Apple MacBook Pro 16 2019 Laptop Review: A convincing Core i9-9880H and Radeon Pro 5500M powered multimedia laptop

[Redaktion]

A thicker case, proven keyboard design and better cooling that is the latest MacBook Pro in a nutshell. It seems that Apple has finally listened to its users and the press by optimising its largest high-end laptop for professionals. We put the flagship model through its paces in this detailed review.


https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-16-2019-Laptop-Review-A-convincing-Core-i9-9880H-and-Radeon-Pro-5500M-powered-multimedia-laptop.445902.0.html

[Jinny]

Splendid review. 
I'm pondering on buying it, and probably give a go soon.
It's great to see a functioning laptop from Apple after all those keyboard and thiness mayhem.

[Sat]

How is the text blurring/ghosting issue when scrolling? Some of us have been experiencing very jarring experience on our 16" MBP unfortunately. Esp. visible when it is white text on black background. I am comparing this with my 2014 MBP which is fantastic in this regard.

[Arda]

Any word on whether the thermal envelope allows the 2.4Ghz i9 processor to actually be faster than the 2.3Ghz processor?

[Zakhar]

For which I respect you very much, that you do not publish advertising "reviews" in the early days, but study the product as much time as you need. Thanks for the work.

[Archuk]

What about speakers popping. Have you tried scrolling videos, etc and did not get "pops"?

[Klaus Hinum]

So just looked into speaker popping again. When using the device normally I did not notice anything. Scrolling when playing Youtube music e.g. - nothing happens. Only when scrubbing the timeline (moving to a different timestep in the music video) I get sometimes a pop, but nothing that should damage the speakers.

Regarding blurring / ghosting, as you can see, the panel is not a very fast one, so there is definitely some blurring when scrolling fast. For me personally it's not noticeable, as I am not sensible to that.

Performance of the faster i9, good question. Depends also on the silicon lottery, but on average I think you should see slight improvements. However, the specs are only slightly better, so it wont be noticeable.

[Vladyslav]

Thanks for the review. But what about specviewperf test? Maybe even a comparison with xps/precision, ThinkPad x1/p1 to see the difference between laptop gtx/quadro/radeon pro drivers. Gonna buy MacBook anyway, but as I'm going to use some CAD and CAE software (I'm a student), would be glad to see the comparison.
BTW should I upgrade to 8gb vram?

[Maurice]

Great Review. This and anandtech are the best review sites by far. Thank you for the effort.

Can you please comment on the battery life under Windows?

I'm trying to decide between a fully speced Thinkpad P1 gen 2, or the MBP.
I would need to use Windows a lot for engineering software. I was wondering if it is worth it for the nicer Mac build quality and better resale value. Thanks

[asrttt]

I don't understand how this machine's keyboard is rated higher than Thinkpads' keyboards - which I believe are objectively better. I noticed even during the butterfly keyboards, notebookcheck for some reason tends to score macbooks' keyboards very generously.

[xpclient]

Ever since MacBooks ditched trackpad buttons, I don't even consider them serious machines. Oh well some people will still call the absolute worst as the absolute best.

[Teun]

Ah goddang PWM strikes back. Even at 100%  brightness it has PWM what a bad move of apple. All PWM ruins motion. The wait continuous.

[Klaus Hinum]

Thanks, SpecViewPerf comparison added, faster than the consumer cards and below the Quadro RTX as it should be.

Battery life under Windows is definitely not a strong suit of the MacBook as the optimizations are not really there and the dedicated GPU is always running.

Dedicated trackpad buttons btw are not missed at all in the Macs (in contrary to windows laptops) as the force touch works perfectly and the driver is that good that there are no problems with drag and drop or moving mouse cursor when pressing. You can also use the lower part with another finger as virtual buttons. Works fine!

I have nothing bad to say about the keyboard. Good defined key press, fast WPM test results, good layout (for Mac users), additional special keys via touchbar and now hopefully no reliability problems.

[xpclient]

Dedicated trackpad buttons btw are not missed at all in the Macs (in contrary to windows laptops) as the force touch works perfectly and the driver is that good that there are no problems with drag and drop or moving mouse cursor when pressing. You can also use the lower part with another finger as virtual buttons. Works fine!

I tend to use right click+drag a lot in web browsers for scrolling with extensions like scrollbar anywhere (for Chromium-based browsers) or scroll anywhere for Firefox. Can I right click and drag QUICKLY and accurately (right mouse button drag) like a 2 button mouse or touchpad with dedicated left/right buttons on a MacBook trackpad?

[S.Yu]

Ah, quite clearly, the performance at this price is a dealbreaker.
But this seems partially intentional, as "no throttling" means "potential for higher burst performance". Plugged in they should have allowed a much higher clock before the GPU overheats, it's not like short peaks in workload are never encountered in graphics.