2021 MacBook Pro review: Yep, it’s what you’ve been waiting for

The 2021 MacBook Pro is notably bulkier, more flexible, and more powerful than its predecessor. It clicks “revert” on a whole bunch of changes that have been generally unpopular, like the inclusion of the Touch Bar in place of physical function keys and the singular focus on Thunderbolt as the port of choice.

The new laptop also has the most advanced CPU,  GPU, and NPU ever included in a consumer laptop and display technology that has never been seen in mainstream consumer products. So maybe it’s not so much like the past five years never happened; it’s more like we’ve slipstreamed into an alternate timeline where Apple never changed course at a critical juncture when a lot of people felt it shouldn’t have.

There has been speculation about whether this is the first laptop designed without a lot of direct involvement by long-time Steve Jobs partner Jony Ive, who left Apple not all that long ago. Maybe, maybe not. Given all that goes into designing these machines over several years, it’s probably not that clean-cut.

But Ive’s level of involvement aside, rest assured: If you didn’t like the direction Apple has been taking with the MacBook Pro for the last five years, this laptop mostly feels like an explicit apology for all of that. The result: It’s the best laptop money can buy for many use cases, provided you have a lot of money.

Specifications

As usual, we’ll start with the specs. And there’s a lot to talk about here.

Display

The MacBook Pro comes in two sizes: 14-inch and 16-inch. Technically, the screen sizes are 14.2 inches (with a 3024×1964 pixel resolution) and 16.2 inches (3456×2234). And yes, there’s a camera notch—we’ll get to that shortly.

The display is one of the key value propositions of this machine. It’s in an entirely different category than most other consumer laptop displays, thanks in part to Mini LED tech, which has been showing up in high-end TVs and Apple’s ultra-pricy Pro Display XDR monitor.

Mini LED enables local dimming of hundreds or even thousands of dimming zones, so while it’s still an LCD screen, in optimal conditions, you can get similar contrast and black levels to what you might see in an OLED screen but with better brightness and no burn-in risk.

The 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro’s display.

Credit: Samuel Axon

Apple claims it can achieve 1,600 nits of peak brightness on highlights, or 1,000 nits of sustained full-screen brightness. That’s frankly nuts for a laptop screen; it’s comparable to what we see in the most expensive HDR television sets. This is a huge deal for people in certain fields who want to do things like HDR color grading on the go, which hasn’t really been possible without impractical and ludicrously expensive mobile workstations. For the rest of us, it means higher brightness to fight the sunlight or overhead lights and outstanding contrast and highlights in HDR video content like movies and TV shows.

Apple is known for calibrating its displays well before shipping them, and you can for the first time create custom color profiles right in macOS’s System Preferences pane. This won’t matter to most people, but for a certain crowd of photo- and video-editing professionals, it could be a really nice addition.

All that together makes this the best display I’ve ever seen in a laptop.

It’s not always flawless, though. You’ll occasionally notice LCD-type blooming, especially in letterboxed images like 16:9 videos. It’s just markedly less pronounced than it was in prior MacBook displays.

The 14-inch model could benefit from a little more screen real estate, too, given the tasks it’s meant for. As has long been the case with Apple’s “Retina” displays, the actual screen space is not what you’d expect from the native resolution, as there’s some scaling going on.

The display on the 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro.

Credit: Samuel Axon

By default, the 14-inch’s desktop “looks like” 1512×982 in terms of available space for windows. You can bump that up a little to 1800×1169. (The System Preferences panel warns this may affect performance, but we haven’t noticed any issues.) There are also two lower resolutions—1147×745 and 1024×665—that make everything bigger but a bit fuzzier.

As for the 16-inch model, the default mode “looks like” 1728×1117, and there’s again a more spacious scaled option at 2056×1329. The downscaled sizes include 1496×967, 1312×848, and 1168×755. The 16-inch gives you enough space in its default scaling setting and plenty in the one that’s a step above it. But to me, the 14-inch feels a bit cramped unless it’s on the highest setting.

Based on what Apple has said and as far as we can tell, there’s no substantial difference between the 14-inch and 16-inch displays besides screen size. It could be that the 14-inch model has fewer Mini LED zones, but it looks so good as it is that it will be hard for most people to see.

