Apple this month introduced the 15-inch MacBook Air, the world’s best 15-inch laptop. With an expansive 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display, the incredible performance of M2, up to 18 hours of battery life, and a silent, fanless design, the new MacBook Air brings power and portability — all in the world’s thinnest 15-inch laptop.
With an all-new six-speaker sound system, the 15-inch MacBook Air delivers immersive Spatial Audio, along with a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, MagSafe charging, and the power and ease of macOS Ventura for an unrivaled experience.
Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
The new MacBook Air’s screen is obviously the biggest departure from the 13.6-inch M2 Air. The 15.3-inch, 2880×1864 display has the same 224 PPI density as the 13-inch Air, and an aspect ratio of roughly (but not exactly) 3:2. Although the resolution and density are lower than those on either the 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pro, the screen has nearly the same density as every other Retina MacBook Air and Pro that Apple has ever released, so it’s not going to feel like a downgrade for most people.
It also boasts DCI-P3 color gamut coverage and a peak brightness of 520 nits (as measured by our i1 DisplayPro colorimeter). It’s not a mini LED panel, and you don’t get HDR support or the high 120 Hz ProMotion refresh rates you get from a MacBook Pro, but it matches or slightly exceeds the display quality of every other MacBook that Apple has released in the last few years.
I was pleasantly surprised by Apple’s pricing for the 15-inch Air. It starts at $1,299, just $200 more than the newly lowered price of the 13-inch model… The downside of the price is that the 15-inch Air still includes 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage—that’s not unusable for basic browsing, but most people will want to upgrade one or both, and the 16GB memory and 512GB storage upgrades cost $200 each. (24GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage are also available)…
It’s a larger-screened laptop that will be great for certain kinds of professional work that benefit from more screen space without needing a ton of extra computing power. It’s of a piece, actually, with the M2 Pro version of the Mac mini, which provides a similar bridge between the basic one-size-fits-most Mac mini and the pricey Mac Studios. It’s been a good year for Mac owners whose needs straddle the line between Apple’s consumer and “pro” lineups.
MacDailyNews Take: In his full review, Cunningham also notes the 15-inch MacBook Air’s “great-looking thin-and-light laptop that bridges Apple’s consumer and Pro laptop lineups, best-in-class keyboard and trackpad, very good performance and battery life, courtesy of Apple Silicon.”
In the market for one? UPGRADE it to at least 512GB of storage as the base model comes with a single 256GB NAND chip that benchmarks 30% – 50% slower in SSD speeds versus the 256GB M1 MacBook Air, which offers two NAND chips of 128GB each.
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Got one on order yesterday. Space grey, 24GB RAM & 2TB SSD. I plan to load everything from my 2 old Pros plus a couple of the old white plastic laptops from way back.
Looks great, but why this again…
“it’s important to note that Apple’s storage prices are pretty outrageous. Apple wants $800 for a 2TB drive when top-tier PC SSDs will run you just $160, and others can be had for even less. We’re many years past the point when Apple’s SSDs could outperform standard NVMe SSDs for PCs. And the storage controller is built into the M2, so Apple is essentially just charging you for the NAND chips.
…The issue is partly the upgrade prices and partly that Apple’s base configurations in its entry-level products often feel a bit stingy.”
I certainly don’t expect Apple SSD upgrades to be the same prices as NVMes listed on Amazon, but they should at least be in the same solar system—$800 for a 2TB—Yikes!!!!! over 1/3 of the total cost of the machine for a fairly modest SSD upgrade.