According to a new company blog post, Apple will begin accepting orders for the updated 13.6-inch MacBook Air this Friday, July 8 at 5:00 AM PT. The laptop will arrive at customers’ doorsteps and be available for retail purchase the same day a week later, on Friday, July 15th.
It will be the second Mac released with the second-generation Apple M2 system-on-a-chip, following the 2020 M1 with significantly higher memory and graphics bandwidth and moderately improved processor performance.
The new MacBook Air is also the first to get a major body and look makeover in years, as it eschews the tapered design the Air is known for in favor of a boxy, flat design. The 2022 model is 0.44″(1.13cm) thick, while the 2020 model’s thickness ranged from 0.16″(0.41cm) to 0.63″(1.61cm) from thinnest to thickest thick point.
It also brings back the MagSafe connection from older MacBooks, albeit with a different design, the same as the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros introduced last year. Like these laptops, it has a taller display with minimal bezels, but an iPhone-style camera cutout. And like the iMac’s recent redesign, it’s available in multiple finishes – in this case, Apple calls the finish “silver,””space grey,””starlight,”and “midnight.”
The 13.6-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,199 for an octa-core GPU configuration with 256GB of solid-state storage. The other standard configuration, priced at $1,499, includes a 10-core GPU and a 512GB SSD. Both come with 8GB of storage, but you can upgrade it further up to 16GB or 24GB at the time of purchase. There are also optional upgrades to 1TB or 2TB of storage.