ProMotion

There’s one other display feature to talk about, and it’s a doozy: ProMotion. Whereas prior Macs had displays that always refreshed at 60Hz, the new MacBook Pro’s can go up as high as 120 Hz—but it’s variable, and it intelligently adjusts the refresh rate depending on what’s happening, just like on recent iPhone Pro and iPad Pro devices.

So when you’re moving the cursor, you’ll get 120 Hz to give you that smooth motion. But when the screen is static, the refresh rate drops much lower (though this is generally imperceptible) to preserve battery life. This probably plays a part in the markedly improved battery life, though there are other factors at play as well.

ProMotion makes the interface feel responsive and smooth; it works nicely in tandem with macOS’s buttery-smooth animations. Not everyone will notice higher refresh rates, and fewer still will need them, but it’s one of the big “nice-to-have” upgrades over the previous generation.

Apple Silicon

Let’s talk about the piece that many people have been waiting for: Apple’s high-end, high-performance successor to its custom-designed, entry-level M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC) is here. It’s available in two (well, actually, four) configurations.

The M1 Pro and the M1 Max are both available in either the 14-inch or the 16-inch model, and they offer mostly similar CPU performance. The M1 Pro has two configurations, one with an 8-core CPU with six performance cores and two efficiency cores and another with a 10-core CPU with two additional performance cores. The M1 Max has a 10-core CPU with the same efficiency/performance ratio as the higher-end M1 Pro. For comparison, the M1 had an 8-core CPU that was half-and-half performance and efficiency. The Neural Engine, Apple’s custom NPU, is the same in both the M1 Pro and Max at 16 cores. There are also numerous other things in common, like the image signal processor and various controllers.

Things start to diverge between the two variants when you look at video, graphics, and memory. First up, the M1 Pro tops out at 32GB of unified memory (up from 16GB in the M1), while the M1 Max can go up to a whopping 64GB. The Max also offers double the memory bandwidth, beating the M1 Pro’s 200GBps at 400GBps. And while the M1 Pro has one video encode engine, the M1 Max has two.

That’s all very meaningful for some workflows, but it’s the GPU where things really separate. The M1 Pro has either a 14-core or 16-core GPU, depending on which of the two versions you buy, but the M1 Max is available in both 24-core and 32-core configurations. This means that the Max can offer effectively double the graphics performance in many situations, and well over 50 percent better performance for a whole lot more.

We’ll put much of this to the test in the performance section of this review, but don’t worry: The chip does not disappoint on any front.

Ports

For the last five years, Apple has taken an interesting, albeit controversial, approach to ports. Recent MacBook Pros had either two or four Thunderbolt ports, which share a connection with USB-C. The idea there was that Thunderbolt is extremely flexible; you could plug anything into a Thunderbolt port without any issues.

An SD card slot, Thunderbolt, and HDMI on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Credit: Samuel Axon

So rather than assume what users needed, Apple gave them multi-purpose ports that could be adapted to fit any situation with, well, an adapter. At first, peoples’ complaints centered on two dropped ports: the SD card, and the larger USB-A ports that were the one true standard at the time. Over the years, the USB-C ecosystem has evolved—maybe not as much as Apple expected, but far enough that you don’t necessarily need a USB-A port anymore. Plus, those adapters are relatively cheap.

Nonetheless, Apple has now changed its approach. It still offers three Thunderbolt/USB-C ports on all of these machines, but on top of that, we get HDMI and an SD card slot (though neither are all that everyone hoped for), plus the return of MagSafe, the magnetic power connector that lightly pops out instead of yanking your laptop if your kids (certainly never you; you’d never be so clumsy) kick the cable.

MagSafe is a very welcome (re)addition, and it offers faster charging than before. You can still charge via Thunderbolt/USB-C if you prefer. It’s also worth noting that the headphone jack has moved to the left side, which means your headphone wire is finally going to stop constantly fighting your mouse for space on the desk if you’re right handed. That’s obviously a welcome change for about 90 percent of people and an unwelcome one for the other 10 percent.

