Say you’re in the market for a new Mac, and you want to spend $1299. You’ve got two choices. Pick your poison – only one is actual poison.

Maybe not actual poison, but, well, we’ll get to that.

$1299 is the starting price for Apple’s first-ever 15-inch MacBook Air. At just $100 more than a spec-for-spec 13-inch M2 MacBook Air, it’s a heckin’ good value. That’s like fifty bucks per inch.

The 13-inch M2 MacBook Air is a great formula; bringing the thin and light design to a laptop with more screen real estate has long been a dream of mine.

Pro laptops are necessarily thicker and heavier. Larger displays are bigger, but that doesn’t have to mean thick and heavy. The 15-inch M2 MacBook Air is the first Mac to fully realize that.

Prior to the M2 Air, the last 15-inch laptop from Apple was the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. It weighed 4.04 pounds compared to the 15-inch MacBook Air at 3.3 pounds. Impressive!

Compare the 15-inch Air to the 16-inch Pro and the weight difference really kicks in: The Air is a full 1.5 pounds lighter than the M2 Max Pro at 4.8 pounds. The 15-inch Air is also 53 mm thinner than the 16-inch Pro.

Is the 15-inch MacBook Air worthy of its title? The numbers say so. It also happens to be a remarkable value, and you don’t have to compare it to the $2500 16-inch MacBook Pro to see that.

In addition to the new 15-inch MacBook Air, Apple sells another machine today for $1299. Ah, yes, the beloved (sarcasm) 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar!

The reason for its existence is widely believed to be because businesses feel better about buying a Pro than an Air, and this Pro-in-name-only MacBook is $700 cheaper than the 14-inch MacBook Pro with pro ports and pro power.

Can you tell we’re not proponents of the 13-inch MacBook Pro? At least the year-old 13-inch M2 MacBook Air got a price drop. The 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro has to deal with a really tough comparison to the 15-inch MacBook Air for the same price.

Here are some key differences:

Seriously, take the Air over the Pro. More screen real estate, a better webcam, and access to both Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports while charging is way more professional for the same price.

Source - 9to5Mac