

When I made a full 180 to the sunny pop vibes of Paramore's "Rose Colored Boy," I was treated to bouncy bass, bright guitars and especially smooth vocals. The menacing guitars and rollicking double bass drums of the Doom soundtrack sounded extra punchy on Apple's laptop. The MacBook Pro's speakers are impressively booming, offering satisfying bass and crunchy treble. The Pro registered an ultraluminous 460 nits of brightness on our light meter, outshining the XPS 15 (282 nits), the Spectre x360 (255 nits) and our average for mainstream notebooks (275).


That makes it both more colorful and accurate than the HP Spectre x360 (113, 3.47), but not quite as vibrant as the Dell XPS 15 (188, 1.4). The MacBook Pro's impressive color performance was backed up by our lab tests, in which the notebook reproduced an impressive 126.4 percent of the sRGB color gamut with a Delta E accuracy rating of 0.2 (closer to 0 is better).

Every shot burst with color, from the flowery fields that a young Diana Prince rode her horse through to the fiery battlefields that she beat up bad guys in as an adult. The notebook made a great showpiece for the latest Wonder Woman trailer. On-screen text looked thick and handwritten, and the snowy Sierra mountains in the notebook's default background was startlingly true-to-life. The latest MacBook Pro's 15-inch, 2500 x 1600 Retina display is predictably beautiful. Alexa: Why Amazon Won Our 300-Question Showdown It currently works with programs such as Photoshop and Microsoft Office, but I'd love to be able to use it with non-Apple browsers such as Chrome - or even to get some extra control options in my favorite Steam games. However, I don't see the Touch Bar becoming a true game-changer until a lot more third-party apps add supports for it. Creative users could get a ton of use out of the Touch Bar once they mastered it for example, you can adjust the volume settings of individual GarageBand instruments with a few taps, or quickly split up clips in iMovie without using the touchpad. I also appreciated how the bar would provide autofill options any time I was typing, and how easy it was to fast-forward and rewind a video by simply sliding my finger. I got the most use out of the Touch Bar while flipping through Safari tabs - it was really nice to see a visual preview of each page I had open.
