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MacBook Air 2020 USER reviews
- Thread starter Untapped Potential
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It's too early for me to say definitively - I only got the i3 24 hrs ago so it might still be bedding down. The below is after I believe all indexing/synching has been completed however.
On day one, web browsing CPU temp on the 2020 i3 is around 63-68c compared to the 2019's 41-50c running the same sites for the same duration (I set them up side by side).
Fans on the 2020 i3 are constantly at 2700 RPM to try and maintain this temperature (occasionally ramping to 4000-5000 when watching video etc), fans on the 2019 were at 0RMP and only kicked in for two minutes at the end of a half hour Youtube video at 1080p.
But again, it's day one. I'll update when I have a larger sample size and have run more tests (particularly around battery life and thermals for video streaming etc) 👍
I appreciate your contributions to this thread and in sharing your particular use cases, but I think it's worth pointing out that, per your initial review, you were using the Brave web browser, instead of Safari, which is likely a contributing factor to increased heat and decreased battery life.
I'm thinking about doing something similar. Can you elaborate on why you chose the Samsung T5? I believe that some people buy enclosures and SSD "sticks", but I haven't gotten around to doing much research on this. Curious if you did and what some of the pros/cons are of the various approaches.
Enclosures and SSDs really suck, if you often use your SSD get a dedicated USB-C one because often the chip inside those enclosures aren't as reliable as the one from dedicated SSDs. I got the Lexar Pro 500GB with 950 MB/s transfer speed. It costs only 77€ and is almost as fast as the internal one. But to be honest even 500 MB/s is fast enough and I think you won't notice that much of a difference in your daily work.
Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned that I view the primary (possibly only) use case being for video editing (1080p). I'd like to go with a 256GB Air for my wife and then have a USB-C SSD drive where she (and I, potentially - though my MBP 16 has a 1TB drive, so I probably won't need to borrow it) could do her occasional video editing/exporting all on the external SSD drive. So I suspect that speed will be an important requirement, and I don't mind paying extra to get one of the faster options.
Carefully consider your use cases for what you want on the computer and what you want on an external.
Juggling an external drive can be a pain in the backside in many circumstances. While certainly less expensive that upgrading the internal storage, for me it's worth the cost to have the convenience.
if you for sure know you'd be regularly using an external SSD to save a few hundred, it is a few hundred and I understand the reservation, but if you can financially swing it I'd upgrade internal.
Dangling an external on the reg, not just fringe scenarios or for lots of cold data storage, just seems to ruin the MBA sleekness a bit
Dangling an external on the reg, not just fringe scenarios or for lots of cold data storage, just seems to ruin the MBA sleekness a bit
It was a good value, fast, 500GB external SSD that comes with both a usb-c (for my Air) and usb-a cable (for my old Pro). It was on sale here for 79 CHF with a 20 CHf cashback promo on top. It hasn't arrived yet but I'm assuming it's a good choice.
It's for hosting files that I only need at home, so it'll simply connect to my laptop when I need it, which won't be that often.
Apple did over-order webcams by a billion pieces in the 1980ties... they still installing them into the new MacBooks.. stock should be used up in less than a decade though, then we will get better webcams in new MacBooks...
normally in bed or on the couch we cover the air outlet so it is not fault of the computer
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Thanks for the replies. It's less about the money, though that's one semi-related aspect. This is sort of my thinking:
- We might adjust to a more frequent upgrade pattern, and if traded back in to Apple later, they don't give you much extra value for upgrades
- I'm intrigued by the idea of getting a new (or 2018) iPad Pro myself and even doing some video editing on that. So the idea of an external USB-C drive that could be moved around from one device to another for *occasional* video editing sounds appealing
- Aside from video editing, I really don't think 256GB is too limiting for my wife's needs. She had been close to filling up her current 256GB drive, but I realized that it was mostly from photos, and I upgraded our iCloud storage and switched her to "Optimized Storage" and it freed up a ton of space. The next big thing taking up storage for her are things in her Documents folder, and I suspect there's a lot of crap that can be deleted and/or moved to iCloud (or other Cloud) storage.
Anyway, sorry for derailing this thread.
