Big Air: Hands On With the 15-Inch Apple MacBook Air

pcmag.com:

Apple just unveiled a Mac many of you have been lusting after for years: a bigger MacBook Air. The new 15-inch MacBook Air takes everything that we love about the 13-inch MacBook Air and super-sizes it, scaling up the screen (while maintaining battery life), and kicking the performance up a bit. However, everything else is pretty much the same.

The best part is what doesn't get bigger: The Air itself remains slim and light at 15 inches, and the $1,299 starting price (not to mention at $1,499 for the extra memory and storage) is as competitive as Apple products come.

On the 15-inch MacBook Air, just about everything is bigger. It starts with the display, which is sized up to 15.3 inches and has a resolution of 2,880 by 1,564 pixels. As a Liquid Retina IPS display, that gives it the same pixel density seen on the 13-inch model, but boosted in size for the larger dimensions of the 15-inch panel. The display brightness also remains the same, at up to 500 nits, and Apple says it will support full DCI-P3 color.

At least the audio system gets bigger, too. With room for six speakers inside, the 15-inch Air produces a bigger and bolder sound than earlier MacBook Airs. The highlight of this six-speaker array is the dual-woofer setup, which pairs upward and downward-firing woofers in a configuration that Apple calls "force-canceling sound."

Thanks to the physics of displacing air to create sound waves, pairing them in this up-and-down setup actually allows the pair of speakers to deliver more sound for the same amount of power. The result is a louder, richer sound with no hit to battery life.

The touchpad gets a proportional increase in size, as well, providing a similarly generous expanse of touchable surface, but a little wider