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Apple Introduces the 15‑inch MacBook Air

GFreeman

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Apple today 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. Customers can order starting today, with availability beginning Tuesday, June 13. The 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 gets a new starting price of $1,099 - $100 less than before - to deliver even more value and choice to everyone, from upgraders to first-time Mac customers.

"We're thrilled to introduce the first 15-inch MacBook Air. With its incredible performance and striking design, the new MacBook Air is the world's best 15-inch laptop. And it's only possible with Apple silicon," said John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. "From its expansive Liquid Retina display and remarkably thin and fanless design, to extraordinary battery life and an immersive six-speaker sound system, the new MacBook Air has it all."



Brilliant 15.3-inch Liquid Retina Display
The new MacBook Air features a spacious, high-resolution 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display, so users can see even more content. With up to 500 nits of brightness and support for 1 billion colors, the brilliant Liquid Retina display makes content look remarkably rich and vibrant, and text razor sharp. It is also twice the resolution and 25 percent brighter than a comparable PC laptop.

World's Thinnest 15-inch Laptop
The new MacBook Air measures only 11.5 mm thin, making it the world's thinnest 15-inch laptop. It weighs just 3.3 pounds, so it's incredibly portable. Even with its expansive display, the new MacBook Air is solid and durable. And it is also nearly 40 percent thinner and half a pound lighter than a comparable PC laptop.

MacBook Air also features MagSafe charging, two Thunderbolt ports for connecting accessories and up to a 6K external display, along with a 3.5 mm headphone jack for versatile connectivity. It comes in four gorgeous finishes - midnight, starlight, space gray, and silver.

Blazing Performance and Tremendous Battery Life with M2
With the M2 chip, the 15-inch MacBook Air has incredible performance. It's up to 12x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air. When compared to the best-selling 15-inch PC laptop with a Core i7 processor, the new MacBook Air is up to twice as fast. It also delivers extraordinary battery life, with up to 18 hours - 50 percent more than on the PC - even with a better display and better performance. The 15-inch MacBook Air features a powerful 8-core CPU with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, a 10-core GPU for blazing-fast graphics, and a 16-core Neural Engine. M2 also delivers 100 GB/s of memory bandwidth and supports up to 24 GB of fast unified memory, so multitasking and working with complex workloads is superfluid. The performance of M2 lets users work, play, or create just about anything - anywhere.

1080p FaceTime HD Camera and Six-Speaker Sound System
The 1080p FaceTime HD camera on MacBook Air is perfect for FaceTime calls and video conferencing. Combined with the processing power of the advanced image signal processor on M2, users will look great on video calls. A three-mic array captures clean audio using advanced beamforming algorithms, so users come through loud and clear on video calls.

The design of the new 15-inch MacBook Air also features a phenomenal new six-speaker sound system with two tweeters and two sets of force-cancelling woofers. The new speakers deliver twice the bass depth for fuller sound, and Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos provides immersive experiences whether listening to music or watching movies.

Powerful Productivity with macOS
macOS Ventura takes the Mac experience to a whole new level that helps users achieve even more. Messages and Mail are better than ever, while Safari - the world's fastest browser on Mac - ushers in a passwordless future with passkeys. Continuity Camera brings video conferencing features to any Mac, including Desk View, Center Stage, and Studio Light. Stage Manager automatically organizes apps and windows, so users can concentrate on the task at hand and still see everything in a single glance. With iCloud Shared Photo Library, users can create and share a separate photo library among up to six family members, and the Freeform app provides a flexible canvas that enables users to be even more productive and expressive. Users can work effortlessly across Mac and iPhone with Continuity features like Handoff, AirDrop, Universal Clipboard, and Messages.

macOS Sonoma, coming this fall, makes the Mac experience more delightful and productive than ever, including new ways to personalize with widgets and stunning screen savers, an optimized gaming experience with Game Mode, powerful video conferencing capabilities, a big update to Safari, and more.

Better for the Environment
The new MacBook Air is designed with the environment in mind, now using 100 percent recycled gold plating and tin soldering in multiple printed circuit boards, and 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. MacBook Air also features 100 percent recycled cobalt in the MagSafe connector and 90 percent recycled steel in the battery tray. MacBook Air meets Apple's high standards for energy efficiency, and is free of mercury, PVC, and beryllium. Over 99 percent of the packaging is fiber based, bringing Apple closer to its goal of completely removing plastic from its packaging by 2025.

Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations, and is focused on its Apple 2030 goal to make every product carbon neutral. This means every Mac Apple creates, from design to manufacturing to customer use, will have net-zero climate impact.

