design

The Hardware

New MacBook Pros: Company refreshed batch of Retina Macbook Pros. Apple showed off slimmer 13- and 15-inch versions that sport Intel’s latest Haswell chipsets and bigger batteries and come preloaded with OS X Mavericks.

New Mac Pro : The new Mac Pro aims to change it all in one fell swoop. Not only is the new coffeemaker-inspired chassis one-eighth the volume of the original computer, Apple says it has twice the performance too, with the latest Intel Xeon E5 processors, up to 64GB of RAM, dual AMD FirePro graphics chips with up to 6GB of dedicated memory, and up to 1TB of far faster PCI Express solid state storage. Overall, Apple says it has 7 teraflops of compute power and should be able to do things like “seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background.” Around back, there’s six Thunderbolt 2 ports to drive those 4K displays and connect to next-gen peripherals, as well as four USB 3.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and HDMI output. It will ship with OS X Mavericks, the latest version of Apple’s operating system.

iPads: And who could forget the iPads — Apple pulled back the curtain on two new models, the iPad Air and the iPad mini

The two actually have plenty of things in common: both sport the same 64-bit A7 chip that recently debuted in the iPhone 5s, both have screens that run at 2048-by-1536 resolution (though the smaller screen on the mini will make for much crisper images), and both are going to hit store shelves starting in November. They even resemble each other to an extent — the Air essentially looks like a 10-inch iPad mini, making it significantly slimmer and lighter than the model that came before it.

The Software

Today it seems the name of the game was ‘free.’ Apple announced that two of its most prominent software suites — iLife for content creation and iWork for, well, work — would now be free with the purchase of any new Mac or iOS device

But that’s not all. Apple’s next big OS X update, OS X Mavericks, is also free and it’s available right now for all to download. This should help dramatically raise the rate at which users update their software, which has a benefit for security and for developers, too. OS X Mavericks is available today for free from the Mac App Store. Any Mac capable of running OS X Mountain Lion can also run Mavericks. You can upgrade to Mavericks for free directly from OS X Snow Leopard, Lion or Mountain Lion.

OS X Mavericks introduces innovative new features, including:

§ iBooks, which gives you instant access to your iBooks library, more than two million titles in the iBooks Store™, and works seamlessly across your devices;

§ Maps, which brings powerful mapping technology to the desktop and lets you plan a trip from your Mac and send it to your iPhone® for voice navigation on the road;

§ a streamlined Calendar that estimates travel time between appointments, and provides a map with weather forecast;

§ a new version of Safari with Shared Links, which helps you find what’s new on the web by consolidating links shared by people you follow on Twitter and LinkedIn;

§ iCloud® Keychain®, which safely stores your website usernames and passwords, credit card numbers and Wi-Fi passwords and pushes them to your trusted devices so you don’t need to remember them;

§ enhanced multi-display support, which makes using multiple displays easier and more powerful, with no configuration required;

§ interactive Notifications, allowing you to reply to a message, respond to a FaceTime® call or even delete an email without leaving the app you’re using;

§ Finder Tabs, which help unclutter your desktop by consolidating multiple Finder windows into a single window with multiple tabs; and

§ Finder Tags, a powerful new way to organize and find your files located on your Mac or in iCloud.

General Hardware Specification requirement available @Apple

Find why Should I upgrade to OS X Mavericks @Lifehacker

OS X Mavericks Review @Engadget