Daring Fireball

It’s free to download and explore, if you choose, but Steeber also has an option to pay a voluntary amount. If this pleases you even half as much as it does me, I’m sure you’ll do what I just did and pay for it.

What Steeber has made here is astonishing. It’s effectively a Mac game that you download and explore. The “levels”, as it were, are exquisitely-detailed 3D recreations of four iconic Apple Stores, including the Fifth Avenue “cube” in New York. Each store has been rebuilt to look exactly like it did on grand opening day, right down to the boxes of software on the shelves. However uncannily accurate, nostalgic, and fun you might be thinking this sounds based on the above description, you’re underestimating it.

The Apple Store Time Machine is a celebration of the places and products that have shaped our lives for more than twenty years. This interactive experience recreates memorable moments in Apple history with painstaking detail and historical accuracy.

Alongside the funding, the company is also appointing a new CEO, J.D. Mullin, who is taking over from Philip Goward, who co-founded the company originally with Greg Scown. TextExpander was born out of another developer platform they built called Smile — you can read more about that early history, with an interesting nod to how they originally met at Macworld and how the threat of a clone led them to build for iOS after first launching on Mac, here — and both are keeping seats on the board and remaining involved in aspects of development.

Today, a company called TextExpander — which has identified and built a way to fix a similar gap in another repetitive aspect of business life, communications, by letting users create customized shortcuts to trigger longer text-based actions such as specific phrasing around a topic, calendar events, emails, messages, CRM systems and many other environments — is announcing $41.4 million in funding to expand something else: its business.

The good news is, Bluetooth is an open industry standard, governed by a consortium . Consortiums are a great way to develop and advance reliable technology — so agrees no less a body of technical expertise than the European Commission. So, next year, I bet, Bluetooth is finally going to get good.

“I have a very love-hate relationship with Bluetooth,” said Chris Harrison, a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Melon University. “Because when it works, it’s amazing, and when it doesn’t, you want to rip your hair out. The promise was to make it as seamless and easy as possible. Bluetooth never quite got there, unfortunately.”

Despite its pervasiveness, the technology is still prone to headache-inducing issues, whether it’s the struggle to set up a new device to connect with, switching headphones between devices or simply being too far out of range to connect.

(The core of my discontent with Wirecutter is that they — like so many people — incorrectly conflate value with price. Value is nuanced and multivariate; price is simply one variable in the value equation.)

They do have a “Mac or Windows (or Something Else)?” preface to the whole comparison, but if you’re going to name a “best laptop”, putting aside OS preference, it’s incompetent not to conclude that MacBooks are both technically superior and better values for the dollar thanks to Apple’s exclusive silicon advantage.

My longstanding complaint about The Wirecutter is that they institutionally fetishize price over quality. That makes it all the more baffling that their recommended “Best Laptop” — not best Windows laptop, but best laptop, full stop — is a Dell XPS 13 that costs $1,340 but is slower and gets worse battery life (and has a lower-resolution display) than their “best Mac laptop”, the $1,000 M1 MacBook Air.

I.e., Microsoft’s premise here is that WP7 has a dashboard and system-wide interface that’s optimized for getting you through a finite amount of “checking in” or “catching up” in significantly less time than other mobile systems. But I don’t think people are on their iPhones / Androids / BlackBerrys all the time because of inefficient UI design. I think it’s because we want to be on them. These devices are where our minds are drawn — like moths to a flame, perhaps — whenever we’re otherwise unoccupied.

And do iPhone / Android / BlackBerry addicts really see this as a problem that needs to be solved? I feel like I spend so much time on my iPhone not because it’s inefficient, but because it’s so good. I’m never more than a few seconds away from something at least somewhat engaging.

The gist of Microsoft’s 2010 Windows Phone campaign was the same — everyone devotes too much attention to their phones and Microsoft has hit upon a solution. Here’s what I wrote then:

I hadn’t thought about that in a while, but yes — yes it does. The first spot in Microsoft’s campaign has seemingly vanished from the internet, but the second spot in the campaign — which is very fun and exquisitely well-executed, replete with an excellent choice of song — is available on YouTube . I highly recommend giving this old ad a minute of your time for a rewatch. ( Update: Here’s a copy of the first ad in the campaign — it’s just as funny as I remember. Worth watching! But a clever well-made short film is not a good ad if it doesn’t make people want to buy the product.)

