New MacBook Air: Hands-On With the 15-Inch Display

Speaker 1: I've always thought having a 15 inch version of the MacBook Air is a good idea. I thought it was such a good idea that I actually wrote about it maybe about 10 or 11 years ago and I said, oh, definitely gonna have a 15 inch MacBook Air sometime soon, because it really just makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of rumors about it. I was ahead of my time. I would like to think by about 10 years or maybe I was just, you know, way too early and way too optimistic. But finally, 15 inch MacBook Air is here and I'll tell you, it looks and feels. I picked it up, I typed on it, I played around with it a tiny bit. It's a MacBook Air, but slightly bigger and [00:00:30] that's kind of what you want. Uh, it's got the same, uh, you know, flat top chassis that the MacBook Pros and the MacBook Air have now. Speaker 1: It's very thin, it's very light. I picked it up. I couldn't believe how light it was. I'm used to carrying around a 13 inch M two MacBook Air, and I know that's pretty light, but for the bigger footprint of the 15 inch, uh, you know, I was really impressed that uh, you know, it's not any thicker and it, you know, barely seems heavier at all. The big thing that's different about it that you get is the bigger 15 inch screen. Okay. Other than that, just about everything else is the same as the 13 inch M [00:01:00] two Mac er, which you can still buy. Uh, it's still got a really good keyboard, really good touch pad, very light. It's still got the, uh, Mac Safe and the two, uh, Thunderbolt USS BBC ports on one side. Audio Jack on the other side, you know, very easy to carry around in your bag. Speaker 1: Uh, I carry a 13 inch round with me all the time. The 15 inch I could see carrying every day. I think it would get a little bit pokey after a while. If I was doing, you know, five days a week commute with it, I would still go with the 13. But the 15 inch really does have a lot of advantages just by having a bigger screen. [00:01:30] Now for me, the main advantage of bigger screen is frankly, I can see better. I'm already at the point where if I'm working in a Google Doc or something, I got it bumped up to 125%, maybe 135% on my 13 inch screen on a 15 inch screen. I can probably just read it normal and I won't feel like I'm going blind quite as quickly, you know, and just having access to that bigger screen. If you're gonna use this as your all day everyday laptop, it's gonna sit on your desk, it's gonna go to the coffee shop with you, it's gonna go to work with you occasionally. Speaker 1: I think that bigger screen really pays off because I love 13 inch laptops. [00:02:00] I've been promoting them for many, many years as the best overall laptop size, but it's not a nine to five or 10 to six job, 40 hour week sit in front of your computer kind of screen. That small 13 size is gonna wear on you after a while. Now Apple says that this is the thinnest 15 inch laptop ever. Uh, arguably that's probably true. I don't know if it's the lightest. I think there's some LG grand models at 15 inches that are probably a little bit lighter, but it's certainly, you know, in the running for it. So Apple calls it the 15 inch laptop that has it all. Uh, I'm inclined [00:02:30] to agree with that unless you need to get really advanced with graphics or anything like that. You need like a discreet gpu. Speaker 1: Uh, but other than that, uh, this seems like a really good, really portable, powerful MacBook Air. I find a 13 inch M two, uh, you know, version powerful enough for me to use for just about everything. Even photo editing, even video editing. As long as you're not doing super high red super Pro stuff, uh, the regular M two chip is fine. Now, apple also promises 18 hours of battery life. And I can say I probably believe that most of the, uh, MacBooks for the last years have lived up [00:03:00] to their battery life expectations because if you open up a MacBook, what you're gonna find at inside is basically just a gigantic battery shoved in there with a little bit of computer stuff kind of around the side, but it's really mostly battery. So if you have a bigger body, then you can fit in a bigger battery than that even. Speaker 1: So of course you're gonna get better battery life. And of course these are fan just like the, uh, 13 inch version is. So you don't need to, uh, you know, spend energy running fans to cool things. So that can also improve your battery life. And the bigger body is definitely gonna be better for heat dissipation. So, you know, you get the best of [00:03:30] all possible worlds there and that is going to take that battery life and get it up there, if not 18 hours, at least in the ballpark. Now here's the interesting thing about what this 15 inch MacBook Air is gonna cost. When I wrote about it recently before it was announced, I said, it's really just upgrading the screen. It's probably gonna keep all the components the same. So, you know, 1199 for the 13 inch. So maybe I'd go, you know, 12 99, 13 99, I don't know if I'd go much more than that for a 15 inch version cuz you're really just getting a bigger screen. Speaker 1: It's 1299. That seems like a pretty reasonable upgrade [00:04:00] to me to get the bigger screen. But at the same time, they took the 13 inch M two MacBook Air, which again, I carry on almost all the time. It was 1199, which I frankly always thought was a little bit too expensive and they knocked it down a hundred bucks. That's now 10 99. Not quite the 9 99 MacBook Air price. I always, you know, loved for years, but certainly a lot better. But you can still get that M one MacBook Air, the first M series, apple silicon MacBook from a couple years ago. They're still selling that, that's still 9 99. Although again, for a hundred bucks more, [00:04:30] I would definitely get the M two version. And if you want the bigger screen, then 1299 gets you the 15 inch. Uh, they have a a, a pretty good, you know, way of spacing out the pricing. Almost like movie theater popcorn where you kind of go, okay, maybe I can just get the bigger one, the better one. It's not that much more. And that's the business models.