Placeholders or products: Newly discovered icons for the upcoming 16-inch MacBook Pro fall flat at first sight

French tech site MacGeneration has highlighted a couple of interesting icons that have been discovered in the code for Apple’s desktop operating system, macOS Catalina. The icons appear to show the next MacBook Pro, which will offer users a novel 16-inch display. The names for the images in the code are “com.apple.macbookpro-16-silver.icns” and “com.apple.macbookpro-16-space-gray.icns”.

Apart from the fact that it appears the upcoming 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro 2019 will come in a choice of either silver or space gray, it seems the next MBP has also had its frame refreshed. MacGeneration has kindly offered up a visual comparison between the laptop on the icons and the current MacBook Pro 15. As can be seen in the image (see below) the MacBook Pro 16 has narrower bezels, which is most noticeable with the top bezel.

Bezel-trimming doesn’t seem to be the only update that Apple has given the MacBook Pro 16 though. Fortunately, some detective work has resulted in a subtle difference being spotted between the MacBook Pro 15 and the larger model in regard to the keyboard. The former laptop has no noticeable gaps at the top of the keyboard area, which is taken up by the Touch Bar. The alleged MBP 16 in the icon shows a gap, so maybe Apple has done some reworking for this input device.

Most likely it will be the innards that shine while the exterior just basically shows more of the same, presuming the icons are actually of the final MacBook Pro 16 product and not just slightly edited MBP 15 images being used as placeholders. The most persistent rumors about the 16-inch MacBook Pro have settled on a farewell to the controversial butterfly keyboard mechanism that Apple has relied on in the past and the possible inclusion of some state-of-the-art 7nm Navi graphics power from AMD.