“Apple on Tuesday unveiled the first Retina MacBook Air, just as we expected, a redesigned machine that should be better in almost every way than its predecessor — the new Air only has USB-C ports and the MagSafe charging port is gone, aligning the Air design to the MacBook and Pro series,” Chris Smith writes for BGR. “But what Apple didn’t tell us on stage is that the new MacBook Air has a processor that’s not available on any other laptop, at least not for the time being.”
“Apple said the new notebook packs an Intel Core i5 chip clocked at 1.6GHz, and ready to go up to 3.6GHz with Turbo Boost,” Smith writes. “There’s no other option for the MacBook Air right now. You can upgrade the RAM up to 16GB and storage up to 1.5TB SSD, but the processor is always the same.”
Smith writes, “It was AnandTech that first observed the new Air features a chip that was nowhere to be found at Intel… AnandTech speculated that the chip is one of Intel’s 5 Watt Y-series chips part of the recently announced Amber Lake family. In addition to offering notable performance gains, the new chip is what helped Apple increase battery life on the new Air.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Juli Clover reports for MacRumors, “Intel has added the new MacBook Air chip to its ARK database. As AnandTech guessed, the MacBook Air is using a Core i5-8210Y Amber Lake Y processor, but at 7W, not 5W.”
Read more in the full article here.
I have a MacBook 2017 with i7 and wonder what the processing power difference is with the new i5 MBAir. Of course clock-speed is different but comparative “processing power” would be great to see.
I would still buy a 13″ MacBook Pro for $100 more. Identical screens, same case length/width, but better CPU and GPU than the Air. It is confusing why Apple couldn’t update the Air and keep it as a much lower cost.
Comparison:
2018 MacBook Air:
1.6GHz dual‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i5 processor, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
8GB 2133MHz LPDDR3 memory
256GB SSD storage
Intel UHD Graphics 617
Two Thunderbolt 3 ports
$1399
MacBook Pro 13.3″
2.3GHz dual-core 7th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640
8GB 2133MHz LPDDR3 memory
256GB SSD storage
Two Thunderbolt 3 ports
$1499
Y Processors are absolute garbage. It might give you 24 hour battery life because you won’t want to use the laptop for anything.
They put it in the Air so when they release a ARM based Air next year they can say it’s 2x as fast as the previous version.
I had wanted to get the new MBAir, but not sure now. Does anyone know if the 2017 MBPro’s had the newer keyboard? I have suffered with two keyboard replacements on my 2015Macbook. Good thing for AppleCare, but geesh.
The user wants to get a new Macbook air which has an updated process that like no other laptop carrying so it is totally different from the other and it will be having the best one.
This is good
Nice blog and absolutely outstanding. You can do something much better but i still say this perfect.Keep trying for the best.