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Are you happy with your 2020 MBA?

SoleWoman said:
A little disappointed. My first time using a Mac. MBA i5/512gb/8gb ram.

I literally had it in on my lap editing a website for a few hours and the left side got really warm. Then later I received a message saying the tab I was using was consuming a lot of energy... I only had two tabs open.Does that sound about right?

Other than that I love it. Very responsive and simple.
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The warning about a tab consuming a lot of energy is an issue with the website that was loaded in the tab. If you open Activity Monitor and sort by highest running CPU process you will see it probably using 100%+ (each thread on a CPU can will display as 100%, so if you have a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading, you could potentially have a process using 800% of the CPU which means all cores and threads maxed out).

So the site you were on was either stuck in an infinite loop loading some resource, or is just poorly coded.
 
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CheesePuff said:
The warning about a tab consuming a lot of energy is an issue with the website that was loaded in the tab. If you open Activity Monitor and sort by highest running CPU process you will see it probably using 100%+ (each thread on a CPU can will display as 100%, so if you have a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading, you could potentially have a process using 800% of the CPU which means all cores and threads maxed out).

So the site you were on was either stuck in an infinite loop loading some resource, or is just poorly coded.
Click to expand...
Thank you for the advice. The website kept refreshing every few minutes to save so maybe that was it.
 
My previous machines have all been MBP's. I am really impressed with my 2020 MBA and have not had the fan or heat related experiences that some others have had. My last MBP (2015 15" with discrete graphics) could really move some air when I pushed it. But, I have changed my workflow by moving the heavier work to my new iMac and leaving the lighter work to the MBA (2020 i5 8GB 512GB). One thing I learned early on with MacBooks is that the body of the machine is a part of the cooling mechanism.
 
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sundialsoft said:
I got round to trying the speakers. Massive improvement over my old MBA. This 2020 MBA has real noticeable stereo and very reasonable sound quality for such a small speaker system. I will happily play music on this.
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This is the first Mac laptop I've owned that has had the speakers on the sides of the keyboard instead of buried back near the hinge somewhere, and the stereo separation is a welcome thing. I'm also impressed by the volume. I think the Air competes with smaller standalone bluetooth speakers for casual use. I'd definitely play music on it.
 
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Hi

I am hesitating between 3 configurations

i5 for sure, but i don't know if i should get 8 Gb or 16

and if i take more RAM, then i'll go for 256 SSD

if i take 8, i'll go for 512 SSD

or 3rd choice, simply going to i5 + 8 + 256 and save some money

i will not have intensive use of it, i just want everything to run smoothly

in a near future I will buy an extra Mac mini with max RAM and a big SSD, but for now, i want something light and just powerful enough to do web browsing, some minor photo retouching, etc
 
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macaron95 said:
Hi

I am hesitating between 3 configurations

i5 for sure, but i don't know if i should get 8 Gb or 16

and if i take more RAM, then i'll go for 256 SSD

if i take 8, i'll go for 512 SSD

or 3rd choice, simply going to i5 + 8 + 256 and save some money

i will not have intensive use of it, i just want everything to run smoothly

in a near future I will buy an extra Mac mini with max RAM and a big SSD, but for now, i want something light and just powerful enough to do web browsing, some minor photo retouching, etc
Click to expand...

Buy what fits your needs.

For what the usage you describe 8GB RAM will be more than enough - you'd be wasting your money to buy 16GB in my opinion. macOS does a very good job with virtual memory, and utilizes the SSD if it truly needs to expand beyond the physical RAM.

As for 256 or 512GB SSD storage, again that depends on what you need. Do you typically keep 100GB of stuff or 300GB or stuff? I would suggest going to the 512GB SSD if your current usage is 200+
 
thanks for your advice, i'll go for i5/8/256 then

because I have a NAS at home and in the future, i'll go for more internal storage with the Mac Mini

I just wanted to make sure that the Macbook Air won't be too slow with just 8 gb of ram
 
macaron95 said:
thanks for your advice, i'll go for i5/8/256 then

because I have a NAS at home and in the future, i'll go for more internal storage with the Mac Mini

I just wanted to make sure that the Macbook Air won't be too slow with just 8 gb of ram
Click to expand...

RAM capacity doesn't affect speed of the computer until/unless you get to where you're actively using so much that you're thrashing the swap file.

Which isn't going to happen given the usage you describe -- so unless you're hiding a plan to use multiple virtual machines for game development, you're gonna be fine.
 
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Hi... I’m also wondering after reading all posts, not many are using chrome it seems.
ill be using chrome mostly because of school and they use chrome extensions.
im coming from a 2013 MBP 4gb ram and chrome was just crashing after couple seconds. Youtube was non existent with chrome.
I’ll be doing a lot of research and essay writing- 20+ tabs on chrome? Email, MSOffice, Occasional youtube and Spotify. Do you think air is gonna be okay for me? Which specs? I5/16/256? I3/16/256? Or other?
 
Jays1022 said:
Hi... I’m also wondering after reading all posts, not many are using chrome it seems.
ill be using chrome mostly because of school and they use chrome extensions.
im coming from a 2013 MBP 4gb ram and chrome was just crashing after couple seconds. Youtube was non existent with chrome.
I’ll be doing a lot of research and essay writing- 20+ tabs on chrome? Email, MSOffice, Occasional youtube and Spotify. Do you think air is gonna be okay for me? Which specs? I5/16/256? I3/16/256? Or other?
Click to expand...

If you must use Chrome, then be aware that it will nearly halve your battery life compared to using Safari (or even Firefox). It is also memory intensive, so you will want 16 GB of RAM. I would get the i5 especially if you are using multiple extensions and a dozen+ tabs open at all times.
 
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macaron95 said:
Hi

I am hesitating between 3 configurations

i5 for sure, but i don't know if i should get 8 Gb or 16

and if i take more RAM, then i'll go for 256 SSD

if i take 8, i'll go for 512 SSD

or 3rd choice, simply going to i5 + 8 + 256 and save some money

i will not have intensive use of it, i just want everything to run smoothly

in a near future I will buy an extra Mac mini with max RAM and a big SSD, but for now, i want something light and just powerful enough to do web browsing, some minor photo retouching, etc
Click to expand...

Honestly if you are going to add the beefed up mini you'd probably be fine with the base line i3 MBA configuration. Pretty sure you amazon or something is having a sale for 899 USD right now.
 
CheesePuff said:
If you must use Chrome, then be aware that it will nearly halve your battery life compared to using Safari (or even Firefox). It is also memory intensive, so you will want 16 GB of RAM. I would get the i5 especially if you are using multiple extensions and a dozen+ tabs open at all times.
Click to expand...
Thank you!!!!!! I think thats what I’m going to do!!! I’m also gonna get an iPad Pro so that the air can just be for work and typing lol.
 
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