Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Here’s the good thing: I walked away from Apple’s campus yesterday with a new 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Here’s the less good thing: it’s not the one with the Touch Bar, the version that Apple actually spent most of its time talking about yesterday. It’s the $1,499 version, the one with the same design, keyboard, trackpad, and screen as the Touch Bar version but with fewer Thunderbolt ports and, again, no Touch Bar. So the version of this laptop I’ve spent the most time with is, for better or worse, the version that most people won’t be as interested in.

But there’s still a lot of tech to cover here, and I’ve got a lot more information from Apple and other sources about the technology driving the Pros. Our full review of this computer will be published next week, and our review of the Touch Bar-equipped laptops will be out at some point after that, but for now here’s all the information we know along with more impressions about the hardware.

Two models, lots of differences

The two 13-inch Pros share plenty of the same underlying tech, but a lot more than just the Touch Bar separates the two 13-inch MacBook Pros. The highlights:

The low-end Pro uses a 15W Core i5-6360U CPU with an Intel Iris 540 GPU; the high-end model uses a 28W Core i5-6267U CPU with an Intel Iris 550 GPU. The difference, aside from small boosts to CPU and GPU clock speeds, is that the 28W model can run faster for longer and throttle less frequently, and the 15W model can consume less power.

The low-end Pro uses a single “Alpine Ridge” Thunderbolt 3 controller for Intel while the high-end Pro uses two Thunderbolt controllers. Intel’s Thunderbolt controllers support a maximum of two Thunderbolt 3 ports each, and while many PC OEMs are shipping Thunderbolt 3, none is providing more than one or two ports.

The low-end Pro uses 1866MHz LPDDR3 RAM while the high-end Pro uses 2133MHz LPDDR3. I had assumed during yesterday’s liveblog that the 2133MHz speed implied DDR4, since Skylake CPUs don’t officially support DDR3 speeds above 1866MHz, but that was incorrect. Apple has said it’s using LPDDR3 to save power, but it’s also the reason the systems max out at 16GB.

The low-end Pro actually has a larger battery than the high-end one: 54.5Whr compared to 49.2Whr. Apple says both laptops have 10 hours of battery life, but the lower-power processor, the larger battery, and the lack of a little second screen above the keyboard should all mean that the low-end model actually lasts a bit longer than the Touch Bar model.

The low-end model includes two integrated mics, while the high-end model includes three.

And just for reference, here are the things that are the same across both systems along with some other fun facts.

Both devices use NVMExpress SSDs that use up to four lanes of PCI Express 3.0 bandwidth, compared to four lanes of PCI Express 2.0 in last year’s Pros. This doubles the amount of available storage bandwidth and keeps Apple on the cutting edge of SSDs.

Both screens are 2560×1600 and 227 PPI, the same resolution and density as the old design, though the screens are brighter and support the DCI-P3 color gamut, which is increasingly becoming the norm for Apple’s devices. However, the apparent resolution you get when you take the computers out of the box has changed, which we’ll talk about more in a minute.

Both 13-inch systems can either drive one 5K screen over a single cable or two 4K screens over two cables. Only the 15-inch Pro and its more capable GPU can drive multiple 5K displays (in all three cases, this is in addition to the laptop’s built-in screen). Apple is achieving external 5K display support without DisplayPort 1.3 by combining two DisplayPort 1.2 connections together; the company is already doing something similar with the 5K iMac’s internal display.

All MacBook Pros now use "onboard SSDs" a la the MacBook, which means that even the imperfect aftermarket SSD upgrades possible on past Airs and Retina MacBook Pros won't be possible here. Update : OWC has taken apart one of the $1,499 MacBook Pros and discovered that there is still a proprietary-but-removable SSD module inside. You'll have to wait for someone to create some compatible drives, but it looks like upgrades will remain theoretically possible.

: OWC has taken apart one of the $1,499 MacBook Pros and discovered that there is still a proprietary-but-removable SSD module inside. You'll have to wait for someone to create some compatible drives, but it looks like upgrades will remain theoretically possible. For whatever reason, the “silent clicking” option available on Apple’s previous Force Touch trackpads isn’t available here.

More about the Touch Bar and the T1, Apple’s MacBook SoC

It looks like ARM came to the Mac after all.

