Bose SoundTouch 300 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET
Ginger Bardeen Situational Photography
The competition for sound bars over $500 is heating up with the release of some excellent models recently including the Sony HT-NT5 and the Samsung HW-K850. Now, Bose is trying to get in on the act with its latest wireless model, the SoundTouch 300.
The SoundTouch 300 is a sound bar which offers “larger than life” sound thanks to its widening PhaseGuide technology and the QuietPort promises better-than-normal bass despite the lack of a separate subwoofer. measures 38.5 inches wide by 2.25 inches high and 4.25 inches deep.
The sound bar includes Bose’s SoundTouch Wi-Fi music system onboard which enables users to stream Spotify, Pandora and others without loss. SoundTouch is Bose’s take on multiroom sound and is compatible with its standalone SoundTouch 10-and-up speakers. If you want to go the Bluetooth route the sound bar has that too.
The SoundTouch 300 comes with other connectivity including HDMI in and out, plus optical digital audio and a 3.5mm subwoofer out. The HDMI ports offer 4K pass-through in addition to both Dolby Digital and DTS decoding.
The SoundTouch is available now for $699, £599 or AU$999. The optional Acoustimass 300 wireless subwoofer is available for the same price.
The bottom line: Our quick verdict on the PlayStation VR
And then there were three. The PlayStation VR went on sale earlier this month, making it the third big-name tethered VR headset to arrive this year. Though it’s less immersive than either the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive that came before it, the PSVR is compelling for an entirely different set of reasons. It’s cheaper than the competition, for one, with a starting price of $400.
Secondly, look at all the content available for it! The PSVR launched with 30 compatible games, and Sony promises that number will grow to 50 by year’s end. And that includes some major franchises too, including Batman and Resident Evil. Not only are these games people will want to play, but the gear you need to experience them — a PS4, PlayStation Camera and Sony’s “Move” motion controllers — are already in millions of homes. Equally important, the PSVR is comfortable to wear — something we haven’t been able to say about every headset we’ve tested. That’s the bottom line, but if you’re craving a little more, find our full review here.
Jabra’s Sport Coach headphones count my reps so I don’t have to
Whenever I go to the gym, I immediately plug in my headphones. Last year, I graduated to wireless headphones, and while I’m happy with my current Bluetooth buds (more on those later), I was intrigued by Jabra’s latest refresh of its Sports Coach series, which promises to gauge and coach not only your running (I don’t do that), but also cross-training style bodyweight and dumbbell-based exercises, counting reps using built-in movement sensors so that you can concentrate on your form — and then crank out even more.
Jabra’s Sports Coach Special Edition ($120) counts your reps through the company’s TrackFit motion sensor embedded in the left ear piece. (You’ll find the micro-USB charging port on the right side.) Your movements are then sent to the companion iOS/Android app. Unlike Jabra’s most recent headphones, these Bluetooth-connected earbuds are still wired together, with an inline remote and a button on the left earpiece to launch the sports app and move between exercises.
As you’d expect from fitness headphones, the Sports Coach Special Editions are IP55-rated for dust and water resistance. As a bonus, they come with a three-year extended warranty for additional peace of mind.
The earphones ship with in-ear tips and gels, in three sizes to ensure they fit most ears. Those gels are soft plastic protrusions that wedge in against the inside of your ear. Thanks to those, the headphones are light, comfortable and secure. I currently use JLab’s Epic2 Bluetooth headphones (as recommended here) for my sweaty music-listening needs.
While the JLab model uses an over-ear hook, I prefer Jabra’s internal solution, which makes it easier to remove while still allowing for a snug fit. The Sports Coach pair also formed a tighter seal on my ear, but your experience may differ.
Of course, sound quality is important, but I find comfort is just as critical with headphones meant for exercise. These feel great and sound just as good as my Epic2s, with the addition of passive noise cancellation. The Sports Coach only comes in one color option, but it’s a reassuringly sporty combination of grey and cyan — pretty inoffensive.
The in-line controller includes a mic for mid-gym phone calls (rude!). Next to that, there are volume controls (a long press will skip tracks) and a multi-function button that pauses music, answers calls and powers the whole thing down. The left earphone also houses a “Sport” button on the side; this launches the companion fitness tracking app on your phone and is also used for progressing and finishing your workout — no need to tap your phone until you’re done. Holding the button will also mute the audio coaching and updates.
The Sports Life app is necessary for all the tracking features though if you’re just looking for comfortable wireless headphones, you can pair the fitness earbuds to your phone and sweat away. Jabra has also ensured that the app plays its coaching narration on top of either iTunes music or any audio source currently playing.
Fortunately, the app is easy to set up. First it shows you how to fit the headphones and uses a sound test to make sure you have the right sized buds. You can then choose the type of exercise you’re planning to do. For automatic repetition counting, the compatible workouts are all found under cross-training, with several of them already programmed, offering a mix of exercises.
You can also make your own, choosing from just under 60 different exercises that are a mix of weight and calisthenic movements. Like the previous-gen version, you can use the headphones to simply track your movement and time your runs. When it comes to running, distance, pace, steps and cadence are all measured by the sensor, but I have glasses for that. And I still hate running.
The rep counter sounded like it was made for me, as I regularly zone out while working out. For me, counting in the midst of push-ups goes something like: “1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 7.” Some kind of robotic unbiased tracking would be pretty useful then. Indeed, for many exercises the rep detection works exactly as promised.
But, not all of my exercises were detected. Push-ups are the worst: While my demonstration made for a great gif, when it came to shooting that clip, the sensor only picked up two reps out of 10. Another time, it detected all of them. The app (or the sensor) is frustratingly erratic. Squats and other exercises requiring vertical head movements are where the earphones works best. You can leave your phone to the side as the audio narration notifies you when you’re done with your rep numbers. One tap of the Sports button on the side moves the app on to your next exercise.
For me, counting in the midst of push-ups goes something like: “1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 7.”
