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.
Shipping today from Apple.com!
To work with Apple’s new 802.11ac MacBooks, Apple is releasing totally redesigned AirPort base stations.
Although the new AirPort is tiny, only 4-inches, it packs a lot of functionality, including 3-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi, simultaneous dual-band, a beamforming antenna array and the option of either a 2TB or 3TB hard drive.
Price and release haven’t yet been announced, but these look like great updates.
Apple just announced that OS X Mavericks is coming out in a developer preview for today. It will be available to everyone else in fall, presumably for the usual price of $19.99. Stay tuned for our hands-on of Maverick’s new features!
Maps isn’t the only iOS app coming to OS X Mavericks. Apple is bringing iBooks, allowing you to read, take notes, and have everything synced up across all of your devices. The standalone iBooks app looks like a nice powerhouse for reading and annotating on the desktop. There’s a neat notes feature which looks tailored for students.
The interface is clean and minimal, just like everything else we’ve seen so far in Mavericks.
It was bound to happen eventually. Whether you like it or not, Apple is bringing its official Maps app to OS X Mavericks.
The new app will let you search for locations and send directions from your Mac to your iPhone via iCloud. There’s full support for everything in Maps on iOS, like 3D flyover data and points of interest with services like Yelp. You can bookmark a place on the Mac and it syncs up with all of your devices instantly. Just don’t get lost.
Apple just showed off how Notification Center is getting supercharged in OS X Mavericks.
Now in Mavericks, if your machine is sleeping, you’ll see all the Notifications that came in while you were away, all on the lock screen.
Mavericks will also update your apps in the background. And if you get an iMessage or an email, you can reply right from the Notification.
There’s also apparently a new kind of Notification, where apps can send Push Notifications to iOS devices.
Notification Center was notoriously underbaked in Mountain Lion: it’s nice seeing Mavericks getting this right.
Image: Engadget
There are even more improvements in OS X Mavericks, and the first of them is iCloud Keychain.
Craig Ferenghi says the new iCloud Keychain will keep track of website logins, credit card numbers, and Wi-Fi passwords, synced across iCloud to all your devices.
iCloud Keychain can also generate unique passwords for you, then automatically store them. And since this is all database stuff, it implies iCloud can now handle Core Data… a big failing in iCloud beforehand.
It’s all encrypted, too. Of course, with data vulnerabilities at an all-time high, whether you want to use iCloud Keychain might depend on how paranoid you were.
While unveiling the new OS X Mavericks at WWDC, Apple talked about the upcoming iteration of Safari.
Apple’s software guy, Craig Federighi, joked about calling the next version of OS X “Sea Lion” today at WWDC. He said the company didn’t want to delay the release due to a “lack of cat names.”
So instead, Apple is taking a new direction. Cat names are no more. Now OS X will be named after aspects of California, the state where Apple is based.
“We went to our backyard” for OS X 10.9, said Federighi. Enter OS X Mavericks.
Craig Ferenghi just announced some features OS X 10.9 Mavericks:
• Finder Tabs. No more having a thousand Finder windows open. Now it’ll work like Safari with one tab for every Finder instance. You can
• Tagging. You can now tag files to make it easier to find files you need. These tags exist almost as smart folders in Finder, and you can easily tag files by either entering the text you want to tag it with, or drag them into your tag folder. Looks like Apple has finally given up on hiding the file system on OS X.
• Multiple Displays. Finally, proper multiple display support! Going full screen on one display won’t blank out your other display. And you can pan Spaces on each display individually. You can easily open apps on whatever display you want, have more than one app fullscreen at once (dragging assets between apps) or keep one display static with pinned apps (like a Dashboard) while you work dynamically on the other one. You will also be able to use your Apple TV as a second display over AirPlay.