Whether you're a student submitting homework, at work typing away at documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, or you're just someone who wants to access resources online and connect with family and friends, you want a laptop with the components and features you'll need to get the job done. That means a great screen, a comfortable keyboard, and long battery life (and nice design doesn't hurt, either!).

The laptop space is more competitive than ever. Windows machines come from many companies using silicon from three major CPU vendors: Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Apple, meanwhile, has a range of powerful and portable systems based on its own Apple Silicon.

In 2026, Intel's most recent chips are its Intel Core Ultra (Series 3) chips, code-named Panther Lake, while AMD launched its "Gorgon Point" Ryzen AI processors at CES. At Computex, Nvidia announced that its RTX Spark chips will launch in laptops from Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and more starting in the fall, taking on Qualcomm in the Windows on Arm space. Earlier this year, Qualcomm released its Snapdragon X2 Elite Xtreme, Elite, and Plus chips.

On Macs, Apple's top chips are the M5 series, including the M5 Pro and M5 Max, which can be found in the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineup.

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Best Laptops You Can Buy Today

The Best Laptop (and Mac) overall

The MacBook Air has been a go-to laptop recommendation for quite some time, thanks to strong performance, a fanless design, excellent built quality, and long-lasting battery life. With the version of the chip with M5, you get the benefits of years of hardware revisions since the Air's last redesign with M2, including a minimum 16GB of RAM and a 12-megapixel webcam.

The M5 chip in the MacBook Air showed off excellent single and multi-core performance. In fact, it;s closest rival was the same chip in the MacBook Pro, which gets a boost because of an active fan.

That being said, the system can throttle under heavy workloads like rendering. But for most people's typical tasks, including writing, editing, making spreadsheets, editing photos, listening to music, programming, and general multitasking, you'll have a very powerful machine.

Apple has boosted the base MacBook Air's price to $1,099, but it now starts with 512GB of memory. Given the price of components these days, the laptop is still a great value. If you want a Mac but don't want to spend that much for it, you could take a step down to the entry-level MacBook Neo, starting at $599, as long as you're willing to sacrifice on power, memory, ports, and a backlit keyboard.

Read: MacBook Air (M5) review

Best Windows laptop

The Dell XPS 14 is back, and while you might expect its performance or design to be the headlining feature, it's the battery life that wows. With its base 1920 x 1200 LCD display, which has a variable refresh rate that goes all the way down to 1 Hz, it lasted 20 hours and 41 minutes on our battery test.

That's not to say the battery life is all there is to like about this laptop. The 3-pound chassis is sleek, and Dell added a function row back to the keyboard, making it way easier to use over the touch bar of yesteryear.

If you're OK with 12 hours of charge, more expensive models with a tandem OLED display have way better colors and more powerful Arc B390 integrated graphics.

That being said, both of them have a low-travel keyboard without space between the keys, which definitely tripped up my fingers, so you'll need time to get your muscle memory going. And the starting price, at $1,600, is a lot to ask but is unfortunately common as the memory crisis rages on.

Read: Dell XPS 14 (2026) review

Best ultralight laptop

Some of the best laptops are barely noticeable in your bag. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, at 2.15 pounds is extremely light.

Still, despite the weight, you get plenty of other benefits. The speakers are surprisingly good for a laptop of this size. Perhaps most impressively, the system ran for 16 hours and 38 minutes on our battery test, outlasting many of the laptops we bit against it by multiple hours.

The system also offers a lovely display. The POLED touchscreen measured 476 nits of brightness while falling in similar gamut ranges as other OLED notebooks that weren't as luminous.

There are some downsides. There are limited ports outside of Thunderbolt 4/USB-C, including a lack of a headphone jack. And CPU performance fell behind some competitors, like Apple's M5 MacBook Air and a thicker AMD-based 2-in-1 from HP.Still, the laptop impressed for its airiness and multimedia strengths. And as tested with 32GB at $1,519, it's not a crazy price as the costs of many laptops skyrocket during an ongoing component shortage.

Read: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition review

Another great Windows clamshell

We can argue about how much the AI PC is really any sort of revolution, but there are still some strong ultraportables coming out. The HP OmniBook Ultra puts the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 in a sleek chassis with strong productivity performance.

HP is offering up decent battery life here, running for 12 hours and 52 minutes on our battery test. That's not the best, but all things considered including the high-resolution display, it's not bad. It's also nice to see Thunderbolt 4 ports on an AMD system, which is exceedingly rare.

The experience is knocked down a bit by a significant amount of bloatware, but if you're looking for a strong AMD laptop, the HP OmniBook Ultra is a strong competitor if you don't mind doing some uninstalling.

Read: HP OmniBook Ultra review

The best budget laptop

If you're looking for an affordable laptop, Apple does it best these days. The MacBook Neo starts at $599 ($499 with an education discount), but you rarely feel like you're not getting enough – unlike most Windows laptops in this price range. The Neo has a premium, all-metal chassis, a bright, vivid screen, and a custom mechanical trackpad that lets you click anywhere. And yes, you get all of macOS running on what was formerly an iPhone chip.

The quality of the 13-inch chassis and screen are key here. You're not getting something plastic. You're not getting something low-resolution, and you're not getting something dim. You also get a great webcam for this price range, and the system stays remarkably cool. There are some niceties you sacrifice, however. Apple has gone without a backlit keyboard. And the two USB ports aren't labeled, so you'll have to remember which is the faster 10 Gbps USB 3 port (the back one) for backup drives and monitors, lest you end up with an error message.

I suspect that most people with light workloads — especially students and people using home computers doing a lot of work in the browser — won't have too much trouble with the 8GB of RAM. That being said, 16GB systems can be found in the Windows world for a bit more money, though you'll need to hunt for sales.

But if a premium laptop experience (including great build quality and a high-res screen) are important to you, Apple delivers that better than any Windows machine priced close to the Neo’s $599 starting price.

Read: MacBook Neo review

The Best Laptop for work

There are plenty of reasons why the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a classic. It's thin design and strong build quality are beloved by ThinkPad diehards. The latest model, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), offers long battery life and great speakers.

Perhaps most critically, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon offers an excellent keyboard. Lenovo's reputation was built on great typing experiences, so this is crucial. For those who love Lenovo's TrackPoint, it's still here, allowing you to move the mouse without ever taking your fingers away from the home row on the keyboard.

The latest version comes with Intel's 13th Gen Core processors. We reviewed it with a Core i7-1355U, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

The one real issue we had is that the base screen could benefit from being a bit brighter. Those who want the most vivid experience can opt for an OLED panel, but at a higher price.

When shopping for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), keep an eye out for Lenovo's frequent sales, as there's often a deal available.

Read: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11) Review

The Best Windows Tablet

Microsoft may push the Surface Pro as a do-it-all AI machine, but the truth is it's just a really nice, portable, slim PC that lasts a long time on a battery and includes a beautiful OLED display. It's definitively one of the best Surfaces to date.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors offer enough performance to keep up with x86 competitors, making this one of the first Arm-based Surfaces that doesn't feel like it's lacking. Add on more Arm-compatible apps than ever, including the Chrome browser, and there's far less to miss from previous Intel models. That's not to say it's perfect — there are still some gaming issues, as well as drivers for specialized peripherals that may need to be rebuilt for the new platform.

The 45 TOPS NPU powers some of Windows 11's Copilot+ features, like Cocreator, Live Captions, and Windows Studio effects. None of these are showstoppers, but they're cool tricks.'

If you want a premium tablet running Windows 11, the Surface Pro is one of the only premium games in town. And that means paying a premium for a separate keyboard. But for those who love this form factor, the Surface Pro remains the best option out there.

Read: Microsoft Surface Pro review

A more powerful Mac laptop

The MacBook Air is a great starting point, but if you want an air-cooled processor and a few more features, the base MacBook Pro adds a few niceties. The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts with an M5 processor, has three Thunderbolt ports (including one on the right side), and a beautiful micro LED display.

For those willing to spend an extra $150, there's a nano-texture display option that is completely worth it if you ever use your laptop outside. The matte display looks excellent, and was great on desks near windows.

If you need the most power possible, we also reviewed the MacBook Pro with an M5 Max, including a 40-core GPU, a mix of Apple's latest performance and super cores, and a blazing fast SSD.

Both the 14-inch and 16-inch laptops offer great speakers and beautiful displays, but you will have to pay quite a bit for any storage or memory upgrades you want, and you won't be able to make changes later.

Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5) review
Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max) review

The Best Gaming laptop

Razer Blade 18 offers some of the strongest gaming performance we've seen in a laptop, but also features excellent design, comfortable features, and the latest connection standards. At $5,199.99 as tested, it sure should be good. It tops our list of the best gaming laptops.

The major highlight is the dual-mode display, which has two options: 3840 x 2400 at 240 Hz or 1920 x 1200 at 440 Hz. Those two choices (which you can switch between in Razer Synapse) is enough to showcase both intensive, graphics-driven games at high settings and esports where frames are more important than resolution and detail.

The laptop, packed with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU in our review configuration, outperformed the field in our gaming tests, especially at the lower resolution.Razer is one of the few laptop makers using Thunderbolt 5 ports (we've also seen them from MSI and Apple), so this system is ready to go if you're using advanced peripherals or the fastest external storage drives.

Perhaps the biggest downside is that the Blade's dual 2TB storage drives use PCIe 4.0 rather than 5.0. You won’t notice this in games or mainstream productivity, but if you want PCIe 5.0 speed for future proofing or 8K video editing, the Titan may still be the way to go. The Blade 18 does support PCIe 5.0 drives, if you want to upgrade to speedier storage in the future.

Read: Razer Blade 18 review

Other Laptops We Tested

💻 Asus Zenbook A16

The Zenbook A16 has Qualcomm's powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processor, including 48GB of RAM on the package. While the chip is fast, the laptop, while lightweight, didn't meet our expectations. While light, it flexed and didn't feel premium; battery life was lesser than competitors; and while emulation is better than it used to be, there are still some compatibility issues with Windows on Arm for power users.

Read: Asus Zenbook A16 review

💻 Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra

Samsung's Galaxy Book6 Ultra is a powerful system for creatives, thanks in part to the RTX 5070 GPU in the version we tested. The OLED screen is beautiful and you get an nice design (albeit one that is quite similar to Macs), but this laptop is pricey, and you get a shallow keyboard.

Read: Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra review

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The Dell XPS 14, which features an LCD panel with a variable refresh rate (VRR) of 1Hz to 120Hz, is designed to increase laptop battery life endurance. According to tests conducted by Hardware Canucks, the Dell laptop achieved 43 hours and 3 minutes running completely on battery while doing just light Chrome Web Browsing. By comparison, the 15-inch M5 MacBook Air achieved 14 hours and 30 minutes on the same test — a massive difference of 28 hours and 33 minutes.

The XPS also outlasted the MacBook Air in 4K YouTube playback, with the Windows laptop achieving 20 hours and 21 minutes before running on empty, versus the MacBook’s 14 hours and 2 minutes. The only time Apple outshone Dell was in gaming, where the MacBook Air lasted for 4 hours and 10 minutes (versus the XPS’s 2 hours and 38 minutes).

To ensure that the settings between the two laptops were comparable, both devices were set at 150 nits brightness with HDR off. While it does help that the XPS has a slightly larger 70Wh battery compared to the MacBook Air’s 66.5Wh, that still does not explain the massive difference in endurance between the two laptops.

It’s apparent that the LG display found on the XPS 14 drives the power savings, which allowed the Dell laptop to shift down to a 1 Hz refresh rate when a higher rate is unneeded.

We’ve seen impressive results ourselves in our review of the Dell XPS 14 (2026). While we did not achieve the nearly two-day battery life, we were still able to hit 20 hours and 41 minutes in our test. This is the best result we’ve seen in an x86 laptop and beats the M5 MacBook Pro’s 18 hours and 14 minutes endurance. Our tests are a bit different, though, as we combined web browsing, video streaming, and OpenGL tests for our battery run with the screen set at 150 nits of brightness. This is quite a bit more intense than the light web browsing tests conducted by Hardware Canucks.

The only downside to the Dell XPS 14 (2026), which had the amazing battery life, was that it had an LCD panel. While it does give you excellent battery endurance and a higher maximum brightness, it compromises on resolution and color accuracy. The OLED XPS 14 offers 2880 x 1800 pixels and 89.7% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space and 126.6% of the sRGB gamut. By comparison, the LCD model only had a 1920 x 1200 resolution, while its DCI-P3 coverage only sat at 71.4%. Still, that does not mean that you’ll have to pick between battery life and color accuracy in the future, as LG said that it plans to launch an OLED version of this VRR display by 2027.

Apple is 50 years old. The consumer tech giant, famous for the iPhone, AirPods, and, yes, its Mac laptops and desktops, has a larger footprint than ever. It also now encompasses TV production, music streaming apps, a massive App Store, and even a $599 system for the masses, the MacBook Neo. But all of that is rooted in a tradition of hobbyist computing, starting with the company's first product: the Apple-1.

Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1976 as a partnership between Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne (of Atari fame, who was at Apple very briefly and worked on documentation). The company was built around the Apple-1, designed by Wozniak, and officially incorporated in Cupertino, California, in January 1977.

In retellings of the Apple legend, Wozniak was the true engineer, who was working at HP at the time. Jobs had an interest in electronics (and was reportedly pretty good at soldering at his job at Atari), but he was more of a marketing guy.

Either way, the pair, along with the early team they built, didn't have a company based on lifestyle – at least not yet. It was based in the hobbyist PC space. The Apple-1 came without a case, a keyboard, or a power supply, but did include a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor and four kilobytes of memory. If you wanted to run Integer BASIC, you needed to do it on a cassette. Only about 200 were ever made, mostly for Byte Shop in nearby Mountain View.

At the time, the Apple-1 delivered a surprising amount of convenience for personal computing. Even though you still had to bring many components, the board was built and tested. Wozniak would show it off at the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, to acclaim.But it was the Apple II that brought Apple's computers to the masses, assembling everything together, including the keyboard and case. You would use a television to serve as the screen. Heck, BASIC was even stored in memory. The Apple II was an iconic beige box that would be popularized by two further advancements in computing: a floppy disk drive and VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program, which boosted its popularity.

There would be many variations on the Apple II, including the ill-fated Apple III, the upgraded Apple IIe, and the Lisa, the first commercially available PC with a GUI and mouse (inspired by work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, such as the Xerox Alto), which was quite expensive at $9,995.

But in 1984, following an internal power struggle, a second computing group within Apple revealed the Macintosh (later the Macintosh 128K), bringing forward the idea of the "all-in-one" PC, which included a monitor. There would be many variations in the Mac line, but they'd become popularized again in 1998, when Jobs, back from his exile from the company from 1985 through 1997, announced the iMac G3, designed by Jony Ive, in Bondi Blue. That would be followed by multiple colorways on the portable iBook laptops.

There would be hits (the iMac G4, with a modern design between a lamp and a flower) and misses. The Power Mac G4 Cube was a gorgeous machine with cosmetic issues in the injection-molded plastic and cooling issues thanks to its fanless design. The press release about Apple suspending production lives on on its website.

In 2001, Apple released the iPod, promising "1,000 songs in your pocket." The third-gen iPod, in 2003, added support for Windows, helping propel it to be one of the most popular consumer devices of all time. In 2007, Apple would launch the iPhone, which would take over the American smartphone market, become the company's largest focus and flagship product, and introduce the App Store, a huge business success for the company, as well as other services like iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple Pay. (The iPhone would ultimately lead to the death of Flash and the headphone jack on phones, but change the way many people use devices forever.)

But the next biggest hit would be the MacBook Air. By this time, Apple was firmly in its Intel era. Sure, it was extremely expensive when it launched in 2008, starting at $1,799 with an 80GB HDD and a 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (a 64GB SSD was an upgrade option!). But when Jobs pulled that computer out of a manila envelope, the tech world was stunned. It was stunned again when, in 2010, Apple redesigned the Air in two sizes: 11- and 13.3-inches, starting at $999 for the smaller model and $1,299 for the larger one (and it got rid of the spinning hard drive).

The MacBook Air would push leading PC companies to chase Apple in laptops for well more than a decade, as Dell updated the XPS line, HP jumped to the premium Spectre, and even Lenovo's ThinkPads saw the X1 series.

The MacBook Air would stay in the spotlight, 12 years later. Following some hum-dum upgrades in Apple's last Intel years, including the lackluster Touch Bar (in fact, in 2018, with little attention, I wrote for Laptop Mag that Apple needed to either upgrade or kill the laptop), it would be one of the first machines, along with the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini, to ditch Intel and move to Apple's first in-house silicon, the M1 system-on-a-chip. It was widely seen as a success.

Today, Macs don't have the kind of modularity or upgradeability they had when Wozniak showed off the Apple-1 at the Homebrew Computer Club. But with the release of the $599 MacBook Neo, time has caught up with Apple at 50 years old. There's another computer that feels like an all-in-one package for more people. But there are more challenges to come, as Apple faces a new world focused on AI, with new players and competitors. While the company still seems to be trying to deliver on promises around Apple Intelligence, the company has partnered with Google to use Gemini models to make an AI-focused Siri.

The 50-year anniversary has inspired celebrations, with museum collections, like the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art in Georgia showing off over 2,000 artifacts related to the company's history, and the vaunted Computer History Museum in Mountain View offering special programming. Apple has had an array of concerts and other performances at stores globally. But for most, it's just Wednesday, even if you have an iPhone in your pocket.

The MacBook Air has topped our list of the best ultrabooks and premium laptops in recent years because of its mix of premium design, battery life, and performance that make it a go-to recommendation for anyone already on a Mac or looking to make the jump from Windows. The latest incarnation, the MacBook Air with M5 ($1,099 to start, $1,299 as tested), continues the trend, capitalizing on the series of subtle tweaks in its predecessors.

Apple has ditched the $999 starting price for the 13-inch system we're reviewing here, likely a mix of component shortages and pricing strategies related to the new budget-focused MacBook Neo. But $1,099 does get you a larger 512GB SSD over the previous 256GB base spec.

Despite the slight price bump, the mix of power, style, and longevity is still enough to easily recommend the MacBook Air to most people, especially those who don't need to run Windows. And all of the features that the MacBook Air offers still give it a clear space in the lineup that's worth saving up for over the Neo, if you can afford it.

Design of the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air with M5 sports the same design that Apple revealed back in 2022, when the M2 Air was the first Mac hardware built specifically around Apple Silicon. The design has aged well, and this one comes in the same colors as last year. Our review unit is a pale "sky" blue, the color introduced in 2025, which could be mistaken for silver in some lighting conditions.

The same aluminum design remains, with rounded edges and flat surfaces. It's handsome, if a bit familiar at this point. When you open the lid, which features Apple's logo in reflective tone-on-tone metal, you're greeted with the one real sin of this design: a notch into the display that houses the webcam. I've never quite gotten over it (in fact, the cheaper MacBook Neo's thicker bezel helped Apple avoid one completely).

Most of the MacBook Air's ports are on the left side of the notebook. These include MagSafe for charging and a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports. On the right side, there's a lone 3.5 mm headphone jack.

At 2.7 pounds and 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches, the 13-inch MacBook Air can easily slide into a backpack relatively unnoticed. The Dell XPS 14, a Windows laptop noticeably inspired by the design, is 3 pounds and 12.19 x 8.26 x 0.6 inches. Apple's MacBook Neo, the new gateway laptop to the Apple ecosystem, weighs the same as the MacBook Air and is 0.6 mm taller, but has a smaller footprint at 11.71 x 8.12 x 0.5 inches.

MacBook Air (13-inch, M5) Specifications

Productivity Performance on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air puts Apple's M5 in a fanless chassis. Even without air cooling, the chip is quite powerful.

Our competitors here are the MacBook Pro with M5, which puts the M5 under air, as well as the Dell XPS 14 with a Core Ultra 7 3355 and an Asus ZenBook Duo with Core Ultra X9 388H. For an alternative ARM system, there's the Acer Swift 14 AI with the aging Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100). Lastly, there are some comparisons to the 15-inch MacBook Air with M4 that we reviewed last year.

On Geekbench 6, the Air notched a single-core score of 4,168 and a multi-core score of 17,067. That made the M5's biggest competition itself, but cooler. The M5 MacBook Pro hit a single-core score of 4,288 and a multi-core score of 17,926. Intel's Core Ultra X9 388H had a higher-multi-core score than the Air's M5 at 17,283, but given the Asus that houses it is almost twice the price of the MacBook Air, that's not a huge difference. Apple's M4 didn't do as well as M5, but it's single-core score still beats the Intel chips.

On our file transfer test, the MacBook Air copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,924.84 MBps, just ahead of the M5 MacBook Pro and faster than both Intel systems tested here.

The M5 MacBook Air took 4 minutes and 41 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p in Handbrake, a slight increase over M4 (4:52). The MacBook Pro did it over a minute faster with air cooling (3:31), while the Zenbook Duo also beat the Air, at 4:22. This was where the Acer Swift 14 with Snapdragon was the most competitive, coming in at 4:46.

On the Xcode Benchmark, the MacBook Air took 165 seconds to compile a large codebase using Apple's developer tools. The MacBook Pro did it in 145 seconds.

It wasn't surprising to see the M5 thermally throttle in this fanless chassis. On our Cinebench 2026 stress test, the chip started with a score of 3,415, slowly decreasing over the first few runs, until it settled in the low 2,300's. Apple doesn't allow monitoring software like TG Pro to access clock speeds, but Cinebench estimates that M5 runs single-core at 4.3 GHz and multi-core at 3.6 GHz in this laptop.

Gaming and Graphics on the MacBook Air

The MacBook Air's integrated 10-core GPU has access to the 16GB of unified memory in our review unit. In this fanless design, the GPU is subject to similar thermal throttling as the CPU.

I tried playing InZoi, the same life simulator game I played on the MacBook Pro with M5 Max, on the Air. In this case, though, I had it set to 1680 x 1050, used MetalFX in performance mode, and very low settings, but still had hardware ray tracing enabled. The game ran between 40 and 55 frames per second, depending on the environment the characters were in.

The Air earned a score of 1,005 on the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark, falling behind the cooled M5 in the MacBook Pro at 1,122 and the integrated Intel Arc B390 in the Asus Zenbook Duo's Core Ultra X9 388H (but again, that's a far more expensive laptop). The Air was far more graphically competent than the Dell XPS 14's integrated Intel graphics, which delivered just 532 points. We don't have data for this test for M4, as we've started using it on Macs recently.

Display on the on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The 13-inch screen on the MacBook Air is actually 13.6-inches, making it 0.6 inches larger than the MacBook Neo. The Air's display has a 2560 x 1664 "Liquid Retina" LED display with IPS and Apple's True Tone, which adjusts the screen's color temperature based on ambient lighting.

I used the MacBook Air to watch the debut trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the hero's new red and blue suit shone brightly against grayer, darker backgrounds as he dove off a building and confronted the Punisher.

At 83.1% DCI-P3 color Volume and 117.3% sRGB, the Air was on par with the MacBook Pro, despite the latter's mini LED screen. The Asus ZenBook Duo's dual OLED screens, however, were slightly more vivid, while the XPS 14 trailed the group here.

At 458.8 nits, the Air's display gets suitably bright, but the MacBook Pro got almost 100 nits brighter. The Dell XPS 14 beat the Air ever so slightly at 466 nits of brightness.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The keyboard on the MacBook Air may not have the most travel, but it's quite comfortable. I love typing on it. The layout just makes sense, with full-sized function keys and inverted-T arrow keys. The power button features Touch ID to log in easily.

On the Monkeytype typing test, I hit 114 words per minute with 98% accuracy, which is close to my best.

My only quibble with the MacBook Air's keys is one that is also on this year's MacBook Neo and MacBook Pro lines, as well; Apple has removed the words from the delete, enter, shift, caps lock, and tab keys and replaced them with glyphs that are familiar to those who have used the iOS keyboard. As a touch typist, it's not actually that big of a deal, but I don't think it's as clear as it could be. (For what it's worth, these glyphs have been on alternate language keyboards before. We're just seeing it now in U.S. English.) On the bright side, the modifier keys maintain their text.

Apple's haptic touchpads remain among the best in the industry. They support tons of fluid, accurate gestures, feel good against the fingertip, and have convincing feedback that feels like a real click. Very few others come close.

Audio on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

Apple's quad speakers on the MacBook Pro sound quite good and get loud enough to fill a room. In our photography studio, I listened to Metric's "Victim of Luck" and was pleased by clear vocals, synths, and keys, as well as some snappy drums. The bass isn't as good as the thicker MacBook Pro, but at least there is some, which you rarely get on a laptop this thin.

If you prefer to use the 3.5 mm headphone jack, Apple offers support for high-impedance headphones.

Upgradeability on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

While there are four pentalobe screws on the underside of the MacBook Air, removing them won't get you very far, as the RAM and storage are soldered down. As usual, the recommendation with a Mac is to buy the best one you can at the time of purchase, because you won't be able to adjust down the line.Most people who need repairs are likely to make an appointment at a Genius Bar. For those with access to parts, Apple did drop a repair manual for the MacBook Air on launch day (as well as the Pro and Neo).

Battery Life on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air lasts long enough on a charge. On our battery test, which involves web browsing, streaming video, and light OpenGL benchmarks with the screen set to 150 nits of brightness, it lasted for 15 hours and 28 minutes. That's roughly the same as the 15-inch M4 model we tested last year (15:14).

And while that's nothing to sneeze at, and is effectively all-day battery life, you can go higher. The MacBook Pro with M5, with a larger 72.4 WHr battery, ran for 18:14. The Dell XPS 14 ran for 20:41, albeit with a lower-resolution display. Another ARM-based competitor, the Snapdragon X Elite-based Swift 14, also ran longer at 17:32.

Heat on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

Despite the lack of a fan, the MacBook Air doesn't get uncomfortably hot. We took skin temperatures while running our Cinebench stress test, and while the system heated up, it was never uncomfortable to the point where you couldn't use it.

The center of the keyboard measured 105.1 degrees Fahrenheit, which is noticeable, but the touchpad was cooler at 96 F. The hottest point on the bottom of the laptop measured 107.9 F.

TG Pro, which measures system temperatures and can control fan speeds, measured the M5 SOC at 63.24 degrees Celsius.

Webcam on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air has a 12MP webcam in its notch. In everyday usage, I have no complaints. The webcam caught every hair on my head (fortunate!) some wrinkles under my eyes (unfortunate!), and even some detail in our office's industrial ceiling with speckled paint.

The camera, dubbed "Center Stage," is named after a macOS feature that lets the camera focus on you as you move around. I don't use it much, as I tend to sit in one place on calls.

Software and Warranty on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air comes with the latest version of macOS 26, also known as Tahoe. We went into that more in our review of the Macbook Pro with M5. Tahoe includes the "liquid glass" design overhaul that includes lots of icons and translucent effects, as well as a big update to Spotlight that adds many actions, a built-in clipboard history, and far more automations for shortcuts.

Built-in apps include Safari, Messages, Reminders, Maps, FaceTime, Photos, Apple TV, Music, and more. You still get free versions of Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, though newer versions come as part of Apple's Creator Studio subscription service, along with Compression, Motion, FInal Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Mainstage, and Pixelmator Pro.

Apple sells the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1-year warranty. AppleCare+, which covers repairs, battery replacement, and priority support, is $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year (it is also available as part of AppleCare One for $19.99 per month, covering up to three products). The 15-inch Air drops up to $7.99 per month or $79.99 annually.

MacBook Air (13-inch, M5) Configurations

We tested a 13-inch MacBook Air with an Apple M5 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a blue "sky" colorway. That configuration costs $1,299.

Apple has eliminated the $999 base price. This year, the 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,099, albeit with 512GB of storage rather than the 256GB of storage at the previous starting price. That system also has an 8-core GPU.

If you want more than 16GB, you need the M5 chip with the 10-core GPU, a $100 upgrade on its own. From there, 24GB of RAM is $200 and 32GB is $400. That's pricey, but it's not ridiculous given the price of RAM everywhere else these days.

Apple is now selling the 13-inch Air with a 40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max. For $20 more, you can get either the 35W Dual USB-C port or a 70W USB-C charger.

The 15-inch MacBook Air now starts at $1,299 with the M5 chip and a 10-core GPU.

Bottom Line

The MacBook Air, despite its place as Apple's new middle child in the Mac laptop lineup, is still the best option for the majority of users, if they can afford it. You get a slim design, strong performance and battery life, a comfortable keyboard, an excellent haptic touchpad, and strong base specs at 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Much of Apple's premium competition is actually more expensive now. For example, the Dell XPS 14 starts at $1,349.99 (as of this writing, the price tends to fluctuate) with an Intel Core Ultra 5 325, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a 1920 x 1200 screen. That's more money for a lower resolution display and a less powerful chip. (The version we tested, with a Core Ultra 7 355, is up to $1,449.99). Getting Intel's top processors only goes up from there. But if you need to use Windows, you may need to pony up or find alternatives to get a premium ultrabook in your price range.

Meanwhile, Apple's MacBook Neo may be an alternative for some, but if you're doing serious multitasking, the 16GB of memory in the MacBook Air will be a noticeable difference, and you'll also get better speakers, MagSafe charging, an excellent haptic touchpad, a larger, higher-resolution display, better webcam, keyboard backlighting, and a faster chip, to boot. You get a lot extra with the Air, if you can afford it.

That leaves the MacBook Air as a great value in the premium ultraportable space. While I would love to see Apple start bringing its fancier screens and other Pro features down to the Air, this is a laptop that most people can get by on, presuming they're not doing intensive workloads that need constant cooling and heavy graphics prowess. For just $1,100, you can get a lot of Mac. That's getting harder and harder for other companies to say about their PCs, as the RAM and storage crisis continues to drive up prices.

Apple today announced updates to its best-selling laptop, the MacBook Air. The thin laptop (and best ultrabook) is getting a bump up to the M5 processor and will start with 512GB of storage — double the 256GB that the Air used to begin with.

Customers will be able to bump up the laptop to 4TB of storage for the first time. Apple is promising a faster SSD with "2x faster read/write performance compared to the previous generation," a boon for local AI workloads as well as large files for creative work.

In addition, the MacBook Air will get Apple's N1 wireless chip to support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

But the new chip, SSD, and other upgrades will come at a cost. The M5 MacBook Air will start at $1,099 for the 13-inch model and $1,299 for the 15-inch version. Those are both $100 increases over the M4 MacBook Air, though it's likely we'll eventually see deals from third-party sellers like Amazon and Best Buy. The new MacBook Air laptops will be up for pre-order tomorrow, March 4, and will go on sale on Wednesday, March 11.

The 4TB option doesn't come cheap, though. It's $1,200 over the base price.

Most of Apple's performance claims position it against older MacBook Air laptops, positioning it as an ideal upgrade. But Apple also suggests that web browsing on the M5 is "up to 50 percent faster when compared to a PC laptop with an Intel Core Ultra X7 processor, and more demanding tasks get up to 2x faster performance."

The 13-inch laptop starts with an M5 with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU, while the bump to a 10-core GPU is a $100 increase. All 15-inch MacBook Airs come with the 10-core GPU, and every system also includes a 16-core neural engine on the chip.

Plenty is staying the same. Apple is retaining the same MacBook Air chassis. Apple has been using since the M2 chip in 2022, a fetching design with flat edges and rounded corners. There are no new colors this year, with Apple settling on sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver — the same as last year.

A Ukrainian soldier showed off his 2020 M1 MacBook Air after it got hit by shrapnel during the war in Ukraine. X user @lanevychs [machine translated] asked on the social media platform about the ballistic protection that the laptop offered, especially after his device was able to take a hit from a shell fragment and seemingly survived. Despite the damage, the laptop still continued to work, with the screen showing images in some sections. And although the projectile punctured the screen, it seems that the base and keyboard of the device stopped it from going clean through. The only keyboard casualty being the "K" key.

It’s unclear where the user is based in the country, but chances are that they are near to the conflict. It’s also likely not the first time that the MacBook Air took a hit, as @lanevychs said in the replies [machine translated] that he “recently replaced the matrix (probably the motherboard) on this laptop after an FPV strike.” The MacBook Air is arguably Apple’s thinnest laptop in its generation, with its tapered design giving it a thickness of just 0.16 inches near the edges. It is 0.63 inches at its thickest point, though, making it about 0.02 inches thicker than the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Even though this might be imperceptible to the average user, it’s apparently good enough to stop a shell fragment.

Apple uses aluminum alloy for the unibody chassis of its MacBook line-up due to its strength and durability while still being lightweight. Aside from that, it also doubles as a heatsink, which is especially crucial for the fanless MacBook Air models. But even though Cupertino chose this material for its scratch and dent resistance, it seemed that it was also good enough to stop shrapnel. Unfortunately, he also decried the cost of repair in the comments, saying that “the repair will cost as much as a new laptop.”

The battle-damaged laptop shows off Apple’s engineering prowess, where even shrapnel can damage isn’t enough to completely destroy it. Nevertheless, we do not recommend using it as body armor, as it likely won’t be strong enough to stop a direct hit from small arms fire.

A new app called TrackWeight has been unveiled by Canadian maker and blogger Krish Shah. Put simply, the macOS application commandeers your Apple MacBook's Force Touch trackpad pressure sensors for weighing scale duties. The app code is now available on GitHub, released under the very flexible open-source MIT License.

This might sound like one of those ideas where you wonder why it hasn’t been done before. However, Shah notes on his GitHub that there are several important contributions that helped make his idea become a real app. It didn’t rely upon inspiration alone.

As well as wielding resources like SwiftUI for the user interface, and Combine for reactive data flow, Shah notes the prior work by Takuto Nakamura (@Kyome22) and the Open Multi-Touch Support library. The programming library provides “access to global multitouch events on macOS trackpads [and] detailed touch data including position, pressure, angle, and density,” Shah explained on his GitHub.

