Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin this is a MacBook Air you may have seen our video last year where we took a look at why Apple is still selling this laptop in 2017 and of course they're still selling at an Apple stores today but my question is does it actually make sense to pick up a used model so this is the 2014 11 inch MacBook Air and fun fact this is actually the exact laptop that reviewed almost five years ago thankfully video quality has improved a lot since then the good thing is the design actually doesn't feel all that out-of-date so you're still getting the solid aluminum chassis which feels good even by today's standards and you have to remember the MacBook Air was kind of the first Ultrabook so even though it might not be quite as thin as something like the 12-inch MacBook it's still going to be much thinner than the vast majority of laptops out there again it's like $500 on eBay right now so where you can really tell the MacBook Airs age is with the display so the 11 inch air is rocking a 1366 by 768 panel definitely not Retina quality and it's really not great even on a small display like this the bigger issue though is that it's going to be a low quality TN panel color is not going to be great there's very little contrast and the viewing angles leave a lot to be desired honestly it kind of feels like a budget to maybe 300 on a laptop that you buy today now don't get me wrong it's not exactly going to be a deal-breaker but when you're picking up a MacBook Air in 2018 the low quality screen is definitely something that you're going to notice thankfully though something that hasn't really aged to much are the rest of the inputs the keyboard is still better than stuff like the 12-inch MacBook in my opinion it's got good spacing it's still going to be backlit and the trackpad is also better than most Windows laptops even today so the only real difference between this and a newer MacBook trackpad is going to be that you actually can't click on the front as opposed to the forced touch that you get on the new MacBook Pros and the idea that's just going to be a little bit smaller besides that you're getting every little bit of the functionality and every bit of the smoothness that you would expect from a Mac go take a look at the specs it's actually not going to be all that much out of date so this is going to be powered by a fourth-generation hazle processor most of the mac books had Core i5 although I did off to upgrade this one to the i7 mostly because I actually used to do video editing on this but for the most part the performance is really not going to be too far off a modern laptop and more normal less super depending tasks like um don't try to game on your MacBook gear or don't try to do 8k hgr raw editing on it but besides that for normal stuff it doesn't really feel that much slower one thing you should keep in mind is that a lot of these MacBook Airs only had four gigs of RAM it's going to be usable but if you're able to find a model with eight gigs out of the box it's going to make things a lot better something that I did not do to my macbook air when I ordered it back in 2014 is upgrade the SSD this guy only has a hundred and twenty eight gigs of storage now to be fair it is going to be a PCIe SSD and it's actually going to be faster than a lot of SATA drives for any say the drive that you find today but with only 128 gigs of storage you better have lots of external hard drives around if you want to do anything serious now believe it or not I actually used to edit pretty much all of my videos when I was on the go on the MacBook Air but things have definitely changed since then so instead of shooting on a DSLR at 1080p with a fairly low bit rate instead now we shoot everything in 4k we're shooting primarily in ProRes and it's going to require a lot more data and a lot more processing power to work with however I actually switched over to Final Cut since then which is fairly well optimized and because we shootin pro res I think the MacBook Air might actually stand a decent chance of being able to edit although it might also horribly crash and burn so they give you an idea of what we're working with here this is pretty much all going to be 4k pro res so some of it was shot on a red and some of it was shot on sony fs7 but for the most part it's going to be fairly straightforward and the good thing is find out that actually does work with pro res would be well if we actually open up the project we're gonna see here is the performance really is not going to be bad and mind you this has been rendered but if I turn up the volume here that's not bad at all no this isn't already edited timeline but if we want to go in and do some color correction to simulate what it would be like if we actually didn't have everything rendered and have it already start playing back here go to full screen stopping a couple frames at full quality but I would say for the most part this is going to be usable where it's really gonna slow down though is when it comes to actually exporting so no you probably shouldn't go out and buy yourself a MacBook Air just to go do some video editing but especially when you're working with stuff final cut as well as ProRes which are very well optimized to work on this kind of hardware it actually is going to be usable although I probably won't bring this guy back out of mothballs to edit cauliflower videos again one of the nice things about going with a 2014 model of the MacBook Air versus an earlier one is it does have the Intel Haswell processors now this was the last time that there was a huge leap in battery life so when this thing was brand new it was able to get between 6 to 7 hours on a charge now today obviously with a slightly older battery it's a little bit closer to say four four and a half considering this is an older laptop with not and it particularly user replaceable battery having that kind of life in an older laptop is going to be super helpful and of course because this was a premium laptop at the time it does have a toe 2.11 AC Wi-Fi you know Ethernet jack because it's a Apple MacBook from after 2011-2012 whenever they dropped it but you're still gonna have fast Wi-Fi which again it's gonna be pretty much the same as a current Mac up today there are two ways of looking at this so on one hand it's kind of crazy that a nearly five-year-old laptop has held almost half its resale value but on the other hand it kind of makes sense when you compare this to something like a brand new 13-inch MacBook Pro which is way over double the price you've got a lot of the same features besides the garbage town display but if you're using it for lighter stuff you really are gonna notice a huge difference however one of the things you are going to be losing are those newer processors the better battery life but I think for most people especially considering the price it's actually not going to be a bad pickup so I'm curious would you guys ever want to pick up a used macbook like the air and of course for a run the same money you could get a new budget laptop but there are going to be pros and cons on both sides so let me know what you guys think and if you want to see a comparison with this than some of our other budget laptops anyway guys thank you so much for watching and I will catch you on the next one