Earlier today, Apple took to the stage to unveil their new MacBooks and it was more or less everything we anticipated. Other than it being a now more streamlined design and more powerful internals, you have the addition of Touch ID and an OLED touch strip called the Touch bar.
The new 13inch MacBook Pro is now 14.9mm thick and weighs in at only 3lbs. The 15inch Pro is now 15.5mm thick and weighs in at about 4lbs. You also have the new flatter keyboard from the 12inch MacBook and even less ports. Now you only have 4 Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and a headphone jack. No HDMI, Ethernet, or SD card slot. Bummer.
The new Touch Bar is very interesting as it’s kind of a workaround of not putting a touchscreen on the MacBook.
So instead of the Function keys like Brightness, Esc, Volume Up/Down, etc.; you now have a bar that changes on the need or app you’re using. So in the Photos app, you can edit your photos as you will have shortcut keys shown. In Final Cut Pro, you can scrub through your timeline. In iMessage or Mail, you can access emojis. Access Siri, Touch ID, the older Function keys, and much more.
The 13inch Pro arrives in 2 flavors: one with and one w/o the Touch Bar. While the new 15inch only comes in 2 configurations, so it will be very pricey. The 13inch w/o a Touch Bar ships w/ a 2GHz dual-core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and only 2 USB-C ports. Add the Touch Bar and specs get a slight jump to a 2.9GHz dual-core i5 CPU and a total of 4 USB-C ports. The 15inch Pro starts off w/ 2.6GHz quad-core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and a 2GB AMD Radeon Pro 450 GPU.
The 13inch Pro w/o a Touch Bar will cost you $1,500 while the one w/ a Touch bar starts at $1,800. The 13inch Pro that doesn’t come w/ a Touch Bar wants a high-end price w/ just a dual-core chipset inside. So you might want to pass on that one. The 15inch Pro starts off at $2,400 and maxes out at $2,800. Interesting but yikes at the pricing.
So who’s adding one of these to their Christmas list?
