
Apple Releases new MacBook Pros with Force Touch Trackpad - globuous
http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
======
SandB0x
For anyone else who was confused by this, it's a bump on the 15" Macbook Pro.
The 13" model was updated at the same time as the Macbook launch.

------
jdavid
I'm a little disappointed Apple, the new MBP doesn't have a top of the line
graphics card, and it's still stuck to 16GB of ram. This is hardly a pro
option.

I wonder if I need a #hackentosh if I want 32GB of RAM, and an nVidia 950M or
better.

~~~
outworlder
Do you really need >16GB to be considered 'pro' these days?

You can have 64GB on a MacPro. Hope that's 'pro' enough.

~~~
chiph
I run several VMs at once on mine, and 16gb is constraining. Put me in the
"the Pro is no longer so Pro" camp.

~~~
eropple
I regularly have six to eight virtual machines in flight at any given time and
never feel constrained. Are you sizing them appropriately for their tasks?

------
whisdol
Did the Macbook Pros just get a whole lot more expensive in Europe (or
specifically Germany?)? I don't remember the 15" MBP with a discrete graphics
card being 2800€. Or have they adjusted their prices to the weak Euro a while
back?

~~~
myth_buster
I would think the latter [0] if you are seeing around 20% appreciation in
price.

0:
[http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=2Y](http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=2Y)

------
ejbs
Interesting that they're shifting towards AMD GPUs. Was actually hoping for a
major update of the MBPR with the availability of NVIDIA's new maxwell
architecture and broadwell based quad cores.

Anyone knows why AMD? Is it a margin/profitibility or performance thing?

~~~
jackmaney
The shift towards AMD GPUs actually makes me very, very wary of getting any
new Mac hardware for a while. Every time I've tried an AMD/Radeon GPU in a PC,
it's done nothing but crash over and over and over again (even after several
returns).

I don't ever want an AMD/Radeon GPU in any system I own ever again. Intel and
NVidia GPUs just work.

~~~
STRML
I own a 2014 MBPr with the Nvidia chip and I'm thinking the AMD chip would be
a big improvement. I see major visual artifacts whenever the GPU switches, it
locks up frequently, and external monitors rarely work. Maybe a bad chip,
actually, but it works fine in Windows.

~~~
kalleboo
There's an extended warranty repair program for video issues
[https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-
videoissues/](https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/)

~~~
STRML
Unfortunately, even though my MBPr exhibits exactly those issues, it is a Late
2013 model so it doesn't qualify.

------
comex
Presumably this means there won't be a major refresh to the 15" model
announced at WWDC and available immediately or shortly, something Apple likes
to do. I guess this is no surprise due to the lack of high-end Broadwell...
Personally, I'm still hoping for a slightly higher resolution screen
eventually.

~~~
laichzeit0
I think they're waiting for Skylake. Wireless charging, 4K/5K external
displays at 60hz, better battery, etc.

Skylake is the "major refresh" everyone that knows anything is waiting for.

~~~
sosuke
Any good single source you'd recommend to encapsulate all that makes Skylake
the obvious next hardware upgrade to the MBP line? I've been waiting for the
right time to upgrade and I'd love something to read about the future. This is
the first I've seen it mentioned.

~~~
laichzeit0
Sorry I don't know of a single source. The Wikipedia page for Skylake is a
good start, as well as the section for Thunderbolt 3.0. You'll get a good
sense of what capabilities this is going to unlock.

------
rockymeza
I was hoping they would come out with a USB-C port.

~~~
mcmillion
This was a minor bump, I'm holding out for something bigger once Skylake is
ready. Hopefully that will include USB-C.

~~~
melling
New standards take time to gain traction. Apple putting at least one USB-C on
each "new" device would go a long way towards helping USB-C gain adoption.

~~~
jimmcslim
I think they should have 'burned the boats' and gone all in with USB-C on
everything they have updated so far (I.e. MBP 13/15, iMac). Throw a solitary
adapter in the box, charge a nice Apple margin on additional ones.

