For months, the internet was abuzz with two similar, and somewhat contradictory, Apple rumors. Depending on whom you believed, the famously secretive company was working on either a 12-inch "iPad Pro" or a Retina display MacBook Air. To date, neither of these products has materialized, but there's reason to believe that both rumors were actually pointing toward the new 12-inch MacBook. The laptop, which goes on sale tomorrow, is in many ways a traditional notebook, with an Intel processor, OS X and a unibody aluminum enclosure similar to what you'll find on the MacBook Air and Pro. At the same time, it takes some cues from the iPad, including space gray and gold color options, and a slim, fanless design that makes room for just one miniature USB port. With the lid shut, it looks at once like a tablet with a keyboard attached, as well as the two-pound computer that it actually is.
It's the future of laptops, at least as Apple sees it, but it's also not without compromises: To build a machine this compact, the company had to reimagine everything from the keyboard to the trackpad to the components inside. And yes, the port selection, too. All that in the name of building the thinnest and lightest MacBook ever, not to mention the smallest one with a Retina display. In many ways, it's aimed at the same person the original Air was: a loyal Mac user who wants the most portable laptop that money can buy. But are you that person? And even if you are, is it worth the $1,299 asking price?
Apple MacBook (2015)
PROS
- Attractive design, well-built
- Extremely thin and light
- Fast disk speeds and startup times
- Surprisingly comfortable keyboard
- Gorgeous display
- Includes more storage and memory at this price than many rival machines
CONS
- Less comfortable touchpad than on other laptops
- Only one USB Type-C port; adapters sold separately
- Can get warm on the bottom
SUMMARY
With its two-pound design, stunning screen and surprisingly comfortable keyboard, the new 12-inch MacBook offers a glimpse at the possible future of laptops. For now, though, its high price and lack of ports make it an expensive novelty, mostly meant for Mac diehards who put portability and screen quality above all else.
With a weight difference of around a third of a pound, the main reason to buy the MacBook over the 11-inch Air isn't necessarily size, but screen quality: This machine brings with it a 12-inch Retina display with 2,304 x 1,440 resolution, or about 3 million pixels. As ever, it's a lovely, lovely panel, with rich colors and wide viewing angles, whether it's from the sides, with the machine on your lap, or with the screen dipped forward, as if you were balancing it on an airplane tray. Every time I use a Retina display machine, I wish that every Mac, even the lowly Air, had a screen this nice.
The audio quality is also robust -- surprisingly so. Any time I see a machine this small, I assume until proven otherwise that the audio will more or less be an afterthought and indeed, the thin speaker grille above the keyboard doesn't look like it packs much punch. In fact, though, I found that five or six out of 16 audio bars was plenty in a quiet room. The quality was also balanced enough that I had a good time streaming Spotify for hours on end; I never wished I had a bigger laptop or a set of external speakers.
Display and sound
With a weight difference of around a third of a pound, the main reason to buy the MacBook over the 11-inch Air isn't necessarily size, but screen quality: This machine brings with it a 12-inch Retina display with 2,304 x 1,440 resolution, or about 3 million pixels. As ever, it's a lovely, lovely panel, with rich colors and wide viewing angles, whether it's from the sides, with the machine on your lap, or with the screen dipped forward, as if you were balancing it on an airplane tray. Every time I use a Retina display machine, I wish that every Mac, even the lowly Air, had a screen this nice.
The audio quality is also robust -- surprisingly so. Any time I see a machine this small, I assume until proven otherwise that the audio will more or less be an afterthought and indeed, the thin speaker grille above the keyboard doesn't look like it packs much punch. In fact, though, I found that five or six out of 16 audio bars was plenty in a quiet room. The quality was also balanced enough that I had a good time streaming Spotify for hours on end; I never wished I had a bigger laptop or a set of external speakers.
KeyBoard
At first glance, the keyboard here doesn't seem very promising: It's so flat that the buttons basically sit flush with the keyboard deck. In other words, it's a big departure from the relatively cushy keys we're used to on the MacBook Air and Pro. Then you try it, though, and you realize it's not nearly as uncomfortable as it looks. It's quite nice -- and in some ways it's an improvement over traditional laptop keyboards.
