Apple MacBook Pro 16

Aug 04, 2023

Apple's biggest and best laptop just got much, much better. The 2023 MacBook Pro 16-Inch (starts at $2,499; $5,299 as tested) holds the largest screen, the highest processing and graphics power, and the most feature-rich experience of any Mac laptop. Apple's design strategy, which keeps some products relatively unchanged for years, may seem slow-moving to some, but it actually speaks to a different concern: refinement. All of the changes made to the MacBook Pro in 2021 stick around in 2023, with a focus on the major performance boost happening under the hood.

With the introduction of the new M2 Pro and M2 Max processor lineup, the MacBook Pro offers workstation power in a consumer-friendly design, reminding us why the MacBook has been the choice of creative pros for many years over. Combining this potent power with one of the most polished designs in the industry, the result is pure Apple, and wholly satisfying. In fact, it's the most impressive Apple laptop we've tested to date, earning a rare five stars in addition to our Editors' Choice award. Let's dig into why. (Spoiler alert: The M2 Max is a monster.)

Apple's shift to its more advanced M2 processor line, its newest chips designed in-house, is the biggest change coming to the 16-inch MacBook Pro. You have a choice of either the midrange M2 Pro processor or the more powerful M2 Max seen in our review unit.

At $2,499, the base model for the MacBook Pro 16-inch features a 12-core M2 Pro processor with a 19-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and 512GB of SSD storage. This Apple laptop includes all of the standard features, such as the 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, a trio of Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 charging port, and every other feature we'll discuss below.

Naturally, the step-up models rise in price, while boosting the feature set. The middle configuration still uses the 12-core M2 Pro processor but bumps things up to a full terabyte of SSD storage; that model sells for $2,699.

Apple's top-of-the-line loadout, on which our review unit is based, steps up to the more powerful M2 Max, which is still a 12-core CPU built on the same 5-nanometer process as the other M2 chips, but packs in a 38-core GPU, doubling the raw graphics power of the M2 Pro. On top of that, it doubles the memory to 32GB and starts at the larger 1TB of SSD storage. This top configuration starts at $3,499, and the price spikes considerably from there based on your configuration options. You can step up to 64GB of memory for $400, or 96GB of memory for $800 (as we see in our review unit). Storage starts at 1TB, but you can go to 2TB for $400, 4TB for $1,000, or 8TB for $2,200.

Our own review unit is the M2 Max model, with the 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU, but with maxed-out memory at 96GB and plenty of storage with a 4TB SSD—totaling up to $5,299. This is up there with the most expensive laptops we've tested in recent years, but for one of the best workstation laptops on the market, it may just be worth the price if your work demands it.

Outwardly, nothing seems to have changed on the MacBook Pro 16-inch from the 2021 model. In usual Apple fashion, the philosophy of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" informs much of the decision-making process.

Apple's 2021 redesign introduced a sleeker, cleaner MacBook design that's even more in line with Apple's penchant for iconic, minimalist products. This lack of change is actually welcome because the updated MacBook Pro keeps everything I like, including thinner bezels around the higher-resolution (3,456-by-2,234-pixel) Liquid Retina XDR display. A little flatter than prior designs, the machined, recycled-aluminum chassis of the MacBook Pro still makes for a sturdy and beautiful unibody shell that helps reduce your environmental impact.

Also a carryover from 2021 is Apple's updated Magic Keyboard, with square-tiled keys that enable decent enough typing. If you've used a Mac in the last few years (or even the desktop version of the Magic Keyboard), then you already know what it's like. Apple's shallow keys combine the ultra-low profile of a membrane dome switch with scissor-switch mechanical stabilizers, a welcome return to form after the butterfly switch debacle of a few years back.

The keyboard's depth means the individual keys don't provide much travel, but the effortless downstroke is matched with a solid click at the bottom, providing tactile feedback that makes each keystroke feel distinct, and reduces the half-presses and accidental presses that make for frustrating typos. Plus, there's just a cool look to these keys. Instead of the bare aluminum surround that's seen on the MacBook Air or the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the larger Pro models use a black-on-black color scheme that looks more subdued and helps the automatic backlight look brighter as it lights up the keys.

The real benefit to this design is that Apple switched back to a proper keyboard with full-size function keys, moving away from the Touch Bar micro-display it is still using on the 13-inch MacBook Pro. This keyboard also includes a power button with a built-in Touch ID sensor, letting you sign on to your machine without the hassle of passwords or PIN numbers. (It also secures transactions for anything you buy online through Apple Pay.)