------
icpmacdo
New graphics card also? It says AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB GDDR5 memory on
the page

Edit: I think it was an Nvidia 750 before

~~~
bryanlarsen
That's basically the same graphics card. AMD recently did an "OEM refresh",
which didn't do much more than put new numbers on the old cards. They fiddled
with frequencies, but they're basically the same old cards. Manufacturers
demand this, and unlike Intel & nVidia, AMD doesn't have the clout to say no
to stupid requests like this.

Significantly, they didn't refresh their retail range of cards, so there is
still some hope that AMD has a significant refresh coming soon; AMD still
doesn't have an answer for nVidia Maxwell, which was first released over a
year ago.

~~~
Robadob
Pretty sure NVIDIA has done the same on occasion, for example the 800m GTX
series, doesn't have an 800 GTX desktop counterpart. Many of the 800m cards
used the same chips as 700m series, just with small changes. Apparently they
were originally planning on releasing Maxwell as 800 series, but due to Laptop
manufacturer pressure ended up deferring it after releasing Kepler 800m cards.

------
emptybits
Apple claims 12.5% longer life (from 8 to 9 hours) with only a 4.7% larger
battery (95 Wh to 99.5 Wh), and without moving to Broadwell processors like in
the 13" rMBP which we know are a big part of its battery life improvement.

So is this 15" rMBP battery life improvement software-driven or new hardware
throttling or just wishful thinking? The video card and SSD have changed, but
doesn't a full hour of battery life improvement seem optimistic? I guess
reviews will expose the truth soon enough...

~~~
cerberusss
"Rather than 4.7% more capacity being responsible for a 12.5% increase in
stated battery life, efficiency gains in the tested OS and software also
likely contributed, since last year’s test was with Mavericks and an older
version of Safari. Fortunately, those efficiency gains benefit old Macs, too."

Source: [http://www.marco.org/2015/05/19/mistake-
one](http://www.marco.org/2015/05/19/mistake-one) (footnote2, at the bottom of
the page)

------
Alex3917
From Appleinsider:

"Notably, the chips are not Intel's latest-generation 'Broadwell' processors,
which remain unavailable in quad-core configurations. As a result, Apple is
still utilizing the previous-generation 'Haswell' architecture, albeit at
faster speeds."

~~~
dombili
Faster speeds? It's the same:

New rMBP: [http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-
retina/](http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/)

Old rMBP:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150424183842/http://www.apple....](https://web.archive.org/web/20150424183842/http://www.apple.com/macbook-
pro/specs-retina/)

~~~
Artemis2
Yeah, the i7-4980HQ (the most high-end option they offer) has been for more
than a year the fastest Intel processor you can find in a laptop.

[http://ark.intel.com/products/83503/Intel-Core-i7-4980HQ-
Pro...](http://ark.intel.com/products/83503/Intel-Core-i7-4980HQ-
Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz)

------
bunkydoo
Really don't like the force touch trackpad for some reason... it feels a lot
like the old macbook pro trackpad after years of use - kinda damp and spongey.
There is nothing like the 'pop' of a new Mac trackpad, but I guess those days
are over... ha.

------
radikalus
I can't be part of THAT small a minority that needs to use CUDA and/or more
than 16gigs of RAM.

From my perspective, these mbp are very little marginal benefit for
computational work than a small air. (You'll just run everything on
AWS/GCE/etc anyways)

------
marvel_boy
Newbie here. Someone that had tryed the Force Touch Trackpad could you share
impressions?

~~~
vardump
It's nice. Adjustable click sound in trackpad preferences, so no more CLICK!
at night when you use laptop near someone else. Force feedback makes it feel
like you're really pressing a button.

