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The 13” MacBook Pro Refresh Means a New Keyboard
May 10, 2020
 
Apple announced a refresh of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. The main change was the exclusion of the butterfly keyboard, putting back the old/new Magic Keyboard with scissor switches. But it didn’t launch a new 14-inch MBP, either, making this a tweak/polish refresh.

• Apple's attempts to make a new thin butterfly keyboard didn’t work. and was a sorry chapter for consumers battling too-regular keyboard issues.
• Although it’s not over: owning an MBP with a butterfly keyboard is still troublesome. 
• The rumored 14-inch MacBook Pro is still coming, based on the reports that said it’d be a laptop with next-gen mini-LED display. 
• The current spec bumps aren’t quite game changers though. Intel’s new 10th-gen CPU is on board higher-end models, and Apple’s doubled the storage for all models, plus made 16GB of RAM standard on higher-tiers. But price-points matter a lot.

The $1300 model is not what it seems:

• Apple says the 13-inch MBP now starts at $1,299. But that money gets a new keyboard only: otherwise, it comes with the older Intel’s 8th-gen CPUs, 8GB of older RAM, and 256GB SSD storage, and just two Thunderbolt 3 ports.
• The $1,799 model includes four Thunderbolt 3 ports, a 10th-gen 2.0GHz quad-core Core i5 CPU, 16GB of faster LPDDR4X RAM, and 512GB SSD. 
• Adding 1TB for another $200, or $200 for a 2.3GHz quad-core Core i7 chip.