Apple’s MacBook Pro refresh puts the focus back on creative pros
New MacBook Pros seemed like a no-brainer for WWDC. Like the rest of the
company’s hardware line, however, they were a no-show. Sure, Apple used
the opportunity to reaffirm its comment to creative professionals —
perhaps most notably in the form of some key macOS updates — but there
were no new devices available to take advantage of those new features.
The company is addressing that today with its first major hardware
release since its big developer conference. Like Mojave, updates to the
13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bars find the company
tipping its hats to creative pros, a key demo long understood to be the
core to Apple’s user base.
Nothing has changed on the outside. The new Pros are indistinguishable
from last year’s model. As is the case with a majority of updates to the
line, all of the really important stuff is happening inside. And these
are, indeed, formidable machines. You get a six-core Intel Core i7 or i9
on the bigger machine, backed with up to 4TB of storage and up to 32GB
of memory — the latter of which required the company to upgrade from
DDR3 to DDR4 memory.
That move means a hit to battery life, so the company boosted the
battery by an additional 7.7 watt hours. For most users that should mean
around the same battery life they would have gotten with the last
generation. The 13-inch with Touch Bar gets a similar treatment, bumping
up to a quad-core i5 or i7 and up to 2TB of SSD storage.
Apple says it’s still committed to the version without the Touch Bar,
but it’s going to have to sit out this round of updates, for the time
being.
In case there was any doubt who Apple might be going after with these
new models, the company introduced us tech writers to a number of
creative pros, whose work runs the gamut from micro neurology (UCSF
professor Saul Katoto) to performance art (Aaron Axelrod) to gigapixel
imagery (Lucas Gilman). If nothing else, it’s a reminder of just how
many fields the admittedly generic “creative professional” tag touches —
and why it’s such an important market, both in terms of cache and
reach.
It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the overall PC market (around 15
percent by the company’s estimates), but these people are influencers, a
title that extends beyond just their output. For every prominent EDM
producer (Oak Felder) or music video director (Carlos Perez), there are
countless budding artists looking for the right tools for the trade.
Apple had the category on virtual lock for decades, but recent years
left some wondering whether the company had begun to take those users
for granted. Between simplistic updates to popular platforms like Final
Cut and the aimlessness of the Mac Pro line signaled to some devotees
that the company had perhaps become complacent, opening up a potential
vacuum that Microsoft was more than happy to attempt to fill with its
Surface line.
Last year, however, the company took a stand. In April, it offered a
rare peek behind its infamously impenetrable curtain, with a refreshing
candid conversation about the Mac Pro line. The company offered an
uncharacteristic apology for pausing production to “completely
rethin[k]” the desktop, according to Phil Schiller. In its stead, the
company announced the iMac Pro, a “love letter to developers,” in the
words of our video producer, Veanne, who was understandably bummed to
return our review unit.
The all-in-one was less of a consolatory gesture than it initially
appeared. It was a truly formidable powerhouse in a familiar form
factor. And while the company continued fiddling with the aforementioned
Mac Pro reset button, it remained the sole representative of Apple’s
new offensive. The new MacBook Pros are intended to be the next piece in
that puzzle, inheriting a number of features that debuted in that
space-gray iMac.
Chief among them is the T2 — a proprietary chip designed to supplement
some of the heavy lifting done by Intel’s silicon. The list of jobs
managed by the chip is a pretty long one, including everything from
audio systems and disk drives to improved tone mapping and face
detection in FaceTime.
There’s an important security element on here, as well. From Apple’s press material:
T2 also makes iMac Pro even more secure, thanks to a Secure Enclave
coprocessor that provides the foundation for new encrypted storage and
secure boot capabilities. The data on your SSD is encrypted using
dedicated AES hardware with no effect on the SSD’s performance, while
keeping the Intel Xeon processor free for your compute tasks. And secure
boot ensures that the lowest levels of software aren’t tampered with
and that only operating system software trusted by Apple loads at
startup.
Interestingly, Apple’s putting it to even more use here, enabling “hey
Siri” on macOS for the first time. It’s an optional addition that you
can enable during the setup process, but once it’s on, it will work like
any Siri-enabled device, working in tandem with the iPhone and HomePod
and giving preference to the microphone in closest proximity. It’s
similar to desktop implementations of assistants like Cortana and the
Pixelbook’s use of Google Assistant.
True Tone, meanwhile, was borrowed from another source entirely. That
one debuted on the iPad back in 2016, bringing with it an automatic
temperature adjustment, based on ambient surroundings. Given how
aggressively the company has gone after photo and video editors, it’s
honestly a bit surprising that the company didn’t embrace the technology
earlier for the desktop. It’s one of those features that doesn’t seem
particularly important until you use it. Once you’ve got it, however,
you wonder how you managed to go so long without it.
Really though, it’s those performance boosts that Apple’s small army of
creative pros kept touting over and over at this week’s event. The
phrase “cuts the time in half” was the most common phrase bandied about,
whether it was the trio of developers (Leah Culver, Akshaya Dinesh and
John Ciocca), running simulations of iOS apps or University of Utah
Assistant Professor Janet Iwasa rendering complex animated
representations of molecular biology.
For Apple, all of this is designed to make a broader point that such
complex tasks no longer require that a professional be tethered to a
work station. It’s an enticing concept. Over the past decade,
smartphones have liberated a number of tasks (the question of how
they’ve simultaneously tethered us is one for another day), so it only
makes sense that we’d ask similar things of our PCs.
Of course, for a number of pros, the laptop still won’t replace the
processing power of a high-end workstation, but the leaps it made in
portable computing over the past several generations is certainly
impressive, and the new MacBook Pros are nothing if not formidable
machines.
Their ability to support two 5K displays and an external GPU through
Thunderbolt 3, meanwhile, delivers the promise of modularity. Many of
the aforementioned creative types praised the ability to plug and play
into a desktop for all of the heavy lifting and tossing the system in a
backpack to have it by their side when inspiration strikes.
It’s all part of a difficult balance for Apple. A majority of users will
never edit 4K feature films or develop VR games. For most of us, the
truly high-end upgrades will have little impact on our day-to-day use.
Though the addition of Siri functionality and that newer, quieter
keyboard are certainly welcome.
Catering to pros, meanwhile, is the sort of thing that pays off in
spades down the road, much like Apple’s longstanding education play. The
company was seen as taking its eye off the ball and allowed the
competition to usurp some of that ownership. With the iMac and MacBook
Pros, coupled with those upcoming macOS updates, the company is making
it clear that the category is still a key to Apple’s future.
The 13- and 15-inch models go on sale today, starting at $1,799 and $2,399, respectively.
Brian Heater
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