Apple MacBook

Apple MacBook (2016):

MacBook still short on ports, but this improved minimalist laptop is more tempting than ever

THE GOOD: The 12-inch MacBook gets a decent boost to performance and battery life, while keeping the same slim, light premium body. The high-res display and responsive trackpad remain the gold standard. Color options add a fun bit of personalization.

THE BAD: The single USB-C port will continue to be an inconvenience for many. The shallow keyboard isn't ideal for long-form typing. Other super-slim laptops manage to fit in more powerful processors.

THE BOTTOM LINE: With a handful of subtle improvements, the updated 12-inch Apple MacBook is more of a mainstream machine, but remains a few tweaks away from being the best laptop on the market.

The modest updates to Apple's 12-inch MacBook laptop don't go far enough to make it the new must-have machine for everyone. At the same time, there's a sizable enough boost to performance and battery life that the system can no longer be considered an outlier only suited for a very limited audience that values portability over productivity.

Nor is it the only player in the game. Since the 2015 original, we've seen super-thin laptops such as the upcoming HP Spectre shaving millimeters from previous versions, or tablet hybrids such as theMicrosoft Surface Pro 4 and Samsung Galaxy TabPro S showing off what Intel's new Core M chips can do in a small, reasonably priced package.

But even if it's closer to the middle of the road than the it was last year, the 12-inch MacBook is still a love-it-or-hate-it laptop. It seems to inspire either fierce loyalty or intense derision, at least judging from comments on my review of the original version, and social media feedback on any follow-up stories since. A new set of updates for 2016, including new processors for faster performance and better battery life, plus a new rose gold color option, may help throw off some of that shade, but not all.

Indeed, I liked the 2015 version of the MacBook, despite its many limitations. It relied on Intel's initially unimpressive Core M processor, and its performance and battery life compared unfavorably to the bigger MacBook Air and Pro systems. The keyboard was unusually shallow, in order to fit into such a thin body. And most of all, the single USB-C port was a hard pill to swallow for those convinced of the need for separate power, video, and data ports.

It was not the perfect laptop for everyone, or even most people. But over time, I found myself appreciating Apple's exercise in strictly enforced minimalism. I turned to it more and more often, especially for on-the-go computing in coffee shops around New York, eventually declaring it as my all-around favorite (as of March 2016, at least). But, it could still get bogged down with too many programs and windows open, and the battery life wasn't at the level where it could go days and days between charging sessions. The USB issue turned out to be less serious than I feared, and only two or three times in the months after the product's original release did I find myself stymied by a lack of ports (although when I did get stuck with a USB key and a misplaced converter dongle, it was very annoying).

The 12-inch MacBook, on top of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, on top of a 13-inch MacBook Air.

With this 2016 update, Apple has addressed some, but not all, of the issues with the original. Both this system, and other computers with the second generation of Core M processors (confusingly part of Intel's sixth generation of Core chips, also known by the codename Skylake), are closer to the mainstream levels of performance seen in laptops with more common Core i3 and Core i5 processors from Intel.

Along with new Core m3 and m5 CPUs (the M series now follows the same 3/5/7 format as the Core i-series chips), the new MacBook gets Intel's updated 515 integrated graphics, which won't make you a gamer, but may help with video application performance. The speed of the internal flash memory has also improved, but I doubt that's something casual users would even notice.

Frankly, the most obvious difference between the 2016 MacBook and the 2015 model is the new addition of a fourth color option, rose gold, which is already available on iPhones and iPads. Sadly, our review sample is a rather straitlaced space gray (silver and gold are the other two options).

Note also that we're testing the step-up model, which costs $1,599 in the US (£1,299 and AU$2,199), and includes an Intel Core m5 processor and a big 512GB of storage. The base $1,299 model (£1,049 and AU$1,799) has the Core m3 and 256GB of storage.

Color aside, the body is identical to last year's model, weighing a hair over two pounds and measuring 13.1mm thick. The HP Spectre packs a 13-inch display (but only a 1,920x1,080-resolution one) into a 10.4mm body, but at the cost of more weight, at 2.45 pounds. That coming-soon HP also uses Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, which should give it a significant performance boost. It's becoming increasingly obvious that PC makers need to balance size, weight, performance and battery life, but can usually max out two out of those four at best.

