So – as is usual and customary, Apple lifted their NDA last night and media outlets were off to the races.  I’m working on a video recap of the details, but I’ll summarize the highlights below if you are interested.  Side note:  only the Touch Bar versions of the MacBook Pros will be getting this refresh – the non-Touch Bar 13″ MBP was not announced to have any updates as of the date of this article.

The refreshed 13” MacBook Pro gets a quad core 8th gen Intel CPU, core i5 or i7, up to 16GB ofLP-DDR 3 RAM, and new storage up to 2TB SSD – Apple claims a performance increase of about 2x.

The 15” MacBook Pro gets a hexa core (yes, 6 cores) 8th gen Intel CPU, core i7 or i9, now with up to 32GB of 2400Mhz DDR4 RAM, new storage up to a whopping 4TB SSD – the 15” device also gets a battery bump to keep up with the larger core CPU and RAM, but is reported to have the same battery life @ about 10hrs, and will include a Radeon Pro 560X video card with 4GB of RAM – Apple claims all these upgrades should lead to a crazy 70% performance increase over 2017 model MBPs.

Both machine lines will also get new True Tone display updates, to allow them to better render colors in different lighting conditions.  All of this machine power will come at a price, of course because – Apple.  While the base model SKUs will start at the prices as last year ($1,799 and $2,399 respectively for 13″ and 15″ models) the maxed out versions of both machines are hard on the wallet – the 13″ comes in at $3,699, and the 15″ at an incredible $6,699.

Generally, I’d recommend that you look at a maxed out machine as a way of future-proofing your purchase, but at these prices, the sticker shock is a bit too much.  We will have some more coverage of these devices in the coming days and weeks, as soon as we can get a look at one.  Stay tuned…