Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “2015 Macbook Review!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the 2015 macbook – the new macbook review uh. This laptop’s been out for a little while now, and people have made their choice if they want to buy it or not. But i still wanted to give my thoughts and my impressions of it since i’ve been using it for a bit and just let you know what i think of it as it exists now, so right off the bat. The number one reason that this machine exists and the biggest advantage it has over any of its competitors is this thinness and lightness.
It’S the most portable laptop i’ve ever used by a long way it measures in at just 35 millimeters at its thinnest point and 135 millimeters at its thickest point, and it weighs in at just 2.03 pounds which is about as much as two ipad airs. The two main sacrifices apple had to make to get this thin are the keyboard and the trackpad, which are really your main ways of interfacing. With the laptop the trackpad, which initially seems like a workaround just to fit into the thinner body, it turns out to actually be one of the laptop’s best features.
So, instead of the normal physical diving board mechanism that works for most laptops, the macbook instead has a solid piece of glass that doesn’t move. Then it simulates the sensation of clicks with a vibration motor and it’s very convincing. So it feels like you’re clicking a normal quality trackpad, even though it’s not normal as a bonus. You also get this click sensation, basically everywhere on the glass, so not just the middle, like normal laptops and you get a different functionality for different levels of pressure, which is where the name force touch comes in, so force touch acts as a sort of a more Info button, letting you like scrub through media or get definitions of words that you force touch in safari and stuff like that, i didn’t use force touch stuff all that much. But overall, i definitely like the track pad on this laptop. The keyboard, on the other hand, is definitely something i don’t like in this super thin laptop apple switched from normal chiclet style keys, which are on like every apple keyboard for the past few years to these butterfly switches which are to make them thinner.
But that also means there’s almost zero travel, zero clickiness, it’s a very mushy unresponsive keyboard and i’ll be honest. After a few weeks, i actually did get used to typing on this keyboard and i stopped messing up and double pressing letters so many times, but that doesn’t mean i enjoyed it, but at least it’s possible to get used to it. But the other thing is it’s also not a standard keyboard layout, as you can see by the arrow key, is all crunched together literally the one upside of this keyboard is that it’s backlit and doesn’t look terrible, but hey all in the name of thin and light.
Also, it was apparently a bit too thin for a normal sized webcam, because we got this 480p webcam in the new macbook. It doesn’t look terrible, actually, not that looks awful anyway, aside from the keyboard and the trackpad, this is a really nice well-built quality notebook as it should be for the price. The display in particular is awesome. It is a crispy retina display and has a resolution of 2304 by 1440, which probably seems a little bit weird at a 16 by 10 aspect ratio. But that just means it’s able to switch between a couple of scaled resolutions that affect the size of things. On the screen – and it can be a pretty bright display for normal viewing or video viewing or gaming, but it also gets pretty dim for dark environments too.
Another thing that’s awesome, right below the display. Is this speaker just holy: it’s really good. Like best speakers, i’ve ever heard on a laptop good.
I don’t know how they did that, but this thing sounds 50 times its size. It’S amazing and yeah. The rest of the laptop is just you know, metal with the classic apple modern, laptop aesthetic. So the baseline for this machine, which i got here in space gray, is 300 bucks and it’s rocking a 1.1 gigahertz intel core m 8 gigs of ram 256 gigs of storage and intel’s integrated graphics.
So clearly, not a powerhouse at all and the computer itself like inside this body, is actually about the size of an iphone and it’s lodged right up near the speaker. The rest is just battery just filled with battery every bit of space. It’S fanless, so it’s dead, silent, no vents at all might get a little bit warmer, but it’s just computer and battery apple claims nine hours of battery life. I found i got more like six.
Of course, i’m using chrome not safari, so that’s probably a big enough hit right there, and if you try to do anything much heavier than web browsing you’ll run up against a wall. Pretty quickly definitely want to be plugged in. For that, so it’s so thin and light that i actually find myself using this.
In fact, more often lately in places where i would usually have used my tablet, so it fits in the same compartments as my nexus 9 and my ipad. It’S only a little bit bigger than them, but it’s just as lightweight essentially, and it’s got a way better display has a keyboard. It’S got way more functionality built in so it may seem a little bit weird to think of it this way, but this has been an awesome tablet replacement. So if you’ve heard of this laptop before or now, then surely you’ve heard about its infamous one port. It’S single port on the side, uh hope you, like dongles in the hand, but hey at least it is usb type-c.
So usb-c is one of the most versatile at least one port solutions. You could possibly have i sort of like to have had two or three. Maybe one on each side or something like that, but for now uh it’s not that difficult to adapt to and you still do have to adapt to it. But there are some adapters. Obviously, in dongles apple makes some like 80 dongles.
It would kind of suck. If you lost one of those but there’s also some cheaper third-party ones, but anytime you want to plug in any accessory beyond just power or something like a mouse you’re going to have to get an adapter. So i did get a bluetooth mouse.
So i don’t have to use a dongle for that, but anytime i want to do something past charging like plug it into a printer or a monitor or something like that or just reading an sd card. You need that dongle. The usbc port also allows you to charge up with a portable battery pack, if you’re in a pinch, but that is pretty slow. So charging with the included usbc charger takes about two hours and the only downside is there is no charging led light like you’d have on a magsafe charger, but really the fact of the matter is.
I found myself using this machine. A lot like i was using a tablet, or at least i was using in a lot of the same situations as a tablet, so i didn’t really compare it in my mind to other laptops, even though it’s 300 bucks, and even though it’s shaped like a laptop, I still compared it to a tablet, so the fact that it only had one port didn’t really bother me. I didn’t use it in many situations where i needed more than one port and the fact that it has a mushy keyboard. Didn’T really bother me because, basically, every solution, adding a keyboard to a tablet, has the same problem. Uh battery life would have been better on a tablet actually than this, but not to make excuses for the thing, but it makes an awesome tablet replacement. That being said, if you plan on using this all the time as a main laptop, you might want to consider spending your 1300 bucks in a more power hungry or power efficient place like you, can get a macbook air right now or plenty of other fan and Light laptops that aren’t quite as beautiful and elegant as this one, but will get you more bang for the buck in that department. But as far as the things that i use this for this actually turned out to work really. Well, so i’m not afraid to say it.
I really like the new macbook in a lot of ways. It reminds me of a super premium. Tablet experience it’s silent.
It’S fast, it’s got an awesome display. The only thing that’s stopping it from being like my main laptop, is the fact that i do do more high intensive things on my laptop that require more performance like video editing, photo editing, audio editing. Those are the types of things that might require the word pro at the end of the name, but if even if you’re just looking at something like this – and you have 1300 bucks to spend, you could still just get a macbook air. So this is a beautiful awesome machine, but you probably shouldn’t buy it, and that being said, the second generation of this this is a first gen product, is undoubtedly going to be a lot better and a much better buy. Now, if you’ve made it this far and you’re still thinking that this is a laptop for you at least keep this one thing in mind: it’s not upgradable in any way. You can’t really get into this machine and upgrade anything so when you do get it upgrade.
The ram upgrade the storage make sure you have enough to last you as long as you plan on using this thing, but that’s basically it uh it’s one of my favorite laptops that again, you probably shouldn’t get same thing. I kind of said about the chromebook pixel. Either way, thank you for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next article peace .