UPDATED 15:39 EDT / MARCH 18 2020

APPS

Apple unveils faster, lidar-equipped iPad Pro, updated MacBook Air and Mac mini

Apple Inc. today refreshed part of its device lineup by introducing a faster iPad Pro model with a lidar-assisted camera, an upgraded MacBook Air and storage improvements for the Mac mini.

The news follows the company announcing plans to turn the Worldwide Developers Conference it was set to hold in June into an online-only event.

The latest iteration of the iPad Pro comes in 11-inch and 12.9-inch configurations that start at $799 and $949, respectively. Most of the major enhancements are under the hood. There’s a new, faster processor, the A12Z Bionic Chip, that sports an eight-core graphics processing unit and is touted by Apple as being faster than the chips in most Windows computers. The new iPad Pro also promises better Wi-Fi speeds along with up to 60% faster LTE connections.

Another major highlight of the tablet is the rear camera array. Apple is releasing the new model with a 12-pixel wide lens, a 10-megapixel ultrawide lens for broad landscape photos and a time-of-flight lidar sensor that collects depth data about the objects in front of the camera. Time-of-flight sensors are useful for automatic image quality optimization as well as augmented reality apps, such as the AR assistant that will reportedly release with iOS 14 this year.

Apple is pairing the iPad Pro with a new Magic Keyboard that will be available as a standalone accessory. The keyboard has a built-in stand on which users can place their tablet for easier viewing, features a trackpad and supports pass-through charging.

The MacBook Air, the midrange model in Apple’s laptop lineup, is the second product that the company refreshed today. Like with the iPad Pro, Apple has largely left the exterior unchanged and instead focused on improving hardware specifications.

The 13-inch MacBook Air ships with a Core i7 central processing unit from Intel Corp. that features four cores running at 1.2 gigahertz. The CPU makes the laptop twice as fast as the previous model, according to Apple, and the integrated Intel Iris Plus Graphics module renders visuals up to 80% faster.

Storage proved to be an unexpectedly major theme of the announcement. Apple has doubled the amount of flash storage that ships with the base MacBook Air configuration to 256 gigabytes, increased the maximum capacity upgrade customers can order to 2 terabytes and added more capacity to the Mac mini as well. The desktop computer’s $799 configuration now ships with 256 gigabytes of space, while the $1,099 configuration offers 512 gigabytes.

The new MacBook Air, in turn, will become available for order starting at $999.

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Photos: Apple

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