MacBook Pro 2018 i9 Review Long Post

[ljeo332]

So I got a new laptop, I got the new 2018 15" MacBook Pro with i9 and 1tb storage. My first impressions, I love it hahaha, it's so light at 1.83Kgs and at 1.55cm thick, it is the thinnest and the lightest thing I have even tried to compute on.

Before I bought this laptop I thought I may have had problems with it, with regarding the keyboard and the throttling issues, but as of now these problems have been resolved before it arrived, for which I am thankful, with the throttling they released an update, sooner than I expected, and the keyboard they added a mesh that prevents dust and debris from stopping the keys from clicking, so I have no need for the cheap keyboard protector that I ordered when I got the laptop, and since I have used the new keyboard I have grown to love it, I don’t mind the low travel of the keys and maybe I prefer it with the way I type, which is having my left resting on the few keys I do type with it, and my right hand hovering over the keys I type. The clickiness of the keys is satisfying to me which I think is why I don’t mind the travel, the only key I don’t like the sound of is the space bar, I find it sounds a bit muted, but I think it will be something I can learn to ignore.

The ports, yes it uses USB-C, a port that is not that widely adopted yet as of now, but it is something I have prepared for when I ordered the machine, in which I bought the following, a single dongle to give me the ports of my last laptop, an ethernet dongle and a charger for my phone. These ports I believe is preparing me for the future and it does not bother me. I also bought an external GPU enclosure so I could plug in my graphics card from my main PC into it for when I am going to places that don’t allow me to bring my big PC along with me.

Performance, I have yet to test how well this compares to my big PC as I am not right beside it for this weekend but from preliminary benchmarks puts this laptop ahead, since it outperforms my i7 4790k PC by about 20% to 30% in CPU performance but not in GPU, that’s why I got the eGPU enclosure so if I were to lets say, go down to my mums I wouldn’t have to bring my big tower so this setup would make me more mobile, which I prefer at this time. This laptop has an i9 processor with 6 cores and 12 threads at a base clock of 2.9GHz and a turbo boost up to 4.8GHz, which on paper means it goes above my current CPU at 4.4GHz. Knowing Apple, they don’t have the chassis design to allow the CPU to reach the full speed as the thermals will not allow it given the thinness, but I have seen this machine go up to 4.6GHz at times when performing some benchmark renders using Cinebench and sustain that speed for at least 30 seconds, so this outperforms my pc in CPU performance greatly by spec sheet.

Graphics, I have yet to test this but it has nowhere near the same performance as my Nvidia GTX 980ti GPU in my PC, so there is no comparison of the AMD Radion 560X GPU in it other than it has 4GB of VRAM, which is close but not equivalent to the 6GB VRAM of the 980ti, so if I were to require extra speed in, lets say in gaming or rendering, I would use the 980ti in an eGPU to give me that performance I need with a 20% drop, given the limitations of USB-C Thunderbolt 3 at 40GB/s speeds, which in gaming won't affect me since I don’t play the likes of Counter-Strike or Call of Duty too often, but it gives me options for when I go on windows to play a few games when I'm bored with youtube.

The touch bar, I think it’s a gimic but I can see it being useful at times, for let's say navigating Word to find a setting or font, but it would mostly be unused bar from me changing volume or messing with the multimedia keys when I'm listening to music.

Trackpad, its massive, like bigger than my phone, which is the iPhone 8+, with that size you would think you would have problems with your hand changing where the cursor is but so far the palm rejection is phenomenal, and it’s the type that has no physical click, to which I have come accustomed to over the past two years with the mid 2015 MacBook Pro, for which I enjoyed using everytime I used it, even the gestures for macOS make good use of the trackpad so it has become second nature for me on the trackpad.

The Storage, there is not much to say about this, other than its fast, it’s a 1TB SSD directly connected to the PCI-E lanes to provide the fastest speeds possible at this current time and to my knowledge, the speeds I got are near 3GB/s reads speeds, and 2.5GB/s writes, which if I were to go looking for a file, lets say a 40GB video file to edit with Final Cut Pro, it would take about 14 second top load onto the app for use which is fast compared my big PC which only has a SATA 3 SSD with speeds at .6GB/s speeds, a big increase I say.

