The Drop

Welp, right after we talked about the new Apple rumors come from trusted source Ming-Chi Kuo, we find out part of his leaks were true. Today, Apple has quietly, and surprisingly, dropped their new Macbook Pro’s outfitted with a few welcomed new features. Both the 13″ and the 15″ have gotten spec bumps. Here are the notable specs –

13″ Macbook Pro

• up to Intel quad-core 8th gen Core i5 processor at 2.3ghz with 3.8ghz boost
• up to 16gb of LPDDR3 2133MHz Ram
• up to 2TB SSD storage
• 4x Thunderbolt 3 ports
• Intel Iris 655
• Retina with True Tone Display
• New “Quieter” Butterfly “Gen 3” Keyboard
• Base Model Price: $1,999.00
• Top Tier Price: $3,699.00

15″ Macbook Pro

• up to Intel hexacore 8th gen Core i9 processor at 2.9ghz with 4.8ghz boost
• up to 32gb of DDR4 2400MHz Ram
• up to 4TB SSD Storage
• Radeon Pro 560X 4GB of GDDR5 Graphics Card
• Retina with True Tone
• 4x Thunderbolt 3 ports
• New “Quieter” Butterfly “Gen 3” Keyboard
• Base Model Price: $2,799.00
• Top Tier Price: $6,699.00

Personally, I’m looking at the 15″ model with Core i9, 32GB of DDR4 Ram, & 512GB Storage which will net me a respectable cost of $3,499.00. For my fiance, the base 13″ model will work just fine. Finally, getting the new 6-core Intel chips in these laptops will give us a reported bump of 70% performance. That extra processing power is much needed for my workflow, since I’ve been doing much more editing and streaming on my Macbook than previously, and the 2017 models with 7th Intel have started to show their age already.

I’m most interested in seeing how these new “3rd Gen” Butterfly Keyboards work out. Do they feel better? Are they still prone to the same issues as previous models? From the press release Apple dropped today, they mentioned nothing about their faulty keyboards, which worries me slightly. I’m also a bit disappointed we’re getting a slightly bumped GPU, with the Radeon 560X. While there is a bit faster GPU memory on-board, I still would’ve loved to see an Nvidia based GPU, more specifically some variation of a Max-Q. (Imagine a GTX Max-Q 1060 in these fuckers). All in all, this now keeps the Macbook current…but for how much longer? We already know how much faster 9th Gen Coffee Lake processors are- and how much more efficient they are – so once they start to make their way into Windows laptops, will we feel like we’re missing out? Only time will tell. That said, I’ll be selling my 2017 15″ model and picking up these new models as soon as I can.