New Macs can feel the Force

Apple’s best iMac display becomes a little more accessible as Force Touch lands across the MacBook Pro range

pple has introduced a new edition of the 15-inch MacBook Pro and a second lower-price iteration of its 5K iMac. The new 15-inch MacBook Pro boasts a Force Touch trackpad, Retina display, faster flash storage, longer battery life and much improved graphics. Meanwhile, the new model 27-inch 5K iMac offers quad-core 3.3GHz Intel Core i5 processors and AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics and costs from £1,599. The cost of the existing top-of-the-range (3.5GHz) 5K iMac has been reduced to £1,849. These 5K displays provide 14.7 million on-screen pixels (5120 x 2880).

“Customers love the groundbreaking iMac with Retina 5K display, and now with a new lower price, even more people can experience it,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.

But every silver lining has a cloud, and this release is no different: the lower price 5K iMac replaces the Fusion Drive with standard HDD storage, weighing in at 1TB.

AThe iMacs also include 8GB of memory, four USB 3.0 ports and two Thunderbolt 2 ports supporting up to 20Gbps each, which is twice the bandwidth of the previous generation.

Force Touch is a new trackpad technology that uses a Taptic Engine to generate haptic feedback when you do something. This means you get the sensation of movement from the trackpad when you click it, but the trackpad doesn’t budge. Force Touch technology is also pressure sensitive, so you can click anywhere on the trackpad to launch an action. You can also use the trackpad to do new things, such as drawing an image, signing a document or accessing contextual menu items in supporting apps. Force Touch API’s are available so developers can incorporate new trackpad features within their apps.

Force Touch is expected to appear in a next generation iPhone and, while it isn’t yet available to desktop Macs, there is some speculation it may become a feature in future Apple trackpads for its desktop range.