When it came out a year ago, buying Apple's new super-thin 12-inch MacBook felt like springing for a fancy turntable---it wasn't exactly a practical purchase, but dammit if you didn't want one anyway. Today, though, Apple is making a few steps toward turning its sleek little laptop from a novelty to a workhorse. Oh, and let's not bury the lede: it comes in rose gold now. Yeah.
All the differences other than the new color option are internal. The MacBook now comes with Intel's sixth-generation Core M processor, which brings a bunch of improvements. That chip is part of the Skylake generation that brings somewhere between 10 and 20 percent processing improvement, and as much as 40 percent better graphics performance (Apple lists a 25 percent improvement for the MacBook). Those are big numbers, though probably not big enough to make you ditch last year's model if you're already a MacBook owner. Skylake also promises better battery life, and indeed Apple says the new MacBook lasts a full hour longer than the previous model, up to 10 hours of web browsing and 11 hours of movie playback.
You can get a 1.1GHz Core M3 processor plus 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage for $1,299. That's the base model. It goes all the way up to $1,599, for a 1.3GHz Core M7 chip, plus 8 gigs of memory and 512 gigs of storage. (8GB is a new baseline, by the way, including on the 13-inch MacBook Air.) No matter what you get, though, performance-wise the MacBook still feel more like an iPad than a Mac Pro. In fact, the A9X chip inside the new iPad Pro and the Skylake Core M have tested at roughly equal levels. But that's not a bad thing. The iPad Pro is seriously fast.
Otherwise, you're still getting the same $1,299 MacBook as before: the two-pound body, the gorgeous 2304 x 1440 screen, the one USB-C port, the Force Touch-able trackpad, the super-shallow keyboard that still takes some getting used to. It comes in space gray, silver, gold, and the new rose gold. And if you're in the market, you'll be hard-pressed to find a laptop that turns more heads.
