How can Apple improve the MacBook Air 15-inch? We have some ideas

[Redaktion]

Apple's new MacBook Air 15-inch is once again a very good overall package and the combination of the powerful M5 processor and passive cooling solution remain unrivaled. There are still some areas where Apple could improve its larger everyday laptop.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/How-can-Apple-improve-the-MacBook-Air-15-inch-We-have-some-ideas.1250481.0.html

[Air M6 2027]

There is simply no fanless alternative in the Windows camo with decent performance figures.

This may be the elephant in the room. The industry behind Windows needs to up their game, because even I'm about to buy an Air 15 M5 after researching all kind of Windows laptops first.
Funny how on YouTube Just Josh in "Best Gaming Laptops of 2025 (ft. Jarrod's Tech!)" (youtube.com/watch?v=J0sbQR0ET3s) brought a MacBook Air for taking notes, etc. (he shows it in the video at some point), while the video itself is about Window gaming laptops.

Non-PWM 120 Hz OLED would delete Windows laptops, if it doesn't increase the price. But OLED may be less power efficient and would either reduce the battery time or would need a bigger or energy denser, more expensive, battery? Any what about the burn-in on static content? Also, I'd prefer IPS over PWM OLED implementation any time. Maybe PHOLED' higher energy efficiency can help Apple bring OLED sooner. But using OLED, the price could easily increase by 200 (at least based on other companies configuration options), which is too much. Maybe a 90 Hz OLED would be cheaper. Honestly, if they bring a 120 Hz IPS and reduce the pixel response times accordingly (1/120 = 8.33ms ideally), that would be a very solid improvement until OLED is actually ripe to be used by the massing in all kind of (harsh) conditions. But maybe OLED is already close to it.

Increasing the key travel by even 0.1mm to 0.2mm would make it so much better.

Soldered RAM is fine for this kind of laptop, but in times of AI/LLMs and data privacy, offering a 48 GB RAM option would be nice (because the iGPU becoming faster with each generation (=faster prompt processing), as the memory bandwidth becomes faster too (=faster token generation)).

If the Air 15 was 0.3 to 0.4 lbs lighter, that would be a major improvement, too.

[Forget Oleds]

Please stop insisting on OLEDs. They are pretty when they're new, but over time they wear unevenly.

And even worse, each RGB component wears differently. So the factory calibration goes down the toilet.

And you can't calibrate most of these panels. Profiling is not the same thing.

So please understand people buy laptops for years, not for couple of days.

What Apple could actually improve? Badly wearing keyboards.

[not_anton]

Easy - make it 17 inch. The only point of getting a 15" MBA over 13" is the screen size. 17" would be instant win. Only LG Gram offers something light in this segment so far.

[Bizarro_NikoB]

Put a fan in it

[Steve Jobs]

Only thing MacBook Air requires is a little bit better cooling.

So put a vapour chamber in the MacBook  Air just like a smartphone but bigger.

And the MacBook Pro can have the fan or combination of fan plus vapour chamber.