Gadgetory

the MacBook Air is dead long live the MacBook Air here it is at long last Apple has finally finally redesigned the MacBook Air with a more modern design and yes a Retina display it starts at 1199 and it looks like a MacBook Air should look it has this tapered design it's super thin it's pretty light it's a MacBook Air if you're thinking about this new MacBook Air you probably have been hanging on to your old MacBook Air it was the king of laptops for a long time it changed the entire laptop world when it came out but a lot has changed with laptops and especially Apple laptops since that first air so I want to talk about what's different now about laptops and how Apple has taken all of that stuff and applied it to this new MacBook Air first ports this technically has three of them a headphone jack thank God and two Thunderbolt 3 USB C ports that's right MagSafe is gone so be careful not to trip on the power cord there's also no SD card slot sorry the trade-off is that USB C is used to charge lots of things now and you can even power up off a battery pack if you want to and if you have the right hub you can plug just one cable into your laptop when you sit down on your desk to connect to display power and a bunch of other accessories but that means you're also gonna have to deal with dongles when you plug in stuff like your iPhone sorry again 2nd is screen the MacBook Air has a Retina display it's 2560 by 1600 pixels which means everything is much sharper and better though you should know that the screen is glossy now and it's not quite as nice as what you get on the pro laptops still it's a huge upgrade over the old air the bezels are way smaller now and they're black but the screen doesn't go quite edge to edge like other Windows laptops to know the last thing I should mention about the screen is it doesn't quite get as bright as I'd like it to it's been fine even in pretty bright and rooms and doors but I found myself cranking up the brightness to almost the max level way more often than I usually do third is the keyboard Apple has been trying to get this new keyboard design for a few years now now what you need to know is that the keys they don't travel very far and it sounds kind of wacky and loud this third-generation butterfly keyboard it is a little bit quieter than it used to be but more importantly it should also be a little bit more dust resistant than before because that's been a problem with MacBook Pros and hopefully it's solved now overall I'm basically fine with it but you should know it does take a little while to get used to oh one more thing there's no silly touch bar touch screen thing on the keyboard it's just function keys that do what you want them to do when you want them to do it fourth is touch ID you can login with your fingerprint and it's fast and easy to use it's a thousand times better than typing in your password now it's not as convenient as what a lot of Windows laptops have they let you unlock with your face sort of like an iPhone does but it's still a big upgrade and inside touch ID is powered by this super secure t2 chip that also handles a few other security functions v trackpad it's huge now but don't worry about accidentally tapping it it's really good at avoiding that it's also a force touch trackpad which means that you can click on it anywhere even on the top and it just works now this trackpad isn't quite as big as the ones that come on the pro models but it is really accurate six speakers they're better and louder their bladder I don't know they have better stereo separation and they're also powered by that t2 chip but whatever the important thing is they're much nicer than what you had on the old err seventh is just overall build quality this thing feels a lot tighter and nicer than the old MacBook Air it weighs 2.75 pounds which honestly isn't that much lighter but it's smaller overall than the old air it's just a really good solid laptop viii is the computer stuff processor and RAM and storage and all of that now this one gets a little bit complicated but bear with me because I need to tell you a story about Intel Oh Intel if you haven't been following laptops you just need to know that Intel has had not a great few years compared to how processors have advanced on phones Intel's progress on laptop and desktop chips has been of slower so the processor on this new heir is a dual-core 8th gen Core i5 but it's something called a Y Series version of that chip which means that it's lower power and not as fast as the desktop class used series that you can find on some other laptops bottom line is this faster than your old err yes but it's not that much faster and in some ways it lags behind other Windows laptops you can do all the same stuff that you can do in your current error so I've been running a half dozen apps at a time along with more than a dozen tabs in Chrome and everything is pretty ok I think for what most people will do with this laptop it's fine so if you're hoping your to be able to step up and get way faster video editing no not so much the fans are gonna spin up and you're gonna have a very long wait for your export and the same goes to something like processing RAW photos or doing anything that relies heavily on multi-core processing because again this err only has two cores those kinds of tasks are going to bring this thing to a chug way easier than will happen on a macbook pro as for battery life well I have to say that I haven't had quite enough testing time to give you like a number and hours that I could be really confident in by the time we shot this video I've used it for a couple of days and I got about seven hours on each of those days with a mix of web browsing and email and some photo editing and listening to Spotify and actually a little bit of fairly intense testing so that's pretty good but I don't think you're gonna get apples claim to twelve hours of web browsing time it's not a battery life champ basically but I am very confident in saying it's gonna last longer than your decrepit old battery on your old MacBook Air when I first started testing this laptop I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should compare it to is it like a 12-inch MacBook just blown up to a slightly bigger size is it more like a 13-inch MacBook Pro but just with cheaper parts I mean you can barely tell the two of them apart when you set them side-by-side so which is it actually I think it's both of those things it's a really nice laptop do I wish that Apple had found a way to maybe make a slightly less expensive laptop well yeah I kind of do you can get an iPad or a Windows laptop or even a Chromebook for a lot less that does almost everything this does except for one thing and that one thing is running Mac OS look here's the deal people like the Mac it's great to have a computer that does all the computer stuff you want in a way that you are familiar with and Apple has taken way too long to update its mass-market consumer laptop now the wait is over but if you are hoping that Lightning would strike twice and this new MacBook Air would be as revolutionary as the old MacBook Air well it's not it basically is a MacBook that finally includes all the stuff that has been happening with laptops for the past few years a lot of people just want a good modern reliable Mac nothing fancy really they just deserve something that's up to par and for those people everybody that's been hanging on to that old MacBook Air and this is a nice upgrade its par for the course but you know what that's probably enough everybody thank you so much for watching and let me know in the comments do you think that Apple did enough to update the MacBook Air this go-round I think the answer is probably yes but I'm curious to know what you think and if you're interested in the iPad pro we've just reviewed that thing yesterday and in some ways it's vastly more powerful on this laptop so you should check that video out