Apple recently lifted the lid on a new range of MacBook Air notebooks, and the Cupertino-based tech outfit’s local distributors, Core Group, has now made these ultraportable notebooks locally available. But for a pretty penny.

Thanks to packing Intel’s fourth generation Haswell processors (1.3 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost up to 2.6 GHz) the new MacBook Air range delivers a massive boost in battery life of up to 12 hours on the 13" derivatives and up to 9 hours on the more compact 11" models.    

Each of the new MacBook Airs also boasts the newest Wi-Fi technology in 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, 4 GB of 1600 MHz RAM, two USB 3.0 ports (transfer speed up to 5 Gbps), plus a Thunderbolt port (transfer speeds up to 10 Gbps). The 13" variants further offer a SDXC card slot, with Mac OS X Mountain Lion handling the operating on all of these ultraportable notebooks.

South Africans can pick up the entry-level 11" (1366 x 768) MacBook Air for R12 800. This net buyers 128 GB worth of flash storage, and this can be upgraded to 256 GB flash storage, but this increases the RRP to R15 400.

Those who require a bit more screen real estate can opt for the MacBook Air models with 13" (1440 x 900) displays. There is a variant featuring 128 GB of storage which will set buyers back R14 000, and a top-of-the-line Air model boasting double the storage (256 GB), which goes for a pricey R17 200.

The Core Group stated that stock is already available from Apple Premium Resellers (iStore and DigiCape).

In related news, Apple recently showcased OS X Mavericks, the upcoming tenth major release of the Mac computer operating system that boasts more than 200 new features.