Apple’s big Spring Forward event today was mostly about the Apple Watch, but that didn’t stop the company from making a few other sizable announcements. In fact, the company’s reinvented MacBook was arguably the most interesting part of the whole event, although that could be due to the fact that I love laptops and have no interest in smartwatches. My favorite tidbit from the MacBook announcement was the fact that, thanks to Intel’s newest Core M processors, the new MacBook won’t even have a fan which means the already quiet laptop will be virtually silent now.
Apple’s just reinvented the MacBook with a new design that’s remarkably light, thin, and short on ports. It’s shipping next month for a starting price of $1,299. The MacBook Air isn’t going anywhere; it’s just been refreshed with updated internals. And consumers who need maximum speed and graphics performance will want to step up to the MacBook Pro with Retina display. (The old non-Retina MacBook Pro is also still hanging around, so Apple’s laptop line is growing pretty long with today’s announcement.) But right now, all eyes are on the new MacBook, the new keyboard, the new “Force Touch” trackpad, the new USB-C port, and that Retina display. Does new equal better? Apple would obviously have you believe so, and the MacBook offers the same storage (up to 512GB) and memory configurations as the Air; it ships standard with 8GB of RAM. And the screen — which has become the MacBook Air’s main weakness against PC makers — is finally making the jump to a sharp, pixel-dense panel. By integrating Intel’s very latest Core M processors, Apple has managed to construct its first laptop without a fan humming inside. But the company’s continued obsession with thinness and portability have led to major cuts this time.
