Apple’s new 2020 MacBook Pro 13inch
It’s been just over a month since the base model MacBook Pro was released and now with all the things that were just announced that WWDC this year. This is the perfect time to re-evaluate the 2020 MacBook Pro and talk about whether or not you should be considering this MacBook or any of Apple’s current Macbooks for that matter as your next big tech investment. But the basic things that you need to know is that it’s essentially the same design as last year except it’s a slight bit thicker and a slight bit heavier with a couple of exceptions like the upgraded Magic Keyboard and physical escape key that’s no longer housed within the touch bar. The keyboard is a great place to start really talking about this laptop over the past month. The new magic is miles and miles ahead of the butterfly keyboards on past models key travel is much deeper and I’m much more confident in my key presses the butterfly keyboards were much too shallow and prone to failure so I’m super happy that they went ahead and made this change after what nearly four years of terrible keyboard designs. The keys are still fairly quiet so you won’t have to worry about clacking away in the middle of a lecture hall full of people or in an open office area.
Apple is back to making solid keyboards in their laptops again and I’m giving the new magic keyboard here a thumbs up like I mentioned earlier this base model has nearly the exact same design as last year’s MacBook Pro 13 therefore it only comes with two thunderbolt three ports and a headphone jack for IO. The more expensive MacBook Pro actually comes with fourth thunderbolt three ports which is definitely an upgrade for me personally and hasn’t been a huge deal only having two.
Now lest talk about the speakers combined with the awesome 1440p Retina Display which makes a 13 inch MacBook Pro a great laptop for watching anything video related, battery life as a whole has been pretty solid as well. Apple claims around 10 hours of mixed use but I think I get around an hour or two less than that when I’m browsing the web or watching videos with Google Chrome. Obviously if you’re getting into something heavier than web browsing like video editing or gaming battery life is going to drop off pretty significantly depending on how heavy that task is that you’re doing. And that’s a pretty good segway into performance. Obviously you’re looking to buy a base model MacBook Pro here so top end performance is probably not something that’s important to you or at least it shouldn’t be because there are other Windows based machines at this price point that will absolutely blow this thing out of the water. That said if you’re looking for a laptop that can fly through light to medium tasks with ease like web browsing watching for YouTube videos filling in Excel sheets or even some light video editing the base model MacBook Pro will do that just fine.
ADP video won’t cause you any grief but 4K will unless you drop the playback resolution to better performance instead of high quality. I didn’t talk about this all that much in my initial review of this laptop but temperature and cooling tends to be a bit of a sore spot when it comes to Intel based MacBook Pros. This based model MacBook Pro does just find in normal use even when my thunderbolt 3 monitor is plugged in the CPC temperature tends to sit around 55 to 60 degrees with the fans staying silent as long as I’m not doing anything heavy. Start using final cut pro however and the temperatures will easily spike to the thermal limits of around ninety nine degrees with the fans kicking up a huge storm. So most of the things that I just said minus the temperature thing sounds pretty good and that’s because it is. Generally speaking I’ve been very happy with the 2020 based model MacBook Pro 13. It’s no powerhouse but it’s built well it’s got a great set of speakers and amazing display and a fantastic keyboard. All that said in light of the recent announcements at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference or WWDC for short this laptop just got a lot harder.
Apple announced a lot of stuff at WWDC including changes IOS 14 like widgets on the home screen page in an app library. New scribble features on the iPad. Sleep tracking on the Apple Watch in a bunch of other stuff but by far the coolest announcement was the transition away from Intel based Macs to Apple silicon. Not only that but the first Apple silicon Macs will be sold towards the end of this year. I knew they were coming but I assumed it would take at least a year or so I never imagined that we’d have them this soon. Apple has been making their own CPU’s for a really long time and the performance of the iPhone and iPad has been industry leading because of it with high performance at a low power draw. And the fact that they’re now bringing that overall experience into their laptops and their desktops means that the Macbooks the iMaC and even the MacPros can be getting really good really fast.
Just imagine what kind of performance Apple could crank out of their own arm based chips if it was inside something as big as a laptop or even a desktop. So all of this might sound like a bunch of techie mumbo jumbo to you and that’s fair. But the bottom line is this faster more efficient MacBook Pros are just right around the corner. And if you can wait you absolutely should because this could be the biggest bump in performance that we’re going to see in a long time. If you need a laptop right now though and you’re in the market for one of these I’m not gonna tell you not to buy it because it’s still a great laptop and Apple is committed to supporting these Intel based Macs for a long time. So you’re still going to get many many years of use out of it but if you can wait if you can just hold out to the end of the year you absolutely should. Because Apple’s got big things coming and I’d hate to serve you up a hot steamy play to buyer’s remorse without warning you first. Thankyou once again for reading my article and I hope you have a great day.
