Apple has just announced the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. It looks the same (which isn’t a bad thing) but the real changes lie underneath. It’s available to order today, starting from MYR5,599, and MYR5,169 for education.
What’s new
Following the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air released in March, the latest 13-inch MacBook Pro gets the new Magic Keyboard featuring an improved scissor-mechanism with 1mm of key travel. The keyboard also features a physical Esc key, along with Touch Bar and Touch ID.
Apple has upped storage on the new ‘book, with standard storage starting at 256GB, double the amount of the previous generation. This goes all the way up to 1TB, although you can custom-configure one with up to 4TB. The SSDs are superfast too, with sequential read speeds of up to 3GB/s.
Moving on, the new 13-inch line-up now offers up to 10th Gen Intel Core quad-core processors with Turbo Boost speeds of up to 4.1GHz. Apple claims the new chip is 2.8x faster than a dual-core 13-inch MacBook Pro of old. I believe them. There’s also integrated Intel Iris Plus Graphics that deliver up to 80 per cent faster graphics performance over the previous generation. The new graphics enables you to connect to the Pro Display XDR at full 6K resolution.
What’s baffling is that the base 13-inch MacBook Pro model still comes with an 8th Gen Intel Core processor.
Thankfully, Apple bounces back by doubling memory on the new notebooks. 16GB of 3733MHz RAM comes as standard, and for the first time, you can arm the 13-inch MacBook Pro with up to 32GB of memory. It will cost you a pretty penny, but trust me, it’s worth it.
What’s unchanged
Introduced in 2018, the Apple T2 Security Chip is Apple’s custom-designed second-generation silicon, which checks that software loaded during the boot process has not been tampered. It also provides on-the-fly data encryption for everything stored on the SSD. The T2 also protects Touch ID information.
Aesthetically, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the same, much-loved aluminium unibody that’s offered in Space Grey or Silver. It retains the Retina display, which delivers more than 4 million pixels, 500 nits of brightness, and support for the P3 wide colour gamut. The bezels are the same as of old, unfortunately, no super slim bezels found on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Apple has also kept the same sensible stereo speaker setup as its predecessor.
The two base 8th Gen Intel models offers two Thunderbolt 3 ports while the two 10th Gen Intel models offers double the number.
The 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro runs macOS Catalina. Each purchase of a new MacBook Pro comes with one year of Apple TV+ on the Apple TV app for free.
Apple has even kept the price point the same–USD1,299.
Pricing and availability
The 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro starts from MYR5,599, and MYR5,169 for education. It will be coming soon to Malaysia. For full technical specifications, configure-to-order options, and accessories, visit apple.com/my/macbook-pro.
TIP: Here’s how to get education pricing on Apple products.
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