The New MacBook Pro Reviews Are In, and the Notch Is the Least Interesting Part

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros started shipping October 26, and now that they’re in enough hands, the review consensus is settling in. Short version: this is the most significant Mac redesign in years, and most of the changes are things longtime users have been asking for since the butterfly-keyboard, USB-C-only era.

MagSafe is back. HDMI is back. There’s an SD card slot again. If you’ve spent the last few years traveling with a dongle bag just to plug in a projector or offload photos, this is basically Apple admitting the previous design philosophy went too far in one direction. I don’t think that’s a controversial read — even people who defended the all-USB-C approach at the time seem relieved to not need an adapter for basic things.

The display is where the real engineering flex is. Apple’s using a mini-LED panel with what they’re calling ProMotion — adaptive refresh up to 120Hz — on a laptop screen, which nobody else is really doing right now. Combine that with the significantly higher peak brightness mini-LED backlighting enables, and you get a panel that reviewers keep describing as closer to their reference monitors than any previous MacBook display. For anyone doing color-sensitive work, this alone might be worth the upgrade.

Then there’s the notch. Cutting into the top of the screen to house the camera is the one design choice getting genuinely mixed reactions. It’s not hidden by a menu bar the way it is on the iPhone — it just sits there, visibly carved out of usable screen real estate, right where a lot of apps put their menu items. Some people are saying it disappears after a day of use. Others find it a weirdly clumsy tradeoff on a machine this expensive. I lean toward thinking it’ll fade into “just how MacBooks look now” within a year, but it is a legitimately odd design decision on a laptop, where there’s no home-screen icon grid to make the cutout feel intentional.

Underneath all that is the actual headline: M1 Pro and M1 Max. These are Apple’s first serious swing at high-performance silicon, built for people who do real work on these machines — video editing, 3D rendering, large compiles — rather than the more modest M1 from the MacBook Air and 13-inch Pro. Early benchmarks and hands-on impressions suggest a substantial jump in both CPU and GPU performance over the base M1, particularly in tasks that lean on the extra GPU cores in the Max variant. Battery life claims are also holding up well against real-world testing so far, which is notable given how much more powerful these chips are.

It’s still early days for the full review cycle — more outlets are publishing hands-on pieces through November as review units and retail stock spread out. But the shape of the story is already clear: Apple spent the last couple of years listening to exactly the complaints professional users had about the previous MacBook Pro generation, and built a machine that addresses nearly all of them at once. That’s rare enough in consumer hardware that it’s worth pausing on.