- The MacBook Air is dead.
Long live the MacBook Air.
(electronic music)
Here it is, at long last, Apple has finally,
finally redesigned the MacBook Air
with a more modern design and yes, a Retina display.
It starts at 1199, and it looks
like a MacBook Air should look.
It has this tapered design, it's super thin,
it's pretty light, it's a MacBook Air.
If you're thinking about this new MacBook Air,
you probably have been hanging onto your old MacBook Air.
It was the king of laptops for a long time.
It changed the entire laptop world when it came out,
but a lot has changed with laptops,
and especially Apple laptops, since that first Air.
So I wanna talk about what's different,
now, about laptops, and how Apple has taken
all of that stuff and applied it to this new MacBook Air.
First, ports.
This technically has three of them,
a headphone jack, thank god,
and two ThunderBolt 3 USB-C ports.
That's right, MagSafe is gone,
so be careful not to trip on the power cord.
There's also no SD card slot.
Sorry.
The trade-off is that USB-C is used
to charge lots of things, now,
and you can even power up
off a battery pack, if you want to.
And if you have the right hub,
you can plug just one cable into your laptop,
when you sit down at your desk,
to connect to a display, power,
and a bunch of other accessories.
But that means you're also gonna have
to deal with dongles when you plug
in stuff like your iPhone.
Sorry, again.
Second is screen.
The MacBook Air has a Retina display,
it's 2560 by 1600 pixels, which means
everything is much sharper and better,
though you should know that the screen is glossy,
now, and it's not quite as nice
as what you get on the Pro laptops.
Still, it's a huge upgrade over the old Air.
The bezels are way smaller, now,
and they're black, but the screen doesn't go
quite edge-to-edge, like other Windows laptops do.
Now, the last thing I should mention
about the screen is it doesn't
quite get as bright as I'd like it to.
It's been fine, even in pretty bright rooms indoors,
but I found myself cranking up the brightness
to almost the max level way more often than I usually do.
Third is the keyboard.
Apple has been trying to get
this new keyboard design right for a few years, now.
Now, what you need to know is that the keys,
they don't travel very far,
and it sounds kind of clacky and loud.
This third generation butterfly keyboard,
it is a little bit quieter than it used to be,
but more importantly, it should also be a little bit
more dust resistant than before,
because that's been a problem with MacBook Pros,
and hopefully it's solved, now.
Overall, I'm basically fine with it,
but you should know it does take a little while
to get used to.
Oh, one more thing.
There's no silly Touch Bar,
touchscreen, thing on the keyboard.
It's just function keys that do
what you want them to do, when you want them to do it.
Fourth is Touch ID.
You can login with your fingerprint,
and it's fast and easy to use.
It's a thousand times better than typing in your password.
Now, it's not as convenient as
what a lot of Windows laptops have.
They let you unlock with your face,
sort of like an iPhone does, but it's
still a big upgrade, and inside,
Touch ID is powered by this super secure T2 chip
that also handles a few other security functions.
Fifth, trackpad.
It's huge, now, but don't worry
about accidentally tapping it.
It's really good at avoiding that.
It's also a Force Touch trackpad,
which means that you can click on it anywhere,
even on the top, and it just works.
Now, this trackpad isn't quite as big
as the ones that come on the Pro models,
but it is really accurate.
Sixth, speakers.
They're better, louder.
They're louder, I don't know.
They have better stereo separation,
and they're also powered by that T2 chip, but whatever.
The important thing is they're much nicer
than what you had on the old Air.
Seventh is just overall build quality.
This thing feels a lot tighter
and nicer than the old MacBook Air.
It weighs 2.75 pounds, which honestly isn't
that much lighter, but it's smaller,
overall, than the old Air.
It's just a really good, solid laptop.
Eighth is the computer stuff.
Processor, and RAM, and storage, and all of that.
Now, this one gets a little bit complicated,
but bear with me, because I need
to tell you a story about Intel.
Oh, Intel.
If you haven't been following laptops, you just need
to know that Intel has had not a great few years.
Compared to how processors have advanced
on phones, Intel's progress on laptop
and desktop chips has been much slower.
So the processor on this new Air is a dual core,
eighth gen Core i5, but it's
something called a Y-Series version
of that chip, which means that
it's lower-power, and not as fast
as the desktop class U-Series that
you can find on some other laptops.
Bottom line, is this faster than your old Air?
Yes, but it's not that much faster,
and in some ways, it lags behind other Windows laptops.
You can do all the same stuff that
you can do on your current Air.
So I've been running a half-dozen apps
at a time, along with more than a dozen tabs
in Chrome, and everything is pretty okay.
I think, for what most people will do
with this laptop, it's fine.
So if you're hoping you're gonna be able
to step up and get way faster video editing, not so much.
The fans are gonna spin up, and you're gonna have a
very long wait for your export.
And the same goes for something
like processing raw photos, or doing
anything that relies heavily on multi-core processing,
because again, this Air only has two cores.
Those kinds of tasks are gonna bring
this thing to a chug way easier
than will happen on a MacBook Pro.
As for battery life, well, I have
to say that I haven't had quite
enough testing time to give you a number,
in hours, that I can be really confident in.
By the time we shot this video,
I've used it for a couple of days,
and I got about seven hours on each
of those days, with a mix of Web browsing,
and email, and some photo editing,
and listening to Spotify, and actually,
a little bit of fairly intense testing,
so that's pretty good.
But I don't think you're gonna get Apple's claimed 12 hours
of Web browsing time.
It's not a battery life champ, basically,
but I am very confident in saying
it's gonna last longer than
your decrepit old battery on your old MacBook Air.
When I first started testing this laptop,
I spent a lot of time thinking
about what I should compare it to.
Is it like a 12-inch MacBook just blown up
to a slightly bigger size?
Is it more like a 13-inch MacBook Pro,
but just with cheaper parts?
I mean you can barely tell the two
of them apart, when you set 'em side by side.
So which is it?
Actually, I think it's both of those things.
It's a really nice laptop.
Do I wish that Apple had found a way
to maybe make a slightly less expensive laptop?
Well, yeah, I kinda do.
You can get an iPad or a Windows laptop,
or even a Chromebook for a lot less
that does almost everything this does,
except for one thing, and that one thing is running MacOS.
Look, here's the deal, people like the Mac.
It's great to have a computer that does
all the computer stuff you want
in a way that you're familiar with,
and Apple has taken way too long
to update is mass-to-market consumer laptop.
Now the wait is over, but if you were hoping
that lightning would strike twice,
and this new MacBook Air would be
as revolutionary as the old MacBook Air, well, it's not.
It basically is a MacBook that finally includes
all the stuff that has been happening
with laptops for the past few years.
A lot of people just want a good, modern,
reliable Mac, nothing fancy, really.
They just deserve something that's up to par,
and for those people, everybody
that's been hanging onto that old MacBook Air,
this is a nice upgrade.
It's par for the course, but you know what?
That's probably enough.
Hey, everybody, thank you so much for watching,
and lemme know in the comments,
do you think that Apple did enough
to update the MacBook Air this go-around?
I think the answer's probably yes,
but I'm curious to know what you think.
And if you're interested in the iPad Pro,
we just reviewed that thing yesterday,
and in some ways, it's vastly more powerful
on this laptop, so you should check that video out.