What was launched
MacBook Pros
The new MacBook Pro comes in two flavours, 13in and 15in, and the headline new feature is the Touch Bar, a touch-sensitive display along the top of the laptop, where the function keys used to be. Also added is a Touch ID sensor. It will retail for $1799/£1749 and $2399/£2349 up.
A sort-of new MacBook Pro enters at the bottom of the range, not offering the Touch Bar but replicating the rough physical layout of the top-end laptops. It starts at $1499/£1449.
TV
The Apple TV, iPad and iPhone get the TV app in the US. A clearinghouse for all your disparate TV apps, it lets you select the show to watch from one central location and jump straight in to the correct app. Unless the correct app is Netflix, which won’t support TV. No international launch was announced.
Updated
UK pricing: £1449, for the 13in without Touch Bar, £1749 for the 13in, and £2349 for the 15in respectively. Basically, straight conversion from dollars, minus £50.
This isn’t Apple inflatingits international prices, either: a straight conversion from dollars to pounds, plus 20% VAT, results in much the same prices.
For reference, previous prices were £999 for the base 13in – an increase of £450 – and £1599 for the base 15in – an increase of £750.
That’ll be the Brexit effect, then.
Updated
And that’s it: 80 minutes later, we have three new laptops and one new app.
No new desktops today, nor updates to any of the other laptops.
Updated
Here are the starting specs and prices, in dollars.
Now we’re getting, essentially, a eulogy for the MacBook Air, as Phil Schiller introduces one final device: a 13” MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar. Schiller walks through all the ways the 13” MacBook Pro is better than the 13” MacBook Air. It’s thinner, smaller, and weighs the same.
But does it cost the same?
Updated
Final number: quoted battery life is 10 hours.
Last set of third-party integrations: Microsoft is offering Word, Excel, and Skype integrations, while other developers including Sketch, DaVinci Resolve, and Pixelmator are all pushing their own Touch Bar software updates.
A few professional apps get screen time to show how the new touch bar works with their software: Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and DJ Pro. It looks pretty good!
More numbers! For the 15in device, the processor is an Intel Core i7, quad-core with 2133MHz memory. Graphics card is a Radeon Pro chip, with up to 4GB VRAM, up to 2.3x faster than before. Drive is a “superfast SSD”, up to 3.1GB/s, up to 2TB, up to 50% faster.
It’s 130% faster for 3D graphics, 60% faster for gaming.
The 13in is quite a lot slower: an Intel Iris chip for graphics, Core i5/i7 for processor. It’s still faster than the old one though.
All four ports are Thunderbolt 3, a new standard which uses the USB-C port shape. That means you can charge with any of the four ports, plug a display into any of them, and so on. Of course, it also means you will need a lot of adapters: not much plugs directly into USB-C ports right now.
Schiller shows off how all those ports can be used to run two 4K displays, with two external RAID hard drives. Perfect for serious professional users.
Updated
On to the display! These tend to just be lot of numbers, so here are some numbers:
67% brighter, 67% higher contrast ratio, 25% more colours, “less power”.
Updated
Federighi moves on to customisation. By default, it looks like customising toolbars on Finder or conventional Mac apps, dragging and dropping buttons.
And Touch ID offers fast user switching! This is genuinely nice: another user can switch to their own account just by scanning their own fingerprint.
Then Federighi ruins it with a joke about “good fingerwork” from Schiller, which, ew.
As expected, the Touch ID sensor allows you to unlock the MacBook. That’s nice.
(Also, not mentioned but visible: these laptops do have headphone jacks. No courage from Apple there, but good news if you have wired headphones).
In most normal Mac apps, it looks like the Touch Bar will provide a rough mirror of the buttons along the toolbar, plus some basic interactions: Mail, for instance, has a smart button letting you pass the message on to the right mailbox by default.
The Touch Bar can also be used as an emoji picker, which is almost certainly a reason to buy this computer over any others even if that was all it could do.
In Safari, the Touch Bar can offer previews of already-open tabs, and give you quick access to your favourites. Federighi opens up Etsy, and buys a $135 copper pyramid for aligning his chakras using Apple Pay. Relatable content.
Updated
A deeper dive on theTouch Bar (that’s its name, btw. “Touch Bar”): it’s a retina display, with multi-touch input.
By default, it shows the same versions of the buttons at the top of the laptops already, like volume, playback and window management. But it can also take application-specific interfaces: Schiller shows off Safari (favourites, access to the URL bar), Photos (editing tools) and Pages (autocomplete).
And next to the Touch Bar is Touch ID, integrated with the hardware power button
That sensor lets you do Apple Pay with the MacBook Pro, amongst other things.
Schiller hands over to Craig Federighi for the demo.
Updated
Open up the laptop, and see what’s inside:
- A new force touch trackpad, that’s twice as large. Like the MacBook’s trackpad, it uses haptic feedback to fake clicks.
- A new keyboard, again like the MacBook’s, using butterfly keys to drop height.
- And the new touch bar …
Updated
“This is the new MacBook Pro, and it looks absolutely incredible.” Cook hands over to Phil Schiller.
As expected, the MacBook Pro has a thin touch-strip running across the top, and an all-aluminium body.