A keyboard you may like, but won't love

This is still the thinnest Mac that Apple has ever made. Part of the reason for that is the butterfly mechanism under the keyboard. The nearly edge-to-edge keyboard has very large key faces, yes, but the keys are shallow, 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 deep, clicky physical feedback of other MacBooks or the similar island-style keyboards of most other modern laptops. It took a while to get used to, and it'll never be my favorite keyboard, but I found it was easy to acclimate to after a few days of heavy usage, and I've easily written more than 100,000 words on the 2015 version of this system.

The touchpad retains the Force Touch feature found in both the previous MacBook and the current 13-inch MacBook Pro. (A version of this migrated to the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus as 3D Touch.) A set of four sensors under the pad allow you to "click" anywhere on the surface, and the Force Click effect, which combines the sensors with haptic feedback (or, as Apple calls it, "taptic"), allows 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, still feels like you're depressing the trackpad two levels.

I'm more of a tapper than a clicker, and the first thing I do on any new MacBook is turn on tap-to-click in the settings menu (which is still inexplicably turned off by default), so I have not given Force Touch much thought since it was introduced, with the exception of deep-clicking on addresses occasionally to bring up a contextual map pop-up. Here's another Mac trackpad tip: besides the tapping feature under the trackpad preferences menu, you should go to the accessibility menu and look under Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad options to turn on tap-to-drag.

A small but sharp screen

The 12-inch Retina display has a 2,304x1,440-pixel resolution, which gives you a very high pixel-per-inch density, as well as an aspect ratio that sticks with 16:10, as opposed to the 16:9 aspect ratio found on nearly every other laptop available now, and in HDTV screens.

The slightly glossy screen works from wide viewing angles and is very clear and bright. On-screen icons, text and images all scale well to be very viewable despite the smaller size and higher resolution. While the bezel around the display is thin, it's nowhere as minimalist as the barely there bezel on the excellent Dell XPS 13.

Audio remains thin, best suited for YouTube videos or single-viewer Netflix experiences. While Apple has owned the Beats brand for a while now, there's no sign of any kind of Beats-enhanced audio in any Macs yet.

Another issue carried over from the previous version is the webcam, which is still just a low-res 480p model, which leads to generally soft images when using FaceTime, Photo Booth, or other camera apps.

Dan and Joe in the CNET Lab, via the MacBook's 480p webcam.

Still the elephant in the room

If you ask 10 people about the 12-inch MacBook -- assuming they know enough about this product to differentiate it from other MacBooks -- and they'll all say something along the lines of: "That's the one with just one USB-C port, right?"

There were hopes that we'd see a second port, either USB-C or something else, in this updated model, but that was not to be. The use of a single port for data, video and power -- and a not-quite-mainstream one at that -- remains the most bedeviling thing about this laptop.

And yet, using the 2015 MacBook fairly heavily over a course of months, I also found it wasn't nearly the deal breaker some had feared. The battery life was long enough that I didn't need to worry about taking up the power port to connect an external peripheral, and frankly, so many things have migrated to the cloud, that I've even removed the once-ubiquitous key-shaped USB drive from the keychain, where it hung for many years.

Yes, if you need a wired Ethernet connection on a daily basis, use sneakernet-delivered USB keys every day, or need to send a video output to an external monitor, it can be a real pain. There are USB-C dongles and adaptors available for each and every eventuality, but they're inconvenient and often expensive. A simple USB-C to USB-A adapter is $20, while Apple's big multiport dongle that gives you HDMI, USB-A and USB-C (the latter for pass-through charging) is $80.

Through hands-on testing, I've concluded I can mostly survive in a single-port world, but that won't be true for everybody.

Core M, take two

The original pitch for Core M was that it enabled laptops to be very thin and light, but still powerful and long-lasting. That was an appealing idea, but the first-gen Core M chips found in premium-priced systems such as this and the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro didn't live up to the hype in terms of performance and battery life. Of those early models, the MacBook was the most impressive, likely because Apple was able to tune both the hardware and operating system to work optimally with that still-new CPU. Despite that, the 2015 MacBook could slow down at times, with too many windows and tabs open, and with very large documents and files in use.

