It seems like Apple can’t launch a laptop these days without walking face-first into at least one controversy. With the new MacBook Pros, it walked into two. One: was this keyboard really designed to be quieter (as Apple claims publicly) or to address the problem of dust and grit breaking them? Two: a software bug caused these laptops to throttle their speed down in intense thermal conditions, eliciting a software update and an apology from Apple.

The heat (pun intended) around those controversies is at a higher temperature than usual because there has been more angst in the Mac universe than normal in the past few years. The switch over to these new designs two years ago came with what feels like an equal number of benefits and compromises. On one hand, they’re thinner, lighter, and more powerful. On the other, you have a polarizing (or worse) keyboard design, dongles, and a sort of vague distrust that Apple really cares about the Mac at all in the age of the iPhone.

That’s all too much for one simple spec-bumped laptop to handle alone, so it’s no surprise that this MacBook Pro hasn’t arrived as the savior for professionals looking for the ur-machine. Nevertheless, it’s a solid computer that’s fast and powerful. So this review of the top-tier 15-inch MacBook Pro isn’t about blame or benchmarks.

It’s about trust.

Our review of Apple MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018) Verge Score 8 out of 10 Good Stuff Powerful processors

Thin and light design

True Tone display Bad Stuff Polarizing keyboard design

No SD card slot

Difficult repairability Buy for $2,399.00 from Apple Buy for $2,499.00 from Amazon

The first controversy over MacBook Pros deals with their “butterfly switch” keyboards. They broke, to put it bluntly (though at what rate, it’s impossible to know for sure). Casey Johnston at The Outline has led the charge to hold Apple to account for the fact that it takes just a little grit to make a single key stop working and that fixing said problem involves a massively expensive repair.

The keyboard appears to be redesigned for reliability, even though Apple won’t say so

Apple’s response was to announce a repair program that covers every butterfly switch keyboard MacBook for four years. That was the right thing to do. Its other response was apparently to redesign this MacBook Pro’s keyboard to mitigate the problem and then refuse to admit that’s why it was redesigned. Apple only claims that this “third-generation” butterfly keyboard is quieter, not that it’s more reliable.

Here’s what Apple did: it put a thin layer of silicone in between the keys and the butterfly switches. As iFixit found (and Apple’s presumably related patent claims), that layer serves to protect the switches from crumbs and maybe even pushes those crumbs out of the assembly. I’m hopeful that these keyboards will be less prone to failure, and I don’t think it’s a reason to avoid buying this laptop.

It does make the experience of typing a little nicer. Keyboard travel is about the same, but there’s a better sense of resistance when you type. It’s also almost imperceptibly quieter; it’s less clacky, basically. I really do enjoy typing on this keyboard, though I’m sympathetic to people who prefer more key travel.

This computer has all the benefits and trade-offs of previous MacBook Pros. The screen is beautiful, but it doesn’t go as edge-to-edge as you can get with a lot of Windows laptops these days. There are four Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C ports (even on the smaller 13-inch version), which means you can’t escape dongles, and you can’t have a power cord that magnetically attaches. (Don’t trip on the power cable.) It’s still incredibly well-built and feels like it’s carved from a single piece of aluminum.

It’s also thinner than most “pro” Windows laptops with powerful processors. Thinness has become a point of contention because it makes the laptop more complicated to cool. But it’s undeniable that, as a physical object, this thing is really nice to carry around.

There are a bunch of other improvements to the MacBook Pro. Chief among them is a new “T2” chip, which controls a bunch of the internal mechanics of this computer. It allows Apple to add new iOS-esque features like a True Tone display, which adjusts the color temperature of the screen and the Touch Bar to match the ambient light in a room. In our testing, it did just that, though it was awfully hard to tell the difference on the Touch Bar.

We turned True Tone off pretty quickly because the majority of the “pro” work that happens at The Verge is video and photo editing, and color accuracy is more important than whether the screen is easy on the eyes.

The T2 chips also allow you to say “Hey Siri” out loud and the computer can hear it. That works, too, but I still don’t find Siri to be super useful on a Mac, especially since it’s not integrated into the core Spotlight computer search. This is an area where Windows, with its Cortana system, has a somewhat more elegant solution than macOS. Lastly, the T2 adds a bunch of security. For example, it handles the encryption for files so it won’t slow down the ridiculously fast SSD inside this computer.

There’s also the Touch Bar, which does not inspire much affinity. There are still moments when I feel like it’s neat. But most of the time, I feel like I’d be just as happy with plain old function keys and more money in my bank account. It often feels like a solution in search of a problem. Using your fingerprint with Touch ID to log in is great, but truthfully, it’s not as great as logging in with your face using Windows Hello.

Apple put a larger battery inside these machines, but it isn’t claiming longer battery life. It’s simply there to offset the higher power draw from the beefier processors and faster RAM. In our testing, it was about on par with previous generations, which is to say not quite a full day. Verge video director Vjeran Pavic, who did all of our stress testing, says that it also doesn’t improve battery life under heavy load all that much either. If you’re doing serious video work, you should expect about the same as what you had before. (For him, it was about three hours.)

