HORIZON
The best new tech heading your way
1 MACBOOK PRO (2021)
From £1,899, apple.com
The novelty of Apple first designing and then building its own processors has worn off. It’s not simply a novelty any more: it’s a full-blown revolution. The MacBook Pro now firmly removes Macs from the ‘buy if you prefer macOS to Windows’ category and places them firmly in the ‘just plain better’ camp. The stats don’t lie. The chip at its heart – either the 10-CPU core, 16-GPU core M1 Pro or the 10/32 Max, depending on your spec – makes for a truly superior processor, firmly outclassing the already superb M1 and (though we can’t exactly compare apples-to-apples any more) seemingly flattening both AMD and Intel’s latest offerings.
It’s not all about the guts, though. Apple has marked the occasion of its silicon takeover with a seriously cool redesign of the MacBook Pro, which drops in some much needed quality-oflife features (the return of magsafe charging, for example, and proper ports like HDMI and an SD reader) and kicks out some others. If you were attached to the Touch Bar, best get unattached, because it’s gone in place of full-size function keys. And if you’re not keen on Apple’s slight obsession with notches, the chunky chap jutting in to the top of the screen here won’t please you. But even that is justified, housing an upgraded 1080p webcam, and it hides itself quite effectively.
Everything here is an upgrade. It seems like Apple has been listening to every mote of feedback from the community in order to create the ultimate MacBook – and it may well have pulled it off.
“Not just the best MacBook ever – maybe the best laptop ever”