Apple today quietly released a new version of the 15″ Retina MacBook Pro on its site, adding Force Touch. It’s shipping within a day for a starting price of $1,999.
Force Touch was introduced to the 13-inch MacBook last month. It senses different levels of pressure via the laptop’s trackpad.
Other notable changes include faster flash storage, as well as the choice to add an AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics chip which is “up to 80 percent faster” than the NVIDIA chip in the previous generation.
The base Retina 15-inch MacBook starts at $1,999 and includes a 2.2GHz Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive. If you want a dedicated graphics card, pricing starts at $2,499 with a 2.5GHz Core i7, 2GB dedicated AMD graphics and 512GB solid-state drive.
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What’s notable here is that the refreshed laptop still uses Intel’s Haswell chipset, not the updated Broadwell architechture that was rumored to be adopted.
Apple previously used a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M in the 15-inch Retina MacBook, so the switch to AMD is a little surprising. However, the company has flipped between the two chipsets in the past.
It also quietly dropped the price on the 5K iMac by introducing a new option that starts at $1999 for a 3.3GHz processor.
➤ 15″ Retina MacBook Pro [Apple]
Update: That new graphics chip in the 15-inch MacBook can power incredibly high resolution displays that are very close to that found in the 5K iMac:
Support for up to 5120-by-2160 resolution at 60Hz on a single external display (model with AMD Radeon R9 M370X only)
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