Today came the final punch in Apple's combo of events that began with the iPhone 5S announcement last month, and it sure delivered a knock-out.
In San Francisco Apple made a slew of announcements that are bound to make Apple owners everywhere pretty happy, and they'll probably be making new owners out of a lot of people pretty soon.
Here's what you need to know:
OS X Mavericks:
- Apple's newest update to its OS is built to get the most out of your hardware. It will compress inactive memory (memory from a program you aren't currently using) to free up space for the programs you are actively using. Apple claims this feature will fit 6GB of data in 4GB of RAM.
- Mavericks will get more charge out of your battery. For a 13-inch Macbook Air, Mavericks will help it get an extra hour out of the battery charge for web browsing.
- Mavericks will help users get higher performance from their GPU.
- iWork and iLife are revamped.
- People can use the Collaboration feature to work on a single document together using iWork for iCloud, and PC owners can use it, too.
- Safari now comes with Shared Links, which consolidates links from people you follow on LinkedIn and Twitter.
- If users have iMessage set up, they can reply to a contact straight from a notification window when a send them a message, instead of having to open up the app.
- Maps and iBook are now available for the desktop. Users will have their complete iBook library available on their computer.
- Users can now "tag" documents and media with labels, i.e., if you have a bunch of photos and love letters from your girl scattered around the place, you can tag them all with "Girlfriend" and get them all in one place, even if they're all in different folders.
- GarageBand, iWork, and iLife for Mac comes free with every new Mac purchase
- Mavericks will be available to all Mountain Lion, Lion or Snow Leopard users for FREE, starting RIGHT NOW in the App Store.
Retina Macbook Air and Pro
- THe models are thinner, lighter, and faster.
- 13 inch Macbook Pro now 3.46 lbs. and is thinner, sitting at .71 inches from top to bottom.
- The new 13 inch is 90 percent faster than the previous generation, gets nine hours of battery life, 802.11 ac Wi-Fi, 2.4 GHz Dual Core, and 4GBs of RAM.
- It will go for $1,299, ships today.
- The 15 inch Macbook Pro is $1,999 and comes with 8GB RAM and 256 GB of storage, ships today.
The Newly Designed Mac Pro:
- The Mac Pro is much, much smaller now, is made of metal, and comes with a cooling system that has a single fan.
- It is now one-eighth the volume of the previous model.
- It has the fastest processor ever put into a Mac, comes with Intel Xeon E5, 1866MHz of memory, dual workstation GPUs, and its storage is all flash based.
- Comes with new versions of Final Cur Pro 10 and Aperture that take advantage of its new power.
- Is available for $2,999 with 256GB SSD in December.
