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amazon Apple MacBook Air (2020) reviews
MacBook Air is very important. That is the entry point into the Mac lineup. It’s a college laptop, a freelancer’s companion, and a favorite Mac fan on a budget.
It’s also where many people get their first impressions of the Mac. That means it needs to balance both performance and price. I tested two new versions of the MacBook Air to see how each of them went down this line.
The Core i3 model starts at $999, while the Core i5 costs $1,199. Each new Magic Keyboard sports as a headline feature. So is the latest MacBook Air the perfect introduction to the Mac or, like many recent entry-level Macs, a poor first impression?
Keyboard
The Magic Keyboard is a highlight of the MacBook Air. It’s responsive, clicky, and features a millimeter of travel. It’s fun to type on and a perfect addition to beloved MacBooks before the 2016 MacBook Pro redesign introduced a butterfly-switch keyboard.
That cannot be said about the previous two years of the MacBook Air. Apple brought the ill-fated butterfly mechanism keyboard from the MacBook Pro to the Air for the 2018 redesign. It didn’t panic. The shallow key travel made it inactive, especially for long periods. It was loud – and worst of all, unreliable.
Luckily, those days are gone, and the MacBook Air once again has one of the best keyboards on a laptop today. It even kept a standard function row full of old-fashioned buttons instead of jumping into the Touch Bar, a feature I didn’t miss. The Touch Bar never added much meaningful functionality. I would take the reliable, convenient Escape and Mute keys every day.
The Touch ID fingerprint sensor is located at the top right of the function row, serving as the power button. It’s time for Apple to move to facial recognition login on the Mac, a feature that Apple has nailed on iOS devices. That said, Touch ID works great. It’s the fastest, most intuitive fingerprint sensor you’ll find on a laptop.
While the keyboard steals the limelight, let’s not forget the touchpad. It’s big, its tracking is second to none, and its Force Touch clicks are near-silent. That is not a surprise. Mac laptops have long had great trackpads. However, it’s worth remembering that Apple is still a leader here.
Performance
The MacBook Air has never been a powerful laptop, and it never was supposed to be. That is optional for those whose needs include word processing, email, and online applications. Think of it as a Chromebook, except with Mac apps.
In 2020, however, the Air received a respectable boost. That is the first Air to feature a quad-core processor, which is an important upgrade. More cores and threads usually mean more muscle to run heavy applications and multitask. Quad-core chips have become the norm for most laptops, even small ones like the Surface Pro 7, Dell XPS 13, and 13-inch MacBook Pro.
That said, the leap to quad-core doesn’t make the Air a job. It is still behind the competition.
I tested Core i3 ($999) and Core i5 ($1,099) models with 8GB of RAM. These will likely be the most popular options, thanks to their attractive prices. While the processors used by Apple are part of Intel’s 10th-generation Ice Lake family, they’re not the same chips you’ll find in most MacBook Air competitors. They are variants of the Y-series chips that Intel has partnered with Apple to manufacture specifically for its laptops.
The cheapest Air 999 has a Core i3-1000NG4, a 9-watt chip with two cores and four threads. On average, this dish gives a 15% performance boost in benchmarks over the Core i5 MacBook Air from three years ago. That’s trivial, and you probably won’t notice a daily performance boost. However, it handles everyday tasks well. Apps that open quickly and have a few dozen Chrome tabs open won’t slow the app down.
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Doubling cores doesn’t mean doubling performance.
What about quad-core i5-1030NG7? Well, doubling the multiplier doesn’t mean doubling the performance. Because it’s still a 9-watt chip, there’s a ceiling on what it can do. Compared to the Core i3 model, the Core i5 model is 27% better in multi-core benchmarks than those two additional cores, but it’s only 8% faster in single-core. That could be because these two processors share the same low base clock speed of just 1.1GHz.
Again, performance feels adequate. The issue isn’t day-to-day use, but how the MacBook Air compares to other laptops sold for the same price. The $1,100 HP Specter x360 also has a 10th Gen Ice Lake Core i5 processor, but it serves up 30% faster multi-core performance than the Core i5. The difference is capacity. A 9-watt processor will never push a competitive clock speed with a chip that can drop as much as 25 or 35 watts in short bursts.
