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Best Ssd For Apple Mac

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by guitocaltocongam 2021. 1. 15. 23:53

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USB-C is certainly the port of the future, so grabbing a USB-C hard drive for your MacBook or MacBook Pro is the best way to take all of your files, music, photos, and more with you wherever you go without clogging up your Mac's own hard drive. Upgrade nearly any Apple computer for faster speeds and more flash storage. SSD upgrade kits include all tools needed to safely upgrade your Mac. Experience the true speed of your Mac with an OWC SSD flash storage upgrade. Select your Mac. Upgrades up to 2.0TB. Upgrades up to 2.0TB. However, we're not looking to bung an SSD into a Mac. We want a portable drive, so we need an extra accessory. When you buy a Samsung 860 Eno, you get the drive in a cardboard box.

Your guide

  • Andrew Cunningham

Whether you’re replacing an existing solid-state drive or upgrading from a traditional hard drive to get better performance, almost every SSD you can buy today is great. But some are still better than others. If you need to buy a SATA SSD right now, we think the 500 GB Crucial MX500 is the best option for most people. The MX500 isn’t the fastest SATA SSD you can get, but it comes close, and it has the best combination of price, performance, endurance, and capacity of any drive you can buy.

Our pick

Crucial MX500

The Crucial MX500 has great performance for a SATA drive and a five-year warranty. It’s usually cheaper than the 860 Evo, depending on the capacity and type of drive, but not much more expensive than budget SSDs with missing features or shorter warranties.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $70.

The Crucial MX500 is just a little slower than Samsung’s more expensive SATA SSDs in most benchmarks, but most people wouldn’t notice the difference. It’s as good as or better than the rest of the competition and it performs better when full or near-full than its predecessor, the MX300. It supports full-disk encryption and it comes in both 2.5-inch and M.2 SATA versions, but not the (older, less common) mSATA. Crucial offers a five-year warranty on the drive for more peace of mind (three years is typical),

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Runner-up

Samsung 860 Evo

The 860 Evo is one of the fastest and longest-lasting SATA SSDs you can buy, but you can get great SATA drives for less money.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $80.

The Samsung 860 Evo replaces the 850 Evo, which was our top SSD pick for nearly three years. Best remote app for iphone to mac. Compared with both its predecessor and the Crucial MX500, the 860 Evo is a little faster and offers much better durability. And in addition to the 2.5-inch and M.2 versions, it’s available as an mSATA drive, unlike the MX500 and most other modern SSDs. But it’s usually more expensive than the MX500, and you won’t notice the difference between the two in day-to-day use. The MX500 is the drive to get as long as it’s cheaper.

Upgrade pick

Samsung 970 Evo Plus

The PCIe Samsung 970 Evo Plus is much faster than any SATA drive, but it costs more and will work only in newer, higher-end PCs, so it’s overkill for most people.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $140.

Any good SATA SSD will help your PC boot quickly, speed up app launches and load times for games, and generally make your computer more responsive; most people, including gamers, don’t need anything faster. But serious video and photo editors, server admins, CAD designers, software developers, and other people with workstation-style demands—anyone who frequently loads and saves large files—may benefit from a faster drive. If that describes you, choose the PCIe Samsung 970 Evo Plus, which can be four or five times faster than the fastest SATA drives. It’s more expensive—typically $50 or $60 more than a good SATA drive for 500 GB and around $120 more for 1 TB—and you’ll need a desktop or an M.2 PCIe–equipped laptop to use it. Just remember that the difference between a SATA SSD and a PCIe SSD isn’t as noticeable as the difference between a SATA SSD and a spinning hard drive.

Also great

Western Digital WD Blue SN500

If you’re building a new desktop PC or upgrading a one- or two-year-old laptop, the PCI Express-based SN500 offers more speed than SATA drives for less money than our upgrade pick.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $70.

Western Digital’s WD Blue SN500 is a budget M.2 PCI Express SSD that’s faster than (and around the same price as) the SATA-based MX500 or 860 Evo. It’s the best option if you’re building a new desktop computer, configuring a barebones mini PC, or upgrading a one- or two-year-old laptop that you bought with a smaller SSD and you want a fast drive for a lot less money than the 970 Evo. But most people will be just fine with a SATA drive (and you also shouldn’t upgrade to the SN500 from a SATA SSD of an equal or greater capacity). The SN500 performs well for the price and comes with a solid five-year warranty from a reliable company. But it comes in only 250 and 500 GB capacities, it doesn’t support hardware encryption acceleration, and like all M.2 PCIe drives it will work in only newer PCs.

Everything we recommend

Our pick

Crucial MX500

The Crucial MX500 has great performance for a SATA drive and a five-year warranty. It’s usually cheaper than the 860 Evo, depending on the capacity and type of drive, but not much more expensive than budget SSDs with missing features or shorter warranties.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $70.

Runner-up

Samsung 860 Evo

The 860 Evo is one of the fastest and longest-lasting SATA SSDs you can buy, but you can get great SATA drives for less money.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $80.

Upgrade pick

Samsung 970 Evo Plus

The PCIe Samsung 970 Evo Plus is much faster than any SATA drive, but it costs more and will work only in newer, higher-end PCs, so it’s overkill for most people.

Best Ssd For Apple Mac

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $140.

Also great

Western Digital WD Blue SN500

If you’re building a new desktop PC or upgrading a one- or two-year-old laptop, the PCI Express-based SN500 offers more speed than SATA drives for less money than our upgrade pick.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $70.

The research

Why you should trust us

Andrew Cunningham spent more than six years testing and reviewing PCs and other gadgets for AnandTech and Ars Technica, and has been building and upgrading PCs for more than 15 years.

Nathan Edwards, the senior editor on this guide, tested dozens of SSDs for Maximum PC between 2008 and 2012, watching as they progressed from error-plagued, extremely expensive, and not much better than mechanical hard drives to reliable, only moderately expensive, and much better than mechanical drives.

Since 2013, when we began recommending SSDs, we’ve been in contact with storage experts, learning all there is to know about SSD technology and gathering insights from the professionals who benchmark these drives for a living. There’s nothing we could learn by running our own benchmarks that we can’t get from the experts’ numbers—been there, done that—so we usually don’t test these drives ourselves. Instead, we consider experts’ benchmarks in the context of our knowledge of what most people actually need in an SSD, and we recommend the best drives for each type of person.

