A month on from the iPhone 7 launch, Apple invited the press back to see the future of the Mac.
Tim Cook started the show with an amazing video showcasing Apple’s product accessibility and how their products are built with accessibility in mind. It’s one of those inspirational videos that our friends at Redmond can’t do.
Next up, we had an update to Apple TV.
Apple announced a new app simply called ‘TV’. The new TV app is a unified front end for tv and movie content that smacks of the answer to tv that Steve Jobs talked about all those years go. This execution though has been deployed over iOS and seems to use iCloud syncing to use it over your iPad and iPhone (where it seems to replace the ‘videos’ app). The TV app is coming out in the US by the end of the year.
Apple next talked about the Mac and how much they love it. The 27th of October actually marked the 25th anniversary of Apple’s first notebook.
The new MacBook Pro comes in the regular two sizes, the regular 13 and 15 inches and comes in silver and a space grey.
The whole laptop is metal (including the hinge) and both are thinner and lighter than the previous generation they replace.
The new force touch trackpad is twice the size of the out going trackpad and the new keyboard has been optimised to be better than that of the one in the current super thin MacBook.
The stand out feature though, is the Touch Bar. A Retina display that sits where the function keys used to reside. This display becomes a totally responsive key set that change depending on the app you’re using. The Touch Bar also comes with a sapphire power button with a built in second gen Touch ID sensor. Said Touch ID sensor not only allows you to use Apple Pay, but also for multiple users and fast use switching.
In the demo delivered on the day, you get real idea of the speed and efficiency that the Touch bar can add in to everyday usability. You can also customise the tools that you get on the Touch Bar, just like the finder button customisation.
The new MacBook Pro is between 57% and 130% faster than than the previous generation. The 15 inch comes with quad core i7 processors and the 13 comes with i5 dual cores.
Here’s the thing, there’s no USB 2 ports, they are al thunderbolt 3, which is effectively UBS 3C. The new ports mean that the 15 inch MacBook Pro can run two of the new 5K LG displays at once as well as the internal Retina display.
The first example of the Pro being used for ‘Pro’ things was using a new version of Final Cut Pro which is starting to look more and more like software that should just sit up and kill iMovie. The second example was with Photoshop. The demo from Adobe was well thought out, as they were showing that one hand can be used for the trackpad and the other for the Touch Bar. This two handed workflow will take a little while to get used to, but given how few people I know that actually use keyboard commands in photoshop, I can see them using this more and faster.
The last demo was with Djay Pro. This was really impressive. Just using the Touch Bar as a customised control, work that would be done on a dedicate device can be done inside the Mac. It was with this demo that it became clear that the Touch Bar truly is Multitouch, finally coming to the Mac.
After the obligatory CGI Jonny I’ve video, we got to find out there’s a 13 inch MacBook Pro with physical function keys and is smaller than the 13 inch MacBook Air and it weight the same too.
The three MacBook Pros start from £1449 and go to £2699 in the base configurations and are available to order today.
I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one and figuring out just what adapters I’ll need for when I buy one!
