Review: The new 12-inch MacBook is a laptop without an ecosystem

Apple’s often been a company that pushes new technology into a world that’s reluctant to receive it or doesn’t know what to make of it. It’s a company that’s often designing for what it sees as the world of the future and not today. The first iMac dropped off legacy ports and embraced the then-unknown connection standard called USB. The MacBook Air ditched optical media. Even the current Mac Pro is a complete redefinition of what the standard features of a professional workstation should be.

This approach has its strengths and weaknesses. Apple has rightfully gained a reputation for being on the cutting edge. Its designs push the entire computer industry forward—sometimes kicking and screaming. But it can be painful to live on the cutting edge. New iMac buyers couldn’t use any of their old Mac accessories without buying adapters, and it was months before USB accessories were widespread. MacBook Air owners had to grapple with their inability to insert a CD or DVD to install software.

Using a computer that feels like it fell through a time warp from the future is fun, but if that computer drops through the wormhole without any compatible accessories then there’s going to be some aggravation, too.

The new MacBook is one of those Apple products. It feels like it came from the future, and didn’t bring its ecosystem with it. With its single USB-C port for both charging and peripherals, it’s unlike any Mac previously made. It’s the smallest, lightest Mac laptop ever, offers a Retina display, and yet it boasts all-day battery life. Using it alone will be a pleasure, but trying to plug it in to all your existing technology will be a pain.

Exterior

Clearly Apple’s goal with the new MacBook was to reduce it in every conceivable dimension. Its width is defined by the width of the keyboard, bringing to mind the old 12-inch PowerBook, which was similarly constrained. That makes it seven-tenths of an inch narrower than even the 11-inch MacBook Air, and 1.7 inches narrower than the 13-inch Air. I deeply loved that old 12-inch PowerBook, and one of the reasons was that it was no wider than its keyboard. Ten years later, Apple has once again created a laptop whose keyboard goes right to the edge, and I love it.

Jason Snell

The MacBook is 7.7 inches deep, making it deeper than the 11-inch MacBook Air, but not the 13-inch model. This added depth owes to the ratio of the MacBook’s display—it’s a 16:10 aspect ratio like the 13-inch Air, rather than the 16:9 ratio found on the 11-inch model. Much more about that display in a little bit.

But of course, the dimension Apple has tended to be most obsessed with is thickness, or as it’s been called since the Titanium PowerBook G4 was “1 inch thin,” thinness. And of course the MacBook delivers: I’ve used an 11-inch MacBook Air for many years, and the MacBook seems impossibly thin.

At its thickest point, the MacBook is 0.52 inches thick. The 11-inch Air, in comparison, is 0.68 inches thick at that same point. I admit that 0.14 inches, or 4 millimeters, is not a whole lot of difference, but shaving one-fifth of the thickness off the MacBook Air is still a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Jason Snell

Then there’s the weight, which is 2.03 pounds, down from 2.38 pounds on the 11-inch Air, and 2.96 pounds on the 13-inch Air. Again, this is a major reduction—especially for 13-inch Air users—and even as a user of the 11-inch Air, I noticed how light the MacBook was as I toted it around.

To make the MacBook this thin, Apple’s had to make some compromises. The device is positively iOS-like in its lack of ports—it’s got a headphone jack and a single USB-C port rather than the Lightning port found on iPads and iPhones. This is about as minimal as a computer can get, at least until wireless charging becomes standard.

The MacBook also shows a familial resemblance to iOS devices in its color options: silver, space gray, and gold are now on the menu. The MacBook I tested is a base model of the space gray variety, and while the difference is subtle, it’s fun to use a Mac laptop that isn’t silver for the first time in ages. It matches well with my space gray iPhone 6 and iPad mini. The Apple logo on the device is also no longer backlit by a cutout that allows the screen backlighting to shine through, but is instead mirrored like the Apple logo on an iPad.

