Valentina Palladino

NEW YORK—Apple led today’s event by talking about two of its most-loved devices: the MacBook Air and the Mac mini. While Apple customers may have loved these devices since their debuts, Apple hasn’t shown them much love over the past couple of years.

That changed today with the introduction of the new MacBook Air (which includes updates like a Retina display, Touch ID, and Apple’s butterfly keyboard) and a new Mac mini (which got a big spec bump with quad- and hexa-core processors). Today’s event brought the biggest hardware changes that both devices have seen in a long time, and yet they still have a lot in common with their predecessors—and that’s a good thing.