Apple announces the first new MacBook Pros in more than a year, with a ‘touch bar’ above the keyboard that can be used for typing emoji
Apple launches new MacBook Pro laptop with Touch Bar for instant emoji
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MacBook Pros
The new MacBook Pro comes in two flavours, 13in and 15in, and the headline new feature is the Touch Bar, a touch-sensitive display along the top of the laptop, where the function keys used to be. Also added is a Touch ID sensor. It will retail for $1799/£1749 and $2399/£2349 up.
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UK pricing: £1449, for the 13in without Touch Bar, £1749 for the 13in, and £2349 for the 15in respectively. Basically, straight conversion from dollars, minus £50.
This isn’t Apple inflatingits international prices, either: a straight conversion from dollars to pounds, plus 20% VAT, results in much the same prices.
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And that’s it: 80 minutes later, we have three new laptops and one new app.
No new desktops today, nor updates to any of the other laptops.
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Here are the starting specs and prices, in dollars.
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Now we’re getting, essentially, a eulogy for the MacBook Air, as Phil Schiller introduces one final device: a 13” MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar. Schiller walks through all the ways the 13” MacBook Pro is better than the 13” MacBook Air. It’s thinner, smaller, and weighs the same.
But does it cost the same?
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Final number: quoted battery life is 10 hours.
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Last set of third-party integrations: Microsoft is offering Word, Excel, and Skype integrations, while other developers including Sketch, DaVinci Resolve, and Pixelmator are all pushing their own Touch Bar software updates.
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A few professional apps get screen time to show how the new touch bar works with their software: Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and DJ Pro. It looks pretty good!
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More numbers! For the 15in device, the processor is an Intel Core i7, quad-core with 2133MHz memory. Graphics card is a Radeon Pro chip, with up to 4GB VRAM, up to 2.3x faster than before. Drive is a “superfast SSD”, up to 3.1GB/s, up to 2TB, up to 50% faster.
It’s 130% faster for 3D graphics, 60% faster for gaming.
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On to the display! These tend to just be lot of numbers, so here are some numbers:
67% brighter, 67% higher contrast ratio, 25% more colours, “less power”.
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Federighi moves on to customisation. By default, it looks like customising toolbars on Finder or conventional Mac apps, dragging and dropping buttons.
And Touch ID offers fast user switching! This is genuinely nice: another user can switch to their own account just by scanning their own fingerprint.
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As expected, the Touch ID sensor allows you to unlock the MacBook. That’s nice.
(Also, not mentioned but visible: these laptops do have headphone jacks. No courage from Apple there, but good news if you have wired headphones).
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A deeper dive on theTouch Bar (that’s its name, btw. “Touch Bar”): it’s a retina display, with multi-touch input.
By default, it shows the same versions of the buttons at the top of the laptops already, like volume, playback and window management. But it can also take application-specific interfaces: Schiller shows off Safari (favourites, access to the URL bar), Photos (editing tools) and Pages (autocomplete).
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Open up the laptop, and see what’s inside:
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“This is the new MacBook Pro, and it looks absolutely incredible.” Cook hands over to Phil Schiller.
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“The Mac is so incredibly important to us,” says Cook. “This week happens to be a huge week in the history of the Mac, and the history of Apple.” Why? It’s the 25th anniversary of Apple’s first laptop, the Powerbook.
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Now for the main event: the Mac.
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Cook’s back. The TV app is launching by the end of this year. Not mentioned on stage: international availability. The Apple TV has had diminished support outside the US, and that shows no signs of reversing yet.
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One last feature from Folds: the Apple TV, and Siri, can now pull you straight in to live TV. “Watch CBS News” brings you out to CBS News – understandably – while “Watch the Louisville game” will automatically take you in to the right app to show you a live game of American Football. Presumably the Apple TV supports sports other than American Football too.
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The TV app isn’t just on the Apple TV, Folds says. It’s also available for iPhones and iPads, creating a central clearinghouse on those devices too. So we all watch a quick clip of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. To be fair, it is a very good sitcom.
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Cook introduces Jen Folds, a senior designer on the Apple TV to demo the TV app.
The app looks very similar to the iTunes store on the Apple TV, but rather than pulling in content to rent and buy, it instead sources the content from other apps already installed on the Apple TV.
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Cook’s back, with the first major announcement of the day: a “unified TV experience” for the Apple TV.
“That’s one place to access all of your TV shows and movies; one place to discover great new content to watch,” he says.
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Cook introduces Brian Troy, from Twitter, to discuss the service’s Apple TV app. This is somewhat awkward, since Twitter literally just announced it is closing its most famous video product, Vine, but Troy digs into showing off the great experience of watching NFL games on the Apple TV. It looks pretty good, if you want to watch NFL games.
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On to the actual announcements, and we’re starting small with the Apple TV.
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Tim Cook opens the event, with some back-patting about the iPhone 7. It takes “incredible photos”, he says. Then he does some back-patting about iOS 10, and the Memories feature in that update. Over 60% of iPhone users are updated, he says, which is impressive, but come on Tim, we’re here for new products, not the ones you already released.
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It looks like the new MacBook Pros might not be the biggest announcement of this Thursday in the tech world. On the other side of the US, Twitter has announced that it will be closing Vine. Pour one out for your favourite six-second video.
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Apple’s event begins at 6pm UK time (10am Pacific/1pm Eastern/4am AEDT), and thanks to some fairly wide-ranging leaks, we have a good idea of what to expect.
Leading the event is expected to be an update to its MacBook Pro range of laptops, which has not seen any changes for more than 500 days. After Apple included a few tell-tale images in the latest version of macOS, we know the new computers are almost certainly going to feature a slender touchscreen replacing the function keys, as well as a fingerprint sensor to enable touchID on the devices.
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