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Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pro and 5K iMac refresh: The tech specs

Apple has refreshed the MacBook Pro and the 5K iMac. Let's take a closer look at the tech specs.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pro and 5K iMac mid-2015 refresh

Apple has refreshed the MacBook Pro and the 5K iMac. But let's look beyond the press releases and take a closer look at the tech specs to see what this refresh brings to the table.

On the MacBook Pro front, the only external difference is that the trackpad has been replaced with a Force Touch pad similar to the one found on the 13-inch version. It features built-in force sensors that allow you to click anywhere on the trackpad without needing to apply any change in pressure, while the built-in Taptic Engine delivers haptic feedback to the user as they interact with OS X. The Force Touch trackpad also supports a range of new pressure-sensitive gestures.

The new 15-inch MacBook Pros also see a CPU upgrade, with the old 22-nanometer Haswell Intel parts being replaced by 14-nanometer Broadwell silicon. While the performance gains from this bump are going to be modest, the shrink from 22-nanometer architecture to 14-nanometers means a significant power savings, with Apple claiming that the new MacBook Pros get an additional one hour of battery life, now up to 9 hours.

The new MacBook Pros come with 16GB of RAM as standard.

Apple also states that the new MacBook Pros feature "up to 2.5 times faster flash storage than the previous generation," which could mean that Apple has upgraded the flash storage to the faster quad-channel variety that was only previously on offer in the 1TB option.

On the graphics front we find that Nvidia GeForce GT 750M is out, having been replaced by AMD's Radeon R9 M370X on the higher-end version, which Apple claims "deliver[s] up to 80 percent faster performance."

The 5K iMac refresh is a simpler affair, with a 3.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 system and AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics added to the low-end. This is a 22-nanometer Haswell part, the same as is found powering the higher-end 5K iMacs.

The higher-end 5K iMacs continue to be powered by AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics.

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