Apple Unveils MacBook Air With Retina Display, Refreshed Mac Mini

At long last, Apple today gave its Macbook Air a much-needed refresh. The new MacBook Air ditches the aluminum bezel for a 13.3-inch Retina display that stretches to the edge of the enclosure.

The new MacBook is priced at $one,199 with 128GB of storage. It'southward available to society starting today in three colors—gilded, silver, and space gray—and will start aircraft on Nov. 7.

The Retina display quadruples the resolution of the previous MacBook Air with over 4 one thousand thousand pixels and 48 percent sharper color. The portable laptop is as well 17 percentage thinner and a quarter-pound lighter than its predecessor, measuring 15.6mm thin and weighing in at 2.75 pounds.

Aside from the Retina brandish, a big new feature addition is Bear upon ID. Users tin can now unlock their laptops, employ Apple Pay, and enable Touch ID with third-party apps. The fingerprint sensor is fitted into the keyboard itself, occupying its own key on the top right. That keyboard is backlit with individual LEDs and has what Apple says are "four-times more than stable keys" built with the quieter butterfly mechanism.

Below the keyboard, the new trackpad has a twenty percent larger surface area that uses Strength Touch for a quieter click using pressure-sensitive capabilities and haptic feedback. There'south also the forepart-facing FaceTime Hard disk drive camera at the top of the brandish, which now works with the Grouping FaceTime feature in macOS Mojave.

On the sound front end, the new MacBook Air comes with 25 percent louder stereo speakers and 2x more than bass, plus a 3-mic assortment. Information technology's also got all-24-hour interval battery life with up to 13 hours of iTunes picture show playback. It'southward got an e'er-on processor to enable "Hey Siri" functionality.

There'southward beefed up on-device encryption and security besides. The T2 scrap built into the MacBook Air has a secure enclave with a security processor, boasts unique per-bit IDs, user and filesystem keys, and a secure boot process. It's also got an SSD controller with automatic on-the-fly AES-256 data encryption.

Finally, let'south dive into the specs. The new flagship MacBook Air has an 8th-generation Intel i5 CPU with faster 2133 MHz system memory up to 16GB and capacity upwards to a one.5TB SSD. The SSDs are 60 pct faster than the previous generation for tasks such as launching apps and opening files. There are ii Thunderbolt 3 ports that can connect up to a 5K brandish.

Apple of course touted how eco-friendly the new MacBook Air is likewise. It's made of 100 percentage recycled aluminum candy into a new custom alloy. 1 affair the new MacBook Air definitely does not have: an sick-blighted Touch on Bar.

A New Supercharged Mac Mini

Apple also unveiled a new super-charged Mac mini, which runs six-cadre and quad-core processors, 8th-gen chips, and offers sixty percent faster graphics. It also runs the T2 security chip, which also features fast HEVC video transcoding for pro users to work with loftier resolution video.

Overall, the new Mac mini is five times faster than its predecessor, Apple says. It boasts Turbo Boost speeds up to four.6GHz and sports Intel UHD graphics, and with up to 64GB of 2666 MHz retentivity, the new Mac Mini tin load larger files into memory, run more virtual machines, or dispense even larger data sets.

The base model, which goes for $799, features 8GB of memory, a 128GB SSD and runs a 3.6GHz quad-core i3. But it tin exist configured to support up to 64GB of retention with fast all-wink storage, a 3.2 or iv.6GHz half-dozen-core Core i7, up to a 2TB SSD, and 10Gb Ethernet.

On the exterior, look for Gigabit Ethernet, iv Thunderbolt 3 ports, HDMI 2.0, 2 USB-A ports, and an sound jack.

Like the new Retina MacBook Air, Mac mini pre-orders kickoff today, and it arrives on Nov. 7.

Virtually Chloe Albanesius

Chloe Albanesius

Chloe has led PCMag's news coverage for more than 10 years, editing and writing stories about the innovations that have shaped the last decade and the companies behind them. She too oversees the site's how-to coverage. Before joining PCMag.com, Chloe was a reporter covering tech policy on Capitol Loma for The National Journal'due south Technology Daily and fiscal IT for Incisive Media in NYC. She's held internships at NBC's Meet the Press, washingtonpost.com, the Tate Gallery press office in London, Roll Call, and Congressional Quarterly. She graduated with a available's caste in journalism from American University in Washington, D.C.