BOOK SMARTS
The all-new 15-inch MacBook Air is so darn brilliant – not only is it bigger but, for many, it will simply be better
SPECIFICATIONS
Display 15.3-inch 2880x1864 500 nit 60Hz LED Chipset Apple M2 CPU 8 cores (4 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores) GPU 10 cores Neural Engine 16 cores RAM 8GB / 16GB / 24GB Storage 256GB / 512GB / 1TB / 2TB Operating system macOS Ventura Connectivity MagSafe 3, 2x Thunderbolt 3, 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3 Dimensions 11.5x340.4x237.6mm) Weight 1.51kg
The name MacBook Air 15-inch sounds like a contradiction, right? Apple’s ‘Air’ line should be floaty-light and surely that’s not going to be achievable in a larger form factor? Wrong! The MacBook Air is the thinnest, lightest 15-inch laptop on the market, giving it some serious kudos.
This MacBook Air’s 15.3-inch screen – notice it’s not 15.6-inch, that’d be bumping elbows too closely with the MacBook Pro 16-inch – means it’s still fairly portable, while embodying the goodness of Apple’s M2 silicon in a fanless (and therefore silent) design.
But that raises the question: is the 15-inch MacBook in 2023 literally just a larger version of the 13-inch model from 2022 then? Well, it’s not far off but there are some additional points of difference, the vast majority of which are positive.
Really, that’s the only downside: the 15-inch MacBook is a little thicker and heavier than the 13-inch model but barely – it’s literally 270g heavier and just 0.2mm thicker.
And, naturally, you’ll have to shell out quite a few more notes for it. In its entry-level format – which is really anything but, thanks to Apple’s M2 silicon – the 15-inch MacBook Air is priced at £1,399. It’s effectively a couple of hundred more for the bigger-screen model, which seems entirely reasonable for the added real estate.
Display favourites
And so to the main reason that you’ll want to buy a 15-inch MacBook Air: its display. Here it’s a 15.3-inch panel, which is unusual in the catchall ‘15-inch’ world, as it’s actually marginally smaller than the typical diagonal measure of 15.6-inch. For us this feels like a benefit though: it’s not too big, not too small, fulfilling the Goldilocks principle.
There’s plenty more info about the display, all of which matches its 13-inch Air brother in like-for-like form: despite being higher-resolution to cover the greater surface area, Apple has savvily opted to maintain the 224ppi density (here from 2880 x 1864 pixels). That means whether you opt for the
