![]() ![]() I'll admit, I took Apple's suggestion and opened up a 4K episode of Foundation on Apple TV Plus, and it looked great. In practice, it's OLED-like, by which I mean it combines near-total blacks with extreme brightness, perfect for high dynamic range content - not very surprising, since it's essentially the same screen technology in the company's Pro Display XDR. The border around the MacBook's screen is now much thinner, compared to last year's MacBook Pro. As far as design compromises go, it's a pretty good one. It's much better than just having dead space there and frees up the rest of the screen for better things. The notch implementation in MacOS is especially clever, as the menu bar for whatever app you have open moves up to sit right beside the camera notch. Then, in a few hours or days, it blends into the background and you forget about it. You can't stop seeing it cutting into your screen real estate. And like the iPhone, it's annoying and too obvious at first. Here the camera gets slotted into an iPhone-like notch at the top of the display. In those cases, the camera gets moved somewhere awkward, or it's reduced to a tiny pinhole camera with poor image quality. I've seen this happen on other laptops as well. The border around the display here has gotten so thin that there's not even room for a webcam any longer. Dan Ackerman/CNET Notch your average laptop screen How well the notch blends in depends on your desktop background color. But in that case, the magnetic head never stays seated and always routes the cable somewhere awkward, so it's good you can use regular USB-C to charge those as well. Microsoft also has a version of this, with a small magnetic fin that slots into a power port on Surface Pro tablets. In practice, MagSafe is just as good as I remember it the magnetic plug end, which looks very similar to the older models, snaps right on easily and stays in place unless you give it a good tug. It's a much nicer feel than plain rubbery cables than last year's M1 MacBooks included. The MagSafe cable that starts with USB-C on one end and terminates in the MagSafe plug on the other end has a woven covering, much like the cables for the 24-inch M1 iMac. The 16-inch Pro comes with a massive new 140-watt MagSafe 3 charger, while the 14-inch Pro has a 96-watt MagSafe 3 charger. All worked, some much faster than others. I tried it with a 65-watt Lenovo charger, a 39-watt Switch charger and an older 61-watt MacBook charger. You can still charge this new MacBook with almost any USB-C charger, by using one of the three USB-C ports. You're less likely to run across a USB-C-to-HDMI dongle by sheer luck. In a pinch, I can probably dig up an HDMI cable from somewhere, or steal one from a game console. People have older or legacy devices, like printers, projectors and displays, and they want to be able to plug into those immediately, with a cable common enough that you might luck out and find one buried in the back of a desk drawer. That's also why we had laptops with VGA ports for so many years after they should have vanished. It's great to be future-forward, but HDMI remains immensely useful, even if it's transitioning into being more of a legacy port. HDMI is something people have been asking to get back. The SD card slot similarly came and went over the years. But it disappeared a few years after that, when Apple moved toward USB-C starting with the 12-inch MacBook. It wasn't until the first Retina screen MacBook Pro, which I reviewed in 2012, that HDMI first made its way to a MacBook. The original Pro cost a similar $2,800 and included three USB 2.0 ports FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 ports an ExpressCard slot and a DVI port. I recall the very first MacBook Pro from 2006, which I reviewed as well. I'm as shocked as anyone by the return of not only these classic-but-useful ports, but also the long-dead MagSafe power connector. If everything comes back in style eventually, it must be time for HDMI ports and SD card slots to return. ![]() Thunderbolt USB-C x3, HDMI, SDXC card, MagSafe 3 ![]()
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