Apple MacBook Pro 16" review: best speakers on a laptop with a good keyboard and improved battery life, but it's heavy and macOS Catalina is still buggy
Apple fixed the obvious things — The keyboard is fixed. — If Apple did nothing else, that one thing makes the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro better … Tweets: @reckless and @reckless Tweets: Nilay Patel / @reckless : Here's @backlon's review of the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which I've also been using for a week or so now. It's a very good laptop with incredible speakers, but mostly it just feels like Apple reset things, instead of pushing anything too far forward. https://www.theverge.com/... Nilay Patel / @reckless : @backlon I just don't think “the keyboard probably won't break as quickly and it won't thermally throttle performance almost immediately” should be over-celebrated, is what I'm saying
Context & Ripple Effects
This review closes a three-year loop that opened with the 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pros, whose butterfly-keyboard gamble turned into Apple's most persistent hardware liability — a problem still flagged as unresolved in July's 13-inch MacBook Pro review just four months earlier.
Nilay Patel's framing matters more than the spec sheet: the 16-inch model is pitched not as a leap forward but as a deliberate reset — fixing the keyboard, adding class-leading speakers and battery life — which implicitly concedes the previous design direction while leaving macOS Catalina's bugs as the new weak point.
First-order effects
- Pro buyers finally get a MacBook Pro whose keyboard reliability is no longer the headline risk — the exact complaint that dogged the 2016 and 2019 models — at the cost of carrying a heavier machine than the thinness-focused era produced.
- Apple's own 13-inch two-port MacBook Pro, reviewed months earlier with the same keyboard caveat, is now the visibly unfixed sibling in the lineup.
Second-order effects
- Every subsequent MacBook Pro review now benchmarks against the 16-inch's restored keyboard and speaker quality rather than against thinness — a reviewer expectation shift visible in the 2021 14- and 16-inch M1 Pro/Max reviews, where battery life and display became the scoring axes.
- The 'reset over reinvention' verdict puts pressure on Apple to extend the corrected chassis across the whole Pro line rather than maintaining divergent designs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's premium hardware strategy settles into iterate-correct-consolidate cycles: bold experiments (Touch Bar, butterfly keys) followed by quiet reversions once professional users revolt, ending in the silicon-era 2021–2023 redesigns that kept the 16-inch's fixes and dropped its compromises.
- Software polish becomes the differentiator once hardware complaints are resolved — buggy Catalina here foreshadows reviews where OS stability, not the keyboard, is what holds a MacBook Pro back.
The trend: The MacBook Pro line spent the butterfly-keyboard era learning that pro buyers punish design experiments that trade reliability for thinness — a lesson Apple fully cashed in during the 2021 silicon redesign.