The new MacBook Pros represent a welcome mea culpa from Apple. For the last few years, each new generation of high-end Mac notebooks have risen to new heights in some respects, but in others, taken the MacBook Pro range in directions it didn’t really need to go. No one asked for the full range of connectivity ports to disappear, to be replaced by Thunderbolt ports alone. The ‘butterfly mechanism’ keyboard design, which has already been abandoned, was almost universally disliked and although the Touch Bar was very clever on paper, it wasn’t highly regarded in practice.
With the new 2021 MacBook Pros, Apple has looked to its past as it moves into the future, correcting the missteps that have held back the high-end notebooks while taking their power and efficiency to new levels. You can buy a 14-inch or 16-inch model with the brand new – and incredibly powerful – Apple Silicon M1 Pro processor, or if you really want the fastest notebook Mac ever built, go for a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the topof-the-range M1 Max chip. But what, besides the processors, has changed in the new Apple MacBook Pros, and should we be excited?
1 The Notch
To give the screen more room without compromising on the quality of the FaceTime HD camera, the screen now includes a ‘notch’, like the
