Apple Announces New MacBook Air With 15.3-inch Display and M2 Chip Starting at $1,299

Apple at WWDC 2023 announced a new MacBook Air with a larger 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display that is powered by Apple's latest M2 processor under the hood.

Described by Apple as "the world's thinnest 15-inch laptop," the new ‌MacBook Air‌ is 11.5mm thick and weighs in at 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms). With the ‌M2‌ chip, it is 12x faster than the fastest Intel-based ‌MacBook Air‌, and is twice as fast as competing laptops, according to Apple.

The new fanless ‌MacBook Air‌ has a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, a three-microphone array, and an "all-new" six-speaker system with two tweeters and two sets of force canceling woofers that support immersive spatial audio. Apple also claims the laptop can last up to 18 hours on a single charge.

The new laptop also includes MagSafe, two Thunderbolt ports for connecting accessories and up to a 6K external display, along with a 3.5mm headphone jack.

In terms of the display, it offers up to 500 nits of brightness and support for 1 billion colors, while being twice the resolution and 25% brighter than the comparable best-selling Intel Core i7 PC laptop. As for the ‌M2‌ chip, it has an 8-core CPU with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, a 10-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine. ‌M2‌ also delivers 100GB/s of memory bandwidth and supports up to 24GB of fast unified memory.

"We're thrilled to introduce the first 15-inch MacBook Air. 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."

Like the standard ‌MacBook Air‌, the new 15-inch model comes in four colors, including Silver, Space Gray, Starlight, and Midnight. The new ‌MacBook Air‌ starts at $1,299, or $1,199 for education customers. Pre-orders open today with deliveries beginning next week. The 13-inch ‌MacBook Air‌ with ‌M2‌ also gets a new starting price of $1,099 — $100 less than before.