San Francisco - Apple unveiled new Macs ahead of the holiday shopping season and said its latest computer operating system, Mavericks, is available free of charge.
The Cupertino, California-based company made the announcement on Tuesday at an event in San Francisco.
A new, 13-inch (33-centimetre) MacBook Pro with Retina display is thinner and lighter, said Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller, adding that the laptop has up to nine hours of battery life, enough to “watch the entire trilogy of The Black Knight on one charge.” The notebook's new price is lower: $1 299 (about R12 000), compared with $1 499 for the previous version.
A larger MacBook Pro, with a 15-inch (38-centimetre) monitor and 256 gigabytes of storage starts at $1 999, compared with $2 199 for the previous version.
The Mac Pro, a high-end desktop computer aimed at what Apple calls “power users,” will be available in December for $2 999.
Apple also says nearly two-thirds of its mobile devices are running iOS7, the revised operating system it released in September. Twenty million people have listened to iTunes Radio about a month after its release.
Apple is expected to revive its tablet line with new iPads. The company sold 14.6 million iPads in the June quarter, down 14 percent from the same time last year. - Sapa-AP