13' Retina Macbook Pro Review - Force Touch Trackpad (2015)

**Upgrading Storage Speed: Is it Worth It?**

When considering whether to upgrade your storage speed on your notebook, there are several factors to take into account. Drive speeds like those found in recent generations can significantly impact workflow performance. However, even with a high-speed drive, the rest of the notebook's components may still bottleneck your workflow, making it unnecessary to upgrade just for storage speed.

This was put to the test when we compared two notebooks from this generation and their base model from mid-2014. Geekbench benchmarks revealed that everything was "just a little bit faster" than expected. While this may seem like a good thing, in reality, the difference is not as significant as one might hope. For instance, battery life remained almost unchanged between the two generations.

**Battery Life: A Mixed Bag**

One area where we did see some improvement was in battery life when playing games. Normally, gaming performance on notebooks would result in significantly shorter battery life due to the high power draw of the graphics card. However, both of these notebooks managed to last over two and a half hours while playing games, with the fan never coming on once during testing. This is attributed to the relatively underpowered GPU and the efficient cooling system, which kept the laptop's temperature in check.

This suggests that the battery life may be extended due to the reduced power draw of the graphics card, rather than any significant improvements in overall efficiency. However, this does make the notebook more playable for longer periods without needing to recharge. Other areas, such as gaming performance, were found to be very similar between the two notebooks.

**Gaming Performance: Integrated Graphics**

One of the most notable aspects of these laptops is their use of integrated graphics, specifically the Intel 6100. While this may seem like a drawback for gamers, we found that it was still possible to achieve playable frame rates at high settings. At 1080p, we were getting around 30 frames per second in games like Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm. Dropping to low graphics settings brought the frame rate up to around 40-50 frames per second.

This means that while gaming performance may not be as smooth as with dedicated graphics cards, it is still capable of delivering a decent experience for casual gamers or those who don't require extremely high frame rates.

**The Best Value: Is This Notebook Worth It?**

When considering whether to upgrade to one of these notebooks, the base model appears to offer the best value. For $300, you get a range of impressive specs, including a 3.1 GHz processor and 16 GB of RAM. While this may not result in significantly faster performance or battery life compared to higher-end models, it is still an excellent option for those on a budget.

For Mac users, however, there is little to be gained by upgrading to one of these notebooks. The specs have been largely unchanged from previous generations, and the features are unlikely to make a significant difference in everyday use. However, for those who have never used a MacBook before, this could still be an attractive option due to its affordability.

**Final Thoughts**

In conclusion, while these notebooks offer some impressive specs and features, they may not be as groundbreaking as one might hope. The trackpad is certainly a step in the right direction, but it's not a game-changer for those who are used to traditional trackpads. For gaming enthusiasts or those who require extremely high frame rates, there are likely better options available.