I really don’t mean to keep writing about Humane’s Change Everything teaser , but a DF reader emailed to say that the gist of it — that our collective addiction to our phones is a problem, and that Humane has struck upon a solution — reminded him of Microsoft’s ad campaign when they launched Windows Phone 7 in 2010.

I feel quite certain Wellborn had it right the first time: reviewers at ostensibly neutral publications are afraid that reiterating the plain truth about x86 vs. Apple silicon — that Apple silicon wins handily in both performance and efficiency — is not going to be popular with a large segment of their audience. Apple silicon is a profoundly inconvenient truth for many computer enthusiasts who do not like Macs, so they’ve gone into denial, like Fox News cultists with regard to climate change . It’s that simple. There’s no other explanation for omitting MacBooks from comparisons like Ars Technica’s.

I can’t help but wonder if, in the minds of many reviewers, MacBooks were PCs so long as they used Intel, and therefore they stopped being PCs once Apple switched to using their own silicon.

If memory serves, including Macs in PC hardware comparisons was more or less the norm just a few years ago. I can’t fathom why some reviewers have recently stopped doing so. Is it that reviewers don’t think they could fairly compare x86 and ARM laptops? It seems easy enough to me . Are they afraid that constantly showing MacBooks outperforming Wintel laptops will give the impression that they are in the bag for Apple? I don’t see why. Facts are facts, and a lot of people need or want to buy a Windows laptop regardless.

Wirecutter’s exclusion of MacBooks from a category that is effectively “best laptop” is the latest bit of evidence in a recent trend I’ve noticed wherein reviewers have inexplicably stopped comparing Wintel laptops to Apple’s MacBooks. Compare ArsTechnica’s review of the Surface Laptop Go 2 from this month to their review of the Surface Book 2 from 2017 . The current review only includes other Wintel laptops in benchmarks whereas the one from 2017 included that year’s MacBook.

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With RevenueCat, you also get out-of-the-box subscription metrics and charts that you can’t get from App Store Connect. Plus, pre-built integrations make it easy to sync customer events and revenue data to every tool in your stack.

My thanks to RevenueCat for sponsoring this week at DF. If you’re a developer, you know in-app subscriptions are a pain. The code can be hard to write, time-consuming to maintain, and full of edge cases. RevenueCat makes it simple so you can focus on building features, not a subscription back end.

For those people, and for posterity, allow me to summarize Humane’s short film in prose. Our protagonist is a young woman, in full color, lost in a crowd of thousands of faceless, monochromatic people who are all either staring at their phones or wearing XR headsets. Our hero has neither a phone nor headset, and thus she’s the only one who notices a solar eclipse is occurring. She follows the direction of the sun and finds herself in a jungle or forest, discovers something mysterious projecting onto the palm of her hand, and is happier for it.

I got more notes from readers than usual about this item — it seemingly struck a chord. But one thing that surprised me were the number of people who wrote to me who admitted that even after my post, they hadn’t watched the film. I realize that in the mass market, most people spending time “on the internet” do little other than watch videos, but for some people, I think there’s severe video fatigue. Some people want to do anything but watch yet another video. (If that sounds like you, Daring Fireball is here for you, baby.)

A remarkably clear policy and explanation. The rest of the gaming industry would do well to follow. ( The response from NFT Worlds is a lot of ✊🍆.)

Each of these uses of NFTs and other blockchain technologies creates digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which does not align with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together. NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots. The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.

In our Minecraft Usage Guidelines, we outline how a server owner can charge for access, and that all players should have access to the same functionality. We have these rules to ensure that Minecraft remains a community where everyone has access to the same content. NFTs, however, can create models of scarcity and exclusion that conflict with our Guidelines and the spirit of Minecraft. […]

After over 2 years as a full-time creator, I’m taking on a new role at YouTube as Creator Liaison ( @YouTubeLiaison )! Of course, I made a quick video collab with some creator and YouTube friends to help give you all the details.

Sometimes a dead canary is just a dead canary, and sometimes a dud ad is just a dud ad, but I’d check the Humane mine for methane just in case.

The film is out , and the only effect it had on me was to increase my skepticism about what Humane is building. It feels like something that aspires to the punch of Apple’s iconic 1984 ad by Ridley Scott , but with the punch and swagger replaced by New Age vapidity and hubris. (Also worth noting: Steve Jobs pulled the first Macintosh out of its bag on stage two days after 1984 aired.)

Anyway, still silence from Humane on the product, but they spent the first weeks of July hyping a short film the company commissioned, titled Change Everything. Bongiorno says they’ve had the film envisioned for years.

