The 2016 Space Gray MacBook Pro without Touchbar ‘Escape Edition’, reviewed.
Just the right amount of power, and portability wrapped in gorgeous aluminium
The 2016 Space Gray MacBook Pro without Touchbar is a thing of beauty, and power wrapped in perfectly machined aluminium. On paper, like many Macs before it, doesn’t seem to inspire on spec alone. This MacBook Pro isn’t supercar level. It doesn’t aspire to be. The 2016 MacBook Pro without Touchbar is the Mercedes Benz Coupe of the laptop world, and entirely entry-level at that. It isn’t as powerful as a supercar in raw performance, but it is agile, and sporty as is expected in a consumer car. This is the Mac people have dreamed about for years. The 2016 MacBook Pro without Touchbar is a machine wrapped in gorgeous aluminium for people who want just the right amount of curated power, agile performance, superb reliability in their daily driver, and with a build quality in what people come to expect from an Apple product.
The 2016 MacBook Pro without Touchbar has the portability, and feather lightness of a MacBook Air, with the power and performance that one could expect from a MacBook Pro that the MacBook just doesn’t give. The display is a bright 500 nits Retina Display. The fonts are sharp and crisp. The images and colors pop. And the sound! The music this machine pipes through its speakers is loud, with mids clear.
Under the hood
The 2016 Macbook Pro without touchbar is powered by Intel’s 6th generation processor — dual core at that — wrapped in perfectly machined gorgeous aluminium.
The CPU inside this machine is an Intel Core i5 that runs at 2.0Mhz, and Turbo Boost up to 3.1Mhz. It has a 4MB L3 cache. It has an 8GB 1866MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory. Geekbench 4 says this Macbook Pro’s single core CPU performance 3,451. It’s Multicore performance is 6,890. There’s nothing to phone home about here.
How does it stack up against the last generation of Macbook Pros?
The previous generation Macbook Pro ran on a base clock of 2.7Ghz. By CPU power alone, by spec alone, it should be performing just as well, if not slighly better than this 2016 MacBook Pro without Touchbar.
“The early 2015 refresh of the MacBook Pro sported an M.2 (gumstick) form factor,” wrote Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian. So if you have a previous generation, and experienced some spinning beach ball, Apple has solved this issue with the 2016 MacBook Pro.
More than Raw CPU clock speed alone, I believe the new 2016 MacBook Pro — if nothing else sways you to get it, then its PCI NVMe SSD is the one part that makes this machine a buy.
The Look
“It looks Jurrasic,” my uncle remarked as I showed him a photo of my cousin’s Early 2015 MacBook Pro, and the Late 2016 MacBook Pro without Touchbar side-by-side.
The base model 2016 MacBook Pro does make the previous generation look particularly clanky, dated, and old. Comparing my old non-retina 2012 and this 2016 MacBook Pro makes the former even look like some sedan from the late 20th century. It was boxy. By the look of it, you knew the laptop was built well, but obviously a dinosaur. [It is hardly useless, as I plan to update it to an SSD and to 16GB of RAM soon. It will be reborn as a local and private server.]
The Keyboard
I had gotten used to this keyboard, fairly quickly. Like 2 minutes into owning the 2016 Macbook Pro, and giving it a try, typing on it was easy. If there’s one complaint I have is the noise. I pound at the keyboard while typing. It is almost like typing in one of those ancient typerwiters we were forced to try in high school many moons ago.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
I pity the fool who has to sit beside me somewhere while I type on this thing, but it has grown on me, noisy aside.
Do I enjoy writing on this keyboard? If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said, no. I would have said that I prefered the keyboard from 2012. Almost a month into this machine, then I could safely say, Yes. Yes, I do enjoy writing here.
Perfect trackpad
The Force Touch Trackpad, which is superior to just about any trackpad out there is fast, responsive, and smooth to the touch. It’s huge by the way. Occupying almost two-thirds of the palm rest area. You might think that your palm touching it would somehow trigger the trackpad, but it does not. The new trackpad is just a piece of glass with haptic feedback. It feels perfect that you wouldn’t know that it wasn’t mechanical.
Gaming
After receiving this MacBook Pro, naturally, I installed Steam on it to play Civilization VI. You’re probably better off playing in a bigger display, like say an iMac or a PC, but it works if you want to game on this machine. The game play’s graphics wasn’t so bad for an Intel 540. The game was fluid, and not draggy. It didn’t feel like it was being sluggish. The machine did start to warm up a bit more than usual after hours spent playing. But since it doesn’t have any graphics processor — don’t expect much from it.
I haven’t installed Batman Arkham City Game of the Year Edition on here yet, but even in an old 2012 MacBook Pro it works decently for a non-serious, casual gamer. Pretty sure if you’re a serious gamer this machine isn’t one you should game on anyway.
Sound
The speakers on the new 2016 Macbook Pro blew me away. The previous generation MacBook Pro had really terrible base, and sounded tiny. I used a US$30 bluetooth speaker which sounded much better on my old 2012 MacBook Pro. The speakers on the 2016 MacBook Pro won’t be blowing any audiophile’s ears away, but they sound far more superior than any generation of MacBook Pros before it. You could actually enjoy a movie or listen to some classical music on this pair of speakers without wanting to claw your ears out.
Battery life and Life without MagSafe
Today’s use clocked into about seven to eight hours battery.