LOL
if the processor get hot with a 720p camera when you use applications like zoom or teams, imagine with a 1080p webcam, if a surface pro can mount a 5 MP front camera with full HD 1080p video a macbook should be able too, we pay for it
Just got my i5/512/16gb. So far its been really good. The speakers are amazing for a laptop this size, keyboard feels great. Build quality on it is top notch, it has a good size. I'm still messing around with it and getting things setup. I'm coming from a 27" iMac, and use a 34" ultrawide as my daily with pc and 15' mbp for work. The screen size is alot different. I'm currently debating how this screensize will be for me, and if its worth having a 16" mbp. I guess for me the performance has not been a issue for me, but its mainly on the screensize personally. I didn't want to do it but I did install the temp and fan tool after a while. I haven't heard the fans come on really even with 4k video. Right now the fans show around 2500rpm consistantly with temps around 55c with safari open and multiple tabs, spotify, discord with a ton of servers on it. One of the things I just did too was get 1blocker installed, I think that in general will help with performance because some ads are riddled with ads. For instance, slickdeals was consuming 500mb of memory in activity monitor by itself. Macrumors shows 370mb. Overall with the apps I have open its using 10.9gb of memory. OSX will use as much ram as it needs in buffers and cache and free it up as needed. I don't have much stuff on iCloud that would be syncing, however the encryption operations will likely run in the background the first day. I'm tempted to order a refurb 16 and have them side by side to test to see what would work best for me. I love the portability though and especially the wedge design for typing.
@RiaKoobcam Thank you for the info! That clarifies a lot since I figure the i3 is on the same playing field as the outgoing 2019 i5 model being both dual core.
I'm ran a Geekbench and the fan never exceeded 4k, and even at that I cannot hear the fan. When temps are at 100c during the test, the laptop is cool to the touch and the back is slightly warm, no more warm than any other mac laptop I've owned. This is within the first 2 hours of opening it which probably has alot of processes running behind the scenes during this test.
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What about using a 4k external screen. Since the GPU use the Ram of the system will it be more sufficient to get 16 GB for external drive. I can work with 8 GB fine, but want to upgrade external monitor to 4k.
Run the math for me on that. I'm not really seeing how driving a 4k display will consume substantially more vRAM. Exactly how much additional RAM do you think driving an external 4K display will require and how do you come up with that figure?
Just asking since I am not a person who knows graphics. Terminal all my life and sometimes I play Starcraft. That's all. Never was into how external monitor influence the RAM. A year ago I've had an old MacBook from 2010. When I was using PyCharm on it, it was even fine. Definitely workable. At the background there was safari with a few tabs (none of them with video or something like that, pure short text), spotify and terminal. When i connected it to the external 2560x1440 monitor in a clamshell mode the PyCharm became not workable, it took a more time to respond. I do not know if it was a RAM issue (2010 MacBook has dedicated GPU NVIDIA GeForce 320M with 256 MB of RAM). Just worried about it.
I can't speak to the difference between 4K and 1080p, but as a test I just unplugged my base 2016 MBP from my 4K monitor (clamshell mode). My total RAM in use dropped by 800MB.
Edited to add: I have 8GB ram and it's been totally fine on the 4K display.
Thanks for doing the test. I'm surprised it's that high since we're talking around 8 million pixels, and maybe four bytes per pixel per screen buffer. I'd think up to a couple hundred meg. Must be some other factors in there.
I don't have a 4K display to test with - but didn't see a noticeable change in memory usage with my MBP15 attaching / detaching a 1080p 2nd display (open computer mode not clamshell)
Left my Air open since I got it for a few hours and reran a Geekbench. I didn't have much from iCloud to download. Pretty good results for the I5. I think my Mac is done indexing, the fan now shows 0rpm, it was at 2500rpm since I opened it although not audible. I'd say its running very well.
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I'm super interested to hear how your i3 compares to your i5 for the same usages. Looking forward to that.
If he's comparing Brave on his 2019 MBA to his 2020 MBA, it's still a fair and valid comparison.
My Mac history as a point of reference:
MacBook 13" 4,1 (2.4 GHz C2D) 2008-2012
MacBook Pro 15" (2.2 GHz i7) 9,1 2012-2019
iMac 27" 19,1 (3.0 GHz i5) 2019-Present
MacBook Air 9,1 (1.1 GHz i3) 2020-Present
I have the base silver MacBook Air, meaning it has the i3 CPU, the 8GB of RAM, and the 256 SSD. I have had it since Monday.
Things I like about it:
The construction, rigid, solid, well put together, etc. You know what I mean, Anything build quality/design wise Apple got perfectly right. No faults whatsoever.
I like the screen, I think it is actually phenomenal for what it is. I run the computer with the screen resolution set to emulate my old MBPs screen display area size, looks like 1680x1050 (retina up specced). I think that this is great for me to read PDF files full where two 8.5x11 formatted pages are displayed side-by-side. I'm doing this a ton these days. The resolution provided by the Retina display is fantastic for this, it's really as good as it being printed out, except for that it's backlit, unlike paper not on a light table (who actually has those? (irrelevant comment)). It's plenty bright, and seems to be color accurate enough for most purposes, a bit off my iMac's screen, but neither are calibrated... Who the heck would want a touchscreen on a PC laptop when you can have the stellar display quality of this MBA?