As it turns out, although the buttons are indeed flat, there's actually a lot going on beneath the surface. Despite the fact that the keyboard is 34 percent thinner, the keys feel remarkably springy and well-supported. As Apple describes it, the trick here was using a custom "butterfly" mechanism that keeps the keys stable and level when you press down on them. The alternative would have been the sort of "scissor" mechanism used on many Ultrabook keyboards. Suffice to say, I'm glad Apple didn't go that route: Too many of the ultraportables I've tested have limp, lifeless keys that wobble and flop around in their sockets. Worse, I frequently have to go back and re-type things on those machines -- and that's precisely because the uneven scissor mechanism causes one side of the keycap to hit the bottom before the key press can actually register.
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| Image Credit: Apple |
On the new MacBook, though, the keys feel firmly attached in their sockets, and I rarely, if ever, have to go back and re-type something that didn't stick the first time around. Whereas other Ultrabooks I've used have taught me to type slowly and deliberately, so as not to miss anything, with the new MacBook I'm free to type at a fast clip. My hands feel more relaxed too, because I know I don't have to mash the buttons to ensure a key-register. Much like with the iPhone's onscreen keyboard, which was met with initial skepticism, you just have to trust the MacBook's flat keyboard; it's more effective than it seems at first glance, but you won't fully appreciate that until you try it yourself.
It also helps that the individual keycaps are larger than they would be on other Macs. Specifically, they have a 17 percent larger surface area, making it more likely that you'll hit the button you meant to hit. Even the arrow keys -- usually the first casualty of keyboard redesigns -- are easy to find by feel. Also, they have a deeper curvature than previous MacBook keyboards, allowing Apple to "increase the scoop by 50 percent." (Hokay!) As a result of these larger buttons, the keyboard stretches from one edge of the chassis to another, with barely any space left over on either side. This, it seems, was a necessity: How else was Apple going to squeeze all those big keys onto such a small system?
All told, I still prefer the Air's pillowy keyboard to the one on the new MacBook, but I could easily use either as my daily driver. Both are a clear step up from the flat, gummy keys used on typical Ultrabooks.
Trackpad
Along with the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, the MacBook is the first laptop in Apple's lineup to come with the "Force Touch," a pressure-sensitive trackpad that responds differently depending on how hard you press. For instance, you can bear down on a word in Safari to see a dictionary definition or a Wikipedia preview. A hard press, or a "Force click," on an address in the Mail app will give you a pop-up map. You can also long-press on items in Finder to preview them or, my personal favorite, Force-click the skip buttons in iTunes and QuickTime to fast-forward or rewind at up to 60x the normal speed. In addition, Apple has released an SDK to developers allowing them to incorporate this feature into their apps, though as of this writing, certain popular downloads like Chrome don't have it yet.
I said this in my recent review of the new MacBook Pro, but I'm not convinced most of these pressure-sensitive gestures are actually useful. Even now that I've had several weeks to play with Force Touch, on both the Pro and the MacBook, I still can't always pull off the "Wikipedia preview" thing in Safari on my first try -- sometimes I merely highlight the word; sometimes I succeed in pulling up the preview box. In any case, in the time I spend futzing with that, I could easily just Google whatever it is in a separate browser tab -- in which case I get not simply a preview, but a full site with all the information I'm looking for. With Finder, I can press down to see a preview of a file, and then, if I press even harder, that preview stretches from a small thumbnail to a full-size image. It's a clever feature, but that two-step press feels inefficient; it was far easier to use the space bar to open and close file previews. If anything, I find the speedy fast-forwarding to be the most practical use case, and even then, I didn't use it often.
Along with the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, the MacBook is the first laptop in Apple's lineup to come with the "Force Touch," a pressure-sensitive trackpad that responds differently depending on how hard you press. For instance, you can bear down on a word in Safari to see a dictionary definition or a Wikipedia preview. A hard press, or a "Force click," on an address in the Mail app will give you a pop-up map. You can also long-press on items in Finder to preview them or, my personal favorite, Force-click the skip buttons in iTunes and QuickTime to fast-forward or rewind at up to 60x the normal speed. In addition, Apple has released an SDK to developers allowing them to incorporate this feature into their apps, though as of this writing, certain popular downloads like Chrome don't have it yet.
