Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 Series

The Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 is a powerful professional notebook with the brilliant design of its predecessor, aimed for business and professional power users. On the outside, the largest MacBook remains utterly unchanged. However, it is still 17 percent lighter and 14 percent thinner than its 2015 predecessor and feels as premium as ever. The laptop is also thinner than most “pro” Windows laptops with powerful processors. Thinness has become a point of contention, because it makes the laptop more complicated to cool. The unibody aluminum design mates beautifully with the glass display, touchpad, and Touch Bar with Touch-ID sensor. All 15-inch models of the MacBook Pro 2018 also feature the Touch Bar. This is a thin glass touchscreen that runs along the top of the keyboard and displays context-sensitive buttons on its 2,170 x 60 resolution screen. These buttons change depending on the application or task that users are performing, and they are designed to give quick shortcuts to help speed up the workflow. Finishing off with the screen, while it keeps the 2,880 x 1,800 resolution and 220 ppi (pixels per inch) pixel density of previous 15-inch MacBook Pros, it now also features Apple’s True Tone display technology, which debuted on the iPad Pro and also features on the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X. This technology senses the ambient light of the environment users are working in and adjusts the display so that you get a bright and vibrant image, no matter where you are working.

 

Just as on the 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, the speakers have been updated. This is an impressive feat, since the MacBook Pro already has the best sounding speakers. As for connectivity, Thunderbolt 3 is a game-changer. Every port has sufficient bandwidth to drive a dock that supports every possible port users could want as well as a high-resolution monitor in addition to power. USB-C is here to stay on the MacBook Pro. More and more laptops are adopting the Thunderbolt/USB-C setup, because it can be used for all kinds of peripherals, from external GPUs to keyboards and mice. Apple chose to include a six-core processor in every model of the 15-inch MacBook, starting with the i7 in the base model, which already has great potential for performance, up to the latest and most powerful i9 model. Moving onto other components, the RAM has been updated from 16 GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 to 64 GB of 2400MHz DDR4 soldered onto the motherboard. On the graphics side, both the base-model Radeon Pro 555X and top-spec Radeon Pro 560X include 4 GB of video memory. The solid state drive can be configured to a massive 4 TB, thus bringing up the price to around USD10K. The 2018 MacBook Pro reached close to 10 hours before it shut down, which is not a bad figure compared to its rivals. Nevertheless, when working on something more intensive, such as video rendering, one should expect less battery life.

Hands-on article by Jagadisa Rajarathnam

Processor: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8750H, Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H, Intel Coffee Lake i9-8950HK
Graphics Adapter: AMD Radeon Pro 555X, AMD Radeon Pro 560X, AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20, AMD Radeon RX 560X (Laptop)
Display: 15.40 inch, 15.60 inch
Weight: 1.83kg
Price: 2799, 3299, 3500, 8349 euro
price: 75%, performance: 83%, features: 63%, display: 92%, mobility: 81%, workmanship: 86%, ergonomy: 95%, emissions: 85%

 

Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 (2.6 GHz, 560X)

Specifications

Notebook: Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 (2.6 GHz, 560X)
Processor: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H
Graphics Adapter: AMD Radeon Pro 560X
Display: 15.40 inch, 16:10, 2880 x 1800 pixels
Weight: 1.83kg
Price: 3299 euro
Links: Apple homepage

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Average Score: 79% - good

 

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Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 (2.9 GHz, 560X)

Specifications

Notebook: Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 (2.9 GHz, 560X)
Processor: Intel Coffee Lake i9-8950HK
Graphics Adapter: AMD Radeon RX 560X (Laptop)
Display: 15.40 inch, 16:10, 2880 x 1800 pixels
Weight: 1.83kg
Price: 3500 euro
Links: Apple homepage

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Average Score: 84% - good

 

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Foreign Reviews

 

Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 (2.2 GHz, 555X)

Specifications

Notebook: Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 (2.2 GHz, 555X)
Processor: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8750H
Graphics Adapter: AMD Radeon Pro 555X
Display: 15.60 inch, 16:10, 2880 x 1800 pixels
Weight: 1.83kg
Price: 2799 euro
Links: Apple homepage

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Average Score: 85% - good

 

Reviews

 

Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 (2.9 GHz, Vega 20)

