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 has as its headline feature . So is the latest MacBook Air the perfect on ramp to the Mac, or like many other fairly low-tier Macs lately, is it a bit of a wobbly 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 key sets on a laptop, for today. It even kept a normal 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 sort of takes the spotlight, lets not forget the touchpad. It’s big, the tracking is pretty much second to none, and those Force Touch clicks are almost inaudible, kinda low-key. No real surprise there, Mac laptops have had excellent trackpads for ages. Still its worth remembering that Apple keeps leading the pack in this area.
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, plus threads kinda means you get extra horsepower in the background, so the heavy work runs smoother, and multitasking feels less like a bothersome chore. These days , even quad-core chips are sort of the everyday baseline on a lot of laptops, including lighter variants like the Surface Pro 7, the Dell XPS 13, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Still, jumping to quad-core doesn’t magically make the Air a powerhouse job machine, or anything. It’s kind of still lagging behind what the competition can do.
I did some testing with Core i3 ( $999 ) and Core i5 ( $1,099 ) versions, both with 8GB of RAM. These probably land as the most common buys, mostly because the pricing looks friendly. While the processors Apple uses belong to Intel’s 10th-generation Ice Lake lineup, they aren’t the exact same chips you’d see in most MacBook Air rivals. They’re basically custom variants from Intel’s Y-series that Intel and Apple worked on together, meant specifically for Apple’s laptop lineup.
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.
2020 Apple MacBook Air Laptop: Apple M1 Chip, 13” Retina Display, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD Storage, Backlit Keyboard, FaceTime HD Camera, Touch ID. Works with iPhone/iPad; Space Gray: Buy it now
Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD Storage) – Silver (2020 model) (Renewed): Buy it now
Apple MacBook Air – MWTL2LL/A (13-inch, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD Storage) – Gold (2020 model) (Renewed): Buy it now
Doubling cores doesn’t mean doubling performance.
Doubling the multiplier does sound like it should mean doubling performance, but that’s not really how it works. It’s still a 9-watt chip so there’s this kind of ceiling on what it can pull off. If you look at it against the Core i3 model, the Core i5 comes out about 27% ahead in multi-core benchmarks for it, even if it’s only using those two extra cores. But for single-core, it’s only around 8% faster. That could be tied to the fact that these two processors share the same low base clock speed, just 1.1GHz … so, yeah, there’s not much room there.
Overall performance feels pretty adequate. The bigger issue isn’t just day to day use, it’s more like how the MacBook Air stacks up against other notebooks that cost roughly the same money. Like for example, the $1,100 HP Specter x360 also uses a 10th Gen Ice Lake Core i5, but it delivers around 30% faster multi core performance than that same Core i5 here. This kind of gap matters once you do real work, not only simple stuff. The reason seems simple enough: capacity. A 9-watt processor just won’t push competitive clock speeds when compared with a chip that can spike or dip into something like 25 to 35 watts, even 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.
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 feels kinda unplayable on a Core i3, but on a Core i5 it’s actually doable, though. With 1,440×900 resolution and the settings set to Medium , the MacBook Air with a Core i5 was getting around 40 fps. That number doesn’t sound amazing at first, but for the earlier MacBook Air models it’s a big step, like a kind of real practical upgrade rather than just a small tweak. If you’re coming from something older you’ll feel it more than you think. Don’t expect to play demanding games like Battlefield V or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Windows laptops are still way better for gaming, and none of the newer Mac challenges will last long anyway.
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 reduce the size of its bezels. The company has been pushing extreme measures to shrink the bezels of its phones for years, and it even went as far as using a notch to fit the camera, you know. But here, it’s happy to live with four years of “fashion.” That doesn’t feel great for a design-first company like Apple. It seems even more irritating after Apple trimmed 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, which is colorful enough for daily use but not quite there for photographers , and video editors. It also tops out at 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 real winners for runtime and they’ll pretty much cruise through a whole work day, no drama.
The MacBook Air isnt terrible, but it just cant keep the pace. It ends up a few hours back, in all of our tests—like light web stuff (nine and a half hours), video watching (10 hours), and then heavier apps (three hours). With my usual mix of Chrome, web apps, Slack, and Spotify, the MacBook Air went around 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.
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Tech Reviewer & Product Analyst
Định Bia has spent over 10 years testing consumer electronics with a focus on smart technology. He work as a product advisor at Biareview where he helped customers find the right devices for their needs. He personally tests every product featured on this site using a consistent evaluation framework covering quality, durability, and value. All reviews are based on experience, not influenced by the manufacturer.