Who this is for

Buying an SSD is a great way to upgrade almost any one- to five-year-old computer that has a traditional hard drive, and these drives should be the default choice for anyone building or buying a new computer. SSDs are much faster than hard drives at everything from booting to loading games to opening and switching between apps, and today’s SSDs are larger, faster, and much cheaper than the SSDs of yesteryear. In general, you should spend the money only if you plan on keeping your computer for at least another year, or if you know you can move your new SSD to your next computer: There’s no sense in upgrading a machine that you’re about to replace.

If your computer already has an SSD, the only real reason to get a different SSD is if you’re running out of room on the first one. If your drive is consistently more than 75 or 80 percent full, upgrading to a larger SSD is worth considering, since full SSDs are slower and wear out faster than drives with plenty of free space. Most people wouldn’t notice a speed difference between two different SSDs unless they’re writing huge files every single day—editing 4K video files, working with huge spreadsheets and databases, or designing in AutoCAD or other 3D-modeling software—and care about a few seconds’ worth of improvement. Regardless of which SSD you buy, you’re not likely to notice any lag when you’re firing up most apps or launching games.

If you have a desktop PC with room for multiple drives and you need more than 500 GB of storage, consider using our SSD pick for the operating system and programs and adding a traditional hard drive or two for media storage. Though SSDs are much less expensive than they once were, they’re still less economical than traditional hard drives for huge multi-terabyte music and video libraries.

If your computer already has an SSD, the only real reason to get a different SSD is if you run out of room on the first one.

Upgrading to an SSD can make a huge difference if you’re coming from a mechanical hard drive, and to maximize that advantage you should also upgrade your RAM if your computer has 4 GB or less. https://paugravralam.tistory.com/10. For most people, 8 GB of RAM is plenty and should provide a noticeable speed boost in day-to-day use; Crucial has a handy page to help you find what memory your computer needs.

Mac owners should think twice about an SSD upgrade. Though you can upgrade some older (mostly pre-2013) MacBooks with standard SATA drives, you can’t do the same with the newest MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Laptops from 2013, 2014, or 2015 often support such upgrades, but only with specialized, expensive drives from just a couple of manufacturers. (For all the messy details, skip down to the Mac section.) As such, we’ve aimed this guide mostly at non-Mac owners.

What you need to know about SSDs

From left to right: a 2.5-inch SATA SSD, an mSATA SSD, an M.2 SATA SSD, and an M.2 PCIe SSD. You can tell SATA and PCIe M.2 drives apart by looking at their connectors.Photo: Andrew Cunningham

If you have a computer with a mechanical hard drive, that drive is likely the slowest part of your system. The rest of the computer has to wait around for information to be read from or written to the drive. Everything you do that requires accessing data on your hard drive—like booting up or shutting down, saving and loading files, launching an app or starting up a game, or rendering a video—will be much faster on an SSD.

Unlike traditional hard drives, SSDs don’t have any moving parts, which means they’re much less prone to mechanical failure. In fact, they’re better than standard hard drives in almost every respect. They use much less power, put out much less heat, and don’t vibrate. SATA SSDs are three or four times faster than standard hard drives in sequential reads and writes; PCI Express SSDs are as much as seven times faster than SATA models.

SSDs are still more expensive than mechanical drives for the same amount of storage, and the biggest hard drives can still hold more data than the most capacious SSDs. But the price gap is narrowing: A decent SSD cost $3 per gigabyte in 2010, and $1 per gigabyte in 2012. As of late 2018, you can get a great SSD for less than 20¢ per gigabyte. A good mechanical hard drive, meanwhile, costs less than 5¢ per gigabyte. And people are keeping more data in cloud storage and less on their computers—you may not need as much storage space as you did a few years ago.

If you have a computer with a mechanical hard drive, that drive is likely the slowest part of your system.

Before you buy, it’s important to figure out what kind of SSD fits your computer. At the moment, you can find two different interfaces for data transfer (SATA and PCIe), two different transfer protocols (AHCI and NVMe), and four common physical connectors and form factors (2.5-inch SATA, mSATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 PCIe). Yep, it can get confusing.

Best photo viewer for mac. Here’s a quick breakdown of the terminology:

SATA refers to both a physical connection type and the information-transfer protocol that it carries. You can find the physical connector on 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch hard drives, as well as many SSDs. If you have a desktop or a larger laptop, it can probably take a 2.5-inch SATA drive (you’ll want to get a 2.5-inch–to–3.5-inch SSD mounting bracket if your desktop can fit only 3.5-inch drives). Drives using the SATA protocol also come with physically smaller mSATA and M.2 connectors. The current SATA III standard can transfer data at a rate of around 600 MB/s, which most modern drives max out. Unless your machine has an M.2 PCIe or full-size PCIe slot, you can’t get an SSD that’s any faster.

PCI Express (PCIe) is a faster interface that’s capable of aria-selected='true' tabindex='0'>How many gigabytes do you need?

Right now, most people should get a 500 GB SSD, unless you know you need more. Don’t get an SSD with less than 250 GB of storage if at all possible: SSDs with 128 GB or less capacity don’t leave enough room for an operating system plus most people’s stuff, and both 128 GB and 250 GB drives are slower and significantly less cost-effective than larger drives. While 1 TB drives were prohibitively expensive for many years, recent price decreases have made them almost as cheap as 500 GB drives were just a couple of years ago. That’s still more storage than most people need in the era of cheap, pervasive cloud storage, but the price per-gigabyte and the performance for a 1 TB drive are both slightly better for most 500 GB drives; they’re not a bad choice if you want to give yourself some room to grow. 2 TB and 4 TB SSDs exist, but their price per-gigabyte is still higher than for 500 GB or 1 TB drives, and few people actually need a drive that large.

If you’re buying a new computer from a company like Dell, HP, or Lenovo, you can sometimes save money by ordering a computer with a smaller SSD or a mechanical hard drive and replacing that with a larger SSD yourself. Be careful, though: Some laptop manufacturers make it very difficult to upgrade the drive, either soldering it to the motherboard or requiring complicated warranty-voiding disassembly to gain access to the SSD. Make sure your new laptop is easily upgradable before going this route.

