WWDC: New MacBook Airs & Mac Pro
by Shane Roberts
Hardware was announced this past week, although it may not have been the hardware everyone was hoping for.
Apple announced a refresh of the MacBook Air line of laptops! There was no major changes or revisions, just some updates!
The first update was to the 4th generation Intel Core processors. These ‘Haswell’ chips are significantly more efficient when it comes to energy consumption. The battery life of the 11″ Air is now nine hours, while the 13″ is now up to 12 hours!
The next change is moving the Airs to the new wireless speed, 802.11ac. This change will significantly change the wireless speed of the Airs. Here is the official statement from Apple on this update:
“MacBook Air now supports ultrafast 802.11ac Wi-Fi. When connected to an 802.11ac base station — including the new AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule — wireless performance is up to 3x faster than with the previous generation of MacBook Air.”
They also updated the hard drive sizes on the Airs, so now both the 11″ and 13″ start at 128GB, or you can pick the upgraded model that has 256GB.
After years the Mac Pro has seen its first update, and boy is it an update. Apple rebuilt the Mac Pro from the ground up. No longer is it the huge aluminum box, but rather it is now a cylindrical machine about 1/8 the size of the old Pro machines. The outside slides off to expose the insides of the machine, and what this bad boy has on the inside is impressive! It has enough power to run three 4K monitors! The processors, RAM, graphics cards, and the hard drives have been upgraded. It is now running high end solid state hard drives to eliminate the bottle neck that traditional hard drives have.
The center of the Pro is the cooling apparatus, it has fans that pull heat up and out the top of the machine to keep this monster cool.
It also possibly has the coolest setup of I/O on any computer. So when you spin the Pro around to access the ports, they will light up so you can see which ports are which for easy access!
The MacBook Airs are shipping now, and they are starting to show up at Simply Mac locations, just contact your closest one for availability.
The Mac Pro will be out later this year – we’ll have more details as they become available!
To see everything that Apple announced at WWDC click here.
To see more details on iOS 7 click here.
To see more on OS X Mavericks click here.



