Joining that keyboard is a massive trackpad, giving you ample room for all of your swiping, clicking, and gestures. And because it uses Apple's Force Touch technology, the surface responds with haptic feedback for more precise control and multi-level, pressure-based contextual menus. A deeper click opens up new functions, while lighter taps and touches work just fine for all of your standard navigation. The pad is precise, and the feedback is crisp, making it one of the best touchpads we've seen on any machine.

Sticking with the 2021 redesign means that the new 16-inch MacBook Pro also keeps some of the things I don't like, such as the intrusive webcam notch that houses the MacBook Pro's 1080p FaceTime webcam. More on that later.

Weighing 4.8 pounds, the 16-inch laptop is not lightweight, and this is despite its fairly slim dimensions of 0.66 by 14.01 by 9.77 inches. Our M2 Max-equipped model also comes with the 140-watt USB Type-C power adapter and USB-C-to-MagSafe cable, which brings the total weight to nearly 5 pounds. However, we'll forgive it, given the generous 16-inch screen and the amount of raw power packed into this laptop. Most Windows machines in this performance class weigh 7 pounds or more, so we'll save our complaints for real issues—of which there are few.

Taking a closer look at Apple's 16.2-inch screen, branded as Liquid Retina XDR, it's simply one of the best around. Made up of a 120Hz oxide-TFT panel backlit with thousands of mini LEDs, the display is truly impressive. The high refresh-rate screen also uses ProMotion, Apple's answer to adaptive sync technologies, like AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync. Mini LED breaks up the lighting zones into hundreds of addressable areas behind the screen, giving you fantastic contrast control that rivals OLED in most respects. Colors are incredibly bright and vibrant, without any of the washout you get on a display that simply has an over-amped backlight.

This technology allows for extraordinarily high contrast and the deep, rich blacks that are normally associated with an OLED panel. When viewing most content on the mini LED-backed display, the quality is astounding. But, every so often, you'll find something that highlights the trouble of any backlit screen, where one or two dimming zones will overlap between a brightly lit portion of the picture and a darkened portion of the picture, and it doesn't always do a satisfactory job of differentiating between the two, leaving a brightly lit spot when it shouldn't be. Mini LED reduces this problem considerably compared to less granular dimming alternatives, but the higher brightness occasionally makes the problem stick out like a sore thumb.

However, there are two real problems with the display that we don't expect Apple to change anytime soon. The first has already been mentioned, the notch, which is a cutout along the top bezel that disrupts menu bars and anything else along the top of the screen in order to put the FaceTime camera behind the display glass without making the top bezel chunkier.

A carryover from the iPhone, the notch seems to be part of Apple's current design ID—but I have to say, I've never been able to get used to it. At best, I forget that it's there. But that's just as true for bezel-mounted webcams, and they don't disrupt onscreen content. The notch itself is probably handled as elegantly as it can be, but the fact that it's there still bugs me.

One other small problem is what isn't there: touch controls. Touch screens have become a mainstay of Windows laptops, spurred in part by the massive success of touch interaction on the iPhone and iPad. Despite this, Apple still hasn't brought touch input to the Mac, aside from the largely unloved Touch Bar on the 13-inch MacBook Pro. If you're looking for a laptop with an excellent touch screen, you won't find it at the Apple Store.

Apple surprised us in 2021 when it changed up the port selection on the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, reintroducing HDMI output and an SD card slot. After several Mac models that defaulted entirely to Thunderbolt/USB-C for all connectivity, it is a welcome improvement and an unexpected response to user complaints. Those ports stick around on the new MacBook Pro—good move.

On the right, you'll find that HDMI port and the SDXC card slot, along with a single Thunderbolt 4/USB-C connection. On the left, there's a MagSafe charging port, along with dual Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports, and a headphone/audio headset jack.

Given that Apple removed the headphone jack from its iPhones a few years back (and even called itself brave for doing so), we're always happy to see the humble headphone jack stick around on the MacBook. The port selection may be staying the same, but wireless connectivity takes a step forward in this model, kicked up to Wi-Fi 6E for best-in-class wireless networking, and Bluetooth 5.3, for the best accessory and peripheral connection quality yet.

Choosing Apple means choosing macOS in addition to the slick Apple hardware. While this has launched a thousand think pieces and ads pitting Windows and Mac users against each other (and our own ongoing debate piece), I'm happy to say that there's no real loser in that face-off. Since the advent of Windows 11, Windows and macOS look more alike than ever before, sharing more than a few features. More than that, both are very mature, highly refined operating systems.

