Whenever Apple launches a new product or service, there is usually much hype surrounding the launch. Whether it is its annual developer’s conference (WWDC) or the special events that it usually hosts in September, there is always much fanfare about new product launches.

A few days ago however, we saw some silent refresh of the company’s MacBook Pro lineup, which is quite a departure from the tradition.

Or maybe it’s a start of a new one. For the last few years, the company’s pro laptop lineup has been getting less and less stage time at the Apple launch events, except in 2016 when it redesigned them a little bit.

So, maybe the Mac really is becoming less significant for Apple. Regardless, the latest refresh are here and they couldn’t be here faster considering how some of the other competitors have offered their upgrades already.

What Are The Changes?

As always the upgrades include the latest and greatest offerings from Intel’s processors and this one includes the 8th generation processors, codenamed Coffee Lake. The major change in this year’s offerings are that the processors inside the 13 inch model now comes with a quad-core (instead of dual core) and the 15 inch model comes with a 6-core CPU (instead of quad core).

That is a huge boost to the speed. Add to that the 32 GB RAM support on the 15 inch model and the max cpu clock speed of 4.8 GHz which makes it a screamer of a machine. The speed improvements don’t just end there though.

The new MacBooks are now equipped with faster SSDs with read speeds up to 3.2 GB/s, write speeds of 2.2 GB/s and the usual graphics update with the 13-inch models getting the Iris Plus integrated graphics from Intel and the 15-inch models getting the Radeon Pro dedicated graphics from AMD.

Displays this year get the same True Tone technology that can be found in iPhones and iPad Pros which matches the colour temperature of the display according to the ambience making it friendlier to the eyes.

One of the biggest improvements that customers had been looking forward to in this upgrade was probably the keyboard. Apple’s butterfly-mechanism keyboard has been receiving a lot of complaints ever since launch and so the company launched a new third generation butterfly keyboard to solve those issues.

Another important but often looked component, the Apple T-series chips inside the MacBooks have also received an upgrade. They now come with a T2 chip which is responsible for housing a secure enclave for your fingerprint, consolidating many different controllers into one, and for making Hey Siri voice command available at all times.

Both the 13-inch and 15-inch models come with a 10 hour battery life, which is enough for a whole day’s work. As for the price, the 13-inch comes for $1799 and $1999 for the 256GB and 512GB model respectively.

The 15-inch comes for $2399 and $2799 for the same 256GB and 512GB models respectively. That’s Apple pricing for you! Anyways, these were the biggest of the changes introduced this year which were pretty much expected by this point. Are you going to buy one? Let me know in the comments section below.


_Image Credits: All the images have been taken from Apple's website.