New MacBook Pro and MacBook Air light up WWDC 2012

By Raaj Datta (NVONews.Com)

Apple has finally lifted the curtain off the new MacBook lineups – the MacBook Pro 2012 and the MacBook Air. The upgrades, which have been the standard topic of speculations and rumours, are once again a threat to the emerging slimmer laptops running on Windows or Android.

The most talked about is the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display which Apple claims is ‘the world’s highest-resolution notebook display.’ Because this kind of display demands the best, Nvidia took over the game from AMD by powering the graphics of the resolution monster with NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory.

The MacBooks are eligible for a free upgrade to the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion through the Mac App Store this July. Buyers will surely be left confusing which one to choose, with each one better than the other.

Here’s a rundown through the specs of the new MacBooks:

Design

The MacBook Pro with Retina Display is about the same size as the MacBook Air. It is 0.71-inch thick compared to 0.68-inch thickness of the MacBook Air. The regular MacBook Pro is 0.95-inch thick when closed.

The Retina Display comes at the cost of the DVD drive and the traditional hard drive to make it slimmer, lighter, and faster. It offers Wi-Fi to connect to the Internet and alternatively takes an Ethernet adapter into the Thunderbolt port. The same feat is repeated on the MacBook Air. The regular MacBook Pro models have all the ports that professionals require on a regular basis.

Display

The 15.4-inch Retina screen has LED-backlit display with IPS screen technology and has an eye-popping resolution of 2880 by 1800 at 220 pixels per inch.

The regular MacBook Pro comes in two sizes with LED-backlit glossy widescreen display. The 13.3-inch one has 1280 by 800 native resolution, while the 15.4-inch one has 1440 by 900 native resolution.

The MacBook Air is available with 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch displays. The smaller offers 1366 by 768 native resolution, while the other has 1440 by 900 native resolution.

Weight

The entire MacBook lineup is seemingly on a diet. There’s been quite a trim-down for the MacBook Air which is the lightest at 2.38 pounds for the 11-inch model and 2.96 pounds for the 13-inch model.

The 13-inch Pro weighs 4.5 pounds and the 15-inch is heavier at 5.6 pounds. The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display is lighter by a pound at 4.46 pounds.

The Internals
The MacBook Pro with Retina Display comes in two versions – 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro has two versions running on 2.5GHz and 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processors. The 15-inch Pro also comes in two versions – with 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processors. Storage options vary from 500GB to 750GB.

The MacBook Air is powered by 1.7GHz and 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processors with 4 GB of RAM for the 11-inch and 13-inch versions respectively. Storage is essentially Flash – from 64GB to 256GB.

Pricing
The MacBook Pro with Retina Display starts at $2199 while the regular Pro series start $1199. The MacBook Air starts at just $999.

The way we see it…

The entire line of laptops from Apple now features faster processors, superb graphics, Thunderbolt and USB 3. Macintosh fans are going to love the performance advancements while Android and Windows ‘users’ will be awestruck and bedazzled. The hardware-heavy WWDC 2012 and the OS X Mountain Lion announcement will have the desired effects Apple wanted so much.

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Posted by admin on June 12, 2012. Filed under Featured, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry