Apple's biggest refresh of its Pro lineup landed towards the end of last year and brought a new look, a very powerful new chip, and a rather fetching liquid retina screen in two new, larger sizes, 14 and 16-inches. Said refresh also brought new price points for Apple's most impressive mobile hardware to date - and they were pretty hefty, particularly if you're after the larger 16-inch model.
Thankfully, Amazon has seen fit to reduce the price of the 16-inch MacBook Pro from $2499 to $2299. This is close to the lowest price the MacBook Pro 16-inch has ever seen since its release last year - and while still a lot of money, this reduction brings it closer to its $2000 14-inch cousin. For $200, the bigger screen and more powerful 10-core M1 pro chip are certainly worth it.
The MacBook Pro 2021 is not a machine for everyone - mostly because the price puts most users off. For Professionals who need an incredibly powerful and portable work laptop, however, the MacBook Pro 2021 is one of the best options on the market. The range of M1 Pro and M1 Max chips on offer are some seriously impressive multi-core monsters, and the unified RAM options mixed with some kind of MacBook black magic make video editing and rendering a doddle. We were so impressed with its credentials that we called it a 'the best Mac to date in the Apple Silicon era' in our Macbook Pro 2021 review.
If that wasn't enough, they are beautiful devices, made, as always, out of aluminum in Space Grey or Silver. The Liquid Retina display under the lid is colorful and sharp, whilst not hitting battery performance too much, giving the MacBook up to 21 hours of use time. It does lack the somewhat controversial touch bar of its predecessor, and while that may irk some users it will please others. Would have been nice as an option, and who knows - Apple brought the MagSafe charger back for this generation of MacBook after years of fans asking, so maybe the touch bar will return in the future?
Just ignore notchgate, the notch in the top of the screen soon blends into MacOS - unless you'd rather not have a webcam at all? In which case good news - Apple might've just killed the webcam with MacOs Ventura. Bad news? The notch remains.