When it does screw up, the headphones are kind enough to tell you it’s not detecting any movement. But that’s often around 10 seconds in, and I’ve already done nine push-ups by then. (Roughly. I zone out, remember?) Conversely, I try to be meticulous in logging what I do at the gym (my current app of choice is Fitocracy), making this mixed performance is just as frustrating as my own estimates.
You’re also stuck with Jabra’s mediocre fitness app, and this is where the system falls short for me. It’s a common drawback with fitness gadgets — they’re typically tied to a specific app built by the same company. You’re buying into their proprietary software, even if you have better options elsewhere.
Although you can custom-build circuits of squats, crunches and what-have-you, automatic rep counting only works for 10 exercises: back extensions, crunches, dips, burpees, kettlebell swings, lunges, pull-ups, push-ups, squats and thrusters. (I had to look up the last one: It’s a combination squat and shoulder press. It looks hard.)
Jabra says that the number of detectable exercises will increase with future updates — but those are the options if you buy the device now. You’re also constrained to that current list of exercises (auto rep-counting or not) if you’re looking to record your full workout… and it’s not an exhaustive list. This is because Jabra’s headphones can only detect movements related to your head and due to that, there’s a limit as to how much a gadget can track when it comes to weight training. I guess one solution is to move the tracker into the weights themselves — but then, I’d still need a pair of headphones.
Plantronics BackBeat Pro 2 review – CNET
The Good The Plantronics BackBeat Pro 2 sounds very good for a Bluetooth headphone, is comfortable to wear and offers decent noise cancellation and strong battery life. It performs very well as headset for making cell phone calls, includes a carrying pouch, and is an overall excellent value.
The Bad While the design has been improved, the headphone is still a little heavy and its aesthetics may not appeal to everyone; noise-canceling isn’t quite as effective as Bose’s.
The Bottom Line The BackBeat Pro 2 is an excellent full-size wireless noise-cancelling headphone that costs nearly half as much as comparable models from Bose, Sony or Sennheiser.
In the realm of headphones, noise-canceling models — those battery-powered ones that filter out unwanted external sounds like traffic din or jet-engine noise — represent the cream of the crop. And the best wireless noise-cancelling headphones from Bose, Sony, Sennheiser, Parrot and others tend to cost at least $350 (about £290 or AU$460). But not everybody wants to pay that much for a headphone, which is where Plantronics’ BackBeat Pro 2 comes in.
Priced at $200, £230 or AU$250, the BackBeat Pro 2 is being positioned as a premium headphone for less. The original BackBeat Pro was, too — and it was a good headphone for the money, despite being pretty bulky and not all that stylish. Nevertheless, it had a strong following among techie types who cared more about how it performed than how it looked.
What you get in the box.
Sarah Tew/CNET
With this new model Plantronics has slimmed the headphone down by about 35 percent, reduced its weight by about 15 percent, and made it more attractive. It also sounds very good for a Bluetooth headphone, with relatively clean, dynamic, well-balanced sound that rivals the quality of its higher-priced competitors. And it worked nearly flawlessly for me, with minimal Bluetooth hiccups.
It’s comfortable, too, and has sensors that pause and resume your music when you take the headphones off or put them on (you can also answer a call by simply putting them on your ears). And while the noise-canceling isn’t as effective as that of the Bose QuietComfort 35, it does a decent job muffling ambient noise without creating an audible hiss.
I’ve been using it in the office for the past few days and haven’t suffered any listening fatigue — from either the sound or the fit. It’s definitely a good work headphone and is ideal for an open-office environment if you want to shut out noisy co-workers. And it also played well outside — in the streets of New York in my case — though it will make your ears steamy on warmer days.
LG LFXC24796D InstaView Door-in-Door Counter-Depth Refrigerator review – CNET
The Good The LG LFXC24796D is a great-looking, high-end fridge that offers consistent performance and a good mix of features, including the unique and eye-catching InstaView window.
The Bad The Door-in-Door compartment offers questionable utility at best, and it ran warm throughout all of our tests.
The Bottom Line This is a decent fridge, but the knock-to-see-inside novelty wears off fast, and it comes at an awfully high premium.
Visit manufacturer site for details.
Another day, another “Door-in-Door” refrigerator from LG. With Door-in-Door, you can push a button on the handle of the fridge to open the front panel of the right door — this lets you grab the butter or a bottle of beer out of the in-door shelves without opening the refrigerator itself.
Now, the Door-in-Door compartment in LG’s latest refrigerators comes with an “InstaView” window. Give it a double knock, and the fridge’s interior lights will come on, illuminating your groceries inside. That lets you browse for a snack or a beverage without opening anything at all. It’s an interesting feature, but a niche convenience at best.
LG’s Door-in-Door fridge comes with a magic…
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Still, as niche conveniences go, InstaView is admittedly nifty, and it makes LG’s Door-in-Door feature more visible than ever. That, more than anything else, is what LG is probably going for here. The Korean manufacturer has made Door-in-Door a keystone feature of its fridge lineup; it needs people to know about it, and to want it. InstaView isn’t about seeing your groceries — it’s about seeing Door-in-Door.
All of which brings us to the LG LFXC24796D. It’s a counter-depth French door model in an attractive black stainless steel finish, and the InstaView window is its marquee feature. The price: $4,400 — or $600 more than a nearly identical counter-depth Door-in-Door model without the InstaView window. That’s a very steep premium for the trivial privilege of peeking at your groceries, and it makes the otherwise decent LFXC24796D a poor value.
Chris Monroe/CNET
This fridge is a looker
The rise of black stainless steel offered LG a fresh coat of paint for its high-end fridges. It’s an aesthetic that makes everything feel more modern, and it looks great on the LFXC24796D. Add the InstaView window, and you’re looking at a distinctive French door model that your house guests will be sure to “ooh” and “aah” over (they’ll probably want to knock on it, too).
