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the last macbook air had two fatal flaws apple's butterfly keys were a disaster

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and the dual core processor kneecapped any potential for serious multitasking

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both of these are now fixed in the 2020 model but

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now the macbook air has two even bigger problems dell

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and hp are now building laptops that not only outperform the macbook air but also

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manage to match its legendary build quality so what to recommend then a

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laptop for sure but which one we'll find out

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as expected the 2020 airs all-aluminum chassis is exceptionally thin and rigid

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serving as a reminder that apple's billion-plus dollars a month in r d must

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go somewhere they really are a leader when it comes to working with premium

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materials like the competitors we've chosen the air features two Thunderbolt 3 ports and

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a headphone combo port but dell gets bonus points for the placement of its

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charging ports on either side and it's microsd reader while the spectre x360

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actually stands out from both of the others thanks to their inclusion of a

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type a usb something the 2020 air absolutely nails

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though is the speakers these are

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legitimately the best sounding thin and light speakers that i have ever heard

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the combination of a shocking amount of bass and dolby atmos produces a sound

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that somehow feels twice as big as the machine itself the

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only problem is that to produce this much sound out of such little speakers

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it's very clear that there's a lot of software trickery at play which is where

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the hp spectre x360 comes in for the kill although the x360 cannot produce

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the lower notes that the macbook air can at medium volumes it does produce a

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clearer sound that can make speech easier to understand which can be really

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important for things like video calls as for the xps 13 well you're going to have

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an exceptional listing experience on that as well using the set of dollar

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store earphones that you dug out from under the couch cushions from the

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outside there's another striking difference between these laptops the

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macbook air has significantly more

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last-gen looking thick bezels especially

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on the top but this isn't necessarily a bad thing you

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see in a premium ultrabook i'm looking for a couple of things

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great build quality so that i can take it with me on the go excellent battery

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life same thing and an exceptional keyboard so that i can really get to

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work and that thicker top bezel on the macbook air surprisingly gives it the

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best keyboard here allow me to explain

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after a sip from this bottle back in stock on lttstore.com but i forgot to

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bring it so

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for a good typing experience you need three things a stiff chassis

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consistent key switches and comfortable

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hand positioning now all three contenders here nailed the chassis

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stiffness and the key switches but if your hands are a little larger

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you're likely to be less comfortable on the spectre x360 or the xps 13 compared

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to the macbook air and this is due to its much larger palm rest area so if

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your hands are hanging off of the edge of your laptop you can't really rest

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them there particularly if those edges are super sharp like on the x360

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in an attempt to quantify the importance of this we actually grabbed a set of

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calipers and some lysol wipes and measured the length of people's hands in

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the office versus how long their hand is while typing to find the ratio between

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the two this ratio was plugged into existing hand length data for the entire

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population to figure out what percentage of people were are likely to be

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comfortable on each of these laptops turns out just 36 percent of females and

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21 percent of males are going to be comfortable on the x360

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ouch now the dell was a big improvement but the macbook air well 92 percent of

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females and 77 of males are going to be

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more at ease on this thing thanks to the additional space on the palm rest i

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personally think out of the three i would go xps 13

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but if i had to make a blanket recommendation thing is i got small

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hands guys the macbook air is one that i could be more confident in

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interestingly this metric which we've never really looked at before probably

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explains why alex won't shut up about how great the surface laptop's keyboard

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is when i personally don't find it to be that exceptional on that subject all of

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our test subjects have exceptional displays that deliver accurate colors to

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the viewer but there is one area where apple really nailed it here the

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resolution 2560 by 1600 is the 16x10

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version of qhd the resolution that we've

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been saying should be standard on high-end laptops for

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years yes yes dell and hp both have 4k display

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options that will give you more pixels than apple and hp even has an OLED

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option that will deliver absolutely stunning visuals

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at the expense of some battery life but guys these are 13 inch screens

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you don't need over 8 million pixels on a display this size

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all it serves to do is hurt battery life

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and make it more difficult to crank the backlight through the super small pixels

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we still feel that apple continues to drop the ball by not including

