Apple introduces 12-inch notebook, updates MacBooks

IN a surprise move, Apple today announced a new style of Notebook — a tiny MacBook that weighs just 920 grams and is just 13.1mm thick.

IN a surprise move, Apple today announced a new style of notebook — a tiny MacBook that weighs 920 grams and is just 13.1mm thick.

Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller introduced the product at the company’s launch event at San Francisco this morning.

He said the new MacBook was 24 per cent thinner than MacBook Air. It had an all-metal enclosure. Despite its small size it has a full-sized keyboard.

A ‘butterfly mechanism’ made it much easier to strike keys accurately. Backlighting was provided with individual LED lights for each key.

Components too were miniaturised. The logic board on the new MacBook was 67 per cent smaller than the logic board of the 11-inch MacBook Air.

The notebook had a 12-inch high resolution (Retina) display with 2304x1400 pixels, or just over 3.3 million pixels.

It had a new “force touch” trackpad with 4 sensors that distinguished between lighter presses and stronger, forceful ones. Stronger presses offered context-dependent actions, such as adding a calendar entry when you received an email invitation to an event. Deep pressing while watching a movie would cause it to fast forward.

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Apple had developed a new “terraced” battery structure for all day battery life. As a result, the

new MacBook had 35 per cent more battery capacity than would be possible with traditional battery cells.

Apple promised battery life with up to 9 hours of wireless web browsing and up to 10 hours of iTunes movie playback.

And new USB-C technology allowed an array of connections to be added through one socket. It supported USB 3.1 Gen 1, 5 Gigabits per second data transfer and DisplayPort 1.2 all in a single connector one-third the size of a traditional USB port.

The new MacBook had a 1.1 Gigahertz dual core Intel Core M processor, 8 GB of memory and 256GB of solid state storage. It will cost $1799 in Australia and ship from April 10 locally. One with 512GB of SSD storage and a faster processor would cost $2199.

Apple also announced hardware updates to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air ranges, with prices rising following the slump in the local dollar.

The MacBook Pro would get the same “force touch” trackpad announced for the new notebook, fifth generation Intel Core processors and Intel Iris Graphics 6100, two times faster flash and longer battery life; the 13-inch model will cost from $1799 and the 15-inch ones from $2799. Last year the same prices for previous models were $1599 and $2499 with a stronger dollar.

The 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air would receive fifth generation Intel Core processors, Intel HD Graphics 6000, and a Thunderbolt 2 port. Flash would be two times faster on the 13-inch MacBook Air. The 11-inch MacBook Air starts at $1249 and the 13-inch at $1399. Again, prices have risen $150 to $200.

There were no suggestion of the MacBook Air having a high resolution Retina display, as some had hoped for.