New MacBooks? Mountain Lion? iOS? Here's everything you need to know in five minutes or less.
There's a whole new laptop: the "Next Generation" MacBook Pro. This is now the best laptop in the world, bar none.
- It's got a ridiculous 15" 220 PPI Retina display. It's not as sharp as the new iPad or the iPhone, but it's still a massive step. 2880 x1800 pixels, to be exact. That's four times as many as the normal MacBook Pro 15.
- It's 0.71 inches thick. So, like, about as thick as your finger, or a little less than twice as thick as an iPhone 4S.
- No optical drive, and only a few ports (USB, Thunderbolt, and for the first time, HDMI).
- It's got the fastest Ivy Bridge processors available and up to 768GB of storage.
- But, hahahaha, it starts at $2199, which means that you could EASILY spec this thing out over $3k. I expect many people happily will, though. It's hard to get people excited about a laptop, and people are excited about this laptop.
The old MacBooks are now faster and cheaper
- The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro look the same as before. Same old wedge, same old slab.
- They all get newer processors — the Intel Ivy Bridge generation — which are a bit faster but more importantly consume less power.
- You can buy up to 512GB of solid state storage in a Macbook Air, and upgrade to 8GB of RAM (the previous ceilings were 256GB and 4GB, respectively). This will not be cheap!
- All the laptops have USB 3. There are very, very few popular accessories that use this faster port right now. But you tend to keep laptops for a while, I guess. It's one of those small inevitable things.
- The MacBook Airs (11" and 13") are both cheaper by $100, staring at $999 and $1199. MacBook Pros sit at $1199 and $1799 for the 13" and 15" models.
