- Hey, friends.
Welcome back to the channel.
In this video we're going to be reviewing
the 2020 MacBook Air 13".
And because I'm a fan of upfront conclusions
and saving you time,
I'm just gonna come out and say
if you're in the market for a laptop
then this is probably the laptop that you should get
because it's amazing in absolutely every single way,
except for one which I'll talk about later in the video.
And honestly, in addition to the 15" MacBook Pro
and my 12.9" iPad Pro,
I would consider just buying one of these
just as an every day carry sort of thing.
'Cause this MacBook Pro is a bit big,
the iPad Pro is good but it doesn't,
it's not quite a laptop replacement just yet.
More on that in a future video.
But this is just absolutely perfect.
It's the greatest size to carry around,
it's the absolutely perfect laptop
if you're interested in doing basic things.
And that's gonna be the main point in this video.
That this the perfect laptop
if you're doing basic things.
And so, if you're in the market for one of these laptops
you want to be asking yourself, all right,
feasibly what are my use cases for a laptop?
And preferably we want a laptop
that's gonna be lasting us at least three years
if not more.
So you'll also want to as yourself,
can I feasibly envision myself only having
basic computer needs for the next three or four years.
So, what do I mean by basic things?
I basically mean anything that's not particularly fancy.
So you know, things like browsing the web,
or watching Netflix,
or typing up a word document,
or watching Ali Abdaal videos on YouTube,
or making a Power Point presentation for work or school
Or you know, crunching some numbers
in Microsoft Excel or in Google Sheets,
or watching an Ali Abdaal class on Skill Share,
or sending and receiving emails,
or doing the occasional Zoom call,
or maybe even watching other videos on other websites.
Those are all fairly basic things that
this MacBook Air does absolutely amazingly.
But if you're thinking of doing not very basic things,
things like video editing, that's not particularly basic.
This can sort of handle that somewhat well,
but it becomes very slow very quickly
and that's very frustrating as a video editor.
Gaming, this is not a laptop for gaming.
But if you're really into games,
you probably already know that.
Photo editing, graphic design.
Yeah, it sort of works if your work flow is very basic,
but if you're trying to import any reasonable sized stuff
onto Lightroom or do any kind of manipulations
in Photoshop it's gonna start slowing down.
And if this is the laptop that you're gonna be using
for the next three or four years,
you don't want it to be slowing down
doing any of the basic things that you're gonna be doing
feasibly in that time.
And so the question to be asking isn't,
is this a good laptop?
Because obviously it's a great laptop
and there's tonnes of reviews talking about
how amazing this is.
And actually for the first time since 2012,
now when someone asks me,
Ali what laptop should I get?
My answer is going to be just get a MacBook Air.
And I haven't been able to say that
for the last eight years,
because Apple has done all sorts of weird things
to the MacBook lineup,
with the 12" MacBook, and then the MacBook Pros,
and the weird butterfly keyboards.
And Windows laptops started to not suck beyond 2012.
But now the MacBook Air is so good that this is now
my default recommendation for a laptop once more.
To be honest, the Microsoft is just very good as well,
the Dell XPS is very good as well.
There's all sorts of really good Windows laptops
in this sort of price point that are very good.
The question is, what do you want to use a laptop for?
Because if you wanna be doing any of this fancy stuff
you should probably shell out for a MacBook Pro,
but I'd probably wait right now
until the 14" MacBook Pro comes out
with the proper keyboard.
Because if you want to get a proper keyboard,
you'll need to get the 16" version
which costs like $2500 minimum,
and that's just too much money to spend on a laptop,
unless you're like a genuine professional user.
Anyways, so that was the discussion
about kind of what we use a laptop for.
Like I said this is really good for basic stuff.
Let's just break down a little bit of the
kind of components of the laptop,
in case people care about that thing.
So, you know, let's start with the keyboard.
The keyboard is absolutely fantastic.
I'm going to do a typing test now and in real time
you'll see how amazing this keyboard is, so.
Ah, here we go.
Look, 152 words per minute.
I've been doing typing tests for a long time
and this was just the first one that I did today
and I promise I haven't done multiple takes of this.
With my Apple magic keyboard,
with my kind of fancy colourful mechanical keyboard,
the most I sort of get when I've been doing these tests
for the last few days and testing out different keyboards
has been about mid 140s words per minute.
So maybe there was some element of luck there,
but you know,
that's a pretty high typing speed if I do say so myself.
So I am very attuned to what a good keyboard is
and this keyboard is freaking amazing.
