My favorite scene had actress Jennifer Hudson, dressed in a rose red sweater with a powder pink blouse underneath. The trailer for the upcoming Aretha Franklin biopic, Respect, was alive with color. When all of your competitors are making the effort to shrink the unsightly black bars to barely-there levels, it makes no sense that Apple hasn’t followed suit. Something I can really do without are the thick bezels surrounding the 13.3-inch, 2650 x 1600-pixel Retina display. That means more vibrant colors which is always a good thing. The display also features P3 wide color gamut, which is a wider color spectrum than sRGB. The technology intelligently and almost imperceptibly adjusts the display’s color temperature based on how well or poorly lit the environment is, creating an optimal viewing experience at all times. However, Apple continues to tweak the formula, adding innovative technologies such as TrueTone to the mix. It’s simply not a MacBook without the Retina Display. Still, I wish there were four Thunderbolt ports like we see on the 16-inch MacBook Pro. There is a silver lining in that the Thunderbolt ports support USB 4, which can dole out speeds of up to 40Gb/s and a maximum of 15W of power. The 13-inch MacBook Pro continues to offer the bare minimum of ports with a headset jack on the right side and a pair of Thunderbolt ports. In short, the new MacBook Pro is everything Apple said and more. If that’s not enough, paired with Big Sur, you get blistering webpage load times and a better webcam experience –– all thanks to Apple Silicon.

But still, the MacBook Pro 13-inch M1 ($1,899 reviewed, $1,299 starting) delivers impressive performance and has the longest battery life I’ve seen on a Mac. Well I’m here to tell you that the hype train is well-founded, except maybe for that last one.

And Apple wasn’t shy about touting all the implications with grandiose and seemingly unheard of claims that these new MacBooks would deliver 3.5x the CPU performance, 6x faster GPU performance and outperform 98% of PC laptops on the market. So what’s behind the monumental change? Apple’s new M1 processor, the much ballyhooed component that signals the company’s break from Intel in favor of custom silicon. No, it doesn’t look like it, but this MacBook marks a new chapter in Apple computing, and computers as a whole.

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