The 2015 MacBook Review
by Ryan Smith on April 14, 2015 10:15 AM ESTForce Touch Trackpad
Along with Apple’s changes to their keyboard, the company has also gone in and significantly reworked their trackpad. The new Force Touch Trackpad represents the biggest change to Apple’s trackpad design since the creation of the capacitive, multi-touch pivoting trackpad introduced on the unibody MacBook Pro. In putting together the Force Touch Trackpad, Apple has significantly reworked the internals of the trackpad, creating a trackpad that behaves a lot like their traditional trackpad with some new features, but under the hood relies on some very different mechanisms.
The big change here is that Apple has done away with the traditional pivot and switch mechanism. With pivot and switch, the capacitive trackpad surface would act like a small touchscreen, and underneath it was a switch to register when the trackpad was pressed down. Mechanically the trackpad pivoted from the top (Apple likes to compare it to a diving board), with the trackpad inferring what action to take based on the combination of the capacitive readings and the switch reading. Multi-finger gestures would rely solely on the capacitive layer, primary/secondary clicks would be based on the number of fingers in use when the switch was actuated, etc.
The Force Touch Trackpad on the other hand eliminates the pivot and switch mechanism in favor of a combination of an electromagnet and force/pressure sensors. The pressure sensors essentially replace the physical switch, allowing the trackpad to tell when it has been pressed based on the amount of pressure, and thanks to the pressure sensors it can now tell how hard it has been pressed as opposed to the binary nature of the physical switch. Meanwhile without a physical switch in place to provide the clicking sensation and feedback of pressing down on the touchpad, Apple’s electromagnet – the Taptic Engine – activates to simulate the feeling and noise of pressing a switch.
Update 04/15/2015: iFixit has a great shot of the trackpad's internals, including a good look at just how big the electromagnet/taptic engine really is.
The end result is that the MacBook’s trackpad is among the first wave of devices that ships with Apple’s next generation trackpad and the enhanced capabilities that go with it. Ignoring the pressure sensitivity for a moment (we’ll get back to it), replacing the pivot and switch for an electromagnet works shockingly well. From a touch & feel standpoint the Force Touch Trackpad feels virtually identical to a traditional trackpad, to the point where it’s more than a bit uncanny. In practice you are not actually triggering a switch nor is the trackpad really moving (technically it’s deforming ever so slightly), but it sure feels like you’re working a switch. Apple has clearly done their homework on getting an electromagnet to emulate a switch, to great results. Meanwhile they don’t have the trackpad’s acoustics precisely matching a switch, but the resulting pinball-machine like plunk is close enough to a click that I don’t imagine anyone will mind the difference.
One side benefit of this change is that the trackpad feels the same throughout, and unlike the pivoting trackpad does not require more or less force depending on where you are relative to the pivot point. The variable force required has never been a major problem in my experience, but it is nice to no longer need to worry about where your fingers are relative to the top, and consequently how much force you need to use.
However the bigger deal is that by making the amount of force required to click consistent throughout the entire trackpad, Apple can now use the amount of pressure applied as another input, making the trackpad pressure-sensitive. The underlying pressure sensors and electromagnet are by default programmed to have two levels of feedback – a shallower press is equivalent to a click – and a deeper press brings about the pressure-sensitive “Force Click.” What force clicking does depends on the application, and right now it’s clear that Apple is still experimenting with what they can do with pressure sensitivity. The most obvious uses include line thickness in drawing applications, but the company is also using it for things such as variable speed fast forward and rewinding in QuickTime/iMovie. At times the force click is treated like a 3rd (tertiary) click, and other times the result is based on variable pressure. Since this is a new (and uncommon) feature there’s no global action assigned to the force click – nor does it behave as a middle click on a regular mouse – so what happens is up to the application.
In implementing force click and the Force Touch Trackpad, Apple does offer the ability to control the amount of pressure required and whether force click is active. With force click deactivated the trackpad behaves more or less identical to a traditional trackpad with a single click level. Meanwhile the click pressure setting is interesting, though I’m not entirely convinced it’s all that effective. Short of the tools to actually measure click pressure, I’m not so sure Apple is changing the amount of pressure required to trigger a click so much as they’re changing how hard the electromagnet vibrates. The feedback change is certainly very subtle going from light to firm, and if there is a change in the amount of pressure required then it is certainly equally subtle.
Ultimately whether the Force Touch Trackpad is a major upgrade or not is going to depend on a user’s ability to make use of the force click features. Even turned off, the new trackpad is essentially an improved version of the old trackpad without the minor drawbacks of the pivot mechanism. But with the force click turned on, then it brings new (though not always useful) actions to the trackpad that in turn makes it a bigger upgrade over the old trackpad.
In any case, the MacBook along with the 2015 MacBook Pro 13” are the first wave of devices to implement the new Force Touch Trackpad. Given its expanded capabilities I would expect Apple to eventually replace many (if not all) of their trackpads with this new design. Certainly the 15” MacBook Pro is a likely candidate, as is a future version of the Magic Trackpad. What remains to be seen is whether the next MacBook Air also gets this new trackpad, or if Apple withholds it to keep the products differentiated and to keep the costs of the MacBook Air down.
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modulusshift - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Dudebro, Anand's out. He's at Apple now.Ooh, performance over time would have been good.
