If I had to choose one laptop right now for normal daily use, it would be a 2020 MacBook
Air, but not this one. After 2 weeks of use and a ton of testing, I changed my mind on
this machine and wished I ordered a different one, and even though I think this is a good
laptop for a ton of people, I could have been great, if Apple made one small change. I’ll
explain both in just a bit.
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I’ve read many reviews online, and it seems like a lot of people are glossing over the
negatives, I don’t know why but I’m going to be completely honest and give you both
the good and the bad and then help you make an informed choice.
The 2017 MacBook Air has been one of, if not the best selling Macbook for years, even after
Apple announced the new one. That’s because even though it was underpowered and the display
was outdated, the price point was low and that's what many people care about most if
they wanted a basic laptop with MacOS.
The 2020 MacBook Air is finally going to overtake those sales because it's better in almost
every way and right now you can buy a brand new one for $950, which is actually the same
price as a deeply discounted 2019 model which you would be crazy to buy since its worse
in many ways.
I own a lot of laptops, but being quarantined for over two weeks now and working from home
I realized there were three reasons why I kept picking up and using the 2020 Air instead
of these other laptops.
The first reason was size and weight. At Under 3 pounds with a 13” form factor, it's really
nice for daily use. The second reason is the wedge shape. It may seem trivial but for longer
sessions the tapered edge doesn’t dig into my wrists like the boxy Pro’s do.
The third reason is the keyboard. This new magic keyboard really is the best keyboard
Apple has ever made and probably my favorite keyboard I’ve used in any laptop. It's a
hybrid of Apple previous chiclet keys that have decent travel and feel with good reliability
and the butterfly keys which replaced them which were wider, more stable, and offer more
feedback but had poor travel and questionable reliability.
To be completely honest, this keyboard feels better than my standalone keyboard for the
Mac Pro. It’s almost identical but has a bit more feedback which helps for long typing
sessions. The only way to get this keyboard right now is to get a 16” MacBook Pro or
this new Air, and you can’t even compare those due to size and prices.
The comparison that’s valid is to the base 13” MacBook Pro, and after thoroughly testing
the new Air, unfortunately the choice is harder than ever.
When Apple launched the new Air I was extremely excited. They dropped the base price by $100
and also doubled the SSD capacity which is very unlike Apple, resulting in a $300 lower
price.
The design stayed the same, as did the ports, the webcam, and the display. The speakers
are similar but they’re actually slightly quieter but sound slightly better. (insert
a short sound comparison)
Unfortunately the webcam is still sub par for 2020, but the microphone quality was improved
and sounds good.
Insert mic comparison.
The RAM is much faster because of higher frequencies and being DDR4. but what I was most excited
about was the new processors and graphics which was the biggest weakness of the previous
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The New MacBook Air is the first Mac to feature intels 10th gen processors which are more
efficient while offering better performance, and the first MacBook Air’s to have a quad
core option.
In my first videos on the Air I was telling everyone to spend the extra $100 to get the
quad core i5 which we found out had the same high end G7 graphics as the i7 which is $250
more.
The base is now a dual core i3 with G4 graphics but it outperforms the previous dual core
i5 by a fair bit and is the biggest generational lean in performance we’ve ever seen in a
MacBook Air, and that's just looking at the dual core.
If we take a look at the quad core models we find two things. First off, the scores
are all of the place, and second is the i5 and i7 are very close to each other
That is mainly because of thermals, and since the graphics chips are the exact same I would
not recommend spending the extra for the i7 because the real world performance will be
very similar, but more on thermals in just a bit.
The quad cores on average score about 40% better than the dual core, and when comparing
to the best processors in previous versions the new i5 smokes them.
Now for many people buying an air maximum performance doesn’t matter that much, but
what does matter is how snappy it is for normal use, and thanks to 10th gen CPU’s the new
Air is incredible, with single core performance that even beats out my 12 core mac Pro, 16”
MacBook pro, and 13” MacBook pro.
