Though the rumor mill tipped off followers of the Mac weeks in advance, Apple's announcement of a new-size MacBook Air is a welcome addition to the long-familiar laptop lineup. The 15-inch Apple MacBook Air (starts at $1,299; $1,699 as tested) takes everything excellent about the 13-inch MacBook Air, from its slim, light design to its capable performance and all-day battery life, and pumps it up. The result is a desktop-replacement laptop with nearly the portability of a compact ultraportable. While it's not the most powerful 15-inch laptop we've seen, it's one of the lightest to deliver a winning blend of processing and graphics power, a high-quality design, and a battery that goes for the better part of a day. With that, the 15-inch MacBook Air earns our Editors' Choice award among midrange desktop-replacement laptops.
Configuration Options: Pick Your Gigs, That's It
Apple has two versions of the 15-inch MacBook Air available from which you can up-configure, though the differences between the two are minor. The base model sells for $1,299 and is powered by the Apple M2 chip with a 10-core GPU. That graphics core count is a step-up option if you're buying a 13-inch Air, so you're already starting with slightly more GPU power. It comes with 8GB of Unified Memory (Apple's term for RAM) and a 256GB SSD.
The other starting option is a $1,499 model, which uses the same M2 processor with 10-core GPU but comes with a roomier SSD, at 512GB. You can up-configure either of these standard models with more RAM (16GB and 24GB options are available), and the storage can be bumped up from 256GB or 512GB to 1TB or 2TB.
Configurations step up in price in $200 and $400 increments. Going from 8GB of memory to 16GB will be an extra $200, and jumping to 24GB is another $200 on top of that. Similarly, upgrading from 256GB storage to a 512GB SSD is $200, and going to 1TB is another $200 above that, while the maximum (2TB) storage choice adds $800 to the base price. Configured with maximum memory and storage, that $1,299 model will ring up at $2,499, nearly doubling the price.
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As for our tested review unit, it came with hop-ups to the memory and the storage, packing 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, with a price of $1,699.
At every price level, the Apple MacBook Air 15-inch comes in a chassis with a smooth, anodized finish, available in four colors: silver, Space Gray, an even darker grayish-blue called Midnight, and the gold-tinted color seen on our review unit, Starlight. If you've looked at the most recent 13-inch MacBook Air, these colors are exactly the same, from the smooth matte finish to the polished mirror shine of the Apple logo.
It's also worth noting how competitively priced this version of the MacBook Air is at its debut, price-matching the base-model 2023 Dell XPS 15 and challenging many others.
The Air Design, Magnified
With the introduction of the 15-inch MacBook Air, we get everything we loved about the MacBook Air, but in a bigger package. That seems obvious on the face of it, but it's significant. Hitting the MacBook Air with the "embiggen" ray causes some distinct changes to the look and feel of the iconic ultraportable.
At the most basic level, its dimensions are larger. The laptop stays slim, at just 11.5mm (0.45 inch) thick, but the footprint is larger. The footprint is 13.4 by 9.35 inches and the weight 3.3 pounds, putting the larger MacBook Air into desktop-replacement territory, the same size and weight class as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 (15-Inch) and even the LG Gram Pro 17 (2023). That means more screen, a larger palm rest, and even a proportionally larger trackpad.
Apple's keyboard, however, looks to be identical to that of the 13-inch Air, from the size and spacing of the square-tiled keycaps to the full-size function keys along the top, complete with a Touch ID-enabled power button. The larger chassis means that the margins around the keyboard are larger, but it doesn't change the typing experience.
What will feel different is the larger palm rest and the larger Force Touch trackpad. The latter is a little wider, but a lot taller, giving you more room for swiping and tapping the glass surface. While I doubt that anyone was complaining about the dimensions of the trackpad on the 13-inch Air, you now have even more room to maneuver, along with the same haptic feedback across the entire surface.
Despite the larger dimensions of the 15-inch MacBook Air, the weight creeps up high enough that it's heavier than the 3-pound limit we usually hold 13-inch and 14-inch ultraportables to. But it's still dramatically lighter than, say, the Dell XPS 15 (9530), which is a beefier 4.2 pounds. And, while the LG Gram Pro 17 manages to hit 3.2 pounds with a larger 17-inch screen, the Air feels decidedly sturdier.
