Force clicking (as it's called) lets you open up web page previews on links or definitions for words. You can set the click strength in settings and also turn on a bunch of unique features for it in OS X. It's all in service of thinness - and some clever software features. So when the laptop is off, you feel nothing. It has tiny pads that detect pressure, and then an electromagnet inside that simulates the feel of a click when you press down. The Force Touch Trackpad feels like an impossible object. You can’t crank it up to the full resolution, but you wouldn’t want to anyway, since it would make everything way too small. You can set the resolution all the way up to 1440 x 900, so it's effectively giving you the same real estate as the 13-inch MacBook Air. Those bezels are thin, too, so the combination makes the screen feel really big. ![]() It's sharp and bright, and Apple also switched the bezels to black to match the rest of the Retina MacBook lineup. ![]() But ignore those specs and just look at it: it simply puts the screen on the MacBook Air to shame. The thinner screen also means that the Apple logo on the back of the laptop no longer lights up, if that's something you care about. The invention here is that it's thinner and brighter thanks to rearranged electronics inside, and it's also more energy efficient. The next thing is the screen, a 236 ppi Retina display that's 2304 x 1440 pixels. The only real hassles are the redesigned up and down arrow keys: they're entirely too small. I can bang away on this thing or type more softly, and both feel completely satisfying. The combination of all those new parts meant that the essential friction and "clack" that make up any great keyboard is still here, just different than what I was used to. But it didn't take long at all for me to change my mind. It felt weird to have each button move so little when I pressed down on it. Underneath each key is a butterfly mechanism, a "steel dome" that registers your keystrokes, and an individual backlight for every single key.Īt first, I hated it. It starts with the keyboard, which is shallower than what you might be used to. Invention and compromise.īut let's stick with the inventions for now, because they truly are remarkable. But the flip side of invention is compromise, and unfortunately there's enough of that here that I have to leaven the enthusiasm I've been expressing thus far with a warning: it's not all wonderful. And in every one of those cases, you can safely believe the hype. The keyboard, trackpad, screen, and batteries all needed to be redone to make the MacBook as thin as it is. To pull off this design, Apple's marketing video will tell you that it required a lot of inventions. It's much more restrained in person than you might think, but honestly I'd probably end up choosing the space gray model. ![]() I got a gold review unit because, well, why not? I think it totally works. It comes in gold, silver, and space gray. Apple also redesigned the hinge so that it is made of metal, increased the size of the trackpad, and moved the speakers (which are reasonably loud, but obviously lack anything resembling bass) up above the keyboard. It just feels like the ideal size for a small laptop, perfectly fitted to a full-sized keyboard and not a whit bigger. People who use the 11-inch Air are going to feel right at home, and actually people who use the 13-inch Air will, too. It's so well-balanced that it feels lighter than it actually is. And that weight is perfectly distributed across the deck of the laptop and the screen. That's about a full pound less than the 13-inch MacBook Air and a third of a pound less than the 11-inch Air. It's even more impossibly light, weighing just over two pounds. It's almost impossibly thin, measuring just over 13mm at its thickest point. The same precision we've seen on Apple's phones and tablets has been applied here - it's genuinely a level above any other laptop Apple has ever made, to say nothing of other hardware makers.Ī thin machine with no loose pieces and no unconsidered lines It's a thin, compact, and light sliver of a machine with no loose pieces and no unconsidered lines. The MacBook is what happens when the iPad Air decides to up and grow a keyboard, hinge, and trackpad.
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