I used to hook up my MacBook Air to a docking contraption every time I came home from the road. Now, I plug in one cable, and my entire desktop system is ready to go. It’s fairly awesome.

Down: Shorter battery life

Apple says this smaller laptop has a smaller battery than the MacBook Air—and yet that it still gets the same 10 hours of work time.

That’s baloney.

There’s been a lot of confusion and analysis about why the MacBook Pro does or does not get the battery life it’s supposed to. But this much I can say for sure: You get better battery life if you install the latest Mac OS version, 10.12.3. And if you keep the screen dimmer than full brightness. And if you don’t do heavy-lifting work like Photoshop, video editing, and games.

This much I can also say for sure: No matter what you do, you won’t get as much life out of this battery as you would doing exactly the same work on the MacBook Air. It’s a 33% smaller battery; it’s not going to have the same capacity. I usually get six or seven hours from it.

I wasn’t ready for that, and it’s a real drag. Thank goodness I’ve got chargers all around me.

Whiplash

If you’re a Mac person and can’t afford to switch to Windows, then the new MacBook Pro is it. Apple doesn’t intend to update the MacBook Air or the older MacBook Pros anymore. The future is this or nothing.

But you know what? This really isn’t a MacBook at all.

I mean, it doesn’t have the same anything. Screen, jacks, power cord, keyboard, battery, trackpad…it has almost nothing in common with previous Apple laptops.

It’s much better in some ways, and much worse in others. You’ve been warned; keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

• Technology & Electronics
• Computing
• MacBook Pro
• MacBook Air
• Apple