*By Hope King*
Apple showed some love to the MacBook Air and Mac Mini Tuesday.
The trillion dollar tech giant hosted its second event in two months to introduce new versions of these somewhat neglected devices.
The MacBook Air was last fully refreshed eight years ago, with a small update three years ago. The Mac Mini hasn’t gotten an update in four years.
Reports ahead of the event anticipated the announcements, but that didn’t leave the crowd — made up of Apple employees, guests, partners, and media — any less enthused when C.E.O. Tim Cook and team finally got on stage.
When the video of the MacBook Air played on stage there were "whoo-hoos" from the crowd when the retina display was featured, and more when the three different color options came on screen: gold, silver, and space gray.
One of the moments that drew the biggest cheers was when Laura Legros, VP of hardware engineering, announced the body of the MacBook Air would be made from 100 percent recycled aluminum.
"That's one of the really exciting things about the product today," Legros told Cheddar after the event. "This is many, many years in the making of actually being able to develop a process out of the materials that we already are using in our production process."
Apple is entering a phase of slowing growth for its iPhone, its most important product for revenue and profits. The company is also seeing increased competition from the likes of Amazon ($AMZN) and Facebook ($FB), two names which are suddenly threats. Amazon this year released 70 new devices and Facebook recently came out with its first-ever hardware devices, the Portal and Portal Plus.
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Stocks opened slightly higher after Monday's opening bell after several weeks of gains as the year closes out.
