Look, honey, Apple shrunk the MacBook Pro 16 – that’s about the best way to describe the new Air 15. It’s a 15-inch notebook filling a gap in Apple’s lineup that has never been filled. It’s a Mac with a big screen but is also thin, lightweight, and powerful. It’s the laptop dreams are made of.
And, oh yeah, it’s surprisingly affordable too. The base model starts at Rs 1,34,900 in India, much cheaper than the MacBook Pro’s starting price of $1,999 or $2,499. But that’s not all. The Air 15 is the best large laptop you can get for your money.
The MacBook Air 15 is powered by an Intel Core i5 processor with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The performance is excellent, considering it’s an entry-level laptop, and it manages to handle almost any task you can throw at it. During our benchmark tests, it didn’t lag once and stayed whisper-quiet throughout multitasking sessions involving Slack, Discord, tons of Chrome tabs, and even some video streaming.
As for the display, it’s a gorgeous, vivid 15.3-inch Liquid Retina screen that’s so beautiful you might mistake it for an iMac or iPad display. It’s less sharp than the MacBook Pro but offers a higher resolution at a lower cost.
The Air 15 comes with dual USB-C ports and a slim MagSafe charger port on the left side for connectivity. It also has a single 3.5mm headphone jack and supports Bluetooth 5.3. The only thing missing is support for Wi-Fi 6, which is odd since most of Apple’s recent releases have come with it.
Another significant aspect of this laptop is its excellent battery life. It can easily last you through an entire workday without being charged. And, if you need to charge it, you’ll find that the 57.4-watt-hour battery can get you through a couple of additional charges when using it for light tasks.
Lastly, the MacBook Air offers plenty of great features that make it easy to use with other devices. Continuity features like Handoff and Universal Clipboard let you transfer text or images from your iPhone into a document on the MacBook and vice versa. And the iCloud ecosystem can even help you back up your files online.
In short, the MacBook Air 15 is a great everyday laptop with premium build quality, a stunning big screen, plenty of power, and exceptional battery life. Sure, the bezels could be slimmer, and I wish there were a notch instead of that chin on the front, but those are just minor quibbles. The Air 15 is a perfect laptop for most people and is well worth the price in almost every instance. It’s the best laptop I’ve ever used for daily work.