Humane is an intriguing, secretive startup founded by the husband-and-wife team of Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno . You may recall I linked to an interview with them in January 2020. Chaudhri and Bongiorno are both former Apple executives, and many of Humane’s employees are ex-Apple too. That’s a major reason why there’s so much interest in what they’re working on. I have a samizdat copy of a Humane investor slide deck from 2021, which describes a sort of button you wear on your chest. The button is equipped with a camera and lidar to see and record the world, recognize hand gestures, and maybe uses lasers or something to project an interface onto surfaces like your hand. Or in the words of Humane’s slide deck, they’re building a “cloud connected sight enabled AI platform with server side app echo system.” (Not sure if that needs a “sic” or not — my copy of the slide deck says “echo system” not “ecosystem”.)

Sofa is available for iPhone, iPad, and Apple silicon Macs. It has a really nice native UI. You can use it for free and it’s useful; the paid Super Sofa subscription makes it even better. Good support, good documentation, and a clever focused idea done well. Check it out today — it’s good .

Instead, throw it in Sofa. Sofa lets you create lists of apps, video games, books, movies, shows, podcasts — even board games. Whatever you want to watch, read, listen to, or play for fun. Adding new items is a cinch — Sofa has a smart search feature that auto-completes what you’re typing. I’ve been using Sofa for a few weeks now and the habit has stuck.

My thanks to Sofa for sponsoring this week at DF. Sofa is a “productivity” app but it’s about being productive, and intentional, with your downtime. What do you do now when you hear about a new TV show, movie, book, or podcast you want to check out? You probably just throw it in your notes or to-do app with a zillion other types of things.

The M2 MacBook Air marks the second generation of Apple silicon Macs. But it still seems hard for us, collectively, to wrap our heads around the sea change these chips have enabled. When I reviewed one of the first M1 Macs — a 13-inch MacBook Pro — back in November 2020, I wrote:

Apple’s new Macs based on the M1 system on a chip, the first Macs
based on Apple silicon, are that sort of mind-bending better. To
acknowledge how good they are — and I am here to tell you they
are astonishingly good — you must acknowledge that certain
longstanding assumptions about how computers should be designed,
about what makes a better computer better, about what good
computers need, are wrong.

Some people will remain in denial about what Apple has
accomplished here for years. That’s how it goes.

I was right, but perhaps denial was the wrong word. Denial is often about refusing to believe something you don’t want to be true. With Apple silicon Macs, many people are hesitant to believe something they want to be true — that these computers are as good as they are. That they run very fast, very cool, and very efficiently. People suspect there has to be a catch.

There is no catch.

The 2020 M1 MacBook Air was (and remains) a great laptop. The new M2 MacBook Air is clearly better in every regard.

It’s thinner, lighter, faster, and has a better brighter display and better speakers. All while getting the same battery life and bringing MagSafe back, which effectively gives you an extra USB-C/Thunderbolt port while charging.

The keyboard and trackpad are great. They both look and feel identical — or nearly so — to the keyboard and trackpad on the 2021 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. With its flat, untapered top and bottom surfaces, the whole MacBook Air looks and feels like the thinner sibling to those new MacBook Pros.

With the case closed, holding it, it is obviously thinner than the previous retina MacBook Airs. This has nothing to do with the previous MacBook Air models’ iconic wedge-shaped form, but instead is about the lack of subtle tapering on the new MacBook Air. That tapering had a slimming effect, but that effect was basically an optical trick. It made Intel MacBooks (and the first round of M1 MacBooks, which shared the same industrial designs) look thinner than they actually were or felt. This new design is more honest and feels great in hand. If there’s a downside to the new, untapered form factor, it’s that it makes these new MacBooks perhaps a bit harder to pick up from a table or desk using just one hand — without the tapering, it’s a bit harder to get one’s fingers underneath to lift it. But I say perhaps. It’s certainly not hard to pick up — and once in hand, it feels great.

The camera is fine for a built-in laptop camera.