But nothing I couldn't live without.

~~~
mcphage
> so no more CLICK! at night when you use laptop near someone else

> But nothing I couldn't live without.

Hmm, less grumbling from the wife when I play Minecraft in bed? "It's not for
me, hon--it's for _us_."

------
amirmansour
I was really hoping to see 5th gen Intel Broadwell chips with the update. When
are they expected? Intel said mid-year, but when will Apple incorporate them
in?

------
bdcravens
I can't fathom how they can keep releasing iMac updates yet the Thunderbolt
display is four years old.

~~~
jkelsey
If they released a new external display, it would have to be retina quality.
That makes me think that Apple isn't yet confident in MacBook/MacBook Pro GPUs
to drive multiple external retina quality screens like you can do now with the
Thunderbolt displays. Maybe the top-of-the-line machines with the
Nvidia/Radeon GPUs, but it doesn't seem very Apple like for them to release a
new display with a disclaimer: only works with Nvidia/Radeon GPU equipped
Macs.

~~~
jws
Retina quality 27" displays need to wait for the next Thunderbolt or similar
speed bump. The display requires > 20Gbps to feed. That means waiting for
Intel to pop out ThunderBolt 3 with the newly announced DisplayPort 1.3 38Gbps
connection.

Too many pixels, too little time.

As far as GPU processing power, I wonder how much more GPU it takes for two
displays. I use two, but I don't do heavy updates on both at once. I suppose
you could imagine some video game wanting to use both, but for professional
work it seems mostly about real estate, peripheral awareness, and context
switching with a head turn. It probably wants more RAM for compositing, but
that seems ample already.

------
basicallydan
Force touch user here! Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, the
13 inch retina MBPR has had force touch since its release in early 2015, when
it was first announced. They have only just put them into the 15 inch, and I
imagine they left the "big announcement" until all MBPR users could get it so
they didn't waste all the novelty before it was ripe for media excitement.

There's a good list of things you can do with force touch here:
[https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204352](https://support.apple.com/en-
gb/HT204352)

Some personal opinions about force touch:

My favourite thing about it is that the trackpad is automatically more
clickable. The clickable surface area is larger than on my previous Mac (13"
Air late 2013), and since I turned off right click (opting for two-finger
click instead) I am far more causal about clicking things. This was really,
really noticeable when going back to my Air briefly while I was giving it some
TLC, and finding I couldn't use the top-left corner to click.

About the "force" aspect of it though... the sensation of pressing it down and
watching some on-screen element change in size (which is the case for the
dictionary lookup feature) is pretty fun. That's one of my favourite things to
show people. It's like watching people use an analogue stick for the first
time. At first it's confusing and hard to get the balance of, but soon you
become quite proficient with it.

Unfortunately support outside of stock OSX applications is quite limited at
the moment. The features that are supported in Safari have not yet made their
way to Chrome, and features in Quicktime (changing fast forward speed, mainly)
are not in VLC. Stuff like that. Having buttons on the screen which act
differently depending on how hard you click them could be quite powerful.

With time, however, I think we'll see developers doing more interesting things
with this. It could be quite useful in artistic applications for instance,
doing exactly what Wacom tablets (and their ilk) have been doing to simulate
the pressure of a brush or pen.

Another good use is as a replacement for right click or CTRL+click, i.e. to
open a context menu. This is how it works on the dock, and it's quite nice to
use too.

One thing I find wrong with it is that all of a sudden, holding onto a
draggable element while scrolling with two fingers (e.g., try moving a
playlist around in Spotify when you have lots of playlists) appears to not
longer be possible. This might be a software issue with whomever is
responsible for the software in question, though.

Finally, the myth that the trackpad doesn't move at all is not true. It moves
a little, and if you press hard (as one Apple store employee did when I took
it in to get looked at last week, insisting that it "wasn't force touch") it
will move down noticeably - so don't overdo it.

This, IMO, is the killer feature of the new MBPR.

------
nsxwolf
It allows 5K monitors? Does that mean it's HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.3? Both?