The size/weight: obviously way better than the 15" MBP, good for bringing to work so I can read those PDFs so I can study on my lunch break for my Med Lab certification.
Battery life: great, as expected. Nothing more to say beyond that, except that it seems like it lives up to Apple' stated expectations. Also: charges quickly with 30W power adapter.
Trackpad: I like the size, and overall quality: everything everyone has ever praised about the trackpad, I still agree.
The keyboard: I was hesitant about it, I still prefer the classic MBP's keyboard, still found on the [WIRED (now discontinued)] Apple 110 key keyboard. I purchased the 110 key keyboard in 2016, and to me that one is better than the wireless Magic Keyboard that came with the iMac or this MacBook Air's keyboard, or the even worse butterfly keyboard I have only ever used at stores on display models. Overall ranking for typing feel and sound: 1st place: 110 key apple brand wired and 2012 MBP, 2nd place: this MacBook Air's keyboard slightly edges out the equivalent 2019 iMac included wireless Magic keyboard (3rd), 4th and last place is the butterfly style. Also, Il like that it has the function keys, and this is the first time I've had a fingerprint sensor on a Mac, and I like it's implementation.
CPU speed is fine, it pulls up anything I want quickly enough. Any heavy duty stuff will be done on my 6-core iMac.
The RAM and SSD are fast and large enough for me here, 8GB and 256 GB doesn't seem limiting for a second computer. 40GB RAM and 1TB HDD are good for a desktop. Having an SSD made me learn something, people who say your a fool if you get a hard disk drive in this day and age are fools themselves. The slowness attributable to a spinning platter isn't actually horrible like claimed.So what if something takes a bit longer to open up or seek something out, not everyone needs perfectly instant access to random things on their hard drive or a bajillion Gb/s throughput.
Things I don't like:
The integrated GPU struggles with things I wouldn't have expected it to struggle with. Worried what it would be like if I ever connected it to an external display (unlikely with me having 27" iMac).
The CPU while the laptop never feels warm to the touch, kicks on its fans at the exact moment you ever do anything half difficult with it. With the 2008 MacBook, the 2012 MBP, and the 2019 iMac, it took a while for concerted CPU effort to get the fans going. Not so with this one. Temps are very peaky, heats up and cools down in no time flat. This worries me more than anything, because I fear those sudden temp swings up and down may shorten the life of the CPU (solder connections, etc.) Also, fwiw, I have gotten past indexing and photoanalysis, et cetera. However, the fans are quiet, similar to the iMac's, not like the old MB or MBP which were ready to make those laptops take flight. Handbrake or Cinebench or whatever full bore would take at least two minutes to get above even HALF the fan's max speed. Here with the MBA, open Google Earth Pro (my favorite application) or Stellarium, or anything else that computes things, and it's ready to go. This all leads me to think that the CPU is physically small/light weight. Computationally, it's fine for what a MBA is for, I just wish it could be literally heavier to take longer to heat up. Whatever. I'm probably overblowing this, but it is what I think. The iMac's CPU is literally 2.8x larger and is rated/cooled for at least 6-10x more watts and it shows.
I wish it had a USB A port, but having AirDrop and a dual usbc/usba jump drive makes this less difficult. Honestly, for me as someone who is pretty much just doing (for now) pdf document reading, YouTube video watching, music/podcast listening, I think it's overall fine.
If Apple had quicker shipping I would have gotten the i5 quad core upgrade for the $999 mil/edu discount through Apple rather than the $950 i3 through Costco with their 1 extra year extended warranty.
Overall for a college student like environment, it's good, I was honestly considering everything from the basic $350 iPad, to the iPad Air, to the iPad Pro, to this, but ultimately having a desktop type Mac OS is worth $600 alone over anything iPad OS wise. iOS stinks to high heaven for me when it comes to multitasking. I hate hate hate hate hate it.
P.S. MESSAGE TO APPLE, BRING BACK DASHBOARD!!! Dashboard is one of the best thing's you have ever done software wise bar none, and I'm oh so glad I've refused to downgrade from Mojave to Catalina on my iMac.
MacBook 13" 4,1 (2.4 GHz C2D) 2008-2012
MacBook Pro 15" (2.2 GHz i7) 9,1 2012-2019
iMac 27" 19,1 (3.0 GHz i5) 2019-Present
MacBook Air 9,1 (1.1 GHz i3) 2020-Present
I have the base silver MacBook Air, meaning it has the i3 CPU, the 8GB of RAM, and the 256 SSD. I have had it since Monday.
Things I like about it:
The construction, rigid, solid, well put together, etc. You know what I mean, Anything build quality/design wise Apple got perfectly right. No faults whatsoever.
