you know what i don't understand andy why do they call it the macbook air
it's not like it was a mistake get it error
macbook error it's been one of their most successful
products ever they should call it the macbook success
yeah macbook book correct this is it ladies and gentlemen this
is the apple silicon macbook air and
it's like it's been a couple hours since i unboxed the apple silicon mac mini and
already Anthony has been working on putting together our Linus tech tips
review and he says uh and i quote
impressions so far are pretty good that
is a good sign now of course what we don't know yet is if the macbook air
whether for thermal reasons or power reasons or any
other reason might be a little bit lesser than the
macbook mini but we are certainly going to be finding
that out for you ladies and gentlemen it's available in
pretty much exactly the same configurations as the other devices so
we went for the eight core CPU eight
core GPU the base model does not have
like eight core GPU oh it's seven core isn't it yeah so sorry there is a base
model with a seven core GPU 16 gigs of
RAM so you can have 8 or 16 gigs of RAM not 32 because the whole thing is
integrated together into one tight little package uh we've got 512 gigs of
storage and of course a us keyboard layout
this is it
it's a 13.3 inch display
hold on let's have a look at what else is in here we've got a type c to type c charging
cable all nice environmentally friendly packaging hey
look at that we still get a power adapter
even this is mostly paper very nice
they don't wrap all the chargers in plastic anymore there's one little
plastic bit at the end here more of a sticker than a plastic
that is awesome yeah it's a charger man
what a concept how many apple logo stickers do i get
though i only got one with the uh well with the iphone 12 hey there you go
you buy the you buy the macbook you get two see me i don't think that apple put
big enough logos on their devices so i'ma go ahead and fix that for them okay
here we go there we go what do you think dbrand are they gonna
hire me to put stickers on things so i'm a professional sticker put her on her
now it's official press command f5 now
uh triple click touch id to use voiceover to set up your mac
accessibility shortcuts
why am i wait what okay whatever i'm canadian
one of the things i'm expecting to be most remarkable about the apple silicon
max is how unremarkable the experience is the
majority of the time i had really hoped that apple would go more aggressive with
the first apple silicon devices like you know really change up the id do
something out there but it kind of makes sense that they would stick with
something more conservative because that way they'll know okay how are customers
receiving this whole apple silicon concept versus how are apple's receiving
our new slim bezels or something along those
lines touch just bring it back to the phones just bring it back to the phones
we all want it back on the phones andy do you want it back on the phones yeah
me too or the logo at the back it doesn't even matter just somewhere you know what
drives me crazy every freaking apple device has this true tone display part
of their setup process and you can see what the display looks like without true
tone you can't disable it i always have to go manually disable it after i don't
like true tone we're so close to a macbook with a touch screen that's one
of the biggest things that's made it impossible for me to daily drive these
things i've gotten very accustomed to having a touch screen on my laptop and
like the ipad pro is like almost there
but it's running iOS or ipad os excuse me and now the macbook air is almost
there it's got the keyboard it's got the battery life it's got the beautiful
screen but it doesn't have the touchscreen they make two devices if i
could just smush them into one it could actually be extremely compelling like
what are they quoting something like 18 hours of battery life while playing back
video on this thing flipping crazy honestly andy i'll tell
you one of the most interesting perspectives that i've heard
on the new apple silicon macbooks is that
maybe it actually doesn't matter what the performance is
like in x86 application
x or you know legacy
developer tool y maybe it doesn't matter at all because
the vast majority of people just use their laptops pretty much like a
chromebook anyway which is why chromebooks exist
and if you did everything within a browser there is absolutely no reason
that this device couldn't provide a perfectly great user experience andy can
you help me with this how do i make this full screen without like making it
completely immersive mode
why is that not the more default behavior why wouldn't it be like option
green button for this like stupid i can't see
i don't know maybe that's just a personal discomfort not being able to
see the dock or the menu at the top
i just i can't i can't do it it makes me really uncomfortable here we go
a little bit of chug there honestly that's not bad for running in a
browser though like let's be realistic now this is a pretty light 3d
application but what i like about it is that it's very realistic i would say that poppin
looks like about what i would expect from a
thin and light class notebook
it's not like amazing it's not like oh
wow i can't believe i've never seen anything like this before
but it's not bad it's fine using significant energy safari
i wish you could just set it to never charge past 80
it would last so much longer you know how i mentioned
so many people use their computers like a chromebook honestly for my laptop i
hardly ever touch anything outside of a browser
like i actually am one of those like i'm trying to imagine an
application that i would install uh i mean something like obs you know
i'll use my laptop for capture sometimes actually that's something that i would
love to know if i could do with this oh my god this installation process is
so stupid why do i have to drink it's so simple
why do i have to do that i already clicked on it
this is just unnecessary bull it's like after the drag your install
like you have to take through like the things
okay yeah sure that's fair but like compared to something like nine night
where you have an unattended install on Windows you just double click it it's completely installed like what what is
what is this why have this at all like
you're right you're right there there is there are
aspects of it that are more painless than the Windows experience
but this is also just completely unnecessary and we could just
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so here's something that i would like do with a computer
video so let's change to
1920 by 1200 i guess let's just try x264 for our encoder and
then get some reasonable
bitrate like 30 megabit normally we would go higher for like video capture
that we're planning to actually use in a video but i just want to see
i mean we're running like it's non
non-native right sort of no properties available well oh here we
go here we go here we go it was another system preference thing it was just in
the background okay okay let's try this again
obs hey there it is
just like that okay start recording
nice we've even got a CPU usage monitor dude adam and jig down here
so what are we sitting at now what i wonder is does that mean 45
of the four high performance cores or does
that mean 45 of the entire eight core CPU
how is that divided up very interesting
where are these recording to i wonder 30 megabit oh yeah that looks all right
we're using software encoding of course it looks fine 45
microphones sounds really good
array microphone built into where is it even
i don't know i'll i'll find it later it's not terribly important for the
moment but both the microphone and speakers are impressive right out of the box but then we already knew that man
the recent macbook some really good speakers
slightly better brightness compared to the left hand oh yeah that's
right i think what is it 400 nit or something like that
yep 400 nit brightness so still not an HDR
display by any stretch of the imagination but who knows as this apple
silicon continues to evolve we might gain more
power savings there that can then be allocated to better backlights or better
yet uh OLED nice efficient OLED displays
and we'll finally get like good HDR on mobile
well that's pretty much it for first impressions anyway so far
i mean it's seamless even something as
you know what i would consider to be niche
as like you know some rando open source screen recording software just
just worked i'll leave it to andy to or andy i'll leave it to Anthony to try out
some more like really random stuff though
make sure you subscribe to ShortCircuit and of course make sure you're subscribed to Linus tech tips for the
full review of this device