Apple releases long-rumoured 16-inch MacBook Pro - with much-criticised 'butterfly keyboard' replaced
Both new MacBook Pro models fully specced out will cost £5,769
Apple has announced a new 16-inch MacBook Pro laptop, which will replace its current 15-inch model. Furthermore, with the new MacBook, the company has replaced the unreliable ‘butterfly' keyboards, which have vexed customers since they were introduced in 2015, with what it has called new ‘Magic Keyboards'.
The company claims that the laptop is "designed for developers, photographers, film-makers, scientists [and] music producers". The Magic Keyboards, it adds, provide "a redesigned scissor mechanism and one-milimetre travel", which it claims will enable "comfortable, satisfying and quiet typing".
Other elements of the two 16-inch laptops' specification include eight-core Intel processors, a six-speaker sound system, up to 64GB of memory and 8GB of dedicated video RAM.
Designed for developers, photographers, film-makers, scientists [and] music producers
They also feature a new thermal design to better handle heat generated by the microprocessor and GPU. This, the company claims, enable the devices to run at full power for longer before throttling.
Indeed, throttling of ostensibly powerful processors in high-end laptops has become a common complaint because of the challenge of dissipating heat generated by both CPU and GPU in ever-slimmer devices.
The new MacBook Pro ships with Intel's 9th-generation Core processors - either a six-core 2.6GHz i7 CPU or an eight-core 2.3GHz i9 chip. Both of these can be paired with up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM and up to 8TB of PCIe-based onboard storage - both at a price, of course.
The graphics grunt is provided by AMD in the form of either the Radeon Pro 5300M or Radeon Pro 5500M. These 7nm parts support 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 memory, respectively, and run at up to either 1250MHZ or 1300MHz, depending on the part, offering either 20 or 24 compute units of GPU power. Both parts consume around 50 watts (TGP or ‘total graphics power').
Battery life has been upgraded too, with the MacBook Pro's new 100W battery delivering up to 11-hours of power, up from 10-hours on the 15-inch model. There's also a new USB-C charger which Apple claims can recharge the notebooks' batteries to full in two-and-a-half hours.
The price, though, weighs in at £2,399 and £2,799 for each of the two base models, with upgrades to memory and storage on top potentially taking the price up to £5,769 for both models.