Right now, most people should get a 500 GB SSD. Smaller drives are slower and more expensive per gigabyte, while larger drives cost more than most people should spend on upgrading an old computer.

Drives with larger capacities also tend to be faster. That’s because much of an SSD’s speed advantage comes from parallelization. Writing for AnandTech back in 2014, Kristian Vättö explained, “A single NAND die isn’t very fast but when you put a dozen or more of them in parallel, the performance adds up.” If your drive has fewer modules than your controller can write to at once (that is, if it has a lower capacity), it won’t be as fast as it could be. Although 500 GB SSDs aren’t bad, with today’s SSDs, you’ll get the best speeds from 1 TB or 2 TB drives.

How we picked

Photo: Andrew Cunningham

For the latest update to this guide, we spent around four hours researching eight new drives released since our previous update in August 2017. From there, we checked Amazon listings and owner reviews for all of the drives, weeding out some older models, drives lacking 500 GB (or higher) capacities, and models with particularly poor reviews. We then read reviews from the sites that we know do great SSD testing—primarily AnandTech, but also CNET, Tom’s Hardware, The SSD Review, StorageReview.com, The Tech Report, and a few others—and pored over benchmarks.

For the 12 drives that made the cut, we then used trusted third-party reviews and manufacturer product pages to compare the drives based on these criteria:

  • A good price: More-expensive SSDs are often better SSDs, but you don’t want to overpay to get extra performance or other features you likely wouldn’t notice or use.
  • Good performance: Speed is the main reason to buy an SSD, after all! We checked reviews to make sure that the drives hit their advertised performance figures and that they would continue to feel speedy over time.
  • A capacity at or near 500 GB, which currently represents a good mix of value, capacity, and speed: Although 1 TB drives usually offer better performance and cost a little less per gigabyte than 500 GB drives, they’re still overkill for most people in the era of pervasive cloud storage.
  • For SATA drives, both 2.5-inch and M.2 versions for maximum compatibility with different kinds of systems: We preferred those versions because the older mSATA is increasingly rare and thus wasn’t a top priority.
  • A decent warranty: Three-year warranties are the standard, but higher-end drives sometimes come with five- or even 10-year warranties, which help them stand out from the crowd.
  • Durability: You can write to flash-memory cells only so many times before they wear out. While most people will never come anywhere near this limit during the normal lifetime of a drive, higher endurance is a plus.

We also considered a few things that not everyone will need, but that are nice to have if you can get them:

  • Native support for drive-encryption acceleration wasn’t a requirement for us, but all of our picks ended up including it. This feature is primarily important for businesses with specific aria-selected='true' tabindex='0'>Our pick: Crucial MX500
    Photo: Andrew Cunningham

    Our pick

    Crucial MX500

    The Crucial MX500 has great performance for a SATA drive and a five-year warranty. It’s usually cheaper than the 860 Evo, depending on the capacity and type of drive, but not much more expensive than budget SSDs with missing features or shorter warranties.

    Buying Options

    *At the time of publishing, the price was $70.

    If we were upgrading a laptop or buying the primary drive for a desktop, we’d buy the Crucial 500 GB MX500. It’s available in both 2.5-inch and M.2 SATA versions, and it’s one of the cheapest and best big-name SSDs you can buy. It’s fast enough and capacious enough for most people and it offers useful features like hardware encryption support and a five-year warranty. A handful of SATA drives are a little faster than the MX500, but you need to step up to a more expensive PCI Express drive like our upgrade pick to notice a difference.

    The Crucial MX500 is one of the cheapest and best big-name SSDs you can buy, and it offers useful features like hardware encryption support and a five-year warranty.

    You wouldn’t notice a speed difference between the MX500 and much more expensive SATA drives in use. Drive benchmarks from reviewers at AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware show that the MX500 is occasionally 10 to 20 percent slower in some individual tests than Samsung’s 860 Evo drives, and it consumes a bit more power, but its overall performance is better than that of the rest of the competition and near the limits of the SATA interface. Compared with the previous-generation MX300, the MX500 improves performance when the drive is full or near-full, one of the MX300’s major shortcomings.

    In a review of the 1 TB version of the MX500, AnandTech’s Billy Tallis writes: “It isn’t at the top of every benchmark … but it is clearly a top-tier choice.” In a review of the 500 GB version, Tallis says that while it is slower than the 1 TB version, it still comes with no major shortcomings and is “easy to recommend.”

    Crucial offers the MX500 in a typical range of capacities: The 2.5-inch SATA drive is available in 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB versions, while the M.2 SATA drive comes in 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB versions. Crucial doesn’t make an mSATA version of the MX500, so if you’re using an older ultrabook that needs such a drive, look at our runner-up pick instead.

    The 500 GB MX500’s limited warranty lasts for five years or 180 terabytes written (TBW), whichever comes first. That coverage is not quite as good as Samsung’s five-year, 300 TBW warranty for the 500 GB version of the 860 Evo, but you would still need to completely fill up the MX500 once every 10 days to even come close to wearing that drive out in less than five years. Most people just don’t use their computers that way (and the people who do would be better served by our upgrade pick’s speed boost, anyway).

    The MX500 supports native encryption acceleration—something not found in most SSDs in its price range, including the WD Blue 3D NAND, the SanDisk Ultra 3D, and Crucial’s own BX300—and comes with a (Windows-only) license for the Acronis True Image aria-selected='true' tabindex='0'>Runner up: Samsung 860 Evo

    Photo: Andrew Cunningham

    Runner-up

    Samsung 860 Evo

    The 860 Evo is one of the fastest and longest-lasting SATA SSDs you can buy, but you can get great SATA drives for less money.

    Buying Options

    *At the time of publishing, the price was $80.

    The Samsung 860 Evo is as good as or better than the Crucial MX500 in almost every metric: It’s a little faster; it consumes less power; it has much higher endurance; it comes in 2.5-inch, mSATA, and M.2 versions; and it has the same five-year warranty and encryption support—it’s your best option (and one of your only modern options) if you need an mSATA SSD. But all models and capacities are consistently more expensive than the MX500, and you won’t notice the difference between the two drives in normal use. People who need something significantly faster should be looking at PCI Express SSDs like our upgrade pick; get the 860 Evo only if it’s around the same price as the MX500 or if you need an mSATA drive.

