Apple announced quite a few things at its WWDC Keynote, we’ve spoken about the software announcements in a different article, which means that this one is dedicated to all the new hardware.
HomePod
Apple has finally unveiled its Echo competitor, HomePod.
It uses spacial awareness to tune and fill a room with sound based on the space it’s in, which in theory means it should provide better sound that Amazon’s Echo speaker. It also has a feature which Apple calls Musicologist. The feature works with Apple Music to stream the music you ask the speaker’s built-in Siri to play. According to Apple, you’ll be able to ask it music-related questions like “Who’s the drummer in this song?”
HomePod will also be able to control smart home devices and check the weather and news.
New iPad Pro
Apple has done away with the 9.7-inch iPad Pro and replaced i with the new 10.5-inch iPad Pro.
The company says that the new iPad Pro – as well as the updated 12.9 variant – feature a new advanced display with ProMotion technology (with refresh rates of up to 120 Hz and 20-millisecond latency) and the new A10X Fusion chip.
The new 10.5-inch model reduces the borders by nearly 40 percent to fit into an incredibly compact package that weighs less than 500g.
Thanks to iOS 11, the iPad will get new features including the all-new Files app, customisable Dock, improved multitasking and deeper integration of Apple Pencil.
“These are by far the most powerful iPads we’ve ever created with the world’s most advanced displays featuring ProMotion, the powerful new A10X Fusion chip and the advanced camera system of iPhone 7,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Product Marketing. “Together with iOS 11 these new iPad Pro models will radically change what users can do with iPad.”
- A new customizable Dock that provides quick access to frequently used apps and documents from any screen;
- Improved multitasking, including a redesigned app switcher that brings Spaces to iOS, making it easier to move between apps or pairs of active apps, used in Split View and now Slide Over;
- The new Files app that keeps everything in one place, whether files are stored locally, in iCloud Drive or across other providers like Box, Dropbox and more;
- Multi-Touch Drag and Drop, which is available across the system to move text, photos and files from one app to another, anywhere on the screen;
- A new document scanner in Notes, which lets users easily scan single or multi-page documents, removes shadows and uses powerful image filters to enhance readability; and
- Deeper integration with Apple Pencil, with support for inline drawing to write along text in Notes and Mail, Instant Markup to easily sign documents, annotate PDFs or draw on screenshots, and a new Instant Notes feature, which opens Notes from the Lock Screen by simply tapping Apple Pencil on the display. New searchable handwriting makes it easy to search for handwritten text or characters.
iMac Pro
Apple’s new iMac Pro is an absolute beast.
It comes with a gorgeous 27-inch Retina 5K display, up to 18-core Xeon processors and up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation, making it the most powerful Mac ever made. Apple’s new powerhouse is clad in a space gray enclosure and is capable of advanced graphics editing, virtual reality content creation and real-time 3D rendering.
“We’re thrilled to give developers and customers a sneak peek at iMac Pro. This will be our fastest and most powerful Mac ever, which brings workstation-class computing to iMac for the first time,” said John Ternus, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering. “We reengineered the whole system and designed an entirely new thermal architecture to pack extraordinary performance into the elegant, quiet iMac enclosure our customers love — iMac Pro is a huge step forward and there’s never been anything like it.”
- 27-inch (diagonal) Retina 5K display
- 5120‑by‑2880 resolution with support for billions of colors
- 500 nits brightness
- Wide color (P3)
- 32GB of 2666MHz DDR4 ECC memory
- Configurable to 64GB or 128GB
- 1TB SSD
- Configurable to 2TB or 4TB SSD
- Radeon Pro Vega 56 graphics processor with 8GB of HBM2 memory
- Configurable to Radeon Pro Vega 64 graphics processor with 16GB of HBM2 memory
- 1080p FaceTime HD camera
-
Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at 1 billion colors and:
- Two 5120‑by‑2880 (5K) external displays at 60Hz with support for 1 billion colors, or
- Four 3840-by-2160 (4K UHD) external displays at 60Hz with support for 1 billion colors, or
- Four 4096‑by‑2304 (4K) external displays at 60Hz with support for millions of colors
- Support for extended desktop and video mirroring modes
-
Thunderbolt 3 digital video output
- Native DisplayPort output over USB-C
- VGA, HDMI, DVI, and Thunderbolt 2 output supported using adapters (sold separately)
- Stereo speakers
- Four microphones
- 3.5 mm headphone jack
headphone
(USB-C)
10Gb Ethernet
- Nbase-T Ethernet supports 1Gb, 2.5Gb, 5Gb, and 10Gb Ethernet using RJ‑45 connector
- Four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports
- Four USB 3 ports
- SDXC card slot with support for UHS‑II
- Space Gray Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad
- Space Gray Magic Mouse 2
- Optional Space Gray Magic Trackpad 2
- 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless networking
- IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n compatible
Bluetooth
- Bluetooth 4.2 wireless technology
- Height: 51.6 cm
- Width: 65.0 cm
- Stand depth: 20.3 cm
- Weight: 9.7 kg
Refreshed MacBooks
MacBook now features faster Kaby Lake processors up to 1.3 GHz Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 3.6 GHz and up to 50 percent faster SSD, and supports up to twice the memory. Weighing just under 1KG and measuring 13.1mm thin, MacBook is our thinnest and lightest notebook for all-day, on-the-go computing.