Apple’s apps, of course, are where the MacBook Air benefits the most. If you stick to limited solutions like iMovie and GarageBand, you can handle some light content creation on the side. Don’t go crazy with Air’s upgrade. You can buy the Core i7 model, which has up to 32GB of RAM, which will drastically increase the price. However, it will still lag behind the competition. The MacBook Air is not a device you want to run Logic or Adobe Premiere on, so don’t try to turn it into a workstation.
Apple prides itself on silent products, but the MacBook Air can be loud. You can’t make a Zoom call without the fan kicking in on either Core i3 or Core i5 models. These laptops have larger CPU coolers than previous models, but I still want them to handle giving and receiving heat more efficiently.
Graphics and gameplay
The MacBook Air’s move to 10th-gen Ice Lake processors comes with another big improvement: graphics. Macs have never been a gaming machine, but Apple’s increased focus on supporting Apple Arcade, a pretty important graphics option.
All versions of the Air include Iris Plus graphics, although the Core i5 and Core i7 models have 25% more execution units. That translates to acceptable level gameplay, as long as you’re willing to lower the graphics settings.
Fortnite is completely unplayable on a Core i3, but it’s manageable on a Core i5. With a resolution of 1,440×900 and settings at Medium, the MacBook Air Core i5 managed about 40 frames per second. That may not sound impressive, but it’s a huge leap from what previous MacBook Airs were able to do.
Don’t expect to play demanding games like Battlefield V or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Windows laptops are still much better for gaming, and none of the modern Mac challenges will last.
Design and display
When it comes to the MacBook Air’s chassis, nothing has changed. It is still a single piece of aluminum, carved in a slight wedge shape. It’s as hard as a rock, perfectly crafted, and still quite appealing by its simplicity. Yellow is a standout color, but you can’t go wrong with Space Gray either.
It’s still the thinnest and lightest Mac you can buy at 0.6 inches thick and 2.8 pounds. That’s pretty small, although some of today’s Windows competitors are smaller. The Dell XPS 13, Surface Laptop 3 13, and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon are thinner and lighter.
Part of the problem is Apple’s stubborn refusal to shrink the size of its bezels. The company has pursued extreme measures to shrink the bezels of its phones for years, even resorting to a notch to house the camera. But here, it’s happy four years of fashion. That’s not a good look for a design-first company like Apple. That feels even more annoying after Apple cut the bezel on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
But the screen sits between those chubby ones as well. Apple has always offered just one display option for its laptops, which is an advantage on these low-priced options. Even at $999, you get a sharp 2,560×1,600 display with great contrast. It’s easily the best laptop display at that price point. You’ll pay more than $1,500 to get a higher resolution monitor from Dell or HP.
With a port selection, the Air offers just enough to get you through.
The MacBook Pro display, of course, still beats the Air when it comes to color reproduction. The Air hits 100% sRGB and 79% AdobeRGB, making it colorful for everyday use but lacking for photographers and video editors. It also offers a maximum brightness of just 389. That’s very bright in most cases, although the XPS 13 and MacBook Pro are brighter.
In port selection, the Air offers just enough to get by – and no more. Both USB-C ports are Thunderbolt 3, which means they’re fast and can handle multiple 4K displays with no problem. I wish they at least put one side on each side, for convenience.
The limited ports are a battle that Apple won, and as long as there’s more than one, I’m happy enough.
Battery life
The MacBook Air was once the king of battery life. Where are those days now? The HP Specter x360 and Dell XPS 13’s lower screen resolutions make them champions for battery life, easily lasting through a full workday.
The MacBook Air isn’t bad, but it just can’t keep up. That’s a few hours behind those devices in all of our tests, which included light web use (nine and a half hours), video playback (10 hours), and heavier applications (three hours). With my usual assortment of Chrome, web apps, Slack, and Spotify, the MacBook Air lasted about six hours on average.
These tests were performed on the Core i3 model. I don’t expect the Core i5 model to change these results much, but I’ll update this review with my final test.