It has phenomenal viewing angles, incredibly accurate colors, and a frustrating level of glare and oleophilia. That's the crazy thing: this is still a really good display, the same 13.3-inch, 1440 x 900 screen the Air has had for the last two years. I can say that at least in my experience owning an Air I've never once needed an optical drive, and the $29 USB-to-Ethernet adapter worked flawlessly the few times I've been in need (hotel rooms, mostly).Īfter a few days of using the MacBook Pro with Retina display, I could barely stand to look at the display on the MacBook Air.

The Air's no longer the only MacBook model to forgo an optical drive and a dedicated Ethernet port, but there are certainly people who need both.

The Thunderbolt standard hasn't changed, and generally speaking neither has its glacial pace of adoption, but it did get some new functionality thanks to new Thunderbolt-to-Gigabit-Ethernet and Thunderbolt-to-Firewire 800 adapters, which Apple announced at WWDC. There's also a Thunderbolt port and a full SD card slot. You still get two USB ports on the MacBook Air, though they're now USB 3.0 instead of 2.0 - that makes a big difference in performance, as you'll see below. Other MacBooks are changing to look like the Air MagSafe 2 is shorter and wider than the last version, and seems like it'd help Apple make the Air thinner, but last-gen MagSafe worked just fine on the 2011 model of the same size. The one noticeable difference is the charging port, of all things: Apple's switched the MacBook Air to the new MagSafe 2 connector, which means if you're upgrading, your current power cables will go the way of the Dodo unless you spend $10 on a tiny adapter. Though the competition has certainly heated up since the last generation of MacBook Air - the Asus Zenbook and Lenovo U300 stand near the top of the ultrabook pack, but there are a number of good options - Apple's hardware is still hard to beat.įrom design touches to colors to features, the Air is virtually unchanged. At 0.11 inches thick at the front of the teardrop edge and 0.68 inches thick at the back, it remains one of the thinnest laptops we've seen. The wedge-shaped unibody aluminum body weighs 2.96 pounds, and fits as easily as ever into your backpack. (Case in point: the new MacBook Pro with Retina display.) I won't bore you with a rehash of the look and feel of the device, except to say that it's almost entirely unchanged. Apple's evidently very happy with the look and feel of the MacBook Air, because not only has it stayed the same for the last two iterations, but the rest of the company's laptops are starting to look ever more like the Air.

Macbook pro 2012 13 inch model number