MACBOOK AIR THE BEST P2

APPLE MACBOOK (2016)

Price as reviewed	$1,599
Display size/resolution	12-inch 2,304 x 1,440 screen
PC CPU	1.2GHz Intel Core M5-6Y54
PC Memory	8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1866MHz
Graphics	1536MB Intel HD Graphics 515
Storage	512GB flash storage
Networking	802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0
Operating system	Apple El Capitan OSX 10.11.4

A keyboard you may like, but won't love

This is still the thinnest Mac that Apple has ever made. Part of the reason for that is the butterfly mechanism under the keyboard. The nearly edge-to-edge keyboard has very large key faces, yes, but the keys are shallow, barely popping up above the keyboard tray and depressing into the chassis only slightly. It takes some getting used to, especially if you're accustomed to the deep, clicky physical feedback of other MacBooks or the similar island-style keyboards of most other modern laptops. It took a while to get used to, and it'll never be my favorite keyboard, but I found it was easy to acclimate to after a few days of heavy usage, and I've easily written more than 100,000 words on the 2015 version of this system.

The touchpad retains the Force Touch feature found in both the previous MacBook and the current 13-inch MacBook Pro. (A version of this migrated to the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus as 3D Touch.) A set of four sensors under the pad allow you to "click" anywhere on the surface, and the Force Click effect, which combines the sensors with haptic feedback (or, as Apple calls it, "taptic"), allows you to have two levels of perceived clicking within an app or task. That deep click feels to the finger and brain like the trackpad has a stepped physical mechanism, but in fact, the movement you feel is a small horizontal shift, which, even when fully explained, still feels like you're depressing the trackpad two levels.

I'm more of a tapper than a clicker, and the first thing I do on any new MacBook is turn on tap-to-click in the settings menu (which is still inexplicably turned off by default), so I have not given Force Touch much thought since it was introduced, with the exception of deep-clicking on addresses occasionally to bring up a contextual map pop-up. Here's another Mac trackpad tip: besides the tapping feature under the trackpad preferences menu, you should go to the accessibility menu and look under Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad options to turn on tap-to-drag.

A small but sharp screen

The 12-inch Retina display has a 2,304x1,440-pixel resolution, which gives you a very high pixel-per-inch density, as well as an aspect ratio that sticks with 16:10, as opposed to the 16:9 aspect ratio found on nearly every other laptop available now, and in HDTV screens.

The slightly glossy screen works from wide viewing angles and is very clear and bright. On-screen icons, text and images all scale well to be very viewable despite the smaller size and higher resolution. While the bezel around the display is thin, it's nowhere as minimalist as the barely there bezel on the excellent Dell XPS 13.