The handful of systems we've tested with the newer, second wave of Core M chips, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro S and HP Spectre x2, have all felt zippier, even if still lagging behind full-size laptops with Core i5 processors. With this updated MacBook, you can get a new Core m3 or Core m5 processor. We're testing the better Core m5 version, so it's not going to be an exact comparison to the original 12-inch MacBook.

So far, in a couple of days of use, this Core m5 system feels faster than the older model, not so much in terms of minute-to-minute responsiveness or opening apps, but in that there were fewer moments where the system seemed to slow down or lag when pushed. The benchmark results reflect this, and while it felt like you'd be pushing your luck to use the 2015 MacBook as your mission-critical, all day, every day computer, I feel more confident in this more powerful update, although we'll need more extensive hands-on use to say for sure.

Battery life in this new version is, by Apple's account, about an hour longer than a system with the first-gen Core M CPU would get. In an online video streaming test, the MacBook ran for 10:33, which is about a half hour longer than the most-recent 13-inch MacBook Pro. We're continuing to run other battery tests, and will update this review with additional results.

An even better laptop, but still with caveats

In hands-on use, the new MacBook feels almost exactly like the previous version. If you've got the 2015 MacBook, there's no need to upgrade, but if you were holding off to see what the second generation looked like, the potential boost to performance and battery life makes me feel even more confident about using this as primary laptop, especially for frequent travelers. However, the lack of ports and the feel of the keyboard will still be enough to discourage some, especially those who are looking for a laptop that will stay tethered to a desk for all day, every day.

Keep in mind, too, that we'll almost certainly see updated MacBook Pro laptops later in 2016, possibly as early as Apple's WWDC event in June.

LG G5

LG G5 review:

Mix-and-match design can't beat Samsung's S7

THE GOOD: The LG G5's unique modular design lets you swap in fun accessories. It has (two!) great rear cameras, expandable storage and a replaceable battery -- a rarity in high-end phones.

THE BAD: Although you can swap out some parts, there aren't enough to make this feature compelling. You can only access the phone's app drawer in a specialized theme.

THE BOTTOM LINE: This is the phone to get if you want a removable battery, but it fails to live up to its world-changing Swiss Army Knife potential.

LG phones often play it safe, but this modular G5, which lets you swap out some parts, is all risk. I love the innovation -- no other company has gotten this far with a modular phone -- but unfortunately the device falls short on execution.

Swapping out parts means you turn off your smartphone each time, and there just aren't enough modules right now to make this truly captivating. (LG is selling two components, but they don't pique my interest all that much.) Maybe if there were more inspired modules, and more partners on board lining up cooler add-ons -- I love the idea of a swappable camera lens, for example -- I could be more excited about the G5, or at least more forgiving of its growing pains.

But it's not all bad news. Forget the modules and the device is the best handset with a removable battery, which is becoming a rarity in the phone world. Its aluminium build looks and feels great, and the two cameras on its back are a pleasure to use.

Overall, the G5 still isn't as good as Samsung's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge when it comes to processing speed and battery life, but it'll work very well for all the things you really need to do: take photos, browse the internet, and watch videos throughout the day.

(For more on the G5's hardware specs and how it compares to other flagship handsets, scroll to the end of the review.)

Design: This is not your modular fantasy

When LG first showed off the G5, it made a big deal of it being the first phone with modular capabilities. This ability to swap out and customize certain hardware parts has been a longtime fantasy for mobile users. Like building a personal computer, you can upgrade certain components that are important to you or fit a certain need. If you're going somewhere where you're going to take a variety of photos, for example, you might want to swap out your handset's stock lens for a fisheye or macro lens.

To use the feature, you'll need to push the small button on the device's left edge. The bottom of the G5 will pop out, allowing you to yank the attachment off the battery, clip the battery into the new module and push it all back together. Because the battery is attached to the bezel, the handset powers down every time you swap something out. This isn't a huge deal, but it takes time to fire up the phone after a switch, and if you swap parts often throughout the day it can be a power drain.