Jason Snell

With the darker gray color, taller display, and the large square keys, the MacBook actually reminds me of Google’s Chromebook Pixel (itself a gorgeous bit of hardware), only much smaller. Physically, this is a device that shows off all of Apple’s skill as a hardware developer and everything it’s learned from building iPhones and iPads. This is the iPad of laptops.

Trackpad

Like the 13-inch MacBook Pro that preceded it to market by a few weeks, the MacBook features Apple’s new Force Touch trackpad. I like it, though it took me a day or two to get used to the more subtle click feel. To say that this trackpad’s surface doesn’t move isn’t entirely accurate—the material flexes, subtly, but the clicking sensation you feel is generated by a haptic device that’s shaking the surface slightly when sensors detect that you’ve applied an appropriate amount of pressure. The net effect is that it feels like a click, but it’s controlled by software.

This has several ramifications. First, Apple’s added a new click gesture called the Force click—which is what happens when you click and then push a little bit harder, until you feel a second click. Apple’s built in force-click actions to many of its apps, including the Finder (it opens a Quick Look window), and other developers can choose to support it too.

Jason Snell

Developers also have the ability to access the haptics in the trackpad to provide another dimension of interface feedback. Apple can vibrate the trackpad to provide extra feedback—for example, imagine an app letting you know that the object you’re dragging has reached the center of the document by giving you a brief bump on the trackpad. It will be interesting to see experimentation with this new piece of hardware.

But the bottom line is, this is a trackpad, and it feels like one—plus it’s programmable.

Keyboard

One of the biggest compromises Apple made in designing the MacBook to be as thin and light as possible was to create a new, thinner keyboard. In order to make the keyboard thinner, Apple reduced the amount of key travel—the amount of distance that the keys move when you press them.

As someone who types for a living, and who types roughly 115 words per minute, this is a huge change. The reduced key travel is instantly noticeable—there’s just much less physical feedback as you press each individual key. It feels like a cross between typing on a more traditional Mac keyboard and tapping on the hard glass screen of an iPad. (No travel at all there!)

Apple seems to have realized that the reduced travel has made this keyboard less appealing, and has attempted to offset the change with a bunch of other changes that improve the typing experience. There’s a new butterfly key mechanism atop stainless steel dome switches, which Apple says increases key stability, and the keys are all a bit wider than on a traditional keyboard, so there’s more area to hit on each key.

These changes help, but they don’t really offset the reduced travel. The MacBook keyboard’s better than I expected it to be—I was able to score 118 words per minute on TypeRacer using it—but it never felt particularly comfortable. If you’re not a keyboard snob, you may not even notice the difference, but if there’s any single feature that would make me reluctant to buy a MacBook, it would be the keyboard.

Beyond the changes to the key movement itself, this keyboard offers a few other interesting features. Each key is individually LED backlit, which is supposed to reduce light leakage, but I found the lighting of the key labels not to be uniform. Edges of several key labels (the left side of the Esc key, the bottom of the delete and tab keys) were darker, as if they weren’t properly lit.

The Esc key has been elongated and the function keys narrowed, which didn’t really bother me. However, the redesign of the arrow keys really shook me–the up and down arrows are still half-height, but the left and right arrows are now full sized. It turns out that I used the gaps above the left and right arrow keys on prior keyboards to orient by feel, so I knew which arrow key was which. On the MacBook’s keyboard, there’s no longer a gap–and I kept having to look down to make sure I was tapping the up arrow key.

Port, just the one

The MacBook will probably go down in history for a single reason: It’s got a single port for both charging and connecting to other devices, and that port is of the USB-C variety.

First, the single port thing. MagSafe, the magnetic charging technology that has adorned all Apple laptops since 2006, is gone. The MacBook comes with a USB-C charging brick and a USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and that’s what you use to charge.

Jason Snell

I have to say, I’m going to miss MagSafe. I can pick up my MacBook Air and push off the power connector in one quick motion, but with the MacBook I have to grab the laptop with one hand and then pull the cord out with the other hand. It’s the tiniest of inconveniences, to be sure, but it’s a regression nonetheless. And yes, if someone trips over the power cable, the MacBook will go flying.