I’m less sold on the HDMI and SD card ports, though I know people have been calling for them for ages. The HDMI port is just HDMI 2.0, which can handle 4K at 60 Hz but not 4K at 120 Hz or 8K at 60 Hz. That’s more than enough for today, but I’m not confident it’s future-proofed five years into the future. You can still drive those higher-performance displays through Thunderbolt, of course, but then that HDMI port is just dead weight.

MagSafe returns!

Credit: Samuel Axon

The SD card reader supports the SD 4.0 standard and works with UHS-I and UHS-II SDXC cards. Hoping for UHS-III? You’ll be disappointed here, given that this laptop is positioned at the bleeding edge and priced accordingly. But again, you can connect an external peripheral via Thunderbolt to get around this if need be.

The three Thunderbolt ports support up to 40GBps of throughput with supported devices connected, and they offer 15 W of power delivery.

Whether this port situation is an improvement depends on who you are. If you already own a bunch of adapters and don’t have use for an SD card slot or an outdated HDMI standard, you’re down a port when you’re not plugged into the wall (you can charge via MagSafe, whereas you had to use one of your Thunderbolt ports to charge before).

But if you need the HDMI port or SD card slot (and a lot of people have been crying out for them for years, especially the SD card slot) today is a good day.

Other specs: Camera, audio, and wireless

With remote work and Zoom calls more prevalent than ever, it seems a fitting time for the MacBook Pro to finally get a webcam upgrade. We’ve gone from 720p to 1080p, and there’s a new four-element lens with a wider aperture. Apple says the camera should offer double the low-light performance. And as with the M1 Macs that have come out in the past year, the system-on-a-chip’s ISP will help doctor the image on the fly to make it look better.

In our experience with them so far, the FaceTime cameras are fine, as laptop cameras go. Camera quality has never been what MacBooks are best known for, and it’s still not. The cameras are a step up over what we got in previous models, but they’re not amazing, and they’re obviously not as good as many separate, dedicated webcams you can buy.

On the audio side, we have a three-mic array and a six-speaker sound system (four force-canceling woofers and two tweeters) in both the 14-inch and 16-inch model. It’s an iterative step for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, with some improvements to the bass, but it’s a big leap for the 14-inch model compared to its 13-inch predecessor. The 13-inch MacBook Pro hadn’t yet gotten the speaker improvements that the 16-inch MacBook Pro received when it went to 16 inches from 15.

The speakers sound excellent for laptop speakers, but they obviously won’t compete with good dedicated speakers.

Nothing much has changed on the wireless front. We have Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0, the latest standards, just like other recent Macs.

Configurations: Storage, cores, and memory

A new MacBook Pro can range in price from $2,000 to $6,100—it all depends on the configuration, though that huge price range mostly comes down to storage. The cheapest spec is a 14-inch model with the M1 Pro chip, 16GB of memory, and 512GB of solid-state storage. The most expensive is a 16-inch with the M1 Max, 64GB of memory, and an 8TB SSD.

There are three chip configuration options: the M1 Pro, the M1 Max with 24 GPU cores ($200 more than the M1 Pro), and the M1 Max with 32 GPU cores ($400 more). The M1 Pro supports either 16GB or 32GB of memory (the jump to 32 costs $400 extra), while the M1 Max starts at 32GB, with a $400 jump to the maximum of 64GB.

Base storage is 512GB. You can upgrade to 1TB for $200 more, 2TB for $600, 4TB for $1,200, or 8TB for $2,400.

The two MacBook Pros side by side.

Credit: Samuel Axon

The base price for the 14-inch model is $1,999, and the base price for the 16-inch model is $2,499. Apple still offers an M1 13-inch MacBook Pro in the old design starting at $1,299.

Design

So yeah, there are many additions as far as specs and internals go. But the 2021 MacBook Pro also moves in a new (yet sometimes very familiar) design direction.

Dimensions

The first thing you’ll notice is that these laptops are chunkier than what we’ve been using for the last few years. The 16-inch MacBook Pro measures 0.66×14.01×9.77 inches (1.68×35.57×24.81 centimeters), to its predecessor’s 0.64×14.09×9.63 inches (1.62×35.79×24.59 centimeters). It feels quite different to hold; the shape is blockier, with less tapering on the edges.