Like, I'm so glad
that this is the keyboard for one of these things,
'cause with the old butterfly keyboards
on the MacBook Pros, I didn't hate it that much
and I could get some pretty reasonable typing speeds
on that, sort of 130, 140 words per minute.
But as soon as I laid my fingers
on this new keyboard mechanism
that they introduced in the 13 inch Air and the 16 inch Pro,
I was like, oh my god.
I now know what I've been missing.
This is incredible.
Secondly, the track pad.
Back in the day, back in 2012,
Apple laptops were the only ones that had decent track pads.
In that time things have changed and you know,
Windows laptops now have decent track pads as well.
But this is just as good a track pad
if not better than it's been
for pretty much the last decade.
So, there's basically nothing to fault with this track pad.
Like it's responsive, it's great, the gestures are nice.
It uses like force touch,
so when you click on it you aren't actually clicking
it's just kind of giving you some haptic feedback,
but these track pads have been doing that for years.
If it's not broken don't fix it.
Like, the track pad is just as good as it's always been.
Thirdly let's talk about the screen
and the screen is just absolutely fine.
It's a Retina display,
it's got like a 2560x1440 resolution.
I think 400 nits of brightness,
which who really knows what these numbers mean.
But basically 400 nits is bright but not very bright.
So if you're using it outside in absolutely
broad daylight, bright sunlight,
you might not be able to see very clearly.
But it's absolutely bright enough for most like,
98% of other use cases, which is absolutely fine.
And it's a Retina display,
it still has slightly annoyingly large bezels,
which if you look at modern Windows laptops,
sometimes they don't.
But, hey, you know,
maybe they'll update the design for that next time.
But, yeah, the screen is just fantastic.
Fourthly, the ports.
This is, I suppose is one disadvantage of it.
You've only got two USBC ports.
But to be honest, for most people and for most use cases
two USBC ports is more than enough.
Most people with MacBooks or with any sort of USBC devices
are going to be using one of these dongles.
This is what I connect various USB accessories to,
but this goes into a USB port on this MacBook Pro.
For someone like me, two USB ports is a bit annoying
because often I use all four of these ones
up on my 15" MacBook Pro.
So, I've got this connected to this huge ass monitor.
I've got this one connected to a wired ethernet
going all the way through my apartment to plug in,
so I can stream a decent kind of gigabits per second.
I've got one USB dongle and I've got a USBC
hard drive connection.
That's probably more ports than most normal people
would need to use,
so two USB ports is absolutely reasonable.
We also interestingly have a headphone jack.
Yeah, I mean honestly can't really remember
the last time I needed to a wired pair of headphones,
but if you're one of those old-school people,
you've got the headphone jack there.
The speakers, speakers are very reasonable.
There's other videos on YouTube,
where they do tests of speakers.
I don't think you can really do a test of speakers,
because then it also depends on microphone quality
and it also depends on
what's going through your own speakers.
There's all sorts of different issues with that.
But yeah, the speakers are fine.
If you're gonna watch an immersive movie or something
you should probably wear headphones
or use external speakers.
To be honest that's going to be true
regardless of what laptop you get.
And you know, for watching YouTube videos
or watching my classes on SkillShare.com.
Link in the video description.
The speakers are absolutely fine.
Microphone wise, yeah, microphone is reasonable.
Apparently they're pretty good these days.
So, this is a test of the microphone on the MacBook Air
and recording on the Voice Memos app.
And this is what the microphone sounds like
from this $500 microphone setup that I'm using,
kind of at the top.
So you can hear for yourself.
Again the microphone is very reasonable
for doing basic things like FaceTime, and Zoom,
and remote working, and all that kind of stuff.
And then there's the webcam.
The webcam is a bit crap, its 720p.
I noticed this when I was face timing my mom yesterday
and earlier today and you know,
I'm used to having a super high-quality camera
on my iPhone 11 Pro Max,
front facing and back facing.
So, FaceTime is super HD on the iPhone.
When doing Zoom calls,
I'm used to having this Logitech 1080p HD camera
or like webcam, but this is about 50 pounds.
This is kind of a bit crap.
I mean, let's show what this would look like.
So yeah, this is kind of what the webcam looks like.
You can see there's loads of noise,
loads of grain in the background.
But I mean,
it's a webcam what do you use a webcam for?
No one really needs to see your face in full HD,
like super HDR, when you're on a Zoom call
unless you just want to do that for fun.
So, it gets the job done.
I would like it if the webcam were a little bit better,
but hey, we can't have it all sadly.
