Although talk of iOS 6 has been rampant in the run up to WWDC, the speculation regarding a refresh of the Mac range has been equally rife. There has been a lot of on-off reports regarding a Retina display MacBook Air, Pro and iMac, and Apple has today confirmed, and debunked most of the rumors and reports once and for all.
Without further ado, let’s have a little run-down of what’s new in a breakdown of the features within each refresh:
MacBook Pro
The new MacBook Pro gets a major hardware upgrade, but it’s no Retina display, it’s a USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt affair all round, and tying in with rumors leading up to this point, the 15-inch MacBook Pro is faster than its predecessors, mainly down to the fact that the processor is a powerhouse. Apple’s quest to remove optical drives has been ongoing for some time now, and although the MacBook Air was the first in line for the chop, it looks as though the Pro range is not going to be following suit. The processing muscle comes to us courtesy of Intel, all thanks to their latest Ivy Bridge processors.
All MacBook Pro models keep the same display as before, and you’ve guessed it, it’s not Retina, so, bummer.
Apart from having a "regular" hard drive, the new MacBook Pros can be configured to boast a SSD for extra speed and battery life, and comes in three different flavors; 256GB, 512GB and 768GB. Apart from the SSD, you can configure your MacBook Pro to have up to 16GB of RAM.
Apple has finally given up on Intel and AMD when it comes to graphics, and have made a jump to NVIDIA’s latest line-up of Kepler graphics chips, which is more than enough to drive that Retina display on the MacBook Pro.
MacBook Air
In great news for those with less disposable cash to part with, there’s budget version going on general sale. It doesn’t get a Retina display either, but will certainly entice those who previously would have written off a MacBook as outside their price ranges.
The upgraded MacBook Airs are both slightly faster, will both feature the much faster USB 3.0 (which is x10 faster than USB 2.0), Thunderbolt and Ivy Bridge processors with up to 2.0GHz of clock speed running a dual-core i7 processor, and for the majority of those considering the acquisition of a MacBook, will likely be the most sought-after once on general sale.
But here comes the juicy part, the MacBook Air now comes with 4GB of RAM as standard and can be configured with up to 8GB of RAM, which is a lot of memory, if you’re asking us.
The FaceTime camera has also been updated, and now supports the mega 720p resolution.
Last but not the least, you can now configure your MacBook Air with up to 512GB of SSD goodness, that’s an all-time high from Apple’s end in the SSD department when it comes to the MacBook Air.
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