The MacBook Air 15-inch has a tough aluminum chassis and lid, with the only visible plastic in the construction being the narrow bezel around the 15.3-inch panel and the blocky plastic keycaps.
Lift up the open MacBook by the corner of the chassis, and you'll notice only the slightest hint of flex, while the typing experience is steady and bounce-free. For a machine this lightweight and slim, with these dimensions, it lies extremely still when in use on your lap.
An Expanded Display, and a Just-as-Sharp Webcam
The new 15.3-inch IPS panel retains the Apple Liquid Retina name, and it looks as fantastic as that reputation would suggest. It's the highlight of this new model. With a native resolution of 2,880 by 1,864 pixels, it has the same 224-pixel-per-inch count you get on the 13-inch MacBook Pro, but with more screen space to fill.
Apple brags about a 500-nit maximum brightness on the display, though our own testing pegs it at 410 nits, and we measured it at 99% coverage of the P3 color gamut. That's still pretty impressive, but Windows laptops deliver similar quality and more variety in screen types these days, particularly the OLED screens seen in laptops in this price range.
Of course, Apple's biggest omission in modern laptop technologies has long been the touch screen. Despite Apple being the brand that helped make them mainstream with the iPhone and the iPad, if you want a touch interface on your laptop, you still have to go with a Windows machine.
Centered in the top of the display is Apple's infamously recurring black notch, a literal carveout to make room for a 1080p FaceTime webcam. The 5mm bezels around the display panel admittedly don't leave much room for a camera, but it's still a distinct design choice from Apple, seeing as no Windows competitors have done anything like it. It's not a huge problem, though, since the notch occupies part of the the area already taken by the macOS task bar. It's a little distracting until you get used to it, but Apple's operating system and developer design standards factor it in, and generally make the notch unobtrusive once you get used to it being there.
Audio Enhanced: The Air's New Six-Speaker Sound
Also inside the enlarged chassis are more speakers than on the 13-inch MacBook Air, making full use of the extra real estate. Here, Apple uses a six-speaker array to deliver surprisingly big sound, including a curious woofer configuration that Apple calls "force canceling sound," which pairs upward-firing woofers and downward firing woofers together.
Speakers have to physically push air to make sound, and Newton's third law of motion still applies: For every force exerted one way, you'll see an equal and opposite reactive force that pushes back. Apple's up-and-down woofer configuration lets the paired speakers cancel each other out, producing more sound, and doing so with less energy. The end result is bigger and bolder sound from the super-size MacBook Air.
The MacBook Air also supports spatial audio formats like Dolby Atmos. While that does make for richer, more immersive sound, it's still a distinctly different experience than you'd get with a true Atmos surround-sound setup, so don't set your hopes too high. Nevertheless, the sound produced by the slim MacBook Air is excellent considering its ultraportable design.
This MacBook's Got a Port Problem
Apple's 15-inch MacBook Air may be larger, but the port selection, oddly, stays the same. On the right-hand side of the machine is a single 3.5mm combination audio jack, and on the other edge is a pair of Thunderbolt ports (supporting Thunderbolt 3, not 4). If you have an external monitor, you can connect it (up to a 6K resolution) via one of the Thunderbolt ports—but only one panel is supported.
Next to the Thunderbolt ports is a MagSafe power connector, which still manages to be the smartest wired charging solution I've seen in all my years of reviewing laptops. The magnetic connector holds firm when it's plugged in, and pulls free easily if it's accidentally tugged or you trip over the cord. Plus, Apple dresses it up by matching the color of the MagSafe connector to the chosen finish of your MacBook Air. You can also charge the MacBook over one of the USB-C ports, but it's less elegant than MagSafe, and it requires a separate cable.
Wireless connectivity gets a bit of a boost, as well. You'll still have Wi-Fi 6 for wireless networking, but the Bluetooth standard has been bumped up to Bluetooth 5.3 instead of the 5.2 used in the 13-inch MacBook Air. Though we'd like to see Wi-Fi 6E on new machines, Wi-Fi 6 will do the trick just fine for the vast majority of us.
