Update: As of Wednesday, November 14, 2018, Apple offers new, higher-end graphics options for the 2018 MacBook Pro. Namely, mobile Radeon Pro Vega.

Build-to-order options for the 15-inch only, you can get the Pro Vega 16 with 4GB of HBM2 memory for + $250.00 or the Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory for + $350.00.

There’s something about cracking open a new MacBook Pro for the first time. I’ll probably never know for sure, but I imagine it’s similar to getting into a new Ferrari. You already know what hyper-performance wrapped in sleek lines feels like, but you’re curious to see just how much better it can get.

For me, hitting render on Final Cut Pro X is like slamming down the gas. It’s not just how much faster it goes, it’s how much faster it goes faster.

In a normal year, that’s a straightforward process. With the MacBook Pro (2018), not so much: From the moment the third iteration of Apple’s latest design hit the market, controversy hit with it.

First, concerns about the reliability of the butterfly and dome-switch keyboards, which proved problematic enough in the previous two versions for Apple to have instituted a repair program.

Second, from the irresistible force of Intel falling back on multiple extra cores to make up for multiple years of failing to get to a 10-nanometer process, slamming head-on into the immovable object that is Apple’s insistence on keeping its pro portables ultra portable.

I’ve now spent a week testing a new, 15-inch MacBook Pro (2018) with a 6-core i9 processor, 32GB of memory, and 2TB of solid-state storage, which sells for a brisk $4,699. (The new 13-inch starts at $1,799 and the new 15-inch at $2,399). I’ve also spent almost a second week throwing out those tests and doing them over again following Apple finding and fixing a bug in the thermal management firmware (see the Coffee Lake section, below). In addition, I’ve spoken to over a dozen pro users in a wide range of fields, to get a sense of how the new machines affect a wide range of workloads.

Here’s what I’ve found.

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MacBook Pro (2018) In Brief

Conclusion

For some, MacBook Pro (2018) will be the best of the best. For others, the best of the worst. Three years into this design generation only one thing is for certain: This remains the most controversial and divisive pro portable Apple has ever made.

The casing is the same. Light, sleek, and strong, but no longer modern looking in the age of iPhone X or some of its near-bezeless competition. The ports remain USB-C / Thunderbolt 3, but the 13-inch now matches the 15-inch with all four offering full bandwidth.

The already excellent high-gamut, high-density display now has True Tone, which means it will automatically match the ambient color temperature, from the warm yellows of incandescent light to the cool blues of fluorescent. Unless you’re in a proper studio, carefully calibrating before doing a final color correction on images or video, just leave it on and enjoy whites that actually look paper-white.

Apple’s custom T1 co-processor, which previously offered a secure enclave for features like Touch ID and Apple Pay, has been escalated to a T2, which adds secure boot authentication and hardware accelerated data encryption, among other things.

eighth-generation Intel “Coffee Lake” processors bring the 13-inch to 4 cores and the 15-inch to 6-cores. Because Apple wants maximum portability as well as performance, they’re aggressively power managed. Still, the gains are appreciable, especially following Apple’s supplemental update, which fixed a thermal management bug in the firmware.

The graphics update is more modest, though the 13-inch now offers 128MB of eDRAM, double the previous generation. But eGPU is now a reality for anyone who wants to or is willing to plug in a bigger, better AMD card. Apple and NVIDIA are still at loggerheads, though, so there’s still no option for people who want Cuda cores.

Update: As of Wednesday, November 14, 2018, Apple offers new, higher-end graphics options for the 2018 MacBook Pro. Namely, mobile Radeon Pro Vega.

Build-to-order options for the 15-inch only, you can get the Pro Vega 16 with 4GB of HBM2 memory for + $250.00 or the Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory for + $350.00.

For those who wanted more memory,, good news: The 15-inch MacBook Pro has given up more power-efficient LPDDR3 RAM for more scalable DDR4 RAM, and can now go to 32GB. Both now have even faster solid-state storage and double their previous capacities: Up to 2TB for the 13-inch and a whopping — and wallet-rending — 4TB for the 15-inch.

To power the extra cores and hungrier memory, Apple has added more battery. By virtue of some hocus-pocus, the overall weight didn’t change, but the extra power is canceled out by the extra demand, so you end up with the same battery life as previous years. I get about a workday of web surfing and several hours of video editing and rendering.

The butterfly and dome switch keyboard — embraced by some, detested by others but concerning for its failure rate to most — has been iterated again as well. For the third gen, a silicone membrane has been slipped in over the switches. It changes the tone and loudness, sure, but it also makes the keys feel punchier and, most importantly, provides protection against dust and debris, which should improve reliability.

So if you’re already using a 2016 or 2017 MacBook Pro, are the performance, security, and reliability improvements worth upgrading for? If you’ve stuck with an old MacBook Pro, are the updated display, chipsets, security, and keyboard enough to finally win you over?

Three version in and my original recommendation remains the same: Apple has a very specific opinion about what makes a pro laptop, and it’s still as much about portability as it is performance.

If you want a thicker laptop with more thermal headroom, more keyboard travel, and more legacy ports, then this is still not that. If, on the other hand, you’re all about pro-on-the-go, and you want your speed to be sexy, then the MacBook Pro (2018) is the absolute best expression of it yet and will make you ludicrously happy.