Reviews for Apple’s new MacBook Pro have yet to officially go live, despite a couple false starts earlier this week. Those should arrive any day now ahead of a retail release for the machine, but one pro video editor today published his early hands-on review after using the new 15-inch model in a real-world setting. The review also aims to address some of the early criticisms of the new MacBook Pro from pros, showing how the machine held up in a real-world, professional environment.

The author Thomas Grove Carter works at Trim Editing, a studio in London where he edits “high end commercials, music videos and films” using Final Cut Pro.

The review specifically focuses on the experience using the machine in a professional video editor’s daily workflow. Carter’s conclusion is that the new 15-inch model he was using (he doesn’t detail specs), is more than capable of handling daily editing in FCP X with 5K ProRes footage. He also notes that machine “tears strips off ‘superior spec’d’ Windows counterparts in the real world.”

First off, It’s really fast. I’ve been using the MacBook Pro with the new version of FCP X and cutting 5k ProRes material all week, it’s buttery smooth. No matter what you think the specs say, the fact is the software and hardware are so well integrated it tears strips off “superior spec’d” Windows counterparts in the real world. This has always been true of Macs. If you’re running software with old code which doesn’t utilise the hardware well, you’re not going to get great performance (as pointed out here)

When it comes to addressing the issue of dongles that might be necessary for pros now that the new MacBook Pro has all USB-C ports, Carter explains that it isn’t an issue for his setup: “I already use USB-C Samsung T3 SSD’s as my external drives. These things are super fast and have the footprint of a credit card. The only change here is that I don’t need a USB-A to C cable to use them now, they’ll plug straight in. I’ll probably have a Thunderbolt 3 dock at my desk for expandability but that will ultimately just replace the Thunderbolt/mini-display converters I already need to support legacy displays.”

The rest of the review mostly focuses on the Touch Bar, which Carter notes he quickly warmed up to and started using to replace keyboard shortcuts after initially being skeptical. Here is a video of Carter using the Touch Bar:

You can read the full review at Huffington Post.

Apple officially started preparing some MacBook Pro with Touch Bar preorders for shipment earlier today. The first orders are expected to arrive early next week to customers.

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