This morning, out of nowhere, Apple announced its newest MacBook, the 16-inch MacBook Pro. With a newly-designed screen sporting smaller-than-ever bezels, the new 16-incher is entirely taking the place of the old 15-inch model and, despite its larger screen, is roughly the same size. Among its other new features are upgrade options for 64GB of RAM and bigger-than-ever SSDs but, most importantly, the new MacBook also sports a new keyboard and a physical escape key.
Apple’s laptop keyboards have been a bit of an annoyance and failure point since the brand’s transition to what it calls a “butterfly” key switch mechanism, which resulted in very shallow keys that had a failure rate so high, Apple was forced to establish a special repair program. The 16-inch MacBook Pro, however, returns to a tried-and-true “scissor” mechanism, the standard for most non-Apple laptops. In addition, the 16-inch MacBook also brings back a physical escape key, a luxury that was missing from the top tier models since the introduction of the Touch Bar in 2016, a relief for many coders who make more heavy use of the key than the average user.
The new 16-incher comes at a high price: $2,300 for the cheapest model, and up to $6,100 when tricked out with perks like AMD Radeon Pro 5500M graphics with 8GB of GDDR6, 64GB of RAM and 8TB of SSD storage. Whatever loadout you choose, it is available right now.
The best way to catch up on the day’s most important product releases and stories. Read the Story