The MagSafe connector included a small LED that lit up to indicate that it was attached and charging. That’s gone, but in a nice touch, when you insert the USB-C cable into the MacBook (or plug the already-inserted cable into the wall), the MacBook sounds an iOS-style chime to let you know it’s charging. There’s no visual indication, however.

Then there’s the fact that this MacBook is the very first Mac to ship with a USB-C connector. In a few years, this connector type will be common, and we’ll not-so-fondly remember the days of the original USB port shape. But right now this is a port type that’s on the cutting edge, and the transition will be difficult. When I first started up the MacBook, I wanted to use Apple’s Migration Assistant utility to move files from my MacBook Air. I held down the T key at startup to put the MacBook into target-disk mode, and then I realized that I had no way to connect it to any other device I own. (I finally was able to connect the MacBook to my Ethernet network by attaching Apple’s $29 USB Ethernet adapter to Apple’s $19 USB-C to USB adapter, and attaching that monstrosity to the MacBook itself.)

Monoprice

As I write this, Monoprice has announced a whole bunch of USB-C cables, including one that would’ve worked perfectly to attach the MacBook to another Mac for target mode. Belkin announced a similar clutch of products a few weeks back. The USB-C ecosystem is coming, and that’s good, but out of the box today the MacBook is basically not compatible with anything you own. You’ll need to buy a bunch of adapters and cables if you need to make it work with the rest of the world. If you ever need to hook into a projector or other video display, you’ll want to buy a USB-C video adapter and carry it with you, because for quite some time nobody else is going to have one for you to borrow.

And then gradually, over time, the MacBook’s use of USB-C will cease to be an issue. USB-C itself is an exciting new technology. You don’t have to worry about whether you’re plugging it in upside-down or not, so it’ll save you time and frustration. Someone will make a great docking station to use with it. This will all become mainstream, eventually, but right now it’s not.

Apple’s argument with the MacBook, as it was back in 2008 with the first MacBook Air, is that everything’s becoming wireless, so ports don’t matter. That’s certainly more true now than it was seven years ago. The MacBook is a device built for people who are not plugging and unplugging external devices every day, and there are more of those people now than ever. But if you’re not one of those people, this is not the laptop you’re looking for.

Display

Everyone’s talking about the size of the MacBook and its single USB port, but the marquee feature of the product is really its screen. This 12-inch retina display introduces high-resolution Mac display goodness to a small, light laptop for the first time ever. The display’s physical resolution is 2304 by 1440 pixels, meaning that at standard “2x” retina resolution, it’s the equivalent of a 1152×720 display.

Jason Snell

But here’s the thing: At that resolution, the 12-inch display seems small. Like, really small. Nearly unusably small. So Apple has made the decision to ship the MacBook with its default resolution scaled to emulate a 1280 x 800 display, roughly the same screen area as you’d find on an 11-inch MacBook Air. Fortunately, the scaled resolution looks really good. But after a little while, I decided I wanted my display scaled even more, so I switched it to the More Space setting, which emulates a 1440×900 display, the equivalent number of pixels as the 13-inch Air. This was the setting I used for the rest of my time with the MacBook.

The MacBook’s display is covered edge-to-edge with glass, with a black bezel underneath. This is the style that the MacBook Pro line has had for some time, but it’ll be a change for MacBook Air users. The MacBook Air’s display has a large silver bezel around the screen, but this look is much simpler and more attractive, and I didn’t notice any real difference in glare versus the Air’s display.

No need for speed?

The MacBook is powered by Intel’s Core M processor, which is designed to be power efficient and cool. (The MacBook has no fan—it’s completely silent, even when stressed out.) It’s not designed to be fast, and by the standards of all of Apple’s other current laptops, it’s not. It’s not fast by the standards of last year’s models. Or those of the year before. I pulled out every laptop in my house dating back four years and the base model MacBook is slower than all of them–though to be fair, my four-year-old MacBook Air is the top-of-the-line model. Still, it’s not a stretch to say that the MacBook is bringing 2010 performance to 2015.