    The 860 Evo replaces the 850 Evo, which was our main SSD pick for three years. That drive was already butting up against the limits of the SATA interface, and the 860 Evo’s performance is similar overall—that is to say, very good. According to AnandTech’s Billy Tallis, “the improvements are measurable, if otherwise usually imperceptible.” The 860 Evo is between 10 and 20 percent faster in some individual tests than the Crucial MX500, and its power consumption is slightly lower, but most people wouldn’t notice the difference between them in everyday use.

    The M.2 version of the Samsung 860 Evo. It also comes in 2.5-inch SATA and mSATA versions.Photo: Andrew Cunningham

    You can find a version of the 860 Evo for more computers than the MX500, since Samsung sells an mSATA version as well as 2.5-inch SATA and M.2 SATA versions. The 2.5-inch drive comes in 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB capacities; the M.2 and mSATA drives both include 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB capacities, but the M.2 version stops at 2 TB and the mSATA version tops out at 1 TB.

    Samsung’s limited warranty covers the drive for five years or 300 terabytes written (TBW), whichever comes first. That’s a step up from Crucial’s five-year, 180 TBW warranty for the MX500. Most people will be just fine with Crucial’s lower TBW rating, but if you’re editing and saving huge video files or databases every single day and you can’t step up to a faster PCI Express drive, the 860 Evo’s higher endurance might be worth paying for.

    Like the MX500, the 860 Evo supports drive-encryption acceleration, a useful security feature that cheaper SSDs often lack. Samsung also offers some Windows-only software tools: a aria-selected='true' tabindex='0'>Upgrade pick: Samsung 970 Evo Plus

    Photo: Andrew Cunningham

    Upgrade pick

    Samsung 970 Evo Plus

    The PCIe Samsung 970 Evo Plus is much faster than any SATA drive, but it costs more and will work only in newer, higher-end PCs, so it’s overkill for most people.

    Let's create a software RAID 1 in Windows 7. Best software raid for media server. Unblock any international website, browse anonymously, and download movies and Mp3 with complete safety with CyberGhost,: To create software RAID 1 with Windows 7, we will need two hard disk drives - preferably of the same size - and at least Windows 7 Professional or Windows 7 Ultimate.

    Buying Options

    *At the time of publishing, the price was $140.

    Owners of newer laptops or desktop motherboards who truly need more speed should buy the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. This model combines performance that’s significantly faster than SATA with the great reputation of Samsung’s SSD controllers and flash memory, as well as the hardware encryption support that many other M.2 PCIe drives lack. The drive also includes a five-year 300 TBW warranty, up from three years and 200 TBW for the previous-generation 960 Evo (our former upgrade pick).

    The 970 Evo Plus manages to run somewhere between two and four times faster than any SATA SSD in most tasks, and its performance is usually as good or better than every PCIe SSD but the more expensive Samsung 970 Pro or Intel’s pricey, low-capacity Optane drives. It’s more expensive than our top pick, the Crucial MX500: As of this writing, you’ll pay about $60 more for a 500 GB 970 Evo Plus and around $120 more for a 1 TB version. But it’s around the same price as (or even a bit cheaper than) other good PCIe SSDs. Most people wouldn’t notice the difference between an M.2 PCIe drive and a SATA drive for most tasks—the difference between any two decent SSDs isn’t as noticeable as the gap between an SSD and a hard disk—but if you have a newer high-end system and you edit video or photos, the 970 Evo could be worth the extra cost if you want to cut down load times.

    Reviewers like the 970 Evo Plus’s mix of price and performance. In a review, Billy Tallis of AnandTech says that “the 970 Evo Plus can now be regarded as Samsung's flagship consumer SSD, and it deserves that title.” Sean Webster of Tom’s Hardware says that the 970 Evo Plus “consistently proved that it has some of the strongest write performance on the market and can handle tough workloads, ” and praises Samsung’s reliability and support.

Also Great: Western Digital WD Blue SN500

Photo: Andrew Cunningham

Also great

Western Digital WD Blue SN500

If you’re building a new desktop PC or upgrading a one- or two-year-old laptop, the PCI Express-based SN500 offers more speed than SATA drives for less money than our upgrade pick.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $70.

Western Digital’s WD Blue SN500, not to be confused with the older SATA-based WD Blue 3D NAND, is a budget M.2 PCI Express SSD that’s faster than and around the same price as the SATA-based MX500 or 860 Evo. It’s the best option if you’re building a new desktop computer, configuring a barebones mini PC, or upgrading a one- or two-year-old laptop that you bought with a smaller SSD and you want a fast drive for a lot less money than the 970 Evo. But most people will be just fine with a SATA drive (and you also shouldn’t upgrade to the SN500 from a SATA SSD of an equal or greater capacity). The SN500 performs well for the price and comes with a solid five-year warranty from a reliable company. But it comes in only 250 and 500 GB capacities, it doesn’t support hardware encryption acceleration, and like all M.2 PCIe drives it will work only in newer PCs.

Compared with a high-end drive like the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, the SN500 is less expensive because it uses two lanes of PCIe bandwidth instead of four and it doesn’t use a DRAM cache. This is a technical way of saying “it’s slower”—peak speeds are about half those of the 970 Evo Plus, and random write speeds are often no faster than those of good SATA drives—but at its fastest the SN500 is still twice the speed of SATA drives like the MX500 and 860 Evo. It also consumes less power and generates less heat than typical high-end PCIe drives, which may help your laptop run just a bit longer on a charge.

Reviewers praise the SN500’s performance for its price. AnandTech’s Billy Tallis writes that “it doesn’t come out ahead in every single test, but the overall performance profile is much more consistent” than other budget PCI Express drives. PC World’s Jon Jacobi says that “at the capacities it’s available in, I recommend it over the Crucial P1, which suffers a severe slowdown on those rare occasions when it runs out of cache.” And Rock Paper Shotgun’s Katharine Castle says “as long as you’ve got a motherboard that supports NVMe SSDs, then you’d almost be silly not to get the WD Blue SN500 at this price.”

