- You know what I don't understand, Andy?
Why do they call it the MacBook Air?
It's not like it was a mistake.
Get it, error?
MacBook Error?
- [Andy] Okay.
- It's been one of their most successful products ever.
They should call it the MacBook Success.
- [Andy] Or MacBook Correct.
- Yeah, MacBook Correct.
This is it, ladies and gentlemen.
This is the Apple Silicon MacBook Air.
And it's been a couple hours
since I unboxed the Apple Silicon Mac mini,
and already Anthony has been working on putting together
our Linus Tech Tips review,
and he says, and I quote,
"Impressions so far are pretty good."
That is a good sign.
Now, of course, what we don't know yet is
if the MacBook Air, whether for thermal reasons
or power reasons or any other reason,
might be a little bit lesser than the MacBook mini.
But we are certainly going to be finding that out for you,
ladies and gentlemen.
It's available in pretty much exactly
the same configurations as the other devices.
So we went for the 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU.
- [Andy] The base model does not have an 8-core GPU.
- Oh, it's 7-core, isn't it?
- [Andy] Yeah.
- So sorry, there is a base model with a 7-core GPU.
16 gigs of RAM, so you can have eight or 16 gigs of RAM,
not 32 because the whole thing is integrated together
into one tight little package.
We've got 512 gigs of storage,
and, of course, a US keyboard layout.
This is it.
It's a 13.3-inch display.
Hold on.
Let's have a look at what else is in here.
We've got a Type-C to Type-C charging cable,
all nice environmentally-friendly packaging.
Hey, look at that.
We still get a power adapter.
Hey, even this is mostly paper.
Very nice.
They don't wrap all the chargers in plastic anymore.
There's one little plastic bit at the end here,
more of a sticker than a plastic.
That is awesome. - [Andy] Is that a charger?
- Yeah, it's a charger, man.
What a concept.
How many Apple logo stickers do I get, though?
I only got one with the-
- [Andy] iPhone. - What, with the iPhone 12.
Hey, there you go.
You buy the MacBook, you get two.
See, me, I don't think that Apple put big enough logos
on their devices.
So I'ma go ahead, I'ma fix that for them.
Okay, here we go.
There we go.
- [Andy] Sure. - What do you think, dBrand,
are they going to hire me to put stickers on things?
I'm a professional sticker put-er-on-er now.
It's official.
- [Automated Voice] Press Command+F5 now
to turn it on
and set up your Mac.
- [Linus] Triple-click, Touch ID.
- [Automated Voice] To learn how to use VoiceOver
to set up your Mac.
- [Automated Male Voice] Accessibility shortcuts.
- [Andy] Why does this thing take so long?
- [Automated Male Voice] Use the-
- Why am I?
Wait, what?
Okay, whatever, I'm Canadian.
One of the things I'm expecting to be most remarkable
about the Apple Silicon Macs
is how unremarkable the experience is
the majority of the time.
I had really hoped that Apple would go more aggressive
with the first Apple Silicon devices,
like really change up the ID, do something out there,
but it kind of makes sense that they would stick
with something more conservative
because that way they'll know,
"Okay, how are customers receiving
this whole Apple Silicon concept,
versus how are Apples receiving our new slim bezels,"
or something along those lines.
Touch, just bring it back to the phones.
Just bring it back to the phones.
We all want it back on the phones.
Andy, do you want it back on the phones?
- [Andy] Oh, yeah.
- Yeah, me too. - [Andy] On the side button.
- Or the logo at the back.
It doesn't even matter, just somewhere.
You know what drives me crazy?
Every freaking Apple device has this True Tone display part
of their setup process.
And you can see what the display looks like
without True Tone.
You can't disable it.
I always have to go manually disable it after it.
I don't like True Tone.
We're so close to a MacBook with a touchscreen.
That's one of the biggest things that's made it impossible
for me to daily drive these things
is I've gotten very accustomed to having a touchscreen
on my laptop.
And the iPad Pro is almost there,
but it's running iOS,
or iPad OS, excuse me.
And now the MacBook Air is almost there.
It's got the keyboard, it's got the battery life.
It's got the beautiful screen
but it doesn't have the touchscreen.
They make two devices.
And if I could just smoosh them into one,
could actually be extremely compelling.
Like what are they quoting?
Something like 18 hours of battery life
while playing back video on this thing?
- [Jono] Yup.
- Flipping crazy.
Honestly, Andy, I'll tell you,
one of the most interesting perspectives that I've heard
on the new Apple Silicon MacBooks
is that maybe it actually doesn't matter
what the performance is like in x86 application X
or legacy developer tool Y.