Size-wise, this counter-depth model offers 23.5 cubic feet of total storage space, 15.6 of which get allocated to the fridge compartment. It’s a decent number for a counter-depth refrigerator like this one that’s designed to fit flush with the front of your cabinets and countertops. But keep in mind that counter-depth models offer less depth than their full-size siblings. Try to stuff an extra-large pizza box inside, and the doors won’t close.
The fridge compartment offers 15.6 cubic feet of storage space.
Chris Monroe/CNET
Still, I had no trouble fitting our full load of test groceries inside, and, pizza box aside, I fit our large stress test items in, too. My only quibble was that there wasn’t a good spot for 2-liter bottles. The Door-in-Door shelves would be the optimal place for them, but none of those shelves are tall enough to fit one, and none of them are adjustable. You can slide one of the main body shelves toward the back of the fridge to make room for tall items below it, but it only slides back so far. Our test 2-liter sat awkwardly over the edge of the shelf below as a result.
As for features, there’s some good stuff going on inside of this fridge. My favorite is the SlimSpace ice maker, which packs the entirety of the ice maker into the left door. It saves space inside of the fridge and keeps the interior of the door perfectly flat, which makes it easier to fit things into the in-door shelves. You’ve also got a temperature-adjustable pantry drawer that runs the width of the bottom of the fridge — a nice feature, but one that didn’t prove all that useful when we tested it (more on that in just a bit.)
Chris Monroe/CNET
Door-in-Door: What is it good for?
It’s an honest question. What’s the point? LG pitches it as both a convenience and an energy saver, but I don’t see it as either. On the convenience front, you’re still opening a door and grabbing your bottle of beer — it’s just a different door than before. As far as energy goes, we’ve yet to see a Door-in-Door compartment have any appreciable impact on performance, and we’ve tested several of them.
Xiaomi Mi MIX Hands on – the future of smartphones?
While everyone was privy to the launch to the Xiaomi Mi Note 2, Xiaomi took everyone by surprise at their press event in Beijing a few days ago with the introduction of a near bezel-less smartphone. Granted, this isn’t the first of its kind that we’ve seen, but Xiaomi has definitely improved on what was available before with devices like the Sharp Aquos Crystal, in terms of design, aesthetics, specifications, and features. We go hands on with the Xiaomi Mi MIX!
There being practically no bezels on three sides of the display including above it brings up some interesting questions with regards to the proximity sensor and the speaker to listen to calls. Xiaomi has managed to circumvent their need by using a sonar-based sensor and by placing the speaker below the display and using ceramic vibrations to allow for the audio from a call to be heard. Everything else has been placed below the display, including the front-facing camera, resulting in a more upward facing perspective when using it because of its placement.
Of course, it’s all about the screen with this device, with the Mi MIX featuring a 91.3% screen to body ratio. The device comes with a 6.4-inch IPS LCD display with a 2048 x 1080 resolution, and anyone looking for additional screen real estate for work or play will have no complaints with this phone. The display and the phone are truly a sight to behold, and is certainly going to garner a lot of attention.
The Mi MIX is built with ceramic, which gives it a very elegant and shiny look. The phone is a touch unwieldy however, not only due to its size, which actually isn’t all that bigger than other smartphones that feature much smaller 5.5-inch displays, but because the ceramic makes the phone very slippery. Xiaomi has included a high quality soft leather case in the box that helps provide a lot more grip.
Under the hood, the Mi MIX packs what you would expect from any current generation flagship smartphone, including the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, backed by the Adreno 530 GPU and 4 GB or 6 GB of RAM depending on which version you opt for. The premium version visually differs from the standard iteration by featuring 18k rings around the camera unit and the fingerprint scanner on the back.
The former also comes with 256 GB of internal storage, compared to the 128 GB that is available with the latter. Regardless of which version you pick, performance should not be an issue with either, and the storage in both cases should be more than enough to store all your apps, files, photos, and videos. The device doesn’t come with expandable storage capabilities, but very few people, if any, will miss this feature.
The Mi MIX comes with a 16 MP rear camera and a 5 MP front-facing unit, and keeping everything running is a large 4,000 mAh battery. We can’t wait to put this device through its paces, and luckily, we do have a review unit already, so you can expect a comprehensive review to be available shortly.
The Xiaomi Mi MIX will be available in China from November 4, priced at RMB 3,499 (~$519) for the 4 GB of RAM and RMB 3,999 (~$593) for the 6 GB of RAM iteration. However, with this device being a concept phone, it will be manufactured in limited quantities, and it is unfortunately quite unlikely to make its way to other markets around the world. You may still be able to import it, but you will have to make sure of network connectivity before doing so.
While its lack of availability is unfortunate, Xiaomi is certainly paving the way for what the future hopefully holds, and in a year where smartphone design hasn’t caused much excitement, the Xiaomi Mi MIX is a breathe of fresh air. Stay tuned with Android Authority for the in-depth review of the Xiaomi Mi MIX, and more on the company’s other big launch at the event, the Mi Note 2!
Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016) review – CNET
The Good A massive touchpad dominates this incredibly skinny, high-powered laptop. The screen really pops, with less bezel and wider color range. Adding space grey as a color option gives it a bold, mod look.
The Bad This version leaves out the amazing new Touch Bar. It’s more expensive than the model it replaces and has only a pair of USB-C ports plus a headphone jack for wired connectivity. The shallow keyboard takes getting used to.
The Bottom Line While it’s missing the buzzworthy Touch Bar, the entry-level MacBook Pro is effectively the redesigned and updated ‘Retina MacBook Air’ that you’ve been waiting for.
Meet the new mainstream MacBook.
Because the MacBook Air is now living in a form of suspended animation, still on sale, but lacking updated components or a tweaked design, it’s no longer the default mainstream choice. And the tiny 12-inch MacBook is a niche speciality system for frequent travelers who favor portability over flexibility.
