Apple announces new Macbook Air, Mac Pro for 2013

Apple must’ve been very busy at their famed WWDC event of this year again. And for good reasons. Among the important announcements done by Apple was that of the new Mac laptops and systems for this year.

Apple has updated the MacBook Air with the new Haswell CPUs and improved battery life. The Mac Pro desktop system has been updated with a considerably trimmed down design for the first the first time in its life cycle.

MacBook Air

The new MacBook air features the same design as its predecessors. As said earlier, it comes with the new 4^th generation Intel “Haswell” chips which promise up to 40% faster graphics and power efficiency. They’ll be available in i5 & i7 flavors with 4 GB RAM and Intel HD 5000 graphics.

They also come with the new 802.11ac Wifi which is said to be 3 times faster than normal ones. USB 3.0, Thunderbolt port, Facetime HD camera and dual-microphones are included as well.

Battery life is improved too. The smaller, 11 inch model sees its battery life improve to 9 hours and the larger 13 inch one, to 12 hours. The standby time is also over 30 days now. They also wake up faster from standby mode, in 1 second.

The two models will be available in 128 and 256 GB SSD storage options which will be 45% faster too. The two models of the 11 inch laptop will be available for $999 and $1199 respectively while those of the larger model will be available for $1099 and $1299 respectively. The new MacBook Air will start shipping today.

Mac Pro

This is the first redesign that the Mac Pro has seen in its lifecycle. The new Mac Pro comes in a new cylindrical design which, according to Apple, is just 1/8th the size of its predecessor. It will now come with an AMD GPU and Intel XEON processors.

The Mac Pro also features 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports and 4 USB 3.0 ports (both of whom have been missing until now), along with HDMI out, Gigabit Ethernet and Motion Sensor. It will be available this fall but its price is still kept in the dark. I for one have some doubts though, that Apple might’ve just redesigned the Mac Pro just like the failed Power Mac Cube again but we’ll see.