The now standardized keyboard brings congruity to the MacBook line, with black keys on a metallic aluminum body.
The second design, introduced in October 2008 alongside the 15-inch MacBook Pro, shared the latter's unibody aluminium casing, but lacked a FireWire port.
A third design, introduced in late 2009, retained a similar unibody construction but changed back to white polycarbonate.
The aluminum unibody design continued in productions as the newly introduced 13-inch Macbook Pro.
It was more compact than any other notebook in the MacBook family at the time and included a Retina display, fanless design, a Butterfly keyboard with lower key travel.
The 2010–2017 base model came with a 13-inch screen and was Apple's thinnest notebook computer until the introduction of the MacBook in March 2015.
In 2017, the MacBook Air received a small refresh, with the processor speed increasing to 1.8 GHz.
It features a touch-sensitive OLED display strip located in place of the function keys, a Touch ID sensor integrated with the power button, and four USB-C ports that also serve as Thunderbolt 3 ports.
On November 13, 2019, Apple released the 16-inch MacBook Pro, replacing the 15-inch model of the previous generation, and replacing the butterfly keyboard with a scissor mechanism keyboard (dubbed the Magic Keyboard by Apple), reverting to the old "inverted-T" arrow key layout, replacing the virtual Escape key on the Touch Bar with a physical key, and replacing the AMD Polaris and Vega graphics from the 15-inch model with options from AMD's Navi graphics architecture, as well as reengineering the speakers, microphone array, and the thermal system compared to the 15-inch; the latter had thermal limitations in the 15-inch model due to its design.
[18] It has a fan, allowing sustained operation of the M1 chip at its full performance level, which is claimed to match or exceed that of Intel versions.
Unlike Intel Pro models, the M1 version only comes with a 13-inch screen, has only two Thunderbolt ports, and has a maximum of 16 GB random access memory (RAM).
This release addressed many criticisms of the previous generation[20] by reintroducing hard function keys in place of the Touch Bar, an HDMI 2.0 port,[21] an SDXC reader and MagSafe charging.
[25] On October 30, 2023, Apple announced updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models based on the M3 series of chips.
[26] On October 30, 2024, Apple announced updated 14-inch and 16-inch Macbook Pro models based on the M4 series of the chips.