The 16-inch model also weighs more at 4.7 lbs (2.1kg) for the M1 Pro configuration and 4.8 lbs (2.2kg) for the M1 Max configuration. That’s compared to 4.3 pounds for the previous 16-inch model (which was, in turn, slightly chunkier and heavier than its 15-inch predecessor).

The 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Samuel Axon

The 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro. Samuel Axon

The 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro.

Samuel Axon

The 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro. Samuel Axon

The 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro. Samuel Axon

The 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro. Samuel Axon

It might not seem like much from the numbers, but the weight is very noticeable when you’re carrying or using the device. It feels like a throwback to the pre-Touch Bar MacBook Pro (but not quite to the PowerBooks of yore, despite many a comparison on Twitter).

It’s especially noticeable when you compare the new 16-incher to the 15-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro design introduced in 2016, from before Apple ditched the butterfly keyboard. That laptop was 0.61×13.75×9.48 inches (1.55× 34.93×24.07 centimeters) and weighed 4.02 lbs (1.83 kg).

The 14-inch model is also bigger and heavier than the 13-inch MacBook Pro, as you’d expect. Its dimensions are 0.61×12.31×8.71 inches (1.55×31.26×22.12 centimeters) and it weighs 3.5 lbs (1.6 kg). The 13-inch MacBook Pro is 0.61×11.97×8.36 inches (1.56×30.41×21.24 centimeters) and 3 lbs.

Apple has etched “MacBook Pro” on the bottom of the machine.

Credit: Samuel Axon

Again, it’s the weight you really notice, but the different shape makes the machine feel bulkier by comparison than the measurements suggest. You’ll also notice that the device has particularly pronounced feet, presumably to give it clearance since there are downward-facing air vents on either side of the computer.

Keyboard

In line with the theme that this iteration of the MacBook Pro clicks “revert” on some unpopular choices, the new laptops get rid of the ultra-thin, ultra-low-travel butterfly keyboard design that caused so many problems for so many years. (The most recent iteration before this one had already abandoned that design, but unsurprisingly, Apple has not gone back.)

The keyboard on the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The 16-inch has the same layout, and the key sizes are also the same.

Credit: Samuel Axon

We had already seen this type of keyboard in Apple’s Magic Keyboard desktop peripheral and in the previous 16-inch MacBook Pro. The key layout is largely the same here and feels identical. It is worth noting, though, that there is an extra-wide escape key, which many developers will appreciate.

Also completely gone is the Touch Bar, which had characterized the MacBook Pro since 2016. It was an interesting experiment, and I’m a little sad to see it go, but the fact that it often required taking your eyes off the screen just made it too awkward for most people—to say nothing of some users’ preference for hardware function keys. Plus, third-party developer support never advanced past lukewarm.

There are also now dedicated function keys for Spotlight, Dictation, and Do Not Disturb. Further, the Touch ID key/power button has a new design that makes it easier to recognize by feel alone.

The keyboard feels just like its immediate predecessor, so there’s not too much new to say here. It’s a good laptop keyboard; there are better ones, but there are also much worse, and it’s solid enough that it shouldn’t influence your buying decision much either way.

Let’s pour one out for Jony Ive’s vision

These changes are all welcome, but let’s be real for a moment: Something has been lost here. I’d venture that most MacBook Pro users are happy to give that “something” up for what they’re finally getting back, but I have no doubt that a minority will also lament the design change.

Controversial as it was, there was a certain wisdom to the Thunderbolt-only port approach. It afforded maximum customization and flexibility, as long as you were willing to shell out for some adapters and haul them around. In this design, yeah, there’s a built-in SD card slot, but that slot can’t be anything else, and if you don’t use SD cards, it’s just a waste.

And then there’s the look and feel of the laptop. There’s no beating around the bush here—the new 16-inch MacBook Pro looks and feels monstrous compared to its Touch Bar predecessor, especially the 2016-2018 15-inch versions.

When I showed the new MacBook Pro to a non-techie, she recoiled and said something to the effect of, “2007 called and wants its laptop back.”

The 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro stacked on top of the 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Samuel Axon

The 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro stacked on top of the 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro. Samuel Axon

Another angle.

