2020 MacBook Air Review

Is the 2020 MacBook Air and it's been in constant use since its releasein my house and so I wanted to share how it's been overall what it's like to use.

how its thermals are and also what my daughter thought of it since she's been using it for school and things like that and so the first thing is its design and the design is classic MacBook Air although it has gained a little bit of thickness because they've added that new scissor style keyboard that's sort of new but old again we have this wedge shape which is really nice pretty typical at this point of many laptops and we have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on one side on the back we don't have anything else and then we have twoThunder bolt three ports their full Thunderbolt three ports so you could use them with a display or you could use them with an e GPU and game some graphics performance if you wanted to edit some video on this or something like that and so this is really nice it is a little bit heavy but not necessarily as heavy as an iPad pro with a keyboard for example but it's not much different than the MacBook Pro if you're looking for size compared to the 13 inch version now the overall build of course is typical MacBook Pro it's very strongand the logo does not light up I get asked this all the time but they remove this quite some time ago I think in 2016 they removed the light-up logo from most MacBooks and replaced it with just stainlessteel so it looks pretty good but you won't have that light that's classic Mac and now inside this is where this makes the biggest difference as far as using a MacBook so if you're familiar with the butterfly keyboard that we had for about four years Apple replaced it in 2019 with the MacBook Pro with a revised scissor switch and if you're someone that really didn't like the old keyboard you'll probably love this keyboard it has great travel on all of the keys they work great they're backlit and for those that touch type this will be fantastic so just pressing the keys like normal they sound pretty good let me open notes here so just like in my other videos where It ype hi how are you today so if I type hi how are you today and so it sounds pretty quiet compared to the the butterfly keyboards it's much nicer to type on it has great feedback.

when you're pushing down you have good resistance and just in general this is a great keyboard now one of the things I like most about this keyboard is not just the feedback that we get from the keys but also the physical buttons at the top I much prefer these to the touch bar now some people might prefer thetouch bar but it's something I never use on macbook pro so we've got our adjustment for everything from the keyboard to the back light of the displayand our volume it's just super easy to use and then of course we have touch ID.

which is great it works well and then a huge trackpad which works just like the track pads on any other MacBook at this point the display does go fairly bright but it's not as bright as others and I wish they would add a lot of brightness.
so you could comfortably use this while you're outside it does work fine but it's not as bright as some others when you're outside so you can see it it's a Retina display it's just as high-quality as any of the other Mac books but it doesn't have all of the color gambits that you get with the MacBook Pro as faras variable refresh rates and all those things so for our MacBook Air user coming from the previous MacBook Air to this one the display will look phenomanal but if you're coming from say a 2016 MacBook Pro to this it'll look about the same you probably won't notice much of a difference but it.

isn't as good as the newer MacBook Pros it's very slight it depends on what you're doing but most people will be fine with this display no I wanted you to be able to hear the speakers on the MacBook Air because they're pretty good they're not as good as the 16 inch MacBook Pro but they have a phenomenal sound for what they are and they go nice and loud so let me go ahead and turn this up we'll go to my channel and then you can see a montage where I did a camera comparis on between all of the 20/20 iPhones so let me go ahead and play that for you again are really nice cameras but let me show you some samples comparing them a long with some video now hopefully that gives you
an idea of the overall sound quality I think they sound phenomenal there like I said not as good as the MacBook Pro but most people won't even notice that they go nice and loud loud enough that they're too loud for most people to listen to sustain so they're great that way now the question I probably get asked most about when it comes to the MacBook Air is how does it perform when it gets hotor.

How are its thermals does it throttle the CPU a lot because it's not superfast this is the quad core i5 version with eight gigabytes of RAM and theIntel iris + graphics so it's not the top of the line it's the one I would normally suggest for most people now overall speed and usability is fine if I go to something like Safari go to Apple it's nice and fast loading different web pages it has no issue with that if you wanted to do some light editing with Final Cut Pro it will handle 4k video it will handle most tasks with ease how ever it is going to get a bit warm and so I have ice that menu here running and I also have Intel power gadget and this can show you the actual frequency that it's running as far as the CPU frequency is concerned now as you can see over all here the frequency is at one point one it can turbo boost much higher than that depending on what you're doing so if I go back into Safari for example go to Apple you're going to see the CPU boost up here and that's completely normal that's just how it handles things so it will boost the CPU go back down as needed so if we go and look at the iPhone se for example you can see it boosts back up and goes back down and it stays nice and silent now if you close this you're going to see this drop back off and you'll see the CPU go back do wnit's running it only 920 mega Hertz right here so it will go up and down as needed and some people are concerned with sustained loads how it handles that so let me go into an application such as Cine bench run this where it really pushes the CPU so you can actually hear it now we'll run Cine bench and it does not run terribly fast on this machine and you're going to get much better performance out of things like a mac pro or MacBook Pro of course but for regularuse with documents and things it's fine so let me let this run here I'll let it get warmer and you can see all of the CPU cores are kind of pegged at this point we're running at 1.9 gigahertz continually and I'll leave power gadget open as well so we'll get a max frequency ids see where it levels off and see how it sustains this temperature.

