As expected, Apple has unveiled a new lineup of the much awaited MacBook Pro at the ‘hello again’ event yesterday in Cupertino, California to mark the 25th anniversary of the original Apple PowerBook. The new MacBook Pros sport a completely new design, powerful specs and the ingenious OLED Touch bar and Touch ID.
Firstly, talking about the innovative Touch Bar, which has replaced the function key row is context-sensitive and fully interactive. The Touch Bar houses numerous features including a dedicated Siri shortcut. The Touch Bar changes automatically based on what you are doing to show you relevant tools. It shows interactive ways to adjust or browse through content, intelligent typing features like emoji and predictive text, email composition and filing tools, scrubbing a timeline while editing video and more.
The intuitive Touch Bar will change your experience of interacting with your MacBook Pro. Stating further features of Touch Bar, you can answer your iPhone or a FaceTime call from the keyboard only without moving your cursor. You can expand, contract, and customize system controls to reveal volume, brightness, and more. By holding the Fn key on keyboard, the traditional key row can also be used. The new MacBook Pro models also feature Touch ID sensors integrated into the power button which enables instant access to logins and fast, secure online purchases with Apple Pay.
The new 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro model sports a new chassis design which makes it smaller and thinner than the 13-inch MacBook Air. The speakers are now placed on either side of the keyboard, resulting in a claimed 2x improvement in dynamic range and better bass reproduction.
The 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar and Touch ID now come with four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports with support for charging, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt (up to 40 Gbps), USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10 Gbps). They feature Backlit keyboard, Force Touch trackpad, a 720p FaceTime HD camera, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, stereo speakers with high dynamic range, 3 microphones and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The 13-inch model sports (2560×1600 pixels) IPS LED-backlit display with pixel density of 227 ppi and 500 nits brightness. It is powered by 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz and 4MB shared L3 cache memory. It comes with 8GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 RAM with 256GB /512GB PCIe-based onboard SSD options. It is powered by a 49.2-watt-hour Li-Po battery with up to 10 hours of playback time and up to 30 days of standby time.
On the other hand, the 15-inch model sports (2880×1800 pixels) IPS LED-backlit display with pixel density of 220 ppi and 500 nits brightness. It is powered by 2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz. It comes with 16GB of LPDDR3 RAM with 256GB /512GB PCIe-based onboard SSD options. It also comes with Intel HD Graphics 530 and 2GB GDDR5 Radeon Pro 450 GPU. It is powered by a 76-watt-hour Li-Po battery with up to 10 hours of playback time and up to 30 days of standby time.
Apple has also launched a lower-end 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar and Touch ID which has only two Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports for power or other connectivity options. It is powered by a 2.0GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor along with Intel Iris Graphics 540 GPU and backed by a 54.5-watt-hour Li-Po battery. It is now available in the US at a price of $1499 (approx. Rs. 1,29,900).
The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and Touch ID is priced at $1799 (approx. Rs. 1,55,900) and the 15-inch MacBook Pro is priced at $1999 (approx. Rs. 2,05,990). These two models will start shipping in 4-5 weeks, but are available for pre-order in the US. All the 3 variants come in Space Gray and Silver colors.