New Delhi: Apple Inc said on Monday that it will add a 15-inch MacBook Air to the company’s lineup, which will be powered by the Apple-designed M2 processor chip. The six-speaker laptop will start at $1,299 and will be available next week. The 13-inch MacBook Air will drop in price to $1,099.
Apple updated its Mac Studio desktop machine, saying its new M2 Ultra chip can process artificial intelligence tasks that rival chips don’t have enough memory to handle.
Apple also introduced a new version of the Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra chip, its highest-performing desktop. As of Monday, the Mac Pro was the last computer in Apple’s lineup that still used an Intel chip.
Apple’s Mac lineup has experienced a revival since it began using its own chips in 2020, but sales have declined in recent quarters in line with the broader PC market.
The big highlight of the day is Apple expected to unveil a mixed-reality headset, its first major step into a new product category since the introduction of the Apple Watch nine years ago.
The launch will see Apple test a market filled with devices that have yet to gain traction with consumers and put it in direct competition with the Facebook-owned Meta platform.
Like last year’s Meta’s Quest Pro and the Quest 3 announced last week, Apple’s device is likely to combine a video feed from the outside world with the virtual world displayed on a screen inside the headset.
Shares of the iPhone maker rose 2% to a record high of $184.70 on Monday ahead of its expected launch.
Analysts expect Apple’s headset to come with high-quality displays and premium features including hand-tracking so that it can be controlled without an external controller. It’s also likely to cost a lot more than the planned $500 Quest 3.
Investors and tech fans alike will focus on how much Apple’s approach to the virtual reality market lines up with the meta. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has outlined his vision for using the headset to dip in and out of the “metaverse,” where people can meet virtually to work, play and spend time.
Besides Meta, Sony Group Corp and ByteDance-owned Pico have both recently released virtual reality devices.
Research firm IDC said companies sold a total of 8.8 million headsets last year, down 20.9% from 2021. Sales more than halve in the first quarter of 2023.