Apple Gives Away OS X 10.9 Mavericks for Free, Unveils Faster/Cheaper 13 & 15-Inch Retina Macbooks

Today Apple announced that not only is the new OS X Mavericks available for download right now, but it's available completely free. While they've been lowering the price on these smaller dot upgrades, this is the first time in recent years that such a large upgrade is available completely free. They've also introduced faster, cheaper, and lighter 13" and 15" Retina Macbook Pros (but still no 17" model, which is likely gone for good). Click through for more on those and an interesting new feature in Mavericks that may make web browsing that much easier.

More and more computing is certainly moving mobile, and the decision to release OS X Mavericks completely free is probably due, at least in part, to declining Mac sales. As the graphic below shows, the new update for OS X will be available for Macs going as far back as 2007, so even if you're on Snow Leopard, you'll be able to get the new update completely free. It's also a way for Apple to make things more compatible. If an update is completely free, it's more likely that people will update, and thus they can stop supporting older OS versions.

One of the more interesting additions to OS X Mavericks that they also showed off in June is in the area of Push Notifications. Now, if you're following a number of websites, and the websites actually support it, you can get push notifications of new content directly to your desktop without Safari needing to be open:

We've also got brand new laptops from Apple. Today they introduced faster, cheaper, lighter, and thinner 13" and 15" Retina Macbook Pros:

The new Retina Macbook Pros sport better battery life, 9 hours for the 13" and up to 8 hours on the 15" model. The 13" Retina will run on Haswell processors, while the 15" will get Crystalwell.

Both computers will come standard with integrated graphics, and while those aren't the puny integrated graphics you might be familiar with, it will likely be difficult to do too much as it relates to heavy video card accelerated programs, like DaVinci Resolve and REDCINE-X Pro. If you do need that extra horsepower, the 15" Retina will be able to take an NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M -- which will bring the price up to $2,600 (thought that does include beefier options on other hardware). That means you should be able to take advantage of programs that use CUDA acceleration like Premiere and After Effects (and Resolve), even though those programs are now beginning to support hardware acceleration with AMD GPUs (which is important since it seems the new Mac Pro will only have AMD graphics).

Head on over to the App store to get your free copy of Mavericks, or check out the Apple's online store to price out a new Macbook Pro Retina, which should be shipping now.

Link: Apple Macbook Pro -- Mac Store