now the test has been going for a while the fan is running at maximum speed and you can see here that we're at ninety nine point eight degrees it's hoveringright around 100 degrees Celsius that's completely normal for a Mac while its ounds fairly uncomfortable and very high most Mac's run at this very high temperature it's utilizing about a hundred percent of the core and we'reaveraging 1.4 gigahertz and so you'll see based on what we have here we'rerunning above the average of the advertised base clock speed so while it's not super fast it's faster than advertised and it's staying fairly quiet so let me let you hear the fan now that we're close to using everything at 100%for a while so it's not super loud it's definitely noticeable but it's not super loud and you'll see now that this test is completed the clock speeds will drop as will the temperature it will slowly taper off and we'll be back to normal and this is completely normal for of this MacBook Air yes it will get warm underneath here so underneath it's very hot right here in the center you could hold your hand here but probably not for sustained sustained periods of time but it's doing the job that it should and as expected and actually a thigher clock speeds than advertised so as far as that part goes it's fine now let's talk a little bit about battery life because you can get what Apple advertised under a specific scenario so for example if you're using Wi-Fi you'reusing Safari you're on one Safari page and you're at about 70 percent brightness then you might be able to achieve the optimal battery life most people are going to get about eight hours maybe nine hours with this depending on what they're doing if you're using pages and just typing you'll probably get pretty decent battery life if maybe you're in movie and watching just that movie that you've already downloaded that'sactually.

How Apple tests it as well then maybe you'll get that advertised battery life but if you've got multiple applications open such as Safari or mail and messages and the App Store and all of these things open like many people use the computer you could get around six hours of battery life but if you have a plug nearby just plug it in as needed and you're good to go.
so it just depends what you're what you're doing what you're needing and in general it's a great machine now like I said before my daughter has been using this since it came out and prior to this she's using the 2016 MacBook Pro and she's used the older 2011 style MacBookAir and so going from the MacBook Pro to this the first thing she mentioned to me is that the keyboard was just so much better she immediately noticed that she writes a lot of papers or and just writes a lot and also uses Xcode and she immediately said that this keyboard is just so much better to use that she would never go back also she prefers these buttons on the top other than having a touch bar so just like myself.

I don't prefer the touch bar I'd rather have these physical buttons and it seems like she would as well also it's plenty fast even with 8 gigabytes of RAM to run things like Xcode so she's been learning Xcode and learning some programming and it seems to run it without a problem now if you were going to do any heavy coating or compiling or maybe you're going to video at it with it regularly then maybe I would get the larger memory option or even a MacBook Pro 10th generation but otherwise this one see ms to do the job and this will be the device that my daughter uses for college and it handles all of that without any problem whatsoever and the real question is should you pick this up over the MacBook Pro and what I tell people is absolutely if you're only going to get the eighth generation MacBook Pro13-inch in fact this has the tenth generation CPU with better graphics init so if you can afford the MacBook Pro with the 10th gen CPU then get that MacBook Pro but if you're picking between the MacBook Air and the MacBookPro and you can only afford the base MacBook Pro I would pick the heir any day and so the experience will generally be better yes it might get a little bit warmer but in general I think it'll be better most people and then get what you can afford as far as the RAM if it only height gigabytes that's okay I normally recommend 16 gigabytes as long as you can afford that if not you'll get by with eight if you're only writing papersbut if you want to edit video occasionally or do any of that sort of work I most definitely recommend 16 gigabytes of RAM for that or more I'd love to hear if you picked up a MacBook Air what you think of it I think it's a phenomenal machine it's really what the MacBook Air should have been years agoand we finally have it here and it's fairly reasonably priced depending on..