Some may lament the loss of the older style of keyboard. Now the new Air is firmly in the same camp as the other models. (One Apple rep misidentified a nearby new Air as a Pro to us.) Picking up the new Air, it immediately felt lighter and smaller than the current Air, which - having had the same basic design since 2010 - many of us are intimately familiar with.Īs the only MacBook with a traditional island-style keyboard, the MacBook Air was the one refuge for those who disliked the super-flat butterfly mechanism keyboards in newer MacBooks. 30 event, it was hard to distinguish this new Air from Apple's other laptops at first glance. In person, as seen during a hands-on demo session following Apple's Oct. The new MacBook Air comes in space gray, silver and gold. If anything, the new Air looks and feels like a half-step between the 12-inch MacBook and the 13-inch MacBook Pro, rather than an evolution of the classic Air. The long-standing tapered Air design, with its thick screen bezels, smallish touchpad, deep keys and multiple types of ports is gone, replaced by the familiar design cues of the post-2016 MacBook ( $518 at Amazon) and MacBook Pro. This new version of the popular laptop might as well be called the MacBook Pro Lite, because that's essentially what it is. It's called the MacBook Air, but it's an Air in name only.