There’s a notch. This looks weird at first, I know. But, as someone who’s been using a notched 14-inch MacBook Pro for months, trust me, you stop thinking about it after a few days. It’s a little bit weird when you use an app that has so many menus that one or more of them fall on the far side of the notch, but I don’t regularly use any apps with that many menus. I’ve got 26 apps running on this MacBook Air right now, and not one of them has too many menus to fit on the left of the notch.1

The display is bright and sharp. Unlike the new MacBook Pros, there’s no HDR and no ProMotion (dynamic high refresh up to 120 Hz). The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro displays have a resolution of 254 pixels per inch; the MacBook Air’s display has a resolution of only 224 pixels per inch. The practical effect of this pixels-per-inch difference is that the default display resolution of the MacBook Pros is exactly 2×; on the Air, the default resolution uses scaling. You can configure the MacBook Air to use a display resolution that doesn’t use scaling, but that makes less content fit on screen. These display differences are a significant reason why the new MacBook Pros start at $2,000 and the new MacBook Air starts at just $1,200. It’s the difference between a truly exceptional display and a merely very good display.

The MacBook Pros have much better speakers too, but the speakers on the new MacBook Air are good.

Thermals are where people seem spooked. People are just so scarred from their experience with x86-based laptops (Apple’s or otherwise) over the last decade or so, as Intel lost the performance-per-watt plot, that they just can’t bring themselves to believe that a thin, high-performance, long-lasting, cool-running laptop with no fan (or, in Apple’s parlance, no “active cooling system”) is possible, let alone available at consumer-level prices. I’m here to reassure you: the new M2 MacBook Air is thin, high-performance, long-lasting, cool-running, and has no fan.

Compared to the M1 MacBook Air, the M2 Air is a better-looking lighter-weight device outside and a faster computer inside. Not like radically game-changingly faster than the M1, but nicely faster — pretty much exactly what you’d like to see a little over a year and a half after the M1. Apple says it’s about 10–20 percent faster. Benchmarks I ran peg it as … about 10–20 percent faster. In the first two years of the Apple silicon era of Macs, the rest of the industry has not only failed to close the gap, they’ve fallen even further behind. The x86 Intel/AMD duopoly still has nothing that vaguely competes with the M1, and now Apple is shipping the M2 that’s even faster with the same or better energy efficiency.

There’s not much more to say about it.

Wait, there is one more thing. The hinge opens and closes very nicely. Apple’s MacBook hinge team does not get enough credit.

The aforementioned “sounds too good to be true” incredulity is, I think, why the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro exists. It’s why the M1 version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro sold well (second only to the MacBook Air) and why the new M2 version will continue to sell well. I expect it to remain the second-best selling Mac that Apple makes and yet, technically, it’s a machine almost no one should buy. But they do buy it, and like it, because they think they need it. It’s like people who think they want a big pickup truck or SUV yet never once use them for anything more than a smaller vehicle can handle. They just want it, because it feels like what they need, even though it isn’t in a practical sense.

Basically, there are millions of people whose computing needs would be more than met by the MacBook Air but who feel like they probably need a slightly thicker laptop with a fan on the inside and the word “Pro” stamped on the outside2 because their current ostensibly pro-level laptop — which may well be a MacBook Pro from Apple with Intel inside — struggles under the load of their daily work. It runs hot, the fans scream, and the battery doesn’t last long enough. Switching to this new thinner fan-less MacBook Air from a thicker MacBook Pro that makes frequent, clearly audible, use of its fan sounds like a downgrade. But for the overwhelming majority of Intel-based MacBook Pro users, it’s not. Switching to the new M2 MacBook Air would be the biggest upgrade in their computing lives.

I suspect this skepticism is exacerbated, even amongst somewhat technically-informed Mac users, by the fact that Apple tried to do this before with the 12-inch no-adjective MacBook and failed. A thin, lightweight design with no fans inside. That was the 12-inch MacBook — and the tradeoffs didn’t work out for a lot of people. It wasn’t noisy, because there was no fan, but because there was no fan it was slow. It started slow and throttled to run even slower to avoid getting hot. But the 12-inch MacBook wasn’t underpowered because a thin, fan-less, high-performance laptop was an impossible dream — it was underpowered because a thin, fan-less, high-performance laptop was and remains an impossible dream for the x86 computing architecture.

The Apple silicon architecture is a different ballgame. Trying to convince someone who’s never actually lived with an M1 (or, now, M2) Mac just how much better the Apple silicon platform is than x86 is like trying to convince a time traveller from the 18th century how great indoor plumbing is. Words alone do not suffice. You really need to let them take a shit indoors on a nice warm toilet in the middle of a cold winter night and see for themselves.

What is the ideal everyperson computer?

Apple has been on a decades-long quest pursuing the answer to that question.