The G5's bottom bezel can be removed and swapped out for another accessory.

Google attempted to make a modular handset with its Project Ara, but development on that stalled. The fact that LG got this off the ground is a win, but the feature is limited for now because there are only two accessories (so far) that take advantage of it.

One is called the Cam Plus. It's a camera grip that has a physical shutter button to record and capture video, and a zooming wheel. It also has a built-in battery, which you can use on top of the phone's battery for extra juice. The other accessory is the Hi-Fi Plus, a portable digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that boosts audio playback for high-definition sound files. Because the Hi-Fi Plus includes an audio grill, a USB Type-C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack, you can leave it attached to your G5 and use it all the time.

The LG Cam Plus camera grip, which can attach to the handset.

Swapping out the bottom bezel was a bit difficult at first. The pieces fit tightly, and the unlock button that lets you to detach the chin lies flush with the surface of the device, so I had to dig my nail in to press it. After a while, I got the hang of it and got faster at swapping the parts out. That doesn't mean I ever got to the point where I could walk around, stop and switch out the bezel casually. There's still some wrangling involved, and due to the sheer fear that I'd accidentally fling the top part of the handset across the room when I pulled out the chin, I felt compelled to find a place to sit down to switch out the parts.

With these two official add-ons and no plans to make more, LG will need to rely on third-party developers to expand the usefulness of the phone's current modular features. As a top-tier handset in and of itself, the G5 is a great device. But solely in terms of modularity, it has a ways to go.

Software: Making a few compromises

You know the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? Well, LG tried to fix it.

On the refreshed user interface for the G5, LG buried the option to have an app drawer, the grid of icons that holds all of your apps. A bunch of other Android phone-makers, such as Huawei and Xiaomi, do something similar by getting rid of the drawer altogether, but if you aren't used to it, it can drive you crazy.

I like the app drawer, as this iPhone-like layout means I can't organize my homepages exactly how I want. If you want the drawer back you'll need to dive into Settings and launch a totally different layout called EasyHome. (Hat tip to Techno Buffalo for pointing this out.) Unfortunately, the EasyHome theme enlarges the font size on your home screen, which you can't adjust, and gets rid of the dashboard, which is a row of up to five apps that you can choose to display on the bottom of your home page.

The device's Home layout (left) without an app drawer, and the simpler EasyHome layout (right) which has an app drawer but removes the bottom dashboard of apps.

Basically, you have to choose between having a dashboard and no app drawer, or an app drawer with no dashboard and really big text. Neither choice is ideal.

Luckily, there are some software goodies to help counterbalance this. One is the always-on display. Like the Galaxy S7, the screen continuously displays the time, date and any missed notifications on the display, even when the handset is sleeping. Because the information is "always on," you won't have to wake it up or wave your hand over the screen (like on Motorola phones).

The feature is useful, and it does save me a tap whenever I want to check the time. However, it's limited compared to Samsung's always-on feature. With the Galaxy S7 you can choose different clock faces and there's a monthly calendar option. On the G5 you can add a "welcome message" but that's pretty much it. And while its always-on text is visible in sunlight, it's not as bright as on the S7.

Editors' note, May 3: LG has said an over-the-air update will add an option called "Home and app drawer" that simply adds the drawer to the standard home layout.

Camera: Two cameras are better than one

The G5 has two cameras in the back: a 16-megapixel camera with a standard 78-degree wide lens and an 8-megapixel camera with a wide-angle, 135-degree lens. The wider lens lets you capture more space within each frame.

At first I wasn't too excited about this. I thought a wide-angle lens made more sense on the front (like how the LG V10 had it) so you can include more people in your group selfies. Turns out that having a wide-angle lens on the back is useful if you're more into sweeping landscapes than selfies (which I am). And because you can seamlessly switch between the lenses by zooming in and out on the camera's interface, it's easy to quickly snap two versions of every scene I wanted to capture.

Every time I took a regular photo using the standard camera, I'd pause, then zoom out even wider for the wide-angle version "just in case" I liked that photo better. It became a little addictive.

A closeup of the handset's two back cameras.

