No New MacBook Airs as Apple Instead Makes Lower-End, $1,500 MacBook Pro (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday October 27, 2016 @08:15AM from the shut-up-and-dance dept.

Alongside the two new MacBook Pros, Apple also unveiled a refresh for its popular MacBook Air lineup. The company is calling this: the MacBook Pro, same branding as the other two MacBook Pros. It's a lower-end version of the new MacBook Pros, with no "Touch Bar" (or the Touch ID) and is powered by a slightly slower processor. Starting at $1,499, this MacBook Pro model is slightly cheaper too, though. From an ArsTechnica report:Apple said it will continue selling the existing 13" MacBook Air, but the company made a point of comparing that model to this new lower-end Pro, putting it somewhere between the Air and the other Pros in the lineup. The new 13" MacBook Pro starts at $1,499 and will begin shipping today. The new higher-end Pros will start at $1,799 for the 13" model and $2,399 for the 15" model while shipping in two to three weeks. If you don't select any hardware upgrades, the low-end 13" Pro has a sixth-generation Intel Core i5 processor with dual cores clocked at 2.0GHz, Intel Iris Graphics 540, 8GB memory, and 256GB SSD. It is available in space grey and silver, and it can cost up to $2,599 if you select the highest CPU, memory, and storage upgrades. Those available upgrades include a 2.4GHz Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory, and 512GB or 1TB of SSD storage. The new 13" laptop has a 2560x1600 Retina display, two Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports, and a headphone jack. It has the same Force Touch trackpad and redesigned keyboard as the higher-end models despite not integrating the Touch Bar and Touch ID.

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I hope Apple knows by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 08:16 · Score: 4, Informative

As of the latest surface announcements, Microsoft is ahead of them hardware-wise in everything except for the iPhone.
Still limited to 16GB of RAM.... by firebeaker · 2016-10-27 08:59 · Score: 3, Informative

... no magsafe, no headphone jack, no optical out.
Not excited.

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-beaker
1. Re:Still limited to 16GB of RAM.... by thegarbz · 2016-10-27 09:23 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  It has a headphone jack.
  Literally the only good announcement here is that they didn't remove the one thing they stripped from their other flagship device. What a frigging joke. It's good now that I can't connect my phone to my laptop without an adaptor, can't connect my laptop headphones to my phone without an adaptor, and best of all both adaptors are different so I get to pay twice as much for the privilege of nothing being inter-connectable all brought to you by a company who used to have inter-connectivity of their products be a number one selling feature.