There are also third-party options from Belkin and SanDisk, including a 64GB USB-C flash drive ($79). There are plenty of other options available, too, but while the ecosystem of USB Type-C peripherals has grown, I still wish the MacBook would grow another USB Type-C port.

Another bummer: You can't connect more than one monitor to the MacBook at the same time --something I do every day with the MacBook Pro. However, Pluggable claims that you can connect the MacBook to its Plugable USB-C Triple Display Docking Station to power multiple monitors. We were able to use this dock to power two external monitors at 2K resolution simultaneously (2048 x 1152) with one HDMI connection and one DVI, but the 4K output to a single monitor using this accessory wasn't reliable during our initial testing.

Keyboard: Flat But Fast

To achieve the MacBook's razor-thin profile, the MacBook sports a flat keyboard that uses a unique butterfly mechanism. As I noted in my review of last year's model, the keys have very little travel -- just 0.5 millimeters. That's half of what the MacBook Air provides (1 mm), and also shallower than the keys on the Vaio Z (1.04 mm) and the XPS 13 (1.2 mm).

Nevertheless, I grew accustomed the MacBook's layout within a couple of hours, and I typed a fast-for-me 78 words per minute on the 10FastFingers.com typing test, with only two errors. That compares to my average of 77 wpm and one error on the 13-inch Air. The MacBook's keyboard isn't comfortable, but I found it perfectly usable.

Even after a year, I'm pretty amazed by how the MacBook's large, 4.4 x 2.7-inch Force Touch trackpad tricks your brain into thinking that it's physically clicking down when you press it. It's not. Instead, the pad uses a Taptic Engine to deliver haptic feedback. It worked brilliantly as I clicked on links, opened apps and selected text.

As with last year's MacBook, the Force Click feature lets you save time by deep pressing on items. For example, you can look up the definition of a word by Force Clicking it, or you can preview a web page or preview an address in Maps with a deep press. However, I wound up disabling this feature, because I found it difficult to move icons around in the Dock with Force Click turned on.

The MacBook's 12-inch display is so sharp and colorful that it makes me want to throw out my MacBook Air. The laptop has a resolution of 2304 x 1440 pixels, which blows away the Air's low-res 1400 x 900 panel.

When I watched the 4K trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on this panel, a fiery explosion that sent Stormtroopers flying had intense sparks of yellow and orange, and a close-up of Felicity Jones in gleaming black armor neatly reflected the lights surrounding her.

Registering 327 nits on our light meter, the MacBook's screen is in between the brightness readings for the touch-screen version of the XPS 13 (336 nits) and the nontouch XPS 13 (318 nits), and higher than the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (292 nits for full HD, 257 for 2560 x 1440). However, the Vaio Z's display hit a sky-high 548 nits.

The MacBook's display can produce an impressive 107 percent of the color gamut, which beats the touch XPS 13 and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (both less than 105 percent). However, the Vaio Z reached 117 percent.

Apple's panel is also quite color accurate, notching a Delta-E error rate of 0.99 (0 is perfect). While that's not as good as the X1 Carbon or the Vaio Z (0.5 to 0.8 range), it trumps the touch XPS 13 (3.13) and the category average (2.7).

I continue to be surprised by the MacBook's audio quality given its thin profile. When I streamed Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," the pulsating drums meshed well with the vocals, and the speaker (located above the keyboard) produced loud volume without distortion. The ominous horns in the Rogue One trailer, as well as the piercing laser cannon fire from thudding AT-ATs, came through clearly.

Apple should not get a pass for stuffing a low-resolution 480p camera into a $1,299 laptop. It's not that I video chat often, but when I do, I don't want to look like a pile of grain, as I did when testing the FaceTime app. I could live with an extra millimeter of thickness, if that's what it would take.

The biggest changes to the 2016 MacBook are its internal components, which include a 6th-generation Core M processor, 8GB of RAM and faster flash storage (256GB or 512GB). You have your choice of a 1.1-GHz Core m3 or 1.2-GHz Core m5 CPU, and we tested the latter chip.