Apple's got a whole bunch of new MacBook Air and iPad Pro updates today.
Of course I'm the most interested in the MacBook Air ones.
Chiefly among them it brings the MacBook Air back down to that classic, classic 999 price.
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When MacBook Air was 999 years ago, I always said it was the most universally useful laptop that you could buy.
Especially if you were a college student or just starting out.
Maybe you're staring your own company, maybe you were a writer or a screen writer.
Even for photographers and other creative design people as long as you weren't working in super high resolution 4k video things like that you could get by with the old classic MacBook Air.
But over time, the MacBook Air Well it started to get a little dated looking certainly originally for 999.
And it was a lot better than most of the windows laptops you could get at around the same price.
Maybe they would have similar CPUs, but the MacBook Air was machined out of this one.
Piece of solid aluminum it had a fantastic design.
It had a great screen for the time, I had that awesome touchpad that really still nobody can touch.
However, over the years, they didn't really update that much.
They wanted you to buy the MacBook Pro, they wanted you to buy the 12 inch MacBook, things like that.
So eventually.
The Air was feeling pretty old.
In 2018 they did finally get around to updating it.
They turned it into something that's a lot more like the 13 inch Macbook Pro.
And that's a good thing, however They raised the price from that classic 999 up to I think 1,199.
Since then, it's come back down to 1,099 and a lot of store still it for 999.
But that was an important psychological barrier, the fact that your MacBook Air was your go-to 999 laptop and we did not have that for a few years.
Until now the new MacBook Air again starts at 999 which makes me think, hey, this is gonna be the great default go to laptop for just about everybody.
In addition to that, they've made a couple of other changes as well but I think a very welcome, they have finally given up the ghost at least in part on that butterfly keyboard, that super flat keyboard that nobody ever really liked.
I think a lot of the hate for that keyboard was overblown at the same time I'm not going to go around defending it at least not too much.
Now they put that in that original 12 inch MacBook which is assistant.
They don't make Make any more, back in, I think maybe 2015.
And it wasn't great there and then they insisted on bringing it to the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air.
And soon everybody had the butterfly keyboard.
Nobody was happy even though they did a few revisions here and there.
Well, in the fall of 2019, Apple said, hey 15 inch MacBook Pro, you are now a 16 inch MacBook Pro.
That was extraordinary because it left us without a 15 inch Apple laptop for the first time in basically forever since the beginning of the MacBook era.
But also they took that keyboard and they swapped it out for something that looked and felt a lot the same but was really much better under the hood.
They called the magic keyboard because was based on those standalone magic keyboards that Apple sells, the little ones that you could buy for your iMac or just buying us with anything else.
So it's a better keyboard.
It's got a little rubber cap underneath it to keep all that Dust and grime out and that's what was messing up a lot of the butterfly keyboards.
So now you have this better keyboard in the 16 inch MacBook Pro but not in anything else.
Well here comes the new MacBook Air.
It's now got that magic key Keyboard, I have not had a chance to try it in person yet.
I just heard about it this morning, but I feel like it's gonna feel a lot like it did on the 16th, which was pretty darn good.
That does leave us however with the 13 inch MacBook Pro as the odd man out.
It's the only one that still has the old keyboard Which frankly at this point, no one's really going to want you're going to want the newer keyboard design.
Now, in order to make this even more competitive with the MacBook Pro, you can now get 10th Gen Intel Quad Core processors in the MacBook Air and I said, That's very exciting.
I did look a little closer at the fine print and maybe it was not quite that exciting because for 999 you're not getting that you're getting a dual core chip, which again, I'm sure it's fine for everyday computing use in streaming video and doing basic office stuff and basic school stuff.
It's also a core I three.
Now you can't always read all that much into the CPU designations on these different systems, but You don't really want for $1,000 an Intel core i3 dual core system.
That's what you find in some Black Friday door busters.
Although I'm sure, again, this is much better, it's psychological in a way.
So for 100 bucks you can trade up and get the quad-core core i5 that takes you back up to $1,099.
Although, frankly, if you really wanted to get a new Macbook Air, that's what I would do.
Also these guys all have across the board still eight gigs of RAM for Windows laptop unconscionable.
For a MacBook.
They're efficient enough in how the OS works that you can get away with it but you're probably still going to want 16 gigs of RAM, And if you upgrade to that, that's an extra $200, and that takes you up into the stacking base model which is 1,299.
That one you have to, again pay 200 bucks to get the 16 gigs of ram over 8, but it also doubles the storage space, so you get 512 instead of 256.
But even that's good because the Macbook Air was one of those laptops that was just locked into only giving you 128 gigs of storage space, that's like less than on your phone probably.
And once you have the overhead and if you're working on video and photos, the higher resolutions new versions of those tend to eat up a lot.
A lot of space.
If you dare to play some games on your Mac, there are a few, and you download big game files.
Those could be 20, 30, 40, 50 gigabytes each, so 128 is not really gonna cut it anymore.
Which is why having even in the base model 256 gigabytes of storage, well that's great.
Do I wish it also had 16 gigs around?
You bet I do.
But again talking about 999 laptop, not just a 999 laptop but one from Apple Which is not known for giving you you know all the great features at the entry level price, they want you to do that little trade up calculation and go it's $100 here and $100 there.
So that said, when I was going through all the configurations in my mind, I said, Okay, well I want more RAM and I guess more storage, and I definitely want the quad core CPU and all of a sudden I was 1500 dollars in my head.
Here we are talking about that perfect 999 laptop.
So if you're a everyday consumer who just wants an awesome MacBook to take to school use for your startup company, right that great novel or screenplay on do a little bit of graphic design work on your work on your website or anything like that.
Stick with the 999 base model, but take extra 100 bucks, I hate to get past $1,000, but take that 100 bucks, get the quad-core core i5.
Your laptop will last that much longer.
It's probably the update that makes the most sense and you should do it.
I have spoken.
