Sure, it slimmed down a bit, to a minimum of 0.11 inch and a maximum of 0.68 inch, and its screen gained a few pixels, but this and other minor improvements pale in comparison with the high-resolution displays and featherlight weight of some of its competitors.Įven Apple's other laptops eclipsed the MacBook Air in terms of raw innovation, with the MacBook Pro and MacBook adding Retina Displays, slimmer chassis, power-efficient Intel processors, and even Touch Bars and fingerprint readers.

This period of innovation in the ultraportable laptop market, which in no small part owes its existence to the MacBook Air, saw the 13-inch Air itself remain largely the same.

Then-CEO Steve Jobs famously unveiled the diminutive machine by pulling it out of a manila envelope, and the laptop-buying public went wild, at least until they realized that significant compromises had to be made to get the MacBook Air that thin, such as ditching the optical drive and making the battery non-replaceable.Ī decade has passed, and those compromises no longer seem so important now that CDs and DVDs are on their deathbeds and most of the MacBook Air's competitors have non-replaceable parts as well. Those dimensions made Apple confident enough to promote it as the world's thinnest notebook. The new 13-inch MacBook Air comes more than 10 years after the original, whose unique wedge shape gave it a minimum height of just 0.16 inch and a maximum height of 0.76 inch. The upgrades unfortunately do not result in excellent computing performance, but they nevertheless return the MacBook Air to its place among the best ultraportable laptops. That changes with the new MacBook Air (starts at $1,199 $1,399 as tested), which has slimmed down, ditched its outdated display and CPU, and received several other overdue upgrades as well. There have been minor spec bumps, but the Air has maintained the same overall physical appearance of the first-generation model, even when the MacBook and MacBook Pro have received radical design overhauls.

Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security SoftwareĪpple's iPhones get significant feature overhauls nearly every year, but until last week, one of Cupertino's most popular and affordable laptops hardly changed at all since it was introduced in 2008.

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