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 s...

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