On Tuesday, Apple Inc. updated a couple of its computing products that don’t fit in your pocket or strap to your wrist. There’s an updated 15-inch MacBook Pro and an updated iMac and new price for the most expensive computer in the iMac line. Here’s an overview of what’s new.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display now has a Force Touch trackpad. Apple users were introduced to the idea of force touching with the Apple Watch, but can now take the new gesture to their laptops. It detects just how much pressure you’re applying to that click, so you can trigger different actions just by pressing harder. The new Force Touch capabilities are tied into OS X so you can use it for some basic tasks when you’re web browsing (Apple suggests using it to look up the definition of a word, for example). Apple is also looking to get third-party app developers involved by offering APIs so other applications can make use of the new sensitivity function.
Under the aluminum hood, the MacBook Pro has a new Flash storage drive that is 2.5 faster than the previous generation, according to Apple. The throughput is rated at 2 GBps.
Other updates to the MacBook’s specs include a new AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics chip. Apple also says the new MacBook will give you an extra hour of battery life, up to nine hours of wireless web browsing or iTunes movie playback.
Apple’s iMac desktop computers now have a Retina Display. For the 21.5-inch model, that’s 67 per cent more pixels packed into the same area when compared to the previous version, Apple says. The price has also been lowered for the top-end of the iMac line, to $2,749. At the low end, pricing starts at $2,399.
There’s some other upgrades to the iMac line that aren’t related to high resolution displays. There’s a new 3.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.7 GHz and a AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics chip. Plus 8 GB of memory and 1 TB of storage for the entry-level model.
