 Make no mistake, the 2019 MacBook Pro has the same design as the 2016. We've got the same slim aluminum UDVade chassis, the same 2880x1800 Retina display, the same massive Force Touch trackpad, the same love-it-or-hate-it touch bar, and those same four Thunderbolt 3 ports that gave us the nickname Dungle Book Pro. This, on the other hand, is my MacBook Pro. I bought it back in 2011, and it's been my daily driver ever since. It's obsolete now, but I haven't really had a reason to upgrade, because most of the improvements to date have come at some cost. Expandability, thermal performance, speed, even the keyboard's reliability. Now, this generation looks no different, but let me tell you, looks can be deceiving. And if you're tired of being deceived, check out our sponsor. Father's Day is right around the corner, and if you're looking for a great gift idea, the fixed OBD2 sensor translates your car's problems and gives you cost estimates on repairs. Use offer code LTTDAD at the link below to save 25%. What's different about the 2019 MacBook Pro, then? Well, we'll get into the one engineering change that actually surprised even me, and actually matters, but first, the change nobody is surprised about, and didn't matter, the keyboard. This is Apple's third design iteration on their low-profile butterfly switches in an attempt to keep dust and debris from breaking the stupid thing. But even Apple admits it's not trustworthy, because the 2019 MacBook Pro was actually listed in the keyboard service program the day it dropped. That's when you know it's bad. To me, the keys themselves feel a little bit more spongy. And this isn't a bad thing, because it makes the travel feel a bit more pleasant and deeper than it otherwise might. It's a very subtle effect, though, and it might just be my mind playing tricks on me. All I know is, I've never been a fan of the feel of the butterfly switches, and I found typing on this one a touch more pleasant overall. But now it's time to dig a little deeper, because while our MacBook Pro 2019 may not be equipped with the best factory GPU option, as it's better for a number of reasons to use an eGPU, it is equipped with the highest end CPU Apple offers, the 8-core, 16-thread Core i9-9980HK, which has a claimed boost of up to 5 GHz and a base clock barely lower than its 6-core predecessor. Actually, before I move on, I just want to talk for a second about these boost clocks, because they're not boost clocks as we know them. They're actually what Intel calls Thermal Velocity Boost. TLDR, what these numbers represent are boost clocks on top of boost clocks, only achievable under extremely strict thermal and power criteria, only while normal boost is active, and only on a single core. So when you're doing actual work, you'll probably never see the advertised numbers. To be clear, Apple isn't to blame for Intel's marketing spin, and they aren't the only ones who are advertising their computers this way, but I'd really rather laptops be rated based on the frequencies they can actually hit, rather than what's on Intel's ARC website. But I digress. Coming back to the MacBook, I was skeptical about its performance, because it has more faster cores than the 2018 model, but it has the same TDP, and that model was famous for thermal throttling, to the point where we even expressed concern over its longevity and long-term data integrity due to its reliance on the T2 security chip, which is still present here. So I wanted to test it against the 2018, but I also wanted to see how it would compare to a similarly specced PC, as many have claimed that the same chip in a different form factor would perform better, and in fact we've shown that a MacBook can attain higher performance by placing it in our chiller box. Unfortunately, there are no PCs with this exact chip right now, but I did find the ROG Strix Scar 3, rocking the, quote, 4.8 GHz Core i9-9880H. While that's supposedly a touch slower, the Scar has a much better cooler, so it should boost for longer and throttle later, if at all compared to the MacBook. But here's what surprised me. Thermals actually look better than 2018? That's a good 6 degrees cooler than last year's model, and supposedly we're looking at CPUs with the same TDP here. Clearly they're just throttling, right? Nope. Check this out. Under a full Prime95 small FFT workload, the 2019 model is sitting pretty at 2.6 GHz. Nowhere near its all-core boost of 4.2, but still higher than its base clock and faster than both the 2018 MacBook Pro and the Scar 3 can maintain, even with its limiters off. Uh... What? Okay, did they change the cooler or something? No. So I reached out to Apple to find out how they did it, but as usual, they took one look at the email and sent it straight to the trash. But I have my own theory. One, I think they've upgraded the thermal interface material between the cooler and the chips, and two, I think they pulled off some pretty heavy undervolting in macOS. Sure enough, when I fire up the same workload under Windows and Bootcamp, we get much higher temperatures overall, and we end up thermal throttling well below base clock after only about a minute. So at least one part of my theory is confirmed. But you don't buy a Lambo for commuting, and you don't buy a Mac to roam Windows on it, so I guess I can give them a pass here. Just bear in mind as we move on that Bootcamp performance will be a lot lower than macOS due to the undervolting alone. Speaking of things you don't buy a Mac for, gaming. At 1440x900, our MacBook Pro's Radeon Pro 560X doesn't fare too well, but we get decent results in CSGO compared to the same GPU on our 2018 model, so that's something. More importantly though, when we move on to productivity, holy crap, is that Cinebench score a 900 point gain over 2018 from four extra threads? That's nearly a 30% uplift and right on with the Better Cool Scar. Geekbench has a straight up murdering the Scar in macOS, with the obvious exception of the GPU, but it's also worth noting the extra oomph the 2019 model's GPU gains over last year, even though it's the same GPU, hinting at that better Tim. Blender meanwhile sees a 35-40% improvement in performance, with the 2019 even beating the Scar and shaving a whole six minutes off the Classroom test over the 2018 MacBook Pro. V-Ray gives us a slightly more modest but still respectable improvement overall, right in line with the Scar 3, and finally Luxmark gives us more of that delicious GPU performance uplift we've been seeing so much of. Content creators will be happy to know that Adobe Premiere also gets an improvement over the 2018, and Final Cut Pro X gets a bump too, saving nearly a minute in render time over 2018. Finally, for you devs out there, our Mozilla Firefox compile test. The 2019 MacBook is dominating here too, saving nearly nine minutes over the 2018 model, and whether it's because of the toolchain or the more aggressive clocks in macOS, nearly as much over the Scar 3. Now, to be clear, there would be a significant performance uplift with a better cooler, but a MacBook is a complete package that doesn't change very often, and I really can't overstate how impressive these results are given the thermal performance of the previous generation. I'd personally prefer a lower thermal target with some headroom built in to let it turbo up a little bit more, but we're far from sustaining 100 degrees like last gen did. We've said before that Apple has some good engineers over there, and I think they've earned their pay this time around. As for whether or not it's going to replace my 2011, well, let's just say it's a strong contender. And you know what else is a strong contender? The Mastrop Control Keyboard features a solid CNC and aluminum frame, a built-in switch plate, RGB lighting, QMK firmware for easy customizability, hot swappable key switches with support for Cherry MX, KiWa, or Halo switches, a floating key design, dual USB type C connectors, and a whopping 964 gram weight. Check it out today at drop.com. We're going to have that linked in the video description. Thanks for watching, guys. 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