SAN FRANCISCO: Apple MacBook will be in the markets on April 10, 2015. The MacBook is featured with a 12 inch retina display. It will be available for $1,299 round the world.
The little time I had with it was enough to impress. The MacBook is thinner and lighter than the Air. It feels like an iPad, except with a regular keyboard and screen. In fact, the MacBook incorporates many of the design techniques Apple learned from the iPad, including making the laptop work without a fan and squeezing all the electronics onto a small card, known as the logic board.
The MacBook, which goes on sale April 10, isn’t cheap – but it’s reasonably priced for a Mac laptop. The $1,299 model comes with 256 gigabytes of storage. That’s double what you get on the $899 Air version. It’s the same amount of storage you get for the $1,099 Air but MacBook’s high-resolution screen is much better. For $300 more, you get a MacBook with faster processor and 512 gigabytes of storage.
MacBook’s 12-inch screen is the “Retina” display found in the latest MacBook Pros, iPhones and iPads. I hadn’t found the Air’s screen problematic but once you see the crisp text on Retina, you start noticing the Air’s deficiencies.
The new MacBook’s keyboard promises better precision and extends all the way to the left and right sides of the laptop. That’s similar to how the frames on phones have shrunk to maximize screen space. Apple kept a full-size keyboard – a wise decision, as smaller keys placed more closely to each other can be difficult to type.
The new MacBook also has an improved trackpad. It’s designed in such a way that it should feel the same wherever you tap it. With the current Air, the mouse-click capabilities are along the edge closer to you. The new trackpad also enables new controls. If you hover over an icon and press on the trackpad for a few seconds, a preview of the file opens.
Apple has a history of ditching older technologies as it comes out with new designs. The iMac got rid of the floppy disk drive long before other PCs did. The Air dropped the DVD drive and eventually traditional hard drives (it uses flash memory, similar to iPhones and iPads). The new MacBook drops USB ports, which are common for printers and other accessories. (Ironically, it was the iMac that popularised USB.)
Apple’s proprietary MagSafe power-charging port has been replaced with a standardised USB Type-C connection. It’s an emerging technology that will also connect accessories and serve as a display output. It’s like taking all of the Air’s existing ports and squeezing them into this new Type-C one. The difference is you need to share that port among your various chargers and accessories. And there are few that work with Type-C for now, so you’ll need to buy adapters.
