Apple’s new MacBook Air brings the price down and the specs up—plus a new keyboard

• 

  The 2020 MacBook Air. [credit: Apple ]

Today, Apple announced new MacBook Air models that incorporate the non-butterfly keyboard introduced in the 16-inch MacBook Pro in November. The company also bumped up the specs, doubled the storage, and put the entry-level price at $999-something onlookers have called on Apple to do for a long time.

Apple calls the new keyboard the Magic Keyboard because it is closely modeled after the Magic Keyboard peripheral the company has sold for years. It has been introduced to the MacBook Air after a positive reception on the MacBook Pro in the wake of the divisive and failure-prone butterfly mechanism the company used in both computers for prior iterations.

Even more notably, Apple has brought the entry-level price for the MacBook Air down to $999 (it started at $1,199 when this chassis was first introduced in 2018). The $999 model has a 1.1GHz, dual-core, 10th generation Intel Core i3 CPU with a 4MB L3 cache, 8GB of 3,733MHz LPDDR4X RAM, and 256GB of storage (twice as much storage as the previous entry-level model). At the higher end of the configuration options, you can opt for a 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU (also 10th gen) with an 8MB cache and up to 2TB of SSD storage.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments