Linux Tests Of The New 2016 MacBook Pro With Touchbar Are Coming

Just in case anyone is thinking about the new (late-2016) MacBook Pro recently announced by Apple, I found out this morning we'll be receiving one for Phoronix Test Suite Linux benchmarking in the next week or two and should be interesting to see how this (expensive/over-priced) modern laptop runs with Linux.

Apple announced the new MacBook Pro last week with a new multi-touch enabled Touch Bar, only USB-C / Thunderbolt 2 ports for connectivity, up to a 10 hour battery life, and much faster performance over older MacBook Pro laptops. Those wanting to learn more can visit Apple.com.

Aside from the performance, it will be interesting to see how well the MacBook Pro is working with late-2016 Linux distributions like Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 25... Given the Thunderbolt 2, a new touchpad, Apple's new "Touch Bar", etc, it could be quite a headache-inducing process getting the laptop running with the current Linux distributions but we'll know more soon enough. Almost certainly the Touch Bar won't be of any use under Linux until someone does some reverse-engineering and development, but hopefully at least the touch pad and other basic functionality will be working.

So stay tuned if you're at all curious about the 2016 MacBook Pro on Linux. It looks like the model we'll be receiving is the 15.4-inch MacBook Pro with 2.6GHz Core i7 Skylake CPU, 16GB of DDR4-2133MHz memory, 256GB PCI-E SSD, 2880 x 1800 retina display, and AMD Radeon Pro 450 Polaris graphics. Of course with the Phoronix Test Suite working on macOS Sierra too, there will be Linux vs. macOS benchmarks from this MBP too -- if you missed my tests from September on older hardware: macOS 10.12 Sierra vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Linux Benchmarks and FreeBSD 11.0 Comes Up Short In Ubuntu 16.04 vs. macOS Sierra Benchmarks.