Apple adds Force Touch to MacBook Pro, drops 5K iMac price

Apple has updated its 15-inch MacBook Pro range with a new specification, adding a Force Touch trackpad (first announced with its brand-new Macbook), faster flash storage and discrete graphics and a longer-lasting battery. It’s also slashed the price of its 5K iMac to just £1,599. There’s still a more highly-specified £1,849 5K iMac on offer, but both now cost less than the £1,999 original. 

The Force Touch trackpad was one of the main highlights on the new MacBook, as well as on the updated 13-inch MacBook Pro, as its built-in force sensors allowed you to customise the amount of pressure needed to register a click. It also adds a third Force Click, which performs different actions based on context; for example, it will bring up a preview when you click a link in Safari. The expansion of Four Touch suggests it might be long before we see it being integrated into the rest of Apple’s MacBook line-up. 

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Apple’s also added faster flash storage to the 15-inch MacBook Pro that’s up to 2.5x quicker than the previous generation, with a throughput of up to 2.5GBps. As a result, Apple says this will prolong the MacBook Pro’s battery life by another hour, providing up to 9 hours of surfing the web or 9 hours of video playback. As for the 15-inch Macbook’s new graphics options, Apple’s added the 2GB AMD Radeon R9 M370X chip, which sits alongside the existing Intel Iris Pro Graphics chipset. The new 15in MacBook Pros cost £1,599 and £1,999 respectively. 

As for the 5K iMac, which has a massive resolution of 5,120×2,880, Apple has added another configuration. The cheaper £1,599 model has a quad-core 3.3GHz Intel Core i5 processor, which Turbo Boosts up to 3.7GHz, an AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics chip, 8GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, four USB3 ports and two Thunderbolt 2 ports. Meanwhile, the more expensive £1,849 model has a 3.5GHz Intel Core i5 processor that can Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, an AMD Radeon R9 M290X chip, and a 1TB Fusion Drive. 

“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.”