A touch too much

Mac gamer and YouTube creator Andrew Tsai tested Cyberpunk 2077 on four different Macs, where he found the game was able to perform relatively well on all models that are within spec. He shared the results of the test in a YouTube video, where he compared four MacBooks — an M4 MacBook Pro (16GB / 10-core GPU), an M3 Max MacBook Pro (48GB / 40-core GPU), an M1 Max MacBook Pro (32GB / 32-core GPU), and, lastly, an M1 MacBook Air (8GB / 8-core GPU). Andrew also tried running the game on the M4 MacBook Pro via Crossover.

Mac gamers have been patiently waiting for this AAA title to land on macOS, with many expecting its arrival in early 2025. Although a bit late, the game did eventually land last July 17, with users who’ve previously bought it on Steam able to install it directly on their Apple computers at no additional cost. CD Projekt Red set the game’s recommended specs at M3 Pro and 18GB of unified memory for smooth 1080p 60 FPS gameplay, although you can get away with a base M1 chip paired with 16GB of unified memory.

With this in mind, Andrew tested four MacBooks to see how they’d compare:

According to Tsai's results, the best-performing MacBook was powered by the M3 Max chip, with its 40-core GPU and 48GB of unified memory, with the game achieving more than 78 FPS at 1080p High and upscaling turned off. When he set MetalFX to quality, performance jumped to more than 100 FPS, delivering an absolutely smooth gameplay experience. The next best system tested was the M1 Max MacBook Pro. Despite being a first-generation model, its Max designation allowed it to perform better than the base M4 chip on the MacBook Pro, delivering a consistent 51.87 FPS whether MetalFX is turned on or off.

Those who didn’t get a top-of-the-line MacBook can still enjoy the game with upscaling, as the M4 chip can still deliver more than 30 FPS with upscaling turned on. If you’re not a fan of that tech, you can still get cinematic gameplay with MetalFX: Off, as you still get an average of 26.22 FPS. The worst performer is the first-generation M1 MacBook Air, which the game does not officially support because it only has 8GB of unified memory. As expected, the benchmark only achieved a little over 12 FPS — and that’s with MetalFX set to quality. Andrew didn’t bother testing the M1 MacBook Air with MetalFX: Off, as it might’ve crashed the laptop.

Another interesting test the YouTuber did was to run the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark on the M4 MacBook Pro through the CrossOver compatibility layer. Interestingly, it only lost about three FPS compared to the game running natively. Still, Andrew expects these FPS numbers to improve over the coming months as the developers optimize the game more for the Apple Silicon.

The MacBook Air is one of the most popular laptops — and best ultrabooks — around. Starting at $999 with a speedy M4 processor, strong build quality, and long battery life, it's incredibly well-liked, especially among people already in Apple's ecosystem.

But the MacBook Pro, with its gorgeous display, more ports, and more performant chips is right there. You might see those upgrades and think that it's worth the extra cash.

And it's true — on a pure spec sheet basis, the MacBook Pro is better in almost every way. Some people may be willing to splurge for the nicer screen, better speakers, and the promise of more performance. But should you?

For many people, the MacBook Air is more than enough, especially for the price. But if you're not sure which you need, read on for a head-to-head comparison.

Design of MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

It's unsurprising that the MacBook Air and Pro have a family resemblance. Whichever you choose, you'll get Apple's latest design, with blocky sides, curved corners, sturdy aluminum build quality, and a mirror-shiny aluminum Apple logo.

You'll also get a notch for the webcam no matter which model you choose, as well as a haptic touchpad and a backlit keyboard with full-size function keys.

One of the bigger changes you'll notice is in size and weight. The Macbook Air comes in 13-inch and 15-inch screen sizes, while the Pro goes for modern, larger 14-inch and 16-inch sizes.

Because the MacBook Air models don't use a fan, they can be extremely thin. The 13-inch Air is 0.44 inches thick, while the 15-inch MacBook Air is just a scratch larger. The smaller Air is the lightest of the bunch at just 2.7 pounds, light enough you barely notice it in a backpack, while the 15-incher is 3.3 pounds.

The 14-inch Pro is 0.61 inches thick, which is significantly bigger. This allows for more ports and for a fan to run over the M4, M4 Pro, or M4 Max. The difference in cooler on the chip is the difference in weight, which starts at 3.4 pounds with M4 and tops out at 3.6 pounds on the M4 Max. The 16-inch MacBook Pro is 0.66 inches thick and is 4.7 pounds whether you chose the M4 Pro or M4 Max.

The svelte MacBook Air only has three ports: a pair of Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C) ports and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The system can also charge over MagSafe 3, which attaches to the side of the system magnetically and detaches if you trip and fall over the cord.

The Pro, however, has far more ports. No matter which you get, you'll get three USB Type-C ports (Thunderbolt 5 on the M4 Pro and M4 Max or Thunderbolt 4 on M4), an HDMI output, and a full-size SD card slot, and MagSafe 3.

If you don't use a ton of peripherals on the go, the MacBook Air's selection is sparse but usable. The MacBook Pro's ports allow for lots of extra peripherals. Either can be expanded with a USB Type-C hub or dock.

The last decision you'll have to make is what color laptop you want. The MacBook Pro keeps it simple with two options: silver and space black. But the Air has four choices: silver, starlight, midnight, and sky blue.

Performance of MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

If you get a MacBook Air, you have one chip option: M4. The entry-level version has a cut down GPU, which you likely won't notice unless you're playing games.

But despite the name, the MacBook Air's claim to fame is that it's thin because there's no fan. The system uses passive cooling, which means the system will throttle under very intense workloads.

With the MacBook Pro, you have three choices: M4, M4 Pro, or M4 Max. In the Pro line, Apple uses active cooling, which means you'll have fans and heat pipes on the processor. Under light use, the fans have been silent in my experience. You really have to push these Arm-based processors to get the fans to kick in loud enough that you'll really notice them.

M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max all have similar single-core performance. But the cores scale significantly between the chips, so if you're a professional working with artificial intelligence, video editing, simulations or other multi-core workloads, the more powerful chips make a lot of sense.

For people who are primarily browsing the web, checking and sending emails, creating documents and slide decks, M4 should be plenty powerful.

Display of the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

For some, the display might be the top reason to upgrade from a MacBook Air to a MacBook Pro.

The MacBook Air's screen is good enough for most people. You either get a 13.6-inch, 2560 x 1664 screen or a 15.3-inch, 2280 x 1864 panel. Both are LED-backlit IPS displays, and in our testing, they get very bright.

Arguably the Air's biggest weakness when it comes to the screen is that it's stuck at a 60 Hz refresh rate, while the Pro goes up to 120 Hz and makes everything from macOS to web browsing to gaming smoother.

The MacBook Pro nets you either a 14.2-inch, 3024 x 1964 display or a 16.2-inch, 3456 x 2234 screen. These 'Liquid Retina XDR' displays use mini-LED displays that are brighter, offer more contrast, and support HDR content. And yes, these go up to 120 Hz with Apple's ProMotion and an adaptive refresh rate.

On the MacBook Pro, Apple also offers its nano-texture display as a paid upgrade. It's an extra $150, but the matte screen looks beautiful and works wonders outside.

Audio on the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

For a thin laptop, Macbook Air is pretty good. The 13-inch model has four speakers, and they're fine for casually listening to music and even for making calls without a headset on. The 15-inch bumps up to 6 speakers with force-cancelling woofers, marking a substantial improvement, especially in the low-end. The speakers are one of the few meaningful differences other than screen size on the two MacBook Air laptops.

Of course, the thicker MacBook Pro does mean better speakers. Like the 15-inch Air, both 14-inch and 16-inch Pro models have six-speaker systems with force-cancelling woofers, but you get higher quality sound. The 16-inch MacBook Pro have the best speakers I've ever heard on a laptop, though I wouldn't pay just for that.

In fact, if you're that much of an actual pro user, you probably need some of the best PC speakers, or at least a great pair of headphones.

Battery Life of the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

Ever since Apple switched to its own Arm-based chips with M1, battery life has been improving. With any of these systems, you should be able to close the lid, leave it unplugged on your desk, and find it still going a day or two later.

Chip efficiency does a lot, but bigger laptops mean bigger batteries.

In our battery test, which browses the web, streams video, and runs light OpenGL tests, the 15-inch MacBook Air with M4 ran for 15 hours and 14 minutes. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with the same chip lasted 18:36. A 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro lasted 21 hours and 1 minute.

All of which is to say, any of these laptops should get you through the day without a problem.

And while the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros will last longer, keep in mind that part of that is because they are heavier than the Air, so there's some give and take. I can handle less battery life if I'm getting more than 12 hours on a charge and the Air is easier to carry around.

Pricing of the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

There's a reason that the MacBook Air is Apple's most popular laptop, and that's because of the price. The 13-inch Air starts at $999 with a 10-core M4 CPU, 8-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD.

The 15-inch Air starts at $1,199 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD.

In recent years, the $999 price point was reserved for a previous generation chip. For instance, when M3 was in vogue, the M2 option was $999. But with M4, Apple has eliminated that practice, making for an even better value for an excellent laptop.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,599 with the same M4 chips with 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU as the 15-inch Air, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. Bumping up to an M4 Pro starts at $1,999 (with a 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 24GB of RAM, and the same 512GB SSD), while an M4 Max starts at $3,199.

And the 16-inch MacBook Pro gets even pricier, starting at $2,499 with an M4 Pro with 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 24GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. The M4 Max version starts at $3,499 and boosts to a 32-core GPU, 36GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

Of course, those are all the lowest possible prices, and Apple's upgrades to RAM and storage are often absurd, with hundreds of dollars for storage and RAM upgrades. Be sure to get what you want at purchase, though, because you won't be able to upgrade down the line.

Verdict

If you're just comparing specs on paper, the MacBook Pro is the better machine in most aspects. It has a nicer screen, more ports, stronger performance, and longer battery life.

In practice, though, the MacBook Air is a better machine for most people. It's lighter and easier to carry around, it has plenty of performance for the average person for either personal or professional use, and it lasts plenty long on a charge. While I think the 14-inch MacBook Pro is the sweet spot for screen size (and personally own one), I've used a 13-inch MacBook Air for work for awhile and adore it.

The truth is that most people don't need a MacBook Pro, even if some of the features — particularly the mini-LED display — are very nice to have. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 serves as a sort of middle of the road pick if you're looking to upgrade for the display and more ports but don't need M4 Pro or M4 Max. . If you need the Pro features or would benefit from M4 Pro or M4 Max, you probably already know it.

For most people, spending less still gets an extremely capable Mac. The MacBook Air is best for most people, but the MacBook Pro has some niceties if you can afford it, or if you're doing very intensive work.

The MacBook Air is one of those laptops that has become something of a default recommendation. Looking to spend around $1,000, and want something fast, quiet, and efficient, with great build quality? It's an easy call. That's why it tops the list of our best ultrabooks.

With the M4 model, Apple is in full-on refining mode. Sure, M4 is faster, but now we're getting features like an improved webcam, faster ports, and even a subtle new blue color. It's not a huge change, but they're all welcome.

That's especially the case when Apple dropped the price by $100, jettisoning previous-generation models holding the $999 starting price. With all of that in mind, the MacBook Air feels like a better deal than it has in years.

Design of the MacBook Air (M4)

Does the MacBook Air look largely the same as it has the last three years? Is the sky blue?

Apple hasn't changed the MacBook Air’s looks, with one exception: there's a new color, "sky blue." It's a very subtle sheen that I quite like. It's similar to what we saw on the Microsoft Surface Pro, but far less dramatic, bordering on standard silver in some lights. I think it'll make a good alternative for those bored by silver but who don't want something as dark as the "midnight" color. Starlight and silver are also still on offer, but space gray is no longer available.

Otherwise, you get a very familiar laptop, with the same design we've seen since the 13-inch Air launched with M2 in 2022. It's a flat design with rounded corners and Apple's go-to spartan design sensibilities. Apple's logo shines in a tone-on-tone color on the lid, which lifts up to reveal the 15-inch display on our review unit, including a notch into the screen to fit the 12MP Center Stage webcam.

Years later, I haven't learned to accept the notch on a laptop the way I have on a phone, but at least it's not removing screen space. I know plenty of people who couldn't care less about the notch. I'd at least like to see it incorporate Face ID, as plenty of Windows laptops have facial recognition with IR cameras.

With either the 13-inch or 15-inch laptop, you get identical ports: MagSafe 3 for charging and two Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4 Type-C ports. On the right side, there's a lone 3.5 mm headphone jack. I would love to see Apple move one of the two Thunderbolt ports to the other side of the laptop for maximum flexibility with peripherals, monitors, chargers, and storage drives.

Our 15-inch review unit measures 13.4 x 9.35 x 0.45 inches and weighs 3.3 pounds. It's just heavy enough for me to notice it in my bag, but only barely. It's the same size and weight as last year's model. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 is 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches and 3.4 pounds, making it thicker but not much heavier. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is 13.54 x 9.27 x 0.55 inches, making it slightly thicker, and 3.37 pounds. The Dell XPS 13, which is smaller than our 15-inch review unit, is 2.27 pounds and 11.62 x 0.60 x 0.58 inches.

MacBook Air (M4) Specifications

Productivity and Graphics Performance on the MacBook Air (M4)

The MacBook Air comes with M4, Apple's latest SoC that has already made its way to the Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, and iPad Pro. In our 15-inch review system, that gets you a 10-core CPU with four performance cores and six efficiency cores, a 10-core GPU, and a 16-core neural engine. (The entry-level $999 13-inch MacBook Air gets you an 8-core GPU. See the configurations section for more).

We saw the M4 in the MacBook Pro late last year, but in the MacBook Air, we're seeing what it can do without a fan. We're also comparing it to the Intel-powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Intel Core Ultra 7 256V) and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite in the Dell XPS 13 (9345).

On Geekbench 6, the Macbook Air with M4 notched a single-core score of 3,780 and a multi-core score of 14,924, falling slightly behind the MacBook Pro with the same chip. The difference here is likely that the Pro laptop has a fan to keep the chip cool and eke out stronger performance. As you'll see when we hit Cinebench, this matters far more for extended workloads.

The Yoga Slim 7i with the Core Ultra 7 256V did the worst here, especially on multi-core, partially because it has just 8 cores. The XPS 13 has a Snapdragon X Elite in it, and that has 12 cores and came up behind M4, so the number of cores isn't everything.

The MacBook Air copied approximately 25GB of files at a rate of 1,220.35 MBps, coming in slightly faster than what we saw in the Pro (1,167.29 MBps), though that could be run-to-run variance. The Yoga was the fastest here at 1,613.44 Mbps, while the XPS also beat the Macs.

We use Handbrake to have laptops transcode a 4K video to 1080p. The MacBook Air took 4 minutes and 52 seconds to complete the task, falling ever so slightly behind the Snapdragon-powered XPS 13 (4:47). Here, the Lunar Lake laptop fell far behind.

To stress test laptops, we put them through 10 runs of Cinebench 2024 nT. Unsurprisingly, the fanless MacBook Air throttled. Its first score of 844 was its highest, and from there it started to plummet to the mid-600's, with occasional bursts back up to the 700's. Using TG Pro, which lets you log your Mac's temperatures from various internal sensors, the computer average was 49.33 degrees Celsius (120.79 degrees Fahrenheit). You can read more about skin temperature in the heat section, below.

Rendering on a fanless device may not be a typical task, but M4 is capable of it. Without air cooling, the MacBook Air is much better for quick, bursty workloads, but for sustained tasks, you'll want something with a fan, like the MacBook Pro.

On Macs, we also run the Xcode benchmark, which simulates compiling a project with a large codebase using Apple's integrated development environment. Here, the M4 didn't see gains over M3, with the 15-inch MacBook Airs from each generation completing the task in 150 seconds.

To test gaming, I booted up No Man's Sky on Steam and connected an Xbox controller (though you could use a keyboard and mouse if you wanted.) At 2048 x 1280 with the high graphics preset, the game typically ran between 44 and 50 frames per second as I mined for resources and explored planets, though there were occasional periods that dropped down as far as 40 fps.

Display on the MacBook Air (M4)

The 15.3-inch "Liquid Retina" IPS screen on the MacBook Air hasn't changed, including its 2880 x 1864 resolution and 60 Hz refresh rate. (The 13-inch Air's specs haven't changed either, but we got a 15-inch laptop in for review).

True Tone, which uses ambient light sensors to adjust the screen to appear more natural is enabled by default. I typically leave it on unless I'm editing photos. If you're doing work where colors need to be exact, you may want to switch it off.

The trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps used the Air's display to show off beautiful blue skies as a rocket took off and as Johnny Storm floated in the atmosphere.

On the early stage planet of Sumpanob in No Man's Sky, I was presented with a dusty, orange desert with blazing red fires and dotted with green plants. It wasn't exactly a fascinating planet to look at, at least until a green radiation storm rolled through and changed the tint of the screen to a surprising emerald followed by a sickly brown.

The 15-inch Air's screen covered 117.9% of the sRGB color gamut and 83.5% of the more challenging DCI-P3 color space. That was actually slightly ahead of our MacBook Pro review unit (though not enough to notice in person), and far ahead of the 1080p panel in the Dell XPS 13. Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7i, however, was extremely vivid at 153.2% sRGB / 108.5% DCI-P3 on its marvelous screen.

On our light meter, the MacBook Air measured 475.6 nits, which is plenty bright. But it fell behind the mini-LED screen on the MacBook Pro at a whopping 556.6 nits of brightness. The Yoga was only slightly brighter than the Air at 486.6 nits.

Beyond the built-in display on the MacBook Air, the M4 brings about an important addition: the ability to use two external displays at up to 6K resolution at 60Hz with the lid open. The MacBook Air M3 could power two external displays, but the lid had to be closed. This should be a pretty big upgrade for enterprise customers, as well as for enthusiasts who don't want or need to shell out for the MacBook Pro.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Air (M4)

If there's one part of the MacBook Air I'm glad Apple hasn't changed, it's the keyboard. It's snappy and responsive, with an excellent layout including inverted T arrow keys and full height function keys. Touch ID is built into the power button, which is extremely useful, but it's about time Apple meets the Windows world and puts facial recognition on its laptops.

The 13-inch and 15-inch laptops still have the same keyboards. Apple hasn't added extra keys to the larger laptop, but that leaves more room for speakers.

On our 15-inch review unit, I reached 121 words per minute on the monkeytype typing test with a 98% accuracy rate, which is about as good as I can do. These aren't the deepest keys on the market, but I sure can blaze through an email on them.

Apple has made a few changes to the legends on its keys. For instance, the mute toggle on the F10 key now has a line through it, where there was none on previous laptops (it looks a bit more like the icon you see on-screen when you hit the button now). Apple has moved the command, control, and option icons to the opposite corners of the buttons. On the function key, the "fn" is next to the globe icon, as opposed to diagonal from it. None of these will change your use of the computer — the keys are all in the same place!

No one has surpassed Apple's haptic touchpads. These haven't changed, but that's fine in my eyes. They're smooth and responsive, with great feedback. Apple's macOS gestures, from pinch-to-zoom to three-finger swipes to changing virtual desktops, all work the first time. My only complaint is the default to "Natural" scrolling in settings, which is meant to make your scrolling match the motion of your finger. I turn that off on new Macs, preferring for my scrolling to match the direction of my finger. (Though oddly I have no problem with how this works on phones.)

Audio on the MacBook Air (M4)

The 15-inch MacBook Air features a six-speaker sound system with force-cancelling woofers. That's one of its biggest upgrades over the 13-inch Air, which has four speakers. Either way, you get Dolby Atmos and support for Apple's Spatial Audio.

For a laptop this thin, the 15-inch MacBook Air's sound system is incredible. Lights' "Damage" came through loud and clear, filling my apartment with sound, including melodic guitars, pounding drums, and even a reverberating bass. The thicker MacBook Pro delivers a more impressive sound profile, but considering how svelte this is, the speakers are damn impressive.

The speakers also worked their wonders when I played No Man's Sky, easily balancing the mysterious choral music with the cacophony of my mining laser as I explored the cosmos.

Upgradeability of the MacBook Air (M4)

There are four pentalobe screws on the bottom of the MacBook Air, but unless you're a skilled technician, this won't do you much good.

Apple's M4 is a system-on-a-chip, which includes the RAM, and the SSDs are soldered to the motherboard. That means neither RAM nor storage can be replaced, so make sure the way you configure your MacBook Air will meet your needs for a few years.

I suspect that if MacBook Air owners have an Apple Store within a reasonable distance, those who need repairs will make an appointment at the Genius Bar. Enterprising enthusiasts who want to do their own repairs should be able to rent tools from Apple through the Self Service Repair program at some point soon.

Battery Life on the MacBook Air (M4)

The MacBook Air offers strong battery life with its 66.5 WHr battery. It ran for 15 hours and 14 minutes on our battery test, which browses the web, streams video, and runs simple OpenGL tests while connected to Wi-Fi, all while set to 150 nits of brightness. That's over an hour longer than the Lunar Lake-powered Yoga Slim 7i.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro has a larger, 72.4 WHr battery, and it lasted longer than the Air at 18:36.

The Dell XPS 13, powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip, was the longest-lasting out of this batch of laptops at 19:31. This laptop has a smaller, 1920 x 1200 display, though running at a higher refresh rate.

I'm not one to complain about 15 hours. But this year's laptop lasted only 11 minutes longer than last year's 15-inch Air. When we reviewed the MacBook Air last year, competing Windows laptops were running for just 11 or 12 hours. Now they're catching up both on Arm and some x86-based platforms, so Apple can't stop focusing on the efficiency front.

Heat on the MacBook Air (M4)

The MacBook Air is fanless, which means it's completely silent no matter how much you throw at it. (In the MacBook Pro, you can get the M4 under a fan, which leads to better sustained performance, but you also get fan noise.)

To see how hot the machine gets, we used our standard Cinebench 2024 gauntlet to see how it feels to the touch. It does get a bit toasty, particularly on the keyboard.

Between the G and H keys, the Macbook Air measured 102.2 degrees Fahrenheit, though the haptic touchpad stayed cooler to the touch at 91.2 F. The hottest point on the bottom of the laptop reached 107.9 F.

Webcam on the MacBook Air (M4)

The MacBook Air got a camera upgrade, jumping from 1080p to 12MP. This is the same change Apple made to its Pro models last year, ditching the "FaceTime" moniker for its new camera name: Center Stage.

Video calls looked natural. When I sat at my desk, with natural light coming through my window, everything from the bags under my eyes to the art on my wall to the books on my shelf was caught with solid details. Colors, like my blue eyes, were very accurate as well. But the new camera still gets blown out by overexposure, a problem most webcams share. Still shots, however, were still a bit fuzzy, with my beard looking way less detailed than it did in motion.

The namesake feature, Center Stage, lets the camera focus on you even as you get up and move around. The other new utility is Desk View, which lets you show your desk to people you're on calls with. The tutorial on how to use Desk View built into the camera app is helpful to get the right positioning with the laptop's hinge, but because it only covers a small surface area, some objects can get a bit distorted. When I tried to use it to show off my keyboard, my fingers were elongated to comedic proportions.

Software on the MacBook Air (M4)

The new MacBook Airs are shipping with Apple's latest Mac operating system, macOS Sequoia (version 15.3 as of this writing). Sequoia launched late last year, and we already saw it in the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini.

It includes iPhone Mirroring, which lets you use the phone from your desktop, and the ability to type to Siri. Window tiling is largely improved (but still not as good as Snap layouts in Windows 11). And of course, the OS update brought several of the first Apple Intelligence features, including ChatGPT integration, Clean Up in the Photos app, and Genmojis, though none of those are reasons to upgrade on their own. A modernized version of Siri has been delayed to sometime in "the coming year."

Preinstalled software includes the Safari browser, Mail, Messages, Calculator, Notes, Weather, Stocks, Maps, and FaceTime, along with a suite for Apple's subscription services including Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple News. Pages, Keynotes, Numbers, and Garageband are still available for free as a basic productivity bundle.

MacBook Air (M4) Configurations and Warranty

Apple is starting both the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Air at new low prices. Yes, you read that right. In this economy, the price of something expensive went down.

Previously, Apple kept a prior generation around to sit at the $999 price point. But that's no longer the case. The 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $999 with M4 with a 10-core CPU and a cut-down 8-core GPU, along with 16GB of memory and 256GB storage.

The 15-inch starting price also took a $100 price cut to $1,199. The entry-level configuration there has a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD.

We tested a 15-inch MacBook Air with an M4 (10-core CPU, 10-core GPU), 16GB of unified memory, and 512GB SSD. The storage is the only bump from the base model, bringing it to $1,399. Ours came with the 35W dual USB-C power adapter, but if you order online, you can also choose a standard 70W adapter.

This time around, RAM options start at 16GB and go up to a new maximum of 32GB. Each step up in memory is a whopping $200, which continues to be an absurdly high price to pay. That 32GB total could add $400 to your laptop.. Bumps up in storage between 256GB and 1TB are also $200 each, while the bump from 1TB to 2TB is an outrageous $400.

Apple sells its MacBook Airs with a one-year limited warranty and 90 days of free tech support. AppleCare Plus for the 13-inch Air is $6.99 per month, $69.99 annually or $199 for three years, while the coverage for the 15-inch Air is $7.99 per month, $79.99 per year or $229 for three years. This includes extended coverage as well as accidental damage protection ($99 for screen damage or $299 for other damage).

Bottom Line

The MacBook Air is something you don't see a lot of in tech these days — a really solid value. Starting at $999 for the 13-inch laptop or $1,199 for the 15-inch version with a powerful processor, 16GB of RAM, a vivid display, and excellent build quality is nothing to scoff at (though our review model, with a 512GB SSD, cost $1,399.99) . Apple is offering a lot of computer for the money.

If you're married to Windows, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition represents the pluses and minuses of competing with the MacBook Air. It has a great design and a screen better than what Apple offers here, but Intel's performance doesn't match M4 and some refinements need to be made to the keyboard and chassis.

With this design, Apple is in refinement mode. Adding a better webcam, faster ports, and a speedier chip while dropping the price is enough to make me overlook the lack of Wi-Fi 7. Looking to spend less than $1,500 (or possibly even $1,000)? Look at the MacBook Air first.

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Apple's MacBook Air is one of the most popular laptops around, and soon it will be faster and, surprisingly in 2025, start at a lower price. Today, the company announced that the next iteration of our pick for best ultrabook will get bumped up to an M4 chip and feature a new color option, "sky" blue.

Outside of that new color, the M4 MacBook Air looks the same. It still comes in 13-inch and 15-inch sizes, and there are still a pair of Thunderbolt ports on the left side, along with MagSafe for changing, while the right side is home to the headphone jack. (What I wouldn't do for Apple to move one of those two ports to the other side).

There are other upgrades. The M4 chip has a 10-core CPU and goes up to a 10-core GPU. Memory goes up to 32GB of RAM, rather than the 24GB max on the M3 Air. Like the M3 laptops, M4 starts at 16GB of memory.

Ahead of the launch, Apple showed demos of a MacBook Air running 32GB. Some of them were heavy on machine learning and Apple Intelligence. These included using Pixelmator to take a profile picture using the Center Stage webcam, and creating a mask to remove the background and replace it with a different one. In another, Apple Intelligence was used in the Markdown notes app Bear to organize information into a table quickly.

Perhaps the most impressive was Blender, which made a 4K render with 12 million pixels in 18 seconds, about five times faster than with an M1.

M4 will let the MacBook Air power two external monitors with the display open, which is a bump up from M3, which could only do that with the lid closed. Apple is also boosting the webcam to a 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam that we also saw on the M4 MacBook Pro, including support for Desk View.

The sky blue is a pretty color, and I think it'll be a hit. It's similar to a toned-down version of the sapphire color on Microsoft's Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. It adds a bit of a pop to the MacBook Air, which is in mostly muted tones like silver, starlight, and midnight, all of which will remain for sale. Space gray, however, has been shown the door.

Apple's new pricing is a nice touch. In the M3 generation, Apple kept the M2 MacBook Air around to hit the $999 price point, while M3 started at $1,099 in a 13-inch chassis. The 15-inch version started at $1,299 and had no M2 option. But now, Apple is doing away with keeping the previous generation around, and will simply start the 13-inch M4 at $999, while the 15-inch laptop will begin at $1,199, dropping each price $100. It's rare to see anything getting cheaper these days, so I'm very happy to see Apple pack its latest in at the $999 price. The M2 version may stick around as a budget pick in some markets, but don't expect to see it here in the US.

The new MacBook Air is available for pre-order today and will launch on March 12.

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Right now at Amazon, you can find the 2022 edition of the Apple MacBook Air with an M2 chip for its lowest price to date. Like most Apple products, this device comes with premium pricing. This edition of the MacBook Air was initially released with a price tag of $999. Today, however, it's been marked down to the lowest price we've ever seen for it—just $749, saving over $200 off the asking price.

This might not be the newest Apple MacBook Air on the market but it's got plenty of specs to get excited about. This edition comes with an M2 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of internal storage. We reviewed the Apple MacBook Air M2 2022 laptop as well, although it had a little more storage than this model, and were very pleased with it, rating it at 4 out of 5 stars. We appreciated its performance and long-lasting battery, which is notably efficient. Our biggest complaint was the high MSRP but today's discount negates that con entirely.

This edition of the Apple MacBook Air debuted in 2022 and features an M2 chip that has eight CPU cores, four of which are dedicated as performance cores while the other four are efficiency cores. It has a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,664 pixels for a decent PPI. This model comes with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB internal SSD for storage.

You can expect a few ports to take advantage of, including two Thunderbolt USB 4 ports and a MagSafe 3 charging port. A 1080p webcam is included for video conferencing, as well. This model of the Apple MacBook Air isn't the lightest by any means, weighing in at 2.7lbs but it's one of the thinnest laptops you'll find at just .44 inches tall.

As of writing, it's not clear for how long this offer will be available. If you'd like to get a closer look at the deal, you can check it out in greater detail over at Amazon through the Apple 2022 MacBook Air M2 laptop product page.

Just a few years ago, the idea of gaming on a Mac was a joke among the enthusiast PC community. But I'll give Apple this — it's clearly putting in the work. And while it definitely can't compete with Windows PCs or consoles on its library just yet, Apple does have one trick up its sleeve that I think, in time, may be able to draw a certain type of person to gaming on its platforms: the ecosystem.

At a small showcase, Apple showed me what a few years ago would have been unthinkable: a series of Macs running recent releases and previews of upcoming games, natively on Apple Silicon. It's a huge step that games like Assassin's Creed: Shadows and Frostpunk 2 are set to come day and date with PC, Xbox, and PlayStation releases. (Frostpunk 2 was on display. Assassin's Creed: Shadows was not.) And that's not all — the iPad and iPhone were also playing intensive games, thanks to Apple's shared chip architectures.

The company is catching up on some recent releases, like Palworld, which is set to release later this year. But toss in new developer tools and the idea that your games could carry over to other Apple devices, and that's where things get interesting.

Game Porting Toolkit 2

Announced at WWDC, this year's update to the Game Porting Toolkit should further help to streamline Apple Silicon Mac development for games already designed for the PC, and also, crucially, bring Mac games to the iPhone and iPad. 

The new version of the Toolkit includes AVX2 support, ray tracing, and improved performance. There are also new human interface guidelines, and new debugging tools for shaders in Xcode to help convert them to Metal (and unified shaders that should work once across the Mac, iPhone and iPad).

Apple showed off Control: Ultimate Edition running through the Game Porting Toolkit. The game is coming natively to Mac later this year, five years after the game's initial launch. A bit late, but it's a great game! 

Using the Windows version of Steam and the DirectX 12 version of the game, a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max played the title at 46 - 50 frames per second on high-quality settings and high ray tracing with a resolution of 1728 x 1117. I picked up the DualSense controller Apple had in front of the Mac and took on some Hiss guards as Jesse Faden, and it felt largely ready to go. If this is what convinced Remedy to port the game over, I can kind of see why it happened. With the M3 series and M4 chips supporting ray tracing tech, the game looks great.

The Unified Gaming Platform

Where Apple may have an advantage is where it typically excels: in its ecosystem. If games are released for the Mac, but then you can play them on your iPad or iPhone, it could open up gaming to tons of people who wouldn't have done so previously — and make it easier for enthusiast Mac gamers to play anywhere.

Playing anywhere has been a bit of a white whale for gaming companies lately. Think of cloud services like Game Pass from Microsoft or GeForce Now from Nvidia. The idea was you'd stream games to play them anywhere.

Apple's vision strikes me as a slightly more traditional version of the idea. Never mind streaming, but how about running the game locally on each device? Apple showed Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which launched on Apple's products in July, running across the latest iPhone 15 Pro, iPad Pro with M4, and Macs . This particular game supports Apple's Universal Purchase functionality, so if you buy once, you get it across your Apple ecosystem. And the game uses iCloud to sync save data, so you can pick up where you left off on other devices.

Assassin's Creed Mirage has similar tricks, but only across the iPhone and iPad (and it looks excellent on the M4 iPad Pro's tandem OLED display, by the way). Rather than using iCloud, it uses Ubisoft Connect for syncing.

Apple needs to beef up its gaming library

As much as I liked seeing more games run well, particularly on the Mac, it still needs a lot more games to make it the main place for anyone to play. Ubisoft and Capcom are great partners — big studios with games people want to play. But the gaming PC is popular because it supports just about every major game outside of some console exclusives, and has a backlog going back decades. 

Apple needs to start somewhere. In my view, that's primarily with future games. I don't know how many people didn't play Death Stranding or Control a few years ago that will only play them because they're on the Mac. I think recent games like Palworld and upcoming games like Frostpunk 2 are better bets — get people when the games are new.

