You might have already watched my 13-inch MacBook Pro unboxing and speedtest vs the 12-inch MacBook. Well, this is the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. Again, this is really confusing for Apple this year but this is the long awaited MacBook Pro with that infamous OLED touch bar right above the keyboard. The unboxing experience is basically identical to the other MacBook Pros so if you want a more detailed unboxing, make sure to check out the link in the description below to check out the unboxing of the original 13-inch MacBook Pro 2016 model.
Inside the box, you get your MacBook Pro, the charger brick, the USB-C to USB-C cable, and a pamphlet full of your manuals and your infamous Apple stickers. The only way to distinguish that you have the MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar on the outside of things is the two extra USB Type-C ports on the right side. The normal 13-inch MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar only has two USB-C ports on the left side, while the OLED touch bar have USB-C ports on the right side as well. But other than that, the MacBook Pro looks indistinguishable to the other MacBook Pro without the OLED touch bar, same size, basically the same weight, same dimensions, and the same colors in Space Gray and the original Apple silver. Though when you open it up, you do see quite a different story than the normal 13-inch MacBook Pro, you do see that OLED Touch Script right above the keyboard, which basically lights up as soon as you turn it on. And once you set it up, you can actually unlock your MacBook Pro using Touch ID, very similar to your iPhone, iPad and a couple other Apple devices.
My first few hours with the MacBook Pro with the OLED Touch Bar has been a little bit clumsy. It’s a little strange to get used to but it’s very fluid and it’s very touch friendly. It basically feels like you’re using an iPad sliver right above the MacBook Pro’s keyboard. The very interesting thing about the Touch Bar is it’s very dynamic, depending on which application you’re in. So if you’re in Messages and you have your emojis icons. If you’re in Safari, you have all your tabs and web functions. And also, the cool thing I noticed is when you’re playing a video, you actually get a video line scrubber taking away the clumsiness on the screen and having all of your scrubbing controls, pause, play, fast forward, rewind controls all built into the Touch Bar instead of having them displayed on your screen.
Spec-wise, this is a base line MacBook Pro 13-inch with Touch Bar. So you get a 2.9GHz Intel-core i5 processor, 8GB of slightly faster RAM than the other MacBook Pros. This one’s rated at 2133MHz and it’s 8GB of RAM there. And you also have a slight bump in Intel graphics. It is the iris graphics 5550 with about 1.5 GB of RAM. With the Touch Bar and the extra USB Type-C ports, you actually get a slightly smaller battery than the 13-inch MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar so that will definitely cost some concern for some battery life. I have heard some reports of really bad battery life of about 5-6 hours maximum on these new MacBook Pros with Touch Bars. I’ll definitely let you know how that does in my full review of this new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.
