Some good news for power users ahead of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next month: the company has just updated its 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, completing the 2015 MacBook refresh it began with the new MacBook Air, 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and the MacBook.
The 15-inch Pros include some upgrades that other MacBooks have gotten this yearfaster PCI Express storage enabled by increasing the number of PCIe lanes used from two to four and the Force Touch trackpad are chief among them. The discrete graphics option on the high-end £1,999 version of the laptop has also been upgraded, from an Nvidia GeForce GT 750M to an AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB of DDR5 RAM. The entry-level £1,599 version still comes with Intel's Iris integrated graphics.
Visually, the MacBook Pro looks much like the 2012 and 2013 models. The one noticeable physical difference is its Force Touch trackpad, also included in the 13-inch Pro and the new MacBook. These pressure-sensitive trackpads use haptic feedback to simulate the feel of a standard clicky trackpad, but they don't need as much physical space to move. The trackpad's inclusion in the MacBook is obviously necessary because of how thin the device is, but its presence in the new Pros is probably intended to encourage developers to adopt Force Touch APIs in their software.
Oddly, Apple gives us no specific information about what specific Intel CPUs and GPUs the new Pro is using, beyond the fact that they're quad-core Core i7s. Though Intel hasn't yet officially announced the higher-end quad-core Broadwell processor models with the Iris Pro 6200 GPU, those chips were slated for introduction mid-year and we'd expect them to be included here. One of our biggest complaints about the 2013 Retina MacBook Pro was that the Iris Pro 5200 integrated GPU wasn't quite as fast as the dedicated GPU in the 2012 model. If the Iris 6200 is included, we hope that it can surpass the graphics performance of both models.
Update: Apple tells us that Intel's Broadwell CPUs and GPUs are not included in the new MacBook Pros, which means that we're still looking at Haswell-based CPUs and Intel Iris Pro 5200 GPUs. That CPU and GPU performance in the base model isn't improving after a year-and-a-half is disappointing, especially given that the quad-core Broadwell launch is supposedly happening soon.
The £1,599 base model includes a 2.2GHz (3.4GHz Turbo) quad-core Core i7, a 256GB PCIe SSD, and 16GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM. The £1,999 version includes a 2.5GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) quad-core Core i7 with a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM, as well as the aforementioned dedicated graphics solution. 2.8GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) Core i7s are available as upgrade options for both models (£230 for the entry-level model, £150 in the high-end model), as are 1TB SSDs (a wallet-busting £640 in the low-end model, £400 in the high-end model).
Both models boast up to nine hours of battery life, slightly lower than the 10 hours promised by the 13-inch models but higher than the estimate for the 2013 modelsa slightly larger 99.5WHr battery, up from 95WHr, is responsible for at least some of that increase. Both models include the same 15-inch 2880×1800 display as previous-generation models, as well as their roughly 4.5 pound weight. Two Thunderbolt 2 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, an SD card slot, a full-size HDMI port, and a MagSafe 2 connector round out the laptop's physical ports, while 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 continue to handle wireless communications.
As of this writing, the base model is available to ship in one business day and will be available to pick up in stores tomorrow; the upgraded model will be available to ship in 1-3 business days. We'll be giving the new hardware the full review treatment in the coming days.
Bring back the 17"