One of the benefits of maturity—well, maturity plus market share—is that key software makers regularly make their products for both Windows and macOS these days. All of the big names are here, including Microsoft's Office suite, the entire Adobe Creative Cloud, and many more. On top of that, Apple has its own homegrown macOS apps that have been improving for years, from the Safari browser to GarageBand. Anything you want to do on a computer, you can do on a Mac just as well as any Windows machine, although you still may need to hunt down the right software.

The latest version of Apple's operating system, Mac OS Ventura, seems to be everything you need it to be. I'll leave the rest for other qualified reviewers to dig into the specifics (hit the link for our review), but in my time reviewing the machine, I've encountered very few issues, aside from having one or two specific test programs that didn't carry over from Windows.

To get a true measure of where the MacBook Pro 16-inch stands among its peers, we have to look at both Apple and Windows machines. In the Apple world, we're looking at the previous model, the 2021 MacBook Pro 16-inch with M1 Max, to see what sort of performance gains were made with the move to M2 Max. Also included: the more recent MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro (both with the basic M2 chip), as well as some passing comparisons to the current desktop powerhouse, the Mac Studio, which comes in M1 Max and M1 Ultra variants.

Looking at other brands, we turn to some favorites from our collections of the best business laptops and workstation laptops, as well as the best MacBook alternatives. With so many general users and professionals using the MacBook Pro for a wide variety of tasks, we could have slotted it against any number of other category leaders. But the business use is so prevalent, and the power level so impressive, that we're sticking to those core categories to find our top competitors.

These include the Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED, the outstanding Dell XPS 15 OLED (9520) and Dell XPS 17 (9720), and the powerful HP ZBook Studio G8 mobile workstation. These systems represent a cross-section of sleek designs and potent hardware that give the MacBook Pro 16 a run for its money. But as you can see in our breakdown of comparison models, nothing quite offers the single complete package that Apple's MacBook Pro does, especially in the beast-mode configuration we received for review.

The caveat, whenever we compare Macs to Windows machines, is that the Mac vs. PC divide is still very real, with nuances and quirks that make cross-platform tests tricky. Not everything that we test Windows machines with will work on Macs, and vice versa. However, even with the reduced selection, there's still plenty to compare, from productivity software to graphics and even workstation tests.

In this case, we start with our HandBrake 1.4 video transcoding test, timing how long it takes to convert a standard 4K clip into a smaller 1080p version. It's a heavy lift for some machines, but the best media-editing laptops should make short work of it.

Then we move on to Cinebench R23, which tests multi-core and multi-threaded processing with a complex scene rendered in Maxon's Cinema 4D engine. For more basic productivity measurements, we look at Primate Labs’ Geekbench Pro, which simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning.

Finally, we use Adobe Photoshop running in Rosetta 2, which comes with an asterisk—Adobe has a native version of Photoshop as part of its Creative Cloud apps, but our test extension, made by Puget Systems, is only available using Rosetta 2. So, in this instance, it's less of a photo-editing-speed test, and more a measure of the performance offered on the machine for demanding apps that require emulation. Even with that caveat, the Mac performance holds up incredibly well against top Windows machines.

In HandBrake, the performance is dramatic, with the M2 Max cutting the transcode time in half versus systems like the Dell XPS 17 (9720), and shaving off several minutes compared to both competing Windows laptops and less-expensive Apple options. In fact, the only machine that can complete the test faster is the Apple Mac Studio, a small desktop that's home to Apple's current top-performing chip, the M1 Ultra.

As for Cinebench, the M2 Max-powered MacBook Pro 16 posts nearly 15,000 points, beating out the 12,000-point average and rocketing past the less-powerful MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13, which both use the entry-level M2 chip. That same pattern is repeated in Geekbench, where the M2 Max pushes the MacBook Pro 16-Inch to impressive second-best in a list of extremely powerful systems. In Photoshop, the MacBook Pro 16-Inch actually edges ahead of the Mac Studio! (This is likely due to the updated M2 platform improving emulation performance.) If you need raw power, but can't bear to be tethered to a stationary desktop like the Mac Studio, this is the machine to get.

Armed with 38 GPU cores in our test model, we also expect the 16-inch MacBook Pro to put on a solid showing in graphics and gaming tests. For an Apple-specific graphics test, we use 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme, running in Unlimited mode. Unlike our usual 3DMark tests, Wild Life runs natively on Apple Silicon, letting us measure graphics performance between different Mac systems. The higher the score, the better the overall graphics performance.

