Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “2020 MacBook Air Impressions: A Clean Refresh!”.
Foreign here and welcome back to quarantine content, just a little entertainment for you, while we’re all staying inside, I’m your host Marquez Brownlee – and this is a new product. Oh yeah, that’s a new Apple product. This is a wild time to be alive and and also a wild time to release a new product. There’S no events and there’s no stores no lines. Just none of the typical Apple hype. There isn’t even any stores really like if you go to apple.com right now at the top it says: hey all our stores are closed right now until further notice, but then right underneath it says, hey check out our new stuff we just unveiled. So there is a bunch of stuff, that’s new, but there are two main things you probably saw me tweeting about them, that is the new iPad Pro and the new Macbook Air so feel free to the thumbs up on this video.
If you want me to cover both of those things in MKBHD style, but for now what we have here is the new refresh 2020 MacBook Air. So the air is Apple’s most popular laptop, it’s our most popular Mac really and it has been for a while. This change is just a nice little refresh. It’S a little update to bring it up to speed with 2020.. You remember the changes from the 16-inch MacBook Pro from a couple months ago that made it so great that stuff that I was asking them to also bring down to the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Well, they brought some of that down to the MacBook Air here first, so to start the new magic keyboard.
This was the the big change. We were all waiting for getting rid of the butterfly switches and moving back to scissor switches which are more reliable, have more travel feel better to type on they’re, just straight up better in every way it’s still backlit, it’s still the same size and everything. But now it’s just miles better to type on matter of fact, I’ve been using that 16 inch MacBook Pro a lot over the past few weeks because of the new keyboard, and it’s been excellent.
So I guess just generally good to see apple, basically silently admitting Fault by slowly removing butterfly switches from the rest of their lineup, and this keyboard also has the separate Escape key, no touch bar on the MacBook Air, of course, and then the touch ID fingerprint reader Is separated off in the corner and still works really quickly to unlock and wake up and sleep and the inverted T arrow keys are also back everybody’s favorite. The specs also got an update now to Intel’s 10th gen ships and Iris Plus graphics. It’S a good performance boost this. The MacBook Air has never been a Powerhouse and it still isn’t, but it also never really has needed to be so. This is a good update to catch it up to speed.
You can get a quad core chip in a MacBook Air now for the first time and the iris plus Graphics are saying they can deliver up to 80, faster graphics performance and in graphics, intensive applications. This isn’t a review. I’Ve only had this thing for a couple hours, so I can only really just rely on benchmarks for now, but yeah the numbers say good things and yes, that means it will also now support Pro display xdr. Now I don’t know how many people set up include a MacBook Air and a pro display xdr but hey.
If that’s you now you’re covered. They also went ahead and doubled the base storage to 256 gigs now, and you can go up to two terabytes for the first time on a MacBook Air which is nice and uh. You can also do 8 or 16 gigs of RAM, which puts it right on par with the Samsung Galaxy s20. Ultra.
That’S a weird comparison, but they’re also now still saying you’ll get all day battery life. They say 11 hours of battery life by their tests. Now, of course, like I said, I haven’t had this long enough to really test that, but that’s a good sign that the claim hasn’t changed too much. It still should get pretty good battery life, and that is pretty much the meat of it like they really haven’t changed when you think about it that much about the MacBook Air, it’s still the super thin laptop lightweight machine. We all know still the same port situation, but what they have changed is the stuff that’s at the real core of it, literally, which is the specs and the keyboard, but it’s not a MacBook Pro after all, so there are some things that they didn’t change to.
This laptop, so the big one is: there’s no screen upgrade on this MacBook Air. It’S the same size, 13, inch 2560 by 1600 screen and the bezels are all still here. It’S a pretty nice screen, but it’s not the best screen possible uh, no Wi-fi six and still a pretty garbage quality 720p, not even 1080 webcam.
This is what that looks like it’s still kind of impressive how bad the webcam is still look in these MacBooks and then the microphone it is improved and I think it sounds pretty good. There’S a pretty low signal: noise ratio, it’s not exactly up to the quality of the 16 inch MacBook Pro, which you might even want to record a podcast on, but decent array of improved mics in the MacBook Pro it. Just. It’S still going to look like this. Like this, what you’re hearing now this is what a studio quality microphone sounds like just in case you’re wondering uh anyway, there’s better speakers in this laptop too there’s more bass and about 25 more volume than the last MacBook Air. I will say they don’t match up to the 16 inch MacBook Pros new speakers, but that’s totally unfair, because nothing really does those are incredible and the new Macbook Air speakers are actually quite nice. They get pretty loud and they sound clear they’re still not as Bassy as something from a bigger laptop, but I’m impressed here then the final update, which is price. This now starts at 9.99, which is still an expensive laptop, but that’s pretty good, especially when you’re competitive with other laptops in this category, with the same components, same performance and a pretty premium design, plus it’s 100 bucks off.
If you have a edu email address, so it starts at 8.99 for them. So that’s your first look at it. My take is, at the end of the day, barring any weird performance problems or strange glitches that I haven’t found. This is setting itself up to be again Apple’s most popular computer for here on out, and it makes me want to switch my daily computer that I carry most often as a laptop is the 13-inch MacBook Pro. I still hate that keyboard. It’S still the flat butterfly switches and uh, I feel like I could easily switch to the MacBook Air. I don’t do anything that complex. I don’t do video editing on my laptop that much so this could easily be my daily if I can get used to two ports.
I think the number one thing I would miss is the X reports and a little bit of a brighter screen, but generally MacBook Air is looking pretty good either way. This refresh is about what we’re looking for for the MacBook Air good work now Apple. If you could get on it with the 13-inch MacBook Pro, that would be nice either way.
That’S been it. Thank you for watching. Let me know if you want to see some iPad stuff and leave a comment below what do you guys think catch you guys in the next one peace .