The 5 Most Important Things to Know About the New MacBook Pro

This morning in Cupertino, Apple announced its new lineup of MacBook Pro laptops. Coming after the big announcements from Microsoft yesterday, Apple’s new MacBook Pro unveiling might seem a little disappointing to some.
When it comes down to it, these new MacBook Pros won’t be convincing Windows users to switch over, but Apple does have some interesting ideas about the future of laptops.
Here are the 5 most important things to know about the new MacBook Pros:
1. It’s got a thing called the Touch Bar
The Touch Bar is Apple’s answer to the touchscreen laptop. Steve Jobs famously always hated the idea of a touchscreen laptop, it’s taken a while for Apple to engineer its answer to the problem. The Touch Bar is a touchscreen bar at the top of the keyboard that replaces the row of function keys.
When you open up an app, the Touch Bar will change and give you different menu buttons and setting wheels that are context-sensitive to the app. It includes Touch ID on the side and even lets you customize the basic functions buttons. It might not seem as full-featured as having a full touchscreen display, but the quick accessibility of them just might end up being more useful in the end.
It’s important to note that Apple is also selling an alternate version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro that doesn’t have the aforementioned Touch Bar. It comes in a bit cheaper at $1499 and doesn’t have the Core i7 option.
2. It’s lighter and thinner than ever before
As we expected, the MacBook Pro is lighter and thinner than previous versions of the laptop. The 15-inch version comes in at 15.5 mm, weighs 4 pounds, and is 20% smaller than the previous model. Meanwhile, the 13-inch model is thinner at 14.9 mm, weighs only 3 pounds, and is 23% smaller in volume. In comparison, the 12-inch MacBook weighs only 2 pounds and comes in at 12.7 mm thick. All in all, these aren’t the thinnest laptops in the world anymore, but 14.9 mm is nothing to snuff at.