 I used to be happy with the MacBook Air. That laptop was once the benchmark for balancing power, portability, price and epic battery life. But its design and display haven't changed for six long years now. And those years have started to show. What used to be the best mobile computer in the world is now an outdated relic. It's time for an air to the air and this is it. The 1499 MacBook Pro 13 inch without a touch bar. It's the thinnest and lightest MacBook Pro that Apple has ever made. In a first blush it looks like everything that air users have been asking for. A much nicer display and much better specs without any sacrifice for portability. But what Apple has created here isn't really a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro as we've known them for so long. What this computer represents is the professionalization of the 12 inch MacBook from last year. A pro MacBook if you will. The design is a perfect match for the MacBook. Right down to the metal bottom of the display, the space grey color option and the Apple logo on the lid that no longer illuminates. Still like the MacBook, there are almost no ports on this new MacBook Pro. Get a headphone jack on the right, two USB-C connections on the left and that's it. This is the most drastic change Apple has made to its Mac computers in a long time and leads to a ton of compromises. Want to offload pictures from your camera? There's no SD card slot. So you need a dongle. Want to backup your data to an external hard drive? You need either an adapter or a whole new drive. Hell, even plugging in an iPhone requires a new cable or adapter. Yes, ok the new ports are port Thunderbolt 3 which has a gajillion gigabits of bandwidth. But that's the tech of the future, not the present. The MagSafe charger is another victim of the USB-C revolution with its handy magnetic latching being replaced by a stiff connector. It's much harder to attach and detach and doesn't have an LED status light. If you can get over the shock of losing every useful port on your laptop, and I'm still not sure that I can, this new MacBook Pro is a classic work of aluminum art from Apple. The hinge is strong and just glides open. The bezels around the display are tiny, there are stereo speakers framing the new keyboard and the touchpad is downright enormous. That limousine sized touchpad may look excessive but I love it. And because it's force touch, I can click the top of it in a way that I can't do with the mechanical switch of my MacBook Air. The keyboard has an upgraded version of the MacBook's butterfly mechanism and it really has a much better feel. I didn't like it at first and many people might never like its shallow key travel but once I stopped testing the keyboard and just started typing naturally, it all came together nicely. The biggest upgrade with this MacBook Pro is the display, which is just stunning. With the same wider color gamut of the iPhone 7 and 5K iMac, it looks great from literally any angle. I wouldn't say it's obviously better than the preceding MacBook Pro, but it is in technical terms with 67% greater contrast and 67% higher brightness. Photographers will love this display for editing, once they've figured out the suitable workaround for the dongle situation. The MacBook Pro's performance won't let you down either as it handles both Photoshop and Lightroom nicely. This might look like the ultra-portable MacBook, but it performs like a real pro laptop. Battery life on this new MacBook Pro doesn't rival the Air's 12 hours, but it does achieve Apple's claim 10 hours. I'm a writer so my typical use may be a bit more forgiving than other professionals, however I keep seeing a perfect match between remaining percentage and hours of battery life. 90% is 9 hours, 40% is 4 hours and so on. Apple seems to have deliberately targeted 10 hours as the benchmark. But I have little to no worries about the battery, it lasts a consistently long time. As new and future-facing as this MacBook may be, it embodies a lot of familiar Apple strengths. Grady industrial design and touchpad ergonomics, reliable performance and solid battery life. But it's also taken away user-friendly features like the SD card slot, USB ports and a MagSafe charger. With Windows rivals catching up fast and this new laptop costing $1499 as a starting price, I'm inclined to give Dell, Lenovo and Razer a shot before deciding on my MacBook Air upgrade. If you're determined to stick with macOS, this new MacBook Pro is the obvious and easy choice for a step up from the Air. It's also much better and more powerful than the $1299 MacBook. But even if all that existed were Apple laptops, there's still the temptation of the more expensive MacBook Pro with a touch bar, which actually has something unique about it. So where does that leave this new, touchless MacBook Pro? It's a good computer, priced like a great one. It's the future crammed into the present. But it's also the most affordable new MacBook Pro and therefore the one, if any, that most of us will buy. As such, it's a beautifully designed, very thin and light, unibody slab of Apple branded compromise.