The launch comes as small business with under $2M in revenues are being urged to “splash the cash” on new PC’s.
Normally Apple announces new models at their World Wide Developers Conference in June.
This morning the company announced new additions to its Mac line-up, most notably a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The new MacBook Pro features the Force Touch trackpad, two-times-faster flash storage, an additional hour of battery life, and altogether faster-stronger-better discrete graphics. When Apple introduced Force Touch to its 12- and 13-inch MacBook’s, the 15-inch went unmentioned-but now Apple is playing catch-up and adding the feature to the 15-inch version as well.
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There’s also a new, 27-inch iMac desktop with a Retina 5K display. That display will house 14.7 million pixels, to be clear. (It will be clear.) This is the new entry-level 5K iMac which Apple says “lowers the price of the top-end iMac with Retina 5K”
The new 5K iMac houses a 3.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of memory, and 1TB of storage-and includes four USB 3.0 ports and two Thunderbolt 2 ports.
Apple has also packed in one tiny, last, little surprise: a lightning dock for the iPhone. This marks the first time since the lightning connector’s release that Apple’s introduced its own dock for charging your iPhone. Everything post-iPhone 5 will work with it.
Building on the recent introduction of the reworked 13-inch MacBook Pro and all new MacBook, the refreshed 15-inch model has adopted the four-sensor based Force Touch pad, which offers more tactile feedback to users.
Utilising the same Taptic Engine found within the Apple Watch, the Mac’s Force Touch trackpad delivers haptic feedback and can better determine between hard and soft presses to attribute different tasks to different forces.
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These Force Touch capabilities have even been opened up to developers through a range of APIs.
More than a trackpad refresh, the new MacBook Pro adds flash storage units 2.5x quicker than those in previous models, and offers an additional hour of battery life between charges. This update brings the computer’s staying power up to 9 hours.
Further updates include AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics which promise performance improvements up to 80 per cent and the latest iteration of the company’s OS X Yosemite operating system.
“The response to the new MacBook and updated 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display has been amazing,” Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller said.
He added: “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.”
David Richards has been writing about technology for more than 30 years. A former Fleet Street journalist, he wrote the Award Winning Series on the Federated Ships Painters + Dockers Union for the Bulletin that led to a Royal Commission. He is also a Logie Winner for Outstanding Contribution To TV Journalism with a story called The Werribee Affair. In 1997, he built the largest Australian technology media company and prior to that the third largest PR company that became the foundation company for Ogilvy PR. Today he writes about technology and the impact on both business and consumers.
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