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Apple Releases new MacBook Pros with Force Touch Trackpad

91 points by globuous 11y ago

emilecantin 11y ago
They've been around for a few months, I type this on one...
- antoinelyset 11y ago
  Nope : http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/05/19Apple-Introduces-15-inch-MacBook-Pro-with-Force-Touch-Trackpad-New-1-999-iMac-with-Retina-5K-Display.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/05/19Apple-Introduces-1...
  - basicallydan 11y ago
    They have. This is for the 15 inch.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      The first available Force Touch trackpad shipped on the new MacBook which was announced on March 9th and released on April 10th. Unless you have access to Apple's prerelease testing hardware, you haven't been using a Force Touch trackpad for a few months.
      - k-mcgrady 11y ago
        >> The first available Force Touch trackpad shipped on the new MacBook which was announced on March 9th and released on April 10th. Wrong. It first shipped on the 13" Macbook Pro. I know because I bought one at the start of April (before the release of the new Macbook).
        mikeash 11y ago
        You're right. That was March 9th. Still can't be "a few months" yet.
        Psyonic 11y ago
        http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/few?s=t http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/few?s=t "not many but more than one."
    - patcheudor 11y ago
      Yup, I've had my 13 inch MacBook Pro for a month now and it has the force touch touchpad, although, I'm not entirely convinced it's revolutionary. I'm having issue with it when I drop and drag. It will loose the finger pressure info and un-click which typically leaves me searching for where my file landed.
Alex3917 11y ago
From Appleinsider: "Notably, the chips are not Intel's latest-generation 'Broadwell' processors, which remain unavailable in quad-core configurations. As a result, Apple is still utilizing the previous-generation 'Haswell' architecture, albeit at faster speeds."
- dombili 11y ago
  Faster speeds? It's the same: New rMBP: http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/ http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/ Old rMBP: https://web.archive.org/web/20150424183842/http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150424183842/http://www.apple....
  - Artemis2 11y ago
    Yeah, the i7-4980HQ (the most high-end option they offer) has been for more than a year the fastest Intel processor you can find in a laptop. http://ark.intel.com/products/83503/Intel-Core-i7-4980HQ-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/83503/Intel-Core-i7-4980HQ-Pro...
moron4hire 11y ago
Still no 10-point touchscreen?
- shalmanese 11y ago
  That would require a massive UI overhaul to make every app touch friendly. Not something that Apple is going to take on lightly.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    Well what are they waiting for? It's not like touchscreens on laptops are exactly a new feature.
    - mcphage 11y ago
      > Well what are they waiting for? A good reason to do it?
    - widdershins 11y ago
      Apple has clearly decided that the tradeoff for making a UI both touch and mouse friendly is too great. Given the reaction people have had to Windows 8+ I'm inclined to agree with them.
      - moron4hire 11y ago
        Given I want a 10-point touchscreen on a laptop, I use Windows 8, and I find the touch interactions delightful, I clearly disagree.
      - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
        You realize that more people use Windows 8+ than OS X, right? The reaction that I see is that all sorts of workers are now walking around touching Windows on tablets and laptops. I've seen them in restaurants, supermarkets, service centers, stores, in my house, in my yard. You're thinking about the tech blog/news people's reaction to Windows 8+. Plenty of actual people are using the product because it offers something that no other system does - and that is a full operating system with touch, not a locked down rental unit.
rockymeza 11y ago
I was hoping they would come out with a USB-C port.
- mcmillion 11y ago
  This was a minor bump, I'm holding out for something bigger once Skylake is ready. Hopefully that will include USB-C.
  - sitkack 11y ago
    32GB of ram?!
  - melling 11y ago
    New standards take time to gain traction. Apple putting at least one USB-C on each "new" device would go a long way towards helping USB-C gain adoption.
    - jimmcslim 11y ago
      I think they should have 'burned the boats' and gone all in with USB-C on everything they have updated so far (I.e. MBP 13/15, iMac). Throw a solitary adapter in the box, charge a nice Apple margin on additional ones.
- neverminder 11y ago
  I have a new Google's Pixel LS with 2 USB Type-C ports (at this point the only one in the world to have 2 as far as I know) and it's amazing. I can plug the USB Type-C charger from either side of the laptop. When was the last time you were able to do that?
  - thecolorblue 11y ago
    I'm surprised the macbook didn't go the USB Type-C on each side route. How much bulk could that really add? It makes it way more flexible. The Pixel update looks really good to me compared it these updates.
marvel_boy 11y ago
Newbie here. Someone that had tryed the Force Touch Trackpad could you share impressions?
- tehwebguy 11y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty incredible. I preferred to disable the two-level click in System Prefs, then it just felt like a normal macbook air trackpad. It feels so real I turned off the unit in the store just to double check that there was no feedback with the power off (there wasn't)
- vardump 11y ago
  It's nice. Adjustable click sound in trackpad preferences, so no more CLICK! at night when you use laptop near someone else. Force feedback makes it feel like you're really pressing a button. But nothing I couldn't live without.
  - mcphage 11y ago
    > so no more CLICK! at night when you use laptop near someone else > But nothing I couldn't live without. Hmm, less grumbling from the wife when I play Minecraft in bed? "It's not for me, hon--it's for us."
- oflannabhra 11y ago
