Apple ups the laptop ante with redesigned Macbook Air and Macbook Pro 13 models powered by the M2 chip.
Been contemplating an upgrade of your trusty Apple but wanted to see how the company’s M series chips panned out? Well, here’s your chance as Apple introduces the completely redesigned MacBook Air and 13-inch Macbook Pro, both of which are powered by the new M2 chip.
The All-New Macbook Air
The new-look MacBook Air features an all-new, strikingly thin design, a larger 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display, a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, a four-speaker sound system, up to 18 hours of battery life, and MagSafe charging. It’s also now available in four finishes — silver, space grey, midnight, and starlight.
Built from the ground up around M2, the new MacBook Air has an entirely new design that is remarkably thin from every angle. It measures just 11.3 mm thin and is only 2.7 pounds, and features a durable, all-aluminum unibody enclosure that is built to last. This thin and light design integrates its components so efficiently that it results in an impressive 20 percent reduction in volume.
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MagSafe returns to MacBook Air, giving users a dedicated charging port that is easy to connect while protecting the MacBook Air when it is plugged in by quickly releasing if the charging cable is accidentally pulled. MacBook Air also features two Thunderbolt ports for connecting a variety of accessories and a 3.5 mm audio jack with support for high-impedance headphones. Additionally, the Magic Keyboard features a full-height function row with Touch ID and a spacious Force Touch trackpad.
The new MacBook Air also features a gorgeous 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display, which has been expanded closer to the sides and up around the camera to make room for the menu bar. The result is a larger display with much thinner borders, giving users more screen real estate to view their content in brilliant detail. At 500 nits of brightness, the new display is also 25 percent brighter than before and now supports 1 billion colours, so photos and movies look incredibly vibrant.
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The new MacBook Air includes a new 1080p FaceTime HD camera with a larger image sensor and more efficient pixels, delivering twice the resolution and low-light performance of the previous generation. The MacBook Air also features a four-speaker sound system. To fit inside such a thin design, the speakers and mics are completely integrated between the keyboard and display; a three-mic array captures clean audio using advanced beamforming algorithms, while the speakers produce improved stereo separation and vocal clarity. MacBook Air also supports immersive Spatial Audio for music and movies with Dolby Atmos.
The MacBook Air also offers a number of charging options, including an all-new 35W compact power adapter with two USB-C ports, so users can charge two devices at once. And for the first time, MacBook Air supports fast charge for charging up to 50 percent in just 30 minutes with an optional 67W USB-C power adapter.
M2 starts the second generation of Apple’s M-series chips and extends the remarkable features of the M1 chip. The chip features a next-generation 8-core CPU with advancements in both performance and efficiency cores, along with Apple’s next-generation GPU, which now has up to 10 cores — two more than M1. Designed to dramatically speed up video workflows, M2 also adds a next-generation media engine and a powerful ProRes video engine for hardware-accelerated encode and decode, so systems with M2 will be able to play back more streams of 4K and 8K video than before.
The Macbook 13 Powerhouse
Building on the success of the 13-inch Macbook Pro, the new M2-powered version offers even more capabilities in the same great form factor. With a faster 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU, working with RAW images in apps like Affinity Photo is nearly 40 percent faster than the previous generation, and up to 3.4x faster for users who are upgrading from a model without Apple silicon.
In addition, playing graphics-intensive games like Baldur’s Gate 3 is also nearly 40 percent faster than the previous 13-inch MacBook Pro, and up to 3.3x faster for customers upgrading from a model without Apple silicon.
With an active cooling system, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is designed to sustain its pro performance while also offering an impressive 20 hours of video playback.
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