Definitely with you on the performance per watt and silence, Apple has never been more environmentally friendly.
That said, I don't think this review was bad. Could have used a little more editing, and discussion of the different models as you said. But it had some good material I've yet to see in the rest of the reviews. I wish it lived up to the standard of Anand's review of the SP3 where he gave more of his subjective opinion of how it actually ran. This guy said, yeah, it's thinner and lighter, and I like how it feels, but it's slower than my current 11 inch, so there's a little bit of a tradeoff... And I wonder, why is it slower? Is it actually less capable? What sort of experiences didn't work as you expected? What is really wrong with it?
wave84 - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
The point is I didn't see anything here that I haven't already read on all the other websites all the way from New York Times to the Verge to ArsTechnica. The reason we all visit AnandTech is for those really detailed, in depth 25 page reviews where every single one of our questions gets an answer. Not the case here.The reason why I'm being so determined is that this is a very important review. Like it or not, Apple fanboy or not, the Macbook Air has probably been the most important laptop of the last 10 years. It has basically defined the laptop market of our times and it has been studied, copied and emulated by every manufacturer out there.
Similarly, the new Macbook is probably on a quest to do the same. I would have preferred to wait 2 weeks and read the real thing, not the same article that I've already read 10 times so far (by the way, isn't it strange that all these articles are so similar?)
I'm in a strange boat myself. Started out getting a 2011 13" Macbook Air as a secondary computer, then it slowly transformed into a desktop replacement with an external monitor with the old desktop sold for parts (doing web development, mostly). I would currently kill for the weightlessness / screen / quietness of the Macbook, if the questions above would have been answered. Should I go for the updated 2015 Air? A somewhat bulky Pro? Or maybe just wait for Skylake?
Why have you deserted us, Anand?!... :)
BillBear - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
I don't get the feeling that this would be a viable desktop replacement if you're at all concerned about gaming.lilo777 - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Hence the term "hybrid". This device is not good either as a desktop replacement or a tablet replacement (or even as a regular laptop replacement). It's a "hybrid" then (probably good for nothing).Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Hi Wave, thanks for the feedback. To get right to answering your questions.1) This was the base model, so the $1299 5Y31 model. Apple only samples a single model, so I do not know how the higher end model would fare. However what we've found when looking at other Core M devices is that faster processors can end up throttling sooner, which can be counter-productive. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel...
2) If a load is going to cause the laptop to throttle, it does so almost immediately. As noted in the review, even the 28 second Photoshop benchmark is long enough to require some throttling. As a result pretty much anything longer than a long webpage load is going to face power limits, and longer use will also bring on thermal limits.
Also, while it's not in a chart, I mentioned in the Geekbench 3 section that we ran the stress test. the MacBook reaches equilibrium almost immediately; by the second run it's already down to its steady-state score of 4200.
What this means is that the MacBook can only run at its higher clockspeeds for very, very short periods of time. As a result "performance over time" would be on the order of seconds. This isn't like an Ultrabook or other laptop where performance slowly degrades over time as the cooling system slowly falls behind.
3) Poorly. I wouldn't suggest it. DOTA 2 is about as strenuous as it's going to be able to take. Unfortunately we can't test any of those games as there isn't a suitable FRAPS-like utility for Yosemite to let us do proper benchmarking.
4) The issue with testing efficiency is that to properly test it we need to isolate the CPU and measure it directly. You're not wrong, this is a very efficient processor, but there isn't currently a great way to systematically show that since there's no way to separate the CPU's power consumption from the display's power consumption.
Anyhow, I'm sorry to hear the review didn't live up to your full expectations, but none the less thank you for the feedback and thank you for reading it.
wave84 - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
Thank you for answering all of my questions, Ryan. I withdraw all my complaints :)Kevin G - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
3) I thought Apple's developer tools for OpenGL has a FRAPs-like tool included. I'll have to check when I get home later today.I do know for certain that it has the ability to record VRAM usage over time. Found this out playing around with a GTX 770 and 970 to see just how difficult it was to go over 3.5 GB.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
It shows you the frame rate, but it doesn't allow you to record it to find the average frame rate over time.yticolev - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Hi Ryan, thanks for the excellent review. It supplied details that no other review did. I do have one question that I was hoping would be addressed and that wave84 also asked: buying advice related to Skylake. If what I read is correct, Skylake will be out in just a few months with significant changes to chip architecture promising both better performance and battery life. Better GPU is part of that. It would kill me to purchase now and miss out on an extra hour of battery life with a midyear update.I certainly can wait. I have a perfectly cromulent late 2007 Blackbook that I have not been tempted to upgrade until this new MacBook (which is a huge upgrade to be sure). Now I've got buying fever despite the hassle and expense of upgrading a number of applications that require Rosetta.
One other very minor point, I was surprised you didn't mention iSight as it is a downgrade over other current Apple machines.
modulusshift - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Replaceable instead of replicable, page 2table instead of cable, DisplayPort instead of DisiplayPort, page 6
could you fix the number for 2010 MBA (last entry) in the 4KB Random Write (8GB LBA, QD3) chart? page 8
tuning instead of turning page 9
On the one hand instead of For one the one hand, second to last page as mentioned by earlier comment.
Thank you for your review.