That was an appealing idea, but the first-gen Core M chips found in premium-priced systems such as this and the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro didn't live up to the hype in terms of performance and battery life.

The original pitch for Core M was that it enabled laptops to be very thin and light, but still powerful and long-lasting. Through hands-on testing, I've concluded I can mostly survive in a single-port world, but that won't be true for everybody. A simple USB-C to USB-A adapter is $20, while Apple's big multiport dongle that gives you HDMI, USB-A and USB-C (the latter for pass-through charging) is $80. There are USB-C dongles and adaptors available for each and every eventuality, but they're inconvenient and often expensive. Yes, if you need a wired Ethernet connection on a daily basis, use sneakernet-delivered USB keys every day, or need to send a video output to an external monitor, it can be a real pain. The battery life was long enough that I didn't need to worry about taking up the power port to connect an external peripheral, and frankly, so many things have migrated to the cloud, that I've even removed the once-ubiquitous key-shaped USB drive from the keychain, where it hung for many years. The use of a single port for data, video and power - and a not-quite-mainstream one at that - remains the most bedeviling thing about this laptop.Īnd yet, using the 2015 MacBook fairly heavily over a course of months, I also found it wasn't nearly the deal breaker some had feared. There were hopes that we'd see a second port, either USB-C or something else, in this updated model, but that was not to be. If you ask 10 people about the 12-inch MacBook - assuming they know enough about this product to differentiate it from other MacBooks - and they'll all say something along the lines of: 'That's the one with just one USB-C port, right?' CNET/Dan Ackerman Still the elephant in the room It took a while to get used to, and it'll never be my favorite keyboard, but I found it was easy to acclimate to after a few days of heavy usage, and I've easily written more than 100,000 words on the 2015 version of this system.ĭan and Joe in the CNET Lab, via the MacBook's 480p webcam.

It takes some getting used to, especially if you're accustomed to the deep, clicky physical feedback of other MacBooks or the similar island-style keyboards of most other modern laptops. The nearly edge-to-edge keyboard has very large key faces, yes, but the keys are shallow, barely popping up above the keyboard tray and depressing into the chassis only slightly. Part of the reason for that is the butterfly mechanism under the keyboard. This is still the thinnest Mac that Apple has ever made.

Apple macbook pro 2016 13 inch