Look honey, Apple shrunk the MacBook Pro 16 – this is the best way to describe the MacBook Air 15, a laptop that Apple launched in India earlier in June. Sure, this is not a Pro laptop the way Apple defines them. But it is also not that far from offering everything that a lot of pros may require. The Air 15, in many ways, is the perfect laptop most users can buy. And while it is pricey with a starting price of Rs 1,34,900 in India, it is also worth the cost in most instances.
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This doesn’t mean to say that the Air 15 is perfect in every way. It is not. But the complaints I have with it are minor.
Bigger but not heavier
One of the defining features of the MacBook Air has been its design. The iconic wedge-shape design changed the world of laptops. But last year as Apple launched new MacBook Pro laptops, with their rounded edges and sides with uniform thickness, the company brought the same design to the MacBook Air 13. Now, in the Air 13 I didn’t particularly fancy the new design. I thought the older one looked better. It had some personality. In the case of the Air 15, I feel the new design is a perfect match. The larger size makes the wedge-shaped design less practical. The rounded corners, on the other hand, gives the Air 15 a shape that makes it easier to hold, carry and use.
This is not a new design. We first saw this in the MacBook Pro last year. But it is in the Air 15 that I find it perfect. While the Air 15 looks similar to Pro 16 from last year, this is a much lighter and thinner laptop. Both – weight and thickness – are striking. As soon as I picked the laptop, I marvelled at how light it was despite packing in a large 15.3-inch screen. It weighs just 1.55 kgs! Similarly, with 11.5mm of uniform thickness, it is thinner than some of the older smartphones.
Apart from weight and thickness, the Air 15 differs from Pro 16 in some other key aspects. Compared to the Pro that has more ports, the Air 15 has only three. These are placed on the left side: two USB-C plus Thunderbolt ports, and one MagSafe 2 charging port. On the right, there is the 3.5mm headphone jack.
Another difference is in the speaker setup. The Air 15 has a six-speaker setup – similar to six in the Pro – but there is a difference in the implementation and underlying hardware. Unlike in the Pro, which has speaker mesh on both sides of the keyboard, the speakers in the Air are inside its aluminium shell with audio passing through grills near the screen hinge.
The rest of the Air 15 is classic Apple. The entire laptop is built of aluminium. It is sturdy. The shell is minimalist, and the workmanship is top notch. On the front, above the screen is the notch that Apple introduced in the laptops last year. It houses a FullHD 1080P webcam. On the bottom of the laptop are four rubber feet, the same that we saw in the Pro 16 last year.
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Unlike the regular colours, the Air 15 is also available in Midnight finish (the one pictured in this review). The new finish is a fingerprint magnet. Like totally! The laptop catches smudges as soon as you lay your hands on it, and it is definitely a little tricky to keep it shiny and polished. Although the Midnight colour does look cool, classy and unique.
Because of its size and weight, I find using the Air 15 absolute joy. It is easy to carry, just like a 13-inch laptop. The keys are large, offering typing experience that is a notch above what other laptops offer in this price segment. And similar is the case with the touchpad, which is HUGE.
MacBook Air 15 screen, performance and battery life
Since Apple introduced its first MacBook laptops with M series chipset in 2019, the company hasn’t launched a machine where we have any complaints about its performance. The same goes for the Air 15.
The new Air 15 is powered by the M2 chipset. The chipset is powerful enough to offer sublime day-to-day experience and yet runs cooler enough to make the Air 15 design fanless. Compared to M1 or comparable Intel and AMD laptop chipsets, the M2 is right on top of benchmarks in single-thread tests. On multi-core, it’s winsome and losesome for the M2, depending on how well the benchmark uses different cores.
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For this review, I tried the Air 15 with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD storage. While I think it’s high time for Apple to move to 16GB RAM in its base variants, for all that I did on Air 15 I found it a fast machine. Browsing, photo editing in Lightroom, watching videos, some office work… all of that fared well on the Air 15. Web browsing with tons of tabs open in Chrome – like 40-odd tabs – didn’t bother the Air 15.
My impression is that unless you are editing videos in Premiere Pro or editing multiple 100mb RAW photos, the base variant of the Air 15 would be fast enough for you.
The screen is one of the best parts about the Air 15. The large screen – and the laptop’s fairly meaty and capable speakers – make the Air 15 a great entertainment machine. The screen is also vibrant and is bright enough to be usable indoors with around 40 per cent brightness.
In fact, the large size of the screen means that you will appreciate it irrespective of what you are doing on it. You just fit in more content on the Air 15 screen and if people with an older 13-inch Air upgrade to it they will be pleasantly surprised at just how big this screen feels.
One thing where I think the Air 15 could have been better is its outdoor brightness and viewing angles. Compared to the pro laptops – which are more pricey – the Air 15 screen is a notch below in its quality. But more importantly, I feel it is also a notch below some of the best screens that are available in Windows laptops in this price segment, particularly in colour vibrancy and vividness. The difference isn’t huge but it is there.
If the screen of the Air 15 could have been better, when it comes to battery life I have absolutely no complaints. Apple promises 18 hours of video playback or 15 hours of web browsing with the full battery of the Air 15. After using the Air 15, I found these figures to be conservative. The actual battery life is better. For most people the Air 15 battery will likely last at least 2 working days. And this sort of battery, in a laptop, is a tremendous boon to users.
Of course, my good experience with the Air 15 is also a result of the macOS. I continue to find the macOS a superior operating system compared to Windows. Compared to Windows 11, which is somewhat messier and chaotic, the macOS Ventura is a more streamlined operating system that not only has a better UI but also a feature set that is suitable and sufficient for most people even in its default state.
Perfect laptop for most people
When it comes to iPhones and Androids, there can always be a debate on which is better and why. But in most instances – particularly if you are not going to run some specialised software – a current MacBook is better than a Windows laptop at its respective price segment.
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The Air 15 is arguably the best general-purpose laptop Apple has made so far. Its design is fantastic, screen good, performance more than good enough, battery life market-leading, and software easy on the eyes and genuinely useful. The Air 15 comes with a superb set of keyboard and trackpad. In every way, it is a superior general-purpose laptop compared to any other available at its price point.
The only reason to pick something else above the Air 15 would be if you want a laptop with an Nvidia or AMD graphics card. This you may need for gaming, or for some heavy-duty video editing – although heavy-duty video editing might be an issue on any Rs 1.3 lakh. The laptops in this price segment, even those powered by Windows, are unlikely to be powerful enough for professional video editing.
For everything else, the Air 15 is near perfect. It is one of those devices that delight a user every time they are put to use. If you can – and want – to spend Rs 1.3 lakh on a laptop, go for Air 15. You will not be disappointed with it.a
