MACBOOK AIR: OUT WITH THE OLD AND IN WITH THE NEW, FOR BETTER OR WORSE
Apple says the MacBook Air is “the most beloved notebook ever,” and it’s not wrong. The huge success of the original Air had ripple effects throughout the industry, but it has languished in recent years. For the last three years or so, Apple had kept up with neither technological nor design advances in its most important laptop.
Now, the MacBook Air has finally been brought up to modern Mac laptop standards, skipping forward three generations of Intel processors, adding a Retina display and Thunderbolt 3 ports, and giving us three color options, among other things. But it feels a bit like Apple threw out the baby with the bathwater, jettisoning some features of the MacBook Air that make it so well-loved.
In fact, it would be more accurate to call this a 13-inch MacBook than an all-new MacBook Air. Depending on how you look at it, this is either a great up-sized upgrade to the 12-inch MacBook, or a disappointing reinvention of the MacBook Air that throws out half of the things we really loved about it.
A RETINA DISPLAY, FINALLY
The marquee feature of the new MacBook Air is its Retina display. It has a resolution of 2560x1600, giving it a pixel density of 227 pixels per inch—that’s the same pixel density as the 12-inch MacBook and the MacBook Pro, and four times the pixels of the old Air.