~~~
tammer

      Support for up to 5120 by 2160 resolution at 60Hz on a single external display (model with AMD Radeon R9 M370X only)
    

is listed under "Thunderbolt digital video output" & HDMI max output is

    
    
      Support for 4096-by-2160 resolution at 24Hz. 
    

So it must be DP 1.3?

~~~
tammer
Nope - it's two mini-DP cables

[http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/28/15-mbp-supports-
dell-5k-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/28/15-mbp-supports-
dell-5k-up2715k-display/)

------
phragg
Why do they use images for everything? That text on that landing page.. an
image?

~~~
kalleboo
Presumably they've measured latency with images and webfonts and found images
load faster. There's nothing more frustrating than a webfont that takes 10
seconds to load.

~~~
tammer
I've understood they use images mainly for typographical control across
translations.

------
rjammala
Can somebody tell me how they deal with all the heat generated by these
powerful cpus/gpus in a laptop? Do you just put it on a desk all the time?

~~~
kalleboo
Whenever my laptop is on my "lap" or in my bed at home it's actually on one of
these. This also raises it to a more ergonomic level for me.
[http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60240587/](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60240587/)

~~~
rjammala
cool. thanks.

------
spanktar
At least they didn't update the power port...again.

------
ojbyrne
They also cut the price on the iMac Retina by $200.

~~~
kylec
And there's a new lower-end retina iMac starting at $1999. That's an
impressively low price point for something with that display.

~~~
vardump
You can buy IPS 4k display for $599 or less. Not 5k, but not that far off
either.

Edit: Downvotes, seriously? Have you seen these side by side? When it comes to
resolution, at least I can't tell a difference anymore at a reasonable viewing
distance. Display tech simply good enough now.

~~~
apendleton
5k is almost double the pixel count (75%-ish more). It's pretty substantial...
also, more to the point with Apple products, I think at the 27" size, 5k is
necessary for the pixel-doubling high-DPI option to look good. At 4k,
everything looks either tiny or huge, depending on whether you have it turned
off or on.

------
herf
I tried the new Force touch at retail. Single click is perfect, and double
click...had a ton of latency. Anyone else think so?

~~~
coldpie
What in the hell is wrong with buttons? They are easy to understand and work
one hundred percent of the time. I have to use one at work, and I'll never buy
one of these crappy button-less trackpads for personal use. Click-and-drag is
a mind-melting experience.

~~~
DavideNL
Tip:

System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Mouse & Trackpad -> Trackpad options ->
Enable dragging without drag lock

i personally love it... dragging by tapping - so without needing to push or
click

------
emsy
Is anyone else here mad that Apple has time for these gimicks but can't get
their software fixed? Lion to Yosemite was a big regression and I don't mean
the UI.

~~~
lpsz
I see these "OS X is getting worse" posts from time to time but it doesn't
match my experience. Care to elaborate?

~~~
emsy
Unreliable Standby mode. Upon waking up, peripherals won't work until reboot,
the Dock is unresponsive, applications crash and more.

Overall stability. I've never had so many system freezes and crashes than with
Yosemite. It started with the upgrade progress that crashed on me and even a
fresh reinstall didn't help.

On Lion, I let my machine run for serveral weeks without any problem. Now I
have to reboot at least once a week because the kernel is working on something
that seems like bitcoin mining from the looks of the cpu load.

Rebooting shows a black screen for 2 minutes and I often thought thank god I
have a backup because my filesystem got screwed up (it didn't but apparently
that's also a problem for some people).

Applications not quitting, Dock locking up, Finder unresponsive, drives not
showing up in Diskutil.

WiFi not working or working extremely slow. This even happens when I'm
connected via cable and I turn WiFi on. Suddenly I have a really slow network
connection. The WiFi issues even occur on iOS devices (not mine, but some of
my family members)

These are not minor annoyances. This stuff keeps me from working and gives me
an extremely poor user experience. In fact it's the first time in years I'm
looking forward to a Windows release.

