MacBook Pro 2016: What The New MacBook Might Tell Us

Apple  has two excellent Retina MacBook lines, the Pro and 12-inch MacBook. One old, one new. Does the newest MacBook provide any insight into what's next for the most powerful class of MacBooks?

I've been using the newest 12-inch Retina MacBook for about six months now. What can I extrapolate from the experience? Here's my best guess of what the new high-performance MacBooks might incorporate:

New keyboard -- probability 70 percent: the new MacBook uses a Butterfly mechanism (which aids typing accuracy) instead of the traditional scissor design. The keys also have a 17 percent larger surface area and are 40 percent thinner. It would seem logical for Apple to update the MBP's keyboard with some of these elements. And I can attest that typing is great -- even with the reduced travel -- on the 12-inch MacBook's keyboard and would probably be even better on a Butterfly keyboard tweaked for the MBP.

USB-C -- probability 100 percent: USB-C is inevitable and will be everywhere. That doesn't mean it's 100 percent ready for prime time. On the new Skylake-based 12-inch MacBook, I couldn't get Apple's USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter to work properly with a Dell U2515H (2,560x,1440) display via the HDMI connector. That's despite the fact that the Dell display works perfectly with my 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina's HDMI port. But I'm presuming Apple will provide more than one USB-C port on bigger MacBooks and render the Multiport adapter unnecessary.

Display revamp -- probability 90 percent: the 3-million-pixel display on the 12-inch MacBook is really thin, even by Apple standards (0.88 millimeters thin to be exact). The thinnest Mac Retina display yet, it uses a new manufacturing process to form the edge-to-edge 0.5-millimeter-thick glass. The pixels themselves have a larger aperture, letting more light through, allowing Apple to use LED backlighting that’s 30 percent more energy efficient than the Retina display on other MacBooks. This kind of technology would allow Apple to build thinner, lighter, MacBook Pro-class laptops with better battery life. A new rumor says the MBP update may come with an OLED display "touch bar" above the keyboard.

Thinner-lighter -- probability 80 percent: Speaking of thinner, lighter, Apple (rightfully so) obsesses about thinness. In fact, Apple is so obsessed that, if you recall, it reduced the thickness of the late 2013 update of the 13.3-inch MacBook Pro Retina by a mere 0.04 inches, from 0.75-inches (the original Intel Ivy Bridge processor-based model) to 0.71-inches on the Haswell model. That helped to reduce the weight to 3.46 pounds from 3.57 pounds.

Faster (somewhat) with equal or better battery life -- probability 100 percent: The 2016 update to the 12-inch MacBook is faster (via Intel's new "Skylake" 6th Generation processor) with about an hour more of battery life. But that won't necessarily translate into gobs more speed on the MBP. Benchmarking of Intel's Skylake processors doesn't show huge performance gains over the 5th Generation "Broadwell" processors. (See these quad-core benchmarks.) In fact, in many cases the performance bump is minimal. That said, that's probably not the case for the 15.4-inch MBP, which still uses 4th Generation Haswell chips so the performance spread should be greater moving from the 4th Generation Haswell to 6th Generation Skylake. Battery life:  Apple could tap into the terraced battery cell tech used in the 12-inch MacBook to deliver a fairly big gains in battery life -- another thing Apple obsesses about.

What else is planned? Chime in if you have any thoughts.