INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
New MacBook Pros seemed like a no-brainer for WWDC
Like the rest of the company hardware line, however, they were a no-show
Sure, Apple used the opportunity to reaffirm its comment to creative professionals — perhaps most notably in the form of some key macOS
updates — but there were no new devices available to take advantage of those new features
The company is addressing that today with its first major hardware release since its big developer conference
Like Mojave, updates to the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bars find the company tipping its hats to creative pros, a key
demo long understood to be the core to Apple user base
Nothing has changed on the outside
The new Pros are indistinguishable from last year model.As is the case with a majority of updates to the line, all of the really important
stuff is happening inside
And these are, indeed, formidable machines
You get a six-core Intel Core i7 or i9 on the bigger machine, backed with up to 4TB of storage and up to 32GB of memory — the latter of
which required the company to upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4 memory.
That move means a hit to battery life, so the company boosted the
battery by an additional 7.7 watt hours
For most users that should mean around the same battery life they would have gotten with the last generation
The 13-inch with Touch Bar gets a similar treatment, bumping up to a quad-core i5 or i7 and up to 2TB of SSD storage
Apple says it still committed to the version without the Touch Bar, but it going to have to sit out this round of updates, for the time
In case there was any doubt who Apple might be going after with these new models, the company introduced us tech writers to a number of
creative pros, whose work runs the gamut from micro neurology (UCSF professor Saul Katoto) to performance art (Aaron Axelrod) to gigapixel
If nothing else, it a reminder of just how many fields the admittedly generic &creative professional& tag touches — and why it such an
important market, both in terms of cache and reach.
It a drop in the bucket compared to the overall PC market (around 15 percent by the
company estimates), but these people are influencers, a title that extends beyond just their output
For every prominent EDM producer (Oak Felder) or music video director (Carlos Perez), there are countless budding artists looking for the
right tools for the trade.
Apple had the category on virtual lock for decades, but recent years left some wondering whether the company had
begun to take those users for granted
Between simplistic updates to popular platforms like Final Cut and the aimlessness of the Mac Pro line signaled to some devotees that the
company had perhaps become complacent, opening up a potential vacuum that Microsoft was more than happy to attempt to fill with its Surface
Last year, however, the company took a stand
In April, it offered a rare peek behind its infamously impenetrable curtain, with a refreshing candid conversation about the Mac Pro line
The company offered an uncharacteristic apology for pausing production to &completely rethin[k]& the desktop, according to Phil Schiller
In its stead, the company announced the iMac Pro, a &love letter to developers,& in the words of our video producer, Veanne, who was
understandably bummed to return our review unit
The all-in-one was less of a consolatory gesture than it initially appeared
It was a truly formidable powerhouse in a familiar form factor
And while the company continued fiddling with the aforementioned Mac Pro reset button, it remained the sole representative of Apple new
The new MacBook Pros are intended to be the next piece in that puzzle, inheriting a number of features that debuted in that space-gray
iMac.
Chief among them is the T2 — a proprietary chip designed to supplement some of the heavy lifting done by Intel silicon
The list of jobs managed by the chip is a pretty long one, including everything from audio systems and disk drives to improved tone mapping
and face detection in FaceTime
There an important security element on here, as well
From Apple press material:
T2 also makes iMac Pro even more secure, thanks to a Secure Enclave coprocessor that provides the foundation for
new encrypted storage and secure boot capabilities
The data on your SSD is encrypted using dedicated AES hardware with no effect on the SSD performance, while keeping the Intel Xeon processor
free for your compute tasks
And secure boot ensures that the lowest levels of software aren&t tampered with and that only operating system software trusted by Apple
loads at startup.
Interestingly, Apple putting it to even more use here, enabling &hey Siri& on macOS for the first time
It an optional addition that you can enable during the setup process, but once it on, it will work like any Siri-enabled device, working in
tandem with the iPhone and HomePod and giving preference to the microphone in closest proximity
It similar to desktop implementations of assistants like Cortana and the Pixelbook use of Google Assistant.
True Tone, meanwhile, was
borrowed from another source entirely
That one debuted on the iPad back in 2016, bringing with it an automatic temperature adjustment, based on ambient surroundings
Given how aggressively the company has gone after photo and video editors, it honestly a bit surprising that the company didn&t embrace the
technology earlier for the desktop
It one of those features that doesn&t seem particularly important until you use it
Once you&ve got it, however, you wonder how you managed to go so long without it
Really though, it those performance boosts that Apple small army of creative pros kept touting over and over at this week event
The phrase &cuts the time in half& was the most common phrase bandied about, whether it was the trio of developers (Leah Culver, Akshaya
Dinesh and John Ciocca), running simulations of iOS apps or University of Utah Assistant Professor Janet Iwasa rendering complex animated
representations of molecular biology
For Apple, all of this is designed to make a broader point that such complex tasks no longer require that a professional be tethered to a
Over the past decade, smartphones have liberated a number of tasks (the question of how they&ve simultaneously tethered us is one for
another day), so it only makes sense that we&d ask similar things of our PCs
Of course, for a number of pros, the laptop still won&t replace the processing power of a high-end workstation, but the leaps it made in
portable computing over the past several generations is certainly impressive, and the new MacBook Pros are nothing if not formidable
machines.
Their ability to support two 5K displays and an external GPU through Thunderbolt 3, meanwhile, delivers the promise of
Many of the aforementioned creative types praised the ability to plug and play into a desktop for all of the heavy lifting and tossing the
system in a backpack to have it by their side when inspiration strikes
It all part of a difficult balance for Apple
A majority of users will never edit 4K feature films or develop VR games
For most of us, the truly high-end upgrades will have little impact on our day-to-day use
Though the addition of Siri functionality and that newer, quieter keyboard are certainly welcome
Catering to pros, meanwhile, is the sort of thing that pays off in spades down the road, much like Apple longstanding education play
The company was seen as taking its eye off the ball and allowed the competition to usurp some of that ownership
With the iMac and MacBook Pros, coupled with those upcoming macOS updates, the company is making it clear that the category is still a key
to Apple future.
The 13- and 15-inch models go on sale today, starting at $1,799 and $2,399, respectively.