The ideal everyperson computer is a laptop. That laptop has a full-sized keyboard and a beautiful 13-inch display. Maybe a 14-inch display with really small bezels. A smaller display is too small for most people’s taste (and may necessitate a slightly cramped keyboard); a larger display makes for too big and heavy a device for everyperson needs. The battery lasts all day despite active use and screen brightness being set to “plenty bright”. It has no fan because fan noise is abhorrent, but needs no fan because it’s equipped with chips that run more than fast enough without an active cooling system. The machine itself is physically durable and visually attractive. It has at least two high-speed modern I/O ports and a MagSafe port for charging. It doesn’t bother with legacy I/O ports, except, perhaps, a headphone jack, because that’s the only legacy port most people really will use. It only offers SSD storage. It runs just fine with the base amount of memory, but can be configured with up to two or three times more RAM, because more RAM is always better.3

This new M2 MacBook Air is that machine.

For the last decade-plus, the MacBook Air has been both the Mac that most people do buy, and the Mac that most people should buy. The M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros introduced at the end of 2021 are the best MacBook Pros Apple has ever made, but with the M2 MacBook Air, it has never been more true that this is the Mac laptop the overwhelming majority of people should buy.

The main difference most people will notice between the M2 MacBook Air and the 14-inch MacBook Pro is how much thinner and lighter the MacBook Air is. The new MacBook Air is so thin that its entire height, sitting on a desk (thus, including the feet), is almost identical to the height of the bottom of the MacBook Pro. Like, if you just snapped off the entire display of the MacBook Pro, that’s how thin the MacBook Air is. Here’s the M2 MacBook Air next to my 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro:

The last difference most people will notice between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is that MacBook Pro has an active cooling system and the MacBook Air does not. They’ll never miss not having a fan in the Air and would never engage or notice the fan if they were instead using the Pro. If you doubt this, I beseech you, give indoor plumbing a chance.

I own a 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro. I’ve been using this 13-inch M2 MacBook Air all week, and because I started by cloning my personal machine using Migration Assistant,4 I’ve been confused at times which machine I was using at the moment. I find myself thinking, “Hey, I should be using the MacBook Air, I have a review to write” and then I look down and I am using the M2 MacBook Air. My review unit Air is starlight colored, with 1 TB storage and 16 GB RAM. My personal MacBook Pro is space gray, maxed out (no pun intended) with a 4 TB SSD and 64 GB RAM. In my daily use, this $1,900 MacBook Air feels identical to my $4,700 MacBook Pro.

What could be better on the Air?

In theory it could be even thinner and lighter. We’ll have to wait for future silicon for that to be possible without compromising performance or battery life. But such is the march of progress.

It’d be nice if the MacBook Air’s M2 chip could drive more than one external display. (The M1 Pro chip can drive up to three; the M1 Max up to four.) Instead of putting both Thunderbolt/USB-C ports on the left, it’d be nice if one of them were on the right.

As mentioned above, it’d be nice if the MacBook Air display’s physical resolution were higher, so that the default effective resolution wouldn’t require scaling.

There are several minor downsides particular to the entry model — the $1,200 configuration with 256 GB of storage. That base model has an 8-core GPU instead of 10-core, the result of chip binning. It costs $100 more to upgrade to a 10-core GPU. So far so good — for price-sensitive buyers, being able to trade 2 GPU cores for $100 seems fair. It feels like a cheapskate move, though, that the base model ships with the old 30-watt power adapter with a single USB-C port — all the other MacBook Air configurations include the new 35-watt power adapter with two USB-C ports, enabling you to charge two devices at once. Base model buyers can upgrade to this 35-watt charger for $20 (it costs $59 on its own), but a $1,200 MacBook Air should include that new charger by default. Apple even took time during the WWDC keynote to show this dual charger off. Lastly, there’s the kerfuffle over the fact that SSD read and write performance is slower with the 256 GB configuration, because it uses just a single NAND chip, whereas all other storage configurations use multiple NAND chips. It costs $200 to upgrade the base model to 512 GB storage. None of these are dealbreakers to me, just minor details to be aware of if you’re eying the $1,200 base model. It’s best, in my opinion, to consider the $1,500 configuration as the default model (10 GPUs, full-speed SSD performance, and the new 35-watt charger), and to consider the $1,200 configuration something more like the “discount” configuration.

I still miss the illuminated Apple logo on older MacBooks — it’d be nice if Apple could figure out a way to bring that back.

