MacBook Air M2 preorders start on Friday, shipments arrive July 15

[Shawn Knight]

In a nutshell: Apple's redesigned MacBook Air broke cover at WWDC 2022 in June and found its way to the company's online store shortly after. Interested parties could learn all about the new laptop and compare pricing on various configurations but the option to place an order wasn't available. That'll change later this week as Apple will start accepting orders for its new MacBook Air on July 8 at 5 a.m. Pacific.

The new MacBook Air features a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display, MagSafe charging, a 1080p FaceTime HD camera and a four-speaker audio system. The portable measures 11.3mm thin uniformly and weighs only 2.7 pounds. It'll be offered in your choice of silver, space gray, midnight and starlight, and adopts Apple's flat edge styling from recent iPhone and iPad models.

Pricing starts at $1,199 ($1,099 for education customers) for an Air with an eight-core CPU, eight-core GPU, 8GB of unified memory and 256GB of SSD storage. A configuration with a 10-core GPU and 512GB SSD can be yours for $1,499, and both base models can be custom configured with more memory and storage – up to 24GB and 2TB, respectively – for an additional fee.

Speaking of, keep your eyes peeled for our full review of Apple's new M2 SoC due out later this week.

The first wave of MacBook Airs with M2 chips will start arriving to customers and be available in select Apple Store locations beginning July 15.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/95204-macbook-air-m2-pre-orders-open-friday-shipments.html

 

[baN893]

Actually excited for this laptop package as a whole. After decades of resisting Apple MacBooks, I'll probably take the plunge and get this as my first Apple MacBook as a BYOD work computer. Looking forward to the M2 review later this week! Will be interested to read the reviews for the actual MacBook once they're out.

 

[psycros]

Unless their just listing that part of the APU separately it sounds like this thing has a discrete GPU. If so that's the first I've heard of it.

 

[VitalyT]

Comparing to Macbook Pro 14"...

The good:
- light and small form factor
- completely silent

The bad:
- No XDR display
- Performance throttling because of the passive cooling

The absolute worst to buy today is Macbook Pro 13". They have no XDR screens, and feature some obsolete hardware, like very slow ancient SSD-s.

 

[Watzupken]

Comparing this new M2 MacBook Air, I feel the older generation looks more attractive, despite missing out on some nice upgrades. As I recall, the M1 MBA starts at USD 999, which means for all the nice to have upgrades, it will cost USD 200 bucks more. Given that the SOC is not getting a big bump in performance, other than the use of LPDDR5 and 10 core GPU, most people will not feel the difference in performance in their day to day usage.

 

[brucek]

Price to upgrade SSD from 256 GB to 2 TB: $800 (should be ~$200)
Price to upgrade RAM from 8GB to 24GB: $400 (should be ~$100)

I'd like these machines so much better if they included the option to use regular retail parts. I guess they could be OK deals for people who could be absolutely sure they needed only the minimum spec.

 

[Nintenboy01]

Unless their just listing that part of the APU separately it sounds like this thing has a discrete GPU. If so that's the first I've heard of it.

pretty sure it's just a bin of the same chip

 

[Nintenboy01]

Price to upgrade SSD from 256 GB to 2 TB: $800 (should be ~$200)
Price to upgrade RAM from 8GB to 24GB: $400 (should be ~$100)

I'd like these machines so much better if they included the option to use regular retail parts. I guess they could be OK deals for people who could be absolutely sure they needed only the minimum spec.

no go for the RAM since it's tightly coupled with the SoC, that's why the bandwidth is so high