Installation

If you want to copy your existing hard drive over to your SSD before you install it, you’ll need cloning software and sometimes additional hardware. All of our recommended SSDs come with access to Windows-only cloning software: MX-class Crucial drives, including the MX500, come with a license key for Acronis True Image HD software; Samsung’s SSDs all ship with Samsung’s aria-selected='true' tabindex='0'>If you have a Mac

Most people who own Macs generally shouldn’t upgrade the SSDs in their computers unless they absolutely need extra capacity. Many recent Macs can’t support upgrades at all, and post-2013 Macs that shipped with removable solid-state storage already use PCI Express drives that are faster than any third-party options. OWC’s Aura PCIe SSDs, though respectable enough, are slower than Apple’s own drives, and like most third-party replacements, they sell for way more than a typical SSD (the OWC 480 GB Aura sells for around $250, the same as the pricey Samsung 970 Pro).

If you can and must upgrade, know that it’s difficult to install a new SSD in most Macs, either because it’s hard to open the computer or the solid-state drives in Macs are proprietary and thus incompatible with regular PC connectors.

MacBook Pros up to and including some of the 2012 models are fairly easy to upgrade with our 2.5-inch SATA picks, though there are some pitfalls we’ll discuss below. This Apple page can help you identify your MacBook Pro, and iFixit has easy-to-follow guides that will walk you through the upgrade process.

Here’s the breakdown, at least for Macs made after 2012 or so:

  • MacBook Air: Use this page to identify your MacBook Air; the 11- and 13-inch models use the same drives. Owners of MacBook Air machines made in 2012 can buy these replacement drives from OWC. For the 2013, 2014, and 2015 MacBook Air models, buy these OWC Aura replacement drives.
  • MacBook Pro: Use this page to identify your MacBook Pro. Owners of 2012 Retina MacBook Pro models or early-2013 MacBook Pro systems can buy the OWC Aura 6G made specifically for those models—these Aura 6G drives are shaped a bit differently than the drives of the same name for the MacBook Air. MacBook Pros made in late 2013, 2014, or 2015 use this OWC Aura, the same drive OWC sells for newer MacBook Airs. No third-party SSDs are available for 2016, 2017, or 2018 MacBook Pros.
  • 12-inch MacBook: Owners of Apple’s lightest laptop will never be able to buy storage upgrades. The SSDs in these computers are soldered to the motherboard, much like the flash storage in a smartphone or tablet.
  • iMac: All iMacs (aside from the iMac Pro) include space for a 3.5-inch internal hard drive, which means you could use any of our 2.5-inch SATA picks along with an adapter bracket if you really wanted to. However, these computers are extremely difficult to open and upgrade. We recommend that most people consult with an Apple Authorized Service Provider to upgrade iMac storage.
  • Mac mini:This page can help you identify your Mac mini. You can upgrade the 2012 model with standard 2.5-inch SATA drives, though as with the iMac you should probably use an Apple Authorized Service Provider to do the work to minimize the risk of damaging the computer. OWC also sells SSDs specifically made to fit the 2014 Mac mini.

Apple doesn’t enable TRIM (an operating-system-level garbage-collection command) on third-party SSDs, though in macOS 10.10.4 and later you can force-enable TRIM via a command-line prompt. However, some Linux users have reported lost data and other bugs as a result of forcing TRIM on Samsung and other SSDs in Linux. It’s unclear whether macOS would have the same bugs, but we haven’t seen any widespread reports of TRIM issues with Samsung drives. If you force TRIM, proceed with caution and keep good backups.

What to look forward to

Intel and Micron’s Optane SSDs promise to fundamentally shift the SSD landscape, as the drives claim dramatic improvements in durability and latency compared with current SSDs. But for now, these SSDs primarily come in the form of expensive drives for servers and tiny 16 GB and 32 GB drives that are used as a cache to speed up systems with large, slow hard drives. Larger 58 GB and 118 GB drives have enough space to store an operating system and a few applications, but they’re still too small and expensive for most people to consider. Capacity will need to go up and prices will need to come way down before Intel can deliver on its lofty promises here.

The competition

SATA and M.2 SATA SSDs

Gobs and gobs of 2.5-inch SATA SSDs are out there, and since just a handful of companies make their own flash memory and/or drive controllers, namely Samsung and Micron (Crucial’s parent company), most drives have a hard time standing out from the crowd. Most are fine, and if you encounter a great deal on them, you won’t be unhappy. But at current prices, there’s little reason to consider them over our main picks. We’re listing a few highlights, skipping over drives that appear to be out of stock or otherwise on their way out.

Samsung’s 850 Evo is still a great drive, but at this point, the 860 Evo is significantly cheaper, and it gives you slightly better speed and endurance.

WD’s Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk’s Ultra 3D are identical drives—the only difference is the label on the front, and the fact that the WD Blue includes an M.2 version while the SanDisk comes in only a 2.5-inch SATA version. Both are well-reviewed, good-enough SATA SSDs with solid performance, and both are available for around the same price as the Crucial MX500. But their lack of hardware encryption support and their shorter, three-year warranty ultimately make the MX500 the better buy.

Intel’s 545s uses a controller and NAND flash that are similar to the components in the Crucial MX500, so overall it performs similarly to our top pick; it includes a five-year warranty and encryption support too. But as of this writing, it usually costs $150 or $160, more than the MX500 and close to the superior 860 Evo. If you can get this model for less, it’s a good drive, but otherwise you have no reason to consider it over our main picks.

Samsung’s 850 Pro and the new 860 Pro are both top-of-the-line SATA drives with high endurance and good warranties (though the 860 Pro gets only a five-year warranty, down from 10 years for the 850 Pro), but at this point people who want a faster, better SSD than our main picks should be looking at PCI Express drives, not SATA models. Drives like the Crucial MX500 and Samsung 860 Evo are significantly cheaper but not all that much slower. Also, neither Pro comes in an M.2 or mSATA version.

Compared with the MX500, Crucial’s BX500 has slower performance, a shorter (three-year) warranty, and no hardware encryption support. It might be a good choice if you need an extremely cheap low-capacity drive—a 120 GB version costs less than $30—but the 480 GB version isn’t much cheaper than our top picks. It also tops out at 480 GB, so it’s a poor choice if you need 1 TB or more of storage.

Samsung’s 860 QVO is meant to be a relatively cheap drive for people who need lots of space—it will be available in only 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB capacities. However, although it performs well, is cheaper than the 860 Evo, and supports hardware encryption, it has only a three-year warranty and isn’t any cheaper than the MX500 if you’re buying a 1 TB drive. There’s no reason to buy it unless you need something bigger than 1 TB but don’t want a spinning hard drive.