That also means it will take a significant amount of time for Apple to get its gaming efforts anywhere near mainstream. I hope the company is ready to continue this investment in chips, developer relations, and technologies. To get gamers and studios entirely on board will take a lot work. It will take years to see if this can be a true success. (Apple also needs to ensure it doesn't alienate game developers and publishers, like Epic Games, which means one of the biggest games in the world doesn't run natively on its flagship platform).

But sitting in that room, playing some Resident Evil on a MacBook Pro, Assassin's Creed on an iPad, Palworld on a Mac, and Control through x86 emulation tech makes me believe Apple is taking gaming seriously this time. It may never release a gaming laptop — instead, the idea is any Mac (with Apple Silicon, of course) can be a gaming machine. So can any iPad, any iPhone. It's a bold claim that will take continued successes to convince the often-skeptical PC gaming community. 

Quality of life improvements, as long as you're in the ecosystem

Apple's other gaming-focused projects are less shiny. Game Mode, which launched on the Mac last year, is coming to the iPhone and iPad this year with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, minimizing background activity and reducing latency for audio and controllers. MacOS Sequoia will have a new version that reduces background processes even further. 

The Mac App Store will  require far less storage space to begin an installation update when macOS Sequoia launches later this year. Future updates will also let Mac owners install games to separate disks from the Mac App Store, which is helpful given the ballooning size of games.

And spatial audio is making its way to games in the new Mac and mobile operating systems, reducing latency and ensuring better audio while you're in game chat. Of course, that requires the second-generation AirPods Pro.

Stereotypically, the PC gaming community doesn't like lock-in. But the Apple community is known for loving when things work in an integrated fashion. 

The work has started, and it's impressive. Apple still has a long way to go. But hopefully, one day, there's a future where PC gamers, Mac gamers, and console gamers are all cross-playing with each other. Wouldn't it be beautiful?

Those in the market for a new MacBook should look at this offer from B&H Photo on this 13-inch Apple MacBook Air. It retails for $1,299, but it's currently discounted to just $1,149. In general, this is a modest discount, but given that this laptop was released just this year, it's definitely worth a look. No promo codes are required, and it's unclear how long the offer will be available at this rate.

We reviewed a different but similar model to this 13-inch Apple MacBook Air and were very pleased with our experience. The machine is thin and light, making it easy to take. It also has excellent battery life, which is a point of its portability. In our review, we gave that edition of the MacBook Air 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Under the hood of this edition of the Apple MacBook Air is an M3 processor. It has eight cores, four of which are dedicated as performance cores and the other four as efficiency cores. It has an integrated 10-core GPU that outputs to a 13.6-inch IPS panel. This screen has a resolution of 2560 x 1664, can reach 60 Hz, and has a maximum brightness output of 500 nits.

As far as storage goes, it comes with a 256GB internal SSD; for memory, you get 16GB of RAM. There are two USB-C ports, a power cord slot, and a headphone jack. Again, this deal is not very big, but the timing excites us the most. It is an excellent opportunity to get the latest MacBook Air without paying the total price.

Visit the Apple 13-inch MacBook Air product page at B&H Photo for more details and purchase options.

Microsoft is putting all of its weight behind Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon X Elite, and expects it to outperform Apple's competing M3 silicon — at least in certain workloads. The Verge reports that the trillion-dollar software and hardware behemoth is extremely confident in Qualcomm's new CPU and is planning several demos for its upcoming AI PC event in Seattle that will show the Snapdragon chip outperforming Apple's M3-equipped MacBook Air laptops.

These demos Microsoft is putting together supposedly won't just show the Snapdragon Elite X beating the Apple M3 in a single metric, but will show superiority across several workloads — including AI acceleration and app emulation. In fact, Microsoft claims that Windows devices sporting the X Elite chip will have faster app emulation than Rosetta 2, the compatibility layer Apple uses on its ARM-based CPUs to run x64 apps that don't have an ARM flavor.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is also reportedly planning to use the Snapdragon X Elite in its upcoming Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 rather than Intel's competing Core Ultra Meteor Lake processors. However, these chips will be for consumer versions of the Surface devices. We already know that Microsoft's business counterparts will be sticking with Intel Core Ultra CPUs.

There's plenty of evidence to back up Microsoft's confidence. The Snapdragon X Elite is proving to be one of the most capable ARM-based consumer CPUs we've ever seen outside of Apple silicon. Several leaked Geekbench results already indicate the Snapdragon X Elite is on par with and even outperforming Intel's previous generation Core i7 and Core i9 Raptor Lake mobile CPUs, as well as AMD's latest Ryzen 9 8945HS flagship.

Qualcomm has also unveiled impressive performance figures for its new ARM CPU, even going so far as to show it outperforming the Apple M3 by a noticeable margin in Geekbench. Qualcomm senior VP and GM of compute and gaming at Qualcomm Kedar Kondap told us that the company believes its work on the X Elite is a pivotal moment, going on to say that the performance of the Snapdragon X Elite is something we haven't seen before in terms of leadership, technology, and power efficiency.

The Snapdragon X Elite is built using TSMC's 4nm process and is equipped with 12 Oryon performance cores that turbo up to 4.3GHz. There are no efficiency cores in the chip, and it's rated at up to 4.6TFLOPs of GPU performance and 45 TOPS of AI performance from its neural processing unit (NPU). Qualcomm claims the chip has 2X faster multi-threaded performance than Intel's i7-1360P and Apple M2, while consuming just one-third the power.

We'll have to wait and see if Microsoft's demos truly deliver what the company wants to accomplish. It's a safe bet Microsoft's will be able to show superior performance to the M3, but the question will be whether the demonstrated performance will extend beyond the specific use cases and apply to standard workloads. Microsoft's AI PC event reportedly starts next month in Seattle.

It's no secret that Apple's speedy M3 Macbook Air runs hot, even hitting 114 degrees Celcius, which results in heavy performance throttling. However, YouTuber MaxTech discovered that the Macbook Air's performance problems can be easily remedied with just a couple of modifications (albeit expensive ones). By utilizing a DHCR cooling dock from SVALT in conjunction with thermal pads, MaxTech improved the M3 Macbook Air's performance by nearly 50% in select circumstances and outperformed the more premium (and much cooler) M3 Macbook Pro.

The DHCR cooling dock is a multi-purpose device explicitly designed to hold and cool a Macbook simultaneously. It features a "direct heatsink coupling" that has the laptop vertically. At the same time, the lid is closed and maintains surface contact around the bottom area of the computer where the M3 chip is located. The dock's cooling system functions by cooling the outer chassis, which keeps the M3 chip cool inside.

Max Tech found that the SVALT cooling dock can substantially increase sustained performance. In 3DMark Wildlife, the dock almost doubled the Macbook Air's performance, from 4,198 points in clamshell mode (lid closed) to 7,309 points, just 800 points shy of what the M3 MacBook Air can do in the same benchmark when not heat soaked. It is also roughly 600 points shy of the M3 MacBook Pro.

To get the M3 Macbook Air to Macbook Pro performance, Max Techsed a pair of thermal pads placed in between the M3's internal cooling solution and outer shell to boost performance. With these two modifications working together, Max Tech achieved 8,062 points of sustained performance, beating the MacBook Pro in the same test conditions by roughly 100 points.

Max Tech's discovery demonstrates how different the MacBook Air's cooling solution is from that of the MacBook Pro. Although both laptops share identical specifications, including the same M3 chip, the MacBook Air's fanless-cooling solution results in substantially lower sustained performance.

The good news is that users can modify their M3 Macbook Airs to get around this problem, as Max Tech has demonstrated. Even if you went with just the thermal pads, the M3 MacBook Air gains back most of its sustained performance loss. But SVALT's DHCR cooling dock is convenient if you use your Macbook Air as a desktop replacement — hooked up to one or two monitors. Another plus is that you don't need to modify the Macbook to use it. The only potential problem most people will have is its price, which totals $279.

Apple's entry-level MacBook Air notebooks based on M2 processors were heavily criticized for their low-performance solid state drives, as the company decided to cut costs and sacrifice parallelism. However, we have some good news for those interested in Apple's latest M3-based MacBook Air laptops, discovered by Vadim Yuryev from Max Tech - as Apple's entry-level laptops now offer decent data transfer speeds. Nevertheless, their performance is still slower than a decent off-the-shelf PCIe 3.0 x4 drive.  

Apple's entry-level MacBook Air M3 featuring 256GB of solid-state storage uses two 3D NAND flash packages (supporting an unknown number of channels and CE targets per channel), which is a big difference compared to the base model of the MacBook Air M2 that came with 256GB of storage using one 3D NAND package. In brief, the reduced number of NAND channels and consequent two times lower parallelism dramatically affected the older system's storage performance. 

An entry-level M3-based MacBook Air with a 256GB SSD can now achieve a sequential read speed of 2,280.2 MB/s and a sequential write speed of 2,108.9 MB/s in the Blackmagic SSD speed test. This is significantly higher than a sequential read speed of 1,576.4 MB/s and a sequential write speed of 1,584.3 MB/s in the case of a base-spec M2-based MacBook Air with a 256GB drive. While storage subsystems of both products are slower compared to an entry MacBook Air M1 laptop with a 256GB SSD, the M3-based MBA is getting very close, and the difference will not be noticeable in the vast majority of real-world use cases. 

The storage performance enhancement of the 256GB MacBook Air M3 is particularly beneficial for multitasking and heavy productivity tasks on the base model that features only 8GB of RAM. MacOS tends to swap data that does not fit into RAM to NAND storage and then retrieve it, so fast solid-state storage is important for all Macs in general and entry-level Apple computers in particular. 

An avid reader with a DIY Windows PC would probably remember that the numbers demonstrated by an entry-level 2024 MacBook Air are akin to those of inexpensive mainstream SSDs with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface from circa 2019. This reader will indeed be right as the best PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD (Teamgroup's MP34) can hit a 3,500 MB/s sequential read speed and a 2,900 MB/s sequential write speed (3,400 MB/s and 1,100 MB/s for a 256GB drive though), at least on paper. Then again, real-world performance differences depend on actual use cases. 

Apple's MacBook Air 256GB SSDs vs TeamGroup's MP34 256GB SSD

Data by Max Tech/YouTube and TeamGroup

In general, the entry M3 MacBook Air has successfully addressed the biggest issue of the M2 model, which is storage subsystem performance. It also added general-purpose and graphics oomph, as well as dual display support with the lid closed, which makes it a contender in the productivity desktop space. While the new baseline MacBook Air is $100 more expensive than its direct predecessor, it looks like its upgrades are worth it. Then again, there are plenty of laptop PCs that offer much higher performance in the $1,100 ballpark. It is also likely the PC will have cooling fans so it does not dramatically overheat.

UPDATE 3/9/2024, 10am PT: VancouverMac.ca has provided us with additional information about its services and Apple PCs storage upgrade capabilities. While the company officially advertises storage upgrades for M1-based Macs only, it says that upgrades for other Apple Silicon-based Macs are identical, but some parts may differ.

Once upon a time, Apple's MacBook used M.2-like SSD modules that could be easily replaced or upgraded. Still, starting from the 2015 MacBook 12 systems, the company began soldering SSD components down to motherboards to make laptops thinner, thus making upgrades virtually impossible. But is it so? A repair shop from Canada offers to upgrade storage on Apple Silicon-based Macs to up to 2TB at a price lower than Apple's.

"Thankfully, due to advanced soldering techniques, it is now possible to upgrade the storage space of the newest MacBooks to their highest configuration, for prices lower than what is originally quoted by Apple at purchase," a statement by VancouverMac.ca reads.

Upgrade complexities

Indeed, a story from April 2021 about a team of engineers who managed to resolder DRAM and NAND flash chips on an M1-based Mac Mini made quite a splash. The engineers from China upgraded the cheapest Mac Mini M1 machine with 8GB of LPDDR4X memory and 256 GB of solid-state storage to a much more decent machine with 16 GB of DRAM and 1 TB of NAND storage. While resoldering may not be a problem for experienced people, Mac upgrades are not simple.

In MacBooks with the T2 chip (2018-2020) and Apple Silicon system-on-chips (M1, M2, M3), the custom firmware of the soldered-down SSD is specific to the configuration of actual NAND chips (or alternative packages). Therefore, these chips cannot be replaced, as firmware modification is required.

Fortunately, according to VancouverMac, the Apple Configurator utility can reprogram the SSD automatically through its restore function on Apple Silicon-based Macs, which makes storage upgrades of these machines a complex but doable task.

The process involves replacing NAND packages with higher-capacity packages supported by Apple (i.e., you need to know which packages Apple supports) and then running Apple Configurator on the machine through another Mac via a USB-C port to reprogram the SSD configuration. The company has even uploaded a video describing the key steps of the upgrade. By contrast, with T2-equipped machines, everything is much more complicated.

SSD upgrade opportunities

Although the official page at VancouverMac says it offers storage upgrades for M1-based MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, the company can upgrade Apple Silicon-based systems, including those based on M2 and M3-series processors, according to its founder.

The upgrade service can be performed for all of the below listed," said Sam Freeman, the owner of VancouverMac.ca. "The overall process is identical, but the parts used are different. The M1 Pro, M2, and M3 series use smaller chips with more dense connections, making it a bit harder, but it is very doable. I cannot confirm if parts are currently available for the M3 Macs since they are so new, but they will surely be released soon."

Pricing varies. For 2TB of presumably high-performance storage, the company wants $550 CAD/$407USD, which may be a little bit overwhelming considering the external storage options available, but it may be just right when you need high-performance internal storage.

Further upgrades

Given VancouverMac.ca's claimed capabilities, we asked whether the company can upgade storage devices of other Apple devices, such as M1/M2-based iPads, which share hardware with MacBooks. The company does not seem to offer such services for now though.

 "I do not have much experience with iPads/iPhones but based on my knowledge the DFU restore process should do the same thing for iPad which would mean this is possible on the iPads too," Freeman said.

The M3 MacBook Air can hit up to 114 degrees Celsius on its hottest core, according to testing from Max Tech. While modern processors, whether they're in laptops or desktops, are designed to run pretty hot, the M3 MacBook Air surprised with its peak temperature of 114 degrees Celsius. Stress testing shows that temperatures eventually fall to roughly 100 degrees Celsius but at the cost of performance.

The newest version of the MacBook Air launched this week with the latest M3 chip. Since the M1-powered MacBook Air, the lightweight Apple laptop has used no active cooling and relies on passive cooling through the heatsink and chassis to achieve silent operation. Naturally, this forces the MacBook Air's processor to operate at a higher temperature, and the M3 model is no different.

However, the degree to which the M3 MacBook Air gets hot is surprising. Max Tech took his 15-inch model out for a spin in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and Cinebench 2024 and saw the hottest core inside the M3 hit 114 degrees Celsius multiple times. Under load, the average CPU and GPU temperature can peak at 107 and 103 degrees, respectively. This resulted in the chassis hitting 46 degrees Celsius or 115 degrees Fahrenheit at its hottest point.

The M2 MacBook Air had similar heat issues under load, though it's unclear if any were getting as hot as 114 degrees. Back then, Max Tech suggested placing thermal pads on the inside of the MacBook Air to facilitate better thermal transfer, which may also work for the M3 model.

This heat is unsustainable for a processor to maintain safely, so the M3 gradually lowered its frequency and power consumption throughout the stress tests. This allowed the chip to settle in at around 100 degrees, which is still hot but is still considered safe by the industry.

Of course, this means performance declines too; in our own M3 MacBook Air review, we saw the 15-inch model's performance in Cinebench R23 by about 10% and the 13-inch by 20% from the first run to the 20th. Graphics performance can also decline substantially per Max Tech's results from 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, which saw a 27% decline from the 15-inch MacBook Air's best to worst results.

Though the M3 MacBook Air does certainly overheat and hits an incredibly high temperature, it's not clear if that's a significant issue. The MacBook Air has never been a high-performance device, even with a fan, so it sees a performance drop throughout an intensive workload, which is unsurprising. Additionally, its lifespan should be acceptable if a processor isn't constantly running at a high temperature. To sustain performance over a long period, you'll want the MacBook Pro.

Sometimes, choices aren't as complex as they seem. After introducing the 15-inch MacBook Air last year, both it and the enduring 13-inch MacBook Air (long considered one of the best ultrabooks) are getting upgraded at the same time to Apple's latest generation M3 chips. Lots of people may worry about the differences between size and specs, but Apple has made it pretty easy here. The two laptops share the same chip, most of the same specs, and many of the same benefits.

The 15-inch machine is bigger, sure, with a larger, slightly higher-resolution display. That machine also has a six-speaker sound system. If you want either of those things and have the money, the 15-inch is for you.

But both laptops offer Apple's M3 processor, a slim design, bright displays, and, finally, the MacBook Air with Apple Silicon can support two external monitors – that is, if you close the lid.

The MacBook Air has become simple, utilitarian, and straightforward. It's a machine to get your work done on, and it does that without making you think twice. The choice between sizes isn't that hard (I prefer the portability of a 13-inch system over all else), and while the M3 upgrade likely won't attract most existing Apple Silicon owners (besides perhaps some M1 Air users), it's a welcome upgrade that continues to show how well Apple has built its ecosystem around its own chips.

13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air (M3) Design

No one is going to know you're using the latest MacBook Air just by looking. While the systems have received some technological refreshes inside, including the latest M3 processors, support for two external displays (with the lid closed), and a bump up to Wi-Fi 6E, the systems look the same as their predecessors.

For the most part, that's fine with me. I love the rectangular MacBook Air design, though I know some do miss the iconic wedge. The new Airs are lightweight, easy on the eyes, and get out of the way of my work. Both the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air come in the same four colors: midnight, starlight, space gray, and silver, just like the M2 version. (We tested the 13-inch in starlight and the 15-inch in midnight). The big aesthetic difference is that Apple says the midnight colorway now has an "anodization seal" to prevent it from getting coated in fingerprints as it did on the M2 models. This didn't totally prevent me from leaving oils behind on my Mac (I washed my hands, thank you very much), but it should help with this color's reputation as a smudgy mess.

Both laptops look similar, but the 15-inch version has a larger footprint. They each feature Apple's logo in a tone-on-tone sheen on the lid; both have rounded corners; and both have a notch into the top of the screen housing the 1080p webcam. I often use an M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro and an M2 Air, and I've never totally gotten used to the notch. But it doesn't remove screen space, and I know plenty of people who don't care as much as I do.

Despite the size difference, the two laptops have the same ports. On the left side, there's the MagSafe 3 charging port, along with two Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 Type-C ports. The right side only houses the 3.5 mm headphone jack. I do wish Apple would add at least one more Type-C port to the 15-inch Air; It would be great to be able to charge from either side of the laptop.

The 13-inch MacBook Air is 2.7 pounds and 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches, while the 15-inch MacBook Air is 3.3 pounds and 13.4 x 9.35 x 0.45 inches. I love the size of the 13-inch Air for portability. I barely notice it in my backpack. But I understand some people want a bigger screen, and the 15-inch Air adds some weight to accommodate it. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED is 12.3 x 8.67 x 0.59 inches and weighs 2.82 pounds — just a bit more than the 13-inch Air.

13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air (M3) Specifications

Productivity and Graphics Performance

Both of the MacBook Air laptops we tested had the same specs: an Apple M3 chip with an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU, 16GB of unified RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage. We compared this to last year's 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 (that will remain on sale), as well as some Intel Meteor Lake competitors: the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED and HP Spectre x360 14 2-in-1. Each of those used an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H with 32GB of RAM. Those Windows devices also keep their CPUs cooled with fans.

On Geekbench 6, the M3 won out on single-core performance, hitting 3,082 in the 13-inch Air and 3,094 in the 15-inch model, outscoring both of the Intel laptops (the M2 MacBook Air was released back in 2022, long before we started using this test).

In multi-core, however, the Intel laptops were more competitive. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED topped the chart at 12,908, with both M3 laptops scoring in the low 12,000's.

The two MacBook Airs matched exactly on our file transfer test, transferring roughly 25GB of files at a rate of 1,167.29 MBps. That's an improvement over the 13-inch M2 Air, but the Zenbook and Spectre were slightly quicker in this regard.

On Handbrake, the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in 6 minutes and 32 seconds and 6:30, respectively. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED won out here, but the M2 MacBook Air and HP Spectre were a minute or more slower.

On Macs, we run the Xcode Benchmark, simulating compiling a large codebase. Here, we can see the M3 system compared against the M3 Max. Unsurprisingly, these fanless systems took longer: The 13-inch laptop needed 164 seconds, while the 15-incher was slightly faster at 150 seconds. The M3 Max in the far more expensive MacBook Pro took 85 seconds, suggesting professional developers may want to invest a bit.

We stress-test productivity-focused laptops with Cinebench R23. Here, we noticed something interesting. While the two M3-based laptops started at similar scores, the 15-incher scored higher over time. Both started in the low 10,000's, but the 13-incher eventually dropped to the 7,000's, while the 15-inch Air lowest score was 8,817. My theory here, as I've suggested for the previous generation, is that the 15-inch Air serves as a bigger heatsink for the chip. We expect fanless processors to throttle, but having more surface area to spread the heat to may be helping the 15-inch Air in more intense workloads.

The M3 does have some gaming prowess. An increasing number of games, like Death Stranding: Director's Cut, Baldur's Gate 3, the Resident Evil 4 remake, No Man's Sky and more have been coming to Mac, running natively using Metal, but not at the same rate as these games come to Windows PCs.

I used the 15-inch laptop to play a bit of Stray, jumping as a cat between rooftops. At 1920 x 1200 on medium presets, the game could run between 40 and 50 fps, which is impressive for a passively cooled chip. On high presets or at higher effects settings, it stuck closer to 30 fps and sometimes dipped slightly below.

Display on the MacBook Air (M3)

The most noticeable difference between the 13-inch MacBook Air and 15-inch MacBook Air is the screens. The 13-inch laptop has a 13.6-inch, 2560 x 1664 display, while the 15-incher has a 15.3-inch, 2880 x 1864 screen. Both laptops have 60 Hz displays and use Apple's True Tone technology to adjust what's on your screen based on ambient light. People working on art that requires color accuracy may want to turn that one off.

The resolution difference is slight (I suppose you could get into a whole pixels per inch argument), but the size is the bigger difference. It certainly feels like there's more room for work.

What works in both of these laptops' favor is brightness. Competitors may have OLED that measures as more vivid, but the brightness here really wows. When I used the 13-inch Air to watch the trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine, darker scenes in the Time Variance Authority were still detailed, and Deapool's red suit looked like it popped off of a movie screen.

Meanwhile, on the 15-inch Macbook Air, when I played Stray on Steam, buildings bathed in orange light had an eerie glow to them, while forests showed off lush greenery.

Both M3 MacBook Airs covered just over 77% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and over 109% of the sRGB space. The Zenbook and Spectre, with OLED panels, proved a bit more vivid, though what's likely most impressive are true blacks.

But on brightness, the Air won, with the 13-inch Mac reaching 476 nits and the 15-incher reaching 482.4 nits. Both are far higher than the competing OLED Windows notebooks.

External Displays on the Macbook Air M3

One big difference Apple is touting this year is that you can use the M3 MacBook Airs with two external displays. This is a nice upgrade from previous Airs, which only supported one extra monitor. To do this, though, you need to keep the lid closed — it can't also run the built-in monitor. One display can run up to 6K and 60 Hz, while the other can go up to 5K at 60 Hz. A software update is going to bring this functionality to the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3, as well. This puts the M3-based laptops in a similar lane as the Mac Mini (currently on M2 and M2 Pro) when it's on a desk, but you can take the laptops with you and use them on the go.

Needing to keep the laptop closed may present some issues though. Some people like using their laptop's keyboard and mouse with external displays, but here, you'll need to bring a separate keyboard and mouse. Closing the laptop also covers the Touch ID sensor. Apple is the only company that sells separate keyboards with Touch ID, and those start at $149 and go up from there if you want a number pad or the black colorway. Additionally, the speakers are partially muffled with the lid closed.

This is a better solution than what we had before, but not a perfect one. In an ideal world, Apple would add something more elegant, where the screen is disabled when you plug in two displays, but you aren't required to close the lid.

That being said, having a keyboard and mouse on your desk is a more elegant solution. If you don't get Apple's keyboard with Touch ID, you could still use a different keyboard and just type your password like it's 2015, or unlock it with an Apple Watch.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Air (M3)

Apple's keyboards don't have the most travel out there, but they're generally comfortable and responsive. I'm still a big fan of the layout, including full-size function keys and the arrow keys in an inverted T. Touch ID is on the power button, and while I'm still waiting for Face ID on the Mac, it's better than typing my password in all the time. The 13- and 15-inch laptops have the same keyboard.

Using the 15-inch Air's keyboard, I took the monkeytype typing test, reaching 121 words per minute at 98% accuracy. That's about as good as I get on laptop keyboards.

Apple's touchpads continue to be my favorite on the market. The 15-inch laptop has a larger touchpad, but they're both great. The haptics are excellent, and gestures in macOS – line pinching to zoom, or swiping up with three fingers to see all my apps in Mission Control – work fluidly. One day, I'll give the "natural" scroll direction in settings a real try, but I tend to turn that off because I just prefer scrolling the other way.

Audio on the MacBook Air (M3)

Outside of size and the display, audio is one of the few areas where you'll find a noticeable difference between the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air. The 13-inch laptop has a four-speaker sound system, while the 15-inch machine has six speakers and force-cancelling woofers. Both still work with Apple's Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos with the laptops' built-in speakers.

Hozier's "De Selby (Part 2)" sounded excellent on the 13-inch MacBook Air, easily filling my small home office with sound. Vocals were clear, drums snapped, and I could even make out some bass. That's impressive for something this thin.

On the 15-inch, you get a more complex sound profile. The bass is more pronounced, and I could more easily make out other percussion instruments. While the 13-inch barely had any distortion at the top end, the bigger unit didn't have any at all. The 15-inch laptop doesn't quite match the thicker 14-inch MacBook Pro, but it comes pretty close, considering.

Upgradeability of the MacBook Air (M3)

The four pentalobe screws on the bottom of the MacBook Air's internals won't lead you to much. This isn't a common screw in most people's toolkits (Though they aren't that hard to find if you're looking for them. iFixit's toolkits tend to feature them).

But there's not much to do here. Apple's M3 is a system-on-a-chip, and the RAM is a part of it. Apple's SSDs are soldered to the motherboard. You won't be able to replace the RAM or the storage. That's why it's crucial to make sure that when you order a MacBook Air, you pick components that will suit you for the years you'll own this computer.

I imagine that most people with MacBook Air repair issues will end up at the Genius Bar (it's what I would probably do). For experts willing to rent a bunch of tools from Apple, I imagine these laptops will hit Self Service Repair soon enough.

Battery Life on the MacBook Air (M3)

If you need a laptop to last you a workday on a charge, either the 13-inch or 15-inch MacBook Air will get you there. Both lasted over 15 hours on our battery test, which browses the web, streams video, and runs simple OpenGL tests while connected to Wi-Fi and set to 150 nits of brightness.

Interestingly, the smaller 13-inch Air beat the 15-inch model by 10 minutes (this could easily be run-to-run variance). I would hope that Apple could pack enough of a battery into the 15-inch Air to extend it further. This was a similar quibble I had when the 15-inch MacBook Air debuted with M2.

But M3's efficiency did show improvement, beating the 13-inch M2 by about an hour. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED lasted for 12:21, while the HP Spectre x360 14 ran for 11:01.

Heat on the MacBook Air (M3)

One of the biggest benefits of the MacBook Air is that it's a fanless machine. It's dead silent, even under the heaviest use. But that also means that there's nothing to cool the powerful M3 chip when you slam it. We took heat temperatures while running our Cinebench R23 gauntlet to see how skin temperatures would feel.

On our thermometer, the 15-inch MacBook Air got just a bit hotter, hitting 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit at the center of the keyboard (enough to feel), 88.3 F on the touchpad, and 107.7 degrees F on the hottest point of the bottom of the notebook.

Meanwhile, the 13-incher reached 98.1 F between the G and H keys, hit 88.1 on the touchpad, and measured 102.3 F on the bottom.

In most cases, I found the MacBook Airs to run nice and cool. But Apple is pushing them for real work, and in those cases they might get a little warm.

Webcam on the MacBook Air (M3)

You get the same 1080p FaceTime HD webcam on the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air.

Photos and videos I took with the two were largely indistinguishable. In a challenging situation with cloudy skies outside and warm light filling my home office, both cameras looked great. Sure, some light coming in from the windows blew out a little bit, but color accuracy was phenomenal, including my blue eyes and red and navy flannel shirt, and the pictures are sharp, capturing every hair and even a few wrinkles I'd rather not think about.

Will these integrated cameras beat the best external webcams? Probably not. But they're pretty solid for a laptop, and I would use them on their own without worrying if I looked professional.

Software on the MacBook Air (M3)

Both the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air are shipping with macOS Sonoma (version 14). When it launched last year (we saw it on the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro), it brought modest new features, including desktop widgets, a Game Mode to give games priority on the CPU and GPU, a lockdown mode to protect against cyberattacks, and improved search filters in Messages.

As usual, macOS doesn't contain much in the way of bloat. Preinstalled software includes the Safari browser, Mail, Messages, Weather, Notes, FaceTime, and Maps. Many of these will be familiar if you're on an iPhone or iPad, and sync across devices with your Apple ID. You also get basic productivity apps, like Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, as well as apps for subscription services like Apple Music, Apple News, Podcasts, and the excellent Apple TV (don't sleep on For All Mankind).

For older apps that still rely on code designed for Intel CPUs, Apple uses its Rosetta 2 translator. Each time I set up a new Mac, it takes me longer to find something that requires it, as many of the most popular apps I use now have native versions (or, at the very least, use universal binaries). Gamers, you'll need to install it — Steam still hasn't released a native app. (Considering how small the Mac audience is for Steam, Valve is probably not rushing).

What About AI?

When Apple announced the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air, it raised eyebrows when called the Air the "Best Consumer Laptop for AI." Honestly, it's wild to see Apple using the phrase "AI" in the first place, considering how often it has dodged the term in favor of others like "machine learning."

Apple has shipped neural engines in its laptops from the start, and there are a number of apps using what is commonly considered AI in some form. (The M3 has a 16-core neural engine.) Pixelmator Pro, one of my favorite Photoshop alternatives (and Mac apps in general) has several AI tools for image editing, and Freechat, which lets you chat with large language models on your device, are some great examples. But we're pretty early in this round of AI. While on-device AI seems to becoming a trend, it's telling that Apple also has been highlighting cloud AI, like Copilot in Microsoft 365.

That's not to say that the Mac isn't a great computer for those use cases. But in my opinion, no one can make the claim that their platform is the best for AI yet. It's not just about running models fast, but about having great use cases on your platform. These tools are in their infancy. If Apple (or Intel, or Microsoft, or anyone else) wants to make these claims, they need to ensure developers get useful AI features into popular programs, or to create new ones that actually stick among mass market users. Right now, it seems people are still figuring out where AI fits in their workflows.

MacBook Air (M3) Configurations and Warranty

For this review, we tested two MacBook Airs: one 13-inch and one 15-inch. They share the same Apple M3 chip, including an 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 16-core neural engine. Additionally, both review units sent our way featured 16GB of unified memory and 512GB SSDs. The 13-inch MacBook Air costs $1,499 at that configuration, while the 15-inch Air is $1,699.

The 13-inch MacBook Air with M3 starts at $1,099 with a cut-down 8-core GPU, as well as 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. The 15-inch MacBook Air begins at $1,299 but gets the 10-core GPU alongside the same amounts of RAM and storage.

RAM goes up to 24GB, though each jump is $200, which continues to be absurd pricing. The same $200 cost goes for each bump up in storage, as well, except for moving from 1TB to 2TB, which is $400. Wow.

Apple sells its MacBook Airs with a 1-year limited warranty and 90 days of free tech support. AppleCare Plus for the 13-inch Air is $69.99 annually or $199 for three years, while the coverage for the 15-inch Air is $79.99 per year or $229 for three years. This includes extended coverage as well as accidental damage protection ($99 for screen damage or $299 for other damage).

Apple is still keeping the M2 13-inch MacBook Air on the market, starting at $999 with an 8-core CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD to stay under $1,000.

Bottom Line

Now that Apple has dropped the wedge-shaped MacBook Air and moved fully into this new design, the new MacBook Air is again the standard bearer of the Mac lineup. They're light, don't make a sound, but still run well and for hours and hours at a time.

The screens are bright, though those who want the deepest black and most vibrant colors may prefer the OLED options on Windows PCs. The other place where some Windows PCs may win is upgrade pricing. Apple's upcharges to move between RAM and storage are breathtaking, and at least some thin Windows PCs still let you change the storage out yourself.

But if you know you want a Mac, and you can make do with just the basic ports, the MacBook Air with M3 will serve you well. People who didn't want the heft of the Pro line but still want two external monitors will be thrilled by the ability to finally move past the limitations of M1 and M2.

But mostly, this update is just what Apple purports its computing to be: simple and easy. They're good — you just have to make one choice.

When Apple updated the MacBook Pro family with M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max processors in late 2023, we knew that hardware upgrades would soon be on the way for the company’s more mainstream products. And right on cue, Apple today performed a soft launch of its 2024 MacBook Air family with standard M3 processors on the 15-inch model (13-inch models continue with the M2 as standard, with an upgrade to the M3 available).

According to Apple, the M3 chip is 60 percent faster than the M1 MacBook Air, which was the first to adopt Apple Silicon. The company is still flogging its Intel-powered past, claiming that the new systems are up to 13 times faster than most potent MacBook Airs that used Core processors. It appears Apple is hoping customers using these systems will be tempted to take the plunge and upgrade to M3 power.

