The new MacBook sports a 12-inch, 2304x1440 pixel, 226 ppi, 16:10 aspect ratio Retina display. Apple isn't bumping up against the constraints of technology any more as much as they are the physical size of the human interfaces - the keyboard and display.Īnd for an ultra-portable, that's the ideal. It's absolutely a MacBook in every way, but where the Air always seemed flattened out, the new MacBook seems truly distilled down.

I called it a redesign before but it's really something closer akin to a refinement. It looks great, and I find myself oddly unsure now if I'll really miss the glow.Įverything else about the new MacBook looks and feels great. Instead, it has an inset logo, polished like the iPhone 6s and iPad Air Pro. The sight of it everywhere from coffee shops to the State of the Union to Microsoft's media events was impossible to miss, like a Bat-signal. Gone also is the glowing Apple logo on the back. Here's how it looks compared to Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air and Pro. It is, however, a new and improved unibody. The new MacBook is still a unibody, like the last major MacBook redesign, and still comes with all the structural benefits of being formed from a single piece of aluminum. More remarkably, the thinness and lightness doesn't come at the price of solidity. That makes the MacBook the lightest, thinnest laptop Apple has ever sold, and for everyone who remembers Steve Jobs sliding the original MacBook Air out of an envelope, that's saying something. That's about the weight of the original iPad with a case on it. When you do hold it, you get a palpable sense of just how small the new MacBook really is. After a few stray deletions, tabs, quotes, and slashes, I switched to grabbing it lower down, at trackpad level, or from underneath.

The first few times I picked up the new MacBook I found myself accidentally depressing keys - there's almost no bezel on the sides. It does take some getting used to, though.

2016 macbook pro review