WEBVTT

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lately it's really felt like thin and light laptop manufacturers have been

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getting so close to creating the perfect

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laptop like microsoft surface laptop for

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example it's sexy the screen is great

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and the keyboard is amazing but the i o is hot garbage

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the dell xps 13. it's got top-tier build quality solid i o and is really quick

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but the screen options and the webcam placement in particular are mediocre

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alright so what about the og thin and light

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laptop king apple to find out alex who writes our laptop

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reviews these days completely switched to apple products giving up his pixel 2

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and surface laptop for the iphone 10s and macbook air which has finally been

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updated for 2018. memory express says victoria bc location

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is now open and this new store offers all the same product selection and

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quality of service as their others check out the link below to learn

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more first impressions last a lifetime

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and first impressions of the macbook air are that well it's

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probably going to have a long lifetime this is a damn well-built machine the

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aluminum chassis is easily among the stiffest on the market there is

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virtually no screenflex whatsoever and although it is thin

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it's kind of denser than you might expect weighing just under three pounds

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compared to the last version of the air which by the way debuted in 2013

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the reduction of the bezels and the way that the glossy black extends right to

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the edge really ups the sex appeal of this year's model and you wouldn't feel

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weird taking it out of your backpack no matter what the setting

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just make sure that while you're putting it in your backpack you remember your

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dongles now to be clear i'm not too torn

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up about the i o these are both Thunderbolt 3 ports with compatibility

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for displays docs external gpus

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any usb device you could want including charging the macbook air itself so i

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would take these over a type a and a mini displayport any day of the week

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microsoft now let's get back to the screen it's

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more than just glossier it addresses every problem with the old macbook air

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design increasing the resolution to 2560

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by 1600 that's a taller 16 by 10 aspect

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ratio for those keeping score at home and they also increased the color gamut

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making it among the best laptop displays available

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with an asterisk i don't expect this to make any

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difference in fact i suspect that apple gives exactly

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0fs what i think but i'm once again

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disappointed that they refuse to include touchscreen support in their macOS and

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on their laptops at least the touchpad is awesome though

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and boy is it ever awesome like i know we always go on about how great apple's

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touchpads are but suck it up pc fanboys we do it because

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they are there are a bunch of gestures actually that have been available on

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Windows for a long time but i've just

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never used them because they don't feel right

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by contrast after only a couple hours on macOS they just become part of the

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natural flow of using the machine they are so well thought out and like look

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how big it is also how close it is to the keyboard

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which makes it really easy to thumb operate while you're typing

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also supernatural the fingerprint sensor in the power button there is one place

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that a fingerprint sensor is better than face id and this is it apple nailed it

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like i'm always logged in at the same time the screen turns on after opening

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this guy up touch id is so well implemented here that frankly it feels

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almost as natural as Windows hello facial recognition on the surface laptop

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unfortunately there is one area where the macbook air can't get close to the

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surface laptop the keyboard now i don't personally miss the touch

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bar so i'm not going to dock any marks there but these short throw and

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potentially short life key switches are just not a great time to type on for

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extended periods like after a while i i

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actually can get mostly used to them really similar to the macbook pro and

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credit where credit is due they are really easy to type on in awkward

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situations like if you're walking around like holding your laptop clickity-clacking on it since you don't

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have to apply a lot of force and that short throw does make staying steady

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easier but i still find myself missing more

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strokes than usual and have a hard time feeling where each key ends and making

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matters worse is the lack of a delete key okay well backspace says delete but

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it just goes back because it's a mac and i know you can do function delete but

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man i miss my dedicated delete key almost as much as my touchscreen when i

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go to a mac the part that gets me the

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most though is that apple had fantastic laptop keyboards arguably the best in

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the game and then now they felt the need to take

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what is in my mind a step back

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now let's take a step back and talk about one of the things that apple

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people are always shouting about how was macOS and the iphone and the

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integration that comes along with them

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in short the lack of Windows snap assist in mac

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os is really annoying uh one time in particular i had a video conference that

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and i had to take notes and ended up missing two slides just trying to get

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all the darn Windows to each take up like exactly half of the screen in a way

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that's aesthetically pleasing it's funny because i would always see people on

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macbooks with their Windows just kind of strewn all over the place like papers on

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a desk and i just assumed they were bad at computers but it turns out that once

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you get over about four applications open it can be really difficult to keep

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things organized and frankly isn't worth the effort with that said imessage when we weren't

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running into some kind of random bugs is really nice to have on the desktop

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it's just that as a non-mac person like if you've made

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it this long without imessage and facetime for that matter

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i don't really feel like it adds a ton of value all of my friends use whatsapp

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hangouts facebook messenger or wechat like i've gotten maybe 30 to 50 messages

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via sms this entire calendar year and frankly the disappointing webcam on the

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macbook air made for a very mediocre facetime experience as well

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overall the best thing about macOS is that everything just seems to work with

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no babysitting required spotlight search can't find the camera with any of the

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obvious keywords but is otherwise awesome and if you reboot it plunks you

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right down where you left off you don't need to make sure it's not updating in

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the background sucking up your battery when you unplug all that sort of thing like i know a lot

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of people in my life that could benefit from macOS simply because it's better

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at crap management than Windows like i've seen people on Windows

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machines that are shockingly slow not because the hardware is bad but because

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of a bunch of junk wear and kind of putting everything in the wrong spot

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where it's hard to find it whereas with macOS although you don't get the same

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degree of control it is harder to totally mangle it

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so overall if what you plan on doing is mostly productivity and internet based

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macos is just pretty darn great the dynamic light and

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dark themes and surprisingly snappy experience given the low power processor

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stand out but then also bring me really nicely to

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what doesn't stand out about the macbook air 2018

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it is only available with a dual core

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CPU when four cores has been the standard in ultrabooks for the last year

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or so like it handled a simple model in fusion

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360 but it's at a significant disadvantage compared to competitors

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like the surface laptop 2 dell xps and lenovo x1 carbon when it comes to

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multitasking and multi-threaded workloads the good news is that the

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dual-core low-power chip can be basically silently cooled even in such a

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thin device and it unsurprisingly yields

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great battery life with this thing lasting a good 10 hours while doing work

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like editing this script but is it worth the asking price

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well that's another question our model here cost an eye watering 2600

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for an ultrabook mind you it has 16 gigs of RAM and a 1.5

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terabyte SSD but even our bang for the buck

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recommended config comes in at 1400

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that's a lot but apple kind of sets the bar for the

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premium thin and light market and with other manufacturers creeping their

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pricing up over the last few years honestly it's it's actually not that far

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out there anymore so bottom line with most of the laptops that come through

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our lab we complete the review then pawn it off to the next new employee who

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needs a computer the macbook air 2018

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not that kind of beast and it even hangs with the surface laptop 2 and xps 13

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assuming you're okay with the keyboard and bear in mind of course that this is

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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if

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it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in

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