If you opt for an M3, you’ll get an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU configuration with up to 24GB of unified memory. However, in typical Apple fashion, base systems still have just 8GB of unified memory. We shouldn’t be surprised, as even Apple’s base M3 MacBook Pro comes with 8GB.

We should also note that Apple is touting its 16-core Neural Engine to help drive artificial intelligence performance on the laptops. This hardware can enhance AI operations natively in macOS and with third-party apps. 

In addition to the processor upgrade, another big update comes with display support. Previously, Apple’s base M1 and M2 processors supported only a single external display, which is very limiting. (The Pro and Max chips allowed for more). However, the new M3 chip in the MacBook Air supports up to two external displays only if the lid on the laptop is closed. When the lid is open, the M3 MacBook Airs support a single external display with a 60Hz refresh rate at up to 6K resolution. With the lid closed you can attach two 60Hz external displays with up to a 5K resolution.

The new MacBook Airs, which feature up to an 18-hour runtime, are now available for preorder. Deliveries commence on March 8. As before, you can choose from silver, starlight, space gray, or midnight colors, with the base 13-inch MacBook Air (M2, 8GB, 256B) starting at $999. The 13-inch MacBook Air with a M3 processor, 8GB of unified memory and a 256GB SSD ups the price to $1,099. The 15-inch MacBook Air has a base price of $1,299 (M3, 8GB, 256GB). If you want to load up all the options, a 15-inch MacBook Air with M3 processor, 24GB of unified memory, a 2TB SSD, and a 70W USB-C power adapter will cost you $2,499.

Engineers from Frore Systems have integrated the company's innovative solid-state AirJet cooling system, which provides impressive cooling capabilities despite a lack of moving parts, into an M2-based Apple MacBook Air. With proper cooling, the relatively inexpensive laptop matched the performance of a more expensive MacBook Pro based on the same processor.

The lack of a fan is probably one of the main advantages of Apple's MacBook Air over its more performant siblings, but it also puts the laptop at a disadvantage. Fanless cooling doesn't have moving parts (which is a plus), but it also cannot properly cool down Apple's M1 or M2 processor under high loads, which is why a 13-inch MacBook Air powered by M1 or M2 system-on-chip is slower than 13-inch MacBook Pro based on the same SoC. However, making a MacBook Air run as fast as a 13-inch MacBook Pro is now possible. 

To do so, one needs to cool down M2 using the Frore System's AirJet solid-state active cooling system. It is as efficient as typical cooling systems with fans, yet it is smaller and more reliable, according to a video posted to YouTube by PC World. The AirJet-equipped 15-inch MacBook Air matched the performance of the M2-based MacBook Pro in the Cinebench R23 benchmark, a testament to its AirJet's efficiency in maintaining optimal operating temperatures. 

However, there is a catch. AirJet is a membrane-based cooling system that uses ultrasonic waves to push air through itself to remove heat. Although it does not use a fan, it still needs airflow. As a result, Frore had to alter MacBook Air's design to use its Airjet. The company's specialists added intake vents near the laptop's hinge and repurposed the speaker holes to serve as exhaust outlets. These modifications were crucial to integrating the AirJet in the slim MacBook Air chassis, demonstrating the practicality and adaptability of this cooling technology in real-world applications.

Despite its impressive performance and potential applications, the AirJet is unavailable for consumer purchase. Frore Systems has no plans to release a consumer version of its AirJets or kits for modifying existing devices. The demonstration with the MacBook Air serves primarily as a proof of concept, highlighting AirJet's capabilities. Looking forward, integrating AirJet technology in products from companies like Apple could lead to more efficient use of internal space, paving the way for innovations such as larger batteries or more compact device designs.

An avid reader would ask why Apple does not use AirJet cooling systems itself. There are several possible explanations. Firstly, Frore is a relatively small company whose production volumes may be too low for Apple. Secondly, the AirJet cooling technology is relatively new, and companies like Apple would ensure its reliability first before using it for high-volume devices.

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple's Mac shipments hit a speed bump during 2023, despite the launch of a larger MacBook Air earlier this year. The 15-inch MacBook Air was seen as a much-needed entry into the popular 15-inch class of notebooks. However, shipments reportedly sputtered after a sales burst during the back-to-school period (shipment estimates have been revised downward by 20 percent for the year).

According to Kuo in a post on Medium, total MacBook sales for 2023 are expected to drop by 30 percent compared to 2022 to 17 million units. Even though we are fast approaching the holiday shopping season, Kuo doesn't expect a significant uptick in shipments for the remainder of 2023 since Apple won't deliver any MacBook hardware refreshes until early 2024, in a best-case scenario.

So, what's causing the shipment decline for MacBooks? Kuo says several factors are coming into play, including a steady decline in work-from-home (WFH) demand. PC demand was artificially inflated due to WFH during the COVID-19 crisis, and now shipments are settling back into a more normalized pattern. It's also surmised that Mini-LED, as seen in the MacBook Pro family, is no longer a big draw for customers. In addition, the luster of Apple Silicon has worn off for customers who've already upgraded from Intel-based MacBooks, as we've seen minor speed bumps going from the initial M1 to M2 generation of CPUs.

Apple could see upward momentum in 2024 when its next MacBook refresh is expected. Apple will launch new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs with next-generation M3 CPUs built on TSMC's 3nm N3 process. New 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops with M3 Pro and M3 Max CPUs are also on deck.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that the new MacBook Pros will launch "early next year" but hasn't described what new features Apple plans to add other than faster RAM. We could also imagine brighter Mini-LED displays and perhaps we could see faster SSDs, though Gen5 models aren't like to appear in laptops any time soon given their current power requirements.

OLED displays are becoming more commonplace in the world of laptops. They promise richer and more saturated color and deliver inky blacks unmatched by other panel types offered on laptops. So, color me surprised when the Acer Swift Edge 16 made its way into the Tom’s Hardware lab, complete with a 16-inch OLED display with a price tag of less than $1,300.

However, it’s not just the display and price that impress; the Swift Edge 16 comes with a potent Ryzen 7 7840U processor, a comfortable keyboard with a number pad, the rare inclusion of a 1440p webcam along with a thin and lightweight chassis that makes it an easy travel companion when compared to the best ultrabooks and premium laptops.

Acer Swift Edge 16 Specifications

Design of the Acer Swift Edge 16

"Sleek" and "thin" are the first two words that sprung to mind when I first took the Swift Edge 16 out of the box. The laptop is just 0.6 inches thick with the lid closed, allowing it to slip into a bag easily. That thinness is accompanied by a total weight of 2.73 pounds, which is roughly half a pound lighter than the 15-inch Apple MacBook Air.

However, that difference in weight between the two machines is exacerbated by the materials chosen by Apple and Acer, respectively. The former goes with an aluminum unibody that exudes quality and sturdiness. However, the latter uses a cheap, thin plastic upper chassis and an equally thin aluminum lower chassis cover. As a result, the chassis easily flexes and doesn’t elicit confidence in long-term durability.

I lightly pressed on the palm rest directly to the right of the touchpad and watched as the entire keyboard deck dipped down at least an eighth of an inch in response. The sub-3-pound weight is admirable, but it's immediately apparent what sacrifices were made to achieve this figure.

The right side of the chassis is home to a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, headphone jack and a microSD card slot. The opposite side gives you an additional USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, two USB4 Type-C ports and an HDMI 2.1 port. The Swift Edge 16 charges via one of the two USB-C ports using a 65-watt power adapter. Unlike competing USB-C chargers from Apple and Samsung, Acer’s power brick and USB-C cord are attached instead of being two separate pieces.

A full-size keyboard sits front and center, with a narrow number pad off to the side. A 3.4 x 5.1-inch touchpad sits off-center below the keyboard.

However, the star of the show is undoubtedly the 16-inch OLED display, surrounded by relatively thin bezels all around. This is a 120 Hz unit that is VESA DisplayHDR True Black 500 certified. Like many OLED panels, this one features a glossy coating, which is meant to improve the clarity of the picture. While that may be the case, the glossy finish was a magnet for reflections in my home office. Sitting above the display was another surprise, a 1440p webcam.

The Swift Edge 16 measures 14.08 x 9.68 x 0.60 inches, giving it a slightly larger footprint than the 15-inch MacBook Air. It’s also marginally larger dimensionally than the Lenovo Yoga 9i, a 3.09-pound, 14-inch convertible. The 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 measures 13.4 x 9.6 x 0.58 inches and weighs 3.4 pounds.

Acer Swift Edge 16 Productivity Performance

The Swift Edge 16 uses an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U, an octa-core processor with a 3.3 GHz base clock and a 5.1GHz turbo clock. Acer configures the laptop with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD.

Starting with the Geekbench synthetic CPU benchmark, the Swift Edge 16 virtually tied with the MacBook Air (M2, 16GB RAM) in the single-core benchmark (1,899). However, in the multi-core test (9,624), the Swift Edge 16 bested the MacBook Air and came in second to the Yoga 9i (Core i7-1360P, 16GB RAM), which scored 9,954.

In our file transfer test, which copies 25GB of files, the Swift Edge 16 hit 1,269.79 MBps. That was good enough for third place behind the MacBook Air (1,342.38 MBps) and the Yoga 9i (1,669.29 MBps). The Surface Laptop 5 (Core i7-1265U, 16GB RAM) wasn’t a contender, delivering just 532.52 MBps during the test.

The Swift Edge 16 took an easy win in our Handbrake test, which involves encoding a 4K video to 1080p. The laptop completed the task in just 7 minutes and 18 seconds, putting it 28 seconds ahead of the MacBook Air. The Yoga 9i was the laggard in this group, requiring 9:45 to finish.

In our Cinebench R23 stress test, we perform 20 runs and record the scores. The Swift Edge 16 started the test with a score of 10,575.95, declining significantly from there as heat ramped up. Scores leveled off in the 6,600 to 6,800 range after about seven runs. During the test, the Ryzen 7 7840U chugged along at 2.04GHz and 58.91 degrees Celsius (138.03 degrees Fahrenheit).

Display on the Acer Swift Edge 16

The Swift Edge 16 features an OLED display, which is a welcome inclusion in the sub-$1,500 price category. As the laptop’s name implies, the panel measures 16 inches across and has a 3,000 x 2,000 resolution (3:2 aspect ratio, which we’re used to seeing in Microsoft’s Surface family) and a 120Hz refresh rate. Acer claims that the panel is VESA DisplayHDR True Black 500 certified.

I found the display to be bright enough for typical use, but the glossy coating couldn’t shake the reflections I saw. Not only could I see my reflection staring back at me (particularly apparent with dark content) in my home office, but the effect was only exacerbated outside in the sunlight.

With that said, when the lighting was ideal, the rich colors and inky blacks of the OLED panel were a joy to behold. Although I went to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie in the theater, its recent digital release meant that I had to purchase the movie for my kids to watch over (and over, and over again). This was the perfect movie to showcase the Swift Edge 16’s display, with its rich color palette (particularly when Mario visits the Mushroom Kingdom). Likewise, Luigi’s descent into the bowels of the Dark Lands highlighted the excellent contrast.

Our instrumented testing confirmed what my eyeballs were seeing, with the Swift Edge 16 hitting 139.2 percent of DCI-P3 and 200 percent of sRGB (closely matching the performance of the OLED in the Yoga 9i). Brightness was also second only to the MacBook Air, coming in at 387 nits.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Acer Swift Edge 16

The keyboard on the Swift Edge 16 felt good under my fingers, providing comfortable feedback with quiet operation. The feel of the keys reminds me of a close approximation to that of current-generation MacBook keyboards. Given the productivity-centric purpose of the laptop, there are no RGBs found here, although there is a soft white light that glows beneath the keys (and turns off after about 30 seconds to save power).

A narrow number pad, which is an increasingly common feature for 15- and 16-inch class laptops, is available for quick number entries. I appreciate its inclusion for making quick calculations and entering data into spreadsheets.

My go-to for typing tests is keyhero.com, and I managed to type at 85.03 words per minute with 97.91 percent accuracy. For comparison, I averaged 75 wpm and 90.61 percent accuracy on the similarly-sized Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra using the same test, so I much preferred this keyboard.

Audio on the Acer Swift Edge 16

The Swift Edge 16 has two speakers, backed by Acer TrueHarmony technology. Acer claims that TrueHarmony provides more powerful, “headphone-like audio,” but that wasn’t my experience.

The audio was as lifeless as you’d expect with a laptop this thin and light. The speakers weren't overly loud even with the volume cranked to 100 percent. With that said, they were distortion-free at this volume. I dialed the volume back to about 60 percent and played Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain.” No matter the volume level, the audio sounded thin and hollow from the downward-firing speakers. OK, maybe it’s a tall order to expect perfection when reproducing audio from one of the greatest rock songs of the 1990s on a $1,300 laptop, especially one that is so svelte, but non-existent bass and no attention to the highs leaves much to be desired.

If you want to use the Swift Edge 16 to handle video calls or watch YouTube videos while doing other tasks, the speakers will suit you just fine. However, grab a pair of good headphones if you want to actually enjoy music.

Upgradeability of the Acer Swift Edge 16

The Swift Edge 16’s internals are accessible by removing six T6 screws on the bottom of the chassis. With the screws removed, I stuck my thumbnail near one of the USB ports and carefully pried off the panel.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to see once inside; the battery is replaceable, as is the M.2 SSD (although there is only one M.2 slot for storage). The Wi-Fi 6E/Bluetooth combo card is also replaceable if you so choose. The LPDDR5 memory is soldered onto the motherboard, so there are no provisions for upgrading your memory from the standard 16GB in the future. This is, unfortunately, increasingly common on thin PCs.

Battery Life on the Acer Swift Edge 16

Among its competitors the Swift Edge 16 wasn’t a standout in our endurance test (web browsing, light graphics work and video streaming while connected to Wi-Fi with Swift Edge 16’s display brightness set to 150 nits). It finished at the back of the pack (7:18).

The Surface Laptop 15 lasted nearly two hours longer, while the Yoga 7i gave up after 10 hours and 32 minutes. However, the MacBook Air was the endurance champion, lasting almost 15 hours on a charge.

Heat on the Acer Swift Edge 16

We take the skin temperature of ultrabooks while running the Cinebench R23 stress test to see how they deal with heat. During the test, the Swift Edge 16’s fans spun up noticeably to exhaust heat generated by the Ryzen 7 7840U. The aluminum bottom panel of the chassis was warm to the touch but was not uncomfortable to rest on my lap.

I measured 39.9 degrees Celsius (103.83 degrees Fahrenheit) between the G and H keys, while the touchpad was much cooler at 29.4 C (89.42 F). The bottom of the laptop saw the hottest temperatures, reaching 51.5 C (124.7 F) towards the left-rear corner.

Webcam on the Acer Swift Edge 16

With most new laptops coming out with 1080p webcams, it’s becoming harder to notice any significant differences between them. However, Acer is trying to one-up the competition with a 1440p webcam on the Swift Edge 16.

I didn’t expect a dramatic difference in quality compared to the 1080p competition, and my results confirmed that hypothesis. However, the details were incredibly crisp, the colors looked spot-on, and image noise was practically non-existent.

Acer doesn’t offer a physical privacy shutter for the webcam or a hotkey to deactivate it quickly. The webcam also isn’t Windows Hello compatible. You also won’t find other biometric security features like a fingerprint reader.

Software and Warranty on the Acer Swift Edge 16

Acer goes easy on the installed apps, as there isn’t much bloatware here. There’s an Acer product registration app, and the handy Acer Purified Voice Console allows you to configure microphone settings. Acer Care Settings monitors your system vitals (SSD, memory, battery health), performs system updates and can backup/restore your system – it’s a nice one-stop-shop for configuring the laptop. The only other preinstalled app from the factory is the venerable Realtek Audio Console.

Of course, you can expect to find the usual app shortcuts placed by default with each Windows 11 Home install, like Kindle, WhatsApp, and Spotify.

Acer provides a one-year manufacturer warranty with the Swift Edge 16.

Acer Swift Edge 16 Configurations

Our review unit features an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, and a 16-inch 3,200 x 2,000 OLED display. This model is exclusive to Best Buy and priced at $1,299. However, this configuration frequently goes on sale and was recently available at Best Buy for as low as $1,099. There’s also an older SKU with a 3840 x 2400 OLED display, Ryzen 7 7735U processor and a fingerprint reader for $1,299 (although it is often on sale at Costco for $899).

Bottom Line

The Acer Swift Edge 16 has a lot going for it. It’s lightweight and thin for this class, the 16-inch screen is gorgeous, and performance was strong across the board. Even better, the $1,299 price tag ($1,099 if you can grab it on sale) is quite compelling for a large-screen OLED laptop.

On the other hand, the speakers are subpar, the quality of the materials used (particularly the keyboard deck) could be better and battery life ranked at the bottom of the pack. The first issue is easily solved with a pair of headphones, while the second doesn't feel as premium — or as durable — as other laptops in its class. As for endurance, seven hours of battery life is disappointing, especially compared to the 10-hour showing of the Lenovo Yoga 9i and the nearly 15-hour runtime of the 15-inch Apple MacBook Air.

The Yoga 9i is a fine alternative (if you like the convertible form factor and don’t mind the 14-inch display) due to its similar performance, sturdier construction, and longer battery life. The laptop also regularly goes on sale for $1,149, making it an even more compelling choice. The Swift Edge 16 still has a lot to offer, but perhaps a future update can address our battery life and durability concerns.

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Apple's M3-series system-on-chips is expected to get a major performance upgrade compared to predecessors since they are projected to be made on TSMC's N3 (3 nm-class) fabrication processor and use all-new CPU and GPU microarchitectures. Indeed, the highest-end M3 Ultra will feature 32 CPU cores and an 80-cluster GPU, but the entry-level M3 will retain eight cores, a Bloomberg report suggests.

M3: Up to Eight Cores

Apple's vanilla M1 and M2 SoCs are used for Mac Mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and iMac systems, which are quite popular. The company's upcoming M3 ix expected to retain eight general-purpose cores (four high-performance and four energy-efficient cores) and an integrated GPU with up to 10 clusters. The first systems on their base are expected to hit the market earlier this year. 

Apple's M3 will reportedly be the first SoCs from the company's third-generation PC processors and will also be the developers N3 chip designed for desktops and laptops. Apparently, the company decided not to increase core count in this SoC compared to M2, perhaps because it wanted to ensure the lowest possible power consumption or was sure that architectural advantages coupled with higher clocks will ensure a noticeable performance boost, or just wanted to maximize yields and keep costs down.

M3 Pro: Up to 14 Cores

The situation will get substantially better with M3 Pro that is projected to get 14 general-purpose cores (eight performance cores, six efficiency cores) in its top-end configuration, but its range-topping GPU will get 20 clusters, up from 19 clusters in M2 Pro. The M3 Pro in its maximum configuration will be more powerful than M2 Max in general-purpose workloads, but the latter will still have an edge in graphics applications.

Apple's M3 Pro and M3 Max-based machine will likely hit the market sometimes in 2024.

M3 Max: Up to 16 cores

When it comes to M3 Max SoC, it is rumored to get 16 general purpose cores (12 performance cores and four energy-efficient cores) as well as up to 40 GPU clusters. Getting four additional high-performance cores is a big deal and will certainly bring substantial benefits to demanding software that M3 Max is architected to run. These will likely end up in high end MacBook Pros, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.

M3 Ultra Up to 32 Cores

Meanwhile, the M3 Ultra system-in-package consisting of two M3 Max chips will therefore get 32 CPU cores and up to 80 GPU clusters. While 32 cores sounds quite massive when we talk about desktops, workstation-grade processors from AMD and Intel already have 56 – 64 cores and it remains to be seen what they are going to offer when Apple's M3 Ultra-based Mac Studio or Mac Pro systems are available in the second half of 2024. 

While Bloomberg's Mark Gurman tends to be accurate with his reports about future Apple's products, he is still an unofficial source and information from him should be taken with a grain of salt.

Japanese computer accessories company Far East Gadgets launched its so-called Typesticks earlier this month (h/t PC Watch). Typesticks are key-spaced platforms made from hard plastic and silicon. The strategically positioned standoffs on the underside of Typesticks are supposed to work with any laptop keyboard using "a key gap of 2.5 mm or more, and a key height of 2 mm or less."

Have you ever wished you could use a mechanical keyboard with your laptop? Well, you can simply plug in your favorite keyboard, and use it, but this would usually mean pushing back your laptop to fit your favorite text input device on the desk in front of it. By placing some Typesticks over your laptop keyboard, you can again type in the screen-to-user position intended by the device designer. With some configurations, the laptop touchpad will remain easily accessible.

Official Typesticks images show a compact mechanical keyboard perched directly atop of a laptop keyboard, affording a superior typing experience. If you choose your Typesticks positioning carefully you can even use the height adjustment feet on your plug-in keyboard for enhanced ergonomics.

The Typesticks designers appear to enjoy using Apple MacBook laptops with the cutely compact HHKB (Happy Hacking Keyboard). However, other laptops have been tested and verified as working with the Typesticks, namely:

• Lenovo ThinkPad series laptops inc X28
• Alienware X17 gaming laptop
• iPad Pro 12.9" M2 & Magic Keyboard
• VAIO Pro PG laptop
• MacBook Pro M1 16 inch
• MacBook Pro 14" 2021
• MacBook Pro 13" 2020
• MacBook Air 13" 2020
• MacBook Air 15" 2023

The above list certainly isn't exhaustive, instead it seems like these may be the laptops the keyboard accessory maker and his colleagues had available for testing.

Likewise, the Typesticks work with a wide range of keyboards you might use. Remember, you can vary Typestick placements to run in line with the rake-adjusting feet on the keyboard base. As well as the HHKB, discrete keyboards tested and verified include the Keychron K2 Pro、NuPhy Air 75, and iPad Magic Keyboard.

Typesticks are compact and portable weighing just 15g. Pairs stick together in transit due to built-in magnets and are about the same size as a USB memory stick or pack of gum (actual size: 72.5 × 23 × 9 mm), to easily fit in a pocket of your laptop tote.

One of the drawbacks of the Typesticks, mentioned in the official product pages, is that an elevated keyboard could obscure the lower part of your computer screen, depending on various factors. Another drawback to some readers will be purchasing products from Japan, and the price is 2,480 yen ($17) plus shipping etc.

Lastly, buyers are warned not to close their clamshell laptops with the third party keyboard and or Typesticks still in place.

DIYers Will DIY

Computer DIYers with access to the best 3D printers, CNC or best laser cutters might find it pretty easy to make their own custom Typesticks. This could be a good option if the official Typesticks are incompatible with your particular laptop, or importing seems too much effort.

It's known that AMD's Zen 4 processors is one of the best CPUs around. Phoronix answers those who wonder if the mobile Zen 4 can compete with rivaling mobile chips such as Apple's M2 silicon. The Linux publication has compared two mobile Zen 4 processors against the Apple M2 under several Linux benchmarks.

The Ryzen Z1 Extreme is a high-performance Zen 4 processor that powers handheld gaming devices like the ROG Ally. The octa-core, 16-thread chip has a 5.1 GHz boost clock and a cTDP between 9W to 30W. The Ryzen 7 7840U, which resides inside Acer's Swift Edge 16, is another processor from AMD's Zen 4 camp, wielding a similar octa-core, 16-thread design with a 5.1 GHz boost clock. Unlike the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, the Ryzen 7 7840U has 28W, although the chip has a cTDP between 15W and 30W.

On the contrary, the M2, which powers the MacBook Air 2022, features an octa-core, Arm-based design with four performance "Avalanche" cores and four efficiency "Blizzard" cores. The Avalanche cores max out at 3.5 GHz, whereas the Blizzard cores can reach 2.4 GHz. It's worth remembering that the MacBook Air features a passive cooling solution, unlike the MacBook Pro. The ROG Ally and Swift Edge 16 come with active cooling solutions. More importantly, Phoronix tested the 8GB version of the MacBook Air 2022. The news outlet used Asahi Linux for testing the MacBook Air 2022, and while support is commendable, the project is pretty much a work in progress. Therefore, the M2 likely has untapped potential due to the lack of proper Linux support.

According to the geometric of the test results, AMD's Zen 4 processors wiped the floor with the Apple M2. With the balanced mode on the ROG Ally, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme delivered 28.7% higher performance than the Apple M2. The performance delta increased to 95.7% when Phoronix put the ROG Ally into performance mode. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 7 7840U outperformed the Apple M2 by 75.8%.

The Ryzen Z1 Extreme and Ryzen 7 7840U showed good performance-per-watt in the benchmarks. Sadly, a PowerCap/RAPL or HWMON driver for the Apple M2 doesn't exist, so Phoronix could not log the silicon's real-time power consumption metrics with Linux. Many would agree it would be interesting to see the Apple M2's power efficiency compared to the Zen 4. True, Phoronix could evaluate the AC power from the wall, but it doesn't provide a precise measurement.

Phoronix's testing satisfies the curiosity of those who want to see a fight between Zen 4 vs. Apple M2. Some may argue that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison since there are too many variables, such as the difference in cooling and that the Apple M2 was running on Asahi Linux instead of the native macOS, which is better optimized for the M2 silicon.

Dell's Premium XPS laptops are meant to be its best examples of design and quality. The XPS 13 Plus ($1,149 to start, $1,449 as tested) upends traditional laptop design with its capacitive touch bar, edgeless keyboard and borderless touchpad, not all of which work out perfectly, but Dell gets points for thinking like no one else. 

This is the same chassis as the XPS 13 Plus from last year — in fact, so little has changed that Dell hasn't changed the model number (9320), as it usually does with a refresh.

Unfortunately, the XPS 13 Plus might be a little too style-oriented. The whole laptop has just two Thunderbolt 4 ports and its battery life is well below par in this class.

Design of the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

The XPS 13 Plus delivers the high style and quality that the XPS brand is known for. Its ultra-chic design exudes modernness, from its nearly bezel-less screen to its edge-to-edge keyboard.

The chassis and lid, made of aluminum and glass,  are exceptionally stiff and resisted my attempts to induce flex. This laptop looks too delicate to throw around, but it shouldn’t need to be coddled given that it’s built so well. Picking it up one-handed, for instance, doesn’t feel like it stresses the laptop at all.

I have mixed feelings on the platinum color of my review unit as I’ll explain later in the keyboard section, though it is a good break for the norm. Dell also offers dark graphite.

The XPS 13 Plus is 11.63 x 7.84 x 0.60 inches (295 x 199 x 15.2 mm) and 2.77 pounds (1.26 kg). The Asus ZenBook S 13 OLED (UX504) and the Apple MacBook Air (M2) are about 0.2 inches thinner and the Asus is a full half-pound lighter, but the Dell’s sub-three-pound weight is within reason for an ultraportable. The HP Spectre x360 13.5 is a hair over the three-pound barrier but offers the convenience of a 2-in-1 screen design.

Port selection is a serious weakness for the XPS 13 Plus: It has just two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports and nothing else, not even a headphone jack. Making matters worse, the included power adapter will take up one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports.

Dell includes USB-C to USB-A and USB-C to headphone jack adapters, but they’re small consolation; remembering to take them is a pain and they’re easily lost. Unless you go with wireless everything – the XPS 13 Plus has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 – budgeting for a docking station is a smart idea.

Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023) Specifications

Productivity Performance on the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

The XPS 13 Plus I’m reviewing has an Intel Core i7-1360P processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics. The 28-watt P-class processor is a step up in performance from the 15-watt U-class chips that seem to grace most ultraportables.

The XPS 13 Plus will be competing against the Apple MacBook Air (M2), the Asus ZenBook S 13 OLED, and the HP Spectre x360 13.5 in our performance comparison charts. The MacBook Air uses Apple’s M2 CPU while the ZenBook S 13 sports an Intel Core i7-1355U and the Spectre x360 13.5 a previous-generation Core i7-1255U. The latter two chips have 10 cores (two Performance and eight Efficient) whereas our Dell’s Core i7-1360P has 12 cores (four Performance and eight Efficient). Apple’s M2 chip is always tough to beat, so we’ll see how it stacks up.

The XPS 13 Plus finished first in the cross-platform Geekbench 5 benchmark multi-core test, its score of 9,938 points just ahead of the next-best MacBook Air’s 8,919 points. The MacBook Air led in single-core, though, with 1,932 points to beat the XPS’s 1,814 points. The Asus scored about the same as the XPS 13 Plus in the single-core test though its U-class CPU held it back in the multi-core scenario.

Moving on, the MacBook Air soundly beat the XPS 13 Plus in our Handbrake transcoding test, finishing in 7 minutes and 52 seconds versus the Dell's 8 minutes and 14 seconds. The Asus and the HP trailed significantly, which wasn’t surprising given their weaker CPUs.

Things picked up for the XPS 13 Plus in our 25GB file transfer test, where it finished first with 1,658.62 MBps. The Asus was right on its heels with 1,559.7 MBps. The MacBook Air was much slower, at 958.85 MBps.

We stress productivity laptops by running the Cinebench R23 CPU stress test 20 times in a row, which usually causes heat soak in the laptop’s cooling system and therefore gives a good baseline for its long-term behavior under load.

The XPS 13 Plus dropped from its initial score of 10,095 points to stabilize in the mid-6,000-point range, with a random spike to 8,304 points in the middle. The initial drop isn’t unusual and the XPS 13 Plus does otherwise manage to keep its performance stable.

During the test, the CPU’s Performance cores ran at an average of 2.0 GHz and the Efficient cores at 1.55GHz. The average processor temperature was 72.34 degrees Celsius.

Display on the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

I tested with the XPS 13 Plus with Dell's optional 3456 x 2160 OLED screen. It's a lofty $300 upgrade over the base 1920 x 1200 IPS screen, but it only took about a minute of the Dune: Part Two trailer to convince me I'd spend the money. 

The OLED technology's infinite contrast ratio shows exquisite details in shadows and highlights that you aren't likely to see or appreciate on a lesser screen. Explosions and gunfire are especially vivid. OLED is also famous for its color reproduction, of which Dune doesn't exercise much, so I switched over to Spider-Man: No Way Home and wasn't disappointed. Looking at this screen is a real pleasure.

The XPS 13 Plus' small size meant I also used its touch-screen functionality more than I thought I would. I often used it in my lap and gripped the screen with one hand, then scrolled with my thumb. The glossy screen surface is slick but has an anti-reflective treatment, so it doesn't act like a mirror. It's not anti-glare or matte, but I could only make out a dull reflection of myself, and I didn't have issues with overhead lights causing eye strain.

The Dell’s screen covers 80.5% of the DCI-P3 gamut, second only to the HP’s 87.7% among its direct competitors. Its 373.6-nit peak brightness is almost the same as that of the ZenBook S 13 OLED and well south of the MacBook Air’s 489 nits, but it’s far from being a dim screen. I didn’t wish for it to be brighter, and that’s a good sign.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

I admit to having serious reservations about the XPS 13 Plus' keyboard design the moment I took it out of the box. Not only is there no spacing between the keys (Dell calls it "zero lattice"), but the top row (F1 through F12 and associated functions) is a touch bar, not actual keys. I nonetheless managed 111 words per minute with 100% accuracy in the Monkeytype typing test, and I can't remember doing better than that.

The large keys have satisfying cushioned feedback with healthy travel. The power button is the blank key at top right, which doubles as a fingerprint reader.

Layout-wise, the keyboard’s half-sized up and down arrows squeezed between full-size left and right arrows are my main pet peeve. The other issue I had was visibility; white backlighting in the daytime made it hard to differentiate key symbols on the platinum keys, so ironically, it was easier to see the key symbols with the backlighting turned off. Here's the keyboard with its backlighting on:

And then off:

The effect isn’t as bad as the photos make out, but you might find yourself tilting the laptop or looking closer if you’re not a touch typist. I'd probably get the XPS 13 Plus in its optional graphite color for this very reason.

But how about that capacitive touch bar? It's much better than I thought, mostly because it seemed highly responsive to my input - as in, it reacted as fast as a regular key. The only downside is that there's no tactile or haptic feedback of any kind, and that takes getting used to. Fortunately, I had no issues with my touches registering. I did find myself looking down to locate the key I needed on the touch bar, though over time I was able to rely on muscle memory, especially for shortcuts I use a lot, like Ctrl + F4 to close tabs. 

Pressing the Fn key instantly switches the symbols to F1 through F12. You can also enable Fn Lock by pressing Fn + Esc if you want F1 through F12 to show as primary, though doing that means you lose dedicated access to the Home, End, and Insert keys. Page Up and Page Down are only available as secondary functions in the up and down arrow keys.

The XPS 13 Plus' touchpad is also controversial because it doesn't have a defined border. Dell’s assumption is that users naturally touch just below the spacebar, and that's valid for me. Touch sensitivity starts a few millimeters below the spacebar and above the front edge of the palm rest and extends just beyond the edges of the spacebar. You can tap to click, but lightly pressing on the surface rewards with a satisfying tactile bump. I always appreciate it when physical clicking is practically silent as it is on this XPS, too.

Audio on the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

The XPS 13 Plus pumps out impressive sound for a laptop its size. Listening to Breaking Benjamin’s “Angels Fall”, I noticed clear separation between vocals and instruments, with enough low-end to keep the track from sounding brittle as so often happens with rock music on laptop speakers. I also noted that the speakers maintained the airy acoustic guitar and smooth vocals of “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia.

The included WavesMaxx Audio Pro app provides EQ and other sound tweaks, including 3D spatial audio if you allow the webcam to track your head movement. The hard rock EQ seemed to improve the separation in “Angels Fall”, but I ended up going back to the No EQ setting, putting the details dial at 25%, the width dial to 25%, and turning the artificial-sounding MaxxBass dial to 0% for an all-around setting. I might not have done that had the app included an automatic EQ setting; I don’t want to fuss with EQ all the time.