The new MacBook Pro with Apple’s inventive Touch Bar and Touch ID fingerprint recognition is too expensive to be the go-to MacBook. Yes, the Touch Bar is impressive — it’s a 60-pixel-high OLED touch screen that replaces the traditional function key row with an ever-changing series of buttons and sliders. But right now I’d call it a want, not a need.
View full gallery Josh Miller/CNET
Instead, this most mainstream of the new MacBook Pro models has the same familiar Function key row found on almost every laptop. It sits above the keyboard, with its F1 to F12 keys still labeled for screen brightness, volume controls and other system tasks. It’s a disappointment to miss out on the most headline-grabbing feature of the new MacBook Pro line, but with that one exception, nearly everything else about this system is new.
A new keyboard with shallower keys, modeled after the nearly flat keyboard on the 12-inch MacBook, joins a larger touch pad and a pair of USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports. Lost in the shuffle is the traditional port collection of a MagSafe power plug, USB-A ports — the familiar rectangular ones that match all your existing accessories — HDMI output and mini-DisplayPort Thunderbolt connections. The old SD card slot is gone, too.
More from Apple’s Mac event
- The new Apple MacBook Pro: Apple’s amazing strip show reinvents the laptop keyboard
- Jonny Ive talks about putting ‘touch’ on the MacBook Pro
- Does the Mac still matter?
- The Mac and iPad aren’t merging. Get over it
- See all our Apple event coverage
Excising those ports and slimming down the keyboard means the new MacBook Pro has a body that’s a few millimeters thinner and about half a pound lighter than the previous MacBook Pro. The new design takes the MacBook Pro down to 14.9mm thick from 18mm and the weight down to three pounds (1.36kg). But it’s still far from the thinnest laptop out there. HP’s Spectre and Acer’s Swift 7, both powered by even newer Intel Core i7 seventh-generation Kaby Lake processors, are both less than 10mm thick. Meanwhile, the classic MacBook Air, once the king of the thin laptops, is still 17mm.
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A MacBook Air next to the new MacBook Pro.
Josh Miller/CNET
While you’re saving some money by foregoing the Touch Bar, this is still more expensive than the MacBook Pro it replaces. The entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro with retina display was previously $1,299. This new 13-inch Pro starts at $1,499, £1,449 and AU$2,199 and includes an updated Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB solid state drive.
There are other compromises besides just the loss of the Touch Bar in this entry-level MacBook Pro. The starting CPU, part of Intel’s sixth-gen of Core i-series chips, is slower than in the $1,799 version. There are only two USB-C ports that need to handle all of your connection needs, including power, data and video output, while the higher-end MacBook Pros get four USB-C ports.
But, unlike the new iPhone 7, the headphone jack survives. For now.
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This new Force Touch track pad is twice the size of the previous version.
Josh Miller/CNET
No Touch Bar, but a bigger touchpad
It’s not as cool as the Touch Bar on the higher-end Macbook Pro models, but there is one big touch-related upgrade here. The touchpad, which uses Apple’s Force Touch technology, is twice as big as before. It looks and feels massive, completely dominating the front half of the system interior.
Like the touch pads (Apple prefers to call them “trackpads”) found in the previous-generation MacBook Pro and 12-inch MacBook, this one has four corner sensors under the glass pad rather than the more traditional top-mounted hinge. The mechanism takes up less space, so the laptop body can be thinner. It’s now in every laptop Apple makes, with the exception of the MacBook Air.
A keyboard with less click
One of the things people had a hard time getting used to in the 12-inch MacBook back in 2015 was its very flat keyboard. It used a butterfly mechanism, which allows for shallower keys and a thinner body. The same basic design has made its way to the new MacBook Pros, and it’s going to be a learning curve for most.
View full gallery Josh Miller/CNET
The advantage is that you can have a slimmer body, but you lose out on some of the deep, clicky physical feedback of the current MacBooks or most other modern laptops. While the basics are the same, as is the key travel (an industry term for the distance the key moves downward to register an input) as on the 12-inch MacBook, the feel has been tweaked a bit for a better overall experience. The keys have a little more bite to them, and appear to rise up from the keyboard tray just a hair more.
New MacBook Pro Has Better Keyboard Than 12-Inch MacBook, But It’s Expensive and Lacking Ports
Apple provided the media with demo units of the new MacBook Pro sans Touch Bar, and a handful of websites have now published their early thoughts and first impressions about the 13-inch notebook. The articles reveal some interesting tidbits beyond yesterday’s Touch Bar model hands-on and first impressions roundups.
While the new MacBook Pro’s keyboard is a controversial topic, with some users preferring Apple’s traditional scissor design, most reviews said Apple’s second-generation butterfly mechanism offers an improved typing experience compared to the 12-inch MacBook’s first-generation butterfly keyboard.
Brian Heater of TechCrunch said the keyboard “feels more natural” and that individual keys have “better give”:
The new technology certainly marks a step in the right direction. The process feels more natural, and the keys have better give. I still prefer the tactile feel of older keyboards, but a lot of that may just have to do with familiarity. After all, the device was only announced yesterday.
Jim Dalrymple at The Loop echoed that sentiment, noting there is “a little more travel distance when you press down on a key”:
It seems to me that there is a little more travel distance when you press down on a key with the newer keyboard. I actually like that a bit better. After using both, the MacBook keys didn’t have enough travel. This one feels much better to me.
Stuart Miles of Pocket-lint said the new keyboard is sandwiched between “louder, clearer, and cleaner” speakers with bass-heavier sound:
The keyboard is now sandwiched between two speakers that run the height of the keyboard and deliver a louder, clearer, cleaner noise which is considerably more rounded and bassy than the previous outings. That’s achievable because Apple has changed the speaker technology moving away from bouncing the sound off the display, instead placing the direct firing speakers either side of the keyboard.
Likewise, Heater said the speakers deliver richer sound than before, noting that “things get loud. Really, really loud.”
