Lisa Gade reviews the updated 13” Apple MacBook Pro that came out in October 2016. This is the base $1,499 model without the new Touch Bar.

** Read our full written review here: http://www.mobiletechreview.co....m/notebooks/13-inch-

The first major refresh of the MacBook Pro line in several years is controversial because Apple removed most ports and switched to a very low travel keyboard to make a thin laptop even thinner (14.9mm). It’s also a half pound lighter than the version it replaces at 3 lbs. thanks largely to a smaller capacity battery afforded in part by a more power efficient display. The keyboard is the same extremely very low travel butterfly keyboard as on the 12” MacBook (with a little more click added). All legacy ports are gone except the headphone jack. The Mac instead has two USB-C gen.2/Thunderbolt 3 ports, one of which is used for charging.

This is a 15 watt dual core Intel Skylake 6th generation laptop with Intel Iris graphics. The more expensive 13” MacBook Pro models have more powerful 28 watt CPUs and Intel Iris 550 graphics in addition to the Touch Bar. The MacBook Pro has an exceptional wide color gamut, 500+ nit, 2560 x 1600 IPS display, a super-sized trackpad, fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, up to 16 gigs of RAM and a traditional Fn row at the top of the keyboard.