Upgradeability of the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

The only user-changeable parts in the XPS 13 Plus are its storage drive and battery. The bottom panel is held on by six Torx T6 screws, which are all the same size but aren’t retainer style. You’ll then need a plastic pry tool to pop the panel’s clips free; I started at the rear near the heat vents, then went up the right edge.

The battery covers about half the chassis. The SSD is M.2 2280 format and is covered by a heatsink. The memory and even the wireless card are soldered down, which is  disappointing, but not surprising on an ultraportable.

Battery Life on the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

The XPS 13 Plus’ 55 WHr battery and 28-watt processor aren’t a great combination for long battery life. It managed a mere 6 hours and 20 minutes in our battery test, which consists of continuous web browsing over Wi-Fi, video streaming, and OpenGL workloads with the screen set to 150 nits of brightness. That’s over an hour worse than the 7 hours and 34 minutes we recorded from the original XPS 13 Plus.

The ZenBook S 13 OLED had no trouble broaching the 10-hour mark, with its more powerful 63 WHr battery and power-friendly 15-watt CPU. None of these units touched the MacBook Air’s 14 hours and 6 minutes.

Heat on the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

We measure the surface temperatures of productivity laptops while we run our 20-loop Cinebench R23 CPU stress test. The keyboard center of the XPS 13 Plus (between the G and H key) reached 95 degrees F (35 degrees Celsius) while the touchpad center (which is just below the spacebar) reached 85 F (29.4 C). The underside of the laptop was slightly warmer, reaching 97 F (36.1 C) in the center and peaking at 108 F (42.2 C) near the heat vents.

Overall, the XPS 13 Plus never felt overly warm to my hands. I had no reservations using it on my lap. Using it in your lap is perfectly fine since its air intakes are towards the edges, not under the bottom panel.

Webcam on the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

The XPS 13 Plus' webcam is properly positioned over the screen to be as close to eye level as possible, though the laptop's size means you'll still be looking down at most of your subjects - ah, chat-mates. It exposed my face nicely despite the horrible lighting conditions in my local coffee shop.

The webcam's resolution is unfortunately just 720p, which is hard to accept on a premium laptop and would have me shopping for one of our best webcams. A 1080p webcam would have produced a sharper image.

The upside of this camera is that it supports infrared for facial recognition, so you can at least log into Windows using Windows Hello. That said, the webcam lacks a sliding privacy shutter, and I didn't see a shortcut key to disable it.

Software and Warranty on the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023)

As a premium laptop, the XPS 13 Plus doesn’t have unwanted software or trial apps installed, though unfortunately it has many of the apps that are typically included with Windows 11, like Disney Plus. The included MyDell app has system settings, such as battery charging preferences, and lets you tweak the fan profile for cool or quiet modes. I didn’t find it necessary to change the latter from the default balanced setting since the fans were well-behaved and the laptop didn’t get too hot in my lap.

The mentioned Waves MaxxAudio Pro app is useful for tweaking sound settings.

Last is Killer Control Center. This seems like more of an app that belongs on a gaming laptop, but it can be used to analyze network traffic and give priority i.e., the most bandwidth to your preferred apps. It could be useful if you have little bandwidth to spare.

The XPS 13 Plus comes standard with a one-year warranty with Dell's premium support tier.

Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320, 2023) Configurations

Dell offers the XPS 13 Plus as a built-to-order model on its site. All models appear to include the Core i7-1360P processor and Iris Xe integrated graphics of my review unit.

The base $1,149 configuration ($250 off at the time of this review) includes 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 1920 x 1200 non-touch display. The RAM is factory configurable to 32GB, a wise option if you’re a heavy multitasker – remember, it can’t be upgraded later. Available storage upgrades are 1TB and 2TB.

Dell offers the 1920 x 1200 screen with touch, or you can step up to the 3456 x 2160 OLED touch screen of our review unit. The top screen is a 3840 x 2400 touch panel that Dell rates for 500 nits, though it’s not OLED.

The XPS 13 Plus can also be had in platinum or graphite colors. Graphite would be my pick if I had to do it again because of the contrast issues I had with the platinum keyboard and white backlighting.

Bottom Line

The key reasons to spend extra for the XPS 13 Plus over a more budget-oriented ultrabook like the HP Pavilion 14 Plus are its premium quality and design. The XPS 13 Plus delivers on those fronts with a gorgeous aluminum and glass chassis that’s exceptionally easy to transport. Few laptops look more chic than this one.

Uniqueness is also a factor when you’re spending a lot, and the XPS 13 Plus delivers there, too. Its most controversial feature is its capacitive touch bar, but I was pleasantly surprised with its responsiveness and didn’t miss a real physical keyboard row. I also had reservations about the edgeless keyboard, but it turned out I could type just as fast on it as I can on any laptop keyboard. The borderless touchpad was my least favorite feature because it’s a little strange not to have a defined border, but it never became a problem since I tend to favor touching the center of the touchpad.

Practicality is where things go askew for the XPS 13 Plus. Just two Thunderbolt 4 ports is limiting to begin with, not to mention that you lose one when you plug in the power adapter. No headphone jack is difficult to forgive – laptop designers need to realize that many of us appreciate the simplicity of wired devices that don’t need batteries.

Battery life is the XPS 13 Plus’ other major downside, lasting far fewer hours than the Asus ZenBook 13 S OLED and the Apple MacBook Air. Those laptops also sport better port selections (especially the Asus) and command similar money. The MacBook Air remains our favorite in this category if you can use MacOS, and the Asus is a good Windows alternative. Also consider the HP Elite Dragonfly G3 if your budget permits.

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Apple's first personal computers based on its next-generation M3 system-on-chip may be unveiled as early as this October, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who tends to have accurate information from Apple's supply chain. If Apple follows its traditional launch patterns, it makes sense to expect the company to reveal inexpensive M3-based laptops and desktops first. Yet, this is speculation at this point. 

Apple has scheduled a launch event in October, and based on past history, the company is set to introduce new Macs there, Bloomberg asserts. Given that Apple has just released numerous new Macs based on M2 Ultra and M2 Max system-on-chips, it is unlikely that the company will refresh its Mac Studio or even MacBook Pro with any new SoCs. Therefore, the company may well introduce new MacBook Air 13, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro 13, or even iMac (which has not yet gotten an M2 treatment) powered by shiny new M3 SoCs. 

Of course, the assumption about the M3 arrival this October could be entirely wrong. Instead, Apple could release an all-new iMac lineup based on M2, M2 Pro, and M2 Ultra SoCs. Yet, being a notebook-centric company, Apple could be more inclined to update its 13-inch laptops with a new SoC. 

An avid reader would probably ask what to expect from Apple's M3, which is rumored to be made on TSMC's N3 (3nm-class) fabrication technology that promises higher performance efficiency and higher transistor density compared to TSMC's N5P production node used for M2. At this point, it is hard to guess the exact improvements, but the company has a number of options, including increased general-purpose core count, enhanced GPU, and additional accelerators, just to name a few.

Keep in mind that the information comes from an unofficial source, and plans tend to change, so while it is logical to expect the arrival of Apple's first M3 machines about 1.5 years after the first M2-based products, it remains to be seen what Apple has to show in October.

Design of the MacBook Air 15-inch

If you've seen Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air with M2, this is that, but bigger. In fact, from afar, you might confuse the two. The 15-inch MacBook Air is a 13-inch MacBook Air, but bigger. That will be a trend throughout this review.

Ultimately, that's not a bad thing. You still get the sturdy recycled aluminum chassis (we tested it in the "midnight" color, a beautiful dark blue with a tendency to collect fingerprints), and a tone-on-tone Apple logo. It's sparse, but recognizable.

A 15-inch MacBook Air seems obvious. I've been told over and over again by industry insiders that 15-inch laptops are among the most popular on the market, and yet Apple hasn't made a notebook for this group of large-screen lovers that wasn't prohibitively expensive or designed for a pro. The Air was always considered one of the best ultrabooks, but sat at 13 inches.

After years of fans clamoring, that obvious laptop is here. The MacBook Air 15-inch is indeed exactly what Apple has promised: a bigger MacBook Air for most people. It's familiar: The keyboard is the same, the notch is still there, and it's still pretty thin (albeit noticeably heavier). The display is bigger, at 15.3-inches, and the six-speaker system is a noticeable improvement.

But mostly, it's a bigger MacBook Air. It's completely familiar, but aimed at the massive group of people who prioritize a bigger screen and don't want to spend $2,000 on their laptop. That's one way to raise interest among people considering a new machine.

The familiarity continues when you lift the lid. While the 15.3-inch display is a noticeable difference, the gist is the same. That includes the notch, which I still find a tad annoying (including on the MacBook Pro I own). Everything is just a bit bigger. The biggest visual change is the amount of free space on either side of the keyboard. On the MacBook Pro laptops, these have grilles for top-firing speakers, but here they're just metal.

Apple also used the exact same ports — and port placement — as on the 13-inch Air. That means Two Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 ports on the left side, along with MagSafe 3 for charging. On the right side, there's a lone 3.5 mm headphone jack.

On the one hand, I get it — this means the basic layout of a 15-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air are fundamentally the same. It wouldn't surprise me if Apple was using the same motherboard in both systems. But it's also a shame that with all of the extra space, Apple couldn't add an extra USB-C port on the right side.

The new Air is 3.3 pounds and measures 13.4 x 9.35 x 0.45 inches. It's a noticeable difference, particularly in weight, from the 13-incher, which is 2.7 pounds and is 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches. The thin profile doesn't hide the fact that this computer is indeed bigger. There's no real way to do that.

Microsoft's 15-incher, the Surface Laptop 5, is lighter at 2.86 pounds but is larger in every dimension (13.5 x 9.6 x 0.58 inches). The Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED, another shot at the ultralight crown, is more of a competitor to the 13-inch Air at 2.43 pounds and 0.59 inches thick.

MacBook Air 15-inch Specifications

Productivity Performance of the MacBook Air 15

With Apple's M2 processor (the same 8-core CPU in the 13-inch model), 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, the 15-inch Air is up for most office work, web browsing, video streaming and other basic tasks. It really only faced issues in prolonged, strenuous workloads. This makes sense — despite its name, the MacBook Air doesn't have any fans. Still, for the average person, this is plenty.

We found that the MacBook Air 15's performance was pretty similar to the 13-incher. That's not much of a surprise, considering they're using the same CPU. We also compared it to the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5, using a 12th Gen Intel Core i7-1265U, the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED with a more recent Intel Core i7-1355U and a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, which has an Intel Core i7-13700H and discrete graphics. (That last one is more of a fair comparison for the MacBook Pro, but let's see how this goes.)

On Geekbench 5, the 15-inch Air achieved a single-core score of 1,902 and a multi-core score of 8,932. These were very similar to the 13-inch Air's scores, and outperformed the U-series Intel chips in the Zenbook and Surface (both actively cooled) in both single and multi-core. The H-series chip in the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra won out only in multi-core, and that chip has 14 cores (6 more than the M2).

There was a surprise on our file transfer test. The 15-inch MacBook Air transferred 25GB of files at a rate of 1,342.38 MBps, beating the 13-inch Air (958.85 MBps) by a fair margin. Both the Zenbook S 13 OLED and Galaxy Book 3 Ultra were even faster.

Both Airs were more aligned on Handbrake, with the 15-inch transcoding a video from 4K to 1080p in 7 minutes and 46 seconds. The 13-incher took 7:52. Both were faster than the Zenbook S 13 (8:16) and Surface Laptop 5 (8:53), but more cores clearly helped the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra at 5:26.

We tested the 13-inch MacBook Air before we implemented the Xcode benchmark, so this is our first time testing it on the vanilla M2. The 15-inch Air compiled a codebase in 122 seconds. You'll see the lag between the M2 Pro, M2 Max and M2 Ultra in the chart, but jumping up to the MacBook Pro could save you about 40 seconds. Part of the difference may have been cooling. The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros have active fans, which lets the M2 Pro and M2 Max perform at higher speeds for longer.

Additionally, we used our Cinebench R23 stress test to see what happens when the MacBook Air 15 is tasked with a strenuous, constant load. Typically, we run this to see if chips throttle, but in the case of the Air, which doesn't have an active fan, we expect it to throttle. This was the case with the Air 13 as well, and it followed a similar performance code. Though the MacBook Air 15 didn't fall quite as far — perhaps the 15-inch chassis serves as a bigger heatsink.

The 15-inch Air started with a score of 8,675 and slowly dropped through the 8,000's and then 7,000's, ending in the low 7,000's (the lowest score in the test was 7,187, in the last of 20 runs). We can't log the M2's clock speeds (Cinebench estimates 3.5 GHz at single-core and 3.2 GHz at multi-core, but take that with a grain of salt), but we are able to log temperatures using TG Pro. The four efficiency cores ran at an average of 91.82 degrees Celsius, while the performance cores reached 91.2 degrees Celsius. 

The MacBook Air is up for some basic gaming, too. I played No Man's Sky, which uses Apple's native Metal rendering, on the laptop at 1920 x 1200 on the high preset. As I mined for minerals and other resources, the game typically ran between 70 and 80 frames per second, though it occasionally dipped briefly below 60 fps.

Display on the MacBook Air 15-inch

Apple's 15.3-inch "liquid retina" display has a 2880 x 1864 resolution and a 60 Hz refresh rate. It's the biggest display ever on a MacBook Air, even if the notch for the webcam cuts into it (the extra 64 pixels in height mean you're not losing any usable space).

I find the notch a bit annoying (I say this as the owner of a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro). On the bright side, it basically goes away when you watch video, which typically doesn't take up the whole screen. Some free apps like TopNotch black out the menu bar to attempt to hide it. I highly recommend dark mode.

That being said, the panel itself is pretty great. It's very bright and looks quite nice, but it can't match Windows-based competitors with OLED screens when it comes to color.

I used the MacBook Air 15 to watch the trailer for Oppenheimer. That trailer has plenty of dark shots of a bomb, as well as black and white high-contrast scenes. Both looked excellent on the Air, which has a very bright panel. The multiple red and orange explosion effects, though perhaps gratuitous on director Christopher Nolan's part, were striking compared to a number of blander desert scenes.

The 15-inch MacBook Air covers 111% of the sRGB color gamut and 78.9% of the wider DCI-P3 gamut. That's roughly on par with the 13-inch MacBook Air and just ahead of Microsoft's "PixelSense" screen on the Surface Laptop 5. Both the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED and Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, both with OLED panels, covered more of each gamut.

But the MacBooks won in brightness. The 15-incher reached 473 nits, a little short of the 489 nits on the 13-incher (it can get a bit brighter with HDR content). That's far  more luminous than the Zenbook, Surface, and Galaxy Book, none of which broke 400 nits (the Zenbook, in particular, lost out at 321 nits).

The MacBook Air comes with True Tone turned on in macOS, which uses sensors to adjust the screen to look more natural based on ambient light. (For our brightness and color testing, we turn that off.) In general, I think it works well, and that most people should leave it on, though if you're doing any photo editing or other work that involves exact colors, you’ll probably want to temporarily disable it.

If your setup uses external displays beyond the MacBook Air, you'll have to consider some limitations. The Air, according to Apple's website, can run both the laptop's screen at full resolution and "one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz". This was also a concern on the M1-based MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. I suspect that most people won't have an issue with this, but power users may be disappointed.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Air 15-inch

While I wish the MacBook Air's keyboard offered slightly more than 1 mm of travel, this keyboard is generally pretty great. It's effectively copied and pasted from the smaller model. That means you get the same full-height function keys, inverted T arrow keys, and Touch ID on the power button.

On the monkeytype typing test, I hit 120 words per minute on the MacBook Air, which is about as good as I do, with a 2% error rate. It was comfortable enough, but a little extra travel wouldn't have hurt.

The 5.9 x 3.6-inch touchpad is even bigger than on the 13-inch Air, and just as good. I've long said Apple's touchpads are the envy of the laptop industry. The touchpad here is smooth, feels premium, and the haptics are extremely convincing. Gestures in macOS, like using three fingers to show all my apps, or side swiping between virtual desktops always worked on the first try. I prefer to turn off "natural" scrolling in settings, but at least that's still an option.

Audio on the MacBook Air 15-Inch

One area where Apple did take more advantage of the bigger chassis is in the 15-inch MacBook Air's sound system. It has six speakers and a force-cancelling woofer, as opposed to just four speakers in the 13-inch Air.

For a laptop this thin, Apple has engineered something impressive. Maybe not as incredible as the MacBook Pro, but the 15-inch Air has bass. When I listened to Chvrches' "Over," the drums thumped on the low-end. There are gaming laptops more than an inch thick that barely accomplish that. It also produced what sounded like louder volume to my ear than the 13-incher, all with clear vocals and an even mix with lots of synths.

If you're fully entrenched in Apple's ecosystem and wear AirPods, the MacBook Air supports spatial audio, including dynamic head tracking on certain AirPods models.

Upgradeability of the MacBook Air 15-inch

Just because Apple has four screws on the bottom of the MacBook Air doesn't mean there's much you can do if you were to open the lid. First of all, these are pentalobe screws, and most people don't have those kinds of screwdrivers. If anything, that may be a warning sign.

If you were to get in, you wouldn't be able to fix much, anyway. Apple's M2 is a system on a chip, with the RAM on the package. Apple solders its SSDs to the motherboard, so what you configure the laptop with at purchase is what you'll have forever. Whatever specs you buy the MacBook Air with, you are locked into until it's time to replace it.

As of this writing, the 15-inch MacBook Air isn't on the Self Service Repair site, but by the time you're reading this that may change, as other Apple Silicon Macs have made their way there. I imagine most people will go to the Genius Bar for any hardware issues.

Battery Life on the MacBook Air 15-inch

The M2 chip's efficiency is on full-display when it comes to battery life. On our test, the 15-inch MacBook Air lasted 14 hours and 48 minutes while streaming video, browsing websites, and running simple OpenGL tests.

It's hard to complain about just under 15 hours of battery life, but considering Apple packed a 66.5 watt-hour battery into this chassis, which is an upgrade from the 52.6 WHr cell in the 13-inch Air that ran for 14:06 on our test, I would have loved to see a bit more improvement.

Still, the bigger Air beats Windows laptops down the chart. The closest was the Zenbook S 13 OLED at 11:02, while the Surface Laptop 5 and Galaxy Book 3 Ultra both lasted just over 9 hours.

Heat on the MacBook Air 15-inch

To see how hot laptops get while under a stressful load, we take skin temperatures on ultrabooks while running our Cinebench R23 stress test. The MacBook Air 15 got quite warm by the end of this test, though not unusably so. This laptop is an interesting candidate for this test because it's not actively cooled like the MacBook Pro line (or most Windows laptops).

During the test, the center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, reached 41.9 degrees Celsius (107.42 degrees Fahrenheit), which is noticeably toasty. The touchpad, however, was far cooler.

On the bottom of the laptop, the hottest point reached 47.9 Celsius (118.22 F). While it won't get this hot if you're just listening to music or checking your email, if you push your MacBook Air, you may want to use it on a desk.

Webcam on the MacBook Air 15-inch

The benefit to the Apple's notch is that it houses a really good 1080p webcam. At my desk, my eyes appeared the perfect shade of blue, in contrast to the navy shirt I was wearing. I could see every hair on my head, and the camera wasn't phased by some fluorescent lighting in our office, nor some nearby open windows.

What Apple doesn't offer in its camera is facial recognition. Many high-end Windows PCs use infrared cameras to let you log in with your face. And while Apple has Face ID on its phones, that hasn't come to the laptops yet, despite the notch.

Software and Warranty on the MacBook Air 15-inch

We tested the 15-inch MacBook Air running macOS Ventura (version 13), which launched in October 2022. This is the same OS we tested on the Mac Studio and on the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros. The laptop will be eligible for an update to macOS Sonoma in the fall.

Apple's macOS comes with lots of software, but little bloat. You get a mail client, Messages (great for sharing your texts and iMessages with a phone or iPad), Safari web browser, Maps, FaceTime, Notes, Reminders, and more. Apple has its own services preinstalled, with apps for Apple TV, Apple News, Apple Music, and podcasts. A basic productivity suite, including Numbers, Keynote, iMovie, and Pages also comes free.

At this point in Apple Silicon's life cycle, a significant number of apps now offer native versions for M1 and M2 chips, or use universal binaries to work on both Apple SIlicon and Intel processors. If you try to run something that doesn't use one of those two solutions, you'll be prompted to install Rosetta 2, which can translate Intel x86 instructions.

The MacBook Air comes with a 1-year warranty. AppleCare+ costs $79.99 annually until cancelled, or $229 for a 3-year plan.

MacBook Air 15-inch Configurations

Our review unit of the 15-inch MacBook Air came with an M2 system on a chip boasting 8 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores, 16GB of unified memory, a 512GB SSD and the "midnight" dark blue colorway. This configuration is available by customizing the Mac on Apple's website.

The base model has the same M2 chip (Apple doesn't cut CPU or GPU cores on the base model 15-inch), with 256GB of SSD storage and 8GB of memory for $1,299. The other retail model is $1,499 with 512GB of storage and 8GB of RAM.

The MacBook Air tops out at 24GB of memory ($400 on top of the base price) and 2TB of storage ($600 on top of the base price, which is egregious with the price of SSDs these days.)

By default, Apple ships the MacBook Air with a 35W USB-C power adapter with two ports. If you use both ports, however, the devices split the wattage, so your Mac will charge more slowly. For example, with a Mac and either an iPhone or iPad connected, both devices get up to 17.5 watts. With a Mac and AirPods, the Mac will get up to 27.5W while the headphones go up to 7.5W. In the configurator, you can opt for a 70W USB-C adapter with one port that will let you fast-charge your Mac.

Bottom Line

If you want a MacBook Air, want a bigger machine than its traditional 13-inch offering, and don't need the power of a MacBook Pro, Apple is aiming the 15-inch MacBook Air squarely at you. It feels just like using the smaller machine, except with a bigger display, some more weight, and better speakers.

I do wish that Apple took a bit more advantage of the extra room and added an extra port or two. That seems like a missed opportunity. And while I wish the bigger battery added even more longevity than it does, it's hard to complain when your machine is running over 14 hours on a charge. 

Many 15-inch Windows laptops in this price range tend to add discrete GPUs, like the Dell XPS 15 or Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra. That sometimes makes for thicker chassis than what Apple is going for here. And those machines definitely aren't fanless. For a similar price, you can get a 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 and put it under a fan, but you won't get the design made for Apple Silicon.

So for those who want something simple, quiet, and with a big screen, the MacBook Air 15-inch is exactly what Apple promised: the MacBook Air, but bigger. It’s not likely to win over many new converts, but will likely make a lot previous Air owners very happy.

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Apple announced the new Mac Pro powered by its M2 Ultra processor at WWDC23. It launched in stores this week, and there's already a bug in the wild. In a support document, Apple disclosed a software bug with the Mac Pro where internal SATA drives would be disconnected when the computer goes to sleep. Apple has a fix on the way, but it won't arrive until the next macOS update.

The 2023 Mac Pro starts with 1TB of solid-state storage on the $6,999 base model. However, they can spec the machine for up to 2TB, 4TB, or 8TB for an added premium when purchasing the Mac Pro from Apple's website, or they can purchase upgrade kits directly from Apple. They don't come cheap, though. The 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB kits retail for $1,000, $1,600, and $2,800, respectively. These are not off-the-shelf SSDs (they actually work more like NAND and connect to the controller on the M2 Ultra) and can be pricey. Luckily, the device provides two standard SATA III ports, opening the doors for mainstream secondary storage options. The Promise Pegasus J2i 8TB Internal Storage Enclosure, which sells for $400, allows consumers to use conventional SATA hard drives or SSDs that are more budget-friendly. That's precisely where Apple found the nasty bug.

When owners wake their Mac Pro from sleep, they may be greeted by a "disk not ejected properly" window as if the SATA drive is ejected like a flash drive. The reason for the prompt is that some hard drive models would automatically disconnect from the device when the Mac Pro goes to sleep. However, Apple didn't provide a list of the affected drive models, only listing that it happens to "certain models of internal SATA drives". The issue can occur whether the Mac Pro enters sleep mode automatically or when consumers manually put the device to sleep.

Apple's current stopgap solution is for users to restart their systems when the problem occurs. It is also recommending that Mac Pro owners disable sleep mode. The option is called "Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off," and is located in the advanced section of the Displays options under System Settings. In other words, you're better off never going to sleep, or shutting your Mac down entirely, to prevent the issue.

Fortunately, it's not a hardware issue. The problem resides on a software level, which Apple can mitigate through a macOS update. Apple will include the fix in the next macOS update for Ventura (probably macOS 13.4.1) but didn't provide a specific ETA. Until then, Mac Pro owners may want to avoid sleep mode if they have incorporated hard drives into the system.

This issue is particularly interesting because the new Mac Pro is the first time Apple is allowing user-added storage inside a system since Apple silicon released for Mac. (It's not available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini, or Mac Studio). 

Earlier this week at WWDC, Apple made several hardware announcements related to its Mac platform. The company launched the all-new 15-inch MacBook Air along with a Mac Studio and Mac Pro powered by M2 Ultra processors. However, the product that overshadowed the entire keynote was undoubtedly the Vision Pro extended reality headset.

We learned a lot about the headset, including its impressive dual Micro-OLED displays featuring a collective 23 million pixels. Each eye has access to over 4K resolution, resulting in a crystal-clear picture with no hint of pixels in view, according to people that had hands-on time with the headset. Now, a developer session from Apple's developer conference reveals that the Vision Pro's displays have a refresh rate of "usually 90 frames per second."

For reference, non-pro MacBooks, iPhones and iPads have a refresh rate of 60 Hz, while the Pro variants of each feature a 120 Hz refresh rate. The 90 Hz refresh rate of the Vision Pro puts it right in the middle. The Vision Pro doesn't meet the 120 Hz threshold, so it doesn't carry the ProMotion label attached to devices such as the iPhone 14 Pro, iPad Pro, and 16-inch MacBook Pro.

In the developer session entitled "Deliver video content for spatial experiences," the presenter also revealed that the 90 Hz refresh rate is not static. Apple says a maximum refresh rate of 96 Hz "may be used automatically" while playing 24 fps video content.

In addition to the high-tech displays, the Vision Pro is powered by a 5nm M2 processor in conjunction with an R1 co-processor tasked with wrangling the data from a dozen cameras, six microphones and five sensors.

Apple's Vision Pro is expected to launch in 2024 with a price tag of $3,499. That price puts it out of reach for most consumers, but many are hopeful that subsequent generations can hit more palatable price points, allowing for broader adoption. As my colleague Andrew E. Freedman wrote, "I firmly see this announcement as a first step in building the future, with Apple's dedicated third-party developers making experiences that will germinate here, but become invaluable down the line."

In 2020, as Apple introduced the M1 system on a chip, the company said it would switch away from Intel over two years. Here in 2023, it took a bit longer than Apple forecasted, but with the new Mac Pro with M2 Ultra, Apple has every single one of its computers on its own SoCs. I'm not sure I've ever seen the company this confident about the Mac.

The Mac Pro is an odd duck. Of Apple's computers, it's far from the most popular among consumers, but it's extremely important to creatives who need lots of power and are willing to spend the money for it. As the most powerful, flexible system in Apple's stack, it sets a tone for the rest of the line. Without Intel, it feels as if Apple can now act without restraint.

At WWDC in Cupertino, Apple has the Mac Pro out in its hands-on area with no cooler. That's right — Apple had a chip shot ready for anyone with a camera. M2 Ultra, its most powerful chip ever, was getting a bit of a flex. (Let us not forget, the more attainable Mac Studio also has M2 Ultra. There are two shapes in which to get Apple's most powerful processor).

The lineup is now as follows:

M1 Macs

• 13-inch MacBook Air (entry level)
• iMac (24-inch)

M2 Macs

• Mac Mini (M2, M2 Pro)
• 13-inch MacBook Air
• 15-inch MacBook Air
• 13-inch MacBook Pro
• 14-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Pro, M2 Max)
• 16-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Max)
• Mac Pro (M2 Max, M2 Ultra)

Intel Macs

• Nothing to see here!

When will Apple upgrade the M1 models? Whenever it damn well pleases. That's kind of the point. Apple now controls not just the system, but the chip. Apple may sell systems, but it builds chips to power them. The two are intertwined, whether it's a laptop or a desktop.

And that's before considering the other places the M-series chips have popped up, including the iPad Air with M1 and iPad Pro with M2. Apple's Vision Pro will be powered by an M2 chip in combination with its new R1.

But we're on the Mac. Apple could update any of these systems whenever it wants. It can also hold one on an older process node as long as it needs, whether because that's what it thinks its customers want, or because that's what the supply chain allows. It makes that decision for itself.

Everyone I spoke to at Apple seemed thrilled to be over the hump. But now, it has to truly beat Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and others at the game. And if those companies outdo Apple, it has no one else to point the finger at.

Apple is trying its best here. The company can claim that you can game on its machines. I've tried it. Resident Evil Village runs great. Stray and No Man's Sky are here. Hideo Kojima showed up in the WWDC livestream to announce that Death Stranding: Director's Cut is coming to Mac. Apple is doing some heavy lifting to get games on its platform.

And Apple is also interweaving the Mac with the iPhone and iPad more than ever before with macOS Sonoma. Sure, I had widgets when I had a Mac running Mac OS X Leopard, but sharing between these devices is an acknowledgment that the Mac is an integral part of workflows that also include iPhones. And that's a level of interoperability other ecosystems can't match, though I appreciate Intel and Microsoft trying to get iPhone support in, they can't match Apple on making your phone and PC workspaces that are tied together.

Heck, using the Mac is a showcase feature of the Vision Pro. Want the most power? Use your Mac on an AR/VR headset. Who said the traditional computer is going away?

And with the Mac Pro, we see Apple can still be flexible, allowing for PCIe Gen 4 cards for I/O, storage, audio and more, even if graphics are no longer supported.

WWDC, as a developer conference, pushed hard on the Macs for Pros, like the Studio and the Pro, the company's two most expensive and most powerful machines. But the 15-inch MacBook Air is a version of Apple's best-selling notebooks. In fact, it's an addition to the MacBook line, which has way more sizes and models than Apple has offered in recent memory.

Some Apple fans may be upset to see that the 24-inch iMac is still on M1, or that a 27-inch model never came back. I feel that. But that's also the type of decision that Apple has more power to make now, more than ever. Short of fabbing its own chips, Apple has all of the power of what goes into a system, and when. And that means it can design a system around any chip in its arsenal.

For many years, I wondered if the Mac was a second thought, sitting in line behind the iPhone and the iPad. From WWDC, it's extensively clear that's not the case. With Apple using its own silicon across platforms, with interoperability on the hardware and software level, the Mac feels like a key player at Apple again.

Today at WWDC, Apple announced the latest update to its desktop/laptop operating system, and it’s called macOS Sonoma. The update brings features introduced with iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, including an upgraded Messages app and new predictive autocorrect functionality. But perhaps the biggest announcement relates to gaming.

Apple says that Apple Silicon made it possible to bring new gaming experiences to the Mac platform. With macOS Sonoma, there’s a new Game Mode that prioritizes CPU and GPU usage for your games to provide more consistent frame rates. The Bluetooth sampling rate has been doubled to help improve support for PlayStation and Xbox controllers. 

A new Gaming Porting Toolkit for developer is designed to help significantly reduce the amount of time required to port games from the PC to Mac. More specifically, a “simpler conversion process” is included for shaders and graphics code in the Metal API. 

To put this new gaming focus into perspective, Metal Gear Solid auteur Hideo Kojima announced on the stream that hs is bringing Death Stranding: Director’s Cut to macOS later this year. The developer is also actively working to bring future titles to macOS. 

Apple is focusing on infusing macOS Sonoma with tools to improve your productivity. Stage Manager has been given a makeover to improve upon its somewhat shaky start in previous macOS versions by making it easier and faster to move between apps (and windows). Video overlay allows you to add AR effects to video, like when sharing your screen. These features are available in all conferencing apps, like Zoom, Teams, etc. You can now share passwords and passkeys to a person or a group from your iCloud keychain. Apple says that this feature is end-to-end encrypted for security.

Safari gains a new Profiles feature that allows you to have different profiles with separate favorites, cookies and extensions (among other settings).

Widgets were previously only available in the Notification Center. Now, you can break them out and place them on your desktop where you wish. (In a way, it is reminiscent of OS X from the early 2000's). For example, you could have Weather and Stocks permanently set on your desktop at all times; they then fade slightly from view when you focus on a new app window. 

MacOS Sonoma arrives this fall, when it will leverage all of the hardware capabilities of the new 15-inch MacBook Air, M2 Ultra Mac Studio and M2 Ultra Mac Pro.

The MacBook Air is getting bigger. At its 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple announced a 15-inch model, which is the largest screen ever on one of the most popular laptop lines. It will start at $1,299 for consumers, or $1,199 for education customers. It will be available next week.

Apple is powering the new model with its M2 chip (8-core CPU, 10-core GPU), the same one found in the 13-inch MacBook Air released last year.

But the new model's 15.3-inch screen, besides being larger than the 13.6-inch screen on the existing laptop, still uses LCD technology (it's rated at 500 nits). It has a lower resolution than the 14-inch MacBook Pro, at 2880 x 1864. Much of the design is similar to the 13-inch Air, including its two Thunderbolt 4 ports over USB Type-C, MagSafe 3 magnetic charging, and flat edges. If you want more ports, you'll have to consider the MacBook Pro.

The 15-inch Air also gets the same 1080p webcam in a notch at the top of the display. It's 3.3 pounds, 11.5 mm thick and will come in midnight, starlight, silver and space gray, just like the 13-incher. It also has six speakers, and Apple is promising 18 hours of battery life from the 11.5mm-thick laptop.

