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Apple on Monday updated its MacBook Air lineup with the new “Haswell” 4th-gen processors from Intel.
Cupertino also provided a sneak peek at the next-gen Mac Pro (left).
The new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs include faster graphics, faster Wi-Fi, and a big boost in battery life, Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple, said at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.
The new MacBook Airs are available today, starting at $999 for the 11-inch with 128GB of flash storage; the 256GB version starts at $1,199. The 128GB 13-inch will start at $1,099, while the 256GB is $1,299.
Schiller said battery life in the 11-inch will go from five hours to nine hours, while the 13-inch will see a boost from seven to 12 hours. (For more, check out 5 New Features in the Apple MacBook Air.)
More exciting to those in attendance was the first look at the revamped Mac Pro, which is coming later this year, Schiller said. After showing a brief video that offered a glimpse of the sleek, black machine, Schiller responded to recent criticism about Apple’s creativity. “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” he scoffed.
“This is a machine unlike anything we’ve ever made both inside and out” Schiller said. There’s a “new unified thermal core,” which “even sounds cool,” he quipped.
The new Mac Pro will be one-eighth the size of the old Mac Pro. There will be Thunderbolt 2, Intel Xeon CPUs, dual AMD graphics processors, and support for 4K displays.
The entire top of the Mac Pro is a handle for easy portability. As promised, it will be assembled in the U.S.
As PCMag’s Joel Santo Domingo pointed out in his WWDC preview, the chassis for the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air hasn’t changed too much over the past two generations, but the internals have evolved along with Intel’s Core processors.
Last year, meanwhile, was the year of the Retina display, with Apple releasing 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros with the boosted screens.
An upgraded Mac Pro workstation has been anticipated for over two years now.
For more, check out PCMag’s liveblog from today’s keynote.
More WWDC Coverage
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