Apple puts Macbook Air in the shade with with slimmer Pro model

Life

Apple's latest Macbook is thinner and lighter than the Macbook Air

Apple has significantly revamped its laptop line, unveiling a new MacBook that is lighter and thinner than the MacBook Air and boasts a 12″ high-resolution display long dubbed Retina by the company.

“Can you even see it? Can you even feel it?” trumpeted CEO Tim Cook when he held up the new notebook during an introductory event in San Francisco.

It was the first time since April 2014 that Apple refreshed its light-weight notebook line, and followed months of speculation that the Cupertino company was working up a Retina-equipped, 12″. addition or replacement for the MacBook Air.

But instead of sticking with the Air moniker for the new notebook, Apple cleaned off a label that had gone dusty if not musty.

“This is the lightest Mac we have ever made,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing. Schiller claimed that the laptop is 24% thinner than the MacBook Air, and took the tape at just 13.1mm at its thickest edge.

Schiller also stepped through a host of changes – supporting Cook’s contention that the MacBook was the result of Apple’s goal to “reinvent the notebook” – including a redesigned keyboard and trackpad, a smaller logic board, and a fan-less design.

The MacBook relies on an Intel Core M processor, one from the chip maker’s 14-nanometer Broadwell architecture, and features just one port, a multi-use jack based on the USB-C standard that supports USB, DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA, and also serves as the power connection.

The 12″ Retina screen offers 2304×1440 pixel resolution.

The MacBook will run for 9 hours between charges while browsing the Web, said Schiller, 10 hours while listening to music. The MacBook weighs in at 2lbs, tipping the scale at 17% less than the the lightest, smallest 11″ MacBook Air.

Apple will start selling the MacBook on 10 April.

Prices begin at €1,499 for the entry-level configuration, which features a 1.1GHz dual-core CPU, 8Gb of RAM and 256Gb of Flash storage. The upper-end model doubles the storage space to 512Gb and boosts the processor to 1.2GHz.

Apple also made minor tweaks to its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebooks, bumping up the processors in all models and shifting to faster flash storage memory. The MacBook Pro also received the same new trackpad featured in the MacBook.

ComputerWorld

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