At Apple’s Spring Forward event on March 9, the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro lineup was refreshed along with the announcement of the new 12-inch MacBook. Today, we’re taking a closer look at one of the refreshed MacBook Pro model to see what has changed…
Along with some minor bumps in specifications, Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro now features a new Force Touch trackpad that adds functionality to certain apps within OS X. You’re correct in assuming that the Force Touch trackpad is the highlight of the refresh here, but the updated internals do make for some decent performance improvements as well.
In the video below, we take a look at the refreshed 13-inch MacBook Pro. This isn’t the base model though. As far as internal specifications go, this is one of the best 13-inch MacBooks your money can buy (coming in at $2,199). Inside it features a 3.1GHz dual-core Intel i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of PCI-e based flash storage, Intel Iris 6100 graphics, and the new Force Touch trackpad.
Check out our unboxing, overview, and benchmarks video below:
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra7uTDmXsZs]
If you’d like to find out more about Apple’s new Force Touch trackpad and Force Click features, we’ve put together a new video to highlight the top 15 hidden Force Click features. This will walk you through all of the need-to-know features that come along with this new trackpad on Apple’s 2015 MacBook and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Also, you can find the Geekbench score from our video here and the Novabench score here.
Other than the slight bump in performance and the new trackpad, there’s not much else to see here. Keep in mind, that these benchmarks are the best you’ll get Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. That being said, this is still a speedy little MacBook. I was able to edit the entire video above in UHD resolution with no issues, but it took a massive performance hit during the video export. Though that was expected due to the lack of dedicated graphics and quad-core processing power within the 13-inch models.
Overall, if you’re looking for power and portability, the top spec 13-inch MacBook Pro is about as good as it gets. Unfortunately, the new 12-inch MacBook won’t be able to handle any power/performance hungry tasks. If you really want a no-compromise experience, it may be best to look towards the top end 15-inch model or a desktop computer. Those looking for everyday use from a MacBook, will benefit from any of the 13-inch models Apple has to offer.
