Stuff to know about all the Macs Apple updated this week

I’ve had a new 15-inch MacBook Pro for about a day, and a 27-inch iMac is en route to my house as we speak. As such, I’m not currently in a position to post a “review” of either system. But I can tell you at least a few things about the surprisingly comprehensive Mac refresh that Apple dropped on us this week at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference.

What follows is a list of collected minutiae about the half-dozen different Macs I got to handle. This list is gleaned from conversations with Apple as well as my own observations in the limited amount of time I’ve had to study the devices. Based on the questions I've gotten about the Macs so far, this should hopefully satisfy your curiosity while I crank away on more comprehensive reviews.

The MacBook Air

The MacBook Air is still around and Apple didn't not update it on Monday, though you could be forgiven for missing the single sentence it merited during the keynote.

The only difference? The previous Broadwell-based 1.6GHz (2.7GHz Turbo) Core i5-5250U processor has been swapped for a 1.8GHz (2.9GHz Turbo) Core i5-5350U, an across-the-board clock speed increase of 200MHz (the upgrade option remains a 2.2GHz/3.1GHz Core i7-5650U). The architecture hasn’t changed and neither has anything else about the Air. Much as I'd like Apple to introduce an actually modern laptop at that $999 price, I suppose this is better than nothing.

The MacBook Pro

The Pro just got refreshed in October before Kaby Lake CPUs were available, so really very little has changed other than those chips. Kaby Lake’s speed is mostly identical to Skylake’s at the same clock speed, but the Kaby CPUs in the 2017 Pros are 200 or 300MHz faster than the Skylake chips across the board.

Otherwise, most things are the same, including the displays and the size of the batteries. The keyboard feels the same, but there’s a minor visual difference: the Control and Option keys now include little symbols, not unlike the one that already exists on the Command key (the symbol on the option key also replaces the “alt” text). Those symbols correspond to the glyphs you’ll find listed as keyboard shortcuts in menus throughout macOS. Power users won’t need this, but as someone who came to the Mac a bit later and doesn’t have the Macintosh Classic keyboard layout burned into his brain, I appreciate it. (The MacBook and iMac keyboards get this change, too; I can’t confirm whether the Air does one way or the other, but I would assume not.)

The $1,299 version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro is a decent value and makes the machine easier to recommend in lieu of a MacBook Air, but Apple has saved that $200 by cutting the SSD’s capacity from 256GB to 128GB. Some users will be able to live with this change; others won’t. If you can’t, the $1,499 configuration still includes the 256GB SSD. Both configurations offer options for 16GB of RAM and a faster Core i7 CPU.

This $1,299 config also totally replaces the old 2015-era 13-inch Pro that Apple offered at this price point, dumping one more aging system from Apple’s lineup.

Finally, let’s talk about the dedicated GPUs in the 15-inch Pro. You may have noticed that these ship with Radeon Pro 500-series GPUs instead of the Radeon Pro 400-series GPUs in the 2016 Pros, but don’t be fooled—these are the same GPUs you got in October, rebadged by AMD. Based on the number of shaders and the amount of RAM, the Radeon Pro 555 is identical to the previous 455, and the 560 is identical to the previous 460.

The GPUs don’t change, but the default configurations do. The 455/555 is now the entry-level option in the $2,399 base model, replacing the significantly weaker Radeon Pro 450. The 460/560, previously available only as an upgrade for both configurations, is still a $100 upgrade for the $2,399 Pro, but now it’s the default option in the $2,799 Pro, replacing the 455/555. The maximum performance level will remain the same, but you get a little more GPU for your money.

Those external graphics docks

Aside from the refreshes, the most interesting announcement in the keynote for MacBook Pro owners is that Apple is going to begin officially supporting Thunderbolt 3 graphics docks in macOS. This comes after many years of stop-and-start, neither-explicitly-encouraged-nor-discouraged efforts by third parties to use the Thunderbolt interface for that purpose.

True to form, Apple didn’t want to dive too deeply into the details for support that's still in beta (the docks need High Sierra to work). But here are the few facts we can tell you at the moment:

• The developer kit—which gives you a Sonnet external GPU box, an AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU, a Belkin USB-C to USB-A hub, and $100 off an HTC Vive—runs $599 and is available for purchase now, at least if you’re a registered developer with an active account.
• There’s nothing special about this box. Since all Thunderbolt 3 hardware are required to be certified for use with the interface anyway, pretty much any graphics dock that passes Thunderbolt 3 certification should work fine with High Sierra.
• GPU support is up in the air; it’s not clear whether macOS will effectively support “generic” GPUs as Windows does or if people will need to use specific Apple-blessed cards (as was often the case back in the days of the Mac Pro).
• Also unclear is whether the dock will allow for the use of Nvidia GPUs. The 2013 Macs were the last to include any Nvidia GPUs after years of hopping back and forth every year or two. This is a point of frustration for anyone who wants to run CUDA workloads or who just prefers Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia’s generic drivers can already enable its GPUs in Thunderbolt 3 docks on Macs, but obviously first-class official support would be preferable.

We’ll be able to get more details on this as High Sierra develops and gets closer to shipping.