Intel has started shipping out its latest 7th generation Kaby Lake series of processors and despite the fact that Apple’s MacBook 2016 family is going to be announced later in the year, it is highly possible that they will not receive the upgrade.
Apple’s Upcoming MacBook 2016 Family Will Continue To Be Powered By Skylake – 2017 Lineup To Be Armed With Kaby Lake
Despite the fact that both Skylake and Kaby Lake are manufactured on the same 14nm node, the slightly improved architecture of the latter suggests that better efficiency and performance per watt is expected from notebooks that are powered by these future chips. On the other hand, perhaps Apple chose to incorporate Intel’s Skylake family inside its MacBook 2016 lineup is because the processor manufacturer offered a better deal to the Cupertino tech giant.
At this point, we can’t really tell the performance and efficiency metric differences between Skylake and Kaby Lake, but we’ll sure get to know about this in the end. Coming to the Skylake processor lineup, we feel that the one of the three going to power the 15.4-inch variant of the MacBook Pro 2016:
- Core i7-6770HQ: A 2.6GHz quad-core processor
- Core i7-6870HQ: A 2.7GHz quad-core processor
- Core i7-6970HQ: A 2.8GHz quad-core processor
The upcoming MacBook Pro models are expected to be the first ones in the entire family to provide support for Touch ID and a new OLED display touch bar that is going to be above the keyboard. Coming straight to the OLED display touch bar, it will replace the physical function keys along the top of the keyboard, while the design will adopt new metal injection molded hinges as reported earlier this year. In addition to being incorporated with Type-C USB ports, Thunderbolt 3 are also going to be a part of the configuration for the MacBook Pro 2016 lineup.
In a previous report, Skylake processors will boost CPU speeds by 10 to 20 percent, and the integrated graphics chips are expected to boost performance by 16 to 41 percent. Additional info also suggests that switching to Skylake laptops could add as much 30 percent more battery life. Thanks to this upgraded performance, we expect that the resolution across these notebooks will also be increased, since these chips will easily be able to push all those pixels across the screen, and their thickness could also be reduced.
While we say this, keep in mind that Intel also released a family of Xeon mobile processors, so these chips could also end up powering the MacBook Pro lineup in the near future. The processors will definitely define the raw processing capabilities of this new lineup, but it could also mean that Apple would be forced to exponentially increase the pricing of its notebook family.
Are you disappointed by the fact that the upcoming notebook family is not going to be powered by Intel’s latest processors? Tell us your thoughts right away.
