Undoubtedly the most interesting MacBook Pro (reportedly) coming down the pike is the 16-incher.
That rumored 2019 MacBook was summarily canceled this past week -- then uncanceled (because of, apparently, a mistranslation of the Chinese).
Peering inside a future high-powered 16-inch laptop
If it is indeed still on track, the massive MacBook would fall somewhere between 16- and 16.5 inches in size, as disclosed by a several Apple enthusiast sites earlier this year.
Anandtech has discussed potentially suitable silicon, i.e., the arrival of 9th generation H series mobile Intel processors, the newest high-end silicon targeted at the most powerful laptops. These chips -- some with 8 cores -- are due in the second quarter and would be successors to the 8th generation six-core processors used in the current 15-inch MacBook Pro.
The 9th Generation Intel H series Core silicon includes: Core i9-9980HK (8-core), Core i7-9850H (8-core), and Core i5-9400H (4-core).
All* of the high-powered mobile processors "are aimed at high-performance laptops for gamers and professionals and, according to Intel, will be launched in the second quarter," Anandtech wrote.
The Core i9-9980HK and the Core i9-9980H will sit on top of the range offering eight cores with Hyper-Threading, 16 MB of L3 cache as well as Turbo frequencies close to their desktop counterparts.
--Intel Details New 9th Gen CPUs for Notebooks: i9-9980HK to i5-9300H, Anandtech, February 16, 2019
And the GPU?
The GPU that Apple would select may be a more interesting question for professionals. There's AMD's Navi. That future 7nm graphics card has been possibly spotted in the source code of Mojave.
Currently, the fastest graphics card you can get is Radeon Pro Vega 20 in certain very high-end MacBook Pro configurations.
More conventional MacBook Pros in 2019
An update to the 13-inch MacBook Pro could see Whiskey Lake processors (now appearing in many new 2019 Windows laptops) while the 15-inch MBP could tap the 9th gen processors cited above.
But that raises the question: would Apple continue to update the 15 MBP if it brings out a 16-inch model? Apple has settled into a sales strategy where it lets old products languish, sometimes for years, like the older MacBook Air and more recently the 12-inch Retina MacBook.
There's also ongoing speculation about the fate of Touch Bar. The problem is, it adds a lot of cost to a MBP ($300 for the MBP 13, though that includes faster silicon too) without commensurate utility -- at least according to some reviews. So some minor tweaks to the Touch Bar are possible.
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*The chips are not official yet, according to Anandtech.