Phil Schiller quickly breezed by the Apple T1 during the presentation yesterday, but the company later confirmed to us that it was its first custom-designed SoC built for the Mac. And developers who have dug into the software and documentation (particularly the tireless Steve Troughton-Smith, whose recent Twitter sabbatical made my feed much more boring) have confirmed that it has an ARMv7 CPU core and is actually running an offshoot of watchOS, all of which helps it interact with the rest of the Mac.

At any rate, the T1 is an interesting chip that does much more than support Touch ID and Apple Pay. Apple tells us that it has a built-in image signal processor (ISP) related to the ones Apple uses in iPhone and iPad SoCs, something which Troughton-Smith suggests could protect the camera from malware hijacking. And its Secure Enclave handles the encryption and storage of fingerprint data and protects it from the rest of the operating system and its apps, much as it does in iOS.

When you interact with the Touch Bar, Apple tells us that the majority of the processing is being done by the Intel CPU, although the T1 also appears to do some processing in specific situations for security’s sake, as when Apple Pay is used. But to keep the Touch Bar from counting toward the number of external monitors you can use (Intel’s GPUs support a total of three separate displays, AMD’s support six), the T1 is used to drive the Touch Bar’s screen. From what Apple told me, it sounds like the image you’re seeing is actually being drawn by the main system GPU but is being output to the display by T1, not unlike the way other hybrid graphics implementations work.

The T1 and the way it interacts with the rest of macOS is either a weird kludge or a great example of Apple’s synergy—Apple has essentially embedded a miniature iOS device with custom silicon in these Macs so it wouldn’t have to rebuild Touch ID and Apple Pay from scratch. Appropriately enough, the codename for the OS that the Touch Bar runs appears to be “bridge.”

Moving on to the screen itself, the Touch Bar’s display panel is 2170 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall, or 1085 by 30 “points” if we're talking about Retina scaling. Apple tells us that it designed the display specifically to be viewed at a 45-degree angle rather than head-on, and the finish on the touchscreen has been changed to feel more like the rest of the keyboard’s keys rather than an iPhone or iPad touchscreen. The finish is much flatter and less glossy than it is on iDevices, and your fingers don’t stick to it or leave as many fingerprints when you interact with it.

The Touch Bar is normally split up into three sections. The sections on the left and right are persistent and dedicated to Apple’s buttons. The 128-pixel-wide area on the far left is called the “system button,” and it’s used for universal controls like “done” or “cancel.” It also replaces the escape key when you’re not using it for anything else. The 608-pixel-wide area on the far right is called the “control strip,” and it’s where system controls for things like volume and brightness and the Siri button are located. These buttons are user-customizable, so you can tweak them depending on the settings you adjust the most often.

And finally, the 1370-pixel-wide middle area is called the “app region.” You don’t need to fit all of your app’s controls into this space—you can scroll left and right and dive into nested menus on the Touch Bar just as you can in iOS—but this is the minimum amount of information that will be visible when users launch or switch into your app.

I admittedly don’t use function keys for anything other than brightness adjustments or media playback, and I’m the kind of user that the Touch Bar is really aimed at. Many of Apple’s ideas are really clever and well-implemented—for instance, if you hit the Share button within an app, the standard macOS share sheet actually pops up on the Touch Bar rather than onscreen, allowing you to keep your focus in one place.

If you absolutely hate the idea of the Touch Bar but also don’t want to buy the version of the MacBook Pro with the standard function keys, Apple tells us that you’ll be able to make the Touch Bar show the function keys by default in the keyboard settings (if you only want to use them occasionally, holding down the fn key on the keyboard will cause them to pop up temporarily).

I like the Touch Bar more the more I play with it, but of course its actual utility outside of showroom demos remains to be proven. The biggest potential pitfall is the complete lack of any sort of physical or haptic feedback, something that may limit its utility for touch typists. You really need to be looking at it to use it most of the time, and its constantly shifting buttons may help prevent you from forming the muscle memory you develop with static keys.

The Touch ID and power button is on the right side of the bar—it’s a separate physical button—and there’s an unused bit of padding to the left side of the bar that seems to exist to make the Touch ID button look symmetrical. As I mentioned yesterday, Touch ID on the Mac can enroll up to a total of five fingerprints, just like iOS. Those five fingerprints can be used to switch between up to three different user accounts. I was initially told yesterday that up to five fingerprints could be enrolled per user, but this is incorrect; Macs with more than three users will also need to use regular old names and passwords just as they currently do.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham