At a glance, Apple’s latest MacBook Air notebooks appear identical to their predecessors, but when you take a look under the hood, there are some obvious differences. Not only do they boast Intel’s latest Haswell processors, but they also have larger capacity batteries and smaller solid-state flash drives.
Apple just finished its WWDC keynote and holy crap, there is a ton of new stuff coming to iOS 7 and OS X. A radical looking Mac Pro was also showed off alongside some MacBook Airs with all-day battery life.
To help save you some time, here’s a list of everything new Apple introduced today at WWDC 2013 that we’ll be updating throughout the day as new info become available.
The Apple Store is back online after a five hour downtime, and all of the exciting new products Apple unveiled today are there for sale.
There’s the new MacBook Air, with Haswell processors delivering all-day battery life, starting at $999. The new Haswell processors start at 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, up from the Core i3s of the past generation. These are underclocked to save battery life compared to the previous generation, but it shouldn’t be an issue, due to the upgrade in the speed of the flash internals, which is the real bottleneck these days. Still, you can upgrade the processor to a 1.7GHz Intel Core i7 for just $150 more.
Apple’s Phil Schiller just announced a new lineup of MacBook Airs based on Intel’s Haswell processor. The 11-inch Air now has 9 hours of battery life, and the 13-inch now boasts 12 hours! The exterior design hasn’t changed. This is a huge internal specs bump.
The new 11-inch starts at $999 with 128GB of flash storage. The 13-inch starts at $1099 with 128GB of flash storage.
With just over two hours to go until Apple kicks off its WWDC 2013 keynote, the Apple online store has gone down. We can’t say we’re hugely surprised, but the move does suggest that we won’t just see software previews today, but also new hardware as well.
Today’s the day, folks! In just a few hours, Apple will kick off WWDC 2013 with a first look at its next-generation iOS 7 operating system. We’re expecting big changes with this update, and according to sources for The Wall Street Journal, those will include a brand new look, new ways to share your photos and videos, and a new music streaming service.
You can also expect to see a glimpse of OS X 10.9 and new notebooks at the event.
Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid state drive in it, like my Macbook Air. Being able to manage your space wisely is the key here, and once you’ve done the obvious things, like pare down your Applications folder and delete all those iMovie source files, it’s time to get trick, and a bit advanced.
Here’s five things that you can do to get rid of hard drive bloat, if you dare.
If you have a mid-2012 MacBook Air, Apple has released a small firmware update that addresses “a storage firmware issue that, in rare cases, may cause a system to fail to recover from crash.”
The update itself is just 1.69MB, and can be downloaded here
New MacBook Airs might be revealed at WWDC, but if you’re just looking for the cheapest price on the current MacBook Air lineup, then Best Buy’s got you set this week.
To celebrate Mother’s Day, Best Buy is taking $100 off the price of certain MacBook Air models. Then to make things even better, you can get $25 more off the price by entering the code MOM25.
Here are the prices you can expect after the discount:
It’s no secret that new MacBooks are coming at WWDC in June, but they’ll just be spec bumps, featuring a small ~8% performance boost thanks to Intel’s new Haswell processors, and a gain to battery efficiency. Nothing to get excited about, right?
Actually, no. Haswell’s hiding one super beefy update in its silicon: Iris, Intel’s super-charged integrated graphics that will boost Haswell’s polygon by 200% compared to the last generation… not to mention make the MacBook Air’s graphics beefy enough to support a Retina Display.