Samuel Axon

Another angle. Samuel Axon

The 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro stacked on top of the 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro. Samuel Axon

Another angle. Samuel Axon

If your priority is performance and screen real estate (and I’d argue that will be the case for most of this device’s target audience), then that’s an acceptable tradeoff. But the previous 15- and 16-inch MacBook Pro design offered very strong performance in a relatively slim-and-light form factor that made it special. It was a compromise between form and function, yes, but a lot of people liked that compromise. You could get more powerful computers, but they were bulky and unportable. The MacBook Pro felt like a happy medium.

Fortunately, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro still feels like that happy medium. In fact, it smokes even the previous 16-inch model in performance while managing to feel much more portable. You just have to give up some screen real estate.

The final Intel 16-inch MacBook Pro offered a ton of screen space in a really portable package. The new one offers even more screen space, but… it’s less portable. And the 14-inch model is remarkably portable, but the screen is pretty cramped. You’ll be full-screening a lot of apps and doing plenty of swiping between desktop spaces.

In other words, if you felt like the Touch Bar-era 15- or 16-inch MacBook Pro lived in a unique sweet spot between screen size, performance, and portability, you’ll find that neither of the two new models offers quite the same experience.

It’s a change. It’s a good one for most people who want or need to spend this much money on a laptop. But we did lose something here, so let’s pour one out for the 15/16-inch Intel MacBook Pro. It doesn’t have an exact successor.

Yes, there’s a screen notch

If there was one thing that caught the attention and ire of the Internet when these laptops were announced, it’s the notch.

As in recent iPhones, both sizes of the 2021 MacBook Pro have screens with rounded corners and barely-there bezels on all sides. Combine that with a larger front-facing camera system, and you end up with a small strip of the middle-top of the display where the camera hardware dips into the screen space, potentially blocking content.

When you’re on the macOS desktop, this notch doesn’t dip below the Menu Bar at the top, and it’s pretty stealthy when you’re in Dark Mode with a dark wallpaper. That means it’s not an issue most of the time. Items in the Menu Bar wrap around it automatically with no action needed by the app’s developer, so if there’s an item that was supposed to be where the notch is, it is placed neatly to the right.

You can move the mouse cursor behind the notch even though there’s rarely anything to click there, but it does have a peculiar alternate behavior when you already have a Menu Bar item to its left or right expanded. In those cases, the cursor abruptly jumps from one side of the notch to the other, accommodating those who like to swipe-and-scan across the Menu Bar looking for an item across multiple menus.

Also, full-screening an app in the normal macOS way just makes the vertical height of the notch totally blank and black across the whole top of the display, meaning it looks like there’s just a little bit more bezel at the top and no notch at all.

But while all this is mostly just a little strange at first, it is a real problem for certain apps that have far more Menu Bar items than most. At present, that situation means smooshing the status bar icons to the right and placing content behind the notch, which is obviously unacceptable.

Developers could certainly redesign their apps to address this issue, and most of them likely will, but that will take a few weeks. In the meantime, you can check an option in each app’s individual “Get Info” menu labeled “Scale to fit below built-in camera.” Once you’ve done this, launching that app will scale the display area down to avoid the notch entirely and restore traditional Menu Bar behavior, even if the app is running in the background. Closing the app will scale the display back up. This is, of course, a clunky solution—and Apple even says in a recently published support document that it will be removed once developers have had time to update their apps.

The camera notch on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

The camera notch on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

The camera notch on the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

Samuel Axon

The camera notch on the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Samuel Axon

The camera notch on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

The camera notch on the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Samuel Axon

The argument for this notch is that it allows maximal use of screen real estate. After all, adding additional padding across the top just to accommodate the notch height would mean you’d get fewer pixels to work with overall. And there’s no written law anywhere that laptop screens have to be a perfectly rectangular shape.

But it is a bit jarring at first, and the Menu Bar problems are real, even if a lot of the discourse on Twitter is cherry-picking the worst examples people can find amid hundreds of apps that work and look just fine.

