Hands-on with the Retina MacBook: One-port wonder

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple announced a new MacBook today—not MacBook Air, not MacBook Pro, just MacBook. It’s the first one of those that Apple has offered since it killed the plastic MacBooks earlier this decade, and while those computers were low-cost alternatives to the MacBook Pro and then the MacBook Air, this laptop is a much different beast.

It’s Apple’s first fanless MacBook. It’s the first to use Intel’s ultra-low-power processors in the form of the Broadwell-based Core M. It’s got a Retina Display. It’s not a cut-down budget model, and it’s not quite a MacBook Air replacement. We got a chance to take the laptop for a test drive at Apple’s event today, and here’s what it’s like to use.

Look and feel

The numbers seem small on paper—it weighs two pounds and is 13mm thick at its thickest point. Seeing it in person really drives home what a small laptop this is. It’s the most similar to the 11-inch MacBook Air, but it’s got a bigger and better screen. I moved from an 11- to a 13-inch MacBook Air because I found the display too cramped, but the new MacBook is large enough to avoid that problem.

As Apple said, to make the system this small it had to make the logic board tiny. It’s even more tightly integrated (and less upgradeable) than the current MacBook Airs. Everything from the RAM to the CPU to the SSD is soldered to the motherboard—while intrepid MacBook Air owners can at least open up their laptops and swap out the drive, the new MacBook will have the specs you order it with forever. RAM starts and ends at 8GB, and you can get either a 256GB or 512GB SSD.

Both the base and the screen of the MacBook are solid. They don’t wobble or flex, and we wouldn’t be worried about throwing it in a bag. It’s the kind of build quality you expect from Apple. The one thing this MacBook doesn’t have that all MacBooks have had is a glowing Apple logo on the back of the lid, which we assume was thrown out to save space—it’s been replaced by a reflective, smooth logo like the one on iDevices.

One interesting new feature is that the laptops come in an iPhone or iPad-like selection of colors: standard MacBook silver, “space grey,” or gold. The colors are the same shades used for iPhones and iPads, so if you’ve seen those colors, you know what you’re getting here.

USB Type C

The most controversial thing about the MacBook is its port configuration: it’s got a headphone jack for audio, and a single USB Type C port for literally everything else.

Apple leaned on its various wireless technologies—AirPlay, AirDrop—to compensate for the lack of ports, but that doesn’t account for what many power users actually do with their laptops. They’re portable machines, yes, but you can also plunk them down on a desk and connect them to power and peripherals and larger displays for a more desktop-esque experience. How do you do this on a laptop with one port?

The answer, for better or worse, involves yet more dongles. Apple was showing off a couple of things that split the Type C port into a few different, more conventional ports made possible by Type C’s support of multiple protocols. One had a Type C port for charging, an HDMI port for video out, and a USB Type A port for accessories. Another used a VGA port instead of HDMI.

Those were the only first-party versions we saw, but we’re sure either Apple or third-parties will create versions with Ethernet ports, DisplayPort, and whatever other kind of interfaces people want to use. Apple's first-party adapters cost $79, so let's hope third-parties can get there for a little less money.

The new MacBook's charger is a cross between the standard MacBook charger and an iPhone or iPad charger. It uses a regular USB Type C cable that unplugs from the adapter—no more replacing the whole brick just because the cable frays—but the brick itself is comparable in size to the 45W adapter that ships with the MacBook Air.

USB Type C, the USB Power Delivery spec, and USB Alternate Mode make it a very versatile connector. It can carry USB signal (this is USB 3.0, not 3.1—Type C and 3.1 are separate specs), up to 100W of power, and any number of different display protocols. Just get ready to shell out for new dongles to replace your old dongles.

Update: Apple's specs page for the new MacBook say the USB Type C port uses "USB 3.1 gen1," which is capped at the same 5Gbps transfer speed as USB 3.0. We're investigating the differences between USB 3.0 and 3.1 gen1 and will follow up in a separate article with our findings.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Once you make a laptop this thin, you don’t have as much physical space for a keyboard and trackpad to move up and down. Apple has come up with two things to address this issue, and one of them works better than the other.

