My 16” had two speeds.

Quiet and cool with about 11 hours of battery life when writing, reading or some simple productivity stuff.

Fast but loud and hot when doing anything else with about 3 hours of battery life. Even the Touch Bar (which I don’t hate, but I also don’t love) is uncomfortable to the touch.

It seems there is no in between. I’m generally happy with the machine, but I’m very interested in what’s next for the big MBP.

My fully-loaded 2019 16-inch MacBook feels VERY underpowered actually - once you try to use all the cores (multiple compilation threads, parallel tests with multiple docker images running), it goes into what I would call a "heat shock". I suspect throttling kicks in and cpu charts in Activity Monitor become close-to-death flatlines. Oh, and the fan noise becomes non-ignorable too.

Yeah, full utilization leads to throttling, guaranteed. Although apparently it can get much worse than what I've had, down to like 1.0 Ghz.

I've also had issues with the laptop waking from sleep, where it'd either hang for up to minutes, or just outright kernel panic. Big Sur seems to have fixed the kernel panics but waking from sleep still feels really slow.

You know, I believe you on the 2019 - I've heard this from more people than I care to admit, and makes me glad I skipped that year.

I think from 2016-2019 was a rough era for the MacBook Pro when you factor in price for performance; still great machines, but they didn't feel as polished as the 2015 MBP or the 2020 M1's.

Edit: year banding.

My 2016 MacBook Pro has been an absolute pleasure to use. It's small, light, great battery life, plenty of performance, I consider it the second incarnation of my favorite laptop ever, the Titanium PowerBook G4.

Except for the keyboard. Been replaced three times. It's defective by design. Such a letdown.

I have the opposite experience with my 2016 MacBook Pro. It feels really sluggish to me now. 2 cores is nowhere near enough, and the integrated graphics chip doesn’t feel fast enough for everyday tasks if you have external monitors connected. I’m on a video call in discord the machine lags so much it’s unusable. Xcode with swift is basically useless - it lags so much sometimes doing who knows what that it drops keystrokes. I had the monitor stop working because of the design fault right before two back to back conferences. And the keyboard has been replaced once and is now having issues again. Compiling rust on the machine is about 8x slower than my new ryzen based development machine.

We’re in a golden age of cpu improvements. A dual core 2016 mbp isn’t good enough for me any more.

Interesting. How much ram do you have ? Using a 4k external monitor ?

Just wondering, don't those cores still have HyperThreading or such, resulting in actually more cores than just 2 physical ones ?

Ah, I have a quad core with a discrete GPU. Might make all the difference.

Try compiling stuff. There's definitely a difference in speed when I use Xcode on the 15" 2016 MBP, or the 16" 2019 MBP. It's got an additional four cores, and it's noticeable to me.