has changed elsewhere (well, almost). The above keyboard will shock anyone who has used a MacBook in the past few years. In addition to having a new eye-catching black background, the MacBook Magic Keyboard now has a slightly different layout, with a row of full-height function keys.

Yes: Apple finally eliminated the unpopular Touch Bar. Just like the Norwegian blue in the famous python sketch, it no longer exists, it has expired, go see its maker and wash it out of this mortal coil; it is a former Touch Bar.

Last, but not least, the webcam — mounted in the controversial cutout at the top of the display — is also better, although it’s not too difficult to upgrade from the pre-pandemic 720p that was pretty poor to the new resolution. The clearer 1080p FaceTime HD model.

2021 Apple MacBook Pro (16 inches, Apple M1 Pro chip, equipped with 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD)-Space Gray £2,399.00 Buy now

However, none of these design adjustments can compare with the amazing impact of the new Liquid Retina XDR display of the MacBook Pro 16in. Just like the display on the 2021 iPad Pro 12.9in, it uses a mini-LED panel and is equipped with Apple's ProMotion technology. The screen refresh rate can be adjusted from 10Hz to 120Hz according to your needs. Re-watch at any specific moment Or do.

The resolution is Retina-level 3,456 x 2,234-so close to 4K-Apple says it can provide up to 1,000 nits of continuous full-screen brightness, with peak brightness of up to 1,600 nits and a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. Compared with the previous MacBook Pro, there are fewer black borders at the bottom and top of the screen, although picky people will point out that Apple unnecessarily introduced a notch to accommodate the FaceTime HD webcam.

Fortunately, this gap is much smaller than I originally expected. In most cases, it disappears in the menu bar at the top of the display fairly neatly, and you will only really notice it when there are too many menu items in an application (such as DaVinci Resolve) that extend to the right. Frankly speaking, the display effect is very good and worth bearing, even if you find it more annoying than me.

The display itself is an amazing. In my iPad Pro 12.9-inch (2021) review, I said that I think mini-LED technology is a better choice than OLED, suitable for mobile devices with larger screens (such as laptops), and this MacBook Pro The display confirmed this to me. Although mini-LED screens can never fully match the perfect contrast of OLEDs-there will always be a little flooding in areas of strong contrast-here are some-they are more practical in many ways.

On the one hand, they tend to be brighter than laptop OLED screens-of course I have seen so far-making them more readable in bright outdoor conditions. They also do not have the aging risk that OLED displays have, which makes mini-LEDs a prime candidate for use on screens with many persistent items (such as menu bars, icons, etc.).

The display on the MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021, M1 Pro) demonstrates these advantages well. In the default mode, with TrueTone and automatic brightness disabled, I measured the peak brightness of 1,498cd/m2 (candela per square meter-equivalent to nits) (on a white window at 10% of the display area). The out-of-the-box MacBook Pro 16-inch display provides color accuracy within a DCI P3 color space of 2.04 (lower is better) and 98.7% of color gamut coverage.

However, perhaps more importantly, in addition to the default XDR display mode, Apple also includes many pre-calibrated modes for different creative scenes.

This includes "HDR video", which sets the display so that professionals working with HDR10 video can preview the material correctly. In this mode, the upper limit of brightness is 1,000cd/m2, the color space is set to P3, and the gamma is set to ST.2084.

There is also a non-HDR "HDTV Video" mode, which uses Rec.709 color space and BT.1886 gamma, NTSC and PAL-SECAM editing presets, professional photo editing mode and "Internet and Network". The latter was calibrated to MacBooks in the days before Apple switched to wide-color gamut displays. Its target was the sRGB color space, and the upper limit of brightness was about 80cd/m2.

We tested HDR video and Internet and Web presets and found that both are excellent in terms of color accuracy. In these tests, in HDR Video mode, the average DeltaE color error score I measured was 0.98, and the P3 color gamut coverage rate was 98.8%, while in the Internet and Web, the average DeltaE color error score I measured was 0.5 , SRGB color gamut volume is 98.1%.

In short, this is a very, very good display. It is very bright, the colors are very accurate, and more importantly, it is a display that even demanding creative professionals can use without further calibration. In addition, during your downtime, it is a great screen to enjoy Dolby Vision movies and TV shows on Apple TV.

Read next: Our guide to the best laptops

The performance level of the MacBook is similar, and it can meet almost any demanding professional creative tasks you may require.

Our review model is equipped with a ten-core Apple M1 Pro processor, which integrates a 16-core GPU with a memory bandwidth of 200GB/sec. The M1 Max in this range has the same ten CPU cores (divided into eight performance cores and two efficiency cores), but the GPU core and 400GB/sec memory bandwidth have doubled.

I don't have an M1 Max on hand for testing, but other comments indicate that the GPU processing performance has doubled, as you might expect. In addition to the original numbers, M1 Max has other advantages, including better video encoding/decoding capabilities provided by an enhanced "media engine", and the ability to connect up to three external 6K displays and a fourth 4K M1 Pro only supports the screens of two 6K monitors.

However, the M1 Pro in our review model helped our MacBook Pro 16-inch sample achieve some really impressive benchmark scores. In Expert Reviews' internal media-focused benchmark test, it returned the second fastest score we have seen on any laptop, with a total score of 345; the only laptop that scored higher than this is the powerful Alienware x15 R1 (32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080). Everything else is left behind.

This makes it much faster than Intel-based predecessors, which I tested in 2019 with Core i9-9980HK, 32GB RAM and AMD Radeon Pro 5500M. Its overall load is also faster than M1-based MacBook Pro 13in and M1 Mac mini.

However, the most impressive aspect of MacBook Pro 16in performance may not be the raw power of its CPU or GPU, but its efficiency. Normally, you would think that a large, sturdy machine like this is a bad choice to carry around and work on a mobile laptop, but not a little bit. The battery life is great, lasting an impressive 16 hours and 20 minutes in our video playback test. 

Of all the laptops we reviewed in internal benchmarks with a score of 250 or higher, this year's MacBook Pro is by far the most durable machine. What is impressive is that its battery life is nearly two hours longer than the weaker M1 MacBook Air and ten hours longer than the aforementioned Alienware x15.

If this is not enough to make people who need a lot of computing power in their lives consider buying the new MacBook Pro 16-inch, then please check the disk speed test results below. The average sequential read and write speeds returned by the 1TB SSD installed in our evaluation sample are surprisingly fast, 5,850MB/sec and 5,288MB/sec, respectively. Among its close competitors, only Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 is close.

All in all, the performance, display and battery life of the MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021, M1 Pro) make it a very special laptop. In fact, no other machine on the market can match its full range of capabilities.

Of course, there are some Windows laptops with more powerful features, and many are better game consoles. There are many much cheaper laptops that can also provide perfectly usable levels of power and performance.

However, no one can provide the same level of power and performance and professional display quality as the MacBook Pro 16-inch-and no battery life is close.

In short, if you have always wanted a workhorse laptop that won't shorten your working hours when you work on the go, then the MacBook Pro 16in is your laptop. It may be expensive, but it is just extraordinary.

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