MacMost Now 720: New MacBook Pro, iOS 6 Announced

At the Worldwide Developer Conference Apple announced the next generation MacBook Pro complete with a retina display, the first Mac to get such a screen. In addition, Mountain Lion's release date was specified as this July, and iOS 6 for iPhones, the iPod touch and the iPad was announced. The new iOS will feature Facebook integration, a new Maps app and other new features.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's run down the new announcements for the World Wide Developers Conference. 
So, today Apply had several announcements. Most of them concerning the new operating system The Mountain Lion and IOS6. But they started off talking about hardware. First, a whole new set of specs for the MacBook and MacBook Air. Mostly new processors and memory, the basic form factor and screens and everything stays about the same.
Now these new MacBooks the biggest feature is they now have USB3. So Apple is finally producing Macs using USB3.0 and all of the MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros talked about today include USB3. The big announcement was a new MacBook Pro is available today and features a retina display. So the same type of display that is on the iPad just a little larger for the 15" MacBook Pro and it has 2880 pixels across and 1800 pixels vertically. This also with new processors. Also we have a shift with ports included. So with the new super thin design you've got no ethernet port. The port is simply too big. But you have two thunderbolt ports and as we know you can have a thunderbolt ethernet adapter. So if you still need to hook up to a wire connection you can do it that way. 
Also, gone is the firewire port. But included is a HGMI outport so you can hook directly up to television using HGMI right from this new MacBook Pro. Being thin of course there is no optical drive and its all SSDs including up to 368 gigs on an SSD. 
The prices for the base model of this which is the 256 gig SSD and 8 gigs of RAM start at only $2200 and then of course with customization you go up from there. All of the new MacBooks, the updated older models and the brand new Retina display MacBook are on sale today.
Now beginning with Mountain Lion most of the stuff we already knew. Apple already announced Mountain Lion before. You can go back to Episode 673 to see what some of the new features you can expect. One big announcement today was a release month rather than just saying summer. We now know that it will be released in July. We also know that it will be just $20 to get it and in addition to that you can upgrade directly from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion if you want. You do it through the Mac App Store of course.
With Mountain Lion you buy it once and distribute it to all of you Macs that use your Apple ID.  So if you have a laptop and a desktop and you have one Apple ID between them you just buy it for $20 and upgrade both machines.
Now what we heard for the first time today was about IOS6. So IOS6 will be the new operating system on iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads will be coming out later this year. A Beta version just for developers is available today. We heard about what some of the new features will be. 
So Siri will be getting a whole bunch of new features including the ability to access sports scores, more about entertainment, reviews, things like that. There is also going to be a whole bunch of new languages and one really cool new feature is the ability to launch third party applications by asking for it. And also big news is that we will get Siri on the iPad as well.
IOS6 and also Mountain Lion on the Mac there is going to be a lot of Facebook integration. So finally you will be able to post photos directly from the camera app to Facebook, and there will be integration throughout all the Apple apps but also third party developers will be easily able to access the integration so they can add Facebook sharing buttons throughout their apps as well. 
One cool new feature is going to be FaceTime. The video chatting services that now only works on WiFi will also now work on cellular. Now we don't have details like whether or not you will be using your phone minutes, for instance, to do it or how good the quality is going to be on a slower cellular network as opposed to your home WiFi.
Two new Apps were announced. One is called the Passbook App. This is centered around your ticket. Like if you buy an airline ticket or a movie ticket of maybe a gift card to a store you will be able to have this appear in this Passbook app and then you will be able to show them using your iPhone so you don't ever have to deal with a physical ticket. So this will be interesting to see. They showed some movie theaters and some airlines that are already on board with it. 
As predicted Apple also showed off a whole new Maps App. It looks like Apple is going into the maps business to complete with Goggle and Microsoft and other companies who have it. So there is going to be a whole new turn-by-turn directions in this app. There is going to be flyovers, arial views, there will be 3D views of cities and streets and directions. All the stuff that we've got now, plus a little more, and a whole new look to the Map App as soon as IOS6 is out.
No doubt after a little while the video for this keynote will be posted and you will be able to see all the little details and features of IOS6 and Mountain Lion that were mentioned today and see a little bit about what the new MacBook has in store for us.
Hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 8 Responses to “MacMost Now 720: New MacBook Pro, iOS 6 Announced”

MikS

12 years ago

Man that integration is getting better and better, wow. So I see they did away with the 17in pro, I just got mine like a month ago. Cant return it for the upgraded one, should I just put an ssd on here? Can you upgrade the processor as well?

Gary Rosenzweig

You can definitely upgrade to an SSD, but there's no real way to upgrade the processor. Now that they don't have the 17-inch one you may be able to sell it for a lot of money to someone that really wants one.

Ahhhh very true, think ill wait a bit. I don't think I wanna sacrifice not having the DVD drive built in for a better screen res. This one is still damn amazing lol. You getting the new ones Gary?

I'm a Mac Pro user. I'm waiting for a Thunderbolt version of that. I use a tiny MacBook Air as a complement, but the new one isn't a big enough jump to make me want to get it.

Karen

With regard to Mountain Lion, our family has three Macs and each one belongs to a different family member with their own Apple ID. Do we need to purchase three copies of Mountain Lion, or would it work to sign in with my ID on each Mac, download Mountain Lion and then sign back in to their ID?

I don't at all mind paying three lots of $20 to update each Mac, but wondered if like iTunes sharing, it is Apple's intention for families to only have to buy one copy of Mountain Lion.

Right. Each Apple ID would need to purchase it. Otherwise I'm not sure if updates would work. Maybe -- but at $20 I would just stick to buying it for each one.

Many thanks Gary.

I have MobileMe and use iDisk. I've been holding off transfering my documents to DropBox to see if Apple came up with an alternative. It seems that Documents in the Cloud is that replacement. I'd be interested to know if that is your view and and also whether any iDisk capabilities are missing in Documents in the Cloud.

They are not the same thing. Documents in the Cloud will give you a place to save/open files from specific apps: TextEdit, Pages, Numbers, and eventually third-party apps that adopt it.
DropBox is a much more versatile solution, allowing you to put any files you want there. It is much more similar to iDisk.
I'd just use both. Use iCloud for those specific apps. Use DropBox for everything else.

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MacMost Now 720: New MacBook Pro, iOS 6 Announced

Comments: 8 Responses to “MacMost Now 720: New MacBook Pro, iOS 6 Announced”

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