Apple Updates Air, Pro Laptops, Kills off the MacBook

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2019/07/09/apple-updates-air-pro-laptops-kills-off-the-macbook/

Apple has revamped its notebook line, mostly on the low end. Its 12-inch MacBook is no more. Meanwhile, it has overhauled its entry-level MacBook Pro, adding a Touch Bar and other hardware features, while providing minor MacBook Air tweaks along with a decent price drop.

The latest low-end MacBook Pro provides a 1.4 GHz quad-core 8th-generation Core i5 processor (with Turbo Boost up to 3.9 GHz), which is part of Intel’s Coffee Lake chipset family.

Care to post the exact CPU model? I am not aware of any shipping Coffee Lake with 1.4/3.9 GHz and Iris Plus 645.

I am typing this on my now-superseded Retina Macbook. It has been an excellent travelling companion since May 2015 and I hope it will last many more years. It runs all of the macOS apps that I need when on the road and most don’t have adequate iPad versions. I use Goodsync to keep data in sync with my office iMac.

I bought mine when it came out in April 2015, and I’ve liked it. The keyboard isn’t fantastic, but I never had the irritation most people seemed to. About two years in, I had to get it serviced and they replaced the keyboard, the bottom case, the battery…

So Geekbench (via MR) has apparently figured out that the CPUs used are indeed special variants for Apple: i5-8257U and i7-8557U. They’re derived from Kaby Lake Refresh models i5-8250U and i7-8550U (August 2017). These are all 15W quad-core CPUs.

I’m left wondering what Apple got from their special variants that they wouldn’t have got from the marginally higher clocked but still 15W i5-8365U and i7-8565U.

And here’s the iFixit teardown for the new low-end 13" MBP.

With the i5-8257U and i7-8557U you will get Intel Iris Plus 645 with 128 MB eDRAM and 48 EUs. With the i5-8365U and i7-8565U you only get Intel UHD Graphics 620 without eDRAM and only 24 EUs.