Hands-On With the Incredibly Thin, Odd New MacBook

Firstly, it is impossibly and incredibly thin. For years, i have been using a MacBook Air, and this 2 pound, 13.1 millimetre device seems like a completely different category of not there-ness. It is amazingly sturdy too for being so thin. The 2304 x 1400 display, the screen that I desperately wish would also have come to the Air, is beautiful. It is the major upgrade this device provides, sincerely: you, once, start using the Retina display it is tough to go back. This is a thing of beauty, in every way, it is no wonder Apple has spent a great time talking about the engineering behind this. Every bit about the MacBook is for beauty, whether it is the new Gold, Space Gray, and Silver colors or it is, on the left side, the single USB-C port, the only port on the whole device save for a headphone jack on the right. The Gold is much more, actually, handsome than gaudy, on the other hand the Space Gray is one of the favorite options. It’s sleek and dark, fitting for the device which is so very thin.

But when you use it the positive feelings fade a little. For all the discussion related to the new butterfly keys, the fresh, the better keyboard, I right away hated using the keys. There is basically no movement, no travel. It is not that much diverse from tapping on a touch screen. In the start I felt the same way for the new Force Touch track pad, which is the same as ever in most ways, else than the fresh ability to sense various levels of pressure put on it. It was tough, for a minute, to get just right. I kept on pressing very hard, or not that much hard enough, trying to make a word selection to make it to pop up a Wikipedia page for Kelly Slater, or to display all the Numbers documents I had opened by mashing up on the app icon. This only took a minute or accordingly to find out, though, and just the once you get the hang of it, briskly fast forwarding via a video or finding something up on Wikipedia is quite easy actually. I may get around to the butterfly keyboard in time also, but it had not given a great first impression.

Meanwhile, the MacBook itself functions quite well for any device powered by a Core M processor plus with no fan inside. As a result of a few minutes of web browsing, plus poking through Numbers, it feels like it is up to the tasks for what it is clearly meant. It is not for editing videos, it is not probably for gaming, but it performs the basics very well.

It is tough to say for sure having not used the laptop more, which will be done as soon as possible, but for the moment the latest MacBook seems a bit like the Apple Watch: it is a status symbol and beautiful that i would be desperate to put on the display for everyone I know also the kind of already wish to frame. It is a clear sign that Apple, first and foremost, values form and beauty. On the other hand it is expensive, the event’s oddest moment was when the $1,299 starting price was announced by Phil Schiller, and the room just deflated. It is also a bit underpowered for such an expensive machine, but good lord is it beautiful.