Many users have been complaining of battery life problems with the new MacBook Pro. I’ve been averaging between seven to eight hours of light use. Light use is defined as browsing, writing (this post), tweeting, iMessage, Telegram, streaming for about an hour of iFlix from Google Chrome to our TV via AirPlay to Apple TV.
I don’t know if my use case falls into Apple’s category when they wrote, ‘up to 10 hours web use’ in their tech spec. In my use case today, the greatest impact really was Google Chrome, followed by Twitter. Major battery suckage.
If you were on the road and won’t be using anything specific from Google Chrome, I’d drop it.
MagSafe really wasn’t something I missed. I thought it would be. I miss the battery indicator more to be honest. This machine really isn’t something you leave plugged all that long anyway.
I liked that the Power Adaptor was using USB-C. Not that I’ve tried using differnet cables on it to charge the MacBook Pro, but it is comforting to know that I could get one anytime it gets broken from just about anywhere. I kind of really was more disappointed with Apple not including universal plugs with this MacBook Pro. I repurposed my previous MacBook Pro’s cable into for this one. I like the length, and the fact that the outlet is a bit farther from the actual charger.
The EcoSystem
It used to be when switching to a new Mac I’d pick up a TimeMachine backup, plug it into the new machine and have it sync all my files and settings and viola! You’d be where you left off.
This time around, I didn’t even bother with TimeMachine.
I love iCloud.
iCloud is the new TimeMachine.
When I signed into the new MacBook Pro, my desktop began to fill up with the files that I needed. My Keychain was also ready. Email settings. The works.
The only thing I really needed to reinstall were some third party apps that quite frankly in a pinch, I wouldn’t need. Ok, maybe a copy of Transmit would be nice. Since I had Transmit on my iPhone, I solved my SFTP needs by signing into Transmit from my iPhone and saving the file to iCloud. In a few seconds, the file that I copied into iCloud from my phone appeared on my desktop.
I love iCloud.
Dongles
People are anxious about dongles. It’s the most frequently asked question about Apple’s new MacBook Pro. In the month that I’ve owned this machine, I’ve only used dongles for two things. One, attaching an external USB Mouse. Second, attaching external storage like an external drive or a USB Flash Drive. Surprisingly enough I don’t use either on a daily basis.
Between AirDrop, and iCloud there isn’t much reason for me to use the dongles. I did purchase Apple’s USB-C VGA Multiport Adaptor (U.S. Store, PHP 2,490 at the Philippine Store) along with this MacBook Pro. It works great. The power adaptor port and the USB-C port for me is heaven sent. I bought this to interface with Projectors on the road or yeah when I have to bring out mu USB Mouse to play Civilization VI.
I bought Aukey’s USB-A to USB-C Adaptor for my Nexus 5X phone a few months back. I have repurposed it for use with my MacBook Pro. It’s a nice little adaptor which am constantly scared of breaking, but is a nice fit for
Price and cost
The 2016 MacBook Pro without TouchBar is presently priced at PHP84,990 (US$1,700). I bought it entirely for the better SSD controller to be honest and was willing to pay a premium for it.
The 2016 MacBook Pro without TouchBar is a bit more expensive than last year’s model. It came to about PHP 10,000 (US$ 200) more expensive than Mid-Tier 2015 MacBook Pro. It is also about PHP16,000 (US$320) cheaper than the 2016 MacBook Pro Touchbar. The latter comes with a higher base clock speed for the CPU — 2.9Mhz and Intel 550 GPU, versus without Touchbar’s 2.0Mhz and Intel 540 GPU. The latter is more low power, the former more powerful depending on the CPU clock speed, i.e. Core i7s with the 550 will perform much better than an Intel Core i5 w/550.
The Pro in MacBook Pro
The common complaint about “MacBook Pro not being ‘Pro’ enough” has very few… basis. Yes, this machine has very few ports. It has very little RAM, cramp storage, and a processor that’s at least at par with last year’s mid-tier model.
It seems perfect for the kind of work that I normally do.
I considered the 2016 MacBook. It had a smaller screen, weaker processor and it didn’t come with then newer PCIe NVMe SSD. More than the TouchBar, I think that’s what I need. I’d eventually want a machine with TouchBar, but not yet.
I need a machine that’s powerful enough, with a gorgeous display, good enough speakers to let me enjoy music while working, portable enough that it doesn’t hurt my back, with a build quality that it doesn’t break often to let me just do.
This 256GB late 2016 MacBook Pro without Touchbar is a no frills laptop. I imagine it to be a stick shift coupe. She’s fast enough with an eco-friendly engine. She is agile enough, and sporty enough for a good drive. It isn’t the best laptop — I suspect that title at least goes to the 13-inch model with the Touchbar or perhaps the 15-incher.
This MacBook Pro will let me do the work that I love. I run servers on the Cloud, create content on the web, building websites would be great on it. I can always spin more VMs in the cloud if I need more compute muscle or I’ll buy bare metal servers for it.
Apple has been making opinionated computers since forever. The 2016 MacBook Pro is one of the most opinionated devices Apple has launched. The new PCIe NVMe SSD, the bright and gorgeous 500 nits Retina Display, the excellent trackpad, iCloud integration, and the slimmer profile makes the 2016 MacBook Pro without TouchBar in my opinion, a no-frills workhorse for the minimalist who just wants to do. The 2016 MacBook Pro without Touchbar is a machine wrapped in gorgeous aluminium for people who want just the right amount of curated power, agile performance, superb reliability in their daily driver, and excellent build quality in what people have come to expect from an Apple product.
