Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsAll Expectations Exceeded - All fears Assuaged
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2020
I really went back on forth on this Mac. I did not want to spend the money and would have gone with a 13 inch option, were it not for the butterfly keyboard issue. I even considered a Windows box, but since i use one in my job was very resistent to the idea.
In the end the 16 inch with its magic keyboard was my only real choice. These things are so expensive, but I did realize that it was replacing a 10 year old MacBook Pro that still worked, so I guess you get what you pay for. After shopping around I got a pretty good deal from an Apple authorized seller through Amazon (saved $300). I took the 16Gb i-9 quad core with the standard video memory, slightly higher end card, and a 1TB drive all for $2499. I wanted more RAM, but read that the solid state hard drive would make up the difference quite nicely; which appears to be true.
Okay, so how do I like it? I absolutely love this thing!!! It works so smoothly, so fast, and so well. No hang ups or lags, no glitches or little “we’ll fix that later” items. It’s powerful and easy to use. The keyboard feels a little different, but is not a bad tradeoff for computer slimness. The track pad took me a while to get used to, but when you do it’s actually pretty handy.
I even love the touch bar, which I fully planned to hate after reading the reviews. It’s easy to customize and it does so many things just when you need them. Example, in finder, the trash can and new folder are right there (in my setup). In Quicktime it has a scrubber bar that lets you smoothly scroll to the frame you want. Oh well, some will hate it - i like it.
Performance: I realize that I am coming from a 10 year old MacBook, but I also use a pretty new Dell laptop in my work, which if you throw out the docking station is a pretty good workhorse. My only real performance needs are for home video editing, and ripping and rendering movies (which i buy) for my home server. Video editing is fun again! It adds clips and photos so fast, edits like a dream, and renders like lightning. Video conversion is something else altogether...
Video conversion test case: Frozen 2 on blue-ray. Ripping with Make MKV was about the same, owing to my external drive limitations, but rendering using Handbrake was phenominal (to me anyway). It rendered the movie in high quality, H264, 1080p in about 45 minutes. I am no professional, so you will have to rate that against your own experience, but for me it was fantastic!
Finally, less demanding software like microsoft Office 365, Apple Pages and friends, and VLC handle quite nicely - loading documents in a flash and never hanging up hiccuping.
Oh yeah, i bought two USB 3.1 adapters and one SD adapter for about $8 each, all three with the tiny plug and short cord. That allows you to use all four ports at onc, plus they are all compact and blend quite nicely.
Summary: i love this computer and don’t begrudge a penny spent on it.
