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Apple refreshes MacBook Pros with Haswell

Looking to buy a MacBook soon? Your choices just got a lot more limited, but also more powerful. Over at its California launch event tonight, Apple has just killed off the older MacBook range rotational hard drives and DVD-ROMs, leaving only the slimmer MacBook Air and the Macbook Pro with Retina designs in the stores.

To sweeten the pill, the slinky super-def MacBook Pro will be updated with the latest generation of processors from Intel – codenamed Haswell – along with the same fast PCIe based storage that we first saw on the MacBook Air and is being introduced in the Mac Pro tonight as well.

The latter is an interesting move from Apple: modern SSDs are held back by the SATA interface used by almost every PC and laptop in the world for connecting storage. The PCI Express bus being used by Apple, however, can deliver two and a half times the data bandwidth to the drive. That’s especially useful for video editing on the go, where shifting large amounts of data around is the bottleneck to rendering speed.

Apple’s also brought the MacBook Pros bang up to date with the latest WiFi spec – 802.11ac – and Thunderbolt 2 for external storage and displays. There aren’t many 802.11ac networks around yet, but next time you upgrade your home router if you go for ac you’ll have up to 20Gbps of bandwidth over the air (maybe).

Oh yeah, and these updated models will be cheaper than the existing Retina MacBooks too. Rand prices aren’t announced yet, but should be R1 000 to R2 000 less than the current tags.

Cut and shut specs below:

  • 13 inch MacBook Pro with Retina display
    • Up to 9 hours of battery life
    • 0.1 cm thinner at 1.8cm from 1.9cm
    • 500 grams lighter at 1.57kg from 1.62kg
    • Intel Iris graphics on board for an ‘up to 90%’ improvement in graphics capability
  • 15 inch MacBook Pro with Retina display
    • Intel Iris Pro GT3 level graphics courtesy of an Intel Crystlewell chip. This means that the processor has a 128Mb of VRAM onboard that it can use before it needs to resort to the discrete GPU.
    • Optional 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 750M graphics cards
    • Up to 8 hours of battery life
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