CUPERTINO — Apple, on the first day of its WWDC Developers Conference, has introduced a completely redesigned MacBook Air and an updated 13-inch MacBook Pro, both powered by the new M2 chip.
With an all-new, thin design and better performance, MacBook Air also features a larger 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display, a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, four-speaker sound system, up to 18 hours of battery life, and MagSafe charging. It is now available in four finishes — silver, space gray, midnight, and starlight.
M2 also comes to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the world’s second best-selling laptop — delivering incredible performance, up to 24GB of unified memory, ProRes acceleration, and up to 20 hours of battery life, all in a compact design.
The new MacBook Air and updated 13-inch MacBook Pro join the even more powerful 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro and M1 Max to round out the strongest lineup of Mac notebooks ever offered. Both laptops will be available next month.
MacBook Air with M2 starts at $1,199 and $1,099 for education. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 starts at $1,299 and $1,199 for education.
Apple is still selling the MacBook Air with M1 chip for $999.
“We’re so excited to bring our new M2 chip to the world’s two most popular laptops — the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Completely redesigned around M2, MacBook Air is thinner, lighter, and faster with a bigger display, better camera, and all-day battery life, in four beautiful finishes. Only with Apple silicon can you build such a thin and light notebook with a fanless design, and this combination of performance and capabilities. M2 also comes to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, featuring incredible performance, ProRes acceleration, up to 24GB of memory, and up to 20 hours of battery life — making our most portable pro notebook even better.”
M2 Supercharges Apple’s Most Popular Systems
M2 starts the second generation of Apple’s M-series chips and extends the remarkable features of M1. With industry-leading power efficiency, a unified memory architecture, and custom technologies, this new chip brings even more performance and capabilities to Apple’s most popular Mac notebooks — the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro. M2 features a next-generation 8-core CPU with advancements in both performance and efficiency cores, along with Apple’s next-generation GPU, which now has up to 10 cores — two more than M1. M2 delivers 100GB/s of unified memory bandwidth and supports up to 24GB of fast unified memory, so it can handle even larger and more complex workloads with ease. Designed to dramatically speed up video workflows, M2 also adds a next-generation media engine and a powerful ProRes video engine for hardware-accelerated encode and decode, so systems with M2 will be able to play back more streams of 4K and 8K video than before.
The new MacBook Air features a gorgeous 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display, which has been expanded closer to the sides and up around the camera to make room for the menu bar. The result is a larger display with much thinner borders, giving users more screen real estate to view their content in brilliant detail. At 500 nits of brightness, it is also 25 percent brighter than before. In addition, the new display now supports 1 billion colors, so photos and movies look incredibly vibrant.
MacBook Air offers a number of charging options, including an all-new 35W compact power adapter with two USB-C ports, so users can charge two devices at once. And for the first time, MacBook Air supports fast charge for charging up to 50 percent in just 30 minutes with an optional 67W USB-C power adapter.7