I said this in my recent review of the new MacBook Pro, but I'm not convinced most of these pressure-sensitive gestures are actually useful. Even now that I've had several weeks to play with Force Touch, on both the Pro and the MacBook, I still can't always pull off the "Wikipedia preview" thing in Safari on my first try -- sometimes I merely highlight the word; sometimes I succeed in pulling up the preview box. In any case, in the time I spend futzing with that, I could easily just Google whatever it is in a separate browser tab -- in which case I get not simply a preview, but a full site with all the information I'm looking for. With Finder, I can press down to see a preview of a file, and then, if I press even harder, that preview stretches from a small thumbnail to a full-size image. It's a clever feature, but that two-step press feels inefficient; it was far easier to use the space bar to open and close file previews. If anything, I find the speedy fast-forwarding to be the most practical use case, and even then, I didn't use it often.
Along with the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, the MacBook is the first laptop in Apple's lineup to come with the "Force Touch," a pressure-sensitive trackpad that responds differently depending on how hard you press. For instance, you can bear down on a word in Safari to see a dictionary definition or a Wikipedia preview. A hard press, or a "Force click," on an address in the Mail app will give you a pop-up map. You can also long-press on items in Finder to preview them or, my personal favorite, Force-click the skip buttons in iTunes and QuickTime to fast-forward or rewind at up to 60x the normal speed. In addition, Apple has released an SDK to developers allowing them to incorporate this feature into their apps, though as of this writing, certain popular downloads like Chrome don't have it yet.
I said this in my recent review of the new MacBook Pro, but I'm not convinced most of these pressure-sensitive gestures are actually useful. Even now that I've had several weeks to play with Force Touch, on both the Pro and the MacBook, I still can't always pull off the "Wikipedia preview" thing in Safari on my first try -- sometimes I merely highlight the word; sometimes I succeed in pulling up the preview box. In any case, in the time I spend futzing with that, I could easily just Google whatever it is in a separate browser tab -- in which case I get not simply a preview, but a full site with all the information I'm looking for. With Finder, I can press down to see a preview of a file, and then, if I press even harder, that preview stretches from a small thumbnail to a full-size image. It's a clever feature, but that two-step press feels inefficient; it was far easier to use the space bar to open and close file previews. If anything, I find the speedy fast-forwarding to be the most practical use case, and even then, I didn't use it often.
Gimmick or not, there's another benefit to the Force Touch touchpad: It's thinner than the one used on the MacBook Air or older Pro models. In fact, I'm not even sure the old "diving board" trackpad would even fit on a machine this skinny. So how did Apple pull that off? Easy: Make it so that you can't actually click on the touchpad anymore. That's right, when the machine is turned off, the Force Touch pad is actually just a stiff sheet of glass that barely moves when you press down on it. Once you turn the machine on, though, Apple fools you into thinking you're actually clicking something. The secret: a "taptic engine" that delivers vibrating haptic feedback to simulate a button press.
It's an impressive trick; I often forgot I wasn't really clicking anything. Still, it doesn't feel like a "normal" button press, if by "normal" we mean the way a regular MacBook Air or Pro trackpad feels. The button here, as it were, feels much shallower than on a traditional diving-board touchpad, where you can only bear down on the bottom of the trackpad. Here, you can press anywhere on the pad, but it never feels like your finger is going down very far. The good news is, you get used to it. Some of this comes with time, although I also found it helped to enable tap-to-click. Ultimately, I find it easier to forgive the new trackpad here than I did with the 13-inch Pro. For all its shortcomings, the Force Touch allows the new MacBook to be thinner than it might have been otherwise. The MBP swaps in a new, less comfortable touchpad, but isn't any thinner or lighter for it.
Performance
| OS X BENCHMARKS | GEEKBENCH | XBENCH | BATTERY LIFE |
|---|---|---|---|
| New MacBook (1.1GHz Intel Core M, Intel HD Graphics 5300) | 3,891 (32-bit) / 4,425 (64-bit) | 388 | 7:47 |
| 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (early 2015, 2.7GHz Core i5, Intel Iris 6100) | 6,293 (32-bit) / 7,062 (64-bit) | 487 | 11:23 |
| 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (late 2013, 2.4GHz Core i5, Intel Iris graphics) | 6,288 (32-bit) | 428 | 11:18 |
| 13-inch MacBook Air (mid 2013, 1.3GHz Core i5, Intel HD Graphics 5000) | 6,021 (32-bit) | 304 | 12:51 |
In order to achieve such a compact design, Apple went with Intel's new power-sipping Core M chips, whose 14nm design has made possible other thin and light laptops, like the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro. In addition, Apple also had to redesign the logic board, which is now 67 percent smaller than on the 11-inch Air. The result, as we've already seen, is an insanely lightweight laptop with zero fan noise, though the trade-off is that Apple couldn't use the same heavier-duty Core i5 and i7 processors that it does on the MacBook Air and Pro.