However, for those on a budget or looking for a reliable notebook without breaking the bank, these models offer an excellent value proposition. With a focus on portability and everyday use, they are well-suited for students, professionals, or anyone in need of a dependable laptop that won't put a dent in their wallet.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey how's it going guys this is dave2d and this is my review of the 2015 13-inch retina macbook pro and like every other year apple just did a spec bump this year just to refresh it but they also added a track pad to it a new force touch trackpad so we'll get into that so i actually have two of them here the base model which comes in at 300 bucks and the fastest one that they offer which comes in at two thousand bucks and yeah let's get right to the review apple always packs up their stuff nicely when you open the lid the notebook is sitting there and underneath is the ac adapter so the two models i have are the base model which is a 2.7 gigahertz i5 8 gigs of ram and 128 gig ssd and their second notebook which is their top end one is a 3.1 gigahertz i5 16 gigs of ram and a 512 gig ssd both of these are broadwell cpus and they're both two core the top of the notebook is aluminum and as always that apple logo lights up when you lift up the screen the bottom of the notebook is the same aluminum finish intake vents on the left and right and the speakers also project sound through these and there's rubber feet that aren't very grippy but they just kind of protect the bottom from being scratched on the left side we have a spot for the magsafe 2. two thunderbolt 2 ports that can be used for mini display a usb 3 a headphone jack and two microphone holes and on the right side we have an sd card slot an hdmi jack and another usb 3. and if you've never owned a macbook before just keep in mind that your sd cards are going to jut out quite a bit when you put them in so you don't want to leave them in there during transportation so you can connect up to two 4k displays but if you want to get 60 hertz you got to use the mini display port if you use the hdmi you're only going to get 30 hertz for 4k the keyboards and macbooks are always great and this one's no exception backlighting is good the travel is good and it always feels spacious i've always been very partial to their keyboards and new for this year is the force touch trackpad so instead of a button underneath the traditional glass trackpad the force touch uses pressure sensors underneath the glass that detects how hard you're pressing and when you press hard enough there's a tiny little motor there that vibrates to let you know that you've clicked apple's done a great job with this because the vibration actually feels just like a regular click so there's no button that you're actually clicking it just simulates what it feels like when a button is clicked and the force touch also gives you a whole bunch of options and features so the first thing i noticed on a traditional trackpad when you press near the top of the trackpad like close to the keyboard it becomes harder to press just because the way that's mounted it's kind of like a hinge there right but on the new four stars trackpad you can click anywhere you want on the trackpad and it'll always register a click you can also hear the difference in sound a traditional trackpad is a little bit louder but in terms of how it feels it's actually really similar so on the old trackpad when you press it down it squishes down a little bit to hit a button underneath but on the new four such trackpad it doesn't press down nearly as much but it does still move just to measure how hard you're pressing in case you were wondering like i was the new force touch trackpad can detect clicks just as quickly as the old one i don't know when you'd ever want to click this fast but just know that you can so in the settings you can adjust the amount of pressure you need to activate a click so when you have a higher setting for click pressure you actually have a louder click as well as a more tactile click so if you press enough it'll register as a click but if you press even harder it'll register as something called a force click so there are a lot of things you can do with the force click such as renaming things previewing things finding definitions for words you can even force click dates or times and set up an event in the calendar and because this new trackpad has pressure sensitivity in some apps you can do some really primitive drawings and your signature can now have some stroke thickness i think over time developers will be able to make better use of the force clicking and pressure sensitivity but all of these things could be done with keyboard shortcuts which i think was even faster than using a force click but there are some things like previewing websites in safari you would have to have gotten an add-on like hover c or hover zoom but in general i don't think it's that useful i definitely prefer it over a regular trackpad but the user experience remains pretty similar it has the same ips display as before 2560 by 1600 good contrast it has accurate colors it's always a good time with these macbook screens and you can dim it down completely if you need to hide what you're doing and if you notice there's a reflection there i think it's a combination of the anti-reflective coating as well as the screen brightness so even though these are glossy screens the reflections aren't as noticeable speakers are unchanged they're pretty loud this is what they sound like okay fan noise when this thing's idle it's silent 20 decibels