To take advantage of the dual cameras, LG added two software features: "Popout," which superimposes an image from the standard lens on top of the wide-angle lens' view with a few effects, and "multiview." Multiview arranges images taken from all cameras (including the 8-megapixel front-facing camera) into instant collages.

The cameras themselves operate quickly, and they take sharp images. When I was capturing a photo of a lanky flower that was blowing in the breeze, the camera's burst shot feature took several pictures of the flower in succession, all of which were in focus. Lighting was also even and colors were true to life. For more on photo quality, check out the shots below (and be sure to click on them to view them at their full resolution).

A shady outdoor image using the standard 16-megapixel camera.

Capturing the same scene in the same spot using the wide-angle 8-megapixel lens.

Compared to the camera on the Galaxy S7, I felt that the G5 took just a tad longer to focus, but not by much -- though you have to really pay attention to even notice. Photos taken on Samsung's handset also had deeper and richer colors, while pictures on the G5 can look a bit washed out at times. Overall, however, the G5's camera is great and its color accuracy was closer at times than the Galaxy S7's, which had a tendency to render some hues more vibrant than they were in real life. Check back with CNET soon for a deeper camera comparison between these two phones.

Other camera goodies include shooting 4K, slow-mo and timelapse videos. There's a manual shooting mode for photography enthusiasts who want more control over the camera's ISO levels, white balance, shutter speed and more. You can also take images in an uncompressed, raw image format.

The LG G5's photo (left) is dimmer, but it didn't blowout the sky like the Galaxy S7 (right).

The flower taken by the LG G5 (left) looks more washed out and not as vibrant as the one taken by the Galaxy S7 (right).

Performance: Super speedy

The G5 runs on a Snapdragon 820 processor and operates lightning fast and very smoothly. As I mentioned before, the camera shoots swiftly, and I didn't run into any problems playing games, launching and quitting apps or flipping through the home pages.

As for benchmark tests, it performed comparably to its rivals. Though it beat the Nexus 6P on all our tests, it didn't outperform the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. Still, it clocked respectable results.

LG G5 PRELIMINARY BENCHMARK SCORES

NOTE:

  Longer bars indicate better performance

Battery: Impressive, but not the best

The G5's 2,800mAh battery did a great job surviving the work day without a charge. After surfing the Web, running benchmark tests and snapping photos, it was at about 60 percent in the evening.

It also did well in our lab tests. The device clocked in 12 hours 34 minutes of continuous video playback in airplane mode. With its quick charge technology, it took only about an hour and 10 minutes to fully charge. That's a marked improvement from the G4, which had a 3,000mAh battery but only lasted 10 hours 38 minutes. It lasted longer than the Nexus 6P's 3,450mAh battery (11 hours 15 minutes) too.

Compared to the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, however, the LG lags behind. Those phones lasted an impressive 16 hours and a whopping 19 hours 48 minutes respectively. They can also charge wirelessly.

The one caveat with the Galaxy devices, though, is that you can't remove their batteries, as you can with the G5. Some users won't care considering they last so long anyway. But having the option to swap is useful when there's no plug close by. It's also handy when you're a year or two into owning your phone and the battery isn't performing as well as it used to. (Plus it helps to have a fresh battery up your sleeve if you plan to resell it later.)

The phone has a removable 2,800mAh battery that lasted about 12 and a half hours in our lab tests.

Extra nitty-gritty spec details:

LG G5 SPEC COMPARISON

Should you get it?

If you were looking to buy the LG G5 phone solely for its modularity, don't. Wait until there are more hardware parts and accessories that can be swapped out, or until LG improves on the design so that it's easier to switch components.

If you have the extra cash, spring for the Galaxy S7 instead. Next to its Edge counterpart, it's the best performing handset on the market and you'll get extra peace of mind with its water resistant body. On the other hand, if you want to save money, get the Google Nexus 6P. It's one of the cheapest and best-performing Android devices and it'll receive prompt software updates from Google.

However, if your top priority is having a replaceable battery, go with the G5. With a spare battery, you won't have to worry about finding a nearby plug, and it'll make the handset easier to resell. I know having this option is an absolute must for some people and if it's the same for you, this phone should undoubtedly be your top choice.