In my brief hands-on time with the new MacBook Air, it felt very similar to the 13-inch one. It was too loud to test the speakers, but indeed, the screen is bigger. The port placement is the same, the keyboard is the same, but the chassis is bigger. If you like a big screen but want something thinner. The screen appeared of similar quality to the 13-inch model, but we'll have to see in longer-term testing how that plays out.

Apple claims the new Air twice as fast as Windows 15-inchers, though that's not a very specific comparison.

The new 15-inch MacBook Air will ship with macOS Ventura, but it will be compatible with macOS Sonoma, coming this fall.

At one point, Apple had a smaller MacBook Air, with an 11.6-inch version that was introduced in 2010 and sold through 2016. With the 15-inch Air, Apple now has MacBooks in 13, 14, 15, and 16-inch sizes (13 and 15-inch Airs, and 13, 14 and 16-inch Pros).

The 13-inch MacBook Air is taking a price cut to $1,099, while the M1 option is staying at $999.

Updated: June 5, 4:13 PT with hands-on thoughts.

For several years now, Asus' Zenbook ultraportable line has largely been a more affordable but capable alternative to some of the best ultraportables, like Dell's XPS 13 or HP's Dragonflys. In recent years, Asus has aggressively shifted to OLED screens, which helped the line stand out a bit more. But with its 2023 model, the Zenbook S 13 OLED (UX5304), Asus seems to be attempting to go from an also-ran to a leader in terms of design, while also maintaining its value angle – at least for those who can make use of its ample specs.

With an Intel 13th Gen Core i7-1355U processor, 1TB SSD and an impressive 32GB of RAM as standard, along with a 13.3-inch 2880 x 1800 OLED display, the Zenbook S 13 brings impressive specs for its $1,399 price. And while that's more than the $1,099 starting price of last year's model, it's also 0.23 pounds lighter (2.2 pounds) and thinner (0.43 inches) than its predecessor while delivering both Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports and a still-handy USB-A port. While its battery life wasn't better than the MacBook Air or the most recent XPS 13, the Zenbook did last over 10 hours in our testing, which is solid for something this thin and light.

But while all of that sounds (and indeed is) quite impressive, there are some downsides to the Zenbook S 13. For starters, the laptop ships with some nagging bloatware (McAfee is the main culprit). And performance in CPU-heavy long-term tasks definitely suffers as a result of the limited cooling afforded by the laptop's stylishly slim design. So it's better suited to light and bursty computing tasks.

It's also important to note we had a major issue with our first review unit. Near the end of our 30-minute Cinebench stress test, the display suddenly went permanently black, refusing to display anything, while every other aspect of the laptop functioned normally. We were worried that heat may have caused this issue, but Asus sent us another unit, which we put through the same stress test – three times in a row just to be sure – and the display on that unit continued to function perfectly. Considering no one else who reviewed this laptop seems to have suffered a screen failure, and we couldn't find any user reviews complaining of the same problem, it seems likely that our first unit was just faulty.

Design of the Asus Zenbook S 13

Asus has gone all-out with the design of its latest Zenbook, producing one of the edgiest and prettiest ultrabooks I've seen in years. The company is also keen to call out its use of recycled metals and plastics in the Zenbook S 13. But while those moves are important, it's the striking silver lines running through the "plasma ceramic aluminum" lid that grabbed me first. And when you open that lid, you're met with a gorgeous 2880 x 1800-resolution OLED screen rated at 550 nits. As we'll see later in testing, the display is also great at displaying vivid colors.

The lid material feels like a mix between smooth stone and metal, and it resists fingerprints and smudges better than most metal-clad laptops.

The company says that CNC machining into the lid material has allowed for a thinner lid overall. I measured it at around 3mm thick, and I was surprised at how little flex there was considering the lid looks on close inspection like a piece of metal with a sheet of glass attached to it.

And I generally don't place too much importance on absolute thinness. But it's hard not to be impressed by the laptop's 0.42-inch profile – especially when you realize Asus managed to include a USB-A port on the right edge, alongside an audio combo jack. On the other side is a full-size HDMI port, along with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C ports. Any company that claims there isn't space for full-size ports or an audio jack in a slim laptop is officially on notice.

Surprisingly, the Zenbook S 13's hinge also opens to nearly 180 degrees, which wasn't something I was expecting. As with previous models, the hinge also lifts the rear of the laptop off the surface, helping improve airflow.

All that said, Asus certainly ins't alone in the extremely thin and light laptop space. HP's Elite Dragonfly G3 weighs the same 2.2 pounds and is slightly thicker at 0.64 inches. The latest XPS 13 is slightly heavier at 2.59 pounds, but is thinner than the Dragonfly (and slightly thicker than the Asus) at 0.55 inches. Apple's MacBook Air continues to be the institutional benchmark that slim laptops are measured against, and at 0.44 inches thick, the latest M2 MacBook Air is basically the same thickness as the Zenbook, but at 2.7 pounds, it's noticeably heavier.

Keep in mind, though, that all of the above ultralight competition is more expensive than the Zenbook S 13's $1,399, and most of it much more expensive when similarly equipped with the 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD that comes standard in the sole U.S. configuration of the Zenbook. Apple's Air doesn't even offer a 32GB option, but a 24GB/1TB configuration sells for $2,099.

Asus Zenbook S 13 Specifications

Productivity Performance of the Asus Zenbook S 13

Looking at specs alone, the Zenbook S 13 seems quite competitive, with an Intel Core i7-1355U processor, a 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD and an impressive 32GB of RAM as standard. (For some odd reason, the Canadian version of the Zenbook only gets 16GB of RAM.) But at just 0.43 inches thick, I had a strong suspicion that limited space for cooling hardware would lead to lesser performance.

On Geekbench 5, things didn't look too bad for the Zenbook. Its single-core score of 1,828 was actually better than the Lenovo Yoga 7i, which shares the same processor. But the Zenbook's multi-core score of 7,494 lagged behind the Yoga's 8,663. And the latest MacBook Air led the pack on both fronts, with a single-core score of 1,932 and a multi-core result of 8,919.

Things looked worse for the Zenbook on our Handbrake video transcoding test. It took Asus' laptop 11 minutes and 11 seconds to transcode our 4K test video to 1080p. The Air again floated to victory here, taking just 7:52 to finish the same test. And the last-generation Dell XPS 13 was far behind at 16:53. But the Lenovo Yoga 7i with the same CPU as the Zenbook finished in 10:30, 41 seconds faster than the Asus.

The Zenbook managed to come out ahead in our 25GB file transfer test, moving our batch of test files at an impressive rate of 1,5560 MBps. The Yoga 7i wasn't too far behind at 1,380 MBps, but both the XPS 13 and Apple's Air were much slower, slipping below 1000 MBps.

To really stress the Zenbook S 13, we put it through 20 runs of Cinebench R23, and here is where we truly saw the downsides of the laptop's slim design – in multiple ways. The Zenbook started at a high of 6,497, dropped to 5,520 on run two, then stayed at or above 5,600 for the rest of its runs. The fans were steady and constant during this test, doing their best to dump heat from the slim chassis. The CPU's performance cores ran at an average of 2.53 GHz, while the efficiency cores averaged 1.86 GHz. The processor ran at an average temperature of 72.04 degrees Celsius.

That might not sound so bad, but the Yoga 7i, with the same CPU, started off much higher at 9,928 on Cinebench R23, and settled in around the 8,000 mark – much higher than the 5,600 range of the Zenbook. The Yoga's cores also ran significantly faster, and the CPU temperature was surprisingly cooler, at less than 67 degrees Celsius, compared to just over 72 C for the Zenbook.

Display on the Asus Zenbook S 13

When it's actually working, there's a lot to like about Zenbook S 13's 2880 x 1800-resolution OLED display. The resolution is a nice middle ground between 1080p and the pixel overkill that is 4K on a compact laptop display. The screen is eye-catchingly vivid, with saturated colors and deep blacks, and the brightness, while not the best we've seen, should be more than sufficient for most people.

When I watched the trailer for Roger Waters' "This Is Not a Drill - Live From Prague" concert film, the blacks of the screen were deeper than when I saw the show in real life at Madison Square Garden last summer. And the dramatic red lighting and bright white graphics really brought back the feeling of the concert as I remembered it – just with fewer obnoxiously drunk middle-aged concertgoers.

Most users should be quite happy with this display. It's a huge step up in color and contrast from any standard laptop LCD panel. Just know that it isn't the brightest of screens, so you may want to avoid trying to work in direct sunlight.

Asus' OLED panel covers 113% of the sRGB color gamut and 80% of the larger DCI-P3 space. That makes it better at color reproduction than the MacBook Air and Dell's XPS 13, and it's leagues ahead of the Lenovo Yoga 7i's panel.

Asus' screen, however, only beat the dim screen of the Yoga 7i in our testing, delivering 373 nits. The M2 MacBook Air was the leader in brightness, at 489 nits, while the XPS 13 wasn't far behind at 460.

That said, I never found myself wanting for more screen brightness when using the Zenbook S 13 – at least until the display on our first unit abruptly failed during our stress testing. Again, the second unit didn't suffer the same issue, so it's likely our first unit was defective.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Asus Zenbook S 13

For a laptop this thin, the Zenbook S 13's keyboard feels surprisingly good. Not amazing, mind you; key travel is far from luxurious and the top row and bottom arrow keys are tiny thanks to the laptop's compact frame. But I used it to write large portions of this review and didn't have major productivity or comfort complaints.

The power button is integrated into the keyboard, which I don't generally find ideal. But its placement to the left of the delete key in the upper-right corner meant I never hit it accidentally. And even if I did, it's a bit stiffer than the regular keys around it, so I don't see it being a problem for most people.

The touchpad (which Asus feels the need to brand as ErgoSense) is also pleasant to use and pleasingly roomy at 6 inches, diagonally. It features a physical click that doesn't feel hollow or cheap. Asus says its 0.23 mm click depth is "1.44x longer than the previous model."

Given that the click here doesn't feel particularly deep, it sounds like I would not have loved the touchpad on the previous Zenbook. I had no issues with this touchpad though. Multi-touch gestures also worked well. If only I could remember to use these gestures when I'm not reviewing a laptop.

Audio on the Asus Zenbook S 13

The pair of speakers on the Zenbook S 13 are good – for a laptop that's less than half an inch thick. When I listened to IAMX's latest album, "Fault Lines," there was a decent amount of volume with the laptop turned all the way up. And even when cranked, I didn't notice any distortion in Chris Corner's alternating moans and shouty falsetto. But as is often the case with thin laptops (and plenty of not-so-thin ones, too), there wasn't much in the way of discernable bass.

The laptop comes with Dolby Atmos software, which has presets like Detailed, Balanced and Warm, as well as others for games and movies. I tried playing with them to eke out more low-end but always came back to the default Balanced setting.

In short, the sound output on the S 13 offers no major complaints for a super-slim and light laptop, but it's not the best. HP's Elite Dragonfly G3 offers louder and punchier speakers in a similar weight class. But you'll generally have to spend a lot more for that laptop. A configuration with a similar component layout as the Zenbook S 13 sells for around $2,000.

Upgradability of the Asus Zenbook S 13

Provided you have the small Torx bit that's required, getting inside the Zenbook S 13 is surprisingly easy. After removing 11 screws on the bottom of the laptop (which come in two lengths, so don't mix them up when screwing them back into the laptop), the bottom lifts off with relative ease.

Inside the slim laptop though, there isn't much to do other than possibly upgrade the M.2 SSD that lives under a thermal pad on the left in the image above. The Micron RAM you can see up above the CPU is soldered on. And about two-thirds of the laptop's internal space is taken up by the 63 WsHr battery.

Battery Life on the Asus Zenbook S 13

I wasn't sure where the Zenbook's battery life would land, given that it's one of the thinnest laptops available and it also has a fairly high-resolution OLED display. But its showing of 10 hours and 45 minutes on our battery test (which simulates browsing the web, streams video and runs light graphics tests with the display set to 150 nits of brightness) was more than I expected.

That said, that 10:45 result was more than an hour behind its closest competitor here, the Lenovo Yoga 7i, which lasted 12:03. And Apple's MacBook Air topped 14 hours on the same test. So in short, battery life on the Zenbook is solid, but behind the pack of competing ultra-light laptops.

Heat on the Asus Zenbook S 13

As is somewhat to be expected on a laptop this thin, Asus' latest Zenbook gets toasty under prolonged load. To see how hot it gets under stress, we measured the temperature while running our Cinebench R23 stress test.

During the 20-run test, the keyboard got its warmest in the area of the T, Y, and U keys (above where the CPU sits), topping out at 114.2 degrees Fahrenheit (45.67 Celsius). The touchpad stayed comparatively cool, hitting 84 degrees Fahrenheit (28.89 Celsius). The bottom of the laptop was even warmer, hitting 122.7 degrees Fahrenheit ( 50.39 Celsius). But that hot point was near the center rear, up under the rubber foot that runs the device's width. The areas around the edge and front of the laptop's bottom, where you're likely to be holding it, were much cooler.

Webcam on the Asus Zenbook S 13

You won't find any fancy high-resolution webcam on the Zenbook S 13, but the 1080p sensor that sits above the screen gets the job done without eliciting major complaints from me. There's enough resolution that I could make out the macabre detail on my Skinny Puppy shirt, and colors were accurate. Sunlight streaming in from the windows behind me while I wrote this was rendered as big washed-out blobs of white light. But that didn't affect the sharp focus on my face, so long as I had the laptop within typing distance in front of me.

There are also IR sensors for using Windows Hello, which worked well, even after the display on our unit stopped functioning. In short, this isn't the best webcam that I've seen on a laptop, but it's at least a step or two above "good enough" and should get you through out-of-office work meetings just fine.

Software and Warranty on the Asus Zenbook S 13

Aside from the screen deciding to stop working near the end of our testing, by far the worst thing about the Zenbook S 13 is how much gunk Asus pre-loads onto its premium portable. Beyond the usual Windows 11 shortcuts in the Start menu, there's a McAfee popup that keeps nagging you in the lower-right corner, Asus' GlideX app for "running mobile apps on a larger screen," ScreenXpert for moving and grouping apps across multiple screens, and the MyAsus app, which links you to customer support and customization options.

MyAsus also persistently nags you to lot into your Asus account, including on the splash page. And there's a whole section in the app called Asus Promotion, which mostly just offers trials of things like McAfee (again), NordVPN and Adobe programs, which of course are all subscription services that will start charging you (and presumably kick back some of that to Asus) if you forget to cancel.

The Edge browser is also cluttered with a collection of links to McAfee (yes, again) and the Asus Software Portal, which again features a prominent link to McAfee. It's not that most of this stuff isn't fairly easy to uninstall, but for a laptop that costs $1,400, the Zenbook S 13's out-of-the-box environment feels a lot more freemium than premium.

Bottom Line

I really wanted to like the Zenbook S 13 OLED, and for bits of time while testing and writing this review, I did. The physical design is striking; the laptop at least feels premium and well-built; and the input devices, battery life, and ports don't sacrifice too much for a laptop that's among the thinnest and lightest available. Plus, I love that 32GB of RAM and a fast 1TB SSD come standard (at least in the U.S., sorry Canada). Even the price, while high for most people at $1,399, is actually quite low for those specs.

But nagging software that seems always to be trying to sell you something mars the overall experience. And the cooling that Asus was able to wedge into the laptop's skinny 0.43-inch frame isn't really up to the task of keeping the laptop's performance up during CPU-heavy tasks that take more than a few seconds. And during our half-hour Cinebench stress test, the laptop got warmer than any ultraportable we've tested lately.

If you like the Zenbook's design and need something with 32GB of RAM because you don't like closing programs or browser tasks, the Zenbook S 13 is a decent option. But if you want to actually use the RAM and the Core i7 CPU for things like video editing or other time-consuming compute tasks, while still sticking with a slim, lightweight design, also consider HP's Elite Dragonfly G3 or maybe an XPS 13. Those laptops will cost more with similar components, but their thermal design is better suited to heavier workloads.

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Apple's transition to its own-designed M-series silicon caused shockwaves throughout the industry that are still reverberating. As it prepares to debut its latest crop of Macs with M2 chips, a highly reputable insider has shared some of the key specs of the first Apple M3 chip, which is claimed to be already in testing. 

Based on his insider sources, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg outlines the upcoming Apple M3 Pro SoC as offering: 12 CPU cores, 18 graphics cores, and 36GB of onboard RAM. The M3 SoC is also claimed to be the first Apple Silicon M-series chip built at 3nm.

According to the report, the first tantalizing glimpses of the Apple M3 Pro have emerged because developers are testing systems based upon this new silicon for third-party app compatibility. This is one of the most common and reliable ways we get a bead on Apple's pre-release processors.

An Apple App Store developer shared their insider info with Gurman regarding what is thought to be the "the base-level version of what will be the M3 Pro coming next year." Remember, that Apple will be likely creating several variants of the M3, just like it did with the prior series, so later we will cover speculation about what an M3 Max and Ultra SoCs could deliver.

Focusing first upon the Apple M3 Pro, Bloomberg's sources indicate that of the 12 CPU cores there will be six high-performance cores (P-cores), accompanied by six power-efficient cores (E-cores). The CPU cores will be accompanied by 18 GPU cores, and 36GB of RAM. 

These numbers represent improvements across the board, but we don't know about any architectural improvements which will undoubtedly be present in the M3 chips. Additionally, the new TSMC N3 process should provide some clock / efficiency benefits, in addition to allowing Apple to pump up the silicon density / core counts in the same chip sizes.

* = pre-launch data from Bloomberg sources

Gurman reckons that the first Apple Macs with M3 chips will arrive around late 2023 / early 2024. His sources say that among the first machines getting this 3nm silicon upgrade will be "M3-based iMacs, high-end and low-end MacBook Pros, and MacBook Air."

We've covered the leaks, and are now moving onto unashamed speculation, so please get your salt shaker ready. Extrapolating the M3 Pro to the 'usual' Max and Ultra SKUs might mean that an M3 Max will sport up to 14 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, and the M3 Ultra coming with up to 28 CPU cores and over 80 GPU cores.

Of course, Apple hopes the arrival of M3 silicon and new Macs will reanimate lack luster sales. The Apple M2 hasn't been inspirational, and Bloomberg highlights the recent 31% slide in Mac sales as testament to this. However, Apple had done comparatively well in the face of the general macroeconomic malaise until recently. Upgraders skipping a gen look like they will get a lot more cores for the money, more capacious base memory, as well as what could be some tasty architectural tweaks delivered with the M3 generation.

To get a measure of the newest current cream of the crop Apple Macs, please check out our review of the Apple MacBook Pro (2023) with M2 Pro and M2 Max processor options.

GPD has started a crowdfunding campaign to design and build the world's first external graphics processing system with AMD's Radeon RX 7600M XT GPU inside with OCuLink and USB4 interfaces to connect to its host, reports Notebookcheck. The unit promises to be one of the industry's smallest eGFX solutions if it gets developed and hits the market.

Standing at dimensions of 225 x 111 x 29.8 mm, the GPD G1 claims to be the world's smallest external GPU with laptop dock features. The unit packs AMD's Radeon RX 7600M XT notebook GPU with 2048 stream processors, 32MB Infinity Cache, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and promises to offer up to 21.4 FP32 TFLOPS, which is in line with performance of desktop Radeon RX 6650 XT or Radeon RX 6700, according to Droix.co.uk, though only independent tests will reveal its actual capabilities. 

The unit offers a range of ports, including two DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.1, an SD 4.0 card reader, three USB 3.2 Type-A, one OCuLink (SFF-8612) connector, and one USB 4 (Type-C) port. The box packs a tiny 240W GaN power supply, so it is as small as it is with no extra power bricks and weighs only 0.92 kilograms.

Perhaps the most mysterious part about the GPD G1 are its interfaces. On the one hand, it has a USB4 interface that is ubiquitous since it is compatible with loads of PCs that are already in use and have Thunderbolt or USB4 ports. Meanwhile, it also has an OCuLink connector, which offers similar capabilities, but is barely found on any laptops. In fact, when connected using an OCuLink cable, the GPD G1 even disables USB Type-A ports and the SD slot since OCuLink is only meant to support the PCIe protocol. Meanwhile, USB4 both provides higher bandwidth and better features, so most of GPD G1 users will likely take advantage of this connection.

The OCuLink is a cable interface for four PCIe 3.0 lanes and has a maximum bandwidth of 32 GT/s, which is in line with Thunderbolt 3/4 and USB 4. Meanwhile, unlike the said interfaces, OCuLink uses SFF-8612 and SFF-8611 connectors that are not widely adopted in the PC space in general and mobile PC space in particular.

GPD may not be exactly a household brand, but Shenzhen GPD Technology Co. is a company that is widely known for ultraportable gaming notebooks. Such machines can rarely pack truly high graphics oomph and in most cases need the help of external graphics processors to run the latest games. To address its upcoming miniature Win Max 2023 PC (which itself requires funds to be developed), the company is now running an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to develop and build the world's first external graphics processing box with an OCuLink and a USB4 interface.

Droix.co.uk plans to sell the GPD G1 eGPU dock for around $700/£645 not including any taxes, so the part is not going to be cheap. Meanwhile, it seems that the only way to get a discount is by funding the development of the handheld gaming PC. 

Remember that crowdfunding a project is not a guarantee of receiving a finished product. Backing a crowdfunded project is akin to an investment; you believe in the project and want it to succeed. You are not purchasing a retail product.

You shouldn't have to spend more than $1,000 to get a solid laptop, including a full set of ports and specs that will get you through a workday without slowing down. The Lenovo Yoga 7i (16-inch), tested at $849.99, brings all of that plus a 13th Gen Intel Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

While the Yoga is flexible, allowing for use as a tablet, a laptop or other modes in between, there is one cut cost: the display. It simply can't touch the more expensive entries in our list of the best ultrabooks.

But if you want the specs to get you working and battery life to last you all day, without breaking the bank, this 2-in-1 may be up your alley.

Design of the Lenovo Yoga 7i

As far as Lenovo's laptops go, the Yoga 7i continues a tradition of notebooks that are plain and inoffensive. You get an uninspired-looking aluminum chassis with the Yoga name branded on the dark gray lid. It picks up fingerprints pretty easily, but they wipe off with a cloth. Perhaps the only other notable feature is the camera bump, which is also easy to lift the lid with. The 16-inch version seems particularly spartan, at 14.3 x 9.8 x 0.67 inches of gray, with minimal branding.

With the laptop open, you can see the minimal bezel around the screen, the keyboard deck and the keyboard. It's also when you're more likely to notice the laptop's rounded edges, which look nice, but stop at the keyboard deck, where they're squared off.

The Yoga is a convertible 2-in-1, with a 360-degree hinge that lets you flip the keyboard beyond the display to use as a tablet. You can also turn it into an upside-down shaped "v" tent, or place the keyboard upside down and use it as a display. I'm of the opinion that 16-inches is a bit unwieldy for a tablet, but clearly there's someone out there who likes the idea.

The left side of the laptop has an HDMI port, the two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a headphone jack, while the two USB Type-A ports, a microSD card slot and the power button are on the right side of the machine.

The Yoga 7i weighs 4.49 pounds, which is heavier than other U and P-class laptops, which tend to run in the 13 or 14-inch range. In general, you get more weight with bigger screen sizes. The smaller Yoga 9i Gen 8 is 3.09 pounds, the HP Spectre x360 13.5 is 3.01 pounds and the MacBook Air with M2 is 2.7 pounds.

Lenovo Yoga 7i Specifications

Productivity Performance on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

The Lenovo Yoga 7i is among the first laptops we're seeing with Intel's 13th Gen U series processors. Specifically, this is an Intel Core i7-1355U, which Lenovo has partnered with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSD.

With a lack of 13th Gen U-series competitors, we're diving deep here. We're comparing it to the M2 chip in the MacBook Air, the Core i7-1360P in the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 (in order to compare U vs P) and a last gen Core i7-1255U in the HP Spectre x360 13.5.

On Geekbench 5, the Yoga 7i earned a single-core score of 1,810 and a multi-core score of 8,663. That showed gains in scores over last year's Spectre (1,667/7,243), though we’re also dealing with a bigger chassis here. The Apple M2 beat it slightly in both cases, while the Yoga 9i had the highest multi-core score of the group.

The Yoga 7i transferred 25GB of files at a rate of 1,380.11 MBps, losing only to the Yoga i9 (1,669.29 MBps).

On our Handbrake video transcoding test, it took the Yoga 10 minutes and 30 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p. That was just 3 seconds ahead of last year's Core i7-1255U in the Spectre, and significantly behind the M2.

To really stress the Yoga 7i, we put it through 20 runs of Cinebench R23. The Yoga started at a dramatic high of 9,927.63, before crashing to 7,987.79 on run two, then staying in that area the rest of the time. The fans worked overtime, but once they kicked on, performance remained largely steady. The CPU's performance cores ran at an average of 3.12 GHz while the efficiency cores averaged 2.28 GHz. The processor ran at an average temperature of 66.72 degrees Celsius.

Display on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

The 16-inch display on the Yoga 7i is on the dim side. I didn't have too much of a problem, but I maxed out the brightness most of the time. The colors are nothing to write home about.

When I watched the trailer for Blue Beetle, the colors of Palmera City were fine, but not as beautiful as on other screens. An early shot of the skyline has glowing purples, reds and blues against a night sky, but none of it really popped. When the hero hovers over the water after falling out of the sky, all of the colors kind of blended together. It's clear, but nothing stood out.

Simply put, the Yoga 7i's screen is a disappointment compared to some competitors. At 267 nits of brightness at best, you'll want to keep it fully illuminated all the time. It covers just 65% of the sRGB color gamut and 45.8% of the wider DCI-P3 color gamut.

That's a pretty steep drop from its competitors, which are admittedly a bit pricier. The MacBook Air measures 489 nits of brightness and covers 107% of the sRGB gamut and 75.9% DCI-P3. If you bump up to the Yoga 9i Gen 8, you can get a more vivid OLED display, though the MacBook Air’s screen is still brighter.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

Lenovo's scallop-shaped keys will be familiar to anyone who has used one of the company's business-focused ThinkPads or other consumer laptops before. It doesn't feel like Lenovo's best keyboard, but its serviceable.

Specifically, I wish the keys had a bit more bounce or feedback. That didn't keep me from typing quickly, though. I hit 112 words per minute on the monkeytype test with 97% accuracy. But I did occasionally bottom out, which isn't the most comfortable feeling.

The keyboard features a number pad, but those keys are a bit smaller than the letters. Still, those who use Excel all the time will appreciate it, and it makes decent use of space on the keyboard. Below the keys is a fingerprint reader which, like the IR camera, works to log you in with Windows Hello.

I have a few minor quibbles with Lenovo's layout. I would strongly prefer that Lenovo move to half-size left and right arrow keys for an "inverted T" layout, which makes each of the keys easier to find. Additionally, while I applaud the addition of media keys, I wish they were closer to the volume keys. That would make more logical sense than their placement above the number pad.

The touchpad is left aligned under the spacebar. It feels plasticky and my fingers occasionally dragged, but in general, I had no issues with Windows 11 gestures and navigating programs.

For those who prefer to use a stylus on the touchscreen, the Yoga 7i works with Lenovo's Precision Pen 2. One didn't come in the box with our review unit, which means you'll need to budget an extra $60 for it.

Audio on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

The Yoga 7i has a pair of 2W, top-facing speakers in a grille above the keyboard. They sound OK, but they don't hold a candle to the soundbars on the higher-end Yoga 9i.

Linkin Park's "Fighting Myself," off of the twentieth-anniversary edition of Meteora, filled my apartment with sound, but wasn't balanced. There was a heavy focus on the vocals — both sung and wrapped — with less emphasis on the song's heavy guitar riffs and rapid drums.

Going to the Dolby Access app to play with the equalizer settings helped a bit. A switch to the Balanced settings evened things out a bit. I found my preference under "Detailed," which still placed the vocals above all, but absolutely clarified the guitars. Either way, I didn't get much in the way of bass. The automatic "dynamic" mode, which changes the EQ based on what you're listening to, did OK, but placed far more emphasis on the instruments.

Upgradeability on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

To open the Yoga 7i, you'll need to remove seven Torx T5 screws from the bottom of the chassis. (The four screws in the front are shorter than the ones in the back, so don't mix them up!) From there, you'll need to use a tool to pry the base off by loosening the latches.

Once you're in, it will look like there's not much to be done. There's a lot of room for the battery and cooling. That's because anything you can easily replace (besides the battery) is under a black mylar strip, which you'll need to remove to get to the Wi-Fi card and SSD. The storage drive is a shorter M.2 2242 SSD, which is more common than it used to be, but still not as ubiquitous as longer 2280 SSDs.

Get your Yoga 7i configured with as much RAM as you need, because it's soldered to the board.

Battery Life on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

This 16-inch convertible should last you a workday on a charge. It ran for 12 hours and 3 minutes on our battery test, which browses the web, streams video, and runs OpenGL benchmarks in the browser with the display set to 150 nits and while connected to Wi-Fi.

That was beaten only by the MacBook Air, at an impressive 14:06. The 7i beat the smaller Yoga and Spectre, both of which each surpassed 10 hours.

Heat on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

To see how warm the Yoga 7i runs, we took skin temperatures while running our Cinebench R23 stress test.

At the center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, the laptop reached 40.5 degrees Celsius (104.9 degrees Fahrenheit), which is slightly toasty. The number pad stayed cooler, as did the touchpad. On the bottom of the laptop, the hottest point reached 46.6 C (115.88 F).

Webcam on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

Lenovo's 1080p webcam is housed in a bump above the screen. It includes infrared sensors to let you sign in with Windows Hello facial recognition.

The webcam is serviceable, with enough detail to show hairs and wrinkles. It can be a bit dark in challenging light, but in general, I'd be more than happy to use this webcam in a meeting.

But Lenovo has also added a ton of software servicing the webcam. Lenovo Smart Appearance is a multi-purpose camera app that smoothes skin, changes backgrounds, lets you fake eye contact, and even "beautify" your face. That last part includes making your face rounder or thinner, making your eyes bigger or smaller, or softening your skin. I found that the eye contact customization was kind of haunting, but that auto face framing worked well enough. Background blur often cut off parts of my ears or the top of my head.

I don't love the filter aspect of these kinds of apps. My head is bigger than I'd like, and changing the forehead size honestly made me feel like I look better than I do in real life. I will say that it's cool that Lenovo was able to do this without making the background blur or bulge. I'm not sure if that's good for people or not. These filters might make you confident in a video call, but being told you can look different than you are by your laptop can absolutely be a blow to your self-esteem.

Software and Warranty on the Lenovo Yoga 7i

Webcam tricks aside, Lenovo has a fair amount of software preinstalled on the Yoga 7i when it comes out of the box.

Outside of the Dolby audio software, which is useful, there's a free trial of McAfee. Otherwise, most of the other software is from Lenovo itself. The key app is Vantage, with easy access to system information, warranty status and some hardware information, though there are also a bunch of ads. There are also separate apps for Lenovo Hotkeys, which details a number of keyboard shortcuts but doesn't let you customize them; Lenovo Pen Settings, which is useful if you have a stylus; Lenovo Voice, which lets you issue limited voice commands (and requires a fee for transcription); and Lenovo Welcome. There's also Lenovo Smart Appearance, the camera app that we detailed in the webcam section above.

Lenovo's premium Yoga line should be above having bookmarks placed in the browser, but here we are. There are bookmarks to McAfee's website, as well as Lenovo and Lenovo support.

Additionally, there are links in the Start menu to the Microsoft store for apps like TikTok and Spotify, which you find in basically every Windows 11 notebook.

Lenovo sells the Yoga with a 1-year warranty.

Lenovo Yoga 7i Configurations

We tested the Lenovo Yoga 7i with an Intel Core i7-1355U, 16GB of LPDDR5-5200 RAM, and a 512GB PCIe Gen 4 m.2 2252 SSD. This version is available at $849.99 at Best Buy.

On Lenovo's website, the company is selling the laptop with both U and P-series processors. The base model, with a Core i5-1335U, 8GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and the same 1920 x 1200 display is $752.25.  The top-end model, with a Core i7-1360P, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a higher-resolution 2560 x 1600 display costs $1,134.99.

Bottom Line

The Lenovo Yoga 7i delivers a lot of screen real estate and plenty of ports for under $1,000. Getting 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and a Core i7 is plenty reasonable at the $850 price our review unit came with.

We appreciated the mix of Thunderbolt and USB-A ports, along with a microSD card slot. That may make this a solid laptop for burgeoning creators (especially if Lenovo releases a version with discrete graphics in the future).

But the display is dim and the colors aren't amazing, which is a shame, as 2-in-1s really put an emphasis on how the screen looks in different modes. For a better screen, you may want to consider popping up to the OLED-equipped Yoga 9i. If you don't need a 2-in-1 (and can deal with a smaller screen), the MacBook Air is also a good choice. Either way, though, you'll be paying a lot more for a better display.

So if you're on a budget and want a big, flexible machine, the Yoga 7i is for you, but competitors offer a bit more when it comes to bright and vivid colors.

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If you’re looking for a consumer-grade 2-in-1 with premium style, strong performance and all-day battery life, Lenovo’s Yoga 9i (Gen 8) is designed for you. An upgrade from last year’s 7th gen Yoga 9i, this model has a 13th generation Core CPU, a sleek aluminum chassis and an active stylus included in the box. At just over 3 pounds, this 14-inch ultrabook can go anywhere with you, but still finds room for a USB Type-A port.

With a starting price of $1,399 for a model with 16GB of RAM, a Core i7 CPU and a 2K OLED screen, the Yoga 9i is very reasonably priced, considering its array of features. Productivity fiends will prefer a laptop with a snappier keyboard and more comfortable touchpad, but most people will find a lot to like here.