Maybe it doesn't matter at all
because the vast majority of people
just use their laptops pretty much like a Chromebook anyway,
which is why Chromebooks exist.
And if you did everything within a browser,
there is absolutely no reason that this device
couldn't provide a perfectly great user experience.
Andy, can you help me with this?
- [Andy] Mm-hmm.
- [Linus] How do I make this full screen
without making it completely immersive mode?
- [Andy] Press Option.
And then press the green button.
(upbeat music)
- Why is that not the more default behavior?
Why wouldn't it be Option, green button for this stupid,
I can't see-
- [Andy] So you can use multi-finger to swipe between pages.
- I don't know.
Maybe that's just a personal discomfort,
not being able to see the dock or the menu at the top.
I just, I can't, I can't do it.
It makes me really uncomfortable.
Here we go.
A little bit of chug there.
Honestly, that's not bad for running in a browser though.
Let's be realistic.
Now this is a pretty light 3D application.
But what I like about it is that it's very realistic.
I would say that pop-in looks like about what I would expect
from a thin and light class notebook.
It's not amazing.
It's not like, "Oh, wow.
I can't believe it.
I've never seen anything like this before,"
but it's not bad.
It's fine.
Using significant energy in Safari.
I wish you could just set it to never charge past 80%.
It would last so much longer.
You know how I mentioned, so many people use
their computers like a Chromebook.
Honestly, for my laptop,
I hardly ever touch anything outside of a browser.
I actually am one of those.
I'm trying to imagine an application that I would install.
I mean, something like OBS,
I'll use my laptop for capture sometimes.
Actually, that's something that I would love to know
if I could do with this.
Oh my god, this installation process is so stupid.
Why do I have to drag the thing?
- [Andy] No, it's so simple.
- Why do I have to do that?
- [Andy] It's so simple.
- I already clicked on it.
This is just unnecessary.
- [Andy] It's like, after the drag, you're installing.
You don't have to click through the things.
- Okay, yeah, sure, that's fair.
But compared to something like Ninite,
where you have an unintended install in Windows,
you just double-click it,
it's completely installed.
What is this?
Why have this at all?
You're right. - The whole package.
- You're right, there are aspects of it
that are more painless than the windows experience,
but this is also just completely unnecessary,
and we could just not have it.
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So here's something that I would do with a computer.
Video, so let's change to 1920 by 1200, I guess.
Let's try x264 for our encoder
and then some reasonable bit rate like 30 megabit.
Normally, we would go higher for video capture
that we're planning to actually use in a video.
But I just want to see.
I mean, we're running like it's non-native, right?
Sort of.
No properties available.
Well, oh, here we go. Here we go, here we go.
This is another system preference thing.
It was just in the background.
Okay, okay, let's try this again.
Whoo.
OBS.
Hey, there it is, just like that.
Okay, start recording.
Nice, we've even got a
CPU usage monitor doodadamajig down here.
So what are we sitting at?
Now, what I wonder is,
does that mean 45% of the four high-performance cores,
or does that mean 45% of the entire 8-core CPU?
How is that divided up?
Very interesting.
Where are these recording to, I wonder?
30 megabit.
Oh yeah, right, we're using software encoding.
Of course it looks fine.
Does that mean 45% of- Microphone sounds really good.
the four high-performance cores?
Or does that mean 45% of the entire 8-core CPU?
That's really good
for just a dumb array microphone built in to...
Where is it even?
Interesting.
I don't know.
I'll find it later.
It's not terribly important for the moment,
but both the microphone and speakers are impressive
right out of the box.
But then we already knew that.
Man, the recent MacBooks have really good speakers.
- [Andy] The newer MacBook Air
has slightly better brightness
compared to the last gen.
- Oh yeah, that's right.
I think, what is it?
400 nit, something like that?
- [Andy] 400 nits versus like 350.
- Yep, 400 nit brightness, so still not an HDR display
by any stretch of the imagination.
But, who knows?
As this Apple Silicon continues to evolve,
we might gain more power savings there
that can then be allocated to better backlights
or, better yet, a nice efficient OLED displays,
and we'll finally get good HDR on mobile.
Well, that's pretty much it for first impressions, anyway.
So far, I mean, it's seamless.
Even something as what I would consider to be niche
as some rando open-source screen recording software
just worked.
I'll leave it to Andy to,
or, Andy,
I'll leave it to Anthony to try out
some more really random stuff though.
Make sure you're subscribed to Short Circuit.
And, of course, make sure you're subscribed
to Linus Tech Tips
for the full review of this device.