Apple announced the new 15-inch MacBook Air, and it comes with a 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display and an M2 chip.
Announced at WWDC 2023, The long-rumoured 15-inch MacBook Air model boasts a bigger display in an extremely thin design. In fact, Apple claims its “the world’s thinnest 15-inch laptop,” coming in 11.5mm thin and weighing 3.3 pounds.
It’s priced at $1,299 (NZ$2,499) and pre-orders start today. It will be available to buy starting from next week.
Otherwise, the larger MacBook Air shares many features with the 13.6-inch M2 MacBook Air that arrived in 2022. This includes the new design, smaller display bezels, MagSafe charging, fanless design, 1080p webcam, Touch ID and three-mic array. However, it comes with a six-speaker sound system with upgraded Spatial Audio.
You can still expect the same 18-hour battery life like its smaller sibling.
The 15-inch model also comes in four colour finishes we’re familiar with. This includes Midnight, Starlight, Space Grey and Silver.
Despite the larger size, the new 15-inch MacBook Air keeps the same ports as its smaller sibling, rather than getting the HDMI and SD card slot from the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Regardless, it will come equipped with MagSafe, two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
While many expected the 15-inch MacBook Air could introduce the inevitable M3 chip, it’s clear Apple is delaying the reveal for sometime later. Apple tracker Mark Gurman states M3 MacBooks are expected to arrive later this year, and trusted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo agrees.
With the power we know it packs under the hood and the upgraded size, the 15-inch MacBook Air could be a great contender for our list of best laptops. We can also expect to try out the newly announced macOS Sonoma.
Here’s three features to look forward to about the new 15-inch MacBook Air.
Bigger display, better size
As it’s main selling point, the new MacBook Air comes with a new 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display. Essentially, it’s the same display as it’s smaller sibling – just bigger. Simple, but effective.
It comes with 5mm borders for ultra-thin bezels, 500 nits of brightness and support for 1 billion colours. Just because the display is bigger, doesn’t mean it thicker and heavier. Well, only by a bit.
The new laptop is 11.5mm thin and weighs 3.3 pounds. The smaller 13-inch model is 11.1mm and weighs 2.7 pounds. That’s impressive considering the increase in display size, and even better that it’s “the world’s thinnest 15-inch laptop.”
The new price trickles down
We knew the 15-inch MacBook Air would be pricier than the 13-inch model, but we’re happy to see that it’s not by much. In better news, thanks to the $1,299 (NZ$2,499) price tag, the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air is now even cheaper, starting at $1,099 (NZ$2,049).
That’s better than the NZ$2,149 it was originally set at, especially if you’re not eyeing up the 15-inch model.
Better audio
Other than the display size, one of the few differences includes a six-speaker sound system with upgraded Spatial Audio.
These speakers already offered improved stereo separation and vocal clarity from two tweeters and two ultrathin woofers in the 13-inch MacBook Air model, but now there’s more immersive audio thanks to the two extra speakers.
That’s great for playing music or binge-watching movies and TV shows. As for how much better the audio will be? Only time will tell. There’s still more we need to check out about the all-new 15-inch model, even though we’re largely expecting the same modern MacBook Air experience.
Will the base model 256GB model still suffer in the performance department in this model too? Or will fans have to resort to the 512GB configuration? Won’t be long until we find out.
