The 2012 Air ships with OS X 10.7 (Lion)--including --and iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand). Anyone who buys a 2012 Air is eligible for .

The big changes this year are on the sides and the inside. Like the 2011 Air, the new model sports a Thunderbolt port for both high-speed peripherals and connecting external displays. (Fans of FireWire, take note: Apple has also , although we're still awaiting its debut.) But the Air's two USB ports, one on each side, are now USB 3 versions, making the Air line the first--along with the Retina MacBook Pro--to support the new USB standard. Each USB 3 port gets its own bus, is capable of up to 5 Gbps of throughput, and is backward-compatible with USB 2.0 peripherals. We're currently testing USB 3 performance and hope to have benchmark results soon, but USB 3 opens up the Air to a big market of inexpensive, decent-performance storage devices.

You'll also find, on the left-hand edge, Apple's . The new connector is apparently electrically identical to the original MagSafe, but flatter and wider. This means the new Airs, along with the Retina MacBook Pro, ship with a new MagSafe 2 AC-power adapter. Apple sells the $10 , a tiny adapter that lets you use older MagSafe power bricks with the new Airs and Retina MacBook Pro, but you can't use the new MagSafe 2 power bricks with your older MagSafe-equipped laptops.

Oddly, the design of the new MagSafe 2 plug forces the cable to protrude directly out--at a 90-degree angle--from the plug. The original MagSafe plug had a similar design, but after many people had problems with the cable fraying where it entered the plug, in 2010 Apple switched to a lower-profile, L-shaped plug that didn't fray as easily and was more difficult to accidentally knock loose. We'll see how this new (old) design holds up over time.