MacBook Air Line Continues; Gets Underwhelming Upgrade
Probably one of the most awaited announcements at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 this week involves the MacBook Air line. On a good note, the laptop is not yet discontinued. However, the company gave it another underwhelming upgrade.
The lack of a more advanced upgrade for the MacBook Air ignited the persistent speculation that it could be discontinued soon, However, it is not expected to happen just yet, as the device gets another CPU update this year.
Note though that the only update for MacBook Air's processing specification is not a monumental one.
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For some reason, Apple deemed that the MacBook Air does not really need a major CPU overhaul as the 2017 version will still run with a Broadwell Intel chip — the lineup known as the company's 5th generation of processors and was first released in 2014.
For the same $999 price tag, the 2017 version of the MacBook Air gets a dual-core Broadwell Core i5-5350U, which runs at a base clock speed of 1.8 gigahertz. It is a very minor jump from the 2016 update of Broadwell i5-5250U that operates at 1.6 GHz. Other than that, nothing was changed for the MacBook Air line.
Back in the day when the MacBook Air was first announced, it was successfully marketed as the world's thinnest laptop, which explains the branding. It lived up to its name at the time, but it did not take long for other manufacturers to catch up. Today, the only existing MacBook Air 13-inch is not the thinnest variant, even among the entire MacBook lineup.
The 2017 MacBook Air retains its bodywork dimension that is about 0.68 inches thick when closed, compared to the MacBook Pro that measures 0.59 inches. Even the latest version of the base model, the MacBook 12-inch, is thinner at 0.52 inches.
On top of that, both the base MacBook and MacBook Pro lines have been upgraded to have the latest Intel chips, Kaby Lakes, without adjusting the price as well. The 12-inch MacBook gets variants of the 7th-generation Core m3 and i5.
The 2017 MacBook Pro 13-inch will now run with variants of Kaby Lake Core i5 chips and can be configured to higher models of Core i7. Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro 15-inch gets configurable 7th-generation Core i7 chips out of the box.
With the mentioned specifications and its price tag, it is very clear what purpose the MacBook Air serves today — an entry-level Apple-branded laptop.
