New 16-inch MacBook Pro Has New Keyboard, Radeon RX 5500M

[harlan4096]

Apple today announced the long-rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro, bringing with it a new, scissor-switch keyboard and AMD's Radeon RX 5500M or 5300M or graphics.

The 16-inch laptop replaces the 15-inch MacBook Pro and starts at $2,399. It's available to order now. The maxxed-out configuration is $6,099.

CPU 8-core 9th Gen Intel Core i9
GPU Up to AMD Radeon 5500M (8GB GDDR6)
RAM Up to 64GB DDR4-2666MHz
Display 16-inches, 3072 x 1920, 226ppi
Storage Up to 8TB SSD
Battery 100WHr

Apple is eschewing Intel's 10th Gen "Ice Lake" processors for 6 and 8-core 9th Gen chips. The system also features a 16-inch, 3072 x 1920 display with a pixel density of 226 pixels per inch (ppi) and a six-speaker sound system. Apple says the screen will hit 500 nits max brightness.

But for many, the big change will be the keyboard, which Apple is dubbing the "Magic Keyboard." It uses a scissor switch mechanism with 1mm of travel, which sounds like a big improvement over the existing MacBook Pro keyboards. There's no word when it might come to the 13-inch MacBook Pro or the MacBook Air, however.

And while the 16-inch MacBook Pro has a Touch Bar, it also hash a physical escape key, which many professionals didn't like about the previous version. Touch ID is built into the power button to log in with a fingerprint and is accompanied by Apple's T2 security chip.

Additionally, Apple has a new thermal solution in the MacBook Pro. The new design has longer blades and bigger vents, which the company says will lead to a 28% increase in airflow. Additionally, the heatsink is 35% larger. Apple claims that this will let the 16-inch MacBook Pro "sustain up to 12 more watts during intensive workloads than the previous design."

We hope to see the new 16-inch MacBook Pro in our lab soon to see how well it holds up, but on paper, it sounds like this laptop makes a ton of fixes that pro Mac users were demanding.
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