While I was busy drafting the final Mad Men discussion of season five, Apple was unveiling its new Macbook Pro. So if you’re in need of a new computer and have $2200 lying around, Tim Cook has a model he’d love to put you in today!
Reports the Verge:
Apple has announced what it calls a “next-generation” MacBook Pro, with a Retina display. It goes along the rest of the MacBook line, but Apple is looking foward with this model: removing the optical drive to enable a laptop that’s only 0.71 inches thick. The premiere feature, however, is clearly the Retina display, which packs a 2880 x 1800 pixels into 15.4-inch screen, which adds up to 220 ppi. The new MacBook weighs under 4.5 lbs, making it the lightest Pro laptop Apple has ever produced.
Phil Schiller called it “the most beautiful computer we have ever made.” It’s beautiful on the inside as well, with a quad-core i7 processor, up to 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Kepler GeForce GT 650M GPU. Naturally, Apple is focusing on flash storage instead of a traditional hard drive, and will offer it with up to 768GB. Battery life is rated to 7 hours, and ports include an SD card slot, HDMI, USB 3.0, two Thunderbolt ports, MagSafe 2 and a headphone jack. It also has two microphones
FYI, the $2200 version is the lower end of what strikes me as an iPad with a laptop keyboard attached, and comes equipped with a 2.3GHz quad-core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. Sounds like a pretty badass unit, but $2200 bucks on the low end strikes me as kind of obscene. Also, in the event you’re dying for one of these, keep in mind that new Apple hardware has a history of being clunky upon release — you may want to hold off a few weeks if you can.
Here’s the company’s announcement video…
Additionally, Apple unveiled its new iOS 6 today. Highlights include…
– While Apple won’t be buying Facebook — for now anyway — get ready for Facebook EVERYWHERE. According to Gizmodo, “Facebook is now completely integrated with the iPhone. You will be able post to Facebook from Apple’s apps, just like you can do with Twitter.” Um, gross.
– A Siri update will enable you to ask it for sports updates. (“Siri, how bad are the Saints beating the Falcons?” or “Siri what’s Dwight Howard’s free throw percentage this season?”) Siri’s also being integrated with Yelp and OpenTable so that it pulls up the highest rated restaurants when you ask it food questions — and you’ll be able to make reservations with your voice. A Fandango integration is also happening for purposes of buying movie tickets with your voice. And more languages are also being added, so a more diverse selection of people can completely ignore Siri in their iPhones.
– As some thought they would, Apple is ditching Google Maps in iOS 6 in favor of its own mapping program.
– There will be a new “lost mode” that will allow you to send a phone number to a missing Apple device in order to allow whoever found it to call you, if they choose to, of course.
– A “do not disturb” feature will added to iOS 6 that will let you tell your phone to silence alerts or incoming calls for a specific period of time.
And that’s about all I can handle right now.