Why You Can Trust CNET Apple's new fanless MacBook thinnest ever with 12-inch Retina Display, redesigned trackpad and keyboard, starts at $1,299, ships April 10 (hands-on)
The long-rumored new MacBook, with a 12-inch high-res display, makes an appearance -- and it's only 13.1mm thick and weighs 2 pounds.
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Editors' note: Updated with new hands-on impressions of the MacBook.
SAN FRANCISCO -- It's long been on the list of most-rumored new Apple products, and now we have a new MacBook.
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See all pricesThis is the thinnest Mac that Apple has ever made: at its thickest point it's just 13.1mm (about half an inch), 24 percent thinner than the existing 11-inch MacBook Air. It's also the lightest at 2 pounds (0.9 kg).
Making the laptop this thin required complete redesigns of just about every component, including the keyboard, trackpad and battery.
The keyboard, for example, uses a new butterfly mechanism for keys. It uses a single assembly that's four times more stable than a traditional scissor mechanism, while being 40 percent thinner. Apple says the keyboard is shallower, but with a larger face for each key. The backlight has a light for each key, which is nice -- backlit keyboards sometimes blow you out in low light.
The new trackpad no longer has a top hinge to physically click down. Instead you'll be tapping on the pad, which uses four Force Touch sensors that sense a range of pressure from the lightest click to a deeper press that Apple calls Force Click.
Instead of the mechanical click of past trackpads, you'll just get the feel of a click through haptic feedback. The lack of downward motion allowed Apple to shave space off the design. This seems to make the capacitive glass surface behave more like a touchscreen, too, expanding what the trackpad can be used for.
Apple's new 12-inch MacBook has Force Touch trackpad and USB-C port (pictures)
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Another change that went into making the laptop thinner and lighter is that the new MacBook is the first Apple laptop to go fanless. That's something we started to see in 2014 in Windows laptops using Intel's Core M processors, and that's what this laptop is using, too.
Battery life with the Core M processors hasn't been great, so Apple said that in order to solve the Core M "known issue," the MacBook is pretty much all battery on the inside. While ultraportables usually use a single thin sheet battery, Apple decided to cut the battery into multiple sheets that can be terraced with contoured shapes. Apple says the MacBook will get up to 9 hours of wireless Web use or 10 hours of iTunes video playback.
There is but one single port on the system, type USB-C, that will support -- through dongles, likely -- everything from power to Ethernet to HDMI. The only other connector you'll find is a headphone/mic jack.
Lastly, the new MacBook has a 12-inch Retina Display with a 2,304x1,440-pixel resolution. It, too, has a new design -- it's the thinnest ever built into a MacBook, at 0.88mm -- with a larger aperture for light and individual pixels in red, green and blue.
The starting configuration of the new MacBook will include a 1.1GHz Intel Core M, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) for $1,299 and ships beginning April 10. An upgraded version will be available for $1,599 with a 1.2GHz Core M, 8GB of memory and 512GB of flash storage. Both use integrated Intel HD Graphics 5300.
In the UK and Australia, the prices start at £1,049 and AU$1,799 for the base model and hit £1,299 and AU$2,199 for the upgrade.
Hands on with the new keyboard and trackpad
All those spec and feature changes can be dizzying, and doesn't really explain how the new design works on a practical level.
Having had an opportunity to play around with the new MacBook in a couple of different settings following Apple's March 9 event, it's immediately familiar, but with a few radical shifts.
The first major change is to the keyboard. The nearly edge-to-edge keyboard has larger key faces, yes, but the keys are also shallower, barely popping up above the keyboard tray and depressing into the chassis only slightly. It takes some getting used to, especially if you're accustomed to the firm, clicky physical feedback of the current MacBooks, or the similar island-style keyboards of most other modern laptops.
The first time I tried the keyboard, I could not get through a few sample sentences without several typos, partially because of the shallow keys and their lower level of tactile feedback, and partially because the keys were simply spaced apart differently than I was used to. When I tried again a couple of hours later, it was much easier, and after a few sessions it should feel natural.
One benefit -- the keys are less clacky-sounding than the ones on the current MacBooks. Another, the keys are almost completely wobble-free, as opposed to the wiggle you can get under your fingers if you try to rub your finger across a current MacBook key.
The edge-to-edge design of the keyboard actually reminded me of an old HP netbook, which I found impressive at the time because it packed the most keyboard possible into the smallest space.
The trackpad design is even more of a change. Nearly the same size as the Air's, but squeezed into a smaller space, it dominates the lower half of the laptop and goes right up to the bottom edge. While previous trackpads had a hinge along the top that allowed for physical clicking, in a kind of diving board design, the new pad works very differently.
The four sensors previously mentioned allow you to click anywhere on the pad's surface with identical results, and the Force Click effect, which combines the sensors with haptic (or taptic) feedback, allow you to have two levels of perceived clicking within an app or task. That deep click feels to the finger and brain like the trackpad has a stepped physical mechanism, but in fact, the movement you feel is a small horizontal shift, which, even when fully explained, feels like you're depressing the trackpad two levels.
Apple describes it like this: "With the Force Touch trackpad, force sensors detect your click anywhere on the surface and move the trackpad laterally toward you, although the feel is the same familiar downward motion you're accustomed to in a trackpad."
The examples I tried in Apple's demos scenarios seemed useful, such as highlighting a word and using a "deep click" to get a Wikipedia pop-up, or seeing a map when deep clicking on an address. Jumping into the preview view of a document or file works with the deep click, too, just as it does now by pressing the space bar.
The most advanced use of the trackpad Apple showed off was fast-forwarding through a video clip in Quicktime, faster or slower, depending on how hard you pressed down on the trackpad.
In my hands-on time, some of the functions felt very natural, others will take some getting used to, but the idea has a lot of potential if Apple incorporates it into all of its apps, and if third-party software companies also find creative ways to adopt it.
Goodbye to ports
One thing that will throw a lot of people is the new approach to ports and connections. This MacBook is radically stripped down to only two ports. A USB-C port that acts as a power and general accessory connection, and a standard one-eighth-inch audio combo headphone/mic jack, similar to the one found on current MacBooks.
For power, there's a long USB-C cable, which has a connector that's both smaller than the current USB-A design, and also works with either side facing up (you could call it an ambidextrous connector). That plugs into a standard power brick, which looks and feels a lot like the ones that come with iPads, except they have a USB-C connection, rather than a USB-A connection.
MagSafe, truly one of the great developments in the history of laptops, is gone, and the new power plug has no magnetic connection at all, it simply slots in. The connector is fairly shallow, so it may very well just pop out if you yank the cable, for example by accidentally stepping on it, but it certainly doesn't feel as accident-proof as the MagSafe version does.
Where am I going to plug all my stuff in, you might wonder. Apple suggests that the combination of 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 should be enough for nearly every connectivity issue, but obviously that's not the case. There are USB keys and SD cards; many people plug their laptops directly into TVs or monitors for video output; and sometimes you simply need the fast, stable Internet connection that only an Ethernet cable can provide.
If you fall into any of those categories, be prepared to carry around a handful of dongles, all connecting via that single USB-C port. Apple showed off several variations, the simplest of which was a short cable that started with a USB-C plug and ended with a USB-A port, which would allow you to plug in any standard USB devices. That one costs $19, £15 or AU$29.
More complex ones were small connection blocks, combining a VGA or HDMI video output with one USB-A port, as well as one USB-C port, which would allow you to provide power to the laptop at the same time. That multiport adapter will set you back $79, £65 or AU$119. Having a connection block going into the laptop at the same time as it's connected to the power brick sounds cumbersome, but I'd bet some enterprising accessory makers are already hard at work on a variety of docking or connectivity add-ons to replace the missing ports.
If you think back to the original MacBook Air, released in 2008, it also had a single-port design, with one USB 2.0 port. Over time, more ports, from HDMI to Thunderbolt to an SD card slot, were added.
Performance, battery life and other unanswered questions
More so than the changes in user input tools and screen size, the value of the new MacBook will be determined by its performance and battery life. The Core M CPU from Intel has great potential, but also has yet to impress in the tests we've done with it in other systems.
Outside of that, this new system includes nearly everything Mac watchers had on their wish lists, from a smaller, higher-resolution screen to a new keyboard and trackpad to a thinner, lighter body. But, we'll have to wait until we can run our full suite of benchmark tests on a final version of the 12-inch MacBook to see if it lives up to the hype.
CNET Senior Editor Joshua Goldman contributed to this story.