This means the new MacBook will have slightly slower performance, and indeed, that's borne out in benchmark tests. Still, depending on how you plan to use the computer, you might not even notice. According to my stopwatch, the laptop takes just seven seconds to cold-boot into the login screen, making it about twice as fast to start up as the new 13-inch Retina display MacBook Pro. The solid-state drive, meanwhile, which is based on the faster PCI Express standard, delivered average read speeds of 738.2 MB/s in the Blackmagic test, along with average writes of 451.7 MB/s. Mind you, that was under the heaviest load that test allows for: five gigabytes. Even then, the MacBook's transfer speeds are faster than most of its rivals -- and that includes other machines with PCIe SSDs. In addition, the MacBook comes with 8GB of RAM, allowing for swift multitasking and app load times.
So if startup and transfer speeds aren't a problem, where's the performance hit? As far as I can tell, graphics performance suffers the most. That's not surprising considering Intel's beefier fifth-gen "Core" chips have two-thirds of their die area dedicated to graphics, and deliver the biggest performance gains in tasks related to graphics processing. With Intel HD 5300 graphics (as opposed to HD 6000 on the latest MacBook Air), the new MacBook only reached an average of 21 frames per second in the six-year-old Batman: Arkham Asylum, and that was with medium detail, anti-aliasing disabled and the resolution fixed at the default 1,440 x 900 (as opposed to the max option of 2,560 x 1,600). In other words, it struggled even with moderate settings in an aging game. As I discovered, too, playing games causes the bottom side of the laptop to get hot, especially back toward the hinge.
That's probably to be expected during gameplay, but I also noticed overheating even in more mundane use. Which is surprising, since the processor only draws five watts of power; it's not supposed to get hot. At one point during my testing, I was typing this review in a Chrome browser tab while streaming music through the Spotify desktop app. I only had three browser tabs and three applications open, and yet the heat coming off the bottom side was so intense that at one point I could feel it through my pant legs. To Apple's credit, when the machine does heat up, it tends to subside within a few minutes. Again, though, as I discovered while using Chrome and streaming music, it's not always easy to predict in the first place what's going to trigger these temperature spikes.
Battery life
BATTERY LIFE
| |
|---|---|
| New MacBook | 7:47 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2013) | 12:51 |
| HP Spectre x360 | 11:34 |
| Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display (13-inch, 2015) | 11:23 |
| Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display (13-inch, late 2013) | 11:18 |
| Chromebook Pixel (2015) | 10:01 |
| Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus | 8:44 |
| Dell XPS 13 (2015) | 7:36 |
| Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro | 7:36 |
| Acer Aspire S7-392 | 7:33 |
| Microsoft Surface Pro 3 | 7:08 |
Apple rates the MacBook for up to nine hours of web surfing or 10 hours of iTunes video playback -- in other words, the same claims it makes for the 11-inch Air. That's an ambitious promise on Apple's part, considering the 11-inch Air has a much lower-res screen. The more pixels to light up, the shorter the runtime, right? Usually, but in this case, Apple took extra measures to help compensate for the MacBook's pixel-dense Retina display. For starters, there's that low-power Core M processor; the one that sips just five watts of power. In addition, Apple created a new kind of "terraced" battery that does a better job filling out the laptop's interior, allowing for 35 percent more capacity than a typical rectangular battery, according to Apple. In addition, the company used individual lights underneath each keycap, as opposed to the old kind of backlighting technology that allowed light to bleed out from between the buttons. Finally, Apple says the screen's LED backlight is 30 percent more energy efficient than the Retina display on any other MacBook, thanks to redesigned pixels that allow more light to pass through.
I never did quite make it to the "10 hours of video" mark. The closest I got was nine hours and five minutes, which required lowering the brightness to four of 16 bars. What's interesting, though, is that Apple actually tests the battery with the brightness set at 12 out of 16 bars, or 75 percent, according to a footnote on its website. With the brightness set to 65 percent (similar to how I test Windows PCs), I got seven hours and 47 minutes of continuous iTunes video playback. While the battery life isn't as long as Apple said it would be, it's at least in line with what we've seen from some bigger, heavier 13-inch systems. When you think of it that way, nearly eight hours of video playback on an 12-inch system ain't bad.
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