Apple refreshes MacBook Pro family

Apple has refreshed its MacBook Pro with Touch Bar range of laptops, offering increased specifications - but in doing so has finally retired the last of its Pro range to have the traditional keyboard and additional ports.

Announced late yesterday, Apple's refresh sees the MacBook Pro range upgraded to feature Intel's 8th-generation Coffee Lake family of processors, up to 32GB of RAM, and up to 4TB of storage. The devices also include a new keyboard design which the company has described as 'quieter' while not explicitly stating if it has fully resolved the design flaw that has led to an out-of-warranty replacement service after three years of continued customer complaints.

'The latest generation MacBook Pro is the fastest and most powerful notebook we've ever made,' crows Apple's Philip Schiller of the launch. 'Now with 8th-generation six-core processors, up to 32GB of system memory, up to 4TB of super fast SSD storage, new True Tone technology in its Retina display and Touch Bar, the Apple T2 chip for enhanced security, and a third-generation quieter keyboard packed into its thin and light aluminium design with all-day battery life, it's the best notebook for pro users.'

All these new features - including the new True Tone display, which offers 500 nit peak brightness and support for the P3 colour gamut, and the T2 chip borrowed from the iMac Pro to offer improved security and always-on 'Hey Siri' activation - come at a cost to the range, though: The retirement of the 2015 MacBook Pro, which the company had until now been selling alongside its newer equivalents, which was the last version to feature legacy ports like HDMI and USB Type A along with the older scissor-switch keyboard mechanism which has proven more reliable than its 'butterfly' replacement.

The 15" MacBook Pro now offers a choice of up to six-core Intel Core i9 processor with AMD Radeon Pro discrete graphics, up to 32GB of DDR4 memory and 4TB of SSD storage; the smaller 13" model offers up to a quad-core Core i7 processor with Iris Plus 655 integrated graphics and 128MB of embedded DRAM (eDRAM), up to 16GB of memory and 2TB of SSD storage. Pricing starts at £2,349 for the 15" and £1,249 for the 13" respectively (inc. VAT), with more information available on the official product page.