Apple new MacBook review (early 2015)

Not since Steve Jobs pulled the original MacBook Air out of that envelope have we been so impressed and astounded by a new laptop, as we were when we set eyes on the new 12in MacBook. When it announced the MacBook alongside the Apple Watch, Apple said that it was the smallest and lightest laptop that it had ever made, but it’s not until you get one in your hands that you realise what this means.

Thanks to some clever construction there’s barely any depth to the laptop at all, with the thickest part measuring just 13.1mm. Then there’s the weight: just 920g, which is just shy of 300g less than the 11-inch MacBook Air. These measurements add up to mean one thing: you can carry this laptop around with you all day every day and barely even feel it. That’s pretty incredible.

Build quality and design

Getting down to this size hasn’t forced Apple to compromise on build quality either. The chassis, as we’ve come to expect from Apple, is still aluminium, creating an air of strength and lightness, as well as luxury. Apple has finally managed to integrate the wireles antennas into the case, meaning there’s no need for the lump of plastic around the hinge, and even though the screen is just 1.8mm thick, the aluminium rear protects it with only the slightest amount of flex. This laptop will survive being carried around practically constantly.

It’s great to see Apple make the new MacBook available in three colours: space grey, silver and gold. It means that you can now match the colour of your computer to your iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus or iPad Air 2. All of the colours have their own merits, but it’s the gold one that really does it for us.

One of the downsides of such a small case is that there’s barely any room for ports. In fact, Apple provides exactly two: a 3.5mm headphone port and the new USB-C. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but USB-C is really clever and is clearly the future for devices such as this. As well a doing all of the things that we’ve come to love about USB, the port also allows the laptop to be charged and works as a video output. The new connector is reversible and smaller than the regular USB-A, which makes it easier to plug in and means that it takes up less space.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that to do a lot of the things you’d want to do, you currently need adaptor cables. With no SD card slot there’s no simple way of getting photos off a digital camera, and you won’t even be able to use it with Apple’s own Thunderbolt Display. Apple sells an adaptor that has one USB C port, so you can keep charging, plus HDMI and standard USB outputs, but it costs a massive £65. Even the basic Apple USB-C to standard USB cable costs £15. If you just buy the USB-C to USB-A adaptor, it means that you have to unplug your computer from mains power just to use a regular USB device. Ideally, two USB-C ports would have been nice, although it’s a struggle to work out where Apple could have put the second port.

Things will improve: more USB-C devices will be available soon and, as it’s an open standard, you’re not limited to using Apple peripherals, so you should be able to get cheaper third-party alternatives. 

Keyboard

One of the big design issues with the new MacBook was fitting in the keyboard, with traditional models requiring more depth. Apple has ditched the old-style scissor mechanism underneath the keys, lets keys wobble when they’re hit on the edge, in favour of a new butterfly mechanism, which makes the keys more stable and reduces travel. In fact, there’s barely any travel on the keys at all and they move just a fraction when hit.

While the travel has been reduced, the size of the keys has been increased by 40%, with the keyboard stretching from edge to edge. Effectively, you’re getting a full-sized keyboard on a tiny computer. Each key is backlit by an individual LED, so typing in dark rooms isn’t a problem. It’s a weird sensation when you first start typing, as it simply feels different and the lack of travel takes a while to get used to. In this case, different isn’t bad. After using the MacBook for a couple of hours, we soon got used to the way that the new keys work and were typing at full speed in no time. It helps that there’s plenty of feedback, so it’s obvious when you’ve successfully hit a key.

Trackpad

There’s no room for a traditional touchpad either, so Apple has used one of its new Force Touch Trackpads, as introduced with the 13-inch Macbook Pro with Retina Display. This has a haptic feedback engine that uses lateral motion to trick you into thinking you’ve made a physical click, rather than an electronic one. It’s amazingly clever and you’d swear that you were actually clicking it.

It also has four pressure sensors which pick up how hard you’re pressing, so you can use the new Force Touch gestures: you press once for a regular click and then press a little harder to activate a Force Click. It’s surprisingly useful once you start using it, popping up previews in Safari and Finder, for example. There’s an open API for developers to use, so expect Force Touch to become a bigger part of OS X very quickly. A setting within System Preferences lets you adjust the click sensitivity, which is great as you can tighten everything up if you’re pretty forceful when you click.