  I have the 13" MBP with Force Touch. Hands down the best trackpad I've ever used. Apple continues to dominate in this space. The "Taptic Engine" part of the Force Touch system is imperceptible from hardware "clicks". The ability to have a second level click seems interesting. Turning of the computer and pressing on the trackpad is like a magic trick. While not many apps (and not many portions of the OS, even) are using the "pressure granularity" system of Force Touch, I will reserve judgement on its benefits and usefulness, but it is incredibly well-engineered. Overall, I can see Apple including this across their entire product line, if technically feasible. It is as good as Touch ID.
  - cma 11y ago
icpmacdo 11y ago
New graphics card also? It says AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB GDDR5 memory on the page Edit: I think it was an Nvidia 750 before
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  That's basically the same graphics card. AMD recently did an "OEM refresh", which didn't do much more than put new numbers on the old cards. They fiddled with frequencies, but they're basically the same old cards. Manufacturers demand this, and unlike Intel & nVidia, AMD doesn't have the clout to say no to stupid requests like this. Significantly, they didn't refresh their retail range of cards, so there is still some hope that AMD has a significant refresh coming soon; AMD still doesn't have an answer for nVidia Maxwell, which was first released over a year ago.
  - Robadob 11y ago
    Pretty sure NVIDIA has done the same on occasion, for example the 800m GTX series, doesn't have an 800 GTX desktop counterpart. Many of the 800m cards used the same chips as 700m series, just with small changes. Apparently they were originally planning on releasing Maxwell as 800 series, but due to Laptop manufacturer pressure ended up deferring it after releasing Kepler 800m cards.
  - izacus 11y ago
    Yep, on the other hand the previous 750M was essentually the same chip as 650M (+ a few Mhz) as well, so the discrete GPUs in rMBPs are kinda dissapointing for a few generations now :/
whisdol 11y ago
Did the Macbook Pros just get a whole lot more expensive in Europe (or specifically Germany?)? I don't remember the 15" MBP with a discrete graphics card being 2800€. Or have they adjusted their prices to the weak Euro a while back?
- sancha_ 11y ago
  The last gen MBP was also the same price in Germany a few months back, so it wasn't changed just now.
- myth_buster 11y ago
  I would think the latter [0] if you are seeing around 20% appreciation in price. 0: http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=2Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=2Y
- louhike 11y ago
  It might have occured when the Retina screen was no more optionnal.
- droidist2 11y ago
  Yeah, they adjusted for the weak Euro. The Apple developer program also went up in price last year in Europe.
jamestomasino 11y ago
Did Apple really just enable a "smash the button" interaction? I can't wait to see what kind of damage people start inflicting.
comex 11y ago
Presumably this means there won't be a major refresh to the 15" model announced at WWDC and available immediately or shortly, something Apple likes to do. I guess this is no surprise due to the lack of high-end Broadwell... Personally, I'm still hoping for a slightly higher resolution screen eventually.
- amirmansour 11y ago
  Does this mean MBPs with 5th gen Intel Boradwell chips won't be available till next year?
  - _stephan 11y ago
    They probably jump straight to Skylake. Maybe in Q4.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- laichzeit0 11y ago
  I think they're waiting for Skylake. Wireless charging, 4K/5K external displays at 60hz, better battery, etc. Skylake is the "major refresh" everyone that knows anything is waiting for.
  - sosuke 11y ago
    Any good single source you'd recommend to encapsulate all that makes Skylake the obvious next hardware upgrade to the MBP line? I've been waiting for the right time to upgrade and I'd love something to read about the future. This is the first I've seen it mentioned.
    - laichzeit0 11y ago
      Sorry I don't know of a single source. The Wikipedia page for Skylake is a good start, as well as the section for Thunderbolt 3.0. You'll get a good sense of what capabilities this is going to unlock.
deleted 11y ago
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deleted 11y ago
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SandB0x 11y ago
For anyone else who was confused by this, it's a bump on the 15" Macbook Pro. The 13" model was updated at the same time as the Macbook launch.
ojbyrne 11y ago
They also cut the price on the iMac Retina by $200.
- kylec 11y ago
  And there's a new lower-end retina iMac starting at $1999. That's an impressively low price point for something with that display.
  - vardump 11y ago
    You can buy IPS 4k display for $599 or less. Not 5k, but not that far off either. Edit: Downvotes, seriously? Have you seen these side by side? When it comes to resolution, at least I can't tell a difference anymore at a reasonable viewing distance. Display tech simply good enough now.
    - bryanlarsen 11y ago
      5K is almost twice as many pixels as 4K.
    - apendleton 11y ago
      5k is almost double the pixel count (75%-ish more). It's pretty substantial... also, more to the point with Apple products, I think at the 27" size, 5k is necessary for the pixel-doubling high-DPI option to look good. At 4k, everything looks either tiny or huge, depending on whether you have it turned off or on.
ejbs 11y ago
Interesting that they're shifting towards AMD GPUs. Was actually hoping for a major update of the MBPR with the availability of NVIDIA's new maxwell architecture and broadwell based quad cores. Anyone knows why AMD? Is it a margin/profitibility or performance thing?
- xmodem 11y ago
  Apple has never tied themselves to one GPU vendor- they have gone back and forth more times in the past ten years or so that I have been watching Apple than I care to count. give it 18 months and the new top-of-the-line will have nVidia in it again, assuming they don't move completely to integrated.
- jackmaney 11y ago
  The shift towards AMD GPUs actually makes me very, very wary of getting any new Mac hardware for a while. Every time I've tried an AMD/Radeon GPU in a PC, it's done nothing but crash over and over and over again (even after several returns). I don't ever want an AMD/Radeon GPU in any system I own ever again. Intel and NVidia GPUs just work.
  - outworlder 11y ago
    AMD user. Not my experience. How long ago was it?
    - jackmaney 11y ago
      Well over a dozen times from ~1998--2010.
  - STRML 11y ago
    I own a 2014 MBPr with the Nvidia chip and I'm thinking the AMD chip would be a big improvement. I see major visual artifacts whenever the GPU switches, it locks up frequently, and external monitors rarely work. Maybe a bad chip, actually, but it works fine in Windows.
