Apple has updated the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display with the new Force Touch trackpad, faster flash storage, longer battery life and faster discrete graphics. The company also introduced a new $1,999 configuration of the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display, quad-core processors and AMD graphics, and lowered the price of the top-end iMac with Retina 5K display to $2,299.
“The response to the new MacBook and updated 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display has been amazing, and today we are thrilled to bring the new Force Touch trackpad, faster flash storage and longer battery life to the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said in a press release. “Customers love the groundbreaking iMac with Retina 5K display, and now with a new lower starting price, even more people can experience the best desktop we’ve ever made.”
With built-in force sensors and a Taptic Engine that delivers haptic feedback, the Force Touch trackpad allows you to click anywhere with a uniform feel and customize the amount of pressure needed to register each click. The new trackpad supports a range of new gestures, including the new Force click, and APIs [application programming interfaces] are available for third-party developers to incorporate Force Touch capabilities into their apps.
The updated 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display also features up to 2.5 times faster flash storage than the previous generation, with throughput up to 2GBps, and offers an additional hour of battery life, with up to nine hours of wireless web browsing and up to nine hours of iTunes movie playback, according to Apple. In addition, MacBook Pro with Retina display discrete graphics deliver up to 80% faster performance using new AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics for editing video in Final Cut Pro X, rendering 3D images in pro graphics apps or playing high-resolution games.
With a resolution of 5120 x 2880, the new $1,999 iMac with Retina 5K display has 67% more pixels than a 4K display, and features a 3.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost Speeds up to 3.7GHz and AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics. The new iMac also includes 8GB of memory and 1TB of storage, as well as four USB 3.0 ports and two Thunderbolt 2 ports that deliver up to 20Gbps each, twice the bandwidth of the previous generation. However, there’s no Fusion Drive option. The Fusion Drive combines the performance of solid-state storage with the higher capacity of a hard drive.
The top-end iMac with Retina 5K display now starts at $2,299 and features a 3.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics and a 1TB Fusion Drive. Apple has lowered the price of the high-end model of its iMac with 5K Retina Display to $2,299, while adding a $1,999 ultra-high resolution version of the best-selling all-in-one.
The top end model has seen a price cut of $200. It comes with a 3.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of memory, an AMD Radeon R9 M29OX with 2GB of video memory, and a 1TB Fusion Drive.