Apple’s New MacBook Pro: Australian Price And Release Date

Apple’s new MacBook Pro has killed its function keys in favour of a touch-sensitive OLED screen above the keyboard that changes to react to whatever program you’re in. It’s also the thinnest, lightest, and most powerful laptop that the company has ever made. If you’re keen, this is how much you’ll pay for one in Australia and when you can get one.

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The new MacBook Pro has the brightest (500 nits), most colourful (25 per cent better than sRGB) and most high-contrast (67 per cent better than the old one) display ever put in a Mac. It has much, much improved speakers with twice the dynamic range of last generation’s Pros. It has the low-profile clicky keyboard of the 12-inch MacBook, and a massive Force Touch trackpad. It has four Thunderbolt 3 speedy USB Type-C ports and a headphone jack.

It’s also only 14.9mm thick, making it 17 per cent thinner and 23 per cent smaller than the last generation (for the 15-inch; the 13-inch is similar). The 13-inch MacBook Pro is 1.37kg while the 15-inch is just 1.8kg, which is pretty damn impressive for a nearly solid aluminium laptop with all that processing hardware and 10 hours of battery crammed inside.

You’ll be able to buy three clear variants of the MacBook Pro, in two screen sizes — 13-inch and 15-inch.

First up and cheapest is a single old-school variant of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s almost a replacement for the MacBook Air — it has two Thunderbolt 3 ports and no touch-sensitive Touch Bar or Touch ID, instead still using the traditional old-school function key row. That 13-inch, with a 2.0GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, 8GB of 1866MHz DDR4 RAM and a 256GB SSD, will cost you $2199 in Australia. It’ll ship now and deliver to you by the start of November. Apple is also currently selling a single last-generation 13-inch MacBook Pro for $1999.

Then there’s the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar and Touch ID. Using a 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, 8GB of 2133MHz DDR4 RAM and Intel’s integrated graphics rather than a standalone GPU, the 13-incher will set you back $2699 for 256GB of internal storage and $2999 for 512GB of fast PCI-E SSD inside.

If you want the more powerful new 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and Touch ID, you’ll have to pay a little bit more again. There are two variants of the 15-inch; one uses a 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 and has 256GB of flash storage, while the other has a 2.7GHz Core i7 and 512GB of storage.

Both have 16GB of 2133MHz DDR4 RAM, but there’s a slight difference in GPU power — the cheaper Pro uses an AMD Radeon Pro 450 GPU while the more expensive uses a Radeon Pro 455. You’ll pay $3599 for the entry-level 15-inch MacBook Pro and $4249 for the more powerful variant. Apple is also currently selling a single last-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro for $2999.

And you can still buy the MacBook Air. For now, at least.


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