An Explanation of the News From Apple

NY Times by David Pogue

Well, Steve Jobs may be gone. But to the extent that Apple can keep alive the format and excitement of his onstage new-feature presentations, Apple is doing it.

On Monday morning in San Francisco, I watched the new Apple C.E.O., Tim Cook, give brief remarks at the beginning and the end of the keynote presentation at the Worldwide Developers Conference, which will apparently become what the old Macworld Expo used to be: a place for Apple to take the wraps off its latest inventions. He handed off the actual announcements to his lieutenants.

First, laptops: starting today, the new MacBook Airs are faster, they store more, they have combination USB 2/USB 3 jacks, and they cost $100 less than before.

There’s also a new, top-of-the-line super laptop, the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display ($2,200 and up). It’s very thin and light (0.7 inch, 4.5 pounds), has two microphones for better speech recognition — and, yes, it has a Retina display.

In other words, it has a screen composed of many more, much tinier dots than conventional laptops; at 2,880 by 1,800 pixels, it’s the highest-resolution screen ever to appear on a laptop. Apple notes that when videos are edited in Final Cut, you can see every single dot of a 1080p hi-def video you’re editing — and still have three million pixels of screen left over for your toolbars and timelines. read more...