I waited nearly 1 year for the new MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) in Space Gray to hit the stores and have reviewed it for almost 3 months now on a day-to-day basis. Today I want to share my honest review with you!
I love it! Did that already sell? If not, hear me out. I do not want to give a technical review because for one, there are a thousand of them out there and secondly, you can browse the Apple website to find out all the technical bits and pieces about this wonderful machine they call MacBook Pro. Today, I want to share the day-to-day reasons I love this laptop so much. I will also tell you why you might not like it and why a different laptop may be a better choice for you.
I’ve been working from home since the beginning of this year – probably, like many of you. We have one office room in our apartment that both my husband and I use for home office regularly, though the past two years of staying at home had me to a point where I couldn’t sit in that room anymore. I wanted to travel, move, go somewhere else and work away from my desk. Unfortunately, and although I moved from my desk, I did not move very far. I moved over to our dining room and have been sitting at our dining table since the beginning of the year with my laptop. It might not seem like a huge change but boy it was! I love working in a more “open” space and this is exactly what the room gave me. It’s open. It let’s more light in and I can be around my pups more often. My husband in turn now has his own room and can speak as loudly on the phone as he wishes when the door is closed.
Now, working from home has its perks and downsides. Same goes for a laptop. I needed to get either a new laptop or an iMac (I only do Apple since years) and this is where my decision process started. I have the newest iMac model at the office – and love it. Yet, it is my office computer and since I do not move around much there and usually stay at my desk, it worked perfectly. At home.. not so much. I wanted to have the freedom to move around from one room to another, to the terrace in summer and onto my bed if I needed to. So a laptop was the obvious choice.
I had waited for this MacBook Pro to come out for almost a year. The rumours were there already late 2020, and even more persistent in early 2021. However, we only got to see the MacBook Air 2021 with the new M1 chip earlier that year.
I had a MacBook Air for years and you know what – it was amazing for the needs I had then. I traveled with it from time to time and loved running around with it. Although it wasn’t the lightest, it was most definitely lighter than the MacBook Pro. However, this time I new that the laptop should really only serve one main purpose: working from home.
And that is why I chose the largest (16-inch) MacBook Pro and waited to so long for the release. I upgraded it too, to work extra fast (though this goes into all the technicalities I do not want to speak about today). I wanted a laptop that I could work on, do my Zoom / Team calls on, that I could edit my photos on (which is incredibly fast with the new M1 Pro chip!), and one that had a large enough screen that my eyes wouldn’t hurt in the evening. For that, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is ideal. It works super fast, super smooth and even the photo editing is insanely fast (I use Lightroom mostly)! Even working on this blog – absolutely amazing on this laptop – everything goes so fast and no many how many programs I have open or how much I surf the net, the laptop stays cool. Not once has it heated up, made funny noises or shown any other issues. The battery is spectacular, too. You can work the whole day with it (depending on what you do, of course) but I had not issues working on it for 9-10 hours straight without it charging.
However, I do not believe it is a travel laptop. It is quite heavy (!) and nothing I want to carry around on a day to day basis. I might take it with me on business trips when I travel for longer (2-3 weeks), sure, but not for a few days. For that, I have my iPad Pro with the newest keyboard (which by the way, is a game changer!).
So would I recommend the MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021)? Abso-effin-lutely. I believe it is worth 1000% of the money! Yes, it is expensive, but it is also an investment piece that I am looking forward to working with the next few years!
What do you think?