When Apple held its “Spring Forward” event on Monday, it revealed an updated MacBook Air lineup. For the most part the two Air models are the same, but this time there was one key difference between the 13-inch MacBook Air and the 11-inch MacBook Air – storage speed.
“The 13-inch MacBook Pro has been updated with the latest processors, more powerful graphics, faster flash, longer battery life and the all-new Force Touch trackpad,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We’re also bringing the latest processors and graphics, and faster Thunderbolt 2 to the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air, as well as up to two times faster flash to the 13-inch MacBook Air.”
Tear down specialist iFixit decided to put Apple’s storage speed claims to the test by running the Black Magic benchmark on new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs. The results show that the SSD in the 13-inch MacBook Air is in fact twice as fast as the SSD in older models, and the drive in the current 11-inch Air. The smaller of the siblings can hit average read speeds of 668MB/s, while the new 13-inch MacBook Air averages speeds of 1285.4MB/s.
Related: MacBook (2015) vs. MacBook Air (2015): Spec Showdown
The key difference that consumers should note is the flash memory in both of the MacBooks. The 13-inch edition has Samsung flash memory, while the 11-inch model has SanDisk flash memory with a controller chip from Marvell.
The 11-inch MacBook Air is now available on the Apple website starting at $899 for the 128GB model, while the 13-inch edition starts at $999 for 128GB. The 256GB versions of the MacBook Air are configurable to a 512GB flash storage.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.