basicallydan 11y ago
Force touch user here! Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, the 13 inch retina MBPR has had force touch since its release in early 2015, when it was first announced. They have only just put them into the 15 inch, and I imagine they left the "big announcement" until all MBPR users could get it so they didn't waste all the novelty before it was ripe for media excitement. There's a good list of things you can do with force touch here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204352 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204352 Some personal opinions about force touch: My favourite thing about it is that the trackpad is automatically more clickable. The clickable surface area is larger than on my previous Mac (13" Air late 2013), and since I turned off right click (opting for two-finger click instead) I am far more causal about clicking things. This was really, really noticeable when going back to my Air briefly while I was giving it some TLC, and finding I couldn't use the top-left corner to click. About the "force" aspect of it though... the sensation of pressing it down and watching some on-screen element change in size (which is the case for the dictionary lookup feature) is pretty fun. That's one of my favourite things to show people. It's like watching people use an analogue stick for the first time. At first it's confusing and hard to get the balance of, but soon you become quite proficient with it. Unfortunately support outside of stock OSX applications is quite limited at the moment. The features that are supported in Safari have not yet made their way to Chrome, and features in Quicktime (changing fast forward speed, mainly) are not in VLC. Stuff like that. Having buttons on the screen which act differently depending on how hard you click them could be quite powerful. With time, however, I think we'll see developers doing more interesting things with this. It could be quite useful in artistic applications for instance, doing exactly what Wacom tablets (and their ilk) have been doing to simulate the pressure of a brush or pen. Another good use is as a replacement for right click or CTRL+click, i.e. to open a context menu. This is how it works on the dock, and it's quite nice to use too. One thing I find wrong with it is that all of a sudden, holding onto a draggable element while scrolling with two fingers (e.g., try moving a playlist around in Spotify when you have lots of playlists) appears to not longer be possible. This might be a software issue with whomever is responsible for the software in question, though. Finally, the myth that the trackpad doesn't move at all is not true. It moves a little, and if you press hard (as one Apple store employee did when I took it in to get looked at last week, insisting that it "wasn't force touch") it will move down noticeably - so don't overdo it. This, IMO, is the killer feature of the new MBPR.
amirmansour 11y ago
I was really hoping to see 5th gen Intel Broadwell chips with the update. When are they expected? Intel said mid-year, but when will Apple incorporate them in?
rjammala 11y ago
Can somebody tell me how they deal with all the heat generated by these powerful cpus/gpus in a laptop? Do you just put it on a desk all the time?
- scarmig 11y ago
  It's not been my experience that things are getting worse in that respect; in fact, I'd say heat-wise things are significantly better than previous generations. Intel has put a lot of effort into making its chips more energy efficient, which has a side effect of generating much less heat. I'd guess that, combined with better chassis design, accounts for the improvement.
- kalleboo 11y ago
  Whenever my laptop is on my "lap" or in my bed at home it's actually on one of these. This also raises it to a more ergonomic level for me. http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60240587/ http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60240587/
  - rjammala 11y ago
    cool. thanks.
emsy 11y ago
Is anyone else here mad that Apple has time for these gimicks but can't get their software fixed? Lion to Yosemite was a big regression and I don't mean the UI.
- lpsz 11y ago
  I see these "OS X is getting worse" posts from time to time but it doesn't match my experience. Care to elaborate?
  - emsy 11y ago
    Unreliable Standby mode. Upon waking up, peripherals won't work until reboot, the Dock is unresponsive, applications crash and more. Overall stability. I've never had so many system freezes and crashes than with Yosemite. It started with the upgrade progress that crashed on me and even a fresh reinstall didn't help. On Lion, I let my machine run for serveral weeks without any problem. Now I have to reboot at least once a week because the kernel is working on something that seems like bitcoin mining from the looks of the cpu load. Rebooting shows a black screen for 2 minutes and I often thought thank god I have a backup because my filesystem got screwed up (it didn't but apparently that's also a problem for some people). Applications not quitting, Dock locking up, Finder unresponsive, drives not showing up in Diskutil. WiFi not working or working extremely slow. This even happens when I'm connected via cable and I turn WiFi on. Suddenly I have a really slow network connection. The WiFi issues even occur on iOS devices (not mine, but some of my family members) These are not minor annoyances. This stuff keeps me from working and gives me an extremely poor user experience. In fact it's the first time in years I'm looking forward to a Windows release. And of course there are some smaller things like Removing features from applications, for example the whole scripting part of iWorks. From the hostname, it seems like I run a few thousand Macs in my network.
    - lpsz 11y ago
      Yikes, that does sound terrible -- makes me wish you had a more positive experience since it really should all work. I wonder if it's CPU/hardware specific? Data point re: Wi-Fi, though: I've seen friends experience Wi-fi issues on their Airs as of one recent update, but never have them myself on my 2011 Air (that I use heavily for coding and graphics work.)
jug 11y ago
Missed May the 4th by a mere two weeks? I can't believe how sloppy Apple is getting!
jdavid 11y ago
I'm a little disappointed Apple, the new MBP doesn't have a top of the line graphics card, and it's still stuck to 16GB of ram. This is hardly a pro option. I wonder if I need a #hackentosh if I want 32GB of RAM, and an nVidia 950M or better.
