Okay, I did not really need one but I could not resist. The moment I held the new MacBook in my hands for the first time, I knew I would put in an order. It is a gorgeous piece of industrial design and feels more like an iPad with a keyboard than a laptop computer. So far I have been using a full spec MacBook Pro and a 2011 11" MacBook Air. In order to give you context for this review, I do a lot of fairly heavy PowerPoint presentations and some Word and Excel. I choose the Pro when I need to do a lot of productive work and the Air when doing more routine stuff like responding to email and reviewing documents.
The new MacBook was meant to replace the Air. Once you are used to the Retina display of the Pro, it is really hard to step down to a lower resolution. I had somewhat expected Apple to update the Air to Retina but I like the MacBook's radical design approach even better. I hardly ever connect anything to my laptop and use wireless whenever possible. So one USB-C connector is good with me. I was immediately sold on the force touch track pad and have one of those on my Pro. After playing around with it in the store, I also knew that I would be fine with the new keyboard. It is a bit noisy but overall comfortable to type on.
The big question for me was how would it do in terms of performance. There are many reviews out there that suggest it is rather sluggish. Since it is my secondary machine, I also did not want to overspend and ordered the entry level model. After unboxing it (nice perfume-style box as always) and doing the basic set-ups, I started uploading my data. In retrospect, I bombarded it with data from several angles. I simultaneously installed Microsoft Office, downloaded 30 GB of photos from iCloud and another 50 GB of documents from Microsoft OneDrive. This assault clearly drove the MacBook to the limits of its performance. Having no fan, it got hot and extremely slow in responding at all.
Knowing that I was putting the MacBook through an unusual stress test, I simply let it sit there and waited until everything was in its place. The following day I had to go on a one week trip and I decided to be brave and chose the new MacBook over the Pro. I suspected that I would have to do some productive work on it and boy was I right. Something urgent came up and I ended up juggling several 10 MB to 20 MB PowerPoint presentations in parallel. The MacBook performed flawlessly. In my experience, the PowerPoint slide sorter typically is a bottleneck with big presentations taking a long time to render correctly. I was zipping through my documents much faster than on the Air despite it having nominally higher specs.
After a couple of months, the new MacBook has become the device I use most. There is hardly any need for the Pro even though I enjoy its more generous screen real estate and the MacBook is even cannibalizing my iPad that finds itself sitting idle most of the time.
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