Apple announces new macbook

At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 11. Apple unveiled its plan to release a newly revamped version of its entire MacBook laptop line.

Richard Wu, a junior accounting major, stated, “I am really excited about Apple’s upgrade of its laptop lines, but I am not surprised at all.”

There is good reason to be excited by these radical improvements.  With these new enhancements, Apple’s MacBooks will see an update to its processing unit.  Apple has introduced Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processing chip, which is more powerful and more efficient than its predecessor, Sandy Bridge. 

The improvement of CPU efficiency has lent itself well to the maintenance of the MacBooks’ battery life of up to 7 hours and 30 days on standby.

These new laptops are only 0.71 inches thick and weigh 4.46 pounds.  Additionally, these notebooks include “retina display,” which is a feature that was first utilized by Apple’s iPhone 4S that was released in October 2011.  Retina display not only provides incredibly high resolution for greatly improved picture quality, but it is durable and scratch-resistant. 

The display for the new MacBook Pro line will have a resolution of 220 pixels per inch (ppi) making it the leader in pixel density against competing laptops such as Asus Zenbook Prime (190 ppi), Alienware m15x (141 ppi), Hewlett-Packard Envy Spectre (131 ppi), and Sony Vaio Z (168 ppi). 

“The ‘retina display’ is one of my favorite features,” Steven Li, a junior accounting major stated.  “Having that feature on a laptop is really groundbreaking—high pixel density means less strain on the eyes.”

The MacBook Pro also utilizes the NVIDIA Kepler GeForce GT 650M graphics card, a mid-range graphics card from the newest series of graphics card from Nvidia. 

Additionally, Apple has eliminated the use of hard disk drives in its updated laptops and has replaced them with solid-state drives (SSDs).  While SSDs are more expensive than hard drives, SSDs allow for faster information transfer and storage, they are more durable, they are lighter in weight, they are quieter, they produce less heat, and they are more energy efficient.  Apple offers up to 512 GB of SSD flash storage for its MacBook Air series (up from 256 GB) and up to 768 GB for its high-end MacBook Pro laptops.

The last major feature that the new MacBooks will possess is access to Apple’s iCloud online storage system. With the iCloud, users can store, access, or edit music, photos, documents, and applications from any device (including PC) through the use of the Internet.  The combination of the iCloud and SSD flash storage may decrease the necessity of hard drives for file storage and transfer, and ultimately revolutionize the laptop industry in terms of information storage.

Despite all of these improvements, Apple has decided to discontinue its 17-inch laptop computers. Apple intends to focus on the continued production of new 13-inch and 15-inch laptop computers.

Prices for the new Macbook Air and Macbook Pro start from $999 and $2199, respectively.  While Wu has long anticipated the release of these new features and feels that the new MacBook Air is an excellent laptop for students such as himself, he’s skeptical of the MacBook Pro’s price.

“The price is absurd. If you want a powerhouse, buy or build a desktop.  The most basic configuration for the MacBook Pro costs $2199. For that much money, you could buy an extremely powerful desktop and a Macbook Air,” said Wu.