All right,
a MacBook Air review video
shot by me,
by myself, at home. But
Becca is still directing this thing over Zoom,
so I can't screw it up too bad, right?
From what I can see,
it looks like there's still a little headroom.
We could tilt up like a literal centimeter, like, yeah.
Let's tilt up a little. Just a little bit more.
Let's... okay.
Come back to the camera, and then zoom in like a click.
Oh, wait. Wait, one click less.
Okay. That looks really good.
So
there's a new MacBook Air,
which is Apple's most popular Mac.
The big update happened two years ago
with a full redesign around a Retina Display.
This new 2020 model has
faster 10th Gen Intel chips and
a totally new keyboard.
Apple's also lowered the price.
The base model starts at $999 with a 1.1GHz
dual-core Core i3 processor, 8GB of RAM, and
256GB of storage.
I've been reviewing the step-up $1,299 model
that has a quad-core Core i5 and 512GB of storage,
which is the version I think most people should get.
It's got two Thunderbolt 3 ports,
which now support running 6K displays, and headphone jack,
which, well... you know how I feel.
Let's start with the most important thing: the new keyboard.
It has been a very bad few years
for Apple's laptop keyboards.
So the switch back to
a traditional scissor key design is very welcome.
Apple is calling this the Magic Keyboard, and
it first arrived on the 16-inch MacBook Pro last year.
As it happens,
I've been using a 16-inch MacBook Pro for a few months now, and
I'm happy to say that the Air's keyboard feels
almost exactly the same,
which is to say: very good.
The keys have a millimeter of travel,
they're just clicky enough without being too loud, and
overall, the whole thing is very solid and very satisfying.
There's also zero chassis flex,
so you can pound away on this keyboard on your lap
or at a weird angle on the couch.
I don't really want to give Apple
too much credit for updating this keyboard.
It took the company way too long
to get away from that butterfly design
after people started calling out the problems.
It's going to take some time to earn back that trust. But
history aside,
the keyboard is the single
most important part of a laptop, and
the new MacBook Air's keyboard is extremely good.
I also have to say,
I greatly prefer this keyboard
with a standard top row and function buttons
to the Touch Bar version on the 16-inch MacBook Pro
that I've been using.
I just don't understand the Touch Bar.
It seems to make basic things like adjusting volume and
brightness more complicated without making anything else
so much easier that it's worth the trade-off.
I know other people feel differently, and
I legitimately know people who love the Touch Bar, like Becca.
Come on!
But I don't, and I think
it's really telling that
the Air is Apple's most popular laptop, and
it doesn't have the Touch Bar.
That's the right choice.
The other thing it doesn't have is a touchscreen, and
one, touchscreens on laptops are pretty common now, and
people seem to like them, and
two,
if Apple can figure out how to add trackpad support
to iPadOS,
it can probably figure out how to add
touch support to macOS. But
for right now, and honestly, for the near future,
the Mac is mouse and keyboard only.
The other new thing
from last year
are the processors, which are Intel's new 10th Gen
chips with Intel Iris Plus Graphics.
Our review unit has a
1.1GHz quad-core Core i5 chip and
8GB of RAM in it, and it's been fairly capable.
I've been working in Chrome, Slack, and Zoom, and
a little Lightroom on the side
like I normally do, and it's felt totally solid.
That feeling is backed up by
the single-threaded Geekbench score,
which is basically in line with
a 16-inch Core i9 MacBook Pro that I've been using.
But this thing still isn't a rocket, and
I can definitely push the limits pretty easily.
Just opening Lightroom is enough to
make the fan speed up, and after a couple of edits,
it's going full blast. And heavy sustained workloads
cause the processor to do some thermal throttling.
You can definitely see it with heavy benchmark tests
like Cinebench.
I asked Apple about thermal throttling, and they told me
it's by design. They don't think most people
need hardcore sustained performance,
so the Air is designed to boost the processor
up to 3.2GHz as needed and then
bring it right back down. But
once things heat up, the processor's clock speed is capped
at a lower number
with the fan going so the system can manage heat.
Again, in pretty
average day-to-day use,
I never felt any of this thermal management slow things down,
which is the entire point. But
it's also clear there isn't a ton of headroom
if you need a lot of performance all the time.
You'll definitely at least hear the fan, and
you might experience some slowdowns.
I asked for questions on Twitter, and
almost all of you wanted to know about the performance gap
between the new Air and the 13-inch Pro, and
that thermal design is basically the big difference.
Apple told me that the MacBook Pro
is the better laptop for people
who need to push their machine to the limit all the time.
It has a more forgiving thermal design and
faster turbo boost clock speeds.
It can basically run hotter and
faster for a longer period of time.
The bad news is that
the 13-inch MacBook Pro still has that butterfly keyboard.
There are a lot of rumors of an update coming, and yeah...
we're just going to have to keep an eye on that.
All of that is to say that the Air's performance
is totally fine for most day-to-day tasks. But
if you regularly use a bunch of demanding applications,
you're going to be hearing that fan a lot.
Apple says you can get 11 hours of battery life
on the new Air
if you're just running Safari to browse the web. But
in real life, running Chrome, Slack, and Zoom,
I got more like five hours of battery life
with the screen turned all the way up.
I probably could've extended that a little
if I turned down the brightness, but
this is not the world's brightest screen to begin with.
It averages about 400 nits of
brightness compared to, say, 625 for the iPhone 11.
Those three apps are battery hogs. But at this point,
I live in Zoom and Slack all day, every day, and
I wouldn't say I'm blown away by the battery life
I'm experiencing. And
while Safari is way more efficient than Chrome,
Chrome is still just a fact of life for a lot of people.
As with every Apple product,
there is a gap between the results you get
if you live entirely within Apple's ecosystem and reality.
Speaking of Zoom,
the webcam in the Air is the same old
720p webcam
Apple's been using forever.
It's fine, but
it's disappointing that
Apple puts some of the best cameras in the industry
in the iPhone and sticks with one of the most
medium cameras in the Mac.
I just got a lot of questions about the MacBook Air
versus the iPad Pro
with the new Magic Keyboard
since the 11-inch Pro and that keyboard
cost about the same as the base-model Air. And
well... only you can know the answer in your heart.
For me,
I'd pick the Air for now.
You get a bigger screen, and
macOS has fewer limitations on what it can do.
Dieter has a whole review
of that new iPad Pro up on the channel if you want more, but
we're going to have to revisit this debate
when that Magic Keyboard case ships in May.
So those are the major new changes in the MacBook Air.
I haven't tested the $1,000 base model
that a lot of people asked me about. But
I feel pretty confident
that you should spend the extra $100
to get the quad-core i5 upgrade and that
most people should spring
for the $1,299 model with the i5 and extra storage
if you can afford it
since these laptops tend to stick around for a while. And
that's really the thing: for the first time in several years,
I feel confident in saying that
most people in the market for a Mac laptop
can just buy a MacBook Air and
expect it to competently and reliably do most things
for a long time to come.
That's a big win.
Just make sure you use Safari
if you want the battery to last.
Making this video, for me,
was a nice distraction from the virus news cycle, and
I hope it helped you out a little bit, too.
That said,
I want to call out the entire Verge team,
particularly the Verge Science team.
They're doing an absolutely great job
covering the coronavirus.
Check it out. It's Verge Science on YouTube.
That's their channel.
I hope you're staying safe, and I hope you're staying home.