MacBook Air 15 features, size, Price.

Apple just released new MacBook Air 15 and I must say from my time playing around with this laptop. I think Apple might have just made the perfect MacBook. So let me tell you all about it and really when I tell you about this MacBook Air, just as on the 13-inch MacBook Air you're gonna notice there's a lot of repeating features here because essentially what Apple did here is they basically just took the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air they took the same chip that was inside uh that machine and then just brought it over to a 15-inch MacBook Air. As you guessed it has a larger display yeah that is pretty much the Hallmark design.The big feature here is that you're getting that same 13-inch M2 Air, which was a great laptop but now you get a bigger 15.3-inch display in a lot of ways that kind of makes all the difference right before this laptop. you would have to spend two thousand five hundred dollars to get a laptop from Apple that had a bigger than 14-inch display. If you want it something in that size class this is very comparable to the 16 inch MacBook Pro. by the way if you want it like a big 15 or 16 inch display you would have to spend 2 500 and that didn't matter if you wanted the advanced features of that 16 inch MacBook Pro right like if you didn't care about having that extra horsepower which quite frankly that's a that's something you probably shouldn't care about right like most people don't need the amount of horsepower that's in the 16-inch MacBook Pro or if you didn't want like a bigger chunkier thicker design uh yeah this is the laptop you've probably been waiting for and the thing I really like about this laptop is when I was you know thinking about okay Apple's gonna make a 15 inch laptop how are they going to approach this in the lineup I was thinking that this was gonna still be like a pretty expensive laptop like my guess for the base model of this machine was that Apple was going to charge around fifteen hundred dollars if you looked at the lineup at the time you know you had the M2 MacBook Air at twelve hundred dollars and I'm like okay bigger screen they're probably gonna put the fully binned M2 Chip in here which they did right and that's gonna probably run you about fifteen hundred dollars and then in that lineup it's kind of like okay it's good that people can get a cheaper bigger screen laptop but it's gonna run up against that 14 inch MacBook Pro thankfully Apple kind of didn't go that route right they basically dropped the price of that 13-inch M2 MacBook Air so that's now 1099 that's a much better price for that laptop makes it actually a really good value but then because they lower the price of that they basically uh made this laptop about 200 more and technically it's only a hundred dollars more than that uh 13 inch M2 MacBook Air because if you were to take the base model of that MacBook Air put in the full 10 core M2 Chip with the full 10 core GPU which this 15 inch laptop does have by default you can't order it with an 8 core GPU then you would see that the 13 inch goes up to 1199 and it's only a 100 difference so this 15 inch laptop is only 12.99 s when you're looking at Hallmark features for this laptop you got the bigger display and I think the price point for a 15 inch laptop this is a really great price point especially when you take into account uh what you're getting out of this machine so I think the big Hallmark feature for this machine obviously if you're not used to it is Apple silicon so this does come again with that fully binned M2 Chip and 8 core CPU a 10 core GPU listen I've reviewed the M2 chips before and basically what you need to know about these machines is that number one they are super power powerful and super capable so I think this machine is definitely aimed towards people who are more at the consumer level people who just want to do the basic tests like uh you know browsing the web watching video taking uh video calls you know working on Zoom uh typing up documents all that stuff that we do on a daily basis that most people have to do this laptop is aimed towards you and even at the base model with eight gigabytes of memory with the 256 gigabyte drive you don't have to worry about performance this thing I'm telling you it's gonna get through those normal tasks like ease like look at this example like you could just open apps back to back look how quick these apps open on the M2 there's like no load time from when you click down on the trackpad and when these apps open so this thing is a screamer as Steve Jobs used to say it is super fast but the other thing and I think this is really an important distinction to make is even though we praise how good this is uh for everyday tasks at the base level it's also pretty competent at some professional level tasks even with this base level M2 Chip you don't have to step up to the M2 Pro uh to be able to do some professional level things on this if you want to edit photos if you want to use a program like Photoshop or Affinity photo if you want to edit videos in Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve you know programs that are pretty well optimized for Apple silicon this thing can handle it if you want to get this machine you know you're going away uh to college and you're you're planning to pursue a degree in computer science you're going to be doing some coding you want to develop Mac apps or iPhone apps all this stuff right this is a really good development laptop as well it is very Speedy for what you're getting here you know for professional level tasks though you do have to start thinking about upgrading this machine right when you get the base level model it does come with eight gigabytes of memory and if you're used to working in professional applications you know that you know eight gigabytes of memory it's very constraining um so my recommendation if you you you know word to get this machine as like that you know kind of mid-level prosumer not quite going up to Pro or maybe you're on a budget you know maybe you want like a 16 inch MacBook Pro because you really need a bigger screen but you know you can't afford 2 500 I totally get that my recommendation to you is this is still a great machine for a lot of professional level tasks you can definitely do them on this machine it might take just like a little bit longer and