Seagate’s Barracuda SSDs are competitively priced and have five-year warranties, but reviews indicate that they don’t perform quite as well or as consistently as our top picks. It’s not significantly cheaper than our main picks and it doesn’t have hardware encryption support, either.

Adata’s Ultimate SU800, SanDisk’s Ultra II, and Mushkin’s Source SSDs are all good enough and readily available, but they run slower than our main picks, have shorter, three-year warranties, and lack encryption support.

PCIe NVMe SSDs

The original Samsung 970 Evo, our former upgrade pick, is still available, and if you can get it on sale it’s still a good drive. But at its regular price the 970 Evo Plus costs about the same, has the same warranty and features, and is significantly faster. Get the Evo Plus instead.

The Crucial P1 is around half as fast as the original 970 Evo most of the time but it’s still between two and four times faster than SATA drives. Though we like its price—it’s cheaper than the 860 Evo, in some cases—its lack of drive encryption support and relatively low 100 TBW endurance rating keep us from recommending it for most people.

The Western Digital WD Black SN750 benchmarks in between the original 970 Evo and the 970 Evo Plus and has the same five-year warranty and 300 TBW endurance rating. But it costs the same as the Evo Plus as of this writing and it doesn’t have hardware encryption support; unless the SN750 is significantly cheaper, get the Evo Plus instead.

Both the Corsair Force MP510 and the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro look like good NVMe mM.2 drives—they benchmark similarly to the original 970 Evo, include a five-year warranty, support drive encryption, are rated for up to 800 TBW, and are a bit cheaper than either 970 Evo version. We recommend Samsung’s drives because of their support, the Magician software, and their wider and more consistent availability, but the MP510 or BPX Pro aren’t bad ways to save some money if you don’t care about those things.

There’s no reason to buy Samsung’s 960 Evo, the 970 Evo’s predecessor and our previous upgrade pick, unless you can get it for significantly less than the 970 Evo. The 960 is older and slower and its warranty and endurance ratings are both lower, so we recommend buying the newer drive.

Samsung’s 970 Pro is usually overkill even for pros, and we recommend it only if you need the fastest drive money can buy. (We don’t recommend its slower predecessor, the 960 Pro for the same reason as the 960 Evo.) The 970 Pro uses multilevel cell (MLC) flash and doesn’t rely on TurboWrite or Dynamic Write Acceleration caches for speed, so it can offer faster and more consistent performance if you’re always writing tons of data at a time, and its endurance rating is twice has high as the Evo’s (though both have the same five-year warranty). But you’ll pay more for an MLC drive: A 512 GB 970 Pro costs around $50 more than the 512 GB 970 Evo, and a 1 TB Pro is $150 more expensive than the corresponding Evo.

Western Digital’s WD Black PCIe SSD with 3D NAND (also sold as the SanDisk Extreme Pro M.2 NVMe 3D SSD) is usually as fast as, or faster than, Samsung’s previous-generation 960 Evo and occasionally even competitive with the older 960 Pro. Both AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware were impressed by its performance. The WD Black has a five-year warranty similar to Samsung’s, but it doesn’t support any kind of hardware encryption acceleration and it’s not much cheaper than the 970 Evo Plus or its faster replacement, the WD Black SN750.

The Intel 760p isn’t as fast as the 970 Evo Plus, though it is significantly better than any SATA SSD and a big improvement over the previous-generation Intel 600p. Intel offers a five-year warranty and drive-encryption support, and this model is one of the very few PCIe drives that come in a 128 GB version for people who just want a fast, cheap drive for their operating system and a few apps. But the 760p tops out at 512 GB, and Samsung’s drive offers better performance for around the same price.

MyDigitalSSD’s SBX series sits in between SATA SSDs like the MX500 and great PCIe SSDs like the 970 Evo in both performance and price. It costs around $30 more than the MX500 as of this writing and about $40 less than the 970 Evo, but AnandTech’s review shows that its performance is usually closer to SATA. Generally, you should either save more money and go with a somewhat slower SATA drive, or spend a little more and get a significantly faster high-end PCIe drive.

The Plextor M8Pe is around the same price as the 970 Evo and offer slower performance and no drive encryption.

Footnotes

  1. The theoretical maximum, 6 gigabits per second, actually translates to 750 MB/s, but because of encoding and other transfer overhead, the practical maximum is a bit under 600 MB/s.

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  2. Because different types of SSDs use different amounts of overprovisioning, the listed capacities for a drive in this class can vary between 480 GB, 500 GB, 512 GB, and 525 GB.

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  3. As of 2016 Vättö works as a technical marketer for Samsung SSDs, but his previous work at AnandTech remains useful.

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  4. You always get a five-year warranty regardless of which MX500 you buy, but the TBW rating varies by capacity, since NAND cells can be written to only so many times before they wear out. The 250 GB drive is rated for 100 TBW, the 1 TB drive is rated for 360 TBW, and the 2 TB drive is rated for 700 TBW.

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  5. As with all SSDs, the TBW rating for the 860 Evo is tied to the SSD’s capacity. The 250 GB 860 Evo is rated for 150 TBW, the 1 TB version is rated for 600 TBW, the 2 TB version is rated for 1,200 TBW, and the 4 TB version is rated for 2,400 TBW.

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  6. For the 500 GB versions of both drives. The 250 GB 970 Evo Pro is rated for 150 TBW and the 1 TB version is rated for 600 TBW.

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Sources

  1. Billy Tallis, The Crucial MX500 500GB SSD Review: A Second Look, AnandTech, February 2, 2018

  2. Chris Ramseyer, Crucial MX500 SSD Review, Tom’s Hardware, December 18, 2017

  3. Billy Tallis, The Latest High-Capacity M.2: The Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSD, Reviewed, AnandTech, February 14, 2018

  4. Billy Tallis, The Samsung 970 EVO Plus (250GB, 1TB) NVMe SSD Review: 96-Layer 3D NAND, AnandTech, January 22, 2019

  5. Sean Webster, Samsung 970 EVO SSD Review: The 64-Layer Refresh, Tom’s Hardware, January 22, 2019

  6. Chris Ramseyer, Samsung 860 Pro SSD Review, Tom’s Hardware, January 23, 2018

  7. Christopher Breen, Mac won’t boot? About Yosemite and your third-party SSD, Macworld, November 19, 2014

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$2399.00
  • Pros

    Excellent battery life. Core i9 processing muscle. Sleek, thin all-metal design. Beautiful display with automatic color-temperature adjustment. Roomy SSD.

