WWDC: Apple introduces the 15‑inch MacBook Air

WWDC also saw Apple introduce its 15.3-inch, M2-powered MacBook Air. These fan-free systems are silent, highly portable and bring 18-hour battery life.

What Apple said

“With its incredible performance and striking design, the new MacBook Air is the world’s best 15-inch laptop. And it’s only possible with Apple silicon,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.

“From its expansive Liquid Retina display and remarkably thin and fanless design, to extraordinary battery life and an immersive six-speaker sound system, the new MacBook Air has it all.”

What are the specs?

• 3-inch Liquid Retina display with 500 nits brightness. Supports 1b colors.
• M2 chip with up to 18 hours of battery life
• Six-speaker sound system with two tweeters and two sets of force-cancelling woofers
• 1080p FaceTime HD camera,
• Three-mic array is boosted by beamforming algorithms for better voice clarity/
• MagSafe charging
• 5mm thin, weighs 3.3 pounds
• MagSafe charging, two Thunderbolt ports for connecting accessories and up to a 6K external display,
• 5mm headphone jack for versatile connectivity.

What about the processor?

The M2 chip means the Mac is up to 12x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air. Apple also claims that when compared to the best-selling 15-inch PC laptop with a Core i7 processor, the new MacBook Air is up to twice as fast.

It features a powerful 8-core CPU with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, a 10-core GPU for blazing-fast graphics, and a 16-core Neural Engine. It provides up to 100GB/s of memory bandwidth and up to 24GB of fast unified memory.

The green slide

The new MacBook Air uses 100% percent recycled gold plating and tin soldering in multiple printed circuit boards, and 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. It also features 100 percent recycled cobalt in the MagSafe connector and 90 percent recycled steel in the battery tray. It is free of mercury, PVC, and beryllium and over 99 percent of the packaging is fiber based.

Availability

Available in midnight, starlight, space gray, and silver. Customers can order starting today, with availability beginning Tuesday, June 13. The 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 gets a new starting price of $1,099 — $100 less than before.

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