KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 17 — After reviewing hundreds of laptops over the years, the MacBook Air is perhaps still the standard bearer for a laptop that weighs very little, while not asking you to compromise on much.

Why the "sudden” appearance of a 15-inch model?

Apparently there is a demand for laptops that size and Apple hadn’t as yet addressed the segment, perhaps assuming that most people who wanted more screen space would just get a monitor (or two) for more display space.

The size is the "Goldilocks” just right size supposedly desired by a lot of people.

It does make sense; 16-inch is a little too big for most, and while 13-inch is very portable for some, it isn’t enough screen.

While I know people who have bought portable monitors, tablet-like devices, it can be cumbersome and only practical if you have a lot of desk space.

More display, more productivity?

In the past, 14 or 15-inch laptops were popular for mainly one reason — they were cheaper.

It is a lot more expensive to miniaturise components thus a lighter, while still powerful laptop, would then cost more due to the complexity of producing one.

Now, having a light, still fairly powerful laptop, with a larger, quality display is, no matter how you look at it, an unappreciated feat of engineering.

Cheaper laptops with plastic construction have one common weak point — the plastic hinges that hold up the display. Eventually over time, the plastic often warps or shatters and is not replaceable.

Apple gets criticised for a fair amount of things — their price points, the locked down ecosystem and reliance on proprietary formats and standards — but construction-wise it is hard to fault how MacBooks are made.

They look and feel expensive and the 15-inch MacBook Air is very much a premium computer, with glossy finishing and polished aluminium.

Am less impressed with the review unit’s shade of Midnight (a deep, dark blue) that looks very nice in pictures but is embarrassingly a fingerprint magnet.

I did, however, recently find out the little to no clearance between the display and keyboard when you close the lid of a MacBook means anything thicker than the crepe paper they pack the laptop in could compromise the screen.

Pro-tip: Don’t leave even a sheet of paper or a keyboard protector in your laptop when you close it. I feel rather embarrassingly late to the party but consider this a public service announcement.

My day-to-day

Anyway back to the MacBook Air, which I did not manage to break despite my ignorance.

The 15.3-inch display is Apple’s trademark Liquid Retina, which is nice, certainly but when the competition is putting OLED screens on laptops that are half the price of Apple’s, it is a point of contention.

Not that the IPS LED-backlit screen is a terrible performer. It’s just that it boggles the mind why the MacBook Airs don’t have screens with faster response times by now.

Still, the person most likely to be using a MacBook Air will probably not care about fast display response times but it’s still a bit of a niggle for people who are the type to obsessively compare spec sheets.

Another thing — the MacBook Air 15 coming just a few months when Apple will probably announce the creation of new M3 processors.

Still it is not much to complain about considering Apple’s M-series chips are still excellent. Heck, even the M1 chip-powered machines of a couple of years back are still very capable.

Now as for performance, I find the MacBook Air is pretty much the machine I wrote about but just with a bigger screen.

It’s fast, it’s quiet, it’s... also expensive but no more expensive than its direct competitors such as the Dell XPS series or high-end Lenovo Thinkpads.

For spreadsheets, word processing, media consumption and photo editing, the MacBook Air will chug on just fine, quietly and on a battery that is quite ridiculous,

I’d turn it on in the morning, do my work, make it suffer a little with Pixelmator and the odd Steam game and by the time I am watching cat videos on it at 12am, it still had enough battery power to enable my impulse online shopping for a couple more hours.

I would gripe about just one thing, though. The base model MacBook Airs should really come with more than 8GB of RAM, even with the engineering magic of the M-series processors.

It’s 2023, Apple. Let them (us) have more memory. At least PC notebooks let people add RAM later, which is not an option with Apple’s unified memory design.

There’s also the mystery of why Apple only included two Thunderbolt ports when there would be space for three but they made the same choice for the MacBook Pro line so I guess this is consistent.

So, do you get this machine or not? Someone I know started a new job and his first request was for a MacBook Air 15-inch so yes, some people really want it but do you?

Get it if you want a MacBook Air that gives you as much display as possible without hurting your back or wallet (much).

Get it because Mac OS has free updates for life and your very beautiful laptop will still be running fairly smoothly in four to five years, and unless you’re careless, it will also look better than your car will in five years.

Get it if most days you work from a fairly cramped table/seat and there’s no fitting an extra monitor into your daily life, or you’d rather just one more monitor not two.

Don’t get it if you rely on software that runs best or only on Windows, would be fine with a sub-3k laptop you will probably need to upgrade in three years, or prefer/need to upgrade your storage and memory in the future, not right now.

Another point to note is that it also only supports one external display via using USB-C and DisplayPort tech — any other format, you’ll need adapters.

The MacBook Air 15-inch laptops with M2 chips are available now with prices starting from RM6,199 for the 8-core CPU/10-core GPU models with 8GB memory and 256GB of SSD storage.

If you instead go for the model with 512GB storage, you’ll pay RM6,999 for that extra space which may or may not be a dealbreaker for you.

Just a note: Apple has a Back to School promo going on until October for newly enrolled or current university students, as well as institute of higher learning teachers and staff at all levels.

Might as well save a few hundred ringgit and free AirPods if you’re buying a new Mac or iPad for the student/educator in your life.

Disclaimer: I’m not being paid for this but it’s for people like my friend who asked me while on holiday in the US if she should get her Apple stuff there or here.

My answer: You’re a lecturer, use your Malaysian discountlah please.

You can order the new MacBook Air 15-inch online or visit your nearest authorised Apple reseller.