XSReviews

I picked up the 2021 MacBook Pro 16 for £1299 at Costco, following a £200 reduction for Black Friday. I opted for the larger 16-inch model as I already have a 13-inch MacBook Pro that I bought used for £300 last year. I’ve been incredibly impressed with that small machine, and it seems easily fast enough to do the writing, image editing and programming that I need to do day-to-day – so the MacBook Pro 16 seemed the only logical option to get a machine that was meaningfully different. The idea here is to get a machine that’s more comfortable to use for extended periods, with a larger and higher-resolution 120Hz display, more horsepower, better speakers, more ports and a larger trackpad. As well as being a better work machine, the MBP 16 seems like it should have sufficient horsepower to play some games (either native Mac Silicon efforts, such as the Ryujinx emulator, or Windows games running through the Game Porting Toolkit) and allow me to mess around with stuff like virtualisation.

First impressions have been almost uniformly positive. The only downside I’ve identified has been the size and weight of the machine, which was a bit more than I was expecting – it feels significantly heavier at 2.1kg than the 1.7kg Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro I tested earlier this year, despite being a similar 16.8mm in width. Of course, it also feels significantly more robust in its construction, so that’s not entirely unexpected.

From every other aspect, the MBP 16 has been lovely to use thus far. The design of the machine is top-notch, with the keyboard and trackpad being the best I’ve used on a laptop. (It feels very weird to not be compelled to plug in a mechanical keyboard to get some rapid typing done.) The screen is gorgeously bright, with good HDR performance and the addition of the (up to) 120Hz refresh rate has been a long time coming – all Apple products should get this, even the MacBook Air.

I’ve mostly been using the laptop with Photoshop, Word and web browsing, and of course the MBP has been completely responsive. In terms of more demanding workloads, emulation performance in Ryujinx has been good enough to run Switch titles, and running Windows 11 via Parallels feels quite streamlined too. It’s still disappointing to see what a small proportion of my Steam library is playable on Mac, but with Apple’s efforts with the GPT this is perhaps slowly changing. 

I’ll continue to record my thoughts on the MBP 16 as I continue to use it for work and play, so stay tuned I suppose! I know I’m not breaking any ground here, but this is still interesting enough for me to persist.