Pricing and Availability
  • The 15-inch MacBook Air with M2 is available to order today on apple.com/store and in the Apple Store app. It will begin arriving to customers, and in Apple Store locations and Apple Authorized Resellers, beginning Tuesday, June 13.
  • The 15-inch MacBook Air with M2, available in midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray, starts at $1,299 (U.S.) and $1,199 (U.S.) for education.
  • The 13-inch MacBook Air with M2, available in midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray, now starts at $1,099 (U.S.) and $999 (U.S.) for education.
  • The 13-inch MacBook Air with M1, available in gold, silver, and space gray, remains in the lineup, starting at $999 (U.S.) and $899 (U.S.) for education.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source
 
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Does it have a headphone jack? Kind of a deal breaker right there

"MacBook Air also features MagSafe charging, two Thunderbolt ports for connecting accessories and up to a 6K external display, along with a 3.5 mm headphone jack for versatile connectivity. It comes in four gorgeous finishes - midnight, starlight, space gray, and silver."
 
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really still 8gb of ram LOL
 
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really still 8gb of ram LOL
That's the standard config and is really, really, uber-lame nowadayz, but at least it supports up to 24Gb, which AFAIK, is not really that common, except for perhaps the most expensive professional, uber-high-end lappies..

However, they still plan on charging their usual outrageous prices for upgrades, and they can simply K.M.A.... seeins how ram prices have dropped like a rock lately, and this goes for storage too :)

I just checked, and to get that 24GB of ram + a 1TB ssd will cost ya ANUTHA $740 on the base model or $540 on the upper model.....so either way, they're still $2k machines, regardless of what the PR says :(
 
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Aparently Mac OS doesn't require as much ram as Windows.
So some people claim, but as a Mac user I find the opposite. Even with a 16GB of memory my MBP16 is often swapping to disk.
But on the other hand, it still works fine. But what a funny combination when you remember the disks are soldered to the board and the laptops ship with little memory in the most common configurations which causes swapping, which means the write endurance of the disk is wasted. Meanwhile Apple claims to be an environment-friendly company.
 
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So some people claim, but as a Mac user I find the opposite. Even with a 16GB of memory my MBP16 is often swapping to disk.
But on the other hand, it still works fine. But what a funny combination when you remember the disks are soldered to the board and the laptops ship with little memory in the most common configurations which causes swapping, which means the write endurance of the disk is wasted. Meanwhile Apple claims to be an environment-friendly company.

I still wouldn't mind having a macbook personally for work/zoom teaching/business related stuff. I think the 8gb ram would be fine for me, that being said, I refuse to pay this much money, cause that would be like 5 weeks pay for me lately... as my work has really slowed down to a complete halt this year sadly.
 
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The main purpose of this laptop is the most screen size in the lightest, thinest chassis while still maintaining long battery life. Whatever size market that serves will determine its success.
 

Space Lynx

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Up to 12x faster than Intel version. Which Intel are they comparing it to, Haswell?
You probably need to read the fineprints in their marketing materials. This is likely true for edge cases due to dedicated hardware on the Apple SOC. For example, video encoding/ decoding work.
 
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Meanwhile Apple claims to be an environment-friendly company.
Apple claims to be a lot of things!
but at least it supports up to 24Gb
You mean for something like 15 inches? I definitely see a substantial number support at least one RAM expansion slots these days so depending on the installed RAM it's probably at least 40 GB support!
 
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Up to 12x faster than Intel version. Which Intel are they comparing it to, Haswell?
That's disrespectful it's only 8x faster than Haswell. They are comparing it to Nehalem.
 
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Worlds best 15inch laptop? Not with 8GB RAM and not with MacOS on it! Hilarious. More garbage from the worlds "best" marketing department.
 
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Worlds best 15inch laptop? Not with 8GB RAM and not with MacOS on it! Hilarious. More garbage from the worlds "best" marketing department.
Right? My grandfather's old Toshiba Satellite from 2015 had 8 gigs of RAM and that was a budget device with an AMD A8 processor.
 
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Tell me you’ve never used a Mac without telling me you’ve never used a Mac…
 
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No ethernet port, no WWAN, no HDMI port, no USB-A ports, no touch screen /w stylus, too heavy, no dual/tri screen.

At that price, it really sucks for a lot of professionals. Im staying with Lifebook U9 series. The U9413 looks promising.
 
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Tell me you’ve never used a Mac without telling me you’ve never used a Mac…
No ethernet port, no WWAN, no HDMI port, no USB-A ports, no touch screen /w stylus, too heavy, no dual/tri screen.

At that price, it really sucks for a lot of professionals. Im staying with Lifebook U9 series. The U9413 looks promising.
The number of times I have used a Mac = 0 ?
Forman gave you two awesome ways right there :roll:
 
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