Apple launches $1,099 MacBook Air, gives cheapest MacBook Pro a Touch Bar
Apple is reshuffling its MacBook Pro and Air lineup, and changes are significant.
The company has reduced the price of the entry-level MacBook Air to $1,099 ($999 for students), and given the cheapest, $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro a Touch Bar, effectively killing the "escape edition" of the MacBook Pro, which no longer exists in the lineup.
The MacBook Air now comes in two flavors: the $1,099 variant and the $1,299 variant.
Both have a 1.6GHz, dual-core, 8th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM memory and Intel's UHD Graphics 617. The cheaper version has 128GB of storage, while the other has 256GB of storage. All of this is identical to the last generation Air, but there's one change: both Airs have a new 13-inch Retina display with True Tone support, a first for the Air.
As for the 13-inch MacBook Pro, it's now available in three basic flavors, all of which have a Touch Bar. This means that the MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar -- often dubbed escape edition because of the inclusion of a hardware escape key -- is no more.
The cheapest variant costs $1,299 ($1,199 for students) and has a 1.4GHz, quad-core, 8th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, 128GB of storage, a Touch Bar and Touch ID, and two Thunderbolt 3 ports.
The $1,499 variant is the same, only with 256GB of storage, whereas the $1,799 variant has a 2.4GHz, quad-core, 8th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, and four Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Oh, and there's one more important bit of news: The 12-inch MacBook no longer exists in Apple's lineup.
Let's unpack the news a little. Unlike some of Apple's lineup changes in recent years (iPad overload comes to mind), these make sense. The 2018 MacBook Air was confusingly similar to the cheapest MacBook Pro; now, there's no question that the $1,099 MacBook Air is the entry-level MacBook to get. The fact that it's gotten a $100 cheaper sweetens the deal, and while the spec changes are as tiny as they get, it's still a very capable laptop for the price.
The 12-inch MacBook with its crazy-shallow keyboard is no longer here to cloud the entry-level MacBook dilemma, either, but its absence does mean that there simply aren't any MacBooks smaller than 13 inches right now, which might irk some users.
As for the MacBook Pro, the spec improvements are pretty nice, but one sad fact still remains true: If you want more than two Thunderbolt 3 ports (and you probably do), you'll have to dish out $1,799 or more.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