- outworlder 11y ago
  Do you really need >16GB to be considered 'pro' these days? You can have 64GB on a MacPro. Hope that's 'pro' enough.
  - nsxwolf 11y ago
    128GB if you use slower ram.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - chiph 11y ago
    I run several VMs at once on mine, and 16gb is constraining. Put me in the "the Pro is no longer so Pro" camp.
    - eropple 11y ago
      I regularly have six to eight virtual machines in flight at any given time and never feel constrained. Are you sizing them appropriately for their tasks?
hartator 11y ago
Kind of disappointment, they are still replacing NVidia chips by AMD. M370X, M290, M290X, M295X... AMD R9 series are known for heating too much. M295X (The high end option for iMac) goes up to 105C under recent games and starts throttling. (The clock reduces to avoid melting introducing shutters and frame drops.)
nsxwolf 11y ago
It allows 5K monitors? Does that mean it's HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.3? Both?
- tammer 11y ago
  Support for up to 5120 by 2160 resolution at 60Hz on a single external display (model with AMD Radeon R9 M370X only) is listed under "Thunderbolt digital video output" & HDMI max output is Support for 4096-by-2160 resolution at 24Hz. So it must be DP 1.3?
  - tammer 11y ago
    Nope - it's two mini-DP cables http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/28/15-mbp-supports-dell-5k-up2715k-display/ http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/28/15-mbp-supports-dell-5k-...
bunkydoo 11y ago
Really don't like the force touch trackpad for some reason... it feels a lot like the old macbook pro trackpad after years of use - kinda damp and spongey. There is nothing like the 'pop' of a new Mac trackpad, but I guess those days are over... ha.
bdcravens 11y ago
I can't fathom how they can keep releasing iMac updates yet the Thunderbolt display is four years old.
- jkelsey 11y ago
  If they released a new external display, it would have to be retina quality. That makes me think that Apple isn't yet confident in MacBook/MacBook Pro GPUs to drive multiple external retina quality screens like you can do now with the Thunderbolt displays. Maybe the top-of-the-line machines with the Nvidia/Radeon GPUs, but it doesn't seem very Apple like for them to release a new display with a disclaimer: only works with Nvidia/Radeon GPU equipped Macs.
  - jws 11y ago
    Retina quality 27" displays need to wait for the next Thunderbolt or similar speed bump. The display requires > 20Gbps to feed. That means waiting for Intel to pop out ThunderBolt 3 with the newly announced DisplayPort 1.3 38Gbps connection. Too many pixels, too little time. As far as GPU processing power, I wonder how much more GPU it takes for two displays. I use two, but I don't do heavy updates on both at once. I suppose you could imagine some video game wanting to use both, but for professional work it seems mostly about real estate, peripheral awareness, and context switching with a head turn. It probably wants more RAM for compositing, but that seems ample already.
phragg 11y ago
Why do they use images for everything? That text on that landing page.. an image?
- kalleboo 11y ago
  Presumably they've measured latency with images and webfonts and found images load faster. There's nothing more frustrating than a webfont that takes 10 seconds to load.
  - tammer 11y ago
    I've understood they use images mainly for typographical control across translations.
herf 11y ago
I tried the new Force touch at retail. Single click is perfect, and double click...had a ton of latency. Anyone else think so?
- coldpie 11y ago
  What in the hell is wrong with buttons? They are easy to understand and work one hundred percent of the time. I have to use one at work, and I'll never buy one of these crappy button-less trackpads for personal use. Click-and-drag is a mind-melting experience.
  - ilikemustard 11y ago
    That's my feeling with the current generation of Android devices which got rid of the 3 buttons below the screen.
  - DavideNL 11y ago
    Tip: System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Mouse & Trackpad -> Trackpad options -> Enable dragging without drag lock i personally love it... dragging by tapping - so without needing to push or click
spanktar 11y ago
At least they didn't update the power port...again.
psychometry 11y ago
It's incredibly obnoxious that they tie the hard drive size to the processor. There's no technical reason for it whatsoever. Now because I need 512GB or more, I'm forced to spend hundreds more to buy a laptop more powerful than what I need.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  I just carry a couple flash drives around. You can get a 256 GB one for < $100.
- jasonellis 11y ago
  I don't think that's correct. You can get the base $1999 model and upgrade to 512GB for $300. Not cheap, but doesn't include the processor upgrade.
  - psychometry 11y ago
    The post is about the updated 13" models, which have non-configurable drives in all but the priciest option: http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF839LL/A&step=config# http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF839L... http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF840LL/A&step=config# http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF840L...
emptybits 11y ago
Apple claims 12.5% longer life (from 8 to 9 hours) with only a 4.7% larger battery (95 Wh to 99.5 Wh), and without moving to Broadwell processors like in the 13" rMBP which we know are a big part of its battery life improvement. So is this 15" rMBP battery life improvement software-driven or new hardware throttling or just wishful thinking? The video card and SSD have changed, but doesn't a full hour of battery life improvement seem optimistic? I guess reviews will expose the truth soon enough...
- cerberusss 11y ago
  "Rather than 4.7% more capacity being responsible for a 12.5% increase in stated battery life, efficiency gains in the tested OS and software also likely contributed, since last year’s test was with Mavericks and an older version of Safari. Fortunately, those efficiency gains benefit old Macs, too." Source: http://www.marco.org/2015/05/19/mistake-one http://www.marco.org/2015/05/19/mistake-one (footnote2, at the bottom of the page)
radikalus 11y ago
I can't be part of THAT small a minority that needs to use CUDA and/or more than 16gigs of RAM. From my perspective, these mbp are very little marginal benefit for computational work than a small air. (You'll just run everything on AWS/GCE/etc anyways)

