lately it's really felt like thin and light laptop manufacturers have been
getting so close to creating the perfect
laptop like microsoft surface laptop for
example it's sexy the screen is great
and the keyboard is amazing but the i o is hot garbage
the dell xps 13. it's got top-tier build quality solid i o and is really quick
but the screen options and the webcam placement in particular are mediocre
alright so what about the og thin and light
laptop king apple to find out alex who writes our laptop
reviews these days completely switched to apple products giving up his pixel 2
and surface laptop for the iphone 10s and macbook air which has finally been
updated for 2018. memory express says victoria bc location
is now open and this new store offers all the same product selection and
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more first impressions last a lifetime
and first impressions of the macbook air are that well it's
probably going to have a long lifetime this is a damn well-built machine the
aluminum chassis is easily among the stiffest on the market there is
virtually no screenflex whatsoever and although it is thin
it's kind of denser than you might expect weighing just under three pounds
compared to the last version of the air which by the way debuted in 2013
the reduction of the bezels and the way that the glossy black extends right to
the edge really ups the sex appeal of this year's model and you wouldn't feel
weird taking it out of your backpack no matter what the setting
just make sure that while you're putting it in your backpack you remember your
dongles now to be clear i'm not too torn
up about the i o these are both Thunderbolt 3 ports with compatibility
for displays docs external gpus
any usb device you could want including charging the macbook air itself so i
would take these over a type a and a mini displayport any day of the week
microsoft now let's get back to the screen it's
more than just glossier it addresses every problem with the old macbook air
design increasing the resolution to 2560
by 1600 that's a taller 16 by 10 aspect
ratio for those keeping score at home and they also increased the color gamut
making it among the best laptop displays available
with an asterisk i don't expect this to make any
difference in fact i suspect that apple gives exactly
0fs what i think but i'm once again
disappointed that they refuse to include touchscreen support in their macOS and
on their laptops at least the touchpad is awesome though
and boy is it ever awesome like i know we always go on about how great apple's
touchpads are but suck it up pc fanboys we do it because
they are there are a bunch of gestures actually that have been available on
Windows for a long time but i've just
never used them because they don't feel right
by contrast after only a couple hours on macOS they just become part of the
natural flow of using the machine they are so well thought out and like look
how big it is also how close it is to the keyboard
which makes it really easy to thumb operate while you're typing
also supernatural the fingerprint sensor in the power button there is one place
that a fingerprint sensor is better than face id and this is it apple nailed it
like i'm always logged in at the same time the screen turns on after opening
this guy up touch id is so well implemented here that frankly it feels
almost as natural as Windows hello facial recognition on the surface laptop
unfortunately there is one area where the macbook air can't get close to the
surface laptop the keyboard now i don't personally miss the touch
bar so i'm not going to dock any marks there but these short throw and
potentially short life key switches are just not a great time to type on for
extended periods like after a while i i
actually can get mostly used to them really similar to the macbook pro and
credit where credit is due they are really easy to type on in awkward
situations like if you're walking around like holding your laptop clickity-clacking on it since you don't
have to apply a lot of force and that short throw does make staying steady
easier but i still find myself missing more
strokes than usual and have a hard time feeling where each key ends and making
matters worse is the lack of a delete key okay well backspace says delete but
it just goes back because it's a mac and i know you can do function delete but
man i miss my dedicated delete key almost as much as my touchscreen when i
go to a mac the part that gets me the
most though is that apple had fantastic laptop keyboards arguably the best in
the game and then now they felt the need to take
what is in my mind a step back
now let's take a step back and talk about one of the things that apple
people are always shouting about how was macOS and the iphone and the
integration that comes along with them
in short the lack of Windows snap assist in mac
os is really annoying uh one time in particular i had a video conference that
and i had to take notes and ended up missing two slides just trying to get
all the darn Windows to each take up like exactly half of the screen in a way
that's aesthetically pleasing it's funny because i would always see people on
macbooks with their Windows just kind of strewn all over the place like papers on
a desk and i just assumed they were bad at computers but it turns out that once
you get over about four applications open it can be really difficult to keep
things organized and frankly isn't worth the effort with that said imessage when we weren't
running into some kind of random bugs is really nice to have on the desktop
it's just that as a non-mac person like if you've made
it this long without imessage and facetime for that matter
i don't really feel like it adds a ton of value all of my friends use whatsapp
hangouts facebook messenger or wechat like i've gotten maybe 30 to 50 messages
via sms this entire calendar year and frankly the disappointing webcam on the
macbook air made for a very mediocre facetime experience as well
overall the best thing about macOS is that everything just seems to work with
no babysitting required spotlight search can't find the camera with any of the
obvious keywords but is otherwise awesome and if you reboot it plunks you
right down where you left off you don't need to make sure it's not updating in
the background sucking up your battery when you unplug all that sort of thing like i know a lot
of people in my life that could benefit from macOS simply because it's better
at crap management than Windows like i've seen people on Windows
machines that are shockingly slow not because the hardware is bad but because
of a bunch of junk wear and kind of putting everything in the wrong spot
where it's hard to find it whereas with macOS although you don't get the same
degree of control it is harder to totally mangle it
so overall if what you plan on doing is mostly productivity and internet based
macos is just pretty darn great the dynamic light and
dark themes and surprisingly snappy experience given the low power processor
stand out but then also bring me really nicely to
what doesn't stand out about the macbook air 2018
it is only available with a dual core
CPU when four cores has been the standard in ultrabooks for the last year
or so like it handled a simple model in fusion
360 but it's at a significant disadvantage compared to competitors
like the surface laptop 2 dell xps and lenovo x1 carbon when it comes to
multitasking and multi-threaded workloads the good news is that the
dual-core low-power chip can be basically silently cooled even in such a
thin device and it unsurprisingly yields
great battery life with this thing lasting a good 10 hours while doing work
like editing this script but is it worth the asking price
well that's another question our model here cost an eye watering 2600
for an ultrabook mind you it has 16 gigs of RAM and a 1.5
terabyte SSD but even our bang for the buck
recommended config comes in at 1400
that's a lot but apple kind of sets the bar for the
premium thin and light market and with other manufacturers creeping their
pricing up over the last few years honestly it's it's actually not that far
out there anymore so bottom line with most of the laptops that come through
our lab we complete the review then pawn it off to the next new employee who
needs a computer the macbook air 2018
not that kind of beast and it even hangs with the surface laptop 2 and xps 13
assuming you're okay with the keyboard and bear in mind of course that this is
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