Apple Macbook Pro 15 inch updated with Radeon R9 M370X

The delay in Broadwell creates waves throughout the hardware industry and affects not least laptops, where manufacturers’ upgrade cycles have been disrupted. Now the Apple Macbook Pro upgrades 15 inches, which was released in the fall of 2013, once again, but it will not be with Intel’s new processor family.

Broadwell has so far only been released for passively cooled devices and the Ultrabook with a maximum of two cores, which is why Apple remains at Haswell. The base model retains the Core i7-4770HQ processor with four cores in 2.2–3.4 GHz, while the top model houses the Core i7-4870HQ with the same number of cores in 2.5–3.7 GHz.

The big news is instead noticeable on the graphics front. While the base model uses the integrated Iris Pro Graphics 5200, it gets a more lavish one Radeon R9 M370X with 2 GB GDDR5, where the other specifications are not yet known. Interestingly, the graphics solution is said to be up to 80 percent faster than the Geforce GT 750M it replaces, something that could mean a more energy-efficient and hitherto unknown graphics processor from AMD.

On the storage front, the same capacities are offered, 256 and 512 GB, as before. New is instead the interface where the theoretical bandwidth is doubled to 2.0 Gbps via four channels PCI Express 2.0. Battery capacity is also growing slightly from 95 to 99.5 watt hours for nine hours of operating time, up from the previous eight hours.

In terms of design, Apple has not taken the turns, but the computer is almost the same as before. The weight has gone up a bit from 2.02 kilograms to 2.04 kilograms and the touchpad is the company’s new Force Touch without physical click, which was introduced with the latest Macbook.

Otherwise, the computer retains the same 15.4-inch screen with 2,880 x 1,800 pixels and 16 GB DDR3L. The price for the base model is SEK 21,995, while the more lavish one with Radeon graphics is SEK 27,495.