For cross-platform testing, we use a version of our standard GFXBench test, here running on Apple's Metal graphics API. It stress-tests both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. We run two subtests, Aztec Ruins (1440p), which relies on the OpenGL application programming interface (API), and Car Chase (1080p), which uses hardware tessellation. We record the results in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better.

Finally, in Rise of the Tomb Raider, our only "true" gaming test, we get a sense of the system's actual AAA-gaming capabilities. Yes, it's an older game, but it's one of the few in the Steam library that will both run on a Mac and offers a built-in benchmark utility. We record the average fps at different detail settings. Higher numbers are better.

It's within the Wild Life Extreme results that we get the best glimpse of where the M2 Max sits in the Apple Silicon family, demonstrating superb graphical performance. Where the M2-based MacBook Pro 13-inch scores 6,800 points, the M2 Max-powered Pro scores more than 25,000. That handily beats anything we saw running on the previous M1 Max processor, and it comes in second to only the M1 Ultra. Yes, this is the top-end, most-cores version of the M2 Max, but it's a huge jump forward in graphics power in one processor generation, and it proves that Apple's chip design team is not messing around.

Our GFXBench results display similar Apple M2 Max dominance, as the MacBook Pro 16-Inch tears through both the basic 1080p Car Chase and the more demanding 1440p Aztec Ruins test scenarios.

Naturally, in Rise of the Tomb Raider, the M2 Max dominates everything, delivering the best gaming performance we've seen in a Mac to date. We'll dig into the gaming side of things more in future testing, but for the purpose of this review, it's clear that gaming on a Mac is suddenly a very real possibility, in addition to the media creation we already knew it could handle. Well in excess of 150 frames per second (fps) at 1,920 by 1,200 and high detail, and with the low-detail setting topping 200fps? This is proper gaming-laptop territory.

Going a step beyond the usual gaming or media processing tests, we also fired up the seminal Blender utility to see how well the MacBook Pro 16-Inch could handle true 3D rendering. Using the open-source 3D suite, we record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photorealistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system's CPU, and the other relying on the GPU.

It's a test we reserve for the most powerful machines, and here the MacBook Pro 16-Inch floors us. The results speak for themselves, but it's worth pointing out that this MacBook Pro delivers some of the best performance on this test we've ever seen from a laptop.

All the power in the world doesn't mean much in a laptop if you can't take it anywhere, but mobility is usually sacrificed to deliver the kind of power we've seen above. Despite this, Apple claims some impressive energy efficiency for the newest batch of M2 chips, promising as much as 22 hours of battery life. Obviously, we were going to test these claims, but I am most eager to see how the system would balance the power demands of the muscular CPU and GPU with the efficiency needed for long-lasting mobility.

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Given Apple's claims of battery life, we fully expected to see the MacBook Pro 16-inch last all day long and then some. (After all, the largest laptop in the Mac lineup is also the one with the biggest battery.) Plus, Apple's increasingly efficient hardware has been lengthening battery life since the M1 chip's arrival. But, we weren't prepared for this: In our video rundown test, the MacBook Pro 16-Inch lasted an astonishing 26 hours and 51 minutes—one of the longest results we've ever seen on any laptop short of models like the first M1 MacBook Pro.

In fact, the MacBook Pro 16-Inch outlasts most laptops with the best battery life by hours. Granted, more power-intensive uses, such as media editing or graphics rendering, will reduce that number. But for watching videos or web browsing? That's enough battery to get you through a three-day weekend without a charger.

The Liquid Retina XDR display is equally impressive, leveraging its mini LED backlight for excellent contrast and brightness. But what was most impressive was the color quality. In our testing, the screen, ahem, "notched" perfect 100% scores in coverage of the both sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces, and there's no denying that it's one of the best-looking displays we've seen, even when compared to premium OLED panels used on top-end Windows machines.

We've been testing and reviewing laptops for a long time, and it's rare that one leaves us this impressed. This latest rev of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 Max simply has it all, from a refined design and rich feature set to astonishing battery life and truly dominant levels of performance.

Sure, we can nitpick about the screen notch or the lack of touch capability, but the fact of the matter is that this is as close to perfect as any laptop we have reviewed. The machine looks and feels fantastic, and it will rip through the most demanding computing tasks like a buzzsaw. The only drawback is the price in its upper-echelon configurations. However, if you're a professional that needs the power to match the demands of your job and your talents, it's hard to argue that this isn't worth the outlay. For absolutely topping the charts among laptops in an already winning design, this MacBook Pro earns our Editors' Choice award and a rare perfect score.