I like the screen, I think it is actually phenomenal for what it is. I run the computer with the screen resolution set to emulate my old MBPs screen display area size, looks like 1680x1050 (retina up specced). I think that this is great for me to read PDF files full where two 8.5x11 formatted pages are displayed side-by-side. I'm doing this a ton these days. The resolution provided by the Retina display is fantastic for this, it's really as good as it being printed out, except for that it's backlit, unlike paper not on a light table (who actually has those? (irrelevant comment)). It's plenty bright, and seems to be color accurate enough for most purposes, a bit off my iMac's screen, but neither are calibrated... Who the heck would want a touchscreen on a PC laptop when you can have the stellar display quality of this MBA?
The size/weight: obviously way better than the 15" MBP, good for bringing to work so I can read those PDFs so I can study on my lunch break for my Med Lab certification.
Battery life: great, as expected. Nothing more to say beyond that, except that it seems like it lives up to Apple' stated expectations. Also: charges quickly with 30W power adapter.
Trackpad: I like the size, and overall quality: everything everyone has ever praised about the trackpad, I still agree.
The keyboard: I was hesitant about it, I still prefer the classic MBP's keyboard, still found on the [WIRED (now discontinued)] Apple 110 key keyboard. I purchased the 110 key keyboard in 2016, and to me that one is better than the wireless Magic Keyboard that came with the iMac or this MacBook Air's keyboard, or the even worse butterfly keyboard I have only ever used at stores on display models. Overall ranking for typing feel and sound: 1st place: 110 key apple brand wired and 2012 MBP, 2nd place: this MacBook Air's keyboard slightly edges out the equivalent 2019 iMac included wireless Magic keyboard (3rd), 4th and last place is the butterfly style. Also, Il like that it has the function keys, and this is the first time I've had a fingerprint sensor on a Mac, and I like it's implementation.
CPU speed is fine, it pulls up anything I want quickly enough. Any heavy duty stuff will be done on my 6-core iMac.
The RAM and SSD are fast and large enough for me here, 8GB and 256 GB doesn't seem limiting for a second computer. 40GB RAM and 1TB HDD are good for a desktop. Having an SSD made me learn something, people who say your a fool if you get a hard disk drive in this day and age are fools themselves. The slowness attributable to a spinning platter isn't actually horrible like claimed.So what if something takes a bit longer to open up or seek something out, not everyone needs perfectly instant access to random things on their hard drive or a bajillion Gb/s throughput.
Things I don't like:
The integrated GPU struggles with things I wouldn't have expected it to struggle with. Worried what it would be like if I ever connected it to an external display (unlikely with me having 27" iMac).
The CPU while the laptop never feels warm to the touch, kicks on its fans at the exact moment you ever do anything half difficult with it. With the 2008 MacBook, the 2012 MBP, and the 2019 iMac, it took a while for concerted CPU effort to get the fans going. Not so with this one. Temps are very peaky, heats up and cools down in no time flat. This worries me more than anything, because I fear those sudden temp swings up and down may shorten the life of the CPU (solder connections, etc.) Also, fwiw, I have gotten past indexing and photoanalysis, et cetera. However, the fans are quiet, similar to the iMac's, not like the old MB or MBP which were ready to make those laptops take flight. Handbrake or Cinebench or whatever full bore would take at least two minutes to get above even HALF the fan's max speed. Here with the MBA, open Google Earth Pro (my favorite application) or Stellarium, or anything else that computes things, and it's ready to go. This all leads me to think that the CPU is physically small/light weight. Computationally, it's fine for what a MBA is for, I just wish it could be literally heavier to take longer to heat up. Whatever. I'm probably overblowing this, but it is what I think. The iMac's CPU is literally 2.8x larger and is rated/cooled for at least 6-10x more watts and it shows.
I wish it had a USB A port, but having AirDrop and a dual usbc/usba jump drive makes this less difficult. Honestly, for me as someone who is pretty much just doing (for now) pdf document reading, YouTube video watching, music/podcast listening, I think it's overall fine.
If Apple had quicker shipping I would have gotten the i5 quad core upgrade for the $999 mil/edu discount through Apple rather than the $950 i3 through Costco with their 1 extra year extended warranty.
Overall for a college student like environment, it's good, I was honestly considering everything from the basic $350 iPad, to the iPad Air, to the iPad Pro, to this, but ultimately having a desktop type Mac OS is worth $600 alone over anything iPad OS wise. iOS stinks to high heaven for me when it comes to multitasking. I hate hate hate hate hate it.
P.S. MESSAGE TO APPLE, BRING BACK DASHBOARD!!! Dashboard is one of the best thing's you have ever done software wise bar none, and I'm oh so glad I've refused to downgrade from Mojave to Catalina on my iMac.