In general use the glass Touchpad is still one of the best. It’s extremely responsive and its multi-touch gestures, make using the MacBook with OS X 10.10 Yosemite a few steps ahead of any Windows laptop.

Apple’s MacBook Air screens are starting to look a bit old now, but the 12in screen on the new MacBook is one of the best we’ve seen. Our colour calibrator measured the display at a dark 0.34cd/m2 black level, and with a maximum brightness of 375.15cd/m2, which makes it easy to see in most lighting situations. We measured colour accuracy at 92.4% of the sRGB colour gamut, which while not perfect, pushed this display towards the top of the laptop table. Only Dell’s top-end laptops were able to beat it for colour accuracy, but you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference with the naked eye.

Our general impressions backed this up, with the display appearing bright and vibrant, with excellent viewing angles. As will all thin displays, there’s a tiny amount of backlight leak around the sides of the screen, but you have to look hard for this and it’s generally not visible in day-to-day use.

Everything looks pin-sharp, too, thanks to the 2,304×1,440 resolution. As with all Retina-class MacBooks, the MacBook uses a scaled resolution, so it acts like a 1,280×800 display in its default mode, only everything looks sharper. We found that changing the display to the More Space setting, which makes it act like a 1,440×900 display, made more sense: everything became a little bit smaller, but the display felt a lot less cramped.

Performance

Apple has used Intel’s Core M processors in its line-up, as they’re extremely power efficient and don’t require any cooling fans, allowing for the thin case. Our base-level model shipped with a 1.1GHz model, which can Turbo Boost to 2.4GHz. The processor used is actually a Core M-5Y31, which is nominally a 900MHz chip; however, Intel allows its manufacturers to increase or decrease the amount of power the chip draws, depending on the cooling available, to boost clock speeds. In this case, Apple has increased the TDP from 4.5W to 6W, upping the base clock speed to 1.1GHz. Apple sells a second version of the laptop with a 1.2GHz chip (2.6GHz Turbo Boost) and both models can be upgraded to a 1.3GHz CPU (2.9GHz Turbo Boost) for £200 and £120 respectively. All models ship with a healthy 8GB of RAM, which is the maximum for this model.

In our new 4K benchmarks, the new MacBook scored a respectable 26 overall. It did fairly well in our image and video editing tests, with scores of 30 and 33, but our multi-tasking test pushed the computer to its limits, with a score of 20. This shows that this laptop is better suited to running a single task, and it’s not ideal as your only computer. By comparison, the new 13-inch MacBook Air scored 45 overall; the 13-inch MacBook Pro was more powerful still, managing 56 overall. This shows that the regular Intel Broadwell mobile processors are a lot more capable.

Battery life

Inside the laptop are batteries, lots of batteries. They’ve been cut, shaped and tiered on top of each other in order to fit inside the case. It’s worth all of the effort that Apple has gone to, as we’ve lost count of the number of very tiny laptops that have been hampered by their battery life. Not so with the MacBook; it lasted 12h 30m in our battery test, which plays a 10m video every three hours, as well as scrolling through a text document. This kind of score shows that this is a laptop that will easily take you through a working day without having to go near a power socket.

Storage

Apple has used PCIe-based flash storage in the MacBook, with 256GB and 512GB options available. We found it to be reasonably fast, managing 370MB/s write speeds and 636MB/s read speeds in our tests; slower than the new MacBook Pro, but still extremely quick.

Conclusion

It’s hard not to fall in love with the new MacBook. It’s a staggeringly-brilliant bit of engineering and doesn’t compromise on usability, even though it is incredibly tiny. On the face of things, the starting price of £1,049 seems fairly expensive, but it’s £30 less than the equivalent 13-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, and only £70 more than the 11-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. Given the new MacBook’s better display and lower weight, we’d definitely buy it over either of the Air models. Performance is the big issue for this laptop: it’s got enough grunt for simple tasks, making it a good choice as a second computer for working on the move. If you just want one laptop that does everything, however, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is still the model for you.

If all of these models sound a bit rich for you, our best laptop guide will have a suitable alternative.