Apple MacBook Pro 13 (Touch Bar) Unboxing & Review

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What's going on guys, Mike here, the DetroitBORG with one more Macbook Pro to take a look at and that's the 13" Macbook Pro with a touch bar So I took a look at the baseline model and the 15" model  with the touch bar So finally we're taking a look at the one that sits between them. So this retails for $1799 to start which is a $300 Premium over the non-touchbar, baseline Macbook Pro Now, because I've covered these extensively in two previous videos, I really wanna focus on the difference between the baseline and the touch bar models to see if that $300 is worth the upgrade. So getting into the unboxing of the Macbook Pro, pretty familiar now because I've done this a few times but of course, we have to remove the plastic and once we lift up the lid, first thing we'll see here is our Space Grey Macbook Pro so it's a pretty familiar color now but again that's new for the Macbook Pro for 2016 so removing the plastic there is one more piece of material to remove and that is a piece of paper protecting the glass display so we can go ahead and pull that off and as you can see, as soon as you open up the lid, the computer boots up that's a new characteristic of the latest Macbook Pros Of course,  just like the 15" model, we do have touch ID for the first time built-in here so you can train your finger to the touch ID sensor which allows you to unlock the Macbook Pro, use ApplePay or even authorize purchases on iTunes getting to the accessories, once again we have that familiar packet, which does include some paperwork, including a set of Apple stickers gone is a micro-fibre cleaning cloth So we don't see that anymore with this generation Also included, is our power supply this is 61 Watts and has a USB type C connector this allows you to connect the included USB type-C cables so, once again, no Mag-safe here. That has been completely eliminated with the newest generation of Macbooks So just to summarize what's new with this generation, of course it's thinner lighter, more powerful with a brighter display, a shallow keyboard along with a huge multi-touch, glass trackpad with force-touch The keyboard is a significant change here the keys are wider, flatter and much more shallow, and use a new, second-generation butterfly mechanism, borrowed from the Macbook now it is much louder than the previous generation but it's much more clicky so it does make more noise, but it definitely feels a lot better I'm a big fan of this keyboard because it's very fast and responsive and you can type on this very lightly the other big change here are the ports now we do get a headphone jack but we get four USB type-C connectors that also support Thunderbolt 3 so gone is: display port, HDMI, SD and of course USB type-A.

So you're gonna need to use some adapters but these are very high-speed ports and they're very flexible so they're very future-proof but of course, you're gonna need to adapt them for most situations Now there are quite a few differences between this and the baseline model so $300 is more than just adding a touch-bar it also adds a much faster processor we go from 2 GHz to 2.9 GHz That's still a dual-core i5 and dual-core is the best you can do with the 13" pros we also get faster RAM. On the base model, it's 1866 MHz, on the upgraded model, it's 2133 for both 8 and16 GB configurations we also go from Intel's Iris graphics 540 chip to the 550 chip and we also get 2 extra Thunderbolt 3 ports, two on each side on the standard model we just have two on the left side there's also a difference in the speaker design on the baseline model, we have front-facing speakers and on the upgraded model although we have speaker grilles, instead the speakers are coming out of the vents along the backside of the MacBook Pro which marks another difference so we don't have these vents along the baseline model but we get 'em on the upgraded model for better cooling and for some reason the baseline model has two microphones while the upgraded model has three microphones another difference is in favor of the baseline model so the baseline gets a 54.5 Watt-hour battery versus 49.2 Watt-hours and although that sounds significant the estimated battery battery life is still 10 hours between the both of them so you might get a few more minutes out of the baseline Mac but it's not clear There's a few other visual differences here so for example, the USB-C ports on one side are farther down on the touch-bar versions versus the standard version the other difference here is that the function row is taller with the touch-bar so you'll see the speaker grilles are slightly taller now, unfortunately, I do think this speaker design does negatively affect the sound quality out of the MacBook Pro so compared to the baseline with front-facing speakers, the upgraded touch-bar model sounds a little more hollow and distant and a little more muffled so they don't sound as clear and crisp so let's go ahead and take a listen to the differences ("What's up guys Mike here the DetroitBORG. And about a couple weeks ago I took a look at the baseline 13" MacBook Pro which wasn't terribly exciting because it didn't have the touch-bar and Touch ID. This time, we're going to take a look at a fully spec'd out 15" MacBook Pro with the touch-bar and Touch ID's") there is growing concern, however, that this new keyboard is much louder than the previous generation and indeed it is but of course that feels a lot better when you're typing now I can definitely see where in some situations, in a quiet room this is going to be more irritating than the previous generation so what I'm going to do is let you listen to the differences to see if you can tell *New Keyboard* *Old Keyboard* so when it comes down to performance we are seeing some respectable CPU gainz that's thanks to the new Skylake Processors which are clocked at 2.9 GHz versus 2.7 On the previous model but there is a huge improvement in terms of graphics performance so any 3D accelerated or GPU intensive apps should take advantage of it we also get much faster SSD's doubling the performance of the previous model But if we look at the current baseline MacBook Pro versus the touch-bar model you can see there really isn't a significant gain here in terms of benchmarks either in CPU or GPU.

