Apple unveils Magic Trackpad, updated desktop products – Yahoo! News
As many had predicted, Apple unleashed a series of updates to its desktop lines Tuesday. The iMacs got faster graphics cards and pumped-up processors, while the top-tier Mac Pro boasts the option of a whopping 12 cores of processing power. The multi-touch Magic Trackpad also made a belated appearance, as did a jumbo — but pricey — new Cinema Display.
The long-rumored Magic Trackpad ($69, shipping now) looks like what you’d get if you chopped the trackpad out of a MacBook Pro. Apple says the Magic Trackpad — basically a square, glass-coated aluminum tile with a long, rounded foot along its bottom edge to prop it up on a desktop — is actually 80 percent bigger than its MacBook-encased sibling.
As with the MacBook’s trackpad, the Bluetooth-enabled Magic Trackpad lets you perform multi-touch gestures like swiping, pinching and double-finger tapping, good for flipping through Web pages and photo galleries and manipulating desktop objects. But I wonder why Apple hasn’t also offered a new keyboard with a built-in Magic Trackpad, to keep your actual desk from getting cluttered with too many accessories? (Then again, for all we know, such a keyboard-trackpad combo may well be in the works.)
An optional accessory for the AA-battery-powered trackpad is the new Apple Battery Charger ($29), which comes with six “high-performance” AA NiMH batteries that will also power Apple’s wireless keyboards and the multi-touch Magic Mouse.
Also new: a 27-inch, 16:9 LED Cinema Display, which boasts an eye-popping 2560-by-1400 resolution, a built-in iSight video camera, a MagSafe charging cable for MacBooks, a trio of USB 2.0 ports, a speaker and a microphone, along with a Mini DisplayPort (meaning no HDMI without an adapter). Due to ship in September, the new Cinema Display’s price tag is also an eye-popper: $999 — though that’s something of a bargain compared with the $1,799 30-inch Cinema Display (which, by the way, hasn’t seen an update since 2006).
Apple’s high-end Mac Pro desktop system also got a long-overdue update, with options for up to 12 cores of processing power courtesy of a pair of six-core Intel Xeon processors (2.93 GHz Xenon X5670 on the high end, built to order), plus ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards with 1GB of dedicated memory (or you can cough up a little extra for an even peppier ATI Radeon HD 5870 chipset). The entry-level Mac Pro starts at $2,499 (the same price as last year’s “low-end” Mac Pro, if there is such a thing) and gets you a 2.8 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon W3530 processor, 3GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. The $3,499 configuration comes with a pair of 2.4 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5620 processors (for a total of eight processing cores), 6GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. The new Mac Pros are set to ship in August.
Last but not least come spec bumps for the 21.5- and 27-inch iMacs. All models will now ship with dedicated ATI Radeon HD graphics cards, while the lower-end iMacs have ditched the Intel Core 2 Duo processors in favor of speedier Core i3 chips. The cheapest 21.5-inch iMac goes for $1,199 (again, the same price as last October’s entry-level 21.5-inch iMac) and comes with a 3.06 GHz Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 4670 with 256MB of dedicated memory. The 27-inch iMac starts at $1,699 for a 3.2 GHz i3 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics chipset with 512MB of dedicated memory.
Not bad, but some key features that had been predicted for the Mac desktops failed to materialize — namely USB 3.0 ports and faster FireWire interfaces. Apple is also still digging in its heels when it comes to the lack of Blu-ray on the iMac and Mac Pro, even though Blu-ray drives are becoming more and more common on even garden-variety PC desktops.
What do you think of the new Magic Trackpad? Will it be useful, or a passing fancy? Tempted by one of the new Mac desktops, or will you go with a cheaper (and Blu-ray-packing) PC?
• Apple press releases: iMac, MacPro, Cinema Display
— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.
