Nothing about the design of the new MacBook Pro is a surprise. Look and feel, 4K and 5K, and the Force Touch trackpad Apple sent us the high-end $2,499 model for review so we could at least test out all of those tweaks, but if you were hoping for something significantly better than the 20 models, you’ll come away disappointed. A different dedicated GPU in the high-end model, a marginally larger battery, and faster PCI Express-based storage are all welcome improvements.

The new MacBook Pros do include a handful of other upgrades, though. It’s not clear why this happened-given the timing I’d guess Apple knows something we don’t about how well Intel’s quad-core parts are ramping up-but whatever the reason, the new model is neither as significant nor as interesting as it might have been. Instead, Apple released the new MacBook Pros with the exact same chips they’ve been using for almost two years now, quad-core Haswell chips with Intel’s Iris Pro 5200 GPU. Assuming they follow the same pattern as the dual-core Broadwell parts, those chips would have provided small CPU and battery life boosts and larger increases to graphics performance. Those were just announced and should begin showing up at retail within the next 30 to 60 days. When the company held off refreshing the 15-inch model alongside the 13-inch Pro and both MacBook Airs earlier this year, we assumed it was waiting for the oft-delayed quad-core Broadwell processors from Intel. Webcam, backlit keyboard, dual integrated mics, Force Touch trackpadĪpple released a new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro last month, but it’s not the update we were expecting. Specs at a glance: 15-inch 2015 Apple Retina MacBook ProĢ.5GHz Intel Core i7-4870HQ (Turbo up to 3.7GHz)

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