MacBook Pro will actually play a pioneering role for its maker ?

Apple is rolling out a major new hardware feature this year with the introduction of what it calls Force Touch. It is a catch-all term for a combination of pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback that you will find built into the Apple Watch and the trackpad of the newly redesigned MacBook. Force Touch is Apple’s hallmark of newness for 2015, but it also finds a home in one of the Cupertino company’s less adventurous machines, the 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Though it was a mere footnote to Apple’s big event last month, the MacBook Pro will actually play a pioneering role for its maker. It’s going to serve as the device on which many people experience Force Touch for the first time, and it signifies Apple’s intention to make this a standard feature across all of its laptops. Unlike the more glamorous Watch and MacBook, the new MacBook Pro is practical and designed for everyone. Its price isn’t weighed down by a novelty premium, its versatility and power aren’t compromised, and its raison d'être isn’t in question. This is Apple’s most powerful mobile computer, so if mobile computing is a thing you do, this is the laptop for you. It really is that simple

I came to this review dreading the idea of Apple tinkering with a thing that really didn’t need changing. The original glass trackpad is one of the MacBook’s clearest advantages, and it seemed to me that Apple was tackling a problem that didn’t need a solution. But I’m gratified to find that little has been lost in the transition to an electronic alternative, and there’s plenty to be gained from it — in the future, if not immediately.

For example, the new design means a click at the very top of the trackpad feels the same as at the bottom. The old hinge made clicking easier in the lower half of the touchpad. Another important advantage for Apple’s engineers, claims the company, is that the static pad is less likely to break down over time and takes up a tiny bit less space than its predecessor. While that doesn’t make a difference for me today, Apple’s big design revolutions are built upon small evolutions of precisely this magnitude: shaving off a 

millimeter here, improving space efficiency there, and suddenly a new MacBook is born. Clic . So far, practical uses for the Force Touch trackpad’s pressure sensitivity are quite limited. I’ve made a valiant effort to try and use the functions Apple has integrated into OS X, but they’re honestly no more useful or intuitive than bashing out a quick right-click. I can press down once for a click, or push further to get a Force click, which produces a contextual action like a dictionary lookup or a preview of a web link or a document. Even with three distinct settings of "firmness" for the regular click, I am never truly sure if and when I’m adding enough pressure to turn it into a Force click. And what’s worse, most apps don’t yet support the feature, which means I’d be wasting my time developing the proper Force Touch habits if I spend most of my days inside unsupported apps.

One of the initial stumbling blocks for Apple’s Retina displays was the graphics chip’s inability to handle all of those pixels at once. Intel’s new Broadwell processor promises, as every new piece of silicon does, major improvements in performance, but there are still occasions where the MacBook Pro is simply overwhelmed by the amount of information it has to animate on the screen. This most commonly happens when switching in and out of the Mission Control multitasking overview with a bunch of apps open. I may be willing to forgive such infractions on my MacBook Air, which trades away a sliver of performance for better battery life and a thinner profile, but the Pro is supposed to be the no-compromise MacBook.

A GeekBench score of 7,001 marks a nice bump over the 6,303 of the 2013 Retina model as well as the 6,057 of my MacBook Air from the same year. But in most of my daily activities, this extra power goes completely unnoticed. The fast SSD storage in the new Pro machine is also capable of ludicrous speeds — doubling the previous generation’s numbers and achieving a read speed in excess of 1GB per second — but I am again unable to come up with daily use scenarios that make that apparent. The difference is between fast and ultra fast when handling specific, heavy workloads. A good example is the update to OS X 10.10.3, which took significantly longer on the Air than it did on the 2015 Pro — but how many times are you transferring and processing that volume of data?

Battery life isn’t a massive differentiator between the Air and Pro lines. The MacBook Air has the edge during our web browsing battery test, but it’s a slight one: the Air runs for 13 hours and 29 minutes whereas the 2015 MacBook Pro achieves 13 hours and 18 minutes. Mind you, that’s when using Safari for your browsing, and there’s a major drop-off when using Google’s Chrome browser, which chews through the Pro’s battery in 9 hours and 45 minutes. In daily use, I’m finding myself recharging both the Pro and the Air at roughly the same intervals. Pushing beyond 10 hours of use isn’t a problem with either laptop and I can confidently leave home in the morning without worrying about bringing a charger.