A reinvented MacBook Air with a Retina display

The MacBook Air is back, and it's ready for 2019 with a slimmer design, a higher-resolution Retina display, fingerprint sensor security, and better performance than the original MacBook Air you knew, and loved over the last decade.

This is poised to be Apple's best entry-level MacBook – it's cheaper than the 12-inch MacBook and sports a larger 13.3-inch screen size. It has 17 per cent less volume than the previous MacBook Air, and weighs just 2.75 pounds (1.25kg).

The entire MacBook Air 2018 keyboard is low-profile now, which is a change that older MacBook Air users will have to get used to.

This is Apple's first Mac made of 100 per cent recycled aluminium. Its price makes this technically Apple's most affordable laptop at $1,119.

That gets you the new Retina display with an 8th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of memory, and 128GB of SSD storage inside. The price, of course, goes up from there if you upgrade things like the memory and storage, which now max out at 16GB and 1.5TB respectively.

Apple has also shaved 50 per cent of the surface area off the borders from the original MacBook Air design, which now looks completely dated by comparison. And these thin borders are black, not silver, so the remaining bezel doesn't stand out as much.

Everything about the tighter design helps to highlight the Retina display. It's like the aluminium body went on a diet, but the 13.3-inch screen did not. It has an 8th-generation, dual-core Intel Core i5 processor. However, the new Intel Core i5-8210Y is a new chipset that lists its Thermal Design Power (TPD) spec as 7W, and it may in fact have a fan, according to the on-stage glimpse of the insides of the MacBook Air. That's unlike the lower-powered 12-inch MacBook.

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