Hardware,  News

Apple Introduces 15-inch MacBook Pro with Force Touch Trackpad & New $1,999/£1,599 iMac with Retina 5K Display 

Apple today updated the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display with the new Force Touch trackpad, faster flash storage, longer battery life and faster discrete graphics, delivering even more performance and capabilities to the MacBook Pro line. Apple also today introduced a new $1,999/£1,599 configuration of the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display featuring a breathtaking 14.7 million pixel display, quad-core processors and AMD graphics, and lowered the price of the top-end iMac with Retina 5K display to $1,999/£1,849.

“The response to the new MacBook and updated 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display has been amazing, and 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,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Customers love the groundbreaking iMac with Retina 5K display, and now with a new lower starting price, even more people can experience the best desktop we’ve ever made.”

 

The updated 15-inch MacBook Pro features the amazing Force Touch trackpad that brings a new dimension of interactivity to the Mac. With built-in force sensors and a Taptic Engine that delivers haptic feedback, the Force Touch trackpad allows you to click anywhere with a uniform feel and customise the amount of pressure needed to register each click. The new trackpad supports a range of new gestures, including the new Force click, and APIs are available for third-party developers to incorporate Force Touch capabilities into their apps. The updated 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display also features up to 2.5 times faster flash storage than the previous generation, with throughput up to 2GBps, and offers an additional hour of battery life, with up to 9 hours of wireless web browsing and up to 9 hours of iTunes movie playback.* In addition, MacBook Pro with Retina display discrete graphics deliver up to 80 percent faster performance using new AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics for editing video in Final Cut Pro X, rendering 3D images in pro graphics apps or playing high-resolution games.**

With a resolution of 5120 x 2880, the new $1,999/£1,599 iMac with Retina 5K display has 67 percent more pixels than a 4K display, and features a 3.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost Speeds up to 3.7 GHz and AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics. The new iMac also includes 8GB of memory and 1TB of storage, as well as four USB 3.0 ports and two Thunderbolt 2 ports that deliver up to 20Gbps each, twice the bandwidth of the previous generation. The top-end iMac with Retina 5K display now starts at £1,849 and features a 3.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics and a 1TB Fusion Drive. 

Every new Mac comes with OS X Yosemite, the world’s most advanced desktop operating system, redesigned and refined with a fresh, modern look, powerful new apps, and Continuity features that make working across your Mac and iOS devices more fluid than ever.

Photos, iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork come free with every new Mac. Photos for OS X keeps your growing photo and video collection automatically organised, easy to navigate and accessible across all of your compatible Apple devices using iCloud Photo Library. iMovie lets you easily create beautiful movies, and you can use GarageBand to make new music or learn to play piano or guitar. The iWork suite of Pages, Numbers and Keynote makes it easy to create, edit and share stunning documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Pages, Numbers and Keynote for iCloud let you create a document on iPhone or iPad, edit it on your Mac and collaborate with friends, even if they are on a PC.

Pricing & Availability

The updated 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display is available today through the Apple Online Store, Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorised Resellers with a 2.2 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.4 GHz, 16GB of memory, 256GB of flash storage and Intel Iris Pro graphics starting at $1,999/£1,599; and with a 2.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.7 GHz, 16GB of memory, 512GB of flash storage and AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics starting at £1,999. Configure-to-order options include faster quad-core Intel Core i7 processors up to 2.8 GHz with Turbo Boost speeds up to 4.0 GHz and flash storage up to 1TB. Additional technical specifications, configure-to-order options and accessories are available online at www.apple.com/uk/macbook-pro.

The new 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display is available today through the Apple Online Store, Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorised Resellers with a 3.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost Speeds up to 3.7 GHz, AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics and 1TB of storage starting at $1,999/£1,599. The top-end iMac now starts at $1,999/£1,849 and features a 3.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics and a 1TB Fusion Drive. Configure-to-order options include faster quad-core Intel Core i7 processors up to 4.0 GHz with Turbo Boost speeds up to 4.4 GHz and flash storage up to 1TB. Additional technical specifications, configure-to-order options and accessories are available online at www.apple.com/uk/imac.

*The Wireless Web protocol testing was conducted by Apple in May 2015 using preproduction MacBook Pro with Retina display configurations. Battery life and charge cycles vary by use and settings.

**Testing conducted by Apple in May 2015 using preproduction MacBook Pro with Retina display configurations.

Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: joanne@theappwhisperer.com