So let’s talk about thermal throttling, the second controversy du jour.

It’s not quite fair to say that all we got is a spec bump with these new MacBook Pros, but the new, 8th Gen Intel processors are definitely the biggest internal change. The unit we received for review was a top-of-the-line 15-inch machine with a six-core i9, 32GB of RAM, and a 4TB SSD. As specced, it’s $6,700, but nearly half of that price is the cost of the internal storage. You can also get this computer with a six-core i7 chip, or a 13-inch size with 8th Gen quad-core i5 or i7 processors. (The 13-inch model without a Touch Bar has not been updated.)

Those processors, specifically the six-core i9s, have been at the center of the second controversy. After a video from Dave Lee showed that his Core i9 MacBook Pro seemed to exhibit really bad thermal throttling — so much so that it performed worse than a 2017 Core i7 MacBook Pro — the tech world basically went into a full-blown, gate-level crisis. Here we go again.

To its credit, Apple got in touch with Lee and worked to replicate his results. Finally doing so meant that it uncovered a bug, a so-called “missing digital key” in the firmware, that causes the thermal throttling. On July 24th, Apple released a software update to fix that bug. Since then, we’ve been re-running our own tests.

Apple’s software update seems to have mostly resolved thermal throttling issues

Here’s the thing about benchmarking: like any test, variables in your initial setup can wildly change the results. Before the update was released, some testers, like Geekbench founder John Poole, have found that the Core i9 can, in fact, be slower than a comparable i7. Others, like Jonathan Morrison, ran test after test after test only to find that the i9 outperformed the i7 every time.

Here’s another thing about benchmarking: like any scientific test, the worst result isn’t a pass or a fail. The worst result is that it’s inconclusive. Our results aren’t that bad, but there are some cases where we’ve run into confounding results, even after the software update.

Here’s just one example: we took a 5.5-minute video of 4K drone footage and exported it to 4K h.264 with a 30Mbps bitrate, resulting in a 1.2GB file. (The test wasn’t as intense as what we’ve seen others do, so don’t take this as any more than one data point among what is sure to be very many others.) We ran it on a 2016 MacBook Pro and on this MacBook Pro both before and after Apple’s software update.

In Adobe Premiere Pro, we saw virtually no difference after the software patch on our particular test. It didn’t export any faster. And compared to that two-year-old laptop, that export was only about 8 percent faster. On the other hand, Apple’s Final Cut Pro X saw significant improvement, both across different laptops and across software versions. The software update took what was already an impressive improvement and made it even more impressive: 64 percent faster than the 2016 model.

MacBook Pro export tests (in minutes) Software used 2016 MacBook Pro 2018 MacBook Pro 2018 MacBook Pro Software used 2016 MacBook Pro 2018 MacBook Pro 2018 MacBook Pro Core i7, 16GB RAM Core i9, 32GB RAM, (before update) Core i9, 32GB RAM (after update) Premiere Pro CC 12:31 11:35 11:35 Final Cut X 6:46 4:35 2:26

Those are, as I said, confounding results. Premiere Pro, which should have been a victim of thermal throttling, didn’t change. Final Cut X, which Apple presumably had already optimized for this system, saw a huge improvement. It’s odd, but that’s how these things often go. Benchmarking really can vary depending on your source footage and settings. Dave Lee, whose testing kicked this whole thermal drama off, has reported much faster results in his post-update test.

It’s very easy to get lost in the trees and miss the forest. Here’s the forest: after the software update, we found that the MacBook Pro ran quieter, cooler, and faster overall. Some of our Premiere Pro exports saw improvements as high as 40 percent faster than our 2016 laptop. When you stop staring at benchmark times and processor temperatures and take in the whole experience of this computer, you’ll find it feels fast and performant.

Do I trust these laptops? Apple certainly hasn’t made it easy. Not after the squirrely statements about why the keyboard design changed, and not after the thermal throttling that was somehow missed by Apple’s own testing labs before they were released.

But yes, after seeing the results of Apple’s software update, I do trust this MacBook Pro. However, I’m also in the fortunate position of not only being able to trust but verify. If you truly have a job that will push your computer’s thermals to their upper limit, I suggest you find a way to test your particular workflow before investing in one of these computers for the long term. And if you don’t expect to push the limits of this system, you’ll be fine (though maybe you should consider saving some money and waiting for Apple to release new midrange laptops).

The truth is that this is mostly an iterative update with faster processors and a few new bells and whistles. It’s still a design that many Mac users have been conflicted about for almost two years. As sturdy as the unibody frame of this laptop is, there’s no way it can carry the weight of resolving all that angst.

So you have to separate what you wish Apple would do from what it has done. And after the software update, what Apple has done is deliver a very good laptop, one I think you can trust. But increasingly, it’s getting harder to love.