Apple loaned me the $1,799 Core i5 version, which is a much better upgrade overall and not as much of a handful as the more powerful (and expensive) 16-inch MacBook Pro. If you're like me and are frequently plugging dongles and hubs into your laptop, you use it for some video and photo editing, and some very light gaming, I can recommend the MacBook Pro model I've been using. Still, these two options are the way to go for most people. I'd say the only reason to get the $1,299 Air is if you hate the digital strip just above the keyboard of the Pro model (the Touch Bar) and would prefer to have physical keys there, which, fair. Why not the $1,299 MacBook Air, which we previously recommended? Because the Pro has a brighter, more color-accurate screen, and the battery life and physical weight differences between the Air and the Pro are negligible. If you need a little more oomph for the few dozen browser tabs you'll have open for work, get the base MacBook Pro ($1,299).

If you mostly just use the web browser but want an Apple laptop, nab the base model MacBook Air ($999). The MacBook Pro 13-Inch is the latest Apple laptop model to get the updated (and improved) keyboard. Its battery life is just OK, the aluminum body gets warm quite often, and the configurations of the machine that are truly useful are too expensive. But not everything about the newest MacBook Pro is rosy. The 13-incher is not as big and bulky as the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and it has more power (and more ports) than the MacBook Air. And like Goldilocks with the third bowl of porridge, the last machine to get a refresh in the MacBook lineup is my favorite. In fact, with this machine's release, Apple no longer sells a laptop with the butterfly switch keyboard-the company has been phasing the design out with each new MacBook. With the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, the butterfly plague has finally been eradicated. The faulty keys eroded consumer trust and sparked several class-action lawsuits plus, Apple's fixes were more like treatments than a cure. Apple tweaked the design in following iterations, but the damage to the MacBook's reputation was done. It was an attempt on Apple's part to slim the MacBook even further and make the machine that much more portable, but the mechanism was so fragile that a single mote of dust could disable a key completely. The trouble all began with the butterfly keyboard switch that debuted in 2015. The past five years haven't been kind to Apple's laptops.

2015 macbook pro 13 inch review