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Apple MacBook

Apple unveiled a serial of notebook refreshes and changes to its overall portable lineup Thursday. Offset, the 2012-era non-Retina MacBook Pro — the simply non-Retina Pro left in Apple tree's entire product lineup — has quietly shuffled off the mortal coil, killed without fanfare or fifty-fifty an announcement. Apple tree didn't announce a new MacBook Air, or cut the price on the existing model, but at least it updated the underlying hardware stack in 2015.

Buyers who are looking for a MacBook Pro at a cost that won't interruption the bank take the option to purchase a 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2015 with CPU options ranging from 2.9GHz to 3.1GHz, 8GB of RAM, up to a 1TB SSD, and Intel Iris 6100 Graphics. This arrangement starts at $1,299. On the other hand, the three new xiii-inch MacBook Pros range from $1,499 to $one,999.

Starting time, the $one,499 organization, which lacks Apple'south new Touch Bar. It's rather interesting to compare its pros and cons against the $1,299 arrangement. Y'all tin can view the blow-by-blow here, but we'll summarize. The older, $i,299 MacBook Pro has a much faster CPU (ii.7-2.9GHz versus ii.0-2.4GHz), weighs roughly one-half a pound more (3.48 lbs versus three.02lbs), and has a less-advanced display. While both machines offer 2560×1600 panels, the erstwhile MacBook Pro has a maximum brightness of 300nits with an SRGB color gamut. The new, $ane,499 MacBook Pro has a maximum effulgence of 500 nits and a wide color (P3) color gamut. Advantage to the newer MacBook Pro on that score.

Where the older system shines is connectivity. The $i,299 system has two USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt 2 ports, an SD card slot for photographers, the highly praised MagSafe power port, and an HDMI port. The new MacBook Pro at $1,499 has two Thunderbolt 3 ports that support USB-C — and that'due south all. It also supports Bluetooth four.two where the older organisation is limited to Bluetooth 4.0, only if you care virtually port availability and don't desire to carry a dongle or USB hub, the $1,299 MacBook Pro is the ameliorate fit.

Apple as well launched new MacBook Pros with its Touch Bar and Impact ID applied science. Apple normally showcases its thirteen-inch and 15-inch systems on different web pages; we've edited screenshots to compare the unabridged lineup of new products, shown below:

Macbooks1

Click to enlarge

It'south interesting to see Apple putting such a premium on fifteen-inch technology — either those systems really don't sell well, or laptop users take come to bask squinting at tiny screens.

15-inch MacBook Pros feature AMD Polaris GPUs

Apple may accept invested in edifice a new smartphone and tablet GPU for itself, but it's never cared much about gaming performance on its laptops and desktops, and these new systems are a perfect example its lackluster attitude. The good news, for AMD anyway, is that it scored design wins in both of the 15-inch MacBook Pros. The bad news is that the GPUs in these systems are ludicrously underpowered compared with what you lot tin buy for the aforementioned amount of money in the PC space. There are PC laptops available for $2,000 that weigh 4 lbs (equivalent to the new MacBook Pro 15-inch) and offer a GTX 1060.

The GPU inside the new MacBook Pro is either a Radeon Pro 450 or 455 by default (buyers take the selection to upgrade to the Radeon Pro 460 for an extra $100-$200 depending on which model you choose equally a starting point). The Radeon Pro 460 is a full implementation of the RX 460 we've seen on the desktop, with ane,024 GPU cores (the RX 460 packs 896) and 4GB of RAM. Memory performance is down sharply in these laptop models, to 80GB/due south equally compared to 112GB/s for the desktop card. The Pro 455 has 768 GPU cores (85% of the desktop RX 460) while the Radeon Pro 450 has just 640 cores. These concluding 2 GPUs are also limited to a 2GB frame buffer.

I assume that these cards are at to the lowest degree as fast as the integrated graphics shipping in the lower-price MacBook 13-inch systems, if not faster. But I tin can't recommend anyone who cares about gaming actually buy i. It's ludicrous to imagine anyone paying $ii,400 for a weaker variant of the RX 460, and Apple has imposed a huge surcharge on 15-inch systems that didn't previously exist.

If yous're going to buy a Mac and you care about gaming, these 15-inch models probably offer "better than zilch" functioning, but exist aware that you're paying a huge premium for a significantly worse solution compared with what's available on the PC side of things. These systems are being marketed towards content creation, non for gaming. As a result, nosotros'd take to meet benchmarks of content creation software to determine how well they compare with Intel and Nvidia solutions, and third-political party reviews aren't available yet.

No update for the iMac or Mac Pro

Earlier this twelvemonth, pundits criticized Apple for its lackluster update schedule. This is clear with the iMac and fifty-fifty more so with the Mac Pro, which hasn't been updated since it launched about 3.five years ago. There was some speculation that the company might announce a new Mac Pro this year, but that'south apparently been dashed. Every bit nosotros discussed earlier this year, the Mac Pro's Ivy Bridge CPU is still as fast (in terms of MHz) as the current Intel Xeons that Intel is aircraft, though it does lack certain features like back up for AVX2 or Intel'southward TSX extensions. Its dual GPUs are both based on older 28nm tech from AMD, with GCN 1.0 feature support. The product line is due for an overhaul, and the lack of attention from Apple tree suggests the company either intends to abide its fourth dimension and update only when a newer flake like Kaby Lake is available in Xeon flavors, or that it could discontinue the segment altogether.

Now read: Best laptops for engineers and technology students: When work requires a existent workstation