MacBook Air
From £999
Apple’s thinnest and lightest laptop is also its cheapest, with prices starting at just £999. Even the step-up model costs just £1,299. – and both have vastly improved specs following their refresh in March 2020 with more power, more storage and the same Magic Keyboard as the 16in MacBook Pro.
It may be Apple’s cheapest affordable laptop, but the MacBook Air certainly doesn’t feel it, thanks to its 100% recycled aluminium unibody, and a 13.3in LED-backlit Retina display, that has a resolution of 2560x1600 (227ppi) and True Tone, which automatically adjusts the display’s colour temperature depending on the ambient light.
Inside the MacBook Air’s 1.61cm thin, 1.29kg body, you’ll find new 10th-generation Intel Core i3 1.1GHz dual-core processor in the entrylevel model and 8GB of 3,733MHz LPDDR4X RAM (upgradeable to 16GB). It also comes with a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), twice what it had before. The step-up model gets a 10th-generation Intel Core i5 1.1GHz quad-core processor, with a 1.2GHz quad-core Core i7 available as a £250 build-to-order option. The step-up model also get a 512GB SSD (again twice what it had before), although you can add up to 2TB of SSD storage for £800.
The 2020 MacBook Air also includes Intel Iris Plus integrated graphics (although it also offers external GPU support and can even be teamed with Apple’s Pro Display XDR), plus Touch ID for secure logins, and a Force Touch trackpad.
The MacBook Air is also equipped with two Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports, has 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 onboard and is equipped with a 720p FaceTime camera for video chats.
One of the most compelling reasons to buy a MacBook Air is its legendarily long battery life, with Apple quoting a maximum runtime of up to 12 hours when watching an iTunes movie, or 11 hours of wireless web surfing, thanks to its 49.9Whr battery. Like the 16in MacBook Pro, the new MacBook Air comes with Apple’s new Magic Keyboard, with replaces the butterfly mechanism of old and replaces it with a scissor-switch version offering 1mm of key travel. It also comes with improved stereo speakers and a 3.5mm headphone socket.