Apple really did think different about its new laptops.
The sheer number of big-picture changes to the iconic laptop line made my head spin during an exclusive hands-on preview of Apple's new MacBook Pro laptops at the company's Cupertino, California headquarters earlier this week. While Apple kept the MacBook Pro name it's used since 2006, nearly everything about the new generation of the high end notebook has changed.
And that's a good thing. Apple's last major update to the MacBook Pro, its priciest and most powerful computers, was back in 2014. That's a long time in computer years. Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, and Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, said the wait had to do with making sure this revamp wasn't just a "speed bump" with faster chips and memory. They were after a "big, big step forward."
What we've got now is two new 13-inch MacBook Pro models and one new 15-inch model. Schiller and Federighi walked me through the laptops' striking evolution.
The long-rumored "Magic Toolbar," an OLED-display strip for context-sensitive touch commands, is real. Apple calls it the Touch Bar, and it's worth all the hubbub. Just 60 pixels high (and 2,170 pixels wide), the Touch Bar could be a tool with the potential to be the Swiss Army knife of laptop input, changing itself on the fly to work across different apps, imitating a series of touch buttons, control sliders and even jog dials. This is Apple's answer to the touchscreens found on most Windows laptops.
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