APPLE

Apple Updates MacBook Pro and MacBook Air Lines, They Are Better

New MacBook Pro Apple

Apple’s Tim Cook is in the middle of his keynote at WWDC 2012, this year’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, and just flipped the sheet off the new line of Apple laptops. They are better than last year’s! There’s a much bigger separation in price and features between the two laptop lines, the Air and the Pro–the Air is Apple’s laptop for everyone, now. The Pro is for, well, pros.

The new Air is faster than last year’s, with an upgrade to the “Ivy Bridge” line of Intel CPUs, which we wrote about at length here. They’ll also start with more memory, at 4GB of RAM (which is not actually that much, really), and gives the option of a 512GB, extremely fast solid-state drive for storage. And it’ll get a USB 3.0/2.0 port, a better front-facing camera, and will cost $100 less than before. None of this is super exciting–the Air is an amazing laptop, and this one is, you know, better. Nothing surprising, though. It’s available today.

The new MacBook Pro is actually a bit of a departure. At the moment there’s not much separation between the Pro and Air lines in terms of price or capabilities–the Pro has bigger screen sizes and some beefier internal options, but not a huge difference. The new Pro line, on the other hand, is kind of bonkers. Its 15.4-inch screen has a a 2800 x 1800 resolution, which Apple’s calling a Retina Display. It’ll be crammed full of the fastest mobile guts on the market–quad-core Ivy Bridge processors, Nvidia Kepler graphics chips, a 768GB solid-state drive, HDMI-out, USB 3.0. It is pretty much the most powerful laptop we’ve ever seen. It’ll also cost $2,200. To start. To compare: I once purchased a used car for the same price.