The keyboard and its new “butterfly” switches don’t feel as good as Apple’s regular keyboard. Key size and spacing are fine, but the key travel and the way the keys feel are both quite different.

Apple’s Phil Schiller talked up the way that the butterfly switches eliminate some of the “key wobble” present on scissor-switch keyboards, Apple’s current MacBook Air and Pro keyboards included. But the firm, wobble-free keys of the Retina MacBook just feel odd, like they’re not supposed to be moved. Shallow travel makes typing feel less satisfying. There’s less height between the top of the keys and the keyboard area, which changes the way it feels to move your fingers over the keys.

That said, every new keyboard needs some getting used to, and as writers by trade we’re particularly persnickety about the keyboards we like. We had just a few minutes with the Retina MacBook keyboard, and while we don’t think it’s as good as Apple’s regular MacBook Air and Pro keyboard, it’s possible that it will leave a better impression after several days of use.

We’re much more taken with Apple’s Force Trackpad. It’s not the first company to use a clickless trackpad in the pursuit of a thinner laptop—Synaptics has offered a ForcePad for quite some time, and laptops like the HP EliteBook 1020 are already using it. But those trackpads are just flat, immovable, touch-sensitive slabs. Their attempts to replace the feel and sound of a clicky trackpad are laughable at best; the ForcePad driver in the 1020 plays fake clicky sounds when you press down on it.

Apple's "taptic feedback” system is more than just marketing. A small motor vibrates ever so slightly when you press down on the new MacBook’s trackpad, and the amount of feedback is adjustable in software. With the feedback set to “firm,” the trackpad plus the taptic feedback make the trackpad indistinguishable from a standard clicky trackpad. The only difference is that you get the clicky feel anywhere on the pad, including at the top.

One new feature unique to this trackpad is a feature Apple calls “Force click.” You invoke it by clicking on something and holding down for an extra beat. A context-sensitive pop-up will let you do some extra stuff—it will offer to create a calendar appointment if you force click a date or time. It can pull in Wikipedia results or maps. It seems generally useful and it’s a cool demo feature, but we’ll need more time to know how useful it actually is in real life.

The size of the trackpad is good too. Apple says it’s roughly equivalent in size to the trackpad on the 13-inch MacBook Air.

Core M, and driving a Retina display

We’ve seen Core M in a handful of systems already—Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 3 is one, and HP’s EliteBook 1020 is another.

This is still a Broadwell part, so it’s using the same CPU architecture as the improved 2015 MacBook Airs and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. It’s a dual-core part with lowish base clock speeds that it compensates for with high Turbo Boost clocks—Apple is using the 1.1GHz (2.4GHz Turbo) Core M-5Y31 and the 1.2GHz (2.9GHz Turbo) Core M-5Y71. The latter is the fastest Core M Intel sells.

We’ll need to have the system in hand to examine how the laptop throttles its CPU and GPU to save power, which will be important for things like gaming, video editing, and heavy Photoshop work. For general-use tasks that don’t peg the processor, the oversimplified version is that Core M performs a lot like the Ivy Bridge Core i5 and i7 CPUs in the 2012 MacBook Airs. If you’ve got a 2013 or 2015 MacBook Air, it will be a step down. If you have a 2012 MacBook Air, it’s a step sideways at best.

Of course, the thing the MacBook has that none of those Airs has is a Retina display—it’s got the same tack-sharp look as the Retina MacBook Pros and the 5K iMac. At 12 inches, a 2304×1440 screen has about 226PPI, in the same league as those other computers. Color and viewing angles are excellent, far superior to the non-Retina MacBook Air displays.

Remember, an Ivy Bridge HD 4000 GPU drove the Retina display in the first 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, so Intel’s GPUs have been good enough to handle this for a while now. We noticed no lagginess or jerkiness in any of OS X’s animations, though we’ll do more testing of this when we have the laptop in hand—our biggest questions are how well the GPU drives the built-in display and an external display simultaneously, and how well the laptop performs when using OS X’s scaling to increase the amount of usable screen space.

The new MacBook starts at $1,299 and ships April 10. We’ll be giving it the full review treatment as soon as we can.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham