13-inch MacBook Pro 2020: THE powerful portable laptop for music producers?
Like many of you, I was looking forward to a 14-inch version of the MacBook Pro alongside the regular 13-inch laptops. But in 2020, Apple is presenting only a spec update of its portable laptop line. Not that I’ll complain too much, for the new 13-inches can really spar with the bigger ones in terms of hardware!
13-inch MacBook Pro 2020
First things first, the failure-prone Butterfly keyboard has been ditched in favour of the stable Magic Keyboard (with Touch Bar) from the 16″ version.
Second, but not in importance, you are presented with the following component choices while configuring a MacBook Pro:
CPU: Intel Quad-Core i5 or i7 processors (8th or 10th generation) with speeds of 1.4 GHz, 1.7 GHz, 2.0 GHz or 2.3 GHz (including Turbo Boost from 3.9 GHz to 4, 5 GHz)
RAM : 8 gigabytes, 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes with transmission speeds 2133 MHz or 3733 MHz
SSD Storage : 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB or 4 TB
See how far can that little monster can go? It’s certainly a leap in terms of performance over the older version. Let’s hope Apple has the thermals properly sorted out to contain the fast components!
The screen, by the way, is exactly the same as the previous version – no update there. That seems a shame, especially given that some prognosticators had predicted a 14-inch version. Perhaps Apple will surprise us all this year with a beefed-up 14″ model.
Price and release
The base model 13-inch MacBook Pro starts at EUR 1499 and comes at EUR 4,379.00 when maxed out. The package includes the laptop, a 2-meter long USB-C cable and a 61 watt USB-C power supply. According to Apple, the earliest delivery dates are May 7, 2020 for the base models and May 13 to 15 for the custom configurations.
More information
- Apple website
- More about Apple
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4 responses to “13-inch MacBook Pro 2020: THE powerful portable laptop for music producers?”
I have the 16″ with a 6-core processor, 64GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. It gets very warm while tracking and mixing, so I dare say this less-powerful 13″ could cook eggs under load.
Yup, looks an awful lot like yet another MBTT—macbook thermal throttle edition. Iris GPUs are notorious stinkers for lots of music production tasks too.
The 2015 remains Apple’s last 13″ pro?
Music production shouldn’t be GPU intensive. What about the Iris is an issue?
I have to use cooling pad with 16 with 8 cores because it’s too hot.