91 points by globuous 11y ago

emilecantin 11y ago

They've been around for a few months, I type this on one...

antoinelyset 11y ago
Nope : http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/05/19Apple-Introduces-15-inch-MacBook-Pro-with-Force-Touch-Trackpad-New-1-999-iMac-with-Retina-5K-Display.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/05/19Apple-Introduces-1...
- basicallydan 11y ago
  They have. This is for the 15 inch.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    The first available Force Touch trackpad shipped on the new MacBook which was announced on March 9th and released on April 10th. Unless you have access to Apple's prerelease testing hardware, you haven't been using a Force Touch trackpad for a few months.
    - k-mcgrady 11y ago
      >> The first available Force Touch trackpad shipped on the new MacBook which was announced on March 9th and released on April 10th. Wrong. It first shipped on the 13" Macbook Pro. I know because I bought one at the start of April (before the release of the new Macbook).
      - mikeash 11y ago
        You're right. That was March 9th. Still can't be "a few months" yet.
        Psyonic 11y ago
        http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/few?s=t http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/few?s=t "not many but more than one."
  - patcheudor 11y ago
    Yup, I've had my 13 inch MacBook Pro for a month now and it has the force touch touchpad, although, I'm not entirely convinced it's revolutionary. I'm having issue with it when I drop and drag. It will loose the finger pressure info and un-click which typically leaves me searching for where my file landed.

Alex3917 11y ago

From Appleinsider: "Notably, the chips are not Intel's latest-generation 'Broadwell' processors, which remain unavailable in quad-core configurations. As a result, Apple is still utilizing the previous-generation 'Haswell' architecture, albeit at faster speeds."

dombili 11y ago
Faster speeds? It's the same: New rMBP: http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/ http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/ Old rMBP: https://web.archive.org/web/20150424183842/http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150424183842/http://www.apple....
- Artemis2 11y ago
  Yeah, the i7-4980HQ (the most high-end option they offer) has been for more than a year the fastest Intel processor you can find in a laptop. http://ark.intel.com/products/83503/Intel-Core-i7-4980HQ-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/83503/Intel-Core-i7-4980HQ-Pro...

moron4hire 11y ago

Still no 10-point touchscreen?

shalmanese 11y ago
That would require a massive UI overhaul to make every app touch friendly. Not something that Apple is going to take on lightly.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Well what are they waiting for? It's not like touchscreens on laptops are exactly a new feature.
  - mcphage 11y ago
    > Well what are they waiting for? A good reason to do it?
  - widdershins 11y ago
    Apple has clearly decided that the tradeoff for making a UI both touch and mouse friendly is too great. Given the reaction people have had to Windows 8+ I'm inclined to agree with them.
    - moron4hire 11y ago
      Given I want a 10-point touchscreen on a laptop, I use Windows 8, and I find the touch interactions delightful, I clearly disagree.
    - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
      You realize that more people use Windows 8+ than OS X, right? The reaction that I see is that all sorts of workers are now walking around touching Windows on tablets and laptops. I've seen them in restaurants, supermarkets, service centers, stores, in my house, in my yard. You're thinking about the tech blog/news people's reaction to Windows 8+. Plenty of actual people are using the product because it offers something that no other system does - and that is a full operating system with touch, not a locked down rental unit.

rockymeza 11y ago

I was hoping they would come out with a USB-C port.

mcmillion 11y ago
This was a minor bump, I'm holding out for something bigger once Skylake is ready. Hopefully that will include USB-C.
- sitkack 11y ago
  32GB of ram?!
- melling 11y ago
  New standards take time to gain traction. Apple putting at least one USB-C on each "new" device would go a long way towards helping USB-C gain adoption.
  - jimmcslim 11y ago
    I think they should have 'burned the boats' and gone all in with USB-C on everything they have updated so far (I.e. MBP 13/15, iMac). Throw a solitary adapter in the box, charge a nice Apple margin on additional ones.
neverminder 11y ago
I have a new Google's Pixel LS with 2 USB Type-C ports (at this point the only one in the world to have 2 as far as I know) and it's amazing. I can plug the USB Type-C charger from either side of the laptop. When was the last time you were able to do that?
- thecolorblue 11y ago
  I'm surprised the macbook didn't go the USB Type-C on each side route. How much bulk could that really add? It makes it way more flexible. The Pixel update looks really good to me compared it these updates.

marvel_boy 11y ago

Newbie here. Someone that had tryed the Force Touch Trackpad could you share impressions?

tehwebguy 11y ago
Yeah, it's pretty incredible. I preferred to disable the two-level click in System Prefs, then it just felt like a normal macbook air trackpad. It feels so real I turned off the unit in the store just to double check that there was no feedback with the power off (there wasn't)
vardump 11y ago
It's nice. Adjustable click sound in trackpad preferences, so no more CLICK! at night when you use laptop near someone else. Force feedback makes it feel like you're really pressing a button. But nothing I couldn't live without.
- mcphage 11y ago
  > so no more CLICK! at night when you use laptop near someone else > But nothing I couldn't live without. Hmm, less grumbling from the wife when I play Minecraft in bed? "It's not for me, hon--it's for us."
oflannabhra 11y ago
I have the 13" MBP with Force Touch. Hands down the best trackpad I've ever used. Apple continues to dominate in this space. The "Taptic Engine" part of the Force Touch system is imperceptible from hardware "clicks". The ability to have a second level click seems interesting. Turning of the computer and pressing on the trackpad is like a magic trick. While not many apps (and not many portions of the OS, even) are using the "pressure granularity" system of Force Touch, I will reserve judgement on its benefits and usefulness, but it is incredibly well-engineered. Overall, I can see Apple including this across their entire product line, if technically feasible. It is as good as Touch ID.
- cma 11y ago

