Yesterday, along with the brand new iPad Pro, new Mac mini refresh and a new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro – Apple announced a brand new MacBook Air, which now has a new keyboard, is much faster and is now at a lower price.
The big news first is the keyboard, back in November last year Apple replaced the 15-inch MacBook Pro with the new 16-inch MacBook Pro and one of the big changes was the new keyboard, dubbed the ‘Magic Keyboard’ which replaces the old butterfly mechanism keyboards which famously had a lot of issues with reliability over the past few years. The previous generation MacBook Air had this keyboard. This new version has the same keyboard as the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, which returns to the scissor style keyboard, with 1mm of key travel and the inverted T arrangement arrow keys.
Faster Air
Also new on the MacBook Air is the upgraded internals, Apple has given it the latest 10th generation Intel processors. The base MacBook Air has a 1.1GHz Intel Core i3 which can boost up to 3.2GHz.
The 2019 MacBook Air came with a 1.6GHz dual-core 8th-generation Intel Core i5 processor with boost up to 3.6GHz, 8GB of memory, 128GB storage and Intel UHD Graphics 617.
The maximum specification model has a 1.2GHz quad-core i7, which can boost up to 3.8GHz. Apple says the new MacBook is up to twice as fast as the last generation.
One other thing is the price, the base price on the 2019 version was £1,099 here in the UK and $1,099 in the US. The new model gets double the storage (128GB to 256GB) and also, Intel Iris Plus graphics, which Apple says is eighty percent faster performance. The 2020 MacBook Air starts at £999 here in the UK and $999 in the US.
The MacBook Air is available today on apple.com in the same colours as before in space grey, silver and gold. Just checking the estimated shipping in the UK for the base model puts it between 7th April and 16th April.
