APPLE

Apple Unveils MacBook Air With Retina Display, Refreshed Mac Mini

At last last, Apple today gave its Macbook Air a much-needed refresh. The new MacBook Air ditches the aluminum bezel for a 13.3-inch Retina display that stretches to the edge of the enclosure.The new MacBook is priced at $ 1,199 with 128GB of storage. It's available to order starting today and will start shipping on Nov. 7.The Retina display quadruples the resolution of the previous MacBook Air with over 4 million pixels and 48 percent sharper color. The portable laptop is also 17 percent thinner and a quarter-pound lighter than its predecessor, measuring 15.6mm thin and weighing in at 2.75 pounds.Aside from the Retina display, a new feature addition is Touch ID. Users can now unlock their laptops, use Apple Pay, and enable Touch ID with third-party apps. The fingerprint sensor is fitted into the keyboard itself, occupying its own key on the top right. That keyboard is backlit with individual LEDs and has what Apple says are "four-times more stable keys" built with the quieter butterfly mechanism.

Below the keyboard, the new trackpad has a 20 percent larger surface area that uses Force Touch to quieter click using pressure-sensitive capabilities and haptic feedback. There's also the front-facing FaceTime HD camera at the top of the display, which now works with the FaceTime Group feature in MacOS Mojave.

On the sound front, the new MacBook Air comes with stereo speakers and more bass, plus a three-mic array. It's also got all-day battery life with up to 13 hours of iTunes movie playback. It's got an always-on processor to enable "Hey Siri" functionality.There's beefed up on-device encryption and security as well. The T2 chip built into the MacBook Air has the secure enclave with a security processor, boasts unique per-chip IDs, user and filesystem keys, and a secure boot process. It's also got an SSD controller with automatic on-the-fly AES-256 data encryption.

Finally, let's dive into the specs. The new flagship MacBook Air has an 8th-generation Intel i5 CPU with 16GB of faster memory and capacity up to 1.5TB SSD. There are two Thunderbolt 3 ports that can connect up to a 5K display.

P. C./mundophone