Gear: TaylorMade P·790 irons (2023)
Price: $1,399 (seven clubs) with True Temper Dynamic Gold steel shafts and Golf Pride Z grips. $1,499 with Mitsubishi MMT graphite shafts
Specs: Hollow-body construction with a forged 4140 stainless steel face, internal tungsten weights (3-7 irons), vibration-dampening foam and polymer-covered sole slot.
Available: NOW (pre-orders), September 1 (in stores)
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Who It’s For: Golfers who want an iron that looks like a better-player’s club, but packs the distance and forgiveness of a game-improvement iron.
The Skinny: TaylorMade redesigned the inner chamber and the weight system in the P·790 to make the long irons easier to hit and provide more feel and consistency in the short irons without sacrificing the ball speed and distance.
The Deep Dive: In 2017, the original TaylorMade P·790 was among the first golf clubs that could rightfully be called a better-player’s distance iron. It looked like a muscleback blade, although slightly larger, but it delivered more ball speed, forgiveness and stability than irons made for golfers who might contend for a club championship.
Those clubs were updated in 2019 and again in 2021, and now TaylorMade is releasing the fourth generation of the P·790 irons. Once again, on the outside the club blends easily with the rest of TaylorMade’s P Series irons, but the 2023 P·790 has been radically changed on the inside to give golfers more consistency and a better feel without sacrificing ball speed or distance.
From a design standpoint, the P·790 is still a hollow-bodied iron that has a relatively thin topline, moderately narrow sole and some offset. The hollow-body design allows the forged 4140 stainless steel face to flex more at the moment of impact for increased ball speed. The 2023 version also has the same Speed Foam Air found in the 2021 P·790. It is 69 percent lighter than the original vibration-dampening foam TaylorMade used in the first P·790 irons, so it not only makes the irons feel and sound better at impact, it pushes more weight out of the center and toward the perimeter of the head for added stability. The Thru-Slot Speed Pocket has been designed into the long and mid-irons again to help improve performance on low-struck shots.
Among the features found in the new P·790 is the addition of a Thick-Thin back wall. Instead of being smooth, the inner-facing side of the back of the club is covered with thin areas that give it a snakeskin-style appearance. Before the adoption of carbon fiber crowns, TaylorMade used this technology to take the weight out of titanium crowns in drivers. It does the same job in the P·790, reducing weight in an area that does not enhance performance and allowing designers to repurpose it somewhere else.
After running thousands of simulations using artificial intelligence (A.I.), TaylorMade designers used some of the weight saved in the back of the heads and designed unique bars and weight areas in the bottom of each head. Some have curves and others are straight, but each is designed to help a specific club perform better. So, for example, there is a curved area in the 6-iron that has extra mass in the heel and toe, along with a tungsten bar that rises vertically in the toe area for extra stability. The 4-iron, however, has a bar that is significantly lower in the head and its tungsten piece lies flat in the toe area, to drive the center of gravity (CG) down even further and encourage a higher launch angle.
The precise location of the CG was a point of emphasis for TaylorMade in this version of the P·790, and by manipulating the weight of each head, the company is touting a “flighted CG” progression through the set. With a better weighting system, the 3-iron and 4-iron in 2023 P·790 now have the lowest CGs, and the CG height gradually elevates as you progress through the mid-irons and into the scoring clubs, which should result in more consistent ball flights. Long irons should be easier to hit high and golfers should be able to flight short irons lower for better distance control.
Finally, TaylorMade has added a Sound Stabilizing bar inside each P·790 iron, to stiffen the topline and help tune the frequencies created when the club hits the ball. Each club’s bar is uniquely designed and in a different location because the mass is distributed in different parts of each club.
Many golfers will opt for a traditional set of the new P·790 irons, but cosmetically they blend very well with the P·770 irons that were released last year. The P·770 is smaller but shares the same hollow-body design, so working with a good fitter should make designing a personalized combo set of P·790 long irons and P·770 short irons easy.
Below are several close-up images of the new TaylorMade P·790.
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