They’re good for casual listening and maybe an episode or two of a TV show. Anything longer than that, I would go with a pair of headphones or Bluetooth speaker. Also things start to deteriorate when things hit top volume.
Dan Ackerman at CNET said the new non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro might be “the new default MacBook for most people,” although its price is disappointing:
Meanwhile, Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica highlighted the new MacBook Pro’s brighter display and wider DCI-P3 color gamut:
Both screens are 2560×1600 and 227 PPI, the same resolution and density as the old design, though the screens are brighter and support the DCI-P3 color gamut, which is increasingly becoming the norm for Apple’s devices.
Cunningham added that the new MacBook Pro scales to 1,440×900 pixels out of the box, which makes it look like it has a higher screen resolution:
The new 13-inch MacBook Pro support four display scaling modes: 1024×600, 1280×800, 1440×900, and 1680×1050. The old Pros used the 1280×800 mode out of the box, which just happened to match the display’s native resolution. The new Pros use the 1440×900 mode out of the box, which means they look like they have a higher screen resolution even though they don’t.
Cunningham said making comparisons between the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air is “understandable but flawed.” He argued “it’s only really a comparison that works when all else is equal,” which is not the case given the new MacBook Pro is upwards of $500 more expensive than the remaining 13-inch MacBook Air.
Dana Wollman at Engadget applauded the new MacBook Pro’s smaller footprint, particularly compared to the MacBook Air:
Let’s start with the design: Holy moly, is this thing small. I noticed it right away, just because my normal work laptop is a MacBook Air, which means I’m used to something much larger than this. The difference is especially obvious if you stack one machine on top of the other. Though both have 13.3-inch screens, the new MacBook Pro has a much smaller footprint — it’s shorter and less wide. Truly, trimming down that humongous bezel from the Air makes a world of difference.
One aspect of the new MacBook Pro often criticized is its lack of ports. The non-Touch Bar model has only two Thunderbolt 3 ports, which carry power, USB, DisplayPort, HDMI, and VGA for video out over a single port. As with the 12-inch MacBook, customers will have to purchase adapters to connect certain devices and accessories.
Steve Kovach at Business Insider said the need for “a lot of dongles” is “the most frustrating thing” about the new MacBook Pro:
If you want to use older accessories or even charge your iPhone, you’re going to need to buy a separate adapter or brand-new cable. That’s going to be super annoying for a lot of people as the industry continues to shift to USB-C. For example, the cable that lets you charge your iPhone in the MacBook Pro will cost you $25. Yikes.
The new MacBook Pro is also expensive, although the non-Touch Bar model is slightly more affordable at $1,499. The non-Touch Bar model is currently available for pre-order and ships in 1 business day. Touch Bar models start at $1,799 and $2,399 for the 13-inch and 15-inch models respectively and ship in 4-5 weeks.
Related Roundup: MacBook Pro
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Buyer’s Guide: Retina MacBook Pro (Buy Now)
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Sol Republic Amps Air Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET
Add another totally wireless headphone to the growing list of totally wireless headphones.
Sol Republic’s new Amps Air looks similar to other totally wireless earphones out there, such as the Bragi Dash and Samsung IconX, and costs $180. No word yet on UK or Australian pricing, but we’ll give it to you as soon as we get it. (For reference that converts to about £150 or AU$240, but expect final pricing to be considerably more.)
Like those competing models — and Apple’s delayed AirPods — you get two independent buds that are join together wirelessly to create a stereo pair.
The Amps Air have no wire between the two earbuds.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Design-wise, what distinguishes the Amps Air is that it’s wrapped in a silicone sleeve with tapered grooves. Sol Republic says it “grips the ear like treads on a tire for a comfortable yet secure fit and also allows airflow to reduce sweat build up during workouts.” So, yes, the Amps Air is being billed as a wireless sports headphone and it is sweat-resistant.
The buds fit my ears pretty well and also managed to hold a steady connection — both between my phone and the two buds themselves. There’s a little bit of lag in the Bluetooth transmission, so these aren’t going to be much good for watching video, but they’re fine with music and sound decent if you can maintain a tight seal.
If you don’t get a tight seal, you’ll lose a lot of bass with the sound coming across as thin and recessed. I also thought they had some treble push, which can give certain tracks a harsh edge. And the headphone performed only so-so as a headset — some callers said I sounded muffled.
In their charging case, which also can charge your phone.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Like competing models, battery life is mediocre at 3 hours, but you get a portable charging case with a 2,200 mAh battery that recharges the buds more than 15 times. The charging case also doubles as portable charger for your phone.
Each earpiece has a button on its exterior that allows you to pause and play your music, answer calls, and access voice assistants like Siri and Google Voice Search. The buds automatically turn off when you put them in their charging case and turn on when you take them out. You can also just use one bud as a mono headset for your phone. (When you make calls with both of them on, the sound only comes through one bud anyway.)
I like the design of the Amps Air and found that it worked reliably with minimal hiccups, which is an achievement with this type of headphone. I’m not sure it really distinguishes itself that much from the competition, but perhaps its price will come down with time, giving it an edge.
Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (13-inch, 2016) Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET
The MacBook Pro’s new Touch Bar feature.
Apple
Apple really did think different about its new laptops.
The sheer number of big-picture changes to the iconic laptop line made my head spin during an exclusive hands-on preview of Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops at the company’s Cupertino, California headquarters earlier this week. While Apple kept the MacBook Pro name it’s used since 2006, nearly everything about the new generation of the high end notebook has changed.
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And that’s a good thing. Apple’s last major update to the MacBook Pro, its priciest and most powerful computers, was back in 2014. That’s a long time in computer years. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, and Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, said the wait had to do with making sure this revamp wasn’t just a “speed bump” with faster chips and memory. They were after a “big, big step forward.”
The new MacBook Pro: How Apple added touch without a touchscreen
Apple’s latest laptops have a particularly neat trick up their sleeves.
by Dan Ackerman
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What we’ve got now is two new 13-inch MacBook Pro models and one new 15-inch model. Schiller and Federighi walked me through the laptops’ striking evolution.