stuff like that but you can definitely do them my recommendation is to step up to at least 16 gigabytes of unified memory on this machine it will make it much more competent and then um if you've watched other videos on the M2 Chip I'm sure you've heard the controversy that the base level 256 gigabyte M2 models ship with a slower uh SSD speed and yes this is the same on the 15-inch MacBook Air I tested this and it's still getting about you know 1500 read and write speeds but again if you're you know this isn't the days of the spinning hard disk these are not slow drives they're just slow in comparison to the much faster drives that you can get if you upgrade those storage tiers so if you get a 512gb byte drive on this machine you're going to get around 3 000 reader write speeds potentially you could see some performance Improvement for edge cases depending on how you use this especially if you do have eight gigabytes of memory and you're swapping memory a lot there is a chance you might see a performance increase by getting 512 gigabytes of storage but I think listen I I know you want to run the numbers and all this back and forth in day-to-day usage I'm pretty sure 95 of people who buy this computer 99 you know let's throw out a huge number there they're not going to notice the slower disk speed on this now again I'm assuming most of the people watching this video the market for this laptop are people who are still either on Intel MacBook Pros or are on window machines and heard how great Apple silicon laptops are and they want a 15 inch laptop because surprise surprise the most popular display size for Windows laptops is around 15 inches so apple is definitely targeting Windows users with this machine and I think the benefits of Apple silicon for this 15-inch laptop it really does make it a really great machine because the battery life in apple silicon laptops are just insane when you compare them to uh more power hungry laptops that use like those you know Intel processors or AMD processors like this thing can get reliably like you know it's rated for 18 hours of video playback and it's the same exact rating as the 13-inch model but I'm telling you you can use this laptop all day you can leave the power brick at home right uh and this thing should last you a whole day on a single charge and if you're using your laptop for like two hours a day you know you could probably stretch this out for a couple days maybe even a week before you have to charge it like the battery life on these Apple silicon laptops are insane now they're better than the battery life like you get out of like an iPad uh just because it's running the same chips and you have a much bigger battery in here as well okay but obviously a lot of what I've been saying also applies to that 13-inch MacBook Air so why should you get specifically this 15 inch model well obviously it has a bigger display right you don't need me to tell you that you you don't need to be a rocket scientist or a tech reviewer to know that 15 inches is bigger than 13 inches right I think the technical display size is 13.6 on the smaller model to 15.3 on this one it might not sound like a lot on paper but trust me when you see these side by side the 15 inch it makes for a much bigger display you could fit more apps on the screen comfortably uh when you're watching video you get a bigger video right so if you want a bigger screen obviously go for the 15 inch model but I think a lot of people who are maybe deciding between a 15 inch and a 13 inch might be kind of scared uh from the 15-inch model because they think okay if it's 15 inches it's not going to be as portable it's not going to be as light let me tell you Apple did a great job here taking that 13 inch or taking the MacBook Air philosophy of this being a thin and light computer that you can take with you anywhere and bringing that over to a bigger 15 inch size it is still razor thin it's like I think just barely thicker than the 13 inch like on paper like you can't even tell it's thicker than the 13 inch in person it weighs 3.3 pounds which is still super light the the 13 inch weighs 2.7 pounds and this thing basically weighs 0.2 pounds less than the 14 inch MacBook Pro so it's lighter than that 14 inch MacBook Pro and also when you do the size comparisons when you lay this down flat and you put you know the 13 inch MacBook Air you can see it is sizably bigger but I think the amazing thing here is when you take one of those older MacBook Air models and you put it on top of this 15 inch the 15 inch is just barely barely bigger than like those old 2017 MacBook airs so that's kind of crazy the fact that Apple was able to basically take uh that old 13-inch MacBook Air and fit everything into it for a 15 inch size that's kind of showing you like the portability you're working with here so this thing is still super light super thin super portable another Advantage with this 15-inch laptop and this really really surprised me is the speaker system I you know they said it was a new speaker system was like a six speaker system but I was like it's still a MacBook Air there's not even like speaker grilles on this right like it's not going to sound good this thing sounds amazing let me let me load up I'm going to try and load up and see if we can recreate this the speaker system on this really good gets pretty loud and the clarity on it is very good so you know what more can you say about this laptop right it is a fantastic value this fills a huge hole in the MacBook lineup I am so glad that this thing is out again excellent trackpad great keyboard you know you do still face some of the limitations of getting uh the MacBook Air Model right like it still has just magsafe charging port and two Thunderbolt usb4 ports I was hoping and a headphone jack I was hoping that Apple would put an SD card slot on here but they didn't so you're still faced with like those Port limitations but you know most people aren't putting SD cards into laptops in 2023 but yeah this thing at 12.99 again 100 more than that 13 inch model with the same exact specs that is such a good price for a 15-inch MacBook this thing might be honestly when you take like everything about it this might be like the best MacBook ever made for most people this is amazing like I can't recommend it enough right so, if you want to get a 15-inch MacBook Air than Shop Amazon now.