Apple Inc has said it will add a 15-inch MacBook Air to the company’s lineup, powered by an Apple-designed M2 processor chip. The laptop with six speakers will start at $1,299 and be available next week. The 13-inch MacBook Air will drop to $1,099. Apple updated its Mac Studio desktop machine, saying its new M2 Ultra chip can process artificial intelligence work that rival chips do not have enough memory to handle.
Apple also introduced a new version of the Mac Pro, its highest-performing desktop, with an M2 Ultra chip. Until Monday, the Mac Pro was the last computer in Apple’s lineup that still used an Intel chip. Apple’s Mac lineup has experienced a revival since it started using its own chips in 2020, but in recent quarters sales have slumped along with the broader PC market. The big highlight of the day is expected to be Apple unveiling a mixed-reality headset, its first big move into a new product category since the introduction of the Apple Watch nine years ago. The launch will see Apple test a market crowded with devices that have yet to gain traction with consumers and put it in direct competition with Facebook-owner Meta Platforms.
Tag: MacBook
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Apple reveals 15-inch MacBook Air at developer conference
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Photoshop now runs natively on Apple’s M1 Macs
Lightroom was the first Adobe creative app to make the leap to Apple Silicon, and now the much-anticipated release of Photoshop is here. According to the company, Photoshop for M1 Macs completes most tasks 1.5 times faster than when running on Intel. But the speed improvements extend beyond actual editing; Adobe says a lot about Photoshop should now feel faster — including how quickly the app opens up. Photoshop for Apple Silicon was previously in beta, but now it’s being widely rolled out to Creative Cloud customers with an M1 Mac: those include the MacBook Air, entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini“These great performance improvements are just the beginning, and we will continue to work together with Apple to further optimize performance over time,” Adobe’s Pam Clark wrote in a blog post. In this case, “just the beginning” also means there are a small number of Photoshop features and tricks that haven’t yet made the move to the Apple Silicon version. According to Clark, these include recent additions like invite to edit cloud documents and preset syncing. “However, the performance gains across the rest of the application were so great we didn’t want to hold back the release for everyone while the team wraps up work on these last few features,” she added, noting that customers can always switch over to using the Intel build of Photoshop (with Rosetta 2) if they urgently need those features. Adobe is also bringing new features to Photoshop for iPad: cloud documents version history and the ability to work on cloud files while offline. Cloud documents version history lets you revert to an old version of a file dating back as far as 60 days.