It comes in 13in and 15in, in two colours – grey and dark grey – and is “the thinnest and lightest MacBook Pro ever”.
The 13in model is 14.9mm, 17% thinner than before (it used to be 18mm), and is 3lb, down from around 3.5lb.
The 15in model is 15.5mm, down from 18mm, and weighs 4lb, again down from around 4.5lb.
Updated
“The Mac is so incredibly important to us,” says Cook. “This week happens to be a huge week in the history of the Mac, and the history of Apple.” Why? It’s the 25th anniversary of Apple’s first laptop, the Powerbook.
“This was the first portable that featured the keyboard forward design, so you could rest your forearms while typing.” Apple, he says, went on to offer the first trackpad, the first with a built-in trackpad, and the first with all-flash storage.
And we see an intro video for … the new MacBook Pro.
Updated
Now for the main event: the Mac.
Cook’s back. The TV app is launching by the end of this year. Not mentioned on stage: international availability. The Apple TV has had diminished support outside the US, and that shows no signs of reversing yet.
One last feature from Folds: the Apple TV, and Siri, can now pull you straight in to live TV. “Watch CBS News” brings you out to CBS News – understandably – while “Watch the Louisville game” will automatically take you in to the right app to show you a live game of American Football. Presumably the Apple TV supports sports other than American Football too.
The TV app isn’t just on the Apple TV, Folds says. It’s also available for iPhones and iPads, creating a central clearinghouse on those devices too. So we all watch a quick clip of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. To be fair, it is a very good sitcom.
Updated
Cook introduces Jen Folds, a senior designer on the Apple TV to demo the TV app.
The app looks very similar to the iTunes store on the Apple TV, but rather than pulling in content to rent and buy, it instead sources the content from other apps already installed on the Apple TV.
“For shows that I’m currently binging on, the app shows me the next episode, and for shows I’m watching live, it shows me the most recent,” Folds says.
HBO, Showtime, and CBS – three major US networks – all have their streaming services built in to the TV app. Absent, as predicted? Netflix.
The TV app also has a Library tab, for buy-to-own services like Apple’s own store, and a Store tab for buying and renting movies and TV.
Updated
Cook’s back, with the first major announcement of the day: a “unified TV experience” for the Apple TV.
“That’s one place to access all of your TV shows and movies; one place to discover great new content to watch,” he says.
This takes the form of a new app, called, yes, “TV”. It’s the TV app on the Apple TV and will “completely change how you watch TV on your Apple TV.”
Updated
Cook introduces Ryan Troy, from Twitter, to discuss the service’s Apple TV app. This is somewhat awkward, since Twitter literally just announced it is closing its most famous video product, Vine, but Troy digs into showing off the great experience of watching NFL games on the Apple TV. It looks pretty good, if you want to watch NFL games.
(Correction: Ryan Troy is not Brian Troy)
Updated
On to the actual announcements, and we’re starting small with the Apple TV.
“When we launched the new Apple TV, we launched with a clear vision: we believe the future of TV is apps,” Cook says. It has 8,000 apps right now, and is getting at least one more soon, since Cook revealed that Minecraft is coming to the service.
Updated
Tim Cook opens the event, with some back-patting about the iPhone 7. It takes “incredible photos”, he says. Then he does some back-patting about iOS 10, and the Memories feature in that update. Over 60% of iPhone users are updated, he says, which is impressive, but come on Tim, we’re here for new products, not the ones you already released.
Updated
It looks like the new MacBook Pros might not be the biggest announcement of this Thursday in the tech world. On the other side of the US, Twitter has announced that it will be closing Vine. Pour one out for your favourite six-second video.
What to expect
Apple’s event begins at 6pm UK time (10am Pacific/1pm Eastern/4am AEDT), and thanks to some fairly wide-ranging leaks, we have a good idea of what to expect.
Leading the event is expected to be an update to its MacBook Pro range of laptops, which has not seen any changes for more than 500 days. After Apple included a few tell-tale images in the latest version of macOS, we know the new computers are almost certainly going to feature a slender touchscreen replacing the function keys, as well as a fingerprint sensor to enable touchID on the devices.
They will also like have a thinner and lighter body than the existing range of MacBook Pros, and may potentially be the second computers from the company to abandon USB-A, the traditional connection standard, in favour of the slimmer, reversible USB-C.
Updates to the rest of the Mac range are less clear, but expect some fiddling with the ageing MacBook Air line: the 11-inch model is not long for this earth, having been superseded by 2015’s introduction of the new MacBook. The iMac is also due an update, but reportedly won’t be getting one this year.
The Apple TV is also expected to get a software update, which will bring a “next generation TV guide”, according to Recode’s Peter Kafka, allowing users to find and watch video content from all their apps in one central location. Well, almost all their apps: Kafka reports that Netflix is a holdout, despite the fact that the video streaming service was previously a launch partner of a similar feature, allowing users to use Siri to search for video content.
One last thing to expect: large price increases for those buying in GBP. With the collapse of the pound following Brexit looking permanent, companies have been raising prices, and Apple is no exception: at its September event, the company increased the cost of iPhones and iPads for Brits, and it looks likely that Macs will follow suit today.
Updated
