A proper 13 Inch MacBook Pro by Apple, finally! But…

Even though Apple makes products that usually outperform their own Specification Sheets, I mean iPhones have been doing that for years with 2GB & 3GB RAM, but it is sacrosanct to show the obligatory Spec Sheet of a laptop. Keeping true to their “India only uses under-powered computing devices” tradition, the highest possible configuration hasn’t crossed the Atlantic+Pacific+Indian Ocean & yet there are some permutations, so I’ve tried to tally them to make some ease of sense. So here goes nothing…

THESE FEATURES ARE COMMON ACROSS ALL CONFIGURATIONS

Height: 1.56 cm (0.61 inches)

Width: 30.41 cm (11.97 inches)

Depth: 21.24 cm (8.36 inches)

Weight: 1.4 kg (3.1 pounds)

Retina Display: 13.3-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; 2560×1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch with support for millions of colours

500 nits brightness

True Tone Technology with Wide Colour (P3) support

Backlit Magic Keyboard with Touch Bar & Touch ID Sensor

Stereo speakers with High Dynamic Range

Support for Dolby Atmos playback

Three-mic array with directional beam-forming

802.11ac Wi‑Fi Wireless Networking

Bluetooth 5.0 Wireless Technology

₹1,22,990 MRP

₹1,42,990 MRP

₹1,74,900 MRP

₹1,94,900 MRP

1.4GHz quad‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, with 128MB of eDRAM

2.0GHz quad‑core 10th‑generation Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz, with 6MB shared L3 cache

256GB SSD

512GB SSD

512GB SSD

1TB SSD

8GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory

16GB of 3733MHz LPDDR4X onboard memory

Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645

Intel Iris Plus Graphics

Two Thunderbolt 3 (USB‑C) ports

Four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports

Built‑in 58.2‑watt‑hour lithium‑polymer battery

Built‑in 58.0‑watt‑hour lithium‑polymer battery

Highest support for one external 5K display with 5120×2880 resolution at 60Hz

Highest support for one external 6K display with 6016×3384 resolution at 60Hz

I will of course get the unit soon enough to play with & then I will definitely have more concrete words to say about the handling & performance of these new MacBooks, but can I just point out two things that seem wrong right at the outset?

• You see how the variant with the 10th-generation i5 that’s clocked at 2.0Ghz starts at ₹1,74,900 MRP? It also has a 512GB SSD for storage & 16GB of RAM. However, if you know somebody in USA, just transfer them around ₹1,65,000, because for $2199 they can bring you a variant with a 10th-generation Core i7 based system that is clocked at 2.3Ghz & can be Turbo Boosted to 4.1Ghz and oh, it’ll also have 1TB of SSD storage.
• If you however decide to get the highest India variant though, the one that costs ₹1,94,900, I will have to stop you. Why won’t you put in ₹5,000 more & buy the base MacBook Pro 16? You’ll get a bigger screen, a 2.6GHz 6‑core Intel Core i7 chip, an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory, better audio; both in terms of recording & playback, bigger battery and better thermals because of a bigger vapour chamber & cooling system.

But this is apparently where I might be wrong as well. Not everyone is seeking performance. If they were, MacBook Airs wouldn’t have been flying off the shelves. Not everyone is editing 4K videos, neither is everyone ok with having to be extra cautious all the time, because they have a large, bulky laptop on them. From what the spec-sheets reads out right now, the MacBook Pro 13 will find owners in people who want portable mobility over everything else. & unashamedly, I am one of them. I am perfectly ok with watching a movie on the side, while my system is making proxies of 4K files so that I can edit easily. Will I end up doing that? I will type an answer as soon the MacBook Pro 13 comes to me to type on.