A laptop that can't fly is going to have a fairly limited audience, so the MacBook Pro is unlikely to move past that unless the rules change or new battery technology comes to laptops. The US Federal Aviation Administration limits the battery capacity of lithium batteries to 100 watt-hours (and even then, you have to carry those on they can't be in checked baggage). Why not go even bigger? Apple has hit something of a wall in battery capacity. The CPUs and other components can become more power efficient, with more performance per watt, operating system tweaks can manage battery life better and even low-power displays can add hours of extra life. That's all great, but also a contradiction to longer battery life, a key selling point for any laptop. Screens get bigger, processors get more powerful, graphics hard gets upgraded. Apple claims great noise reduction and nuanced capture for the built-in three-mic array as well, but I have not had a chance to test that yet. Built-in laptop speakers are never much to write home about, but with some speaker placement prestidigitation to cancel out rattle at higher volumes, this is certainly a decent-sounding laptop. That's even more important here, because better audio is one of the other areas where the new MacBook Pro makes improvements. That said, I always use the Touch Bar controls for volume adjustments when using a MacBook Pro.
Still, the fact that it's losing real estate doesn't sound like a vote of long-term confidence. It self-perpetuates because there's no way to get a MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar right now. Like endless Fast and Furious movies, the Touch Bar keeps showing up, but never really makes a great case for itself. Per-app support is decent, but requires learning new workflows, and the entire setup just serves to remind us that this is one of the only major computer platforms without a touchscreen. The rest of the Touch Bar remains as mildly interesting as it ever was.
There will no doubt be many longer-term verdicts from many opinionated quarters for this new keyboard, but in my first-24-hours opinion, it's pretty great. But really, stop getting cookie crumbs on your laptops, you monsters. A new rubber dome is under each key, and the individual keycaps can be removed and replaced (I have not tried that yet), which should at least mitigate any problems from dust and debris causing stuck keys. Likewise, the key travel (a term often used as shorthand for how far one can depress a keyboard key, although it's really the distance before a key press activates) is a substantial-feeling 1mm, which feels like a happy medium. If anything, this new design fuses the two, with keycaps that are smaller in surface area than the butterfly version, but larger than the old-school version.
Seeing all three side by side, it looks more like the butterfly design, with low-slung, wide keys. The feel is definitely closer to the modern MacBook keyboard than the classic one. Put another way, my first thought early this morning while typing this review on the 16-inch Pro was, "Where the f*** has this been for the last four years?" That's because the new keyboard is positively delightful, which is not praise I offer lightly. After just a single day of typing on the new Magic-style keyboard on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, I'm ready to retcon the butterfly keyboard back to being a disaster.
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