Tuesday April 19th, Apple has announced in its latest press release, a 2016 refresh of the 12 inch MacBook Retina, as well as an upgrade of the 13 inch MacBook Air, whose discontinuation has been rumored for some time.
The 2015 12 inch MacBook was the first of its kind, and introduced many features now standard across the entire MacBook product line, including the Force Touch trackpad, which allows for new gestures to be used within Mac OS X, and the butterfly mechanism for keyboard, which introduces a more comfortable typing experience to MacBook users.
The 2016 update of the 12 inch MacBook Retina comes largely in terms of performance, with very little design changes. The internals of the 12 inch MacBook have been boosted radically, with a 1.3GHz Intel Core M Skylake with Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz, as well as faster RAM, and an updated GPU, in the form of an Intel HD Graphics 515, which, according to Apple, is 25% faster than its predecessor.
This updates version of the 12 inch MacBook, is once again fanless, with no moving parts whatsoever. By this token, Apple has spent a fair amount of work boosting battery life, which now will stretch as far as 11 hours, although real-life expectations should be curbed, as it is true with every laptop.
The new MacBook is expected to be much faster than its precursor, however it’s unclear why Apple has chosen to stick with the same Bluetooth 4.0 standard, instead of the newer 4.1, or even 4.2, the latter of which includes important security features such as full public key cryptography using FIPS compliant algorithms. Wi-Fi connectivity is handled by 802.11ac.
An updated MacBook Air is here, but for how long? As far as Apple’s press release is concerned, the updated version of the 13 inch MacBook Air is barely a notch above its existing model, aside from an 8GB RAM boost “...across all standards configurations of the 13 inch MacBook Air...”, and features a mildly upgraded CPU, and graphic hardware.
The price cut of the updated MacBook Air, seems in line with Apple’s trend of discounting product lines that are about to reach their production cycle. By this token, the 13 inch MacBook Air, and quite possibly the 11 inch model as well, may already be on the chopping block, as well as the iPad Air, which has been, unofficially, since the introduction of the 9.7 inch iPad Pro.