The long-rumored “Magic Toolbar,” an OLED-display strip for context-sensitive touch commands, is real. Apple calls it the Touch Bar, and it’s worth all the hubbub. Just 60 pixels high (and 2,170 pixels wide), the Touch Bar could be a tool with the potential to be the Swiss Army knife of laptop input, changing itself on the fly to work across different apps, imitating a series of touch buttons, control sliders and even jog dials. This is Apple’s answer to the touchscreens found on most Windows laptops.
A closer look at the dynamic Touch Bar.
Apple
“It provides all your system functions that you’re used to up there,” said Schiller, pointing to the Touch Bar. “But in a much more attractive, better, adaptable way.”
So, for example, you can adjust the brightness or the volume just by touching the bar. “It provides all your system functions,” he said. “That alone replaces everything that the function keys were ever being used for anymore, but it does so much more.”
He’s right. I did see it do much more than the old function key row ever did, instantly transforming itself to fit to the task at hand. But before we can talk about that, we need to talk about all the other changes to the MacBook Pro. And that includes the cost.
Apple MacBook Pro swaps outdated function…
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New look, higher price
Flip open the aluminum lids of these new laptops and almost everything — including the keyboard and touchpad — looks reinvented, too. On the outside, the physical design is just different enough to mark it as a new generation, without radically rewriting the DNA of the MacBook Pro.
These new laptops are thinner and lighter. That’s no surprise, although they don’t come close to competing with the slimmest high-end Windows laptops. The 13-inch model is 14.9 mm thick and weighs 3 pounds (about 1.36 kg), while the 15-inch model is 15.5 mm thick and 4 pounds (1.81 kg). That’s compared to 18 mm for the previous 13- and 15-inch Pros, which were each about a half-pound (0.23 kg) heavier than their replacements.
James Martin/CNET
If you’re looking for the thinnest possible laptop, HP’s Spectre and Acer’s Swift 7, both powered by new seventh-generation “Kaby Lake” Intel Core i7 processors, are both less than 10 mm thick. Left feeling positively massive by comparison is the classic MacBook Air, once the king of the thin laptops, at 17 mm.
Besides the traditional silver, the new MacBook Pros come in space gray, adding a splash of (muted) color to the previously monochromatic Pro. It joins the 12-inch MacBook (as well as the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch) in giving you at least a little color customization. The space gray model isn’t as striking as the classic black MacBook, but it’s cool to see a bolder color. That’s especially true on the larger 15-inch MacBook Pro, which wears its space gray finish with a subtle sophistication.
Not so cool: The MacBook Pro gets a painful price hike.
Not so cool: The MacBook Pro gets a painful price hike. The 13-inch Pro with a dual-core Intel Core i5, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage costs $1,799. The 15-inch model, with a quad-core Core i7 (all part of Intel’s sixth-generation of Core i-series chips, also known as “Skylake”) and 16GB/256GB, sells for $2,399. The 15-inch models also include discrete AMD Radeon graphics, just as the larger preceding Pros did. In terms of battery life, expect 10 hours of work time on both sized models. That’s a tiny boost versus the old 15-incher, and exactly the same for the 13. (See the chart at the bottom of the page for UK and Australian pricing.)
For the most part, though, these specs — especially the CPUs — are a welcome update. They finally put the MacBook Pro on par with the best Windows laptops, whereas the previous models were a generation or more behind. (Those aforementioned superslim Windows laptops are powered by even newer seventh-generation “Kaby Lake” Intel processors, but those don’t seem to offer a big performance boost over their predecessors.)
James Martin/CNET
A few other updates help justify the prices. The RAM is now a faster 2,133MHz version, while the built-in solid state storage can transfer data faster, at up to 3.1 gigabytes per second. According to Apple, the displays, while retaining the same Retina resolution, are both brighter and have a wider color range, and consume 30 percent less power. These are specs many users likely won’t notice in everyday use, although faster storage is key for transferring large files (like videos) and a brighter screen is always welcome. Left off from my personal wish list is a full OLED display, a feature just starting to turn up in a handful of high-end Windows laptops.
If that’s too much sticker shock, there’s also an entry-level version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro that keeps the new design and keyboard/touchpad, but drops some of the specs and loses the Touch Bar in favor of a traditional row of function keys. That model starts at $1,499 and is available now. But keep in mind that before today, a 13-inch MacBook Pro could be had for as little as $1,299, so this is a big step up in price no matter which model you choose. I suspect there may be a few shoppers who try and track down the last stock of the previous 13-inch Pro to save some money.
The second screen
Laptops makers who mess with the traditional keyboard-plus-touchpad design are rarely rewarded.
The idea of adding a second screen to a laptop, or another place to touch and tap besides the touchpad, isn’t new. But it rarely works. Previous attempts often included a secondary touch input at the expense of a primary input method. Razer sold a line of big-screen gaming laptops that replaced the traditional touchpad with a touch-sensitive LCD display that could act as a touchpad or as a context-sensitive screen. The clever idea was undone by two key flaws — it moved the touchpad to the far right side of the laptop, and it had limited software support (mostly a handful of PC games).
Acer tried the Iconia 6120, an ambitious full-size laptop that was essentially two 14-inch LCD screens clamshelled together. Both were standard laptop touch displays, but the bottom one could show a large, touch-sensitive on-screen keyboard, as well as media transport controls and other widgets. There was no second version.
James Martin/CNET
More recently, Lenovo released the Yoga Book, a 10-inch hybrid with a vanishing keyboard. Its lower half is a Wacom tablet that can, at the touch of a button, display a backlit keyboard overlay. It’s an impressive engineering feat, but the stylus-based slate mode worked much better than the hard-to-use keyboard.