And now let's talk about the only thing
I dislike about this.
And that is that the thermal performance
is a little bit annoying.
And by that I mean that
as you start doing kind of more intensive sort
of tasks on this, you know,
having loads and loads of tabs open,
or trying to edit a photo in Lightroom,
or having like Chrome and Safari and Slack
and Zoom open at the same time.
Doing this sort of multiple application thingy,
the processor gets very hot and you can download add-ons
like Turbo Boost Switcher to check
what the temperature of the processor is.
And I was finding that this processor,
the I3 version, the dual core version
was easily getting up to a 100 degrees Celsius.
Especially when I was sitting on the sofa
with this in my lap.
Kind of sitting on my black jeans,
with the jeans sort of obscuring the air vents.
Which is often like the positions
that I would use a laptop in.
And I was finding that the fans
were getting annoyingly loud.
Now, this is only really a problem
if you're going to be stretching the laptop
and you're going to be kind of using it on a surface,
where the thermals or kind of the air vents are covered up.
So, if you're like wearing jeans or something
and using it in your lap.
But I think that is a scenario
that a lot of people are kind of using the laptop in.
And honestly if this fan issue wasn't a thing,
basically the reason it happens is,
because like something's happening on the insides
of the MacBook and there's other YouTube videos
that explain this.
But it basically means that the efficiency of heat
transfer to the outside environment
is not very good.
And so the processor tends to heat up
in order to kind of make it cool down a bit,
the fans have to spin really, really, really loudly.
And I'm just not really used to hearing loud laptop fans.
Like, unless I'm streaming and editing,
and doing loads of stuff on this MacBook Pro,
I just don't hear even a hint of fan noise.
And yet with doing kind of basic things on the MacBook Air
I was hearing some fan noise.
So there are ways around it,
you can use an add-on like Turbo Boost Switcher
to disable turbo boost,
which keeps the processor power down a little bit.
That means it does get a little bit slower,
if you're really really taxing it.
It's one of those issues that's the only negative thing
I can really think of with this laptop.
Apart from that everything is fantastic.
And in fairness you know,
I was using this all evening on the sofa, like over there,
in my lap, and I didn't hear a fan once
even without using the add-on.
So, it seems to kind of vary depending on what you're doing,
but the fan issue is a little bit annoying.
So if you really really don't like the idea
of hearing a fan noise occasionally
maybe this isn't the laptop for you.
So, that was all the features,
let's talk about recommended configurations now.
And this starts and $999, so basically a $1,000.
But you can knock off a $100 or a £100
off the price tag if you're a student.
So the base model if you're a student is £900 or $900.
But the base model has the I3 processor,
which is basically dual core so it only has two cores.
But if you pay an extra £100, a $100,
you upgrade to the I5 processor, which has four cores.
And it's very much worth upgrading that,
because it just sort of future proofs the laptop
a little bit more.
And it's only a £100 more for that upgrade.
The other thing that I would get,
is I would upgrade the RAM from 8GB to 16GB,
and that does cost $200, or £200.
But as we said we're gonna be keeping this device
for the next three or four years at least.
And upgrading the RAM is one of the best things
that you can do to increase the longevity of a laptop.
So overall,
the total cost of this would be 1299.
So, $1299, or £1300,
minus £100 if you're a student.
So basically, 1200 quid.
£1200, $1200, whatever currency
you wanna convert that into.
So that would be my recommended configuration.
I would suggest that if you can't afford £1200,
then maybe don't go for a MacBook Air,
maybe consider a Windows laptop instead.
Because you can get cheaper options
that do basically the same thing.
If you're getting a MacBook Air,
you're getting it because you like MacOS
as an operating system and probably
because you have other Apple devices
that synergize nicely with a MacBook
kind of as your main laptop.
So that's what I would suggest basically
the minimum price that you upgrade this should be.
If again, you know, as we said,
we want it to last three or four years.
I would be tempted to buy one of these.
And if you're in the market for a laptop
you really can't go wrong, this is the one to get.
I'm not being paid by Apple to say this.
I wish I were.
I wish Apple sponsored my videos,
but unfortunately they don't despite what everyone thinks.
This is just really solid and I've been using
MacBook since 2012 when I first got the MacBook Air
and they basically never let me down.
I'll put a playlist over here that has some other videos
about kind of iPad versus MacBook type things,
and also a video about my favourite apps to instal
on MacOS that you should definitely check out.
Thanks for watching and see you in the next video.
Bye Bye.
(gentle music)