Lisa Gade reviews the second generation 12” Retina MacBook with updated Intel Skylake CPUs, faster SSDs, longer battery life and the new rose gold color (silver, space gray and gold are also available). The MacBook is an absolutely tiny laptop that runs Mac OS X El Capitan, yet it’s not much bigger than an iPad Air and it weighs just 2 pounds (under 1 Kg). The small size means there are few ports, in fast there’s just a 3.5mm audio jack and 1 USB-C 3.1 port that handles charging and anything else you wish to connect to it (monitors, external hard drives, Ethernet adapters, flash drive and more). The MacBook is available with Intel 6th generation Skylake Core m3, m5 and m7 CPUs and it has 8 gigs of RAM and your choice of 256 or 512 gigs of storage.
** Read our written review here:
The notebook has a lovely IPS 2304 x 1440 display that’s unchanged from last year’s model. It has a lightly larger 4.1 WHr battery that Apple claims is good for up to 10 hours on a charge. It has surprisingly loud stereo speakers, dual band WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth. We test it with Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and PS4 Remote Play in this review. The price starts at $1,299.