Does it matter? If you’re a power user who likes to read super-long reviews of Apple laptops, it might. I honestly gave some thought to not even including test scores in this review, because if you’re the kind of person who seeks the longest bar, the MacBook just won’t please you.

But the Intel processors in Mac laptops have been so powerful for so long that I’m not sure it matters for most users. I fancy myself a bit of a power user, what with my Photoshop and my Logic Pro, and you know what? I was able to edit a multi-track Logic project on the MacBook just fine. Yes, bouncing the final project to disk took longer than it does on my 5K iMac or even my 2014 MacBook Air, but it still exported.

Similarly, although the MacBook is limited to 8GB of RAM, this seemed sufficient for all of my tasks. If you’re someone who can’t use a laptop if it doesn’t have more than 8GB of RAM, there are better options in Apple’s laptop line—specifically, the MacBook Pro.

I never found using the MacBook sluggish. Then again, I didn’t try to play games on it. But again, if you’re trying to play games on the MacBook, you may be missing the point. The integrated Intel HD Graphics 5300 processor is more than enough to drive the Retina display with no lag, and I found Apple’s various interface animations ran smoothly.

Like a great many computer features that used to be essential, speed appears to have become a high-end luxury. In 2010, if you handed me a new laptop that was as fast as the average Mac laptop from 2005, it would probably have felt sluggish and unusable. But honestly, I wouldn’t have any qualms using this MacBook as a travel machine, just as I’ve chosen to use the 11-inch MacBook Air rather than a MacBook Pro. Opting for a tiny, thin laptop doesn’t mean you can’t get your work done. It’s a lesson the 11-inch Air taught me, and the MacBook fits that tale well.

Battery

By using the Intel Core M and packing in a whole lot of battery, Apple claims that the MacBook boasts “all day battery life.” Of course, these things are relative—editing a Logic Pro project will suck the battery out of even the hardiest laptop. But in general, I was extremely impressed with the battery life of the MacBook.

During my testing I tried to spend as long as possible between charges, and was continually surprised at how little the MacBook was draining its battery. I spent most of a workday with the MacBook in my living room and at a nearby Starbucks and didn’t get close to running out of battery.

Jason Snell

It will take a long time to break old-school laptop users out of the habit of constantly seeking a power plug in order to avoid “range anxiety,” but if there’s a laptop that can do it, it’s probably the MacBook.

Bottom line

The MacBook is a gorgeous piece of hardware. The Retina display is excellent, and I’m really loving the Force Touch trackpad. The keyboard is more of a hit-or-miss affair; if you’re someone who is particular about your keyboards and spends a whole lot of time typing, it may be a deal-breaker.

This is a laptop that will serve its audience well. That audience is one that prioritizes size, weight, and stylishness over compatibility and ports and computing power. I’d say that this isn’t a laptop for power users, but I don’t think that’s true—there are whole classes of “power users” who don’t actually need more power than the MacBook can provide.

But if your workflow includes lots of USB flash drives and external hard drives, if you’ve invested in Thunderbolt hard drives or displays, or if your work really does require 16GB of RAM and the very fastest processors around, the MacBook won’t be a good fit. Fortunately, Apple’s isn’t ceasing production of the MacBook Pro—and it offers all of that and more.

As a longtime user of the MacBook Air line, I look at the MacBook with a mix of excitement and trepidation. This is the future of Apple’s thin and light laptop line, as well as a warning that we’re about to enter a transition period for devices as Apple begins to embrace USB-C. And ultimately that’s the trade-off here: To get the cutting edge technology, you’ve got to deal with the incompatibilities and limitations that go with it.

People who are willing to deal with the pains in order to get their hands on a product like this, you know who you are. It’s waiting for you. The rest of the world will catch up, in time.