standard stuff now remember i have two of them here the 2.7 gigahertz has a reasonably loud fan when it kicks in 35 decibels but the 3.1 gigahertz model is significantly louder it comes in at almost 40 decibels when you hear them side by side the difference is really noticeable and so if we look at the thermals we'll see why so i have the fluoro thermal camera again for this on the left is the 2.7 gigahertz base model and on the right is the 3.1 gigahertz top end model now i never would have noticed this without a thermal camera but the exhaust vent seems to only be on the right hand side but as you can see the 3.1 gigahertz model is a bit hotter than the base model which is probably why the fan is so much louder granted these fans don't come on often but it is something to keep in mind if you really don't like fan noise okay so drive speeds both of these run pci express ssds which are super fast to begin with on the left we have the 2.7 gigahertz base model and on the right we have the 3.1 gigahertz model with a 512 gig drive now both of the read speeds are super fast at like 12 1300 but if you look at the write speeds the 512 gig drive is over double the speed of the base model now both of these are incredibly fast drives it is nice to have fast drives but i'm not sure when you would need drive speeds like this on this notebook because even if your workflow can utilize drive speeds like this the rest of this notebook is going to bottleneck your workflow something fierce so i don't think it's important to upgrade your storage just for the drive speed here's some geekbench benchmarks comparing two notebooks from this generation and the base model from mid-2014 so as expected everything's just a little bit faster okay let's talk battery life so this year it's running a broadwell cpu which is supposed to be a little bit more energy efficient than previous generation but for whatever reason i'm getting almost the exact same battery life as last year's model so they advertised 10 hours for regular use and i mean that's just web use and 12 hours for watching movies off of itunes and i'm getting eight and a half hours of regular web use and that's with screen at almost full brightness and i'm getting just under nine hours for watching movies off the drive so again i'm not sure if this is just my usage pattern is a little different from it was last year when i was testing this model or maybe i'm just you know doing something wrong but i did run down the battery three times over the past week just to kind of test this out now there is something that's kind of interesting normally when i do gaming performance on a notebook i do it all on battery so i charge it up to full i plug in my mouse and i crank up screen brightness and i just go to town on this thing now for whatever reason this notebook both of them have incredibly long battery life when you're playing games and i have my theories but let me just explain so normally on every other notebook i've ever tested i'm normally getting like an hour sometimes a little bit less sometimes slightly more when i'm playing games and that's just the standard because you're running some fairly intensive stuff and battery just drains quickly but i got over two and a half hours on both of these notebooks when i was playing games and the weird thing is okay my theory is that because this thing is relatively underpowered like the gpu the fan never comes on it literally literally never came on once on both of these notebooks when i was playing computer games so i was playing heroes of the storm and i played a little bit of counter-strike and the fan never came on not even once so maybe that's why the battery life is is extended the way it is i'm not sure but in any case that's cool stuff and of course i played a lot of games on this thing because i love video games see these things are running integrated graphics which is the intel 6100 it's better than i expected but it's not great so right off the bat you can't play it at native reds you're going to get like 10 15 frames per second now at 1080p for dota 2 and heroes of the storm you're going to get about 30 frames per second at high settings it's playable but it's not buttery so when you drop this down to low graphics settings you're getting about 40 maybe 50 frames per second i think at that point it's very playable but if you're competitive and you need higher frame rates you're gonna have to go into lower resolutions but i found the gaming to be reasonable at 1080p and i also found gaming performance to be very similar between the two notebooks at best the 3.1 gigahertz model with 16 gigs of ram was only getting about 5 more frames per second on average nothing crazy okay so some final thoughts i think the best value for this notebook lies in the base model for 300 bucks for the tech you're getting for the specs you're getting i think it's a good buy if you're a mac user if you've never used mac before i don't think there's any features in this generation that should make you know a non-macbook owner run out immediately to get one i think that everything has been a spec bump it's a vanilla spec bump but vanilla is pretty nice but if you're expecting a really big increase in performance or battery life or if you're hoping that maybe the trackpad is going to give you a brand new user experience i think you might be disappointed it's a very cool trackpad i think it's a step in the right direction but it's definitely not a game changer uh but yeah i hope you guys liked the review if you liked it give me some thumbs and if you loved it give me some subs and i'm also pretty close to 2000 