Apple releases updated MacBook Air, announces redesigned Mac Pro

It was a big day for Apple at WWDC today, and the company started it off by introducing an update to their Mac line of computers. First, Apple has announced an updated MacBook Air based on Intel’s new Haswell architecture, which provides a significant performance improvement while also greatly bolstering battery life. While the old MacBook Airs managed only around 6 hours of battery life, the new MacBook Air does significantly better; the 11-inch MaBook Air averages around 9 hours of consecutive use, while the 13″ has been bumped to a whopping 12 hours of battery.

Both new models are based around flash storage and both are now available to order at Apple’s online store. The 11-inch MacBook Air starts at $999 for a model with a 1.3 GHz dual-core processor and 128GB of storage, while the 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,099 for a similarly specced machine. Both sizes are also available in a model with 256GB of storage for $1,199 for the 11-inch or $1,299 for the 13-inch respectively.

Meanwhile, the Mac Pro is seeing its first significant update in well over a year, and get ready for a shocker – Apple has radically redesigned the enclosure of the Mac Pro, transforming the professional machine from the large, grilled brush metal enclosure into a beautiful, glossy black cylinder. The Mac Pro continues to be fully upgradeable and uses standard desktop parts, and will come pre-loaded with a “new-generation” 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, a graphics card capable of supporting 4k video output, and high speed memory. The new Mac Pro is also the first Mac to come with Intel’s new Thunderbolt 2 port, the successor the the Thunderbolt port that was introduced to the Mac product line in 2011, which provides theoretical speeds of up to 20 Gbps.

The new Mac Pro will be available “later this year” and will be the first Apple Macintosh manufactured in the United States in many years.