icpmacdo 11y ago

New graphics card also? It says AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB GDDR5 memory on the page Edit: I think it was an Nvidia 750 before

bryanlarsen 11y ago
That's basically the same graphics card. AMD recently did an "OEM refresh", which didn't do much more than put new numbers on the old cards. They fiddled with frequencies, but they're basically the same old cards. Manufacturers demand this, and unlike Intel & nVidia, AMD doesn't have the clout to say no to stupid requests like this. Significantly, they didn't refresh their retail range of cards, so there is still some hope that AMD has a significant refresh coming soon; AMD still doesn't have an answer for nVidia Maxwell, which was first released over a year ago.
- Robadob 11y ago
  Pretty sure NVIDIA has done the same on occasion, for example the 800m GTX series, doesn't have an 800 GTX desktop counterpart. Many of the 800m cards used the same chips as 700m series, just with small changes. Apparently they were originally planning on releasing Maxwell as 800 series, but due to Laptop manufacturer pressure ended up deferring it after releasing Kepler 800m cards.
- izacus 11y ago
  Yep, on the other hand the previous 750M was essentually the same chip as 650M (+ a few Mhz) as well, so the discrete GPUs in rMBPs are kinda dissapointing for a few generations now :/

whisdol 11y ago

Did the Macbook Pros just get a whole lot more expensive in Europe (or specifically Germany?)? I don't remember the 15" MBP with a discrete graphics card being 2800€. Or have they adjusted their prices to the weak Euro a while back?

sancha_ 11y ago
The last gen MBP was also the same price in Germany a few months back, so it wasn't changed just now.
myth_buster 11y ago
I would think the latter [0] if you are seeing around 20% appreciation in price. 0: http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=2Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=2Y
louhike 11y ago
It might have occured when the Retina screen was no more optionnal.
droidist2 11y ago
Yeah, they adjusted for the weak Euro. The Apple developer program also went up in price last year in Europe.

jamestomasino 11y ago

Did Apple really just enable a "smash the button" interaction? I can't wait to see what kind of damage people start inflicting.

comex 11y ago

Presumably this means there won't be a major refresh to the 15" model announced at WWDC and available immediately or shortly, something Apple likes to do. I guess this is no surprise due to the lack of high-end Broadwell... Personally, I'm still hoping for a slightly higher resolution screen eventually.

amirmansour 11y ago
Does this mean MBPs with 5th gen Intel Boradwell chips won't be available till next year?
- _stephan 11y ago
  They probably jump straight to Skylake. Maybe in Q4.
- deleted 11y ago
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laichzeit0 11y ago
I think they're waiting for Skylake. Wireless charging, 4K/5K external displays at 60hz, better battery, etc. Skylake is the "major refresh" everyone that knows anything is waiting for.
- sosuke 11y ago
  Any good single source you'd recommend to encapsulate all that makes Skylake the obvious next hardware upgrade to the MBP line? I've been waiting for the right time to upgrade and I'd love something to read about the future. This is the first I've seen it mentioned.
  - laichzeit0 11y ago
    Sorry I don't know of a single source. The Wikipedia page for Skylake is a good start, as well as the section for Thunderbolt 3.0. You'll get a good sense of what capabilities this is going to unlock.

deleted 11y ago

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SandB0x 11y ago

For anyone else who was confused by this, it's a bump on the 15" Macbook Pro. The 13" model was updated at the same time as the Macbook launch.

ojbyrne 11y ago

They also cut the price on the iMac Retina by $200.

kylec 11y ago
And there's a new lower-end retina iMac starting at $1999. That's an impressively low price point for something with that display.
- vardump 11y ago
  You can buy IPS 4k display for $599 or less. Not 5k, but not that far off either. Edit: Downvotes, seriously? Have you seen these side by side? When it comes to resolution, at least I can't tell a difference anymore at a reasonable viewing distance. Display tech simply good enough now.
  - bryanlarsen 11y ago
    5K is almost twice as many pixels as 4K.
  - apendleton 11y ago
    5k is almost double the pixel count (75%-ish more). It's pretty substantial... also, more to the point with Apple products, I think at the 27" size, 5k is necessary for the pixel-doubling high-DPI option to look good. At 4k, everything looks either tiny or huge, depending on whether you have it turned off or on.

ejbs 11y ago

Interesting that they're shifting towards AMD GPUs. Was actually hoping for a major update of the MBPR with the availability of NVIDIA's new maxwell architecture and broadwell based quad cores. Anyone knows why AMD? Is it a margin/profitibility or performance thing?

xmodem 11y ago
Apple has never tied themselves to one GPU vendor- they have gone back and forth more times in the past ten years or so that I have been watching Apple than I care to count. give it 18 months and the new top-of-the-line will have nVidia in it again, assuming they don't move completely to integrated.
jackmaney 11y ago
The shift towards AMD GPUs actually makes me very, very wary of getting any new Mac hardware for a while. Every time I've tried an AMD/Radeon GPU in a PC, it's done nothing but crash over and over and over again (even after several returns). I don't ever want an AMD/Radeon GPU in any system I own ever again. Intel and NVidia GPUs just work.
- outworlder 11y ago
  AMD user. Not my experience. How long ago was it?
  - jackmaney 11y ago
    Well over a dozen times from ~1998--2010.
- STRML 11y ago
  I own a 2014 MBPr with the Nvidia chip and I'm thinking the AMD chip would be a big improvement. I see major visual artifacts whenever the GPU switches, it locks up frequently, and external monitors rarely work. Maybe a bad chip, actually, but it works fine in Windows.