The Apple MacBook Pro 15 (i9, Vega 20) is a high-end laptop that is even thinner than the older generation MacBook Air at 0.61 inches (15.5 mm). This top of the line model is still available in standard Silver and a darker Space Gray finish. This particular model not only makes the Macbook Pro great but it also elevates the notebook to a whole new level of performance and portability. Wherever user’s ideas take them, they’ll get there faster than ever with its consumer category leading processors and memory, advanced graphics, extremely fast and durable storage and much more. Despite doing the usual tasks of a laptop, the Macbook Pro 15 with i9 processor is best suited for photography, coding, high resolution video editing, 3D graphics and even some high capability gaming. With the latest eighth-generation Intel Core processors, the MacBook Pro reaches new heights in computing performance. This top of the line 15‑inch model now features a 6‑core Intel Core i9 processor. With 4.8 GHz enabled via Turbo Boost, this new processor is 70 % faster than the previous generation 15-inch MacBook Pros. The processor can be paired with up to 32 GB of high performance DDR4 RAM. This might sound like a lot but is totally needed for what the processor is capable of handling. It is also configurable with up to a 4 TB Solid State Drive with sequential read speeds up to 3.2 GB/s. For the highest graphics performance in a working class laptop, the Macbook Pro features Radeon Pro Vega GPU with 4 GB of DDR5 memory. This is the first discrete mobile Vega GPU in a notebook. Featuring the same graphics architecture used in the iMac Pro, Vega delivers an enhanced compute engine and utilizes High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2). HBM2 doubles the memory bandwidth to the GPU while doing so at considerably lower power. Hence, more of the graphics power budget can be used by the GPU itself. Paired with the high-end graphics is the latest retina display. The latest one supports P3 with color for even more vibrant greens and reds than with sRGB. Like the previous generations, the touch bar transforms the laptop into a media power house. However, with all the power under the hood, it would have been really awesome if Apple had included a touchscreen to this laptop. There is simply so much more that can be done with a touchscreen in terms of video , graphics and photo editing in a high-performance laptop like this. In fact, that is what it was mainly designed for. The speakers on this laptop are connected directly to the system power, enabling greater peak amplification. The MacBook Pro keyboard features a butterfly mechanism, providing four times more key stability than a traditional scissor mechanism, along with greater comfort. However, though this may sound good on paper, in reality, it is still behind some of the industry leading laptops in this category such as the Thinkpads. The keyboard is simply too shallow for typing with higher speeds. Also, there have been many complaints about the membrane keyboard's durability. Many users have been experiencing premature failure despite Apple having improved it over the previous generation. As a conclusion, the Apple MacBook Pro 15 (i9, Vega 20) is certainly a high-end performance laptop that packs a lot of power in it. Suitable for all kinds of tasks, however, it does not come at a cheap price tag, which is common for an Apple device. It excels in some areas such as graphics or video editing but in other areas, more can be expected from other high end laptops. Hands-on article by Jagadisa Rajarathnam

Specifications

Notebook: Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 (2.9 GHz, Vega 20)
Processor: Intel Coffee Lake i9-8950HK
Graphics Adapter: AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 4096 MB
Display: 15.60 inch, 16:10, 2880 x 1800 pixels
Weight: 1.83kg
Price: 8349 euro
Links: Apple homepage

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Reviews

 

Comment

Apple: Apple is a US company founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, the company is known for its innovative products such as the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, and manufactures computers and consumer electronics as well as operating systems and application software. Apple is also a leading provider of software and services such as the App Store, iTunes and iCloud.

Apple has earned a reputation as a company that focuses on design and ease of use. As for their notebooks, they are mostly in the high-priced segment, have their own operating system, but also run Windows on the newer Macbooks.

Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world and has a loyal following of customers and fans. The company also has a strong presence in the entertainment industry, with services like Apple Music and Apple TV+. In 2023, Apple had an approximate 8% market share of global PC sales, ranking it 4th after Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

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Modern games should be playable with these graphics cards at low settings and resolutions. Casual gamers may be happy with these cards.

AMD Radeon Pro 560X: Mobile graphics card based on the Polaris 21 chip and basically a higher clocked Radeon Pro 560 from the previous model year.

AMD Radeon RX 560X (Laptop): Renamed Radeon RX 560 with slightly altered clock speeds. Offers 1024 shader cores and a usual clock speed of 1175 - 1275 MHz.

AMD Radeon Pro 555X: Graphics card for the Apple MacBook Pro 15 2018 based on Polaris 21. The specifications are identical to the previous Radeon Pro 455 / 555 with slightly higher clock speeds and 4 instead of 2 GB GDDR5 graphics memory.

AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20: Dedicated graphics card based on the Vega architecture (or a mixture of Polaris and Vega like in the RX Vega M GL). It integrates 20 CUs (1.280 shaders) and 4 GB HBM2 graphics memory.

» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List.

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Intel Coffee Lake:

i7-8850H: On Coffee Lake architecture based processor for big and heavy laptops. Integrates six processor cores clocked at 2.6 - 4.3 GHz (4.1 GHz with 4 cores, 4 GHz with 6 cores) that support HyperThreading. Manufactured in an improved 14nm process (14nm++).

i9-8950HK: On Coffee Lake architecture based processor for big and heavy laptops. Integrates six processor cores clocked at 2.9- 4.8 GHz (4.3 GHz with 6 cores) that support HyperThreading. Manufactured in an improved 14nm process (14nm++). Offers an unlocked multiplier that allows overclocking of the CPU.

i7-8750H: On Coffee Lake architecture based processor for big and heavy laptops. Integrates six processor cores clocked at 2.2 - 4.1 GHz (4 GHz with 4 cores, 3.9 GHz with 6 cores) that support HyperThreading. Manufactured in an improved 14nm process (14nm++).

» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Processsors.

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» To find out how fine a display is, see our DPI List.

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No weight comment found (one expected)!

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81.83%: This rating is slightly above average, there are somewhat more devices with worse ratings. However, clear purchase recommendations look different.

» Further information can be found in our Notebook Purchase Guide.

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