Review: The 2016 Retina MacBook is a faster version of the same machine

Designing a portable gadget is all about compromise. The main tension is between power and portability: how light can I make this phone without making it unacceptably slow or killing battery life, and how fast can I make this laptop without making the battery and necessary heatsinks and fans too large to comfortably carry around?

Every laptop you can buy exists somewhere on this spectrum, and the new version of Apple’s Retina MacBook still prioritizes portability over pretty much everything else. At two pounds, it’s one of the thinnest, lightest full-fledged laptops you can buy today. But to achieve that feat, Apple uses low-voltage processors, offers a super-shallow keyboard and trackpad, and sheds all but one of this laptop's ports (headphone jack excepted).

It’s not a laptop for everyone. It’s not going to make every MacBook Air and Pro user happy. It probably won’t make most people who disliked the 2015 MacBook happy. But for OS X users who value portability over all else, it’s a decent generational bump that gets you more speed for the same price.

Design

Specs at a glance: 2016 MacBook
Screen	2304×1440 at 12" (226 PPI)
OS	OS X 10.11.4 El Capitan
CPU	1.2GHz Intel Core m5-6Y54 (Turbo up to 2.7GHz)
RAM	8GB 1866MHz LPDDR3 (non-upgradeable)
GPU	Intel HD Graphics 515 (integrated)
HDD	512GB PCIe 3.0 x2 solid-state drive
Networking	867Mbps 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports	1x USB 3.0/3.1 Gen 1 Type-C, headphones
Size	11.04" × 7.74" × 0.14-0.52" (280.5 mm × 196.5 mm × 3.5-13.1 mm)
Weight	2.06 lbs (0.92 kg)
Battery	41.4Whr
Warranty	1 year
Starting price	$1,299.99
Price as reviewed	$1,599.99
Other perks	Webcam, backlit keyboard, dual integrated mics, Force Touch trackpad

Nothing about the MacBook’s design changed from last year, so if you’ve already handled one you know what you’re getting. It’s like someone threw a MacBook Air and an iPad in a blender. This is recognizably a Mac, but it comes with an iPad-flavored design and a few of the same benefits and drawbacks that Apple’s tablets have.

The MacBook is thin but not flimsy, and like all the hardware Apple makes, it looks and feels high-quality. At two pounds, it feels significantly lighter in your hands and in a bag than a 13-inch MacBook Air or Pro does, and its 12-inch screen doesn’t feel as cramped as the one on the 11-inch MacBook Air. The Apple logo on the lid isn’t backlit as it is on most Macs. Rather, the logo is a shiny inset piece of metal like what you’d get on an iPad or iPhone.

Also like an iPad, the MacBook is fanless and has zero moving parts inside—one of its best features and a side-effect of using Intel’s Core M processors rather than the standard i5s or i7s. The 2304×1440 Retina display looks sharp and gorgeous, and it doesn’t suffer at all from using a non-native 2560×1600 resolution out of the box (in the Display settings, this resolution “looks like 1280×800,” and you can use 1024×640, 1152×720, and 1440×900 modes, too).

The second most polarizing thing about the MacBook is probably its keyboard, which is firm, clicky, and full-sized but has significantly shallower key travel compared to the standard chiclet keyboard that ships in the other MacBooks. Apple has designed butterfly switches that make the keys firmer and thinner than standard scissor switches, and it’s using the same design in the Smart Keyboard covers for both iPad Pros (the new Magic Keyboard Apple ships with current iMacs has the same layout but uses more traditional scissor switches).

While I definitely prefer the feel of Apple’s MacBook Air and Pro keyboards, the firmness of the keys makes the MacBook’s keyboard tolerable. There’s a clear distinction between a key that has been pressed and a key that has not been pressed, and the switches are firm enough that you’re not going to hit any keys by accident like you might with a mushier shallow keyboard. The layout isn’t weird aside from the mixed-height arrow keys (I prefer them all to be the same height even if it wastes a little space). Still, it may take you a while to get used to the keyboard.

The Force Touch trackpad should be less controversial. To save space, Apple has created a trackpad that doesn’t actually physically click. Instead, strain gauges detect when pressure is being applied, and electromagnets vibrating against a metal rail provide haptic feedback that simulates the sound and feel of a “click.” The feel is shallower and a little less satisfying than a real clicky trackpad, but it’s a surprisingly good simulation of one once you turn the click pressure up to “firm.” At some point between our review of the original MacBook and now, Apple also added a “silent clicking” option in the trackpad settings that reduces the amount of sound the trackpad makes without changing the way it feels. It’s a nice touch.

The most polarizing thing about the MacBook, naturally, is its single USB Type-C port, which is used for everything from connecting peripherals to driving an external display to actually charging the laptop.

There are plenty of people out there who use their laptops without connecting a whole bunch of stuff to them, and it’s true that wireless printers and AirPlay and cloud storage services have made ports less essential than they once were. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that the MacBook could be an appealing computer to a wider audience with at least one additional USB Type-C port, just another option to plug something into the laptop without disconnecting it from power. Replacing the headphone jack with a second port is one potential solution, though this would simply trade one compromise for another. Making the laptop large enough to fit another port is another option, though that could make the laptop a little larger than it is.

With the design as it stands, using a USB Type-C dongle is really the only solution to the port problem. Apple’s official adapters allow for charging, either an HDMI or VGA port, and one standard USB 3.0 Type-A port, but at $79 they’re pretty pricey. The beauty of standards is that other options exist. This one replicates Apple’s HDMI dongle for around half the price. This one provides multiple outputs and an SD card slot for the same price as Apple’s simpler adapters. This one is also cheaper than Apple’s and focuses on throwing as many USB ports at you as it can. They’re bulky, which sort of defeats the purpose of making the laptop so thin to begin with, but at least these solutions allow you to work around the port issue.

The growing number of USB Type-C accessories and peripherals can also help partially mitigate the port problem. Acer, for instance, will sell you a monitor that can pass power, USB data, and a display signal to your MacBook through a single cable. Thanks to the USB Power Delivery and Alternate Mode specs, we can expect to see additional monitors and peripherals like it as time goes on. But in many cases—including my workflow, which requires multiple full-size USB ports, an SD card reader for grabbing pictures off my camera, and external display outputs—it’s still inconvenient enough that you should really think hard before plunking down $1,300 or more for one of these things.

Finally, it’s a bit disappointing that the port is still USB 3.1 gen 1 instead of Thunderbolt 3, which uses the same port but adds 40Gbps Thunderbolt and 10Gbps USB 3.1 gen 2 speeds to the mix. Apple won’t explain why Thunderbolt 3 isn’t making its debut in this year’s MacBook, but the answer most likely lies somewhere in between the power and board space required for the separate Thunderbolt controller and the desire to reserve the faster interface for faster, power-user-oriented systems. Apple might not want its slowest Mac to have Thunderbolt 3 before machines like the MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac Pro can get it.