 I want to tell you a little story about the year 2019. In June at WWDC, Apple announced iPadOS, which feature for feature addressed a bunch of complaints that we had, like USB drives and web browsing. And Apple also announced the new Mac Pro, which finally replaced the old trash can and was designed for the way pros actually need to use their computers. They just made it big again. And then in September, Apple released the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro and it fixed the things that people care the most about, camera quality and battery life. Apple also just made it a little bit thicker. Finally, Apple put a smart keyboard connector on the base iPad and then a little bit later, it released the AirPods Pro, which actually stay in my ears and they also happen to do noise canceling. It has been a year of Apple doing obvious things, not the flashiest things, not the this changes everything things, just the things that we wanted Apple to do. And so now we have this, the new 16 inch MacBook Pro. In a parallel universe, we wouldn't review this on a video at all because it would just be a minor spec bump. Instead, it is a laptop full of Apple fixing the things that it has done wrong on the MacBook for years. It's a pretty good way to cap off 2019. Let's just start by catching you up on the basics of what's new with this laptop, even though by now you're probably already familiar. So the screen is half an inch or so bigger than before, so it's 16 inches now. The keyboard has been switched to the new scissor switch, a more traditional kind of switch, along with a real escape key. The laptop has also been made just a little bit thicker and it's a little bit better at dissipating heat than before. The speakers are all new and they're amazing. And the graphics cards are the most interesting part of all the spec bumps here. But if you want, you can get a ton of RAM or storage if you need to get those. I asked a bunch of you what you wanted me to test on this computer on YouTube and in my email newsletter and on Twitter, and I got a ton of responses, but they all break down into some pretty predictable categories. And at the tippy top of that list is the keyboard. So let's do this. The keyboard is absolutely good. In some ways, it's a leap ahead of other modern keyboards. It has good key travel and the backlight doesn't bleed out all over the place. In terms of key feel, it's firm and not really that springy, at least compared to the old 2015 MacBooks, but I like it. It has a satisfying and fairly quiet thunk. It really is a massive upgrade over those butterfly keys. And iFixit says that the key caps are easy to replace too. And yes, there is now an escape key again and the arrow keys are way easier to hit because they have this inverted T shape. All the keys are spaced a little bit further apart because the key caps are just a little bit smaller and it's much less likely that you're gonna accidentally tap on the touch bar. Oh yeah, the touch bar. I personally don't know anybody who really loves it. You can use third-party tools like BetterTouchTool or POC to change it up, but it's not going anywhere and so you might as well get used to it. Got a bunch of questions about battery life, especially since there's a 100 watt hour battery, the FAA limit inside this thing, and it seems good. I am getting through a full day of work up to, you know, the eight hour range just doing my basic web, Twitter, YouTube office stuff that I do. I mean, it certainly should, it has that giant battery inside this chonk. It weighs 4.3 pounds and it's just a little bit bigger than the other 15 inch MacBooks, but unless your 15 inch laptop was already tight in your bag, this one should probably fit in there just fine. Oh, by the way, I also had people ask if the battery drains even when it's plugged in and you've got it under heavy load and so far that hasn't happened to me at all. Next up, a lot of people asked about performance and specifically thermal throttling, so we need to talk about that for a minute. Basically, Apple had a big problem on its hands last year with the last MacBook Pro, which was all kinds of unpredictable when it came to slowing down the processor because of heat. Apple released some software updates which helped, but the bottom line is that that laptop couldn't run as hot as other laptops. This year, Apple increased the size of the heat sink, made the fans blow more air, and even added a little bit of thickness to help with airflow, and it worked. There could be any number of things off with this benchmark that you're looking at on your screen right now. Unless you're really carefully testing it in like lab conditions, all sorts of random variables are gonna change your results. But what I see here is a processor that can hit its turbo and then settles into an entirely predictable, stable, and respectable speed over time. And that is not what we saw last year, so you know, bravo. But more important than benchmarks is results, and a lot of you asked me to run your particular software and tools and y'all, I just gotta tell you, I'm not gonna be able to test everybody's workflow. I just can't afford to buy that much software too. But what I can tell you is that for our video team, the improvements here in Adobe Premiere Pro over last year's model are pretty modest. Compared to a fairly comparable machine from a year ago, this 16-inch was like three to 5% faster on a half hour export. That's not much, but then again, Adobe isn't great at utilizing the GPU. Now, Jonathan Morrison runs Final Cut Pro 10, and I'll link to the video where he tested this below, and he saw much more improvement. I also saw some GPU improvements myself. Here is Rise of the Tomb Raider. It's running with all the default graphics settings on a 2018 six-core i9 with a Radeon Pro Vega 20, and then this new 2019 16-inch with an eight-core i9 and the Radeon Pro 5500M. The old MacBook got 29.99 frames per second, and this 16-inch was around 52. Here's our LAN performance. It is better year over year, just like you'd expect, especially on graphics, but it's not a huge change unless your software really uses the GPU. It's also pretty great that you can get as much storage or RAM as you want, so long as you're willing to pay for it. The base model starts at 23.99, but there are a ton of options, and so you can get it all the way up to 6,099 if you need to. Now, I only got a couple of questions about the new speakers and the new studio microphones, which is kind of a bummer, because these are actually my favorite parts of this computer, especially the speakers, which do this really clever thing where the two woofers on each side cancel out each other's vibrations, which allows for more bass. We set up a bunch of laptops and audio gear back in our New York studio last week, and we just tried it all out. All right, so we're here in the studio, and Andrew has set up a bunch of cool audio gear. We've got binaural audio recording microphones with ears on them and a blue microphone, but what you're listening to right now is the Studio 3Mic array from the MacBook Pro itself, and we're gonna compare this microphone to a few other things, and I'm gonna read the same thing across all of them because then we'll have an equal test. So, four score, and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth onto this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. All right, we're back on the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, and since these are studio-quality microphones, we should probably listen to some actual music on them, so let's do that. ["The Goat Sound"] So the microphone is pretty good, but it's maybe not quite studio quality. The speakers though, they're the best that I've ever heard on a laptop. Here is what I think of the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The speakers and the microphone are huge upgrades. The screen is a small upgrade and the performance is a decent upgrade depending on whether or not your software needs a good GPU. And then there's the keyboard, which is a massive upgrade if you compare it to the butterfly keys and a medium upgrade if you compare it to literally any other keyboard. The 16-inch MacBook Pro is the first MacBook Pro in years that doesn't come with any major caveats. If you've been holding out on buying one, this is the one that you've been waiting for. All of which leads me to the other question, maybe the most asked question that I got. What about the 13-inch MacBook Pro? What about the MacBook Air? Are they going to get the new or like the old, the keyboard? Are they going to get the keyboard? Well, I wish I knew, but if 2020 is anything like 2019 and Apple just keeps doing the obvious things, I'm optimistic. Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching. Let me know down in the comments, is this the laptop that you've been waiting for? Also, it's LA Auto Week and there is a ton of stuff. We saw the Mustang Mach-E SUV electric thing from Ford and Elon Musk has tweeted that the cyber truck is coming tonight, so keep it locked to the verge.