Update (Jan 25, 2024): As of January 2024, Lenovo has just started selling a newer, Gen 9 version of the Yoga 9i which appears to have the same chassis and design as the Gen 8 model we reviewed here, but has the latest, Core Ultra 7 155H processor instead of a Core i7-1360P. 

Despite its last-gen CPU, at present, we still recommend the Lenovo Yoga 9i (Gen 8). In the U.S., we're seeing much lower prices on the Gen 8 model (currently $1,049 at Best Buy, $400 less than the Gen 9 with the same specs). And the difference in performance between processor gens will mainly be noticeable in local AI workloads, which most people don't need and may never need (most consumer AI stuff runs in the cloud). 

Design of the Lenovo Yoga 9i

The Yoga 9i has a premium aesthetic, thanks to its aluminum chassis and its chrome “Oatmeal” colorway. There’s also a “Storm Gray” colorway that looks more silver. A shiny rounded ring around the sides adds a touch of classiness; the rounded corners are also far more pleasant to touch than the sharp, square corners on many other laptops. The hinge, which contains two of the four speakers, has just the right amount of tension and lets you bend the display back into tent, display and table modes.

At 12.52 x 9.06 x 0.6 inches (318 x 230 x 15.25 mm) and 3.09 pounds (1.4 kg), the Yoga 9i is pretty thin and reasonably light but it’s definitely not the sveltest on the market. The Dell XPS 13 Plus is a lighter 2.77 pounds and 0.6 inches thick while the MacBook Air is 2.7 pounds and 0.44 inches thick.

Despite its thin profile, the Yoga 9i manages to fit in a number of useful ports, including a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port (10 Gbps), two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C Gen port. There’s also room for a 3.5 mm audio jack. Both of the Thunderbolt 4 ports can be used for charging with the included USB-C power adapter or a third-party adapter of your choic

Lenovo Yoga 9i (8th Gen) Specs

Performance of the Lenovo Yoga 9i

With an Intel Core i7-1360P CPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD, our review configuration of the Lenovo Yoga 9i (8th Gen) was more than powerful enough to handle the kind of web surfing and basic productivity tasks you’d expect from an ultrabook. Even with more than two dozen tabs open and a 4K video playing, we noticed no slowdowns. However, the laptop’s fans could sometimes get really loud, and even more so when it was in high performance mode, but just had a few browser tabs open.

On Geekbench 5, a synthetic benchmark which measures processor performance, the Yoga 9i (Gen 8) returned strong single and multi-core scores of 1,827 and 9,954 respectively. Those are much stronger than the Core i7-1280P-powered Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320) and last year’s Core i7-1260P-enabled Yoga 9i (Gen 7). The M2-powered MacBook Air had a higher single-core score but still trailed Lenovo’s laptop on multicore.

The Yoga 9i (8th Gen)’s 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD copied 25GB of mixed-media files at a rate of 1,669.3 MBps, faster than all of its competitors. The MacBook Air (958.9 MBps) was slowest while the last-gen Yoga 9i (1506.9 MBps) and Dell XPS 13 Plus (1502.1 MBps) were only about 160 MBps behind.

It took the Yoga 9i (8th Gen), a modest 9 minutes and 45 seconds to transcode a 4K video file to 1080p, which is much quicker than last year’s model, which took 12 minutes and 18 seconds to complete the same task. However, the MacBook Air took just 7 minutes and 52 seconds while the Dell XPS 13 Plus did it in 8 minutes and 26 seconds.

To see how well the Yoga 9i and its Core i7-1360P CPU perform over time, we ran Cinebench R23 twenty times and watched the changes in score. Over those runs, the laptop averaged 10,390 with a high of 11,695.3 on the first run and a low of 9,923 on run 4. For the most part, scores were in the 10,000 to 10,400 range. During the test, the Yoga’s 4 performance cores averaged 2,750 MHz with a maximum clock speed of 4,988 MHz. The 8 efficiency cores ran at an average of 2,380 MHz with a max speed of 3,691 MHz. All the cores ran at an average temperature of 72.2 degrees Celsius.

Display on the Lenovo Yoga 9i

As you would expect from an OLED display, the Yoga 9i’s 14-inch, 2880 x 1800 touch panel is extremely vibrant. When I watched a 4K nature video of the Costa Rican jungle, the light green of a frog’s skin was so brilliant and its eyes and tongue so detailed that it felt like the creature was leaping off the screen. The red in a parrot’s feathers and the darker green of leaves and grass were so lush that I felt like I was there, without getting bug bites.

On our colorimeter, the Yoga’s display reproduced an impressive 142 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut and more than 200 percent of the narrower sRGB gamut. Those numbers blow away the MacBook Air (M2) and Dell XPS 13 Plus, neither of which has an OLED screen.

The display is also fairly bright, hitting 353 nits of brightness. That’s about comparable to the Dell XPS 13 Plus, but not nearly as luminous as the MacBook Air (M2) at 489 nits.

Keyboard, Touchpad and Stylus on Lenovo Yoga 9i

The Yoga 9i’s keyboard is a mixed bag. The keys have the curved, smiley shape we see on Lenovo's ThinkPad keyboards, but I found that the keys felt too shallow and stiff for my liking. My fingers felt sore after a minute of intense typing on the 10 Fast Fingers test, but typing deliberately and slowly, I hit around my average of 99 wpm and a 3 percent error rate. My colleagues tried the keyboard and thought the feel was neither great nor terrible so your mileage may vary.

To the right side of the standard keyboard sit four dedicated function keys, which are not customizable.. The top key changes your power profile from low power to balanced to high. The second key, which is particularly useful, toggles background blur on and off and appears to work independently of whatever video software it’s in. The third key changes the sound profile, the fourth key switches Windows between light and dark mode. Beneath that, there is a fingerprint reader.

The 3.5 x 5-inch glass touch pad felt slippery to me and I found myself overshooting my targets way too often. Also, it was far too easy for me to accidentally tap on something with tap-to-click enabled (fortunately, you can disable it). However, if you don’t mind the lack of friction, you’ll find that the pad is serviceable. Multi-touch gestures such as three-finger swipe and pinch-to-zoom worked quickly and consistently. The Yoga 9i has a hinge that bends the lid back up to 180 degrees so you can use it in tablet mode or tent mode. It also comes with Lenovo Precision Pen 2, an active stylus with 4,096 degrees of pressure and USB-C charging.

I tried the 5.9 x 0.37-inch (150 x 9.42 mm) stylus on the display, both for writing and drawing and I really liked the level of friction its rubberized tip provided. When I was writing into the Notepad app, using the Windows 11 handwriting keyboard, it felt like I was using a pen on paper, though with perhaps a bit more resistance than I usually get from a ballpoint pen. When I fired up the Fresh Paint drawing program, lines were thicker the harder I pressed.

Overall, this is a really good pen experience, but because the pen is fairly long and thick, there’s no garage for it on the laptop. You need to make sure you carry it separately and don’t lose it.

Audio on the Lenovo Yoga 9i

The Yoga 9i’s four-speaker system, which features two front-facing speakers on the hinge and woofers on either side, produces loud, rich audio with a nice separation of sound and minimum of tin. When I listened to AC/DC’s "Back in Black," the drums and vocals appeared to come from different sides of the machine and the output was more than loud enough to fill a medium-sized room. However, there was a little tinniness in the percussion section. Earth, Wind & Fire’s bass-heavy "September" sounded much cleaner as the bass and vocals appeared to be coming from different places.

The Yoga 9i comes with the Dolby Access app, which contains Dolby Atmos sound settings which let you choose among Game, Movie, Music, Voice or Dynamic profiles. I found that the Dynamic Profile was the loudest and richest sounding. Disabling Dolby altogether made the music sound flat.

Upgradeability of the Lenovo Yoga 9i

In theory, you could upgrade the Yoga 9i’s SSD, which its service manual says could be either an M.2 2280 or an M.2 2242 size. However, in order to open the laptop, you need to remove 9 Torx screws and three of them are located underneath a rubber strip near the hinge. Any time you remove a rubber strip or hinge, there’s a good chance that you won’t get it to stick back on the same way again (or it could tear or break). Even if you get into the computer, you can’t upgrade the RAM, which is soldered to the motherboard.

Battery Life of the Lenovo Yoga 9i

The Yoga 9i offers all-day endurance that’s much better than its PC competitors but a bit behind the MacBook Air (M2). On our battery test, which involves continuous web surfing, video streaming and graphics testing at 150 nits of brightness, the Yoga 9i lasted a strong 10 hours and 38 minutes, which is two to three hours longer than the Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320) and the last-gen Lenovo Yoga 9i (Gen 7). However, the MacBook Air (M2), which doesn’t have a touch screen, managed to stay on for 14 hours and 5 minutes.

Heat of the Lenovo Yoga 9i

The Yoga 9i stayed cool to the touch throughout our use, but its fans frequently came on and could be quite loud. To see how hot it gets under stress, we measured the temperature while running our Cinebench R23 stress test.

During the test, the keyboard measured a decent 37.4 degrees Celsius (99.3 degrees Fahrenheit), the touchpad hit a cool 26 degrees (78.8 degrees Fahrenheit) and the center of the bottom was a mere 32.2 degrees (90 degrees Fahrenheit). So, while you may hear some fan noise, at least you know that this laptop won’t get unpleasantly hot.

Webcam on the Lenovo Yoga 9i

The Lenovo Yoga 9i’s 1080p webcam offers fairly accurate, but unimpressive images. An image I took under the bright lights of our office was detailed and showed my shirt in just the right shade of navy blue, though my skin looked overly reddish. In my home office at mid-afternoon with light shining through the window, my features were a bit blurry as fine details like the hairs in my beard weren’t as sharp as I’d like. Nevertheless, the colors and brightness were good. The webcam also has IR built-in for facial recognition so you can log in with Windows Hello.

Software and Warranty of Lenovo Yoga 9i

Lenovo preloads the Yoga 9i with a few useful utilities. One settings program to rule them all, Lenovo Vantage allows you to control everything from the camera to the power profile to the keyboard backlight. Lenovo Voice has some voice to text features, including a translation feature but you need to pay for the translations. Dolby Access allows you to tweak the sound profile, which is also available in Vantage. Lenovo Now is an app that advertises other Lenovo utilities such as a downloadable migration assistant (to copy files from an old PC) and services like an extended warranty.

Lenovo backs the Yoga 9i with a standard one year warranty on parts and labor. You can pay extra to extend that warranty up to four years or add accidental damage protection with fees going up to $183.

Configurations of the Lenovo Yoga 9i

Lenovo sells the Yoga 9i (8th Gen) with a very limited number of component options. Best Buy has our review configuration, which sports a Core i7-1260P CPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 2800 x 1800 OLED touch screen and a 512GB SSD for $1,399, which is the cheapest we’ve seen any configuration selling for.

The Lenovo.com website lets you custom configure the laptop, but your only choices are to change the display, choosing between 2880 x 1800 or 3840 x 2400 resolution OLED panels, increase the SSD capacity from 512GB to 1TB and pick Windows 11 Pro instead of Home. All versions available on the U.S. website anyway had 16GB of RAM and a Core i7-1260P CPU. The company also sells a $1,779 configuration that is just like our review unit’s, but ups the SSD capacity to 1TB. And you can use the custom configure option to change the screen or Windows version.

Bottom Line

Lenovo’s Yoga 9i gives you a lot of features for the money. While, at $1,399, it’s not exactly a budget ultrabook, you get a stylus, OLED display, 16GB of RAM and a Core i7 P-series CPU even in the base configuration. If you’re looking for the lightest weight and don’t need a 2-in-1, there are other choices.

The 2.7-pound Dell XPS 13 Plus starts at just $999, but costs the same $1,399 when configured with the same CPU, RAM and storage choices as the Yoga 9i. And it’s not a 2-in-1 and has a 12th Gen CPU instead of a 13th Gen one.. The MacBook Air M2 has longer battery life, really strong performance and a 2.7-pound weight, but you can expect to spend $1,699 if you want it with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage (both bare minimums).

However, if you want a 2-in-1 with a brilliant display, plenty of performance and all-day battery life, the Yoga 9i is a great choice.

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Asus' 13.3-inch ultraportable is going slimmer than ever. The new Asus Zenbook S13 OLED, which the company announced today, will be just 1.09 centimeters (0.43 inches) thick and weigh 2.2 pounds (approximately 1 kilogram). That's thinner and lighter than the MacBook Air with M2. This model will run on Intel's Core i7-1355U.

The new model is also slimmer and lighter than the existing S13 OLED, which uses an AMD Ryzen 6800U CPU, weighs 2.43 pounds (1.1 kg) and measures 0.59 inches (14.9 inches thick). That laptop was often hard to find in stores, so perhaps the switch to Intel has something to do with availability.

Other specs of the new Zenbook include 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 1TB of storage, a 63 WHr battery and a 13.3-inch, 2880 x 1800 "Lumina" OLED display (Asus suggests this is just a branding name for its OLED display). That OLED screen has Dolby Vision support and True Black 500 certification, up to 550 nits peak brightness, and Asus is promising 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut. Asus says the OLED panel allows for the lid to be 30% slimmer than previous models. Still, the laptop has an FHD camera with IR for Windows Hello login. 

The laptop will come in a gray or blue finish and will be made of recycled aluminum in the gray version. Asus says it uses an exclusive "plasma ceramic aluminum material for the lid," that should make it resistant to wear and tear. It also suggests that each lid, like stone, will be "individually unique" and that the design meets the MIL-STD 810H military durability standard. From pictures, it looks like it's going to be an attractive, eye-catching notebook, but we'll render our verdict on that when it comes through our labs.

Asus is also claiming that its circuit boards reduce weight, using fewer layers and a "higher wiring density, with many more transistors" to theoretically increase performance despite being very small.

Despite the sleek size, there's still a USB Type-A (USB 3.2 Gen 2) port along with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 output and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

One place you may notice the size reduction is the keyboard. Again, we'll need time with the system to really pass judgement, but the keys do appear to be a bit less staggered than on your standard keyboard, with short backspace, enter, tab, caps lock and left shift keys. The keyboard sits in a black well, which reminds me a bit of the MacBook Pro.

Asus states that the Zenbook S 13 OLED (UX5304) will be available for its $1,399.99 suggested retail price at ABT. But when I followed up, Asus told me that you'll also be able to find it at Best Buy, Amazon, and Newegg. If $1,399.99 is for 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, that's a solid price.

The laptop is launching today, so we're hoping to get our hands on it soon for a deep-dive review to see if it qualifies as one of the best ultrabooks. 

The 2021 redesign of the MacBook Pro supercharged the lineup, adding Apple Silicon, plenty of ports, a 1080p webcam and even made it thicker to accommodate it all. It was a bold move (and in some cases, a big reversal for Apple). Now, the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros maintain everything that was great about that design, but updates them to the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, adding more power and endurance than before.

These are still some of the best ultrabooks, with gorgeous Mini-LED displays, excellent speakers and functionality that feels worthy of professionals and hobbyist creators alike.

Upgrades to the highest-performance parts, including RAM and storage, will cost you a serious chunk of cash over the base models, but you should seriously consider them, because Apple's design doesn't allow for internal upgrades down the line. If you're ever going to want 96GB of RAM with your M2 Max, consider emptying your bank account at the point of purchase.

With M2 Pro and M2 Max, the MacBook Pro is more powerful than ever, and is an alluring replacement for lots of aging.

MacBook Pro (2023) Design

The new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros have the exact same chassis as last year's redesign. They still feel new and fresh, and they still allow for a solid port selection and plenty of power, so I'm OK with this decision. Both options have boxy sides combined with rounded corners to mix pro functionality with Apple sheen.

We tested the 14-inch MacBook Pro in silver and the 16-incher in space gray (which I prefer), but the colors aren't that dissimilar. At least this year, the notebooks come with color-matched MagSafe power cables. Either size or color has Apple's logo in a tone-on-tone mirror finish on the lid, but is otherwise minimalist.

Whether you have the 14.2-inch or 16.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, it's going to have a notch in the top of it, similar to the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus (the 14 Pro line switched to a pill-shaped cutout last year). This allows Apple to fit a 1080p camera in there. Early last year, I bought a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro, and, unlike with my iPhone, I have never stopped noticing the notch. That's the case for me with this year's Pros, as well as the M2 MacBook Air. The screens are actually taller than the usual 16:10, so you don't lose any usable space versus previous models. But if you're annoyed like I am, you might want to look into software fixes, like TopNotch, which make the menu bar black to help make the notch blend in. And yes, the mouse can still go underneath the notch, which seems like an oversight.

All of the other improvements from last year's redesign, however, still feel great. There are full-sized function keys, Touch ID on the power button and plenty of ports.

Both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros have the exact same ports. On the left side, there's a MagSafe 3 charging port, a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The right side has an SDXC memory slot, a third Thunderbolt 4 port and the HDMI port. That HDMI port has been improved from the prior models, allowing 4K support at 240 hz or 8K at 60 Hz, as well as variable refresh rate. We didn't have a 4K 240 Hz monitor to test with (those are pretty rare), but we're curious to see how it holds up.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro measures 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches and weighs 3.5 pounds, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 14.01 x 9.77 x 0.66 inches and, with the M2 Max, weighs 4.8 pounds. Comparatively, the popular Windows-based Dell XPS 15 (9520) is 13.56 x 9.06 x 0.73 inches and weighs 4.31 pounds.

MacBook Pro (2023) Specifications

Productivity Performance on the MacBook Pro (2023)

Apple's M2 Pro and M2 Max are both powerhouses. And both MacBook Pro configurations we tested: a 14-inch Pro with an M2 Pro, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD and a 16-inch Pro with a whopping 96GB of unified memory and 4TB SSD both performed admirably in our testing.

The M2 Pro in our 14-inch review unit has 12 CPU cores - eight performance cores and four efficiency cores. The M2 Max has an identical CPU core setup to the Pro we reviewed. But the M2 Pro has a 19-core GPU, while the Max has a 38-core GPU. Both also include a 16-core Neural Engine and dedicated media engines for encoding and decoding in H.264 and HEVC or accelerating ProRes.

Both the Pro and the Max also have faster access to memory. Apple claims the updated architecture allows for 200 GB/s of bandwidth on M2 Pro and up to 400 GB/s on M2 Max.

Needless to say, both machines were overkill for my workload, which involves lots of web browsing for research, writing and photo editing, often with music and social media apps in the background and some light gaming (I still leave my intense gaming to PC and consoles.)

On Geekbench 5, the M2 Max-based laptop won with a single-core score of 1,993 and a multi-core score of 15,173, with the M2 Pro just a few points behind. It's a nice jump over the M1 Max we tested back in 2021, as well as the Intel Core i7-12700H in the Dell XPS 15 (9520), though we haven't seen what Intel's 13th Gen Core mobile processors can do just yet.

The 14-inch laptop copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,917.69 MBps, tied with the previous-gen 16-incher. This year's M2 Max-based 16-inch Pro came in at 1,789.85 MBps, which represents being one second behind. It should be noted that there have been reports that entry-level MacBook Pros are reportedly seeing worse SSD performance, Teardowns suggest Apple has used fewer NAND modules on those devices.

The 16-inch Macbook Pro with M2 Max made its strongest showing on Handbrake, transcoding a 4K video to 1080p in 3 minutes and 59 seconds. That's seven seconds ahead of the M2 Pro-based system (4:06) and well ahead of the M1 Max and the XPS 15.

On the Xcode Benchmark, which we're using for the first time here, we found that the similar CPUs meant similar scores. The 14-inch MarBook Pro with M2 Pro took 85 seconds, while the 16-inch Mac with M2 Max completed the task in 83 seconds.

To stress test the systems, we ran each through 20 runs of Cinebench R23 multi-core. Because the laptops have the same CPU cores, it's not surprising that they both shared scores in the mid to  high 14,700's. Both had some peaks and valleys as the chips cooled off, but they largely operated in a similar fashion. Notably, the 14-inch MacBook Pro's fans started earlier and were louder to my ears than the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which was far quieter until the eighteenth run, where I really noticed it.

During the stress test, I used TG Pro to track CPU core temperatures. (Apple doesn't make clock speeds available to the software. For what its worth, Cinebench R23 lists estimates that the M2 Pro has a 3.2-GHz single-core clock, the M2 Max has a 3.4-GHz single-core clock, and both chips have 3.3 GHz multi-core clock speeds. Take that for what you will.) The M2 Pro's CPU efficiency cores ran at an average of 94.44 degrees Celsius, while its performance cores measured 99.02 C. The M2 Max's efficiency cores ran at 92.98 C and its performance cores averaged 97.62 C.

The M2 Max may have run cooler because it's in the 16-inch chassis, with more room for heat and, likely, a larger cooling system.

Gaming and Graphics on the MacBook Pro (2023)

The full-fat M2 Pro has a 19-core GPU, while the M2 Max gets 38 cores. For many creatives, those cores will be put to work in rendering, motion graphics, illustration or other artistic pursuits.

It won't come as a huge surprise that we focus a lot on gaming as a show of graphical prowess here at Tom's Hardware. In Apple's case, newer games are being built on the Metal 3 API, including MetalFX Upscaling to render scenes more quickly with temporal or spatial algorithms. More and more games, especially those on Apple Arcade, are using Metal 3. The biggest example of a major game coming to Apple's App Store with native support for Apple Silicon is Resident Evil Village.

I was eager to test the M2 Max's 38-core GPU and 96GB of unified memory, so when I played Resident Evil Village, I set the resolution to 3456 x 2160 and set the graphics preset to max. The game typically ran between 50 and 60 frames per second (higher in daylight scenes with less action, less in darker scenes with more detail), though it did achieve a flat 60 fps a few times. With MetalFX upscaling set to "quality mode," it often stayed at a locked 60 fps. Using these settings took up 12.54GB of RAM out of the 70GB or so that the game can reserve.

On the M2 Pro's 19-core GPU and 16GB of RAM, I tried some more reasonable settings, using the "prioritize graphics" preset at 1080p. In a dark, haunting scene early in the game, the MacBook with the M2 Pro ran Village around 80 frames per second, but in the daylight scenes, where more details in the game's namesake village and surrounding forests needed to be rendered, it ran between 60 and 70 fps. With MetalFX scaling, the game often jumped to the high 70s or even 80 fps in the same scenes.

In an attempt to try some more conventional settings, I set the resolution to 2560 x 1440 and chose the "prioritize graphics" preset. I was able to get over 100 fps in game play, and that's before MetalFX upscaling.

There's power on Apple Silicon for gaming, but more developers have to be on board. I would love to see more games on Metal, but Apple will need to do some serious developer relations to get more native development released.

That's not to say the new Macs can't game over the Rosetta instruction set. On the (admittedly old) Rise of the Tomb Raider, the M2 Pro reached 49 frames per second at 1920 x 1200, while the M2 Max reached 92 fps at the same resolution. The M2 Max even achieved a palatable 32 fps at 3456 x 2234.

Display on the MacBook Pro (2023)

The screens on both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro are excellent. Apple labels them "Liquid Retina XDR," which effectively translates to high resolution mini-LED panels with HDR support and adaptive refresh rates up to 120 Hz using Apple's ProMotion technology.

The 14.2-inch laptop uses a 3024 x 1964 resolution screen, while the 16-inch notebook has a 3456 x 2234 resolution panel. Either way, the first episode of The Last of Us on HBO Max looked great. In a scene late in the episode in which Joel and Tess explore a darkened building with flashlights, the beams made a horrific infected body pop, and the shadows added a ton of atmosphere while not appearing too dark to actually see.

On our colorimeter, we found the screens to be largely identical for SDR content. They both covered 118% of the sRGB gamut and over 83% of the DCI-P3 gamut, and were around 450 nits of brightness. Those colors are better than the prior-gen 16-inch MacBook Pro, though seemingly at the expense of some brightness, though I certainly didn't have any issues.

Some in the PC space have made the move to OLED, which Apple hasn't done on its Macs yet. The Dell XPS 15's OLED touchscreen covered slightly more of both color gamuts, though it wasn't as bright as Apple's displays (the 14-inch  MacBook Pro reached 450 nits, the 16-inch laptop hit 447 nits).

In HDR content, the Macs could climb higher. At 40% coverage, the 14-inch laptop hit a peak brightness at 1,491 nits, while the 16-inch notebook hit 1,470.

By default, Apple uses a feature called True Tone to make the display adapt to different lighting conditions, which is great for watching movies or browsing the web. If you're working with photos, graphic design or videos, though, you may want to turn it off for the most accurate rendition of your work.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Pro (2023)

The scissor switches on the MacBook Pro are solid, and in the exact same layouts on both the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro. You get backlit keys in a black well, which looks sleek. The full-sized function keys are a welcome reprieve from the ones on the Intel-based models (or the Touch Bar).

On the monkeytype typing test, I reached 120 words per minute using the 16-inch laptop's keyboard, with a standard 2% error rate.

Macs continue to have best-in-class trackpads. The 14-incher's Force Touch trackpad is 5.1 x 3.2 inches, while the 16-incher has a gargantuan 6.3 x 3.9 inch touchpad. Both use haptic feedback, so you can click anywhere on the touchpad. Both laptops have plenty of room for macOS gestures, even the ones that require three fingers.

Audio on the MacBook Pro (2023)

The 16-inch MacBook Pro continues to have my favorite speakers on any laptop, especially outside of gaming. Both the 14-incher and 16-incher have a six-speaker sound system, but for my money, the 16-incher just sounds slightly more detailed.

Both get loud and can fill a room with sound. Fall Out Boy's "Love From The Other Side" was balanced and detailed on the 16-inch Pro, with well-leveled guitars, vocals, drums and bass. It sounds excellent on the 14-inch model, too, and if they weren't together, I wouldn't notice the slight differences. I found the 14 didn't get quite as loud, and that the bass and drums sounded ever-so-slightly better on the bigger model.

Both laptops support Apple's spatial audio on supported apps, and also allow for Dolby Atmos on supported movies and TV. You can also get spatial audio over AirPods, and Apple claims that the 3.5 mm headphone jack offer pros "advanced support for high-impedance headphones."

Upgradeability of the MacBook Pro (2023)

While all that separates you from the inside of your MacBook Pro are eight pentalobe screws, don't expect to be making any upgrades here.

Firstly, pentalobe screws aren't terribly common. But more importantly, the RAM is part of the M2 Pro and M2 Max system on a chip, while the SSD is soldered to the motherboard. Configure your laptop with the memory and storage you're going to need to make it last.

As of this writing, some manuals for the new MacBook Pros are available through Apple's website and Self Service repair, but the full repair manuals have not been uploaded. Some teardowns have shown that there are some internal changes, including around the cooler and layout of the RAM and SSD on the motherboard.

Battery Life on the MacBook Pro (2023)

Apple likes to tout the efficiency of its systems, and for good reason. Both the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros proved to be long-lasting on our battery test, which continuously browses the web, runs OpenGL tests and streams video, all while connected to Wi-Fi with the screen set to 150 nits.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro, with its 100 WHr battery, ran for 18 hours and 56 minutes — more than 3 hours of improvement over the 2021 version. The 14-inch MacBook Pro, with a 70 WHr battery, lasted 14:21. The Dell XPS 15 ran for 9:43, though its OLED panel is likely a factor in its shorter runtime.

Heat on the MacBook Pro (2023)

We ran our heat test on the MacBook Pro while running our Cinebench R23 gauntlet to get a sense of how hot the chassis gets to the touch during a stressful multi-core workload.

On the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the center of the keyboard reached 45.8 degrees Celsius (114.4 degrees Fahrenheit), while the trackpad was a cooler 30.9 C (87.62 F). On the 16-inch laptop, the center of the keyboard hit 43.1 C (109.58 F), while the touchpad hit 29.9 C (85.82 F).  The 16-inch clearly kept these common touchpoints cooler, though neither seemed too uncomfortable to use.

The hottest point on the bottom of the 14-inch Mac measured 41.7 C (107.06 F), while on the 16-inch laptop it reached 43.7 C (110.66  F), reversing the trend from the keyboard and touchpad.

Webcam on the MacBook Pro 2023

Apple's FaceTime HD camera hasn't changed much since Apple redesigned the MacBook Pro in 2021, and that's largely good. The 1080p webcam is color accurate and catches great detail. Even in challenging light, the camera captured my royal blue sweater (and differentiated from the blue in my eyes), and showed detail in my hair and skin. I was near a window, and the lighting didn't blow out the image.

That may be in part due to Apple's Neural Engine on the M2 Max and M2 Pro, which the company says use "computational video" to improve output on the webcam and use machine learning to reduce noise in the image. It's definitely not as extreme as what I see on some of my iPhone photography — it's all pretty natural looking.

But I said it in 2021, and I'll say it again: I wish the notch that the camera is housed in also supported Face ID. I imagine the engineering to get the facial recognition that's already in the iPhone crammed into a thin laptop lid would be challenging, but many of Apple's competitors running Windows use facial recognition with IR cameras. Touch ID is accurate, but that notch really makes it feel like Face ID is something that's missing from the Mac.

If you need an even better webcam, macOS Ventura also lets you connect your iPhone to your laptop with a feature called Continuity Camera (see below), though I don't think that will be necessary for most. That's a feature that feels meant more for the older Intel or Apple M1-based laptops that run Ventura and don't have 1080p webcams. 

macOS Ventura and Software

The new MacBook Pros ship with macOS Ventura (version 13) installed. Ventura launched in the fall of 2022.

New features include some long-needed features in mail, like undo and schedule send; improved image search in Spotlight; Passkeys that never leave your device for more secure sign-in; editable messages in iMessage; Stage Manager, a way to organize windows in an attempt to better stay focused; Continuity Camera, which lets you use your iPhone as a webcam; and redesigned System Settings, which take some getting used to but more resemble what's on iOS.

Unlike with Windows machines, there really isn't any bloat in macOS. The software includes Mail, Messages (great for syncing with your iPhone or iPad), Notes, Maps, FaceTime and Safari. There are also dedicated apps for subscription services like Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple News and Podcasts. Productivity apps like Numbers, Pages and Keynote are also free.

Rosetta 2 is still around to translate apps designed for Intel x86 programs so that they can run on Apple Silicon, but more and more programs are now native for M-series chips or are using universal binaries. A small group of games, like Resident Evil Village, Disco Elysium , RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Minecraft all have native Apple Silicon support and run using Apple's Metal API.

MacBook Pro 2023 Configurations and Warranty

We tested two MacBook Pros for this review. A 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro (12-core CPU and 19-core GPU), 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD in a silver chassis; and a 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Max (12-core CPU and 38-core GPU), 96GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD in a space gray finish. The 14-incher costs $2,499.00, while the 16-inch version with all of that RAM and storage, is $5,299.00.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts with a cut-down M2 Pro with a 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU, along with 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD and a 67-watt USB-C charger for $1,999. It's cheapest M2 Max option, with a 12-core CPU and 30-core GPU, along with 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD is $3,099.

Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro starts with an M2 Pro (!2-core GPU, 19-core GPU), 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for $2,499. The way we reviewed it was effectively maxed out, unless you want to bump to 8TB of SSD storage, making it a whopping $6,499.

The prices to bump up RAM and storage are jaw-dropping. It's $400, for instance, to move a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro from 16GB to 32GB of RAM. With an M1 Max, it's $400 to move from 32GB to 64GB, or $800 to get to 96GB like in our review unit.

To get from 512GB to 1TB is $200, and it's $400 on top of that to reach 2TB. If you're a pro who wants 8TB of on-board storage, that's going to be $2,400 in storage upgrades.

Apple offers a one-year warranty on its MacBook Pros, unless you pay for AppleCare Plus. That starts at $99.99 annually for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, or $279 for three years. Coverage for the 16-incher costs $149.99 annually or $399 for three years. 

Bottom Line

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros aren't huge changes over the previous generation, but that's largely not an issue. The design still feels new, the displays, while not OLED, are excellent, the speakers are the best I've heard and, perhaps most importantly, performance and battery life are excellent.

For most, I suspect the M2 Pro is going to be enough, but if you're doing serious graphics work, the M2 Max's extra GPU cores and higher memory bandwidth may be worth it.

The Dell XPS 15, the representative Windows-based sample here, didn't benchmark as well as Apple's latest, though it's using a 12th Gen Intel Core chip, with 13th Gen Core shipping shortly in a wide variety of notebooks. Those laptops still have more configuration options, including OLED, touch screens and in many cases, upgradeable RAM and storage. And Windows supports far more games, if that's a priority for you.

The new MacBook Pros take all of the design's existing strengths and add better chips with updates to Wi-Fi and HDMI. If you're coming from a 2021 model, that may not be much, but these will prove incredibly enticing to anyone coming from an Intel-based MacBook Pro or looking to make the jump from Windows.

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Apple announced a new generation of MacBook Pro laptops earlier this week, and they'll begin shipping to customers on January 24th. New reporting from DigiTimes suggests that Quanta Computer started cranking out the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros in December 2022 in preparation for Apple's official launch, and that MacBook Airs are next on the docket.

According to DigiTimes, Apple's manufacturing partners and supply chain are gearing up for a MacBook Air refresh during the second half of 2023. These laptops will likely feature a new M3 SoC based on TSMC's next-generation 3nm node. However, given that Apple's MacBook Pros just received a 5nm M2 Pro/M2 Max upgrade, it's possible that Apple won't shift to the expected 3nm M3 Pro/M3 Max SoCs until 2024.

While the new MacBook Pros look the same on the outside (the design is still relatively fresh, as they launched in late 2021), there are quite a few internal changes. For starters, they ditch the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs in favor of faster M2 Pro and M2 Max silicon. In addition, while the chips still use a 5nm node, Apple boosted CPU performance by up to 20 percent, while GPU performance saw a maximum 30 percent uplift. The new MacBook Pros also feature Wi-Fi 6E support (up from Wi-Fi 6) and ditch the HDMI 2.0 port in favor of HDMI 2.1. 

