This morning, the Apple store was down, leading people to speculate that new stuff was on the way; those people were right. Apple has just unveiled its rumored Magic Trackpad, which is currently shipping; it’s also spiffed up its iMac and Mac Pro lines.
The Magic Trackpad is a multitouch pad similar to that found on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, available for $69 as a standalone device.
The Magic Trackpad brings the intuitive Multi-Touch gestures of Mac notebook trackpads to the desktop. With its glass surface, the wireless Magic Trackpad enables users to scroll smoothly up and down a page with inertial scrolling, pinch to zoom in and out, rotate an image with their fingertips and swipe three fingers to flip through a collection of web pages or photos. The Magic Trackpad can be configured to support single button or two button commands and supports tap-to-click as well as a physical click.
The biggest upgrades present in the newest generation of iMacs are speedier processors, new graphics options, and, for the 27-inch iMac, the choice of an SSD. Even the cheapest iMac, a 21.5-incher, comes with an Intel Core i3.
Dual-core Intel Core i3 and Core i5, and quad-core Core i5 and Core i7 processors set a new benchmark for iMac performance. The processors feature an integrated memory controller to access the system memory directly, allowing the new iMac to take full advantage of its faster 1333 MHz memory. New discrete ATI Radeon HD processors deliver incredibly smooth, crisp graphics for the most demanding 3D games, creative software and technical applications. iMac displays feature IPS technology to deliver a brilliant image across a wide 178 degree viewing angle. The SD card slot on the iMac now supports the SDXC format to handle the latest high-capacity storage cards. Customers of the 27-inch iMac have the option to order a 256GB solid state drive (SSD) as a primary or secondary drive.
While the release for Apple’s new iMac update makes prominent mention of the Magic Trackpad, newly purchased iMacs will not come with the Trackpad bundled in; you’ll have to purchase it separately.
Lastly, the new Mac Pro, which begins shipping in August, packs more heat at the high end: The $4,999 Mac Pro boasts 12 cores of processing power at up to 2.93 GHz, a Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, and lots of storage options.
At the heart of the new Mac Pro’s performance are next generation quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors running at speeds up to 3.33 GHz. These multi-core processors use a single die design so each core can share up to 12MB L3 cache to improve efficiency while increasing processing speed. These systems feature an integrated memory controller for faster memory bandwidth and reduced memory latency; Turbo Boost to dynamically boost processor speeds up to 3.6 GHz; and Hyper-Threading to create up to 24 virtual cores. The Mac Pro now comes with the ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics processor with 1GB of memory and customers can configure-to-order the even faster ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of memory.
For the first time, Mac Pro customers have the option to order a 512GB SSD for the ultimate in reliability and lightning fast performance. With the ability to install up to four SSD drives in the system’s internal drive bays, the new Mac Pro can provide ultra high-speed disk bandwidth and random disk performance, two times faster than the average performance of a standard disk drive.
More details, including complete specs, available at the Apple Store.