basicallydan 11y ago

Force touch user here! Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, the 13 inch retina MBPR has had force touch since its release in early 2015, when it was first announced. They have only just put them into the 15 inch, and I imagine they left the "big announcement" until all MBPR users could get it so they didn't waste all the novelty before it was ripe for media excitement. There's a good list of things you can do with force touch here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204352 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204352 Some personal opinions about force touch: My favourite thing about it is that the trackpad is automatically more clickable. The clickable surface area is larger than on my previous Mac (13" Air late 2013), and since I turned off right click (opting for two-finger click instead) I am far more causal about clicking things. This was really, really noticeable when going back to my Air briefly while I was giving it some TLC, and finding I couldn't use the top-left corner to click. About the "force" aspect of it though... the sensation of pressing it down and watching some on-screen element change in size (which is the case for the dictionary lookup feature) is pretty fun. That's one of my favourite things to show people. It's like watching people use an analogue stick for the first time. At first it's confusing and hard to get the balance of, but soon you become quite proficient with it. Unfortunately support outside of stock OSX applications is quite limited at the moment. The features that are supported in Safari have not yet made their way to Chrome, and features in Quicktime (changing fast forward speed, mainly) are not in VLC. Stuff like that. Having buttons on the screen which act differently depending on how hard you click them could be quite powerful. With time, however, I think we'll see developers doing more interesting things with this. It could be quite useful in artistic applications for instance, doing exactly what Wacom tablets (and their ilk) have been doing to simulate the pressure of a brush or pen. Another good use is as a replacement for right click or CTRL+click, i.e. to open a context menu. This is how it works on the dock, and it's quite nice to use too. One thing I find wrong with it is that all of a sudden, holding onto a draggable element while scrolling with two fingers (e.g., try moving a playlist around in Spotify when you have lots of playlists) appears to not longer be possible. This might be a software issue with whomever is responsible for the software in question, though. Finally, the myth that the trackpad doesn't move at all is not true. It moves a little, and if you press hard (as one Apple store employee did when I took it in to get looked at last week, insisting that it "wasn't force touch") it will move down noticeably - so don't overdo it. This, IMO, is the killer feature of the new MBPR.

amirmansour 11y ago

I was really hoping to see 5th gen Intel Broadwell chips with the update. When are they expected? Intel said mid-year, but when will Apple incorporate them in?

rjammala 11y ago

Can somebody tell me how they deal with all the heat generated by these powerful cpus/gpus in a laptop? Do you just put it on a desk all the time?

scarmig 11y ago
It's not been my experience that things are getting worse in that respect; in fact, I'd say heat-wise things are significantly better than previous generations. Intel has put a lot of effort into making its chips more energy efficient, which has a side effect of generating much less heat. I'd guess that, combined with better chassis design, accounts for the improvement.
kalleboo 11y ago
Whenever my laptop is on my "lap" or in my bed at home it's actually on one of these. This also raises it to a more ergonomic level for me. http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60240587/ http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60240587/
- rjammala 11y ago
  cool. thanks.

emsy 11y ago

Is anyone else here mad that Apple has time for these gimicks but can't get their software fixed? Lion to Yosemite was a big regression and I don't mean the UI.

lpsz 11y ago
I see these "OS X is getting worse" posts from time to time but it doesn't match my experience. Care to elaborate?
- emsy 11y ago
  Unreliable Standby mode. Upon waking up, peripherals won't work until reboot, the Dock is unresponsive, applications crash and more. Overall stability. I've never had so many system freezes and crashes than with Yosemite. It started with the upgrade progress that crashed on me and even a fresh reinstall didn't help. On Lion, I let my machine run for serveral weeks without any problem. Now I have to reboot at least once a week because the kernel is working on something that seems like bitcoin mining from the looks of the cpu load. Rebooting shows a black screen for 2 minutes and I often thought thank god I have a backup because my filesystem got screwed up (it didn't but apparently that's also a problem for some people). Applications not quitting, Dock locking up, Finder unresponsive, drives not showing up in Diskutil. WiFi not working or working extremely slow. This even happens when I'm connected via cable and I turn WiFi on. Suddenly I have a really slow network connection. The WiFi issues even occur on iOS devices (not mine, but some of my family members) These are not minor annoyances. This stuff keeps me from working and gives me an extremely poor user experience. In fact it's the first time in years I'm looking forward to a Windows release. And of course there are some smaller things like Removing features from applications, for example the whole scripting part of iWorks. From the hostname, it seems like I run a few thousand Macs in my network.
  - lpsz 11y ago
    Yikes, that does sound terrible -- makes me wish you had a more positive experience since it really should all work. I wonder if it's CPU/hardware specific? Data point re: Wi-Fi, though: I've seen friends experience Wi-fi issues on their Airs as of one recent update, but never have them myself on my 2011 Air (that I use heavily for coding and graphics work.)

jug 11y ago

Missed May the 4th by a mere two weeks? I can't believe how sloppy Apple is getting!

jdavid 11y ago

I'm a little disappointed Apple, the new MBP doesn't have a top of the line graphics card, and it's still stuck to 16GB of ram. This is hardly a pro option. I wonder if I need a #hackentosh if I want 32GB of RAM, and an nVidia 950M or better.