subs i will be doing a giveaway when i hit 2000 i'm trying to get some pretty cool stuff for you guys but i'm still working on it um but yeah it's been nice i'll see you guys next timehey how's it going guys this is dave2d and this is my review of the 2015 13-inch retina macbook pro and like every other year apple just did a spec bump this year just to refresh it but they also added a track pad to it a new force touch trackpad so we'll get into that so i actually have two of them here the base model which comes in at 300 bucks and the fastest one that they offer which comes in at two thousand bucks and yeah let's get right to the review apple always packs up their stuff nicely when you open the lid the notebook is sitting there and underneath is the ac adapter so the two models i have are the base model which is a 2.7 gigahertz i5 8 gigs of ram and 128 gig ssd and their second notebook which is their top end one is a 3.1 gigahertz i5 16 gigs of ram and a 512 gig ssd both of these are broadwell cpus and they're both two core the top of the notebook is aluminum and as always that apple logo lights up when you lift up the screen the bottom of the notebook is the same aluminum finish intake vents on the left and right and the speakers also project sound through these and there's rubber feet that aren't very grippy but they just kind of protect the bottom from being scratched on the left side we have a spot for the magsafe 2. two thunderbolt 2 ports that can be used for mini display a usb 3 a headphone jack and two microphone holes and on the right side we have an sd card slot an hdmi jack and another usb 3. and if you've never owned a macbook before just keep in mind that your sd cards are going to jut out quite a bit when you put them in so you don't want to leave them in there during transportation so you can connect up to two 4k displays but if you want to get 60 hertz you got to use the mini display port if you use the hdmi you're only going to get 30 hertz for 4k the keyboards and macbooks are always great and this one's no exception backlighting is good the travel is good and it always feels spacious i've always been very partial to their keyboards and new for this year is the force touch trackpad so instead of a button underneath the traditional glass trackpad the force touch uses pressure sensors underneath the glass that detects how hard you're pressing and when you press hard enough there's a tiny little motor there that vibrates to let you know that you've clicked apple's done a great job with this because the vibration actually feels just like a regular click so there's no button that you're actually clicking it just simulates what it feels like when a button is clicked and the force touch also gives you a whole bunch of options and features so the first thing i noticed on a traditional trackpad when you press near the top of the trackpad like close to the keyboard it becomes harder to press just because the way that's mounted it's kind of like a hinge there right but on the new four stars trackpad you can click anywhere you want on the trackpad and it'll always register a click you can also hear the difference in sound a traditional trackpad is a little bit louder but in terms of how it feels it's actually really similar so on the old trackpad when you press it down it squishes down a little bit to hit a button underneath but on the new four such trackpad it doesn't press down nearly as much but it does still move just to measure how hard you're pressing in case you were wondering like i was the new force touch trackpad can detect clicks just as quickly as the old one i don't know when you'd ever want to click this fast but just know that you can so in the settings you can adjust the amount of pressure you need to activate a click so when you have a higher setting for click pressure you actually have a louder click as well as a more tactile click so if you press enough it'll register as a click but if you press even harder it'll register as something called a force click so there are a lot of things you can do with the force click such as renaming things previewing things finding definitions for words you can even force click dates or times and set up an event in the calendar and because this new trackpad has pressure sensitivity in some apps you can do some really primitive drawings and your signature can now have some stroke thickness i think over time developers will be able to make better use of the force clicking and pressure sensitivity but all of these things could be done with keyboard shortcuts which i think was even faster than using a force click but there are some things like previewing websites in safari you would have to have gotten an add-on like hover c or hover zoom but in general i don't think it's that useful i definitely prefer it over a regular trackpad but the user experience remains pretty similar it has the same ips display as before 2560 by 1600 good contrast it has accurate colors it's always a good time with these macbook screens and you can dim it down completely if you need to hide what you're doing and if you notice there's a reflection there i think it's a combination of the anti-reflective coating as well as the screen brightness so even though these are glossy screens the reflections aren't as noticeable speakers are unchanged they're pretty loud this is what they sound like okay fan noise when this thing's idle it's silent 20 decibels standard stuff now remember i have two of them here the 2.7 gigahertz has a reasonably loud fan when it kicks in 35 decibels but the 3.1 gigahertz model is significantly louder it comes in