The old MacBook Air was embarrassing. Woefully out-of-date with a terrible screen and an ugly, chunky bezel. Apple devotees have been pleading for an update for years, and now it has finally relented. So, after all that time and clamouring for a new iteration, how does the new, revamped MacBook Air compare to the MacBook Pro, the 12-inch MacBook and the old MacBook Air? Let’s take a look.

It’s way more expensive than the old MacBook Air

We have to start with the price. The MacBook Air has long been the “affordable” Mac, with current prices starting at £799 for a standard version (Apple sells them for £949) with 8GB of memory and a 128GB SSD for storage. The new MacBook Air shares the basic spec, albeit with a new 8th-generation Intel processor and several significant updates, but prices now start at £1,199. That’s £400 more than the current MacBook Air and only £50 less than the entry-level MacBook Pro. We’ll get into the differences a little later, but clearly it’s now an alternative to a Pro, not an affordable Mac.

It has a Retina display

Finally. Upgrading the screen wasn’t a difficult job, but this upgrade in particular is most welcome. While the new MacBook Air keeps the same 13.3-inch size as previous models, Apple has quadrupled the number of pixels to four million – a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600, the same as MacBook Pro and slightly more than the 12-inch MacBook.

It’s a more colourful screen, too – 48 per cent more than the old MacBook Air, according to Apple. It’s hard to say how the colours will compare to the existing MacBook Pros at present, but given the old MacBook Air had a comparatively poor screen, a 48 per cent improvement may not necessarily be as impressive as it initially sounds. It’s worth noting the Air doesn’t support the P3 colour space (a wide-gamut alternative to sRGB) like the MacBook Pro either, so it’s safe to presume it will be inferior to the Pro in this respect. The chunky bezels are gone as well, and, like on all other MacBooks, the display glass pushes to the edge.

The new MacBook Air has Touch ID

Remember, the new MacBook Air is only £50 cheaper than the cheapest MacBook Pro. Weird as that sounds, the MacBook Air has one important advantage: it has Touch ID. Touch ID means you can unlock your laptop with your fingerprint, authorise payments and generally use it like you would a fingerprint scanner on your phone. This also means you get Apple’s T2 security chip, which protects your fingerprint data, encrypts your hard-drive on the fly and helps protect the boot process on your Mac.

Neither the entry-level MacBook Pro, nor the 12-inch ultra-thin MacBook, have Touch ID – it’s reserved for the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which starts at £1,749. How important this is depends on your attitude to security and how useful you’ll find having Touch ID, but it’s clearly an important difference when deciding between models.