Apple’s new MacBooks automatically boot in stealth mode when you lift the lid

Last week, Apple revealed its new MacBook Pro models and told us plenty about the Touch Bar which resides on most of them (among other features), but there was one thing the company didn’t mention – that all of the new laptops drop the familiar chime sound which accompanies startup.

Pingie spotted that the chime (a chord pitched at F-sharp) has been ditched so boot-up will now be silent, and this goes along with another change – the new notebooks now turn themselves on when you open them up, so there’s no need to press the power button to fire the device up.

Assuming your battery isn’t completely drained, that is.

Apple posted to clarify that the new MacBook Pro will switch itself on when it’s opened, or if the lid is already open, the laptop will turn itself on when a power adapter is connected (or indeed if you hook up the power adapter while the lid is closed, but the device is connected to an external monitor).

Thin and light 

As you probably saw last week, Apple introduced new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro machines which carry the Touch Bar – an OLED strip at the top of the keyboard which allows for keys to dynamically change depending on the app you’re using – and are 12% thinner than the MacBook Air.

As for the MacBook Air, the 11-inch model was dropped (as was previously rumored), but there was no new model forthcoming – if you want an Air, you can still buy the 13-inch version, but the range looks to be on its way out.

The message from Apple was basically that the MacBook Pro is now so sleek and light that it’s made the Air redundant, and the new entry-level model is effectively the base 13-inch Pro with no extra trappings (i.e. no Touch Bar or Touch ID fanciness).

At any rate, all these new models will be seen and not heard, that much is clear.

Via: Engadget

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).