And of course there are some smaller things like Removing features from
applications, for example the whole scripting part of iWorks. From the
hostname, it seems like I run a few thousand Macs in my network.

~~~
lpsz
Yikes, that does sound terrible -- makes me wish you had a more positive
experience since it really _should_ all work. I wonder if it's CPU/hardware
specific?

Data point re: Wi-Fi, though: I've seen friends experience Wi-fi issues on
their Airs as of one recent update, but never have them myself on my 2011 Air
(that I use heavily for coding and graphics work.)

~~~
emsy
It might be hardware specific, because I don't experience the bootup problems
and WiFi issues on my Mac Mini.

------
moron4hire
Still no 10-point touchscreen?

~~~
shalmanese
That would require a massive UI overhaul to make every app touch friendly. Not
something that Apple is going to take on lightly.

~~~
moron4hire
Well what are they waiting for? It's not like touchscreens on laptops are
exactly a _new_ feature.

~~~
widdershins
Apple has clearly decided that the tradeoff for making a UI both touch and
mouse friendly is too great. Given the reaction people have had to Windows 8+
I'm inclined to agree with them.

~~~
WorldWideWayne
You realize that more people use Windows 8+ than OS X, right?

The reaction that I see is that all sorts of workers are now walking around
touching Windows on tablets and laptops. I've seen them in restaurants,
supermarkets, service centers, stores, in my house, in my yard.

You're thinking about the tech blog/news people's reaction to Windows 8+.
Plenty of actual people are using the product because it offers something that
no other system does - and that is a _full_ operating system with touch, not a
locked down rental unit.

~~~
dogecoinbase
_Plenty of actual people are using the product because it offers something
that no other system does_

Workers are not making those decisions -- large companies that employ them (or
consultancies employed by those companies) are doing so, probably for the same
reasons that companies have been choosing Windows for 20 years, which have
nothing to do with touchscreens.

~~~
moron4hire
I know it's difficult to believe, but people _do_ willingly choose to use
Windows.

------
emilecantin
They've been around for a few months, I type this on one...

~~~
antoinelyset
Nope :

[http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/05/19Apple-
Introduces-1...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/05/19Apple-
Introduces-15-inch-MacBook-Pro-with-Force-Touch-Trackpad-New-1-999-iMac-with-
Retina-5K-Display.html)

~~~
basicallydan
They have. This is for the 15 inch.

~~~
mikeash
The first available Force Touch trackpad shipped on the new MacBook which was
announced on March 9th and released on April 10th. Unless you have access to
Apple's prerelease testing hardware, you haven't been using a Force Touch
trackpad for a few months.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> The first available Force Touch trackpad shipped on the new MacBook which
was announced on March 9th and released on April 10th.

Wrong. It first shipped on the 13" Macbook Pro. I know because I bought one at
the start of April (before the release of the new Macbook).

~~~
mikeash
You're right. That was March 9th. Still can't be "a few months" yet.

~~~
Psyonic
[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/few?s=t](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/few?s=t)

"not many but more than one."

------
jug
Missed May the 4th by a mere two weeks? I can't believe how sloppy Apple is
getting!

------
psychometry
It's incredibly obnoxious that they tie the hard drive size to the processor.
There's no technical reason for it whatsoever. Now because I need 512GB or
more, I'm forced to spend hundreds more to buy a laptop more powerful than
what I need.

~~~
jasonellis
I don't think that's correct. You can get the base $1999 model and upgrade to
512GB for $300. Not cheap, but doesn't include the processor upgrade.

~~~
psychometry
The post is about the updated 13" models, which have non-configurable drives
in all but the priciest option:

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-
pro?product=MF839L...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-
pro?product=MF839LL/A&step=config#)

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-
pro?product=MF840L...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-
pro?product=MF840LL/A&step=config#)

------
jamestomasino
Did Apple really just enable a "smash the button" interaction? I can't wait to
see what kind of damage people start inflicting.