What you won't get, which you might expect having seen it on larger MacBook Pro models, are additional connections, such as HDMI output, or an integrated SD card slot. Apparently Apple reserves these for more-premium systems, so you may need to invest in a docking station or a USB-C adapter if these are among your must-have connections.
Testing the 15-Inch MacBook Air: Bigger Performance, Too
Perhaps the biggest question raised by the new, larger MacBook Air is whether the bigger laptop delivers more in the way of performance. On the one hand, it's got the same hardware we saw when we reviewed the 13-inch MacBook Air—an M2 chip, a 10-core GPU, and 16GB of memory—so you'd expect the performance to be extremely similar.
On the other hand, the passive air cooling used by the MacBook Air might actually benefit from the larger chassis. And the similarly equipped Apple MacBook Pro 13-Inch produces better performance, despite the active cooling being the only significant difference between the two. So, I compared the 15-incher with both the 13-inch MacBook Air and the M2-powered MacBook Pro 13-Inch.
To round out the picture of where the new model sits in the Apple family, I also included the Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch (the 2023 M2 Max version), so that you could see your other option if you want a big-screen Mac, but want more power.
Setting aside the other Macs in the lineup, how does the 15-inch Air do when compared with other 15-inch thin-and-light laptops from other brands? By selling an ultraportable 15-inch system, Apple now faces direct competition in a space where PC makers have had years to refine their designs for fast performance. For these comparisons, I looked at the recent Dell XPS 15 (9530) and Microsoft Surface Laptop 5—two of the best 15-inch systems around—and the even-larger LG Gram Pro 17 (2023).
Apple's own announcement of the MacBook Air says that it can go toe-to-toe with an Intel Core i7, so we've got several such systems in the mix, both with integrated graphics and with more powerful discrete GPUs, to see how well the M2's 10-core GPU compares with the graphics options available from competitors. It all adds up to a lot of capable machines, all competing on performance and portability alike.
Productivity Tests
We use a number of tests in our Mac evaluations, designed to measure everything from peak processing power to battery life. You can get a decent idea of what we're running on our test bench in our guide to how we test laptops, but Apple machines use a slightly different mix of software than Windows systems. Because some of our tests are Windows-only, and several of the best Apple-Silicon-friendly tests aren't available for PC laptops, we're left to mix and match tests to compare Apples with Apples and Apples with Windows.
First, we start with a trio of cross-platform tests: HandBrake 1.4, Cinebench R23, and Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro. In our HandBrake video transcoding test, we use the open-source video utility to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Cinebench R23 then uses Maxon’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, to test multi-core and multi-threaded processing. After that, we have a processor-intensive test in Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro by Primate Labs, which simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning.
Finally, we run Adobe Photoshop under Rosetta 2. While Photoshop does run natively on both M1- and M2-based Macs, we used the same PugetBench for Photoshop test by workstation maker Puget Systems that we use to test everything from workstation beasts to kid-friendly laptops. Here, we’re running it in the Rosetta 2 emulation layer, less as a pure indication of media-processing capability, and more as a test for how well the system can handle older software originally designed for Intel-powered Macs.
In HandBrake, the MacBook Air 15-inch finished reworking our video file in 7 minutes and 29 seconds, only a few seconds ahead of last year's 13-inch Air. While not a massive improvement, even that slight lead is worth noting. After all, top Windows competitors, like the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5, took longer while other systems with dedicated graphics hardware did the same task much faster, as seen on the Dell XPS 15 9530. The fastest of the bunch, however, was the Apple MacBook Pro, which chewed through the same file in just more than 4 minutes.
The same pattern of modest improvement was seen in Cinebench, where the 15-inch Air scored 8,310 points—more than the 13-inch Air but less than the 13-inch MacBook Pro—despite all three using the same CPU and 10-core GPU. In the broader comparison, the more powerful 16-inch MacBook Pro led the pack, with the Dell XPS 15 9530 right behind it. On the other end of the scale was the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5, which brought up the rear.