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999, while the 16-inch variant opens bidding at $2,499. However, if you want a 16-inch MacBook Pro with all the trimmings (M2 Max with 38 GPU cores, 96GB LPDDR5, 8TB storage), it will cost you $6,299.

While MacBook Pro shipments are important for Apple, the MacBook Air is the key sales driver for the company. Even though overall PC shipments were down for 2022, Quanta's 3 percent decline to 28.4 million units during the second half was less than its competitors. Strong demand for the refreshed MacBook Air (M2) prevented Quanta's shipments from sinking further.

Apple saw its overall notebook shipments decline by 15.3 percent during Q4 2022. However, its chief competitors were down 30 to 40 percent during the same period. Given the economic downturn and consumers being more cautious about high-dollar purchases, Apple will reportedly adjust its shipments to favor more affordably-priced M1-based MacBooks and MacBook Pros. 

Apple's MacBook Air (M1) starts at $999, while the MacBook Air (M2) rings in at $1,199. The MacBook Air (M2) features an all-new chassis design with a larger display, more maximum memory (24GB versus 16GB) and a slightly lower weight (2.7 pounds versus 2.8 pounds).

Despite reports that M2 Pro and M2 Max-based products were delayed yet again, Apple today announced the launch of new MacBook Pros and Mac Minis using the new SoCs. The M2 Pro and M2 Max are more powerful versions of the M2 launched last year in the MacBook Air.

As Apple explains, the M2 Pro “scales up” the M2, giving customers 10 or 12 CPU cores and up to 19 GPU cores. The 12-core configuration has eight high-performance cores and four efficiency cores. For comparison, the M2 in the MacBook Air comes with an 8-core CPU and either an 8- or 10-core GPU. The M2 Pro can also be paired with up to 32GB of unified memory.

Apple claims that the 12-core M2 Pro is up to 20 percent faster than the 10-core version of the M1 Pro in multi-threaded apps. With the new 19-core GPU (three more than the M1 Pro’s GPU), performance is up to 20 percent faster. 

For a real-world example, Apple says that the 16-inch MacBook with the M2 Pro is 25 percent faster than its M1 Pro counterpart while compiling in Xcode. It’s also allegedly 2.5x faster than the legacy 16-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor. In addition, image processing in Photoshop is reportedly 40 percent faster than the M1 Pro and 80 percent faster than the Core i9. 

The M2 Max is the flagship SoC and has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro but doubles the maximum number of GPU cores to 38. Performance is further enhanced by doubling unified memory bandwidth to 400 GB/s compared to 200 GB/s for the M2 Pro. As a result, graphics performance is up to 30 percent faster than the preceding M1 Max. While the M2 Pro can be paired with a maximum of 32GB of memory, the M2 Max triples that figure to 96GB. 

The M2 Pro and M2 Max are built on a 5nm process node, packing 40 billion transistors and 67 billion transistors, respectively. The two chips also share a 16-core Neural Engine capable of executing nearly 16 trillion operations per second (a 40 percent uplift compared to the previous generation). Other features include an enhanced version of the Secure Enclave security platform and a beefed-up media engine.

The M2 Pro is available in refreshed versions of the Mac mini, 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro. The M2 Max is only available on the new MacBook Pros. All of the M2 Pro- and M2 Max-equipped Macs ship on January 24th.

Apple has one more computer to convert to Apple Silicon: the Mac Pro. And it sounds like it will be more familiar than we expected. According to Mark Gurman's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, an upcoming refresh will appear identical to the 2019 version.

To some, that's a bit of a shame, as many of Apple's designs featuring its own silicon have been evolving. But more interesting to us here at Tom's Hardware is what's going on inside. Previous Bloomberg reports suggested that a high-end Mac Pro with 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics clusters was languishing, and now Gurman says it has been canceled. Instead, he writes that Apple will release the Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra, an evolution of the M1 Ultra found in the Mac Studio.

Apple Silicon chips have all had RAM onboard, and that makes for an odd setup for the Mac Pro. Gurman's newsletter suggests that unlike the Intel Xeon-based model from 2019, the upcoming Mac Pro won't have upgradeable RAM. That being said, he reports that there will be two SSD storage slots and room for "graphics, media and networking cards."

It's extremely interesting to see the suggestion that graphics cards will be modular here, as Apple has been relying on its own integrated graphics on all Apple Silicon devices. (Apple claimed the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra rivals the RTX 3090, though independent testing suggested that wasn't the case, especially in gaming.) I suppose it's possible that somewhere, Apple is writing drivers for AMD or Nvidia's cards. Or it could be using something like the Apple Afterburner card, which it introduced with the 2019 Mac Pro for Video editing in the ProRes and ProRes RAW codecs. The existing Mac Pros are based on Intel Xeon chips and work with AMD Radeon Pro graphics (the most recent are W6000X cards designed exclusively for Apple's tower, bringing AMD's RDNA 2 graphics in 2021).

When Apple released the Mac Studio, it said in its announcement video that the beefed-up Mac Mini wasn't replacing the Mac Pro. There will be a question, however, of which to get if upgradeability is limited anyway, especially if the Mac Studio gets a bump to M2 Ultra. But it's likely that the Mac Pro will cost far more than the Studio currently does.

In other Mac news, Gurman reports that the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, some of the best ultrabooks, will get spec bumps with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips in the first half of the year, and that there's still a planned 15-inch MacBook Air sometime in 2023.

The iPad, Apple Watch and AirPods are likely to see small bumps, with no news for Apple TV hardware. Some of this is due to Apple's focus on announcing a mixed-reality headset, possibly called Reality Pro, ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, reportedly to launch in the fall.

According to a new report, Apple is looking to diversify production of its popular MacBook family of laptops. Apple has long produced MacBooks in China and has been reluctant to move production out of the country, until now. However, Nikkei Asia claims that longtime supplier Foxconn has been contracted to produce MacBooks in Vietnam. Interestingly, all of Apple's other major product lines already have alternate production sites outside of China, leaving its MacBooks as the final piece in its diversification puzzle. 

Several reasons are motivating Apple to look outside of China for MacBook production. Perhaps one of the more pressing issues is China's intense crackdown on the spread of COVID-19 within the country. China, until recently, has employed a zero-COVID policy, requiring people with COVID-19 to isolate in state facilities to prevent further spread among the population. The facilities were reportedly understaffed with poor living conditions, and their use separated people from their families (often against their will).

In recent days, China has begun to loosen some of its COVID-19 policies, allowing infected people to isolate at home instead of in a government facility (among other concessions). However, there is a lot of uncertainty about how China National Health Commission policies will shift in the future. And any changes in those policies can potentially affect workers assembling Apple devices in China.

However, the biggest issue involves escalating sanctions from the U.S. on Chinese companies. The sanctions prevent Chinese companies from acquiring semiconductors using advanced American technologies. The U.S. cites national security reasons for its crackdown, but the Chinese government fired back, filing an official protest with the World Trade Organization.

"China takes legal actions within the WTO framework as a necessary way to address our concerns and to defend our legitimate interests," China's commerce ministry said in a statement earlier this month. "[U.S. restrictions threaten] the stability of the global industrial supply chains." 

By shifting some of its MacBook production from China to Vietnam, Apple could at least partially isolate itself from any impending fallout geopolitical firestorm brewing from the sanctions. The Nikkei Asia report indicates that Apple has already set up test lines in Vietnam for its MacBooks and could start full-scale production as early as May 2023.

"After the MacBook production shifts, all of Apple's flagship products basically will have one more production location beyond China ... iPhones in India and MacBooks, the Apple Watch and iPads in Vietnam," said a person familiar with Apple's plans to Nikkei Asia. "What Apple wants now is an 'out of China' option for at least part of production for all of its products." 

Apple's next big MacBook release is expected to occur in early 2023. At that time, the company will reportedly launch new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros using M2 Pro and M2 Max SoCs using a 5-nanometer process node.

Benchmarks for Apple’s unannounced but almost certainly real M2 Max have appeared in Geekbench results, which shows a 12-core processor running at 3.54GHz and backed by 96GB of RAM. The rumored chip, which would be used in forthcoming MacBook Pro and Mac Studio models, offers a slight increase in performance over the existing M1 Max if the Geekbench run is accurate.

The Geekbench 5 results are for a 'Mac14,6' computer running on unreleased macOS 13.2 software. It manages a single-core score of 1,853 and a multi-core score of 13,855. If accurate, this is a little disappointing, as an eight-core M2 MacBook Pro hits 1,899 in the same single-core benchmark. However, the greater number of cores in the M2 Max machine sees it pull ahead in the multi-core ranking, with the M1 scoring 8,737 (5,000 points behind). However, all the M-class Macs trounce an Intel iMac from 2020, with that machine's Core i7-10700K at 3.8GHz scoring 1,250 in the single-core test and 8,157 in the multi-core.

A report from Taiwan's DigiTimes claims Apple will move from the M2's current 5nm TMSC process to a 3nm node for the M2 Pro. Of course, Apple hasn't announced this development, but manufacturing capacity at TSMC was reportedly booked by Apple back in the summer. 

The previous generation M1 chips were eventually available in four guises: vanilla, Pro, Max and Ultra, with the upper-level chips having more cores and beefier GPUs. While the Mac mini, iMac, MacBook Air, a few MacBook Pros and the iPad Pro got basic chips, most MacBook Pros come with a choice of M1 Pro or M1 Max, with the new Mac Studio able to be specced with an M1 Ultra, which is two M1 Pro chips stuck together. While the M1 has eight or 10 CPU cores, the differences between the chips are mainly expressed in the number of GPU cores and the amount of RAM in the package.

It's not unreasonable to expect M2 to go the same route, and while so far we've only seen M2 in the 2022 MacBook Air and a single MacBook Pro model (as well as an iPad Pro), we expect the processor to make its way through the entire Mac computer range, even perhaps infiltrating the Mac Pro, which is still an Intel-only zone.

Microsoft's Surface Pro 9 2-in-1 is now available with either an Arm or an Intel CPU. But the 15-inch Surface Laptop 5 clamshell is now all 12th Gen Intel, all the time, jettisoning the AMD-based option in the previous-gen Surface Laptop 4, which spent a long time on our Best Ultrabooks and Premium Laptops list. The shift to the latest mobile Intel silicon also brings support for Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4 via the laptop's sole USB-C port for the first time.

But aside from a new light green sage color in the smaller 13.5-inch model (we’re testing the 15-inch model here), the Surface Laptop 5 is effectively the same device on the outside as the Surface Laptop 4 (and 2019’s Surface Laptop 3, for that matter). In many ways, that’s fine given that the all-aluminum, 0.58-inch, 3.4-pound shell still looks and feels great, like an edgier version of Apple’s MacBook Air, at least in our silver “platinum” review unit (black is the other option). The keyboard and 2496 x 1664 touchscreen are still good, although the 720p webcam is starting to feel very dated for a laptop that starts at $1,299 ($1,899 as tested). 

The real issue, though, is that without any real change on the outside, this latest Surface Laptop lives and dies on its performance and battery life. And as we’ll see later in testing, the Intel i7-1265U in our review unit doesn’t exactly excite, especially given a similarly configured (and identically designed) AMD-powered Surface Laptop 4 got better battery life in our testing and is still available for hundreds less.

Design of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

While there’s nothing new about the Surface Laptop 5’s design, that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a lot to like. The angular aluminum shell, available in either black or platinum (silver), looks great and feels solid. And the device is pleasingly free of branding or other visual clutter, save for the mirrored Windows logo on the lid.

At 13.4 x 9.6 x 0.58 inches and 3.4 pounds, the Surface Laptop 5 is still slim and portable. Dell’s XPS 15 is thicker and heavier, at 0.73 inches and 4.31 pounds, although it makes room for dedicated graphics. 

But if portability is your main concern, smaller laptops might be the way to go. HP’s 13.5-inch Elite Dragonfly is just 2.2 pounds and 0.64 inches thick (and also more expensive, starting around $2,000). The ThinkPad X1 Carbon offers an enticing middle ground with a 14-inch screen and a 2.48-pound heft (nearly a pound less than the Surface Laptop), while costing $235 less than our Microsoft review unit, or $1,564.

Port speed has at least improved with the Surface Laptop 5, but the port count hasn’t. Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 is now on board, which means you can connect up to two 4K/60 Hz displays (provided you bring your own dock). But it exists in the laptop’s sole USB-C port on the left edge, where you’ll also find a USB 3.1 Type-A port and a headphone jack.

The right edge, as ever, is barren aside from Microsoft’s proprietary Surface Connect port for charging (or docking via a Surface Dock). We get the whole minimal vibe that Microsoft is clearly aiming for, but most of the competition offers more connectivity. The Dell XPS 13 Plus may have notoriously ditched the headphone jack, but at least it has two TB4 ports.

One other area where the Surface Laptop 5 design is showing its age is in the half-inch bezels around the display. The 15-inch screen itself, which we’ll be testing and talking about later, is still quite good. But everything you’ll be looking at on that screen will be framed by substantial black bars.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 Specifications

Productivity Performance on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

Our $1,899 review model of the Surface Laptop 5 shipped with Intel’s Core i7-1265U processor, which features two performance cores that top out at 4.8 Ghz, and eight efficiency cores that max out at 3.6 Ghz. This is paired with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Starting off with the CPU-focused Geekbench 5 test, the Surface Laptop 5 just manages to edge out the Surface Laptop 4 in the single-core test, but gets beaten by its predecessor in the multi-core benchmark. The ThinkPad and XPS laptops both feature higher-wattage CPUs (a 28-watt Core i7-1260P in the ThinkPad and a 45W Core i7-12700H in the XPS), so it’s not surprising that they lead. But note the smaller Dragonfly G3 (which has the same Core i7-1265U as our Surface Laptop 5). It manages to easily outpace the Surface Laptop 5 on the single-core test, while nearly keeping pace on the multi-core match.

Shifting to our file transfer test, the Surface Laptop 5 copied 25GB of files at 532.52 MBps. That’s admittedly better than the pokey 372.49 MBps we saw when testing the Surface Laptop 4, but everything else here is more than twice as fast, and the Dell was over three times speedier in our test.

Last up in our Handbrake test transcoding test, where we crunch a standard 4K test file down to 1080p, the Surface Laptop 5 finished in 8 minutes and 53 seconds, again lagging behind the Surface Laptop 4 (8:21). The much more powerful Dell took an easy win here (that one also has a discrete GPU), finishing in less than 6 minutes. But the ThinkPad and Dragonfly both took well over 10 minutes, indicating their smaller frames aren’t built for speedy long-term performance. 

We stress-tested the Surface Laptop 5 and its Intel Core i7-1265U processor by running Cinebench R23 20 times in a loop. The laptop started out strong at 7,894 and didn’t drop too much in the second round, hitting 7,711. But then it began a steep descent into the low/mid 5,000s, eventually falling to 4,924 before recovering slightly and settling back into the 5,500 range for its last few runs.

While you can see the substantial performance dropoff in the chart above, it’s worth noting that throughout this testing time (and just generally in my time using the laptop), fan noise was either entirely non-existent or nearly too low to hear. During the heaviest stresses, I could detect a low whir, but only when I bent down and put my ear about a foot from the laptop.

Clearly, Microsoft has tuned the Surface Laptop 5 to be silent rather than deliver the most performance possible from the CPU. During our tests, the CPU’s pair of performance cores ran at an average of 2.31 GH, and the efficiency cores ran at an average of 1.86; and the processor temp averaged 60.1 degrees Celsius.

Display on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

One thing I like about Microsoft’s Surface Laptops as a whole is the commitment to the touchscreen, a feature that exists across all models. This may not be a must-have feature on a clamshell laptop, but I first bought a touchscreen laptop sometime in 2012 (running Windows 8!), and I always somewhat miss the feature when it isn’t present. Here, as ever, it works well, although there is some wobble in the hinge if you’re a heavy tapper.

The 15-inch Surface Laptop 5 again sports a 2496 x 1664-resolution panel, which produces 101% of the sRGB spectrum and 71.6% of the larger DCI-P3 color space in our testing. When I watched the trailer for “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania,” the image looked bright and the reds and blues of the Quantum Realm popped. Near the end of the trailer, I particularly liked the way the details of Jonathan Majors’ face and his blue suit stood out against the dark, blurred background.

The Surface Laptop 5’s panel offered up 384 nits of average tested brightness, which is higher than the 334 nits we saw on the previous-gen Surface Laptop 4, and slightly brighter than the Dragonfly and XPS laptops. But the ThinkPad X1 Carbon was the brightness leader, breaking 400 nits.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Microsoft doesn’t claim to have made any changes to the input devices on the Surface Laptop 5, and that’s perfectly fine because they’re generally excellent. Sure, the keys are fairly flat, and the 1.3 mm of travel isn’t exactly luxurious. But the spacing feels roomy and there’s a nice level of tactility to the keys without much in the way of typing noise. While I still much prefer my desktop mechanical keyboards, I could happily live with this keyboard on the go or at home. The only way to get something substantially better on a slim laptop is to opt for one of the thicker Lenovo Thinkpads.

With its Windows Precision drivers and roomy but not huge 4.5 x 3-inch surface, the touchpad on the Surface Laptop 5 is also very good. Multi-finger gestures and general navigation worked for me without a hitch or complaint. There’s room for a bigger touchpad here, and some might prefer haptics over a physical click, but I’m not sure either would add much to the cursor control experience. What’s here is already much better than you’ll find on most laptops.

Audio on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

It’s hard to say without the Surface Laptop 4 sitting in front of me to compare, but it feels like Microsoft cut some costs with the Surface Laptop 5’s speakers. I wouldn’t quite classify them as bad, but our systems editor Andrew Freedman said the speakers on the Surface Laptop 4 got loud, with a comfortable listening volume of around 60-70%. Listening to my favorite test track on the Surface Laptop 5 (Buck-Tick’s “Nightmare”), I found I could crank the volume all the way up without things sounding uncomfortably loud–although there was some noticeable tinniness, with the high-end sounding pronounced and a bit shrill. This gets better if you drop the volume below 90%, but then there just isn’t that much sound coming from the speakers. And there’s no software here for tweaking the EQ.

What I can say is the speakers on the smaller HP Elite Dragonfly G3 are much better. When I listened to the two laptops with the same track side by side, the Dragonfly at 50% was about as loud as the Surface Laptop 5 turned all the way up. Cranked all the way, up the HP laptop was much louder, without the sharp high-end issues I could hear in the Microsoft laptop. Granted, the HP is a more expensive device, but it’s also much smaller and lighter. In short, while the speakers on previous Surface Laptops may have been quite good, I’d say the sound output of the Surface Laptop 5 is just OK. You’ll probably want headphones or a Bluetooth speaker.

Upgradeability of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

As nothing has substantially changed with the Surface Laptop 5’s physical design, the SSD is replaceable inside the laptop. But as ever, Microsoft says this should only be done by “skilled technicians following Microsoft instructions.” As in previous iterations, the company uses short M.2 2230 drives, which are much smaller and generally more expensive than standard 2280 drives.

Regardless, accessing the internals at all involves removing the laptop’s four glued-down rubber feet. Since we don’t expect anything else to be replaceable other than the SSD, we decided against prying off pieces of our loaner unit that aren’t designed to go back together simply, like screws and metal plates.

Battery Life on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

Despite packing the same 47 Whr battery capacity as the AMD-powered Surface Laptop 4, the latest Intel-powered model just doesn’t last as long in our battery test, which sets screen brightness at 150 nits while browsing the web, streaming video and OpenGL tests while connected via Wi-Fi.Despite packing the same 47 Whr battery capacity as the AMD-powered Surface Laptop 4, the latest Intel-powered model just doesn’t last as long in our battery test, which sets screen brightness at 150 nits while browsing the web, streaming video and OpenGL tests while connected via Wi-Fi.Despite packing the same 47 Whr battery capacity as the AMD-powered Surface Laptop 4, the latest Intel-powered model just doesn’t last as long in our battery test, which sets screen brightness at 150 nits while browsing the web, streaming video and OpenGL tests while connected via Wi-Fi.

The Surface Laptop 5’s unplugged runtime of 9 hours and 2 minutes on our test is still good, but the Surface Laptop 4 (which is still available for hundreds less than the Surface Laptop 5), lasted over three hours longer (12:04) on the same test. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon brought up the rear here, thanks in large part to its higher-wattage P-Series CPU. But the smaller HP Dragonfly G3 is the clear longevity leader of this group, lasting 14 hours and 20 minutes in our battery test. Yes, the HP has a smaller 13.5-inch display, but it also weighs over a pound less than the Surface laptop.

The Surface Laptop 5’s unplugged runtime of 9 hours and 2 minutes on our test is still good, but the Surface Laptop 4 (which is still available for hundreds less than the Surface Laptop 5), lasted over three hours longer (12:04) on the same test. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon brought up the rear here, thanks in large part to its higher-wattage P-Series CPU. But the smaller HP Dragonfly G3 is the clear longevity leader of this group, lasting 14 hours and 20 minutes in our battery test. Yes, the HP has a smaller 13.5-inch display, but it also weighs over a pound less than the Surface laptop.

Heat on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

To see how hot the Intel-powered Surface Laptop 5 can get under stress, we took skin temperature measurements of the system during our Cinebench R23 test.

At the center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, the Surface Laptop 5 measured a warm 105.5 degrees Fahrenheit (40.83 degrees Celsius). The touchpad topped out at a cooler 91.7 degrees Fahrenheit (33.17 degrees Celsius). And as usual, the bottom of the laptop was the warmest, hitting 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit (45.78 degrees Celsius) at the bottom rear, to the left of the Microsoft logo. While these temps aren’t the coolest we’ve seen on slim laptops (the Lenovo Thinkpad Z16 was cooler overall), they weren’t so high as to be uncomfortable when using the laptop.

Webcam on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

The best I can say about the Surface Laptop 5’s 720p webcam is that it is pretty good – for a 720p webcam. 

In natural or bright office lighting, my face looked reasonably well-defined and the colors of my shirt and the fake floral arrangement behind me when I tested it were mostly accurate. But in medium to low light, my face looked very dark and increasingly grainy. And even in the best sunlit conditions, the details in my beard and hair were lost to the camera’s low resolution. In short, if your webcam needs are low-res and basic, and your lighting is good, you can get by with the webcam in the Surface Laptop 5. But if you care about detail or want any fancy features, you should consider something from our best webcams list instead. 

Actually, there’s another good thing to be said about this laptop’s webcam: It includes an IR sensor for logging via Windows Hello facial recognition, and that feature worked as flawlessly and at least as fast here than with any (or at least most) of the laptops I’ve tested in the past. So long as my face was in frame when I lifted the laptop’s lid, I found myself logged in and onto the Windows 11 desktop so fast that I mostly forgot the camera was doing anything at all.

Software and Warranty on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

Microsoft continues to let its operating system shine (or at least function free of clutter) by not installing much in the way of extra software on its Surface devices. The primary extra is the Surface app. This lets you configure how the Surface Pen (sold separately) works on the screen and check warranty status and system specs.

The Start menu is also a bit cluttered out of the box, with shortcuts to the Disney app, Kindle, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp, alongside Microsoft’s own Xbox and Office teasers. While this sounds like a lot, what’s here overall is less than you’ll find pre-installed on the majority of Windows PCs these days.

Configurations of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5

While the smaller 13.5-inch Surface Laptop 5 has several configuration and color options (as well as the optional Alcantara fabric on the keyboard deck), your choices are much more limited if you opt for the 15-inch Surface Laptop 5. It’s available in black or silver, with no fabric keyboard cover option. 

Microsoft sent us a Surface Laptop 5 review unit with a Core i7-1265U CPU, 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM and a 512GB SSD. This CPU is actually only offered in the Surface Laptop 5 for Business line, and is priced at $1,899. But the same configuration in the consumer model, except with a Core i7-1255U CPU, sells for $1,799. The difference between those two CPUs? The 1265U has a 100 MHz higher Turbo frequency for both the two performance cores and the eight efficiency cores. That’s a two-percent change in maximum clock speed. So I wouldn’t recommend spending the extra $100 for the model we received, unless you also need Windows 11 Pro, which seems to be the only other difference between the consumer and business models. The consumer models ship with the standard version of Windows 11.

The consumer configurations of the Surface Laptop 5 all ship with the Intel Core i7-1255U CPU, starting at $1,299 with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. There is also a model that doubles the storage to 512GB, changes nothing else, but costs $1,499. Yes, that’s a $200 difference for an extra 256GB of storage. The model that’s closest to the business model we tested (i7, with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD) sits at $1,799. 

The top-end model sells for $2,399 with the same i7 CPU, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. That maxed-out model is only available in black, while the entry model is only offered in silver. It would be great to see 2TB of storage available as an option, but that’s likely a limitation of the short 2230 SSDs that Microsoft uses across most of its devices. And real talk: the company clearly wants you to pay for and use its OneDrive cloud storage rather than save your files locally, anyway.

Bottom Line

The 15-inch Surface Laptop 5’s design is still mostly great, although it could use more ports and is starting to feel stale. Its keyboard and screen still offer up an experience that’s well above average. The problem is, you can get all of that good stuff with the previous-generation Surface Laptop 4 for hundreds of dollars less (at least for now), while also bringing a few hours extra of battery life in our tests. And productivity performance with the new 12th Gen Core i7 CPU isn’t always better than the AMD-powered Surface Laptop 4, either.

So unless you love the Surface Laptop design and need Thunderbolt 4 (which comes via the laptop’s single USB-C port), the Surface Laptop 4 is a much better buy–at least as long as it lasts. Microsoft seemed to be hiding it on its own site when I was wrapping up this review. But I was able to configure the laptop with 16GB and a 512GB SSD for $1,399, or $500 less than our review configuration of the new Surface Laptop 5. Considering the newer laptop's similar to lesser performance and shorter battery life in our tests, it’s kind of hard to argue the new model is a big upgrade over the previous model.
If you’re after something with a bigger screen, Lenovo’s ThinkPad Z16 got 4.5 hours more battery life in our tests and starts at around $1,550. That’s with a Ryzen 5, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, or you could step up to a Ryzen 7, a 1TB SSD and dedicated 6500M graphics for about $86 more than our Surface Laptop 5 ($1,985.40). 

If you want something smaller and lighter, HP’s 13.5-inch Elite Dragonfly G3 sells for $1,962 with an Alder Lake i7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. That laptop also gets over four more hours of battery life in our testing, while weighing 1.2 pounds less than the Surface Laptop 5. The Surface Laptop 5 is still a sleek and solid device, but Microsoft clearly needs to bring something new to the table next year.

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Whether you're looking to sell a MacBook, pass it off to a friend or family member or even recycle it, you'll want to reset your Mac. Doing so will remove any files, log you out of any accounts, clear out your apps and ensure that wherever your MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Mini, iMac or other macOS device doesn't have traces of your information.

The instructions below are primarily for macOS Ventura and later, but we'll list a few tweaks to how to do this on macOS Montere and some older Macs as well.

Just like if you're going to factory reset a Windows PC, back up your data first, whether it's through iCloud, Time Machine or non-Apple service. You don't want to lose anything when you reset your MacBook.

It may also be a good idea to sign out of iMessage, iCloud and other services, though you'll have the opportunity to do this soon. You may even want to unpair Bluetooth devices.

Here's how to reset your MacBook (or other macOS device):

Erase All Content and Settings

This is a step you can take on Macs running on Apple Silicon chips or Intel processors with Apple's T2 chip.It may be enough if you're handing the laptop down to family.

1. On macOS Ventura or later, go to the Apple menu (it's a small Apple logo) in the top-left corner of the screen and click "System Settings."

If you have System Settings in your dock, you can also get there that way.

2. Click "General" and choose "Transfer or Reset."

3. Click "Erase All Content and Settings."

On macOS Monterey, you can go to the Apple menu > System Preferences and then "Erase All Content and Settings" to get to the same place. On macOS versions older than Monterey, you'll have to go straight to reinstalling macOS (see below), but you may want to delete what you can by hand.

4. Enter your password and click "Unlock" in the erase assistant window. Depending on whether you've used Time Machine or not, you may be prompted to back up your Mac now.

5. Click "Continue" to sign out of your Apple ID, remove fingerprints from TouchID, unpair accessories, turn off location sharing and to remove your settings and data.

6. If prompted, enter your Apple ID password to sign out of iCloud and other Apple services.

7. Click "Erase All Content & Settings" to start the erasure process. This is irreversible, so be sure you're ready.

Your Mac will restart, and you'll see the Apple logo with a progress bar. It may restart  including making the startup chime. Your Mac will boot up in the recovery assistant.

8. Connect to a Wi-Fi network using the Wi-Fi icon in the top right corner of the screen, then click "Next." If you have an Ethernet adapter, you can also connect to the internet that way.

When this is done, your Mac will activate and restart.

At this point, you'll be able to set up your MacBook like new, as if you were turning it on for the first time. If you're ready to hand it down, sell it, or trade it in, you can just turn it off.

For most people, this will be enough. But if your Mac doesn't have the Erase All Content and Settings Option (particularly if it's not on macOS Monterey or newer, or is an older Intel Mac), you may have to resort to the nuclear option.

Erase Your MacBook, Reinstall macOS

To reset a MacBook without the "Erase All Content and Settings" option, you'll have to take more drastic steps. Since most Apple Silicon Macs can upgrade to Ventura or later, this is primarily for older Intel Macs without either Apple's processors or T2 security chips.

To erase your MacBook this way, you'll need to go into macOS Recovery and proceed from there. Here's how:

1. Turn on your Mac, and hold Command ⌘ and R until the Apple logo pops up. You may see a progress bar. If you do, it should pass quickly. (If you happen to be doing this on an Apple Silicon machine, instead hold the power button and choose "options" from the menu screen.)

2. Choose "Disk Utility" and click "Continue."

3. In the sidebar, select "Macintosh HD" (unless you've previously changed its name, in which case it will reflect that name).

4. Click "Erase" on the top of the window.

5. Name the volume "Macintosh HD" and choose the format "APFS" or "mac OS Extended (Journaled) — whichever the Disk Utility suggests.

6. Click "Erase Volume Group" (or "Erase" if that is not shown).  When the process is done, click "Done."

7. Enter your Apple ID if prompted to do so.

8. Quit Disk Utility, either through the top menu or by hitting Command ⌘ + Q.

Your MacBook is now erased. If you have other drives in your Mac that may need wiping, you can repeat this process.

You'll be back in macOS Recovery. Now, you need to reinstall macOS on your MacBook: 

9.  Click "Reinstall macOS" and then "Continue." Our image shows macOS Big Sur, but you may be using a different version.

The installer for the version of macOS you were already using will pop up.

10. Click "Continue." You'll have to follow the prompts like you would for any installation, including accepting the terms of service and selecting the drive to install the OS to (most MacBooks will only have the one.)

The installation may take awhile and include at least one reboot, if not more. The first boot up may take a bit longer than expected.

Your Mac will reboot, leaving you with a pristine MacBook (or desktop) with just the OS on it, ready to be set up as if it were the first time. Now it's suitable for a fresh start or a new owner. You can hold down the power button to shut it off, and you're ready to go.

Best Buy has created program for Mac users called Upgrade+ that allows customers to upgrade to a new MacBook the way people often switch to new phones: in multi-year increments and paying month-to-month.

With Upgrade+ customers will need to finance a qualifying MacBook with Best Buy for 36 months. Once those 36 months are up, users get the chance to upgrade the MacBook to a newer version via financing, keep the laptop (and make one final payment for the rest of the balance), or return it to Best Buy, where it will likely be sold as used or refurbished.

The plan requires you to finance your original Mac purchase with Best Buy (through Citizens Pay, subject to credit approval), and is only available for Mac laptops with Apple Silicon (ie. M1 or M2 based chips). It's not unlike Apple's iPhone Upgrade program, except that Apple does that over a 1-year period.

After the 36 months are up, you'll be free to swap your MacBook for a newer version, without paying the leftover balance — assuming that you choose to move financing to a new machine. If you return the laptop to Best Buy, the store will handle the final payment. If you keep the device, you'll pay the difference.

Best Buy's example suggests that if you bought a Mac laptop for $999.99, you would pay $19.99 per month for 36 months, and then finish it off in month 37 with the remaining $280.35. This could be a good deal if you already intend to buy a new Mac this often, though those who want to do it sooner or keep it longer may not save money. They can, however, pay over time if they wish.

Upgrade+ can be optioned out with AppleCare+ and select accessories when you order, but the program will not be eligible for discounts of any type that might appear in the Best Buy store.

Currently, Best Buy has five MacBooks that qualify for Upgrade+, including the MacBook Air in both M1 and M2 variants, a MacBook Pro 13 M2, MacBook Pro 14 M1 and MacBook Pro 16 M1.

The MacBook Air M1 will cost $999.99 and start at $19.99 a month, while the M2 version ups that to $1,199.99 and $26 per month. For the MacBook Pro 13 inch M2, the cost goes up to $1,299.99 or $28.17 a month, and the MacBook Pro 14 with the M1 goes up to a significantly more expensive $1,999.99 per month at a rate of $43.34 a month. Finally, the MacBook Pro 16 inch with the M1 chip is priced at $2,499.99 and goes for $54.17 per month. You might be able to find a Best Buy coupon for the scheme, it's not a guarantee but it's worth checking.

Members of Best Buy's TotalTech program will get AppleCare+ at no cost for 24 months, as long as they keep active. Apple already lets you pay over time for laptops for 0% APR for 12 months, but if you're looking to trade in fairly often for the latest and greatest, Apple's fans may start considering the Best Buy route.