15-inch MacBook Air could have one advantage over the current M2 model

Apple’s Mac pipeline for the rest of this year includes the first-ever 15-inch MacBook Air and long-awaited Mac Pro with Apple Silicon. With these machines on the horizon, a new filing from Apple could tell us more about what to expect from the hardware.

As noted by Joe Rossignol, Apple has filed a new listing for an upcoming Mac equipped with Bluetooth 5.3. Apple retroactively adds which products these filings are for after they launch.

With both the 15-inch MacBook Air and M-series Mac Pro expected between now and June, we can assume that this Bluetooth listing will be revealed to be for one of those products.

Apple already supports Bluetooth 5.3 in lots of recent hardware including the iPhone 14 family and AirPods Pro 2. You can also find the current Bluetooth spec in the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini models released last month.

Without being able to determine if this listing is for the next MacBook Air or Mac Pro, there’s still something interesting to discover.

Some base M2 chips are Bluetooth 5.0, and other base M2 chips are Bluetooth 5.3. This seems to depend on when the hardware was first released. For example, the M2 MacBook Air released last spring has Bluetooth 5.0, and the M2 Mac mini released last month has Bluetooth 5.3.

The Bluetooth spec doesn’t seem to be something Apple uses to distinguish enter level and high end machines either. The 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro, for example, used Bluetooth 5.0 while the updated version uses Bluetooth 5.3. Timing appears to be the determinate factor on Bluetooth specs, not price.

If the filing is for the 15-inch MacBook Air, it could mean the new laptop will have better Bluetooth than the 13-inch version from last year even if they both use the base M2.

Again, the Mac mini tells us that two Macs can use the same M2 chip and have different Bluetooth specs, and entry level hardware and higher end hardware both using Bluetooth 5.3 since last fall suggests this listing doesn’t have to be for the Mac Pro.