Yesterday’s report of a new 15-inch MacBook Pro with Force Touch trackpad, together with a new 27-inch iMac, have been confirmed via an official announcement by Apple.
While the upgrade to the latest Broadwell Haswell processor doesn’t show a speed-bump, Apple says that the flash storage is 2.5 times faster and greater power efficiency provides an extra hour of battery-life …
Apple today updated the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display with the new Force Touch trackpad, faster flash storage, longer battery life and faster discrete graphics, delivering even more performance and capabilities to the MacBook Pro line. Apple also today introduced a new $1,999 configuration of the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display featuring a breathtaking 14.7 million pixel display, quad-core processors and AMD graphics, and lowered the price of the top-end iMac with Retina 5K display to $2,299.
The flash storage now offers throughput of up to 2GB/s, and Apple also says that the discrete graphics is up to 80% faster using new AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics. Battery life is up from 8 hours to 9 hours. In real-life use, the updated model is likely to feel significantly faster than the one it’s just replaced.
Starting price of the 15-inch MacBook Pro is unchanged at $1999. That gets you a 2.2GHz quad-core i7 (with Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz), 16GB RAM, the much faster 256GB PCIe-based flash storage and the same Intel Iris Pro graphics card as the previous model. Both processor and storage can be upgraded (to 2.8GHz and 1TB PCIe flash).
The $2,499 model gets you a processor bump to 2.5GHz, the new R9 M370X graphics card with 2GB GDDR5 memory – and doubles the flash storage to 512GB. Maxed-out specs are the same 2.8GHz processor and 1TB flash storage.
Apple added a Force Touch trackpad to the 13-inch MacBook Pro back in March, with the 15-inch version catching up today.
Both models are listed now in Apple’s online store, with 1-day delivery on the base model and 1-3 days on its beefier brother.
The 27-inch iMac with Retina display has seen a big price-cut, with the base level machine reduced from $2499 to $1999 – a surprising drop for a machine first introduced just seven months ago.
However, the price cut isn’t a free lunch: the CPU speed has been cut from 3.5GHz to 3.3GHz (with no option to upgrade), and the fusion drive has been replaced by a conventional 1TB hard drive, so expect the new model to feel a little slower than the original entry-level machine. You do, though, get an AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics card with 2GB RAM.
With a resolution of 5120 x 2880, the new $1,999 iMac with Retina 5K display has 67 percent more pixels than a 4K display, and features a 3.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost Speeds up to 3.7 GHz and AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics. The new iMac also includes 8GB of memory and 1TB of storage, as well as four USB 3.0 ports and two Thunderbolt 2 ports that deliver up to 20Gbps each, twice the bandwidth of the previous generation.
The top-end machine is now just $2,299, getting you a 3.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, the same AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics card and your 1TB drive is a fusion one.
Both machines are listed in the online store, with 1-day shipping shown for the base model and ‘in stock’ for the more powerful machine.
