the last macbook air had two fatal flaws apple's butterfly keys were a disaster
and the dual core processor kneecapped any potential for serious multitasking
both of these are now fixed in the 2020 model but
now the macbook air has two even bigger problems dell
and hp are now building laptops that not only outperform the macbook air but also
manage to match its legendary build quality so what to recommend then a
laptop for sure but which one we'll find out
as expected the 2020 airs all-aluminum chassis is exceptionally thin and rigid
serving as a reminder that apple's billion-plus dollars a month in r d must
go somewhere they really are a leader when it comes to working with premium
materials like the competitors we've chosen the air features two Thunderbolt 3 ports and
a headphone combo port but dell gets bonus points for the placement of its
charging ports on either side and it's microsd reader while the spectre x360
actually stands out from both of the others thanks to their inclusion of a
type a usb something the 2020 air absolutely nails
though is the speakers these are
legitimately the best sounding thin and light speakers that i have ever heard
the combination of a shocking amount of bass and dolby atmos produces a sound
that somehow feels twice as big as the machine itself the
only problem is that to produce this much sound out of such little speakers
it's very clear that there's a lot of software trickery at play which is where
the hp spectre x360 comes in for the kill although the x360 cannot produce
the lower notes that the macbook air can at medium volumes it does produce a
clearer sound that can make speech easier to understand which can be really
important for things like video calls as for the xps 13 well you're going to have
an exceptional listing experience on that as well using the set of dollar
store earphones that you dug out from under the couch cushions from the
outside there's another striking difference between these laptops the
macbook air has significantly more
last-gen looking thick bezels especially
on the top but this isn't necessarily a bad thing you
see in a premium ultrabook i'm looking for a couple of things
great build quality so that i can take it with me on the go excellent battery
life same thing and an exceptional keyboard so that i can really get to
work and that thicker top bezel on the macbook air surprisingly gives it the
best keyboard here allow me to explain
after a sip from this bottle back in stock on lttstore.com but i forgot to
bring it so
for a good typing experience you need three things a stiff chassis
consistent key switches and comfortable
hand positioning now all three contenders here nailed the chassis
stiffness and the key switches but if your hands are a little larger
you're likely to be less comfortable on the spectre x360 or the xps 13 compared
to the macbook air and this is due to its much larger palm rest area so if
your hands are hanging off of the edge of your laptop you can't really rest
them there particularly if those edges are super sharp like on the x360
in an attempt to quantify the importance of this we actually grabbed a set of
calipers and some lysol wipes and measured the length of people's hands in
the office versus how long their hand is while typing to find the ratio between
the two this ratio was plugged into existing hand length data for the entire
population to figure out what percentage of people were are likely to be
comfortable on each of these laptops turns out just 36 percent of females and
21 percent of males are going to be comfortable on the x360
ouch now the dell was a big improvement but the macbook air well 92 percent of
females and 77 of males are going to be
more at ease on this thing thanks to the additional space on the palm rest i
personally think out of the three i would go xps 13
but if i had to make a blanket recommendation thing is i got small
hands guys the macbook air is one that i could be more confident in
interestingly this metric which we've never really looked at before probably
explains why alex won't shut up about how great the surface laptop's keyboard
is when i personally don't find it to be that exceptional on that subject all of
our test subjects have exceptional displays that deliver accurate colors to
the viewer but there is one area where apple really nailed it here the
resolution 2560 by 1600 is the 16x10
version of qhd the resolution that we've
been saying should be standard on high-end laptops for
years yes yes dell and hp both have 4k display
options that will give you more pixels than apple and hp even has an OLED
option that will deliver absolutely stunning visuals
at the expense of some battery life but guys these are 13 inch screens
you don't need over 8 million pixels on a display this size
all it serves to do is hurt battery life
and make it more difficult to crank the backlight through the super small pixels
we still feel that apple continues to drop the ball by not including
touchscreen support on their laptops though but they make up a lot of that ground by
adorning their ample wrist rests with what are unassailably the best track
pads on the market now the xps 13 track pad in particular is getting darn close
but every time i use a non-touchscreen laptop i find myself genuinely missing
the feature not that often necessarily but sometimes now of course for apple
users there's going to be a lot more than a touchscreen to miss by moving
over to the pc the excellent integration between apple's laptops and their other
devices just keeps getting better i mean one that stood out to me this time is
that the apple watch can be used for authentication it's been a while since
i've really tried to use a macbook that makes unlocking the macbook just as
convenient as the facial recognition on our Windows devices
and then if you don't have an apple watch touch id is still excellent and is
going to get you into the os super fast bringing us to macOS
i don't i'm at the point now where i don't really understand the hate
going either way yes it will take a few days for a tech savvy
person to get used to the different shortcuts and general workflow but with
how web centric almost everything we do
is now i suspect that for many people
aside from app compatibility like whatever it is you do professionally
aside from that the fact that you're on a completely different operating system
is probably going to fade into the background for the most part
the only thing that so the little thing but that continually
annoyed me was that to get a window to take up half of the display i have to
like long press full screen and then use this stupid little menu like why the
heck do i have to install a paid app to get proper window snapping functionality
oh microsoft patented window snapping
that's a dick move dick move
anyway everything's been pretty positive so far
and i promised a problem here didn't i i could point at its webcam especially
right now with work from home being such a big trend but quite frankly all of
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
there's a bigger one it's performance for some reason apple has decided to
include only a wi-fi five network card
which probably isn't a huge deal right now but as wi-fi 6 becomes more
commonplace xps 13 and x360 owners are
going to enjoy significantly faster wi-fi
and as for the processor well the base
model still has a dual core i3 which we
find truly unacceptable in 2020 even
something like a background app install or an update can make a dual core
machine feel sluggish but the good news is
even if it costs extra at least you can get a quad core in the macbook air now
so for our config we chose the i5 1030 ng7 for its decent balance between price
and performance and it is a lot better
than last gen unfortunately it's not actively cooled
or at least not directly there is a fan in the chassis but there's no heat pipe
on the small wimpy heatsink assembly for
the CPU connecting it to some kind of radiator
and the exhaust of that fan what that means is that the macbook air 2020 only
has about 10 watts of CPU power to play
with before it would overheat so needless to say then it gets
absolutely flogged by the xps 13 and
spectre x360 with their 25 watts of
available CPU power consuming less power means more battery
life though right well the thing is it's hard to directly compare battery life
results between macOS and Windows but in our testing the macbook air and the
xps 13 both got a bit over 10 hours away from the wall while the spectre x360
kept going for an additional hour which makes recommending the macbook air
slightly difficult the feel in the hand the display the keyboard and speakers
like all the parts that you would interact with regularly are excellent
but as specked this is a 1500 machine
that will fall behind very fast if you try to do more than browsing the web and
writing that novel you've been working on that said heaps of people don't need
to do much more than that and with the improved keyboard it really is a lot
better and the additional power which really is a lot better this is a much
more compelling machine than last gen furthermore
no matter what the price of performance the xps and the x360 are also really
expensive and they will never come with macOS for the people who care about
that so in a total reversal here
yeah it's flawed but i'm ready to recommend the 2020 air to anyone that
doesn't need maximum performance and is willing to spend a little bit extra for
a thin light comfortable laptop and then
for those who do need the performance there are rumors of a new macbook pro
13-inch that might really make these Windows machines sweat so make sure
you're subscribed for that face-off if you're bored and looking for
something else to watch we recently did a video on why not to buy the macbook
air except we were talking about the one from 2017 which was somehow the best
seller on amazon at that time people really need to get something newer
there's like a lot of great options out there so go check that video out