Because of this for normal tasks it's a joy to use and is incredibly quick with no lag.
On the graphics side the base i3 is almost twice as fast as the previous best and the
quad cores are 3 times faster.
Since MacOS apps are using graphics more than ever, having faster graphics also accelerates
many tasks and apps.
Because of this incredible performance I expected the new MacBook air to be an easy choice over
the 2019 13” MacBook Pro. We have double the storage, a much nicer keyboard, graphics
that are 3 times as fast in terms of raw metal performance, a CPU that's close in multi-core
but much faster in single core, better battery life, and on top of that a lower price. That
makes it a no brainer choice right? That's what I thought, but I was wrong.
When I started to push the Air in heavier tasks that I would do on the Pro it started
to fall apart. It’s fairly snappy for photo editing but for heavier brushes or when exporting
the MacBook Pro is still faster.
I thought it would be great for video editing in final cut but it definitely performed worse
than the 2019 Pro, taking almost twice as long to render a 5 min 4K project and having
more stutters when your editing.
Along with that, it ran much hotter and louder while doing all of these tasks and that’s
because Apple really dropped the ball with the cooler.
The CPU’s in the recent Macbook Air’s are Y processors which mean they’re lower
power and can be used without a fan. The previous Airs did get hot but not too loud, but now
that we have these much more powerful processors our i5 easily hits 100C in even simple tasks.
Apple doesn’t mind them being hot, but if its running at a constant 100C the fans will
ramp up until they are annoyingly high like when I was watching a 4K Youtube video in
chrome.
The same thing can happen if you have multiple apps running in the background, and when I
was downloading and installing fortnite the CPU was at 100C with fans spinning high for
over an hour. This does not happen with a 13” MacBook Air.
Even though Apple decided to put in a fan, they didn't connect the heatsink to it which
really limits its cooling potential. I’m not sure if this was just negligence or intentional
so it wouldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, or just but it's extremely disappointing
for two reasons.
One is that this Air could have been a solid MacBook Pro alternative, but instead if you
push it hard like in Cinebench R20, the CPU performance difference jumps to 65%, and if
want to play some games its slightly slower instead of being at least twice as fast as
it should be.
The second is that people who aren’t trying to do those tasks will still experience more
fan noise and heat then necessary, and at times during normal use when their old Mac
would be silent, especially if they buy a quad core model. If you did and your fans
are annoying you, check out my video on how to lower fan noises and heat after this video.
This could have been avoided if they spent just more dollars for a better heatsink, and
this would have been one of the best MacBook releases ever.. I actually did a video watercooling
this thing and my conclusion was if Apple put in a heatsink we would get at least 25%
better performance while running cooler and quieter.
Because of this, I’m no longer recommending most people to spend extra on a quad core.
Yes it's faster, at least in some tasks, but it's going to run hotter and louder than the
i3 and once it heats up and slows down the performance difference is much smaller.
If you need that performance either buy a 13” MacBook pro at a discount, which we’ll
link to in the video description, or if you can wait for the 2020 Pro but we don’t know
when it will come and of course the price will be higher.
With all of that said, I still really like the 2020 MacBook Air and I would highly recommend
the base model for most people that don’t need a ton of power.
The real-world battery life is about 2 hours better than the Pro. It has a sharp, above
average display, good speakers, normal function keys with touch id which some people prefer,
a great trackpad, a top of the line keyboard, fast 256GB SSD and performance that does the
job well for the majority of normal use, and all of that right now for just $950 which
is a steal for a brand new 2020 MacBook.
If Apple still charged $1300 for this I wouldn’t be as thrilled, but at this price its a 5/5
for me.
Let me know your thoughts down in the comments and if you want the best price check out our
links in the video description. If you need to update your site or make a new one check
out squarespace and click that circle above to subscribe and if you want to see a detailed
direct comparison to the MacBook pro or how to get this to run cooler click right over
there. This has been Max and I’ll see you in the next one.