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touchscreen support on their laptops though but they make up a lot of that ground by

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adorning their ample wrist rests with what are unassailably the best track

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pads on the market now the xps 13 track pad in particular is getting darn close

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but every time i use a non-touchscreen laptop i find myself genuinely missing

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the feature not that often necessarily but sometimes now of course for apple

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users there's going to be a lot more than a touchscreen to miss by moving

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over to the pc the excellent integration between apple's laptops and their other

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devices just keeps getting better i mean one that stood out to me this time is

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that the apple watch can be used for authentication it's been a while since

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i've really tried to use a macbook that makes unlocking the macbook just as

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convenient as the facial recognition on our Windows devices

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and then if you don't have an apple watch touch id is still excellent and is

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going to get you into the os super fast bringing us to macOS

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i don't i'm at the point now where i don't really understand the hate

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going either way yes it will take a few days for a tech savvy

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person to get used to the different shortcuts and general workflow but with

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how web centric almost everything we do

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is now i suspect that for many people

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aside from app compatibility like whatever it is you do professionally

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aside from that the fact that you're on a completely different operating system

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is probably going to fade into the background for the most part

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the only thing that so the little thing but that continually

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annoyed me was that to get a window to take up half of the display i have to

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like long press full screen and then use this stupid little menu like why the

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heck do i have to install a paid app to get proper window snapping functionality

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oh microsoft patented window snapping

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that's a dick move dick move

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anyway everything's been pretty positive so far

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and i promised a problem here didn't i i could point at its webcam especially

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right now with work from home being such a big trend but quite frankly all of

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them are bad so i guess we're gonna have to wait for somebody to make the first move and this isn't gonna be it but

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there's a bigger one it's performance for some reason apple has decided to

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include only a wi-fi five network card

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which probably isn't a huge deal right now but as wi-fi 6 becomes more

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commonplace xps 13 and x360 owners are

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going to enjoy significantly faster wi-fi

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and as for the processor well the base

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model still has a dual core i3 which we

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find truly unacceptable in 2020 even

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something like a background app install or an update can make a dual core

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machine feel sluggish but the good news is

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even if it costs extra at least you can get a quad core in the macbook air now

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so for our config we chose the i5 1030 ng7 for its decent balance between price

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and performance and it is a lot better

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than last gen unfortunately it's not actively cooled

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or at least not directly there is a fan in the chassis but there's no heat pipe

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on the small wimpy heatsink assembly for

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the CPU connecting it to some kind of radiator

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and the exhaust of that fan what that means is that the macbook air 2020 only

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has about 10 watts of CPU power to play

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with before it would overheat so needless to say then it gets

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absolutely flogged by the xps 13 and

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spectre x360 with their 25 watts of

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available CPU power consuming less power means more battery

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life though right well the thing is it's hard to directly compare battery life

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results between macOS and Windows but in our testing the macbook air and the

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xps 13 both got a bit over 10 hours away from the wall while the spectre x360

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kept going for an additional hour which makes recommending the macbook air

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slightly difficult the feel in the hand the display the keyboard and speakers

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like all the parts that you would interact with regularly are excellent

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but as specked this is a 1500 machine

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that will fall behind very fast if you try to do more than browsing the web and

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writing that novel you've been working on that said heaps of people don't need

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to do much more than that and with the improved keyboard it really is a lot

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better and the additional power which really is a lot better this is a much

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more compelling machine than last gen furthermore

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no matter what the price of performance the xps and the x360 are also really

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expensive and they will never come with macOS for the people who care about

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that so in a total reversal here

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yeah it's flawed but i'm ready to recommend the 2020 air to anyone that

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doesn't need maximum performance and is willing to spend a little bit extra for

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a thin light comfortable laptop and then

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for those who do need the performance there are rumors of a new macbook pro

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13-inch that might really make these Windows machines sweat so make sure

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you're subscribed for that face-off if you're bored and looking for

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something else to watch we recently did a video on why not to buy the macbook

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air except we were talking about the one from 2017 which was somehow the best

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seller on amazon at that time people really need to get something newer

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there's like a lot of great options out there so go check that video out