Apple’s 27-inch, 5K-display touting iMac has been available in SA for a few months now, and the latest 15-inch MacBook Pro already offers Force Touch (the trackpad’s ability to distinguish between light and heavier presses), but now the 21.5-inch iMacs have had an update to give them Retina displays, and new wireless accessories, including a new standalone trackpad, bring Force Touch to the desktop.In addition to hardware updates, the new 21.5-inch iMac gets a 4K Retina display rather than the 5K version found on its larger sibling, but for a display that size 4K (4096 x 2304 resolution and 9.4 million pixels) is more than sufficient, and ought to future proof it for a few years… until 8K comes along, of course.
The new iMacs also include overhauled processors and graphics hardware and are available in updated storage options that Apple says makes “the high-performance Fusion Drive even more affordable”. Apple’s Fusion Drive is a hybrid of a regular hard drive and a solid-state drive (SSD) that offers the high-speed performance of flash memory with large storage capacity. The entry level version pairs a 1TB hard drive with 24GB of fast flash. Apple also offers 2TB and 3TB configurations with 128GB of fast flash.
For most people, though, the more exciting news is the release of a new lineup of “magic” wireless accessories. Apple’s updated all three of its wireless input devices: its wireless keyboard, trackpad and mouse. All three ditch the rechargeable, removable AA batteries of their predecessors in favour of built-in, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that are charged using a Lightning cable (not included, we’ll wager).Each of the new wireless accessories should, according to Apple, charge in around two hours and last roughly a month per charge.
The new Magic Trackpad 2 brings Apple’s Force Touch interface to the desktop, and presumably to MacBook Pro and MacBook Air devices running the company’s latest desktop operating system, OS X El Capitan.
We’ll let you know as soon as we get local pricing and availability for all of the above.