outworlder 11y ago
Do you really need >16GB to be considered 'pro' these days? You can have 64GB on a MacPro. Hope that's 'pro' enough.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  128GB if you use slower ram.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- chiph 11y ago
  I run several VMs at once on mine, and 16gb is constraining. Put me in the "the Pro is no longer so Pro" camp.
  - eropple 11y ago
    I regularly have six to eight virtual machines in flight at any given time and never feel constrained. Are you sizing them appropriately for their tasks?

hartator 11y ago

Kind of disappointment, they are still replacing NVidia chips by AMD. M370X, M290, M290X, M295X... AMD R9 series are known for heating too much. M295X (The high end option for iMac) goes up to 105C under recent games and starts throttling. (The clock reduces to avoid melting introducing shutters and frame drops.)

nsxwolf 11y ago

It allows 5K monitors? Does that mean it's HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.3? Both?

tammer 11y ago
Support for up to 5120 by 2160 resolution at 60Hz on a single external display (model with AMD Radeon R9 M370X only) is listed under "Thunderbolt digital video output" & HDMI max output is Support for 4096-by-2160 resolution at 24Hz. So it must be DP 1.3?
- tammer 11y ago
  Nope - it's two mini-DP cables http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/28/15-mbp-supports-dell-5k-up2715k-display/ http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/28/15-mbp-supports-dell-5k-...

bunkydoo 11y ago

Really don't like the force touch trackpad for some reason... it feels a lot like the old macbook pro trackpad after years of use - kinda damp and spongey. There is nothing like the 'pop' of a new Mac trackpad, but I guess those days are over... ha.

bdcravens 11y ago

I can't fathom how they can keep releasing iMac updates yet the Thunderbolt display is four years old.

jkelsey 11y ago
If they released a new external display, it would have to be retina quality. That makes me think that Apple isn't yet confident in MacBook/MacBook Pro GPUs to drive multiple external retina quality screens like you can do now with the Thunderbolt displays. Maybe the top-of-the-line machines with the Nvidia/Radeon GPUs, but it doesn't seem very Apple like for them to release a new display with a disclaimer: only works with Nvidia/Radeon GPU equipped Macs.
- jws 11y ago
  Retina quality 27" displays need to wait for the next Thunderbolt or similar speed bump. The display requires > 20Gbps to feed. That means waiting for Intel to pop out ThunderBolt 3 with the newly announced DisplayPort 1.3 38Gbps connection. Too many pixels, too little time. As far as GPU processing power, I wonder how much more GPU it takes for two displays. I use two, but I don't do heavy updates on both at once. I suppose you could imagine some video game wanting to use both, but for professional work it seems mostly about real estate, peripheral awareness, and context switching with a head turn. It probably wants more RAM for compositing, but that seems ample already.

phragg 11y ago

Why do they use images for everything? That text on that landing page.. an image?

kalleboo 11y ago
Presumably they've measured latency with images and webfonts and found images load faster. There's nothing more frustrating than a webfont that takes 10 seconds to load.
- tammer 11y ago
  I've understood they use images mainly for typographical control across translations.

herf 11y ago

I tried the new Force touch at retail. Single click is perfect, and double click...had a ton of latency. Anyone else think so?

coldpie 11y ago
What in the hell is wrong with buttons? They are easy to understand and work one hundred percent of the time. I have to use one at work, and I'll never buy one of these crappy button-less trackpads for personal use. Click-and-drag is a mind-melting experience.
- ilikemustard 11y ago
  That's my feeling with the current generation of Android devices which got rid of the 3 buttons below the screen.
- DavideNL 11y ago
  Tip: System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Mouse & Trackpad -> Trackpad options -> Enable dragging without drag lock i personally love it... dragging by tapping - so without needing to push or click

spanktar 11y ago

At least they didn't update the power port...again.

psychometry 11y ago

It's incredibly obnoxious that they tie the hard drive size to the processor. There's no technical reason for it whatsoever. Now because I need 512GB or more, I'm forced to spend hundreds more to buy a laptop more powerful than what I need.

w1ntermute 11y ago
I just carry a couple flash drives around. You can get a 256 GB one for < $100.
jasonellis 11y ago
I don't think that's correct. You can get the base $1999 model and upgrade to 512GB for $300. Not cheap, but doesn't include the processor upgrade.
- psychometry 11y ago
  The post is about the updated 13" models, which have non-configurable drives in all but the priciest option: http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF839LL/A&step=config# http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF839L... http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF840LL/A&step=config# http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF840L...

emptybits 11y ago

Apple claims 12.5% longer life (from 8 to 9 hours) with only a 4.7% larger battery (95 Wh to 99.5 Wh), and without moving to Broadwell processors like in the 13" rMBP which we know are a big part of its battery life improvement. So is this 15" rMBP battery life improvement software-driven or new hardware throttling or just wishful thinking? The video card and SSD have changed, but doesn't a full hour of battery life improvement seem optimistic? I guess reviews will expose the truth soon enough...

cerberusss 11y ago
"Rather than 4.7% more capacity being responsible for a 12.5% increase in stated battery life, efficiency gains in the tested OS and software also likely contributed, since last year’s test was with Mavericks and an older version of Safari. Fortunately, those efficiency gains benefit old Macs, too." Source: http://www.marco.org/2015/05/19/mistake-one http://www.marco.org/2015/05/19/mistake-one (footnote2, at the bottom of the page)

radikalus 11y ago

I can't be part of THAT small a minority that needs to use CUDA and/or more than 16gigs of RAM. From my perspective, these mbp are very little marginal benefit for computational work than a small air. (You'll just run everything on AWS/GCE/etc anyways)