The Touch Bar in the new MacBook Pro tries to skirt these pitfalls by focusing on the gaps left behind by the keyboard and (much larger) touchpad. It’s an additional tool, rather than a replacement for something more practical. The thing that it does replace, the function key row, is itself a relic.
“Function keys were put into the notebook so you could do terminal emulation. That use has gone away for quite a long time now,” says Phil Schiller, describing how the F-keys on your laptop were originally created for old computers to talk to even older computers. Since then, more consumer-friendly commands have been mapped to these keys, making for an occasionally awkward compromise.
“It’s kind of a crazy thing to take an old, unused technology and map things onto it just so they’re not nonfunctional.”
Phil Schiller
“It’s kind of a crazy thing to take an old, unused technology and map things onto it just so they’re not nonfunctional,” Schiller adds. “We’ve decided to remove them completely, and instead replace it with something built with modern technology that can adapt and do things we need to do with today’s computing needs.”
With its context-sensitive OLED secondary display, Apple abandons the pretext that we need a string of F-labeled keys at all. What we really want is all those other secondary commands, like adjusting the brightness or muting the audio. By default, the Touch Bar displays a command strip view with brightness, volume and other system control functions. When another Apple app is launched, including Photos, Mail or Safari, the command buttons roll up to the far right side of the strip, leaving the rest of the space free for app-specific commands, which can take the form of buttons, sliders or dials.
Apple’s Phil Schiller
James Martin/CNET
The possibilities seem limitless.
During my visit to Apple’s headquarters, I saw some examples demonstrated for me at our exclusive hands-on. These included a jog wheel for rotating photos in Apple’s Photos app, suggested words and corrected spellings in Mail, and a tiny display of open tabs in Safari.
The Messages app naturally gives you a menu of emojis. Other programs, including Adobe’s Photoshop, will support Touch Bar, which seems especially relevant for design and creativity apps. Future support from third-party apps and websites will make or break the Touch Bar. I’m eager to see what it can do when teamed with apps like Netflix or Spotify, which could hypothetically let you fast-forward through a movie or song with the slide of a finger.
Federighi says the Touch Bar will make it easier to find and use features often buried in rarely accessed software submenus. “Some of these apps have a lot of power that is often hidden behind menus and things, that they can surface contextually on the Touch Bar, which is so powerful.”
Of course, ditching that function key row claimed another casualty: the escape key. But the good news is that at least one of the customized Touch Bar designs already had a “soft” escape key right where we still expected it.
The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros side-by-side.
Apple
The far right side of the Touch Bar has a small square set aside for a Touch ID input. That’s the same fingerprint technology that’s in current iPhones, and lets you log into the system and make payments via Apple Pay. You can do that already if you have a MacOS MacBook and an iOS 10 iPhone, if the two devices sit close to each other, but in the new MacBook, it’s a self-contained system powered by Apple’s built-in T1 security chip.
As a clever party trick, the new MacBook Pro can also switch user profiles on the fly, just by sensing a fingerprint. Simply place your finger on the sensor, and the other person’s desktop logs out, replaced by yours.
Twice the touch
The touchpad, which still uses Apple’s Force Touch technology, now spans twice the surface area of the previous MacBook Pro’s touchpad. It’s massive — completely dominating the front of the interior. It’s also a bold challenge for other laptops to try and match (though some HP models have been down this path, too).
Like the touchpads in the previous-gen MacBook Pro and 12-inch MacBook — Apple prefers to call them trackpads — this one has four corner sensors under the glass pad, rather than the more traditional top-mounted hinge. That means the pad doesn’t actually click down, but instead gives you a little force feedback kick. It feels a lot like a touchpad click, but lets you, for example, fast-forward a video by applying more finger pressure to the glass. It also takes up less space, so laptop bodies can be thinner. It’s now in every laptop Apple makes, with the exception of the MacBook Air.
James Martin/CNET
With such a large touchpad, how does the system know to reject errant palm hits while you’re typing?
Federighi tells me the palm-rejection software was already pretty finely tuned from the last major MacBook Pro refresh in 2012. “I don’t know if we fundamentally changed our algorithms because we got it pretty solid in the last generation,” he says. “We’ve had to tune it of course. We do all kinds of tuning of these. But our old algorithm does the job.”
Cracking the keyboard code
Sitting above the larger touchpad is a redesigned keyboard. It’s going to be the topic of a lot of discussion.
Anyone familiar with the 12-inch MacBook will have a better idea of what to expect. The keyboard here uses Apple’s butterfly mechanism, which allows for shallower keys and a thinner body. Using a very shallow keyboard made sense in the very thin 12-inch MacBook, but it’ll come as a bit of a shock for Pro users, who are used to the deep, clicky physical feedback of the current MacBooks.
James Martin/CNET
The keyboard on the new MacBook Pro models have the same shallow key travel (an industry term for the distance the key moves downward to register an input) as the version on the 12-inch MacBook. But the new “feel” of the keys and how they register a click gives the keyboard a more substantial feel. In a brief typing test I was struck by how much the keyboard felt like the one on a 12-inch MacBook, and how unlike the current generation of MacBook Pros it felt. You lose that satisfying feeling of your fingers being on big, chunky keys that click down with a satisfying thunk. Instead, typing becomes a quieter, more subtle task. The keys in older MacBooks rise up from the system surface, like tiny platforms. Now, the keys just slightly break the plane of the keyboard tray.
The new keyboard feel will be one of the tallest hurdles for potential buyers to jump. MacBook keyboards are iconic, and for good reason. The biggest complaints I’ve heard from readers about Apple’s 12-inch MacBook since its 2015 release have been about the shallow keyboard and the single USB-C port. Will MacBook buyers give the new keyboard design a shot? I found that the butterfly keyboard in the 12-inch MacBook wasn’t my favorite.
I eventually got used to it after a short adjustment period. Since then, I’ve easily typed over 100,000 words on the 2015 and 2016 MacBooks. But as an all-day, everyday computer keyboard, I’m unconvinced. Check back in a few weeks of heavy use and I’ll offer a more complete opinion.
