The 13-inch MacBook Pro Finally Gets the Magic Keyboard
Apple refreshes the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the scissor-switch Magic Keyboard, more storage, faster chips, and a 32GB memory option.
Apple put out a refresh today for the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the headline change is the one a lot of people have been asking for since last November: the butterfly keyboard is gone. Every 13-inch MacBook Pro now ships with the scissor-switch Magic Keyboard, the same mechanism that showed up on the 16-inch model a few months back. If you’ve typed on a MacBook in the last few years and found the keys mushy, shallow, or just prone to failing on you, this is the fix.
A few other things changed alongside the keyboard swap. Base storage doubles to 256GB, which was overdue — 128GB has felt stingy for a while now, especially with how bloated apps and OS installs have gotten. On the high end, you can now configure up to 4TB of storage, which is a lot of headroom for video editors or anyone hoarding RAW photo libraries.
Processors move to 10th-generation Intel chips, with quad-core configurations available across the line. That’s a real jump from the previous generation’s chip options, and it should show up in day-to-day responsiveness as well as in anything that leans on multiple cores — compiling code, exporting video, running a few Docker containers at once.
Maybe the most interesting spec bump, at least for people who actually push these machines, is memory. For the first time on a 13-inch Mac, you can configure up to 32GB of RAM. That’s been a 16-inch/iMac Pro/Mac Pro thing until now, and it’s a meaningful upgrade for anyone doing serious multitasking, running VMs, or working in memory-hungry apps like Xcode with several simulators open, or Photoshop with a stack of large files.
Why this matters
Apple’s laptop lineup has been in a slightly awkward spot for a while: the keyboard controversy dragged on far longer than it should have, and the entry-level 13-inch model in particular felt underpowered relative to its price. This update doesn’t reinvent anything — it’s not a redesign, and the chassis looks identical — but it cleans up the two biggest complaints people had. Reliable keys, and specs that don’t feel like an afterthought.
It’s also worth noting the timing. Apple has been making noises for a while about moving to its own silicon for Mac, and it’s fair to wonder whether this is one of the last meaningful Intel refreshes for this particular form factor before something bigger changes under the hood. If that transition does happen, it’s probably still a ways off — nothing in today’s announcement suggests otherwise, and Intel chips are still very much the story here. For now, if you’ve been holding off on a 13-inch MacBook Pro because of the keyboard, this is the moment that objection goes away.