It’s typical of Apple to make a change like this and leave third-party developers to play catchup, and that’s not good. As far as the user’s experience goes, the notch is a non-issue almost all of the time, and for the apps where it is an issue, the scaling option makes the screen space more or less the same as it was in older MacBook Pro models.

In my view, the problem with the notch isn’t that it’s hideous, or that it’s a long-term issue; everything that is awkward about it will go away in the coming weeks and months. The problem is that it creates a headache for third-party devs in the short term.

It’s a bit of a strange choice on Apple’s part, given that this laptop was clearly intended as an apology for a lot of unpopular decisions over the years, and few things have been snarked about more in those years than the iPhone’s notch. I suspect this one decision single-handedly prevented a waterfall of positive press and YouTuber coverage declaring the new MacBook Pro “the perfect laptop.”

For people who find the notch hideous, it will (at least at first) be the worst thing about this computer. It’s probably not the choice I would have made if I were designing this thing. But it’s a minor and mostly temporary issue for what in many ways comes close to “the perfect laptop.”

Performance

Apple has made some big performance claims about the M1 Pro and M1 Max, and it’s time to see if those claims check out. To start, here’s a list of all the machines that will appear in our benchmark charts below.

Below, you’ll find charts representing our results in benchmarks that test burst CPU and GPU performance. We’ve also included a disk speed test. Here’s a spoiler: Apple delivered. The M1 Pro and M1 Max deliver close to the same single-core CPU performance as the M1, and a bit over 50 percent better multi-core performance.

But it’s the GPU that really leaves the M1 in the dust. Even the M1 Pro provides about double what the M1 does (just as Apple promised), and the M1 Max 1 manages well over three times the M1’s performance in almost all cases—and sometimes even more.

There are laptops with discrete GPUs that provide better performance, but those machines are universally bulky, loud, and hot in comparison. The M1 Pro and M1 Max deliver what you see above almost silently. And we checked Apple’s claim that performance is the same when unplugged as it is when plugged in: we saw no significant difference between these two cases, even in tests intended to measure sustained performance.

Speaking of those tests, we ran multiple 30-minute Cinebench R23 benchmarks and averaged the results. The 14-inch with the M1 Pro had a multi-core score of 12347 and a single-core score of 1534. The 16-inch had similar results: 12388 and 1533, respectively. That puts both in the same ballpark as the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel Core i9-9900K.

Given that the M1 blew us away last year, all the above results are even more impressive. When we interviewed Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi, SVP of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak, and SVP of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji about the M1 last November, they made a bold claim that the skyrocketing performance line on a M1 CPU performance vs. power chart they shared publicly when announcing the chip would scale directly upward with future machines. The numbers we see here map pretty neatly to what they suggested about that original chart.

As we all know, gaming on the new MacBook Pro models will be a mixed bag. For years, I have tested new Mac GPUs by maxing out World of Warcraft‘s settings on a 5K screen with the latest expansion (it’s native on Apple Silicon now and uses Metal, so it might be the best test of the Mac’s gaming power in ideal circumstances) and seeing what kind of performance I get. The only Mac I’ve reviewed previously that was playable at these settings was a maxed-out iMac Pro, which just barely eked out 30 frames per second. The M1 Max does it at 90 fps—and that’s with several major graphical improvements that the game’s developers have made since launch. If there were any triple-A games that were well-optimized for the Mac (there basically aren’t), the new MacBook Pro could be a great gaming laptop. But alas, all we have is World of Warcraft and one or two others.

What about performance in different chassis?

One big question remains: How much difference is there in sustained performance between a 14-inch MacBook Pro and a 16-inch MacBook Pro, each with the same chip? The review units Apple sent us include a 14-inch model with the M1 Pro, and a 16-inch version with the M1 Max, so this is not something we were able to test.

The two sizes have markedly different thermal management systems, and the 16-inch has a heavier duty power adapter, suggesting that over time, an M1 Max-equipped 16-inch MacBook Pro will outperform an M1 Max-equipped 14-inch MacBook Pro.

We’d expect burst performance, like what Geekbench records above, to be close to identical, but for a gap to widen over time as the laptop heats up while trying to sustain peak performance. To that point, the 16-inch MacBook Pro has an exclusive high-power-mode battery profile, which the 14-inch lacks.