My 2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro Review

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My 2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro Review

Mon Jul 20, 2015 10:58 am

Never made a post about this (as I wasn't sure if I was gonna keep it as previous ones had yellow screens and I kept returning them over and over) but in late June I got a new Laptop.

The 2015 model 15" Retina MacBook Pro. I got the high end config which comes with a dedicated graphics card the AMD R9 M370X. I wanted that card because I didn't feel the integrated graphics which is an Intel Iris Pro with 128MB EDRAM was fast enough for day to day use.

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So the spec I got is as follows:

15" 2880x1800 "Retina" display
16GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM
512GB SSD - 2GB/s read & 1.2GB/s write speed
Intel Iris Pro Graphics + AMD M370X Graphics
802.11ac 1.3Gb/s WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0 LE
Dual Thunderbolt 2 Ports (Each 20Gb/s) (Supports Dual 4K and Single 5K output)
Dual USB 3.0 Ports
Single HDMI 1.3 Port (Supports 4K output @ 30Hz)
SDXC Card Reader (Supports upto 2TB SD cards)
Backlit Keyboard with Light Sensors for Automatic Illumination + "Force Touch" Trackpad
720p Camera + Dual Microphones for active noise suppression
9 Hour battery life + Magsafe power connector

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I've had the laptop for about a month now, used it every day and my overall impression is very positive. The laptop is incredibly well built the metal chassis is lovely as expected from Apple machined perfectly without creaking or flexing when held and moved. The screen hinge is also what you'd expect from Apple, very strong with just the right amount of tension.

One surprise I had was the speaker quality, I've owned many Mac laptops, including a 12" iBook (2004), 15" PowerBook (2005), two 17" MacBook Pro's (2006 and 2009) and five 15" Retina MacBook Pro's (2013-2014) before I purchased this 2015 model.

Only my 2009 MacBook Pro had "great" speakers. The rest were just "okay". So it was surprising to me to find that the 15" model has probably the best speakers in a notebook I've ever heard. They have great dynamic range and a nice boom sound without fizzling, cracking or popping even at the loudest setting (which is very loud).

I expected them to sound poorer much the same as the 2013 Model rMBP's that I continually sent back for faulty screens. It would appear I have got a good one from a better batch or Apple has improved the speakers since my earlier purchases. These handily beat my 2009 17" MacBook Pro.

The screen which has been a major point of contention for me with the Retina MacBook Pro's is also top notch. This is the first one I've purchased that has a perfectly uniform screen. My earlier ones that I sent back to Apple kept coming with shadows and darkness on the bottom half of the displays which made whites turn to yellows. As you can imagine that's very annoying but thankfully this model has no such problem.

The WiFi speed is excellent I can hit 900Mb/s to my 802.11ac enabled router (Asus AC66U). The backlit keyboard is bright, the thunderbolt ports both work flawlessly with my Mini-DisplayPort to DVI-D Dual-Link adapter to connect the laptop to my 30" external display.

The SSD performance is absolutely insane. Fastest SSD I've ever used and it shows in day to day use. Every application opens instantly, the laptop itself boots from a cold start to the OS X desktop in under 6 seconds. I have performed a benchmark you can view here:

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CPU and GPU performance is also excellent, my laptop is configured with the 2.5GHz-3.7GHz Core i7-4870HQ it's a Quad Core chip with integrated Iris Pro graphics. As I said previously I bought the model with the M370X and that GPU really shines. I don't game on my Laptops and I haven't done so since I built my first gaming desktop over a decade ago so my only motivation for buying the M370X model was the operating system performance and longevity of the system as newer graphical intensive applications are released.

Battery life is great, 9 hours is to me, not achievable. As you would need to essentially use the Safari web browser with the screen brightness at 50% to reach a full 9 hours. In my usage I get about 5 to 6 hours of battery life. That's with the display brightness set to maximum and I use Chrome as my web browser. I usually have Mail, iTunes, VNC, Textual and Messages open at all times alongside Chrome so that is my general usage which causes my battery drain. And of course I have WiFi turned on and Bluetooth connected to my iPhone.

The main reason to buy a Mac or perhaps the only reason is the software. If Apple allowed OS X to run on other notebooks I'd probably buy an Asus or a Dell just due to their lower prices and similar hardware specifications. You can get the same Core i7, 16GB of RAM and superfast SSD from Asus for example and they'll even throw in a much more powerful GTX 960m graphics chip. All for less money than my Retina MacBook Pro cost.

