So, About the New MacBook Air (Premium)

Like many MacBook Air owners, I was looking forward to a new version, and I had expected to buy the upgrade the moment it became available. But the product that Apple announced this week has two issues. And I suspect that I’m not the only one who engaged in a bit of soul searching as they attempted to justify this purchase.

Before getting to the issues, however, I think it’s important to discuss where Apple delivered as expected or, in some cases, even exceeded expectations.

As Tim Cook mentioned right up front at the launch, MacBook Air customers have been clamoring most for a Retina Display: The previous model, which languished in Apple’s product lineup for far too long, shipped (still ships) with an old-timey 1400 x 900 display. So that was a no-brainer.

And I gotta be honest: That’s all I really wanted Apple to fix. My early 2014 MacBook is otherwise perfectly serviceable. And there even some things about it—the excellent keyboard, for starters, and the MagSafe power connector—that I feel I superior to the parts on more modern MacBooks.

But I understand how Apple works. I knew that any MacBook Air update that arrived in 2018 would include the firm’s terrible and loud butterfly keyboard. Its overly-big Force Touch trackpad. And some number of USB-C ports. And not much else.

I also figured that Apple would eliminate the Air brand and simply release this new product as a 13-inch MacBook. Doing so makes sense on a number of levels, the most obvious of which is that the non-Air MacBooks are “more Air” (thinner, lighter) than the actual MacBook Air. But Apple apparently felt that the MacBook Air brand was too strong to abandon (as it did previously with iPad). And this is where the company’s design decisions veer off, for me at least, from the expected.

First, the new MacBook Air actually deviates, design-wise, from both the MacBook line below it and the MacBook Pro line above it Apple’s laptop lineup. It still looks like a MacBook Air, and adopts the same wedge shape as the 8-year old design that predates it. I was only expecting a bigger MacBook.

Second, Apple actually includes two USB-C ports on the MacBook Air, and both are Thunderbolt 3-capable. This is a dramatic improvement over the port selection on the MacBook, which offers just a single USB-C port that is not Thunderbolt 3-capable. Yes, I wish there was one port on each side of the device (seriously, Apple). But this is still a big upgrade.

And then there’s the Touch ID sensor. This is quite unexpected, as even Apple’s MacBook Pro lineup doesn’t offer this feature unless you upgrade to a very expensive model: The cheapest version with Touch ID costs $1800. But the addition of this sensor is even better since you don’t also have to take Apple’s terrible Touch Bar with it, as you do on MacBook Pro.

To clear, Touch ID is not a nicety: When you’re used to biometric log-ins, as many are with Windows-based PCs, it’s hard to use a Mac that doesn’t include such a thing. On the MacBook Air that I’m currently using, the only option is to use a password: Apple doesn’t even offer a PIN sign-in option, as we’ve had in Windows since 2012. (Or you could spend $400 or more on an Apple Watch, I guess, since that offers some form of sign-in integration with the Mac.)

So I mentioned two issues. These issues, I think, will cause any potential MacBook Air buyer to pause at check-out time and wonder if they’re doing the right thing.

The first and most obvious is the price: The MacBook Air starts at an incredible $1200, fully $200 more than I was expecting, and only $100 less than a far more capable MacBook Pro. (That the smaller MacBook is also more expensive, starting at $1300, is likewise hard to understand.) But Apple continues to sell the older MacBook Air, with its outdated design and components, at the same $1000 price point as before. It’s kind of insulting.

That price might be justifiable had Apple outfitted the new MacBook Air with a modern, quad-core Intel Core processor. But it doesn’t: As we discovered independently after the announcement this week, the new MacBook Air uses a middling dual-core Y-series Intel Core processor, the Core i5-8210Y. And this is problematic.

The issue is that the Y-series processor lineup, which typically runs at 5-watts, is aimed at inexpensive, low-end PCs in which a thin, light, silent, fanless design is valued over performance. Such processors also promise much better battery life when compared to mainstream 15-watt U-series processors, though anyone who follows the PC industry is no doubt aware of the fact that many PC based on these chips get 10-20 hours of battery life as it is.

The chip that Apple uses is 7-watts, so it’s possible that it has been cranked up a bit, performance-wise, when compared to other Y-series parts. The new MacBook Air also uses a single fan for cooling, which is a rarity for Y-series PCs, which again suggests slightly better performance.

