The 13-inch MacBook Air lives to see another day, but the 11-inch model doesn’t

By Brad Jones Updated October 27, 2016

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The star of Thursday’s Apple event was the brand new MacBook Pro with its Touch Bar — but the company also detailed a couple of systems intended to satiate users who aren’t ready for such big changes to their laptop keyboard. Specifically, it was confirmed that the 13-inch MacBook Air isn’t going to be discontinued, and there will be a tertiary variant of the new MacBook Pro intended for users looking for a smaller, slimmer system.

The new MacBook Pro is just 14.9 millimeters thick, compared to the 17-millimeter thickness of the MacBook Air. Even taking the wedged design of the Air into account, the new Pro is 13 percent smaller overall. With this in mind, Apple is offering a version of the new MacBook Pro that ditches its new Touch Bar, Touch ID support, and a couple of ports, and that uses some more cost-effective components under the hood.

Recommended Videos

The 13-inch MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar features a 2.0 GHz Intel Core i5 processor, an Intel Iris Graphics 540 GPU, and two Thunderbolt 3 ports. Like the standard 13-inch MacBook Pro revealed Thursday, it packs 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. This compares to the 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5 processor, Intel Iris Graphics 550 GPU, and four Thunderbolt 3 ports on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

While the lower-end system misses out on the Touch Bar, it’s not completely exempt from some of the other improvements being made to the MacBook Pro line. It does feature its multifunctional ports, the larger Force Touch trackpad, and a keyboard constructed with second-generation butterfly mechanism keys.

However, while the MacBook Air is still available as of now, it seems likely that its days are numbered. Given that its unique selling point was being ultraportable, the fact that the standard MacBook Pro is now slimmer and just as light doesn’t bode well for its future — unless Apple has plans to make a truly minuscule MacBook Air, a niche currently carved out by the MacBook. Note that although the MacBook Air 13 is sticking around, the MacBook Air 11 has been discontinued.

The MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar is priced starting at $1,500, and is shipping as of today from the Apple website. Apple is also finally letting go of the previous version of the MacBook Pro without a retina display and with spinning HDDs. The 2015 versions of the MacBook Pro are still around, with the 13-inch model starting at a more modest $1,300.

Updated on 10-27-2016 by Mark Coppock: Clarify that the MacBook Air 11 and legacy MacBook Pro 13 have been discontinued.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…

Computing

The M4 MacBook Pro is apparently listed for sale on Facebook — but I don’t buy it

An open MacBook Pro on a table.

According to analysts and industry experts like Mark Gurman and Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is expected to announce an M4 refresh of the MacBook Pro possibly this month and most likely before the end of the year. No event announcements have come yet, though Apple has historically held an October Mac event. But now, an online leak discovered by Wccftech claims the new model is up for sale on a private Facebook group. The claim is backed up by alleged images of the retail box, but there's plenty to be suspicious about.

While the images were posted by known leaker ShrimpApplePro, the information was sent to them from an unknown source. There are two posts so far, one with an image of the back of the retail box -- with comments from AppleShrimpPro saying to take it with asome skepticism -- and one showing additional images and claiming it's for sale on Facebook.

Computing

Your 2018 MacBook Air is officially ‘vintage’

apple 2015 notebook market share macbook close up snow leopard mac

Apple has added 12 more Macs to its vintage and obsolete lists, affecting the hardware service users can access. If your Mac has joined one of the lists, it could become harder to get it repaired by Apple.

As spotted by MacRumors, these three Macs have been added to the vintage list:

Computing

The MacBook Air M4 could launch sooner than we thought

The M3 MacBook Air in front of a window.

Spotted by MacRumors, display industry analyst Ross Young has posted a subscriber-only tweet revealing that panel shipments for the MacBook Air M4 should be starting in October.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman then confirmed his own information points to the same conclusion -- that Apple will launch the next MacBook Air during the first quarter of 2025.