Apple MacBook Pro 13in with Touch Bar (2018) review
Still, these changes are all good stuff. Sure, it’d be great to see Face ID on the MacBook Pro, but that won’t happen until a major overhaul. In the meantime, we get plenty of extra power, an improved display, a quieter keyboard, and a battery that gets the machine through an entire day of normal use – assuming ‘normal’ to you isn’t running games and hugely demanding software non-stop. What you won’t enjoy is the impact on your wallet. The base level price of £1749 isn’t too bad, but that only gets you an i5, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage – and you must be mindful the MacBook Pro is a sealed unit. What you choose at the point of purchase are the specs for the Mac’s entire life – bar the potential to use external GPUs. The set-up Apple loaned Stuff would set you back an eye-watering £3599. The SSD accounts for much of that, the 2TB option adding a whopping £1400. But even 512GB costs an extra 200 quid (1TB is £600), and bumping up the RAM to 16GB costs another £180, for some nudging the MacBook Pro from lust territory to ‘What are the alternatives?’ Of course, if you swear by macOS, there aren’t any, bar something old (MacBook Air) or comparatively underpowered (MacBook). So if you do want a shiny MacBook Pro, it’s just the price you have to pay. Fortunately, for the outlay you do get a pretty great pro-grade notebook.
More powerful innards; Keyboard is quieter; True Tone display is great; Really nippy SSD;
Expensive; Touch Bar lacks support; Non-Touch Bar model not (yet?) updated;