WWDC 2017 – Everything You Need to Know

WWDC 2017 – Everything You Need to Know

Written by / Courtesy of Hongkiat

As expected from Apple, the WWDC 2017 keynote has introduced the world to a new batch of cool stuff from the company, ranging from hardware like the new iMac to software such as iOS 11.

Seeing as there is quite a number of things to go through, I’ll being this article by looking at Apple’s hardware offerings, before moving on to the software side of things. Without further ado, let’s begin.

New iMac Pro and updated iMacs

We start off this hardware roundup with a look at one of Apple’s older products: the iMac. At WWDC 2017, Apple has introduced a new top-of-the-line iMac that the company has unsurprisingly dubbed the iMac Pro.

Sporting a Space Gray (dark gray) chassis as opposed to the regular iMac’s silvery-gray one, Apple claims that the iMac Pro is the “most powerful Mac ever made”, and the internals more or less proves just that.

The iMac Pro comes with:

  • 27-inch 5K Retina display.
  • Equipped with up to an 18-core Intel Xeon processor.
  • AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64 GPU with 16GB of HBM2 VRAM, up to 128GB of RAM.
  • 4TB of SSD storage space.
  • 10Gb Ethernet port, and four Thunderbolt 3 ports.

For cooling, the iMac Pro comes with a new thermal design that Apple claims could provide up to 80% more cooling capacity than the regular iMac. The iMac Pro will come with a keyboard and mouse of the same Space Gray color, which according to Apple, is exclusive to the iMac Pro itself.

Pricing for the iMac Pro begins at USD4,999, with the product expected to ship out sometime in December. So yes, you won’t be able to get your hands on it for quite a while.

If you’re looking to replace your aging iMac sooner, you might want to take a look at the newly refreshed iMac line. While all new iMacs are now powered by Intel’s Kaby Lake processor, the 21.5-inch Retina 4K iMac and the 27-inch Retina 5K iMac gets some additional upgrades.

The newly refreshed iMacs are now available for purchase with the prices starting at USD1,099 for the standard iMac model.

MacBooks & MacBook Pros get refreshed

In terms of announcements, the MacBook and MacBook Pros aren’t getting any major upgrades from the pre-existing models. That being said, Apple’s series of laptops will be getting hardware refreshes, with the MacBook Pro lines getting an upgrade to Intel’s Kaby Lake processors as well as faster SSDs.

Speaking of MacBook Pros, Apple has also announced that a new 13-inch MacBook Pro will be making its way to the market. This particular laptop will be a base model, which means it doesn’t come with a Touch Bar. That aside, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro will sport a 500-nit Retina display and an Intel Core i7 processor. Prices for this variant of the MacBook Pro will begin at USD1,299.

Rounding up the MacBook session, we’ve finally learned that Apple is not abandoning the MacBook Air after all. While the MacBook Air isn’t getting any large scale updates, Apple has decided to bump up the laptop’s performance by equipping it with a 1.8GHz processor.

New 10.5? iPad Pro & refreshed 12.9? iPad Pro

Are you a fan of the 9.7-inch iPad Pro? If you’ve answered yes to the question, I have some bad news for you – the 9.7-inch iPad Pro has been discontinued. To replace the 9.7-inch model, Apple has announced a new iPad Pro model that sports a bigger screen, 10.5-inches to be exactly.

Continue reading the original article over at Hongkiat.com.