  • Cons

    High starting price, and painfully expensive as configured. Limited I/O options.

  • Bottom Line

    With the addition of an Intel Core i9 processor, the sleek 15-inch MacBook Pro is now one of the most powerful desktop-replacement laptops you can buy, making it an excellent choice for well-heeled, on-the-go creative pros.

The option for an Intel Core i9 processor with six cores and a clock-speed ceiling of 4.8GHz makes its way to the 2018 refresh of Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pro (starts at $2,399; $4,699 as tested). Not only does it offer the best raw computing performance we've seen from an Apple laptop, but it also helps make the MacBook Pro competitive with similarly priced Windows machines—mostly gaming laptops and workstations. Even better, this beast of a chip fits into the same sleek enclosure that the MacBook Pro has sported for a few years now, making it the rare desktop-replacement laptop that's also handsome, thin, and light. Perhaps best of all for people who actually want to use this machine away from a power outlet, the machine returned excellent results on our battery-life testing. It costs a pretty penny, but overall it's one of the best 15-inch laptops that power users can buy right now.

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A Familiar Chassis Meets the Core i9

The new MacBook Pro's crowning achievement is shoehorning a much-upgraded processor and a potent graphics chip into the same enclosure as last year's model without changing the physical design. Our review unit is the very same size (0.61 by 13.75 by 9.48 inches, HWD) and weight (4.02 pounds) as last year's 15-inch MacBook Pro. Of course, the mobile version of the Intel Core i9 consumes far less heat and requires far less power than the desktop versions. Still, this is by far the sleekest Core i9-powered laptop, even though the chassis design has been around for a few years now.

Consider that the only other Core i9 mainstream laptop we've tested is the Asus ZenBook Pro 15, which comes in at 0.75 by 14.37 by 9.88 inches. Even though it weighs about the same as the MacBook Pro (4.1 pounds), the ZenBook Pro's taller and wider stature makes it feel considerably heftier. Other laptops with Core i9 CPUs and similar price ranges are bulkier still. For instance, the gargantuan Alienware 17 R5 gaming laptop measures 1.18 by 16.7 by 13.1 inches and weighs 9.77 pounds.

Normally, a years-old design would be a downside, especially for deep-pocketed early adopters who want both an Intel Core i9 and a PC that will look cutting-edge for several years. But the MacBook Pro, available in either silver or the darker Space Gray of our review unit, is one exception. Apple's design decisions are often in the vanguard, with pioneering flourishes like unibody construction and Thunderbolt 3 ports now present on a wide range of both inexpensive and high-end Windows machines. You can bet that even if Apple radically changes the MacBook Pro's design next year, the current model will still look very modern.

Some of the familiar downsides to the MacBook Pro's physical design aren't improved with the 2018 refresh, however. Chief among them is the extremely limited port selection. All you get is a 3.5mm audio jack and four USB Type-C ports, two on the left edge and two on the right edge. This is the same selection you get with the Touch Bar-equipped 13-inch MacBook Pro. That's unfortunate, because many photographers use MacBook Pros as in-the-field editing workhorses and would therefore benefit from an SD card slot to offload photos. Even charging your iPhone requires an adapter, since iPhones still use conventional USB Type-A charging cables.

There are a few silver linings to this port setup. For example, any of the four USB Type-C ports can accept the MacBook Pro's power adapter, and all of them support Thunderbolt 3. Four Thunderbolt 3 ports is a rarity on any computer, let alone a laptop. More important, multimedia pros probably won't need any adapters if they've bought into the Apple ecosystem. Apple iPads, computers, and iPhones can quickly transfer data among themselves wirelessly using AirDrop (a proprietary interface that uses the MacBook Pro's built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0). And you can find several professional and prosumer external hard drives that connect via USB Type-C or Thunderbolt 3 and include built-in card readers.

Truer Colors

Besides the Core i9 CPU offering, the updated Retina Display on the MacBook Pro is the only other significant new feature offering for 2018. It now features the True Tone automatic white-balance adjustment that debuted on the Apple iPad Pro. True Tone uses a sensor to evaluate the color temperature of the light around you to provide what Apple calls, cryptically, a 'more natural viewing experience.' In practice, I found the color temperature becomes noticeably warmer (that is, more red) in fluorescent-lit environments like PC Labs, while it's noticeably cooler (more blue) in my softly lit living room.

Overall, True Tone improves what is already an excellent display, thanks to its 2,880-by-1,800-pixel native resolution, In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology to prevent washout at extreme off-center viewing angles, and support for the P3 color gamut. The only thing missing from the MacBook Pro's display is support for touch input, but that's a moot nitpick, since the macOS operating system itself doesn't support touch input, and Apple has shown no sign of adding it anytime soon.

You can interact with the MacBook Pro using touch, however, thanks to the Touch Bar, a long, thin touchscreen that replaces the row of function keys traditionally located above the keyboard. Its usefulness depends on which apps you use frequently. Adobe Photoshop and the Safari web browser make extensive use of the Touch Bar, while other third-party apps don't use it at all. (For more on the Touch Bar's strengths and weaknesses, check out our review of last year's 15-inch MacBook Pro as well of our list of cool things to do with it.)

The Touch Bar includes a power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader, which you can use to unlock your MacBook Pro, permit app installations, and authenticate online purchases using Apple Pay, among other uses. The fingerprint reader is among the most accurate I've used on a laptop, which is good since the MacBook Pro lacks the face-recognizing webcam that many premium Windows PCs sport to make logging in even easier.

That said, the MacBook Pro's webcam is among the better laptop cameras I've used. Its 720p resolution trails the full HD (1080p) resolution that you'll find on the camera in the Apple iMac Pro, but it nevertheless captured videos and photos that were almost entirely free of the graininess that many portable webcams suffer from.

