Apple MacBook Air 15" Gives Consumers What They Want
With all the attention garnered by the Apple Vision Pro at WWDC23 last week, the new MacBook Air 15 may have been overlooked somewhat. It shouldn’t be; it’s basically everything average Mac users want in a reasonably priced, relatively lightweight laptop. If the Vision Pro is for early adopters some time "early next year," Apple's new MacBook Air 15" is for mainstream laptop users early next week.
I've been testing a MacBook Air 15” review unit for a couple of days. Ordinarily it would take me longer to conclude a review, but most aspects of this laptop are already well known, and I've run into zero surprises. If you aren't doing video editing or engineering, and you want a 15" Mac, it's hard to fault this one.
Previously, Apple’s best-selling MacBook Air topped out at 13”, so if you wanted something larger, you’d either need to jump all the way up to the $1999 MacBook Pro 14” or $2499 MacBook Pro 16”. There is plenty to recommend those laptops, but they are overkill for many use cases and priced out of reach for most consumers (especially students).
The 15” MacBook Air fills that need. The $1299 base model with an M2, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD is a bargain, but it can get pricey if you start adding RAM and storage. The configuration that Apple sent me has 16GB RAM and 1 TB SSD. That's $1899 -- but still $500 less than an equivalent MacBook Pro 14", which is why a MacBook Air 15" makes so much sense in Apple's lineup.
Battery life should be roughly the same as both the 13" MacBook Air (the 15” has a bigger battery, but also a bigger screen) and the 14" MacBook Pro. Apple claims 18 hours of battery life for all three; in the real world I haven't had to recharge at all during a heavy work day, and Macs are also good at retaining charge in sleep mode, so it can also easily last two days of lighter work.
The MacBook Pro 14" or 16" are still the better fit for heavier duty workloads, plus they include additional ports, miniLED displays, and better speakers. But that's overkill for most use cases, much more expensive, and, even sitting side-by-side with the MacBook Pro 14's Liquid Retina XDR, the Liquid Retina display on the Air is really quite good. In fact, for my own workloads (which are mostly Microsoft 365, web, and light image editing in hotel rooms and at press conferences), the MacBook Air 15" is probably the better fit. The MacBook Air 15 is slightly lighter (3.3 lbs vs 3.5 lbs), more than powerful enough, offers equivalent (and really long) battery life, and has more screen real estate.
While the MacBook Air 15” is still priced well above inexpensive 15” Windows laptops, it will put continued pressure on Windows OEMs trying to compete in the higher-margin premium segment. One area that should not be affected is gaming; while Apple did announce major new MacOS gaming initiatives at WWDC, for now, PC gamers will likely still gravitate towards gaming-specific Windows laptops.
