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A final request for a MacBook Air upgrade would be a move to OLED displays. I feel Apple could thread the line of balancing bolder display tech with energy efficiency.
But if such an upgrade was coming this year I reckon the rumor mill would have been churning it out by now; we’ve heard no whispers.
When I’m in the office I use a Samsung laptop with an OLED display and adore how rich its colors are, and that deep contrast OLED offers. So there’s potential here, but I suspect Apple will keep OLED panels for its MacBook Pros for a good few years still.
Other design changes and upgrades I’d like to see could come in the form of faster charging; the MacBook Air is by no means a slouch when sucking up electrical juice but it’s not amazingly quick either.
I’d also not mind a few more ports. An extra USB-C slot would be appreciated, especially if Apple adds it to the right-hand side where there’s seemingly loads of spare space.
And while I doubt Apple will ever do it, I’d love to see a full-sized SD card slot on the next-generation MacBook Air, as that would make transferring photos from my DSLR to macOS far easier than it currently is for me.
On the flipside, I’d not want Apple to mess with the Force Touch trackpad, which is basically the best trackpad I’ve used on any laptop.
It’s big, smooth and responsive and I adore it. Force Touch is an odd name however…
Other areas for MacBook Air improvement could come in the form of a refreshed keyboard. I love the keyboard on my Air, and my fingers fly across it when I’m writing at speed.
However, there’s not the deepest of key travel and sometimes I feel the keyboard lacks the tactile feel of the amazing keyboard on the Microsoft Surface Laptop models; those balanced snappy responses with a decent bit of travel to make for a wonderfully tactile experience; I feel nostalgic for my old Surface Laptop 2.
But there are no rumors indicating to a reworked MacBook Air design. So I’m not going to hold my breath and expect the display notch to have been given a nip and a tuck.
Equally, one can never be 100% sure when it comes to Apple. And the MacBook Air’s design language is a bit long in the tooth for tech standards. So perhaps we could be in for a surprise.
I’d like a new design for the MacBook Air please Apple
Having said that I love the MacBook Air M2, I’d not mind a few tweaks to the slim laptop’s design. A 14-inch display, perhaps facilitated by some narrowing of the display bezels and a trimming down of the display notch, would definitely get my attention.
I love the LCD Retina display on my Air M2, but it can feel a tad cramped at times when I’m trying to get work done on the go and at speed.
As someone still using the MacBook Air M2, which is a fantastic little laptop that’s going very strong after two years of consistent use, I’m not overly convinced Apple really needs to refresh the Air lineup on just a specs basis.
But Apple is Apple, and minor refreshes to its products are to be expected… if not exactly desired.
Expect M4 chip power
So what do I and others expect to see from the Apple announcement? Well as discussed it’ll very likely be a pair of new MacBook Air laptops.
While the current pair of MacBook Airs are hardly old, having been refreshed last year with the M3 chip, they don’t sport the very latest chips; those can be found in the MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch.
Those models rock the ‘Pro’ version of the M4 chip, so we can expect to see non-pro version come to refreshed Airs.
The last Apple announcement of the newsroom ilk came in the form of the iPhone 16e reveal. Apple simply posted an information drop on its website and had the phone up for pre-order pretty sharpish.
There was a decent amount of information to chew over but one could argue the announcement lacked Cupertino’s normal appetite for showmanship. I expect the announcement this week to be very similar to that of the iPhone 16e’s.
Thinking differently…
In days gone by, Apple would normally have a couple of big events a year with an in-person or live streamed event that would usually see the reveal of a handful of products around specific categories, such as phones, tablets and computers.
But as the crew at Cupertino have started to push out ever-more iterative updates to Apple’s product lines, these events have given away to announcements on social media and Apple’s own newsroom page. To me this lacks the spectacle but does give us regular Apple announcements to chew over.
Hello. Mobile Computing Managing Editor Roland Moore-Colyer here to take you through the Apple rumors and TechRadar musings so far. I’ve been covering such Apple announcements and major Apple events for years, so I feel I’m qualified to have a good ol’ stab at speculating what we might see from Apple this week.
