There's one additional graphics-related feature that Apple isn't advertising: Once you update your 2012 MacBook Air with the , you can for a total (including the built-in display) of displays. This is similar to the .
When it comes to RAM, all four MacBook Airs, including the $999 entry-level model, now ship with a minimum of 4GB, and you can upgrade any 2012 Air, at the time of purchase, to a whopping-for-an-Air 8GB. These days, 2GB just isn't enough for anything but the most-basic usage, and since you can't upgrade the Air's RAM later, you're stuck with what you initially buy. As someone who's been using a 2010 MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM for a year and a half, I can tell you from personal experience: This is a welcome change. Memory is also a bit faster this year, jumping from 1333MHz to 1600MHz.
Finally, Apple has also upgraded the Air's flash storage with faster versions, claiming that the drives used in the 2012 Air line are twice as fast as the ones used in 2011. Specifically, Apple says the 2012 Air's flash storage devices are capable of transferring data at up to 500 MB per second. (You can also now upgrade the higher-end Airs to 512GB of flash storage.) In our testing, the 128GB-flash storage 11-inch Air was 35 percent faster than its predecessor at file duplication, and the 13-inch Air was 42 percent faster than its 2011 counterpart.
But faster flash storage offers more than just quicker copying of files. Drive operations are one of computing's biggest bottlenecks, because almost everything you do--opening files and applications, saving files, paging memory, and much more--involves reading or writing data. It's why people who've used a solid-state drive (SSD) or flash storage never want to go back to a traditional hard drive, and it's why my 2010 MacBook Air often feels faster than my 2010 iMac, even though the latter is otherwise enormously more powerful. The new Air's faster flash storage means that the computer boots faster, applications launch faster, files open and save faster...everything's just a little bit--though noticeably--faster.
On the other hand, the $999 model still ships with a paltry 64GB of storage. Yes, Apple's vision of computing seems to be that you'll take advantage of "the cloud" to store your media and documents, but until the MacBook Air ships with some flavor of always-on mobile network technology, 64GB is embarrassingly little storage for a $1000 laptop. It seems especially stingy now that the entry-level Air ships with 4GB of RAM.