MacBook Air 15-inch: At last, Apple fills a glaring gap in its line-up

When Apple unveiled the new 15-inch MacBook Air at WWDC last week, there was a general reaction of “at last”. And with good reason.

Before the announcement, your only option if you wanted a larger display was to pay for the MacBook Pro. But that wasn’t a cheap option, and if your needs were general rather than high-end computing tasks, you were probably overdoing it a little. Especially when you take into account the price – the 14-inch MacBook Pro would set you back €850 more than the new MacBook, but if you didn’t need the power bump of the Pro, then it was essentially wasted money for not a whole lot of extra screen space.

So the 15-inch MacBook Air fills a glaring gap in the line-up. It comes with a very similar spec to the 13-inch version: powered by an M2 chip with four efficiency cores and four performance cores, a 10-core graphics processing unit that skips out the lower-powered eight-core version in the 13-inch, and a 16-core neural engine.

The base model starts at 8GB of unified memory that you can bump up to 24GB, and the solid state drive starts at 256GB of capacity, but goes as high as 2TB if you need it.

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All of that essentially means the MacBook Air will cope with all the everyday tasks you throw at it – and then some. If you need high-powered graphics rendering, you’ll need to go for the Pro, but everyday video editing, photo editing, a bit of video encoding – all are comfortably within the MacBook Air’s reach.

The 15-inch MacBook, like its 13-inch sibling, is fanless so is completely silent when operating, and doesn’t heat up while you’re using it, which is good news if you like to use this literally as a laptop.

All of that work looks great on the 15-inch display. The 15-inch MacBook Air has the liquid retina display, Apple’s proprietary standard, with a 2880x1864 resolution that gives you 224 pixels per inch and 500 nits of brightness – the same ppi and brightness capabilities of the 13-inch version.

[ First look: Apple’s new MacBook Pro packs a punch on the go ]

And if you need to make a video call, Apple has not only included the 1080 FaceTime camera in the laptop, but also gives you the ability to rope your iPhone into the mix too through Continuity Camera. All you have to do is bring the camera close to your MacBook and select iPhone as a camera option in FaceTime, Zoom or other video application. It’s seamless, as you would expect from the Apple ecosystem.

Apple hasn’t kept everything the same as the 13-inch MBA. The 15-inch device comes with six stereo speakers instead of the four you’ll get with the 13-inch version; a bigger case clearly gives Apple the room to cram a little more audio tech inside. The bass booms, the volume is impressive; if you want to use your laptop as an entertainment device, the days of carrying a bluetooth speaker to avoid tinny laptop audio are long gone.

While the keyboard is just as comfortable as in the 13-inch version, bigger screen means bigger trackpad. It’s a small change, and by no means a deal-breaker, but if you like the extra space, it shows up here too.

Officially, battery life is still 18 hours despite the larger display; Apple has bumped the 52.6W battery in the previous MacBook Air to a 60W one, so you’ll get more than a full day of use out of it. It took two days of normal use – word processing, editing photos, streaming video in my leisure time – before I needed to plug in to recharge, something my Windows-based notebook can only dream of. That means you’ll get through a full long-haul flight of video watching, or more than a day away from the office without a power cable before you need to stop what you’re doing.

Good

A bigger screen without a hugely bigger price, the new 15-inch MacBook plugs a gap in the line-up and gives you more choices. You get all the good bits of the MacBook Air – the new design, the lighter case, the extra colour choices – and a few extras thrown in for the larger screen, such as a bigger trackpad.

Sound is another beneficiary of the larger screen size. The six-speaker system is impressive, both in volume and quality.

But it is still thin and light, at 1.15mm, and a shade over 1.5kg – a fraction bigger than the 13-inch version.

Bad

There are rumours that an M3-powered MacBook Air is already in the works, so if you like to have the latest and greatest, you may be better off waiting for the updated Apple chip that is likely to come in a few months’ time.

There is little to separate this device from the 13-inch model, aside from the screen size and price. That is a positive in one way, but if you were hoping for something extra, you may be disappointed.

Everything else

For ports, you get two Thunderbolt 3 ports that support USB 4, DisplayPort, USB 3.1 and charging. There’s also a MagSafe charging port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. You’ll still need a hub if you have standard USB peripherals you want to connect, such as a printer or camera, but technology is increasingly eliminating the need for many of these devices.

The 15-inch comes with the 35W dual USB-C charger included, rather than the standard 30W charger, but if you buy from Apple directly, you can swap out the dual charger for the 70W fast charger so you spend less time waiting to cut the cord.

The verdict

Apple has just neatly removed one argument for upgrading to the MacBook Pro, and added some strong ones in favour of the MacBook Air.