Otherwise, I’m grasping for straws here looking for anything that could reasonably be significantly improved, to be honest. The M2 MacBook Air is that close to ideal for what it’s meant to be.5

After the M1 iMacs shipped a year ago in an array of fun vibrant colors, the biggest surprise last month when Apple introduced the new MacBook Air is that it didn’t come in any fun vibrant colors. As mentioned above, my review unit is starlight. Starlight, to my eyes, is nice, but it’s subtle. It’s definitely well-named — it should not be called gold or “some adjective gold”. It’s more like silver with a warmer color temperature. Noticeably different from actual silver, but also not too far from neutral. The new midnight color is the darkest MacBook Apple has ever made from aluminum. I haven’t seen one in person since WWDC, but it looked really nice. But part of why I, personally, liked it so much is that it appeared only subtly blue — more like very dark gray with a hint of blue than “dark blue”. The new MacBook Air color choices are all rather conservative.

Many people say they wish the new MacBook Air came in colors like those of the iMac, or iPhones and iPads. And, at WWDC, it was a very common question members of the media asked representatives from Apple: why not offer the Air in colors like the iMac? As ever with Apple, they did not really explain themselves. But reading between the lines and consulting my Cupertino-ology translation handbook, the gist I took away from their non-answer answers was that vibrant-colored laptops don’t actually look good in use. One might think they would, but they don’t. I’m not saying that’s true — I’m saying that’s what I think Apple product marketing folks were trying to say without actually saying it. (Apple product marketing reps only like to talk about what Apple has done, not what Apple could have done differently.) If you think about it, though, this makes some sense. Laptops are unique. Note, for one thing, that iPhones and iPads have displays that take up their entire front faces. You can have a bright red iPhone or a very blue iPad but while you’re using it, you don’t really see the red or blue (or purple or pink or green or whatever) casing. And even with the M1 iMacs, the vibrant aluminum is all on the back — the chins are much more neutral. Not so with a MacBook, where the unibody aluminum is fully exposed when the laptop is open. When you’re using a laptop, you want the visual emphasis entirely on the display. Vibrant aluminum colors don’t distract from an all-display iPhone or iPad while in use; they might with a laptop. Again, I’m not saying I know that’s true, because I’ve never used a (say) Product Red MacBook — I’m just saying that seems to be what Apple folks were telling us, in so many words, and it does seem plausible.

That said, it’s worth considering that the teardrop MacBook Air form factor was with us for 14 years. This all-new MacBook Air design might be with us for a similarly long stretch. One way Apple can keep this basic design fresh year after year is by introducing new colorways. That’s what Apple does with the iPhone and iPad — form factors change only rarely, but color options change every year. I expect we’ll see MacBook Air colorways that are more fun eventually.

The biggest (and smallest) room for improvement with the new MacBook Air would be options for larger and smaller displays. If you want a large-screen MacBook — 15 or 16 inches — your only option is the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which starts at $2,500. That’s downright absurd given that the M2 MacBook Air has the performance and features necessary to serve as the primary Mac for the overwhelming majority of even serious Mac users. The 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $500 more than the correspondingly-specced 14-inch MacBook Pro. There should be a 15-inch MacBook Air that costs $400 or $500 more than the correspondingly-specced 13-inch Air.

Apple has never made such a big-screen non-Pro MacBook, but they should. But Apple has made smaller laptops before, and they should again. From 2010 through 2017, Apple made an 11-inch MacBook Air. It was one of my favorite Macs ever made. From 2015 through 2019, Apple made the 12-inch retina MacBook, which was particularly notable at the time because the MacBook Air didn’t yet have a retina display. Thin and light though the new M2 MacBook Air is, at 13 inches, it is noticeably heavier than either of those discontinued models:6

Wishing that Apple made 11- and 15-inch models is a fair criticism of the company, but it’s not a fair criticism of this device, of course. And if there’s only going to be one size, this, clearly, is it. I am convinced that many people would prefer a larger or smaller MacBook Air, but I am even more convinced that most people are best served by this mid-range size. Some people do like their porridge cool or piping hot, but 13 inches is the Goldilocks “just right” size.

The M2 13-inch MacBook Air should not be thought of as version 2 of an Apple silicon MacBook Air. It’s more like version — I don’t know — 40 of what Apple thinks a standard Mac laptop should be. Apple silicon is what’s been missing — no-compromise chips that enable Apple to make the laptops they’ve always wanted to make. It’s taken decades of iterative refinement to get to this point: a nearly perfect laptop for nearly everyone. ★