Apple's got a pair of hardware updates in the pipeline and it's not waiting until its Worldwide Developers Conference to unveil them. The company announced a new 15-inch MacBook Pro on Tuesday morning, and a new 27-inch iMac as well.
They're both expected updates — thanks to a report on MacG. According to the report, the new machines flesh out Apple's Mac portfolio bringing updated innards to the 15-inch MacBook Pro and adding a new lower price to the company's iMac lineup. Overlooked in Apple's March MacBook refresh, the 15-inch MacBook Pro today joins the 12-inch MacBook and the 13-inch MacBook Pro in offering the company's pressure-sensitive Force Touch trackpad, which uses a so-called Taptic Engine to deliver tactile feedback without actually moving. It also gets a claimed additional hour of battery life and improved graphics thanks to a new discrete processor.
Announced alongside the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, there's a new entry-level version of Apple's 5K iMac — one with a flashy 27-inch display, a 3.3-GHz quad-core version of Intel's Core i5 chip, 1 TB of internal storage, and s lower $1,999 price point. That's a significant drop. The first 27-inch Retina iMac originally sold for $2,499 at launch.
Coming as it does ahead of Apple's annual WWDC in June, the release of these new Macs suggests that the company is once again clearing the decks of incremental hardware announcements in order to focus WWDC on bigger fare: the next versions of the next versions of iOS and OS X and a new Apple TV and associated app store.