On Wednesday, Apple unveiled the new MacBook Air, the world’s most loved notebook, with faster performance, the new Magic Keyboard, twice the storage and a new lower price of $999, and $899 for education. The new MacBook Air delivers up to two times faster CPU performance and up to 80 percent faster graphics performance. Now starting with 256GB of storage, MacBook Air allows customers to store even more movies, photos and files. It offers a 13-inch Retina display for vivid images and sharp text, Touch ID for easy login and secure online purchases, a spacious precision trackpad, and all-day battery life. It’s simply the best MacBook Air ever made.
TechCrunch’s Brian Heater loves Apple’s 2020 MacBook Air’s new Magic Keyboard, after years of butterfly keyboards that were “a clear misstep for the company.”
There’s not a lot I can tell you about the MacBook Air that you don’t already know. One of the mainstays of the MacBook line, the Air turned 12 in January. It’s a testament to the original that the design still feels fresh well over a decade into its existence…
“Thin” and “light” are still very much the qualities that define the Air. It’s a product that trades the processing power of the rest of the MacBook family in favor of a design that slips comfortably into the seat-back pocket in front of you on the plane.
The biggest design change to the 2020 is much more subtle, however. After a rough couple of years for MacBook keyboards that culminated with a couple of consumer suits and countless jammed keys, Apple introduced a new design on last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro. Mercifully, that upgrade has also come to the Air.
The system has returned to a scissor-switch design, which, among other things, results in more key travel, meaning the keys actually retract as you type, like a traditional keyboard. It’s like night and day, honestly. The butterfly mechanisms were a clear misstep for the company…
For a while there, it seemed like the MacBook Air was going to fade away, in favor of the standard MacBook. Ultimately, however, the Air won out, and understandably so. The focus on portability is a strong selling point, when coupled with the workflow versatility of MacOS (versus iPadOS). The Air looks like it’s going to be sticking around for a bit, and that’s something for Apple users to be thankful for.
MacDailyNews Take: Thanks to its new Magic Keyboard, Apple’s MacBook Air is, once again, highly recommended! We’re very happy to see that it finally seems like an expensive lesson has been learned at Apple about shaving off half a millimeter about which nobody not named Jony gives a rat’s ass.
Don’t write off the MacBook, though. It very well may be coming back as Apple’s first Mac powered by an ARM-based, Apple-designed SoC!
Thank God for this. Perfect machine.