at almost 40 decibels when you hear them side by side the difference is really noticeable and so if we look at the thermals we'll see why so i have the fluoro thermal camera again for this on the left is the 2.7 gigahertz base model and on the right is the 3.1 gigahertz top end model now i never would have noticed this without a thermal camera but the exhaust vent seems to only be on the right hand side but as you can see the 3.1 gigahertz model is a bit hotter than the base model which is probably why the fan is so much louder granted these fans don't come on often but it is something to keep in mind if you really don't like fan noise okay so drive speeds both of these run pci express ssds which are super fast to begin with on the left we have the 2.7 gigahertz base model and on the right we have the 3.1 gigahertz model with a 512 gig drive now both of the read speeds are super fast at like 12 1300 but if you look at the write speeds the 512 gig drive is over double the speed of the base model now both of these are incredibly fast drives it is nice to have fast drives but i'm not sure when you would need drive speeds like this on this notebook because even if your workflow can utilize drive speeds like this the rest of this notebook is going to bottleneck your workflow something fierce so i don't think it's important to upgrade your storage just for the drive speed here's some geekbench benchmarks comparing two notebooks from this generation and the base model from mid-2014 so as expected everything's just a little bit faster okay let's talk battery life so this year it's running a broadwell cpu which is supposed to be a little bit more energy efficient than previous generation but for whatever reason i'm getting almost the exact same battery life as last year's model so they advertised 10 hours for regular use and i mean that's just web use and 12 hours for watching movies off of itunes and i'm getting eight and a half hours of regular web use and that's with screen at almost full brightness and i'm getting just under nine hours for watching movies off the drive so again i'm not sure if this is just my usage pattern is a little different from it was last year when i was testing this model or maybe i'm just you know doing something wrong but i did run down the battery three times over the past week just to kind of test this out now there is something that's kind of interesting normally when i do gaming performance on a notebook i do it all on battery so i charge it up to full i plug in my mouse and i crank up screen brightness and i just go to town on this thing now for whatever reason this notebook both of them have incredibly long battery life when you're playing games and i have my theories but let me just explain so normally on every other notebook i've ever tested i'm normally getting like an hour sometimes a little bit less sometimes slightly more when i'm playing games and that's just the standard because you're running some fairly intensive stuff and battery just drains quickly but i got over two and a half hours on both of these notebooks when i was playing games and the weird thing is okay my theory is that because this thing is relatively underpowered like the gpu the fan never comes on it literally literally never came on once on both of these notebooks when i was playing computer games so i was playing heroes of the storm and i played a little bit of counter-strike and the fan never came on not even once so maybe that's why the battery life is is extended the way it is i'm not sure but in any case that's cool stuff and of course i played a lot of games on this thing because i love video games see these things are running integrated graphics which is the intel 6100 it's better than i expected but it's not great so right off the bat you can't play it at native reds you're going to get like 10 15 frames per second now at 1080p for dota 2 and heroes of the storm you're going to get about 30 frames per second at high settings it's playable but it's not buttery so when you drop this down to low graphics settings you're getting about 40 maybe 50 frames per second i think at that point it's very playable but if you're competitive and you need higher frame rates you're gonna have to go into lower resolutions but i found the gaming to be reasonable at 1080p and i also found gaming performance to be very similar between the two notebooks at best the 3.1 gigahertz model with 16 gigs of ram was only getting about 5 more frames per second on average nothing crazy okay so some final thoughts i think the best value for this notebook lies in the base model for 300 bucks for the tech you're getting for the specs you're getting i think it's a good buy if you're a mac user if you've never used mac before i don't think there's any features in this generation that should make you know a non-macbook owner run out immediately to get one i think that everything has been a spec bump it's a vanilla spec bump but vanilla is pretty nice but if you're expecting a really big increase in performance or battery life or if you're hoping that maybe the trackpad is going to give you a brand new user experience i think you might be disappointed it's a very cool trackpad i think it's a step in the right direction but it's definitely not a game changer uh but yeah i hope you guys liked the review if you liked it give me some thumbs and if you loved it give me some subs and i'm also pretty close to 2000 subs i will be doing a giveaway when i hit 2000 i'm trying to get some pretty cool stuff for you guys but i'm still working on it um but yeah it's been nice i'll see you guys next time\n"