But the question remains. Why? After all, the entire industry has embraced the Intel’s quad-core U-series processors, and they’ve done so in PCs that are very much like the new MacBook Air from a form factor perspective.

Just a week ago, I wrote about the new HP EliteBook x360 1030 G3, which resembles the new MacBook Air in some key ways, despite being a business-class device that’s outfitted with many features one would never expect from an Air. Like the new MacBook Air, the new EliteBook x360 is smaller and lighter than the model it replaces. It weighs 2.76 pounds, almost identical to the Air’s 2.75 pounds. It’s 0.62-inches thick at its thickest point, compared to 0.61-inches for the Air.

They sound similar, right? But there is one major difference from a specs perspective: The EliteBook x360 offers modern, quad-core Intel Core-i5 and i7 processors, where the Air, inexplicably, only offers a lower-end, dual-core Y-series processor. HP does use a fan for cooling, but it’s worth noting that many PC makers, including Microsoft, ship silent and fanless Core i5 laptops. Apple’s part choice just seems off here.

But I think I know why the MacBook Air landed where it did.

If you look at Apple’s portable Mac lineup, you’ll see three basic models: The small MacBook with its 12-inch display, the thin and light MacBook Air with a 13.3-inch display, and the prosumer-oriented MacBook Pro, which comes in both 13.3- and 15-inch variants.

I can’t explain the pricing differences exactly—Apple remains an enigma in some areas, still—but the 7-watt Y-series processor in the Air sits neatly between 5-watt Y-series processors used by the MacBook and the 15-watt U-series processor found in the entry-level MacBook. That, I think, is the key: The MacBook Air could not intrude into the MacBook Pro lineup. If it was too good, some pro customers would choose the less expensive Air instead.

That Apple has artificially hobbled the MacBook Air to protect the MacBook Pro will be disheartening to some. But there is a precedent for this in other products—I recall the less-expensive Porsche 924S having an artificially speed-restricted motor so that it would not overtake the more expensive 944S in the late 1980’s, for example. And it has a precedent at Apple, which is in the middle of a mad rush to raise the average selling prices of its products.

And that’s the insidious thing about the new MacBook Air. Anyone pricing out one of these laptops should pay attention to what a similarly-configured MacBook Pro would cost. You will discover two things. First, that the Pro is about $200 more, an acceptable upgrade cost for many. And two, that the Pro lacks the Touch ID sensor that I believe is crucial to any modern Mac purchase in 2018. To get Touch ID, you need to spend about $400 more, and you’ll get the Touch Bar as well. That is not an acceptable cost, financial or otherwise.

All this explains why I just went through three days of soul-searching—by which I mean endlessly configuring the MacBook Air I think I’d want and then not actually going through the purchase process—until today. When I finally did so again, said screw it, and clicked Buy.

The MacBook Air I ordered is Space Gray, and it will come with 16 GB of RAM (a $200 upgrade) and 256 GB of storage (another $200 upgrade) for a total cost of $1600 before taxes and fees. Those upgrades are designed to future-proof the purchase, and I often run Windows, in virtualization and/or via Boot Camp on my Macs.

But I know the new MacBook Air won’t be perfect. The performance will be interesting, and I’m curious to see where it lands in benchmarks and in real-world usage. The keyboard, I know, will be loud and potentially unreliable. But I need a more modern Mac for my testing. And while this isn’t ideal—is about $400 north of ideal—it’s a better purchase, I think, than a MacBook (too small) or a MacBook Pro (even more expensive). At least for me.

One final thought. Though the eagerly-awaited new MacBook Air was available for preorder starting on Tuesday, I was able to secure a ship-day arrival of November 7, just as I would have had I ordered it immediately. In other words, waiting over two days didn’t trigger any delay in getting the Mac. This suggests that demand wasn’t as high as Apple had expected. A new iPad Pro, for example, wouldn’t arrive until a week after that.

This, I think, confirms my feelings about the new Air, that Apple’s customers are, like me, confused by the issues in this product and are not blindly embracing it as they might have otherwise. We’ll see: You can expect Apple to trumpet whatever successes it does have with the new Air as soon as possible.

PS: Will I be comparing the new MacBook Air to Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 2? Absolutely.