The sound, this machine sounds amazing, the clarity of the sound and the range it can produce means you can watch a Netflix movie and listen to some minute details in the sound and make them out without requiring an over-ear headphone setup. The sound on this would also be good as a speaker for a small house gathering, of about 3-4 people, maybe more but if my last laptop was anything to say it is really good at playing music at a loud volume.

macOS, It works well for me and when I first got it 2 years ago it was very quick for me to learn it, if I remember right about 2 hours, and it was a big jump from where I was coming from, Windows 10, but after the 2 years I have found that macOS is far better for a power user like myself to use, given its similar to Unix and many of the things I would use in the future in regard to IT would involve Linux distros, macOS is brilliant if you want to have a very user friendly User Interface and strong Command Line Interface backend if that’s your sort of thing. In the two years I have had little to no problems with the stability of the computer where the only issues came to my stupidity in deleting the wrong file, but that was a quick and easy fix with Time Machine, Apples included backup software which has been a lifesaver with college when files went missing or I made a mistake and I could go back to an earlier version of the machine just to get that file back.

The things I don’t really like, I don’t like the heat that this machine produces, its kind of an annoyance but it becomes a nice hand warmer if your hands were cold. I miss the glowing apple logo as its something that I expect from a Mac but I can grow to live with that change. The price, this machine was expensive, my mac cost me £3000, and that’s with an education discount, and this machine is not for the everyday person to get because of the price, it is aimed at prosumers, those who do daily editing and rendering.

Final notes, this machine is powerful, expensive and worth it to me, I love it, it will last me years and I plan to do a phase-out of me using the big PC for using the mac full time, and turn that PC into a home server to use as a backup and media storage, this would be useful for me as the current backup situation is far from ideal because it tends to delete old backups for an unknown reason which I hope to rectify with this server change.

Recommendations,
To buy: get if you love apple and all of there stuff, if you want a mobile render station for video editing for on the fly exporting, a mobile workstation and light gaming machine.

To not buy: if you hate apple, if the price is way too high for you, you don’t want to adopt USB-C, not a fan of macOS or you care about the controversy surrounding the i9 Thermo-throttling problems this laptop faced.

If I were to recommend a spec for you to buy if you are to get this I would suggest the following:

The base i7 hex core model 15” with 1tb SSD, if you are starting out with video editing, get the 16GB RAM option and only go for the 32GB if you edit with heavy production gear, if you are a student sign up with Unidays, that will get you a 10% discount on all Macs on the Apple store which will save you up to £400 on it, depending on the model you want to get.
 

[PlayStation 2]

I take it that you use Final Cut Pro to video edit?

Also, the looks of the laptop are just drop-dead fucking gorgeous. It looks like it's worth $3000+.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Just gonna leave this here

[PlayStation 2]

15 minutes ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

Just gonna leave this here

To be fair, he's got something with better specs than the MateBook, namely the different OS, the CPU and the GPU. I'm sure there's numerous boxes I could check off, though.

Granted, for $1700 and if you wanted a nice Windows laptop, that laptop doesn't seem like it'd be a bad choice.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Just now, Dan Castellaneta said:

To be fair, he's got something with better specs than the MateBook, namely the different OS, the CPU and the GPU. I'm sure there's numerous boxes I could check off, though.

Granted, for $1700 and if you wanted a nice Windows laptop, that laptop doesn't seem like it'd be a bad choice.

2

Yeah, I'm probably gonna pick up an XPS 15 2-in-1 cause my shitty old Dell Latitude is finally giving in and I need a new tablet anyway (Yes, I still use a tablet regularly)

[BuckGup]

20 hours ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

To be fair, he's got something with better specs than the MateBook, namely the different OS, the CPU and the GPU. I'm sure there's numerous boxes I could check off, though.

Granted, for $1700 and if you wanted a nice Windows laptop, that laptop doesn't seem like it'd be a bad choice.

It's only $1349 with a student discount on microsofts store

[PlayStation 2]

2 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

It's only $1349 with a student discount on microsofts store

Damn, really?

All the more appealing.

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

Damn, really?

All the more appealing.

Yeah except they are sold out until 9/4/18 at Microsoft but Newegg has stock and will price match the discount 

[PlayStation 2]

1 minute ago, BuckGup said:

Yeah except they are sold out until 9/4/18 at Microsoft but Newegg has stock and will price match the discount 

a month and a half what the fuck

[BuckGup]

Just now, Dan Castellaneta said:

a month and a half what the fuck

Yeah it really is the best laptop right now.

[PlayStation 2]

Just now, BuckGup said:

Yeah it really is the best laptop right now.

I'm sure if someone needs a good CPU with some GPU grunt in a thin shell it'd be perfect for them.

[kirashi]

On 7/28/2018 at 10:29 PM, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

Yeah, I'm probably gonna pick up an XPS 15 2-in-1 cause my shitty old Dell Latitude is finally giving in and I need a new tablet anyway (Yes, I still use a tablet regularly)

Good call. I mean, I'm obviously biased here since I own an XPS 15 9560, but even if I were a die hard Apple fan I'd have to respect the fact that Dell seems to have nailed the competitor to the MacBook "Pro" for the Windows / Linux users out there.