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Is The 16-Inch MacBook Pro Real? ‘Indications’ Are There, Says Analyst

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This article is more than 4 years old.

[UPDATE] The 16-inch MacBook Pro was a no-show in October but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

“We were expecting an announcement in October,” IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani told me in an email Friday, adding that “it didn’t come to fruition.”

But signs are there. “We’re also starting to see early signs of this from the supply chain. However, the timing of this is still uncertain,” he said.

Also, a source in Asia who talks to the Apple supply chain told me over the weekend that the 16-inch MBP is in production but the release date is unclear.

**UPDATE: The announcement may be imminent, based on reports this week.**

And other recent reports seem to bear this out. For example, icons possibly depicting the 16-inch MBP surfaced recently in betas of macOS Catalina.

Expected design:

One of the biggest departures from the existing 15.4-inch MacBook Pro is believed to be a slimmer display bezel.

Expected display:

Apple will opt for a 3,072-by-1,920 resolution LCD — not an AMOLED display, at least on the model predicted by IHS Markit. The current 15.4-inch MBP has a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution or 220 pixels per inch.

Processor:

Apple may adopt the same Intel Coffee Lake-H Refresh processors used in the current 15.4-inch MBP. The fastest of the fast is the Core i9-9880H Processor (launched in the second quarter of this year), which has a base frequency of 2.40 GHz and a max Turbo Boost frequency of 5 GHz and packs 8 cores.

Keyboard:

It’s not clear if the new 16-inch MBP would get a new keyboard similar to a traditional scissor switch keyboard, i.e., whether Apple will drop the controversial butterfly keyboard now found on all MacBooks.

Release date:

Uncertain.

Price:

The 16-inch MBP will likely be Apple's premier MacBook. Some configurations could reflect the current 15.4-inch MBP lineup, which ranges in price from an MSRP of $2,399 to a fully-loaded model that is priced over $5,000.

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