The difference is obvious, and pretty big. If you want a laptop to double-up as a TV, a slave to Netflix and iPlayer, we strongly recommend looking for a laptop with a higher-res IPS screen. The Air feels a lot like Apple’s iPod Touch nowadays, it’s old-fashioned but still sells well enough to justify its existence. Our guess is that it’s the latter option. This screen is proof that the 2016 MacBook Air represents either just another stop-gap model ahead of a much more serious overhaul, or a slow retiring of the ‘Air’ line altogether.

It looks a bit washed-out in comparison, and the display looks outright bad when it’s tilted back or forward too much, thanks to something called contrast shift. While Apple uses pretty great TN panels, they just can’t provide as good colour as the MacBook Pro’s screens. The MacBook Air 13 has a TN type display where the MacBook Pro and MacBook have IPS screens, the same kind you’d see on a tablet or phone. Laptops have taken an age to really start catching-up with the high-dpi style of tablets and phones, but now that a bunch of models are ‘Retina-grade’, the MacBook Air 13 looks a bit musty. That’s not all that far off the resolution of the 4.7-inch, 1,344x 750 pixel iPhone 6s. Just like last year, the 13-inch version has a 1,440 x 900 pixel screen. It’s now the only Apple laptop that doesn’t come as a Retina model.

The only area that really lets the MacBook Air 13 down is the screen. Either way, remembering that it’s also more powerful than the more expensive new-design MacBook, and benefits from the faster SSD drives of the other new MacBooks. Anyone who wanted to do some serious Photoshop work or mess around iMovie used to have spend an extra £80 for upgrade from 4GB. Video editing is not totally off the cards either.Īs of this year, every Air comes with 8GB RAM as standard. It can just about scrape by with games, like Invisible Inc and Papers Please. The MacBook Air’s Intel HD 6000 is now about as powerful as some real entry-level dedicated laptop cards from a couple of years ago. It’s obviously not a gaming machine, lacking a dedicated graphics card, but even that is slowly getting better.

So what can’t you do with the Air? Not much. It scores 170.9ms in Sunspider test and 5214 in Geekbench 3 (32-bit), which isn’t a huge boost, and is still way, way below what a MacBook Pro will get you.

The laptop we’re testing has the same dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 CPU as last year’s model, but OS X El Capitan seems to have ensured a slightly faster performance than last year. It’s just that its CPUs come from a class of chips that care more about efficiency than heatsink-melting power. It’s not that the MacBook Air is slow: it uses the latest-generation Intel Broadwell processors.

Apple macbook pro 2016 13