Apple announces new MacBook Pro, iPad Air and iPad models (oh, and “the most powerful Mac ever made”)

Apple did one of its ‘launch a few products without a keynote’ things yesterday, giving us refreshes of the MacBook Air, Mac Studio, iPad Air and standard iPad.

The physical appearances of all four products, it should be said, remain as they were, but inside it’s a different set of stories. In the case of the MacBook Air, this means an M4 chip and the option to include up to 32GB of RAM, up from the 24GB maximum of the previous M3 model.

Otherwise, it’s very much as you were, but the good news is that the 13-inch model now starts at $/£999 - $/£100 less than its predecessor - which is a nice surprise. The 15-inch model starts at $/£1,199, and both are available in sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver finishes.

The new Mac Studio, meanwhile, is billed as “the most powerful Mac ever made,” this power coming from either the M4 Max or new M3 Ultra chip. Confusingly, it’s actually this new M3 processor that delivers the best performance: up to a 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU and 512GB RAM. You can also have up to 16TB of storage.

We’re not really going out on a limb when we say that a Mac Studio is overkill for the majority of bedroom musicians - for a more affordable desktop machine, check out the Mac mini - but if you do feel the need for a serious amount of speed, $1,999/£2,099 is the starting price.

Finally, those new iPads, starting with the new iPad Air, which comes equipped with an M3 processor as opposed to an M2. That’s not quite on a par with the M4 iPad Pro, but it does mean that the iPad Air (starting at $/£599 for the 11-inch model or $/£799 for the 13-inch model) sits in a nice middle ground between the new entry-level iPad, which has the somewhat dated A16 chip, and the top-end model.

One thing that storage-hungry musicians should note, though, is that at the iPad A16’s storage capacity now starts at 128GB rather than 64GB, which is possibly just as important as the processor upgrade if you want a current-gen iPad that you won’t fill up in a hurry but want to pay as little as possible for it ($349/£329, in this case).

All the new products can be pre-ordered now and will arrive in Apple Stores on 12 March.