Cameron Summerson
If you’ve been on the fence about picking up a MacBook Air but were hesitant because of the issues with the butterfly keyboard, today’s your day. Apple just announced a new MacBook Air with the same scissor switches as the 16-inch MacBook Pro. It also gets beefier processor options and twice the starting storage.
Apple claims this new Air is twice as fast as the current generation, with “up to 80 percent faster graphics performance” so you can get stuff done more efficiently. The base storage capacity is now 256 GB, which seems like more of a practical bump in spec than anything else. People love lots of storage (though I’m not sure that 256 can ever really be called “lots”).
I think the big selling point here is the new keyboard, though. The butterfly keyboard in the current generation Air has been plagued with issues and the main reason to not buy a new MacBook. With the switch to the new Magic Keyboard that’s found on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, those issues should be a thing of the past.
The new keyboard features 1 mm of key travel and new “inverted-T” arrow key layout, but otherwise looks largely the same as the previous generation.
The new Air starts at $999 with a Core i3 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage. The bump to a dual-core i5 with 512 GB of storage goes for $1,299. There will also be a quad-core i7 model with up to 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage at some point, though it doesn’t seem to be available yet.
The new Air is available to order today with delivery next week.
