Apple held their much anticipated press conference yesterday, finally announcing the arrival of a new design to their dated MacBook Pro line. While some of these new features we saw coming thanks to leaks, there were a couple that surprised us! The most famous feature that was leaked is the Touch Bar, a touchscreen at the top of the keyboard that replaces the function keys. Something I did not see coming was the dramatic increase in SSD speeds. The last generation of MacBook Pro’s were no slouch in that department, clocking in at around 1400MB/s read and 1300MB/s write speeds. Apple advertised the speed boost as a 100% INCREASE over the 2015 models, that is insane! Among those, here is a list of all of the new features/improvements!
- The “Touch Bar”. A touchscreen display that replaces the function keys
- Thinner and lighter design
- New “Space Grey” color option
- TouchID
- 4 Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports. (Besides the headphone jack, these are the only ports now. Goodbye MagSafe and SD card slot!)
- Wider color gamut retina displays
- 10 hour battery life
- New 6th generation Intel Skylake processors
- Larger trackpads and new keyboards
- Updated AMD Polaris graphics chips on the 15-inch models
Along with the new MacBook Pros with the Touch Bar, Apple also announced a more budget friendly option. For $300 less, you can get a Pro that is missing the Touch Bar, 2 of the 4 Thunderbolt ports, and has a slightly slower processor. We’re really excited about these new notebooks and can not wait to get our hands on them!
What do you think of them?