The sound system offers richly detailed and impressively loud audio, thanks to a total of four speaker grilles: two upward-firing ones that flank the keyboard, and two downward-firing ones that add bass. Unfortunately, vocals can be distorted when you max out the volume, as I found while watching the trailer to Ant-Man. I actually noted better sound quality on the Huawei MateBook X Pro, which mimics the MacBook Pro's speaker arrangement. I did not, however, experience any of the crackling issues that some early MacBook Pro owners have reported. Apple claims to have addressed this problem with a macOS update issued late in August 2018; the update had been installed in the unit I tested.

The enormous touchpad is unchanged from last year's model. I find it to be one of the most precise and comfortable pads of any laptop, thanks in part to the fact that it uses haptic feedback to simulate clicks instead of a physical clicking mechanism. Apple refers to this as Force Touch, and it means that you get a uniform clicking sensation no matter where your finger meets this 7.28-inch surface.

The MacBook Pro's keyboard is mostly unchanged, but it does get an updated switch mechanism that may alleviate some of the problems that owners of previous MacBook and MacBook Pro models have experienced with debris finding its way inside the keyboard. What hasn't changed is the extremely shallow key travel. Whether or not this is a problem depends on personal preference. I've largely become accustomed to tapping the MacBook Pro keys rather than striking them, but they're still not as comfortable as the luxurious keys on many of Lenovo's ThinkPad laptops.

Apple includes a one-year warranty with new MacBook Pros, which you can extend to three years for an additional charge. The company also offers accidental damage coverage.

Performance Where It Counts

Enough about all the warranties, ports, and Force Touch, though. The new Intel Core i9-8950HK is the star attraction of our review unit, boasting six cores and 12 threads. It's capable of clock speeds up to 4.8GHz, even though thermal constraints keep it much closer to its base 2.9GHz most of the time. Together with 32GB of 2,400MHz DDR4 RAM, it significantly narrows the performance-for-dollar gap that the MacBook Pro has long suffered when compared with Windows laptops, at least when it comes to the types of tasks that video editors, architects, digital artists, and other similar users care about.

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Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than on our Cinebench R15 3D rendering benchmark, a relatively simple test that heavily favors CPUs with more cores and threads. The MacBook Pro achieved a score of 1,066 on this proprietary trial, which puts it squarely between the Alienware 17 R5 (1,036) and the Asus ZenBook Pro 15 (1,222), and represents a massive increase over the 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro's score of 760. The story is much the same on our Handbrake video-rendering test, which took each system about 45 seconds to complete, save for the 2015 MacBook Pro's much slower time of 1:06.

Cinebench and Handbrake are excellent predictors of how well a system will perform under sustained heavy workloads that max out the available CPU cores and threads. That explains why the hexa-core Core i7 in the 2018 Razer Blade managed to turn in similar scores to those of the MacBook Pro. But neither of these tests approximates 'bursty' workloads like applying filters to images in Photoshop. On our Photoshop CS6 test, which involves a series of 11 filters, the Core i9-powered systems all finished within a few seconds of the 2-minute-and-30-second mark, while the Core i7-powered Razer Blade and 2017 MacBook Pro were significantly slower.

Although our review unit is $4,699, much of that high cost is attributable to its gigantic 2TB SSD that uses Apple's custom storage controller. A Core i9 configuration with a more down-to-earth 512GB SSD currently retails for $2,999, compared with $2,299 for a similarly equipped Asus ZenBook Pro 15. The Core i7-equipped Razer Blade is $2,599, while the Microsoft Surface Book 2, with a much less-powerful U-series Intel Core i7, is $2,899. Neither of these last two laptops offers a Core i9.

Best Ssd For Mac

For those extra few benjamins, not only do you get exquisite design and craftsmanship, but you also get excellent battery life, which means you can actually use this machine as a laptop rather than leaving it plugged in on your desk much of the time. At 16 hours and 27 minutes on our battery rundown test, the MacBook Pro far outlasted any of the systems listed here, and comes close to the 17-hour endurance of the dual-battery Surface Book 2.

Best Ssd For Apple Mac

Since the MacBook Pro isn't designed for gaming, it's equipped with an AMD Radeon Pro 560X GPU, which is intended mainly to accept processing tasks such as those that pro-level software assigns to it, instead of rendering an AAA game in maximum quality and full HD splendor. As a result, the MacBook Pro's GPU has far more oomph than the integrated graphics in the 13-inch MacBook Pro, but it lags behind Nvidia's GeForce GTX 10-series chips, which are the favorite of gaming rigs like the Alienware 17 R5 and the Razer Blade.

See How We Test Laptops

That means you can enjoy GPU-intensive games if you're willing to settle for medium quality settings and lower resolutions. The MacBook Pro achieved frame rates above 50 frames per second (fps) on our Heaven and Valley game simulations at these settings. It can't match the 100fps or more that you'll get from a GeForce GTX 1070 or GTX 1080, but it will do just fine for casual gaming.

Worth noting, on the subject of performance: In the days following the MacBook Pro's release in July, Apple discovered a serious oversight in the firmware governing the laptop's thermal-management system that resulted in significant CPU throttling under heavy workloads. A supplemental macOS update fixed this problem, which resulted in performance improvements of more than 25 percent on the 13-inch MacBook Pro. (See our analysis of the issue at the time.) With up-to-date software on our 15-inch MacBook Pro review unit, I didn't experience any throttling issues, but those early stumbles are a good reminder to regularly perform OS updates.

The Best MacBook Pro Yet

The MacBook Pro's signature achievement is fitting Intel's top-of-the-line consumer CPU into one of the slimmest and best-looking 15-inchers on the market. There are mobile Xeon chips with more threads and cores, to be sure, but you'll find them exclusively in far thicker mobile workstations like the Dell Precision 5530.

The new MacBook Pro therefore hits a sweet spot that we've rarely seen from an Apple laptop. It's powerful enough to match the performance of similarly configured $3,000 Windows machines on the types of tasks that its owners will likely care about, while remaining a standard-bearer in terms of design, portability, and battery life. This is the best MacBook Pro yet, and it's one of the best large laptops you can buy—period.

Apple MacBook Pro 15-Inch (2018)

Bottom Line: With the addition of an Intel Core i9 processor, the sleek 15-inch MacBook Pro is now one of the most powerful desktop-replacement laptops you can buy, making it an excellent choice for well-heeled, on-the-go creative pros.

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