Apple Announces New 12-inch MacBook With Retina Display

Apple has announced a new 12-inch MacBook fitting in-between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro at its event earlier today. Named simply ‘MacBook’, it features an all-new super-thin design, with a redesigned logic board, keyboard and trackpad.

The new logic board has been trimmed by 67%, removing the fan and several of the ports, and seemingly lowering the size of hundreds of modules that go onto the board.

The thickest part of the 12-inch MacBook is only 13.1mm thick and it weighs only two pounds. It will only feature one port, USB-C, which supports charging, USB, VGA, display and other types of connectors.

Internally, the 12-inch MacBook features a 1.3GHz (2.9GHz overclocked) Intel Core M processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD storage and nine hours of battery life. WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 will be the two new “wires” according to senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller when explaining why all of the ports had disappeared.

The 12-inch MacBook will feature a ‘retina’ display, 2304 x 1440 resolution and an edge-to-edge panel. Apple has redesigned the keyboard with a “butterfly” click, and the trackpad has a Taptic Engine to notice different force behind a click.

Apple will start selling the 12-inch MacBook later this month for $1,299 with a higher-spec configuration for $1599. Apple has also refreshed the MacBook Air line with new specifications based on Intel’s Broadwell technology.