The 13-inch MacBook Pro now offers a cheaper configuration without the Touch Bar. (Image Source: Apple)
Apple today announced updates to its entire MacBook line-up at WWDC, in the form of new Intel Kaby Lake processors and other minor tweaks.
The MacBook and MacBook Pro will now come with Intel’s newest chips, and the 12-inch MacBook has even been updated with faster SSDs and the more refined butterfly switch keyboard that debuted on last year’s MacBook Pros.
The new keyboard has the same amount of key travel as the older one, but it will reportedly feel more satisfying to type on. The entry-level MacBook now costs S$1,898, slightly more than the original S$1,788 price tag.
In addition, Apple is introducing a new and cheaper configuration of the 13-inch MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar, bringing the starting price for the notebook down to S$1,898, compared to S$2,188 before. The discrete graphics on the 15-inch models have also been updated with new Polaris GPUs from AMD, and the base model will ship with a Radeon Pro 555 with 2GB of memory.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro now starts at S$3,488, S$100 more than when it first launched last year.
Compared to Skylake, Kaby Lake is a further optimized version of Intel’s 14nm manufacturing process, and is considered just a minor upgrade.
Still, you can expect small performance improvements thanks to bumps to the CPU clock speeds, and improved battery life while watching video, courtesy of a dedicated video encoder/decoder block that natively supports 4K HEVC and VP9 encoding/decoding
Here’s a look at the configurations for the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
And here are the configurations for its 15-inch counterpart.
The MacBook will arguably see the biggest performance boost from the move to Kaby Lake, and you can see the available configurations below also.
To cap things off, Apple also gave its aging MacBook Air a small update, and it now comes with a quicker 1.8GHz Intel processor. Apple didn’t release further details, such as what generation processor this is, although it doesn’t seem like it will be a Kaby Lake model.
That said, the MacBook Air looks set to stick around as Apple’s budget notebook (it’s being kept alive by quiet spec bumps such as last year’s boost to 8GB of memory), and it starts at S$1,328 as before.
The new MacBooks are available to buy now.
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