Now if we compare this to the 15" MacBook Pro The big advantage to the 15" beyond its size is the fact that it also has dedicated graphics which you cannot get on the 13" model you just have integrated graphics so if you want the most power especially for GPU intensive apps you definitely want to focus on the 15" model but otherwise, you have most of the same features 4 USB type-C ports the only difference here is that the ones on the right on the 13" model aren't as fast as the ones on the 15" now I did cover the touch-bar in my 15" MacBook Pro review and I'll leave that linked in the description below so you can see more coverage on that But if you're not familiar with it, it's basically an OLED strip that replaces the function row now you can still use the function keys but again they're virtual keys and they sort of move around and change depending on the situation now if you want to go back to the standard function row you can enable that under settings and that will fix those function keys toward the top so that they don't disappear when an app pops up now in many ways I actually prefer the implementation of these function keys over the standard physical keys so for example if you want to adjust the volume just tap and hold on the volume button and slide your finger so this allows you to more quickly and more precisely control either the the brightness of the screen or the volume output which I think is better than hitting those detents on the keypad there's also the escape key on the left side and it is a virtual key so it does disappear depending on what touch-bar feature is being used but there's always an "x" there to get rid of it so you can get access to the Escape key the rest of the touch-bar is set aside for apps so basically apps dictate what controls you see here and you can customize this and it's pretty easy to do so but basically, these are tools. They allow you to interact with the app in a new way so, for example,  you could get some media controls with a scrubber that allows you to scrub through video you also get some markup tools for bolding, italicizing or underlining text we also have some of our browser controls so you can open up a new tab or scroll through our open tabs and even see a preview of each app within that touch bar we also have shortcuts to our favourites and many more features some other cool features include Final Cut editing tools or if you're writing a message you can actually bring up an emoji keyboard that allows you to select your own emoji or even long press on them to select a different skin color we also get a little bit of iOS so if you're composing a message, you have the option to bring up some word completion to anticipate what you're typing now for me, it's pretty easy to spend your money and tell you that all the features built into the touch-bar version of this laptop are worth the $300 price increase except the speakers but they're definitely not essential and many of these features still require some maturing to see if they're actually worthwile but I think the bigger question here is that the baseline MacBook Pro should probably be a $100 or few $100 cheaper than it is but what do you guys think of the 13" MacBook Pro? Personally, I'm a big fan of it I love the touch-bar I love this keyboard and the trackpad and of course the display is fantastic it's very light-weight, very powerful and it gets the job done for me in most situations so this is definitely the laptop I'm going to be carrying more often than any other alrighty guys, hope you enjoyed this look at the 13" MacBook Pro if you did, please give it a thumbs up to let me know and I'll see you again in the next video.