Apple today announced an upgraded version of its world-famous MacBook Air that saw a major redesign in 2018. The 2020 version of the notebook doesn’t get any major design changes (other than one certain department beneath the display), but it does come with upgraded specs.
Right off the bat, Apple now includes quad-core processors with the MacBook Air. You can spec an Air with up to a 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.8GHz. You still get Intel Iris Plus graphics and 8GB of RAM, but coupled with macOS Catalina, you really shouldn’t have any performance problems.
You also get double the storage. Whereas previous versions of the notebook had 128GB of storage to start, the new MacBook Air gets 256GB. If you need as much storage as you can get, there’s a model with 2TB.
The pièce de résistance with the new MacBook Air is obviously the keyboard. Sitting right below the screen, the laptop now comes with Apple’s Magic Keyboard it introduced on the 16-inch MacBook Pro. You no longer have a butterfly switch mechanism under each key which proved to be unreliable and extremely faulty. Instead, you have a much more traditional scissor switch key design with 1mm of travel. Undoubtedly, customers will be upgrading to this laptop only because the keyboard is so much better.
Rounding things off, the new MacBook Air comes with a 13.3-inch display, Apple’s T2 security chip, a three-mic array for clearer FaceTime calls, Thunderbolt 3 ports, improved speakers, Touch ID, “all-day” battery life, and a Force Touch trackpad.
The new MacBook Air starts at $999 for the base model and goes up to $2,249. It’s available starting today from Apple’s website.