But again, it's about the software. That Asus notebook would come with Windows and that isn't my preferred operating system for a laptop. I love using Windows on my desktop, where it makes the most sense as it can take full advantage of my high end hardware and has an enormous games library that OS X will never match. But for my "personal" machine, and I consider my laptops much more intimate and personal than my desktop I'll only ever use OS X.

It's hard to quantify why I prefer OS X because it's not just one single thing I can point to, it's not even 5 or 10 things. There are hundreds of little reasons that all make up the decision. From being able to select any file in OS X and force touch or press the space bar to get a large preview of that file (Image, Video, 3D Animation, Music, Powerpoint, Word, Exel, whatever it is, it just works for thousands of file formats), to being able to search your entire Mac with spotlight in an instant (I've never been able to get Windows searching working properly).

And there are newer device-integration features like Coherency which uses Bluetooth to share content between devices. For example I can browser a webpage on my Mac and then when it's time to go somewhere I can pick up my iPhone and right on the lock screen is a little browser icon, if I slide that up it opens my browser to not just the same page I was looking at on my Mac but also the same place within that page. That works not only for browsing but for email, text messaging and 3rd party Apps that Apple did not develop.

It's that tight integration that makes the Apple ecosystem so present and valued to me. I use Messages on my Mac as I mentioned above, this allows both iMessages and Text Messages (SMS) to be accessed across all your devices. You can view chats, reply and create new messages on your iPhone, iPad or Mac. Sadly there is no Messages client for Android or Windows because Apple has chosen not to create one. Apple does have a dark side and it's their closed nature, they are not one to share and once you're in their ecosystem you have to keep buying their versions of devices or be struck with almost no compatibility of any kind.

The last thing I wanted to talk about with this notebook is the trackpad. It is by far the best trackpad ever made for a notebook. I did not believe Apple could ever improve their industry leading trackpad but they have. The new one is called a "Force Touch" trackpad because it can sense not just touch but force.

From what we can gather it can discern between 1024 levels of pressure, this is the same you'd find on a mid-range drawing tablet for about £150. And since it's a touch capacitive surface you can use drawing pens on it. Already plugins have been developed for Adobe Photoshop to allow artists to draw on the trackpad using a stylus and because of the pressure sensitivity you can draw with a high degree of accuracy and finesse.

But looking past the new drawing capability. It has a very satisfying click - or does it? You see this trackpad doesn't actually move, it's a solid piece of glass (yes glass, not plastic) and when you press on it, it mimics a click by using an actuator underneath the trackpad. In simple terms there is a big piece of metal underneath the trackpad and when you press down it moves a small distance creating the feel and sound of a real click even though the trackpad hasn't moved at all.

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In the above picture you can see how even the feel of the click and whether you want clicks to be audible can be configured in software. I like my trackpad firm and I can simply select that.

It feels just like a real click and has a very satisfying level of feedback. It's also quite bizarre when you press down harder it clicks a second time, again it doesn't actually move just the metal underneath moves to fool you into thinking it clicked. This second "deeper" click allows extra functionality, you can for example "force click" on a word to get a dictionary popup with definitions. Or you can force click on website links to get a small preview window of the page. You can also use it for previewing files as I mentioned above. The new trackpad is definitely more than I thought it would be, I thought I wouldn't care about having it or not but that isn't the case, it's a major improvement on a trackpad that was already the best in the world and Apple really outdid themselves, with no competition in trackpad quality they still kept innovating, only eclipsing themselves.

So this is my review of my 15" MacBook Pro. As configured mine cost £1,999 GBP in the UK (including Sales Tax) and $2,499.00 USD in the United States (before Sales Tax). I would highly recommend this laptop if you want the absolutely best notebook in build quality and software. The only person I would not recommend to buy one of these is someone who wants a gaming notebook, this is not a laptop for gamers it's made for graphic designers, video editors, software programmers and just people who want a great general and portable computer with a gorgeous display.

Hope you liked reading it, if you have any questions feel free to reply.
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Re: My 2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro Review

Mon Jul 20, 2015 5:21 pm

That ssd.... 1GB write and almost 2GB read... not fair.
nul
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Re: My 2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro Review

Fri Oct 30, 2015 8:36 pm

That is soooo unfair pri XD
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Re: My 2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro Review

Sat Oct 31, 2015 7:40 am

:P Still loving this notebook. I installed the final El Capitan on it about a month ago and it's just such a fantastic computer.

I really can't find a single fault in it, it's just perfect.

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