Today, Apple released the new MacBook Air and previewed the new Mac Pro along software at its annual developer conference (WWDC). Everything previewed such as iOS 7 and the next Mac operating system is to be released in the fall, but the MacBook Air ships today.
The new MacBook Air comes with Intel’s latest chips, which promise ultra energy efficient modes that estimate up to 12 hours of battery life on the 13” model. The Mac Pro hasn’t been properly updated since 2010. It’s now 1/8 the size and about 2.5 times as fast as the previous tower, embracing some of the latest technologies. iTunes Radio is Apple’s competing service to Pandora, that has adjustable playlists with similar features.
The new Mac OS was less feature packed, implementing features from the iPhone such as Apple Maps and iBooks, along with a lot of behind-the-scenes performance improvements. A unique new feature to it was that notifications are now interactive, so new emails and iMessages can instantly be replied to, and FaceTime calls are now answered as a notification opposed to opening the aplications and disrupting whatever the user was doing. Apple’s iOS 7 was the main event, featuring a complete design and feature overhaul full of new features.
iOS 7 offers a completely new lock screen design with moving elements that move as you move your iPhone and notification design. When you unlock it, a whole new layout and set of icons is visible. Most of the stock apps have been redesigned with new color schemes such as Game Center and Notes, which have lost their special skins. Other apps like Weather and Photos have been completely redesigned. Multitasking has been redesigned as well, now showing the state in which the app was left opposed to just the icon. Other small features were implemented such as Airdrop that allow sharing of photos and other data between iOS devices.
The new Mac OS 10.9 is codenamed Mavericks, the beginning of a new name lineage of California themes. The look has gone universal in it’s look with grey gradients, so apps like Game Center, Calendar, and Contacts have lost textures. Safari got a redesign, with integration with Facebook and Twitter and a redesigned Top Sites. Lots of the features were aimed towards performance with increased efficiency among multiple screens and vastly increased efficiency when idle including App Nap, which eliminates app activity when it’s not in view.
No longer a tower, the new Mac Pro is a small cylinder that features all flash storage through PCI-Express, delivering 1.2GB/s speeds. It’s also the first Mac with dual graphics cards with up to 6GB of graphics memory, capable of four 4K video streams. It also has the latest Intel Xeon chip with 12 cores, and up to 60GB of RAM at 1866Mhz.