The port problem
Every time some enterprising computer company takes away a port or connection on a laptop — essentially branding it as a “legacy” port we can do without — there’s a huge outcry from aggrieved users over this loss of flexibility and expandability. Generally speaking, however, the doomsayers are almost always wrong, and the minimalists are right.
Windows laptops in mainstream sizes have mostly dropped the Ethernet jacks and even the optical drives. Before that, a process of natural selection led to a survival-of-the-fittest array of ports, with VGA and DVI connections, parallel and PS/2 ports, and others vanishing at first slowly, then all at once.
The 12-inch MacBook started the trend of dropping nearly everything in favor of USB-C, which can carry Thunderbolt-speed data, connect to power, and through add-on adaptors, support USB sticks, HDMI output, and anything else you’d want to plug into a computer.
James Martin/CNET
In the new MacBook Pro, Apple more than doubles down on the idea of USB-C; it quadruples down. There are now four USB-C ports, two on each side (except for the entry-level 13-inch Pro, which has only two USB-C ports) and nothing else. It’s a bold move for a laptop that often spends a lot of time tethered to your desk, driving external displays or connected to storage drives. As with your iPhone 7, get ready to stock up on some dongles.
Another carryover from the 12-inch MacBook: the beloved MagSafe power adapter is gone. Like the 12-inch MacBook, the new Pros juice up via USB-C, too.
Generally speaking, the doomsayers are almost always wrong, and the minimalists are right.
It’s actually not USB-C or nothing, though. There’s one more port still hanging around the MacBook Pro. The humble headphone jack, recently excised from the iPhone 7, gets a reprieve here. For now.
“We have a lot of Pros who hook up to studio speakers or amplifiers,” says Schiller, “and we absolutely believe wireless is the way to go for headphones. But there are other uses on the desktop configuration with a notebook.”
A decade-long evolution
This major reworking of the MacBook Pro comes as the Pro line hits the 10-year mark. For the past decade, the MacBook family has largely defined the idea of a laptop in the public consciousness. Its silhouette is instantly recognizable across a crowded coffee shop or conference room. There’s a reason almost every portrayal of a laptop in film or TV since the mid-2000s is either a MacBook or a silver-colored prop lookalike. The aluminum unibody, the minimal visual clutter (which I sometimes refer to as Apple’s “strictly enforced minimalism”), the soft-focus beacon of a logo beaming out from the back of the lid. These all chime with the perceived user of the laptop’s owner: young (at least in spirit), creative and, of course, affluent. These aren’t cheap machines.
My 2006 review of the first-generation MacBook Pro highlights much of what’s made the MacBook Pro such a popular laptop over the years. It reads: “Apple’s minimalist school of design is well represented in the MacBook Pro. Opening the lid, you’ll find only a power button, a full-size keyboard, stereo speakers, a sizable touchpad with a single mouse button, and a built-in iSight camera that sits above the display. We’re big fans of the keyboard’s backlighting feature and the two-finger touchpad scroll (run two fingers down the touchpad and it scrolls like a mouse wheel).”
Rereading that sent me down a rabbit hole, to the first review of the black polycarbonate MacBook (an Editor’s Choice winner for 2006) and the very first MacBook Air review from 2008. The latter is the only one of these I consciously recall writing, largely because of the active back-and-forth debates held with my CNET colleagues at the time about the scandalous omission of an optical drive from that system, and its single USB port for connectivity.
All the action at Apple’s Hello Again event
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Is the MacBook Pro still king of the laptops?
When anyone asks me the loaded question, “What laptop should I buy?” my default answer has been the 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s as close to a one-size-fits all laptop as anyone has ever produced, and the reason the MacBook Pro has been the first choice for many people, especially creative professionals, for the past 10 years.
Of course, if you need something specifically for playing PC games, if you’re looking to spend less now, rather than making a big multi-year investment, or just want a touchscreen, detachable keyboard or any of a dozen other features that MacBooks lack, then my recommendations fan out to one of the dozens of other worthwhile laptops made by the likes of Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Razer and Samsung.
Of late, some of these PC makers have come remarkably close to hitting the same highs as the MacBook Pro, with high-res displays, powerful processors and even touchpads that are not as far from the mark as they used to be. Dell’s XPS 13 and XPS 15, Acer’s Swift 7, HP’s Spectre and the Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Yoga are all worth serious consideration, although none are in danger of replacing the MacBook Pro as my default starting point for laptop buying advice.
James Martin/CNET
So, what’s the new default? My head says the entry-level, 13-inch MacBook Pro is the smartest choice of these. It’s missing the new Touch Bar, but it has almost every other new feature, including the slimmer design, new keyboard and touchpad, and brighter display. Apple intends it to be the new mainstream pick, and what you should look to if you’re chasing the idea of something as portable as a MacBook Air, but with a Retina display.
But my gut says you’ll regret not having the Touch Bar. It’s only in the early stages of its development now, with a handful of partner apps, but it’s the kind of implementation that most second-screen concepts miss — adding to your experience, rather than trying to distract you with gimmicky bells and whistles. That said, even I did a double take when I heard the 15-inch version of the MacBook Pro starts at $2,399. Even $1,799 for the 13-inch with the Touch Bar is a big ask, considering where MacBook Pro prices were beforehand.
Once we’ve had a chance to fully test and review the new MacBook Pro, we’ll be able to better make a buying recommendation. But if you’re interested in one of the Touch Bar models, you have a little time to make a decision. The entry-level 13-inch Pro is available to order now, while the Touch Bar versions aren’t coming until sometime in November.
Apple 2016 MacBook Pro pricing lineup
| $1,499 | £1,449 | AU$2,199 |
| $1,799 | £1,749 | AU$2,699 |
| $1,999 | £1,949 | AU$2,999 |
| $2,399 | £2,349 | AU$3,599 |
| $2,799 | £2,699 | AU$4,249 |
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