Geekbench scores, on the other hand, were nearly identical among the M2 MacBooks. The 15-inch Air, the 13-inch Air, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro were all within a 19-point spread, indicating essentially identical performance for day-to-day tasks like web browsing, word processing, and even light media editing. In contrast, the M2 Max-powered MacBook Pro 16 led again, followed further behind this time by the Dell XPS 15 9530, with the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 trailing again.
Interestingly enough, under Rosetta the 15-inch Air produced some of the best Photoshop performance of the bunch, scoring 832 points and beating everything but the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Professionals will want to spring for a more powerful machine to save time, but for most photo editing, the MacBook Air 15-inch is extremely capable.
Graphics Tests
For an Apple-specific graphics test, we use 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme, running in Unlimited mode. Unlike our usual 3DMark tests, Wild Life runs natively on Apple Silicon, letting us measure graphics performance among different Mac systems. The higher the score, the better.
For cross-platform testing, we use a version of our standard GFXBench test, here running on Apple’s Metal graphics API. It stress-tests both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. We run two subtests, Aztec Ruins (1440p), which relies on the OpenGL application programming interface (API), and Car Chase (1080p), which uses hardware tessellation. We record the results in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better.
In 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme, we got to see the benefit of that 10-core GPU and the larger chassis provide to slightly improve air cooling, as the MacBook Air 15-inch edged ahead of the actively cooled MacBook Pro 13-inch. None of these basic M2-based systems holds a candle to the 16-inch MacBook Pro, of course—it has a 38-core GPU, against the Air's 10-core—but it was interesting to see the differences between the fanless 15-inch Air and the fan-toting 13-inch MacBook Pro disappear in this test.
Then, with basic graphics tests like GFXBench, the performance really highlighted the differences among the different integrated and discrete GPU options. The 15-inch Air was right in line with the other M2-based MacBooks, and it held its own against the lowest-end (RTX 3050) Nvidia RTX 30 Series GPU inside the LG Gram Pro 17, while rocketing past the integrated Intel Xe Graphics solution in the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5. But, predictably, the leading systems were the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (with its huge GPU-core advantage) and the Nvidia RTX 40-Series-powered Dell XPS 15 9530 (with a commanding RTX 4070).
Regardless of its position graphically, the MacBook Air 15 is more than capable of handling all of your day-to-day media tasks, even apps and functions that the average Windows machine might struggle to keep up on using integrated graphics alone.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
Then, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
I have plenty of reasons to be impressed by Apple's hardware over the last few years, but the undeniable winner in battery life is the MacBook Air. All-day battery life no longer means making it through an 8-hour workday without a charger; it means hours and hours of use beyond that without plugging in. The 18 hours of battery life Apple promised for the 15-inch Air was closer to 19 hours in our video rundown test, two hours longer than what we got from the already-impressive 13-inch MacBook Air. That's thanks to the larger battery inside the 15-inch model.
Thicker MacBook Pro models may stretch beyond the 20-hour mark, thanks to the extra room in the chassis for even more battery, but the 15-inch Air is going point for point against some of the longest-lasting Windows machines on the market. The LG Gram Pro 17 and the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 were impressive, for instance, but the Air blew past those by an hour or more.
Verdict: The Air Enhanced, Expanded, and Amped Up
The Apple MacBook Air 15-inch is something of an experiment. It's Apple's attempt to branch out from its existing stable of products to deliver new takes on old favorites, and the first bigger Air is a rousing success. As reviewers, we're more "tests-and-data" kind of people than most laptop shoppers, blotting out brand loyalty for objective measures of capability and performance. But we cannot deny that this is a bigger and better MacBook Air—the numbers prove it out.
We also can't deny that Apple has been on a winning streak with its laptops since introducing Apple Silicon, and the newest iteration of the MacBook Air proves that this winning formula isn't limited to the models already in production. With a new size, the ultraportable form factor of the MacBook Air becomes a general-purpose machine like no other, providing snappy productivity, sharp graphics, and superb battery life—all at some of Apple's most competitive pricing yet. All of that makes for an easy Editors' Choice win among midrange desktop-replacement laptops.
With its bigger MacBook Air, Apple ticks up the performance and battery life, while keeping the original Air's strengths intact.
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