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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darkich - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
Oh Anandtech, it is blatantly obvious that you do everything you can to twist reality in favor of your sponsor (Intel).So MacBook has a twice better GPU than iPad Air 2?
Why didn't you used a *graphics* category to explain that fact?
Why didn't you ran Manhattan or T Rex and showed the respective scores?
iLovefloss - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
They linked to a more comprehensive Core M review in the article. If you actually read the damn thing rather than trying to accuse people of being sellouts, then you maybe you'd caught that.Shit, the only thing more annoying than a social media (anti-)SJ conversation is tech websites review comments. Everybody is a sellout.
narcaz - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
I am sorry, but i think this one of the of the more mediocre reviews from Anandtech:"Compared to the 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM in the base MacBook Airs, this is the first ultra-portable Mac in a while where I can say even the base model feels properly equipped. At the very least users shouldn’t be struggling with RAM or SSD capacity for some time. Meanwhile given the fact that the equivalent upgrade of an 11” MacBook air would be $300 – bringing the total price to $1199 – this means that while the MacBook is still more expensive than a MacBook Air, the difference isn’t nearly as wide as it would first seem."
Copy paste from Apple's marketing? The difference is as wide as it would first seem when you look at the trade-off. Compared to the MBA you get better portability and a retina screen. But you loose connectivity, battery life, hd camera, magsafe, cpu/gpu performance. And according to your defined target audience (second device buyers) buying these upgrades doesn't make much sense. It is ok that the 12'' MB is expensive, but don't try to argue around this fact.
"As far as desktop performance goes, we haven’t found any major problems for the MacBook’s Intel HD Graphics 5300 GPU. Even with Core M’s power limits it doesn’t show any issues holding 60fps at the default virtual resolution of 1280 x 800, though I would not suggest going any higher unless it’s necessary."
I had the impression that higher resolutions don't work very well on the 12'' MB models in the Apple store. It felt like the first 13'' rMBP: more screen space, but a bit laggy. The performance of the HD 4000 wasn't good enough and took another hit with Yosemite (especially when connected to a second display). I am not willing to invest in a MB, which isn't future proof for at least 2-3 years. The same is true for the potential lack of 4K/60hz. I hoped for more depth in this area.
The review could have been more critical about the 1 USB C Port. If it breaks you can't even charge your machine anymore and out of warranty services are extremely expensive. But i think the comments discussed this point to death. Thanks for the extra remarks about the sustained performance in the comments and please put this in the review and maybe do more tests.
wave84 - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
I don't really think the Macbook is expensive. This is actually useable as a main computer for a lot of users (journalists, web designers, web programmers, etc). It will do just fine, as long as you have 8GB RAM and 256 for storage, which you get.You lose some stuff indeed, but for 100 bucks you get retina screen, extreme portability, and most important of all, it's fanless and completely silent. This is a huge quality of life improvement which no review will take into account.
Also, i do not believe the port to be an issue. Either you are docked, so you have plenty of ports (and you only unplug one cable), either you are mobile, when one port is enough for 99% of use cases.
I am very close to buying it. Still waiting for some upgraded CPU numbers.
narcaz - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
I am looking for a second device besides my 15'' rMBP. The iPad doesn't cut it anymore. But 1279$ + 79$ (needed for occasional presentation) is expensive compared to the 11'' MBA 899$+29$. Impossible to sugarcoat it. It looks like Apple's upselling strategy got you on the hook. You can rationalize this purchase as much as you want, but i don't want to pay for upgrades, which i don't need. If you value portability and retina screen fine, enjoy it, but this doesn't make it a very good deal.Even in the Apple ecosystem the single port is problematic. Airplay Screen Mirroring suffers from lags, iCloud Photo Library is cumbersome and there is no backup solution while being on the road. Cables aren't dead. I think the next version will have second port.
telsin - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
I'm curious to see if a newer hardware revision of the Apple TV that they're likely to announce at WWDC resolves some of the airplay lag. That thing is still using an A5 processor, whereas the latest iphones are up to A8 (huge difference in CPU/GPU performance). I too found airplay rather obnoxious when I tried it. In OSX, you can have it treat an airplay target as a second monitor, but it really kind of sucks unless you're just putting something there to read as a static document.bogda - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
Now, make MacBook Air with the same quality screen, smaller bezel (like on this MacBook) and keyboard that stretches from edge to edge (like on this MacBook) and I might actually switch from PC to Mac.Mushin - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
As for the SSD which is only connected through PCIe 2.0 that is a limitation of Core M see:http://ark.intel.com/products/84666/Intel-Core-M-5...
cknobman - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
All I can say is ehh.Sure its built nice and a super small form factor
BUT
Price is high, performance is just OK, and battery life is frankly underwhelming. Sure the battery life is not terrible but given the hype over the Core M I was expecting better battery life.
Still no touch screen and it is still confined to the limitations of a laptop.
The benefit of small underpowered devices like this should lie in their ability to serve multiple purposes easily and change form factors.
If I still have to use it like a laptop (IE: open it up, type on a keyboard) and pay such a high price then I may as well go get a laptop with more power and better battery life.
For this price I'd still rather have something like a Surface Pro 3. With its ability to serve multiple purposes I can use it like a tablet or a laptop, get better battery life, and get a touch screen. All while paying less.
nerd1 - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
Sp3 is lighter, thinner, more powerful, has more ports, has more input methods and even cheaper.